The Red Room - August Strindberg (best summer reads TXT) 📗

had calmed down, and when he beheld the sea and the skerries, he became sentimental and talked a great deal of nonsense: he had lost all hope of ever seeing God’s (?) green earth again, he said, and so on.

But presently he began to suffer from something like qualms of conscience. He maintained that he had no right to be happy and take a holiday when there were so many unhappy people in the world; he imagined that he was neglecting his duty towards the scoundrel who edits the Workman’s Flag, and begged us to row him back. When I talked to him of the terrible time he had just gone through, he replied that it was the duty of all men to work and suffer for one another. This view had almost become a religion with him, but I have cured him of it with soda water and salt baths. He was completely broken, and I had great difficulty in patching him up, for it was hard to say where the physical trouble ended and the psychical began.

I must say that in a certain respect he excites my astonishment⁠—I won’t say admiration, for I never admire anybody. He seems to suffer from an extraordinary mania which makes him act in direct contradiction to his own interest. He might have been in a splendid position, if he had not thrown up his career in the Civil Service, particularly as his brother would, in that case have helped him with a sum of money. Instead of that he cast his reputation to the winds and slaved for a brutal plebeian; and all for the sake of his ideals! It is most extraordinary!

But he seems to be mending at last, more particularly after a lesson he had here. Can you believe it, he called the fishermen “sir,” and took off his hat to them. In addition he indulged in cordial chats with the natives, in order to find out “how these people lived.” The result was that the fishermen pricked up their ears, and one of them asked me one day whether “this Falk” paid for his own board, or whether the doctor (I) paid for him? I told Falk about it and it depressed him; he is always despondent, whenever he is robbed of a delusion. A few days later he talked to our landlord on the subject of universal suffrage; later on our landlord asked me whether Falk was in poor circumstances.

During the first few days he ran up and down the shore like a madman. Often he swam far out into the fjörd, as if he never meant to return again. As I always looked upon suicide as the sacred right of every individual, I did not interfere.

Isaac told me that Falk had opened his heart to him on the subject of the girl Beda; she seems to have made an awful fool of him.

Apropos of Isaac! He is one of the shrewdest fellows I ever met. He has, after one month’s study, mastered the Latin grammar, and he reads his Caesar as we read the Grey Bonnet; and what’s more, he knows all about it, which we never did. His brain is receptive, that is to say, capable of assimilating knowledge, and in addition to this it is practical; this combination has produced many a genius, in spite of gross stupidity in many other respects. Every now and then he indulges his business instincts; the other day he gave us a brilliant example of his talent in that direction.

I know nothing about his financial position⁠—for in that respect he is very reticent⁠—but a little while ago he had to pay a few hundred crowns. He was very fidgety, and as he did not want to apply to his brother (of the Triton) with whom he is not on friendly terms, he asked me to lend him the sum. I was not in a position to do so. Thereupon he sat down, took a sheet of notepaper, wrote a letter and sent it off by special messenger. For a few days nothing happened.

In front of our cottage grew a pretty little oakwood which shaded us from the sun and sheltered us from the strong sea breezes. I don’t know much about trees and things pertaining to nature, but I love to sit in the shade when the days are hot. One morning, on pulling up my blind, I was dumbfounded; I was looking at the open fjörd and a yacht riding at anchor about a cable-length from the shore. Every tree had gone, and Isaac was sitting on a stump reading Euclid and counting the trunks as they were being carried on board the yacht.

I wakened Falk; he was furious and had a quarrel with Isaac who made a thousand crowns on the deal. Our landlord received two hundred, all he had asked for. I could have killed Isaac, not because he had had the trees cut down, but because I had not thought of it first.

Falk said it was unpatriotic, but Isaac swears that the removal of the “rubbish” has improved the view; he declares that he will take a boat next week and visit the neighbouring islets with the same object.

Our landlord’s wife cried all day long, but her husband went to Dalarö to buy her a new dress; he remained away for two whole days, and when he returned at last, he was drunk; there was nothing in the boat, and when his wife asked for the new dress, the fisherman confessed that he had forgotten all about it.

Enough for the present. Write soon and tell me a few new scandals, and be careful how you manipulate the loan.

Your deadly enemy and security,

H. B.