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

At the very back of the room Borg was sitting alone in the lamplight, working at the mutilated body of a man who had hanged himself.

“Good evening,” said Borg, laying aside his knife. “Would you like to see an old friend?”

He did not wait for the answer⁠—which was not forthcoming⁠—but lighted a lantern, took his overcoat and a bunch of keys.

“I didn’t know that we had any friends here,” said Sellén, desperately clinging to a flippant mood.

“Come along!” said Borg.

They crossed the yard and entered the large building; the creaking door closed behind them, and the little piece of candle, a remnant from the last card party, threw its red, feeble glimmer on the white walls. The two strangers tried to read Borg’s face, wondering whether he was up to some trick, but the face was inscrutable.

They turned to the left and went along a passage which echoed to their footsteps in a way which suggested that they were being followed. Falk kept close behind Borg and tried to keep Sellén at his back.

“Over there!” said Borg, standing still in the middle of the passage.

Nobody could see anything but walls. But they heard a low trickling sound, like the falling of a gentle rain and became aware of a strange odour, resembling the smell of a damp flowerbed or a pine-wood in October.

“To the right!” said Borg.

The right wall was made of glass, and behind it, on their backs, lay three white bodies.

Borg selected a key, opened the glass door, and entered.

“Here!” he said, standing still before the second of the three.

It was Olle. He lay there as quietly, with his hands folded across his chest, as if he were taking an afternoon nap. His drawn-up lips created the impression that he was smiling. He was well-preserved.

“Drowned?” asked Sellén, who was the first to regain his self-possession.

“Drowned,” echoed Borg. “Can either of you identify his clothes?”

Three miserable suits were hanging against the wall. Sellén at once picked out the right one; a blue jacket with sporting buttons, and a pair of black trousers, rubbed white at the knees.

“Are you certain?”

“Ought to know my own coat⁠—which I borrowed from Falk.”

Sellén drew a pocketbook from the breast pocket of the jacket, it was saturated with water and covered with green algæ, which Borg called “enteromorph.” He opened it by the light of the lantern and examined its contents⁠—two or three overdue pawn-tickets and a bundle of papers tied together, on which was written: To him who cares to read.

“Have you seen enough?” asked Borg. “Then let’s go and have a drink.”

The three mourners (friend was a word only used by Levin and Lundell when they wanted to borrow money) went to the nearest public-house as representatives of the Red Room.

Beside a blazing fire and behind a battery of bottles, Borg began the perusal of the papers which Olle had left behind, but more than once he had to have recourse to Falk’s skill as an “autographer,” for the water had washed away the words here and there; it looked as if the writer’s tears had fallen on the sheets, as Sellén facetiously remarked.

“Stop talking now,” said Borg, emptying his glass of grog with a grimace which exhibited all his back teeth; “I am going to read, and I beg of you not to interrupt me.

“ ‘To Him who cares to Read.

“ ‘I have a right to take my life, all the more so because not only does my act not interfere with the interests of a fellow-creature, but rather it contributes to the happiness, as it is called, of at least one person; a place and four hundred cubic feet of air will become vacant.

“ ‘My motive is not despair, for an intelligent individual never despairs, but I take this step with a fairly calm conscience; that an act of this kind throws one’s mind into a certain state of excitement will be easily understood by everybody; to postpone it from fear of what might come hereafter is only worthy of a slave clutching at any excuse, so that he might stay in a world where he cannot have suffered much. At the thought of going, a burden seems to fall from my shoulders; I cannot fare worse, I might fare better. If there is no life beyond the grave, death must be happiness; as great a happiness at least as sleep in a soft bed after hard physical labour. Nobody who has ever observed how sleep relaxes every muscle, and how the soul gradually steals away, can fear death.

“ ‘Why does humanity make so much ado about death? Because it has burrowed so deeply into the earth, that a tearing away from it is bound to be painful. I put off from the shore long ago; I have no family bonds, no social, national, or legal ties which could hold me back, and I’m going simply because life has no longer any attraction for me.

“ ‘I do not want to encourage those who are well content to follow my example; they have no reason to do so, and therefore they cannot judge my act. I have not considered the point whether it is cowardly or not⁠—to that aspect of the question I am indifferent; moreover, it is a private matter; I never asked to come here and therefore I have a right to go when I please.

“ ‘My reason for going? There are so many reasons and they are so complicated that I have neither the time nor the ability to explain them. I will only mention the most obvious, those which had the greatest influence on myself and on my act.

“ ‘My childhood and youth were one long continuation of manual labour; you who do not know what it means to labour from sunrise to sunset, only to fall into a heavy sleep when the toil is over, you have escaped the curse of the fall, for it is a curse to feel one’s spiritual growth arrested while one’s body sinks deeper