Married. August Strindberg

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      After passing his first examination in the spring, Theodore was obliged to spend a summer at Sköfde, in order to undergo the cold water cure. In the autumn he returned to Upsala. His newly-regained strength was merely so much fresh fuel to the fire.

      Matters grew worse and worse. His hair had grown so thin that the scalp was plainly visible. He walked with dragging footsteps and whenever his fellow students met him in the street, they cut him as if he were possessed of all the vices. He noticed it and shunned them in his turn. He only left his rooms in the evening. He did not dare to go to bed at night. The iron which he had taken to excess, had ruined his digestion, and in the following summer the doctors sent him to Karlsbad.

      On his return to Upsala, in the autumn, a rumour got abroad, an ugly rumour, which hung over the town like a black cloud. It was as if a drain had been left open and men were suddenly reminded that the town, that splendid creation of civilisation, was built over a sea of corruption, which might at any moment burst its bonds and poison the inhabitants. It was said that Theodore Wennerstroem, in a paroxysm of passion had assaulted one of his friends, and the rumour did not lie.

      His father went to Upsala and had an interview with the Dean of the Theological Faculty. The professor of pathology was present. What was to be done? The doctor remained silent. They pressed him for his opinion.

      “Since you ask me,” he said, “I must give you an answer; but you know as well as I do that there is but one remedy.”

      “And that is?” asked the theologian.

      “Need you ask?” replied the doctor.

      “Yes,” said the theologian, who was a married man. “Surely, nature does not require immorality from a man?”

      The father said that he quite understood the case, but that he was afraid of making recommendations to his son, on account of the risks the latter would run.

      “If he can’t take care of himself he must be a fool,” said the doctor.

      The Dean requested them to continue such an agitating conversation in a more suitable place.... He himself had nothing more to add.

      This ended the matter.

      Since Theodore was a member of the upper classes the scandal was hushed up. A few years later he passed his final, and was sent by the doctor to Spa. The amount of quinine which he had taken had affected his knees and he walked with two sticks. At Spa he looked so ill that he was a conspicuous figure even in a crowd of invalids.

      But an unmarried woman of thirty-five, a German, took compassion on the unhappy man. She spent many hours with him in a lonely summer arbour in the park, discussing the problems of life. She was a member of a big evangelical society, whose object was the raising of the moral standard. She showed him prospectuses for newspapers and magazines, the principal mission of which was the suppression of prostitution.

      “Look at me,” she said, “I am thirty-five years old and enjoy excellent health! What fools’ talk it is to say that immorality is a necessary evil. I have watched and fought a good fight for Christ’s sake.”

      The young clergyman silently compared her well-developed figure, her large hips, with his own wasted body.

      “What a difference there is between human beings in this world,” was his unspoken comment.

      In the autumn the Rev. Theodore Wennerstroem and Sophia Leidschütz, spinster, were engaged to be married.

      “Saved!” sighed the father, when the news reached him in his house at Stockholm.

      “I wonder how it will end,” thought the brother in his barracks. “I’m afraid that my poor Theodore is ‘one of those Asra who die when they love.’”

      Theodore Wennerstroem was married. Nine months after the wedding his wife presented him with a boy who suffered from rickets—another thirteen months and Theodore Wennerstroem had breathed his last.

      The doctor who filled up the certificate of death, looked at the fine healthy woman, who stood weeping by the small coffin which contained the skeleton of her young husband of not much over twenty years.

      “The plus was too great, the minus too small,” he thought, “and therefore the plus devoured the minus.”

      But the father, who received the news of his son’s death on a Sunday, sat down to read a sermon. When he had finished, he fell into a brown study.

      “There must be something very wrong with a world where virtue is rewarded with death,” he thought.

      And the virtuous widow, née Leidschütz, had two more husbands and eight children, wrote pamphlets on overpopulation and immorality. But her brother-in-law called her a cursed woman who killed her husbands.

      The anything but virtuous lieutenant married and was father of six children. He got promotion and lived happily to the end of his life.

      LOVE AND BREAD

      The assistant had not thought of studying the price of wheat before he called on the major to ask him for the hand of his daughter; but the major had studied it.

      “I love her,” said the assistant.

      “What’s your salary?” said the old man.

      “Well, twelve hundred crowns, at present; but we love one another....”

      “That has nothing to do with me; twelve hundred crowns is not enough.”

      “And then I make a little in addition to my salary, and Louisa knows that my heart....”

      “Don’t talk nonsense! How much in addition to your salary?”

      He seized paper and pencil.

      “And my feelings....”

      “How much in addition to your salary?”

      And he drew hieroglyphics on the blotting paper.

      “Oh! We’ll get on well enough, if only....”

      “Are you going to answer my question or not? How much in addition to your salary? Figures! figures, my boy! Facts!”

      “I do translations at ten crowns a sheet; I give French lessons, I am promised proof-correcting....”

      “Promises aren’t facts! Figures, my boy! Figures! Look here, now, I’ll put it down. What are you translating?”

      “What am I translating? I can’t tell you straight off.”

      “You can’t tell me straight off? You are engaged on a translation, you say; can’t you tell me what it is? Don’t talk such rubbish!”

      “I am translating Guizot’s History of Civilisation, twenty-five sheets.”

      “At ten crowns a sheet makes two hundred and fifty crowns. And then?”

      “And then? How can I tell beforehand?”

      “Indeed, can’t you tell beforehand? But you ought to know. You seem to imagine that being married simply means living together and amusing yourselves! No, my dear СКАЧАТЬ