XII
Pilgrimage and Penance
There are ninety towns in Sweden, and the powers have condemned me to go to the one which I most dislike. First of all, I visit the doctors. The first speaks of neurasthenia, the second of angina pectoris, the third of paranoia, a mental disease, the fourth of emphysema. This is enough to ensure me against being put into a lunatic asylum. Meanwhile, in order to procure the means of livelihood, I am forced to write articles for a newspaper. But whenever I sit at the table to write, hell is let loose. A new discovery comes to make me wild. Whenever I take up my quarters in an hotel there breaks out a fiendish noise, just as there did in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière in Paris; I hear shuffling footsteps and the moving of furniture. I change my room, I go into another hotel, and still there is the noise over my head. I visit the restaurants, but as soon as I sit down to a meal the noise begins there also. And it should be observed that whenever I ask those present whether they hear the same noise too, they say “yes,” and their description of it tallies with mine.
It is then no acoustic hallucination from which I suffer; everywhere there are plots, I say to myself. But one day, as I go by chance into a shoemaker’s shop, the noise instantaneously breaks out. It is no plot, then! It is the Devil himself! Hunted from hotel to hotel, pursued everywhere by electric wires even to my bed, attacked everywhere by electric currents which lift me from my chair, or out of bed, I deliberately set about planning my suicide. The weather is terrible, and in my depression I seek distraction in drinking bouts with friends.
One dreary day, after such a bout, I have just finished my early breakfast in my room. I turn round towards the table on which the breakfast things are standing. A slight noise attracts my attention, and I see that a knife has fallen on the ground. I lift it up and place it so that it cannot do so again. The knife moves and falls.
So it is electricity!
The same morning I write a letter to my mother-in-law, and complain of the bad weather and life in general. As I write the sentence, “The earth is dirty, the sea is dirty, and dirt rains from the sky,” imagine my astonishment, as I see a clear drop of water fall upon the paper. No electricity! A miracle! In the evening as I am still working at the table, a noise from the washing-stand startles me. I look in that direction, and see that a wax-cloth, which I use in my morning ablutions, has fallen down. In order to get at the rights of the matter, I hang it up, so that it cannot fall down again.
It falls again!
What is that? My thoughts now revert to the occultists and their secret powers. I leave the town with my written indictment of them in my pocket, and betake myself to Lund, where there are old friends of mine: doctors, specialists in mental disease, and even theosophists on whose aid I reckon.
How have I come to settle down in this little university town, this place of rustication and penance for the students of Upsala, when they have lived too freely at the cost of their purses and their health? Is this my Canossa, where I must retract my false doctrines before the same set of youths who between 1880 and 1890 regarded me as their standard-bearer? I understand my position exactly, and know well that I am under the ban of most of the professors as a seducer of youth, and that the fathers and mothers fear me like the Evil One himself.
Moreover, I have made personal enemies here, and have contracted debts under circumstances which set my character in a dubious light. Here Popoffsky’s sister-in-law and her husband live, and both of these, who have an influential position in society, are able to stir up powerful enemies against me. I have also here relations who ignore me, and friends who have left me to become my enemies. In a word, it is the worst place I could have chosen for a quiet residence; it is hell, but a hell contrived with masterly logic and divine ingenuity. Here I must drain the cup of humiliation, and reconcile the youth of Lund with the alienated powers. By a picturesque accident, I buy myself a mantle with cape and cowl, of a flea-brown colour, like a Franciscan’s. Thus, after a six years’ banishment, I return to Sweden in a penitent’s costume.
About the year 1885 there was formed in Lund a Students’ Association called “The Old Boys,” whose literary, scientific, and social programme was best expressed by the word “Radicalism.” It was coloured by modern ideas; it was first socialistic, then nihilistic, and tended finally to a general dissolution of society. It had besides a fin de siècle flavouring of Satanism and decadence. The head of that party, the most conspicuous of their champions, a friend of mine, whom I have not seen for three years, pays me a visit. Dressed like myself in a monkish-looking mantle of a grey colour, grown old, lean, with melancholy aspect, he shows his history in his face.
“You also?” I ask him.
“Yes! It is all up with us.”
On my inviting him to take a glass of wine, he declares himself a teetotaller.
“How are the ‘Old Boys’?” I ask.
“Dead, come croppers, turned into Philistines and steady members of society.”
“It is a case of Canossa, then!”
“Canossa all along the line.”
“Then it is Providence Itself which has brought me
