(Lagerlöf admired Kipling’s Jungle Book, which she read before starting out on Nils Holgerssons underbara resa [The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1906].) Nonetheless, Gösta may serve here as an instrument of the Almighty, moving in mysterious ways His wonders to perform: rejected by his wife, Captain Lennart becomes “God’s pilgrim.” The trick played on the feeble-minded, beautiful “Girl from Nygård” is more appalling: the planned wedding, at which she is left waiting “in the kitchen.” Gösta departs to dam off the flash flood threatening Ekeby, and then leaves that worthwhile and essential task in order to help the runaway Countess Elisabet.

The Nygård girl, who bears a physical resemblance to Elisabet, returns to her forest home and falls to her death—accident or suicide? Anna Stjärnhök has accused Gösta, to the young Countess Elisabet, of having caused the death—a kind of suicide—of another simple soul, pious Ebba Dohna, surely a case of sour grapes on Anna’s part (Gösta having renounced Anna with lightning speed amid his protestations of pain at doing so). She tells Elisabet about the “murder” of Ebba Dohna, she says, falsely moralizing, because she does not want him “to become a married woman’s lover.” Three chapters later, she washes (she claims) her hands of Gösta after having learned that he abandoned the necessary task of saving Ekeby from the surging waters in order to serve as the countess’s “slave, her page.” “So I see . . . that God does not have only one string on his bow. I will put my heart at ease and stay where I am needed. He can make a man of Gösta Berling without me.”

In the case of the Nygård girl, as in Ebba’s, Gösta’s excuses are flimsy: “I never promised the girl from Nygård that I would marry her! ‘Come here next Friday, then you’ll see something funny’ was all that I said to her. I can’t help it if she liked me.” Gösta delivers this excuse for the daft girl’s death in response to Elisabet’s outcry, “Oh Gösta, Gösta, how could you?” But Gösta has misapprehended the reason for Elisabet’s question. She has remonstrated with him because he told the mob threatening Ekeby that she “was good and pure,” not because he caused the Nygård girl’s death. Gösta, in his turn, says nothing more about the dead girl, but praises Elisabet’s “lovely soul.” Lagerlöf is full of surprises and hints. Can it be that Elisabet, like Gösta, is self-centered? The reader, who has become fascinated by Lagerlöf’s actually quite complex characters, is relieved to learn, in the next chapter, that Gösta, roaming the woods in suicidal despair, wants “to die at the place where the Nygård girl had been killed.” He feels remorse, after all, for the joke and its consequences.

The engaged reader also feels some distress at the lot of refined Elisabet, marooned in the forest croft with her poet-fiddler Gösta, served and entertained by unbalanced Löwenborg and his painted piano table. The majoress says, “It will be a gloomy life for you, Gösta,” and adds, “for Elisabet too.” Indeed, the future for the novel’s cast looks very bleak. Love, or Eros, so often apostrophized, seldom turns out well. Anna Stjärnhök enters into a “marriage” with the dead fiancé, Ferdinand Uggla, she has never loved. The late-life marriage of Ulrika Dillner to Sintram, of course, is doomed from the start, and, luckily for her, is annulled thanks to Anna Stjärnhök’s valor. The miserly pastor of Broby blooms at the thought of a reunion, forty years too late, with the love of his youth. After their weekend of happiness, she departs, content at this new memory—“such a magnificent dream”—and the pastor “sat in his desolate home and wept in desperation.” Marianne Sinclaire, caught kissing Gösta in the tableau vivant, carried off by him, subjected to harrowing adventures (including the dreadful scene when, in the icy night, she is shut out of her father’s house), has her beauty ruined by smallpox, and is abandoned by Gösta, who puts the blame on her: “He didn’t want to be her plaything any longer.” In chapter 27, “Old Ballads,” Marianne is wooed and won by Knight Sunshine, Adrian [Löwensköld]. “It was not happiness, not unhappiness, but she would try to live with that man.”3

As for the cavaliers,4 they have to leave Ekeby, despite their belated turn to honest work. Bound for his forest croft, Gösta will not accept the gift of Ekeby (already partly burned by the cavalier Kevenhüller’s final invention) from the dying majoress. Gösta delivers his farewell oration to them, but his words will do them no good, deprived of their refuge, as they are, by his decision. “The pains of old age awaited them.” He gives them cold comfort by wanting, he says, to believe that they have learned the answer to the questions of how “a man could be both happy and good.” Whether Gösta, eloquent to the end, realizes it or not, he paraphrases the Hávamál of the Elder Edda about the existential choice between selflessness and selfishness. The “dear old men,” the cavaliers, also get a handsome sendoff from the narrator, even more verbally gifted than Gösta himself.

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Selma Lagerlöf was scarcely the naïve or artless teller of tales as she was perceived by some observers, for example, the refined poet and judge of literature Oscar Levertin, to whom Georg Brandes had assigned the task of presenting Lagerlöf to Germany (1904) in a handsome series, Die Literatur. Thomas Mann, that master of irony, knew better. Introducing the Gesammelte Werke, the ten-volume set of her works issued in Munich (1924), Mann described the portrait of her included in it: her “bright, energetic face” looked toward the observer “in its pinched asymmetry, kindly and almost sly,” and sly she was. The chapter “Lady Musica” quite unbelievably requires the twelve cavaliers to perform Haydn’s Ninety-Second Symphony. Its mostly merry melodies are intended to lift Gösta’s gloom after Elisabet’s escape into an unknown fate. Löwenborg plays his soundless Beethoven on his piano table; is the reader supposed to think of deaf Beethoven? In the chapter’s last line, the “melancholy” of Gösta is dispelled; the Swedish word is mjältsjukan. Did Lagerlöf want her Swedish audience to think of “Mjältsjukan,” the famous confessional lyric of Esaias Tegnér, the son of Värmland, the erotically tormented Bishop of Växjö?

Lagerlöf plays many little jokes on her readers. Sintram gets his name from a tale by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué, Sintram und seine Gefährten (1815), about a splendid young knight from Drontheim (Trondhjem in Norway); in a reenactment of Albrecht Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel (Knight, Death, and Devil), this Sintram thrusts the cruciform hilt of his sword at the evil one and sends “the terrible stranger” flying. The prim British novelist Charlotte Yonge translated it as Sintram and His Companions, and the book became a children’s classic in late Victorian England.