Short stories, Swedish -- Translations into English; Sweden -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
At the same moment she felt something hard and cold against her
cheek. She could not help smiling. It was the old, red wooden horse, the
old three-legged Camilla, that lay beside her on the pillow. Her little
brother, who could never sleep at night without having it with him in
his bed, had put it in her bed. It was very sweet of her little brother.
Ingrid felt still more inclined to cry when she understood that her
little brother had wanted to comfort her with his wooden horse.
But she did not get so far as crying. The truth all at once flashed upon
her. Her little brother had given her the wooden horse, and her mother
had given her her white myrtle flowers, and the hymn-book had been
placed under her chin, because they had thought she was dead.
Ingrid took hold of the sides of the coffin with both hands and raised
herself. The little narrow bed was a coffin, and the little narrow
chamber was a grave. It was all very difficult to understand. She could
not understand that this concerned her, that it was she who had been
swathed like a corpse and placed in the grave. She must be lying all the
same in her bed, and be seeing or dreaming all this. She would soon find
out that this was no reality, but that everything was as usual.
All at once she found the explanation of the whole thing--'I often have
such strange dreams. This is only a vision'--and she sighed, relieved
and happy. She laid herself down in her coffin again; she was so sure
that it was her own bed, for that was not very wide either.
All this time the Dalar man stood in the grave, quite close to the foot
of the coffin. He only stood a few feet from her, but she had not seen
him; that was probably because he had tried to hide himself in the
corner of the grave as soon as the dead in the coffin had opened her
eyes and begun to move. She could, perhaps, have seen him, although he
held the coffin-lid before him as a screen, had there not been something
like a white mist before her eyes so that she could only see things
quite near her distinctly. Ingrid could not even see that there were
earthen walls around her. She had taken the sun to be a large
chandelier, and the shady lime-trees for a roof. The poor Dalar man
stood and waited for the thing that moved in the coffin to go away. It
did not strike him that it would not go unrequested. Had it not knocked
because it wanted to get out? He stood for a long time with his head
behind the coffin-lid and waited, that it should go. He peeped over the
lid when he thought that now it must have gone. But it had not moved; it
remained lying on its bed of shavings.
He could not put up with it any longer; he must really make an end of
it. It was a long time since his violin had spoken so prettily as
to-day, he longed to sit again quietly with it. Ingrid, who had nearly
fallen asleep again, suddenly heard herself addressed in the sing-song
Dalar dialect:
'Now, I think it is time you got up.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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