The Son of a Servant

by August Strindberg

In the course of the summer there arrived a black-bordered proclamation which caused great commotion when read aloud in church. King Oscar was dead. Many good things were reported of him, even if no one mourned him. And now the bells rang daily between twelve and one o'clock. In fact, church-bells seemed to follow him.

The boys played in the churchyard among the graves and soon grew familiar with the church. On Sundays they were all assembled in the organ-loft. When the parish clerk struck up the psalm, they took their places by the organ-stops, and when he gave them a sign, all the stops were drawn out and they marched into the choir. That always made a great impression on the congregation.

But the fact of his having to come in such proximity to holy things, and of his handling the requisites of worship, etc., made him familiar with them, and his respect for them diminished. For instance, he did not find the Lord's Supper edifying when on Saturday evening he had eaten some of the holy bread in the parish clerk's kitchen, where it was baked and stamped with the impression of a crucifix. The boys ate these pieces of bread, and called them wafers. Once after the Holy Communion he and the churchwarden were offered the rest of the wine in the vestry.

Nevertheless, after he had been parted from his mother, and felt himself surrounded by unknown threatening powers, he felt a profound need of having recourse to some refuge and of keeping watch. He prayed his evening prayer with a fair amount of devotion; in the morning, when the sun shone, and he was well rested, he did not feel the need of it.

One day when the church was being aired the boys were playing in it. In an access of high spirits they stormed the altar. But John, who was egged on to something more daring, ran up into the pulpit, reversed the hour-glass, and began to preach out of the Bible. This made a great sensation. Then he descended, and ran along the tops of the pews through the whole church. When he had reached the pew next to the altar, which belonged to a count's family, he stepped too heavily on the reading-desk, which fell with a crash to the ground. There was a panic, and all the boys rushed out of church. He stood alone and desolate. In other circumstances he would have run to his mother, acknowledged his fault, and implored her help. But she was not there. Then he thought of God; he fell on his knees before the altar, and prayed through the Paternoster. Then, as though inspired with a thought from above, he arose calmed and strengthened, examined the desk, and found that its joints were not broken. He took a clamp, dovetailed the joints together, and, using his boot as a hammer, with a few well-directed blows repaired the desk. He tried it, and found it firm. Then he went greatly relieved out of the church. "How simple!" he thought to himself, and felt ashamed of having prayed the Lord's Prayer. Why? Perhaps he felt dimly that in this obscure complex which we call the soul there lives a power which, summoned to self-defence at the hour of need, possesses a considerable power of extricating itself. He did not fall on his knees and thank God, and this showed that he did not believe it was He who had helped him. That obscure feeling of shame probably arose from the fact of his perceiving that he had crossed a river to fetch water, i.e., that his prayer had been superfluous.

But this was only a passing moment of self-consciousness. He continued to be variable and capricious. Moodiness, caprice, or diables noirs, as the French call it, is a not completely explained phenomenon. The victim of them is like one possessed; he wants something, but does the opposite; he suffers from the desire to do himself an injury, and finds almost a pleasure in self-torment. It is a sickness of the soul and of the will, and former psychologists tried to explain it by the hypothesis of a duality in the brain, the two hemispheres of which, they thought, under certain conditions could operate independently each for itself and against the other. But this explanation has been rejected. Many have observed the phenomenon of duplex personality, and Goethe has handled this theme in Faust. In capricious children who "do not know what they want," as the saying is, the nerve-tension ends in tears. They "beg for a whipping," and it is strange that on such occasions a slight chastisement restores the nervous equilibrium and is almost welcomed by the child, who is at once pacified, appeased, and not at all embittered by the punishment, which in its view must have been unjust. It really had asked for a beating as a medicine. But there is also another way of expelling the "black dog." One takes the child in one's arms so that it feels the magnetism of friendship and is quieted. That is the best way of all.

John suffered from similar attacks of caprice. When some treat was proposed to him, a strawberry-picking expedition for example, he asked to be allowed to remain at home, though he knew he would be bored to death there. He would have gladly gone, but he insisted on remaining at home. Another will stronger than his own commanded him to do so. The more they tried to persuade him, the stronger was his resistance. But then if someone came along jovially and with a jest seized him by the collar, and threw him into the haycart, he obeyed and was relieved to be thus liberated from the mysterious will that mastered him. Generally speaking, he obeyed gladly and never wished to put himself forward or be prominent. So much of the slave was in his nature. His mother had served and obeyed in her youth, and as a waitress had been polite towards everyone.

One Sunday they were in the parsonage, where there were young girls. He liked them, but he feared them. All the children went out to pluck strawberries. Someone suggested that they should collect the berries without eating them, in order to eat them at home with sugar. John plucked diligently and kept the agreement; he did not eat one, but honestly delivered up his share, though he saw others cheating. On their return home the berries were divided by the pastor's daughter, and the children pressed round her in order that each might get a full spoonful. John kept as far away as possible; he was forgotten and berryless.

He had been passed over! Full of the bitter consciousness of this, he went into the garden and concealed himself in an arbour. He felt himself to be the last and meanest. He did not weep, however, but was conscious of something hard and cold rising within, like a skeleton of steel. After he had passed the whole company under critical review, he found that he was the most honest, because he had not eaten a single strawberry outside; and then came the false inference—he had been passed over because he was better than the rest. The result was that he really regarded himself as such, and felt a deep satisfaction at having been overlooked.

He had also a special skill in making himself invisible, or keeping concealed so as to be passed over. One evening his father brought home a peach. Each child received a slice of the rare fruit, with the exception of John, and his otherwise just father did not notice it. He felt so proud at this new reminder of his gloomy destiny that later in the evening he boasted of it to his brothers. They did not believe him, regarding his story as improbable. The more improbable the better, he thought. He was also plagued by antipathies. One Sunday in the country a cart full of boys came to the parish clerk's. A brown-complexioned boy with a mischievous and impudent face alighted from it. John ran away at the first sight of him, and hid himself in the attic. They found him out: the parish clerk cajoled him, but he remained sitting in his corner and listened to the children playing till the brown-complexioned boy had gone away.