"Then I felt drawn northward where my last child and her mother live. An instinct told me to bring perfume for the mother and school-fees for the child, as that day it was going to the kindergarten for the first time. Then I began to hunt for the perfume; it ought to have been lilac, but I had to take lily-of-the-valley. I also wanted flowers, but could not find any.
"So I continued northwards and came to their house; the sun shone in, the table was spread for coffee; there was an air of comfort, homeliness, and kindness over all. I was received in a friendly way, felt in a moment that the whole of my black life lay behind me, and realised the happiness of merely being alive."
The After-Odour.—The teacher continued: "As I went thence, I felt the happiness of the present. All the past was only the dark background. I was thankful in my heart, when I remembered all I had come through without perishing. When I came home, I learnt through the telephone that my worst enemy had died on the morning of this very day. His death-struggle was taking place at the very time that I made the pilgrimage through my past life. I reflected: Why should I pass through my agony just when he died? He was a 'black man'[1] with an obsolete materialistic view of things which he thought was modern; a literary huckster who wrote reviews of marchionesses' rubbishy books, in order to be invited to their castles, and praised his associates as long as they consorted with him; the partisan of a coterie and a log-roller.
"I had never come into personal contact with him, but once, a long time ago, he had called himself my pupil. He could not however grow, nor follow me upwards. It was now as though my old self had died in him. Perhaps therefore I suffered his death and felt it just now. But why the perfume? That I know not. But when I learnt that the deceased decomposed so rapidly that he had to be buried at once, I could not help connecting the perfume with his dissolution. When, eight days afterwards, I read a posthumous review by the deceased of my last work, and saw that he regretted that I was not a pagan and lamented my defection from the Lord of Dung, it was as though I sniffed an after-odour from the dunghole, and I seized the perfume-flask in good earnest."
[1] Strindberg's expression for a free-thinker.
Peaches and Turnips.—The teacher continued: "At the same time a similar death happened. Another of the 'Black Flags' departed under peculiar circumstances two days after the first. I had known this man during the period in which the ape-king ruled. We did not like each other, but like condemned criminals were compelled to keep together. Our friendship was only the reverse-side of a hatred; his hideous appearance frightened me; his profession was equally repulsive, but brought in much money. He wrote according to the taste of the time, and lived in the false idea that he was 'illuminated' and liberal-minded. When his father died, the son expressed his regret that 'his father had recovered the faith of his childhood.' What happened then? The son who lived in faith in wickedness and ugliness, began to develop this faith in a peculiar way. He had in his writings shown a predilection for turnips; in his latter days he inoculated peaches with turnip-juice in order to make the southern fruit partake of the beautiful flavour of the latter. The same perverse taste was evident in his last book; there his sympathy is decidedly on the side of the 'blacks.' He ended in an asylum. He could not be saved, for he did not know how to seek the Saviour. So he died. I had just regretted not having sent some flowers to his grave, when I saw in an obituary notice that the dead man had vented a noisome lie against me, which a bosom friend of his now repeats in print. In the same notice the world is threatened with his posthumous writings. When they come out, I will buy a flower and hold it under my nose, while I breathe a sigh of gratitude to him, who restored to me the faith of my childhood and saved me from the mad-house."
The Web of Lies.—The pupil said: "I am eight-and-fifty years old; have lied less than others; and have therefore always believed what others said. When, in my old age, I sit together with friends of my youth and make comparisons, I find that my whole life is a web of lies. Last night I sat with such a friend, and had a protracted talk of the following intelligent kind. I said, 'When the Prince of X. married....' 'Married! He isn't married.' 'Isn't he? Is that a lie too?' 'He has never been married.' 'Now during twenty years I have spread it abroad that he was married, and a whole story has been built on this lie, which I was about to relate, but now I must drop it.'
"Here is another lie! During thirty years I have told people that Dr. H. was present when the Malunger murderer was executed. He had falsely informed me that, as a medical student, he had received a commission to examine the head after it had been cut off. He gave me such interesting details on the subject that I was accustomed to describe them in company. What a liar he was!
"'But he was there.' 'Was he there?' 'Certainly; I saw him standing behind the priest when I took a photograph of the scaffold.' 'You? Have you ... Are you lying or is he?' 'I am not.' 'No; now I don't know where I am. Everything is topsy-turvy. For the last ten years I have retracted the lie which I had spread. I have made Dr. H. a liar! One ought never to speak or write, but only draw the things which one absolutely needs. He was then really there! How can I restore to him his honour, of which I have robbed him?'"
Lethe.—The teacher answered: "This whole web of lies, errors, misunderstandings, which forms the basis of our lives, transforms life itself into something dreamlike and unreal, and must be dissolved when we pass into the other life. I read to-day of a dying man. Instead of seeing his life pass by him, as is usually the case, his whole life dissolved into a cloud; his memory failed; all bitterness and all trouble disappeared; and on the other hand, all his disappointed hopes assumed an aspect of reality. He thought he was loved by his wife, who had been cold to him; he thanked her for all the tenderness which she had never shown him. The children who had deserted him he saw again in the bright light of youth; he seemed to hear the sound of little feet upon the floor, the characteristic of a happy home, and his face wore a happy smile. The dark autumn weather outside changed into spring; little girls handed him roses to kiss in order to enchance their value. Finally he saw himself and his family in an arbour drinking coffee out of Dresden china cups, into which they dipped yellow saffron-cakes.... Then he fell into his last sleep. It was a beautiful and enviable death; it was paradise. From the ancient Lethe he drank forgetfulness of the troubles he had undergone before he trod the Elysian fields. If it only were so! To drag all one's bygone filth with one in memory cannot be favourable to a new life in purity. There are illnesses in which one loses memory. May death prove to be such an illness!"