With the troop of children close upon his heels old Hermansson squeezed himself into the high narrow pew. He did so the more calmly as the pew was at this moment the most respectable place. But to Mr. Brundin the hard wooden seat of duty at once seemed repugnant.
Hedvig stealthily joined the other children who were to be confirmed, and sat down under the pulpit.
The clergyman was an old shaggy-bearded man with a face like granite and reindeer-moss. This teacher of Our Lord began the catechism in a dry, hard voice, as if he were engaged in an interrogation on the four rules of arithmetic rather than in partaking of the divine sacrament. In this severe old Church, confronted by this severe old man, the gospel seemed to be a vain mockery and punishment, the great punishment, the only reality. It was strange to hear the young girlish voices answer his lifeless voice as it spelled out, without a spark of fire, the long record of judgment. It was as if Death had been sitting on a stone and piped a tune on a dry bone, while frightened Echo answered from the green shores of life. There was in the quick, breathless repetition of the lesson every degree of fear, from the side-glance which would avoid the whip, down to the low trembling sigh that dies out in a sob. But he who had ears to hear would nevertheless have been startled by Hedvig’s voice. She knew her lesson and her voice did not shake, but there was something unnaturally tense, something of keenest anguish in her voice.
What sort of a God was it whom Hedvig feared and whom she was to receive today at the altar rails. Let us pause to reflect on his origin and on his history, which is much older than Hedvig’s first meeting with the clergyman. From the beginning, he was a God from the Servants’ Hall and he was an inheritance from Hedvig’s first horror, the Bogey Man!
We never escape from our first impressions and experiences. They bind us with the fibres of deep-seated roots which we never draw up into the full light of consciousness.
There Kristin, severe and foreboding, stood over the little sugar thief whom she had caught: “Hedvig, if you do not leave the sugar box alone, the Bogey Man will come and take you.”
From the beginning these two experiences blended, and each by unfortunate association strengthened the influence of the other. The more frightened she grew of the Bogey Man, the more she thought of the sugar box, and the more she thought of the sugar box, the more frightened she grew of the Bogey Man. At last he overshadowed her whole existence. He was in the dark hole under the kitchen stairs; in Kristin’s big black book; in the dull eyes of her moribund apoplectic father, in the hawk-like face of her grandfather in there over the green sofa. The darker it grew, the more dangerous the Bogey Man became. She ate her supper slowly, slowly, in order to postpone the inevitable. Alone and silent in her fear, she sat amongst her sisters and brothers who romped and struggled round about her. Then they were driven to bed. “Please, Kristin, don’t pull down the blind. Dear Kristin, please leave the lamp a little longer.”
It was no use. In vain she pulled the bedclothes over her head, the Bogey Man was still there, the blackest thing in the darkness. And he came sneaking into her dreams and groped with his shadow hands about her little trembling heart so that she often awoke with a loud shriek in the middle of the night.
In her terror, Hedvig attached herself more and more closely to old Kristin, who knew all about all these ominous mysteries. And thus it came about that God succeeded to the Bogey Man.
But this intimacy during the long hours of twilight with an old, tired, and harried creature who had not the sense to spare tender ears, was dangerous. In everyday life Kristin’s God was a mean and nagging kitchen-God whose chief business was to punish the maids’ laziness and pilfering. But he had also his greater and more threatening moods when he emerged from his past in a small soldiers’ cottage in a mighty Småland forest in order to punish incendiaries and murderers and to look after brownies and trolls. When on Sunday evenings Kristin sat reading aloud from the Old Testament her voice would assume an expression of cruel lamentation, something submissively threatening which gripped Hedvig with a deep awe of the people through the dim and distant ages.