Married by August Strindberg

Author:August Strindberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620137840
Publisher: Duke Classics

Phoenix

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The wild strawberries were getting ripe when he met her for the first time at the vicarage. He had met many girls before, but when he saw her he knew; this was she! But he did not dare to tell her so, and she only teased him for he was still at school.

He was an undergraduate when he met her for the second time. And as he put his arms round her and kissed her, he saw showers of rockets, heard the ringing of bells and bugle calls, and felt the earth trembling under his feet.

She was a woman at the age of fourteen. Her young bosom seemed to be waiting for hungry little mouths and eager baby fists. With her firm and elastic step, her round and swelling hips, she looked fit to bear at any moment a baby under her heart. Her hair was of a pale gold, like clarified honey, and surrounded her face like an aureole; her eyes were two flames and her skin was as soft as a glove.

They were engaged to be married and billed and cooed in the wood like the birds in the garden under the lime trees; life lay before them like a sunny meadow which the scythe had not yet touched. But he had to pass his examinations in mining first, and that would take him,—including the journey abroad—ten years. Ten years!

He returned to the University. In the summer he came back to the vicarage and found her every bit as beautiful. Three summers he came—and the fourth time she was pale. There were tiny red lines in the corners of her nose and her shoulders drooped a little. When the summer returned for the sixth time, she was taking iron. In the seventh she went to a watering-place. In the eighth she suffered from tooth-ache and her nerves were out of order. Her hair had lost its gloss, her voice had grown shrill, her nose was covered with little black specks; she had lost her figure, dragged her feet, and her cheeks were hollow. In the winter she had an attack of nervous fever, and her hair had to be cut off. When it grew again, it was a dull brown. He had fallen in love with a golden-haired girl of fourteen—brunettes did not attract him—and he married a woman of twenty-four, with dull brown hair, who refused to wear her dresses open at the throat.

But in spite of all this he loved her. His love was less passionate than it had been; it had become calm and steadfast. And there was nothing in the little mining-town which could disturb their happiness.

She bore him two boys, but he was always wishing for a girl. And at last a fair-haired baby girl arrived.

She was the apple of his eye, and as she grew up she resembled her mother more and more. When she was eight years old, she was just what her mother had been. And the father devoted all his spare time to his little daughter.

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