Old Lady

oeOld Lady

MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD--Selma Lagerloef--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). For human character, as for meat, salt preservative. Selma Lagerloef is an old lady but she is salty. Best-loved Swedish writer, she is no Pollyanna but a wideawake female citizen whose rose-colored spectacles sometimes conceal but rarely lessen the knowing twinkle in her eye. Far enough removed from her own childhood (she is 75) to be forgivably sentimental about it, she writes with her accustomed sub-humorous kindliness of the little girl she was. Readers who missed the first volume of her reminiscences (Marbacka, 1924) will be well advised not to miss this second. Author Lagerloef's world is a settled, mildly prosperous land whose natives bother their heads more about the price of eggs than the noble army of martyrs. On the modest but hereditary family estate of Marbacka, Selma Lagerlf spent most of her childhood. Her sister Anna was the beauty of the family; Selma was towheaded and not pretty, had been sent away to Stockholm's Orthopedic Institute to help her lameness. An undemonstrative child, she loved her father fiercely; when he was dangerously ill she made a vow to God that if his life were spared she would read the Bible from cover to cover. Her father recovered; Selma struggled on and one day her uncle discovered her poring over the Book of Revelation under a gooseberry bush. Her uncle reported to her parents, and when she overheard them making light of her simple-mindedness she left the last few pages forever unread. Selma's governess broke the news to her gently that she was an unremarkable child, but Selma's hopes of some day becoming a writer were not dashed. She said to herself: "Perhaps I can become a writer if it depends only on the will and not on talent. For will I think I have." Because she was sure the Devil lurked in a certain corner in the garret she forced herself to pass by there every day.

Author Lagerloef is too good a narrator and too modest a person to make herself the heroine of her story. The other members of her family circle and many a kindly-remembered friend bulk quite as large in her story. Pastor Unger always came to call when the house was upset, and made confusion worse confounded without annoying anybody. When the parish he had always pined for fell vacant he refused to apply, because he thought another man should have the post, but he gave himself the satisfaction of nearly applying. He appeared at the registrar's office and at the last legal minute lowered his papers till they nearly touched the table, then took them up again. Curmudgeonly Agrippa Prastberg lived on a raft, once a year ruined the Lagerloefs' kitchen clock by "regulating"' it. When mischievous urchins daubed his floating home with paint, he showed his resentment by lying motionless in his punt. Doctor Piscator was a dangerous man to call in because he stayed so long. But he was a violent pro-German, and the Lagerloefs' governess finally hit on the expedient of playing La Marseillaise.

Marbacka is still in good Lagerloef hands. Old lady Selma Lagerloef spends her summers there, in the modernized manor house (see cut), oversees the cultivation of its 140 acres, the welfare of its 53 tenants.

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