Book Three — Gertrude

Something strange has come over Gertrude. It is not grief in the ordinary sense; it is a boundless, growing fear of seeing Ingmar — on the road, at church, anywhere. She cannot stay and she cannot control it. She draws her kerchief down over her face when she goes out, takes the narrow bypaths alongside the ditches where she thinks there is less chance of meeting him, keeps her eyes lowered on the highroad.

The fear does not diminish; it grows. There is not a single place in the parish where she can be certain of not running across him. On the river he might be floating timber; in the forest he might cross her path. When weeding the garden she scans the road. Her pigeons do not fly at his approach; her dog does not bark; he is too familiar to trigger the usual alarms. She would shut herself in entirely if she could.

The chapter follows Gertrude through one extraordinary dream — she goes out to milk the cows and finds herself lost in a landscape that keeps shifting — and through the slow, inevitable movement toward a decision she cannot yet name. She will join the pilgrims. Not from faith, but because the parish has become intolerable. Lagerlöf does not explain this; she simply shows Gertrude at the end of a chapter-long interior journey, at a point of no return.