Margareta Bergfeldt

Ludvig and Sussi Battwyhl, Louis and Katja Brenner and Julia and Kurt Balzar are upper class millionaires. They don't seem to do any real work but still need a vacation in the mountains. Everybody seems to be romantically involved with everybody. A rich American woman joins them.

A knight returning home with his squire Jons after a ten-year crusade to the Holy Land finds a country paralyzed by the Black Death, a newly burned witch, a blacksmith and his runaway wife, an actress, a Virgin Mary with her child and the knight's faithful wife. All approaches the realm of the dead in a single "tragicomic long dance of death". The narrator begins with: "In a church in southern Småland is our spectacle painted on the wall just to the right of the entrance to the porch. The unknown painter has on the church wall depicted a number of people in formal long dance toward death."

The teacher Arne Markell, who is also a well-known poet, leaves his class of students. He will marry Lena and work for a new school. One of the students, Majken, misses him sincerely.