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.

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."