Chapter X: Part TWO (2)

If Peter imagined that Frida now belonged to him, without any further expense, he was mistaken. A few more such moments and she considered herself free again. And so she let him understand in a delicate way that new favours had to be bought with new offerings. Peter suffered, but he suffered more in his greed than in his affection. He was so accustomed to think that everything depended on money that he could scarcely imagine a man being loved for his own sake. He puffed and whined—but paid. He did not even try to press down her demands by simulated indifference. Such is love.

So things went on for a few months. Then one fine day Peter received a letter in which Frida herself proposed a meeting without mentioning any fresh gifts. He was just about to welcome her, feeling heartily content, when he was checked by an inward shock. He suddenly remembered some land he had once bought when the seller in apparent absentmindedness had registered the transfer in his own name instead of the purchaser’s.

It was the only time he had ever been completely taken in.

Peter read through Frida’s letter again. It was too eager. It was not quite the same old Frida. He felt a slight presentiment of something unpleasant. A voice whispered in his ear to be on his guard. He knew what it all meant. He sat long and worried in front of the clean sheet of note paper. In the end he wrote something about important business which prevented him from meeting her just then. After this extraordinary exercise of self-control Peter felt very sorry for himself, so much so that the tears came into his eyes. He wandered about puffing and sighing among the fields of Selambshof, a victim of desire, suspicion, hope and fear. Into the bargain Stellan wired that he was coming home immediately from the North, so that Peter was obliged with a bleeding heart to screw the name-plate on to the door again and set out all the photographs of horses and ladies. Thus the discreet little free retreat for his amours disappeared from view. Then another letter from Frida arrived in which she begged and prayed to be allowed to see her own Elk very soon. Peter was really touched. It was sweet to hear her beg like this. All there was of hunger and love in his great body stirred within him. But he felt at the same time that the thing was growing more and more dangerous. “I must be strong,” he thought, “very strong.” And he did not answer the letter, not a line....

Peter was not left long in doubt. It was as he had suspected, Frida was expecting a child. She absolutely must see him, she wrote. She was so ill and so run down. If he did not arrange things for her at once she would drown herself....

Peter sat long staring at the letter and it did not affect him in the way he would have thought. Instead it rather comforted him in a strange way. It cooled his desire to think of her growing more and more unshapely and ugly every day.

“Oh no,” he muttered, “you won’t drown yourself. I have paid for what I have had. We are square. It is high time for me to return to my senses.”

The long tug of war between his love and his purse had ended in a victory for the purse.

Peter burnt all Frida’s letters and did not answer a word. He had decided to regard the affair with Frida as a dream. And he knew he could do it. There was not a trace of proof. So wonderful was the instinctive cunning of this man that he had not sent a single line signed with his name, written in his own handwriting, or even posted at Selambshof. And scarcely once had he been seen in Frida’s company. She on her side had from the first had every reason to keep the matter secret, because a liaison with the hated Peter the Boss would at once have driven away all her customers in Majängen.

But Peter was not to escape as unscathed as he had imagined. Frida was not at all the sort of person to allow herself to be hanged in silence. For a time she continued to bombard him with letters, full of entreaties and reproaches. Then she began to hang around Selambshof, big, swollen, with a sinister spotted face and awful to see. Peter kept a sharp lookout and succeeded for a long time in avoiding her. But one winter evening she suddenly confronted him in the avenue. Peter did not even greet her, but walked on as if he had not noticed her. Then she seized him by the sleeve and poured over him a wild flood of curses and threats. There were no witnesses. Peter let the flood pass over him with great calm—yes, positively with a kind of enjoyment. Only now when he heard her voice and saw her body did he feel the child as something real. And in his innermost heart he no longer doubted that it was his. No, it was almost a pleasure to think how something of himself was irresistibly developing within her. He enjoyed that sensation with the last cruel glowing spark of his love. But his voice was low and ice-cold when at last he answered her. And he spoke slowly as if he wanted to impress something for all eternity upon her consciousness.

“Not a farthing,” he said. “Take from what you and Brundin stole. From us you have had enough.”

With that he shook her off and went away.

* * * * *

Frida ceased to hover around Selambshof. She adopted new tactics. She stayed at home in Majängen and talked. There was no longer any truce of silence. To everybody who came she opened her heart concerning the scoundrel at Selambshof, who would not do the proper thing. As the unhappy victim of Peter Selamb she won much sympathy and many new customers in Majängen. Her laundry was besieged by the women and became a sort of focus for the hatred of Peter the Boss. The whole community waited excitedly for the Spring Sessions.

But a good deal was to happen before then, and Peter would have several reasons for reflecting on Majängen this winter.

There was the old business of the water supply. It had been decided after several stormy meetings that water was to be laid on in the houses at Majängen. It was necessary, because the wells were insufficient and tainted. Part of the necessary money had already been collected and then Peter’s permission to lay down the pipes was sought. It was considered to be only a matter of form. The streets were of course his, but even if he did not fulfil his promise of making roads it never occurred to anybody that he would deny the people he had humbugged facilities for the pipes. But that was exactly what Peter did.

“The ground is mine, and if you want to put down pipes you will have to pay for them,” he said.

This answer was unworthy of Peter the Boss. It could be no pleasure to have a hotbed of epidemics just outside your door. He acted in direct opposition to his own interests. But it is a fact that one hardening of the heart brings in its train others. He was furious with everything that was brewing against him in that dark _charnel_ house. And he hated to think of the coming Spring Sessions. And that is why he said “No,” an obstinate, sullen, impossible “no,” which, as we have said, was quite unworthy of the cleverness of Peter the Boss.

This was too much. The newspapers then got hold of him. The reporters were about to catch the mood of the winter twilight. They described the horrors of the outskirts of the town, the struggle between town and country, tearing each other to pieces in an indescribable chaos, the bottomless roads, the ragged hillside, the torn pines, the maimed, squinting, hunchbacked, cold-sweating, ramshackle houses. And in the midst of it all came the Salvation Army to their red barn with “Blood and Fire” over the cross on the door. “Starvation and Frost” were everywhere and thus the symphony was complete. Here hope, misfortune, idleness, thrift, crime and the new life thronged together. Here the scum that the town had cast out huddled together with the indomitable spirits that boldly sought a new life on new ground. And just now when all the good influences were co-operating, after a pathetic struggle, in an united effort to make something worthy of human beings out of their grey stone hill everything was brought to nought by the mere word of Peter Selamb. Who was this gentleman after all? Well, he was the manager of Selambshof. He sat there in his sinister highwayman’s lair and took toll from the citizens of the town and grabbed all the land that the town required. We are suffocating, we want air, we want to get out! Very well, please pay up. Everybody must pay toll to Peter Selamb of Selambshof.

People did not choose their words. The newspapers outdid each other in indignation. They were of course right. But it is not always well to be too much in the right—not even for a newspaper—

The hammer blows rained down with a frequency sufficient to fell an ox. But Peter merely blinked his eyes. He did not understand how anybody could be afraid of the press. He had no real respect for any other kind of letterpress than that which is to be found on bank-notes and in the paragraphs of the penal code.

“Do these damned journalists want to teach me how to build suburbs?” he muttered with an almost compassionate shrug of the shoulders. And he did not budge an inch on this matter: “The ground is mine. If they want to put down pipes, they will have to pay.”

After a few weeks the newspaper campaign against Peter the Boss subsided. It had had no effect.

As for Frida, things took their course. It is seldom that the birth of a child has been awaited with such general interest. The women in Majängen talked of nothing else when they met at the wells, laboriously to pump up the grey and ill-flavoured clay water. Round this child the hopes of the whole community for vengeance on Peter the Boss were centred.

At the end of March, Frida Öberg gave birth to a son, who was named Bernhard.

And then Peter received a summons to appear before the Court and he arrived in a grey suit in his dog-cart with old “Interest.” And when he came he appeared neither haughty nor humbled.

The Court lay by the high road some distance away from the suburb. But all Majängen was of course there. The crowd stretched out as far as the yard. Peter stepped forward with half-closed eyes and a good-tempered grin on his face. Nobody could say he looked frightened. He slapped some of the men on the back:

“Make room, boys, nothing is going to happen without me, anyhow.”

A Swedish crowd is harmless when it is sober. People stared and made way. But a coarse voice was heard:

“He ought to be hanged....”

Peter had now reached the hall. On the other side of the long table with the judge and the jurymen sat Frida. She had a bundle in her arms. She stared Peter straight in the eyes and lifted up the child so that he should really see it. Then a murmur passed through the hall and the jurymen put their close-cropped heads together. Peter turned away his eyes at once, shrugged his shoulders, and bowed to the judge as if to say: “As between gentlemen, cut the whole thing short.”

Through his friends he had conveyed to the judge the truth about Frida Öberg: An easy-going wench, maid at Selambshof, an affair with the fraudulent bailiff, dismissed with him, vengeance, blackmail, etc.

The baby began to cry. Did Frida pinch it for effect or not? The judge, who looked as if he were at a meeting of shareholders, glanced up from his papers with a wry face:

“Is it necessary to bring the child here?”

Frida jumped up, grateful for this opportunity to make a demonstration. “What am I to do when I am poor and alone, sir? I have nobody to look after the poor boy.”

The judge remarked in a dry voice that he had been informed she had a laundry and that her sister was working with her.

At last the summons was read and the judge began his questions. When Frida once began to speak, she could not stop, but flung herself with such a primitive force and such a naïve matter-of-factness into the dismal love story that the judge at once thought it wise to order the hall to be cleared.

Peter grinned with malicious pleasure as the angrily muttering inhabitants of Majängen shuffled out.

When Frida had finished, Peter rose, looked at the wall, and stoutly denied everything.

Then a witness was called. Peter suddenly recognized with a certain discomfort the porter at Stellan’s house. Well, it appeared that he had never seen them together, but only believed he had noticed that they both stayed on the second floor. Peter was calm again. He had won worse cases. Then the judge showed him a love letter signed “Bull Elk,” on the reverse side of which there appeared a part of the Selambshof receipt stamp. Peter boldly denied everything except the stamp. But he began to feel rather glum.

The parties were dismissed during the deliberations of the Court. Frida sat in the midst of a crowd of women and suckled the baby. But Peter went out and patted old “Interest.” He stood there stroking and stroking and found it difficult to look up. He felt hate all round him like something prickly. He no longer felt safe. He would probably have to resort to ... the last ...

After a long delay all were admitted into the Court again. It was black with people but absolutely silent. The oath was taken.

All eyes were fastened on Peter the Boss. He seemed to shrink and grow smaller as he stood there. Now he looked like an old bent and grey peasant. Would he do what peasants had been accustomed to do so often before in similar cases?

Peter stepped slowly up to the table. He felt just as if he were walking in a vacuum. He seemed to be paralysed in the arm when he wanted to place his hand on the Bible, the greasy old court Bible, which had seen so many things. He could not help glancing at Frida. She also had risen and taken a step towards the table. She looked at him with an expression in which hatred and anxiety mingled with a strange cold curiosity. The child also stared at him with vacant black eyes. And a little hand moved with awkward, blind jerks. Peter suddenly thought of a newborn, trembling young fox which he had once pulled out of its lair and killed with the butt end of his gun. He felt queer, sick. He was afraid ... afraid.... For a moment he let his hand fall....

The judge fixed him with his eye:

“Well, what’s the matter? Can’t you take the oath?”

Peter started. He suddenly heard Stellan’s clear sneering voice:

“Clodhopper! In love with an old servant girl, what? Ridiculous!”

He placed his hand on the Bible again. The judge recited the oath with the expression of one who had been offered at dinner hare that was too high. Peter repeated it after him. He wanted to speak quickly, but he could only get the words out slowly. His voice was thick and indescribably humble and there was in him something of the fat rat and the lascivious dog.

Frida had been quiet, surprisingly quiet during all this. Then her voice was suddenly heard. There was no cry, no sob, no longer any affectation:

“He swore false all the same.” And it sounded like a weary statement of fact.

With that the case was finished and the defendant was acquitted of responsibility for the child. The judge muttered something to the Clerk of the Court and the jurymen next to him. Nobody in the hall moved. Peter was the first to go out, straight past all the amazed, loathing and disgusted faces that stared closely at him. He staggered out into the cool, dazzling April sunshine. He stood there fumbling with the reins and patting old “Interest’s” back and muttered inanely:

“How have things been with you, old girl? How have things been with you? They have been playing hell with your old master, really hell.”

Peter got up in his dog-cart and drove with slack reins down towards the point where the road to Selambshof turned off. Then he suddenly heard behind him a prolonged shrill, strident whistling, a sound that seemed to be pure venom.

It was a greeting from Majängen. It was the signal of a long and bitter guerilla war.

* * * * *

Peter had won his case—but he felt all the same confoundedly dismal. He could eat nothing for dinner, though he took a couple of appetisers. And things did not improve when Stellan rang up. Fancy he had heard of it already. He was absolutely furious:

“Scandalous,” he cried, “grotesque—that sort of thing should be settled on the quiet. You are a damned clodhopper, you make us all impossible.”

Peter put down the receiver, hurt, sad, almost ready to cry. “Abuse,” he thought, “nothing but abuse. And all the same it was really for Stellan’s sake that I ... swore....”

With the coming of dark, Peter began to be frightened. He could not forget all those eyes staring at him in the hall. And every one of them knew that he had forsworn himself. Perjury! What did that matter now, when nothing could be proved. He had put his hand on the book and repeated what that damned judge—who as a matter of fact was a rake in financial difficulties himself—had said. But he, Peter, had not asked to lay his hand on the book. It was the Court that had forced him into entirely unnecessary folly. Anyhow he had certainly won his case. Why the devil then should he have to lay his hand on the book? The book, the book ... Peter suddenly felt cold inside. The old terror of his childhood rose out of the depths of the past and seized him. He had of course never felt anything so noble as an honest doubt. He had never felt any sort of contact with the powers for which the Bible stood. A little piece of Kristin’s and Hedvig’s hard old God, the centre of Selambshof’s gloomy crippled terror, still survived deep down in his soul beneath the rich flora of lies and dishonesty. “So help me God in body and soul,” yes, that was what he had sworn. Supposing God should punish him now! Supposing he were to take away from him all that he possessed! Supposing he had to sit naked, starved, and alone in the dark forest just as he had dreamt as a child!

Peter was afraid of the God in the book, afraid as a negro of his fetish....

Oh, if only he had had Hedvig to talk to. She knew all about that sort of thing. She was the medicine man who knew the appropriate spell...!

The clock had already struck twelve when Peter set out to look for a Bible in the great dark owl’s nest called Selambshof. From one room to another he walked searching in every corner, but without finding what he looked for. At last he crept stealthily into the housekeeper’s room like a thief and stole her Bible from her night table. Then he sat down to turn over the pages, greedily fastening on everything that spoke of wrath and threats and punishment. With swimming head and smarting eyes he made himself drunk with fear. At dawn he staggered trembling and shivering into the office and took a thousand-crown note out of the safe. And he spread it out so that he might really see how large it was. Then he put it in the housekeeper’s Bible—at one of the worst passages....

That was the way out of Peter the Boss. He tried to bribe God with a thousand crowns.

As soon as it was dark the following evening he stole towards Majängen with the note in his pocket. It would have been simpler of course to send the money by post. But that was not good enough. The post is such a silent and mysterious institution. He was afraid that his sacrifice would go unnoticed by the Lord. And if he could “bull” shares by his self-abnegation that would be all to the good. So he would deliver the money himself—though of course without witnesses. Otherwise it might be dangerous.

Peter crept forward in the rain with the brim of his hat turned down and his collar turned up. It was really bold of him to go to Majängen now, but he was not the first whom fear has made bold. He slipped, stumbled, and stepped into holes in the darkness on the bottomless roads. Several times he thought he heard steps and whispering voices behind him. But these sounds were at once drowned in the soughing of the poor meagre pine branches which were struggling against the storm somewhere up in the darkness above his head. Now he would reach the asphalt house in a moment. Black as misfortune it hung there over the damp edge of the cliff. The laundry was closed, but there was a light in the window. Peter was just going to sneak up the long wooden staircase to reconnoitre when suddenly there came something whizzing through the darkness. It was a rain of big stones. Peter drew back a step but was hit by the next shower in the back just below the neck and also on the head. He fell forward without a sound, and lay there in his own clay like a sack of sand.

These were the first shots in the war between Selambshof and Majängen. Fatal hits. Peter was after all on the way to his woman and child. There was perhaps after all just a chance of Peter turning human being.... But then the stones intervened...!

Peter was unconscious and half suffocated by the clay. The thousand-crown note still lay in his pocket and it never reached its destination. He woke up in his bed at Selambshof. And his first thought in the midst of all his pains was: “That’s what you get for trying to do good...!”

Peter had to stop in bed quite a long time. He had injured his spine. He got up again even more bent, more pale and more flabby in the face than before.

He was now a man without pity. If Peter the Boss had had before his sentimental moments, they were now a thing of the past. And he had, as it were, grown too coarse for all fear. And he procured for himself a watch-dog—a great, shaggy, wolf-like monster—chiefly for the pleasure of seeing people anxiously sneaking past Selambshof. And then the harsh barking of the dog was a kind of company at nights. For Peter had begun to find difficulty in sleeping.

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III

+THE ANGEL OF DEATH+

Hedvig’s and Percy’s marriage had for long been unconsummated. At first in the Swiss mountain sanatorium Hedvig was not allowed to live in the same house as her husband. Later on when he was better she still remained his nurse.

“Think of your fever,” she said, and withdrew gently from his delicate approaches. “It is your duty to get well, Percy dear.”

Percy was all too far away from the thousandfold stimulant of art from which in his longing and his imagination he had otherwise derived vitality. His natural submissiveness was still further fortified by the strict discipline of the sanatorium. So he yielded and always acquiesced in her cold sisterly behaviour to him. But only to approach her again at the next opportunity with the same persistent, childlike, half-embarrassed supplication for love. And if he had not done so Hedvig would certainly have felt secretly hurt and worried. After having wandered about the whole day in the pure cold air and in the light of the white snow-capped peaks, among the brotherhood of suffering and among the recaptured convalescents high up in the seclusion of the alpine world it was pleasant in the evening to whisper a soft “no” to the adoring husband. There was rehabilitation in it. It healed old wounds. It was an innocent triumph. She lived through happy days. There was nothing that tempted or scorched or tore at the heart. There was just life enough for Hedvig Hill.

“No, Percy dear. For your own sake. Your temperature would rise....”

And she uttered her “no” in the same tone as others would whisper their “yes.” “See how I sacrifice everything for you,” she seemed to say, “my best years, my womanhood, my beauty, I sacrifice all for you, darling Percy.” Even to herself she made a sacrifice of her half-heartedness and her fear—though she probably suspected in her inmost heart this unsatisfied longing of Percy’s was in the long run more dangerous to him than ordinary life together as husband and wife. The truth was that Hedvig Hill sipped at what she did not dare to drink at one draft. She hugged to herself the glimpse of pain she saw in Percy’s glance after her refusal. She cherished the mist of pulsing blood in his blue eyes, so like those of a precocious boy. And she warmed her lonely bed with it.

Then one day came when Percy was—not cured, because a complete cure seemed almost out of question—but anyhow, so much better that he could think of moving about in the world once again.

The doctors spoke of the south.

Hedvig felt a nervous dread of all that was to come. It was as if they were being turned out of a safe refuge, she thought. She would have preferred to remain amongst the brotherhood of the doomed, bewitched by the mountain spirits up there into a half-life in the big white monastery.

“But Percy, would it not be safer to spend one more winter in the sanatorium?” she whispered.

Percy shook his head and smiled. He had been very mysterious these last days; he had sent off and received a number of telegrams.

“Where are we going? Wouldn’t it be best to go home?” wondered Hedvig.

“You are going to have a magnificent present,” cried Percy, who glowed with the pleasure of planning, acting and moving about after years of supervision and inactivity.

So they went down into the valley when the first September days had already sprayed the woods with gold. There the train stood ready. The smoke, the noise, the jolting about soon tired Percy, who was so spoilt with fresh air and quiet. Then Hedvig turned nurse again, and wrapped him up in their reserved compartment. But that evening the train rushed into a town by the sea under the mountains. It was Genoa and they at once went aboard a steamer which seemed to have waited only for them in order to depart.

“But where is this boat going to? Where are we going?” wondered Hedvig.

She positively knew nothing. Percy only smiled mysteriously.

One brilliantly fine morning they went ashore at white Cadiz.

“Here is my present,” said Percy. “It is the country that suits your hair and your eyes.”

At the sanatorium Hedvig had forgotten to be Spanish. She felt terribly nervous and cast out into the unknown.

“Now we will choose towns for you, just as one chooses frocks,” continued Percy. “We shall begin with Seville, though I suspect that Toledo would be the most suitable.”

So they arrived at Seville.

“I can’t offer you an auto-da-fé,” he whispered. “You will have to be satisfied with a ‘corrida’.”

Above the entrance to the _plaza de toros_ there stood in big letters “Press Bull-fight in commemoration of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary.”

With eyes that still smarted and burnt from all the pitiless light on the yellow sand of the arena Hedvig saw within a fraction of a second a little grey bull, with the picador’s dart in his neck, bury his horns into the stomach of the rearing horse. The horse beat the air helplessly with his forefeet and lifted his slender neck and his head with a gesture of wild, maddening pain, and then fell heavily on one side with the picador beneath him, but only to rush up again and to gallop, pursued by the bull, round the arena with bleeding sides and trailing entrails.

Hedvig stared fixedly down. She was very pale.

“This is horrible,” she muttered. “I want to go.”

But she did not go.

More picadors, more bleeding horses. Then banderilleros who, dancing nimbly, buried their flag-adorned darts in the bleeding neck of the bull with subtle, playful cruelty. Meanwhile the sunlight lay like fire on the yellow sand, the red blood stains, and the bright shawls of the women on the rails of the boxes. Even the rising metallic sound of thousands of voices seemed to be burnt through by the heat of the sun.

Then the _espada_ entered. With his knee breeches, slippers and pouched hair he seemed to have stepped straight out of a Mozart opera.

Swinging his red cloth he dances an elegant Death dance before he draws his weapon. Now everything gleams bright, the sun, eyes, the thin fire-shaft of the sword. His posture, as with his weapon raised to the level of his eyes he calmly awaits the onslaught of the bull, is extremely graceful. Now the fire of the fine tongue of steel is suddenly extinguished in the bull’s neck, the Colossus staggers and falls heavily.

Hedvig sat mute and pale with devouring eyes. She was staring at the gate from which the next bull would rush in....

When they drove home in the first yellow twilight Percy’s arm stole round her waist.

“I believe all the same Toledo has amused itself in Seville,” he smiled. “Wasn’t that a fine way of getting the sanatorium out of the system?”

Hedvig pushed away his arm almost unkindly:

“Don’t laugh at everything,” she muttered.

And suddenly she felt a secret bitterness that the man by her side was not stronger, more robust, more dangerous, that he had allowed her to say “no” so often.

Darkness requires more heat than light. The sun, the sight of blood, the inborn cruelty of the south had all at once burnt through her shyness, her fear and her brooding. Hunger for life buried its claws deep in this strange virgin soul that had lain so anxious and so self-absorbed. She was not the first barbarian from a twilight-land to whom the south has given a bold desire to live.

That night Sister Hedvig became her husband’s lover.

They remained the whole autumn in Seville and saw many bull fights. Hedvig was very beautiful at this time. Hers was a dark passionate unfolding. Percy overwhelmed her with costly clothes and jewels. He dressed her up as a Spaniard with combs and shawls and mantillas. He did not touch his paint brush, but he let her pose to his love. And Hedvig enjoyed his admiration, enjoyed her own beauty. For the first time in her life she was at peace with her own body. It was no longer the cause of restlessness and heavy care and danger. It took pride in this man’s caresses. Beneath her silk and her jewels she felt the glow of her nakedness. A solemn thrill would pass through her at the thought of her own shoulders and breast. And she enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction, which was both hot and cold. Oh, what a relief not to feel any longer that anxious longing in her inmost soul.

Hedvig Hill was happily in love with herself. For Percy also these were happy days. Their late union gave his mind a bright coolness. Perhaps he sometimes suspected the gulf which nevertheless existed between them. But that did not frighten a dilettante, it only now and then liberated a certain light self-irony. He enjoyed his own extravagant gifts, he enjoyed seeing her bloom in her own way under his hands. He felt something of the cool intoxication of the artist before his work when it has achieved independent life.

“You are my most beautiful picture,” he would whisper. “I sometimes imagine I have done it myself.”

The time was far away when he had lain in the shadow of Death looking at her with a beggar’s eyes. Percy Hill forgot things easily.

It was the evening of a clear and brilliant October day. The whitewashed walls no longer dazzled. Down in the patio of the small hotel two Spanish matrons in black were sitting talking with phlegmatic fire. Their talk flowed as musically and as monotonously as the little spraying fountain in the marble basin. Hedvig and Percy had just returned from a long drive towards the _vega_. The coolness of the approaching autumn suited him wonderfully well. He stood leaning against the window frame with his hands behind his head:

“Today I feel quite aggressively alive,” he said. “Fancy if we should have a child, Hedvig. A little girl. I would much rather have a girl than a boy.”

There was a slight touch of annoyance in his voice.

Hedvig sat at her dressing table doing her hair. She felt a sudden unpleasant shock. Strange as it may sound, she had up till that moment not thought of the consequences of their life together, and not for a moment had she thought of herself as a mother. She let slip the knot and her black hair flowed again over her naked white shoulders. She sprang up from the dressing table with a hard expression and frightened eyes:

“I don’t want a child!” she cried. “Never, never!”

Percy wondered at her vehemence. His smile grew hesitating:

“Dear child, forget my nonsense. It is bad taste to foretell nature in that way. I only meant that I should certainly find your condition beautiful.”

Hedvig had now calmed down again. She came up to him and stroked his hair:

“You must never talk like that, Percy,” she muttered. “You ... we have no right to children ... they are for those who are healthy...”

And her face had suddenly resumed the old expression of sisterly resignation and self-sacrifice.

Percy grew a shade paler. It seemed as if the climate had suddenly grown more chilly. It seemed as if the light reflected by the white walls had been reflected by snow. The sanatorium had followed even to Seville.

“Forgive me, I forgot for a moment that I was an invalid,” he said.

From that day Hedvig suffered constant anxiety lest she should have a child.

Woman’s egoism is more negative than that of a man—it is a real minus quantity. For she reveals her sacrifice and her devotion in the very lines of her body. Her whole body is a manifestation of generosity, a splendid promise. From the day that her breasts fill out, invisible childish lips grope round them. Within the sweet swelling lines of her body and lips slumber the forces of regeneration. Her egoism is a barrenness, a cowardly self-betrayal, for she betrays her own body and she betrays the future...

Of course Hedvig was convinced she had the noblest motives. Of course it was the curse of heredity that frightened her. She did not admit even to herself that she would have been still more frightened had he been a healthy man, that it was her own body she was beginning to fear again and this time not with a vague and indefinite fear as before. No, now she knew what was at stake. At any moment there might begin to grow within her a strange being that would feed on her blood, would tear her body, would perhaps bring death to her. She grew cold with fear at the least disquieting sign. She had moments of hatred of her husband. And she began to behave with a meanness and nervous caution that deprived their life of all its charm.

Percy yielded. Probably it was criminal of him to hope for children.

He did not see through his wife, or at least only half saw through her. There were perhaps dark moments when he suspected the cowardly poverty of her character, but people of his type do not pursue disagreeable thoughts to the end. All the same Percy relapsed into a restless state. He felt as if he had been exiled from the kingdom of peace and health of which he had only had a glimpse. He left Seville and began to lead a roving life in Spain and the south of France. Galleries, ruins, mountains, waterfalls. It was the same old hunt for beauty! Several times he tried to stay in one place and take up his paint brush again. But these were only good intentions, interrupted by crises of discouragement. Towards Spring they reached Paris, for which he had all the time been longing. Percy settled in Montparnasse amongst the Scandinavian painters and talked art with feverish and excited interest. Here he suddenly fell victim to the modern extremists, to futurism, cubism, naïvism and ultra-expressionism, on which he had formerly only bestowed an ironic curiosity. It seemed as if his very refinement and submissiveness had rendered him defenceless against the latest brutalities. He began to buy the crudest objects. The strangest things were sent to their studio on the Boulevard Raspail. There was a “Portrait of a Lady,” consisting of four straight, black-green lines on a pink ground. There was a picture called “Motion” which consisted of four triangular fields containing parts of a woman’s leg and a locomotive.

Percy looked stealthily at Hedvig when with eager explanations and cold enthusiasm he showed her these acquisitions. “I am not happy,” his look said. “This kind of art is not for happy people. It is for those who have something to avenge.”

They were, as a matter of fact, so many reproaches flung in the face of life because he was weak, enervated, sorely tried and without a future.

Hedvig had suffered all the time from his new associates, among whom she felt helpless and embarrassed. She was jealous of all the strange, poisonous indecency that they called modern art. She stared silently at the new monstrosities. Very well—he prefers all this to me, she thought. It did not merely hurt her. She had also a strange, suppressed feeling, never admitted, but nevertheless real, of becoming free, of slipping out of his hands; a throbbing, secret, insolent feeling that anything was possible. But with all this there immediately blended an anxious care, an old frightened care as old as the Selambshof days, which stirred within her every time he gave her expensive flowers, bought first-class tickets or threw a big silver coin to a beggar.

“What have you given for those pictures?” she asked defiantly.

He mentioned a large sum, several thousand francs. And she went into her own room with a pale face.

From this time Hedvig began to insist on their going home.

But Percy continued to buy modern art. Everything was not so provocative as those first pictures. There were also pearls of bold but still exquisitely tasteful expressionism. After running about all the day at exhibitions and art dealers he sat down to drink his apéritif. He looked out over the murmuring streams of humanity on the big boulevards, which always make you feel that you are a poor little drop in the ocean and may be washed away at any moment. But all the same there came into his eyes a little look of anger. And he did not turn to Hedvig, who sat there dressed in black looking stiff and disapproving, but to the young painters round the table. It was strange how the air of Paris made him free and independent:

“It’s a pity it’s so damned banal to make a donation,” he exclaimed. “But a poor wretch like me has no other way out. I have no children. I won’t live very much longer. I am an end and not a beginning like you boys. My money has no personal future. But if I add a wing to my little art gallery and fill it with first-class explosive matter and then present the whole splendour to the nation or rather to the city, yes, to Stockholm, then I shall at any rate have sown the seeds of a little healthy restlessness in their minds. And a little help to you fellows. And I shall have erected a little monument to myself in the usual dishonest but generally approved way. The Hill Collection! What do you think of that idea?”

They grew excited round the table:

“We must thank you, of course! But why don’t you do something yourself? You can, Percy! You are no bourgeois! Why don’t you stick it out?”

Hedvig had been sitting all the time silent and forbidding. At Percy’s unexpected mention of an endowment she suddenly felt a cold shiver of anger. She rose quickly:

“You all seem to forget that Percy is ill,” she said. “He must not be rushed. He is much too excited here in Paris. Shan’t we go back home now, Percy?”

The young painters felt a little nervous of Mrs. Hill, of her aristocratic air, her dark nun-like beauty. Silence fell around the table. Percy rose with his little, absent-minded, apologetic smile:

“Yes, there you see, gentlemen,” he said.

And then they left.

At last Hedvig succeeded in making her husband leave Paris, where it was already beginning to be hot and dusty. There is always an element of danger in the journey home for consumptives who have been living in the south. In Stockholm there had been an unfortunate relapse in the late spring, with storm and icy rain. Percy had to go to bed at once and Hedvig was again his nurse. He did not want the doctor. He had a real horror of doctors and Hedvig did not insist on calling one in. She took great care that he should not be exposed to tiring visits of old artist friends and she nursed him with quite, inexhaustible energy. There was no more talk of the great donation and Hedvig began to feel a certain deep calm.

But one fine day Percy got up in spite of all her protest and in spite of his not having quite a normal temperature. And the following morning an architect arrived. The two men walked round the house, drew, measured and made a lot of calculations.

“I want the drawings as quickly as possible,” Percy said at lunch. “I am in a great hurry.”

His eyes glowed and he had little red patches in his cheeks.

The architect promised to do his best.

Immediately afterwards the pictures began to arrive from Paris. Not only those that Hedvig had already seen, but a whole lot of new ones. Percy evidently had somebody down there buying for his account.

Hedvig said nothing. She kept to herself, locked herself in, brooded and scarcely answered when spoken to.

Still more new pictures arrived, and Percy was busy with them the whole day, studying them, and moving them from one crowded room to another.

Then the plans were ready and the workmen arrived, a whole swarm of them. They dug and blasted, laid foundations and built the walls. Percy sat in an easy chair out in the sunshine and looked on. He was so eager that he scarcely allowed himself time to eat. “This is my protest against oblivion,” he thought. “I am building a house for my ashes. I am building my own little pyramid....”

He really imagined his ashes standing in a beautiful Japanese urn in a corner of the Hill gallery.

Towards autumn the roof was already on the new wing. Percy began to hang the pictures at once. He could not even wait till the walls had dried. He himself was not strong enough to move anything, but he sat in his chair and gave orders to Ohlesson, the coachman, who had now become a chauffeur. You could see even from Ohlesson’s back how he disapproved of these awful novelties. Percy did not worry. Whenever he looked in at the rooms containing examples of the older art, everything there seemed to him strangely quiet and as it were covered over with a fine dust. His taste was already brutalised by these strident colours and paradoxical forms. He really needed strong food now, poor Percy. Fatigue sometimes descended like a grey mist over his feverish zeal. He used these new excesses as weapons against the deepening shadows.

Hedvig walked about devoured by a silent consuming bitterness. Her feelings were a strange compound of jealousy of his overpowering interest in art and brooding anxiety at his wicked extravagance. This donation seemed to her like a challenge, like a theft from one who had sacrificed herself for him. Percy had allowed himself to be seduced, she thought. He has no power of resistance. But she dared not speak openly to him. She had a vague feeling that there was something within her that she must not betray. That is why she never went beyond her increasingly bitter reproaches that he overtired himself, and neglected himself. She wore an expression as if the crêpe were already floating round her. Yes, Percy thought sometimes that she assumed her widowhood in advance. There was something sharp and nervous in his answer:

“Why do you insist on wearing black?” he said. “I should understand you much better in sealing wax red or sulphur green.”

Her old method of holding him was no longer effective. Hedvig again began to feel his lack of respect for illness as a personal insult. By and by they almost quarrelled about Ohlesson, the chauffeur. Hedvig began to drive into town every day in the car. Then Percy would have no one to help him, she thought. Then he would be forced to rest. This made her a little easier. One day she did something she had been tempted to do for a long time. She ordered Ohlesson to drive to Selambshof.

The avenue was full of yellow leaves. Several of the old trees had blown down and there were ugly gaps as in a broken set of teeth.

Peter sat in the office puffing at an unlit cigar and looking at his papers. He had aged. He was bent, his face was flabby and yellow. Hedvig stood before him as Laura had done once upon a time. She could not help having been spoilt by so many beautiful and expensive things. For a moment she shivered at the ugliness of her brother. But in her inmost heart she tolerated him, had even a feeling of security in the presence of something intimate and familiar.

“Good-morning, Peter!”

“Good-morning, Hedvig. So the elegant Mrs. Hill visits this remote spot. Why this honour?”

Hedvig did not answer but looked out through the window with an expression of resignation.

Peter wore a look of injured innocence which suited him perfectly:

“Is it perhaps for the last dividends? Because Levy has long ago cashed them.”

Hedvig had, on Laura’s recommendation, appointed the lawyer Levy to look after her personal estate, including her shares in Selambshof. And Peter did not at all like the insolent supervision of the Jew.

Hedvig shook her head.

“I am anxious about Percy,” she mumbled. It sounded as if this confession had been forced out of her by a thumbscrew.

“Really, how—how is your lord and master, anyhow?”

On Peter’s face there appeared a well-meaning grin of sympathy. He summoned up all that was left of his former sentimentality, but it did not reach beyond his expression. His eyes penetrated swiftly into her very soul with a cold, familiar, insolently searching glance. “Aha, my dear,” they seemed to say, “this business did not turn out so well as you thought.” Hedvig, of course, stood in silent, dignified protest against his every low thought. But all the same she enjoyed his glance—something that groped blindly and stealthily in her vitals.

“Percy is very bad,” she exclaimed in a kind of exaltation, “much worse than he thinks himself. And he has quite lost his balance. He does nothing but buy picture after picture, mad things that unscrupulous people palm off on him. He is positively throwing away all he has! It is such a dreadful shame!”

Peter was playing with his pencil. He had never heard Hedvig say so much at once before.

“You mean that Percy ought to be under restraint,” he interrupted calmly. “I am afraid that would be rather difficult.”

“I shall have remorse all my life if I do nothing to help and protect him.”

Peter wanted to damp what he thought was unbusiness-like vehemence.

“Pictures, you said ... but pictures can be good, almost as good as shares. They give no dividend but they can rise a damned lot in value.”

“No, not the pictures that Percy buys. He is being robbed by real swindlers. And then he wants to give it all away to the State. But they will never accept such rubbish. People will only laugh at us.”

Peter was startled. A donation! This was damned serious. He rose panting, walked up to Hedvig and poked his thumb into her arm:

“You ... you ought to occupy Percy’s time a little more,” he leered. “So that he won’t have any left for this nonsense. Why the devil are you so black and white and beautiful as sin?... And have expensive pretty frocks and all that sort of thing.... The chief thing is that Percy does not commit any folly while he is still ... well, I mean that one can always protest against a will....”

There was a certain satisfaction in Peter’s grunts. He enjoyed saying this kind of thing to an elegant lady in diamond rings and black silk. There was a sort of luxurious revenge at last in being able to speak straight out to Hedvig, the hypocritical Hedvig.

His sister did not push him away. She smelled his breath, and the smell of stale tobacco and of cheese on his old clothes. All the time she had the same feeling in the pit of her stomach as one has when one sinks rapidly in a lift. Now she had reached the bottom. She did not push him away. She stood there with closed eyes without a trace of colour in her face. She felt his shamelessness groping with coarse, hairy hands about her reserve, her shyness, and her stealthy and lying fear.

“How dare you!” she whispered in a low, hoarse voice, “how dare you say anything so vile?”

But his words stuck all the same. They crawled about, teemed and multiplied within her. They stimulated her to action and emboldened her gloomy heart.

Hedvig staggered out of Peter’s hovel. She stood beneath the naked, shivering maples on the soil of her bitter youth and of her long humiliation. A dull consuming autumn restlessness ran through her blood. The darkness of the main building attracted her suddenly as by some secret hardening of her heart. The door stood ajar above the bank of withering leaves on the steps. She entered. Everything was dim, dusty, cold, stuffy. She wandered about the empty echoing corridors, turned the creaking locks, stole through swarms of moths between the covered mirrors and chairs and the windows which were specked with innumerable dead flies. In her own room she sank with a groan on to the edge of the old narrow bed of her girlhood. Memories of her poor, lonely, miserable childhood rushed over her with renewed strength. She felt a wild self pity, a kind of fury clawing her breast. But she liked to feel that claw. That was why she was here. She drained the cup of pain to the last drop with voluptuous bitterness. It gave her a right to revenge.

When, as if under the pressure of a dangerous burden, Hedvig slowly staggered out again it was only to pursue the past still further. She strolled through the neglected, overgrown garden where the benches and the paths were covered with dead stalks and the trees were already robbed of their fruit. Here in the old pear tree beside the well there was a big hole in which she used to hide her secrets—as a dog hides a bone. There had lain for a long time a broken seal out of the smoking room and a little ring with a green heart that she had taken from Laura. In her thoughts she still obstinately defended this theft: “Had not Laura broken her fine comb? And not given her anything in place of it!” How quiet and self-possessed she had been as she sat there and Laura searched for the ring, cried and stamped....