Chapter XII: Part TWO (4)

“Yes, but Stellan, have you never experienced moments when you really shudder at yourself ... at all the miserable and damnable things one has done?”

“No, I have never permitted myself that luxury.”

Marine looked at him with a mien in which for the first time there was something of a stranger.

“You are a bit of a barbarian after all, my dear Stellan,” he mumbled, “You have a queer insensibility on which to fall back. I am damned if I know how it is but I have never been able to _will_ anything when I have been with you. But I will tell you this much, I should never have entered into this folly if I had not made up my mind beforehand to escape from it all. It’s disquieting to play for a living human being.... No, away with it all....”

“My dear Manne, I can’t help it if you only drew a knave of hearts,” mumbled Stellan coldly.

“No, old boy, of course you can’t, but that’s not the point. I have felt the whole time that this was impossible. You don’t understand what a human being can feel like, Stellan. I played only because you proposed it. For twenty years I have not done anything else but what you proposed. I am a wretch. And you, Stellan, what are you? Imagine! I have known you for so long and yet I don’t even know that. It’s strange, but tonight ... I almost seem to catch a glimpse of you, after all. Yes, you are one of those who succeed in everything. You remain a Selamb. And all the same I am somehow sorry for you, Stellan. Yes, I feel damned sorry for you, because, you see, there is something in life that you would never understand if you lived to be a hundred....”

Manne had never been known to make so long a speech before. Stellan stood up and patted him on the shoulders.

“My dear Manne, now you are ready for a rest,” he said.

“That’s right ... ready for a rest,” muttered Manne, and gave Stellan a hand which at first was limp, but afterwards pressed hard the hand of his friend.

Thus they separated.

If Manne had realized, about ten years earlier, all he realized that night, his life would perhaps have been shaped differently.

Stellan did not go to bed immediately. The genial mists of sleep seemed to have flown into the infinite distance. He stood in the moonlight leaning against the stone parapet of the balcony and felt how its chill mounted from his hands to his chest. His thoughts multiplied mechanically and spread like hoar frost. He thought of his own life. “I have been an incurable gambler,” he thought. “Well, what of it—it requires courage after all, that flirtation with Fate. You can say what you like but I have been a dare-devil. Chance has been my God and I have not betrayed him....”

Cold and penetrating a voice returned the answer he had expected all the time: “Not until tonight. You marked the cards. You were frightened, Stellan Selamb, frightened....”

Stellan was not, for the moment, thinking of Manne, whom he had seduced into gambling, from whom he had won, and whom he now knew to be destitute. No, he only heard the voice that had called him afraid: So cold and selfish can conscience be.

“No, I was not at all frightened,” he protested. “The fact is that I at last perceived my own stupidity. What the devil is the use of relying on chance. Chance is the fool of necessity, nothing else. And we have been the fools of the fool. If everything is a mathematical certainty what the deuce does it matter if I dig my nail into an ace of hearts!”

But it is dangerous to betray one’s God even if he is a fool. The pitiless voice was not silenced: “You stole your friend’s last chance, Stellan Selamb, you are no longer a gambler, you are a thief, a cowardly thief.”

Stellan shuddered. That is the worst that can happen to a man of his stamp—to doubt his own courage. He discovers all at once all the things he has neglected to be afraid of. The stone parapet felt dreadfully cold. It positively made his hands stiff. But he could not let go. The moon seemed to breathe a silent, cold threat. What lies were told about the moon? A dead world! The death’s head from space grinned into his face. Stellan suddenly looked round with an uncertain look. Behind him rose the high white façade like a wall of snow. It struck a chill into his back. And behind it slept the woman without a future, the woman whose bosom was a tomb. Was it not almost suicide to take such a half dead creature to wife?

“Why do I stand here in the moonlight,” he thought. “Am I alive or am I only a ghost?”

Yes, the moment of agony had come to Stellan Selamb as it comes to everybody. He felt a cruel fear. But it was not the fear that is the beginning of wisdom. He had gracefully skated on the outside edge on the smooth ice of prejudices and fictions. But now he had fallen through into deep reality. “Ugh—this seems to be bottomless! Yes, the world is as deep as my fears.”

* * * * *

Stellan came down late the following morning and found Count Lähnfeldt in an evident bad temper at Captain von Strelert’s sudden and unceremonious departure.

But out on the parapet of the steps Elvira sat already impatiently waiting for her ride. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders:

“The Baron has already run away,” she said. “It was not an orderly retreat, it was precipitate flight.”

The morning sun and the ride helped Stellan to recover himself. After the ghostly visions of the night he enjoyed feeling Cæsar’s fine shoulders working beneath him. The coolness of the rushing air around his forehead and temples mingled exquisitely with the gentle innocent warmth of the beautiful, gleaming body of the horse. Stellan did not feel exactly tired, only strangely unsubstantial and fragile.

They were riding in silence and he kept a little behind. He could not understand his feelings yesterday in the park. No, today he looked at her more critically than ever. Even during the ride when she appeared to greater advantage than otherwise he found in her something attenuated, tense, unsexed, that left his instincts cold and unmoved. But that did not worry him now. It was rather a relief. It somehow made the thing easier. For one always feels it is easier to reach a goal that one does not long for too intensely. And it was high time. Tomorrow the rest of the shooting party was due to arrive, and then it might be difficult to find an opportunity.

Stellan tried to imagine how his rejected predecessors had behaved under similar circumstances. Of course they had stopped her in a narrow concealed forest path where the horses had been forced close together and were caressing each other’s noses in the twilight of the pines. And then they had avowed their intentions in the traditional style and received a shrug of the shoulders for an answer.

Stellan made up his mind that she should hear something different.

He chose a moment when they were stopped by a floating bridge which was open to let pass a sand barge that was just being slowly towed through. His tone was as cold as possible:

“Miss Lähnfeldt, what would you say to a shoot in Africa?”

She really looked surprised.

“A shoot in Africa?”

“Yes, up the Nile, for instance. To shoot hippopotamuses, crocodiles, lions. You get a licence in Cairo and hire a boat, a comfortable house-boat, and a few niggers.”

“Well ... yes ... perhaps it would be an idea ... since we can’t go to the moon....”

“And how do you think I would be as manager and courier then?”

“Well ... perhaps....”

“Would you like to try it with me?”

“I am afraid it would be a bit difficult to arrange.”

“Not if we got married....”

She suddenly looked straight at him, defiantly, nervously. Her voice was hard, almost shrill.

“I am ... an invalid....”

“And I am ruined....”

A moment before Stellan had never meant to say anything of the kind; he only had a clear feeling that he must be absolutely unsentimental. But he did not regret it. A brutal sincerity may sometimes be the most refined of lies.

The barge had at last passed through and sailed on. Stellan continued in a different and more passionate tone:

“I don’t seek any repetition of my life’s former adventures. What is most exquisite in you, Elvira, is that you are ... free. Heaven protect me from those women who only breathe the nursery. No, there is a different and more robust air about you, an air in which one can breathe. I have never dreamt of such courage in a woman as you showed up in the rigging of the balloon. I sincerely believe that we together might do something bold and great with our lives.”

“To begin with, we should make father furious,” she said in a voice that did not sound at all distressed at the prospect. Then she suddenly turned her horse and started off homewards at a sharp gallop.

Stellan followed silent and pale, with lips pressed tight together, without knowing what to think. It was exactly the same feeling as he had in the presence of the roulette ball. Through his head a ridiculous thought flashed. “Be bold and take your courage in both hands. I never talked about courage till I began to doubt it. And now just because I am afraid I shall fling down my courage as if it were the ace of trumps in the highest suit. It will be a continuation of yesterday’s little cheating game.”

And he felt how chill self-contempt was beginning to grow up out of the events of the night....

Not until they had arrived at the broad steps did the whirling ball stop. Then the princess of the palace reined in her horse and graciously stretched out her hand with a quick nervous smile:

“Well, all right then....”

Stellan did not kiss her riding glove. In front of the groom he bent quickly forward and pressed his lips to her cheek.

She kept her countenance.

“Well, one can still live, even with a little self-contempt,” he thought, when of her own accord she put her arm through his on the steps. He was right. Nothing really improves your chances better in the game of life.

Elvira was right in saying her father would be furious. The little man positively swelled with wounded dignity, when Stellan came to ask for his daughter’s hand. Elvira hastened to point out that she was of age and could do as she liked, but then he threatened to cast her off, to disinherit her. Yes, he would give all he possessed to the House of Nobles. She tore his heart to pieces when she reminded him in a dry tone that all he possessed came from her mother and that she had her own inheritance from her mother. To be the head of the noble family of Lähnfeldt, and to hear such words from a degenerate plebeian daughter was truly terrible. He summoned to his assistance all the great departed of the castle to fight his fight against his blind and irreverent daughter. He painted in wonderful colours the brilliant and distinguished future she was thoughtlessly flinging away. He threatened to descend on her wedding day into the big porphyry coffin in the crypt below the Church.

Goodness only knows if Elvira would have had the strength to struggle on, had not the old man’s mad and obstinate resistance suddenly received a blow. A few weeks later a scandal occurred in society that put the Count’s superstitious belief in the aristocrat to a severe test.

His own choice, Baron Manne von Strelert, Captain of the Horse Guards, had shot himself after having forged Count Lähnfeldt’s signature on a bill for twenty thousand crowns. Then the lord of Trefvinge at last gave in, sighing. Poor Manne had served Stellan even unto death....

Where Manne had hidden those lost twenty thousand crowns was never quite cleared up. But amongst his fellow officers there was some talk about “The Glove,” having taken fine new business premises immediately after his death and having considerably increased her business.

Stellan was married at the end of November. There was a splendid ceremony in Church with many decorations and uniforms. Peter was promised higher interest on his loans on the condition that he was ill and absent from the celebrations.

The general opinion was that the bridegroom looked a little stiff and aged.

The pair set out immediately for Africa for their shoot.

While the rice pattered against the window of the reserved carriage decorated with flowers, people outside on the platform whispered to each other that there was not much risk in this couple penetrating into Africa, as everybody knew that nothing could happen to the bride.

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V

+WASTE+

The Selamb stratagem had succeeded with Tord and his wife. A couple of years had passed without anything being heard from them. Stellan could celebrate his wedding without the slightest admixture of bohemianism. And Tord had not again exercised his temperament in the press. Everything was quiet and the pair had evidently settled for good out there by the sea.

But then a communication arrived at Selambshof, signed Tord of Järnö, in which Peter was enjoined in angry and haughty tones immediately to procure more money.

In less than three years the money had wasted away. Let us see how this had happened.

First of all they had of course built beyond their means in the wildest manner. When Tord and Dagmar one still and radiant April day paid their first visit to Järnö, they, of course, proudly ignored the insipid, idyllic southern glen with its little red tenant’s cottage and rushed up amongst the sparse stunted pines on the hill above. On the highest, most exposed point, where there was a view over both the bay and the sea, they stopped:

“This is where the house shall stand!”

And it must be built of thick, round logs with a covered verandah, and a dragon’s head and open fireplace. An eagle’s eyrie on the cliff it was to be. Tord made the drawings himself. But not a tree must be felled on Järnö, so all the timber must be brought in. Labour might probably have been found on the islands round about if they had not been in such a hurry. But they had to get workmen from town. And terribly troublesome and expensive it was to trail the heavy logs from the pier up the steep hill, where there was not even a path.

Anyhow, towards the middle of the summer the grating of the saws and the blows of the hammers were heard.

Meanwhile Tord and Dagmar lived a glorious tent life on a meadow by the sea. They sailed in their new-built boat, swam, took sunbaths and ran about naked like savages on the rocks to the great amusement of the workmen up on top.

One day Tord covered Dagmar all over with fine clay taken from the bottom of the bay and she stood there in shining blue on the shell-covered sand, like a statue. Mattson the bailiff came walking down between the juniper bushes with an unfinished oar on his shoulders. She, however, stood still and laughed aloud:

“Selamb has made a statue of me! Don’t you think I’m a funny statue, Mattson?”

Mattson blinked his eyes and walked on, shaking his grey head at such shamelessness. He wondered in his own mind what sort of gentlefolk had come out to Järnö.

After dinner they went up towards the hill to see if their house was growing. Tord always had a bottle under his arm, and when work was finished the men were treated all round to a drink. Neither he nor Dagmar despised the glass. These little festivities were not exactly ceremonious, for the men soon discovered that they had no need to choose their words. Dagmar laughed and Tord imitated their phrases as soon as the drink began to affect him. It was wonderfully easy to learn their language. “I am studying the people,” he thought, “I look straight through their simple minds. I will make something out of it some day, something uncommonly fresh and piquant....”

But then it grew suddenly silent as the weary workmen staggered down to sleep in the bailiff’s barn. And with the silence it seemed as if space had suddenly become a deep vortex. And the evening was cruelly cold and green over the serrated edges of the black forests in the west. Then it was a comfort to have spirit in your body. Tord threw back his head, a little too much back, he almost toppled over. “I am a poet,” he thought. “It is I, Tord Selamb, who am pleased to interpret the mysterious meaning of the dull song of the ground swell. The sea, the clouds, the cliffs are mine, and I do with them as I like. Wait till I give myself up to it. Then I shall produce a hymn, something powerful, rude, infernal, something of nature’s elemental beauty....”

And he felt a supreme contempt for the miserable slaves in town.

Then he went to sleep in Dagmar’s arms, which were brown and cool and soft.

Towards autumn the eyrie in the cliffs was ready. It was visible from afar and became at once an excellent and recognized landmark for sailors both out at sea and in the bay. There was a large, high hall and a couple of small rooms with folding beds. Tord furnished them with reindeer skins, elk horns, Lapplanders’ knives, guns, axes and ice hooks. And over the door a bear’s skull glinted ghostlike in the twilight.

They had made a secret arrangement with the old gardener at Selambshof, the philosopher in the neglected garden, and he used to come out as their only servant. He had been a sailor before he started growing cabbages and he felt a longing for the sea. His work was to carry water, make log fires, and open tins of preserves.

Meanwhile the Mattsons down in the dell lived their quiet workaday life, tied to the soil, the water, and the seasons of the year. They banked up their potatoes, cut their hay and their rye, milked their two cows, and plied their nets and lines, all with silent, disapproving side-glances at the queer folk on the hill.

As long as there was summer and sunshine and the air vibrated with the hammer blows on his cliff fortress, Tord was contemptuous of the silent disapproval that crawled about on its ridiculous daily round somewhere below his feet. But now it was autumn, silent, still, darkening autumn, far away from the noise and the lights of the town. And Tord began by and by to realize that the Mattsons were in their neighbourhood.

One evening he took a bottle in his pocket and climbed down into the valley: “I will feel that devil’s pulse,” he thought.

Mattson sat in his workshop carving:

“Well, Mattson, shall we have a drink to clear our heads?”

“Thank you, sir, but I don’t care about anything strong in the middle of the week like this.”

“All right, I’ll drink it myself then. What are you slaving away at?”

The old man thoughtfully turned a piece of lilac wood in his hand before he began to work with his knife:

“I am making pins for a rake.”

“Now, for the winter?”

“Summer will come again. And it’s not good for poor people to be idle....”

That was one for Tord. He struck at the nettles outside the door with his stick. The calm in Mattson’s eyes irritated him. Both sea and sky became commonplace beside that miserable plodding. What was the use of the autumn coming and the leaves falling and the darkness and loneliness when Mattson sat carving rake pins all the same?

“I will pay you back for that, old fellow,” thought Tord. And he longed for an autumn storm, a real three-day autumn gale. Especially when he had his nets out.

Then came the autumn ploughing. Nobody possessed beasts of burden out here by the sea, but Mattson’s neighbours came sailing in with their wives. And then they yoked themselves to the plough. Mattson’s wife also took part and pulled, though she was so old, but Mattson drove. Furrow after furrow they ploughed in the drizzling rain with tough sustained persistence.

Tord ran into the forest to escape seeing it. But he found no peace, he had to go back to the ploughing. For a moment he stood behind a juniper bush and stamped with anger, then he suddenly rushed out into the clay:

“Stop!” he cried. “This is my soil and I won’t look on at this miserable business.”

They stopped and stared at him:

“What is one to do when the island will not feed a beast?” suggested Mattson.

Tord stalked about with heavy lumps of clay under his shoes:

“How much can you get out of these miserable patches?”

“Oh, about three bushels of rye,” mumbled the bailiff, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. “The soil is good.”

“All right, I’ll pay you for three bushels! But get away now!”

And Tord took out some bank-notes.

But Mattson looked at his neighbour and shook his head:

“No, sir, you mustn’t make fun of an old man. I have ploughed this soil for forty years, I have. You put your money back again.”

Upon which Mattson made a sign to the drawers, who put their backs into the work again and continued their furrow as if nothing had happened.

From that day on Tord hated all that was Mattson’s. Incessantly he was running up against the object of his annoyance. Mattson’s cock woke him in the mornings with his obstinate moralisings on the dung heap. When he went down to his boat he swore because he had to dive under the old man’s nets, and on the juniper slope he was irritated by the stupid bleating of the sheep. In the midst of his land he was again reminded of Mattson by a lot of troublesome fences, cleverly built up of stones, branches and thorns. Such things irritate a free man strolling about on his own property. Tord did not step over them, no, he put his foot on the rubbish and enjoyed hearing it crash down, and he stepped through as proudly as if he were stepping over the walls of Jericho. But the next time he came strolling along he found to his fury that the fence had been repaired as if by magic.

It was work, patience, foresight, civilization that Tord hated in Mattson. This hatred occupied him fully the whole of the autumn. If he sat down to write and could not get into the right mood it was Mattson’s fault. If he got drunk it was as a protest against the sobriety of that damned old blockhead. When at last the gale came, Tord had his great day. A real raging south-easterly gale so that the old man could not get out and save his catch but had to go about waiting anxiously to haul in his torn nets full of seaweed and rubbish.

One day Tord flew into a real rage. One of his dogs, a big ferocious mastiff, had caught his leg in a fox trap which the bailiff persisted in putting out in spite of Tord’s prohibition. There was a terrible scene and Tord would probably have struck the old man in his own kitchen if Dagmar had not come between them. But from that moment Tord swore inwardly that Mattson should leave Järnö. He only waited for quarter day, which was the first of December, to give him notice.

You can imagine his malicious joy when the whole first week of December had passed without Mattson bringing the rent.

The old man only stared when at last he came with his poor notes and was told that he was to leave at once.

“I have lived here forty years,” he mumbled calmly, “And I have always been accustomed to pay some time in December after I have been into town and sold my salted herrings and mutton.”

He could not realize anything so catastrophic as that he should leave Järnö.

Tord stood there grey in the face shaking the lease in his hand. “Now I suppose I shall see something else than that damned calm in your eyes,” he thought.

“You have not paid in due time, and now you have got to clear out. Järnö is mine, you see, and I don’t want you here any longer.”

Mattson only shook his head. He went home with a very thoughtful expression, and the same day he hauled up the sail of his big boat to go into town to speak to the storekeeper and to people versed in law, in order to find out the rights of the matter. But his wife came up to Dagmar crying. And Dagmar begged for her and scolded Tord and said that he was disgusting, but it was no use. And then she cried too, because she was afraid of the loneliness, when she would be the only woman on the island. But Tord rushed out and stalked about alone the whole of the cold winter day with his lame dog and would not be mollified.

Mattson returned from his journey with a gloomy face, and offered to compromise by a payment of damages. Yes, he would even try to pay a higher rent. But Tord only shouted that he wanted to be left in peace.

The following day Mattson came again, and this time he was humble and alarmed, and begged as if for his life. And now it was a joy for Tord to look into his eyes. Yes, he had a great and lovely revenge on all the prudence and calmness of the world. He escaped with a cruel feeling of pleasure from the idler’s secret feeling of inferiority.

“No!” he cut him short. “I won’t move. You’ll find here, Mattson, no use for your rake pins. Clear out now!”

Shortly before Christmas a couple of sand barges arrived at the pier, and took on board Mattson’s corn, cattle, furniture and tools. It cut one’s heart to see the kitchen table, the folding bed, the plants, moved out into the winter cold. Tord stood up on his hill-top and watched. He meant to be defiant and hardhearted and enjoy the ice-cold wind. But as a matter of fact he was frightened and felt sick.

Then four steady and determined men from the barges came up and demanded on Mattson’s account a round sum for the autumn sowing, manure, newly planted fruit trees, and improvements to piers, fences, outhouses. Tord paid without bargaining and with a certain tremulous eagerness.

Mattson did not show himself except on a receipt.

Then one of the barges set off with the old couple on board. The other remained a little behind. There, hidden among the alders by the shore, stood a powerful youth and peered up towards the hill. When he saw Tord set out for a walk, he followed him unperceived. He chose a quiet, suitable place where there were no witnesses. There he suddenly sprang out and gave Tord a blow on the back of his head, so that he fell unconscious for a time and awoke covered with blood and with two teeth missing. The barge had already disappeared, swallowed up by the grey ice-cold winter twilight across the bay.

That was the first time Tord had suffered rough, bodily ill-treatment. It brought out again all the timid hatred of mankind that his marriage had seemed for a moment to thrust aside.

He came home late and said he had fallen and struck against a tree stump. Dagmar could not help laughing for a moment at the ridiculous gap in his teeth. But she stopped short when she saw his expression, and her laugh turned to sobs. She had evil presentiments, Dagmar, and they were to come true....

Tord had not so many opportunities of kicking down Mattson’s fences and revelling in his new eaglelike loneliness. It soon appeared that he must go and buy provisions if they were not to starve to death when the ice came and it was too thick to get through with a boat, and not thick enough to walk on. They had, as a matter of fact, cut away the ground beneath their feet by turning Mattson out. Where were they now to procure milk, fish, meat and wood? Tord sailed about to the neighbouring islands and told the peasants to bring him these necessities, but they were annoyed at his treatment of Mattson and therefore could not spare him even a herring.

Tord was to learn to his annoyance that Mattson with his foresight and experience had stood like a rock between him and a thousand worries and difficulties. But this only strengthened him in his angry resolve to help himself. In a furious north wind he and the old gardener sailed twelve miles to the nearest store and there he bought a boatload of preserved food, ham, potatoes, flour and lamp oil. They had to hack their way out of the harbour through ice half an inch thick, frozen during the night, so it was high time....

Then came the real winter and locked them in with dark and unsafe ice.

At the end of February the old gardener fell on the very slippery ground when he was carrying water from the well, and broke his leg above the knee. Fortunately the ice bore just then, so they were able to get him into hospital. They could not tempt another servant out to the eagle’s nest, so now they had to shift for themselves. Tord was not able to climb the hill with water and wood, so they had to move into Mattson’s humble cottage for the winter. In the spring Tord had soundings made but they found no water up on the hill: so he had to bring out more workmen to construct a proper road up. All this cost money—so much that even Tord realized he could not go on for ever. Then he bought fishing and shooting implements and a few goats in order to help him out, and he took to cattle breeding. But now for the first time he really missed Mattson’s experience.... He did not know where to try for the cod. He did not know how to deal with a tangled net. The ducks flew past when he lay out in the skerries. And the goats soon dried up; and besides, they became so wild that he could not catch them. So during the course of the summer these means of support failed him, and he had to turn to expensive preserved food again.

Dagmar had not much time to run about naked in the sunshine this summer. There was not so much left that was “beautiful and wonderful and lovely.” But she had not quite lost her gypsy-like boisterousness and freedom from care, though when there was no alcohol left and the bad weather really set in, it might happen that she grew sulky and quarrelsome. Once towards the autumn when she had had special cause for anxiety she mentioned town, but Tord flew into such a rage that she was frightened and flew out into the kitchen with her cards and her pipe. And Tord strolled about the shores for weeks cogitating in dull anger on the shameless weakness and faithlessness of women.

The whole of this winter Tord went about plaguing himself with his money worries, so that he had no energy left for anything else. The great book that he was to write, his masterpiece, his hymn to nature, weighed him down like a dead weight. It was like loose ballast which only increased the lurch, when he inclined to melancholy. Nature swayed around him like a helpless chaos. He had moments of hatred of the frequent gales that would never yield a song. He grew furious with the eternal, rolling, breaking seas whose rhythm he could not catch.

“Money,” he thought, “that cursed money. I am never free!”

Towards the spring he at last wrote the letter to Peter. It had cost him weeks of effort and disgust, such a terror had he of everything in the nature of business. His haughty insolence was only an armour to shield him against his lack of confidence, his fear, and his suspicions.

Peter had not expected such news so soon. He rubbed his hands. And he took good care not to show the letter to his brother and sisters. This time he meant to settle the business alone. Peter delayed his reply for a whole fortnight in order to humble Tord. Then he came sailing out himself to Järnö, not in his own cutter, but in a humble little fisherman’s boat. It was in the twilight of an April day. Nobody seemed to have noticed him up in the big, grey, log house. The island looked completely deserted. Peter took the opportunity of looking round a little. Neglect and waste struck him like a cold blast. Broken down fences, unploughed fields, empty cattle sheds, plundered outhouses with half open doors hanging on a single hinge. Not a cow or a pig or a hen. He scratched his chin thoughtfully, but his expression was not of discontent, on the contrary! “I see, that’s how things are,” he thought, “I shall escape cheaper than I had thought. Why give a lot of money to people who can’t look after anything?” And he mentally lowered his bid for the remainder of Tord’s shares in Selambshof by several tens of thousand crowns.

That neglect cost Tord Selamb dear.

At last Peter struggled up the hill panting, and knocked at the door; he was greeted by an infernal barking from the brutes inside.

Tord had been watching Peter the whole time from the window, but had not cared to go and meet him. Such is the custom of the skerries! And then, he did not want to appear too eager, poor fellow!

The first evening they did not talk business, but they drank the whiskey Peter had brought. But he broke up early. He wanted to get up early to shoot duck.

So at dawn they lay out at Kallö skerries, which belonged to Järnö. In front of them lay the grey sea with smooth patches to the lea of white drifting ice floes, where the little waves lapped the point of land and the silly eider decoys nodded in their wooden way and pretended to be alive. But here Tord’s horror of business lifted a little. He felt a grim, fierce kind of excitement. “This is the struggle for life in all its hellish nakedness,” he thought, not without satisfaction. “Here I lie in the icy cold on a primitive rock in an arctic sea and wait for the opportunity to lure and kill.” Under the open sky with a gun in his hand he felt hardened and reckless, capable of any struggle. Yes, he even became intoxicated at the crazy thought that Peter was in some way in his power out here in the wilderness of Järnö. Where it was a matter of deceiving himself he could be a poet right enough, poor Tord!

But Peter lay there in his greasy old fur coat and peeped at Tord with his cunning little bear eyes. He appreciated those little, nervous twitchings which suddenly stiffened into defiance. “But how mad is he?” thought Peter. “How far can I go?” He made little frightened delicious guesses, and he felt much easier in the region of his pocketbook.

Then a flight of ducks approached from the south. It looked at first like a dark, billowing ribbon against a low, bright rift in a cloud. Then it quickly became a stormy, vibrating wave. The wind held its breath before this space-devouring speed, which made sea and sky shrink. The living wave swung around in a curve towards the decoys. A confusion of wings beat the air to froth around their heavy bodies. The ducks did not seem to want to descend. All the same Tord had time to let go his two barrels into the flight. Peter’s gun boomed a little later. His furs were too heavy for him. The old gardener who lay concealed with the boat was able to bring in three birds. “Of course, one can get a shot in when Peter is here,” thought Tord, with a certain bitterness. The fact was that he had never had the patience to wait when he was alone. But Peter loudly praised Tord’s shot and confessed that he himself had missed.

They shot quite a lot of eiders and also longtailed ducks later on in the day. Peter was lost in admiration. He warmly praised the fine shooting and the wonders of Järnö generally. He himself was a heavy-witted, clumsy, impossible rustic whilst Tord appeared to be a master shot and a splendid sportsman. And it ended in Tord, under the influence of the several drinks, indulging in the wildest bragging of his fierce, free, eagle’s life betwixt sea and cliff.

Then they returned home.

Dinner was quite festive. Dagmar had, in honour of the occasion, put on some gaudy silk rags and had powdered her nose. It was of no importance that her fingers were sooty. Tord’s excited pride derived new strength from the burgundy, the brandy, and the whiskey. He clenched his fists and stalked to and fro between his bear skins and elk heads in the high resounding hall. The firelight from the burning logs flickered over his jersey, Lapp shoes and untrimmed beard. He showed his contempt, with terrible oaths, of the miserable herds that thronged the streets out there in the town. He was the lonely, free, scornful ... superman. He recognized no other relations and friends than the sea, the wind and infinite space.

Peter also seemed to be very far from claiming the honour of relationship. He shrank up in his seat. He enjoyed doing so before the magnificent Tord. He was not well, he was dusty, worried, tired. Business worried him. There was no difficulty in making oneself small if only one’s pocketbook grew fat in the process.

They did not talk of Tord’s affairs.

Three days of constant drinking passed. Then Peter suddenly got it into his head that he must go back home at once. He had a great big bill falling due the following day. He groaned over that bill as he was packing up his things. He had still not said a word of Tord’s affairs. “You begin, old man,” he thought.

Tord stood there with a sick headache and bit his lips. “Cash! Cash! Cash!” throbbed in his head. It was sickening to talk money after all his wild, eagle-like boasting. He caught hold of Peter’s arm in a way that rather resembled pinching:

“Well, curse you, what about my letter?” he cried. “What will you give for my shares?”

Peter shrank more than ever, smaller and smaller until he was like a little grey mouse:

“Buy shares? Impossible! These are not the times ... I have no ready money.”

“Why the devil did you come here then?” Tord said brutally.

Dagmar went about tidying up with a fur coat on top of her chemise and her hair down:

“What a polite host!” she laughed.

“Yes, I suppose I’d better clear out at once,” whined Peter.

For once Tord said something sensible.

“All right, I will come in with you to talk to Stellan and Laura about the shares.”

Peter suddenly became very thoughtful. He sat down at a table and began to calculate in a small greasy notebook:

“I might try to renew that bill, and then I could perhaps help you,” he mumbled.

Tord had an instinctive feeling that his last proposal had been the best one, and that he ought to talk to his sisters and brother. But he did not stick to it, so incurably lazy was he.

“Well, what will you give?” he asked in a voice that was thick with excitement.

Peter writhed. He seemed quite in despair.

“I might risk about fifty thousand.”

Tord thought it sounded too absurdly little compared with what he had received before.

“Damn you!” he shouted.

Peter began again with an injured expression to pack his bag. And Tord asked Dagmar to bring out his town clothes.

“Sixty-five thousand,” Peter suddenly ejaculated.

“A hundred thousand!” Tord hissed through the gap in his teeth.

Then Peter felt a wild joy. But it was deep, deep-seated. Not a spark of it came to the surface. He took out his shapeless pocketbook and slowly counted out seventy-five notes of a thousand crowns each.

“That is all I have with me.”

Tord suddenly closed. Such is the power of cash over weak minds. And of course he could not know that Peter had exactly the same amount in his other pocketbook.

But he had scarcely signed Peter’s paper and parted with his shares when he felt that he had been tricked.

“Clear out now, you cheat!” he shouted. “And don’t come near Järnö again, because if you do you will get a bullet in your head.”

And Peter quickly disappeared with the old gardener, who was to sail him over to the steamer. He calculated that he had earned about two hundred thousand on this stroke of business. But it had been too easy. He felt almost uncomfortable as he sat there huddled up on the lee side and looked out at the calm April day. Yes, there was something uncanny in a Selamb having such wretched ideas of business.

Tord did not go into town to put his seventy-five thousand in the bank. He kept them out at Järnö. No signing of papers, no hanging over a counter. The money must not link him to the town, the community.

“Now I am free,” thought Tord, “absolutely free....” He went out to devour the living spring. Alone like a cock he walked about and endeavoured to seek inspiration. Yes, now the moment had come when Tord Selamb would become a poet.

But alas! no notes would come. He had a big grey lump in his chest that would not melt. His work, his cursed masterpiece simply oppressed him like a quintessence, a rude microcosm of his vague conceit. There came cramp, but nothing else. And it was not easy to go about with that cramp in the wild teeming life of spring....

May is once and for all not a month for the Selambs.

It was already growing summerlike. Tord came to meet it with staring, feverish eyes and a thin emaciated face. He began to keep to the sea more and more. It seemed as if the soil burnt his face.

It had been a long, wet, windy day, but towards evening the clouds lifted a little and it grew calm. Tord rowed out over the great shallow bay covered with reeds and with only a narrow passage out to the big buoy. From the wet oars and thwarts arose a damp chill. The shores, already beginning to look mysterious in the twilight, echoed back the flapping of the cuckoos’ wings. When Tord bent over the side he could imagine the brown, tangled swamp of lakeweed down there in the shallow water. But above him in the cool endless depth of the sky there glowed a chaos of vanishing cloud, flung out by the storm but now forgotten and left to the stillness. There were clouds that had stiffened in every gesture of perplexity, of terror and of suffering, clouds on the whipping post, clouds on the rack, clouds that had had the “Swedish draught.” But all seemed to have died in torture.

Mute immeasurable disruption.

Tord rested on his oars. He felt it to the very bottom of his being, this disruption. The cramp suddenly relaxed within him. He felt a strange, shivering relief. Then he rowed homewards, but slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking everything with his oars. Afraid to meet anybody, silently as a thief he stole into his house, crept up to his bed and fell asleep voluptuously tired with the sky beneath his eyelids.

At dawn he awoke and at once sat down to write with this mute, wild disruption still within him.

His poetic rapture lasted for several weeks. It was a wonderful joy at last to be able to pour it forth, to reveal himself, to shout out all he felt, to take revenge on all the thousand impressions that had weighed him down to earth with their luxuriant wealth.

When Tord was not writing he wandered about with staring eyes and careful, groping steps, as if he were fragile and afraid to fall to pieces. If Dagmar spoke to him he told her to shut up, though in an anxious, almost gentle voice.

Tord had already filled a tremendous packet of notepaper when his imagination suddenly dried up one long, gloomy, wet day. He sat down to copy it out, but he had some difficulty in finding the way in the maze of his own inspiration. What did they really mean, all those strange figures resembling a barometric curve during a storm or the seismograph record registering an earthquake? Certain after-echoes of his inspiration and an infinite reverence for his own Selambian genius helped him, however, over the worst. Only here and there a brief humdrum phrase crept in to make it more intelligible and as a sacrifice to the philistines.

On an absolutely still, sultry day in July, with distant thunder in the air, Tord copied out with trembling hand the last line of his poem. Then he rushed out into the kitchen and tore Dagmar away from the stove, where she stood in her chemise and an underskirt with her pipe in the corner of her mouth, cooking sausage for supper. He trailed her with him into the bedroom, forced her into a chair, pulled down the blind, and began to read.

It was unrhymed verse, of course, in the shortest possible lines, abrupt sentences and inarticulate phrases. A collection of exclamations, questions, curses, shouts of jubilation, all expressive of Tord Selamb’s relation to woman, the clouds, the sea, the lightning and the eagles.

Tord read with a hoarse, trembling voice. He seemed to whisper the most extraordinary secrets of his life with a wild emotion. And still, had he not, in the presence of the uninitiated, been seized already at the very first line by a terrible doubt? Was this ... was this really poetry? He looked at his wife above the sheets of papers with the eyes of a beggar, but of a mad beggar beseeching prostrate adoration.

Dagmar responded rather badly to his expectations. At first she looked a little embarrassed, almost like a child when its parents speak of something it should not understand. Then she looked at the door and mumbled:

“Pray excuse your slave, but I am afraid the sausages will be burnt....”

“Let them burn then, idiot,” shouted Tord. After which he continued his reading in a more threatening voice.

Dagmar listened again. She sat quite still and good for a long while. Then her mouth began to twitch quite irresistibly, though she looked frightened.

Tord then hissed out the following lines:

“In a blue flash of lightning
With a blue hissing sound
Creaking
Manly
Zig-zag
I saw it suddenly
The filth
The original filth
In the recesses of your body ...
Damnation
Unclean one!”

“Splendid,” Dagmar snorted. “Thunder and filth!”

Whereupon she burst out laughing just as when Tord came home with his teeth knocked out, a thoughtless irrepressible feminine laugh, cruel without malice, pitiless though with no ill-will. But Tord hated her at this moment, hated her. She laughed! When she ought to have sunk at his feet, and adored his genius, saved him from doubt! Oh! the weakling’s dream of power is often far more intense than that of the strong man. It is not the bad poets who are the least devoted to their verses. Just the line that most challenges the ridicule of the world is often aglow with the most intense passion. Just the very wretchedness of the form often reflects a seriousness from which there has been no deliverance. Yes, the bad poets are the unborn children of emotion. Their sufferings are cruel. People seem to them empty, blind, perverse, malevolent. How can anyone laugh at red, flowing blood? How can anyone help trembling in the presence of a volcano in eruption?

Tord ran to the door and tore it open. His eyes shrank and his beard shook when he looked at his wife:

“Get out,” he shouted. “Out with you into the kitchen. That’s your place!”

And Dagmar went, without any such refinement as injured pride, but with her heart suddenly filled with compassion, a sort of slovenly, annoyed pity.

For several weeks Tord did not open his mouth. He strolled about alone along his shores or locked himself in to file away at his verse. His ambition soon discovered the usual solace for the wounds and doubts of the hermit. “I am too singular, too wildly original and deep,” he thought. “They can’t understand me. I must fill out my voids, if I want any followers. I must soften down, moderate and chasten my verse.” So he sat down with intense suffering to convert his poems to a more human note: a process which really consisted in his striking out a few oaths and putting in a few “ands” and “buts” instead of a simple comma.

Then he sent in his revised work to a publisher in Stockholm, this time taking good care not to read anything to Dagmar. He had to wait a long time for a reply. Already after the first week he sailed across to the store for his post. Then he went every second day. As it was a long way, he spent most of his time with the tiller in his hand. In the end he did not trouble to sail home, but stayed away in the harbour. And it was as if the store had become his home.

Poor Tord! So little was his proud self-sufficiency worth.

At last one day the storekeeper flung a parcel to him. It contained Tord’s poems. They had been returned. Pale and trembling with fury he staggered down to his boat. He did not sail directly home, but roamed about for several days among the skerries, calling the elements to witness the shocking injustice he had suffered.

But at last he had to return to his home on the cliff, which he saw wherever he sailed. His hatred began to long for her, the woman. He must have somebody to vent his spleen on.

There was something dark, startling and fierce in his face when he stepped into the hall, without a greeting, and flung himself down on one of the benches in the wall. He could not even wait for an excuse for a quarrel. Dagmar only needed to ask him where he had been so long when he poured a torrent of abuse and accusations over her. She was a stupid, dirty, greedy animal who couldn’t help pulling a man down and degrading him. Yes, a short time ago humanity had been a lot of scoundrels who would not recognize his greatness, now he was pulled down and degraded. Suffering knows no logic. He wanted to see her suffer and groan and hate as he himself suffered and groaned and hated. But alas! already long ago during the loneliness of the cold winter’s evenings he had dulled the effect of hard words. Dagmar did not even trouble to get angry:

“Poor boy, so they have been returned,” she muttered.

Then he rushed up and struck her with his clenched fist on her soft breast so that she fell to the floor. And with her cry in his ears he rushed out and sat down in a crack in the hillside. He stared into the gloomy darkness that lay so close to his eyes and blended the sea and sky to a lifeless mass. His hand shuddered after having struck something too soft. But his outburst had not brought him any relief. It was himself he had struck, himself he had hated because he was not capable of doing what he wanted to; because he had not the liberating sense of form; because he was closed off from the great brotherhood of souls. But his was a selfish self-hatred without any spirit of resignation or reconciliation. There was not a trace of self-conquest. And until he has overcome himself a Selamb does not become a poet.

* * * * *