Chapter XV: Part TWO (7)

Hedvig was at once overcome by confused emotions of shame, indignation and furious suspicions. The impudent, shameless, immoral rabble! Before my eyes! Of course they were spying through the chinks in the blinds. And now they are laughing at me between their kisses. Yes, I have seen them often exchange glances of secret understanding. Fancy if they have seen me with the papers too. Fancy if they are conspiring to rob me. If they murder me one night and take everything and set fire to the house to hide their crime....

Hedvig remained on her aching knees till the couple had passed through the gate and disappeared in the darkness of the forest. Then she dragged herself to bed and lay there listening with every nerve in the thick darkness. All the time she imagined she heard something move in the wardrobe. In the end she had to get up and bring the papers and the money into her bed. With her arm round the two heavy leather portfolios she at last fell into a restless slumber.

The following morning Hedvig dismissed the chauffeur and the parlourmaid. That was the beginning to the depopulation of Hill villa. Then she sold the car and had a fire and burglar proof safe built into the wall in the wardrobe. When it began to grow cold in the autumn she closed up the picture galleries and only heated a few rooms. By that time both the cook and the other maid and the gardener had gone. She had only one servant left, an old bad-tempered, silent, faithful servant of the Hill family.

The snow came and Hedvig got herself up at dawn, so as not to be seen, and swept the snow drifts from the gate. For long periods only one thin column of smoke rose from the chimneys to show that there was still flickering life in the big white villa. It gradually began to become a ghost-house.

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VIII

+TORD SAILS OUT TO SEA+

With its knife-sharp stem the big motor boat cut straight through the September storm. In the stern Stellan and Laura were lying, well protected from both draught and spray by canvas and bevelled glass screens. The splash of the waves mingled with the sound of jingling mirrors and trays in the elegant saloon.

“The motor runs nicely today,” observed Laura.

“It always runs well when you are on your way to something disagreeable,” mumbled Stellan.

“Do you think there is more vibration in the bows?”

“Of course there is nearer the motor. Why do you ask?”

“The vibration is nearly as good as massage. I have not had any for a whole week. It’s perfectly awful. I think I will move up there.”

Laura stepped up to the bows. Her life was now characterised by an incessant struggle against incipient corpulency. She took massage, had gymnastics, played games and rode. The fear of getting old forced her out of her feline laziness. She positively dared not sit still. “If I rest or if I lie on my back, then old age will come over me,” she thought. This new restlessness went hand in hand with an ardent desire to be in at everything, not to miss anything. She had fallen a helpless victim to the disease of seeing and being seen. Dances, first nights, private views, bazaars, matches:—everywhere you saw Countess von Borgk. And everywhere you saw her flirt with young men, preferably very young men.

It had not been exactly an agreeable surprise for Stellan to discover her at the great autumn shooting party at Granö. Stellan was no longer fond of female company. His wife he fortunately escaped. She was always at the seaside or at some sanatorium, but Laura he often met. But with the old bachelor Major von Brauner he had thought he would be free from her. Certainly Brauner had figured at Laura’s gambling evenings out in the Narvavägen, but Stellan did not know that relations had continued. Judge of his annoyance, then, when he turned in his motor boat and saw his pretty sister on the pier; Laura in short skirts, with puttees on her legs and a young painter fool carrying her gun.

And at dinner she came down, the only lady amongst so many men, half naked, wrapped in some green silk stuff that really cried aloud of her lost youth. And she herself gave the signal for the naughty stories after dinner. Grotesque!

As if that were not unpleasant enough they began to talk about the neighbouring Järnö. And who should start that topic but Laura. She was half lying in her chair and told lots of stories about dear old Tord. There was a moment of painful silence, but as the family itself did not seem to mind ... well, then they let their tongues wag. Nobody mentioned such a trifle as that Tord had the Governor of the province at him all the time for neglect. That was to be seen in any paper. But now he had put up big notices:

“Landing forbidden on penalty of death.

Tord of Järnö.”

And he actually did shoot at people who entered his waters. Von Brauner himself had once sought shelter there during a thunderstorm and had heard the bullets whizz about his ears. The people round about were so furious that an accident might happen at any moment.

“A philosopher who has read too much Darwin and Nietzsche,” mumbled Stellan. “He wants to be a living protest against the more sentimental theories.”

Stellan tried to save the situation by being objective at the same time as he appealed to the sportman’s individualism and the aristocratic prejudices of the company.

But Laura laughed:

“Nonsense, he is just mad. But anyhow, madmen may be rather jolly.”

The following day Stellan left Gränö in order to go to Järnö and talk to Tord. It was not so easy to get Laura to come with him, because she felt very much at home amongst the shooting party. But now they were on their way anyhow. The motor boat already began to plunge in the rougher and heavier seas of the big Järnö bay.

Stellan put on an old oilskin and went up on the captain’s bridge:

“Are you quite sure of the chart?” he asked the man at the wheel.

“Yes, sir, I was born in this neighbourhood.”

Between the seas Stellan took the opportunity of looking down into the engine room. Because he had his suspicions of Laura’s vibration. The mechanic, who was a handsome dark youth, might also have something to do with it.

Stellan was an old gambler, who was very frightened of leaving anything to chance.

The rocking of the boat soon made Laura leave the fumes from the engine room and quietly creep into the saloon.

They were approaching Järnö. Tall and foreboding rose the dark, rusty-looking hill surmounted by its log castle. The boat steered straight for the entrance to the harbour.

Was the madman really going to shoot? Not even through his Feiss-glasses could Stellan distinguish any sign of life.

Bang! A shot rang out above the lapping of the waves but nobody saw where it went.

“One ought to come here in warships,” the man mumbled.

Stellan slowed down. They slipped under the lee of the hill beside a dilapidated old shed.

Another shot of welcome! This time the shot struck only a few yards to starboard. But it was impossible to discover who had fired it.

Laura cried out that she wanted to go back. Stellan looked as if he felt sick. He waved a handkerchief eagerly as a flag of truce. There were no more shots. The boat floated quietly in towards a tumbledown fishing pier. But still no living soul was visible.

Stellan had some trouble in getting Laura out of the saloon. Not that he had any illusions about Tord’s chivalry, but he felt safer all the same when he had her with him. Silent and hesitating they went ashore, still with the reports of the shots on their nerves. They passed through an old field which was now running wild and full of little shoots of birches and aspens, then they cut across a little garden quite overgrown with pestilence weed out of which a few half suffocated black currant bushes stretched up their arms like drowning people, whilst the poor naked apple trees writhed in grey despair in front of a rotting cottage wall with broken windows and grass-grown porch. Nature crept in over the work of man and began to resume its power. Over the whole there lay, in the gloomy autumn day, an indescribable odour of dampness, decay and dismal neglect.

Shivering, Laura and Stellan took the path up the hill. Up there, whipped by the winds, the big house lay with its weathered logs, surrounded by a litter of empty tins and broken bottles.

Nobody came out when Stellan knocked. The door was not locked and they walked in. The big hall was cold, dirty and filled with a strange smell of animals. The whole house shook in the gale, and on the windows towards the north a pine branch knocked persistently as if the wind wished to enter as a guest.

They cautiously penetrated further. On one of the folding beds in the bedroom something lay huddled up under a reindeer skin. It moved when Laura lifted the fur rug and an untidy head peeped out. It was Dagmar. She stared in dull amazement at the visitors, without recognizing them.

“I am Laura ... Laura Selamb ... and this is Stellan.”

“Oh, I see, it’s you....”

Dagmar crept down. She was dressed in some grey rags. She had the grey complexion of the really poor, she looked emaciated, worn out. She gave at the same time the horrible and pitiful impression of a starved and tormented woman. She shook herself, and her teeth chattered:

“I am lying down as I am not quite well.”

“We wanted to speak to Tord,” said Stellan. “Where is he?”

Dagmar’s face hardened:

“I don’t know at all.”

“He greeted us with his gun, so he must be in the neighbourhood.”

“I suppose he ran away when he recognized you. He is not very fond of visitors.”

Then Dagmar suddenly approached Laura and stroked the smooth sleeve of her raincoat timidly, like a frightened dog:

“Goodness, how pretty you are! Do you know I have not talked to a woman for several years.”

Laura shrugged her shoulders and giggled:

“Well, that is nothing to long for.”

An expression of terror suddenly came over Dagmar’s face.

“You must be hungry,” she mumbled. “And I have only got a little salted herring.”

Stellan went out and blew three short sharp signals on a whistle. Then he returned.

“Don’t trouble about food,” he said. “My men will bring up all we need. But how shall we get hold of Tord?”

“Oh, he has not eaten anything today, and when he is hungry he will come and feed out of your hand.”

The men soon arrived carrying up boxes of food and wine. Dagmar excused herself for a moment and dived into a wardrobe to make herself smart.... She returned dressed in an old-fashioned, frayed red silk frock which hung round her thin body. But there still glimmered a last spark of beauty in her features.

When dinner was over she went out into the porch and hammered a broken zinc tub with a poker and shouted into the forest:

“Food, food, food!”

It sounded like the cry of an angry bird through the roaring of the wind.

Tord did not come.

“Well, then we can eat without the beast,” said Dagmar.

Her eyes suddenly grew wet as she sank down by the dazzlingly white tablecloth. Such a lot of lovely food—so many fine bottles! And then there was the man with “Rapid” in white letters across his jersey, just like a footman behind her chair! And then Laura’s jewels and Stellan’s yachting suit!

“Goodness me,” she mumbled. “Goodness me!”

And then she drank her first cocktail.

Stellan pointed to Tord’s empty chair:

“How has our amiable host got into the habit of shooting at people who call on him?”

Dagmar quickly drank her second cocktail. A wild smile lit up her face like lightning:

“He is afraid they will come and take me from him.... So you can see he is mad.”

They ate for a moment in silence. The firelight from the logs in the fireplace flickered over the faces in the big dark hall, which was still shaken by the gale, and where the pine branch still persistently knocked at the window:

Knock, knock, knock...!

Dagmar drank and drank—with trembling hands and staring eyes. Suddenly she flung herself forward with her hands stretched across the table and her forehead on the cloth. She was seized by a paroxysm of weeping:

“It is terrible here!” she mumbled, “it is terrible here! I shall never be a human being again, never!”

She again lifted her face, distorted and dirty from her tears. She shook her clenched fists and by fits and starts there broke from her a wild and disconnected wailing over the drudgery, the loneliness, the hatred, the savagery of life out here on the stormbeaten cliff’s.

“He is mad!” she cried. “Tord is mad! He can’t bear to see people. He hides his money under trees. If I had not stolen from him, we should have starved to death!”

At the mention of money Laura pricked up her ears and across Stellan’s rigid mask a glimpse of a melancholy grin appeared. There was thus at least something comprehensible in this misery.

“What happened to the money?” he mumbled.

Stellan was told. Dagmar’s tears dried suddenly. She spluttered out fragments of the long, bitter monologues of years. Into her voice there entered the shrill accents of old quarrels. Peter had brought the money. And it was an enormous bundle of notes. But Tord did not put them into the bank. No, he pushed them all into a drawer, so mad was he. And he carried the key on a string round his neck. And he was mean with the money so that he need not go into town and talk business any more. He wanted to be free from that mob, he said. The money must last as long as he lived. And that was why they went half starved, and dressed in old rags. In the end Tord got it into his head that they did not need any food from the shops, but could live by shooting and fishing. It was no use begging or talking, for then he simply went away. Once he lay out in the skerries for a whole fortnight and then Dagmar had only some plaice to live on. But when Tord came home she saw no other way out than to make him drunk with his last bottle, and then she took the key and stole some of his money and sent the old gardener into town for winter supplies. For the old gardener was still alive then.

Tord said nothing when the old man came sailing back with his load of provisions. He was so hungry that he just threw himself over the food.

So things went on for a long time. Dagmar had learnt to open the drawer with a hairpin, and she had to watch for an opportunity to send the old man out when Tord was drunk or asleep. It seemed almost as if he acquiesced in the arrangement so long as he need not give out the money himself. But one day Dagmar found the drawer empty. All the notes were gone. She became dreadfully frightened. She began to spy on Tord to discover where he had hidden his money. And he was on his guard to see if she were following him. And thus they stole about silently and spied on each other like two criminals. And at last she managed to discover where he kept his treasure. It was in a hole underneath a tree root behind Mattson’s barn. She took a whole bundle of notes and hid them for herself. Tord noticed that the pile had suddenly diminished and he came home white with fury and threatened to kill her. But she defied him and would not tell her hiding place. And Tord did not find it.

One fine day the old gardener died. His pipe just fell out of his mouth and he was dead. Tord wanted to dig a grave for the old man down there without further ado. “We can say that he was drowned, if anybody asks,” he said. Dagmar frightened him by saying that they would be arrested as murderers if they did not notify the death. At last she got him to put up the sails of his boat. Dagmar sat down in the deckhouse and cried. She felt as if she had lost both father and mother when they sailed into the cemetery with the old man.

And now she had only herself to fall back on if they were to keep body and soul together out there at Järnö. Soon everything was eaten up again and Tord would not go to the shops. And when she herself was going to set out in the skiff he had hidden the oars. She became so desperate that she sat down alone on the pier and howled like a wild animal. Then she remembered she had one more refuge and that was her red blanket. She had arranged once with the storekeeper that if they were in distress she was to hang out a big red rug in the window of the big house. And then he would take the motor boat and bring food to them. She had not much hope; she sat for an eternity out on the cliff only staring out over the water to see if the signal worked. On the third day a motor boat actually rounded the point and so their distress was staved off for that time. This had happened last autumn. The winter was cruel. They had no longer anybody to carry wood and water. Dagmar became ill from all the drudgery. For two months they were isolated when the ice would neither break nor bear. At last the ice froze properly everywhere except over an under current.

But then the peasants smashed up the yacht which was lying in the steamer track through the ice, and then it was impossible to get across as they were too weak to drag out another boat. People had begun to damage everything of Tord’s that they could lay hands on, nets, piers, boats; so hated was he now. And Tord no longer swore and raged. He only walked about like a dumb animal for days and weeks together. And about that time the lamp oil also ran out, so that they had to sit there in the darkness in the evenings after the logs in the fireplace had burnt out. So they sat there in the dark and dared not let each other go and still they couldn’t help nagging. She was ill, and she wanted to die merely to annoy him. And he tried to keep quiet until she should go mad.

“Yes, this has been a terribly long winter,” said Dagmar, “a terribly long winter.”

After which she was quiet for a moment and sat there rocking her head and staring straight in front of her.

Laura had risen from the table and stood warming her back at the open fireplace:

“But why, in God’s name, woman, why have you not left him long ago?” she exclaimed.

Dagmar started. It seemed as if she had been cruelly torn out of the voluptuous intoxication of at last shouting out her misery.

“Why didn’t I leave him?” she mumbled; “it must be because I am mad, because he has infected me, because I have not spoken to a woman for years. But now there must be an end. Now I must get away. Fancy, I was quite young when I came here! Quite young and pretty! And look what he has made of me now!”

She tore her frock open and showed her thin neck and shrunken chest.

“Yes, that’s how I am now. I must get away. I must come with you to town. He says he will shoot me if I run away—but that doesn’t matter. I can’t live another winter out here anyhow.”

During Dagmar’s outpourings Stellan had been sitting motionless sucking an unlighted cigar. Now he exchanged a quick glance with Laura. Unpleasantness and scandal threatened from all sides. They must be careful. He called in the men and ordered them to clear the table and take the things down to the boat. Then he turned to Dagmar:

“To take you with us now is absolutely out of the question,” he said coldly. “But if you can persuade Tord to go abroad, preferably out of Europe, I am prepared to give you some money.”

Dagmar had begun to pull out some clothes at random and put them in a knapsack. She looked up and shook her head:

“You don’t understand,” she muttered hurriedly. “He is impossible. It is impossible to talk to him. I must get away!”

Stellan rose:

“Good-bye,” he said. “Thank you. We must get away before it grows dark. Think over what I have said.”

Dagmar stamped on the floor:

“No,” she cried. “I must come with you! You can put me ashore wherever you like. I can very well sleep in the gutter tonight! But I must get away!”

Laura and Stellan walked quickly out. Dagmar came after them, without hat, in her red silk frock and with her bundle in her hand. The gale tore her untidy fair hair. Mumbling, crying, stumbling, she ran after Laura and Stellan down the rock hillside.

“If you don’t take me with you, I will throw myself in the water!”

And so she did. When by Stellan’s orders the man pulled in the gangway and the boat began to back out she flung herself in, scorning death, with bundle and silk frock and all.

The men had to pick her up. Pale, shivering, dripping, but full of the determination of despair she clung to the mast on the foredeck. But Stellan steered into the pier again....

At that moment a grey figure appeared round the corner of the shed. It was Tord. For hours he had been sitting there in the smell of herrings, amongst torn nets and worm-eaten decoy ducks, and staring at an ant’s trail that began in a hole in a floor board and disappeared between some stones at the side of the lake. Now he walked half way out along the tottering dilapidated pier. He was dressed in a worn fur cap, grey Iceland sweater and torn Lapp boots. In his hand he held a rifle. His rough unshaven face was as grey as a lichen, shrunken, and set in hopeless defiance. For a moment he stood motionless, staring at Dagmar, who still tremblingly clung to the mast. The gust of wind ruffled the pools on deck and tore at her wet ragged skirt. The vibration of the motor set the water in the whole of the little harbour nervously trembling. It was as if the water, the boat and the woman were shivering from the same cold squall.

“I can jump into the water again,” she cried.

Stellan was going to jump ashore, but Tord fingered his rifle.

“Back,” he shouted. “Let go! You shall not land at my pier again. To hell with you all!”

Yes, that is what Tord cried out. For years he had watched over Dagmar like a red Indian, so that she should not run away. But now he suddenly stood there telling her to go to hell!

Laura had settled down comfortably on the bridge. She pulled Stellan’s arm:

“Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “Let us see what he will do. This is interesting. I have not seen Tord for many years. He really is interesting.”

But Stellan took no notice of her. He was ashamed before his men and stepped up to Tord. He stood there straight and stiff in his yachting suit with the mien of an officer before a drunken recruit.

“This won’t do,” he said in a low tone. “Damn it, what a figure you cut! You are completely impossible. If you will take your wife and go away to South America I will find the money.”

Tord came face to face with his brother:

“South America? Because you have a badge on your cap? By your snobbish order? You just get aboard. Access to this island is forbidden by Tord Selamb!”

Tord planted the muzzle of his rifle in Stellan’s stomach and forced him, with his fingers on the trigger, to retire on board. After which he took his curved knife and cut the moorings.

“Back,” he commanded again, and the man at the wheel obeyed.

The big red mahogany boat glided quickly out of the harbour.

Dagmar still clung to the mast and stared shivering at the lonely grey man out on the pier:

“The key of the larder lies under my pillow,” she called. And there was suddenly a tremulous note of pity in her voice at the sight of his terrible loneliness.

Then she crept down in the machine room.

They were already in the open. The gale had increased and the motor boat rolled and pitched in the high seas in Järnö bay. Laura got out some dry things for Dagmar. She looked up with a grimace at Stellan:

“Why the devil had you to go out to Järnö? There was more fun at Brauner’s!”

Stellan shrugged his shoulders.

“It might be as well to have her with us. Tord will soon follow and then we will deport them.”

Tord did not see the motor boat for a long while from the pier. It was hidden by a tongue of land. “I won’t go up the hill,” he thought. “What the deuce have I to do on the hill?” But soon after he was up there all the same. The boat was visible far out in the channel. It looked like a dark spot on the grey waters. Sometimes there was a flash of light as it dashed through a big sea. It got smaller and smaller. He had to fasten his gaze upon it intently if the water was not to appear absolutely deserted. Then the boat disappeared far, far away beneath a grey headland.

Tord started. When his hand moved on to the rifle barrel the steel was so cold that it burnt. Somebody had drawn a deep, moaning sigh. It must have been himself.

He was alone now. It was ghastly how everything suddenly grew in the loneliness, how everything grew big and heavy and terrible, the trees, the clouds, the wind, the sea.

Quickly, as if pursued by an enemy, he dived into his house. The fire had gone out. The pine branch still beat against the window: knock! knock! knock! He went up to the wall and tried with his hand the draught from a chink between the logs, then he suddenly rushed out into the kitchen and swallowed some remains of food. It was the first food he had tasted that day. A drop of wine was left in a glass. He poured it into him. Then he spat it out again feeling nauseated. And then he was in the bedroom by Dagmar’s bed. The pillow was still pressed down after her head. He raised his clenched fist for a blow but suddenly stopped and raised the rifle that he still trailed with him. The shot went straight into the pillow so that the feathers whirled about. Afterwards it became horribly quiet. Tord shivered. Why make a noise and shoot? There was nobody to hear him, nobody. Then the pine branch began to beat against the window again. Knock! knock! No, he could not stay here!

Tord went down to the little reed-grown bay. He half ran but stopped now and then like a child that stops crying for a moment to feel its pain. Down there the old yacht lay riding at anchor. For days and weeks its deckhouse had been his last refuge when everything else was disgusting and hateful. The punt lay beneath the alder trees. Tord got it afloat and rowed out through the scattered, rustling reeds. On board the yacht the deck was covered with withered leaves. The water had risen up into the cockpit. Water is never so unpleasant as when, brown with rust from the ballast, it rises up in an old boat. Tord pumped. With difficulty he opened the swollen doors of the cabin. Down below it smelt of rotting oak, rotten ropes, mildew and damp. He pushed away a lot of rubbish and lay down on a cushion. Flap, flap! went the eternal waves as they splashed against the stem. Rat-tat! the foresail halyard beat against the mast as the wind swept in. And the alders and the hill swung to and fro through the little window, to and fro, to and fro!

The chill rose out of the cold, stinking cushion so that Tord could no longer lie on it. He climbed up on deck and began mechanically to hoist sail. The stiff grey hemp creaked in his hands. Out of the wet, mildewed folds of the sail crawled swarms of earwigs. The sheets were full of kinks and doublings. The boom suddenly knocked him down on the deck, but he rose groaning, pulled in the shiny, green anchor chain and hauled up the anchor, which was a mass of mire and mud. Then he sprang to the helm.

As by magic the yacht found its way out through the narrow, difficult channel. Now it lay in Järnö bay, under the lee of the familiar hill. Black, gusty squalls puffed in all directions over the leaden grey water. At first the old hull did not seem to know what it wanted to do. The sails filled, shivered and went over. The main-sheet struck off Tord’s fur cap. He did not care. He sat huddled up by the helm looking at a feather that had fastened on his sleeve. He stared at the soft, white down that trembled at each puff. The memories of past kisses, caresses and embraces softly, wonderfully softly, flattered his soul. There to starboard was the course to town, to the people, to Dagmar.... He fell away before an easterly gust; he was already out in the more steady wind of Järnö bay.... But then the yacht suddenly went about with whipping sails and headed out towards the open sea visible through “The Iron Door.” Tord did not know why he had tacked. It was as if the old boat had known better than he.

As soon as Tord had rounded the point, the gale cast itself upon him as if a window had blown in. The yacht luffed, slowed down with flapping sails and vibrated till you could feel it through the whole hull. Then it slowly fell away and gathered speed.

Tord seemed to waken up. Beneath his blown coarse tufts of hair his glance grew keen again. “By Jove, now we shall have some sailing!” Muttering sturdy oaths, he worked himself up for a quarrel, a wild quarrel with his beloved old sea. It was the last thing he had to fight with. Everything else had gone.

He was still under the Kall-skerries, and the worst had not yet begun.

There are gales and gales. This was no puffing, impatient, spring squall, nor yet a black, summer squall, but a big heavy, autumn gale with all the grimness of the coming winter behind it. It came from the north, too. Sky, water and hills had all the hues of iron. The clouds hung with shades of darkish blue between the lighter clearings in the sky. The distant cliffs flashed suddenly with a ghostlike, dead, metallic sheen.

Now he would soon be out in the open sea. Now it was time to put about if ever he wanted to get back. But Tord did not. The sea was stronger than he.

East of Järnö the sea is almost always deserted. There are no buoys or lighthouses, no sails and no smoke from steamers. No man stood with glasses to his eyes following the death struggle of the yacht out in the raging twilight of the sea.

Tord did not give in so easily. He sailed like an old sailor. He sat huddled up to windward and spat out the salt water and avoided the worst breakers. With a kind of pale and passionate devotion he saw the seas grow and grow. Every heavy, onrushing, crested wave out there in the desolate expanse was like a confirmation of something he had long, long known. Stiff with cold in his dripping rags, shivering to the very marrow with weariness, he felt a mysterious inward joy as both the boat and himself irresistibly succumbed. Then the peak blew down and the boom trailed in the water. Then the waves began to crash in through the missing hatch in the bows. It became more and more difficult for the heavy half-disabled hull to lift itself out of the troughs. Then Tord was flung overboard just at the moment when the boat capsized and sank. He saw the faded red pennant at the masthead dive a few fathoms away from him. He still kept afloat, he was still swimming. But he did not swim towards the land, but further out, towards the sea. The last thing he saw was a high, wonderfully tall, mountain of water, iron-grey, ice-green, rising above his head, with a crest of coldest, palest foam. In the middle of the wave he sucked the water into his lungs, lost consciousness and passed without pain.

Thus finished Tord Selamb’s last great wild quarrel. Defiance you might call it, a wild mad defiance unto death. A philosopher might perhaps mumble something about the negative in all egoism. Tord had driven the Selambian selfishness to the point at which it annihilates itself.

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IX

+PETER’S TOMBSTONE+

One cold winter day in the third year of the world war Laura drove out to Lidingön. Private cars were no longer permitted, but she had borrowed the big sledge from Trefvinge.

Laura did not suffer at all from the biting cold, she was too fat for that. She had given up the struggle and had thrown herself into the arms of an ever growing appetite. The nervous interest in food which had arisen during the great crisis had broken down her last timid resistance. Yes, now when other people grew thin she grew fat, irrevocably fat. Her appearance was really rather striking. In her shining furs she resembled an enormous, hairy female animal. Her cheeks had folds in them but her eyes, embedded in fat, were still clear and quick, and the small mouth was greedy and hard.

Some people simply do not seem made for suffering.

Laura had in good time put on a soft protective layer of fat between herself and the cruel “fimbul” winter of a world in which starvation, pain, hatred and death in these days did their terrible work.

After some searching they found the road that turned off to Villa Hill. It had not been cleared of snow. There was not a trace of footsteps or of sledge marks. It was like driving into the desert. One turn and the house lay there apparently quite deserted in its big wooded park.

To penetrate to the front door was impossible, the road was blocked by a giant snowdrift. Laura had to trudge through the snow to the kitchen door where a few tracks really met. A bad-tempered old servant peeped suspiciously out through the half-opened door, but did not want to remove the safety chain.

“I am Countess von Borgk, your mistress’ sister. I have an important errand. Open at once, woman.”

Laura passed through a kitchen that frightened her appetite to a cold shudder and was then brought through silent, dusky stairs and passages to the hall.

“You can wait here. The mistress is out, but will soon be back.”

Laura sank down on a chair with a grey cover. She had not been out to see Hedvig for years. Ugh! how awful everything looked here, dark, dirty, cold, dilapidated....

Time passed, and Laura grew impatient. She took a peep at the picture galleries. The door was locked but she found the key on a shelf.

The poor deserted pictures! Dust, spiders’ webs, damp spots and dust again. Through dirty window panes, shaded by overgrown fir hedges and entangled branches of creeper, through glass roofs covered by the shrivelled leaves of autumn and the snow of winter a miserable twilight penetrated. The poor nudes in the pictures shivered in their bare skin over a long narrow drift that had blown in through a broken window in the roof. The “_plein air_” and impressionistic landscapes were blotted out by the dust and twilight. The modern brutalities seemed to survive longest. One or two shrill colour-screams still cut through the dark, the icy cold, and the silence like a cry of distress....

Laura huddled up in her furs. This was too dismal. She felt hungry—a desire to chew something—so it was always nowadays if she was exposed to any emotion. She took a packet of tough nougat out of her hand bag and took refuge before a big Dutch picture of still life. Chewing and staring at a crowd of hams, salmon, lobsters, oysters and tankards of ale she thought for the thousandth time: “That Hedvig! That miserable emaciated misfortune! What a jolly life she might lead if she were not so idiotic!”

Then Laura saw a dark shadow on the window. A woman came stealing out from the edge of the wood. She was thin and bent and she trudged heavily along in the deep snow. In her skirt she carried a big bundle of branches, brought down by the wind. From under the cap pulled deep down over the eyes she looked with shy, spying glances at the sledge and then walked quickly up to the kitchen door.

A moment later she slid stealthily and nervously into the hall.

That grey ghost was Hedvig Hill. The world had long ago forgotten that she had been a beauty and had been married to a young sympathetic patron of art. She generally passed as a half-crazy old maid who was afraid of people, who hated Jews, and hid her money in the seats of chairs. But nobody knew how wealthy she was. Whilst she herself got poorer and poorer and sank into a state of hopeless sterility, her money had multiplied and multiplied. It now represented an enormous sum of power and influence that she could not grasp or imagine.

Hedvig stopped with her hand on the door knob and stared anxiously at Laura:

“What do you want here?”

Laura swallowed a piece of chocolate:

“Peter has been ill for some time ... well, it is nothing infectious....”

Hedvig sounded indifferent.

“Well, what about it?”

“He has taken home a creature from Majängen. He imagines it is his son ... you remember that story....”

An expression of brooding hatred came over Hedvig:

“All men are disgusting brutes,” she mumbled.

Laura smiled teasingly:

“I don’t agree....”

She really writhed with the desire to say something sarcastic, but kept quiet for diplomatic reasons.

Hedvig fidgeted impatiently. She suffered to see Laura’s fatness, her furs, her smile:

“But what can I do? Why do you come here?”

“Well, Stellan asked me to fetch you. We must all three go out to Peter. Fancy if he is mad enough to recognize that unfortunate boy as his son!”

On Hedvig’s face came an expression of alarmed excitement, of mean spite:

“Would Peter let us suffer for his excesses....”

“Yes, he has been angry with us ever since we took Tord’s shares from him. He has got some plan in his head. But be quick now!”

Hedvig stood hesitating:

“Will you drive me back here after?” she mumbled.

“Of course, you won’t have to spend a farthing. But be quick!”

Hedvig disappeared and returned after a good while, stuffed up in a lot of moth-eaten woollen underskirts, jerseys and shawls, amongst which you could distinguish an old ragged Spanish mantilla fastened about her ears under the hat as if she had toothache.

They were late for Stellan. He had arranged to meet them away out at the toll-house. He did not like to be seen with his sisters, neither the fat one nor the thin one. Frozen and angry he climbed up into the sledge and pulled the fur rug round him without greeting them. These three, sisters and brother, were not exactly a centre of warmth in the icy cold winter twilight. And still their meeting was really an extraordinary event, because they never met now except at the annual board meetings.

Laura sat looking at Stellan, thinking that he had grown ridiculously small. She often thought so of people nowadays. As far as Stellan was concerned it was in some measure true. Without being bent, he had as a matter of fact shrunk, sunk into himself. Time had brought to his face-mask stiff folds which would not permit a smile to peep through. The hard restless eyes seemed to have lost for ever the secret of joy. His whole person diffused solemn boredom of long echoing passages and big empty rooms of state.

The silence was only broken by the crunching of the horses’ hoofs and the creaking of the runners where the snow was thin. The snow had fallen during a gale so that in open spaces the road was almost bare between the drifts. They had already passed Ekbacken yard, and the three now drove along the lake, the lake of their childhood. The frosted bushes on the shore resembled enormous fantastic crystals that had grown without sap and lived without life. They leant over a world of ice-floes frozen together, cloven from shore to shore by a black channel of open water. Nothing gave such a shiver of cold as this reeking trembling open water where the sluggish poisonous stream of Hell seemed to flow up between the blocks of ice. Over on the other shore there hung a gigantic cloud, like an enormous bird, with the grey colour of primeval time, and laden with pagan cold. Beneath it white globes of light trembled against a smoky, dull-glowing sky, which seemed red from the reflection of gigantic sacrificial fires. It was the big new works built round the old glue factory. Day and night it shone and roared and hissed on the other shore. Day and night. There the timber of the forests was ground to the finest powder as a substitute for cotton fibre in explosives. A flourishing war industry!

Stellan did not notice that it was the roar of the flight of Nidhögg, who feeds on corpses, that he heard, nor that he passed along Nastrand, the shore of corpses, where the dragon sucks the dead....

The stiff mask lit up for a moment as he lifted a gloved finger in the direction of the arc lamps:

“Good shares,” he mumbled, “rose five today again.”

“I see,” said Laura, “then I will buy....”

“All right, but don’t keep them too long....”

The sledge was already turning up the avenue before Stellan seemed to remember why they were driving out to Selambshof.

“We must go slow with Peter,” he said. “If we make a mess of the thing now we shall scarcely have time to repair the damage. At any moment there might be serious complications. Fortunately he does not seem to have written any letters to that woman in Majängen. I mean the mother. And neither has he taken any steps that point to recognition or adoption. I know it both through the coachman and the housekeeper, because I have long been forced to maintain certain relations with them. This war crisis at once sharpened Peter’s appetite for unpleasant kinds of business in a way that made it necessary to keep an eye on him. It is not long since he had half Selambshof full of boxes of sugar and butter. Yes, the house was practically used as a warehouse. I was there one evening myself and saw the exquisite portrait of our old grandfather peeping out from behind a pile of boxes of butter.... And then his company. He has developed a habit of taking home real criminals, and then they sit up half the night and drink and gamble like madmen. That creature from Majängen is by no means the first of his kind. Peter had scarcely been ill a week when he sent the coachman for him. The mother, who was a well-known termagant, swore and behaved like a lunatic. She would have nothing to do with ‘that devil at Selambshof’ she said. And even the young rogue himself seemed to have had remorse, for at first he was unwilling to go. But when the coachman returned with certain vague promises things went more easily and he ran away from his dear mother to Selambshof.”

Laura had listened with great interest:

“I should have liked to see the first touching meeting,” she said.

“It can’t have been very sentimental; Peter is said to have stared rather angrily at the figure before him and to have cried: ‘You are a lucky young rascal!’ And then he asked: ‘Can you play camphio?’ No, he could not play camphio but he must have been willing to learn, because from that time the cards were out several evenings one after the other. Now when Peter is too weak himself, the coachman and that creature have to be in with him with cards and alcohol....

“Yes, that is how things are at present. I don’t for a moment suppose that Peter’s conscience has in any way awakened or that he has grown fond of the scamp. No, he is the slave of his money and nothing else. And now he is working out a trick to keep his fortune together and to cheat his legal heirs.”

The sledge stopped, they had arrived.

Selambshof looked higher and gloomier than ever—with all its black windows. In the trees the crows were quarrelling over their perch for the night. Nobody kept them in check any longer, so they collected there every evening. Both horses and people started at the screams of hundreds of black ghostlike birds in the deep twilight.

An uncanny presentiment of death came over brother and sisters. Selambshof was at one with Peter the Boss. But Selambshof was also their own youth ... the root of their lives ... and now Peter was going to die and lots of other things with him....

Laura was frightened and wanted to get out of the sledge:

“No, this is too awful! I am going home again!”

Stellan had to pull her with him. They walked in silently.

Peter had had his bed moved into the office. It stood in the place of the old leather settee underneath the yellow, fly-marked Selambshof map. A lonely oil lamp feebly lit up some soiled glasses on the night table and his own swollen, puffy, pale face. It really was a room in which an Eskimo might have complained of the lack of comfort. But Peter seemed to think it ought to be like that. He had cheated many in the course of his life, had Peter the Boss, amongst others himself.

The visit of his sisters and brother did not seem to be unexpected or unwelcome. You could even see a little flash of satisfaction in his features, which seemed to worry Stellan. Hedvig was earnestly requested to keep quiet at first, and even did so, after she had crept away into a corner, wrapped up in all her jerseys and shawls. Otherwise their tones were of the gentlest. They were all kind care and spoke eagerly of doctors, nurses, cures, during which Laura all the same kept at a certain cautious distance, nervously chewing....

Then a dog was heard to bark outside, a great dull subterranean sound as if it had come from beyond the copper gates of death. All felt a shiver pass through them. Even Peter seemed to feel rather uncomfortable:

“That damned dog!” he swore. “It sounds as if the devil himself was on the way.”

Stellan ran to the window. Out in the snow he saw a shadowy figure dancing a sort of war dance, whilst throwing snowballs and lumps of ice at the furious watch-dog. Thin, lank, with high shoulders, and bare hands and head, in spite of the cold, the shadowy figure danced between the drifts.

Stellan turned to Peter:

“It must be your ... your new boarder ... he amuses himself by teasing the dog....”

“I see, is it only little Bernhard?” Peter grunted relieved. “Yes, he is not exactly a friend of watch-dogs....”

But now Hedvig’s voice sounded suddenly from the corner. She sat there looking as old-fashioned and motheaten as if she had hung herself away in a wardrobe out of pure meanness and then forgotten where the key was. Her voice also sounded strangely stuffy and dusty:

“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter,” she mumbled. “You should never have taken up with that woman....”

Peter did not seem to have noticed her before. A shiver passed over his swollen features. Hedvig, that ghost from the time of the great fear, again raised a secret anxiety in his innermost being, right in the centre of the hard annual rings of his soul.

“Aha, is it you, you crotchety old soul?” he muttered. “You are the right person to cheer up an invalid, you are.”

After a murderous look at Hedvig, Laura hurried up to Peter. Rustling with silk she came, covered with jewels, the scalps of many men embedded on her swelling bosom. Her voice sounded anxious:

“Dear little Peter, don’t make any scandal, it would be an awful scandal!”

Then Stellan came up:

“You must think of our name. Don’t believe the story is forgotten. You are confessing that you swore false. A Selamb a perjurer! You can hear for yourself that it is impossible. That creature would be a walking witness to your perjury. It is not possible that you should make such a scandal!”

Peter half rose on his elbow. His pale, puffy face derived new life from his malice. He looked at them with an angry gallows-bird expression reminiscent of the great family quarrels:

“Scandal,” he panted, “scandal! That will be for you; scandal! I shan’t suffer from it.”

That was also an advantage in its way! Peter sank back on his pillow with an expression that almost resembled peace.

The dull barking began again. Once more Stellan saw the dark shadows tumble out into the twilight of the snow-lit garden. Now he was swinging a bottle in his hand. Carefully he staggered closer to the tied-up dog. Then he stood balancing and watching with a cunning smile till he could get in a blow on the head with the bottle. The glass broke and the contents ran out over the eyes and nose of the dog so that it crept into its kennel growling and sniffing at the strong alcohol. Now the passage was clear and the shadowy figure ventured to the window to look in. The face, suddenly pressed flat against the ice-covered window pane, looked grotesque.

Peter, who did not seem to be unconscious of these happenings, beckoned to the watcher to come in. After some scraping and moving about in the hall, somebody at last groped about for the door handle. The door was slowly and cautiously pushed open as if by a burglar and the dog-fighter came in. He remained in a corner where the light was faint, made a movement as if to take off a cap that was not there, whilst his street-arab face, blue with cold, quickly sobered and assumed an insinuating and fawning expression.

You could not say that the heir presumptive was exactly pleasant to look at. But Peter seemed as pleased as ever. He introduced his son with a mien of having quite unexpectedly, in the eleventh hour, produced out of his sleeve a small dirty trump that would win the game:

“Yes, here you have the boy. A handsome lad, don’t you think so? You, Stellan, have none. And yours ran away, dear Laura. But mine stands here as big as life. And Bernhard is his name.”

Bernhard grinned, a grin, however, that faded quickly away when Peter quite unexpectedly began to shower abuse on him because he had touched the whiskey without permission.

There followed a moment’s icy silence. Stellan went slowly up to Bernhard:

“We have come here for your sake,” he said. “My poor brother, whose strength is much reduced by his illness, seems to have got it into his head for some unaccountable reason that you are a relation of his. It is of course an absurd mistake. As I don’t like mystery, I tell you so openly in his presence.”

Bernhard fidgeted but did not dare to answer. He only stared at Peter, who, with eyes half-closed, seemed to be waiting:

Stellan looked like the incarnation of impersonal authority, hard as iron and firm as a rock.