ill. She caught hold of his hand and pressed it violently:

“Georg dear, they have rung up from the nursing home. He wants to see me. But I can’t trail myself there. I feel so awfully bad. Will you go there and give him my love, tell him how ill I am.”

Georg stood pale, hating the thought of going to the sick bed of this feared and secretly detested stranger. But he drew himself up. It did not enter his head to say “no” on an occasion like this.

After some hours Georg came back. He had not been able to give any message as the patient was unconscious.

Laura put no questions about the nursing home, what the doctor had said, or how the patient looked. She only heaped her gratitude on Georg and fawned on him like a dog.

She probably felt she might need him again.

The next day the Count was still unconscious and then Laura ventured to be a little bit better and to get up. It was boring to stay in bed, and besides she had a superstitious fear of pretending to be ill—she might really become ill.

On the whole, she thought extraordinarily little of the man whose name she bore. It seemed as if his illness had obliterated all her memories, from the earliest society ones to the latest exquisitely sensual; it seemed as if it had made of him a remote half-hostile stranger.

Several days passed. There was no talk of any visit to the invalid. He could speak to nobody, periods of unconsciousness interchanged with periods of delirium. Laura could no longer keep quiet or sit alone. She had at last made some acquaintances in the hotel, a secretary of the Danish Legation and a young widow whom she had met at the seaside. They in their turn had introduced her to a Russian musician who was passing through. So they were able to have a little game of bridge up in Laura’s sitting room in the evening.

“How is your husband getting on?” said the lady between the bids.

“Oh, I was there today ... he is much better....”

Georg heard these words through the half open door.

Then the telephone in Laura’s bedroom rang. With a sigh she dropped her cards and went in, carefully closing the door to the sitting room. The Russian did not play bridge, but was improvising on the piano.

Once more there was a terrible, pious, insistent voice on the telephone:

“The Count is conscious again. He only mumbles your name. He must speak to you. He can’t have long to live. You won’t let him die quite alone....”

Laura’s voice sounded like a cry of distress, half in despair, half in fury:

“Good God ... I ... I told you, nurse, that I was ill myself ... that I am in bed ... that the doctor has forbidden me.... But I will try to send somebody....”

She rushed in to Georg. She was pale, very much décolletée, dressed in black rustling silk and covered with jewels. She did not notice how her son quickly hid a parcel under the table. She stroked him on his arm and hand quickly and nervously.

“Dear little Georg, you must go to the nursing home again! Alexis has become worse. I can’t bear to see him suffer. My nerves are quite exhausted. Yes, it would quite finish me. I have some friends here but they must leave, they must leave at once.... I am simply done....”

Georg turned away. Her perfume enveloped him. As she bent forward he saw with a shudder her dazzling white breasts move below her low-cut frock. He suddenly felt a strange sickening shame that she should be his mother, that he had sprung from her body. He jumped out of his chair:

“No, mamma, you go yourself!” he exclaimed.

But she clung to him, moaned, begged, caressed, kissed him. Yes, in her miserable panic she seemed to have forgotten that he was her son and she was prepared to employ all the artifices that a frightened woman can employ in order to move a man.

Georg jumped up and pushed her away from him:

“Leave me alone!” he said, “I don’t want you to touch me!”

Merely from anxiety and in order to get away from her he at last rushed out for the second time to the sick man.

Laura stood at the table with a rigid smile on her lips. The danger she had escaped seemed to have numbed every limb in her body. She pulled her shawl over her bare shoulders. Her son’s contempt passed like a chill shiver over her skin. Your own flesh and blood! Bah! The boy was like wax in her hands.

She went into the sitting room. She walked slowly and carefully. It seemed as if there were something cold, frail and motionless within her, something that could not bear a shock.

Laura excused herself to her guests:

“My husband is worse and I must go to him,” she said, quietly and solemnly.

Appearances must, of course, be saved.

They said good-bye with many regrets and expressions of sympathy. The young Russian musician had a refined and a very sensitive face. He meant to kiss his hostess’s hand but stopped half way and turned a little pale. As he bent over this beautiful and robust woman’s body it seemed as if he had suddenly been startled as before something dead, before the stench of a dead soul.

Laura hurried to bed, took a sleeping draught and pulled the bed cover over her head.

* * * * *

Early the next morning she was awakened by the message of the death of her husband. She first felt a strange creepy sensation of relief. Now he would never call for her again. Now she no longer need go and see him. Now she could escape the nursing home....

But then she was seized by a bitter ague. Her nerves at least had not forgotten him. A cold breath chilled certain of her more intimate memories and the cold bony fingers of death groped too close to her own spine. It was like a poisoning of the senses.

Laura felt so out of sorts and so sick that she quite believed she was mourning her dead husband and felt keenly sorry for herself. She dressed in her plainest black frock and sank down into an easy chair.

Then a tall thin man in a black frock coat, carefully buttoned, and dismal folds on his forehead appeared ghostlike on the scene. He was the undertaker. Laura told him with a tired, an infinitely tired gesture, and in a few monosyllables to address himself to her brothers at Selambshof and Trefvinge. After which the gloomy looking figure withdrew bowing solemnly.

Laura sank together. “I am an old woman,” she thought. “Everything inside me feels so frozen and dead. I am an old, broken, lonely woman. My life is finished.”

Then she suddenly thought of Georg. Good God, Georg! She had forgotten Georg. Of course, she had Georg. She was not alone. Her life was not finished. She had her son, a big, handsome, clever, brave boy.

A glow of warmth surged once more through Laura’s veins. A certain remorse for her previous indifference and neglect stirred inside her. For once she really suspected something of a mother’s feelings.

She flew into Georg’s room.

It was empty.

She sat down to wait. She sat on the edge of his bed, fingering his pillow and his night shirt and got out her watch every second minute. Never before in her life had she really waited for any human being.

She called the chambermaid. She inquired of the waiter and the hall porter. No, nobody had seen the young gentleman. And still he had been sleeping in his bed, you could see that.

Laura worked herself up into a state of nervous, shivering, whining anxiety. Towards dinner time the hall porter sent up a letter that had been left by a messenger boy. It was from Georg and read as follows:—

To my mother,

I am writing to say good-bye. We shall not see each other again. I had not meant to leave like this, but what happened yesterday was too cowardly. I can’t stay any longer. I am going to sign on as soon as I get a chance and sail to America to find father. It is no good trying to find me because I am sixteen years of age and I am not coming back to you. I know all about how you and Uncle Peter behaved to father. I know it through old Lundbom and Sara, who was a maid at Ekbacken. She is married to a workman in the yard now. Old Lundbom believed in you at first but he was sorry when he understood how everything had happened. Two years ago he received a letter from father that was to be given to me when I was sixteen. In it is his address and everything. He is in a big office and has a rather good job, though it was not so easy at first. He is a noble man, I know that. It is for his sake I have been working so hard at school because you have never cared for me before. So now I am going. All the money I have got from you is in the right hand drawer of the table, because I don’t want to use it to run away with. Good-bye now. And you must forgive me, for I cannot do anything else.

Good-bye!

Georg Hermansson.

_P. S._

If anybody does any harm to old Lundbom because of this, they will hear from me when I come back!

Laura did not faint after reading this letter. She had no attack of nerves, made no scene, did not stir up heaven and earth to get her son back. She only suddenly felt empty, quite empty. She no longer felt anxious for Georg. She could not as a matter of fact understand her former anxiety and eagerness for him.

She washed her face in cold water, powdered it, and drove out to order mourning clothes.

VII

+SHADOW PLAY+

The spring was early that year. Through the windows of the renaissance hall of the Hill villa the May sunshine flowed calm and warm as in June. But Hedvig, who was walking to and fro, had still retained her winter complexion. Yes, the tragic beauty of her face was deathly pale as she took a few steps to and fro like a prisoner measuring his cell. She seemed slimmer than ever and was still dressed in black. Like a dark shadow she glided to and fro, to and fro, across the wine-red sun-bespattered carpet.

Each time Hedvig came opposite to the little cupboard on the wall where the telephone was concealed, she stopped a moment with helplessly hanging hands and a restless, anxious expression. By and by she approached the spot more and more frequently and it seemed as if an irresistible force drew her to the telephone. Then she stretched out her hand to lift the receiver. But then a door banged in the region of the kitchen and at once she withdrew her hand as if it had been burnt, and she resumed her restless pacing. Then everything was quiet again and Hedvig was again at the telephone. In a low unsteady voice she asked for a number. After which her voice with a tremendous effort rose and became tense, haughty, commanding:

“May I speak to Mr. Levy?”

But the tension died away in a disappointed, dissatisfied tone,

“I see, not in yet....”

Hedvig resumed her cell-walking. She mumbled to herself and looked if possible even paler than before. Incessantly she looked at the clock in despair that the minutes passed so slowly through the silent and sunny room.

For the second time Hedvig was drawn to the telephone. Now at last he had come to the office. The cool relief suddenly made her voice indifferent, hard, businesslike:

“Good-morning! It is Mrs. Hill speaking. I only wanted to remind you of those mortgages that were to be attended to ... those in....”

Levy’s voice answered over the ’phone, stern and assured, with an imperceptible note of satisfaction:

“Yes, of course, the mortgages.... Yes, that will be all right.... I will come out to dinner, _if I may_, then we can talk it over....”

It was not the first time Levy had invited himself to dinner at Hill villa. Probably in the correct surmise that his client would never be able to make up her mind to do it.

Hedvig put the receiver down with a shrug of the shoulders, a wretched false little shrug. She resumed her walking. You could see how she tried to convince herself that she was quite cool and indifferent now that her anxiety lest he should forget the mortgages was over.

Her steps halted suddenly in front of one of the patches of sunlight on the carpet. It looked as if she dared not venture out on that red sea of light. It looked as if the spring sun, which flooded the large silent room in ever greater volume, had dazzled and paralysed her.

Good God! What was she to do before dinner? How was she to occupy herself the whole of this long pitiless radiant spring day!

She found no way out but the usual one—to fly to the shadows. She rang the bell and ordered her car.

“Shan’t we begin with the open car soon, Madam?” said Ohlesson, the chauffeur.

“No!”

So the big black covered car ran out to the cemetery. And then Hedvig sat there on the seat by Percy’s grave, from which she had not allowed the dry withered funeral wreaths to be removed. Erect, motionless she sat under her black sunshade, whilst all around the light May green sparkled and swayed in the broad stream of sunlight. The sun appropriated even Hedvig’s black silk cloak and made it live and shimmer with a thousand colours. But her face was only lit up by a faint reflection from below, from the marble of the tomb.

It was more than a year and a half since Percy had died, but lately Hedvig had begun to take refuge here again. Here she fought her way back to the life of shadows, a thin life, a continuation of their life in the sanatorium. Not that she was able to forget even here on the seat in the cemetery all that consumed her:—money, business and everything connected with it. No, but she thought of it with less anxiety. Rather with a solemn and pious feeling that it was her duty to watch over what her dear Percy had left behind....

There was something strange about Percy Hill. He had been a poor invalid, and yet his character had been so free from any mean fears that even long after his death his memory acted as a sedative. As Hedvig sat there her heart filled with quiet gratitude that she had been given the joy of sacrificing some years of her life to him. She no longer suffered for having lied to him and cheated him in his last wish. She had only been the nurse who prevented her poor patient from injuring himself. Her conscience closed its eyes to the circumstances attending her patient’s death.

No, there was no danger in sitting there whispering to her memory, that sentimental liar. Her egoism was not frightened of the past, but of the future.

What a challenge to all the powers of the spirit, this feeble, mute, half-concealing lie in the midst of the clear sunshine! It seemed as if the light in sudden anger had surged around her with increased intensity; had sent a fresh wave of burning restlessness through her body. She rose and seemed to grope after the receding shadows. Then with dazzled, burning eyes she staggered along the cemetery path. Outside the gate her motor hummed, impatient to rush her back to all that waited for her ... business ... Levy ... the future...!

“I won’t change,” Hedvig thought in the car. She found there was something safe, reassuring, in the fact that she did not intend to put on different clothes. But when she came home she did so all the same. And she sat long before the mirror. And then she stood in the window looking down the road.

At last there came a car and Levy got out.

“Taxi,” thought Hedvig, as if she could blunt the point of a threat with that prosaic reflection. Levy ran quickly up the stairs. “Jew,” she thought, as if by doing so she had kept something at bay. But all the same she had to force herself to walk slowly, really slowly, out into the hall to receive her guest.

Levy had brought some yellow roses.

“If there were black roses, I should give you them instead,” he said.

Hedvig forgot the roses on a table in the hall on purpose. She had a sensation that he flushed up for a moment beneath his even pallor.

There were primroses and lilac on the dining-table.

“Those flowers don’t suit you,” he said with a quick bitter smile. Then he turned to the maid who was serving: “Take away those flowers and fetch my roses out of the hall!”

He seemed quite at home.

Then Levy threw himself into business and made good progress from the start.

Levy had made money live for Hedvig, too much so! At first she had regarded her large fortune as a safe protection against all the demands and dangers of life. She sat huddled up in the middle of her gold heap where nothing could reach her. But Levy had thrown out his hands:

“Good God, what money! What a heavy shapeless mass! What an old, moss-grown stump of a fortune! For twenty years it has had to take care of itself. For twenty years not a single experienced hand has touched it. It looks like a fund for widows and orphans.”

“You mean that the investments are safe as a rock,” mumbled Hedvig. “But surely that is a good thing!”

“Yes, but the interest, Mrs. Hill, the interest! You don’t get much more than three and a half per cent. and you could get six. You allow a hundred thousand a year to run through your fingers. That is to make yourself a laughing stock to God and man. As an expert I can’t bear to see such an absurdity. Allow me to make some dispositions for you. You can submit them for the approval of your brothers.”

Hedvig worried and pondered long before she said yes. But the hundred thousand were stronger than her fears. And thus Levy had lured her into his world, the money-world. She began by questioning him on all occasions in a woman’s way, ignorantly, persistently, suspiciously. And he would reply. He answered not only patiently but willingly, quickly, ardently, enthusiastically. He explained the whole economic mechanism of credits, bills, mortgages, debentures, shares. The whole of this finely balanced system of suspicion and confidence made a deep impression on Hedvig. To her over-cautious spirit it seemed like balancing on the edge of the abyss. His quick purposeful assurance seemed to her something supernatural, almost creepy. But she had to hear more and more. Oh, it was deliciously exciting to hear Levy talk of money. It was only now she began to grasp what money was. And she felt as if she were in a swing, feeling giddy at the fact of owning so much.

Yes, Levy’s interest became more and more eager. Hedvig had already been lured from her gold-heap where she had enjoyed the twilight. Her money was no longer like a wall protecting her against the world. No, it was instead a medium in which she moved about. It formed the thousand connections, the tentacles and nerves thanks to which she at once felt what was happening in the town, in the country, in Europe, in the whole world.

Levy tore Hedvig with him half way into life, at least into that kind of life which consists of movement and business. He showed to her confined and numbed egoism another kind of egoism that was world-embracing, intensely awake and technically brilliant. He was the personification of that egoism. It was something different from Percy’s laissez-aller and cool, submissive irony. It was wheels that rolled. It was diamond cut diamond. It was power, destiny. Hedvig sometimes became quite frightened at his passionate discourse, frightened as if she had come out into the strong daylight without a dark corner to which to retreat. And she no longer had her money to protect her. It had become his confederate, it betrayed her to him, it was in love with him. Hedvig had no way out but to assume a forced reserve, a sudden cold, and sheer rudeness. But that had no effect on him at all. He was insensitive to everything which was not logic. Then in her anxiety she crept behind her dead husband, draped herself in crêpe, fled to the shadows and became just piety and memory. That was the only thing that hitherto could damp Levy’s eagerness. The world-embracing, hot and cold romance of money shrank up violently and he became gradually colder and colder, more formal and more ironical, till at last he said good-bye with a bow that was really a shrug of the shoulders.

So today Mrs. Hedvig had to assume her crêpe.

During the soup Levy raised the question of the mortgage. That was a mere nothing, a bagatelle. They would buy the house by auction, no doubt about that. It would certainly be good business, because the house was, as it happened, valued much too high. Other people are frightened of houses that are assessed too high. But we are not, Mrs. Hill. For we know of a certain little insurance company that will take the house with open arms. They need it on their books. A house that is bought for 200,000 but can be taken up at 300,000 improves the position at once by 100,000—not for the shareholders but for the Board of Directors.

Levy’s face suddenly became contemptuous and almost offended. This topic seemed to upset him. It was not worthy of the occasion or of his feelings:

“Well, that’s that,” he exclaimed. “I am tired of the house property swindle. That’s for inferior people, philistines and small fry. I really can’t understand your brother Peter’s taste. I admit that he has a brutal sort of natural business shrewdness, but he lives like an old-fashioned craftsman amidst modern improvements. Before 1905 we believed that business consisted in cheating each other and the State. Yes, I believed it too. But that is now old-fashioned, hopelessly old-fashioned. Nowadays we have at last grasped the fact that the really lucrative business is the positive one in which money really makes a contribution.... That is to say shares, industrial shares! We live in the age of a most tremendous industrial boom. The whole world is becoming industrialised. You must be blind not to see in which direction the royal road of capital leads. Money and wheels are related. Shares, industrial shares! Invest your money in forests, waterfalls and iron mines! Send it to the saw mills, the harbours and the ammunition works!”

Here Levy swallowed the third glass of mineral water and broke out into a vehement flood of share quotations and statistics of exports. And all the time he stared at Hedvig with an expression that was at once appealing, passionate, embittered and sceptical. He wanted to dazzle her, make her enthusiastic, but there was something spasmodic and almost despairing in his efforts. There was not a spark of real and innocent joy in the present moment.

Did he see through her, this woman before him, or did he suffer from the fact that the passionate pulses of his heart were only capable of stirring the ashes of some dry calculations?

Hedvig stared at the table-cloth. She felt his glance on every point of her face and neck. His harsh, quick voice at the same time opened up the whole world for her and spun her into a net of supple meshes. It was already as if she could not move hands or feet. He seemed to her to come closer, closer. She intermittently felt hot and cold in this strange heat with cold currents that streamed out from his being. Quickly, relentlessly the terror rose in her, the irresistible terror of seeing herself cut off from any possibility of escape, overpowered.

She suddenly got up from coffee:

“Shall we not do the round of the pictures today?” she said. “It is the first time it has been light enough after dinner.”

The round of the pictures was an invention of Hedvig’s fear. She felt safer amongst Percy’s pictures.

Levy rose slowly and offered Hedvig his arm. The tension in his face broke down. He was evidently not pleased to have to leave his own special field of attack and to have to resort to a slow roundabout strategy in order to fight with a dead man.

And yet Levy could certainly talk of art, in case of need. He was a connoisseur in his own way and had a great deal to say not only of market values but also of theories and technique. There were various things here that he could tell some malicious stories about, various things he was prepared at once to slaughter with his criticism, but also some things he had to admire. But it was a jealous, inarticulate admiration. Levy bit his lip and kept silent. To come up against the dead husband all the time made him, Jacob Levy, barrister, embarrassed and uncertain of himself. He knew much, but not how to battle with a shadow.

Hedvig found time to breathe. And she at once started the game of “Chinese shades.” It was really a game in her own style, silent, stealthy, and unconsciously false. She had had many and long rehearsals of it out there by the grave. Every accent of her voice was reminiscent of crêpe. Solemnly she advanced through the rooms which the evening light was filling with its first pure tones of gold. She stopped with head inclined before one picture after the other. In every gesture, in every word, she simulated admiration for her dead husband’s fine understanding of art and for the modest, unselfish enthusiasm that never failed in spite of exhaustion and suffering.

A good dose of almost religious piety was administered to Levy. But he evidently did not like the medicine. His pallor was tinged with green. His lips curved into an imperceptible, nervous grimace. But he had to swallow it all the same. It was only when they had come out into the hall among the modern things that he suddenly plucked up his courage again amidst these new, more reckless and more highly coloured surroundings. With a solemnity that was more austere than ever—perhaps because it required more effort—Hedvig halted before an animal painting, signed by a not unknown French artist. The picture represented two tigers, as innocently striped as if they had been painted by a child of five. They were playing in a jungle which seemed to consist of a ragged bouquet of dried grass.

Then Levy could keep silent no longer: “I know a little story about that master,” he exclaimed eagerly. “Two Parisian Jewish dealers had a good lunch together and then went down to the _Salon des Indépendants_. And there one of the Jews made a bet with the other that inside a year he would take up and make famous any one of the exhibitors. And the other Jew walked about a long time searching till he found the most hopeless and impossible painter in the whole gigantic exhibition. He chose this painter. But the other was not frightened. He quickly created for the tiger painter a new school of art, which was dubbed ‘naïvism’ and in one year he became, as a matter of fact, world-famous. There you see the power of advertisement and of the Jewish genius.”

Of course Hedvig in her inmost heart understood Levy much better than the picture. But we are all most sensitive about our lies. And she also grew angry because she felt again that she was losing her supremacy and began to feel unsafe. That’s why she regarded his blasphemous story as an insult to Percy’s memory.

“An artist may be great even though he has been run by an unscrupulous Jew,” she mumbled. “This picture was, as a matter of fact, bought before the Jews made it expensive. And it was the general opinion amongst my husband’s friends that it was a real find.”

Hedvig began an eager defence of the striped tigers and the ragged dried grass. She used expressions that she had heard on Percy’s lips during the art discussions down in Montparnasse and from the time when he tried in vain to convince her of the new ideals. She stole his phrases, his catchwords, his characteristic abbreviations, his little jokes and even his trick of bending his head on one side and looking through half-closed eyes.

So the game of “Chinese shades” was followed by a plundering of the dead. All that she could lay hands on was now used as a weapon against the insistent Levy. Truly, human beings play strange games with each other.

Levy suddenly looked very tired. There was something pathetic about his raised shoulders. He had one of his fits of inevitable truth-telling. But his quick, harsh voice was unsteady:

“Why do you lie to me, Hedvig?” he mumbled. “You were an enemy to all art whilst your husband was alive. Yes, I know it. And you are still to this day indifferent to all this. And all the same you let loose these striped tigers on me. Why can you never be sincere, Hedvig? Why are you so afraid that you must always lie?”

Hedvig froze up and was silent. Every nerve in her was chilled. Never had anyone dared to come so near to her. It seemed as if this man had dared to see more of her than she herself had seen. She kept absolutely motionless like an animal shamming death to escape a danger. And still,—did she not feel far, far within a sort of wild relief, something of the same kind as she had felt once when hearing Peter’s cynicisms, though deeper, finer....

Levy stretched out his hand:

“Good-night! I am a little tired. I must go now. I will look after your mortgage. Good-bye—till next time!”

And then he was gone.

Hedvig went to bed, though it was still daylight. She was accustomed to go to bed immediately after his visits. She longed to lie motionless on her back and think.

Hedvig undressed slowly and carefully. She still felt her nerves trembling. For a moment she stood naked before the big mirror built into the wall. Her body was wonderfully well preserved. In its pale, even whiteness, its slim roundness, it seemed to her wonderfully young, immensely younger than she herself. And still it made her shudder. It might betray her to love, at any moment it might betray her to love.... And some day it would relentlessly deliver her to death. Yes, Hedvig belonged to those in whom nakedness always awakens thoughts of death. If she had lived some hundred years earlier her fear would have driven her to self-torture. Then she would have scourged and martyred her body in order to blunt the point of death.

She quickly drew the blinds and crept beneath the bedcover. She slept in Percy’s old bedroom, that solemn debauch in the architecture of the ’nineties which had once aroused her frightened amusement when she came there as a nurse. The bed still resembled a gigantic catafalque, in the vault of the alcove, the zodiacal signs gleamed and in the twilight on the opposite wall the blood dripped from Saint Sebastian’s naked sides....

Hedvig knew that she had a long sleepless night in front of her. With her eyes half-closed and her hands stretched by her sides, she went slowly and carefully through all that had passed between her and Levy. In the silence she weighed his gestures, his looks, his tones and his actions. There was something in them that she revelled in, slowly sipping, drop by drop, like a frightened drinker. It was a lonely, selfish joy, separated from the world by walls of darkness and silence.

But by and by she grew more restless, sighed, and turned over beneath the bedclothes. She felt that she was approaching a thought that always recurred with terrible regularity during her nightly meditations. Levy was her lawyer? Why did he not charge her anything? She had asked once long ago what she owed for the winding-up, but she had received an evasive answer. Since then they had not discussed that point. Did he not want to accept anything? He might have asked for a very large sum. She could not help enjoying the thought of having perhaps escaped it. But then came the frightened after-thought: Why does he not want anything? Of course because it imposes an obligation, because he wants you to become his. He may ask you to be his wife any day.

Levy was no longer a harmless, gently stimulating, caressing shadow. He stood there by the side of her bed terribly alive and with pale face and harsh, passionate voice, hotly demanding his rights. And behind him roared the whole traffic of the vast opening world. She had to answer yes or no. She knew she could not escape that moment. Yes or no. Torn between jubilation and agony she writhed in the darkness. She could not quite set aside her passion. Her egoism trembled to the very roots. She dreamt frightened dreams of being permitted at last to bare herself, give herself up, be freed from herself, to fling all her misery into the flames of love.

But in the midst of her excitement she suddenly became cold as ice. Horribly clear a voice sounded inside her: “Supposing he only wants your money!”

Then suspicion, and anxious greed rushed over her with a thousand reasons. She tormented herself systematically with her sister’s and brothers’ shrugs of shoulders, sarcasms and covert warnings. Levy’s sharpness, his genius for business, his legal acumen, all that she had profited by in him seemed now to bear witness against him. “Yes, it is my money he wants,” she mumbled, “of course it is my money.” And now she forgot his looks, his accents and the unsteadiness of his voice. And the memory of her own white body in the mirror could no longer warm her with a single spark of self-confidence. No, it is my money he wants. And perhaps he does not even mean to marry me to get it. Perhaps he will simply use his position to cheat me, trick me, and rob me. He must have seen that I don’t understand business. Perhaps he is just now planning how he can take all I have from me, and ruin me.

So Hedvig passed hours of grinding agony, till, calmed by the morning light, she fell into a short sleep.

* * * * *

A few days later she stood again at the telephone, ringing up Levy. Now it was a question of some timber shares that she had bought on his advice and that had gone down a few crowns.

On the fifteenth of June Selambs Ltd. had its annual meeting. That was the last permitted day according to the articles of association. Peter could never make himself pay any dividend a single day before he must.

The meeting was, as usual, held in the office at Selambshof. Hedvig came early so that the others should not be able to meet and talk about her. For weeks she had worried over this meeting, at which Levy would again meet her sister and brothers. A few years ago—on Laura’s and Stellan’s recommendation—he had been allowed to buy a few shares, and had been elected to the board, chiefly in order to keep an eye on the managing director.

Peter was extremely obliging. He stalked about arranging shares and distributing writing blocks and pencils. He always looked frightened nowadays at these meetings, and today more so than usual.

Levy came late, in a hurry, with his coat buttoned, as impersonal as a chapter of a law book. He bowed stiffly and sat down at once in his usual place; the chairman’s place at the writing desk.

“Well,” said Peter, “shall we elect a chairman for the annual meeting. Is anybody proposed?”

Laura played with the chain of her little gilt handbag. She was dressed in black and white stripes and had a very tight skirt. It was in that year that skirts began to be worn tight. She still had her golden hair and her smooth skin. And all the same you could clearly see that she had aged. Her voice sounded cold, the playful purring had gone.

“I beg to propose Stellan,” she said.

Hedvig was huddled up in her corner, staring at Levy. “Now he will look at me, now he thinks I shall say something,” she thought and grew cold all over her body. But Levy did not. Perhaps he grew a shade paler, but he looked at Laura with an amused little smile. Then he calmly put away his papers.

“I beg to second the last honourable speaker,” he said. “The more so as I have things to say which do not come well from the Chair.”

Peter’s voice sounded like that of a ventriloquist:

“Is the meeting agreed on this?”

“Yes,” said Levy in a loud voice. Then he left his place and demonstratively went and sat down beside Laura on the sofa, where he took up a foreign newspaper and began to study the quotations.

So Stellan was chairman. He seemed to take up the hammer without any enthusiasm and now and then cast embarrassed side-glances at his predecessor. They then proceeded to the adjustment of votes. When they came to Tord Selamb, one hundred shares, absent, Levy pricked up his ears:

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, in an indifferent tone, “this is now the third year that Mr. Tord Selamb neither appears in person nor sends a proxy. Is that not strange?”

Stellan looked inquiringly at Peter:

“I suppose the meeting has been properly convened? He has been called?”

Peter searched his papers:

“Tord does not care a damn for old Selambshof,” he muttered in a reproachful tone. “He does not care a damn for anything....”

“Supposing the reason is that he has sold his shares,” said Levy without looking up from his paper.

Now it was Stellan’s and Laura’s turn to prick up their ears:

“Sold? To whom should he have sold them?”

Both looked threateningly at Peter.

Levy continued:

“We can safely strike Mr. Tord Selamb off the list of voters. Because I happen to _know_ that for three years he has not possessed a single share.”

“How do you know that?”

“That’s very simple. I wrote and asked him.”

“But Tord does not answer letters.”

“No, not the first. But perhaps the third if it makes him really furious. In the end I got the answer wrapped up in a parcel of abuse. He has sold his shares.”

Stellan rose and stared at the managing director of the company:

“Peter, have you cheated him out of his shares?”

Peter resembled a bear which has been smoked out of his den. He growled nervously and beat about him with half paralysed paws.

“Hm, well, damn it all, what was I to do.... He begged me to help him....”

Laura rose purple with anger:

“You are a wretched scoundrel,” she cried, “a wretched scoundrel! For three years you have cheated us!”

Stellan fidgeted at his sister’s vulgar expression:

“Please tell us immediately what you paid Tord,” he said stiffly. “Otherwise I will adjourn the meeting and go out myself to Järnö to find out.”

Peter stood there rocking and shuffling his feet. His eyes grew smaller and smaller in his head:

“Well, seventy-five thousand,” he mumbled with a grin that was now rather pleased than embarrassed.

Laura seemed on the point of flying at him:

“Seventy-five thousand! What a pretty business. We can understand you wanted to keep it to yourself!”

Stellan looked as if he had bitten into a very sour apple. He was apparently exercising his art of formulating things:

“It will be our common duty to take care of Tord when he has finally ruined himself,” he said. “Thus it is only reasonable that his shares should be distributed equally among us.”

“Never!” said Peter, “never! never!!”

But Stellan was cold as the grave:

“In that case you cannot count on being re-elected. There is only one way in which to regain our confidence.”

“Yes, you will be instantly kicked out if you don’t share alike,” assured Laura. “We will make Stellan director instead.”

Peter growled, beat about, threatened, whined, but in the end he had to say good-bye to his fine little stroke of family business:

“But it went off all right for three years,” he mumbled with a melancholy grin. “Twenty-five shares per head at seven hundred and fifty each. It is little short of a godsend.”

After this quarrel in the orthodox Selambian fashion they resumed their seats and proceeded with smoothed foreheads and clear eyes with the agenda.

Hedvig had been sitting silent the whole time staring at Levy. She thought of the strong family feeling of the Jews, and their racial _esprit de corps_. She searched nervously for a look of disgust and contempt in his face. The whole meeting occasioned her a new and mysterious torment. The harshness of their cold voices jarred on her. She felt strangely weak and moved. She had suffered and struggled during those last weeks and now she was tired, tired. She wanted to stand up and propose that they should give poor Tord what the shares were worth. The words burnt her tongue. Never before had Hedvig been so near the mellow and fragrant shores of life. If only Levy had reacted, if only she could have seen the proper pained expression on his face. But she could only discover a half-amused and half-contemptuous curiosity behind his oriental mask. And so she never rose up from her chair. And so the words remained unsaid. And so she believed that he was cold and hard like the others....

And yet Levy had fought like a lion just for her sake. He had disclosed what he knew only in order to disarm Stellan and Laura, whose opposition and ill-will he had foreseen. There is no time to sit and turn up your nose when you are fighting for the object of your passion. And must he not be pleased when he saw the magnificent effect of his information? I have made myself indispensable, he thought. Now they can’t have the impudence to turn me out....

But Levy had reckoned without his host.

Without any further quarrels they had gone through the annual report and accounts, agreed the balance sheet, approved the action of the directors, settled the dividend and had now come to the election of the new board. Stellan’s fingers travelled thoughtfully along the edge of an inky paperknife. He seemed to want to sit on only half of the old, worn, dirty office chair:

“May I ask the meeting to propose new members of the Board?”

There was another silence. The room smelt of dust, pipe-smoke, dry paper and old sun-dried leather. The shadows of the elm branches in the garden moved sleepily across the knots in the worn floor-boards. Then Laura’s voice sounded again, clear, dry and cold:

“I beg to propose Peter and Stellan and then—Mr. Sundelius.”

Sundelius was the Manager of a rival firm of Levy’s, with whom he was moreover engaged in a lawsuit. Nothing could be more outspoken. Levy took a long puff at his cigarette:

“Excuse me, but has Sundelius any shares in the company?” he mumbled.

Laura smiled an exquisite little smile and played with her suede shoe beneath her striped silk skirt:

“Yes, I have sold a couple to him.”

Then Stellan’s voice sounded, far away and impersonal:

“Has anyone anybody else to propose?”

Levy suddenly looked at Hedvig. Yes, now he looked at her inquiringly, exactingly, severely. It seemed as if his black pupils would draw her out of her silent corner. He made a gesture. It was something indescribable, something between a shrug of the shoulders and a passionate, supplicating seizing of a receding cloak, the gesture with which one appeals to a hardened miser in a bazaar in the East. Did she not see how they were playing with him, sneering at him, wanting to kick him out? Had he helped her or had he not? Were they friends or not? Did he love her or not? Were they to marry or not?

Hedvig sat there fingering her pencil. Her face was white. She shivered for cold. What was it Levy asked of her? Yes, only that she should propose the re-election of the present board. She must do it at once or it would be too late. But why did she not say what she had to say? Why could she not move her tongue? Why was she so afraid of her own voice?

Hedvig’s glance left Levy and roamed about the room. Ugh! how many eyes about her—how horribly many! There sat Stellan pretending to look at his nails, there Peter sat staring and sulking, there Laura eyed her with cold scorn. And they all waited for her confession. Go on, admit now that you are in love with Levy! Call out to anybody who cares to listen that you are in love with Levy.

Hedvig sat there as if paralysed, incapable of moving either hand or tongue.

She was silent—and condemned herself to silence for all her life.

Then Stellan’s voice sounded with cruel, calculated hardness:

“May we consider the nominations closed?”

“Yes,” said Laura.

“Does the Meeting elect the candidates proposed, Peter Selamb, Stellan Selamb and Mr. P. Sundelius?”

“Yes,” said Laura in a loud voice.

The hammer fell.

Levy rose. He was perhaps paler than before. Nobody could see whether his hands trembled, for he had put them in his trouser pockets. His voice sounded steady:

“Well, then I have nothing more to do here. The fee due to me as a member of the board you will perhaps allow me to forego for the benefit of your brother, Mr. Tord Selamb, whose circumstances I consider deserving compassion.”

And with that Levy left the annual meeting of shareholders in Selambs Ltd.

All eyes turned maliciously towards Hedvig’s corner. They forgot Levy’s sarcasm to enjoy their triumph.

“Ugh! how nice to be rid of the Jew,” laughed Laura. “It was really wise of you Hedvig not to persist in clinging to that knave of spades.”

“He is really an impossible person,” said Stellan. “His father came to Sweden on foot with a bundle on his back.”

Peter wanted to add his straw to the heap too, though he did it in a somewhat strange way:

“If I had followed that scoundrel’s advice I should still have had Tord’s shares,” he muttered. “He advised me to transfer the shares in his name, then we two and Hedvig would have been able to outvote you. But I thought it was too devilish.”

This was a lie, a clumsy lie. Hedvig knew it and still she remained silent and allowed her mind to be poisoned. Yes, she sat there with a face that shrank in pale, shivering misery and allowed them to thrust the sting into her love. Their cold malicious joy even gave her a sort of miserable relief. It soothed her wound. At last she managed to rise and go out. At the door she suddenly turned round:

“I don’t know why you make such a fuss about Levy,” she mumbled. “I think he is useful to run errands.”

In the car Hedvig sat and repeated these words to herself as if she had been afraid of losing them. She got out in town and walked about for hours in the streets. She would have turned to a statue of ice if anyone had whispered to her that she did so in the secret hope of meeting Levy. But when she came home she kept near the telephone the whole evening. “If he rings up now and reproaches me,” she thought, “how shall I make him understand that it is quite hopeless to expect anything of me.” It was late when, with a sigh Hedvig tore herself away from the telephone. Then she lay on her bed in the cool green half light of the summer night. “Tomorrow he will come of course,” she thought. “He will be pale, bitter, sarcastic. He stops in front of me without stretching out his hand. ‘What do you mean? Have I deserved this treatment? Are you so ungrateful and hard? Or do you mistrust me? Have they told you I want your money? But that is a lie, you know it is! I love you Hedvig! I can’t live without you! You must be my wife.’”

Hedvig lay quite still and felt the blood burning in her veins as in a fever after an ague. “Yes, then I must tell him—that I can _never_ be his wife,” she thought. But it was a strange trembling “_never_.” She longed with every fibre of her being to hear those reproaches, that prayer which she thought to refuse.

It was not Levy who came the following day but a letter from the firm of solicitors Levy & Östring, containing a bill for thirty-five thousand crowns for winding-up costs and various other commissions.

Poor Levy. There was a sort of helplessness in this revenge. His thoughts were cast almost exclusively in terms of money. He could not grow furious without figures buzzing in his ears. That’s why his wounded pride and aching love found expression in a heavy bill of costs. Yes, for he had really loved Hedvig with a passion that was not less because it was embittered and clear-sighted.

Levy’s revenge had much more effect than he had suspected. He had as a matter of fact sent Hedvig a bull of excommunication that was to part her completely from life and mankind.

“There!” was her first thought, “he did want to plunder me. He wanted my money and nothing else.” And she felt confirmed in all her old morbid suspicions. There were only cheats and crooks in the whole world and Levy was one of the worst of them.

But at the same time the last shreds of the veil of charity were torn from her feelings. She knew now that she had loved him; that she still loved him in spite of all; that she would never be rid of an aching pain in her heart.

That was the climax of a mute and humiliating drama in which love fought a hopeless fight against mean fear. Hedvig remained with her poor gold.

Yes, she clung convulsively to the money for which she had sacrificed all. She could not transact any new business herself but, strange to say, and in spite of her distrust, she allowed all Levy’s investments stand. But she collected her papers, pondered and calculated. Down in the vaults of the bank and at home in her villa she sat and counted and counted. Like the hermit with his rosary she sat mumbling, letting one figure after the other slip between her fingers.

Levy’s letter accompanying the bill she did not answer. Perhaps it was her timid unwillingness to reveal anything. Perhaps it was a secret hope that he would call himself.

In the end Mr. Levy had to take proceedings to get his money.

Hedvig no longer drove out to Percy’s grave. The shadow game was over. She no longer needed the dead to protect her against the living. And though she now more and more rarely went outside the house she no longer glanced at Percy’s collections. It was really a strange whim of fate that just such a being as she should steal about in that big house, built as a home of Art.

* * * * *

On a sultry and still summer evening Hedvig rose with smarting eyes and throbbing temples from her papers in the bedroom. She had an idea that people stared at her down at the bank and she had therefore brought everything home: shares, mortgages, title deeds, deposit receipts, bank-books and bundles of notes. And now it was difficult in the evenings because she did not dare to light the light from fear of being seen from the outside through the chinks in the blinds. She sat over her papers till the figures swam together in a grey mist and there was a pricking sensation in her eyes. Then she crept to the door to see that the towel was hanging over the keyhole, so that none of the servants should peep in. Then she stole slowly, stopping all the time to listen, towards the big built-in wardrobe where she had found a good hiding place behind an old carved chest. When her treasure was hidden, she noiselessly opened a window and looked out to see if anybody moved.

Hedvig stood long in the window. The evening was sultry and heavy. Far below the firs lay a woolly darkness. Above, a few faint scattered stars hung in a sky to which the reflections of the neighbouring town imparted a reddish, ominous hue. Against this background she presently distinguished the quick shadowy flight of the bats round the eaves, the soft flutter of the moths, the flight of the spiders with their long helplessly suspended legs, all the mysterious fluttering and hovering things out in the big witches’-kitchen of the damp, warm summer night.

Hedvig felt a fever round her temples, a dull anxiety. All her silent, secret, suppressed feelings revived for the last time and moved about in the darkness. It was the restlessness of the body in the presence of the relentless oncoming autumn that melted together with her dim light-shy anxiety for her treasure.

Hedvig closed the window, pulled down the blind, turned on the light, and began to undress. She moved slowly, hesitatingly, sighing. At first she turned her back to the mirror, but by and by she stole one glance after the other into it. She was irresistibly drawn to the corner where the mirror stood. It seemed that the air there was not so still and burdened with loneliness. Before the mirror her movements quickened. With her glance fastened intently on her own image Hedvig loosened her hair and let her last garment fall to the floor. She had aged quickly of late, had grown grey about the temples and had folds beneath her breasts. And now she suddenly screwed up her face, so that it was full of wrinkles, and emphasised the weariness of her pose. “I am old,” she mumbled, “I am old.” And it seemed as if she had huddled up under the lee of old age.

But Hedvig did not escape so easily. She did not deceive herself. With a jerk she straightened herself up again, threw back her head, lifted her arms behind her neck so that her breasts seemed more beautiful. And she felt how a smile spread and opened out on her face. She saw it in the mirror, a strange, girlish trembling smile with pouting mouth, ready to be kissed and bitten. She began to turn and sway to and fro as if she heard dance-music. Closer and closer her face approached the mirror. She felt a faint sickness as if in a swing, and the air felt hot round her temples. Beside her own nakedness she beheld in the unnatural gloom of the mirror-room the nakedness of St. Sebastian. The ropes cut into his beautiful limbs. The points of the arrows were softly embedded in the even, slightly bronzed flesh.... To Hedvig he suddenly assumed Levy’s face. Yes, it was Levy’s mouth which smiled at her. His lips had lost their scorn and smiled close to hers, ecstatically, sensually. His eyes had lost their sharp, short-sighted stare and revealed black, fathomless depths of life and passion. His scorching breath rushed over her, his arms bent her irresistibly....

Hedvig collapsed. Moaning and sobbing she rolled on the carpet whilst the last late attenuated rush of blood painfully fought its way through her bosom....

Suddenly she started as if somebody had poured cold water over her. She seemed to hear footsteps and whispers outside. She flew to the switch, turned out the light and listened again intently. Then she quickly put on some clothes and lifted the blind carefully. Trembling in her whole body she lay there crouching and watched. At first she saw only the black darkness, but by and by she distinguished two figures, one dark and one light, down by the fence. They stood in the shadow of the firs tightly clasped together.

It was the chauffeur and the parlourmaid.

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.

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.

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.

“Surely you can understand that we can find doctors and lawyers to clear up this matter,” he said.

Peter was still silent, but he began to look as he had done in days gone by when he used to do a stroke of business. He winked with his right eye at Bernhard, whose face suddenly lit up:

“No, thank you, sir—that won’t work. That was too simple.”

Peter opened both eyes.

“You ought to say ‘Uncle,’ Bernhard,” he said, “you ought to say ‘Uncle.’”

Laura could not suppress a little anxious snigger. But Stellan did not move a feature. He came close up to Bernhard:

“I advise you to be careful,” he said. “I have collected some information about you in Majängen and know exactly how you stand with the police.”

Bernhard bit his nails, frightened and furious. He looked again at Peter, who now blinked with both his eyes, and lay down comfortably as if to listen to music. And Bernhard did not disappoint his expectations, but stared Stellan boldly in the face:

“No, Uncle dear, don’t come in here with the police for here you see one of the family....”

Stellan turned grey, but still controlled himself:

“I couldn’t think of bandying words with you. But if you behave decently we might perhaps compensate you for the vain hopes my brother may have raised. What would you say to a couple of thousand-crown notes and a ticket to America?”

Peter smiled:

“You want him to go to America, do you? So that he might join Laura’s Georg, is that it? Well, Bernhard, what do you say to America and the cash? A fine offer, eh?”

“No, thanks, America does not suit me at all.”

Peter wagged his head, filled with paternal pride:

“The lad is no fool. I needn’t be ashamed of him. I am damned if I don’t envy you when I think of all the money you will get.”

Now Hedvig’s voice was suddenly heard again from the corner:

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

Stellan grew furious. His thin bony hands trembled and his voice broke. The brutality of the barrack-room broke through his outer shell. It was terrible to see the aristocratic mask fall so suddenly:

“Shut up, you old goat!” he shouted to Hedvig. Then he held his clenched fist before Bernhard’s face:

“And you, you damned young scoundrel, be off in less than no time, or the police will fetch you! Get out now!”

But Bernhard did not get out at all. With this tone he was familiar. It frightened him less than the icy authority before. He jumped closer to the bed and lowered his head between his shoulders ready for a grip at the throat or a blow at the back of the head. He was evidently prepared for war as one understood it amongst the youth of Majängen.

Peter rose. Yes, he rose up in bed. His pale puffy face was covered by a broad grin:

“Bravo,” he grunted. “This is better than I thought it would be. I am damned if I am not beginning to feel quite well again.”

He was not unlike the man from Chicago who fainted when he came into the pure air but revived again when somebody held a rotten herring under his nose.

It seemed, as a matter of fact, as if death had for a moment withdrawn from the room before this last grotesque phase of egoism. Poor overworked death in the third year of the world war! Coarsened and banalised by the crude slaughter of engines of destruction and by the horribly laconic press announcements. Talk no more of the twinkling evening star and the purifying effect of suffering or of clear vision at the moment of farewell. What an age! when men have grown so empty and hard that they even know no fear. It is as if they no longer existed themselves, but only their machines and their money. Egoism driven to extremes turns into something almost like its opposite. It dies the death of cold, around a soulless mass of cold metal. Life—spontaneous happy and suffering life—is nothing, its end cannot therefore be anything either....

Peter was lying with ruined kidneys and was on the point of collapse. But anything so fine as death, the good old death, he had never met, and was never to meet.

He just fell to pieces.

A first milder paroxysm had come already. Laura suddenly seized Stellan’s arm and pointed to the bed. Panic made her mass of flesh tremble. It was an ugly, cowardly fright:

“Come, let us go!” she panted and pulled her skirts round her as if she had seen a mouse. “I want to get away from this at once!”

Peter had sunk back on the pillow. He moaned heavily and spasms passed over his shapeless face, whilst one hand groped about on his chest and the other contracted like a claw.

But Stellan pulled himself together with a furious effort. His face grew cold and hard. This was the last chance. Now the last card was being played. He pushed Laura away and bent quickly over Peter with a low but penetrating whisper:

“You are not going to steal from us and make a scandal, Peter. The slightest effort will be the end. Let us separate as friends!”

Peter struggled with his growing weakness. He forced the words out with a tremendous effort:

“The will ... clear ... all clear....”

Stellan bent still lower. It sounded as if he had wanted to push each word like a probe into the invalid’s conscience:

“We shall oppose the will ... there will be a lawsuit ... do you hear, a lawsuit.”

“I shall ... win ... win....”

“You will be declared of unsound mind. The will will be declared null.”

“No ... I shall win ... win....”

And it sounded as if a secret malicious satisfaction irresistibly overcame his cramp and pain. Peter the Boss will bring an action, Peter the Boss will win. What the deuce does it matter then if he happens to be dead.

Laura had already fled. Stellan followed slowly, after having telephoned for the doctor. Hedvig came last. In the door she turned, stared at her dying brother and mumbled again obstinately, like a monomaniac:

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

But Bernhard had sunk down on a chair by the bed, pale, sick, red-eyed. In his bold restless eyes there appeared something like tears. Youth, even neglected and criminal youth, has always a softer fibre. The real blindness, cruelty, and sterility lies on the other side of the midday line.

A few days later Peter the Boss went to sleep, having never wakened again while he lived. His egoism survived him. Blind and unredeemed it still survived in his stupid cunning will. “My money shall rule them,” he had thought. “They shan’t pass over Peter the Boss so easily.” And neither did they.

The will showed that he had not taken any steps legally to recognise his son. He simply made him his sole heir—but with the important and particularly sound reservation that he should not dissipate the fortune but only draw the interest. To this will were attached, however, a lot of strange conditions which really seemed to have been added only to give the disappointed heirs a tempting opportunity. Thus the heir, if he wanted to retain the inheritance, must always remain clean shaven like the testator when alive; never travel in motor cars; never back any bills or go abroad. Strange also was the way he had remembered his dear sisters and brother. To Stellan was bequeathed Peter’s watch, an old silver turnip which the lord of Trefvinge would not even touch with his fingers. Hedvig got the humble stock of old clothes of the deceased, and Laura was consoled with the yacht “Laura,” laid up in the yard at Ekbacken with all its inventory, as for instance, anchor, buoy, ensign staff, and glass rack, all in memory of her beloved first husband, Herman Hermansson.

This will was the tombstone of Peter the Boss, and his relations celebrated its unveiling by a long and scandalous lawsuit in which nothing of the Selamb nature was hidden from the eyes of the world. Against Levy, whom Peter had had the good idea of appointing executor of the will and who now got a welcome opportunity for revenge both on Laura and Hedvig, a whole army of lawyers and psychologists was mobilised. The Selamb brother and sisters were now no longer afraid of scandal. These people, who were really choking with money, tore every shred of cover from the deceased and scratched the brain out of his skull, in order to fling it on the judge’s table. The whole press of the country echoed these magnificent disclosures. From the court of first instance to that of final instance this comedy of greed dragged its way along, but Peter was too cunning for his opponents and won his lawsuit in the end, as he had said. Yes, one may really say that it was Peter who won and not his son. That young rogue had, as might have been expected, not been able to support his good fortune, but by the time of the final settlement of the case, already lay in hospital, having drunk himself to death.

Already during his lifetime Peter had been moderately well known, but now under the plain stone out in the New Cemetery, he grew to a type of power. He was accepted and quoted. People told anecdotes about him, laughed at those he had tricked, and shrugged their shoulders at his enemies. The masses in the end always capitulate to a scoundrel of coarser calibre than themselves. And when nowadays a poor honest bourgeois who has been working hard the whole week, takes his Sunday walk beyond the toll bar and catches sight of Selambshof, he forgets all that was done up there in that robbers’ stronghold in order to hamper his own life and make it more difficult and expensive. And he points at the false Gothic over the edge of the forest and exclaims:

“Look! That’s where that scoundrel Peter Selamb lived! Do you know what he used to say? ‘God will surely feed the hawk,’ he used to say. And that is true enough—for he cheated the town of a good round sum. Twelve millions he left behind him, that scoundrel, Peter Selamb!”

There is secret admiration in his voice. The heart swells so strangely in the poor little bourgeois heart, just as does the heart of a soldier when you tell him about Napoleon.

Here ends this book, which has told of such as prefer to hunt alone.

Georg Hermansson is at the moment of writing already a prominent engineer in Philadelphia. As far as we can see, he will soon have to return home to take over the greater part of the spoil. Who knows? perhaps he will one day fight the battle of civilisation with the ill-gotten wealth of the Selambs against those who hunt in flocks. The best days of the Selambs’ system are now over and the egoism of the masses is perhaps now the greater danger.

THE END

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_); text that had extra inter-character spacing by “plus” signs (+The New Day+).