laura cast a glance down the esplanade before she pulled the blind. she had moved to narvav?gen now. it was the most fashionable quarter.
the september evening was clear and cool. the prosperous-looking windows in the house opposite threw back discreet golden reflections. the little church at the corner looked like a luxurious bigoted needlework box. the recently planted trees of the esplanade were as like each other as soldiers in a row marching in column order out towards the fields.
laura sighed faintly and contentedly. everybody was back in town. the season was beginning.
she switched on the light. the cream coloured blind completed the circle of coquettish intimacy. she sat down at her dressing table. in the mirror she saw a face which still retained the seaside sunburn. it suited her well, made her hair still fairer and her teeth whiter. laura was now a woman of thirty. there was something of the fair renaissance type in her plumpness, something at one and the same time crude and refined. her quick smile was full of health and light impudence.
but just now laura was not smiling. on the whole women are never so serious as when they are occupied with their personal appearance. during the siege of the legations during the boxers’ rising in china it is told that a lady stole yolks of eggs, whilst people died of starvation all round her, in order to preserve the colour of her hair. that is serious....
202laura always had a long tête-à-tête with her face before she paraded it in public.
she became very impatient as somebody hesitatingly fingered the door handle and little georg at last stepped in.
georg was very like his father. he had his long face and fair eyes. in this case the weaker had been the stronger. it looked like nature’s revenge. she had always the image of the wronged father before her.
georg smiled the hesitating smile of the neglected child. there was a certain shyness about him as he crept up to the mother.
laura’s face hardened as she turned from the mirror:
“don’t touch me! you soil my clothes.”
georg humbly drew back:
“mummie darling, may i stay up a little longer?”
“no, you must obey sofi!”
“but mummie, why must i always go to bed when people come?”
“that’s enough. run away now. i’m in a hurry!”
he went slowly, looking troubled, but he stopped at the door:
“may i sit and play in bed a little at least?”
“all right, but run away now!”
then georg went to bed. and in bed he sat and drew a picture of his mummie as a hobgoblin. but then he grew frightened of what he had done and drew her as a princess. and when sofi came to pull down the blind he lay awake in the twilight and listened to the guests. he was accustomed to lie in the darkness and enjoy laura’s parties through closed doors.
georg had not always been so lonely.
just after the divorce, whilst laura still felt her position to be delicate, she had cultivated the ladies, well knowing that it is they who make one’s position. then she availed herself of every opportunity to pose as a deserted mother with her little baby. but her baby grew up and the ladies 203bored laura. nor did they feel very much drawn to laura. it was not that she made any mistakes. on the contrary, at first she was very careful about her reputation. but she made her friends restless in some way. they did not like to see her entertain their husbands. they gradually held aloof. only the eccentrics and the bohemians among them remained faithful to her, including a fashionable woman sculptor and a middle-aged baroness who wrote causeries on the fashions.
thus there were mostly men at laura’s little parties. she realized this with a shrug of her shoulders, a contented shrug. as a matter of fact she always felt at home with men. but little georg was not an additional attraction for them. he was still exhibited now and then as an almost newborn babe. but in the end the sweet little baby grew too long in legs. and then laura began to keep him out of sight. she came to think of him more and more as a tiresome encumbrance. she even grew ashamed of this reminder of her age and of her past. georg was under the care of untidy, uncontrolled and incessantly changing nurses. when laura was travelling she boarded him out with strangers wherever she might happen to be. and when she entertained he was put to bed to be out of the way.
laura had resumed her work in front of the mirror. as the delicate task advanced towards the finishing touch with the powder puff and the choice of perfumes and jewels, her serious expression grew in solemnity.
her movements became more deliberate like those of an officiating priest. all these pastes, creams, essences and perfumes were sacrifices and incense in a secret cult. the dressing table was the altar and the image in the mirror was the god. and just as a worshipper at the altar ponders over the past and questions the future, so it was at her dressing table that laura became absorbed in recollections and sought inspiration for her future plans. her 204face thus participated very intimately in all she did. when she thought of herself it was quite naturally of her hair, her mouth, her eyes, that she thought. her egoism flourished under the spell of the mirrored image. the shadow and the reality merged imperceptibly together. she was sitting at the high altar of feminine selfishness.
then stellan arrived, dressed in a dinner jacket. he stepped without ceremony into the holiest of holies, patted laura approvingly on the neck, and threw himself down in an empty chair beside the dressing table. you could scarcely have seen that he was over thirty and that his life during the last years had been rather stormy. his face still bore an expression of self-satisfied, smiling irony. only the corners of his mouth had set, not into earnestness, but into hardness.
sister and brother had not met during the whole summer. laura tore herself away from the mirror with an effort. she looked at her brother searchingly. it was as if she looked in vain for something in his face:
“and now you have become a balloon pilot, too,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. “how did you get that idea into your head?”
stellan played with a small lady’s watch of about the size of a sixpence.
“well, i did it in anger. i had to sell the ace of spades, and it got into the papers. so then i found a way of cutting out the cavalry. they look simply ludicrous down below on their horses.”
laura did not answer stellan’s smile:
“do you know what i thought when i read about your folly?” she said. “oh, are his affairs in such a rotten state?” i thought.
stellan frowned:
“no, dash it all, don’t think it is a subtle form of suicide. rather then as a new phase of my notorious passion for gambling. i must have excitement. it is a game 205with a rather higher stake than usual, that’s all....”
“well, but how are your affairs?”
“my affairs,” said stellan with a shrug of his shoulders. “i have no affairs, only debts. but they are of no importance anyhow. just sufficient to keep me from getting fat. they keep one up to the mark.”
stellan’s financial position was bad. and still his superior airs were not all pose. he did not worry over his position. if he had done that he would have been lost. it never occurred to him to refuse himself anything; on the contrary. he, stellan selamb, must of course live up to his position. the best was, of course, always for him and his like. it is an enormous source of strength to have such an inborn conviction. because you usually get what you consider should as a matter of course be yours.
it was this elegant microcosm of upper class prejudices that kept stellan afloat.
laura looked at her brother with something almost resembling admiration. his assurance, his elegant bearing, his haughty smile, impressed her:
“there is an easy solution,” she said in a significant tone.
stellan suddenly looked bored. he understood only too well what laura meant. the great day of settlement was approaching when he would have to produce the heiress in anticipation of whom he had drawn so many bills.
“damn it,” he muttered, “you too! my colonel attacked me the other day and asked if i did not mean to get married. he must have heard something alarming. and do you know what that idiot ohrnfeldt said the other day when i got him to indorse a note for me? ‘it is your duty as an honest man to marry a rich girl,’ he said. not bad, what? i am a positive enigma to those honest souls. they think i have let several fine chances slip through my fingers.”
“well, but why do you neglect those ... chances?”
“ugh, it goes against the grain to do what everybody expects me to do. i think it is ridiculous.”
206laura did not answer. she resumed her task at the mirror. there is all the same something artificial in stellan’s recklessness tonight, she thought, not without anxiety. because she also had lent him money. not much, certainly, but more than she would like to lose.
stellan sat silent a moment staring at the absurdly small lady’s watch, which seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with anything so serious as time. then he rose as if he had suddenly noticed what time it was:
“i suppose manne is coming tonight?” he said.
“of course.”
“good ... laura, you must see that one of your financial friends backs his new bills. manne must have money.”
“yes, because if he has any money, you will get some too. isn’t that so?”
“well, manne still has delightfully bad luck at cards.”
the guests began to arrive.
laura’s home was a meeting place for some younger financiers and a certain set of officers introduced by stellan. great interest was shown at laura’s in aristocrats in financial difficulty. and sometimes the play was high.
laura was a charming hostess at these highly original men’s parties. she enjoyed queening it over these men with a future or a past. she flirted gaily and without sentimentality with both mars and mercury, with a secret leaning towards mercury. yes, in the company of these moneyed men laura was perfectly at home. she enjoyed the cool rapid talk of investments and bargains in shares. their lightning estimates and calculations gently stimulated her. she was buoyed up and sustained by these speculative chances. she constantly swayed between pleasant irresponsibility and instructive calculations. her cool and sparkling head exercised, in the last resort, a natural and easy domination over her senses. she played with bold assurance, with her womanliness as the stake.
yes, laura liked gambling, but she liked winners still 207better, winners who understood how delicately to share their gains. since she had observed that her fair type made a special impression on jews she had deliberately begun to cultivate “the little black boys” as she called them. this was the period of the first national industrial boom and “the little black boys” were making larger fortunes than ever. because whatever happens in the world it is sure to make the jews wealthier. and laura kept to the fore and was given many a helping hand and many a hint which she did not neglect to use to her advantage. people thought that she liked to risk small sums for the fun of the thing, but secretly she carried an a systematic and extensive business by which she had collected a not insignificant fortune.
the last comer in laura’s circle was jacob levy, the lawyer.
levy was a business lawyer, still quite young, but obviously a man with a future. he had a large, but finely chiselled nose, dark brown eyes and thin, ironically curled lips. his was an international face, a face which seemed as if for generations it had stared itself tired in all the markets of the world. though born in sweden, levy spoke with a certain accent. his father was a danish jew and his mother came from poland. the ancient swedish title of his professional rank seemed incongruous in him. he was a cosmopolitan, and money and the hazards of money were his real home and country. behind his mask of pale indifference lay a passionate will and a cool, sharp observation which sometimes got the better of him. in the most impersonal tones he would utter extraordinarily insolent truths, which sometimes cut straight across his own interests.
laura liked those truths, which had not yet however, been directed against herself.
stellan did not share his sister’s taste. he detested levy and treated him with an icy cold rudeness, which only seemed to amuse him. they emphasized their respective 208vocations as officer and lawyer and indulged, of course in most general terms, in exquisite sarcasms at each other’s expense. to keep to the general is often the best way to offer personal insults. in the beginning the atmosphere was a little chilly and depressed at laura’s first dinner of the season. financiers sat stiff in a corner and looked as if the state bank had raised its rate, and the military kept to themselves and discussed promotions and the damned journalistic moles. the hostess herself hovered about with a little frown on her brow. perhaps it was stellan’s irritation that infected the others. he was not the only one waiting for manne von strelert, everybody was saying,
“wasn’t captain von strelert coming tonight...? i hope manne won’t fail us tonight...!”
good old manne seemed to be a special attraction! at last the cavalry arrived in all its glory. the talk at once became livelier and gayer. everybody chatted and laughed round the tall young officer with the careless and mischievous eyes. though not a wit there was nevertheless a certain distinction in all that manne said. he was especially characterized by a kind of good-tempered acquiescence in his fate. he was capable of anything impossible and was always game. he realized that somewhere within him there were numerous possibilities but it never occurred to him to try to develop them. in his aristocratic helplessness he had a certain likeness to those race horses which are so tall that they can never feed themselves. they simply cannot reach down to their fodder.
manne von strelert’s character was summed up in two prominent and widely appreciated fundamental qualities: he could not say “no” and he had a wonderful, glorious, never-failing bad luck in gambling. to this it should be added that for some time past the owner of kolsn?s found himself in an embarrassing financial position. is it then strange that all eyes lit up around him and that tonight he was the greatest attraction at laura’s dinner?
209stellan occasionally reproached manne in gentle and almost flattering tones for his extravagance. he had during the course of years won somewhat large sums of money from his old messmate and childhood friend. and tonight he simply could not help winning more.
they had dined early so as not to be disturbed in their play. manne took the hostess in. that evening she courted the army.
laura’s manner varied entirely according to the category of guests in which she happened to be moving. she preferred to take her financiers one by one, and whatever was said openly had often a hard metallic ring about it. but with her officer friends she displayed a special abandon. with them she was the personification of reckless gaiety. her playful coquetry, and her light-hearted, infectious laughter at once threw open the gates to a paradise of irresponsibility and golden unconcern. yes, she could be quite delightfully gay, laura, a veritable saute marquis and vogue la galère.
finance did not mind this apparent neglect and watched for an opportunity to grind its own little axe.
manne von strelert was not the man to resist any kind of seduction, least of all laura’s. he soon began to drink her health, in all sorts of drinks, and to make a series of perfectly absurd little speeches in her honour.
laura frankly enjoyed the admiration, both coarse and refined, of her hair and shoulders, of these connoisseurs of horses and women. but in the midst of the laughter and toasts her eyes now and then searched levy and stellan. nothing had been arranged beforehand. but it so happened that they had every reason to be pleased with her. there was surely—hang it all—no harm in her enjoying herself to the full with dear old manne, who at this moment seized an opportunity of pressing her hand under the table.
dinner was over and the party was just rising from the 210table when manne noticed some little pink shells that had been brought in as ashtrays. he filled one with the last drops of his champagne:
“one more toast,” he exclaimed! “a toast for the little pink shell and the eternal line of curve.”
and with his hand manne indicated round his lady a very significant wave line.
laura pushed back her chair and stood there with her bare white shoulders and a seductive smile. she lifted her soft arms as if waltzing.
“yes, i appeal to you, gentlemen, am i not round?”
“indeed, indeed,” sighed manne and kissed her shoulders.
“then you must see how one of our youngest parisian painters has imagined me,” she laughed. “i made a little trip there a few weeks ago....”
all eyes turned upon levy for a second. they knew that he also had been to paris a few weeks ago. he looked quite unconcerned.
“the most modern art is like an unshelled chestnut,” he said. “green and full of prickles.”
“i look like a starved green skeleton with mauve-coloured frost bites,” laura interposed, eagerly, with her cheeks a little flushed.
“i told the great master that it was not kind of him to make me so angular. then he bowed and said: ‘art is free, madame, and on this occasion it has not been able to take any notice of your roundness.’ yes, that’s what he said. but come with me and look at the masterpiece for yourselves.”
with the whole troop of laughing men after her laura ran through the yellow drawing room into her little reading and writing room where she had hung the curiosity. she opened the door quickly and almost stumbled over something that lay across the threshold.
it was georg. he had crept out of bed to peep at the 211party through the keyhole and had fallen asleep at his post. he lay there dressed only in his outgrown nightshirt and with black streaks across his knees from his stockings. there was an air of sad neglect and helplessness over the whole emaciated little figure.
“who the deuce is that kid?” laughed one of the men, who did not know that laura had a child.
laura grew rigid for a moment, but quickly recovered herself and assumed as well as she could the pose of the tender-hearted mother. she lifted up the boy, wrapped him up as decoratively as possible in her shawl, and kissed his cheek. and at this kiss from his mother georg awoke in the midst of the glorious party. still half asleep, he threw his arms round her neck and whispered something out of his dreams: “mummie ... princess all the same.”
everybody politely applauded the group. only levy was silent. he stood alone and stared obstinately at the famous picture, which nevertheless was tame compared with the geometrical excesses of some later schools.
“hm ... frost bites,” he mumbled in a low voice. “perhaps there is something in the frost bites all the same....”
his voice sounded quite impersonal, as if he had not known what he was saying.
laura carried off the boy quickly. she did not stop in the nursery. from there they might hear. no, she went all the way to her own bedroom. there she let loose her anger. there she suddenly began to pinch and beat the disobedient child who had torn away the veil, betrayed, and exposed her. it was as if she had wished to take her revenge for all the annoyance, and all the worries he had caused her from the moment that she was first conscious of his presence in her womb. it was as if she wished to take her revenge for all the memories from ekbacken, which seemed to her unspeakably oppressive and outworn.
212“you were told to stay in bed!” she panted. “why don’t you obey? i shall smack you if you don’t obey!”
georg did not scream. he shrank under the blows and glanced horrified at his mother. he did not understand. oh, how the pretty rings hurt when she beat him. and just now she had smiled and kissed him. he did not understand. his little soul was full to the brim with strange and ghastly questions....
the memory of this terrible contrast was to remain with him all his life.
laura suddenly felt ashamed and stopped beating him. she felt a sort of gratitude that he did not scream, and she led him back to his bed as if nothing had happened.
“there, go to sleep now,” she said in a tone of indifference.
and then she went back with her most charming smile to her guests.
play started. they did not start playing cards at once. first of all they gaily laid their stakes at roulette. laura was banker and imitated the professional croupiers’ cry: “faites vos jeux! rien ne va plus!”
laura always had phenomenally good luck, and all laid their stakes as if it were a tribute due to the hostess. then they began to play whist or bridge, which had just become fashionable, in order to pass on to écarté or vingt-et-un later on.
stellan from the very beginning appropriated the well-primed manne. it was interesting to see the two friends together at the card table. manne was no gambler. he threw down his stakes with reckless optimism and with a boyish challenge to fate. and he swore a little in evident surprise each time he did not win. stellan on the contrary was a born gambler, at once cold and passionate. nobody who saw him at cards could fail to see that this was his great vice. his excitement showed itself in a slight pallor in his smooth, distinguished features, from which everything 213else seemed to slip away as from a polished metal. a blue vein pulsed in his hard clear forehead. he spoke shortly and sharply, and unconsciously raised his voice as if he had been surrounded by deaf people. forgetfulness, slowness, or bad play drew forth his biting irony. he himself had an astounding memory for cards and a keen sense of observation. he took the game as seriously as if it were a science, and he jealously guarded it as a precious joy which a gentleman should know how to invest with a certain cult. he impressed you at one and the same time as an expert and custodian of chance. thus he developed in his friends a real devotion to play which concealed from weaker heads among them its dangerously exciting and undermining viciousness.
during the course of years the stakes had grown bigger and bigger. they started now where formerly they had ended. stellan won, but never enough. so it was today again. it was usually not difficult to pluck poor manne. but just now he had had a little spell of absurd good luck, which had decreased stellan’s winnings. and stellan had to have cash. he then made a plunge, drove up the stakes, doubled five times!—ten times!! one after another the bids fell. before manne could turn around stellan held in his hand three thousand-crown notes and a cheque for five thousand.
levy had already finished playing bridge. he never played anything else. now he was standing by their table looking on at the final spasms.
“what’s this, kolsn?s is not entailed?” he suddenly asked in an indifferent tone. it seemed as if he had not understood himself the impertinence of the question.
stellan expected a scene, but manne was not his usual self tonight.
“oh no,” he muttered, “it is waiting for god’s chosen people.”
214“why not just as well only for propertied people,” stellan cut in.
manne rose. he suddenly looked sober and slapped stellan on the back.
“you are difficult tonight,” he said. “now i must have a whiskey and soda.”
the art of losing gracefully never forsook him.
stellan leant back in his chair and puffed hard at his torn cigarette. he felt his winnings like a cool shiver in his limbs.
levy was still standing beside him with a pale smile:
“shall we two play a little?”
“i am rather tired.”
levy raised his voice so that he should be heard all over the room:
“are you so anxious to keep your winnings?”
stellan grew pale with anger and had a sharp answer ready, but then it struck him that he might just as well be engaged when manne came back for his revenge. he forced himself to a polite gesture towards the empty chair and levy sat down.
they continued with écarté and, against stellan’s wish, the stakes were high. this was something so unusual for levy that everybody gathered around them.
now stellan had no longer a sunburnt, cursing country youth opposite him. over his cards he saw a pale immobile mask. it was the pallor of a race fifty generations removed from forest and field but for whom calculation is second nature. yes, it seemed as if he had the very soul of money pitted against him. he felt all the time that his winnings were insecure and that he would inevitably lose.
levy sat there with half-closed eyes as if half asleep, and in the end won from stellan all that he had won and more into the bargain. he had seen that his opponent was not at ease, and that he had had to win that evening. and that is exactly the time when one is most likely to 215lose. levy had only to wait till he had won enough in the ups and downs of the game. then he proposed higher stakes than stellan could afford. then it was stellan’s turn to rise from the table and take a whiskey and soda.
“how can you find anything in this miserable gambling?” levy scornfully flung after him.
then he kissed laura’s hand and drove home with the thousand-crown notes and manne’s i.o.u. in his pocketbook....
it was late. all the guests except stellan and manne had already said good-bye. laura yawned openly. but manne insisted on staying and would not go.
“laura dear, do let me stay till six. only till six when my horse is groomed. i must mount him a moment before ... before ... oh, good god....”
laura knew what was coming. manne was going to be sentimental. the situation no longer had any novelty. she had an irresistible longing to go to bed and with a mocking curtsey entrusted manne to the care of stellan, who never slept after a night’s gambling. then she withdrew.
and as laura sat in her lace nightdress and pink silk boudoir cap and counted out her neat little winnings on the eiderdown, stellan and manne lounged in their easy chairs in front of the fireplace. the fire had gone out long ago.
the dawn was raw and dismal. half-emptied glasses with lip marks and thumb marks, cigar ash and stinking, saliva-soaked cigar ends were everywhere. and then the pitiless sharp grey light peeping in through the blinds and the cold anguish of the dry air itself in a room where people have worn out their nerves with barren excitement.
on the carpet lay a torn knave of spades grinning at them.
manne began to talk about “the glove.” he always did at this time of night.
“the glove” was manne’s pet name for a plump little 216lady who had a glove shop in regeringsgatan. for a long time she had kept manne at a distance and he had been forced to purchase and make presents of an incredible number of pairs of gloves in order to win her favour. and now marriage with her was not the most impossible of dear old manne’s eccentricities. he was unfaithful to “the glove” now and then with ladies of his own class, but he always returned to her, disappointed and full of remorse. her diligence, thrift, wordly wisdom and other bourgeois qualities had for him an exotic attraction, the whole charm of the incomprehensible.
manne tried to kick away the knave of spades and looked appealingly at stellan with his boyish, humid eyes.
“if you only knew what a woman she is! damn me if the tears do not come into my eyes when she sews on my buttons. and i had promised her not to gamble again! what will she say when i tell her this?”
stellan sat there shivering and sleepless, with the worries of tomorrow like poison in his veins and nerves. he was sick of manne’s sentimentality. it was as if a night frost had fallen on their friendship:
“why the devil do you tell her?”
manne smiled a pathetic smile:
“you don’t understand, stellan. i can hide nothing from her. i can’t. i should go mad at once if i did. she is my reason and conscience, you know. we won’t go just yet, stellan. it isn’t six yet. and i must ride a little before i talk to her....”
manne poured out a glass of soda water and swallowed it in one draught:
“ugh!” he said, “how awful it all was!” and then he suddenly began to talk about old kolsn?s, about his father, the late chamberlain, who had taken part in the battle of dybb?l, and about his poor little shivering mother with her sewing basket and screen and fires well into june. and 217he talked about their long battle on the lake outside stonehill and about their riding trips in the backa forest.
“do you remember it all, stellan? those were fine times, weren’t they, stellan? my old home. it is a damned shame. what have i done with it all now? i am a traitor. yes, a traitor. curse it!”
stellan, cold and numb, felt a shock pass through him. was this how matters stood? was it as bad as that with kolsn?s?
“what nonsense are you talking?” he muttered.
manne stared anxiously at him:
“stellan, old man, it ... you had better not go to the bank with my cheque ... not tomorrow, anyway....”
“why not?”
“because there is nothing there, not a farthing.”
“you ought to have told levy that. he won it from me.”
for the second time a shock passed through stellan, as he pronounced levy’s name. but manne sank back in the chair staring straight out in front of him:
“i shall have to clear out,” he muttered, half crying. “tomorrow i shall have to get away. what will ‘the glove’ say?”
stellan was again cool, tense, fully awake. he was one of those people who do not know the meaning of melancholy or remorse. their egotism is so rounded and complete that such things do not touch them. neither can they admit defeat. that would be the end of their world. adversity to them only points forward to new opportunities to be seized.
levy wants kolsn?s, thought stellan. once again he sat there, tense, cool and collected with the blue vein throbbing in his forehead just as if the table and the cards were again before him. levy wants kolsn?s, that’s as clear as daylight.
each time he thought of levy he felt as if he had been 218pricked by a spur. he hated levy, and during these moments he was learning a great deal from him. what was it levy had said? “how can you find anything in this miserable gambling?” yes, that’s what he said. things which had seemed impossible before seemed all at once self-evident, final. yes, of course, that’s it, he thought. i’ll trick levy and save myself.
he suddenly looked manne steadily in the eyes:
“do you know what it means to write cheques like that?” he asked. his tone was so sharp that poor manne was startled.
“no...!”
stellan blurted out the worst:
“prison, old man, if you don’t find the five thousand by the time the banks open. can you do it?”
“no, it is impossible.”
“i’ll try to get you the money, but on one condition—that you won’t let levy have kolsn?s.”
that was a condition that the astounded manne agreed to with all his heart.
“no, because i think i know of a better buyer, if you really can’t keep the estate. that’s agreed then. you take your ride and confess to ‘the glove’ and i will go and hunt for the money. we meet outside the bank at half past nine. good-bye!”
stellan called a cab and drove straight to selambshof.
peter the boss was of course impossible at laura’s parties. but there was all the same a secret channel of communication between her drawing room and selambshof. peter, too, had his interests in society.
stellan opened a window, climbed in and sat down on the edge of his brother’s bed. he looked like a fat hog when he was asleep. on the night table lay an old silver watch, a cash book and a half-finished cigar. peter jumped up and rubbed his eyes:
“what the devil is the matter?”
219“business. kolsn?s is ripe. what will you give me if i get it for you for five hundred thousand?”
peter was not quite awake yet, but he could always manage to appear indifferent at first.
“damn kolsn?s,” he rattled, lighting the half-smoked cigar.
stellan opened both windows. he also looked supercilious and indifferent. from his manner you would have thought he was the master, rolling in money, and peter the servant.
“don’t talk nonsense,” he cut in. “you know you want kolsn?s like dear life.”
peter felt a mixture of fear and secret admiration for his brother’s brilliancy and his careless way of handling money. stellan was, as a matter of fact, much more difficult to trick than he had believed. peter held nearly all stellan’s shares in selambshof as security, but he didn’t own them and there was a damned big difference between the two things. but now this fine gentleman must surely be in a difficult dilemma as he came so early in the morning.
“you seem to imagine that i lie dreaming about kolsn?s since you come whilst i am still in bed,” ventured peter cunningly.
“i come from one of laura’s shows. it was there i saw this opportunity. the matter is urgent. levy is after the estate. what do you offer?”
“well, five thousand!”
stellan laughed aloud:
“ridiculous! i want fifty thousand.”
now it was peter’s turn to laugh.
“you are mad. you have no idea what a big sum fifty thousand is.”
“fifty thousand. not a farthing less.”
peter began to dress. he tried to do so slowly.
“i’ll send thomson to manne.”
“good! thomson will be kicked out.”
220“i’ll go myself.”
“you’ll only see me. manne will settle nothing without me. he has a horror of business.”
“well, i’ll give twenty thousand.”
“good. levy will get the estate.”
“thirty thousand.”
“fifty, not a farthing less.”
peter whined, reproached stellan for his extravagance, dwelt upon the fabulousness of the sum and his own miserable means. meanwhile he calculated quickly and surely and arrived at the result that anyhow it would be a good stroke of business.
“well, i suppose i shall have to present you with fifty thousand to spend on champagne and gambling.”
peter sounded quite broken-hearted. but stellan was not at all touched. he even demanded five thousand in cash. and as soon as peter had produced the notes he made off as quickly as he had come so that peter sat there and did not know what had really happened, and believed it was some fine new way of robbing him of some cash. but stellan returned and in three days the whole business was settled.
manne had, on stellan’s advice, turned to the estate agent, o. w. thomson.
“thomson has good connections with my brother, who might reflect on kolsn?s,” he said. “but it is better to choose an indirect way, because you must not appear too keen.”
at manne’s request stellan was present at these transactions. that is to say, at all except the last and decisive meeting. for by then he had already got his fifty thousand. and he thought that manne might as well bear the responsibility himself if there should be any trouble. the result was that peter seized kolsn?s for four hundred and fifty thousand only by threatening to withdraw at the last moment—offensively simple.
221poor manne was both sad and happy when it was all over. he was ashamed to mention the fifty thousand to stellan and thanked him warmly for his help.
when drawing up the contract he had, by criminal negligence and ignorance, completely forgotten to safeguard the interests of the people on the estate. and this was very hard on a number of old tenants and dependants who had now no refuge but the workhouse.
he had spoken a true word of himself that night:
“traitor, traitor to his home and to the soil that had nourished him.”
and so it happened when kolsn?s was thrown into the market in laura’s drawing room. it was not the first estate that had suffered such a fate, nor would it be the last.
this affair had scarcely become known before laura came rushing into stellan’s room. she was furiously angry.
“you have behaved abominably” she cried. “you have acted behind my back. why was i not told anything? i had almost promised levy that he should be allowed to do manne that little service.”
stellan made no effort to defend himself. he atoned for his crime by giving his sister a beautiful bracelet of brilliants. there were several of laura’s jewels that had their little history.
