one cold winter day in the third year of the world war laura drove out to liding?n. 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 390was 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 391and 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 maj?ngen. he imagines it is his son ... you remember that story....”
an expression of brooding hatred came over hedvig:
392“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 393ridiculously 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 nidh?gg, who feeds on corpses, that he heard, nor that he passed along nastrand, the shore of corpses, where the dragon sucks the dead....
394the 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 maj?ngen. 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 maj?ngen 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.”
395laura 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, 396fly-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 397as 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 398the 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:
399“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 maj?ngen 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:
400“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 maj?ngen.
peter rose. yes, he rose up in bed. his pale puffy face was covered by a broad grin:
401“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 402hand 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 403criminal 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 404and 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.
405here 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.
