IV

+THE COLD MOMENT+

There was a charity fête at the Athletic Ground. The quadrille on

horseback and the bicycle race were over and now people thronged round

the tombola and the stalls.

Stellan did not look up at the sky when he stepped out into the saddling

yard. He did not give a thought to the balloon whose gigantic yellow

silk bubble was already beginning to swell out and shimmer in the cool

September sunshine. No, his looks searched anxiously amongst the

scattered groups of spectators outside the ring of guard. And he

suddenly muttered a half-suppressed oath at the sight of Peter who,

furious and massive as a bull, bore down on him from his ambush. He

awaited the attack in the most deserted spot he could find. And a

certain weariness appeared in the hard lines of his mouth:

“You have become damned difficult to find,” panted Peter. But Stellan

was already prepared with a smile. It is strange that smiles can thrive

so many degrees below freezing point.

“You can meet me as much as you like when you have got decent

clothes—and a decent face....”

Peter was unshaven. His overcoat dated from the fat and sentimental

period. It now hung on him like a sack. His barge-like shoes were

covered with the dirt of the bad roads of Selambshof and he had in his

hand, not a stick but a cudgel. And he shook the cudgel and struck the

ground with it:

“You are damned smart, you are! But if I take everything this fine

gentleman possesses perhaps he won’t be quite so smart. Tomorrow I want

my seventy-five thousand, or else I’ll make you bankrupt!”

Stellan still smiled. He pointed to the balloon and his tone became

exquisitely ironical:

“Come up with me and then we can talk business.”

Peter looked with a ludicrous expression of suspicion and disapproval on

the expensive and dangerous ascent in which his seventy-five thousand

would soar heavenwards:

“If you were at least decently insured,” he sighed. Then he suddenly

grew furious again and shouted, so that he was overheard by the people

round about them:

“I must have the money tomorrow. I won’t wait any longer.”

Stellan grew pale and came close up to his brother. It was as if he were

abusing some obstinate labourer:

“You lout! You want to get hold of my last share in Selambshof! But I

have already put them up another spout. Curse you, there are better and

bigger creditors than you! Yes, I have nothing but debts, so my position

is really excellent. The only hope for the creditors is that the bubble

won’t burst. But do you think it will improve matters for a shabby old

moneylender to come and hang on to my coat tails just as I am going up?

No, get away and keep quiet and I will show you something to make you

think.”

Stellan suddenly had an idea. He pushed aside the astonished and

hesitating Peter without further ceremony and went straight towards the

steps of the tennis pavilion.

There Miss Lähnfeldt was standing amidst a group of uniforms and allowed

Manne von Strelert to pay her his court. Both had taken part in the

quadrille on horseback and she was dressed in riding breeches, which at

that time was something quite new and bold, and she stood there amongst

all the men, slim and slight, but with her head held high and with a

proud carriage.

Stellan ploughed his way through the group. Not a feature betrayed what

kind of conversation he had just passed through. The lines round his

mouth were gay and slightly cruel. He saluted, kissed her hand, and said

aloud, so that everybody round them should hear:

“Miss Lähnfeldt, do you remember I promised you a sensation? Come up

with me today.”

Miss Lähnfeldt wanted to appear a sportwoman. She cultivated to the best

of her ability the Anglo-Saxon style. Thanks to persistent and expensive

training she had really developed her little strength until she was

considered a bold rider and a fairly good tennis player. She did not

answer Stellan at once, but bit her lip and cast a glance at the

officers round her. But Manne protested. One had no right to tempt

charming ladies into the clouds, he thought. Charming ladies might get

dizzy....

Stellan looked gratefully at Manne, certain that his words would only

egg her on. She was not a coward, or at least she was more vain than she

was afraid. And a crowd is a bellows to vanity. Elvira Lähnfeldt was one

of those women who are excited by a crowd. The thought of some kind of

notoriety always occupied her thoughts. In every crowd the desire to be

noticed, spoken of, praised and envied, worked like a stinging poison in

her veins. When she now looked at the group around her it was in order

to measure the effect of the proposal! It would surely create a

sensation if she went up, a real sensation....

She did not say “yes” straight out. She answered by the eternal feminine

question:

“But what shall I put on?”

“My military fur coat,” said Stellan. “Besides, your riding costume is

most suitable. But come along, it is twelve o’clock and the people are

waiting.”

She took his arm and they stepped out into the open space. The group

behind them applauded. Manne was teased at the cavalry being

outdistanced by the air force. There were several people there who were

interested in seeing the two friends’ position improved. The balloon was

already filled. Stellan turned away a poor journalist who had had half a

promise to be allowed to go up with him, and amidst a murmur of surprise

from the crowd he lifted Miss Lähnfeldt very chivalrously over the edge

of the gondola. But he did not give the order to let go at once. He did

not grudge his partner a few moments of exquisite joy in the polite and

encouraging exclamations of the gentlemen and the little cries of alarm

from her lady friends.

Then the attendants let go the ropes and the balloon rose. There was a

flutter of white handkerchiefs from the dark group below in the grey

oval of the cycle course.

As you know, one need not rise very high before everything down below

looks small.

“What mites,” said Miss Lähnfeldt. And her voice sounded a little

malicious.

Stellan cast a side-glance at her in order to gauge the effect of the

increasing depth beneath them. She looked down with an expression which

seemed to say; “This is nothing much.”

“Wait a bit, my dear,” thought Stellan. “You will get as much as you can

stand.” He had already made up his mind that this would not be a

pleasure trip, but an adventure.

The wind was west south-west. The balloon had not had time to rise much

before they were out over Lidingön. Below him Stellan saw the shining

green roof of the Hills’ villa.

Hedvig ... yes, he would have to try there too if everything else went

wrong. If only Percy had been alive.... But Hedvig alone, no, there

wasn’t much chance....

The balloon began to sink very suddenly. One must always be careful when

passing over forests, where the air is warmer and lighter. But Stellan

purposely neglected to cast out any ballast till they almost swept over

the tops of the trees. That was a trick that used to impress beginners.

Stellan looked again at his partner. She was perhaps a little paler than

before and held on a little more tightly to the edge of the gondola. But

if he had hoped for any frightened screams and looks of anxious appeal

he was doomed to disappointment.

“The balloon must manœuvre badly,” she said.

Stellan flung out ballast, perhaps more than was necessary and they rose

quickly into silent and radiant space over the bright and dazzling

autumn coast landscape. It was really wonderfully beautiful with the

spray of gold that the leafy trees made amongst the dark pines and the

deep solemn September blue of the water in the bays—which to the

far-penetrating gaze of those above shivered in iridescence of

algæ-green, seaweed-brown and shimmering gneiss-red nearer inshore in

the shallower water. In a narrow smooth belt of calm water a toy steamer

drew behind it a silver shimmering fan of dwarf-like waves. And far away

in the east along the strangely banked up horizon the sea stretched like

a low endless blue ridge.

But most wonderful of all was the silence and the stillness, the

incomparable, mighty calm in a balloon that moved with the wind and in

which a candle flame would burn as steadily as in a closed room.

“Strange ... it is like sitting in a glass cupboard,” said Miss

Lähnfeldt in a low voice and there was after all involuntary admiration

in her voice. But then she added: “Though I must say I thought it would

be more exciting....”

Stellan bit his lip: he was not in the mood for enjoying anything

beautiful just now. He felt like a stage manager who is responsible for

effect before a critical and spoilt public. He thought of Peter, his

affairs, marriage—without any enthusiasm for the last.... He felt almost

hostile to the woman by his side. Her affected indifference irritated

him. He could not manage to pay her any sort of attention. He felt like

a partner who dances out of time and has nothing to whisper into his

partner’s ear. Annoyed, he tapped the barometer. It sank, though the

balloon was sinking slowly. It was already three o’clock in the

afternoon. The sun suddenly disappeared. Behind them in the west the sky

was clouded. The air began to grow a cold, whitish grey, and clouded

over, they no longer saw the earth below them. In an incredibly short

time they had become enveloped in a dense cloud.

Stellan did not descend, as was his duty with an approaching storm when

he was so near the sea. He was a desperado. Miss Lähnfeldt was going to

have an experience, that was all. He threw out several sacks of ballast,

which disappeared in long brown streaks in the fog below them.

His manœuvring was not quite planless. He had observed that the wind in

the upper strata was several degrees more southerly and he began to

think of the Åland islands.

Now they were suddenly out in the sunshine again, in the cold dazzling

sunlight over an enormous shimmering sea of cloud. They soared alone in

a dazzling white, ever changing, chaos of snow mountains and lakes of

fog—millions of years before human life existed....

“I have seen this before in Switzerland,” said Miss Lähnfeldt shivering

with cold.

The balloon had risen rapidly and lost much gas. It soon began to sink

again through the cloud world, which now grew grey. When it cleared up

below them they were already out over a nasty grey, white-crested sea. A

very strong wind was blowing.

Then the first feminine exclamation escaped from Miss Lähnfeldt:

“But, good heavens, how shall we get back?”

Stellan bowed for the first time with a polite and amiable smile:

“By steamer,” he said. “We will sleep at Mariehamn tonight.”

As a matter of fact he was not so sure of it. The wind higher up had

evidently been a few degrees more in the west than he had counted on. In

its present quarter they would pass south of Åland. But the storm lower

down might draw them south ... otherwise ... well what otherwise? Well,

otherwise they would go to hell....

What does a man like Captain Stellan Selamb feel when he mutters to

himself that he might “go to hell”? Nothing really. He has never

properly conceived death. His egoism is so hard and polished that the

thought of death slips off everywhere.

If you want an opinion of a man, try to find out his views of death.

Death comes _in_ life and not _after_ life. And it is what happens in

life that makes us really alive. What else are we but our conception of,

our defiance of, our struggle against, and our victory over, death? Yes,

because there is a real, a living courage which conquers death....

Stellan had the gambler’s courage. It is always better than cowardice.

But it is really very superficial. A hard frozen surface with no

resilience beneath. Clear but shallow thoughts that have never

penetrated to the depths of life. An inner reflection of a blind,

pitiless Fate.... How much of the courage that meets us in the wild and

bloody history of the world is not of this kind? The great gamblers!

Minds and souls are only cards to them, playing cards or trumps in the

wild gamble of politics and war. They only know themselves even as

trumps in the game. Even their own terrible egoism is really only a

mirage. For death has not made them alive....

The balloon drove eastwards with the gale. Stellan sailed low and saved

his ballast. In the north they could see Åland and Lernland and

Lumparland. The waves washed heavily in the apparent stillness around

them. They were sinking lower and lower. The last sack of ballast went

over. The balloon began to shrink round the valve. There must be a

leakage. Now a giant roaring wave attempted to grab the gondola.

Stellan had to throw out everything loose, the ballast sacks themselves,

ropes, fur coats, stethoscopes and barometer. He used the momentary

respite to assist Miss Lähnfeldt up into the rigging where she sat as on

a trapeze and held on to the cordage. She was very pale and looked as if

she might faint any moment, so he thought it best to make her fast.

“This is abominable,” she mumbled, as if she had been exposed to some

clumsiness on the part of a vulgar partner. But she did not whimper.

They swept in over the breakers and rocks of the wild and deserted

skerries of Kökars. The gondola was already trailing in the water, and

the balloon began to swing and jerk to and fro. Stellan also climbed up

into the rigging. He took the anchor with him. With violent jerks they

trailed over a stony rocky island on the skerries. Then again they were

carried over an empty roaring bay. But now the wind had really turned

into the south and there was some wooded country ahead of them. Stellan

cut away the gondola, as it made the balloon dip. Then it rose for the

last time. They sat as in a swing over the surging water. Phew! now they

were rushing in towards the land. A jetty and a few red-painted

outhouses were visible in the grey twilight. Stellan dropped anchor in a

damp marshy meadow so that the balloon might trail a little and reduce

speed. It caught in an alder with a terrible jerk. Quick as lightning he

tore open one of the gores—and the balloon partly fell and was partly

flung down into a copse of young birches.

Stellan freed himself at once. He hastened to drag out his fellow

passenger from below the torn, flapping and billowing balloon cloth. She

had fainted....

Some people came running up and he made them carry her in. They had had

the luck to land just beside a country house. Then he rushed to the

telephone and arranged for telegrams....

Miss Lähnfeldt lay ill for a few days, till Stellan one day stepped in

to her with a bundle of Swedish newspapers full of highly coloured

descriptions of the unique and adventurous balloon flight of the

well-known tennis player and rider, Miss Lähnfeldt.

For the first time she looked at Stellan with gratitude and approval.

* * * * *

Stellan was invited to the autumn shoot at Trefvinge. He gave a low

whistle when he saw the name of Miss Lähnfeldt and not her father on the

invitation card. He understood that the invitation was from her and not

from her father.

But he also whistled, though in another key, when he heard from the

coachman that Captain von Strelert had already arrived. For it was

equally evident that Manne, Baron Manne von Strelert was the guest of

the Count.

* * * * *

Count Lähnfeldt had, as a matter of fact, been extremely angry over his

daughter’s rash action. Busybodies, of course, telephoned at once to

Trefvinge to tell him that his daughter had gone up in a balloon with

Captain Selamb. In a balloon! It seemed almost indecent to him. He could

not remember any really aristocratic ladies who had gone up in a

balloon. And with that Captain Selamb into the bargain! From Selambshof

... brother of Peter Selamb...!

When, later in the day, there came a telephone message from Furusund

that the balloon had been driven out to sea in the gale, then he

regarded the information as a confirmation of his view that Captain

Selamb was not the sort of gentleman that the daughter of Count

Lähnfeldt should go up in the air with. He was so extremely vexed that

he scarcely felt any anxiety for the life of his only child.

Towards evening he calmed down a little when he received a wire that

they had landed at a quite respectable Finnish-Swedish country house.

And when the following day he read in the papers of the brave and

sporting action of a lady moving in the highest circles, and of the

courage and the self-control of Miss Lähnfeldt, daughter of the

well-known Count Lähnfeldt of the magnificent seat at Trefvinge, well,

then he thought at last that perhaps his daughter’s eccentricity had

something aristocratic in it after all.

But from that admission to the approval of Captain Selamb as in any sort

of capacity suitable company for his daughter was a long step,—So far

Stellan had not yet come, in spite of his well arranged stage management

and press advertisement. It was therefore with measured dignity and a

rather chilly expression that the Lord of Trefvinge received him. And

this occurred in the largest and most splendid room of the castle, the

great tapestry hall, which might well have subdued even the boldest.

“Good-morning, Captain Selamb! My daughter is just dressing for a ride

with Baron von Strelert.”

“Yes, I heard that Manne had promised to come for a few days,” answered

Stellan in a light, almost insolent, tone. He read the master of the

house quite clearly, so clearly indeed that he sometimes was afraid of

not being able to keep a straight face.

Count Lähnfeldt was a very short man, in spite of the high heels and

extra soles on his shoes. He had an extremely neat face. His words and

his gestures were dignified, slow, and heraldically stiff. But his eyes

showed a continual nervousness, the nervousness of the actor: “Do I make

an impression—do you believe in me?” they seemed to say.

Alas, nobody believed at all in him. People made most impudent fun of

him behind his back. He was generally called Count _Loanfeldt_, and the

reason was known to everybody.

The owner of Trefvinge was the son of an unmarried actress, but whilst

still very young he married the extremely wealthy widow of a brewer, who

died when his only daughter was born. The title of Count was Portuguese.

He had received it from King Charles, of the house of Bragança, after

having on a certain delicate occasion lent him a hundred thousand

crowns. This happened in Vienna whilst the monarch was still only Crown

Prince. Lähnfeldt, who had quite early begun to imagine that his unknown

father was a high-born aristocrat, did everything to correct the unjust

fate that had given him a plebeian name, and when travelling he always

used to try to come into contact with royalty. And now he had managed to

procure rooms at the hotel adjoining the suite of the Crown Prince,

Charles. It struck him at once that the Crown Prince received a lot of

people who did not behave with becoming reverence at all. When he

questioned the porters, he shrugged his shoulders. The callers were

simply creditors. A gentleman of his Highness’ suite had gambled away

all the funds, and for some incomprehensible reason no money arrived

from home. He could not even pay his hotel bill.

Herman Bogislaus Lähnfeldt needed no more. He decided to intervene at

once for the salvation of the monarchic principle. Bowing, he stepped up

to the Crown Prince Charles and begged that an old admirer of the house

of Bragança might be allowed to hand over to its present august

representative an humble gift of a hundred thousand crowns to be used

for some charitable purpose.

The Crown Prince received the cheque with an amazed but gracious smile.

About half a year later, Lähnfeldt received two large letters with seals

of State and Portuguese stamps. One contained an account of the use to

which his money had been put in an Orphanage in Lisbon, the other letter

contained the letters patent of his title.

He rushed down to Lisbon and threw himself at the feet of the newly

crowned King Charles. Then he rushed home again to buy an estate as a

background to his new dignity. And now he sat here at Trefvinge, the

ancestral home of the Oxenstierna family, and tried to fill out the

magnificent frame.

Such was Count Lähnfeldt’s history.

He had one great grief. The title was not hereditary. Already in

Elvira’s childhood he would look at the little plebeian with compassion

and melancholy. And when she grew up his only hope lay in a suitable

marriage for her.

“You must marry, Elvira,” he preached. “If you don’t marry you will

remain plain ‘Miss’ all your life.”

But it had not pleased Miss Elvira to marry yet. She was already nearing

thirty. Some suitors she had turned away herself, others had withdrawn

of their own accord, to the great astonishment of all but the initiated.

Neither Stellan nor Manne belonged to the initiated. But both were in

such miserable circumstances. And they knew only too well each other’s

business at Trefvinge. All the same, they kept countenance when they met

out in the sunshine on the steps, at least Stellan did. Manne was not

quite so happy. The poor boy had of course arrived first at the mill but

it hurt him all the same to stand in the way of an old friend. So he

cast timid and remorseful glances at Stellan when he helped Miss Elvira

into the saddle.

She, on the other hand, seemed in excellent spirits this morning.

“Come on, Captain Selamb,” she said with a little side-glance at her

father. “Cæsar II is free. We are riding towards the sand pit.”

Stellan’s voice sounded cold:

“Thank you, but I am too much handicapped.”

She shrugged her shoulders and gave her black mare a light cut with her

whip. But Manne sat still and looked as if he could not get going.

Stellan was cruel enough to wave a glove, with a meaning wink, to remind

his friend of his faithlessness to “The Glove.”

Never before in his life had Manne looked so lost on horseback. He

suddenly set his bay to a gallop and followed his companion, who was

already disappearing through the park gates.

Stellan had settled on an entirely different plan of action to Manne. He

had made up his mind to be indifferent to Miss Lähnfeldt so as to excite

her spirit of contradiction, and to try to win the father instead. For

that reason he at once began to display immense interest in the history

of the castle. Faithfully and indefatigably he accompanied the Count, as

he rattled out a whole armoury of dates, and roamed around like a parody

of greatness in the many splendid apartments. Patiently he sat for hours

in the library amongst peerages, pedigrees, genealogies, and

Gotha-almanacs and listened to the anecdotes of the lord of the castle.

Count Lähnfeldt knew every anecdote concerning a prince.... Then they

walked outside and down the steps, and Stellan duly admired the

Oxenstierna coat of arms cut in sandstone over the proud Renaissance

doorway. He sat with a becoming thrill of reverence on the seat round

the giant oak which Axel Oxenstierna had planted with his own hand and

in the shadow of which the Count, like the previous owners of the

castle, used to sit and marvel at “the small amount of wisdom that the

world is ruled with” and grow horrified at the tendency of the time to

level us all “like pigs’ feet.” Stellan was surprised at himself that he

need not sit silent at the feast but was also able to say something

about Oxenstierna. The moment before he had not suspected his knowledge.

It had been the same at school long ago when lazy Stellan always knew an

answer after all. Perhaps it was some kind of thought reading....

The Count by and by worked himself up into stammering enthusiasm.

Oxenstierna! Oxenstierna! It sounded as if he were speaking of his own

ancestor. Well, who knows if he had not some such thoughts. Then he took

Stellan’s arm and drew him to the small Chapel, of which he had the

patronage, whose white-washed gable shone under the yellowing birches on

the other side of the garden wall. He took the rather large key of the

crypt out of a case he always carried in his pocket, and staggered in

front of Stellan down into the dusky vault. And over the richly carved

oak and copper coffins he mumbled reverently a string of names of which

most were well known in history, and stopped at last in front of a

gigantic open coffin of porphyry, the lid of which was leaning against

the wall.

“This,” he said, caressing the carvings on the lid, which depicted a

bear with a little child on its back, “is the Lähnfeldt coat of arms.

And here I shall one day rest my weary bones.”

You could hear from his tone that death had lost its bitterness for him

since he would enter such distinguished company.

After all this the Count was a little tired, and, excusing himself on

the plea of important correspondence, he went up to take his little

snooze before dinner, just like any ordinary human being.

Stellan wandered about alone with his hands behind his back in the

stately park of Trefvinge. Around him this September day he heard from

the high tree tops a sharp sound, as from an over-tense string. In the

clear transparent air a dry leaf floated slowly down to his feet with a

fine even motion. It was a motion as symmetrical and regular as the

shape of the leaf itself. He pondered for a moment on the static

problem. Then it struck him that even in his youth he had felt irritated

that wealth and secure luxury should chase shadows and idle fancies in

order to obtain a little excitement. He suddenly shivered with a light

but penetrating dread. He realised here in the silence of the park in a

way that he had never done before, that he, Stellan Selamb, was on the

verge of ruin. “If I don’t succeed in this,” he thought, “there is no

other way out than the revolver....”

Stellan stood there with twitching face and a queer helpless movement of

his right hand. What was the matter, were his nerves already giving way?

“Well, of course, one does not lead a life like mine without being

punished for it,” he muttered. “Strange that it comes like this in the

stillness and not in the balloon out there over the sea, for

instance....”

He took a few steps but halted again suddenly amongst the sunny patches

on the hard dry road. The thought that she, Elvira Lähnfeldt, was now

riding by Manne’s side irritated him like a noxious poison. He saw her

suddenly in the light of anxious and trembling hope. He saw her as she

had sat in the sunshine, light, straight, elegant on her nervous jet

black horse. Her assurance and her recklessness were thorns in his side.

For a moment he found her really beautiful and desirable in her cool

refinement. The brittle, overstrung elements in her character seemed to

him to be in wonderful harmony with the beautiful autumn day. Fancy if

he might lead a calm and exquisite life together with this child of

luxury and taste with her the joys of a satisfied ambition! Even the

thought of her secret infirmity seemed to him at this moment an

additional refinement, a promise of a painless, concentrated life of

pleasure.

Stellan pulled himself up as if at a word of command. “Damn it, I am not

falling in love, I hope,” he thought. But the next moment his thought

was: “No, dash it all, the fact is I have not slept for several nights!”

He struck his leg with his stick: “Keep cool! If you get sentimental,

all is lost. She is nothing but a whimsical and obstinate child and you

must conquer her through her whims and her obstinacy.”

For a moment Stellan felt his head swim and the ground give way under

his feet. This made him doubly reckless. Partly from a kind of cruel

sensuousness and partly to give himself courage, he began in imagination

to undress her and lay bare her infirmity. “It is not the softest women

who are the weakest,” he thought. “With all her arrogance and all her

sport she is really a poor, delicate, and enfeebled creature. She is

suffering from the disease of wealth, the sapping of strength of those

who do not need to do anything for their living. And she can’t have

children. The future is cut out of her body. Whence can she derive any

strong instincts difficult to conquer? No, she is really a very easy

victim to one who is wise and reckless....”

Stellan already smiled to himself. “No, my dear Manne, you are too good

natured,” he thought. “Even from behind one can see when you are

lying....”

Then he hurried in to dress for dinner.

The evening of that same day, Stellan and Manne were standing out in the

moonlight on the narrow balcony that ran outside their two rooms on the

first floor. The host and hostess had already withdrawn and everything

was quiet in the big house behind them.

Stellan scrutinized his old friend. Manne’s face was pale over his big

white shirt front. There was really not much left of the old

irrepressible Manne von Strelert.

“The old man isn’t exactly exciting,” Stellan mumbled, pointing with his

thumb towards the house. Manne answered with unusual vehemence:

“Why can’t he realize that he is behind the times with his aristocracy!

That sort of thing originated in the middle ages, damn it all! And how

he chews my poor ‘Baron.’ Heavens above, it makes me wish I were a

grocer.”

Stellan was amazed that Manne should get excited so easily. He felt a

strange cold satisfaction and continued pitilessly:

“My dear Manne, you have not much respect for your prospective

father-in-law.”

Manne started as if he had been struck. He was unguarded and had no

repartee ready. He put his hand on Stellan’s arm and mumbled almost

tenderly:

“Stellan ... don’t let us talk about that any more....”

For a moment they stood silent, looking out into the blue shimmering

night which was full of small fluttering creatures. Below them the apple

trees in the orchard were bowed down with fruit. Further away a thin

veil of mist lay over a meadow in which were some grazing cows whose

white spots shone like newly washed clothes in the moonlight. And beyond

the bright edging of yellow reeds the bay of Lake Mälar lay dreaming

with a narrow silver streak upon it that leapt into life when a breeze

passed. Still further there were reflections of the moon constantly

appearing and disappearing where the water seemed to repose as calm as a

mirror but was all the same stirred by a faint ground swell.

The whole atmosphere seemed full of the delicious coolness of rich ripe

fruits, and full of the peace and calm of possession and ownership.

“Fancy that there are people who lead quiet and happy lives,” mumbled

Manne.

Stellan imitated his tone:

“Yes, why are we not innocent vegetarians, feeding on carrots and

staring at the moon.... Nonsense! Manne! Nonsense! There are people who

lead dull lives, and people who don’t. Let us as long as possible belong

to the latter! Now is the hour of lovers and gamblers.”

He suddenly made a gesture embracing the castles and the acres of

Trefvinge.

“Look here, Manne, all this that seems so safe and still—shall we cut

through the pack for it tonight?”

When these words escaped Stellan he had still no second thought. It

looked as if Manne did not at first understand what he meant. He

remained silent for a long time, but then he mumbled too:

“Yes. Let’s cut for it.”

There was a strange dull note of relief in his voice. It was as if his

friend had relieved him of the burden of willing and choosing for

himself.

Thoughts flashed quick as lightning through Stellan’s brain. It was now

that he began to feel a strange assurance that he would somehow win. His

words came quick, like rapier thrusts:

“I have an unopened pack of cards with me. We will simply back our luck.

He who draws the highest heart stays. The other leaves early tomorrow

morning on the clear understanding that he does not intend to come

back.”

Manne was paler than ever and had a vacant look in his eyes:

“Right you are!”

Stellan ran inside to his room and searched for the cards. The lamp was

not lit. He had to search for a long time in his suit case. Meanwhile he

was thinking swift as lightning. “Manne must not draw the highest

heart,” he thought, “No, not this time. For then all is over with

me....” The shiver and the dizziness he had felt in the park returned.

“No, Manne must not draw the highest card....” At last he found the pack

of cards, picked it up with trembling hands and pressed his thumb nail

hard into the edge of the ace of hearts as it peeped out through the

round hole in the wrapper. There must be quite a noticeable mark on the

other side ... Stellan had not premeditated this, had never before done

anything of the kind. He felt something approaching surprise.

“Well, that is what we Selambs do,” he muttered to himself. Quickly he

went back to Manne’s room and flung the pack on the table:

“You open the pack and shuffle!”

Manne took up the pack and shuffled slowly, almost indifferently.

Stellan sat down opposite him.

“We must avoid misunderstandings,” he said. “The two is lowest and the

ace highest, isn’t that so?”

“Good!”

With a gesture indicative of long practice Manne spread the cards out

fan-like on the polished surface of the mahogany table:

“You draw first, as I shuffled.”

Stellan’s eyes looked searchingly at the fan for the marked card. No, he

could not see it. He must gain time. He opened his cigarette case:

“Let us smoke a cigarette together, before we draw. It will be the most

exquisite cigarette we ever smoked together. A cigarette with Fate....”

“All right!”

The cigarettes were finished. Stellan had to draw. Now he saw the ace on

the extreme right. The little mark on the back of the card was

noticeable in a tiny reflection from the lamp. Stellan had a feeling of

being lifted off the floor, of soaring. But he did not dare to draw the

ace at once. That would have looked too strange. He had to minimize the

risk.

“Look here, Manne,” he said, smilingly. “Supposing I draw a low heart

straight off and you draw a club. Then it would be sudden death. That

would be idiotic extravagance with our precious excitement. We will

continue to draw till each of us has at least one heart and after that

the highest wins.”

“All right,” said Manne. His tone had become more and more obviously

indifferent.

Stellan drew the nine of clubs. He saw Manne’s hand hovering over the

cards with cold excitement. But it stopped at the harmless end and drew

the ace of spades.

Next draw. Not even now could Stellan make up his mind to take the ace

of hearts. He drew a card beside it, thinking that Manne, in obedience

to some psychological law, would try his luck at the other end. He drew

the two of clubs.

Manne drew the knave of hearts. A cry escaped him. It sounded as if he

had hurt himself.

Stellan had not drawn a heart yet. Now he had to take it. He felt

strangely frightened. It seemed as if he were about to put his hand into

somebody else’s purse. He felt as if all his fellow officers were

sitting round him staring at his fingers. “No, damn it, what am I really

doing,” he thought. Then he pulled himself together. “Bah—you must throw

out ballast—keep afloat. And nobody knows!”

He turned up the ace.

Manne leaned back in his chair with a little tired smile, a smile of

sad, weary, pathetic relief.

“Congratulations,” he muttered, “congratulations. Fate was right that

time, perfectly right.”

They smoked for a moment in silence. Stellan wanted to say something

encouraging but could not get the words over his lips. It was Manne who

took up the thread again:

“I say, Stellan, don’t you sometimes shudder at life ... and yourself?”

“When some excitement is over, I sometimes feel discomfort....”

Manne’s voice sounded childishly pleading:

“Yes, but Stellan, have you never experienced moments when you really

shudder at yourself ... at all the miserable and damnable things one has

done?”

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

Marine looked at him with a mien in which for the first time there was

something of a stranger.

“You are a bit of a barbarian after all, my dear Stellan,” he mumbled,

“You have a queer insensibility on which to fall back. I am damned if I

know how it is but I have never been able to _will_ anything when I have

been with you. But I will tell you this much, I should never have

entered into this folly if I had not made up my mind beforehand to

escape from it all. It’s disquieting to play for a living human

being.... No, away with it all....”

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

mumbled Stellan coldly.

“No, old boy, of course you can’t, but that’s not the point. I have felt

the whole time that this was impossible. You don’t understand what a

human being can feel like, Stellan. I played only because you proposed

it. For twenty years I have not done anything else but what you

proposed. I am a wretch. And you, Stellan, what are you? Imagine! I have

known you for so long and yet I don’t even know that. It’s strange, but

tonight ... I almost seem to catch a glimpse of you, after all. Yes, you

are one of those who succeed in everything. You remain a Selamb. And all

the same I am somehow sorry for you, Stellan. Yes, I feel damned sorry

for you, because, you see, there is something in life that you would

never understand if you lived to be a hundred....”

Manne had never been known to make so long a speech before. Stellan

stood up and patted him on the shoulders.

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

“That’s right ... ready for a rest,” muttered Manne, and gave Stellan a

hand which at first was limp, but afterwards pressed hard the hand of

his friend.

Thus they separated.

If Manne had realized, about ten years earlier, all he realized that

night, his life would perhaps have been shaped differently.

Stellan did not go to bed immediately. The genial mists of sleep seemed

to have flown into the infinite distance. He stood in the moonlight

leaning against the stone parapet of the balcony and felt how its chill

mounted from his hands to his chest. His thoughts multiplied

mechanically and spread like hoar frost. He thought of his own life. “I

have been an incurable gambler,” he thought. “Well, what of it—it

requires courage after all, that flirtation with Fate. You can say what

you like but I have been a dare-devil. Chance has been my God and I have

not betrayed him....”

Cold and penetrating a voice returned the answer he had expected all the

time: “Not until tonight. You marked the cards. You were frightened,

Stellan Selamb, frightened....”

Stellan was not, for the moment, thinking of Manne, whom he had seduced

into gambling, from whom he had won, and whom he now knew to be

destitute. No, he only heard the voice that had called him afraid: So

cold and selfish can conscience be.

“No, I was not at all frightened,” he protested. “The fact is that I at

last perceived my own stupidity. What the devil is the use of relying on

chance. Chance is the fool of necessity, nothing else. And we have been

the fools of the fool. If everything is a mathematical certainty what

the deuce does it matter if I dig my nail into an ace of hearts!”

But it is dangerous to betray one’s God even if he is a fool. The

pitiless voice was not silenced: “You stole your friend’s last chance,

Stellan Selamb, you are no longer a gambler, you are a thief, a cowardly

thief.”

Stellan shuddered. That is the worst that can happen to a man of his

stamp—to doubt his own courage. He discovers all at once all the things

he has neglected to be afraid of. The stone parapet felt dreadfully

cold. It positively made his hands stiff. But he could not let go. The

moon seemed to breathe a silent, cold threat. What lies were told about

the moon? A dead world! The death’s head from space grinned into his

face. Stellan suddenly looked round with an uncertain look. Behind him

rose the high white façade like a wall of snow. It struck a chill into

his back. And behind it slept the woman without a future, the woman

whose bosom was a tomb. Was it not almost suicide to take such a half

dead creature to wife?

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

only a ghost?”

Yes, the moment of agony had come to Stellan Selamb as it comes to

everybody. He felt a cruel fear. But it was not the fear that is the

beginning of wisdom. He had gracefully skated on the outside edge on the

smooth ice of prejudices and fictions. But now he had fallen through

into deep reality. “Ugh—this seems to be bottomless! Yes, the world is

as deep as my fears.”

* * * * *

Stellan came down late the following morning and found Count Lähnfeldt

in an evident bad temper at Captain von Strelert’s sudden and

unceremonious departure.

But out on the parapet of the steps Elvira sat already impatiently

waiting for her ride. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders:

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

retreat, it was precipitate flight.”

The morning sun and the ride helped Stellan to recover himself. After

the ghostly visions of the night he enjoyed feeling Cæsar’s fine

shoulders working beneath him. The coolness of the rushing air around

his forehead and temples mingled exquisitely with the gentle innocent

warmth of the beautiful, gleaming body of the horse. Stellan did not

feel exactly tired, only strangely unsubstantial and fragile.

They were riding in silence and he kept a little behind. He could not

understand his feelings yesterday in the park. No, today he looked at

her more critically than ever. Even during the ride when she appeared to

greater advantage than otherwise he found in her something attenuated,

tense, unsexed, that left his instincts cold and unmoved. But that did

not worry him now. It was rather a relief. It somehow made the thing

easier. For one always feels it is easier to reach a goal that one does

not long for too intensely. And it was high time. Tomorrow the rest of

the shooting party was due to arrive, and then it might be difficult to

find an opportunity.

Stellan tried to imagine how his rejected predecessors had behaved under

similar circumstances. Of course they had stopped her in a narrow

concealed forest path where the horses had been forced close together

and were caressing each other’s noses in the twilight of the pines. And

then they had avowed their intentions in the traditional style and

received a shrug of the shoulders for an answer.

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

He chose a moment when they were stopped by a floating bridge which was

open to let pass a sand barge that was just being slowly towed through.

His tone was as cold as possible:

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

She really looked surprised.

“A shoot in Africa?”

“Yes, up the Nile, for instance. To shoot hippopotamuses, crocodiles,

lions. You get a licence in Cairo and hire a boat, a comfortable

house-boat, and a few niggers.”

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

the moon....”

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

“Well ... perhaps....”

“Would you like to try it with me?”

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

“Not if we got married....”

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

hard, almost shrill.

“I am ... an invalid....”

“And I am ruined....”

A moment before Stellan had never meant to say anything of the kind; he

only had a clear feeling that he must be absolutely unsentimental. But

he did not regret it. A brutal sincerity may sometimes be the most

refined of lies.

The barge had at last passed through and sailed on. Stellan continued in

a different and more passionate tone:

“I don’t seek any repetition of my life’s former adventures. What is

most exquisite in you, Elvira, is that you are ... free. Heaven protect

me from those women who only breathe the nursery. No, there is a

different and more robust air about you, an air in which one can

breathe. I have never dreamt of such courage in a woman as you showed up

in the rigging of the balloon. I sincerely believe that we together

might do something bold and great with our lives.”

“To begin with, we should make father furious,” she said in a voice that

did not sound at all distressed at the prospect. Then she suddenly

turned her horse and started off homewards at a sharp gallop.

Stellan followed silent and pale, with lips pressed tight together,

without knowing what to think. It was exactly the same feeling as he had

in the presence of the roulette ball. Through his head a ridiculous

thought flashed. “Be bold and take your courage in both hands. I never

talked about courage till I began to doubt it. And now just because I am

afraid I shall fling down my courage as if it were the ace of trumps in

the highest suit. It will be a continuation of yesterday’s little

cheating game.”

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

events of the night....

Not until they had arrived at the broad steps did the whirling ball

stop. Then the princess of the palace reined in her horse and graciously

stretched out her hand with a quick nervous smile:

“Well, all right then....”

Stellan did not kiss her riding glove. In front of the groom he bent

quickly forward and pressed his lips to her cheek.

She kept her countenance.

“Well, one can still live, even with a little self-contempt,” he

thought, when of her own accord she put her arm through his on the

steps. He was right. Nothing really improves your chances better in the

game of life.

Elvira was right in saying her father would be furious. The little man

positively swelled with wounded dignity, when Stellan came to ask for

his daughter’s hand. Elvira hastened to point out that she was of age

and could do as she liked, but then he threatened to cast her off, to

disinherit her. Yes, he would give all he possessed to the House of

Nobles. She tore his heart to pieces when she reminded him in a dry tone

that all he possessed came from her mother and that she had her own

inheritance from her mother. To be the head of the noble family of

Lähnfeldt, and to hear such words from a degenerate plebeian daughter

was truly terrible. He summoned to his assistance all the great departed

of the castle to fight his fight against his blind and irreverent

daughter. He painted in wonderful colours the brilliant and

distinguished future she was thoughtlessly flinging away. He threatened

to descend on her wedding day into the big porphyry coffin in the crypt

below the Church.

Goodness only knows if Elvira would have had the strength to struggle

on, had not the old man’s mad and obstinate resistance suddenly received

a blow. A few weeks later a scandal occurred in society that put the

Count’s superstitious belief in the aristocrat to a severe test.

His own choice, Baron Manne von Strelert, Captain of the Horse Guards,

had shot himself after having forged Count Lähnfeldt’s signature on a

bill for twenty thousand crowns. Then the lord of Trefvinge at last gave

in, sighing. Poor Manne had served Stellan even unto death....

Where Manne had hidden those lost twenty thousand crowns was never quite

cleared up. But amongst his fellow officers there was some talk about

“The Glove,” having taken fine new business premises immediately after

his death and having considerably increased her business.

Stellan was married at the end of November. There was a splendid

ceremony in Church with many decorations and uniforms. Peter was

promised higher interest on his loans on the condition that he was ill

and absent from the celebrations.

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

aged.

The pair set out immediately for Africa for their shoot.

While the rice pattered against the window of the reserved carriage

decorated with flowers, people outside on the platform whispered to each

other that there was not much risk in this couple penetrating into

Africa, as everybody knew that nothing could happen to the bride.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

V

+WASTE+

The Selamb stratagem had succeeded with Tord and his wife. A couple of

years had passed without anything being heard from them. Stellan could

celebrate his wedding without the slightest admixture of bohemianism.

And Tord had not again exercised his temperament in the press.

Everything was quiet and the pair had evidently settled for good out

there by the sea.

But then a communication arrived at Selambshof, signed Tord of Järnö, in

which Peter was enjoined in angry and haughty tones immediately to

procure more money.

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

had happened.

First of all they had of course built beyond their means in the wildest

manner. When Tord and Dagmar one still and radiant April day paid their

first visit to Järnö, they, of course, proudly ignored the insipid,

idyllic southern glen with its little red tenant’s cottage and rushed up

amongst the sparse stunted pines on the hill above. On the highest, most

exposed point, where there was a view over both the bay and the sea,

they stopped:

“This is where the house shall stand!”

And it must be built of thick, round logs with a covered verandah, and a

dragon’s head and open fireplace. An eagle’s eyrie on the cliff it was

to be. Tord made the drawings himself. But not a tree must be felled on

Järnö, so all the timber must be brought in. Labour might probably have

been found on the islands round about if they had not been in such a

hurry. But they had to get workmen from town. And terribly troublesome

and expensive it was to trail the heavy logs from the pier up the steep

hill, where there was not even a path.

Anyhow, towards the middle of the summer the grating of the saws and the

blows of the hammers were heard.

Meanwhile Tord and Dagmar lived a glorious tent life on a meadow by the

sea. They sailed in their new-built boat, swam, took sunbaths and ran

about naked like savages on the rocks to the great amusement of the

workmen up on top.

One day Tord covered Dagmar all over with fine clay taken from the

bottom of the bay and she stood there in shining blue on the

shell-covered sand, like a statue. Mattson the bailiff came walking down

between the juniper bushes with an unfinished oar on his shoulders. She,

however, stood still and laughed aloud:

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

Mattson?”

Mattson blinked his eyes and walked on, shaking his grey head at such

shamelessness. He wondered in his own mind what sort of gentlefolk had

come out to Järnö.

After dinner they went up towards the hill to see if their house was

growing. Tord always had a bottle under his arm, and when work was

finished the men were treated all round to a drink. Neither he nor

Dagmar despised the glass. These little festivities were not exactly

ceremonious, for the men soon discovered that they had no need to choose

their words. Dagmar laughed and Tord imitated their phrases as soon as

the drink began to affect him. It was wonderfully easy to learn their

language. “I am studying the people,” he thought, “I look straight

through their simple minds. I will make something out of it some day,

something uncommonly fresh and piquant....”

But then it grew suddenly silent as the weary workmen staggered down to

sleep in the bailiff’s barn. And with the silence it seemed as if space

had suddenly become a deep vortex. And the evening was cruelly cold and

green over the serrated edges of the black forests in the west. Then it

was a comfort to have spirit in your body. Tord threw back his head, a

little too much back, he almost toppled over. “I am a poet,” he thought.

“It is I, Tord Selamb, who am pleased to interpret the mysterious

meaning of the dull song of the ground swell. The sea, the clouds, the

cliffs are mine, and I do with them as I like. Wait till I give myself

up to it. Then I shall produce a hymn, something powerful, rude,

infernal, something of nature’s elemental beauty....”

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

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

soft.

Towards autumn the eyrie in the cliffs was ready. It was visible from

afar and became at once an excellent and recognized landmark for sailors

both out at sea and in the bay. There was a large, high hall and a

couple of small rooms with folding beds. Tord furnished them with

reindeer skins, elk horns, Lapplanders’ knives, guns, axes and ice

hooks. And over the door a bear’s skull glinted ghostlike in the

twilight.

They had made a secret arrangement with the old gardener at Selambshof,

the philosopher in the neglected garden, and he used to come out as

their only servant. He had been a sailor before he started growing

cabbages and he felt a longing for the sea. His work was to carry water,

make log fires, and open tins of preserves.

Meanwhile the Mattsons down in the dell lived their quiet workaday life,

tied to the soil, the water, and the seasons of the year. They banked up

their potatoes, cut their hay and their rye, milked their two cows, and

plied their nets and lines, all with silent, disapproving side-glances

at the queer folk on the hill.

As long as there was summer and sunshine and the air vibrated with the

hammer blows on his cliff fortress, Tord was contemptuous of the silent

disapproval that crawled about on its ridiculous daily round somewhere

below his feet. But now it was autumn, silent, still, darkening autumn,

far away from the noise and the lights of the town. And Tord began by

and by to realize that the Mattsons were in their neighbourhood.

One evening he took a bottle in his pocket and climbed down into the

valley: “I will feel that devil’s pulse,” he thought.

Mattson sat in his workshop carving:

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

“Thank you, sir, but I don’t care about anything strong in the middle of

the week like this.”

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

The old man thoughtfully turned a piece of lilac wood in his hand before

he began to work with his knife:

“I am making pins for a rake.”

“Now, for the winter?”

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

idle....”

That was one for Tord. He struck at the nettles outside the door with

his stick. The calm in Mattson’s eyes irritated him. Both sea and sky

became commonplace beside that miserable plodding. What was the use of

the autumn coming and the leaves falling and the darkness and loneliness

when Mattson sat carving rake pins all the same?

“I will pay you back for that, old fellow,” thought Tord. And he longed

for an autumn storm, a real three-day autumn gale. Especially when he

had his nets out.

Then came the autumn ploughing. Nobody possessed beasts of burden out

here by the sea, but Mattson’s neighbours came sailing in with their

wives. And then they yoked themselves to the plough. Mattson’s wife also

took part and pulled, though she was so old, but Mattson drove. Furrow

after furrow they ploughed in the drizzling rain with tough sustained

persistence.

Tord ran into the forest to escape seeing it. But he found no peace, he

had to go back to the ploughing. For a moment he stood behind a juniper

bush and stamped with anger, then he suddenly rushed out into the clay:

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

business.”

They stopped and stared at him:

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

Mattson.

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

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

“Oh, about three bushels of rye,” mumbled the bailiff, and wiped the

perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. “The soil is

good.”

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

And Tord took out some bank-notes.

But Mattson looked at his neighbour and shook his head:

“No, sir, you mustn’t make fun of an old man. I have ploughed this soil

for forty years, I have. You put your money back again.”

Upon which Mattson made a sign to the drawers, who put their backs into

the work again and continued their furrow as if nothing had happened.

From that day on Tord hated all that was Mattson’s. Incessantly he was

running up against the object of his annoyance. Mattson’s cock woke him

in the mornings with his obstinate moralisings on the dung heap. When he

went down to his boat he swore because he had to dive under the old

man’s nets, and on the juniper slope he was irritated by the stupid

bleating of the sheep. In the midst of his land he was again reminded of

Mattson by a lot of troublesome fences, cleverly built up of stones,

branches and thorns. Such things irritate a free man strolling about on

his own property. Tord did not step over them, no, he put his foot on

the rubbish and enjoyed hearing it crash down, and he stepped through as

proudly as if he were stepping over the walls of Jericho. But the next

time he came strolling along he found to his fury that the fence had

been repaired as if by magic.

It was work, patience, foresight, civilization that Tord hated in

Mattson. This hatred occupied him fully the whole of the autumn. If he

sat down to write and could not get into the right mood it was Mattson’s

fault. If he got drunk it was as a protest against the sobriety of that

damned old blockhead. When at last the gale came, Tord had his great

day. A real raging south-easterly gale so that the old man could not get

out and save his catch but had to go about waiting anxiously to haul in

his torn nets full of seaweed and rubbish.

One day Tord flew into a real rage. One of his dogs, a big ferocious

mastiff, had caught his leg in a fox trap which the bailiff persisted in

putting out in spite of Tord’s prohibition. There was a terrible scene

and Tord would probably have struck the old man in his own kitchen if

Dagmar had not come between them. But from that moment Tord swore

inwardly that Mattson should leave Järnö. He only waited for quarter

day, which was the first of December, to give him notice.

You can imagine his malicious joy when the whole first week of December

had passed without Mattson bringing the rent.

The old man only stared when at last he came with his poor notes and was

told that he was to leave at once.

“I have lived here forty years,” he mumbled calmly, “And I have always

been accustomed to pay some time in December after I have been into town

and sold my salted herrings and mutton.”

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

Järnö.

Tord stood there grey in the face shaking the lease in his hand. “Now I

suppose I shall see something else than that damned calm in your eyes,”

he thought.

“You have not paid in due time, and now you have got to clear out. Järnö

is mine, you see, and I don’t want you here any longer.”

Mattson only shook his head. He went home with a very thoughtful

expression, and the same day he hauled up the sail of his big boat to go

into town to speak to the storekeeper and to people versed in law, in

order to find out the rights of the matter. But his wife came up to

Dagmar crying. And Dagmar begged for her and scolded Tord and said that

he was disgusting, but it was no use. And then she cried too, because

she was afraid of the loneliness, when she would be the only woman on

the island. But Tord rushed out and stalked about alone the whole of the

cold winter day with his lame dog and would not be mollified.

Mattson returned from his journey with a gloomy face, and offered to

compromise by a payment of damages. Yes, he would even try to pay a

higher rent. But Tord only shouted that he wanted to be left in peace.

The following day Mattson came again, and this time he was humble and

alarmed, and begged as if for his life. And now it was a joy for Tord to

look into his eyes. Yes, he had a great and lovely revenge on all the

prudence and calmness of the world. He escaped with a cruel feeling of

pleasure from the idler’s secret feeling of inferiority.

“No!” he cut him short. “I won’t move. You’ll find here, Mattson, no use

for your rake pins. Clear out now!”

Shortly before Christmas a couple of sand barges arrived at the pier,

and took on board Mattson’s corn, cattle, furniture and tools. It cut

one’s heart to see the kitchen table, the folding bed, the plants, moved

out into the winter cold. Tord stood up on his hill-top and watched. He

meant to be defiant and hardhearted and enjoy the ice-cold wind. But as

a matter of fact he was frightened and felt sick.

Then four steady and determined men from the barges came up and demanded

on Mattson’s account a round sum for the autumn sowing, manure, newly

planted fruit trees, and improvements to piers, fences, outhouses. Tord

paid without bargaining and with a certain tremulous eagerness.

Mattson did not show himself except on a receipt.

Then one of the barges set off with the old couple on board. The other

remained a little behind. There, hidden among the alders by the shore,

stood a powerful youth and peered up towards the hill. When he saw Tord

set out for a walk, he followed him unperceived. He chose a quiet,

suitable place where there were no witnesses. There he suddenly sprang

out and gave Tord a blow on the back of his head, so that he fell

unconscious for a time and awoke covered with blood and with two teeth

missing. The barge had already disappeared, swallowed up by the grey

ice-cold winter twilight across the bay.

That was the first time Tord had suffered rough, bodily ill-treatment.

It brought out again all the timid hatred of mankind that his marriage

had seemed for a moment to thrust aside.

He came home late and said he had fallen and struck against a tree

stump. Dagmar could not help laughing for a moment at the ridiculous gap

in his teeth. But she stopped short when she saw his expression, and her

laugh turned to sobs. She had evil presentiments, Dagmar, and they were

to come true....

Tord had not so many opportunities of kicking down Mattson’s fences and

revelling in his new eaglelike loneliness. It soon appeared that he must

go and buy provisions if they were not to starve to death when the ice

came and it was too thick to get through with a boat, and not thick

enough to walk on. They had, as a matter of fact, cut away the ground

beneath their feet by turning Mattson out. Where were they now to

procure milk, fish, meat and wood? Tord sailed about to the neighbouring

islands and told the peasants to bring him these necessities, but they

were annoyed at his treatment of Mattson and therefore could not spare

him even a herring.

Tord was to learn to his annoyance that Mattson with his foresight and

experience had stood like a rock between him and a thousand worries and

difficulties. But this only strengthened him in his angry resolve to

help himself. In a furious north wind he and the old gardener sailed

twelve miles to the nearest store and there he bought a boatload of

preserved food, ham, potatoes, flour and lamp oil. They had to hack

their way out of the harbour through ice half an inch thick, frozen

during the night, so it was high time....

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

At the end of February the old gardener fell on the very slippery ground

when he was carrying water from the well, and broke his leg above the

knee. Fortunately the ice bore just then, so they were able to get him

into hospital. They could not tempt another servant out to the eagle’s

nest, so now they had to shift for themselves. Tord was not able to

climb the hill with water and wood, so they had to move into Mattson’s

humble cottage for the winter. In the spring Tord had soundings made but

they found no water up on the hill: so he had to bring out more workmen

to construct a proper road up. All this cost money—so much that even

Tord realized he could not go on for ever. Then he bought fishing and

shooting implements and a few goats in order to help him out, and he

took to cattle breeding. But now for the first time he really missed

Mattson’s experience.... He did not know where to try for the cod. He

did not know how to deal with a tangled net. The ducks flew past when he

lay out in the skerries. And the goats soon dried up; and besides, they

became so wild that he could not catch them. So during the course of the

summer these means of support failed him, and he had to turn to

expensive preserved food again.

Dagmar had not much time to run about naked in the sunshine this summer.

There was not so much left that was “beautiful and wonderful and

lovely.” But she had not quite lost her gypsy-like boisterousness and

freedom from care, though when there was no alcohol left and the bad

weather really set in, it might happen that she grew sulky and

quarrelsome. Once towards the autumn when she had had special cause for

anxiety she mentioned town, but Tord flew into such a rage that she was

frightened and flew out into the kitchen with her cards and her pipe.

And Tord strolled about the shores for weeks cogitating in dull anger on

the shameless weakness and faithlessness of women.

The whole of this winter Tord went about plaguing himself with his money

worries, so that he had no energy left for anything else. The great book

that he was to write, his masterpiece, his hymn to nature, weighed him

down like a dead weight. It was like loose ballast which only increased

the lurch, when he inclined to melancholy. Nature swayed around him like

a helpless chaos. He had moments of hatred of the frequent gales that

would never yield a song. He grew furious with the eternal, rolling,

breaking seas whose rhythm he could not catch.

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

Towards the spring he at last wrote the letter to Peter. It had cost him

weeks of effort and disgust, such a terror had he of everything in the

nature of business. His haughty insolence was only an armour to shield

him against his lack of confidence, his fear, and his suspicions.

Peter had not expected such news so soon. He rubbed his hands. And he

took good care not to show the letter to his brother and sisters. This

time he meant to settle the business alone. Peter delayed his reply for

a whole fortnight in order to humble Tord. Then he came sailing out

himself to Järnö, not in his own cutter, but in a humble little

fisherman’s boat. It was in the twilight of an April day. Nobody seemed

to have noticed him up in the big, grey, log house. The island looked

completely deserted. Peter took the opportunity of looking round a

little. Neglect and waste struck him like a cold blast. Broken down

fences, unploughed fields, empty cattle sheds, plundered outhouses with

half open doors hanging on a single hinge. Not a cow or a pig or a hen.

He scratched his chin thoughtfully, but his expression was not of

discontent, on the contrary! “I see, that’s how things are,” he thought,

“I shall escape cheaper than I had thought. Why give a lot of money to

people who can’t look after anything?” And he mentally lowered his bid

for the remainder of Tord’s shares in Selambshof by several tens of

thousand crowns.

That neglect cost Tord Selamb dear.

At last Peter struggled up the hill panting, and knocked at the door; he

was greeted by an infernal barking from the brutes inside.

Tord had been watching Peter the whole time from the window, but had not

cared to go and meet him. Such is the custom of the skerries! And then,

he did not want to appear too eager, poor fellow!

The first evening they did not talk business, but they drank the whiskey

Peter had brought. But he broke up early. He wanted to get up early to

shoot duck.

So at dawn they lay out at Kallö skerries, which belonged to Järnö. In

front of them lay the grey sea with smooth patches to the lea of white

drifting ice floes, where the little waves lapped the point of land and

the silly eider decoys nodded in their wooden way and pretended to be

alive. But here Tord’s horror of business lifted a little. He felt a

grim, fierce kind of excitement. “This is the struggle for life in all

its hellish nakedness,” he thought, not without satisfaction. “Here I

lie in the icy cold on a primitive rock in an arctic sea and wait for

the opportunity to lure and kill.” Under the open sky with a gun in his

hand he felt hardened and reckless, capable of any struggle. Yes, he

even became intoxicated at the crazy thought that Peter was in some way

in his power out here in the wilderness of Järnö. Where it was a matter

of deceiving himself he could be a poet right enough, poor Tord!

But Peter lay there in his greasy old fur coat and peeped at Tord with

his cunning little bear eyes. He appreciated those little, nervous

twitchings which suddenly stiffened into defiance. “But how mad is he?”

thought Peter. “How far can I go?” He made little frightened delicious

guesses, and he felt much easier in the region of his pocketbook.

Then a flight of ducks approached from the south. It looked at first

like a dark, billowing ribbon against a low, bright rift in a cloud.

Then it quickly became a stormy, vibrating wave. The wind held its

breath before this space-devouring speed, which made sea and sky shrink.

The living wave swung around in a curve towards the decoys. A confusion

of wings beat the air to froth around their heavy bodies. The ducks did

not seem to want to descend. All the same Tord had time to let go his

two barrels into the flight. Peter’s gun boomed a little later. His furs

were too heavy for him. The old gardener who lay concealed with the boat

was able to bring in three birds. “Of course, one can get a shot in when

Peter is here,” thought Tord, with a certain bitterness. The fact was

that he had never had the patience to wait when he was alone. But Peter

loudly praised Tord’s shot and confessed that he himself had missed.

They shot quite a lot of eiders and also longtailed ducks later on in

the day. Peter was lost in admiration. He warmly praised the fine

shooting and the wonders of Järnö generally. He himself was a

heavy-witted, clumsy, impossible rustic whilst Tord appeared to be a

master shot and a splendid sportsman. And it ended in Tord, under the

influence of the several drinks, indulging in the wildest bragging of

his fierce, free, eagle’s life betwixt sea and cliff.

Then they returned home.

Dinner was quite festive. Dagmar had, in honour of the occasion, put on

some gaudy silk rags and had powdered her nose. It was of no importance

that her fingers were sooty. Tord’s excited pride derived new strength

from the burgundy, the brandy, and the whiskey. He clenched his fists

and stalked to and fro between his bear skins and elk heads in the high

resounding hall. The firelight from the burning logs flickered over his

jersey, Lapp shoes and untrimmed beard. He showed his contempt, with

terrible oaths, of the miserable herds that thronged the streets out

there in the town. He was the lonely, free, scornful ... superman. He

recognized no other relations and friends than the sea, the wind and

infinite space.

Peter also seemed to be very far from claiming the honour of

relationship. He shrank up in his seat. He enjoyed doing so before the

magnificent Tord. He was not well, he was dusty, worried, tired.

Business worried him. There was no difficulty in making oneself small if

only one’s pocketbook grew fat in the process.

They did not talk of Tord’s affairs.

Three days of constant drinking passed. Then Peter suddenly got it into

his head that he must go back home at once. He had a great big bill

falling due the following day. He groaned over that bill as he was

packing up his things. He had still not said a word of Tord’s affairs.

“You begin, old man,” he thought.

Tord stood there with a sick headache and bit his lips. “Cash! Cash!

Cash!” throbbed in his head. It was sickening to talk money after all

his wild, eagle-like boasting. He caught hold of Peter’s arm in a way

that rather resembled pinching:

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

for my shares?”

Peter shrank more than ever, smaller and smaller until he was like a

little grey mouse:

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

money.”

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

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

her hair down:

“What a polite host!” she laughed.

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

For once Tord said something sensible.

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

the shares.”

Peter suddenly became very thoughtful. He sat down at a table and began

to calculate in a small greasy notebook:

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

mumbled.

Tord had an instinctive feeling that his last proposal had been the best

one, and that he ought to talk to his sisters and brother. But he did

not stick to it, so incurably lazy was he.

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

excitement.

Peter writhed. He seemed quite in despair.

“I might risk about fifty thousand.”

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

received before.

“Damn you!” he shouted.

Peter began again with an injured expression to pack his bag. And Tord

asked Dagmar to bring out his town clothes.

“Sixty-five thousand,” Peter suddenly ejaculated.

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

Then Peter felt a wild joy. But it was deep, deep-seated. Not a spark of

it came to the surface. He took out his shapeless pocketbook and slowly

counted out seventy-five notes of a thousand crowns each.

“That is all I have with me.”

Tord suddenly closed. Such is the power of cash over weak minds. And of

course he could not know that Peter had exactly the same amount in his

other pocketbook.

But he had scarcely signed Peter’s paper and parted with his shares when

he felt that he had been tricked.

“Clear out now, you cheat!” he shouted. “And don’t come near Järnö

again, because if you do you will get a bullet in your head.”

And Peter quickly disappeared with the old gardener, who was to sail him

over to the steamer. He calculated that he had earned about two hundred

thousand on this stroke of business. But it had been too easy. He felt

almost uncomfortable as he sat there huddled up on the lee side and

looked out at the calm April day. Yes, there was something uncanny in a

Selamb having such wretched ideas of business.

Tord did not go into town to put his seventy-five thousand in the bank.

He kept them out at Järnö. No signing of papers, no hanging over a

counter. The money must not link him to the town, the community.

“Now I am free,” thought Tord, “absolutely free....” He went out to

devour the living spring. Alone like a cock he walked about and

endeavoured to seek inspiration. Yes, now the moment had come when Tord

Selamb would become a poet.

But alas! no notes would come. He had a big grey lump in his chest that

would not melt. His work, his cursed masterpiece simply oppressed him

like a quintessence, a rude microcosm of his vague conceit. There came

cramp, but nothing else. And it was not easy to go about with that cramp

in the wild teeming life of spring....

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

It was already growing summerlike. Tord came to meet it with staring,

feverish eyes and a thin emaciated face. He began to keep to the sea

more and more. It seemed as if the soil burnt his face.

It had been a long, wet, windy day, but towards evening the clouds

lifted a little and it grew calm. Tord rowed out over the great shallow

bay covered with reeds and with only a narrow passage out to the big

buoy. From the wet oars and thwarts arose a damp chill. The shores,

already beginning to look mysterious in the twilight, echoed back the

flapping of the cuckoos’ wings. When Tord bent over the side he could

imagine the brown, tangled swamp of lakeweed down there in the shallow

water. But above him in the cool endless depth of the sky there glowed a

chaos of vanishing cloud, flung out by the storm but now forgotten and

left to the stillness. There were clouds that had stiffened in every

gesture of perplexity, of terror and of suffering, clouds on the

whipping post, clouds on the rack, clouds that had had the “Swedish

draught.” But all seemed to have died in torture.

Mute immeasurable disruption.

Tord rested on his oars. He felt it to the very bottom of his being,

this disruption. The cramp suddenly relaxed within him. He felt a

strange, shivering relief. Then he rowed homewards, but slowly,

carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking everything with his oars.

Afraid to meet anybody, silently as a thief he stole into his house,

crept up to his bed and fell asleep voluptuously tired with the sky

beneath his eyelids.

At dawn he awoke and at once sat down to write with this mute, wild

disruption still within him.

His poetic rapture lasted for several weeks. It was a wonderful joy at

last to be able to pour it forth, to reveal himself, to shout out all he

felt, to take revenge on all the thousand impressions that had weighed

him down to earth with their luxuriant wealth.

When Tord was not writing he wandered about with staring eyes and

careful, groping steps, as if he were fragile and afraid to fall to

pieces. If Dagmar spoke to him he told her to shut up, though in an

anxious, almost gentle voice.

Tord had already filled a tremendous packet of notepaper when his

imagination suddenly dried up one long, gloomy, wet day. He sat down to

copy it out, but he had some difficulty in finding the way in the maze

of his own inspiration. What did they really mean, all those strange

figures resembling a barometric curve during a storm or the seismograph

record registering an earthquake? Certain after-echoes of his

inspiration and an infinite reverence for his own Selambian genius

helped him, however, over the worst. Only here and there a brief humdrum

phrase crept in to make it more intelligible and as a sacrifice to the

philistines.

On an absolutely still, sultry day in July, with distant thunder in the

air, Tord copied out with trembling hand the last line of his poem. Then

he rushed out into the kitchen and tore Dagmar away from the stove,

where she stood in her chemise and an underskirt with her pipe in the

corner of her mouth, cooking sausage for supper. He trailed her with him

into the bedroom, forced her into a chair, pulled down the blind, and

began to read.

It was unrhymed verse, of course, in the shortest possible lines, abrupt

sentences and inarticulate phrases. A collection of exclamations,

questions, curses, shouts of jubilation, all expressive of Tord Selamb’s

relation to woman, the clouds, the sea, the lightning and the eagles.

Tord read with a hoarse, trembling voice. He seemed to whisper the most

extraordinary secrets of his life with a wild emotion. And still, had he

not, in the presence of the uninitiated, been seized already at the very

first line by a terrible doubt? Was this ... was this really poetry? He

looked at his wife above the sheets of papers with the eyes of a beggar,

but of a mad beggar beseeching prostrate adoration.

Dagmar responded rather badly to his expectations. At first she looked a

little embarrassed, almost like a child when its parents speak of

something it should not understand. Then she looked at the door and

mumbled:

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

“Let them burn then, idiot,” shouted Tord. After which he continued his

reading in a more threatening voice.

Dagmar listened again. She sat quite still and good for a long while.

Then her mouth began to twitch quite irresistibly, though she looked

frightened.

Tord then hissed out the following lines:

“In a blue flash of lightning

With a blue hissing sound

Creaking

Manly

Zig-zag

I saw it suddenly

The filth

The original filth

In the recesses of your body ...

Damnation

Unclean one!”

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

Whereupon she burst out laughing just as when Tord came home with his

teeth knocked out, a thoughtless irrepressible feminine laugh, cruel

without malice, pitiless though with no ill-will. But Tord hated her at

this moment, hated her. She laughed! When she ought to have sunk at his

feet, and adored his genius, saved him from doubt! Oh! the weakling’s

dream of power is often far more intense than that of the strong man. It

is not the bad poets who are the least devoted to their verses. Just the

line that most challenges the ridicule of the world is often aglow with

the most intense passion. Just the very wretchedness of the form often

reflects a seriousness from which there has been no deliverance. Yes,

the bad poets are the unborn children of emotion. Their sufferings are

cruel. People seem to them empty, blind, perverse, malevolent. How can

anyone laugh at red, flowing blood? How can anyone help trembling in the

presence of a volcano in eruption?

Tord ran to the door and tore it open. His eyes shrank and his beard

shook when he looked at his wife:

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

place!”

And Dagmar went, without any such refinement as injured pride, but with

her heart suddenly filled with compassion, a sort of slovenly, annoyed

pity.

For several weeks Tord did not open his mouth. He strolled about alone

along his shores or locked himself in to file away at his verse. His

ambition soon discovered the usual solace for the wounds and doubts of

the hermit. “I am too singular, too wildly original and deep,” he

thought. “They can’t understand me. I must fill out my voids, if I want

any followers. I must soften down, moderate and chasten my verse.” So he

sat down with intense suffering to convert his poems to a more human

note: a process which really consisted in his striking out a few oaths

and putting in a few “ands” and “buts” instead of a simple comma.

Then he sent in his revised work to a publisher in Stockholm, this time

taking good care not to read anything to Dagmar. He had to wait a long

time for a reply. Already after the first week he sailed across to the

store for his post. Then he went every second day. As it was a long way,

he spent most of his time with the tiller in his hand. In the end he did

not trouble to sail home, but stayed away in the harbour. And it was as

if the store had become his home.

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

At last one day the storekeeper flung a parcel to him. It contained

Tord’s poems. They had been returned. Pale and trembling with fury he

staggered down to his boat. He did not sail directly home, but roamed

about for several days among the skerries, calling the elements to

witness the shocking injustice he had suffered.

But at last he had to return to his home on the cliff, which he saw

wherever he sailed. His hatred began to long for her, the woman. He must

have somebody to vent his spleen on.

There was something dark, startling and fierce in his face when he

stepped into the hall, without a greeting, and flung himself down on one

of the benches in the wall. He could not even wait for an excuse for a

quarrel. Dagmar only needed to ask him where he had been so long when he

poured a torrent of abuse and accusations over her. She was a stupid,

dirty, greedy animal who couldn’t help pulling a man down and degrading

him. Yes, a short time ago humanity had been a lot of scoundrels who

would not recognize his greatness, now he was pulled down and degraded.

Suffering knows no logic. He wanted to see her suffer and groan and hate

as he himself suffered and groaned and hated. But alas! already long ago

during the loneliness of the cold winter’s evenings he had dulled the

effect of hard words. Dagmar did not even trouble to get angry:

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

Then he rushed up and struck her with his clenched fist on her soft

breast so that she fell to the floor. And with her cry in his ears he

rushed out and sat down in a crack in the hillside. He stared into the

gloomy darkness that lay so close to his eyes and blended the sea and

sky to a lifeless mass. His hand shuddered after having struck something

too soft. But his outburst had not brought him any relief. It was

himself he had struck, himself he had hated because he was not capable

of doing what he wanted to; because he had not the liberating sense of

form; because he was closed off from the great brotherhood of souls. But

his was a selfish self-hatred without any spirit of resignation or

reconciliation. There was not a trace of self-conquest. And until he has

overcome himself a Selamb does not become a poet.

* * * * *

Now Tord sat mostly indoors absorbed in zoology. If he sometimes went

out shooting or fishing he locked up the oars and the sails of the boats

he was not using himself. He was afraid of finding the house empty on

his return.

Already in early childhood Tord had turned to animals. There was

something of the timid idleness of the savage in him. He was too lazy

for most people. Perhaps already then he felt a sentimental attraction

to dumb animals, which was natural in one who himself lacked the power

of expression. Now he fled to them again—in protest. That was his

attitude towards a coarse, degenerate humanity, which did not

understand how to appreciate him. No! crows and common snakes are

better! But Tord’s new devotion to animals was without any

sentimentality. He enjoyed seeing them pursue and hurt each other. He

hunted them and killed them himself without hesitation. And he studied

them—scientifically, as he liked to imagine—in thick folios and with

knife and microscope.

It was a cool and sweet-smelling evening in spring. Tord stood in a

clearing in the open copse and waited for a flight of woodcocks. The

leaves were nicely wrinkled like the fingers of a newborn babe and

shimmered reddish brown in the level sunlight. But Tord bit his lips

together and did not suffer as he did before in the spring. His gun was

his salvation. Now they were coming, flying low over the treetops:

“rrrt! rrrt! pisp!” It was the mating call, the love flight of the male.

Tord threw up his gun and the warm body of the bird fell down among the

tree trunks. He hurried home, eager to examine his bag. The little

bird’s heart still beat when he plunged the knife into it, its fibres

still trembled beneath the glass of the microscope.

It was a knife in the heart of the spring. There was _revenge_ in this

Selambian thirst of knowledge.

* * * * *

But soon Tord’s interest was caught in a quite special way by a branch

of the animal world that he had hitherto overlooked—insects. He became

in his own way a passionate entomologist.

To Tord the study of insects was that of a diabolical collection of

caricatures. Here life and nature unveiled their whole cruelty and

amorality. On most parts of the surface of the earth the spread of

humanity has swept away the most gorgeous forms of wildness and cruelty.

The larger animals seem on the whole rather tame. But the little animals

of the soil and the air our civilization has, for the most part, proudly

passed over. Here theft, parasitism, poison-murder, crude cannibalism,

and the most terrible perversity still rage without check. Tord learnt

to observe and enjoy the jaws of the lion-ant in the treacherous

sandpit, the graceful poisonous thrust of the hymenoptera, the erratic

frenzy of the golden beetle, the horrible life of the burning beetle

amidst putrefaction, the devouring by the female cross spider of the

male after impregnation. Yes, this was a lovely Lilliputian world. The

devilish struggle for existence at first seemed to him a parody on this

miniature scale. But as he penetrated deeper into his mysteries the

elements of parody disappeared and only horror was left. The little

animal males grew in his eyes to gigantic creatures, still more horrible

because of the glistening stiffness of the cutaneous skeleton that made

them resemble living machines. They peopled his dreams with horrible

sights. They laid their parasitical larvæ in the intestines of his

thoughts. They became the pretext and symbol of his new philosophy of

life....

In this way Tord Selamb soon fell into black naturalism. He overlooked

the fact that if, as he supposed, everything was nature, this must also

apply to our human reaction against nature’s cruelty. And that therefore

nature contained within herself the correction of this evil. Horror

itself is in the last resort a promise. There is a profound

contradiction. But these are not Selambian truths.

What lies behind the Selambian egoism is the “blind spot,” the blind

spot of the soul. They are simply insensitive to rays from certain

directions.

During his studies of insect life Tord had a special favourite. That was

the praying cricket, Nature’s most exquisite wonder. With her, his

brooding spirit celebrated its gloomy mass. One dark, sultry August

evening he fell a victim to her charm in old Henri Fabre, the Homer of

insects. Round the lamp there was a restless buzzing of Daddy-Longlegs

and grey night-moths that seemed to be made of dust. He watched them,

with a mixed feeling of voluptuousness and sickness, blind themselves

and burn themselves on the hot lamp funnel. And then he read about the

praying cricket, and how with crossed front legs and lifted head she

seems to assume a pious attitude of prayer beneath the nun’s veil of

folded wings. But as soon as a victim approaches she unveils herself.

Then she resembles a vampire, a flying dragon. Then the scissors of her

crossed legs open, she seizes a victim, much bigger than she herself,

and devours it as quickly as lightning. Of course, she also seizes the

opportunity of devouring the male after mating. But—this is the

exquisite point—it has also been noticed how, during the very act of

copulation, she turns backwards and begins to devour the male’s head.

Yes, she positively devours him whilst the hind part of his body

continues to fulfil the function of sex, till her greed has reached the

most vital organs....

When Tord had come so far, he rose vehemently and rushed in to Dagmar.

His face was pale and wet with perspiration and a mingled expression of

disgust and triumph. And without any preliminaries he flung the love

story of the praying cricket in the face of his wife:

“Do you hear, woman, she eats the male’s head? But he goes on all the

same, just goes on! Say, then, if love is not stronger than death!”

Dagmar did not answer. She did not bother to understand what he was

saying. She did not care a straw for his praying cricket. But she was

frightened at his tone. Yes, from that moment she felt a kind of terror

of Tord Selamb and of life out at Järnö.

------------------------------------------------------------------------