+SHADOW PLAY+
The spring was early that year. Through the windows of the renaissance
hall of the Hill villa the May sunshine flowed calm and warm as in June.
But Hedvig, who was walking to and fro, had still retained her winter
complexion. Yes, the tragic beauty of her face was deathly pale as she
took a few steps to and fro like a prisoner measuring his cell. She
seemed slimmer than ever and was still dressed in black. Like a dark
shadow she glided to and fro, to and fro, across the wine-red
sun-bespattered carpet.
Each time Hedvig came opposite to the little cupboard on the wall where
the telephone was concealed, she stopped a moment with helplessly
hanging hands and a restless, anxious expression. By and by she
approached the spot more and more frequently and it seemed as if an
irresistible force drew her to the telephone. Then she stretched out her
hand to lift the receiver. But then a door banged in the region of the
kitchen and at once she withdrew her hand as if it had been burnt, and
she resumed her restless pacing. Then everything was quiet again and
Hedvig was again at the telephone. In a low unsteady voice she asked for
a number. After which her voice with a tremendous effort rose and became
tense, haughty, commanding:
“May I speak to Mr. Levy?”
But the tension died away in a disappointed, dissatisfied tone,
“I see, not in yet....”
Hedvig resumed her cell-walking. She mumbled to herself and looked if
possible even paler than before. Incessantly she looked at the clock in
despair that the minutes passed so slowly through the silent and sunny
room.
For the second time Hedvig was drawn to the telephone. Now at last he
had come to the office. The cool relief suddenly made her voice
indifferent, hard, businesslike:
“Good-morning! It is Mrs. Hill speaking. I only wanted to remind you of
those mortgages that were to be attended to ... those in....”
Levy’s voice answered over the ’phone, stern and assured, with an
imperceptible note of satisfaction:
“Yes, of course, the mortgages.... Yes, that will be all right.... I
will come out to dinner, _if I may_, then we can talk it over....”
It was not the first time Levy had invited himself to dinner at Hill
villa. Probably in the correct surmise that his client would never be
able to make up her mind to do it.
Hedvig put the receiver down with a shrug of the shoulders, a wretched
false little shrug. She resumed her walking. You could see how she tried
to convince herself that she was quite cool and indifferent now that her
anxiety lest he should forget the mortgages was over.
Her steps halted suddenly in front of one of the patches of sunlight on
the carpet. It looked as if she dared not venture out on that red sea of
light. It looked as if the spring sun, which flooded the large silent
room in ever greater volume, had dazzled and paralysed her.
Good God! What was she to do before dinner? How was she to occupy
herself the whole of this long pitiless radiant spring day!
She found no way out but the usual one—to fly to the shadows. She rang
the bell and ordered her car.
“Shan’t we begin with the open car soon, Madam?” said Ohlesson, the
chauffeur.
“No!”
So the big black covered car ran out to the cemetery. And then Hedvig
sat there on the seat by Percy’s grave, from which she had not allowed
the dry withered funeral wreaths to be removed. Erect, motionless she
sat under her black sunshade, whilst all around the light May green
sparkled and swayed in the broad stream of sunlight. The sun
appropriated even Hedvig’s black silk cloak and made it live and shimmer
with a thousand colours. But her face was only lit up by a faint
reflection from below, from the marble of the tomb.
It was more than a year and a half since Percy had died, but lately
Hedvig had begun to take refuge here again. Here she fought her way back
to the life of shadows, a thin life, a continuation of their life in the
sanatorium. Not that she was able to forget even here on the seat in the
cemetery all that consumed her:—money, business and everything connected
with it. No, but she thought of it with less anxiety. Rather with a
solemn and pious feeling that it was her duty to watch over what her
dear Percy had left behind....
There was something strange about Percy Hill. He had been a poor
invalid, and yet his character had been so free from any mean fears that
even long after his death his memory acted as a sedative. As Hedvig sat
there her heart filled with quiet gratitude that she had been given the
joy of sacrificing some years of her life to him. She no longer suffered
for having lied to him and cheated him in his last wish. She had only
been the nurse who prevented her poor patient from injuring himself. Her
conscience closed its eyes to the circumstances attending her patient’s
death.
No, there was no danger in sitting there whispering to her memory, that
sentimental liar. Her egoism was not frightened of the past, but of the
future.
What a challenge to all the powers of the spirit, this feeble, mute,
half-concealing lie in the midst of the clear sunshine! It seemed as if
the light in sudden anger had surged around her with increased
intensity; had sent a fresh wave of burning restlessness through her
body. She rose and seemed to grope after the receding shadows. Then with
dazzled, burning eyes she staggered along the cemetery path. Outside the
gate her motor hummed, impatient to rush her back to all that waited for
her ... business ... Levy ... the future...!
“I won’t change,” Hedvig thought in the car. She found there was
something safe, reassuring, in the fact that she did not intend to put
on different clothes. But when she came home she did so all the same.
And she sat long before the mirror. And then she stood in the window
looking down the road.
At last there came a car and Levy got out.
“Taxi,” thought Hedvig, as if she could blunt the point of a threat with
that prosaic reflection. Levy ran quickly up the stairs. “Jew,” she
thought, as if by doing so she had kept something at bay. But all the
same she had to force herself to walk slowly, really slowly, out into
the hall to receive her guest.
Levy had brought some yellow roses.
“If there were black roses, I should give you them instead,” he said.
Hedvig forgot the roses on a table in the hall on purpose. She had a
sensation that he flushed up for a moment beneath his even pallor.
There were primroses and lilac on the dining-table.
“Those flowers don’t suit you,” he said with a quick bitter smile. Then
he turned to the maid who was serving: “Take away those flowers and
fetch my roses out of the hall!”
He seemed quite at home.
Then Levy threw himself into business and made good progress from the
start.
Levy had made money live for Hedvig, too much so! At first she had
regarded her large fortune as a safe protection against all the demands
and dangers of life. She sat huddled up in the middle of her gold heap
where nothing could reach her. But Levy had thrown out his hands:
“Good God, what money! What a heavy shapeless mass! What an old,
moss-grown stump of a fortune! For twenty years it has had to take care
of itself. For twenty years not a single experienced hand has touched
it. It looks like a fund for widows and orphans.”
“You mean that the investments are safe as a rock,” mumbled Hedvig. “But
surely that is a good thing!”
“Yes, but the interest, Mrs. Hill, the interest! You don’t get much more
than three and a half per cent. and you could get six. You allow a
hundred thousand a year to run through your fingers. That is to make
yourself a laughing stock to God and man. As an expert I can’t bear to
see such an absurdity. Allow me to make some dispositions for you. You
can submit them for the approval of your brothers.”
Hedvig worried and pondered long before she said yes. But the hundred
thousand were stronger than her fears. And thus Levy had lured her into
his world, the money-world. She began by questioning him on all
occasions in a woman’s way, ignorantly, persistently, suspiciously. And
he would reply. He answered not only patiently but willingly, quickly,
ardently, enthusiastically. He explained the whole economic mechanism of
credits, bills, mortgages, debentures, shares. The whole of this finely
balanced system of suspicion and confidence made a deep impression on
Hedvig. To her over-cautious spirit it seemed like balancing on the edge
of the abyss. His quick purposeful assurance seemed to her something
supernatural, almost creepy. But she had to hear more and more. Oh, it
was deliciously exciting to hear Levy talk of money. It was only now she
began to grasp what money was. And she felt as if she were in a swing,
feeling giddy at the fact of owning so much.
Yes, Levy’s interest became more and more eager. Hedvig had already been
lured from her gold-heap where she had enjoyed the twilight. Her money
was no longer like a wall protecting her against the world. No, it was
instead a medium in which she moved about. It formed the thousand
connections, the tentacles and nerves thanks to which she at once felt
what was happening in the town, in the country, in Europe, in the whole
world.
Levy tore Hedvig with him half way into life, at least into that kind of
life which consists of movement and business. He showed to her confined
and numbed egoism another kind of egoism that was world-embracing,
intensely awake and technically brilliant. He was the personification of
that egoism. It was something different from Percy’s laissez-aller and
cool, submissive irony. It was wheels that rolled. It was diamond cut
diamond. It was power, destiny. Hedvig sometimes became quite frightened
at his passionate discourse, frightened as if she had come out into the
strong daylight without a dark corner to which to retreat. And she no
longer had her money to protect her. It had become his confederate, it
betrayed her to him, it was in love with him. Hedvig had no way out but
to assume a forced reserve, a sudden cold, and sheer rudeness. But that
had no effect on him at all. He was insensitive to everything which was
not logic. Then in her anxiety she crept behind her dead husband, draped
herself in crêpe, fled to the shadows and became just piety and memory.
That was the only thing that hitherto could damp Levy’s eagerness. The
world-embracing, hot and cold romance of money shrank up violently and
he became gradually colder and colder, more formal and more ironical,
till at last he said good-bye with a bow that was really a shrug of the
shoulders.
So today Mrs. Hedvig had to assume her crêpe.
During the soup Levy raised the question of the mortgage. That was a
mere nothing, a bagatelle. They would buy the house by auction, no doubt
about that. It would certainly be good business, because the house was,
as it happened, valued much too high. Other people are frightened of
houses that are assessed too high. But we are not, Mrs. Hill. For we
know of a certain little insurance company that will take the house with
open arms. They need it on their books. A house that is bought for
200,000 but can be taken up at 300,000 improves the position at once by
100,000—not for the shareholders but for the Board of Directors.
Levy’s face suddenly became contemptuous and almost offended. This topic
seemed to upset him. It was not worthy of the occasion or of his
feelings:
“Well, that’s that,” he exclaimed. “I am tired of the house property
swindle. That’s for inferior people, philistines and small fry. I really
can’t understand your brother Peter’s taste. I admit that he has a
brutal sort of natural business shrewdness, but he lives like an
old-fashioned craftsman amidst modern improvements. Before 1905 we
believed that business consisted in cheating each other and the State.
Yes, I believed it too. But that is now old-fashioned, hopelessly
old-fashioned. Nowadays we have at last grasped the fact that the really
lucrative business is the positive one in which money really makes a
contribution.... That is to say shares, industrial shares! We live in
the age of a most tremendous industrial boom. The whole world is
becoming industrialised. You must be blind not to see in which direction
the royal road of capital leads. Money and wheels are related. Shares,
industrial shares! Invest your money in forests, waterfalls and iron
mines! Send it to the saw mills, the harbours and the ammunition works!”
Here Levy swallowed the third glass of mineral water and broke out into
a vehement flood of share quotations and statistics of exports. And all
the time he stared at Hedvig with an expression that was at once
appealing, passionate, embittered and sceptical. He wanted to dazzle
her, make her enthusiastic, but there was something spasmodic and almost
despairing in his efforts. There was not a spark of real and innocent
joy in the present moment.
Did he see through her, this woman before him, or did he suffer from the
fact that the passionate pulses of his heart were only capable of
stirring the ashes of some dry calculations?
Hedvig stared at the table-cloth. She felt his glance on every point of
her face and neck. His harsh, quick voice at the same time opened up the
whole world for her and spun her into a net of supple meshes. It was
already as if she could not move hands or feet. He seemed to her to come
closer, closer. She intermittently felt hot and cold in this strange
heat with cold currents that streamed out from his being. Quickly,
relentlessly the terror rose in her, the irresistible terror of seeing
herself cut off from any possibility of escape, overpowered.
She suddenly got up from coffee:
“Shall we not do the round of the pictures today?” she said. “It is the
first time it has been light enough after dinner.”
The round of the pictures was an invention of Hedvig’s fear. She felt
safer amongst Percy’s pictures.
Levy rose slowly and offered Hedvig his arm. The tension in his face
broke down. He was evidently not pleased to have to leave his own
special field of attack and to have to resort to a slow roundabout
strategy in order to fight with a dead man.
And yet Levy could certainly talk of art, in case of need. He was a
connoisseur in his own way and had a great deal to say not only of
market values but also of theories and technique. There were various
things here that he could tell some malicious stories about, various
things he was prepared at once to slaughter with his criticism, but also
some things he had to admire. But it was a jealous, inarticulate
admiration. Levy bit his lip and kept silent. To come up against the
dead husband all the time made him, Jacob Levy, barrister, embarrassed
and uncertain of himself. He knew much, but not how to battle with a
shadow.
Hedvig found time to breathe. And she at once started the game of
“Chinese shades.” It was really a game in her own style, silent,
stealthy, and unconsciously false. She had had many and long rehearsals
of it out there by the grave. Every accent of her voice was reminiscent
of crêpe. Solemnly she advanced through the rooms which the evening
light was filling with its first pure tones of gold. She stopped with
head inclined before one picture after the other. In every gesture, in
every word, she simulated admiration for her dead husband’s fine
understanding of art and for the modest, unselfish enthusiasm that never
failed in spite of exhaustion and suffering.
A good dose of almost religious piety was administered to Levy. But he
evidently did not like the medicine. His pallor was tinged with green.
His lips curved into an imperceptible, nervous grimace. But he had to
swallow it all the same. It was only when they had come out into the
hall among the modern things that he suddenly plucked up his courage
again amidst these new, more reckless and more highly coloured
surroundings. With a solemnity that was more austere than ever—perhaps
because it required more effort—Hedvig halted before an animal painting,
signed by a not unknown French artist. The picture represented two
tigers, as innocently striped as if they had been painted by a child of
five. They were playing in a jungle which seemed to consist of a ragged
bouquet of dried grass.
Then Levy could keep silent no longer: “I know a little story about that
master,” he exclaimed eagerly. “Two Parisian Jewish dealers had a good
lunch together and then went down to the _Salon des Indépendants_. And
there one of the Jews made a bet with the other that inside a year he
would take up and make famous any one of the exhibitors. And the other
Jew walked about a long time searching till he found the most hopeless
and impossible painter in the whole gigantic exhibition. He chose this
painter. But the other was not frightened. He quickly created for the
tiger painter a new school of art, which was dubbed ‘naïvism’ and in one
year he became, as a matter of fact, world-famous. There you see the
power of advertisement and of the Jewish genius.”
Of course Hedvig in her inmost heart understood Levy much better than
the picture. But we are all most sensitive about our lies. And she also
grew angry because she felt again that she was losing her supremacy and
began to feel unsafe. That’s why she regarded his blasphemous story as
an insult to Percy’s memory.
“An artist may be great even though he has been run by an unscrupulous
Jew,” she mumbled. “This picture was, as a matter of fact, bought before
the Jews made it expensive. And it was the general opinion amongst my
husband’s friends that it was a real find.”
Hedvig began an eager defence of the striped tigers and the ragged dried
grass. She used expressions that she had heard on Percy’s lips during
the art discussions down in Montparnasse and from the time when he tried
in vain to convince her of the new ideals. She stole his phrases, his
catchwords, his characteristic abbreviations, his little jokes and even
his trick of bending his head on one side and looking through
half-closed eyes.
So the game of “Chinese shades” was followed by a plundering of the
dead. All that she could lay hands on was now used as a weapon against
the insistent Levy. Truly, human beings play strange games with each
other.
Levy suddenly looked very tired. There was something pathetic about his
raised shoulders. He had one of his fits of inevitable truth-telling.
But his quick, harsh voice was unsteady:
“Why do you lie to me, Hedvig?” he mumbled. “You were an enemy to all
art whilst your husband was alive. Yes, I know it. And you are still to
this day indifferent to all this. And all the same you let loose these
striped tigers on me. Why can you never be sincere, Hedvig? Why are you
so afraid that you must always lie?”
Hedvig froze up and was silent. Every nerve in her was chilled. Never
had anyone dared to come so near to her. It seemed as if this man had
dared to see more of her than she herself had seen. She kept absolutely
motionless like an animal shamming death to escape a danger. And
still,—did she not feel far, far within a sort of wild relief, something
of the same kind as she had felt once when hearing Peter’s cynicisms,
though deeper, finer....
Levy stretched out his hand:
“Good-night! I am a little tired. I must go now. I will look after your
mortgage. Good-bye—till next time!”
And then he was gone.
Hedvig went to bed, though it was still daylight. She was accustomed to
go to bed immediately after his visits. She longed to lie motionless on
her back and think.
Hedvig undressed slowly and carefully. She still felt her nerves
trembling. For a moment she stood naked before the big mirror built into
the wall. Her body was wonderfully well preserved. In its pale, even
whiteness, its slim roundness, it seemed to her wonderfully young,
immensely younger than she herself. And still it made her shudder. It
might betray her to love, at any moment it might betray her to love....
And some day it would relentlessly deliver her to death. Yes, Hedvig
belonged to those in whom nakedness always awakens thoughts of death. If
she had lived some hundred years earlier her fear would have driven her
to self-torture. Then she would have scourged and martyred her body in
order to blunt the point of death.
She quickly drew the blinds and crept beneath the bedcover. She slept in
Percy’s old bedroom, that solemn debauch in the architecture of the
’nineties which had once aroused her frightened amusement when she came
there as a nurse. The bed still resembled a gigantic catafalque, in the
vault of the alcove, the zodiacal signs gleamed and in the twilight on
the opposite wall the blood dripped from Saint Sebastian’s naked
sides....
Hedvig knew that she had a long sleepless night in front of her. With
her eyes half-closed and her hands stretched by her sides, she went
slowly and carefully through all that had passed between her and Levy.
In the silence she weighed his gestures, his looks, his tones and his
actions. There was something in them that she revelled in, slowly
sipping, drop by drop, like a frightened drinker. It was a lonely,
selfish joy, separated from the world by walls of darkness and silence.
But by and by she grew more restless, sighed, and turned over beneath
the bedclothes. She felt that she was approaching a thought that always
recurred with terrible regularity during her nightly meditations. Levy
was her lawyer? Why did he not charge her anything? She had asked once
long ago what she owed for the winding-up, but she had received an
evasive answer. Since then they had not discussed that point. Did he not
want to accept anything? He might have asked for a very large sum. She
could not help enjoying the thought of having perhaps escaped it. But
then came the frightened after-thought: Why does he not want anything?
Of course because it imposes an obligation, because he wants you to
become his. He may ask you to be his wife any day.
Levy was no longer a harmless, gently stimulating, caressing shadow. He
stood there by the side of her bed terribly alive and with pale face and
harsh, passionate voice, hotly demanding his rights. And behind him
roared the whole traffic of the vast opening world. She had to answer
yes or no. She knew she could not escape that moment. Yes or no. Torn
between jubilation and agony she writhed in the darkness. She could not
quite set aside her passion. Her egoism trembled to the very roots. She
dreamt frightened dreams of being permitted at last to bare herself,
give herself up, be freed from herself, to fling all her misery into the
flames of love.
But in the midst of her excitement she suddenly became cold as ice.
Horribly clear a voice sounded inside her: “Supposing he only wants your
money!”
Then suspicion, and anxious greed rushed over her with a thousand
reasons. She tormented herself systematically with her sister’s and
brothers’ shrugs of shoulders, sarcasms and covert warnings. Levy’s
sharpness, his genius for business, his legal acumen, all that she had
profited by in him seemed now to bear witness against him. “Yes, it is
my money he wants,” she mumbled, “of course it is my money.” And now she
forgot his looks, his accents and the unsteadiness of his voice. And the
memory of her own white body in the mirror could no longer warm her with
a single spark of self-confidence. No, it is my money he wants. And
perhaps he does not even mean to marry me to get it. Perhaps he will
simply use his position to cheat me, trick me, and rob me. He must have
seen that I don’t understand business. Perhaps he is just now planning
how he can take all I have from me, and ruin me.
So Hedvig passed hours of grinding agony, till, calmed by the morning
light, she fell into a short sleep.
* * * * *
A few days later she stood again at the telephone, ringing up Levy. Now
it was a question of some timber shares that she had bought on his
advice and that had gone down a few crowns.
On the fifteenth of June Selambs Ltd. had its annual meeting. That was
the last permitted day according to the articles of association. Peter
could never make himself pay any dividend a single day before he must.
The meeting was, as usual, held in the office at Selambshof. Hedvig came
early so that the others should not be able to meet and talk about her.
For weeks she had worried over this meeting, at which Levy would again
meet her sister and brothers. A few years ago—on Laura’s and Stellan’s
recommendation—he had been allowed to buy a few shares, and had been
elected to the board, chiefly in order to keep an eye on the managing
director.
Peter was extremely obliging. He stalked about arranging shares and
distributing writing blocks and pencils. He always looked frightened
nowadays at these meetings, and today more so than usual.
Levy came late, in a hurry, with his coat buttoned, as impersonal as a
chapter of a law book. He bowed stiffly and sat down at once in his
usual place; the chairman’s place at the writing desk.
“Well,” said Peter, “shall we elect a chairman for the annual meeting.
Is anybody proposed?”
Laura played with the chain of her little gilt handbag. She was dressed
in black and white stripes and had a very tight skirt. It was in that
year that skirts began to be worn tight. She still had her golden hair
and her smooth skin. And all the same you could clearly see that she had
aged. Her voice sounded cold, the playful purring had gone.
“I beg to propose Stellan,” she said.
Hedvig was huddled up in her corner, staring at Levy. “Now he will look
at me, now he thinks I shall say something,” she thought and grew cold
all over her body. But Levy did not. Perhaps he grew a shade paler, but
he looked at Laura with an amused little smile. Then he calmly put away
his papers.
“I beg to second the last honourable speaker,” he said. “The more so as
I have things to say which do not come well from the Chair.”
Peter’s voice sounded like that of a ventriloquist:
“Is the meeting agreed on this?”
“Yes,” said Levy in a loud voice. Then he left his place and
demonstratively went and sat down beside Laura on the sofa, where he
took up a foreign newspaper and began to study the quotations.
So Stellan was chairman. He seemed to take up the hammer without any
enthusiasm and now and then cast embarrassed side-glances at his
predecessor. They then proceeded to the adjustment of votes. When they
came to Tord Selamb, one hundred shares, absent, Levy pricked up his
ears:
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, in an indifferent tone, “this is now the third
year that Mr. Tord Selamb neither appears in person nor sends a proxy.
Is that not strange?”
Stellan looked inquiringly at Peter:
“I suppose the meeting has been properly convened? He has been called?”
Peter searched his papers:
“Tord does not care a damn for old Selambshof,” he muttered in a
reproachful tone. “He does not care a damn for anything....”
“Supposing the reason is that he has sold his shares,” said Levy without
looking up from his paper.
Now it was Stellan’s and Laura’s turn to prick up their ears:
“Sold? To whom should he have sold them?”
Both looked threateningly at Peter.
Levy continued:
“We can safely strike Mr. Tord Selamb off the list of voters. Because I
happen to _know_ that for three years he has not possessed a single
share.”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s very simple. I wrote and asked him.”
“But Tord does not answer letters.”
“No, not the first. But perhaps the third if it makes him really
furious. In the end I got the answer wrapped up in a parcel of abuse. He
has sold his shares.”
Stellan rose and stared at the managing director of the company:
“Peter, have you cheated him out of his shares?”
Peter resembled a bear which has been smoked out of his den. He growled
nervously and beat about him with half paralysed paws.
“Hm, well, damn it all, what was I to do.... He begged me to help
him....”
Laura rose purple with anger:
“You are a wretched scoundrel,” she cried, “a wretched scoundrel! For
three years you have cheated us!”
Stellan fidgeted at his sister’s vulgar expression:
“Please tell us immediately what you paid Tord,” he said stiffly.
“Otherwise I will adjourn the meeting and go out myself to Järnö to find
out.”
Peter stood there rocking and shuffling his feet. His eyes grew smaller
and smaller in his head:
“Well, seventy-five thousand,” he mumbled with a grin that was now
rather pleased than embarrassed.
Laura seemed on the point of flying at him:
“Seventy-five thousand! What a pretty business. We can understand you
wanted to keep it to yourself!”
Stellan looked as if he had bitten into a very sour apple. He was
apparently exercising his art of formulating things:
“It will be our common duty to take care of Tord when he has finally
ruined himself,” he said. “Thus it is only reasonable that his shares
should be distributed equally among us.”
“Never!” said Peter, “never! never!!”
But Stellan was cold as the grave:
“In that case you cannot count on being re-elected. There is only one
way in which to regain our confidence.”
“Yes, you will be instantly kicked out if you don’t share alike,”
assured Laura. “We will make Stellan director instead.”
Peter growled, beat about, threatened, whined, but in the end he had to
say good-bye to his fine little stroke of family business:
“But it went off all right for three years,” he mumbled with a
melancholy grin. “Twenty-five shares per head at seven hundred and fifty
each. It is little short of a godsend.”
After this quarrel in the orthodox Selambian fashion they resumed their
seats and proceeded with smoothed foreheads and clear eyes with the
agenda.
Hedvig had been sitting silent the whole time staring at Levy. She
thought of the strong family feeling of the Jews, and their racial
_esprit de corps_. She searched nervously for a look of disgust and
contempt in his face. The whole meeting occasioned her a new and
mysterious torment. The harshness of their cold voices jarred on her.
She felt strangely weak and moved. She had suffered and struggled during
those last weeks and now she was tired, tired. She wanted to stand up
and propose that they should give poor Tord what the shares were worth.
The words burnt her tongue. Never before had Hedvig been so near the
mellow and fragrant shores of life. If only Levy had reacted, if only
she could have seen the proper pained expression on his face. But she
could only discover a half-amused and half-contemptuous curiosity behind
his oriental mask. And so she never rose up from her chair. And so the
words remained unsaid. And so she believed that he was cold and hard
like the others....
And yet Levy had fought like a lion just for her sake. He had disclosed
what he knew only in order to disarm Stellan and Laura, whose opposition
and ill-will he had foreseen. There is no time to sit and turn up your
nose when you are fighting for the object of your passion. And must he
not be pleased when he saw the magnificent effect of his information? I
have made myself indispensable, he thought. Now they can’t have the
impudence to turn me out....
But Levy had reckoned without his host.
Without any further quarrels they had gone through the annual report and
accounts, agreed the balance sheet, approved the action of the
directors, settled the dividend and had now come to the election of the
new board. Stellan’s fingers travelled thoughtfully along the edge of an
inky paperknife. He seemed to want to sit on only half of the old, worn,
dirty office chair:
“May I ask the meeting to propose new members of the Board?”
There was another silence. The room smelt of dust, pipe-smoke, dry paper
and old sun-dried leather. The shadows of the elm branches in the garden
moved sleepily across the knots in the worn floor-boards. Then Laura’s
voice sounded again, clear, dry and cold:
“I beg to propose Peter and Stellan and then—Mr. Sundelius.”
Sundelius was the Manager of a rival firm of Levy’s, with whom he was
moreover engaged in a lawsuit. Nothing could be more outspoken. Levy
took a long puff at his cigarette:
“Excuse me, but has Sundelius any shares in the company?” he mumbled.
Laura smiled an exquisite little smile and played with her suede shoe
beneath her striped silk skirt:
“Yes, I have sold a couple to him.”
Then Stellan’s voice sounded, far away and impersonal:
“Has anyone anybody else to propose?”
Levy suddenly looked at Hedvig. Yes, now he looked at her inquiringly,
exactingly, severely. It seemed as if his black pupils would draw her
out of her silent corner. He made a gesture. It was something
indescribable, something between a shrug of the shoulders and a
passionate, supplicating seizing of a receding cloak, the gesture with
which one appeals to a hardened miser in a bazaar in the East. Did she
not see how they were playing with him, sneering at him, wanting to kick
him out? Had he helped her or had he not? Were they friends or not? Did
he love her or not? Were they to marry or not?
Hedvig sat there fingering her pencil. Her face was white. She shivered
for cold. What was it Levy asked of her? Yes, only that she should
propose the re-election of the present board. She must do it at once or
it would be too late. But why did she not say what she had to say? Why
could she not move her tongue? Why was she so afraid of her own voice?
Hedvig’s glance left Levy and roamed about the room. Ugh! how many eyes
about her—how horribly many! There sat Stellan pretending to look at his
nails, there Peter sat staring and sulking, there Laura eyed her with
cold scorn. And they all waited for her confession. Go on, admit now
that you are in love with Levy! Call out to anybody who cares to listen
that you are in love with Levy.
Hedvig sat there as if paralysed, incapable of moving either hand or
tongue.
She was silent—and condemned herself to silence for all her life.
Then Stellan’s voice sounded with cruel, calculated hardness:
“May we consider the nominations closed?”
“Yes,” said Laura.
“Does the Meeting elect the candidates proposed, Peter Selamb, Stellan
Selamb and Mr. P. Sundelius?”
“Yes,” said Laura in a loud voice.
The hammer fell.
Levy rose. He was perhaps paler than before. Nobody could see whether
his hands trembled, for he had put them in his trouser pockets. His
voice sounded steady:
“Well, then I have nothing more to do here. The fee due to me as a
member of the board you will perhaps allow me to forego for the benefit
of your brother, Mr. Tord Selamb, whose circumstances I consider
deserving compassion.”
And with that Levy left the annual meeting of shareholders in Selambs
Ltd.
All eyes turned maliciously towards Hedvig’s corner. They forgot Levy’s
sarcasm to enjoy their triumph.
“Ugh! how nice to be rid of the Jew,” laughed Laura. “It was really wise
of you Hedvig not to persist in clinging to that knave of spades.”
“He is really an impossible person,” said Stellan. “His father came to
Sweden on foot with a bundle on his back.”
Peter wanted to add his straw to the heap too, though he did it in a
somewhat strange way:
“If I had followed that scoundrel’s advice I should still have had
Tord’s shares,” he muttered. “He advised me to transfer the shares in
his name, then we two and Hedvig would have been able to outvote you.
But I thought it was too devilish.”
This was a lie, a clumsy lie. Hedvig knew it and still she remained
silent and allowed her mind to be poisoned. Yes, she sat there with a
face that shrank in pale, shivering misery and allowed them to thrust
the sting into her love. Their cold malicious joy even gave her a sort
of miserable relief. It soothed her wound. At last she managed to rise
and go out. At the door she suddenly turned round:
“I don’t know why you make such a fuss about Levy,” she mumbled. “I
think he is useful to run errands.”
In the car Hedvig sat and repeated these words to herself as if she had
been afraid of losing them. She got out in town and walked about for
hours in the streets. She would have turned to a statue of ice if anyone
had whispered to her that she did so in the secret hope of meeting Levy.
But when she came home she kept near the telephone the whole evening.
“If he rings up now and reproaches me,” she thought, “how shall I make
him understand that it is quite hopeless to expect anything of me.” It
was late when, with a sigh Hedvig tore herself away from the telephone.
Then she lay on her bed in the cool green half light of the summer
night. “Tomorrow he will come of course,” she thought. “He will be pale,
bitter, sarcastic. He stops in front of me without stretching out his
hand. ‘What do you mean? Have I deserved this treatment? Are you so
ungrateful and hard? Or do you mistrust me? Have they told you I want
your money? But that is a lie, you know it is! I love you Hedvig! I
can’t live without you! You must be my wife.’”
Hedvig lay quite still and felt the blood burning in her veins as in a
fever after an ague. “Yes, then I must tell him—that I can _never_ be
his wife,” she thought. But it was a strange trembling “_never_.” She
longed with every fibre of her being to hear those reproaches, that
prayer which she thought to refuse.
It was not Levy who came the following day but a letter from the firm of
solicitors Levy & Östring, containing a bill for thirty-five thousand
crowns for winding-up costs and various other commissions.
Poor Levy. There was a sort of helplessness in this revenge. His
thoughts were cast almost exclusively in terms of money. He could not
grow furious without figures buzzing in his ears. That’s why his wounded
pride and aching love found expression in a heavy bill of costs. Yes,
for he had really loved Hedvig with a passion that was not less because
it was embittered and clear-sighted.
Levy’s revenge had much more effect than he had suspected. He had as a
matter of fact sent Hedvig a bull of excommunication that was to part
her completely from life and mankind.
“There!” was her first thought, “he did want to plunder me. He wanted my
money and nothing else.” And she felt confirmed in all her old morbid
suspicions. There were only cheats and crooks in the whole world and
Levy was one of the worst of them.
But at the same time the last shreds of the veil of charity were torn
from her feelings. She knew now that she had loved him; that she still
loved him in spite of all; that she would never be rid of an aching pain
in her heart.
That was the climax of a mute and humiliating drama in which love fought
a hopeless fight against mean fear. Hedvig remained with her poor gold.
Yes, she clung convulsively to the money for which she had sacrificed
all. She could not transact any new business herself but, strange to
say, and in spite of her distrust, she allowed all Levy’s investments
stand. But she collected her papers, pondered and calculated. Down in
the vaults of the bank and at home in her villa she sat and counted and
counted. Like the hermit with his rosary she sat mumbling, letting one
figure after the other slip between her fingers.
Levy’s letter accompanying the bill she did not answer. Perhaps it was
her timid unwillingness to reveal anything. Perhaps it was a secret hope
that he would call himself.
In the end Mr. Levy had to take proceedings to get his money.
Hedvig no longer drove out to Percy’s grave. The shadow game was over.
She no longer needed the dead to protect her against the living. And
though she now more and more rarely went outside the house she no longer
glanced at Percy’s collections. It was really a strange whim of fate
that just such a being as she should steal about in that big house,
built as a home of Art.
* * * * *
On a sultry and still summer evening Hedvig rose with smarting eyes and
throbbing temples from her papers in the bedroom. She had an idea that
people stared at her down at the bank and she had therefore brought
everything home: shares, mortgages, title deeds, deposit receipts,
bank-books and bundles of notes. And now it was difficult in the
evenings because she did not dare to light the light from fear of being
seen from the outside through the chinks in the blinds. She sat over her
papers till the figures swam together in a grey mist and there was a
pricking sensation in her eyes. Then she crept to the door to see that
the towel was hanging over the keyhole, so that none of the servants
should peep in. Then she stole slowly, stopping all the time to listen,
towards the big built-in wardrobe where she had found a good hiding
place behind an old carved chest. When her treasure was hidden, she
noiselessly opened a window and looked out to see if anybody moved.
Hedvig stood long in the window. The evening was sultry and heavy. Far
below the firs lay a woolly darkness. Above, a few faint scattered stars
hung in a sky to which the reflections of the neighbouring town imparted
a reddish, ominous hue. Against this background she presently
distinguished the quick shadowy flight of the bats round the eaves, the
soft flutter of the moths, the flight of the spiders with their long
helplessly suspended legs, all the mysterious fluttering and hovering
things out in the big witches’-kitchen of the damp, warm summer night.
Hedvig felt a fever round her temples, a dull anxiety. All her silent,
secret, suppressed feelings revived for the last time and moved about in
the darkness. It was the restlessness of the body in the presence of the
relentless oncoming autumn that melted together with her dim light-shy
anxiety for her treasure.
Hedvig closed the window, pulled down the blind, turned on the light,
and began to undress. She moved slowly, hesitatingly, sighing. At first
she turned her back to the mirror, but by and by she stole one glance
after the other into it. She was irresistibly drawn to the corner where
the mirror stood. It seemed that the air there was not so still and
burdened with loneliness. Before the mirror her movements quickened.
With her glance fastened intently on her own image Hedvig loosened her
hair and let her last garment fall to the floor. She had aged quickly of
late, had grown grey about the temples and had folds beneath her
breasts. And now she suddenly screwed up her face, so that it was full
of wrinkles, and emphasised the weariness of her pose. “I am old,” she
mumbled, “I am old.” And it seemed as if she had huddled up under the
lee of old age.
But Hedvig did not escape so easily. She did not deceive herself. With a
jerk she straightened herself up again, threw back her head, lifted her
arms behind her neck so that her breasts seemed more beautiful. And she
felt how a smile spread and opened out on her face. She saw it in the
mirror, a strange, girlish trembling smile with pouting mouth, ready to
be kissed and bitten. She began to turn and sway to and fro as if she
heard dance-music. Closer and closer her face approached the mirror. She
felt a faint sickness as if in a swing, and the air felt hot round her
temples. Beside her own nakedness she beheld in the unnatural gloom of
the mirror-room the nakedness of St. Sebastian. The ropes cut into his
beautiful limbs. The points of the arrows were softly embedded in the
even, slightly bronzed flesh.... To Hedvig he suddenly assumed Levy’s
face. Yes, it was Levy’s mouth which smiled at her. His lips had lost
their scorn and smiled close to hers, ecstatically, sensually. His eyes
had lost their sharp, short-sighted stare and revealed black, fathomless
depths of life and passion. His scorching breath rushed over her, his
arms bent her irresistibly....
Hedvig collapsed. Moaning and sobbing she rolled on the carpet whilst
the last late attenuated rush of blood painfully fought its way through
her bosom....
Suddenly she started as if somebody had poured cold water over her. She
seemed to hear footsteps and whispers outside. She flew to the switch,
turned out the light and listened again intently. Then she quickly put
on some clothes and lifted the blind carefully. Trembling in her whole
body she lay there crouching and watched. At first she saw only the
black darkness, but by and by she distinguished two figures, one dark
and one light, down by the fence. They stood in the shadow of the firs
tightly clasped together.
It was the chauffeur and the parlourmaid.
Hedvig was at once overcome by confused emotions of shame, indignation
and furious suspicions. The impudent, shameless, immoral rabble! Before
my eyes! Of course they were spying through the chinks in the blinds.
And now they are laughing at me between their kisses. Yes, I have seen
them often exchange glances of secret understanding. Fancy if they have
seen me with the papers too. Fancy if they are conspiring to rob me. If
they murder me one night and take everything and set fire to the house
to hide their crime....
Hedvig remained on her aching knees till the couple had passed through
the gate and disappeared in the darkness of the forest. Then she dragged
herself to bed and lay there listening with every nerve in the thick
darkness. All the time she imagined she heard something move in the
wardrobe. In the end she had to get up and bring the papers and the
money into her bed. With her arm round the two heavy leather portfolios
she at last fell into a restless slumber.
The following morning Hedvig dismissed the chauffeur and the
parlourmaid. That was the beginning to the depopulation of Hill villa.
Then she sold the car and had a fire and burglar proof safe built into
the wall in the wardrobe. When it began to grow cold in the autumn she
closed up the picture galleries and only heated a few rooms. By that
time both the cook and the other maid and the gardener had gone. She had
only one servant left, an old bad-tempered, silent, faithful servant of
the Hill family.
The snow came and Hedvig got herself up at dawn, so as not to be seen,
and swept the snow drifts from the gate. For long periods only one thin
column of smoke rose from the chimneys to show that there was still
flickering life in the big white villa. It gradually began to become a
ghost-house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------