Lately Selambshof had not been as quiet as usual. The scattered brothers and sisters began once more to find the way back to the ancestral home. The fact of the matter was that the estate was growing more and more valuable every day. The town had already begun—to Peter’s great joy—to encroach upon a part of Ekbacken. Now it began to stretch its arms around Selambshof. And like old King Midas it changed all it touched into gold.
Yes, it was extraordinarily pleasant to sit there and feel how you were growing richer and richer every moment. And then they had to look after their interests, keep an eye on each other, and especially on the honourable director of Selambshof Limited.
It was curious to watch the Selambs when they were together. They quarrelled terribly, but stuck together all the same—just like the Bonaparte family. None believed another. They laid mines and countermines. They tricked one another until they got even, so that in the end a sort of rough natural justice prevailed. Peter the Boss now sat in the prisoner’s dock as a result of a too bare-faced falsification of the accounts of Maj?ngen and Solberget Ltd. Laura unhesitatingly accused him, in the clearest and most spirited terms of being a false old thief. Stellan’s sword play was more skilful and he got in a whole series of neat little thrusts, each one of which would have been a sufficient indictment in a prosecution for misrepresentation and misappropriation. Peter smiled complacently 186at these accusations, which he regarded as so many pleasant expressions of recognition of his merit. He lied with a certain heavy grace to this assembly of expert connoisseurs. Behind all his lies lay all the same the truth that he had really done great things for Selambshof. And he realised that in their inmost hearts his sisters and brothers knew they must look up to him, Peter the Boss, as the eldest and the head of the family. And after all the whole quarrel was sunk in the great and glorious consciousness of the daily increasing value of Selambshof.
But towards the spring these meetings were not quite as agreeable as usual. That was the fault of Tord. Yes, the despised, neglected, almost forgotten Tord down there in The Rookery began to cause the high family council very serious anxiety. He had dismissed the bohemian painter who had been a parasite on him for several years and instead he had returned with a woman, a slovenly person who spoke a sort of Norwegian and who was a very dubious person. Well, that might have passed if Tord had not got the mad idea of marrying her. The Selambs had had a terrible shock when they saw in the paper the reading of the banns. And now a fortnight later they were sitting by a big wood fire in the icy hall of Selambshof and knew no more than that Tord had driven to town with the woman that morning. They might already be married by now, though the sisters and brothers had been told nothing. Really it was extraordinary behaviour....
Let us now see how Tord Selamb had come to do this most unexpected thing: arranging for the banns to be read and going to church to be married.
The story really begins with the severing of Tr?sk?ngen and the Quarry. Peter had in some way tricked Tord into being absent at the meeting when the sale was decided on. This put him into a fury which increased in violence when Tord saw the secret retreat of his youth defiled by boundary posts, trenches, blasting and disgusting hordes of insolent 187intruders. His protracted fury finally resulted in some immoderate and indignant articles in the yellow press. Tord was not, of course, indignant that people should be tricked into living on a marsh and on a refuse dump. No, he was furious because of this encroachment upon his dominion of boxes of lizards and frogs. He tried to enlist science in his cause by clamouring about some rare marsh flowers and an unique diving bug. It was a vehement defence of the wilderness and an infuriated battle cry against the town. And the whole concluded with some mixed reflections of a hermit’s spleen, pseudo-science, artist’s slang and bad nature-lyrics.
The articles were of course anonymous. But Peter recognised the author from certain attacks and exposures. He was not ungrateful for this valuable free advertisement of Maj?ngen and Solberget, which must now appear to the uninitiated as a glorious paradise in the wilderness. But for the sake of order he made certain representations to his youngest brother, which resulted in a quarrel, during which Tord gave vent to his excitement by letting off his gun, into the air it is true, but still a gunshot.
Filled with a new indignation, Tord continued his articles and painted on the wall the devil of capitalistic greed despoiling nature, with features which resembled those of Peter the Boss to a nicety. He began to develop a taste for writing. He suddenly felt that he was meant to be a writer, and was at once seized with a violent contempt for the art of painting. It is true that all he wrote, except those violent articles of propaganda, was cast into the editor’s waste paper basket, but that only increased his irritation without in any way convincing him of his incapacity. After a quarrel with his old painter-friend over the relative values of the two arts he without further ado kicked out the disgusting parasite who had tricked him into wasting the most beautiful years of his youth with such rubbish as the crayon and the paint brush.
188The painter was gone. Libations with Peter were over. Tord was alone, quite alone with his foxes and crows and mice in the gruesome Rookery.
He got into the habit of making long excursions into the town—the detestable town. Nothing like it had happened to him since he had slipped out there as a boy in profound secrecy for some devilment. At that time he had had a strange, secret partnership with some unknown vagabond in whose company he had pilfered in the market place and cut holes in sacks of flour down by Skeppsbron. He remembered the latter especially because of the strange, soothing satisfaction it afforded him to stand there in the twilight and feel the cool, velvety flour running through his fingers into the mud. He had already begun to revel in destruction, perhaps from a precocious, instinctive hatred of all the culture on which society is based.
Tord hated the town, but not in the same way as Herman, to whom it meant lawsuits and a bad conscience. Tord did not suffer from his conscience. No, he had an instinctive hatred of all the adaptability, refinement, co-operation and methodical work for which it stood. He detested the great complex machine in which men are only cogs. It was the complex purposefulness and relative common sense of teeming civic life which tormented him.
But Stockholm was becoming a great city and as such it had another side. It was a jungle, a wilderness of stone, the home of the thronging masses and of cold emptiness by night. But the town began to exert a certain fascination over Tord. He was going to be a writer, as we know, and those who can do nothing else can always explore the special vices of the imagination. He discovered that loneliness in a crowd has many joys for a fastidious individualist. The masses are necessary, so that we may look down on them. In the crush of humanity we dream so easily of the lofty heights from which all below look like creeping things. It is always so with the dreams of sterile 189genius. It would begin at the top, forgetful of all that lies below.
So much for Tord and the throng. But he did not hold out long. He soon relapsed into restless despair. He was frightened by the very masses over which he had just triumphed, and fled, full of loathing, home to The Rookery.
No, it was better in the emptiness and the cold stony landscape. To stroll about in the deserted outskirts of the town in the uncertain spring twilight when the masses of houses rise up like huge banks of darkness in the waning light and the street lamps look like giant submarine lilies which have collected all the cold phosphorescent light. To drift about on still summer’s nights when the lamps are out and everything sleeps at the bottom of a green sea, where the desires of our dreams move silently like great fishes. The town in storm and darkness when the lonely wanderer, stimulated by drink, imagines himself lord of this brooding deserted world of stone! The town as landscape, as nature, as the hunting ground of all the wild instincts. The narrow back street defiles, the dark ambushes of the doorways, the snares of the public house and the bordel. Hazard, adventure, vice, women! Yes, every evening the town was a great wild jungle where the chase of women was permitted. Tord pursued this chase with a restless and obstinate interest. He had the lonely man’s long vision for a woman’s shadow. He could follow one after the other for hours but without being able to approach one. He was consumed by an envious hatred of the enterprise of others more bold. He returned home dead tired, embittered and lonely, lonely....
Nevertheless it was in this hunting ground that Tord Selamb at last met his fate. It was one dark, rainy, icy cold evening in March. Hot and cold, heedless and obstinate he followed a woman. But it did not end as usual. The dark shadow would not allow itself to be caught; it 190did not suddenly vanish in a doorway. The figure in front of him only walked on and on, against the wind, restlessly, without goal or purpose, it seemed, but sharply dismissing all who accosted it. Now and then it dived into a dark back street or crept into a gateway, but more from caprice than to escape its pursuers. The purposelessness of its roving movements fascinated Tord in quite a peculiar way. It was like a beast of the forest, he thought. He had not yet seen its face but its step was young and springy. This was really no idle loitering. It walked with the conscious energy of one who is angry and mumbles disjointed phrases to himself. Then it walked towards the southern heights of the town. Then steps and a square with melancholy sighing trees, and then a cobbled back street with a few yellow flickering lamps on posts at the corners of the ramshackle old houses. It was a cul-de-sac, terminating in a big wooden barrier. Below glimmered the rough wet sides of the hill, lit up by the lights along a flight of steps on the other side of a deep, dark, shaft-like yard. The woman did not appear to notice Tord. She took something out of her pocket and hurled it down into the depths. It struck the stone with a faint metallic sound. Tord was now standing beside her. What had she thrown down? The question burnt his lips but he remained mute in spite of himself. She turned round and was about to resume her progress, when a sound was heard from the black bag she carried in her hand. She suddenly pulled out a little grey kitten and kissed it:
“Kirre,” she mumbled, “darling little Kirre....”
The kitten was Tord’s fate, it broke for a moment the spell of his dumbness:
“What did you throw down?” he asked suddenly.
She carefully put the kitten back again and answered without looking at him, straight into the chilly darkness, but in a tone of triumph and determination:
“It was the key.”
191“What key?”
“To the studio, of course. Beastly, disgusting creature! Now that’s done with at last!”
And then came her story, disingenuous, straightforward, unblushing, and with a strong appeal. She had been living with a sculptor who had recently returned from Paris. She had been with him the whole winter. Oh, how she had spoilt the beast! Cooked his food and been his model all the day. She was posing as the young witch. “And everybody said I was a splendid witch,” she exclaimed, whilst an angry little smile flashed beneath the dripping brim of her hat. But what had this beast of a sculptor done when his lump of clay was ready? He ha............