With its knife-sharp stem the big motor boat cut straight through the September storm. In the stern Stellan and Laura were lying, well protected from both draught and spray by canvas and bevelled glass screens. The splash of the waves mingled with the sound of jingling mirrors and trays in the elegant saloon. “The motor runs nicely today,” observed Laura.
“It always runs well when you are on your way to something disagreeable,” mumbled Stellan.
“Do you think there is more vibration in the bows?”
“Of course there is nearer the motor. Why do you ask?”
“The vibration is nearly as good as massage. I have not had any for a whole week. It’s perfectly awful. I think I will move up there.”
Laura stepped up to the bows. Her life was now characterised by an incessant struggle against incipient corpulency. She took massage, had gymnastics, played games and rode. The fear of getting old forced her out of her feline laziness. She positively dared not sit still. “If I rest or if I lie on my back, then old age will come over me,” she thought. This new restlessness went hand in hand with an ardent desire to be in at everything, not to miss anything. She had fallen a helpless victim to the disease of seeing and being seen. Dances, first nights, private views, bazaars, matches:—everywhere you saw Countess von Borgk. And everywhere you saw her flirt with young men, preferably very young men.
372It had not been exactly an agreeable surprise for Stellan to discover her at the great autumn shooting party at Gran?. Stellan was no longer fond of female company. His wife he fortunately escaped. She was always at the seaside or at some sanatorium, but Laura he often met. But with the old bachelor Major von Brauner he had thought he would be free from her. Certainly Brauner had figured at Laura’s gambling evenings out in the Narvav?gen, but Stellan did not know that relations had continued. Judge of his annoyance, then, when he turned in his motor boat and saw his pretty sister on the pier; Laura in short skirts, with puttees on her legs and a young painter fool carrying her gun.
And at dinner she came down, the only lady amongst so many men, half naked, wrapped in some green silk stuff that really cried aloud of her lost youth. And she herself gave the signal for the naughty stories after dinner. Grotesque!
As if that were not unpleasant enough they began to talk about the neighbouring J?rn?. And who should start that topic but Laura. She was half lying in her chair and told lots of stories about dear old Tord. There was a moment of painful silence, but as the family itself did not seem to mind ... well, then they let their tongues wag. Nobody mentioned such a trifle as that Tord had the Governor of the province at him all the time for neglect. That was to be seen in any paper. But now he had put up big notices:
“Landing forbidden on penalty of death.
Tord of J?rn?.”
And he actually did shoot at people who entered his waters. Von Brauner himself had once sought shelter there during a thunderstorm and had heard the bullets whizz 373about his ears. The people round about were so furious that an accident might happen at any moment.
“A philosopher who has read too much Darwin and Nietzsche,” mumbled Stellan. “He wants to be a living protest against the more sentimental theories.”
Stellan tried to save the situation by being objective at the same time as he appealed to the sportman’s individualism and the aristocratic prejudices of the company.
But Laura laughed:
“Nonsense, he is just mad. But anyhow, madmen may be rather jolly.”
The following day Stellan left Gr?n? in order to go to J?rn? and talk to Tord. It was not so easy to get Laura to come with him, because she felt very much at home amongst the shooting party. But now they were on their way anyhow. The motor boat already began to plunge in the rougher and heavier seas of the big J?rn? bay.
Stellan put on an old oilskin and went up on the captain’s bridge:
“Are you quite sure of the chart?” he asked the man at the wheel.
“Yes, sir, I was born in this neighbourhood.”
Between the seas Stellan took the opportunity of looking down into the engine room. Because he had his suspicions of Laura’s vibration. The mechanic, who was a handsome dark youth, might also have something to do with it.
Stellan was an old gambler, who was very frightened of leaving anything to chance.
The rocking of the boat soon made Laura leave the fumes from the engine room and quietly creep into the saloon.
They were approaching J?rn?. Tall and foreboding rose the dark, rusty-looking hill surmounted by its log castle. The boat steered straight for the entrance to the harbour.
374Was the madman really going to shoot? Not even through his Feiss-glasses could Stellan distinguish any sign of life.
Bang! A shot rang out above the lapping of the waves but nobody saw where it went.
“One ought to come here in warships,” the man mumbled.
Stellan slowed down. They slipped under the lee of the hill beside a dilapidated old shed.
Another shot of welcome! This time the shot struck only a few yards to starboard. But it was impossible to discover who had fired it.
Laura cried out that she wanted to go back. Stellan looked as if he felt sick. He waved a handkerchief eagerly as a flag of truce. There were no more shots. The boat floated quietly in towards a tumbledown fishing pier. But still no living soul was visible.
Stellan had some trouble in getting Laura out of the saloon. Not that he had any illusions about Tord’s chivalry, but he felt safer all the same when he had her with him. Silent and hesitating they went ashore, still with the reports of the shots on their nerves. They passed through an old field which was now running wild and full of little shoots of birches and aspens, then they cut across a little garden quite overgrown with pestilence weed out of which a few half suffocated black currant bushes stretched up their arms like drowning people, whilst the poor naked apple trees writhed in grey despair in front of a rotting cottage wall with broken windows and grass-grown porch. Nature crept in over the work of man and began to resume its power. Over the whole there lay, in the gloomy autumn day, an indescribable odour of dampness, decay and dismal neglect.
Shivering, Laura and Stellan took the path up the hill. Up there, whipped by the winds, the big house lay with 375its weathered logs, surrounded by a litter of empty tins and broken bottles.
Nobody came out when Stellan knocked. The door was not locked and they walked in. The big hall was cold, dirty and filled with a strange smell of animals. The whole house shook in the gale, and on the windows towards the north a pine branch knocked persistently as if the wind wished to enter as a guest.
They cautiously penetrated further. On one of the folding beds in the bedroom something lay huddled up under a reindeer skin. It moved when Laura lifted the fur rug and an untidy head peeped out. It was Dagmar. She stared in dull amazement at the visitors, without recognizing them.
“I am Laura ... Laura Selamb ... and this is Stellan.”
“Oh, I see, it’s you....”
Dagmar crept down. She was dressed in some grey rags. She had the grey complexion of the really poor, she looked emaciated, worn out. She gave at the same time the horrible and pitiful impression of a starved and tormented woman. She shook herself, and her teeth chattered:
“I am lying down as I am not quite well.”
“We wanted to speak to Tord,” said Stellan. “Where is he?”
Dagmar’s face hardened:
“I don’t know at all.”
“He greeted us with his gun, so he must be in the neighbourhood.”
“I suppose he ran away when he recognized you. He is not very fond of visitors.”
Then Dagmar suddenly approached Laura and stroked the smooth sleeve of her raincoat timidly, like a frightened dog:
376“Goodness, how pretty you are! Do you know I have not talked to a woman for several years.”
Laura shrugged her shoulders and giggled:
“Well, that is nothing to long for.”
An expression of terror suddenly came over Dagmar’s face.
“You must be hungry,” she mumbled. “And I have only got a little salted herring.”
Stellan went out and blew three short sharp signals on a whistle. Then he returned.
“Don’t trouble about food,” he said. “My men will bring up all we need. But how shall we get hold of Tord?”
“Oh, he has not eaten anything today, and when he is hungry he will come and feed out of your hand.”
The men soon arrived carrying up boxes of food and wine. Dagmar excused herself for a moment and dived into a wardrobe to make herself smart.... She returned dressed in an old-fashioned, frayed red silk frock which hung round her thin body. But there still glimmered a last spark of beauty in her features.
When dinner was over she went out into the porch and hammered a broken zinc tub with a poker and shouted into the forest:
“Food, food, food!”
It sounded like the cry of an angry bird through the roaring of the wind.
Tord did not come.
“Well, then we can eat without the beast,” said Dagmar.
Her eyes suddenly grew wet as she sank down by the dazzlingly white tablecloth. Such a lot of lovely food—so many fine bottles! And then there was the man with “Rapid” in white letters across his jersey, just like a footman behind her chair! And then Laura’s jewels and Stellan’s yachting suit!
“Goodness me,” she mumbled. “Goodness me!”
377And then she drank her first cocktail.
Stellan pointed to Tord’s empty chair:
“How has our amiable host got into the habit of shooting at people who call on him?”
Dagmar quickly drank her second cocktail. A wild smile lit up her face like lightning:
“He is afraid they will come and take me from him.... So you can see he is mad.”
They ate for a moment in silence. The firelight from the logs in the fireplace flickered over the faces in the big dark hall, which was still shaken by the gale, and where the pine branch still persistently knocked at the window:
Knock, knock, knock...!
Dagmar drank and drank—with trembling hands and staring eyes. Suddenly she flung herself forward with her hands stretched across the table and her forehead on the cloth. She was seized by a paroxysm of weeping:
“It is terrible here!” she mumbled, “it is terrible here! I shall never be a human being again, never!”
She again lifted her face, distorted and dirty from her tears. She shook her clenched fists and by fits and starts there broke from her a wild and disconnected wailing over the drudgery, the loneliness, the hatred, the savagery of life out here on the stormbeaten cliff’s.
“He is mad!” she cried. “Tord is mad! He can’t bear to see people. He hides his money under trees. If I had not stolen from him, we should have starved to death!”
At the mention of money Laura pricked up her ears and across Stellan’s rigid mask a glimpse of a melancholy grin appeared. There was thus at least something comprehensible in this misery.
“What happened to the money?” he mumbled.
Stellan was told. Dagmar’s tears dried suddenly. She spluttered out fragments of the long, bitter monologues of years. Into her voice there entered the shrill accents of 378old quarrels. Peter had brought the money. And it was an enormous bundle of notes. But Tord did not put them into the bank. No, he pushed them all into a drawer, so mad was he. And he carried the key on a string round his neck. And he was mean with the money so that he need not go into town and talk business any more. He wanted to be free from that mob, he said. The money must last as long as he lived. And that was why they went half starved, and dressed in old rags. In the end Tord got it into his head that they did not need any food from the shops, but could live by shooting and fishing. It was no use begging or talking, for then he simply went away. Once he lay out in the skerries for a whole fortnight and then Dagmar had only some plaice to live on. But when Tord came home she saw no other way out than to make him drunk with his last bottle, and then she took the key and stole some of his money and sent the old gardener into town for winter supplies. For the old gardener was still alive then.
Tord said nothing when the old man came sailing back with his load of provisions. He was so hungry that he just threw himself over the food.
So things went on for a long time. Dagmar had learnt to open the drawer with a hairpin, and she had to watch for an opportunity to send the old man out when Tord was drunk or asleep. It seemed almost as if he acquiesced in the arrangement so long as he need not give out the money himself. But one day Dagmar found the drawer empty. All the notes were gone. She became dreadfully frightened. She began to spy on Tord to discover where he had hidden his money. And he was on his guard to see if she were following him. And thus they stole about silently and spied on each other like two criminals. And at last she managed to discover where he kept his treasure. It was in a hole underneath a tree 379root behind Mattson’s barn. She took a whole bundle of notes and hid them for herself. Tord noticed that the pile had suddenly diminished and he came home white with fury and threatened to kill her. But she defied him and would not tell her hiding place. And Tord did not find it.
One fine day the old gardener died. His pipe just fell out of his mouth and he was dead. Tord wanted to dig a grave for the old man down there without further ado. “We can say that he was drowned, if anybody asks,” he said. Dagmar frightened him by saying that they would be arrested as murderers if they did not notify the death. At last she got him to put up the sails of his boat. Dagmar sat down in the deckhouse and cried. She felt as if she had lost both father and mother when they sailed into the cemetery with the old man.
And now she had only herself to fall back on if they were to keep body and soul together out there at J?rn?. Soon everything was eaten up again and Tord would not go to the shops. And when she herself was going to set out in the skiff he had hidden the oars. She became so desperate that she sat down alone on the pier and howled like a wild animal. Then she remembered she had one more refuge and that was her red blanket. She had arranged once with the storekeeper that if they were in distress she was to hang out a big red rug in the window of the big house. And then he would take the motor boat and bring food to them. She had not much hope; she sat for an eternity ............