One cold winter day in the third year of the world war Laura drove out to Liding?n. Private cars were no longer permitted, but she had borrowed the big sledge from Trefvinge. Laura did not suffer at all from the biting cold, she was too fat for that. She had given up the struggle and had thrown herself into the arms of an ever growing appetite. The nervous interest in food which had arisen during the great crisis had broken down her last timid resistance. Yes, now when other people grew thin she grew fat, irrevocably fat. Her appearance was really rather striking. In her shining furs she resembled an enormous, hairy female animal. Her cheeks had folds in them but her eyes, embedded in fat, were still clear and quick, and the small mouth was greedy and hard.
Some people simply do not seem made for suffering.
Laura had in good time put on a soft protective layer of fat between herself and the cruel “fimbul” winter of a world in which starvation, pain, hatred and death in these days did their terrible work.
After some searching they found the road that turned off to Villa Hill. It had not been cleared of snow. There was not a trace of footsteps or of sledge marks. It was like driving into the desert. One turn and the house lay there apparently quite deserted in its big wooded park.
To penetrate to the front door was impossible, the road 390was blocked by a giant snowdrift. Laura had to trudge through the snow to the kitchen door where a few tracks really met. A bad-tempered old servant peeped suspiciously out through the half-opened door, but did not want to remove the safety chain.
“I am Countess von Borgk, your mistress’ sister. I have an important errand. Open at once, woman.”
Laura passed through a kitchen that frightened her appetite to a cold shudder and was then brought through silent, dusky stairs and passages to the hall.
“You can wait here. The mistress is out, but will soon be back.”
Laura sank down on a chair with a grey cover. She had not been out to see Hedvig for years. Ugh! how awful everything looked here, dark, dirty, cold, dilapidated....
Time passed, and Laura grew impatient. She took a peep at the picture galleries. The door was locked but she found the key on a shelf.
The poor deserted pictures! Dust, spiders’ webs, damp spots and dust again. Through dirty window panes, shaded by overgrown fir hedges and entangled branches of creeper, through glass roofs covered by the shrivelled leaves of autumn and the snow of winter a miserable twilight penetrated. The poor nudes in the pictures shivered in their bare skin over a long narrow drift that had blown in through a broken window in the roof. The “plein air” and impressionistic landscapes were blotted out by the dust and twilight. The modern brutalities seemed to survive longest. One or two shrill colour-screams still cut through the dark, the icy cold, and the silence like a cry of distress....
Laura huddled up in her furs. This was too dismal. She felt hungry—a desire to chew something—so it was always nowadays if she was exposed to any emotion. She took a packet of tough nougat out of her hand bag and took refuge before a big Dutch picture of still life. Chewing 391and staring at a crowd of hams, salmon, lobsters, oysters and tankards of ale she thought for the thousandth time: “That Hedvig! That miserable emaciated misfortune! What a jolly life she might lead if she were not so idiotic!”
Then Laura saw a dark shadow on the window. A woman came stealing out from the edge of the wood. She was thin and bent and she trudged heavily along in the deep snow. In her skirt she carried a big bundle of branches, brought down by the wind. From under the cap pulled deep down over the eyes she looked with shy, spying glances at the sledge and then walked quickly up to the kitchen door.
A moment later she slid stealthily and nervously into the hall.
That grey ghost was Hedvig Hill. The world had long ago forgotten that she had been a beauty and had been married to a young sympathetic patron of art. She generally passed as a half-crazy old maid who was afraid of people, who hated Jews, and hid her money in the seats of chairs. But nobody knew how wealthy she was. Whilst she herself got poorer and poorer and sank into a state of hopeless sterility, her money had multiplied and multiplied. It now represented an enormous sum of power and influence that she could not grasp or imagine.
Hedvig stopped with her hand on the door knob and stared anxiously at Laura:
“What do you want here?”
Laura swallowed a piece of chocolate:
“Peter has been ill for some time ... well, it is nothing infectious....”
Hedvig sounded indifferent.
“Well, what about it?”
“He has taken home a creature from Maj?ngen. He imagines it is his son ... you remember that story....”
An expression of brooding hatred came over Hedvig:
392“All men are disgusting brutes,” she mumbled.
Laura smiled teasingly:
“I don’t agree....”
She really writhed with the desire to say something sarcastic, but kept quiet for diplomatic reasons.
Hedvig fidgeted impatiently. She suffered to see Laura’s fatness, her furs, her smile:
“But what can I do? Why do you come here?”
“Well, Stellan asked me to fetch you. We must all three go out to Peter. Fancy if he is mad enough to recognize that unfortunate boy as his son!”
On Hedvig’s face came an expression of alarmed excitement, of mean spite:
“Would Peter let us suffer for his excesses....”
“Yes, he has been angry with us ever since we took Tord’s shares from him. He has got some plan in his head. But be quick now!”
Hedvig stood hesitating:
“Will you drive me back here after?” she mumbled.
“Of course, you won’t have to spend a farthing. But be quick!”
Hedvig disappeared and returned after a good while, stuffed up in a lot of moth-eaten woollen underskirts, jerseys and shawls, amongst which you could distinguish an old ragged Spanish mantilla fastened about her ears under the hat as if she had toothache.
They were late for Stellan. He had arranged to meet them away out at the toll-house. He did not like to be seen with his sisters, neither the fat one nor the thin one. Frozen and angry he climbed up into the sledge and pulled the fur rug round him without greeting them. These three, sisters and brother, were not exactly a centre of warmth in the icy cold winter twilight. And still their meeting was really an extraordinary event, because they never met now except at the annual board meetings.
Laura sat looking at Stellan, thinking that he had grown 393ridiculously small. She often thought so of people nowadays. As far as Stellan was concerned it was in some measure true. Without being bent, he had as a matter of fact shrunk, sunk into himself. Time had brought to his face-mask stiff folds which would not permit a smile to peep through. The hard restless eyes seemed to have lost for ever the secret of joy. His whole person diffused solemn boredom of long echoing passages and big empty rooms of state.
The silence was only broken by the crunching of the horses’ hoofs and the creaking of the runners where the snow was thin. The snow had fallen during a gale so that in open spaces the road was almost bare between the drifts. They had already passed Ekbacken yard, and the three now drove along the lake, the lake of their childhood. The frosted bushes on the shore resembled enormous fantastic crystals that had grown without sap and lived without life. They leant over a world of ice-floes frozen together, cloven from shore to shore by a black channel of open water. Nothing gave such a shiver of cold as this reeking trembling open water where the sluggish poisonous stream of Hell seemed to flow up between the blocks of ice. Over on the other shore there hung a gigantic cloud, like an enormous bird, with the grey colour of primeval time, and laden with pagan cold. Beneath it white globes of light trembled against a smoky, dull-glowing sky, which seemed red from the reflection of gigantic sacrificial fires. It was the big new works built round the old glue factory. Day and night it shone and roared and hissed on the other shore. Day and night. There the timber of the forests was ground to the finest powder as a substitute for cotton fibre in explosives. A flourishing war industry!
Stellan did not notice that it was the roar of the flight of Nidh?gg, who feeds on corpses, that he heard, nor that he passed along Nastrand, the shore of corpses, where the dragon sucks the dead....
394The stiff mask lit up for a moment as he lifted a gloved finger in the direction of the arc lamps:
“Good shares,” he mumbled, “rose five today again.”
“I see,” said Laura, “then I will buy....”
“All right, but don’t keep them too long....”
The sledge was already turning up the avenue before Stellan seemed to remember why they were driving out to Selambshof.
“We must go slow with Peter,” he said. “If we make a mess of the thing now we shall scarcely have time to repair the damage. At any moment there might be serious complications. Fortunately he does not seem to have written any letters to that woman in Maj?ngen. I mean the mother. And neither has he taken any steps that point to recognition or adoption. I know it both through the coachman and the housekeeper, because I have long been forced to maintain certain relations with them. This war crisis at once sharpened Peter’s appetite for unpleasant kinds of business in a way that made it necessary to keep an eye on him. It is not long since he had half Selambshof full of boxes of sugar and butter. Yes, the house was practically used as a warehouse. I was there one evening myself and saw the exquisite portrait of our old grandfather peeping out from behind a pile of boxes of butter.... And then his company. He has developed a habit of taking home real criminals, and then they sit up half the night and drink and gamble like madmen. That creature from Maj?ngen is by no means the first of his kind. Peter had scarcely been ill a week when he sent the coachman for him. The mother, who was a well-known termagant, swore and behaved like a lunatic. She would have nothing to do with ‘that devil at Selambshof’ she said. And even the young rogue himself seemed to have had remorse, for at first he was unwilling to go. But when the coachman returned with certain vague promises things went more easily and he ran away from his dear mother to Selambshof.”
395Laura had listened with great interest:
“I should have liked to see the first touching meeting,” she said.
“It can’t have been very sentimental; Peter is said to have stared rather angrily at the figure before him and to have cried: ‘You are a lucky young rascal!’ And then he asked: ‘Can you play camphio?’ No, he could not play camphio but he must have been willing to learn, because from that time the cards were out several evenings one after the other. Now when Peter is too weak himself, the coachman and that creature have to be in with him with cards and alcohol....
“Yes, that is how things are at present. I don’t for a moment suppose that Peter’s conscience has in any way awakened or that he has grown fond of the scamp. No, he is the slave of his money and nothing else. And now he is working out a trick to keep his fortune together and to cheat his legal heirs.”
The sledge stopped, they had arrived.
Selambshof looked higher and gloomier than ever—with all its black windows. In the trees the crows were quarrelling over their perch for the night. Nobody kept them in check any longer, so they collected there every evening. Both horses and people started at the screams of hundreds of black ghostlike birds in the deep twilight.
An uncanny presentiment of death came over brother and sisters. Selambshof was at one with Peter the Boss. But Selambshof was also their own youth ... the root of their lives ... and now Peter was going to die and lots of other things with him....
Laura was frightened and wanted to get out of the sledge:
“No, this is too awful! I am going home again!”
Stellan had to pull her with him. They walked in silently.
Peter had had his bed moved into the office. It stood in the place of the old leather settee underneath the yellow, 396fly-marked Selambshof map. A lonely oil lamp feebly lit up some soiled glasses on the night table and his own swollen, puffy, pale face. It really was a room in which an Eskimo might have complained of the lack of comfort. But Peter seemed to think it ought to be like that. He had cheated many in the course of his life, had Peter the Boss, amongst others himself.
The visit of his sisters and brother did not seem to be unexpected or unwelcome. You could even see a little flash of satisfaction in his features, which seemed to worry Stellan. Hedvig was earnestly requested to keep quiet at first, and even did so, after she had crept away into a corner, wrapped up in all her jerseys and shawls. Otherwise their tones were of the gentlest. They were all kind care and spoke eagerly of doctors, nurses, cures, during which Laura all the same kept at a certain cautious distance, nervously chewing....
Then a dog was heard to bark outside, a great dull subterranean sound as if it had come from beyond the copper gates of death. All felt a shiver pass through them. Even Peter seemed to feel rather uncomfortable:
“That damned dog!” he swore. “It sounds as if the devil himself was on the way.”
Stellan ran to the window. Out in the snow he saw a shadowy figure dancing a sort of war dance, whilst throwing snowballs and lumps of ice at the furious watch-dog. Thin, lank, with high shoulders, and bare hands and head, in spite of the cold, the shadowy figure danced between the drifts.
Stellan turned to Peter:
“It must be your ... your new boarder ... he amuses himself by teasing the dog....”
“I see, is it only little Bernhard?” Peter grunted relieved. “Yes, he is not exactly a friend of watch-dogs....”
But now Hedvig’s voice sounded suddenly from the corner. She sat there looking as old-fashioned and motheaten 397as if she had hung herself away in a wardrobe out of pure meanness and then forgotten where the key was. Her voice also sounded strangely stuffy and dusty:
“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter,” she mumbled. “You should never have taken up with that woman....”
Peter did not seem to have noticed her before. A shiver passed over his swollen fea............