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 reelected. 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 goodbye 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 floorboards. 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
