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 old 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 root 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 Järnö. 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 out on the cliff only staring out over the water to see if the signal worked. On the third day a motor boat actually rounded the point and so their distress was staved off for that time. This had happened last autumn. The winter was cruel. They had no longer anybody to carry wood and water. Dagmar became ill from all the drudgery. For two months they were isolated when the ice would neither break nor bear. At last the ice froze
