As soon as Tord had rounded the point, the gale cast itself upon him as if a window had blown in. The yacht luffed, slowed down with flapping sails and vibrated till you could feel it through the whole hull. Then it slowly fell away and gathered speed.
Tord seemed to waken up. Beneath his blown coarse tufts of hair his glance grew keen again. “By Jove, now we shall have some sailing!” Muttering sturdy oaths, he worked himself up for a quarrel, a wild quarrel with his beloved old sea. It was the last thing he had to fight with. Everything else had gone.
He was still under the Kall-skerries, and the worst had not yet begun.
There are gales and gales. This was no puffing, impatient, spring squall, nor yet a black, summer squall, but a big heavy, autumn gale with all the grimness of the coming winter behind it. It came from the north, too. Sky, water and hills had all the hues of iron. The clouds hung with shades of darkish blue between the lighter clearings in the sky. The distant cliffs flashed suddenly with a ghostlike, dead, metallic sheen.
Now he would soon be out in the open sea. Now it was time to put about if ever he wanted to get back. But Tord did not. The sea was stronger than he.
East of Järnö the sea is almost always deserted. There are no buoys or lighthouses, no sails and no smoke from steamers. No man stood with glasses to his eyes following the death struggle of the yacht out in the raging twilight of the sea.
Tord did not give in so easily. He sailed like an old sailor. He sat huddled up to windward and spat out the salt water and avoided the worst breakers. With a kind of pale and passionate devotion he saw the seas grow and grow. Every heavy, onrushing, crested wave out there in the desolate expanse was like a confirmation of something he had long, long known. Stiff with cold in his dripping rags, shivering to the very marrow with weariness, he felt a mysterious inward joy as both the boat and himself irresistibly succumbed. Then the peak blew down and the boom trailed in the water. Then the waves began to crash in through the missing hatch in the bows. It became more and more difficult for the heavy half-disabled hull to lift itself out of the troughs. Then Tord was flung overboard just at the moment when the boat capsized and sank. He saw the faded red pennant at the masthead dive a few fathoms away from him. He still kept afloat, he was still swimming. But he did not swim towards the land, but further out, towards the sea. The last thing he saw was a high, wonderfully tall, mountain of water, iron-grey, ice-green, rising above his head, with a crest of coldest, palest foam. In the middle of the wave he sucked the water into his lungs, lost consciousness and passed without pain.
Thus finished Tord Selamb’s last great wild quarrel. Defiance you might call it, a wild mad defiance unto death. A philosopher might perhaps mumble something about the negative in all egoism. Tord had driven the Selambian selfishness to the point at which it annihilates itself.
IX
Peter’s Tombstone
One cold winter day in the third year of the world war Laura drove out to Lidingön. 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 was 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
