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 and 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 Majängen. He imagines it is his son … you remember that story. …”
An expression of brooding hatred came over Hedvig:
“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 tollhouse. 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 ridiculously 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 forever 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
