Now the sledge with its load of furniture slipped towards the town crunching through the half-melted snow mixed with sand—a bad surface for sledging. Brundin had not even put his head outside the door but now he had to get out. Crestfallen, grey, with downcast eyes, he came out with a dining-room clock under his arm. Hedvig only stared at him. His eyes met hers for a moment when he was getting into the sledge. He bowed awkwardly and then the spring of the clock made a noise as if it had been broken. Hedvig did not bend her head, did not return his greeting. She stood there like a graven image and there was something of a rigid dark triumph in her expression.
But when Brundin disappeared down the avenue she stole into his empty house and with a face suddenly grey with the hunger of love she rubbed it against the empty walls.
But Peter stood down at the corner of the avenue. He had relapsed into his old habit of going somewhere alone to meditate. He wondered how it was that Brundin was not put into prison. Fancy if it was because old Hermansson did not dare to bring Brundin into Court. What was it Kristin used to say: “It’s a pity for those children who have to have a guardian,” she used to say. Well, Peter did not exactly believe that old Hermansson had cheated them. But he had all the same a vague feeling that the matter ought not to be forgotten.
The distrust we learn during the years when we have a right to be trustful easily becomes a dangerous weapon.
It was now a little later in the spring. A new bailiff of proved honesty had been appointed and Peter was sent to an elementary Agricultural School in the Upland plain.
He did not like being there. The other pupils seemed to him dull, the soil unfavourable. The Brundin case was still fermenting within him. He longed to be home. There are many kinds of homesickness, and one of them is of a kind not suitable for poetry.
Let us now look at our friend Peter during the spring ploughing. The pupils were standing in a bunch out on the clay and each one had to plough a plot with the new American steel plough.
“Press harder on the right guide. Not too shallow and not too deep. Look at the horses. The furrows must be straight as a die.”
Thus said the teacher. Peter was the last. He stood there changing feet and thinking that he would take root in the clay. At last it was his turn. He called to the horses and the furrow was started. It was a still April day with big white clouds in the sky. The horses’ sides and the newly turned clay soil shone in the sun. Down in a hollow hung a blue mist and further away a wood of budding birches shimmered like a purple-brown cloud. But Peter neither saw nor felt anything of all that. Nor did he enjoy seeing how finely the ploughshare cut through and turned up the frozen soil. He had no desire just to add furrow to furrow in the ploughed field. He only thought it was heavy, tiresome, lost labour. And all the same he looked like a peasant with his coarse features and his heavy awkward carriage, which he had probably inherited from his mother’s side. But a poison had entered into the peasant’s body. It was the infection of the town—the town that had begun to creep nearer and nearer Selambshof. It was anxiety to turn everything into money. If only he were back at Selambshof, he thought. But he did not long for the house or the trees. He longed to sneak about, and spy and struggle for possession of the money that he already scented. To go about here ploughing soil that was not even his own made him sick. He had already developed the habit of looking at everything from the point of view of ownership. You cannot take any interest in a thing for itself. No, nothing exists in itself but only as “mine” or “yours,” principally “mine.” To whom did this field belong? To the County? That is the same thing as nobody. That was empty, strange, and simply repellent, thought Peter. He had already begun to fear common interests and common institutions. They constituted a kind of silent affront to his selfishness.
Then Peter came slowly back on the return and moved alongside his first furrow. It did not look very straight. He was reproved by his instructor—he heard the mumbling and suppressed laughter of his fellow students. What stupid country bumpkins they were with their lazy self-confidence. Their rustic self-importance about spray-drains and dung-wells irritated him. What experience of life had they had? It would do them good to get caught in the snares of somebody like Brundin and to be really, thoroughly cheated for once. And then he began to think of that old story again. There was something strangely fascinating in thinking of Brundin’s tricks and wheezes. Of course he disapproved of it all. But he could not help thinking of it, all the same. “So that is what they call business,” thought Peter. “That is the way to get rich.” He felt a strange disquietude, one moment he was hot and the next cold. “I shall never allow anybody to cheat me,” he thought. “But how can you really make sure? The only way is, of course, to go to meet one’s enemy and forestall him. You must practise deception, not much, of course, but sufficient to prevent him from deceiving you.”
Peter had now done his allotted share of the
