“If it is beautiful here why are you going away?”
The sun was not less bright because Herman turned away from her and grumbled. Laura pressed his hand encouragingly:
“I’ll soon be back,” she whispered softly.
She felt very superior to Selambshof and Herman and all the other everyday things which remained where they were put and never moved. But all the same there was a strange tenderness in her feeling of superiority. Sometimes she did not quite know if it was gay or sad.
Old Johannes, the gardener, sat in his porch and looked tranquilly at the neglect around him. He had been a sailor in his youth and divided his day into watches, four hours he smoked his pipe and four hours he rested. But during the day watch he slept. But somehow he managed to pay his rent so that he was not driven out. Until today Laura had only thought of the old man as something unkempt and dirty. She had never given him a further thought as she munched his apples. But now he suddenly appeared quite nice to her, sitting there in the sunshine. A bumble bee buzzed lazily round the patches on his trouser-knees. His hands seemed as if made of bark. His whole face was smothered with hair, just as the garden was with weeds. When he scratched his beard with his coarse nail there was a grating sound. But his eyes were wonderfully calm. It was as if in a quiet, still, protected corner the sun were shining down on a barrel of rainwater.
Laura suddenly realised why Tord spent so much time with the gardener.
“How is Tord’s fox?” she wondered.
She referred to a fox that had been caught in a trap and which Tord had been allowed to keep. It lived in a shed.
“Tord has got him on the leash,” smiled the old fellow, pleased at the interest in their common pet.
The door of a big grateless room stood open. The floor was covered with fruit. Laura dived in with the gardener and came out with her hat filled with the rosiest apples that ever woman tempted man with. Herman sighed and ate. It was all “sour grapes” to him. He pulled at Laura’s arm. He wanted to be alone with her. He was jealous of the garden, of the gardener, of the Swiss Alps, and of everything.
They moved on.
On the other side there was a hillock with terraces and ledges and some tumbled-down summer cottages. Here everything was silent, mysterious, and abandoned. Laura and Herman walked about in the small devastated gardens and peeped into the empty rooms where the winter seemed already to have thrown its shadow. Squeezed in between the lake and the hill lay a rambling old house given over to the rooks. It was a high house with three balconies, built over the water and embellished with some extraordinary extensions on the land side. Here the water splashed against the piles, covered with a green ooze, and the aspens, burnt red by the autumn, rustled, and the whole was illuminated by a strange light reflected from the paths covered with yellow leaves.
Herman succeeded in opening the door. Past empty cupboards, garden furniture and old gate-legged tables covered with marks left by glasses they penetrated to the highest balcony. Here the last flies of autumn buzzed against the window panes and tendrils of Virginia Creeper pushed in through the chinks and cracks.
They sank down on a garden seat strangely moved by this sunny brightness and forlorn melancholy. Herman dug his stick into the floorboards and then he suddenly threw it aside and kissed her. He kissed her passionately and violently with bitter sealed lips. But she pulled him towards her and opened her lips softly. And she loved to feel how he tried to resist her but was not able to do so. No, humbly and helplessly he clung to her lips. This was their first real kiss. Everything before had been play. And she was going to leave all this behind. She felt so tenderly, so blissfully, so lovingly faithless. The tears came into her eyes and she smiled like a real little angel.
At this moment Laura happened to look out through one of the side windows. Who was that standing far away on the hill, almost on the same level as they were, if not Hedvig. She pretended to be interested in something out on the lake. But the expression of offended loneliness and stern disapproval in her pinched face was not to be mistaken. She had a disagreeable way of stealing upon you, had Hedvig. Of course she had seen everything. Of course she was green with envy because Laura had caught Herman and was going to Switzerland and was not as silly as Hedvig herself.
“So now we shall have her haunting this place,” muttered Laura. “Now this jolly place is spoilt for us.”
They pulled an old curtain before the window so that Hedvig should see nothing and then they stole away from “The Rookery” as silently as Indians. Now they were out in the wood on the other side of the avenue and they kissed each other again, but without lingering. A restless longing drove them on. They walked all the way to Träskängen and when they got there it was almost evening. A cold breeze met them as they jumped about from one dry spot to another.
In the deepest hollow there lay a white mist over banks of reeds and pools. But when they came up again on the other side of the hill towards the quarries it was so hot that they had to stop. In the twilight the scene around them seemed ragged and gloomy and deserted.
It was old Enoch who had started blasting here once upon a time. It seemed as if an evil spirit had ruled the forest, or some barren destructive fiend. Everywhere there were
