Peter stood there with outstretched hand, and Lundbom really could not help seizing it, though Herman had forbidden all communication with Selambshof.
“What’s the position?” grunted Peter. “If I can do anything I must know the position.”
Lundbom shook the ledger:
“There were losses last year already. This year will be still worse.”
“The figures?”
“Thirty thousand last year. At least fifty thousand this year, if things go on like this. Now we are selling out our timber below cost. We are hard up for ready money.”
“Have you any specially difficult payment to make?”
“Yes, on Saturday week, a bill for twenty thousand. Fancy, we who never used to touch bills before.”
“Who has got your bill?”
Lundbom mentioned a small notorious usurious banker. Peter whistled. That bank proved that Herman had not known how to look after his business in town properly. He rose and pressed Lundbom’s hand:
“Goodbye! Not a word to Herman about this. He must be managed carefully, poor boy, Goodbye!”
A week later Herman came back from his sailing trip. He was once more sitting on the pier. The twilight was strangely yellow. In the south a big grey-black cloud floated, so heavy and solid-looking that it seemed a miracle that it did not fall. A warm but strong southeasterly wind had sprung up after the day’s calm. The leafy mosses of the willows on the shore turned in the wind and yellow crested waves beat with foreboding insistence against the slimy green piles on their sloping stone ballast. Then the foresail halyard of the cutter began to flap persistently against the mast, a sound which in a badly chosen harbour at night threatens to cast you adrift and to shift your anchor in the dark.
Herman was sitting with outstretched legs. His chin had sunk into the sweater and he stared motionless out over the water. Over his whole being there descended a chill shadow of loneliness which gave a touch of melancholy and appeal even to his warm yachting shoes.
He stretched out for his whiskey glass but checked his groping hand and muttered something to himself about a renewal, a commission, and nine percent. He came no further. There he stopped. He refused, from a kind of spite, to think any more than was necessary to keep things just afloat for the moment. It was also from some foolish spite that he had sought the assistance of an ill-famed bank. “That fits in with me best,” he thought, “for everybody thinks I am an impossible person.”
Ugh! business … banks … the whole town!
He felt such a strong desire to take flight in his boat again that it hurt him. Alone! out into the storm and darkness!
At this moment a massive figure came walking out along the pier. There was something disarming even in his way of dodging between the holes in the rotten floorboards of the pier. His little, round, wrinkled head hung on one side between his enormous shoulders—as if it were drooping from sheer compassion. He somehow looked like an enormous child. He stopped and looked at Herman, with two small watery eyes that threatened to overflow.
Herman jumped up when he caught sight of the newcomer, he drew himself to his full height, erect and rigid as a post:
“What do you want here?”
Peter stretched out his arms, which resembled thighs on which hands had happened to grow.
“Look here, old boy … why should we go on like this, … two old friends like ourselves. … You know I couldn’t help things. …”
Herman suppressed his angry impulse and with a shrug of his shoulders sank back on the seat, staring once again out over the water where an old black-tarred firewood smack was just taking in her topsail and slowly turning into the wind with dark sails booming.
Peter seized the opportunity of sitting down on the seat without further ceremony:
“You mustn’t think I am on Laura’s side,” he assured Herman. “She is a handful, she is, without a heart in her breast!”
“I have never asked to hear your opinion about my divorced wife,” said Herman in a voice that was meant to be frigid.
But all the same there was a corner in his soul where Peter’s words did good. He could not hide his wound. Peter noticed it at once. So much sensitiveness he had left from the time of the Great Fear. Yes, yes, that is the after-swell, he thought, and moved closer up to Herman, ready to give him another dose. Then it suddenly started to rain. Big, whipping drops. Herman rose silently, taking his glass and bottle with him. Without looking at Peter he walked quickly up to the house. “I don’t mind your being short with me if it soothes you,” thought Peter, and followed him faithfully up the steps and into the smoking room.
Herman put the bottle on the table, threw himself on the sofa and stared at his toes.
Peter took the matches and lit the lamp. Then he went into the kitchen and returned with a couple of bottles of soda water and a clean glass. After that he filled Herman’s glass and prepared one for himself.
“Your health,” he said.
Herman drank deeply without replying. Then followed a moment’s silence. The rain drummed against the upper windows, and rushed down the rainpipes. A cool damp penetrated into the close room.
Peter took a cigar out of a box and lit it:
“I’ll be damned if I don’t stay the night, old boy! It feels jolly to be back at old Ekbacken again!”
Herman was still mute and seemed absorbed in the opposite wall. But when Peter drank he drank also. And that happened often. Peter thought the whiskey tasted good. Yes it really was very jolly to be sitting here at Ekbacken and see old father Hermansson’s treasures
