The articles were of course anonymous. But Peter recognised the author from certain attacks and exposures. He was not ungrateful for this valuable free advertisement of Majängen and Solberget, which must now appear to the uninitiated as a glorious paradise in the wilderness. But for the sake of order he made certain representations to his youngest brother, which resulted in a quarrel, during which Tord gave vent to his excitement by letting off his gun, into the air it is true, but still a gunshot.
Filled with a new indignation, Tord continued his articles and painted on the wall the devil of capitalistic greed despoiling nature, with features which resembled those of Peter the Boss to a nicety. He began to develop a taste for writing. He suddenly felt that he was meant to be a writer, and was at once seized with a violent contempt for the art of painting. It is true that all he wrote, except those violent articles of propaganda, was cast into the editor’s waste paper basket, but that only increased his irritation without in any way convincing him of his incapacity. After a quarrel with his old painter-friend over the relative values of the two arts he without further ado kicked out the disgusting parasite who had tricked him into wasting the most beautiful years of his youth with such rubbish as the crayon and the paint brush.
The painter was gone. Libations with Peter were over. Tord was alone, quite alone with his foxes and crows and mice in the gruesome Rookery.
He got into the habit of making long excursions into the town—the detestable town. Nothing like it had happened to him since he had slipped out there as a boy in profound secrecy for some devilment. At that time he had had a strange, secret partnership with some unknown vagabond in whose company he had pilfered in the market place and cut holes in sacks of flour down by Skeppsbron. He remembered the latter especially because of the strange, soothing satisfaction it afforded him to stand there in the twilight and feel the cool, velvety flour running through his fingers into the mud. He had already begun to revel in destruction, perhaps from a precocious, instinctive hatred of all the culture on which society is based.
Tord hated the town, but not in the same way as Herman, to whom it meant lawsuits and a bad conscience. Tord did not suffer from his conscience. No, he had an instinctive hatred of all the adaptability, refinement, cooperation and methodical work for which it stood. He detested the great complex machine in which men are only cogs. It was the complex purposefulness and relative common sense of teeming civic life which tormented him.
But Stockholm was becoming a great city and as such it had another side. It was a jungle, a wilderness of stone, the home of the thronging masses and of cold emptiness by night. But the town began to exert a certain fascination over Tord. He was going to be a writer, as we know, and those who can do nothing else can always explore the special vices of the imagination. He discovered that loneliness in a crowd has many joys for a fastidious individualist. The masses are necessary, so that we may look down on them. In the crush of humanity we dream so easily of the lofty heights from which all below look like creeping things. It is always so with the dreams of sterile genius. It would begin at the top, forgetful of all that lies below.
So much for Tord and the throng. But he did not hold out long. He soon relapsed into restless despair. He was frightened by the very masses over which he had just triumphed, and fled, full of loathing, home to The Rookery.
No, it was better in the emptiness and the cold stony landscape. To stroll about in the deserted outskirts of the town in the uncertain spring twilight when the masses of houses rise up like huge banks of darkness in the waning light and the street lamps look like giant submarine lilies which have collected all the cold phosphorescent light. To drift about on still summer’s nights when the lamps are out and everything sleeps at the bottom of a green sea, where the desires of our dreams move silently like great fishes. The town in storm and darkness when the lonely wanderer, stimulated by drink, imagines himself lord of this brooding deserted world of stone! The town as landscape, as nature, as the hunting ground of all the wild instincts. The narrow back street defiles, the dark ambushes of the doorways, the snares of the public house and the bordel. Hazard, adventure, vice, women! Yes, every evening the town was a great wild jungle where the chase of women was permitted. Tord pursued this chase with a restless and obstinate interest. He had the lonely man’s long vision for a woman’s shadow. He could follow one after the other for hours but without
