“Laura dear, do let me stay till six. Only till six when my horse is groomed. I must mount him a moment before … before … oh, good God. …”
Laura knew what was coming. Manne was going to be sentimental. The situation no longer had any novelty. She had an irresistible longing to go to bed and with a mocking curtsey entrusted Manne to the care of Stellan, who never slept after a night’s gambling. Then she withdrew.
And as Laura sat in her lace nightdress and pink silk boudoir cap and counted out her neat little winnings on the eiderdown, Stellan and Manne lounged in their easy chairs in front of the fireplace. The fire had gone out long ago.
The dawn was raw and dismal. Half-emptied glasses with lip marks and thumb marks, cigar ash and stinking, saliva-soaked cigar ends were everywhere. And then the pitiless sharp grey light peeping in through the blinds and the cold anguish of the dry air itself in a room where people have worn out their nerves with barren excitement.
On the carpet lay a torn knave of spades grinning at them.
Manne began to talk about “the Glove.” He always did at this time of night.
“The Glove” was Manne’s pet name for a plump little lady who had a glove shop in Regeringsgatan. For a long time she had kept Manne at a distance and he had been forced to purchase and make presents of an incredible number of pairs of gloves in order to win her favour. And now marriage with her was not the most impossible of dear old Manne’s eccentricities. He was unfaithful to “the Glove” now and then with ladies of his own class, but he always returned to her, disappointed and full of remorse. Her diligence, thrift, wordly wisdom and other bourgeois qualities had for him an exotic attraction, the whole charm of the incomprehensible.
Manne tried to kick away the knave of spades and looked appealingly at Stellan with his boyish, humid eyes.
“If you only knew what a woman she is! Damn me if the tears do not come into my eyes when she sews on my buttons. And I had promised her not to gamble again! What will she say when I tell her this?”
Stellan sat there shivering and sleepless, with the worries of tomorrow like poison in his veins and nerves. He was sick of Manne’s sentimentality. It was as if a night frost had fallen on their friendship:
“Why the devil do you tell her?”
Manne smiled a pathetic smile:
“You don’t understand, Stellan. I can hide nothing from her. I can’t. I should go mad at once if I did. She is my reason and conscience, you know. We won’t go just yet, Stellan. It isn’t six yet. And I must ride a little before I talk to her. …”
Manne poured out a glass of soda water and swallowed it in one draught:
“Ugh!” he said, “how awful it all was!” And then he suddenly began to talk about old Kolsnäs, about his father, the late chamberlain, who had taken part in the battle of Dybböl, and about his poor little shivering mother with her sewing basket and screen and fires well into June. And he talked about their long battle on the lake outside Stonehill and about their riding trips in the Backa forest.
“Do you remember it all, Stellan? Those were fine times, weren’t they, Stellan? My old home. It is a damned shame. What have I done with it all now? I am a traitor. Yes, a traitor. Curse it!”
Stellan, cold and numb, felt a shock pass through him. Was this how matters stood? Was it as bad as that with Kolsnäs?
“What nonsense are you talking?” he muttered.
Manne stared anxiously at him:
“Stellan, old man, it … you had better not go to the bank with my cheque … not tomorrow, anyway. …”
“Why not?”
“Because there is nothing there, not a farthing.”
“You ought to have told Levy that. He won it from me.”
For the second time a shock passed through Stellan, as he pronounced Levy’s name. But Manne sank back in the chair staring straight out in front of him:
“I shall have to clear out,” he muttered, half crying. “Tomorrow I shall have to get away. What will ‘the Glove’ say?”
Stellan was again cool, tense, fully awake. He was one of those people who do not know the meaning of melancholy or remorse. Their egotism is so rounded and complete that such things do not touch them. Neither can they admit defeat. That would be the end of their world. Adversity to them only points forward to new opportunities to be seized.
Levy wants Kolsnäs, thought Stellan. Once again he sat there, tense, cool and collected with the blue vein throbbing in his forehead just as if the table and the cards were again before him. Levy wants Kolsnäs, that’s as clear as daylight.
Each time he thought of Levy he felt as if he had been pricked by a spur. He hated Levy, and during these moments he was learning a great deal from him. What was it Levy had said? “How can you find anything in this miserable gambling?” Yes, that’s what he said. Things which had seemed impossible before seemed all at once self-evident, final. Yes, of course, that’s it, he thought. I’ll trick Levy and save myself.
He suddenly looked Manne steadily in the eyes:
“Do you know what it means to write cheques like that?” he asked. His tone was so sharp that poor Manne was startled.
“No … !”
Stellan blurted out the worst:
“Prison, old man, if you don’t find the five thousand by the time the banks open. Can you do it?”
“No, it is impossible.”
“I’ll try to get you the money, but on one condition—that you won’t let Levy have Kolsnäs.”
That was a condition that the astounded Manne agreed to with all his heart.
“No, because I think I know of a better buyer, if you really can’t keep the estate. That’s agreed then. You take
