Today Peter was more than unusually obstinate with his books. He had already penetrated so far back in the books that the handwriting was not his own scrawl nor that of Inglund’s but a soft elegant handwriting with almost sensuous curls and flourishes. It was Brundin’s beautiful handwriting, which still made Peter feel sick. He tried for the hundredth time to enjoy the stale sweetness of victory. But it did not bring him joy. He still had a queer feeling that Brundin had cheated him of something … something that Peter the Boss would never enjoy.
Then a woman dressed in white came tripping gaily across the lawn, a plump little lady dressed in white with a big white bundle under her arm. She disappeared round the corner of the kitchen. Peter put out his head through the window and called out:
“Hallo! There’s nobody at home there! Come in here instead!”
Peter looked very surprised when the woman with the bundle came to the door of the office:
“Upon my word, it’s … isn’t it Frida?”
She answered with fluent tongue:
“Yes sir, it’s Frida right enough. I have the new laundry at Majängen now—Frida Öberg, Laundress—No. 5, Solbacken. Here is the bill. Excuse my bringing the laundry at this hour, but I had promised it on Saturday. There is no change here at Selambshof, I see.”
Peter stood with the bill in his hand, staring at the laundress, who had begun to pick collars, cuffs and starched shirts out of her bundle. How strange that it was Frida he was staring at, Frida of Brundin’s bedroom. That white and soft creature he had one night caught a glimpse of from behind the blind in the bailiff’s wing. This then was the Frida of his timid, oppressive, light-shy boyish dreams. There she stood, well preserved, smiling, insinuatingly plump, equipped with such charms that not even the simplest country yokel could help noticing them. Suddenly she was enveloped by a warmth as from hot irons, thought Peter. And far away at Kolsnäs they heard the accordion again tuning up a dance. Then he felt a sudden furious desire for movement, to make a noise and jump about with somebody in his arms. And he seized one of the shirts and waved it about:
“I hope you have washed the wedding shirt well?” he cried out almost menacingly.
“Why, are you going to get married, too?”
“Yes, this very moment, if necessary. Don’t you hear the wedding music? Shan’t we take a turn, we two?”
With the shirt spread out before him he jumped about in a sort of grotesque dance, threw his great arms round Frida and began to jump about whilst the wedding shirt still flapped about them. The worn floorboards groaned under Peter’s weight, the dust rose high and the flies buzzed away frightened from the paper ball below the lamp in the ceiling.
Frida defended herself laughingly when Peter wanted to kiss her:
“No, I must go now, sir.”
Peter stood perspiring and nervous and withheld the money for the bill:
“Won’t you have a look round old Selambshof for a moment? There isn’t a soul at home. I reign alone here now. Come along.”
He pulled her with him up to the main building and, eager and flushed, piloted her through the dusty closed rooms where the old gloomy and worn-out furniture slept and dreamed evil dreams in the heat and twilight.
“It is so cursedly quiet here tonight,” exclaimed Peter. “Can’t you laugh a little again so that I may hear what it sounds like?”
Frida laughed, but the echo came back hollow and scoffing from the depths of the corridors. Then they entered the green smoking room off the hall, which resembled a thousand other smoking rooms in so far as it contained an equipment of guns, deers’ horns, elks’ heads and stuffed birds. Peter seized the opportunity to impress upon her what a wonderful Nimrod he was and what an expert on the secrets of animal life, especially of animal sex attraction. He imitated the call of the capercailzie, he described the feathers of the mating ruff and its collar of feathers and finally he imitated the night call of the ruttish elk and its stamping so that it echoed through the whole of the empty house. Meanwhile he drew nearer and nearer to the door of the next room where he slept in the summer because it was so much cooler there than in his own wing. But when Frida saw that they were approaching the bedroom she wisely stopped on the threshold and not even the wildest and most seductive bird-calls could make her penetrate further. No, now she suddenly remembered that she ought to have met a friend long ago. She thanked him for all the kindness he had shown her and insisted on going. Then Peter became furious and reproached her coarsely for her behaviour with the bailiff:
“If that blackguard was good enough, I ought to be too—don’t you think so?”
A hard look came into Frida’s eyes and she hissed out as if testing a hot iron with her wet finger:
“I should like to tell you, sir, that I am on my own now and don’t need to listen to anybody.”
“Don’t be so high and mighty. It was I who managed things so that you escaped examination when Brundin was caught, because I was sorry for you.”
Peter had no proofs at all that she too was involved in Brundin’s frauds, but he always seized an opportunity of boasting of his kindness and of threatening a little. Frida was not at all
