She therefore contented herself with lying in a humble tone about the whole affair:
“No, I had nothing to do with that scoundrel, sir. And besides a poor girl can’t understand all that men do. …”
By now Frida had already backed out on to the stairs and as soon as she felt safe she at once adopted her most seductive manner again:
“I hope I may iron many wedding shirts for you, sir,” she said, and curtsied and smiled and tripped gaily away, white, plump and coquettishly swaying whatever was capable of being swayed.
Peter stood on the stairs mumbling curses after her. Then he climbed breathlessly up into the observatory and watched with his glass to his eyes where she would emerge from the avenue into the road. He followed the white little figure in the twilight till it disappeared in a strange black house up on the ridge of the hill over Majängen.
A woman had entered the life of Peter the Boss. He was in love, positively in love with Frida Öberg, owner of the Majängen Laundry, No. 5, Solbacken.
Peter had never been able to associate with decent women. He was frightened of the “guinea hens,” as he called them. He grew nervous and hot from the unaccustomed effort of not saying anything coarse or mingling curses with his speech. He even felt a sort of fear of his sister Laura. Once many years ago she had dragged him into a set of Lancers and that was one of his most awful memories. Even today he felt a shiver down his back whenever he saw a dress suit. Thus it is clear that Peter’s erotic experiences were of the simplest. They were all lost in the fog that lies between the revels of the evening and the sore head and sordid regrets of the morning.
But now he was in love, but it was a delight mingled with not a little worry and anxiety. From the very start he felt love as a threat to his purse. He had anxious little suspicions that he was now more susceptible to cheating than before. For the first time he had to be on his guard not only against others but also against himself. “Ugh, this will be an expensive business,” he thought, when the longing to see Frida again came on him. She is no fool, that little witch! She won’t do anything for nothing. He positively endowed her with a calculating cunning and a mysterious seductive self-interest. But the more difficult and dangerous he made her, the more he must love her. Peter the Boss suspected a soul akin to his own.
He made up his mind not to appear too eager. No, I’ll wait till she brings the laundry again, he thought. But time passed, until he could not wait and began to hover about Majängen.
It was not exactly a pleasure to walk about there. There were no decent roads, but only heaps of stones and clay holes, for the company had long ago sold all the sites and had thus no interest in fulfilling its vague promise as to the construction of roads. Besides, the inhabitants of Majängen were unpleasant people. All the earliest purchasers, honest workingmen and small tradespeople, who had bought the ground and built upon it at too high a price, had been forced to leave their marsh-dwellings. In their place a floating population had found its way out to Majängen. The worst scum of the town population was to be found there. And Selambshof and Peter the Boss were not exactly loved by them. They rightly considered that it was his filth they had to wade in up to their knees and that it was on his heaps of stones they almost broke their legs.
So that when in his rosiest and most gentle dreams Peter wandered about there, he was perturbed by expressive glances, tightly clenched fists in trouser pockets and long, rude oaths at the house corners. And in the windows there teemed pale and dirty children who took their fingers out of their mouths in order to point at him as the bad man from Selambshof.
All that would not have mattered so much if Peter could only have caught a little glimpse of his beloved. But he never saw her outside in the clay, no plump smiling face showed itself above the window curtains of the laundry up in the “asphalt” house. Thus he had christened the big two-storied ramshackle house halfway up Solberget, because it was covered with asphalted cardboard outside the boards, and none of the successive owners had been able to afford to repair the outer boards, so that it remained there as black and dismal as it had been three years ago. And it was confoundedly difficult to get to it, for there were only steep narrow wooden steps leading past the entrance and Peter could not climb up and down them all day long in order to steal a glance through the window panes.
“Life is hard,” thought Peter, “you never meet those you want to meet.”
In the end he went home and wrote a letter. There are many ways of interpreting one’s feelings. Peter’s was not very personal because his eloquence was based on a lover’s advertisement in a newspaper and of course any mention of marriage was carefully avoided. And somehow the handwriting was not quite his. And he did not sign it Peter Selamb, but “Frida’s own Elk.” That is what he did.
“Never put your name unnecessarily to any document …”
The answer came by return post and was both pleasing and disquieting. Frida wrote that she was doing well and did not need to bow down to anybody, but that she might find use for a new Laundry stove of the Orion make and a blue silk coat with white revers. And then she allowed herself to hint at the possibility of further sympathy.
Peter fully realized the risk
