“How have things been with you, old girl? How have things been with you? They have been playing hell with your old master, really hell.”
Peter got up in his dogcart and drove with slack reins down towards the point where the road to Selambshof turned off. Then he suddenly heard behind him a prolonged shrill, strident whistling, a sound that seemed to be pure venom.
It was a greeting from Majängen. It was the signal of a long and bitter guerilla war.
Peter had won his case—but he felt all the same confoundedly dismal. He could eat nothing for dinner, though he took a couple of appetisers. And things did not improve when Stellan rang up. Fancy he had heard of it already. He was absolutely furious:
“Scandalous,” he cried, “grotesque—that sort of thing should be settled on the quiet. You are a damned clodhopper, you make us all impossible.”
Peter put down the receiver, hurt, sad, almost ready to cry. “Abuse,” he thought, “nothing but abuse. And all the same it was really for Stellan’s sake that I … swore. …”
With the coming of dark, Peter began to be frightened. He could not forget all those eyes staring at him in the hall. And every one of them knew that he had forsworn himself. Perjury! What did that matter now, when nothing could be proved. He had put his hand on the book and repeated what that damned judge—who as a matter of fact was a rake in financial difficulties himself—had said. But he, Peter, had not asked to lay his hand on the book. It was the Court that had forced him into entirely unnecessary folly. Anyhow he had certainly won his case. Why the devil then should he have to lay his hand on the book? The book, the book … Peter suddenly felt cold inside. The old terror of his childhood rose out of the depths of the past and seized him. He had of course never felt anything so noble as an honest doubt. He had never felt any sort of contact with the powers for which the Bible stood. A little piece of Kristin’s and Hedvig’s hard old God, the centre of Selambshof’s gloomy crippled terror, still survived deep down in his soul beneath the rich flora of lies and dishonesty. “So help me God in body and soul,” yes, that was what he had sworn. Supposing God should punish him now! Supposing he were to take away from him all that he possessed! Supposing he had to sit naked, starved, and alone in the dark forest just as he had dreamt as a child!
Peter was afraid of the God in the book, afraid as a negro of his fetish. …
Oh, if only he had had Hedvig to talk to. She knew all about that sort of thing. She was the medicine man who knew the appropriate spell … !
The clock had already struck twelve when Peter set out to look for a Bible in the great dark owl’s nest called Selambshof. From one room to another he walked searching in every corner, but without finding what he looked for. At last he crept stealthily into the housekeeper’s room like a thief and stole her Bible from her night table. Then he sat down to turn over the pages, greedily fastening on everything that spoke of wrath and threats and punishment. With swimming head and smarting eyes he made himself drunk with fear. At dawn he staggered trembling and shivering into the office and took a thousand-crown note out of the safe. And he spread it out so that he might really see how large it was. Then he put it in the housekeeper’s Bible—at one of the worst passages. …
That was the way out of Peter the Boss. He tried to bribe God with a thousand crowns.
As soon as it was dark the following evening he stole towards Majängen with the note in his pocket. It would have been simpler of course to send the money by post. But that was not good enough. The post is such a silent and mysterious institution. He was afraid that his sacrifice would go unnoticed by the Lord. And if he could “bull” shares by his self-abnegation that would be all to the good. So he would deliver the money himself—though of course without witnesses. Otherwise it might be dangerous.
Peter crept forward in the rain with the brim of his hat turned down and his collar turned up. It was really bold of him to go to Majängen now, but he was not the first whom fear has made bold. He slipped, stumbled, and stepped into holes in the darkness on the bottomless roads. Several times he thought he heard steps and whispering voices behind him. But these sounds were at once drowned in the soughing of the poor meagre pine branches which were struggling against the storm somewhere up in the darkness above his head. Now he would reach the asphalt house in a moment. Black as misfortune it hung there over the damp edge of the cliff. The laundry was closed, but there was a light in the window. Peter was just going to sneak up the long wooden staircase to reconnoitre when suddenly there came something whizzing through the darkness. It was a rain of big stones. Peter drew back a step but was hit by the next shower in the back just below the neck and also on the head. He fell forward without a sound, and lay there in his own clay like a sack of sand.
These were the first shots in the war between Selambshof and Majängen. Fatal hits. Peter was after all on the way to his woman and child. There was perhaps after all just a chance of Peter turning human being. … But then the stones intervened … !
Peter was unconscious and half suffocated by the clay. The thousand-crown note still lay in
