They grew excited round the table:
“We must thank you, of course! But why don’t you do something yourself? You can, Percy! You are no bourgeois! Why don’t you stick it out?”
Hedvig had been sitting all the time silent and forbidding. At Percy’s unexpected mention of an endowment she suddenly felt a cold shiver of anger. She rose quickly:
“You all seem to forget that Percy is ill,” she said. “He must not be rushed. He is much too excited here in Paris. Shan’t we go back home now, Percy?”
The young painters felt a little nervous of Mrs. Hill, of her aristocratic air, her dark nun-like beauty. Silence fell around the table. Percy rose with his little, absentminded, apologetic smile:
“Yes, there you see, gentlemen,” he said.
And then they left.
At last Hedvig succeeded in making her husband leave Paris, where it was already beginning to be hot and dusty. There is always an element of danger in the journey home for consumptives who have been living in the south. In Stockholm there had been an unfortunate relapse in the late spring, with storm and icy rain. Percy had to go to bed at once and Hedvig was again his nurse. He did not want the doctor. He had a real horror of doctors and Hedvig did not insist on calling one in. She took great care that he should not be exposed to tiring visits of old artist friends and she nursed him with quite, inexhaustible energy. There was no more talk of the great donation and Hedvig began to feel a certain deep calm.
But one fine day Percy got up in spite of all her protest and in spite of his not having quite a normal temperature. And the following morning an architect arrived. The two men walked round the house, drew, measured and made a lot of calculations.
“I want the drawings as quickly as possible,” Percy said at lunch. “I am in a great hurry.”
His eyes glowed and he had little red patches in his cheeks.
The architect promised to do his best.
Immediately afterwards the pictures began to arrive from Paris. Not only those that Hedvig had already seen, but a whole lot of new ones. Percy evidently had somebody down there buying for his account.
Hedvig said nothing. She kept to herself, locked herself in, brooded and scarcely answered when spoken to.
Still more new pictures arrived, and Percy was busy with them the whole day, studying them, and moving them from one crowded room to another.
Then the plans were ready and the workmen arrived, a whole swarm of them. They dug and blasted, laid foundations and built the walls. Percy sat in an easy chair out in the sunshine and looked on. He was so eager that he scarcely allowed himself time to eat. “This is my protest against oblivion,” he thought. “I am building a house for my ashes. I am building my own little pyramid. …”
He really imagined his ashes standing in a beautiful Japanese urn in a corner of the Hill gallery.
Towards autumn the roof was already on the new wing. Percy began to hang the pictures at once. He could not even wait till the walls had dried. He himself was not strong enough to move anything, but he sat in his chair and gave orders to Ohlesson, the coachman, who had now become a chauffeur. You could see even from Ohlesson’s back how he disapproved of these awful novelties. Percy did not worry. Whenever he looked in at the rooms containing examples of the older art, everything there seemed to him strangely quiet and as it were covered over with a fine dust. His taste was already brutalised by these strident colours and paradoxical forms. He really needed strong food now, poor Percy. Fatigue sometimes descended like a grey mist over his feverish zeal. He used these new excesses as weapons against the deepening shadows.
Hedvig walked about devoured by a silent consuming bitterness. Her feelings were a strange compound of jealousy of his overpowering interest in art and brooding anxiety at his wicked extravagance. This donation seemed to her like a challenge, like a theft from one who had sacrificed herself for him. Percy had allowed himself to be seduced, she thought. He has no power of resistance. But she dared not speak openly to him. She had a vague feeling that there was something within her that she must not betray. That is why she never went beyond her increasingly bitter reproaches that he overtired himself, and neglected himself. She wore an expression as if the crepe were already floating round her. Yes, Percy thought sometimes that she assumed her widowhood in advance. There was something sharp and nervous in his answer:
“Why do you insist on wearing black?” he said. “I should understand you much better in sealing wax red or sulphur green.”
Her old method of holding him was no longer effective. Hedvig again began to feel his lack of respect for illness as a personal insult. By and by they almost quarrelled about Ohlesson, the chauffeur. Hedvig began to drive into town every day in the car. Then Percy would have no one to help him, she thought. Then he would be forced to rest. This made her a little easier. One day she did something she had been tempted to do for a long time. She ordered Ohlesson to drive to Selambshof.
The avenue was full of yellow leaves. Several of the old trees had blown down and there were ugly gaps as in a broken set of teeth.
Peter sat in the office puffing at an unlit cigar and looking at his papers. He had aged. He was bent, his
