“Good morning, Peter!”
“Good morning, Hedvig. So the elegant Mrs. Hill visits this remote spot. Why this honour?”
Hedvig did not answer but looked out through the window with an expression of resignation.
Peter wore a look of injured innocence which suited him perfectly:
“Is it perhaps for the last dividends? Because Levy has long ago cashed them.”
Hedvig had, on Laura’s recommendation, appointed the lawyer Levy to look after her personal estate, including her shares in Selambshof. And Peter did not at all like the insolent supervision of the Jew.
Hedvig shook her head.
“I am anxious about Percy,” she mumbled. It sounded as if this confession had been forced out of her by a thumbscrew.
“Really, how—how is your lord and master, anyhow?”
On Peter’s face there appeared a well-meaning grin of sympathy. He summoned up all that was left of his former sentimentality, but it did not reach beyond his expression. His eyes penetrated swiftly into her very soul with a cold, familiar, insolently searching glance. “Aha, my dear,” they seemed to say, “this business did not turn out so well as you thought.” Hedvig, of course, stood in silent, dignified protest against his every low thought. But all the same she enjoyed his glance—something that groped blindly and stealthily in her vitals.
“Percy is very bad,” she exclaimed in a kind of exaltation, “much worse than he thinks himself. And he has quite lost his balance. He does nothing but buy picture after picture, mad things that unscrupulous people palm off on him. He is positively throwing away all he has! It is such a dreadful shame!”
Peter was playing with his pencil. He had never heard Hedvig say so much at once before.
“You mean that Percy ought to be under restraint,” he interrupted calmly. “I am afraid that would be rather difficult.”
“I shall have remorse all my life if I do nothing to help and protect him.”
Peter wanted to damp what he thought was unbusiness-like vehemence.
“Pictures, you said … but pictures can be good, almost as good as shares. They give no dividend but they can rise a damned lot in value.”
“No, not the pictures that Percy buys. He is being robbed by real swindlers. And then he wants to give it all away to the State. But they will never accept such rubbish. People will only laugh at us.”
Peter was startled. A donation! This was damned serious. He rose panting, walked up to Hedvig and poked his thumb into her arm:
“You … you ought to occupy Percy’s time a little more,” he leered. “So that he won’t have any left for this nonsense. Why the devil are you so black and white and beautiful as sin? … And have expensive pretty frocks and all that sort of thing. … The chief thing is that Percy does not commit any folly while he is still … well, I mean that one can always protest against a will. …”
There was a certain satisfaction in Peter’s grunts. He enjoyed saying this kind of thing to an elegant lady in diamond rings and black silk. There was a sort of luxurious revenge at last in being able to speak straight out to Hedvig, the hypocritical Hedvig.
His sister did not push him away. She smelled his breath, and the smell of stale tobacco and of cheese on his old clothes. All the time she had the same feeling in the pit of her stomach as one has when one sinks rapidly in a lift. Now she had reached the bottom. She did not push him away. She stood there with closed eyes without a trace of colour in her face. She felt his shamelessness groping with coarse, hairy hands about her reserve, her shyness, and her stealthy and lying fear.
“How dare you!” she whispered in a low, hoarse voice, “how dare you say anything so vile?”
But his words stuck all the same. They crawled about, teemed and multiplied within her. They stimulated her to action and emboldened her gloomy heart.
Hedvig staggered out of Peter’s hovel. She stood beneath the naked, shivering maples on the soil of her bitter youth and of her long humiliation. A dull consuming autumn restlessness ran through her blood. The darkness of the main building attracted her suddenly as by some secret hardening of her heart. The door stood ajar above the bank of withering leaves on the steps. She entered. Everything was dim, dusty, cold, stuffy. She wandered about the empty echoing corridors, turned the creaking locks, stole through swarms of moths between the covered mirrors and chairs and the windows which were specked with innumerable dead flies. In her own room she sank with a groan on to the edge of the old narrow bed of her girlhood. Memories of her poor, lonely, miserable childhood rushed over her with renewed strength. She felt a wild self pity, a kind of fury clawing her breast. But she liked to feel that claw. That was why she was here. She drained the cup of pain to the last drop with voluptuous bitterness. It gave her a right to revenge.
When, as if under the pressure of a dangerous burden, Hedvig slowly staggered out again it was only to pursue the past still further. She strolled through the neglected, overgrown garden where the benches and the paths were covered with dead stalks and the trees were already robbed of their fruit. Here in the old pear tree beside the well there was a big hole in which she used to hide her secrets—as a dog hides a bone. There had lain for a long time a broken seal out of the smoking room and a little ring with a green heart
