“No, old boy, of course you can’t, but that’s not the point. I have felt the whole time that this was impossible. You don’t understand what a human being can feel like, Stellan. I played only because you proposed it. For twenty years I have not done anything else but what you proposed. I am a wretch. And you, Stellan, what are you? Imagine! I have known you for so long and yet I don’t even know that. It’s strange, but tonight … I almost seem to catch a glimpse of you, after all. Yes, you are one of those who succeed in everything. You remain a Selamb. And all the same I am somehow sorry for you, Stellan. Yes, I feel damned sorry for you, because, you see, there is something in life that you would never understand if you lived to be a hundred. …”
Manne had never been known to make so long a speech before. Stellan stood up and patted him on the shoulders.
“My dear Manne, now you are ready for a rest,” he said.
“That’s right … ready for a rest,” muttered Manne, and gave Stellan a hand which at first was limp, but afterwards pressed hard the hand of his friend.
Thus they separated.
If Manne had realized, about ten years earlier, all he realized that night, his life would perhaps have been shaped differently.
Stellan did not go to bed immediately. The genial mists of sleep seemed to have flown into the infinite distance. He stood in the moonlight leaning against the stone parapet of the balcony and felt how its chill mounted from his hands to his chest. His thoughts multiplied mechanically and spread like hoar frost. He thought of his own life. “I have been an incurable gambler,” he thought. “Well, what of it—it requires courage after all, that flirtation with Fate. You can say what you like but I have been a daredevil. Chance has been my God and I have not betrayed him. …”
Cold and penetrating a voice returned the answer he had expected all the time: “Not until tonight. You marked the cards. You were frightened, Stellan Selamb, frightened. …”
Stellan was not, for the moment, thinking of Manne, whom he had seduced into gambling, from whom he had won, and whom he now knew to be destitute. No, he only heard the voice that had called him afraid: So cold and selfish can conscience be.
“No, I was not at all frightened,” he protested. “The fact is that I at last perceived my own stupidity. What the devil is the use of relying on chance. Chance is the fool of necessity, nothing else. And we have been the fools of the fool. If everything is a mathematical certainty what the deuce does it matter if I dig my nail into an ace of hearts!”
But it is dangerous to betray one’s God even if he is a fool. The pitiless voice was not silenced: “You stole your friend’s last chance, Stellan Selamb, you are no longer a gambler, you are a thief, a cowardly thief.”
Stellan shuddered. That is the worst that can happen to a man of his stamp—to doubt his own courage. He discovers all at once all the things he has neglected to be afraid of. The stone parapet felt dreadfully cold. It positively made his hands stiff. But he could not let go. The moon seemed to breathe a silent, cold threat. What lies were told about the moon? A dead world! The death’s head from space grinned into his face. Stellan suddenly looked round with an uncertain look. Behind him rose the high white façade like a wall of snow. It struck a chill into his back. And behind it slept the woman without a future, the woman whose bosom was a tomb. Was it not almost suicide to take such a half dead creature to wife?
“Why do I stand here in the moonlight,” he thought. “Am I alive or am I only a ghost?”
Yes, the moment of agony had come to Stellan Selamb as it comes to everybody. He felt a cruel fear. But it was not the fear that is the beginning of wisdom. He had gracefully skated on the outside edge on the smooth ice of prejudices and fictions. But now he had fallen through into deep reality. “Ugh—this seems to be bottomless! Yes, the world is as deep as my fears.”
Stellan came down late the following morning and found Count Lähnfeldt in an evident bad temper at Captain von Strelert’s sudden and unceremonious departure.
But out on the parapet of the steps Elvira sat already impatiently waiting for her ride. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders:
“The Baron has already run away,” she said. “It was not an orderly retreat, it was precipitate flight.”
The morning sun and the ride helped Stellan to recover himself. After the ghostly visions of the night he enjoyed feeling Caesar’s fine shoulders working beneath him. The coolness of the rushing air around his forehead and temples mingled exquisitely with the gentle innocent warmth of the beautiful, gleaming body of the horse. Stellan did not feel exactly tired, only strangely unsubstantial and fragile.
They were riding in silence and he kept a little behind. He could not understand his feelings yesterday in the park. No, today he looked at her more critically than ever. Even during the ride when she appeared to greater advantage than otherwise he found in her something attenuated, tense, unsexed, that left his instincts cold and unmoved. But that did not worry him now. It was rather a relief. It somehow made the thing easier. For one always feels it is easier to reach a goal that one does not long for too intensely. And it was high time. Tomorrow the rest of the shooting party was due to arrive, and then it might be difficult to find an opportunity.
Stellan tried to imagine how his rejected predecessors had behaved under similar circumstances. Of course they had stopped her in a
