Mattson sat in his workshop carving:
“Well, Mattson, shall we have a drink to clear our heads?”
“Thank you, sir, but I don’t care about anything strong in the middle of the week like this.”
“All right, I’ll drink it myself then. What are you slaving away at?”
The old man thoughtfully turned a piece of lilac wood in his hand before he began to work with his knife:
“I am making pins for a rake.”
“Now, for the winter?”
“Summer will come again. And it’s not good for poor people to be idle. …”
That was one for Tord. He struck at the nettles outside the door with his stick. The calm in Mattson’s eyes irritated him. Both sea and sky became commonplace beside that miserable plodding. What was the use of the autumn coming and the leaves falling and the darkness and loneliness when Mattson sat carving rake pins all the same?
“I will pay you back for that, old fellow,” thought Tord. And he longed for an autumn storm, a real three-day autumn gale. Especially when he had his nets out.
Then came the autumn ploughing. Nobody possessed beasts of burden out here by the sea, but Mattson’s neighbours came sailing in with their wives. And then they yoked themselves to the plough. Mattson’s wife also took part and pulled, though she was so old, but Mattson drove. Furrow after furrow they ploughed in the drizzling rain with tough sustained persistence.
Tord ran into the forest to escape seeing it. But he found no peace, he had to go back to the ploughing. For a moment he stood behind a juniper bush and stamped with anger, then he suddenly rushed out into the clay:
“Stop!” he cried. “This is my soil and I won’t look on at this miserable business.”
They stopped and stared at him:
“What is one to do when the island will not feed a beast?” suggested Mattson.
Tord stalked about with heavy lumps of clay under his shoes:
“How much can you get out of these miserable patches?”
“Oh, about three bushels of rye,” mumbled the bailiff, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. “The soil is good.”
“All right, I’ll pay you for three bushels! But get away now!”
And Tord took out some banknotes.
But Mattson looked at his neighbour and shook his head:
“No, sir, you mustn’t make fun of an old man. I have ploughed this soil for forty years, I have. You put your money back again.”
Upon which Mattson made a sign to the drawers, who put their backs into the work again and continued their furrow as if nothing had happened.
From that day on Tord hated all that was Mattson’s. Incessantly he was running up against the object of his annoyance. Mattson’s cock woke him in the mornings with his obstinate moralisings on the dung heap. When he went down to his boat he swore because he had to dive under the old man’s nets, and on the juniper slope he was irritated by the stupid bleating of the sheep. In the midst of his land he was again reminded of Mattson by a lot of troublesome fences, cleverly built up of stones, branches and thorns. Such things irritate a free man strolling about on his own property. Tord did not step over them, no, he put his foot on the rubbish and enjoyed hearing it crash down, and he stepped through as proudly as if he were stepping over the walls of Jericho. But the next time he came strolling along he found to his fury that the fence had been repaired as if by magic.
It was work, patience, foresight, civilization that Tord hated in Mattson. This hatred occupied him fully the whole of the autumn. If he sat down to write and could not get into the right mood it was Mattson’s fault. If he got drunk it was as a protest against the sobriety of that damned old blockhead. When at last the gale came, Tord had his great day. A real raging southeasterly gale so that the old man could not get out and save his catch but had to go about waiting anxiously to haul in his torn nets full of seaweed and rubbish.
One day Tord flew into a real rage. One of his dogs, a big ferocious mastiff, had caught his leg in a fox trap which the bailiff persisted in putting out in spite of Tord’s prohibition. There was a terrible scene and Tord would probably have struck the old man in his own kitchen if Dagmar had not come between them. But from that moment Tord swore inwardly that Mattson should leave Järnö. He only waited for quarter day, which was the first of December, to give him notice.
You can imagine his malicious joy when the whole first week of December had passed without Mattson bringing the rent.
The old man only stared when at last he came with his poor notes and was told that he was to leave at once.
“I have lived here forty years,” he mumbled calmly, “And I have always been accustomed to pay some time in December after I have been into town and sold my salted herrings and mutton.”
He could not realize anything so catastrophic as that he should leave Järnö.
Tord stood there grey in the face shaking the lease in his hand. “Now I suppose I shall see something else than that damned calm in your eyes,” he thought.
“You have not paid in due time, and now you have got to clear out. Järnö is mine, you see, and I don’t want you here any longer.”
Mattson only shook his head. He went home with a very thoughtful expression, and the same day he hauled up the sail of his big boat to go into town to speak to the storekeeper and to people versed in law, in order to find out the rights of the matter. But his wife came
