The whole of this winter Tord went about plaguing himself with his money worries, so that he had no energy left for anything else. The great book that he was to write, his masterpiece, his hymn to nature, weighed him down like a dead weight. It was like loose ballast which only increased the lurch, when he inclined to melancholy. Nature swayed around him like a helpless chaos. He had moments of hatred of the frequent gales that would never yield a song. He grew furious with the eternal, rolling, breaking seas whose rhythm he could not catch.
“Money,” he thought, “that cursed money. I am never free!”
Towards the spring he at last wrote the letter to Peter. It had cost him weeks of effort and disgust, such a terror had he of everything in the nature of business. His haughty insolence was only an armour to shield him against his lack of confidence, his fear, and his suspicions.
Peter had not expected such news so soon. He rubbed his hands. And he took good care not to show the letter to his brother and sisters. This time he meant to settle the business alone. Peter delayed his reply for a whole fortnight in order to humble Tord. Then he came sailing out himself to Järnö, not in his own cutter, but in a humble little fisherman’s boat. It was in the twilight of an April day. Nobody seemed to have noticed him up in the big, grey, log house. The island looked completely deserted. Peter took the opportunity of looking round a little. Neglect and waste struck him like a cold blast. Broken down fences, unploughed fields, empty cattle sheds, plundered outhouses with half open doors hanging on a single hinge. Not a cow or a pig or a hen. He scratched his chin thoughtfully, but his expression was not of discontent, on the contrary! “I see, that’s how things are,” he thought, “I shall escape cheaper than I had thought. Why give a lot of money to people who can’t look after anything?” And he mentally lowered his bid for the remainder of Tord’s shares in Selambshof by several tens of thousand crowns.
That neglect cost Tord Selamb dear.
At last Peter struggled up the hill panting, and knocked at the door; he was greeted by an infernal barking from the brutes inside.
Tord had been watching Peter the whole time from the window, but had not cared to go and meet him. Such is the custom of the skerries! And then, he did not want to appear too eager, poor fellow!
The first evening they did not talk business, but they drank the whiskey Peter had brought. But he broke up early. He wanted to get up early to shoot duck.
So at dawn they lay out at Kallö skerries, which belonged to Järnö. In front of them lay the grey sea with smooth patches to the lea of white drifting ice floes, where the little waves lapped the point of land and the silly eider decoys nodded in their wooden way and pretended to be alive. But here Tord’s horror of business lifted a little. He felt a grim, fierce kind of excitement. “This is the struggle for life in all its hellish nakedness,” he thought, not without satisfaction. “Here I lie in the icy cold on a primitive rock in an arctic sea and wait for the opportunity to lure and kill.” Under the open sky with a gun in his hand he felt hardened and reckless, capable of any struggle. Yes, he even became intoxicated at the crazy thought that Peter was in some way in his power out here in the wilderness of Järnö. Where it was a matter of deceiving himself he could be a poet right enough, poor Tord!
But Peter lay there in his greasy old fur coat and peeped at Tord with his cunning little bear eyes. He appreciated those little, nervous twitchings which suddenly stiffened into defiance. “But how mad is he?” thought Peter. “How far can I go?” He made little frightened delicious guesses, and he felt much easier in the region of his pocketbook.
Then a flight of ducks approached from the south. It looked at first like a dark, billowing ribbon against a low, bright rift in a cloud. Then it quickly became a stormy, vibrating wave. The wind held its breath before this space-devouring speed, which made sea and sky shrink. The living wave swung around in a curve towards the decoys. A confusion of wings beat the air to froth around their heavy bodies. The ducks did not seem to want to descend. All the same Tord had time to let go his two barrels into the flight. Peter’s gun boomed a little later. His furs were too heavy for him. The old gardener who lay concealed with the boat was able to bring in three birds. “Of course, one can get a shot in when Peter is here,” thought Tord, with a certain bitterness. The fact was that he had never had the patience to wait when he was alone. But Peter loudly praised Tord’s shot and confessed that he himself had missed.
They shot quite a lot of eiders and also longtailed ducks later on in the day. Peter was lost in admiration. He warmly praised the fine shooting and the wonders of Järnö generally. He himself was a heavy-witted, clumsy, impossible rustic
