Then they returned home.
Dinner was quite festive. Dagmar had, in honour of the occasion, put on some gaudy silk rags and had powdered her nose. It was of no importance that her fingers were sooty. Tord’s excited pride derived new strength from the burgundy, the brandy, and the whiskey. He clenched his fists and stalked to and fro between his bear skins and elk heads in the high resounding hall. The firelight from the burning logs flickered over his jersey, Lapp shoes and untrimmed beard. He showed his contempt, with terrible oaths, of the miserable herds that thronged the streets out there in the town. He was the lonely, free, scornful … superman. He recognized no other relations and friends than the sea, the wind and infinite space.
Peter also seemed to be very far from claiming the honour of relationship. He shrank up in his seat. He enjoyed doing so before the magnificent Tord. He was not well, he was dusty, worried, tired. Business worried him. There was no difficulty in making oneself small if only one’s pocketbook grew fat in the process.
They did not talk of Tord’s affairs.
Three days of constant drinking passed. Then Peter suddenly got it into his head that he must go back home at once. He had a great big bill falling due the following day. He groaned over that bill as he was packing up his things. He had still not said a word of Tord’s affairs. “You begin, old man,” he thought.
Tord stood there with a sick headache and bit his lips. “Cash! Cash! Cash!” throbbed in his head. It was sickening to talk money after all his wild, eagle-like boasting. He caught hold of Peter’s arm in a way that rather resembled pinching:
“Well, curse you, what about my letter?” he cried. “What will you give for my shares?”
Peter shrank more than ever, smaller and smaller until he was like a little grey mouse:
“Buy shares? Impossible! These are not the times … I have no ready money.”
“Why the devil did you come here then?” Tord said brutally.
Dagmar went about tidying up with a fur coat on top of her chemise and her hair down:
“What a polite host!” she laughed.
“Yes, I suppose I’d better clear out at once,” whined Peter.
For once Tord said something sensible.
“All right, I will come in with you to talk to Stellan and Laura about the shares.”
Peter suddenly became very thoughtful. He sat down at a table and began to calculate in a small greasy notebook:
“I might try to renew that bill, and then I could perhaps help you,” he mumbled.
Tord had an instinctive feeling that his last proposal had been the best one, and that he ought to talk to his sisters and brother. But he did not stick to it, so incurably lazy was he.
“Well, what will you give?” he asked in a voice that was thick with excitement.
Peter writhed. He seemed quite in despair.
“I might risk about fifty thousand.”
Tord thought it sounded too absurdly little compared with what he had received before.
“Damn you!” he shouted.
Peter began again with an injured expression to pack his bag. And Tord asked Dagmar to bring out his town clothes.
“Sixty-five thousand,” Peter suddenly ejaculated.
“A hundred thousand!” Tord hissed through the gap in his teeth.
Then Peter felt a wild joy. But it was deep, deep-seated. Not a spark of it came to the surface. He took out his shapeless pocketbook and slowly counted out seventy-five notes of a thousand crowns each.
“That is all I have with me.”
Tord suddenly closed. Such is the power of cash over weak minds. And of course he could not know that Peter had exactly the same amount in his other pocketbook.
But he had scarcely signed Peter’s paper and parted with his shares when he felt that he had been tricked.
“Clear out now, you cheat!” he shouted. “And don’t come near Järnö again, because if you do you will get a bullet in your head.”
And Peter quickly disappeared with the old gardener, who was to sail him over to the steamer. He calculated that he had earned about two hundred thousand on this stroke of business. But it had been too easy. He felt almost uncomfortable as he sat there huddled up on the lee side and looked out at the calm April day. Yes, there was something uncanny in a Selamb having such wretched ideas of business.
Tord did not go into town to put his seventy-five thousand in the bank. He kept them out at Järnö. No signing of papers, no hanging over a counter. The money must not link him to the town, the community.
“Now I am free,” thought Tord, “absolutely free. …” He went out to devour the living spring. Alone like a cock he walked about and endeavoured to seek inspiration. Yes, now the moment had come when Tord Selamb would become a poet.
But alas! no notes would come. He had a big grey lump in his chest that would not melt. His work, his cursed masterpiece simply oppressed him like a quintessence, a rude microcosm of his vague conceit. There came cramp, but nothing else. And it was not easy to go about with that cramp in the wild teeming life of spring. …
May is once and for all not a month for the Selambs.
It was already growing summerlike. Tord came to meet it with staring, feverish eyes and a thin emaciated face. He began to keep to the sea more and more. It seemed as if the soil burnt his face.
It had been a long, wet, windy day, but towards evening the clouds lifted a little and it grew calm. Tord rowed out over the great shallow bay covered with reeds and with only a narrow passage out to the big buoy. From the wet oars and thwarts arose
