“The figures?”
“Thirty thousand last year. At least fifty thousand this year, if things go on like this. Now we are selling out our timber below cost. We are hard up for ready money.”
“Have you any specially difficult payment to make?”
“Yes, on Saturday week, a bill for twenty thousand. Fancy, we who never used to touch bills before.”
“Who has got your bill?”
Lundbom mentioned a small notorious usurious banker. Peter whistled. That bank proved that Herman had not known how to look after his business in town properly. He rose and pressed Lundbom’s hand:
“Good-bye! Not a word to Herman about this. He must be managed carefully, poor boy, Good-bye!”
A week later Herman came back from his sailing trip. He was once more sitting on the pier. The twilight was strangely yellow. In the south a big grey-black cloud floated, so heavy and solid-looking that it seemed a miracle that it did not fall. A warm but strong south-easterly wind had sprung up after the day’s calm. The leafy mosses of the willows on the shore turned in the wind and yellow crested waves beat with foreboding insistence against the slimy green piles on their sloping stone ballast. Then the foresail halyard of the cutter began to flap persistently against the mast, a sound which in a badly chosen harbour at night threatens to cast you adrift and to shift your anchor in the dark.
Herman was sitting with outstretched legs. His chin had sunk into the sweater and he stared motionless out over the water. Over his whole being there descended a chill shadow of loneliness which gave a touch of melancholy and appeal even to his warm yachting shoes.
He stretched out for his whiskey glass but checked his groping hand and muttered something to himself about a renewal, a commission, and nine per cent. He came no further. There he stopped. He refused, from a kind of spite, to think any more than was necessary to keep things just afloat for the moment. It was also from some foolish spite that he had sought the assistance of an ill-famed bank. “That fits in with me best,” he thought, “for everybody thinks I am an impossible person.”