It was not exactly a pleasure to walk about there. There were no decent roads, but only heaps of stones and clay holes, for the company had long ago sold all the sites and had thus no interest in fulfilling its vague promise as to the construction of roads. Besides, the inhabitants of Majängen were unpleasant people. All the earliest purchasers, honest workingmen and small tradespeople, who had bought the ground and built upon it at too high a price, had been forced to leave their marsh-dwellings. In their place a floating population had found its way out to Majängen. The worst scum of the town population was to be found there. And Selambshof and Peter the Boss were not exactly loved by them. They rightly considered that it was his filth they had to wade in up to their knees and that it was on his heaps of stones they almost broke their legs.
So that when in his rosiest and most gentle dreams Peter wandered about there, he was perturbed by expressive glances, tightly clenched fists in trouser pockets and long, rude oaths at the house corners. And in the windows there teemed pale and dirty children who took their fingers out of their mouths in order to point at him as the bad man from Selambshof.
All that would not have mattered so much if Peter could only have caught a little glimpse of his beloved. But he never saw her outside in the clay, no plump smiling face showed itself above the window curtains of the laundry up in the “asphalt” house. Thus he had christened the big two-storied ramshackle house half way up Solberget, because it was covered with asphalted cardboard outside the boards, and none of the successive owners had been able to afford to repair the outer boards, so that it remained there as black and dismal as it had been three years ago. And it was confoundedly difficult to get to it, for there were only steep narrow wooden steps leading past the entrance and Peter could not climb up and down them all day long in order to steal a glance through the window panes.
“Life is hard,” thought Peter, “you never meet those you want to meet.”
In the end he went home and wrote a letter. There are many ways of interpreting one’s feelings. Peter’s was not very personal because his eloquence was based on a lover’s advertisement in a newspaper and of course any mention of marriage was carefully avoided. And somehow the handwriting was not quite his. And he did not sign it Peter Selamb, but “Frida’s own Elk.” That is what he did.
“Never put your name unnecessarily to any document...”
The answer came by return post and was both pleasing and disquieting. Frida wrote that she was doing well and did not need to bow down to anybody, but that she might find use for a new Laundry stove of the Orion make and a blue silk coat with white revers. And then she allowed herself to hint at the possibility of further sympathy.
Peter fully realized the risk of payment in advance, but he also understood that without some magnanimity he would make no progress at all. So with a swimming head he sent a round sum for the two objects aforesaid. At the same time he wrote that he had found a little refuge well protected from the eyes of the world where they might meet and sympathize. The refuge was Stellan’s flat. Stellan had been ordered North again, much to his annoyance, and Peter had charge of the keys. He now hurried to the elegant little two-roomed flat in Karlavägen, removed the name plate, aired the rooms, put away all Stellan’s belongings into the wardrobes and sat down to wait.
Frida arrived dressed in the new blue silk coat and with the whole warmth of the new Laundry heater of “Orion” make around her.
“I always keep my promises,” she whispered, “I’m made that way.... But goodness me! how smart this is. Are you living here too, Sir?”