But Percy continued to buy modern art. Everything was not so provocative as those first pictures. There were also pearls of bold but still exquisitely tasteful expressionism. After running about all the day at exhibitions and art dealers he sat down to drink his apéritif. He looked out over the murmuring streams of humanity on the big boulevards, which always make you feel that you are a poor little drop in the ocean and may be washed away at any moment. But all the same there came into his eyes a little look of anger. And he did not turn to Hedvig, who sat there dressed in black looking stiff and disapproving, but to the young painters round the table. It was strange how the air of Paris made him free and independent:
“It’s a pity it’s so damned banal to make a donation,” he exclaimed. “But a poor wretch like me has no other way out. I have no children. I won’t live very much longer. I am an end and not a beginning like you boys. My money has no personal future. But if I add a wing to my little art gallery and fill it with first-class explosive matter and then present the whole splendour to the nation or rather to the city, yes, to Stockholm, then I shall at any rate have sown the seeds of a little healthy restlessness in their minds. And a little help to you fellows. And I shall have erected a little monument to myself in the usual dishonest but generally approved way. The Hill Collection! What do you think of that idea?”
They grew excited round the table:
“We must thank you, of course! But why don’t you do something yourself? You can, Percy! You are no bourgeois! Why don’t you stick it out?”
Hedvig had been sitting all the time silent and forbidding. At Percy’s unexpected mention of an endowment she suddenly felt a cold shiver of anger. She rose quickly:
“You all seem to forget that Percy is ill,” she said. “He must not be rushed. He is much too excited here in Paris. Shan’t we go back home now, Percy?”
The young painters felt a little nervous of Mrs. Hill, of her aristocratic air, her dark nun-like beauty. Silence fell around the table. Percy rose with his little, absent-minded, apologetic smile:
“Yes, there you see, gentlemen,” he said.
And then they left.
At last Hedvig succeeded in making her husband leave Paris, where it was already beginning to be hot and dusty. There is always an element of danger in the journey home for consumptives who have been living in the south. In Stockholm there had been an unfortunate relapse in the late spring, with storm and icy rain. Percy had to go to bed at once and Hedvig was again his nurse. He did not want the doctor. He had a real horror of doctors and Hedvig did not insist on calling one in. She took great care that he should not be exposed to tiring visits of old artist friends and she nursed him with quite, inexhaustible energy. There was no more talk of the great donation and Hedvig began to feel a certain deep calm.