And it must be built of thick, round logs with a covered verandah, and a dragon’s head and open fireplace. An eagle’s eyrie on the cliff it was to be. Tord made the drawings himself. But not a tree must be felled on Järnö, so all the timber must be brought in. Labour might probably have been found on the islands round about if they had not been in such a hurry. But they had to get workmen from town. And terribly troublesome and expensive it was to trail the heavy logs from the pier up the steep hill, where there was not even a path.
Anyhow, towards the middle of the summer the grating of the saws and the blows of the hammers were heard.
Meanwhile Tord and Dagmar lived a glorious tent life on a meadow by the sea. They sailed in their new-built boat, swam, took sunbaths and ran about naked like savages on the rocks to the great amusement of the workmen up on top.
One day Tord covered Dagmar all over with fine clay taken from the bottom of the bay and she stood there in shining blue on the shell-covered sand, like a statue. Mattson the bailiff came walking down between the juniper bushes with an unfinished oar on his shoulders. She, however, stood still and laughed aloud:
“Selamb has made a statue of me! Don’t you think I’m a funny statue, Mattson?”
Mattson blinked his eyes and walked on, shaking his grey head at such shamelessness. He wondered in his own mind what sort of gentlefolk had come out to Järnö.
After dinner they went up towards the hill to see if their house was growing. Tord always had a bottle under his arm, and when work was finished the men were treated all round to a drink. Neither he nor Dagmar despised the glass. These little festivities were not exactly ceremonious, for the men soon discovered that they had no need to choose their words. Dagmar laughed and Tord imitated their phrases as soon as the drink began to affect him. It was wonderfully easy to learn their language. “I am studying the people,” he thought, “I look straight through their simple minds. I will make something out of it some day, something uncommonly fresh and piquant....”
But then it grew suddenly silent as the weary workmen staggered down to sleep in the bailiff’s barn. And with the silence it seemed as if space had suddenly become a deep vortex. And the evening was cruelly cold and green over the serrated edges of the black forests in the west. Then it was a comfort to have spirit in your body. Tord threw back his head, a little too much back, he almost toppled over. “I am a poet,” he thought. “It is I, Tord Selamb, who am pleased to interpret the mysterious meaning of the dull song of the ground swell. The sea, the clouds, the cliffs are mine, and I do with them as I like. Wait till I give myself up to it. Then I shall produce a hymn, something powerful, rude, infernal, something of nature’s elemental beauty....”
And he felt a supreme contempt for the miserable slaves in town.
Then he went to sleep in Dagmar’s arms, which were brown and cool and soft.