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.