It was already growing summerlike. Tord came to meet it with staring, feverish eyes and a thin emaciated face. He began to keep to the sea more and more. It seemed as if the soil burnt his face.
It had been a long, wet, windy day, but towards evening the clouds lifted a little and it grew calm. Tord rowed out over the great shallow bay covered with reeds and with only a narrow passage out to the big buoy. From the wet oars and thwarts arose a damp chill. The shores, already beginning to look mysterious in the twilight, echoed back the flapping of the cuckoos’ wings. When Tord bent over the side he could imagine the brown, tangled swamp of lakeweed down there in the shallow water. But above him in the cool endless depth of the sky there glowed a chaos of vanishing cloud, flung out by the storm but now forgotten and left to the stillness. There were clouds that had stiffened in every gesture of perplexity, of terror and of suffering, clouds on the whipping post, clouds on the rack, clouds that had had the “Swedish draught.” But all seemed to have died in torture.
Mute immeasurable disruption.
Tord rested on his oars. He felt it to the very bottom of his being, this disruption. The cramp suddenly relaxed within him. He felt a strange, shivering relief. Then he rowed homewards, but slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking everything with his oars. Afraid to meet anybody, silently as a thief he stole into his house, crept up to his bed and fell asleep voluptuously tired with the sky beneath his eyelids.
At dawn he awoke and at once sat down to write with this mute, wild disruption still within him.
His poetic rapture lasted for several weeks. It was a wonderful joy at last to be able to pour it forth, to reveal himself, to shout out all he felt, to take revenge on all the thousand impressions that had weighed him down to earth with their luxuriant wealth.
When Tord was not writing he wandered about with staring eyes and careful, groping steps, as if he were fragile and afraid to fall to pieces. If Dagmar spoke to him he told her to shut up, though in an anxious, almost gentle voice.
Tord had already filled a tremendous packet of notepaper when his imagination suddenly dried up one long, gloomy, wet day. He sat down to copy it out, but he had some difficulty in finding the way in the maze of his own inspiration. What did they really mean, all those strange figures resembling a barometric curve during a storm or the seismograph record registering an earthquake? Certain after-echoes of his inspiration and an infinite reverence for his own Selambian genius helped him, however, over the worst. Only here and there a brief humdrum phrase crept in to make it more intelligible and as a sacrifice to the philistines.
On an absolutely still, sultry day in July, with distant thunder in the air, Tord copied out with trembling hand the last line of his poem. Then he rushed out into the kitchen and tore Dagmar away from the stove, where she stood in her chemise and an underskirt with her pipe in the corner of her mouth, cooking sausage for supper. He trailed her with him into the bedroom, forced her into a chair, pulled down the blind, and began to read.
It was unrhymed verse, of course, in the shortest possible lines, abrupt sentences and inarticulate phrases. A collection of exclamations, questions, curses, shouts of jubilation, all expressive of Tord Selamb’s relation to woman, the clouds, the sea, the lightning and the eagles.