Now Tord sat mostly indoors absorbed in zoology. If he sometimes went out shooting or fishing he locked up the oars and the sails of the boats he was not using himself. He was afraid of finding the house empty on his return.
Already in early childhood Tord had turned to animals. There was something of the timid idleness of the savage in him. He was too lazy for most people. Perhaps already then he felt a sentimental attraction to dumb animals, which was natural in one who himself lacked the power of expression. Now he fled to them again—in protest. That was his attitude towards a coarse, degenerate humanity, which did not understand how to appreciate him. No! crows and common snakes are better! But Tord’s new devotion to animals was without any sentimentality. He enjoyed seeing them pursue and hurt each other. He hunted them and killed them himself without hesitation. And he studied them—scientifically, as he liked to imagine—in thick folios and with knife and microscope.
It was a cool and sweet-smelling evening in spring. Tord stood in a clearing in the open copse and waited for a flight of woodcocks. The leaves were nicely wrinkled like the fingers of a newborn babe and shimmered reddish brown in the level sunlight. But Tord bit his lips together and did not suffer as he did before in the spring. His gun was his salvation. Now they were coming, flying low over the treetops: “rrrt! rrrt! pisp!” It was the mating call, the love flight of the male. Tord threw up his gun and the warm body of the bird fell down among the tree trunks. He hurried home, eager to examine his bag. The little bird’s heart still beat when he plunged the knife into it, its fibres still trembled beneath the glass of the microscope.
It was a knife in the heart of the spring. There was revenge in this Selambian thirst of knowledge.
But soon Tord’s interest was caught in a quite special way by a branch of the animal world that he had hitherto overlooked—insects. He became in his own way a passionate entomologist.
To Tord the study of insects was that of a diabolical collection of caricatures. Here life and nature unveiled their whole cruelty and amorality. On most parts of the surface of the earth the spread of humanity has swept away the most gorgeous forms of wildness and cruelty. The larger animals seem on the whole rather tame. But the little animals of the soil and the air our civilization has, for the most part, proudly passed over. Here theft, parasitism, poison-murder, crude cannibalism, and the most terrible perversity still rage without check. Tord learnt to observe and enjoy the jaws of the lion-ant in the treacherous sandpit, the graceful poisonous thrust of the hymenoptera, the erratic frenzy of the golden beetle, the horrible life of the burning beetle amidst putrefaction, the devouring by the female cross spider of the male after impregnation. Yes, this was a lovely Lilliputian world. The devilish struggle for existence at first seemed to him a parody on this miniature scale. But as he penetrated deeper into his mysteries the elements of parody disappeared and only horror was left. The little animal males grew in his eyes to gigantic creatures, still more horrible because of the glistening stiffness of the cutaneous skeleton that made them resemble living machines. They peopled his dreams with horrible sights. They laid their parasitical larvæ in the intestines of his thoughts. They became the pretext and symbol of his new philosophy of life....
In this way Tord Selamb soon fell into black naturalism. He overlooked the fact that if, as he supposed, everything was nature, this must also apply to our human reaction against nature’s cruelty. And that therefore nature contained within herself the correction of this evil. Horror itself is in the last resort a promise. There is a profound contradiction. But these are not Selambian truths.
What lies behind the Selambian egoism is the “blind spot,” the blind spot of the soul. They are simply insensitive to rays from certain directions.