From which you can see that everything is relative in this world.
Peter stalked home from his tailor. It was Stellan who had forced him to order a new suit of evening clothes for the family dinner.
Peter had at first obstinately refused. It seemed to him a matter of honour not to betray his greasy old evening coat. Not till Stellan had promised to pay the bill did he give in.
“Tell the tailor you have won the suit as a bet,” Stellan hissed out. “It is unnecessary to show people what a mean beggar you are!”
Peter took his revenge by ordering the most expensive things he could get hold of.
He was walking homewards one sultry August night, yellow in the face, bent and heavy. His head, which had always been a little askew, had sunk between his shoulders. He walked on the edge of the foot path, staring at the paving stones, and carefully avoided stepping on the joints, so that sometimes he took gigantic steps and sometimes proceeded with a ridiculous strut. It was always so when Peter went pondering over business.
Twice he stole into small bars and had a glass. The further he came out towards the suburb—his suburb—the more slowly he walked. He stopped at a row of houses that were being built in a blocked up suburban street that was under repair and from which you could see the tops of the masts in the Ekbacken shipyard away in the background. These houses lay silent and deserted. Their uneven brick walls glowed in the last rays of the sun high up above the chasm of the street. But in the empty window-holes the heavy twilight floated and he visualized all the struggles and mean worries that would soon be housed there. Peter stood in the raw chilly draught from the gaps in the walls and thoughtfully stirred a big trough of mortar with his stick. His expression was at the same time one of disapproval and contempt. “Don’t build,” he muttered, “don’t build! Buy from those who have built beyond their means. Houses are worst for those who have them first. Quite different from girls, ha, ha! But then they are good, damned good. No shares and such rubbish for me. What is it they say about a thief? Yes, he is one who has not had time to promote a company, ha, ha! No, land and bricks are better. Both real bricks and those that have engraved on them ‘robur et securitas.’”
After this monologue Peter stalked on in the twilight. He then came to a rather wild and queer patch of stony ground which most resembled the scene of a devastating battle. It was here that the country and town skirmished with each other on a battlefield that was never cleared, full of blown-up rocks, rubbish heaps, bottomless fragments of road and fields brown and intersected with a deep trench. The town had pushed forward its apparatus of siege: stone-cutters’ sheds, metal-crushers and dynamite boxes. The country obstinately defended its retreat by guerilla troops of creeping nettles and dock leaves, whilst one or two dried-up dusty pines represented the remnants of the main army in retreat.
And over it all whirled the crows, the ravens of the battlefield.