But Peter was the marauder in this war. From each onward push of the town he would creep home with fresh booty of war. He strolled among the rubbish and interposed his coarse signature between those of the buyer and seller. And woe to him who had ventured too far in the heat of the moment. They were his victims at once.
Peter struggled panting up a mountain of road metal. He stood up dark against the red evening sky, a grinning and spying evil spirit on a pedestal of millions of broken fragments of stones. He looked out over the masses of houses of the town. They were enveloped in smoke, smouldering like a weary brain after a long working day. The very air around them seem used up and tired. Yes, there the stupid town lay and sweated and converted Peter’s rocks into gold. It paid dearly for its work. And still there was no gratitude in his glance as he looked down upon it from the macadam mountain, but rather something resembling inveterate distrust and aversion. The town, the community, and the public were there to be cheated and that was all. This was the doom pronounced on the honest old granite rocks and it made them less safe, less suited for human habitation.
Then Peter turned on his heel and glanced at his own domains. Then he saw the grey ribbon of a new road stretched past red fences and high piles of wood, long and straight as an arrow it stretched with neat, well measured plots of building land on either side. Yes, it was like following the columns of a cash book with safe entries and solid credits. All the way to the big sandpit all was well. But there Majängen began, Peter’s sore spot. He fell in his own estimation as half involuntarily he stared at that miserable agglomeration of cottages above which even the sunset glow seemed sullied and decayed.
Peter was afraid of Majängen. For several years he had not dared to set foot there. And his fear was shared by all his neighbours and, as a matter of fact, by the whole town. Yes, Majängen was a name of terror. Peter’s own policy had long ago driven away all decent, honest people, and now only the worst rabble lived there. In the twilight they swarmed out of their holes, the Majängen roughs, thin, pale, with their hands deep in the pockets of their wide trousers and caps pulled down over their eyes. They had a new style. Their slang and their types quickly took possession of the comic papers, so that Peter and his like soon began to talk the simple but expressive language of their mortal enemies.
These youths conducted a bitter war against Selambshof. They pulled down fences, broke windows, trampled on garden beds. Their numerous thefts testified to their activity, against which he tried in vain to defend himself with fierce dogs and barbed wire. Safe in their immunity from punishment and intoxicated with their success, the hooligans of Majängen extended their raids to the outskirts of the town, where epidemics of theft and brawling broke out. But it was not enough that hooliganism, prostitution, theft, damage to property and brawls issued from Majängen as from an open sore, worst of all were the epidemics. Diphtheria, scarlet fever and typhus succeeded each other out there in the cottages and were a constant menace both to Selambshof and to the town. These were Peter’s epidemics. There were no drains, and in his greed he had not given a hand’s breadth of land to those who wanted to supply water and light to the community. It was a terrible blunder that was to become both costly and dangerous both to him and to the town. Now in the dog days there raged again a terrible typhus epidemic which had caused the loss of several human lives in the immediate neighbourhood of Selambshof.
Peter crawled down from the heap of road metal as if the very sight of the seat of plague were dangerous. As usual, he returned by way of Ekbacken.
Slowly he walked past the fine house, where old Hermansson had lived, and which was now used as a public-house and for working men’s tenements. Down in the shipyard he stopped below an old ghost of a brig that raised its blackened rigging towards the empty space above and whose riven sides disclosed serious rot. Here, as usual, his temper improved. Why did Peter really like to walk about among the tarred shavings or to sit and ponder over the rough weathered logs on the stack? Why did he continue this business, which, even if it did not quite run at a loss, was still of no importance? Did he perhaps after all enjoy the shadow of honest and productive work that lifted its languishing head here on his fine shore property—which increased in value from year to year? Or did he keep the yard going from a pious memory of Herman and his first good stroke of business?
Then he came down to the pier, the long rotting, shaking, pier which still, as if by miracle, held together. Out there on the seat two figures were visible against the dark smooth water, one bent and huddled up and the other thin like a boy, with straight back. One was, of course, Lundbom, the old fixture Lundbom, who was still able to keep the books. But the other? It was funny how he reminded you of poor old Herman! But it must be Georg, Laura’s Georg! It was not the first time Peter had seen the tall lad wandering about here on the quay, talking to the workmen and old Lundbom. “Let me see,” thought Peter, “what if the fellow is planning some trouble for Laura.” And this thought brought him a certain satisfaction. For his own part he did not feel any remorse or the least unpleasantness at the sight of Georg out here. It simply did not occur to him that he had once wronged his father. He thought rather with a certain phantom-like return of sentimentality of the twenty thousand that Herman had with him when he left. “Well, yes, I saved the slam for him anyhow, I saved the slam.”
Of Herman’s fate in America he had during all these years never heard a sound, he did not even know if he was alive....
At last Peter reached the avenue leading up to Selambshof. He now walked slowly and half reluctantly. The evenings had grown very long in the bailiff’s wing. And he did not dare to call in the coachman now when Stellan’s cursed butler was there in the main building....