The silence was only broken by the crunching of the horses’ hoofs and the creaking of the runners where the snow was thin. The snow had fallen during a gale so that in open spaces the road was almost bare between the drifts. They had already passed Ekbacken yard, and the three now drove along the lake, the lake of their childhood. The frosted bushes on the shore resembled enormous fantastic crystals that had grown without sap and lived without life. They leant over a world of ice-floes frozen together, cloven from shore to shore by a black channel of open water. Nothing gave such a shiver of cold as this reeking trembling open water where the sluggish poisonous stream of Hell seemed to flow up between the blocks of ice. Over on the other shore there hung a gigantic cloud, like an enormous bird, with the grey colour of primeval time, and laden with pagan cold. Beneath it white globes of light trembled against a smoky, dull-glowing sky, which seemed red from the reflection of gigantic sacrificial fires. It was the big new works built round the old glue factory. Day and night it shone and roared and hissed on the other shore. Day and night. There the timber of the forests was ground to the finest powder as a substitute for cotton fibre in explosives. A flourishing war industry!
Stellan did not notice that it was the roar of the flight of Nidhögg, who feeds on corpses, that he heard, nor that he passed along Nastrand, the shore of corpses, where the dragon sucks the dead....
The stiff mask lit up for a moment as he lifted a gloved finger in the direction of the arc lamps:
“Good shares,” he mumbled, “rose five today again.”
“I see,” said Laura, “then I will buy....”
“All right, but don’t keep them too long....”
The sledge was already turning up the avenue before Stellan seemed to remember why they were driving out to Selambshof.
“We must go slow with Peter,” he said. “If we make a mess of the thing now we shall scarcely have time to repair the damage. At any moment there might be serious complications. Fortunately he does not seem to have written any letters to that woman in Majängen. I mean the mother. And neither has he taken any steps that point to recognition or adoption. I know it both through the coachman and the housekeeper, because I have long been forced to maintain certain relations with them. This war crisis at once sharpened Peter’s appetite for unpleasant kinds of business in a way that made it necessary to keep an eye on him. It is not long since he had half Selambshof full of boxes of sugar and butter. Yes, the house was practically used as a warehouse. I was there one evening myself and saw the exquisite portrait of our old grandfather peeping out from behind a pile of boxes of butter.... And then his company. He has developed a habit of taking home real criminals, and then they sit up half the night and drink and gamble like madmen. That creature from Majängen is by no means the first of his kind. Peter had scarcely been ill a week when he sent the coachman for him. The mother, who was a well-known termagant, swore and behaved like a lunatic. She would have nothing to do with ‘that devil at Selambshof’ she said. And even the young rogue himself seemed to have had remorse, for at first he was unwilling to go. But when the coachman returned with certain vague promises things went more easily and he ran away from his dear mother to Selambshof.”
Laura had listened with great interest:
“I should have liked to see the first touching meeting,” she said.