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HAS AN IDEA

Laccmaker Lekholm
Has an Idea

(1 U S TA F fl R LIST ROM

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l.iuttln Mae Vragh
THK DIAL 1'RKSS
Ntw Yart Affmxx.\i

1951, v DIAI, TRUSS, INC.

IW TO OWJTKf* fiTATKn nf
Y TUK VAlt-ftALLOU fKtfl, SHC.

BOOK ONE

They were approaching Sweden.

Karly one afternoon, under a low, chilly December sun,
they had seen, a few miles away on the port quarter, the surf
breaking house- high against RockalPs desolate sugar-loaf,
white with gulls' droppings.

At breakfast on Sunday morning the captain told them
that they had passed through the Pentland Firth during
the night.

Dinner that evening had been a regular festivity j a dis-
play of drcs#uits, deeolletages and jewels from New York
and Seattle, Chicago and Worcester, Saint Paul and Minne-
apolis} champagne and eloquent speeches in praise of the
new country and the old, the captain and the ship 5 the band
had played "l)u gamla, du fria" and "The Stan-spangled
Banner," and at dessert a secretary of the Legation in
Tokio, on his way home on leave, had declaimed Heidcn-
fctam's "Sverige v and drawn tears from many a steely,
shrewd emigrant's eye.

Monday had been a breaking-up day. Everyone had
packed. And in a corner of the bar, or out on the promenade
deck in the raw North Sea December drizzle, those com-
pelled to do so had broken the more or less romantic bonds
which people so inclined cannot avoid during ten or twelve
days of la/y luxury on that unsteady Cythera, an Atlantic
liner.

Karly next morning they had headed in towards Gothen-
burg between bare, rain-lashed rocks, grey and desolate in.
the faint, drizzly dawn. And they had been met by hun-
dreds of expectant, shining umbrellas on the quay, while,
on deck, the band clad in oilskins had played national aits

3

4 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

and eyes had grown wet and hearts had filled with emotion:
Sweden, Sweden, Sweden!

At last the Christmas boat, with her thousand passengers
and, thanks to the prosperous times, her record mail, which
was to spread joy and well-being over a motherland still op*
pressed by economic troubles, was moored alongside the
quay.

A few hours later Dr. Charles Holmes, house surgeon at
the American naval hospital at Annapolis, was walking up
and down in his room at the hotel among unopened trunks
and suitcases. Outside the rain poured down from a low,
leaden sky he could not see, but whose height and hue he
could guess from the faint light in the room. Across the
narrow street on to which his window looked, a row of wet
panes stared at him, with impenetrable darkness behind
their dirty grey lace curtains. Under one of them a dingy
signboard creaked in the wind, and on it was printed in
black letters: Anna Bergquist's Dining-rooms.

Dr. Holmes, alias Karl Lekholm, formerly medical stu-
dent at Lund, walked up and down his room deep in
thought.

Now he had reached his goal. Within twenty-four hours
he would stand before his aged father and say "Here I am*"

He had not seen him for nearly twenty years. About ten
o'clock one January morning it had been a Wednesday, he
remembered he had boarded a Wilson steamer to go out,
via London, into the world and life. Once, eight years ago,
he had sent home to his father a money order for something
over six thousand kroner. That was the sum he owed him,
But apart from that money order, dispatched under an as-
sumed name during a visit to New York, he had, all these
years, never sent a word to his people at home to let them
know how he was doing or where he was.

And now he was at his goal. There could no longer be
evasion or delay. Within twenty-four hours he would stand

HAS AN IDEA 5

before his father and say "Here I am." And he was afraid-
mortal ly afraid. All the years that had passed were wiped
away like chalk scrawls from the blackboard of his life. He
had shrunk again to the boy he had once been, in constant
fear of a thrashing, with a daily accumulation of crimes on
his permanently had conscience, living in an equally per-
manent fear of discovery* But now there was no longer a
way out, I le must go home, must enter his father's presence
and say "I lere I am."

Dn Holmes, alias Kalle Lekholm, paced up and down
his room in ever increasing agony of mind. cc Why did I
never write in all these years?" he asked himself. It was per-
fectly incomprehensible to him now. It could have been so
easy, it ought to have been comparatively easy. Only a few
lines, a prayer for forgiveness. , . . At any rate it would
have been easier than this having to stand before his fa-
ther, after nearly twenty years' complete silence, and say
"Hero I am,"

The letter home the letter which was never written in
which he had meant to explain everything, his crime, his
flight, his silence, had been a nightmare to him all these
years. Not every night or every clay. But the least little re-
verse in his professional or private life, especially in the last
few yean, had sufficed to reawaken the old fear in him.
"The letter! the letter!"

During these periods of depression the spectre had
clutched his throat in an iron grip and squeezed the sweat
from the pores in his forehead. He had gone to bed dead
tired, as one does after a hard day's work, like a lump of
lead in pyjamas. And about three in the morning the still-
ness all round had suddenly wrenched him out of his heavy
slumber, and in the silence, empty and yawning like an
abyss, he had felt his whole existence waver, grow giddy
and fall- And during the dizzy fall into the bottomless
chasm a voice within him had cried, "The letter! the let-

6 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

ter ! " He had woken at the cry and found himself sitting up
straight in his bed, bathed in sweat. And he had promised
himself: "I will write next Sunday ... I must write next
Sunday." ...

And yet the letter had never been written.

Heaven knew how many Sunday afternoons he had put all
recreation aside and endeavoured to pull himself together.
But nothing had ever come of it. He did not know how or
where to begin. Memories came rushing into his mind, a
swarm of accusations, ever growing, howling at him ever
louder like an angry mob. Like most other people, he had
pleasant memories too of his childhood and youth, in which
he played a less pitiable, humiliating role, which bore wit-
ness to the honesty and modesty in his nature. But it was as
though he were in the presence of a hostile, yelling crowd;
the pleasant memories, stealing shyly and cautiously into
his mind, had no prospect of holding their ground against
the shouts of his accusers, demanding his surrender.

He was filled with disgust when he saw his own childhood
and youth pass before him. He could not recognize himself,
so different had he been then from what he had become
since & good, law-abiding and on the whole successful
American citizen. He could not discover any kind of connec-
tion between the two individuals. It was as if he had lived
two quite separate lives the one untruthful and unbal-
anced, the other honest and steady,

His childhood and youth! He had been guilty of most of
the sins a boy and a youth can commit ; he had lied to escape
punishment, pilfered at home to satisfy some sudden and
urgent desire. A habit of fibbing as a small boy had grown
into systematic deceit at the Gymnasium. And no sooner had
he taken his degree than his deceit took an active form. The
son of a hard-working municipal treasurer, he had led the
comfortable life of the aesthetic university hedonist within
the scope a small town allowed: shelves full of beautifully

II A S A N I D E A 7

bound books, frequent visits to Copenhagen, the pose of a
gourmet and a judge of wines, his motto the words: "The
most difficult thing of all is to do nothing."

It had ended in a crime. And he had run away the same
evening ... to start a new life. . . .

When Dr. Charles Holmes was called down to dinner
after a Sunday afternoon like this, devoted to mental con-
centration and the writing of letters, he had achieved only
pages covered with disconnected words. He never got any
further. He could not do it. His whole being groaned in
anguish under a divine Nemesis which hour by hour, inch
by inch, was dragging him before a tribunal from which
there is no appeal to a higher court on earth.

So the letter was not written that time.

Instead, since he had married, something else happened
regularly in those times of depression $ when he felt himself
breaking down he fled to his wife, and that he might have
something solid to lean on in his life, rootless for all its out-
ward stability, clung desperately to her coldly proud, shal-
low nature- These approaches on his part astonished her, as
she had no idea of what gave rise to them. Dr. Charles
Holmes, surgeon in the American Navy, could not confide
his life's secret to his wife, daughter of a highly placed
American naval officer the secret that he really and truly
belonged to the herd of European criminals who were a
national danger from the racial hygienic standpoint. His ap-
proaches not only astonished but rather annoyed her. She
had never been accustomed to outbursts of feeling of other
than a poetical, romantic kind, and they were naturally
antipathetic to hen

Sooner or later he recovered from his depression. The
recollection of it certainly remained, like the recollection of
an illness- But although the memory was always there to
remind him that in the depths of his heart he carried an in-
fection which at times of spiritual and bodily weakness

8 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

threw his whole organism into a paralysing fever, his
outward existence lay before him again, secure and well-
ordered his many duties, his interest in his immediate
environment, and his at once exhausting and successful work.

At these times he dismissed all thoughts of the letter.
Some day within a not too remote future he would get
out of harness for a few months and suddenly appear at
home. That was the only solution, the simplest reply to the
long silence. A look, a shake of the hand, a tone of the voice,
could reveal what no letter, however detailed, could ex-
plain.

And so the letter was never written. And the journey was
postponed, too, year after year* There was always some ob-
stacle first the hard struggle for existence, then the war,
an unexpected appointment to a ship, the fear of being out-
stripped by rivals during a long spell of leave there was
always something. Once he had actually taken his ticket
home. That was after the war, when he was in Paris. But
then he had fallen in love with the girl who later became his
wife, and so the journey did not come off. He had acquired
new interests, a new task which just then seemed to him
infinitely more important than cleansing his own system of
infections.

And so the years had passed till a day came when his
wife told him that she had fallen in love with another man
and wished to be free. Then his fear flamed up into undis-
guised panic. He must go home. No powers in the world
could prevent him any longer* He must see his father* His
father . . . during the years that had passed he had
grown an old man. He had reached the age when even the
stoutest tree can be snapped by a storm. The strange thing
was that not till now had he seen his father as anything but
a middle-aged man, with the sharp, penetrating mathema-
tician's look which hardened into contempt when con-
fronted with the smallest error in the sum of life. His

HAS AN IDEA 9

father , * . he was an old man already, bent and white,
whom any trifling ailment might bring to the grave. He
was not far short of seventy.

He must go home. He must make his way home to the
source from which he had sprung, must go back to the only
thing that was safe and solid in an insecure, elusive world
his origin. I Je must see him before he died, must hold his
hand in his before it grew cold for ever, must feel it close
round his own iti the warmth of forgiveness. Everything
else muht talce its chance marriage, prospects, promotion,
everything, , - . But the meeting with the man who had
given him life could not be postponed.

He lay sleepless of nights, his hair sticking to his perspir-
ing forehead. It was perfectly incomprehensible to him that
he had been able to wait so long utterly beyond his under-
standing, I le must go home before it was too late if it was
not too late already, I le had never thought of that either,
he who had been at grips with life and death all these years
that his own father might be dead already, perhaps with-
out having sent him a thought of forgiveness. Perhaps he
had lived for years with his dead father's curse resting upon
him, and perhaps it was that curse which sent an ice-cold fear
through him at night & message from the dead. This was
sheer primitive terror. In those hours, when he lay sleep-
less, shut in by the crushing, fevering night, with a motor-
horn now and again cleaving the silence like the shriek of a
hunted, tortured soul, he felt his whole life weighed down
by this supernatural curse, through which the dead took
vengeance on the living.

I le must go home. - . ,

He inquired anonymously of the vicar of his native
town, through the Swedish Consulate-General in New
York, whether his father was still alive. When he received
an answer in the affirmative, he applied for three months'
leave and left his new country the day before his wife was

IO LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

to marry again. He must go home. He felt he was engaged
in a race with death. Every day on board the ship crept by
at a snail's pace. . . .

And now he was at his goal. In a few hours he would
stand before his father and say "Here I am, father!"

He paced up and down his room in the hotel. His brain
was filled with a swarm of memories, thoughts, feelings,
questions, which it would take a whole book to describe. For
they contained all his own history the history of his par-
ents, his brothers and sisters, his family.

And it is these thoughts and feelings, and the manner in
which his questions were answered by the event, that are
the subject of this book.

II

It cannot be denied that Dr. Charles Holmes's continual
brooding over his past life had made him what is commonly
called a philosopher.

It had happened without himself noticing it. By degrees,
as one incident of hisS childhood and youth after another
rose before his eyes, incidents in which he himself had in-
variably figured as the black sheep and whipping-boy, he
had ceased to occupy the centre of the stage and other actors
had assumed it his parents, his brothers, his grandparents,
his whole race. His outlook had extended. There was hardly
one fit of depression from which he had recovered without
having disinterred new memories, new situations, that had
thrown a stronger light on his fellow-actors* His own
destiny had acquired a background in that of his family,
arranged with fuller cohesion, more perfect continuity. And
so, in the course of years, the artless tones from these insig-
nificant instruments, unknown to himself, had combined to

HAS AN IDEA II

form a whole in which isolated events and individual fates
seemed to him to melt more and more into a complete
melody of life.

Besides his own youthful peccadilloes, there was -and of
this too he was unconscious another cause which, as the
years passed, attracted him more and more irresistibly to his
family and the varied destinies of its members. It was the
impulse which Kant calls the hidden art within us, without
which we should have no consciousness, but of which we
ourselves are seldom conscious the impulse to weave to-
gether into a connected, coherent whole the fragments of
knowledge and experience life gives us.

And in the new world to which he had fled to begin a
new life he had met with only fragments. He could expect
nothing else a foreigner and a doctor, continually moving,
ordered now here, now there. Of the lives and antecedents
of the people who had been his associates at various stages of
his career he knew little more than he was able to learn
of the surgical cases that came under his care. In the one
case it was a fragment of a human soul, in the other a hu-
man body. Beyond the few facts revealed by a chance
communicativeness in the gunroom, or an accident which
required the presence of the ambulance, he had only guess-
work to rely on, lie had not become really intimate even
with his wife's family. It was only when thinking of his own
relations that he felt himself able to follow the threads in
the woof of life- Only in their destinies, to whose analysis
his crime and his loneliness had driven him, could he find
the unity his impulse demanded that he should seek.

And so it had happened that one night, while he lay
awake staring out into the darkness and silence, and his fa-
ther and mother, and all the others whose blood was his
blood, passed before his inward vision, he asked himself: If
this handful of people were the only human beings from
whose fates you had the opportunity of passing judgment

12 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

on existence, what would be your judgment of life? Could
you, on the basis of these obscure lives, arrive at any definite
conclusions?

The questions about life, its value, its significance, its pur-
pose, which had forced themselves upon him during his
later schooldays and his first years as a student, as upon
most young men and women of his generation, rose before
him again in the form of these lives with which his own
was most intimately connected, and which he was now, in
his hours of solitude, piecing together with the aid of all
he had heard and seen of them in his childhood and youth*

Life? What was life? What had his family to teach him
about life?

Ill

Of his grandfather, the lacemaker Pehr Anders Lekholm,
Dr, Charles Holmes, alias Karl Lekholm, had only two or
three definite recollections. One extended over many years j
it covered, indeed, the whole period from the time when he
began to find his way about in life to the time when he
turned his back on his country for ever. The other memories
embraced hardly more than a few brief minutes. Swift,
painful, dramatic situations, in which a white-haired old
man suddenly revealed the weakness, desire for domina-
tion, strength and pose of a long life.

The one memory, that which embraced the whole of
Karl Lekholm's childhood and youth, was the image of a
pleasant, slightly ridiculous little old man with a bushy
white moustache and bushy white hair which, even in his
old age, fell in a stubborn curl on to the chalk-white, blue-
veined forehead, a pair of eyes whose iris was of such a pale
blue that it made the impression of being watered, a long,

HAS AN IDEA 13

hooked nose and a curiously sewn collar which he himself
had designed to leave free an exaggeratedly large Adam's
apple.

On weekdays the old man, whom his grandchildren had
nicknamed Knsign Stfil, 1 used to wear a brown dressing-
"gown and sit as often as he could in an armchair at the
)parlour window, where there was one of the small looking-
glasses known as "gossip mirrors." With the aid of this
> mirror he had an extensive view of all that happened in the
street All the time he sat there he twined his thumbs cease^
lessly round one another, and continuous up-and-down
movements of the large Adam's apple indicated the rhythm
of his thoughts and feelings* On Sundays he displayed more
energy. He went to church twice wearing a tail coat, black
trousers, creaking high boots partly covered by his trousers,
a black cravat and a top-hat.

He did not enjoy the least respect either in Karl Lek~
holm's eyes or in those of Karl's brothers and cousins. It was
as though the old man's grandchildren had been born with
the idea that no attention whatever need be paid to him.
How this view had become so early and so deeply rooted
in their minds that it had become a positive axiom it is not
"easy to say. Perhaps they had gathered it from the tone of
voice in which he was discussed in the family.

The very nickname by which his grandchildren knew
him conveyed a world of mistrust and ridicule. For to Karl
Lekholm and his brothers and cousins the name Ensign
Still signified the limit of unreliability and untruthfulness.
!Not till they went to school did they realize, with great dif-
ficulty, that the man whose name they had given their
grandfather was no Mtinchhausen, but a generally re-
spected and esteemed historical character. How and when
the name Knsign Stdl had been given to the old man the
Lekholm children did not know. Presumably one of his

1 After the famous hero of Runebcrtfs poem.

14 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

own sons, in a moment of thoughtless geniality, had pointed
out the supposed likeness between the two.

The fact was that the old man used often to narrate the
most hair-raising stories from a war he called the Slesvig
war, and about a place called Kolding, where he had been
in a fight. And in this fight, as in the so-called Slesvig war in
general, thousands of men, according to Ensign StaPs ac-
count, had lost their lives. When the lacemaker narrated
these stories to any of his grandchildren, he used to make
sure that the door leading into the kitchen or the breakfast-
room, where his wife most often was, was shut. For when-
ever old Fru Lekholm, by an unlucky chance, overheard
any detail of his stories, she thrust her sharp little bird's
face with its long, lean throat in at the door and said:

"There you are, Lekholm, talking so loud that the walls
shake. You're too old to sit and tell innocent children such
lies."

Then the lacemaker brushed up his white moustaches
and thumped the table with his fist.

"Be quiet," he roared. "Deuce take it! Am I ]ying?
Wasn't I in the fight at Kolding, eh?"

Old Fru Lekholm gave him a long, sharp, piercing look.
But that was the only answer she had to give. The lace-
maker had, been in the fight at Kolding,

The view that Ensign Stal was a ridiculous figure was,
therefore, easily explained. As to his kind-heartedness, Karl
Lekholm had come to this conclusion because the old man
used to give him five ore every Sunday when he accom-
panied him to church- He could still, a middle-aged man,
feel the old fellow's dry, shrivelled hand, with the great
blue veins he was afraid to touch, close round his own as
they walked to the church. When this first took place Karl
could hardly have been more than four or five. He received
the five ore when they parted after the service, a short way
from his grandparents' door.

HAS AN IDEA 15

Then the old man stopped in the street. "Hold my stick,"
he said, and looked carefully round.

The stick was a Spanish cane with a curved ivory handle,
a dog's head yellowed with age and with dirt in its ears.

Then he took out his black purse, fished out the coin,
looked round him again and put it cautiously into KarPs
hand.

"There you are, but remember not a word!"

Karl promised. He took his cap off without saying thank
you well, he had promised not to say a word about the five
ore and ran straight to Soderberg's, the confectioner's
shop in Ostra Storgatan, which opened at one o'clock on
Sundays. There he bought five-ore's worth of "remains"
biscuits which had crumbled during their tenancy of the
glass jars on the shelf behind the cake counter.

On weekdays, at any rate during his earliest childhood,
Karl saw very little of Ensign StaL And their relationship
was, without any kind of agreement, as cool as is always the
case with two people who are allied in some rather discred-
itable secret adventure.

But one Sunday their joint church-going came to a fearful
end. It was a wet day, and the rain was pouring down. The
old man was in a hurry to get home, and in his haste he had
entirely forgotten the mite he owed his grandson. They had
entered Karl's grandparents' front gate without the old
man once moving his hand in the direction of his trousers
pocket, where he kept his purse. And now, when, to judge
by all indications, it seemed to be his intention to cross the
yard diagonally and go into his house by the kitchen door,
Karl Lekholm considered that it was, to say the least, high
time to remind him of the tribute. He was convinced that,
bound by his promise of silence, he would not dare to re-
mind his grandfather of the little douceur once he was in
the house. He gave a tug at his grandfather's hand and said:

"Grandpapa, you won't forget the five ore, will you?"

l6 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

"Deuce take it!" the old man said. He led him back to
the gate, put down his open umbrella, put his hand into his
trousers pocket, and was about to hand over the five-ore
piece to Karl when the kitchen window was suddenly
opened. Grandmamma, who had been standing, hidden by
the blind, whipping cream for the Sunday pudding, and
while doing so had observed their curious proceedings,
thrust her lean head, with a white lace cap on it, out of the
window and shrieked:

"Lekholm, what in Heaven's name are you about? Do
you think I don't see what you're doing? Do you think
we're millionaires?"

The old man stood, purse in hand. He looked first at her
and then at his grandson. Then he submissively thrust his
purse back into his trousers pocket, picked up his open um-
brella and went grumbling across the yard into the kitchen.
By that time Karl was already a good part of the way home.
The moment he heard his grandmother's voice he had
grasped the seriousness of the situation and burst headlong
out of the gate into the street.

With this scene their church-going automatically came to
an end. Not a word more was ever said about it. Grand-
father and grandson instinctively avoided one another for a
long time after. Karl Lekholm could not look his grand-
father full in the face; he was ashamed for the old man's
sake.

Another of these sudden situations which had burned
itself ineradically into Dr. Holmes's memory took place a
few years later one of those intense incidents in which a
whole long human life stands out transfigured, cleansed
from the stage of sordid cares and the grey dust of the daily
round.

It was a day at the beginning of October. His Majesty
King Oscar II, with his two sons Gustav and Karl, was to
pay a visit to the town to open the new town hall. The sta-

HASANIDEA 17

tion buildings were adorned with the king's monogram
surmounted by a crown and hung with wreaths. Avenues of
flags had been put up along the main streets and round the
market-place. Flags were flying from the military head-
quarters, the governor's house, the schools, the leading
hotel and a number of private houses and offices. On the
platform were waiting the governor of the province, the
president of the court of justice, the general, the regimental
commander, the mayor and many others. Outside a battery
was drawn up with limbered guns, farther off the children
of various schools formed a double rank, and beyond them,
in the direction of the market-place, the citizens were
crowded on both sides of the royal route.

It was a brilliant autumn day, real king's weather, with
sunshine, a touch of cold and just enough wind to catch the
flags and blow out their yellow crosses to greet the exalted
visitors.

Karl Lekholm, who was then in the fifth form of the ele-
mentary school, was standing drawn up along with his com-
rades when he suddenly received a violent nudge.

"Look, Kalle, look, here comes your grandfather! What
on earth's that uniform he's got on? And what a lot of
medals he's got on his chest! He's regularly dressed u$!"

Karl Lekholm looked . . . and a second later he went
scarlet in the face for shame, his knees grew weak under
him, and he felt himself shrinking like a toy balloon. For
there he came, his old grandfather, Ensign Stal. He was
wearing his uniform from the Slesvig war the one which
hung in a glass case in the parlour^ he had four medals on
his chest, white gloves on his hands, and the huge silvery
moustaches stuck out waxed and stiff on each side of the
thin, withered face. He walked between the straight lines
of citizens, school-children and soldiers, as if he were one
of the most eminent dignitaries in the town, received with
titters and followed by laughter.

18 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

The apparition was at once so unexpected and so strange
that no one attempted to stop him, not even the town magis-
trate or the chief o police. Rigid as a poker he strode
towards the entrance to the station, over which was the
king's monogram.

And there he remained "standing at ease," with his arms
hanging loosely at his side and the right foot a half pace in
front of the left, in correct military style.

Two or three minutes later the king and his two sons ap-
peared at the door leading from the platform. The regi-
mental band struck up a march, the battery commander
gave the order to shoulder arms and himself saluted, the
guns on the old ramparts thundered out the first of their
twenty-one shots. . . .

The king stopped. He caught sight of kcemaker Lek-
holm, who was saluting him at the foot of the steps, stand-
ing stiffly at attention with his right hand correctly raised to
the peak of his cap. The king stopped again and went up to
the eccentric figure. Karl Lekholm shut his eyes in terror of
what was going to happen, of the king's wrath which was
about to fall on his ridiculous old grandfather, and not till
it was all over did he dare to look up and hear what had
happened. . . .

There was a third memory too. He was fourteen or fif-
teen years old then. It was a winter's evening, just about
New Year's Day, and he was in his father's room. The lamp
with its green shade was burning on the writing-table. The
stove had been lighted, and now the register was shut and
Karl's father was standing before the stove with his hands
behind him. Grandpapa and Uncle Fredrik, who had come
back from America that Christmas, were sitting on the sofa.
At Christmas nothing but gloomy topics had been discussed
Anders, who had died a few months before, money, em-
bezzlement, drunkenness, ruin. . . .

HASANIDEA 19

Suddenly Uncle Fredrik said slowly, emphasizing each
word:

"If I had known that, I could have helped him!"

There was a dead silence, a long, oppressive, painful si-
lence.

Then, suddenly no one really knew how it had hap-
pened, so absorbed was each one of them in reflection over
Uncle Fredrik's words suddenly the old lacemaker had
rushed at Karl's father. He had seized him by the collar
with both hands and shaken him backwards and forwards:

"You're fractricides, that's what you are! You're fractri-
cides, you and Per!"

Karl Lekholm's father, who had inherited his mother's
height and was a head taller than his old father, stood quite
still and let himself be shaken. He only said:

"Go out of the room, boys!"

And Karl and his three brothers slouched out of the room
in silence, one behind the other.

IV

At the time when Dr. Charles Holmes made his noisy en-
trance into the world, at the beginning of the eighties, the
old lacemaker had been for more than a decade a super-
fluous individual, broken, dethroned, without authority $ an
empty noise of which no one was afraid. Even the profes-
sion to which he had devoted the strength of his youth and
manhood was such that it now hardly afforded a living, at
least in the form or on the scale on which he exercised it.
And it was not only he himself and his occupation which
were hopelessly of the past; the whole epoch in which he
had been born and brought up, had lived and worked,

2O LACEMAK.ER LEKHOLM

seemed now, in his old age, so infinitely remote that it had
long melted into pure legend bordering on the idyllic a
time with no telegraphs, railways or telephones.

That time had been his time. And in it he had been a devil
of a fellow.

One only needed to ask him to find out that. And that he
had been in the prime of life, if not exactly a notable figure,
nevertheless a figure in the daily life of his native town and
his circle of acquaintances the countless stories that were
told of him bore witness to that. Stories which with the pas-
sage of years, now that the dust lay thick over reverses, cares
and troubles, bestowed on him almost classical proportions.

Pehr Anders Lekholm was, as has been said, a lacemaker
by trade. He was the fourth of the line, for father and son
had plied their craft in the town. It was in its way an aristo-
cratic craft, inasmuch as in his time there were not more
than twenty-four lacemakers in the whole kingdom. It was
a clean, decent trade, too j not dirty and evil-smelling like a
shoemaker's or tanner's, or noisy like a coppersmith's, or
sedentary like a tailor's, a watchmaker's, a goldsmith's, or
exposed to changes of climate like a mason's, or sticky like a
painter's. There was a certain amount of variety about itj
sometimes one was spinning up in the long attic, at other
times sitting at one's loom in the workshop. It was, in other
words, a trade which ought to have suited the brisk, lively
little man as a glove fits a hand.

It was, moreover, a trade which in those days yielded a
decent living, and not least in his native town. For it was
no ordinary town in which he and his father had been born.
If the legend that the town owed its origin to a mighty
king's dream was not true, it was none the less a town of
distinguished origin. It had been built by royal command, as
a fortress and bulwark against Swedish attacks and raids on
the rich Danish province Skane, on a low-lying island, sur-

HAS AN IDEA 21

rounded by a river which every spring flooded the fields
around and gave the whole district the appearance of a lake.

It was not a pretty town and never had been pretty. It
was built on a stiff military rectangular plan, with four
straight streets running lengthways, two fairly broad and
two narrow, with side streets of equal number and equal
straightness crossing the long streets. The whole was sur-
rounded by a high fortress wall with redoubts, bastions,
canals, casemates and gates several feet thick with mono-
grams over them.

Two neighbouring towns of great antiquity had been de-
prived of their privileges as market and craft towns in order
to supply it with citizens. No pigs might be kept in the
town 5 no cattle might graze on its ramparts, and every citi-
zen who built a house there must construct a stable for at
least eight horses to satisfy the State's billeting require-
ments. The place had been a fortress and remained a mili-
tary town, even , after most of the walls had been pulled
down and had made way for broad, shady boulevards.

A town whose inhabitants were proud of it, where aristo-
cratic officers rattled their sabres in the uneven streets, a
town to which charming young ladies of the highest social
position drove from the big estates throughout half the
province to dance at the great gatherings with gold^-braided
lieutenants with horse-tails on their helmets and clinking
spurs. The world's greatest artillery regiment, CardelPs
Regiment, which had won fame in the battles of Gross-
beeren and Dennewitz, was stationed in the town. Such was
the glory and distinction of being an officer in this regiment,
that even in ceremonial processions its junior lieutenant
walked several paces in advance of the president of the
royal court of justice.

Pehr Anders Lekholm had been apprenticed to his fa-
ther. As a journeyman, according to the custom of the day,

22 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

he had travelled widely; he had worked in Stockholm,
Malmo, Ltibeck and Copenhagen. He had then seen a good
deal of life and men before he took over his father's work-
shop as a master lacemaker and became a citizen of the
town.

In those days he had been regarded in his circle as a re-
markably good match. Several years after he had come into
the world King Karl XIV Johan had graciously decided that
the regiment stationed in the town, as a mark of distinction
for the services it had rendered in fighting the great Bona-
parte in the battle of the three Emperors at Leipzig, should
receive a new uniform, a black jacket the breast of which
was adorned with no fewer than eleven rows of black braid.

All this braid-making work was carried out by Pehr An-
ders Lekholm's father, who had previously woven all the
braid which was worn as stripes on the trousers and distin-
guishing marks on the sleeve. Neither Pehr Lekholm nor
his father, therefore, was dependent on casual orders for
his earnings, like most of the other lacemakers in the king-
dom lace and fringes for drawing-room sofas, plush chairs
and coffins. All that had to be done was to go up to the regi-
mental office once a year, bow to the quartermaster and
submit a sealed envelope containing a tender, neatly writ-
ten out by the copyist at the court of justice, for the delivery
of lace and braid for uniforms to his Majesty the King and
his Government. It was, strictly speaking, a matter of form.
Pehr Anders Lekholm, like his father, grandfather and
great-grandfather, was the only lacemaker in the town. His
existence, therefore, was deeply and firmly rooted both in
the past and in the present. The contract with his Majesty
the King and his Government must have been a lucrative
business. Only ten years after the Lekholm workshop had
obtained the contract, Pehr Anders's father had exchanged
his old house for a new one built of stone, in Ostra Storga-
tan, only a hundred yards from the market-place.

HASANIDEA 23

According to the oral traditions preserved by Pehr Lek-
holm's sons from his years of apprenticeship and wander-
ings as a journeyman, nothing peculiar or notable had been
observed in regard either to his personal characteristics or
his participation in public affairs, until after several years'
work abroad he returned to his native town one day at the
end of September 1 849 with the claim to be treated and ad-
mired as a hero. He had been one of the 170 Swedes who
had taken part as volunteers in the first Slesvig war. To
confirm his statements and claims he brought with him a
shabby Danish soldier's uniform of dark-green cloth with
red collar and white buttons, and a certificate which Dr.
Holmes as a child had spelt his way through such countless
times that he still remembered it by heart:

"The Swedish volunteer, PEHR ANDERS LEKHOLM, private in
the 5th battalion of the line, 1st company, is hereby released from
service with the battalion according to the order of August 9.
"It is the battalion commander's pleasant duty m this con-
nection to observe that the above-named private, during the
time he served in the Danish Army, has distinguished himself
both by courage and endurance in the dangers and hardships
of the campaign and by exemplary good conduct both on and
off duty.

"HELGESEN, Major, acting commander

"5th battalion of the line.

"KjAERSGAARD, August 19, 1849."

Along with this uniform and this official certificate Pehr Lek-
holm brought a cutting from a Danish newspaper describ-
ing the battle of Kolding. This cutting described how the
battalion which had been ordered to take the lead in storm-
ing the town had recoiled for a moment before the rain of

24 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

bullets with which the Germans received them from roofs,
windows and street corners. At this critical moment, how-
ever, one of the senior officers of the regiment, Major
Schindel, dashed forward into the thick of the fight, and
with him Captain Rothe, Lieutenant Goerfeldt, Corporal
Larsen, Privates Lars Larsen and Hans Nielsen-Vade, and
the Swedish volunteers Berglund, Pousette and Lekholm
names as ineradicably rooted in Dr. Holmes's memory as
the order of the Swedish kings. Schindel himself fell, his
breast pierced by German bullets, and several of the rest
were wounded. But their courage electrified the whole
assaulting column, which now rushed forward to victory
shouting "Hurrah! "

To these trophies, the uniform, the certificate and the
newspaper cutting, Pehr Lekholm was able next year to add
others: the Dannebrog Order in silver, an address of
thanks, prettily ornamented and framed in cardboard,
signed by nearly 50,000 men from every part of Denmark 5 a
silver medal one side of which depicted Heimdal blowing
a battle-call on his horn, while the reverse was adorned with
a Viking ship bearing two warriors, and inscribed: "And the
wind blows her in to Denmark." The medal was accom-
panied by a letter in which Denmark thanked Pehr Lek-
holm not only for his personal help, but also for the
contribution he had made for "the first cohesion of the
Scandinavian peoples in the hour of danger. 33

All these trophies in turn were installed in the parlour
in the Lekholms 3 house in Ostra Storgatan. The uniform
and a rifle (which he had not used in the war) and the card-
board address in which he "was hailed by nearly 50,000
men from every district of Denmark" were placed in a wal-
nut bookcase with a glass front, whose shelves had hitherto
been adorned with specimens of his skill in his craft. Around
this bookcase, which stood against the wall opposite the
door leading into the lobby, were grouped his certificate of

HASANIDEA 25

demobilization, the newspaper cutting and the address
thanking him for his contribution to Scandinavian cohesion
in the hour of danger, all three glazed and framed, while
the silver medal was mounted on a sort of round cushion of
red velvet, which also but only on ceremonial occasions
was hung up on the wall beside the bookcase. The Danne-
brog cross, on ceremonial occasions, Pehr Lekholm himself
wore on the lapel of his tail coat.

There was, then, no question but that the little lacemaker
was a hero. He had been working in Copenhagen when the
war broke out. That he had served in the war as a volunteer
was also known in the town from the letters he had written
to his father his mother was dead and which he had
signed: "My father's ever-faithful son and soldier, P. Lek-
holm, ist company, 5th battalion of the line."

That he would return as a hero was, apparently, some-
thing which those who had known him in his childhood
found it harder to imagine. His outward appearance, to
begin with, corresponded in no way with the popular con-
ception of the military heroes of history, least of all in a
garrison town, and at a time when no one much under six
feet tall was accepted as a recruit for an artillery regiment.

Pehr Lekholm was considerably below medium height,
so undersized, in fact, that his marvellous good fortune in
coming out of the fight at Kolding with a whole skin was
jestingly explained by his being so small that the Germans
could not see him. The warlike moustaches with which he
reappeared in his native town, and which he allowed to
grow in such a way that they joined his whiskers under his
cheekbones, were calculated, if anything, to emphasize his
amiable, not to say rather foolish, expression.

And as for his qualities of character, there was not one
acquaintance of his childhood or youth who preserved from
those days any memory of him which could be said to in-
dicate latent heroism. The courage, coolness and contempt

26 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

of death with which he and a handful of other men had in-
spired a whole attacking column to dash forward to vic-
tory seemed, to say the least, improbable, when seen against
the background of the obscurity in which he had hitherto
lived.

On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that
doubts were cast upon either the documents he brought
with him or the vivid descriptions with which he further
illustrated and described them. People seem to have ac-
cepted his heroic deeds with the reluctance with which
Swedes, from time immemorial, have received the news of
a countryman's success and exploits in a foreign land. The
colonel of the regiment shook hands with him in the mid-
dle of the market-place, when they met one day by chance
just outside headquarters. His health was drunk at the
usual monthly evening of the craftsmen's association im-
mediately after his return from mortal danger. But these
honours must have been done him with the subconscious
but none the less firmly rooted conviction that in spite of
all his heroic deeds he was still only Pehr Lekholm, and
Pehr Lekholm, as his fellow-men had learned to know
him, was certainly no hero.

This subconscious conviction seems to have shown itself
even in the honours that were done him. When the colonel,
outside headquarters, congratulated him on the laurels he
had won in the field, it is said that he did so with the pro-
fessional hero's faint ironical smile at the blind hen which,
by a quaint freak of chance, had fluttered down into a corn-
bin. At the craft association's evenings the same undercur-
rent of ridicule ran like a broad red strand through all the
stilted formal oratory. It all came to this that anyhow he
was the same old Pehr Lekholm as before and they ex-
pressed their pleasure at having him back again as he always
had been a quiet, capable journeyman hcemaker, who was
now to take over his invalid father's workshop.

HASANIDEA 27

The fact unfortunately inseparable from human na-
ture must also be taken into consideration that nobody,
even in a small town in the middle of the last century, could
or wanted to occupy his imagination for any length of time
with anyone so uninteresting as a lacemaker, even if he had
inspired a whole assaulting column to dash on to victory.

It is certain that the undercurrent of ridicule and swift
oblivion offended the little lacemaker. He and his comrades
had been accustomed to different treatment on the other
side of the Sound. The whole of the latest period of his life
had been filled with enthusiastic ovations and the epic at-
mosphere of perils overcome. In the field he had often
dreamed of his return home, picturing it in the vivid colours
of a war painting, as the culminating point of his experiences
during the last year. And his reception had been lukewarm,
grudging j his exploits had been minimized, ridiculed and
swiftly forgotten.

Pehr Lekholm was by nature what we nowadays should
call a bad psychologist. His simplicity forbade him to seek
for any deep-rooted causes for the reception he had met
with. At the same time, his kind, not to say generous, heart
prevented him from thinking ill of his fellow-creatures. He
was, unfortunately for his own future, ignorant of the
Swede's characteristic reluctance to recognize obvious merit
openly and without reserve, of the need to level all emi-
nences so typical of his countrymen.

His naivete, moreover, blinded him to the fact that his
readiness to make the supreme sacrifice wakened a feeling
of shame in many others. He had accomplished what they
had neither desired nor dared. The whole of his little per-
son, made ridiculous by his absurd moustaches, was an ac-
cusation which stabbed them to the heart. The sight of this
little man, who had come out of mortal danger with a whole
skin, reawakened in a painful manner all the doubts and
questionings which a year and a half ago, when their breth-

28 PACEMAKER LEKHOLM

ren's call for help was echoed in the Swedish papers, had
kept the keenest of them at home. Evidently the risk had
not been so great . . . perhaps they would themselves
have returned as heroes, if they had gone forth like men.
The doubts of the spring of '48 now turned to accusations
of cowardice. And an accusation is something which one
does everything possible to get rid of or at least minimize.

But Pehr Lekholm saw nothing of all this. He was con-
scious only of the lukewarmness, the grudgingness, the
ridicule. And he could not explain them in any way except
as evidence of mistrust. People thought he lied, or at least
exaggerated. And accordingly he felt injured. The misjudg-
ment which he considered was being passed on him grew
in his mind as misjudgment so often does to an obses-
sion. It was in his particular case very easy for his grievance
to take the proportions of an obsession $ for it naturally,
through a kind of horror vacui, filled the gap the changing
scenes and stirring events of his year in the field had left
behind them.

For a man in the position which lacemaker Lekholm con-
sidered himself to occupy the most natural way out would
perhaps have been to cloak his injured pride with a chilly,
dignified reserve. But this way out was closed to him by
another very prominent characteristic in his moral equip-
ment his gregariousness. He was by nature no more of a
recluse than he was a misanthrope. Like the time in which
he lived, he was filled with sugary ideals of brotherhood.
Moreover, the driving force of his active, lively tempera-
ment was a petty inquisitiveness, always stretching out its
neck to glean something new, always with one eye on the
"reflecting mirror." He must be there in a corner, must feel
himself, if not at the centre of events, at least somewhere
on their outskirts. And so it came about that Pehr Lekholm,
instead of proudly drawing back into a dignified reserve,
made it his first duty to define his place in and contribu-

HASANIDEA 29

tion to the Slesvig war, and thus dissipate the mistrust with
which, rightly or wrongly, he believed himself to be re-
garded.

The result he achieved unfortunately proved to be quite
different from and contrary to his intentions j he only laid
bare, more and more pitilessly, the inmost recesses of his
nature,

In other words, the hero of Kolding invited ridicule. He
became a ludicrous figure, a butt.

It is easy to understand how the transformation from hero
to butt could take place so rapidly.

It only required that some member of the company
should ask him: "By the way, Lekholm, what was it hap-
pened that time you, etc.," for the lacemaker to begin his
narrative.

In a few minutes a wag would interrupt him: "Last time
you told it all quite differently."

Then the lacemaker would jump up, red in the face as a
cock's comb, brush up his bushy moustaches and cry:

"Deuce take it, don't you believe me? Do you think I'm
lying? Deuce take it, I never heard such a thing" and his
story used to begin all over again.

The most painful feature of the part he came to play, for
his relations, was that when he gradually realized it he only
made a still greater fool of himself by his fruitless efforts to
secure respect for himself and credence for his assertions.

To lacemaker Lekholm's credit, however, it must, with-
out anticipating events, be pointed out with emphasis that
his claim to the title of hero acquired at a very early stage a
deeper significance than sheer vanity or the necessity of
dissipating the supposed incredulity of people in general.
In the light his intellect was capable of casting on life and
its complicated problems, the thesis, put in the briefest form
possible, was this: once a hero, always a hero. And it was
precisely this view which his fellow-men refused to accept

3O LACEMAKLER LEKHOLM

or at any rate in his case. Their view could, in turn, be
quite briefly formulated thus: that even if Pehr Lekholm,
in the fight at Kolding, had in some way or other inspired
a whole assaulting column to dash forward to victory, this
did not alter the fact that he was just Pehr Lekholm, the
little lacemaker.

Deep under his vehement and foolish attempts to gain
himself credence burned another desire, more disastrous to
his own future and his family's to show his fellow-creatures
the justification of his estimate of himself. He thus laid upon
himself the obligation to live up to his heroic deeds, to
achieve notable results despite his humble position in the
community.

VI

Pehr Lekholm's first notable achievement after his return
from the war was to get engaged and married. From a
superficial point of view, it would hardly seem that in tak-
ing this step he had done anything which marked him out
from the overwhelming majority of men. He was then
nearly thirty, so that he was fully old enough to marry.
Nor could it be said that he was taking upon himself a re-
sponsibility exceeding most men's capacity 5 his livelihood
was more than secure, as he had already in name, if not yet
in a pecuniary sense, taken over his father's workshop, a
very good business by the standard of the time. Nor was
there anything about his choice of a bride which on the whole
afforded any striking contrast to the ordinary bourgeois
love affair.

But in the lacemaker's eyes his conquest of his future
wife was the most remarkable thing he had ever done, al-
most as notable as the part he had played in the fight at
Kolding, although it naturally fell into a quite different

HASANIDEA 3!

and more pleasant category of events. His fellow-creatures
were ready to agree with him, in so far as they were obliged
to credit him with more than normal courage in daring to
link his fate with Augusta Topfer's. In doing so they
thought primarily, not so much of her personal appearance
as of her established reputation for having an uncommonly
strong will of her own.

Augusta Charlotte Topfer was daughter to a German
assistant surgeon who had been employed with General
CardelPs artillery regiment during Karl Johan's war against
Napoleon. He had accompanied the regiment back to its
depot and opened a little .barber's shop, where, in addition
to shaving and cutting the hair of the officers and leading
citizens of the town, he carried on in an inner room various
activities of a "minor surgical" nature: he bled people, drew
teeth, removed corns and spliced broken arms and legs.

The assistant surgeon had prospered. He had married
one of the daughters of the town, bought a little two-storied
wooden house in Ostra Storgatan, not far from the Lek-
holms', and occupied his spare time with his violin and the
occult writings of Swedenborg.

By reason of his tendency to mysticism and his alleged
intercourse with spirits, his solitary life and his inability to
acquire a mastery of the Swedish tongue, he had, in the
eyes of the populace, come to be surrounded with an at-
mosphere of mystery. His uncanny appearance contributed
in no small degree to this result a very tall, very lean,
stooping form, with deep, piercing black eyes, a long, thin,
pallid face, an unusually long upper lip and a goat's beard
which made his pointed chin more pointed than ever. In
the little town where the force of circumstances had planted
him it was not the sweep, but the surgeon, that was the chil-
dren's bogy. Superstitious old women were ready to swear
that his eyes burned green in the dark just like those of Old
Nick himself. In reality Herr Topfer was a peaceable, kind-

32 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

hearted old man, who worshipped, besides the one true
God, his violin, Swedenborg and vegetarianism.

Despite his German birth, Herr Topfer had won the lace-
maker's genuine affection as soon as Lekholm returned
from the war. The assistant surgeon, who had smelt powder
himself, was the only person in the town who visibly and
audibly appreciated Lekholm's act of heroism. Further,
the old man took a layman's interest in strategy. And the
two often spent the evening together at his house, where
the surgeon followed the lacemaker on his and the Danish
army's honourable retreat with many appreciative or critical
comments.

It was during these evenings that love awakened and
grew in the lacemaker's breast. And this love seemed to him
the most remarkable thing that had ever existed of its kind.

It should be pointed out that it was not the great mystery
of love itself, its electrifying effect on body and soul, that
seemed to him so strange. He had experienced sensations of
that kind more than once before. If the words he uttered
on this subject in moments of anger, hate or humiliation
were to be accepted at their face value, his wanderings as a
journeyman could easily have been traced by the women's
broken hearts he had left behind him on his way.

The element of romance in this love story lay in the fact
that she had accepted him. For she was the most remark-
able woman he had met. And according to his own account,
as has been said, he had had to do with a good many.

Augusta Topfer had never been pretty, even as a young
girl. And now she was thirty-one, and definitely reckoned
an old maid. Her face and figure were so like her father's
that people, looking at her, noticed the absence of the goat's
beard. Her undeniable disabilities in the marriage market,
clear to every swain of superficial inclination, were, however,
wiped out by her conspicuous qualities, at least in the eyes
of a man who could appreciate moral beauty. The fact is

HASANIDEA 33

that she was in many respects a remarkable woman.
Equipped with a keen intelligence, she was highly educated
for her time and social position, and further possessed a
considerable musical talent. She played the piano in a way
which, in Major Rosenstjerna's firm opinion, would have
made good on any concert platform in the world, if she
had been trained.

It does honour to the lacemaker's instincts that her un-
attractive exterior did not blind him to her brilliant quali-
ties of mind and intellect. During the whole of the first
period of his marriage not to speak of his engagement
he never grew tired of muttering to himself: "Deuce take
it, I never saw a woman like my wife." In her outstanding
qualities he felt that he found a complement to his own.
Even the fact that she had gone through life so long un-
appreciated became a further merit in his eyes: she would
be content with no one but a real man, a hero. He was not
only happy in his choice 5 he was proud of his Augusta.
With the generosity and sincerity of heart which had made
him respond to a kindred people's cry for help in the hour
of distress, he recognized her merits with unqualified en-
thusiasm. He was the first to admit that in his married life
she represented the strong brain, the high culture, the re-
markable talent, while he on his side embodied the typical
quality of the male sex courage.

Unfortunately his enthusiasm led him to quote her fre-
quently, when with his friends and boon companions: Au-
gusta thinks this my wife says that Augusta played to me
yesterday till my heart melted in my body, the deuce it
did. ...

Socially, Augusta Topfer was in no way superior to the
lacemaker, although her father's solitary life and the fam-
ily's abstention from intercourse with others could not fail
to endow it with the mystery and dignity of the recluse.
On the other hand, there was no question but that Augusta,

34 LACEMAK.ER LEKHOLM

thanks to her musical gift, enjoyed a social position which
marked her off from most of the daughters of the bour-
geoisie. Thereby she shed an additional glamour over the
name of Lekholm. For example, she was invited to play
at gatherings at the Stadshotell, and so came into personal
contact with the wives of the governor, the president of
the court of justice and the colonel.

Further, she had for several years played the piano in
the quartette formed by Major Rosenstjerna, known as an
able violoncellist, the other two members of which were a
judge named Nolleroth who played the flute and a head-
master who performed on the violin. This quartette assem-
bled two Saturdays in each month at the house of one of
the three gentlemen, and the music was followed by a sup-
per, in which Augusta Topfer participated as a matter of
course.

The social barrier did, indeed, prevent the three from
accepting an invitation which lacemaker Lekholm, after his
marriage, once reverently sent them, suggesting that they
should transfer the musical entertainment to his humble
but well-provided home. The respect with which the three
gentlemen regarded Fru Lekholm, and the musical com-
radeship which had arisen between them, was nevertheless,
in a way, extended to the lacemaker. They returned his
greetings with marked friendliness $ sometimes they even
stopped in the street, chatted with him, and jestingly warned
him not to take up too much of his wife's time.

In short, Lekholm found that through his marriage he
had acquired a social distinction which no other craftsman
in the town possessed except Hofstedt, the tanner. But
Hofstedt was so immensely rich that his daughter had mar-
ried into the officers 7 corps.

As for Augusta Topfer, her thoughts and feelings were
as different as could be from the lacemaker's. He was far
from being the man she had dreamed of having as a hus-

HASANIDEA 35

band. It was commonly asserted that she had secretly cher-
ished other, socially loftier aspirations and had on their ac-
count refused several offers from men of her own class j it
was even said that the choice of her heart was no one less
than a certain lieutenant, who later became Major Rosen-
stjerna. It is certain at any rate that in later years she made
no concealment of the fact that the lacemaker had not been
her ideal husband. Moreover, she realized perfectly from
the first that, as regarded qualities of head, he was but in-
differently equipped. But, on the whole, she preferred
Lekholm to the certain prospect of going through life in
loneliness. His father's health was poor; his mother had
died in child-birth several years before 5 in other words, she
would, in all human probability, soon be mistress in her own
house. And she did not consider the lacemaker too stupid to
be her children's father.

In this respect he fully satisfied the hopes she had set on
him; after a year's marriage Fru Augusta Lekholm gave
birth to twins a son, Per, and a daughter, Charlotte.

This happy event further strengthened the lacemaker's
conviction that Augusta and he were a remarkable married
couple.

VII

It was inevitable that the rumour that Fru Lekholm "wore
the trousers" should spread rapidly through the town.
Among the circumstances which contributed to this result
were Augusta's reputation of "having a will of her own"
and the lacemaker's incurable and unlucky habit of talking
of her and her sayings and doings in tones which combined
sincere admiration and boastful generosity. Even the dif-
ference in the height of husband and wife was probably a
factor of some influence. Another factor which most cer-

36 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

tainly played a considerable part was the fact that people
had, once for all, come to regard the lacemaker as a butt.

Now one cannot repeat the same joke for ever, least of
all in a small town, where pleasant social life is a necessity
of existence. When people had grown tired of teasing Pehr
Lekholm about his military exploits, they were obliged to
seek for new and still more vulnerable points. They attacked
the one which for several reasons was the most obvious
the lacemaker's marriage. In doing so they may be said to
have followed one of the royal roads of male jesting - y a hen-
pecked husband has from time immemorial been an utterly
ludicrous and contemptible figure, and not least in Pehr
Lekholm's prime, when submissiveness was regarded as a
wife's absolute duty and a husband's supremacy was so un-
assailable that he was respectfully addressed, even when in
bed, not as an individual, but as the representative of a large
and powerful group of human beings in this case the Lek-
holm family.

Certain it is that, when he had been married a few years,
people began to chaff the lacemaker about the unheroic
role he played as a husband. At the gatherings which his
gregariousness prevented him from ever missing, it became
customary to hint to him, by pointed allusions, that his
humiliating position in his own household was no longer a
secret. The attack was delivered from both flanks with cun-
ning and tactical skill. Someone wondered if his old woman
had given him leave to stay out so late. Someone else asked
dubiously whether Augusta would let him have another
glass.

It was not because of any particular delicacy in the in-
sinuations made that it was some time before the lacemaker
grasped the humiliating sense of the questions addressed to
him. The period in which he lived was no time of half-
suppressed melodies. Men were still rough and hard both

HAS AN IDEA 37

in jest and serious matters. His failure to understand was
due partly to what his wife Augusta used later to call his
natural foolishness and partly to his inability to take the
charges seriously. Were not he and Augusta good friends,
a happy married couple? Did he not admire her as much
as a man could admire his wife? Was he not proud of
her?

But one evening, at one of these social gatherings, he
suddenly understood. He did not quite know why, but he
understood, as happens once or twice in a man's life, when
everything of a sudden becomes clear and the eyes seem
to have acquired the gift of penetrating the thickest walls.
What the devil! Did they think he was henpecked? He!
He who, with a few others, had inspired a whole assaulting
column to dash forward to victory! who considered him-
self, in his marriage, to represent the manliest of all virtues,
courage! he, who had the same contempt for a henpecked
husband as for a deserter in the field! . . . He twirled his
moustaches, went as red as a cock's comb in the face and
sprang up from his chair.

"Deuce take it, gentlemen, you don't think my wife rules
me?"

Well, no, they wouldn't go so far as that. There was a
good deal of gossip in the town. "They say that at home
you stick your tail between your legs and make yourself

scarce."

There were further moustache-twirlings.

"Surely you don't mean, gentlemen, that I, who was in
the battle of Kolding, am afraid of a woman?"

Well, bigger men than he had trembled at the knees be-
fore a woman.

"Deuce take it, I never heard such a thing!"

Like the man of action he was, he took immediate steps.
The lacemaker was by nature at any rate for those days

38 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

moderate in his consumption o strong drink. But now,
as in the fight at Kolding, he would rather die than show a
lack of courage. He gave them all the lie there and then,
all together and each separately, by mixing himself an-
other toddy of a mahogany-brown colour. And it was fol-
lowed in the course of the evening by many others.

Late that night the lacemaker was borne home on broad
though rather unsteady shoulders to the two-storied house
he owned. At the foot of three age-worn stone steps, which
led up to the outer door, they laid him down to find his
keys, hauled him up to the door and pulled the bell-rope
with a red velvet tuft on the end, a product of the Lekholm
workshop. Those who had stayed on the pavement could
see from the street a light struck in the bedroom, which was
beyond the parlour, and a moment later the bearers heard
Fru Augusta's sharp, now rather frightened voice ask in-
side the door:

"Who's that?"

One of the men who had carried him replied after some
hesitation, disguising his voice, and to an accompaniment of
suppressed giggles:

"It's Lekholm."

There was a moment's pause. Then Fru Augusta said,
the fear in her voice now increased to terror:

"If you're Lekholm, you can very well open the door
yourself."

No, Lekholm could not open himself.

There was another long pause. Then Fru Augusta's voice
was heard again, now sunk in a hoarse whisper:

"Is he ill?"

"No, not exactly. But we'll lay him here on the mat."

They stole out and, pressed against the wall right under
the two windows of the parlour and bedroom, followed in
breathless silence the further development of events, listen-
ing eagerly to the words that passed between the couple as

HASANIDEA 39

Fru Augusta, to judge from the noise, dragged her husband
into the lobby, words that on the lacemaker's side were
limited to monotonous mumbled oaths, while his opponent
gave proof of the possession of a considerably larger vocab-
ulary. And when the lobby door was shut they crept off like
black shadows, still keeping close to the walls, till they
reached the neighbouring market-place. There they stopped,
held their hands to their sides, and finally burst into roars
of laughter which echoed in the Trinity Church's hallowed
walls and woke all the sleeping dogs in the town.

They had not had such fun since goodness knew when.
And they looked forward with joyful anticipation to the
rich harvest whose seed had been sown that night.

Events developed very rapidly in the Lekholm family.
The day after that night of degradation the lacemaker had
stayed in bed and accepted submissively and without pro-
test the spiritual and physical attentions his wife bestowed
on him. Even when, in the evening, she declined to brew
him the fortifying toddy his alcohol-poisoned body required
in order to sleep peacefully explaining fully her reasons
for so doing he submitted to her decided refusal, not with-
out a bitter grumble into his pillows. For the next two or
three days the lacemaker performed his tasks in the attic
and at the loom with the new and savage energy which, in
a decent well-conducted man, usually follows an alcoholic
outbreak. In a few days more this energy was reduced to its
normal everyday dimensions, and the lacemaker was again
the man he had been before the night of degradation. At
least he considered that he was.

Unfortunately his wife did not share his view, which he
fully realized when a fortnight later, as every Saturday, he
left the loom at five o'clock and went downstairs to change
his clothes.

When, after washing and changing his underclothes, he

40 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

opened the wardrobe door to take out his Sunday tall-coat,
it was not there.

At first the good-natured fellow did not realize the situa-
tion. He called to his wife in the kitchen:

"Augusta, where's my best coat? "

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

A minute later she came in, shutting the door carefully
so as not to be overheard by the servant, the two journey-
men and the apprentices, who were just having their supper.

'Tour best coat, Lekholm?" she said quietly, with an
emphasis on every word. "I've locked it up. What do you
want it for this evening, anyhow?"

The lacemaker looked at her.

"What do I want it for? You know it's the craftsmen's
association's evening at the Schweden to-night."

Augusta Lekholm's voice was calmer than ever, and the
words fell one by one, weighty as the phrases of the Cate-
chism:

"It'll be a long time before you go to any more evenings,
Lekholm."

Now the lacemaker understood. If this incident had taken
place many years later, and the lacemaker had known the
German language and been intimately acquainted with its
modern poetry, he might at that moment have quoted the
immortal opening to one of Rilke's most beautiful poems.
Mit einmd weiss ich viel von der Font'dne! It would, no
doubt, have expressed just what he felt. So she meant to
have her revenge! That was why she had stopped abusing
him the first day he was up and about again. And he had
thought that she was so submissive because his newborn
ferocity had made her respect him. Oho so that was what
she was after. Oho! He twirled his moustache and said:

"Well, that's the deuce. You've locked up my best coat."

"I have," his wife replied, "and you won't see it again
for a long time except when you go to church."

HASANIDEA 41

The lacemaker put his hands on his hips, advanced his
left foot a half pace in front of the right, puffed out his
chest and regarded her.

"Deuce take it, Augusta, hand over that coat!"

She looked down at him with a gleam of contempt in her
black eyes.

"You're a fool, Lekholm, a silly idiot! You make your-
self a laughing-stock in everyone's eyes. Fve always thought
that, but Fve never said it till now. But now I'll say it so
that you can hear it!"

The lacemaker planted his right foot a half pace before
his left.

"I don't care a damn for that. But if you lock up my best
coat I'll go as I am in my working clothes. And then peo-
ple'll know you're a vixen. For that matter, they all know
it already. It's only I who've been such a fool that I didn't
realize it till now. Hand over the coat, I tell you. Deuce
take it!"

There was a moment's silence. Fru Lekholm had turned
as white as a corpse. And she smiled, a peculiar smile which
the lacemaker had never seen before.

"Who says I'm a vixen?" she asked, with an ominous
quiet.

"Everyone! everyone! the deuce! give me my coat!"

She did not answer for a moment. She only nodded two
or three times. Then she turned round.

"You shall have your coat, Lekholm."

The lacemaker took the coat, put it on, and went to the
craftsmen's association's evening.

There was not a single man in the lacemaker's day, and
very few in ours, who would not have acted as he did, or at
any rate, if for one reason or another he had acted differ-
ently, would not have sympathized with Lekholm in the
course he had taken. And there have been many and still

42 LACEMAK.ER LEKHOLM

are some men, who, like the lacemaker, would have em-
phasized their independence by coming home drunk.

By her method of reforming her husband, Augusta Lek-
holm had done something very serious she had set the
lacemaker's thinking apparatus working. And this was all
the more dangerous in that this apparatus apart from its
never having been seriously used before gave every indi-
cation of being simple and elementary in its construction.

All that evening, at the gathering, Pehr Lekholm
thought.

That she had called him a fool and a silly idiot mat-
tered nothing to him. He had never claimed to be any kind
of genius 5 from the first he had frankly acknowledged her
undeniable superiority in intelligence, as also in education
and musical talent. (It would in any case have been super-
fluous for the lacemaker to emphasize her superiority in the
last-named field, for he had no feeling whatever for music
beyond his admiration of skill with the fingers, which as a
lacemaker he could fully appreciate.)

But by locking up his best coat she had shown that she
doubted his courage 5 and this wounded him to the in-
most depths of his being. He, who had taken part in the
fight at Kolding and inspired a whole assaulting column
to dash on to victory, who had made his contribution, grate-
fully recognized by the State of Denmark, to the first co-
hesion of the Scandinavian peoples in the hour of danger
that he should not dare take a coat out of a locked cup-
board! What the deuce was she thinking of? Who did she
suppose he was? Did she, too, think his stories of the war
were lies? Deuce take it, he must make an example! This
was war! And war was something he understood.

Moreover, Augusta Lekholm, by her impulsive method
of education, had also succeeded in offending the lacemaker's
sense of justice. As he sat there among his boon compan-
ions, the degrading punishment she had desired to inflict

HASANIDEA 43

seemed out of all proportion to his offence. He had come
home dead drunk. Quite true. But what if he had? He was
not the first man in the world's history who had made a slip
of the kind. Such things had happened, and still happened,
to men of greater distinction and higher position in the town
than himself. And that a woman, for a reason like that,
should wish to deprive a man of the only real reward for his
week's toil was too much for his comprehension and for his
kindly heart's universal good will.

Her trick injured him the more deeply in that, as pre-
viously indicated, his coat was too short to be turned into
the soft, capacious cloak of the recluse or misanthrope. He
was a gregarious animal in the literal sense of the word.
He loved, after his week's labour, the clink of glasses, the
speeches over the punch-bowl, the free jesting, the smell of
beefsteaks, the kaleidoscopic abundance of the hors tfoemre.
He was a cheerful person by nature. But cheerfulness, in his
view, ought to be a collective quality. It blossomed most
freely in company. If he were forbidden to attend the crafts-
men's association's evenings and similar functions, it simply
meant that he was deprived of the reward of his week's
labour, his whole life turned to one long working week-
day. And that was what she had tried to do. Damned cat!

And she had done more than that. She had meant to
humiliate him to a degree beyond anything his friends had
ever dared. Their jokes had never been so base, so devilish.
Lock up his Sunday coat! Prevent him from coming to the
gatherings! And suppose he had been such a weakling as
to stay at home, to keep away till she was graciously pleased
to let him have his coat back! What would have happened
then? His friends and colleagues would have laughed till
their sides split. That was what the consequences would
have been if he had let himself be intimidated. It was really
she, and not his friends, who was trying to make a fool of
him. His friends were right j she was a vixen. Damned cat!

44 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

If they thought she ruled the roost, they were quite wrong.
Your best!

If the lacemaker's behaviour that evening meets with a
certain degree of comprehension even from men of our
own day, to whom the idea of being dominated by a woman
no longer signifies the nadir of degradation, it is equally
certain that some women of the present time, who are as
anxious as Fru Lekholm to bring up their husbands in the
way they should go, will doubt whether her educational
method was the right one. }

Indeed, she herself discovered in her old age that, how-
ever admirable her object of reforming her husband had
been, her method had been ill chosen. At least, she once
confessed it herself to her children and grandchildren. Her
husband was ill with pneumonia, and both the nature of the
illness and the patient's great age made recovery unlikely.
The seriousness of the moment softened her bitterness. A
life of scolding at an obstinate husband gave place, in the
hour, as she thought, of final separation, to a degree of
gentleness and self-reproach. She vowed that she had not
been the original cause of the degradation and ridicule into
which Lekholm in the course of years had plunged her,
himself and his whole family. Before that unfortunate
night when he had had to be carried home she had never
uttered one word or made one gesture to show what a silly
fool she thought him. And Heaven knew there had been
cause enough.

It was above all the force of circumstances unhappy
circumstances which had by degrees transformed her into
the shrew all saw in her her husband, her children, her
grandchildren, her servants, her fellow-creatures. She could
prove that she had not been a devil from birth. She had
been born and brought up in a God-fearing home. From
her universally respected father, who had held his head
upright through all the changes and chances of life, she had

HASANIDEA 45

learned to know her place, as a daughter in the house, as a
wife in the home, as a woman in the community. Long be-
fore she married Lekholm she knew that a woman should
obey her husband. God had arranged and ordered it so. She
had never interfered in what he did until, unhappily, it
was too late. And she only asked her children whether both
they and their offspring would not have had quite another
and a more promising future before them if she had taken
charge of affairs long before she was compelled to do so.

Nor had she ever, on any occasion, wished to prevent
Lekholm from going to the cafe. She had wanted him to
have his amusement like other decent men. But she appealed
to her children: how could she have acted otherwise after
he had been borne home like a corpse on that fatal evening?
And with his accursed obstinacy, worse than a mule's! They
must remember that she had been born and brought up not
only in a God-fearing, but in a temperate home. She had
never seen a drunken man in her father's house. He had
taught her to hold them in horror. And when Lekholm
paid court to her, it was just on the fact that he was known
as a decent, sober tradesman that her father had laid em-
phasis. And he was to come home from every gathering
drunk, for years on end.

If they only had an idea how many tears she had shed
and what sufferings she had endured because she knew what
a laughing-stock he was making himself in the eyes of God
and men. And the tipsier he became, the more absurdly he
behaved. Ought she not to have prevented him? She had
known from the beginning, or at least had a feeling, that
he at bottom was nothing of a man, for all the heroic deeds
of which he bragged. But she wished to keep up appear-
ances, at least to the world. She wanted people to think she
was married to a man and not to a fool. She knew what
they had said when she accepted Lekholm that she could
get no one else. Every time people made mock of him, their

46 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

mockery pierced her heart like a knife. Did they think it
was any pleasure to be regarded as a shrew? That was all
she wanted to say in her own defence now, by his death-
bed.

It might be that she had acted rather thoughtlessly that
time when she had locked up his best coat But after all . . .
And she would not have given up the coat that time, if he
had not said that everyone thought her a vixen. She a
vixen! It had deprived her of all power of resistance. She
felt that nothing else signified anything. Lekholm, the
idiot, could at that moment have taken not only his Sun-
day coat but everything he possessed. He could have carried
off the whole house without her being able to stir a finger.
She had felt it so much. It was as if she had stood naked in
the pillory in the market-place. She, who loved music, who
could interpret the piety of Bach, the profundity of Bee-
thoven, the seriousness of Handel, the charm of Mozart
that she should be regarded by the craftsmen of the town,
men who had grown up as plain, rough-hewn journeymen,
as a common scold!

And anyhow, if she had not handed over the coat that
time, things would have turned out just the same. She knew
her Lekholm. They could take it from her!

VIII

The handing over of the locked-up Sunday coat was not
the only incident of that evening which had such a decisive
influence on the Lekholms' married happiness. On his re-
turn home as on his departure the lacemaker had a sur-
prise. And now, as eight or ten hours earlier, a key played
a part of special significance. Fru Lekholm never referred
to this scene in her old age unless directly reminded of it

HAS AN IDEA 47

by her husband. In her eyes it was only a logical solution of
the problem which lay at the root of the tail-coat quarrel.
The lacemaker, for his part, was of quite another opinion.
In his view his married life would have taken quite a differ-
ent course if his reception by Augusta had been other than
it was.

As far as can be judged, there are no factors which di-
rectly challenge his assertion, especially in view of his good
nature and his power of forgetting an injury.

The lacemaker had on the whole enjoyed his evening.
He could, on the whole, be said to have conquered all along
the line 3 he had compelled his wife to produce the coat from
the wardrobe , he had, in his own view, turned the edge of
his friends' ridicule by a double manifestation of his abso-
lute independence 5 he had gone to the gathering, and had
drunk of his own accord several ostentatiously dark toddies.
He felt that he had had something resembling a triumph
that evening, and made his way home with more tender
feelings in his heart. That he was drunk he denied to his
last day, but he was certainly in a jovial mood, ready to
forgive his wife and bury the wrong perpetrated earlier in
the evening in oblivion and his own bosom.

He walked home with two or three friends who lived
in the same direction. He stood with them for a long time
at the foot of his stone flight of steps, discussing the af-
fairs of the world. Everything was apparently quiet in
the house 5 the light was out in his and Augusta's bedroom 5
the arch of heaven lay above them in all the glory of a cold
winter night, thickly dusted with stars.

He shook hands in farewell with his companions, as-
cended the two steps up to the outer door, unlocked it, shut
it, opened the lobby door, shut that too, hung up his hat
and overcoat and was about to go into the parlour, when
what the deuce! What was the matter with the door? It
would not open. . . .

48 LACEMAKER LEK.HOLM

Struggle with the lock as he might, the thing seemed be-
witched. He passed his hand across his forehead, a sudden
prey to the painful uncertainty which comes over a man
when he suddenly finds himself confronted with the inex-
plicable. What had happened? Where was he? He lit an-
other match and looked round. No, there was no mistake
about it. He was in his own lobby. He looked carefully at the
lock as long as the match gave light, then felt it again care-
fully in the dark, and stood still for a long time with his
back to the wall, thinking. . . .

And suddenly it dawned upon him. She had put the catch
up. ... The damned cat had locked him out 5 he supposed
she wanted him to sleep on the floor in the lobby. . . .

He stood absolutely motionless, muttering to himself:
damned cat, the devil take her! . . . Here he had come
home, filled with thoughts of peace and reconciliation and
affection . . . and she had shut the door. ... A damned
vixen! . . , For a few short minutes his heart was melted
at the thought of all the tenderness he had felt for her in
the last few hours. He was sorry for himself. It was not
only that he, the hero of Kolding, should be treated like a
dog by a hag of a woman. But that his kind heart should
have cherished tender feelings for her, that . . . that.
. . . No, the deuce! . . . The next moment he had made
a run at the door and delivered a double kick on it.

"Open the door, I tell you. Open the door!"

There was no answer from within. But he heard a roar
of laughter out in the street. It came from his friends, who
had waited outside to hear what kind of reception he would
get. His shouts had been heard through the pane of glass
which admitted light from the street. And the laugh was
followed by a cry of encouragement.

"Can't you get into your room, lacemaker? Do you want
any help?"

The lacemaker became perfectly quiet again. He put his

HASANIDEA 49

back to the wall again and thought. He was quite sober
now, absolutely sober. His brain was working at high pres-
sure. Now he would once more be the talk and laughing-
stock of the whole town. The very next day everyone would
know how he had been shamed and humiliated.

It was a little while before he had made up his mind
how he must act. He felt once more as if he were on the
field, out alone on a dangerous patrol, where any hasty step
might be fatal.

He could have broken the door in if he had liked. But if
he had done so, his companions outside would have had all
the more to tellj besides, he would wake the whole house,
the court copyist and his sister, who lived on the floor above,
the servant, and perhaps the journeymen and apprentices
as well. He passed his hand again across his forehead, which
was covered with perspiration from the mental strain he
had been through.

"Deuce take it, Lekholm, you've got to take this business
quietly and sensibly. You must be careful how you act."

And without uttering another word, except to murmur
under his breath that he had bivouacked under the open
sky in earlier days, he took off his overcoat quietly and
peaceably, went up to the attic and curled himself up on
the floor with a piece of matting under him, a bale of wool
braid for a pillow and his thick winter coat laid over him.
He did not sleep well. But nevertheless he smiled a strange
smile, quite new to him.

"The deuce! You'll pay for this, you cat! "

Just before five in the morning, before the inmates of
the house got up, he crept down from the attic again, opened
the lobby door and cautiously felt the lock of the parlour
door, which she had unfastened some time in the course of
the night. He was trembling and shivering with cold. His
face was white, his nose and lips blue. His moustaches hung
from the corners of his mouth like a walrus's whiskers.

5<3 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

He presented a most ridiculous and at the same time lamen-
table appearance. But if Augusta could have seen his soul
at that moment she would have recoiled in horror at the
sight. It was not only his body which had frozen that night j
his heart had turned to stone. And something else had hap-
pened to him as well. The moment out in the lobby when
he saw light, when the secret of the lock was suddenly re-
vealed to him, was the third and last time in his life that he
understood, that he realized the position. From that mo-
ment on he only thought, brooded over a scheme of revenge.

He did not open any conversation with his wife while
he took off his best coat and crept into his working clothes.
His taciturnity might have seemed ominous to anyone else
than Augusta 3 and perhaps it would have seemed so to her,
if she had remembered the part he had played in the fight
at Kolding. But during her three years of married life
nothing had been farther from her than the association of
Lekholm's personality with any act of heroism. She took
his silence as a sign that she had really crushed him, broken
his obstinacy for ever.

Like the man of action he was, and with the quickness
that characterized his work as a craftsman, he put his plan
into execution as quickly as possible. He did not leave his
home during the whole of the week that followed. He went
about his daily work, to all appearance as though he had
been subjected to no humiliation. The only change notice-
able in him was that he put as much fresh energy into his
work as if a new Government contract had been at stake.
But at the same time he was in the best of humours, which
was not customary with him on such occasions, and sang
the Danish song, Den ta$re Landssoldat, from morning
till night.

At one o'clock on Saturday he left the workshop without
saying a word to his men, went to the market, where he
bought several pounds of beefsteak, and obtained some

HASANIDEA 5!

brandy and toddy. He conveyed all these articles in by the
door opening into Smalgatan and up to a safe hiding-place
in the attic, without anyone noticing either his absence or
his mysterious proceedings on his return. At four o'clock
an hour earlier than usual when he knew that Augusta
was out making her last purchases at Hintze's, the grocer's
he went down to the bedroom, had a wash, changed his
underclothing and put on his Sunday suit.

At half -past four exactly the lacemaker left his house,
ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before Augusta might
be expected to return. Having plenty of time on his hands,
he went for a short walk outside the town and then returned
to the Schweden, where he found some of his companions
assembled craftsmen and tradesmen who, like the lace-
maker, celebrated the arrival of the Sabbath every Saturday
night. There was a lot of joking about his having been
locked out, and finally the court copyist Lind, who lived
with his sister on the floor above the Lekholms and was
known for his intellectual brilliance, summed up the whole
situation in a witty, malicious pun which made them nearly
choke with laughter. And the curious thing was that the
lacemaker himself laughed.

"Deuce take it, I'll tell my wife that when I get home
to-night."

"Oh, I say, go easy, Lekholm, you don't say so much
when you get home at night j we know that."

Unfortunately there was a hitch in the lacemaker's plan
right at the beginning} or it would perhaps be more cor-
rect to say that things did not happen quite in accordance
with his calculations. He had expected that at about half-
past six or seven, when she had waited for him till her
patience was exhausted, Augusta would send one of the ap-
prentices to find him and ask him to come home. He had
his answer ready:

"Say that I shall come when I please,"

52 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

But no apprentice came. That was a thing he had not
counted on. He scratched his head: what the deuce could
the baggage be up to? Had she suspected anything? Per-
haps she had made a search and found the provisions and
got an inkling of his plan? He reflected for a few moments
as to whether he should steal home and see whether the
beefsteak and the drinks were still where he had put them.
But the ex-volunteer from the Danish war saw the necessity
of suppressing his natural curiosity in the interests of high
strategy.

On those Saturdays which were not a special occasion
the gathering used to break up at eleven o'clock. But before
they separated that evening, the lacemaker tapped on his
glass, rose and said:

"Gentlemen and friends, you are welcome to my home
now to eat a little beefsteak with onions, empty a glass or
two and drink a little something when you go."

They stared at him. What the deuce! What had come
over the lacemaker? But he only smiled.

"Deuce take it!" he said, with a twirl of his moustaches,
"don't you believe there is any food and drink in the house?
Fve been out myself and bought two pounds of beefsteak,
and brandy and toddy. Don't you believe me now? Or
perhaps it's you who are afraid of my dear little wife? If so,
I'll only say that you have misjudged her. She's as quiet as a
lamb, and she and I ars the best of friends. She'll show
you that to-night. Come along! You'll be welcome I prom-
ise you that."

The lacemaker had grown fierce as he delivered his in-
vitation. He felt as if his heart had shut like a fist that tren>
bled with longing to strike. Now they should see, by Gad!
Now he would show them who they had been making fun
of. He would like to know if they still took him for a fool
after what was going to happen to-night. Now now,
by all the devils in hell, they should see a man who

HASANIDEA 53

had been in the fight at Kolding, and plenty of others, too!

He twirled his moustache again and raised his right arm
in the air like a company commander in the field:

"Forward, march, boys!"

Several refused to obey orders even before the march
had begun. And the column which formed up outside the
Schweden under the lacemaker's command and marched
across the Little Market in the clear winter night and turned
into Ostra Storgatan, had no little resemblance to that which
had recoiled before Kolding. They advanced slowly, as
though they might expect to fall into an ambush at any mo-
ment, so that the lacemaker was far ahead of the rest as he
strode on with long steps, muttering fearful threats and
swinging his Spanish cane like a sabre. A hundred yards or
so from his front steps he began to trot, which further in-
creased his lead. His anger was by now exalted to a holy
wrath. He talked to himself under his breath:

"Now, by Gad, now I'm going to put a stop to this. Fve
been a butt and a henpecked husband long enough. Now
the baggage shall see who's master in this house, she or I,
and all the others, too. Now you'll get beefsteak and onions
till your nostrils are full of it, you set of asses, who sat at
home when I was risking my life in the war. Now! now! "

He reached his own house, bounded up the three steps
like a leopard and hammered on the door with his clenched
fists:

"Open the door, Augusta, open it, or the deuce !"

The others had stopped for a moment to watch his pro-
ceedings. Then they advanced again slowly, all except the
copyist, who hurried forward to be at hand if needed. The
situation was becoming more and more of a puzzle to him,
as to the others.

The lacemaker thumped on the door again.

"Open the door, Augusta, I tell you, or, the deuce !"

The copyist had joined him.

54 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

"What are you yelling for, you lunatic? If you've for-
gotten your key, I can open the door for you."

The lacemaker pushed the copyist down the steps.

"Don't interfere. The hostess shall receive her guests at
the door."

He attacked the door again.

"Open the door, I tell you, or, deuce take it ! We're

going to have beefsteak and onions and brandy and toddy.
Pve got the grub up in the attic. You've only got to put your
clothes on, old woman, and do some cooking. Open the
door, open the door, I tell you, or "

The copyist had reascended the three steps. But he was
pushed down again:

"Keep your hands off, please. And hold your tongue.
Don't interfere! No one but me understands this business.
Open, you damned cat, or I'll break in the door. Don't you
hear what I say?"

At that moment the door was actually opened. The great
key was hesitatingly and creakingly turned in the old lock.
The door groaned and was slowly opened an inch or two.
There was a glimpse of a tall white form inside.

The lacemaker flung the door wide open.

"I want beefsteak and onions," he yelled, blind with fury
at her not having opened the door earlier. "Beefsteak and
onions, I tell you! And deuce take it, I'll make you stir
your stumps, too!"

A second later he had given the white figure a resounding
box on the ear. The white figure uttered a scream:

"Help, help, he'll kill me!"

She fell backwards, struck her head against the banisters
of the staircase which led up to the rooms where the copyist
and his sister lived, screamed again and fell to the floor
with a thud.

The copyist, after the lacemaker had pushed him down
the steps for a second time, had joined the other guests.

HAS AN IDEA 55

All were growing more and more dubious and irresolute.
But the copyist recognized his own sister's voice calling
for help. He leapt to her aid, caught hold of the lacemaker
in the darkness and gripped him in combat. Several of the
other guests moved off in silence, while three or four
advanced hesitatingly to the steps to see what could be
done.

Augusta Lekholm, who that night had again fastened
the door between the lobby and the parlour, had lain in bed
listening to her husband's heathenish noise with a chilly
smile on her lips, cold despair in her heart and an inflexible
determination to go to her own home next day with the
twins until the lacemaker gave satisfactory assurances of
complete surrender in the future.

But when she heard the cry she leapt out of bed, lit a
candle and, with a quaking heart, hurried to the door.
There, to her consternation, she found Mamsell Lind sit-
ting on the stairs that led to her rooms, with blood running
down her face on to her nightgown from a wound in the
scalp. On the floor lay in a tangle the copyist Lind, the
looking-glass maker Safberg, the girdler Olsson and on
top of them all her own husband. The little lacemaker
seemed to have been inspired with the strength of a lion
and the suppleness of a leopard. He struck, kicked, bit,
panted and swore. He trembled and gnashed his teeth as
he groaned:

"Now, now, now, deuce take it! PU put a stop to this!"

"Lekholm, Lekholm! Good heavens, Lekholm, what
are you doing?" she cried, when, after a moment's thought,
she had succeeded in unravelling the tangle and more or
less realizing the situation. "Lekholm, don't you hear what
I say?"

She seized one of his coat-tails and pulled with all her
might. But the lacemaker was beyond hearing and feeling.
He only continued to shout:

56 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

"Now, now, now, deuce take it! I'm going to put a stop
to this!" . . .

And he did put an end to it. After that evening of blood-
shed and disturbance the lacemaker assumed and for many
years held the place in his home which God and the Church,
by the words of the Marriage Service, had reserved for
him. He had nearly frightened the life out of Augusta.
When at last she had succeeded, not without some damage
to her nightdress, in tearing him from his opponents' grasp
and had got him into the bedroom, where she meant to
deal with his behaviour in the most moderate language
possible, his fury broke out again. Once more he began to
tremble all over, to grind his teeth, with flashing eyes and
fists clenched till they grew white at the knuckles. He leapt
into the air several times with both feet together, shouting:

"Silence, woman, silence! This is all your doing, you
vixen. I'll have silence here the silence of the grave. Or
else I don't know what I may not do."

Augusta looked at the little man she may be said to
have looked him up and down, as her greater height com-
pelled her to do. But only for a few brief seconds. For she
had met the look in the eyes of a man who had been driven
to the uttermost length, to the limit of reasoned action. She
felt at that moment to her frozen marrow that the man
before her would not shrink from murder.

And she said nothing. She said nothing for many years.
The lacemaker only needed to thump the table and say:
"Silence, the silence of the grave or I don't know what I
may not do." No more was needed to stifle any objection
or opposition from her side. For behind the words she always
saw the raving Lekholm of that sanguinary evening, the
man of superhuman strength, the hero of Kolding.

Nor was she the only person who, after the fight at the
front-door, which had been the subject of universal discus-

HASANIDEA 57

sion and comment, took another view of Pehr Lekholm.
Certainly he remained absurd. But people did not dare chaff
him so openly as before. Allusions to his foolishness always
had to be so veiled that he did not understand them. If they
were too obvious, his eyes flashed as much as to say: "Silence,
or I don't know what I may not do." The lacemaker had,
in other words, succeeded in making himself respected.

Nor was this all. Everyone now realized what people had
at first been unable to understand, with the result that they
had made light of his exploits that forces were alive in
him which, in the hour of danger or of exaltation, could
make a hero of him.

With the fight at the front-door, which attained wide
celebrity in the town, began Pehr Anders Lekholm's time
of greatness. And at the same time, it may be said, his his-
tory left the realms of legend and heroic exploit for the
firmer ground of economic reality.

He had won a victory on two fronts. He had gained his
companions' respect in so far as they no longer dared chaff
him openly, and at the same time he had made himself
master in his own house to such a degree that he could
henceforward come home from his convivial gatherings in
whatever state he pleased, quite sober or intoxicated, with-
out Fru Augusta Lekholm (daring to complain.

But there was something which made it impossible for
him to rest on the laurels he had won, respectable as they
were. There was still one slur to be wiped out 5 his wife had
called him a fool and an idiot. It was perfectly true that he
could not play the piano or talk German as well as Fru
Augusta. He had, moreover, hitherto readily and generously
admitted that in his home his wife represented both the
higher education and the keener intelligence, while he him-
self completed the picture as the representative of courage.
His restless spirit now desired nothing more or less than to
show his superiority in the intellectual domain also, and in

58 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

one way or another establish his renown for all time in that
field as well. Only then would he be able to live free and
happy.

It was at this juncture in the history of the Lekholm fam-
ily that the lacemaker's brother, Oscar, appeared on the
scene, to play the leading role for many years to come and
reduce Pehr to a figure, certainly not unimportant, but of
the second rank.

This Oscar was born in 1838, so that he was fourteen
years younger than Pehr. He was one of those children who
come into the world more or less as Isaac did; their mothers
have stood behind the door and smiled. Oscar's mother
had paid for her smiling with her life 3 she was in any case
rather old to have a child, and then she had contracted
puerperal fever and died a fortnight after the boy's birth.
Oscar had been a delicate boy all through his childhood
and earliest youth 5 every time he was attacked by a child-
ish ailment he had nearly died.

When Pehr Lekholm came home from the Slesvig war
he had, as was mentioned earlier, taken over the workshop
for practical purposes, if not in name. His father, who suf-
fered severely from gout, moved with Oscar into the rooms
on the first floor, and there the old man died in 1 85 1 of ague,
which ravaged the town that winter. Then Oscar moved
down to his brother's part of the house and lived with the
apprentices in a little room looking on to the yard, while
the first-floor rooms were let to the court copyist Lind and
his sister.

Oscar had duly been sent to the grammar school, in which
the lacemaker himself had gone through three classes, and
owing to his poor constitution had stayed on year after
year without either the lacemaker or himself coming to
any decision about his future. But now he had reached the
age when a decision must be made. He had himself no

HASANIDEA 59

definite wishes. The lacemaker scratched his head when he
thought of the boy. What should he do with him? There
was no go about him. He had always been quiet, uncom-
municative and reserved. He spent most of his time sitting
over a book. One summer he had helped with the spinning
up in the attic, but he had not put his back into the work.
And now he had risen so high in the school that he could
hardly be trained as a craftsman. The lacemaker thought
the matter over and came to the conclusion that he would
perhaps do best behind a counter faking the weights when
customers were not looking, sitting and writing figures in
an account-book, or something in that line. One thing was
certain: he was no good as a craftsman. Pehr Lekholm had
already spoken of him several times to Johan Hintze, and
wondered whether a place could be found for him among
the casks of herrings and sacks of flour. But Hintze thought
the boy was not strong enough.

"Serving in a shop's not like sitting at a loomj it needs
a man's strength."

The lacemaker had to abandon the idea of his brother
and protege serving in a shop, and thought of apprenticing
him to Sjogren to learn watchmaking. That ought to be a
quiet enough profession!

The lacemaker was worried about Oscar. And even if
he did not take a gloomy view of the boy's future, he had
never dreamt that through him would come the oppor-
tunity of removing the slur Augusta had cast upon him
when she called him a fool.

And yet this was the case.

About six o'clock one Saturday evening at the end of
April the lacemaker and the other members of the "monthly
bath" club were sitting in the bath-house, sweating, scratch-
ing their backs and exchanging such ideas as the situation
and temperature suggested to them. The schoolmaster
Browallius came in, and Lekholm was introduced to him.

6O LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

They had run. up Against each other several times at the
meetings o the education circle. And hardly two months
earlier Browallius and his wife had been to the shop to buy
two or three yards of black material to ornament a coffin j
their newly born child had died, and this melancholy oc-
currence had given the lacemaker an opportunity of re-
marking, as he handed over the little parcel, that the Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away, and that men must praise
His holy name and obey His commandments. The fat
schoolmaster was short-sighted, and without his glasses had
some difficulty in finding his way in the feeble light of the
bath-house. The lacemaker, however, rose when he saw
him and said:

"Please sit here, Herr Doktor, I'll move along and make

room."

The schoolmaster blinked; he had obviously not recog-
nized the lacemaker. The latter accordingly bowed and
murmured his name; and the schoolmaster sat down beside
him. As they sat there, scratching their backs, chests and
arms, the lacemaker suddenly had an idea an idea which
was to decide the fate of Oscar, himself and his whole
family. Suppose he asked Dr. Browallius about Oscar's
future? . . . He had, as has been said, had earlier contact
with him both on the ideal plane in the education circle
and on the commercial plane, when he sold the material for
the coffin. It could, therefore, hardly seem presumptuous
or too familiar if he now, with a simple question, asked the
schoolmaster's advice in a family matter.

"Excuse my troubling you, Herr Doktor," he said, "but
I have a younger brother and, so to speak, proteg6, who is
one of your pupils, and with regard to whose future I feel
a certain anxiety, if I may so express myself."

"Excuse me, but what is your name?" asked Browallius,
who had not caught the name when the lacemaker bowed
to him.

HASANIDEA 6 1

"Lekholm. Master-lacemaker Lekholm. You did me the
honour of making a small purchase from me on the occa-
sion of the loss of your youngest child."

"I know, I know. But why are you anxious about your
brother's future?"

Lekholm explained his meaning in a long and round-
about oration. Before he had finished, the schoolmaster in-
terrupted him.

"Why not let the boy go to the university, and possibly, if
ways and means allow, read for Holy Orders? His mental
abilities are of such an order that they deserve a chance of
further development. Besides, from my knowledge of him,
and from what I have seen of his general behaviour, he
seems to be of a quiet and meditative disposition. So why
not let the boy continue his studies, if, as I said just now,
ways and means allow of it?"

No one knowing the lacemaker's impressionable and at
the same time proud nature, and his childish wealth of im-
agination, will have any difficulty in understanding what
effect these words had upon him. Oscar had mental abilities!
They ought to be further developed! Oscar was of a quiet
and meditative disposition! Oscar should be a student! A
Lekholm a student! A Lekholm with a university degree.
. . . That was something quite new in the history of that
family of craftsmen, a thing he himself had never dreamed
of for all his power of imagination. His only brother at a
university! What lustre would he not cast upon the family
name! The lacemaker already saw himself visiting Oscar
at Lund and drinking toddy with his friends, men of learn-
ing. His brother Oscar a clergyman! Perhaps he would
even see the day on which his own brother would preach
in Trinity Church itself, from whose pulpit, famous
throughout the kingdom for its beauty, so many eloquent
preachers had interpreted God's word!

The very thought filled him with enthusiasm* A brother

62 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

of his student and clergyman. ... No other craftsman in
the town had such a thing. . . . Through the puny little
Oscar he would himself attain a social position all the heroic
deeds in the world could not have secured him 5 he, master-
lacemaker Lekholm, had a brother a student, studying at
the university. . . .

To the crackling, shining firework display of imagery
which Dr. BrowalHus's words had called into being in his
naive and impressionable mind, there was added a few mo-
ments later one rocket excelling all the others in brilliance
and splendour. Augusta would not be able to call him a fool
any longer now! Had he not a brother who was to take his
degree at the university? She had none. One of her brothers
was nothing more than a barber, and the other was behind
a counter in a shop in Malmo. But he, the lacemaker, had
a brother who was to be a student. What did that prove?
Why, if his father had not apprenticed him at fourteen, but
had let him continue his studies, who knew but that he him-
self would not have given proof of the same intellectual
capacities as Oscar? Why not? Who could prove the con-
trary? Was not the presumption rather, seeing that Oscar
had brains and they were brothers, that he himself had
similar mental abilities, although they had never been
tested? Who could prove the contrary?

It was a long time before the lacemaker could pull him-
self together sufficiently to stammer a reply to Dr. Bro-
wallius.

"It's worth thinking about," he said, although he had
already made his decision, "and as for ways and means, that
could be managed. The boy has inherited half the freehold
from his father, and the house is valued at over six thousand
riksdaler."

Browallius smiled.

"Men have become bishops on less," he said.

When the lacemaker came home that night from the

HASANIDEA 63

convivial gathering at the Schweden, he went straight into
the apprentices' bedroom and shook Oscar till he woke.

"You're to be a student!"

Oscar rubbed his eyes. At the sight of his brother and
guardian, with inflamed countenance and smelling o toddy,
he feared some berserk outbreak, and held both hands bei-
fore his face in alarm.

The lacemaker shook him again.

"Don't you hear what I say? You're to be a student!
And then you're to read theology and be a clergyman. Dr.
Browallius and I have put our wise heads together and de-
cided the matter. And now you've got to put your back into
it. The deuce you have!"

Then he went into the bedroom and aroused his wife,
who was only pretending to be asleep.

"Who was it who always said I was a fool?"

Augusta protested. She too was alarmed at his resolute
and martial aspect.

"Go to bed, Lekholm dear. You'll wake the children."

The lacemaker twirled his moustache.

"I want to know first who it was that called me a fool."

"Perhaps I may have once, Lekholm, years ago. . . ."

"Once! Often! But anyhow you admit having called me
a fool?"

"Yes, yes, Lekholm, only don't wake the children."

The lacemaker stepped a pace nearer the bed, put his
hands on his hips and said:

"Look at me!"

"Yes, yes, I'm looking, I'm looking."

"I only want to tell you that Oscar is to be a student and
read for Holy Orders. Dr. Browallius and I agreed on that
this evening. Do you hear what I say?"

"Yes, yes, Lekholm, I hear, I hear."

The lacemaker put the other foot forward.

"Well, what does that prove?"

64 LACEMAK.ER LEK.HOLM

"Why, it proves that Browallius thinks he has brains."

"But what does it prove as regards myself?"

"I don't understand what you're driving at, Lekholm, I
really don't."

"You don't understand j you, with your good brains and
your musical talent. I understand. But do you know what
it proves? It proves that I, as Oscar's blood-brother, am
not the fool you think I am. Do you understand now?"

Now one of the twins began to cry, Augusta protested:

"Didn't I say so, Lekholm? Now you've woken the
children."

'Woken them? That's just what I mean to do wake
them! My boys shall be students, the whole lot of them,
as many as you give me. Thatfs what Pm good jorl"

The lacemaker, without knowing what he did, had ut-
tered the fatal words, and had made demands on himself
and his posterity the full bearing of which neither he nor
any other person on earth at that moment could grasp or
foresee. Sooner or later the dream of a university degree
would have attracted some member of the Lekholm family,
as for over a century it has attracted and still attracts every
Swedish family which longs to rise above the mass and
move in a loftier, freer sphere.

But, as it happened, it was the lacemaker, Pehr Anders
Lekholm, who had dreamed the dream and, late one Sat-
urday night, uttered the fatal words:

"My boys shall be students, the whole lot, as many as
you give me."

From the moment when the puny weakling Oscar, whom
they had not known what to do with, revealed himself as
a future servant of the Lord, the lacemaker, with his cus-
tomary enthusiasm, made the boy's future his whole inter-
est in life. Certainly Oscar could not have a separate room
for his studies: space conditions forbade that. The two ap-
prentices were enjoined to keep as quiet as mice in the

HASANIDEA 65

den they shared with him when Oscar was "working."

But he ought to and should have better food, and he
alone of the whole family was regaled with an egg for
breakfast. The lacemaker knew that a working brain re-
quired plenty of nourishment j an apprentice or a young
journeyman could make do with whatever came along, and
he himself was content so long as he could fill his stomach j
but a young man who was doing brainwork must fill his
brain, and as food for the brain there was nothing like hen's
e gg s - An egg contained, in the lacemaker's frequently ex-
pressed opinion, all the nourishment which was later re-
discovered in the adult fowl.

So the lacemaker incorporated Oscar's success with his
own, and his life during the next ten years became a kind of
magnified reflection of his brother's. One September day,
when he was eighteen, Oscar returned from Lund, where
he had matriculated and been entered as a member of the
university. His head was crowned with the blue Lund
student's cap. The lacemaker took a holiday from the work-
shop that day and did not leave Oscar's sidej they walked
together up and down the two main streets, and in the eve-
ning Pehr Lekholm gave a party at the Schweden in his
brother's honour, to which all his own boon companions
were invited.

Oscar had passed his examination so well that he had been
allowed to live out for the next three terms on a Count's
estate not very far from his native place, and he occasionally
visited the town in the Count's carriage and even in the
company of the Count and Countess.

That Christmas he sprang a further surprise on his
brother and guardian. He declared that he would rather
read medicine than theology. The lacemaker stared at him
with his mouth half open, twirled his moustaches, and said:

"Are you as clever as all that?"

"Clever? What do you mean?"

66 LACEMAK.ER LEKHOLM

"What do I mean? Deuce take it! Pm not so stupid that
I don't understand that one needs much more brains to be-
come a doctor than a clergyman."

Oscar considered that from the point of view of brains
there would be no difficulty 5 it was only a question of
money.

The lacemaker could sit still no longer. He walked to
and fro with his arms folded. He could not utter a word.
He, lacemaker Lekholm, had a brother who was to be a
doctor! Brother to a man who was lord of life and death,
a man to whom all doffed their hats in fear and reverence!
Perhaps he might even become town doctor in that very
town! Dr. Lekholm, lacemaker Lekholm's brother.

He stopped, put his hands into his trousers pockets and
looked at his young brother. That puny little chap, as weak
as a chicken, with down on his chin and pimples on his
cheeks so he was to rise to social eminence, rescue human
lives from the jaws of death j wherever he went a kind of
vacuum of reverence would be created around him, some-
thing majestic and exalted which could be expressed in no
other way than a subdued murmur of "the doctor's coming,
Dr. Lekholm's coming." . . . The lacemaker could only
laugh, a laugh that was half bewilderment, half triumph.
The news was too overwhelming, too unexpected for him
to be able to think clearly. The only articulate words he
could utter were: "The deuce!"

It was not till some time later that he added:

"We must think it over. But not a word to Augusta. Not

a word. Mind that! Or, deuce take it "

Pehr and Oscar spent the whole of Christmas-time working
out calculations. A room could be got for something between
25 and 40 kroner a term. Oscar would have breakfast and
supper at home. The charwoman would fetch dinner in a
basket. It cost 75 ore for two i.e. 37^ ore a head. That
made about 200 kronor a term, including books. At any

HASANIDEA 67

rate, until Oscar had taken his bachelor's degree and had to
go to Stockholm to take up duty there. The whole thing
would take eight years. It was a long time, but at the end of
it he would be a doctor and a man of position. And when
Oscar had got so far, it would be his turn to help the lace-
maker's boys, who would by then be old enough to go to
the university. For they were going to be students. The
deuce they were!

"But not a word to Augusta about it. Not a word till
youVe taken your bachelor's degree. Mind that! We must
keep it dark, or she may think it'll cost too much."

Augusta, however, was informed of the state of affairs in
a roundabout way. The very evening Oscar went back to
Lund the lacemaker confided his secret to his tenant, the
copyist Lind. As they sat and drank at the Schweden, Lek-
holm's heart overflowed. He took the copyist by the hand
and looked into his eyes with an air of profound solemnity
and importance.

"Can you keep a secret?"

The copyist pledged his honour as an official of the court
of justice. How many secrets were hidden in his breast!
how many things unknown to the world he had inscribed
on stamped paper!

The lacemaker stretched out his neck till his unnaturally
large Adam's apple looked like a second chin. He put his
lips so close to the copyist's ear that his huge moustache
tickled the other's face, and whispered:

"Oscar's going to be a medical student. What do you
think of that? A doctor! The deuce! But not a word. Not a
word to a soul! Augusta knows nothing about it. And she
isn't to know anything till he's taken his bachelor's degree.
She might think it'll be too expensive now when our own
little ones are beginning to come one after the other."

The copyist alluded once more to all the secrets that lay
hidden in his breast. But when they had parted that same

68 LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

night on the threshold, he went straight up to his rooms,
woke his sister Lina and told her under promise of absolute
secrecy what he had heard. He had never forgiven the lace-
maker for the sanguinary encounter in which his sister had
come off so badly, and he knew what a promise of secrecy
meant for Lina. He was glad to have a chance of paying off
old scores against the lacemaker, the conceited idiot.

And at seven the very next morning Augusta came rush-
ing up to the workshop in the attic, where the lacemaker
was. She wanted to speak to him quite privately. But the
lacemaker was no longer a man who could be talked to pri-
vately, except when he chose. Moreover, he understood in
an instant what had happened.

"The devil take the copyist! Silence here! the silence of
the grave! or I don't know what I may not do."

Augusta withdrew to her own domain, grumbling to her-
self. It is possible that there might have been a storm
which would have compelled the lacemaker to assert his
authority again by some display of violence. But a visit from
the lacemaker's father-in-law, Herr Topfer, that very eve-
ning, had a pacifying effect. The surgeon took Lekholm's
side completely. He thought the plan an extremely wise
one. The medical profession was without doubt the noblest
to which a man could devote his abilities, and no sacrifices
were too great when it was a question of helping a gifted lad
to consecrate his life to the art of healing. If God in His
wisdom had granted him, the assistant surgeon, sufficient
means he himself would have chosen that career.

The lacemaker soon forgave the copyist for having
blabbed. He felt, indeed, that it had been all to the good;
for now that the secret had become public property without
serious consequences to his domestic peace, lie could talk
openly of his brother's brilliant future.

And he did so with an enthusiasm which would have
wearied his acquaintances if his lack of sense of proportion

HASANIDEA 69

and megalomania had not given them an opportunity o
"pulling his leg." He became a butt again, as he had been
on account first of his heroic exploits and later of his admired
Augusta. When his friends and acquaintances met him, the
first question they asked was:

"Well, any news of Oscar ?"

The lacemaker twirled his moustaches.

"Oscar, yes, the deuce there is! Yes, by Jove! I had a
letter from him the other day. He "

And he would start a long story. . . .

In the course of a few summer and Christmas holidays
the lacemaker, by means of an inquisitiveness which Oscar
found most wearisome, had completely identified himself
with the academic world. He soon knew everything there
was to be known about the university. Not only had he the
professors of the medical faculty at his fingers' ends, but by
dint of ceaseless questioning he had extended his knowledge
till it embraced a large number of the lecturers and the
best-known of the eccentrics who stayed up without ever
taking a degree. He revelled in them their peculiarities,
their absent-mindedness, their remoteness from the world,
their strange doings. None of the funny stories told over
the toddy-glasses had any zest for him if their subject was
not the university. Incidents in his own sphere of activity
and circle of acquaintances, the adventures and pranks of
travelling journeymen, had no interest for him; they be-
longed to a lower, insignificant world which made no appeal
to him. Even in the fights which, according to Oscar, still
took place between "town and gown," though on a smaller
scale than in old days, he abjured his own past completely
in his thoughtless enthusiasm and took the students 5 side
with all the vehemence of his fiery nature.

"I'd like to have been there I'd have shown them how
we did it in '48. The deuce I would!"

At this time, in his own view, the lacemaker was at the

7O LACEMAKER LEKHOLM

height of his power and prestige. Another factor contributed
to this besides Oscar's future medical career the origin and
extension of the volunteer movement in Sweden. It was a
matter of course that this movement should arouse the lace>-
maker's enthusiasm to a degree hitherto unwitnessed even
in him. At the very first meeting of the education circle at
which the question was discussed he took the floor and de-
livered two harangues which created a pardonable sensation,
less on account of their oratorical form than of their vigour.
They were more like a demonstration in bayonet fighting
than anything else. As an ex-volunteer in the Slesvig war
he regarded himself as marked out for a command, and was
put in charge of a troop.

Sunday, instead of Saturday evening, now became the
one day in the week in which he felt that he lived in the true
meaning of the word. In order worthily to prepare himself
for it, and for the responsibility which rested upon him, he
came home from the cafe the evening before at an earlier
hour and as a rule perfectly sober. He was up early on Sun-
day morning, brushed and examined his green volunteer's
uniform and polished his sword. Immediately after break-
fast he arrayed himself in his panoply, put on his shako,
brushed up his moustaches and girded himself with his
sword. He cast a last approving glance at himself in the
parlour mirror and turned to his wife and children, who
were watching him, with the words:

"Am I all right?"

Then he went off to the volunteers' pavilion on the out-
skirts of the town, where they used to parade. For several
hours he commanded and shouted at his troop with an ever-
growing sensation of joi de vivre. And this sensation swelled
to positive ecstasy when, at the head of his men, he rushed
forward across the little pavilion garden in a bayonet charge
against the enemy, who were waiting for them behind
Lagergren's garden hedge under command of Olsson the

HAS AN IDEA 7!

girdler. The girdler always retreated a few steps when at-
tacked by Lekholm. The lacemaker always rushed straight
at him, and forgetting in his martial zeal that this was not
Kolding, but only pretence, he used to thrust his sword at
the girdler through the hawthorn hedge in a manner which
the latter considered threatening and aggressive. The gird-
ler had repeatedly remonstrated with him for his mis-
placed zeal, and once they had nearly come to loggerheads
during the luncheon which after the exercises was always
consumed in the pavilion, a luncheon with plenty of drink,
including innumerable glasses of bultis.

During these years blessings fell like spring rain on the
lacemaker's head. His wife had borne him three more sons,
all of whom were to rise to distinction. He himself thought
the time was not far off when he would be promoted to be
lieutenant in the volunteer corps. Oscar came home in the
holidays and accompanied him to the Saturday evening re-
unions at the Schweden, where the lacemaker made the
shy, reserved lad tell stories about professors and students.
And one day at the beginning of June Oscar came home
as a bachelor of medicine, wearing the red-braided officers'
cap of the Royal Medical Corps, Oscar was all but an offi-
cer! Artillerymen, police-constables, sergeants and even
elderly sergeant-majors saluted him as he walked along the
boulevard at the lacemaker's side.