He made up his mind not to appear too eager. No, I’ll wait till she brings the laundry again, he thought. But time passed, until he could not wait and began to hover about Majängen.
It was not exactly a pleasure to walk about there. There were no decent roads, but only heaps of stones and clay holes, for the company had long ago sold all the sites and had thus no interest in fulfilling its vague promise as to the construction of roads. Besides, the inhabitants of Majängen were unpleasant people. All the earliest purchasers, honest workingmen and small tradespeople, who had bought the ground and built upon it at too high a price, had been forced to leave their marsh-dwellings. In their place a floating population had found its way out to Majängen. The worst scum of the town population was to be found there. And Selambshof and Peter the Boss were not exactly loved by them. They rightly considered that it was his filth they had to wade in up to their knees and that it was on his heaps of stones they almost broke their legs.
So that when in his rosiest and most gentle dreams Peter wandered about there, he was perturbed by expressive glances, tightly clenched fists in trouser pockets and long, rude oaths at the house corners. And in the windows there teemed pale and dirty children who took their fingers out of their mouths in order to point at him as the bad man from Selambshof.
All that would not have mattered so much if Peter could only have caught a little glimpse of his beloved. But he never saw her outside in the clay, no plump smiling face showed itself above the window curtains of the laundry up in the “asphalt” house. Thus he had christened the big two-storied ramshackle house half way up Solberget, because it was covered with asphalted cardboard outside the boards, and none of the successive owners had been able to afford to repair the outer boards, so that it remained there as black and dismal as it had been three years ago. And it was confoundedly difficult to get to it, for there were only steep narrow wooden steps leading past the entrance and Peter could not climb up and down them all day long in order to steal a glance through the window panes.
“Life is hard,” thought Peter, “you never meet those you want to meet.”