The painter was gone. Libations with Peter were over. Tord was alone, quite alone with his foxes and crows and mice in the gruesome Rookery.
He got into the habit of making long excursions into the town—the detestable town. Nothing like it had happened to him since he had slipped out there as a boy in profound secrecy for some devilment. At that time he had had a strange, secret partnership with some unknown vagabond in whose company he had pilfered in the market place and cut holes in sacks of flour down by Skeppsbron. He remembered the latter especially because of the strange, soothing satisfaction it afforded him to stand there in the twilight and feel the cool, velvety flour running through his fingers into the mud. He had already begun to revel in destruction, perhaps from a precocious, instinctive hatred of all the culture on which society is based.
Tord hated the town, but not in the same way as Herman, to whom it meant lawsuits and a bad conscience. Tord did not suffer from his conscience. No, he had an instinctive hatred of all the adaptability, refinement, co-operation and methodical work for which it stood. He detested the great complex machine in which men are only cogs. It was the complex purposefulness and relative common sense of teeming civic life which tormented him.
But Stockholm was becoming a great city and as such it had another side. It was a jungle, a wilderness of stone, the home of the thronging masses and of cold emptiness by night. But the town began to exert a certain fascination over Tord. He was going to be a writer, as we know, and those who can do nothing else can always explore the special vices of the imagination. He discovered that loneliness in a crowd has many joys for a fastidious individualist. The masses are necessary, so that we may look down on them. In the crush of humanity we dream so easily of the lofty heights from which all below look like creeping things. It is always so with the dreams of sterile genius. It would begin at the top, forgetful of all that lies below.
So much for Tord and the throng. But he did not hold out long. He soon relapsed into restless despair. He was frightened by the very masses over which he had just triumphed, and fled, full of loathing, home to The Rookery.