Oskar Selamb had never loved his wife. He had neglected her, treated her brutally, and worn her out. But all the same her death gave him the finishing blow. It was her scolding that had kept him going. Now he sank irrevocably. His journeys to town grew more frequent then ever. Meaner and meaner grew the bars outside which his shabby old coach had to wait till late into the night. He could not even keep himself decent. Old friends avoided him, whilst discussing with interest whether it was from joy of getting rid of his wife or from grief at losing her that he was drinking himself to death.
The more subtle held that it was a combination of these two feelings. The only one who tried to do something for his friend Oskar was his neighbour and companion from childhood, William Hermansson, owner of the Ekbacken sawmill and shipyard. As it happened the Ekbacken establishment was situated just by the main road into town, and when, nowadays, William saw Oskar’s dreary looking coach, he stepped out on to his front-door step and admonished his old friend in carefully chosen words. He tried in every way to tempt him to decent intercourse in his respectable and comfortable widower’s home, reminding him of the times when he had found a refuge there from old Enoch’s tyranny. But Oskar always drove past with some vague pretext of important meetings and urgent business.
Within a few months the crash came. Oskar Selamb was brought home a pitiful wreck after having had a stroke at a miserable little inn in the slums. After several months he got up from his sickbed, bloated, with unsteady hands, and no memory, scarcely a human being any more. But still there was no sign that death would mercifully do its work. After solemn lamentations, the owner of Ekbacken agreed to become the guardian of the children, and through his efforts a new bailiff, named John Brundin, was appointed.
That is how things had been for more than two years at Selambshof. Thus on the still summer evening we have described Oskar Selamb sat on his usual seat underneath the old elm. He sat there so motionless that the sparrows hopped about in front of him on the round stone slab superposed on an enormous oak stump which did service as a table. But out there in the slanting golden rays of the sun, round the wing where the bailiff lived, shimmered clouds of gnats and fine spiders’ webs.