“I think it was on the third day that I discovered their secret. The very first morning Nygaard had pointed out a long tree-covered spit of land that ran into the river some half a mile south of the farm, and asked me not to go on it. He said he had hung many nesting boxes there and started a thriving colony of smew and goldeneye, and he did not want them disturbed. Of course I agreed, though it seemed late, even at that latitude, for duck to be sitting their eggs.

“I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished—even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden.”

Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing the week before, when I left Lily; like a pre-echo of this.

“Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear.

“Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my 'bedroom' in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink onto the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane.”

I glanced from Conchis to Lily and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present.

“I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, I think we are all insane here. He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my campbed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant 'hill of the holy stone,' the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

“Originally the farm had been no more than a summer dacha, a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father—an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing—of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship’s engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practice in Tronctheim, Henrik met Ragnar, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.

“All went well for a year or two, hut then his behavior grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragnar wrote Gustav a letter. What it said made him catch the next boat north. He found that for nearly nine months she had managed the farm singlehanded—what is more, with two babies to look after. He returned briefly to Trondheim to clear up his affairs, and from then on assumed the responsibility of the farm and his brother’s family.

“He said, 'I had no choice.' I had already suspected it in the strain between them. He was, or had been, in love with Ragnar. Now they were locked together more tightly than love can ever lock—in a state of total unrequitedness on his side and one of total fidelity on hers.

“I wanted to know what form the brother’s madness had taken. And then, nodding at the stones, Gustav went back to Seidevarre. To begin with, his brother had taken to going there for short periods to 'meditate.' Then he had become convinced that one day he—or at any rate the place—was to be visited by God. For twelve years he had lived as a hermit, waiting for this visit.

“He never returned to the farm. Barely a hundred words had passed between the brothers that last two years. Ragnar never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them. Especially since, by a surcroit de malheur, he was almost blind. Gustav believed that he no longer fully realized what they did for him. He took it as manna fallen from heaven, without question or human gratitude. I asked Gustav when he had last spoken to his brother—remember we were then at the beginning of August. And he said, shamefacedly but with a hopeless shrug, 'In May.'

“I now found myself more interested in the four people at the farm than in my birds. I looked at Ragnar again, and thought I saw in her a tragic dimension. She had fine eyes. Euripidean eyes, as hard and dark as obsidian. I felt sorry for the children too. Brought up, like bacilli in a test tube, on a culture of such pure Strindbergian melancholia. Never to be able to escape the situation. To have no neighbors within twenty miles. No village within fifty. I realized why Gustav had welcomed my arrival. In a way he had kept his sanity, his sense of perspective. His insanity, of course, lay in his doomed love for his sister-in-law.

“Like all young men I saw myself as a catalyst, as a solver of situations. And I had my medical training, my knowledge of the still then not ubiquitously familiar gentlemen from Vienna. I recognized Henrik’s syndrome at once—it was a textbook example of anal over- training. With an obsessive father identification. The whole exacerbated by the solitude in which they lived. It seemed as clear to me as the behavior of the birds I watched each day. Now that the secret was revealed, Gustav was not unreluctant to talk. And the next evening he told me more, which confirmed my diagnosis.

“It seemed Henrik had always loved the sea. This was why he had studied engineering. But gradually he realized that he did not like machinery, and he did not like other men. It began with misomechanism. The misanthropism took longer to develop, and his marriage was probably at least partly an attempt to prevent its development. He had always loved space, solitude. That is why he loved the sea, and no doubt why he came to hate being cramped aboard a ship, in the grease and clangor of an engine room. If he could have sailed round the world alone… But instead he came to live at Seidevarre where the land was like the sea. His children were born. And then his eyesight began to fail. He knocked glasses over at table, stumbled over roots in the forest. His mania began.

“Henrik was a Jansenist, he believed in a divine cruelty. In his system, he was elect, especially chosen to be punished and tormented. To sweat out his youth in bad ships in filthy climates so that his reward, his paradise should be snatched out of his hands when he came to enjoy it. He could not see the objective truth, that destiny is hazard: nothing is unjust to all, though many things may be unjust to each. This sense of God’s injustice smouldered in him. He refused to go to hospital to have his eyes looked at. He became red-hot for lack of the oil of objectivity, and so his soul both burnt in him and burnt him. He did not go to Seidevarre to meditate. But to hate.