I lay basking in the sun,While the boat was drifting in the current,I heard the sillock and climbed into the top,I was giddy with my dream.I awoke wet through,And the thwart was floating,While the boat was drifting in the current.
I lay basking in the sun,While the boat was drifting in the current,I heard the sillock and climbed into the top,I was giddy with my dream.I awoke wet through,And the thwart was floating,While the boat was drifting in the current.
I lay basking in the sun,While the boat was drifting in the current,I heard the sillock and climbed into the top,I was giddy with my dream.I awoke wet through,And the thwart was floating,While the boat was drifting in the current.
I lay basking in the sun,
While the boat was drifting in the current,
I heard the sillock and climbed into the top,
I was giddy with my dream.
I awoke wet through,
And the thwart was floating,
While the boat was drifting in the current.
His deep bass came out with full force in the silence under the knoll.
The lake was like a mirror, and the captain took one trout after another.
Torsknut, with patches and fields of snow on the summit, stood on its head deep down below them, so that it almost caused a giddy feeling when they looked out over the boat-rail. And when they arrived under the cattle station, the steep green mountain side, with all the grazing cattle, was reproduced so clearly that they could count the horns in the water.
"Nay, here the cows walk like flies on the wall," said the captain. "If the milk-bucket falls up there, it will roll down to us into the boat."
The shelter was, in fact, nothing more than a little mud hut on the rocky slope, and a little wooden shed, with boulders on the roof, and a hole in it. There the captain was to be quartered, and Inger-Johanna was to sleep till the sun rose, and she, with Jörgen, Great-Ola, and Svarten, should go back again to the Grönnelidsaeters.
They had eaten supper—the trout and an improvised cream porridge—and were now standing, watching the sun set behind the great mountains.
The captain was going about on the turf, in slippers and unbuttoned uniform coat, smoking his pipe with extreme satisfaction. He stopped now and then and gazed at the sun playing on the mountain peaks far away.
Then a range of hitherto dark blue peaks took fire in violet blushing tints, until they seemed an entire glowing flame. And now the snow-fields became rose-red in the east—wonderful fairy tales in towers and castles gleamed there—the three snowy peaks then were turned to blood, with a burning, shining flash on top of the middle one. And again in the distance, still unlighted, blue peaks, snow-drifts, and glens, on which the shadows were playing.
Jörgen was lying, with his father's spy-glass, watching the reindeer on the ice-fields.
"Good-by, Miss Inger-Johanna," said Grip. "I am going over the mountains to-night, with one of the men to guide me. There are more people here than the hut will accommodate. But first let me say to you," he added in a subdued tone, "that this open-hearted day on the high mountain has been one of the few of my life.... I have not found it necessary to say a single cowardly, bad witticism—nor to despise myself," he added roughly. "Yes, just so—just as you stand there, so fine anderect and haughty, under the great straw hat, I shall remember you till we meet in the city again."
"It is a good ten miles to Svartdalsbod," suggested the captain, when he took leave—"always welcome to Gilje, Grip."
He was already giving his farewell greetings a good distance up the steep ascent of Torsknut.
"Does not seem to know fatigue, that fellow," said the captain.
She stood looking at him. The last rays of the sun cast a pale yellow tinge in the evening with this transparent mirroring. There was such a warm life in her face!
Some kind of an insect—a humble-bee or a wasp—buzzed through the open window into the room newly tinted in blue—hummed so noisily on the window-pane that the young girl with the luxuriant black hair and the slightly dark, clear-cut face, who was lying sleeping into the morning, was almost aroused.
She lay sound asleep on her side, after having come home in the night. The impressions of the mountains' summits were still playing in her brain. She had another trout on the line—it flashed and floundered there in the lake—Grip came up with two sticks, which were to be placed crossways.
Surr-humm! straight into her face, so that she woke up.
The day was already far advanced.
There on the toilet table with white hangings above it surrounding the glass which had been put there for her return home, was the violet soap in silver paper.
It was plainly that which attracted all the inexperienced insects to ruin: they had found the way to an entirely new world of flowers there and plunged blindly headlong, believing in the discovery, without any conception of the numerous artificial products of the age outside of the mountain region—that the fragrance of violets did not produce violets, but only horrid, horrid pains in the stomach. There plainly existed an entire confusion in their ideas, to judge by all the disquiet and humming in and out of those that had recently come and possibly began to suspect something wrong and took a turn or two up and down in the room first, before the temptation became too great for them, and by the earlier arrivals that slowly crept up and down on the wall with acquired experience in life, or were lying stupefied and floundering on the window-sill.
"Ish!—and straight up into the washing water."
She looked with a certain indignation at the cause—her violet soap.
At the same time it opened a new train of thought while she smelled it two or three times.
"Mother's yellow soap is more honest."
She quickly threw it out of the window, and witha towel carefully wiped those that had fallen on the field of battle off the sill.
Later in the forenoon, Ma and Inger-Johanna stood down in the garden, picking sugar peas for dinner.
"Only the ripest, Inger-Johanna, which are becoming too hard and woody, till your father comes home. What will your aunt say when she hears that we have let you go with your father so far up in the wilderness—she certainly will not think such a trip very inviting, or comprehend that you can be so eloquent over stone and rocks."
"No, she thinks that nothing can compete with their Tulleröd," said Inger-Johanna, smiling.
"Pass the plate over to me, so that I may empty it into the basket," came from Ma.
"So aunt writes that Rönnow is going to stay all winter in Paris."
"Rönnow, yes—but I shall amuse myself very well by reading aloud to her this winterGedecke's Travels in Switzerland,—and then give her small doses of my trip."
"Now you are talking without thinking, Inger-Johanna. There is always a great difference between that which is within the circle of culture and desolate wild tracts up here in the mountain region."
Ma's bonnet-covered head bowed down behind the pea-vines.
"Father says that it is surely because they wantto use him at Stockholm that he is going to perfect himself in French."
"Yes, he is certainly going to become something great. You can believe we find it ever so snug and pleasant when we are sometimes at home alone and I read aloud to aunt."
Ma's large bonnet, spotted with blue, rose up, and with a table knife in her hand she passed the empty plate back. "And he has the bearing which suits, the higher he gets."
"Quite perfect—but I don't know how it is, one does not care to think about him up here in the country."
Ma stood a moment with the table knife in her hand.
"That will do," she said, as she took up the basket, somewhat troubled—"We shan't have many peas this year," she added, sighing.