Chapter XIV
Abouttwenty years had passed, and the traffic down in the country store and inn showed an entirely different style both in building and goods. There had also begun to be a route for travellers and tourists in the summer up through the valley.
The snow drifted, so that it lay high up on the steps this Sunday afternoon.
But in the little warm room behind the shop there was jollity. He had come up again, he, the delightful Grip; and now he was sitting there with the shopkeeper, the bailiff's man, and the execution-server.
Only let him get a little something to drink.
"Your health, you old execution-horse!" came in Grip's voice—"When I think of all those whom you have taken the skin off without ever getting any part in the roast, I can get up a kind of sympathy for you; we are both of us cheated souls."
"Although I have not acquired the learning and sciences"—began the gray-headed man who had been spoken to, somewhat irritated—"I insist on—"
"Everything lawful, yes—oh—oh—never mind that, Reierstad. Consider that science is the sea of infinity, and a few drops more or less do not count either for or against. Just peep out a little into the starry night, and you will have a suspicionthat the whole of the planet, my friend, on which you parade in such a very small crevice, is only one pea in the soup—soup, I say—it is all the same. Isn't that so, Mr.—Mr. Simensen?"
He always appealed to the shop boy, who, with his small pig's eyes, smiled very superciliously and was evidently flattered.
"And in regard to the last information, one ought to have a little something to reinforce the oil in the lamp with, Sir."
It was the execution-server who had stood treat first—a pint and a half bottle of spirits.
The execution-server had a kind of ancient deferential respect for Grip. He knew that he had belonged to the higher sphere, and that he still, whenever he liked, might show himself in the houses both of the sheriff and of old Rist, places which he never left without improvements in his outfit.
"I will confide a secret to you, Reierstad. If you are a little of a genius, then you must drink—at least it was true in my time. There was great havoc on that kind, you see, on account of the vacuum. Did you not notice something of that?"
"Hi, hi, hi," neighed Simensen.
"Yes, you understand what I mean, Simensen?—A good glass of punch extract in this frost—of yours in the shop—would taste so good now, wouldn't it? I am not at present flush of money; but if you will have the goodness to put it down."
Simensen caught the idea, of course. "All right, then."
"As you grease the wheels, the carriage goes, you know very well, my dear Simensen—and, well,—there comes the fluid.—Do you want to know why we drink?"
"Oh, it can't be so very difficult to fathom that."
"No, no; but yet it may perhaps be placed in a higher light, which a man like you will not fail to appreciate—you know there is a great objection to new illumination fluids, besides—you see, hm!" He seated himself comfortably—"You live in a thin coat and cold, poor conditions—are ashamed of yourself at heart—feel that you are sinking as a man, day by day. If there is a discussion, you don't dare to assert yourself; if you are placed at a table, you don't dare to speak. And then—only two drams—two glasses of poor brandy for spectacles to see through—andein,zwei,drei,marsch! The whole world is another!—You become yourself, feel that you are in that health and vigor which you were once intended for; your person becomes independent, proud, and bold; the words fall from your lips; your ideas are bright; people admire. The two glasses—only two glasses—I do not refuse, however, the three, four, five, and six, your health!—make the difference—you know what the difference is, Simensen!—between his healthy and his sick man, while the man whom the world struckdown—well, yes—But the two glasses carry him always farther—farther—inexorably farther, you see—until he ends in the workhouse. That was a big syllogism."
"Yes, it certainly was," said Simensen, nodding to the execution-server; "it took half a bottle with it."
Grip sat there mumbling.
The strong drink had plainly got more and more hold on him; he had been out in the cold the whole day. His boots were wet and in bad condition. But he continued to drink; almost alone he had disposed of the punch extract.
"Come, come, don't sit there so melancholy—or there won't be any more to get," Simensen prodded him.
"No, no—no, no—more syllogisms, you mean—something Reierstad also can understand." He nodded his head in quiet, dull self-communion. "Came across an emaciated, pale child, who was crying so utterly helplessly down here. There is much that screams helplessly—you know, Reierstad!—if one has once got an ear for the music, and has not a river of tears—there, you drink, drink. Give me the bottle."
"It were best to get him to bed over in the servants' room, now," suggested Simensen.
"Perhaps the pig is drunk," muttered Grip.
Monday morning he was off again, before daylight,without having tasted anything; he was shy so early, before he had got his first dram to stiffen him up.
Grip had his own tactics. He was known over very nearly the whole of the country south of the Dovrefjeld.
As he had had fits of drinking and going on a spree, so he had had corresponding periods when he had lived soberly in the capital, studying and giving instruction. Again and again he awoke the most well-grounded hopes in his few old comrades and friends who remained there. A man with such a talent for teaching and such a remarkable gift for grasping the roots of words and the laws of language, not only in Greek and Latin, but right up into the Sanscrit, might possibly even yet attain to something. Based on his total abstinence for three and four months and his own strong self-control, they would already begin to speak of bringing about his installation at some school of a higher grade, when all at once, unexpectedly, it was again reported that he had disappeared from the city.
Then he would pop up again after the lapse of some weeks—entirely destitute, in one of the country districts, shaking and thin and worn from drink, from exposure, from lying in outhouses and in haylofts, seldom undressed and in a proper bed.
Along in the afternoon he appeared at the sheriff's house.
Gülcke was the only one of the functionaries of his time who still kept his office, after Rist had left. He was still there, nursed by a careful wife, who had ever surrounded him with a padding of pillows, visible and invisible.
Grip knew what he was doing; he wanted to find the mistress, while the sheriff was in his office.
She was sitting in an easy chair snugly behind the double windows in the sitting-room with her knitting-work andThe Wandering Jewbefore her, while her clever sister Thea, an unmarried woman now in the thirties, was looking after the dinner out in the kitchen.
Thinka took the care of the house upon herself after Miss Gülcke's death, and was her old husband's support and crutch unweariedly the whole twenty-four hours together.
And these greasy, worn books of fiction from the city, with numbers on their backs, were the little green spot left for her to pass her own life on.
Like so many other women of those times, to whom reality had not left any other escape than to take any man who could support her, she lived in these novels—in the midst of the most harshly creaking commonplaces—a highly strained life of fancy. There she imagined the passions she herself might have had. There were loves and hates, there were two noble hearts—in spite of everything—happily united; or she consoled picturesque heroes,who in despair were gazing into the billows.
There—in the clouds—was continued the life with its unquenchable thirst of the heart and of the spirit for which reality had not given any firm foothold—and there the matronly figure which had become somewhat large, cozily round and plump, and which was once the small, slender Thinka, transferred her still unforgotten Aas from one heroic form to another—from Emilie Carlén to James, from Walter Scott to Bulwer, from Alexander Dumas to Eugène Sue.
There in her domestic, bustling sister's place lay the sewing, with a ray of sunshine on the chair.
The dark inlaid sewing-table was Thea's inheritance from Ma. And the silver thimble, with the shell old and worn thin inside and out, broken and cracked at the top and on the edges, she used and saved, because her mother had used it all her time. It stood, left behind like a monument to Ma—to all the weary stitches—and pricks—of her honorably toiling, self-sacrificing—shall we call it life?
It was more at a pressure than by regularly knocking that the door to the sitting-room was opened, and Grip cautiously entered.
"You, Grip? No, no, not by the door, sit down up there by the window. Then my sister will get you a little something to eat,—oh, you can manage to eat a little bread and butter and salt meat, can't you? Well, so you are up this way, Grip?"
"Seeking a chance to teach, I may say, Mrs. Gülcke," was the evasive reply. "I am told you have heard from Jörgen over in America," he hastily added, to get away from the delicate subject.
"Yes, just think: Jörgen is a well-to-do, rich manager of a machine-shop over in Savannah. He has now written two letters and wants to have his eldest sister come over; but Inger-Johanna is not seeking for happiness any more—" she added with a peculiar emphasis.
There was a silence.
Grip, with a very trembling hand, placed the plate of bread and butter, which the maid had brought, on the sewing-table. He had drunk the dram on the side of the plate. There was a twitching about his lips.
"It gives me pleasure, exceeding great pleasure," he uttered in a voice which he controlled with difficulty. "You see, Mrs. Gülcke, that Jörgen has amounted to something I count as one of the few rare blades of grass that have grown up out of my poor life."
Sleigh-bells sounded out in the road; a sleigh glided into the yard.
"The judge's," Thinka said.
Grip comprehended that he would not be wanted just now, and rose.
Thinka hastened out into a side room and came in again with a dollar bill—"Take it, Grip—a little assistance till you get some pupils."
His hand hesitated a little before he took it. "One—must—must—" He seized his cap and went out.
Down by the gate he stopped a little, and looked back. The window had been thrown open there.
"Airing out after Grip," he muttered bitterly, while he took the direction of the valley, with his comforter high up around his neck and his cap, which down in the main parish had replaced his old, curled up felt hat, down over his ears; in the cold east wind he protected his hands in the pockets of his old thin coat, which was flapping about his emaciated form.
It was not an uncommon route, whither he went over the mountains in his widely extended rambles in the summer, or, as now, in the short, dark midwinter, when he was obliged to confine himself to the highway.
This country district had an attraction for him, as it were; he listened and watched everywhere he came for even the least bit of what he could catch up about Inger-Johanna, while he carefully avoided her vicinity.
"The young lady of Gilje," as she was called, lived in a little house up there, which she had bought with one of the four thousand dollars that old Aunt Alette had given to her by will.
She kept a school for the children of the region,and read with those of the captain, the newly settled doctor, and the bailiff.
And now she had many boys to care for, whom she had got places in the country round about, while in the course of years she had striven to put several young geniuses from the neighborhood in the way of getting on down in the cities.
She was imperious, and gave occasion for people's talk by her unusually independent conduct; but to her face she met pure respect. She was still, at her fortieth year, delicate and slender, with undiminished, even if more quiet, fire in her eyes, and hair black as a raven.
She sought for talents in the children like four-leaved clover on the hills, as she was said to have expressed it; and when Grip, down at Thinka's, talked of Jörgen's happy escape from his surroundings as one of the few green leaves in his life, he then suppressed the most secret thought he cherished, that her little school was an offshoot propagated by his ideas.
In the twilight the next afternoon a form stole up to the fence around her schoolroom—the longing to catch, if possible, a glimpse of her drove him nearer and nearer.
Now he was standing close to the window.
An obscure form now and then moved before it.
An uncertain gleam was playing about in there from the mouth of the stove. The lamp was not yet lighted, and he heard the voice of a boy reciting something which he had learned by heart, but did not know well; it sounded like verse—it must be the children from the captain's house.
The entry door was open, and a little later he was standing in it, listening breathlessly.
He heard her voice—her voice.
"Recite it, Ingeborg—boys are so stupid in such things."
It was a poem from the Norwegian history. Ingeborg's voice came clearly:
And that was young Queen Gyda,The flower in King Harald's spring—Walks yet so proud a maidenOver the mountain ling?Highborn was she and haughty,Her seat she would not share;The Hordaland damsels away she sent,And the Rogaland girls must fare.She willed a kingdom unitedTo the outermost skerrie bare,A king for a queen, the whole of a manFor a maid—and none to share.
And that was young Queen Gyda,The flower in King Harald's spring—Walks yet so proud a maidenOver the mountain ling?Highborn was she and haughty,Her seat she would not share;The Hordaland damsels away she sent,And the Rogaland girls must fare.She willed a kingdom unitedTo the outermost skerrie bare,A king for a queen, the whole of a manFor a maid—and none to share.
And that was young Queen Gyda,The flower in King Harald's spring—Walks yet so proud a maidenOver the mountain ling?
And that was young Queen Gyda,
The flower in King Harald's spring—
Walks yet so proud a maiden
Over the mountain ling?
Highborn was she and haughty,Her seat she would not share;The Hordaland damsels away she sent,And the Rogaland girls must fare.
Highborn was she and haughty,
Her seat she would not share;
The Hordaland damsels away she sent,
And the Rogaland girls must fare.
She willed a kingdom unitedTo the outermost skerrie bare,A king for a queen, the whole of a manFor a maid—and none to share.
She willed a kingdom united
To the outermost skerrie bare,
A king for a queen, the whole of a man
For a maid—and none to share.
He stood as if rooted to the floor, until he heard Inger-Johanna say, "I will now light the lamp, and give you your lessons for to-morrow."
Immediately he was away before the window.
He saw her head in the glow of the lamp just lighted—that purity in the shape of her eyebrows and in the lines of her face—that unspeakably beautiful, serious countenance, only even more characteristically stamped—that old erect bearing with the tall, firm neck.
It was a picture which had stood within him all these years—of her who should have been his if he had attained to what he ought to have attained in life—if it had offered him what it should have—and if he himself had been what he ought to have been.
He stood there stupefied as if in a dizzy intoxication—and then went away with long strides, when he heard the children coming out into the entry.
His feet bore him without his knowing it.
Now he was far down the Gilje hills, and the moonlight began to shine over the ridges. He still hurried on; his blood was excited; he saw—almost talked with her.
A sleigh came trotting slowly behind him with the bells muffled by the frost.
It was old Rist, who was sitting nodding in his fur coat, exhausted by what he had enjoyed at Gilje.
"If you are going over the lake, Grip, jump on behind," he said by way of salutation, after looking at him a little.
"I tell you, if you could only leave off drinking," he began to admonish—
Before the lamp thus—it ran in Grip's thoughts—she set the milky shade slowly down over the chimney, and a gleam passed over her delicate mouth and chin—the dark, closely fitting dress—and the forehead, while she bowed her magnificent head—she looked up—straight towards the window—
"And if you will only try to resist it—at the time the fit comes on—which is the same as the very Satan himself."
Grip was not inclined to hear any more, and it was cold to hang on over the lake.
He jumped off and let old Rist continue his talk in the idea that he was standing behind him.
It was a cold, biting wind out on the ice.
For a while he saw his own shadow, with his hands in his coat pockets, moving away, while the moon sailed through the clouds—the lamp shone so warmly on her face—
*****
Three days afterwards, towards evening, Inger-Johanna stood at the window looking out. Her breast heaved with strong emotion.
Grip had died of pneumonia down at the Lövviggaard.
She had been down and taken care of him tillnow she had come home—talked with him, heard herself live in his wild raving, and had received his last intelligent look before it was quenched....
The moon was so cold and clear in the heavens. The whole landscape with the mountains and all the great pure forms shone magically white in the frost—white as in the snow-fields of the lofty mountains....
"The power of the spirit is great," she said, sighing in sorrowful, yet trembling meditation—"he gave me something to live on."
THE END