Chapter 7

Then two young men arrived, sprouts off the Norwegian tree, sportsmen to their finger tips, who talked of nothing but sailing, cycling, and football; they were going to be civil engineers--the young Norway. They, too, wanted to see the Blue Peak to the best of their ability; after all, one must keep pace with modern life. But they were so young that when they looked up at the peak, they were afraid. Solem had learned more than one trick in tourist company; craftily he led them on, and then extorted money from them in return for a promise not to expose their foolishness. So all was well; the young sprouts came down the mountain again, bragging and showing off their sportsmanship. One of them brought down a bloodstained rag which he flung on the ground, saying,

"There's what's left of your lawyer that fell off."

"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" laughed the other sprout.

Yes, truly, they had acquired dashing ways among their sporting acquaintances.

It rained for three weeks; then came two fine days, and then rain again for a fortnight. The sun was not to be seen, the sky was invisible, the mountain tops had disappeared; we saw nothing but rain. The roofs at the Tore Peak resort began to leak more and more.

The hay that still lay spread on the ground was black and rotting, and the stacks had gone moldy.

The cotters had got their hay indoors during the patient spell. They had carried it, man, woman, and child, on their backs.

The men from Bergen and Mrs. Brede with her children have left for home. The little girls curtsied and thanked me for taking them walking in the hills and telling them stories. The house is empty now. Associate Master Höy and Mrs. Molie were the last to go; they left last week, traveling separately, though both were going to the same small town.

He went by way of the village--a very roundabout route--while she crossed the field. It is very quiet now, but Miss Torsen is still here.

Why do I not leave? Don't know. Why ask? I'm here. Have you ever heard anyone ask: "How much is a northern light?" Hold your tongue.

Where should I go if I did leave? Do you imagine I want to go to the town again? Or do you think I'm longing for my old hut and the winter, and Madame? I'm not longing for any specific place; I am simply longing.

Of course I ought to be old enough to understand what all sensible Norwegians know, that our country is once more on the right road. The papers are all writing about the splendid progress the tourist traffic has made in Stordalen since the motor road was opened--ought I not to go there and feel gratified?

From old habit, I still take an interest in the few of us who are left; Miss Torsen is still here.

Miss Torsen--what more is there to be said about her? Well, she does not leave; she stays here to complete the picture of the woman Torsen, child of the middle class who has read schoolbooks all through her formative years, who has learned all about _Artemis cotula_, but undernourished her soul. That is what she is doing here.

I remember a few weeks ago, when we were infested with Englishmen, a young sprout coming down from the mountain top with a bloodstained rag which he threw on the ground, saying, "Here's what's left of your lawyer that fell off!" Miss Torsen heard it, and never moved a muscle. No, she never mourned the death of the lawyer very keenly; on the contrary, she wrote off at once to ask another friend to come. When he came, he turned out to be a swaggering scatterbrain--a "free lance," he called himself in the visitors' book. I have not mentioned him before because he was less important than she; less important, in fact, than any of us. He was beardless and wore his collar open; heaven knows if he wasn't employed at a theater or in the films. Miss Torsen went to meet him when he came, and said, "Welcome to our mountains," and "Thanks for coming." So evidently she had sent for him. But why did she not leave? Why did she seem to strike root in the place, and even ask others to come here? Yet she had been the first to want to leave last summer! There was something behind this.

XXII

I muse on all this, and understand that her staying here is somehow connected with her carnal desires, with the fact that Solem is still here. How muddled it all is, and how this handsome girl has been spoiled! I saw her not long ago, tall and proud, upright, untouched, walking intentionally close to Solem, yet not replying to his greeting. Did she suspect him of complicity in the death of the lawyer and avoid him for that reason? Not in the least; she avoided him less than before, even letting him take her letters to the post office, which she had not done previously. But she was unbalanced, a poor thing that had lost her bearings. Whenever she could, she secretly defiled herself with pitch, with dung; she sniffed at foulness and was not repelled.

One day, when Solem swore a needlessly strong oath at a horse that was restless, she looked at him, shivered, and went a deep red. But she mastered herself at once, and asked Josephine:

"Isn't that man leaving soon?"

"Yes," Josephine replied, "in a few days."

Though she had seized this opportunity to ask her question with a great show of indifference, I am certain it was an important one to her. She went away in silence.

Yes, Miss Torsen stayed, for she was sexually bound to Solem. Solem's despair, Solem's rough passion that she herself had inflamed, his brutality, his masculinity, his greedy hands, his looks--she sniffed at all this and was excited by it. She had grown so unnatural that her sexual needs were satisfied by keeping this man at a distance. The Torsen type no doubt lies in her solitary bed at night, reveling in the sensation that in another house a man lies writhing for her.

But her friend, the actor? He was in no sense the other's equal. There was nothing of the bull in him, nothing of action, only the braggadocio of the theater....

* * * * *

Here am I, growing small and petty with this life. I question Solem about the accident. We are alone together in the woodshed.

Why had he lied and said the Dane wanted to climb the Blue Peak that unfortunate Sunday morning?

Solem looked at me, pretending not to understand.

I repeated my question.

Solem denied he had said any such thing.

"I heard you," I said.

"No, you didn't," he said.

A pause.

Suddenly he dropped to the floor of the shed, convulsed, without shape, an outline merely; a few minutes passed before he got up again. When he was on his feet once more, pulling his clothes to rights, we looked at each other. I had no wish to speak to him further, and left him. Besides, he was going away soon.

After this, everything was dull and empty again. I went out alone, aping myself and shouting: "Bricks for the palace! The calf is much stronger today!" And when this was done, I did other nothings, and when my money began to run out, I wrote to my publisher, pretending I would soon send him an unbelievably remarkable manuscript. In short, I behaved like a man in love. These were the typical symptoms.

And to take the bull by the horns: no doubt you suspect me of dwelling on the subject of Miss Torsen out of self-interest? In that case I must have concealed well in these pages that I never think of her except as an object, as a theme; turn back the pages and you will see! At my age, one does not fall in love without becoming grotesque, without making even the Pharaohs laugh.

* * * * *

_Finis._

But there is one thing I cannot finish doing, and that is withdrawing to my room, and sitting alone with the good darkness round me. This, after all, is the last pleasure.

An interlude:

Miss Torsen and her actor are walking this way; I hear their footsteps and their voices; but since I am sitting in the dark of the evening, I cannot see them. They stop outside my open window, leaning against it, and the actor says something, asks her to do something she does not want to do, tries to draw her with him; but she resists.

Then he grows angry.

"What the devil did you send for me for?" he asks roughly.

And she begins to weep and says:

"So that's all you've come for! Oh, oh! But I'm not like that at all. Why can't you leave me alone? I'm not hurting you."

Am I one who understands women? Self-deception. Vain boasting. I made my presence known then because her weeping sounded so wretched; I moved a chair and cleared my throat.

The sound caught his attention at once, and he hushed her, trying to listen; but she said:

"No, it was nothing...."

But she knew very well this was not true; she knew what the sound was. It was not the first time Miss Torsen used this trick with me; she had often pretended that she thought I was not within hearing, and then created some such delicate situation. Each time I had promised myself not to intervene; but she had not wept before; now she wept.

Why did she use these wiles? To clear herself in my eyes--mine, the eyes of a settled man--to make me believe how good she was, how well-behaved! But, dear child, I knew that before; I could see it from your hands! You are so unnatural that in your seven and twentieth year, you walk unmarried, barren and unopen!

The pair drifted away.

And there is something else I cannot finish doing: withdrawing into solitude in the woods, alone with the good darkness round me. This is the last pleasure.

One needs solitude and darkness, not because one flees the company of others and can endure only one's own, but because of their quality of loftiness and religion. Strange how all things pass distantly, yet all is near; we sit in an omnipresence. It must be God. It must be ourselves as a part of all things.

What would my heart, where would I stray? Shall I leave the forest behind me? It was my home but yesterday; now toward the city I wend my way; to the darkness of night I've resigned me.

The world round me sleeps as I tarry, alone, soothing my ear with its quiet. How large and gray is the city of stone in which the many all hopes enthrone! Shall I, too, accept their fiat?

Hark! Do the bells ring on the hillside?

Back to the peace of the forest I turn in the nightly hour that's hoarest. There's a sweet-smelling hedgerow to which I yearn; I shall rest my head on heather and fern, and sleep in the depths of the forest.

Hark, how the bells ring on the hillside!

Romantic? Yes. Mere sentimentality, mood, rhyme--nothing? Yes.

It is the last happiness.

XXIII

The sun has returned. Not darkly glowing and regal--more than that: imperial, because it is flaming. This you do not understand, my friend, whatever the language in which it is dished up for you. But I say there is an imperial sun in the sky.

It's a good day for going to the woods; it is sweeping time, for the woods are full of yellow things that have come suddenly into being. A short time ago they were not there, or I did not see them, or they had the earth's own complexion. There is something unborn about them, like embryos in an early stage. But if I whirl them about, they are miracles of fulfillment.

Here are fungi of every sort, mushrooms and puffballs. How close is the poisonous mushroom to the happy family of the edible mushroom, and how innocently it stands there! Yet it is deadly. What magnificent cunning! A spurious fruit, a criminal, habitual vice itself, but preening in splendor and brilliance, a very cardinal of fungi. I break off a morsel to chew; it is good and soft on the tongue, but I am a coward and spit it out again. Was it not the poisonous mushroom that drove men berserker? But in the dawn of our own day, we die of a hair in the throat.

The sun is already setting. Far up the mountainside are the cattle, but they are moving homeward now; I can hear by their bells that they are moving. Tinkling bells and deep-mouthed bells, sometimes sounding together as though there were a meaning in it, a pattern of tones, a rapture.

And rapture, too, to see all the blades of grass and the tiny flowers and plants. Beside me where I lie is a small pod plant, wonderfully meek, with tiny seeds pushing out of the pod--God bless it, it's becoming a mother! It has got caught in a dry twig and I liberate it. Life quivers within it; the sun has warmed it today and called it to its destiny. A tiny, gigantic miracle.

Now it is sunset, and the woods bend under a rustling that passes through them sweet and heavy; it is the evening.

I lie for another hour or two; the birds have long since gone to rest, and darkness falls thick and soft.... As I walk homeward, my feet feel their way and I hold my hands before me till I reach the field, where it is a little lighter. I walk on the hay that has been left outdoors; it is tough and black, and I slip on it because it is already rotting. As I approach the houses, bats fly noiselessly past me, as though on wings of foam. A slight shudder convulses me whenever they pass.

Suddenly I stop.

A man is walking here. I can see him against the wall of the new house. He has on a coat that looks like the actor's raincoat, but it is not the little comedian himself. There he goes, into the house, right into the house. It is Solem.

"Why, that's where she sleeps!" I think. "Ah, well. Alone in the building, in the south wing, Miss Torsen alone--yes, quite alone. And Solem has just gone in."

I stand there waiting to be at hand, to rush in to the rescue, for after all I am a human being, not a brute. Several minutes pass. He has not even bothered to be very quiet, for I hear him clicking the key in the lock. Surely I ought to hear a cry now? I hear nothing, nothing; a chair scraping across the floor, that is all.

"But good heavens, he may do her some harm! He may injure her; he may overpower her with rape! Ought I not to tap on the window? I--what for? But at the very first cry, I shall be on the spot, take my word for it."

Not a single cry.

The hours pass; I have settled down to wait. Of course I cannot go my way and desert a helpless woman. But the hours wear on. A very thorough business in there, nothing niggardly about this; it is almost dawn. It occurs to me that he may be killing her, perhaps has killed her already; I am alarmed and about to get up--when the key clicks in the lock again and Solem emerges. He does not run, but walks back the way he came, down to the veranda of my own house. There he hangs the actor's raincoat where it hung before, and emerges again. But this time he is naked. He has been naked under the coat all this time. Is it possible? Why not? No inhibitions, no restraint, no covering; Solem has thought it all out. Now, stark naked, he stalks to his room.

What a man!

I sit thinking and collecting myself and regaining my wits. What has happened? The south wing is still wrapped in silence, but the lady is not dead; I can see that from Solem's fearless manner as he goes to his room, lights the lamp, and goes to bed.

It relieves me to know she is alive, revives me, and makes me superlatively brave: if he has dared to kill her, I will report it at once. I shall not spare him. I shall accuse him of both her death and the lawyer's. I shall go further: I shall accuse others--the thief of last winter, the man that stole the sides of bacon from a tradesman and sold me rolls of tobacco out of his bag. No, I shall not keep silence about anything then....

XXIV

When it grew light, Solem went to the kitchen, had his breakfast, settled his business with Paul and the women, and returned to his room. He was in no hurry; though it was no longer early in the day, he took his time about tying his bundles, preparatory to leaving. Lingeringly he looked into the windows of the south wing as he passed.

Then Solem was gone.

A little later Miss Torsen came in to breakfast. She asked at once about Solem. And why might she be so interested in Solem? She had certainly stopped in her room intentionally so as to give him time to leave; if she wanted to see him she could have been here long ago. But was it not safest to seem a little angry? Supposing, night owl that I was, that I had seen something!

"Where is Solem?" she asked indignantly.

"Solem has gone now," Josephine replied.

"Lucky for him!"

"Why?" asked Josephine.

"Oh, he's a dreadful creature!"

How agitated she was! But in the course of the day she calmed down. Her anger dissolved, and there was neither weeping nor a scene; only she did not walk proudly, as was her habit, but preferred to sit in silence.

That passed too; she roused herself briskly soon after Solem's departure, and in a few days she was the same as ever. She took walks, she talked and laughed with us, she made the actor swing her in the children's swing, as in the lawyer's day....

I went out one evening, for there was good weather and darkness for walking; there was neither a moon nor stars. The gentle ripple of the little Reisa river was all the sound I heard; there were God and Goethe and _über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'_ that night. On my return, I was in the mood to walk softly and on tiptoe, so I undressed and went to bed in the dark.

Then they came again to my window, those two lunatics, the lady and the actor. What next? But it was not he that chose this spot; of that I was sure. She chose it because she was convinced I had returned. There was something she _wanted_ me to hear.

Why should I listen to him still pleading with her?

"I've had enough of this," he said. "I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Oh, well...." she said. "No, let's not tonight," she added suddenly; "some other time. Yes? In a few days? We'll talk about it tomorrow. Good night."

For the first time it struck me: she wants to rouse you, too, settled man though you are; she wants to make you as mad as the others! That's what she's after!

And now I remember, before the lawyer arrived, when there was Tradesman Batt--I remember how during his first few days here, she would give me a kind word or a look that was quite out of the picture, and as unmistakable as her pride would permit. No, she had no objections to seeing old age wriggle. And listen to this: before this she had been intent to show a well-behaved indifference to sex, but that was finished; was she not at this moment resisting only faintly, and raising definite hopes? "Not tonight, but some other time," she had said. Yes, a half-refusal, a mere postponement, that I was meant to hear. She was corrupt, but she was also cunning, with the cunning of a madman. So corrupt.

Dear child, Pharaoh laughs before his pyramids; standing before his pyramids he laughs. He would laugh at me, too.

* * * * *

Next day we three remaining guests were sitting in the living room. The lady and the actor read one book; I read another.

"Will you," she says to him, "do me a great favor?"

"With pleasure."

"Would you go out in the grounds where we sat yesterday and fetch my galoshes?"

So he went out to do her this great favor. He sang a well-known popular song as he crossed the yard, cheerful in his own peculiar way.

She turned to me.

"You seem silent."

"Do I?"

"Yes, you're very silent."

"Listen to this," I said, and began to read to her from the book I held in my hands. I read a longish bit.

She tried to interrupt me several times, and at length said impatiently:

"What is this you want me to listen to?"

"The _Musketeers_. You must admit it's entertaining."

"I've read it," she said. And then she began to clasp her hands and drag them apart again.

"Then you must hear something you haven't read before," I replied, and went across to my room to fetch a few pages I had written. They were only a few poems--nothing special, just a few small verses. Not that I am in the habit of reading such things aloud, but I seized on this for the moment because I wanted to prevent her from humbling herself, and telling me anything more.

While I was reading the poems to her, the actor returned.

"I couldn't find any galoshes there," he said.

"No?" she replied absently.

"No, I really looked everywhere, but...."

She got up and left the room.

He looked after her in some surprise, and sat still for a moment. Then it occurred to him.

"I believe her galoshes are in the passage outside her door," he said, and hurried after her.

I sat back, thinking it over. There had been a sweetness in her face as she said, "Yes, you're very silent." Had she seen through me and my pretext for reading to her? Of course she had. She was no fool. I was the fool, nobody else. I should have driven a sportsman to despair. Some practice the sport of making conquests and the sport of making love, because they find it so agreeable; I have never practiced sport of any kind. I have loved and raged and suffered and stormed according to my nature--that is all; I am an old-fashioned man. And here I sit in the shadow of evening, the shadow of the half-century. Let me have done!

The actor returned to the living room confused and dejected. She had turned him out; she had wept.

I was not surprised, for it was the mode of expression of her type.

"Have you ever heard the like of it? She told me to get out! I shall leave tomorrow."

"Have you found the galoshes?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied. "They were right in the passage. 'Here they are,' I said to her. 'Yes, yes,' she said. 'Right under your nose,' I said. 'Yes, yes, go away,' she said, and began to cry. So I went away."

"She'll get over it."

"Do you think so? Yes, I expect she will. Oh, well, it's my opinion nobody can understand women, anyhow. But they're a mighty sex, the women, a mighty sex. They certainly are."

He sat on a while, but he had no peace of mind, and soon went out again.

* * * * *

That evening the lady was in the dining room before us; she was there when we came in, and we all nodded slightly in greeting. To the actor she was very kind, quite making up for her petulance of the afternoon.

When he sat down he found a letter in his table napkin: a written note folded into the napkin. He was so surprised that he dropped everything he was doing to unfold and read it. With an exclamation and a smile, his blue, delighted eyes splashed over her; but she was looking down into her lap with her forehead wrinkled, so he put the note away in his vest pocket.

Then it probably dawned on him that he had betrayed her, and he tried to cover it up somehow.

"Well, here goes for food!" he said, as though he were going to require all his energy for the task of eating.

Why had she written? There was nothing to prevent her speaking to him. He had, after all, been sitting on the doorstep when she emerged from her room and passed him. Had she foreseen that the good comedian could not contain himself, but would surely let a third person into the secret?

Why probe or question further? The actor did not eat much, but he looked very happy. So the note must have said yes, must have been a promise; perhaps she would not tantalize him further.

XXV

A few days later, they were going to leave. They would travel together, and that would be the end.

I might have pitied them both, for though life is good, life is stern. One result at any rate was accomplished. She had not sent for him in vain, nor had he come in vain.

That was the end of the act. But there were more acts to come--many more.

She had lost much: having been ravished, she gave herself away; why be niggardly now? And this is the destiny of her type, that they lose increasingly much, retaining ever less; what need to hold back now? The ground has been completely shifted: from half-measures to the immolation of all virtue. The type is well-known, and can be found at resorts and boarding-houses, where it grows and flourishes.