Chapter 2

The vicarage buildings lay on the slope of a small hill; from the top, the land stretched away flat and level, with alternating timber and clearing. It struck me that here would be the proper place to dig the well, and then run a pipe-line down the slope to the house. Judging the height as nearly as I can, it seems more than enough to give the pressure needed; on the way back I pace out the approximate length: two hundred and fifty feet.

But what business was it of mine, after all? For Heaven's sake let me not go making the same mistake again, and insulting folk by talking above my station.

V

Grindhusen came out again on Monday morning, and we fell to digging as before. The old priest came out to look, and asked if we couldn't fix a post for him on the road up to the church. He needed it badly, that post; it had stood there before, but had got blown down; he used it for nailing up notices and announcements.

We set up a new post, and took pains to get it straight and upstanding as a candle in a stick. And by the way of thanks we hooded the top with zinc.

While I was at work on the hood, I got Grindhusen to suggest that the post should be painted red; he had still a trifle of red paint left over from the work at Gunhild's cottage. But the priest wanted it white, and Grindhusen was afraid to contradict, and carefully agreed to all he said, until at last I put in a word, and said that notices on white paper would show up better against red. At that the priest smiled, with the endless wrinkles round his eyes, and said: “Yes, yes, of course, you're quite right.”

And that was enough; just that bit of a smile and saying I was right made me all glad and proud again within.

Then Frøkenen came up, and said a few words to Grindhusen; even jested with him, asking what that red cardinal was to be stuck up there for on the road. But to me she said nothing at all, and did not even look at me when I took off my hat.

Dinner was a sore trial to me that day, not that the food was bad, no, but Grindhusen, he ate his soup in a disgusting fashion, and his mouth was all greasy with fat.

“What'll he be like when it comes to eating porridge?” I thought to myself hysterically.

Then when he leaned back on the bench to rest after his meal in the same greasy state, I called to him straight out:

“For Heaven's sake, man, aren't you going to wipe your mouth?”

He stared at me, wiping his mouth with one hand. “Mouth?” he said.

I tried to turn it off then as a joke, and said: “Haha, I had you there!” But I was displeased with myself, for all that, and went out of the brewhouse directly after.

Then I fell to thinking of Frøkenen. “I'll make her answer when I give a greeting,” I said to myself. “I'll let her see before very long that I'm not altogether a fool.” There was that business of the well and the pipe-line, now; what if I were to work out a plan for the whole installation all complete! I had no instruments to take the height and fall of the hill ... well, I could make one that would serve. And I set to work. A wooden tube, with two ordinary lamp-glasses fixed in with putty, and the whole filled with water.

Soon it was found there were many little things needed seeing to about the vicarage--odd matters here and there. A stone step to be set straight again, a wall to be repaired; the bridgeway to the barn had to be strengthened before the corn could be brought in. The priest liked to have everything sound and in order about the place--and it was all one to us, seeing we were paid by the day. But as time went on I grew more and more impatient of my work-mate's company. It was torture to me, for instance, to see him pick up a loaf from the table, hold it close in to his chest, and cut off a slice with a greasy pocket-knife that he was always putting in his mouth. And then, again, he would go all through the week, from Sunday to Sunday, without a wash. And in the morning, before the sun was up, and the evening, after it had gone, there was always a shiny drop hanging from the tip of his nose. And then his nails! And as for his ears, they were simply deformed.

Alas! I was an upstart creature, that had learned fine manners in the cafés in town. And since I could not keep myself from telling my companion now and then what I thought of his uncleanly ways, there grew up a certain ill-feeling between us, and I feared we should have to separate before long. As it was, we hardly spoke now beyond what was needed.

And there was the well, as undug as ever. Sunday came, and Grindhusen had gone home.

I had got my apparatus finished now, and in the afternoon I climbed up to the roof of the main building and set it up there. I saw at once that the sight cut the hillside several metres below the top. Good. Even reckoning a whole metre down to the water-level, there would still be pressure enough and to spare.

While I was busy up there the priest's son caught sight of me. Harald Meltzer was his name. And what was I doing up there? Measuring the hill; what for? What did I want to know the height for? Would I let him try?

Later on I got hold of a line ten metres long, and measured the hill from foot to summit, with Harald to help. When we came down to the house, I asked to see the priest himself, and told him of my plan.

VI

The priest listened patiently, and did not reject the idea at once.

“Really, now!” he said, with a smile. “Why, perhaps you're right. But it will cost a lot of money. And why should we trouble about it at all?”

“It's seventy paces from the house to the well we started to dig. Seventy steps for the maids to go through mud and snow and all sorts, summer and winter.”

“That's true, yes. But this other way would cost a terrible lot of money.”

“Not counting the well--that you'll have to have in any case; the whole installation, with work and material, ought not to come to more than a couple of hundred Kroner,” said I.

The priest looked surprised.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

I waited a little each time before answering, as if I were slow by nature, and born so. But, really, I had thought out the whole thing beforehand.

“It would be a great convenience, that's true,” said the priest thoughtfully. “And that water tub in the kitchen does make a lot of mess.”

“And it will save carrying water to the bedrooms as well.”

“The bedrooms are all upstairs. It won't help us there, I'm afraid.”

“We can run the pipes up to the first floor.”

“Can we, though? Up to the bedrooms? Will there be pressure enough for that, do you think?”

Here I waited longer than usual before answering, as a stolid fellow, who did not undertake things lightly.

“I think I can answer for a jet the height of the roof,” I said.

“Really, now!” exclaimed the priest. And then again: “Come and let us see where you think of digging the well.”

We went up the hill, the priest, Harald, and I, and I let the priest look through my instrument, and showed him that there would be more than pressure enough.

“I must talk to the other man about it,” he said.

But I cut out Grindhusen at once, and said: “Grindhusen? He's no idea of this work at all.”

The priest looked at me.

“Really?” he said.

Then we went down again, the priest talking as if to himself.

“Quite right; yes. It's an endless business fetching water in the winter. And summer, too, for that matter. I must see what the women think about it.”

And he went indoors.

After ten minutes or so, I was sent for round to the front steps; the whole family were there now.

“So you're the man who's going to give us water laid on to the house?” said Fruen kindly.

I took off my cap and bowed in a heavy, stolid fashion, and the priest answered for me: yes, this was the man.

Frøkenen gave me one curious glance, and then started talking in an undertone to her brother. Fruen went on with more questions--would it really be a proper water-supply like they had in town, just turn on a tap and there was the water all ready? And for upstairs as well? A couple of hundred Kroner? “Really, I think you ought to say yes,” she said to her husband.

“You think so? Well, let's all go up to the top of the hill and look through the thing and see.”

We went up the hill, and I set the instrument for them and let them look.

“Wonderful!” said Fruen.

But Frøkenen said never a word.

The priest asked:

“But are you sure there's water here?”

I answered carefully, as a man of sober judgment, that it was not a thing to swear to beforehand, but there was every sign of it.

“What sort of signs?” asked Fruen.

“The nature of the ground. And you'll notice there's willow and osiers growing about. And they like a wet soil.”

The priest nodded, and said:

“He knows his business, Marie, you can see.”

On the way back, Fruen had got so far as to argue quite unwarrantably that she could manage with one maid less once they'd water laid on. And not to fail her, I put in:

“In summer at least you might. You could water all the garden with a hose fixed to the tap and carried out through the cellar window.”

“Splendid!” she exclaimed.

But I did not venture to speak of laying a pipe to the cow-shed. I had realized all the time that with a well twice the size, and a branch pipe across the yard, the dairymaid would be saved as much as the kitchen-maids in the house. But it would cost nearly twice as much. No, it was not wise to put forward so great a scheme.

Even as it was, I had to agree to wait till Grindhusen came back. The priest said he wanted to sleep on it.

VII

So now I had to tell Grindhusen myself, and prepare him for the new arrangement. And lest he should turn suspicious, I threw all the blame on the priest, saying it was his idea, but that I had backed him up. Grindhusen had no objection; he saw at once it meant more work for us since we should have the well to dig in any case, and the bed for the pipes besides.

As luck would have it, the priest came out on Monday morning, and said to Grindhusen half jestingly:

“Your mate here and I have decided to have the well up on the hill, and lay down a pipe-line to the house. What do you think of it? A mad idea?”

Grindhusen thought it was a first-rate idea.

But when we came to talk it over, and went up all three to look at the site of the well, Grindhusen began to suspect I'd had more to do with it than I had said. We should have to lay the pipes deep down, he said, on account of the frost....

“One metre thirty's plenty,” I said.

... and that it would cost a great deal of money.

“Your mate here said about a couple of hundred Kroner in all,” answered the priest.

Grindhusen had no idea of estimates at all, and could only say:

“Well, well, two hundred Kroner's a deal of money, anyway.”

I said:

“It will mean so much less in _Aabot_ when you move.”

The priest looked at me in surprise.

“_Aabot_? But I'm not thinking of leaving the place,” he said.

“Why, then, you'll have the full use of it. And may your reverence live to enjoy it for many a year,” said I.

At this the priest stared at me, and asked:

“What is your name?”

“Knut Pedersen.”

“Where are you from?”

“From Nordland.”

But I understood why he had asked, and resolved not to talk in that bookish way any more.

Anyhow, the well and the pipe-line were decided on, and we set to work....

The days that followed were pleasant enough. I was not a little anxious at first as to whether we should find water on the site, and I slept badly for some nights. But once that fear was past, all that remained was simple and straightforward work. There was water enough; after a couple of days we had to bale it out with buckets every morning. It was clay lower down, and our clothes were soon in a sorry state from the work.

We dug for a week, and started the next getting out stones to line the well. This was work we were both used to from the old days at Skreia. Then we put in another week digging, and by that time we had carried it deep enough. The bottom was soon so soft that we had to begin on the stonework at once, lest the clay walls should cave in on top of us.

So week after week passed, with digging and mining and mason's work. It was a big well, and made a nice job; the priest was pleased with it. Grindhusen and I began to get on better together; and when he found that I asked no more than a fair labourer's wage, though much of the work was done under my directions, he was inclined to do something for me in return, and took more care about his table manners. Altogether, I could not have wished for a happier time; and nothing on earth should ever persuade me to go back to town life again!

In the evenings I wandered about the woods, or in the churchyard reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, and thinking of this and that. Also, I was looking about for a nail from some corpse. I wanted a nail; it was a fancy of mine, a little whim. I had found a nice piece of birch-root that I wanted to carve to a pipe-bowl in the shape of a clenched fist; the thumb was to act as a lid, and I wanted a nail to set in, to make it specially lifelike. The ring finger was to have a little gold ring bent round.

Thinking of such trifles kept my mind calm and at ease. There was no hurry now for me about anything in life. I could dream as I pleased, having nothing else to do; the evenings were my own. If possible, too, I would see and arrive at some feeling of respect for the sacredness of the church and terror of the dead; I had still a memory of that rich mysticism from days now far, far behind, and wished I could have some share in it again. Now, perhaps, when I found that nail, there would come a voice from the tombs: “That is mine!” and I would drop the thing in horror, and take to my heels and run.

“I wish that vane up there wouldn't creak so,” Grindhusen would say at times.

“Are you afraid?”

“Well, not properly afraid; no. But it gives you a creeping feeling now and then to think of all the corpses lying there so near.”

Happy man!

One day Harald showed me how to plant pine cones and little bushes. I'd no idea of that sort of work before; we didn't learn it in the days when I was at school. But now I'd seen the way of it, I went about planting busily on Sundays; and, in return, I taught Harald one or two little things that were new to him at his age, and got to be friends with him.

VIII

And all might have been well if it had not been for Frøkenen, the daughter of the house. I grew fonder of her every day. Her name was Elischeba, Elisabeth. No remarkable beauty, perhaps; but she had red lips, and a blue, girlish glance that made her pretty to see. Elischeba, Elisabeth--a child at the first dawn of life, with eyes looking out upon the world. She spoke one evening with young Erik from the neighbouring _gaard_, and her eyes were full of sweetness and of something ripening.

It was all very well for Grindhusen. He had gone ravening after the girls when he was young, and he still spanked about with his hat on one side, out of habit. But he was quiet and tame enough now, as well he might be--'tis nature's way. But some there are who would not follow nature's way, and be tamed; and how shall it fare with them at last? And then there was little Elisabeth; and she was none so little after all, but as tall as her mother. And she'd her mother's high breast.

Since that first Sunday they had not asked me in to coffee in the kitchen, and I took care myself they should not, but kept out of the way. I was still ashamed of the recollection. But then, at last, in the middle of the week, one of the maids came with a message that I was not to go running off into the woods every Sunday afternoon, but come to coffee with the rest. Fruen herself had said so.

Good!

Now, should I put on my best clothes or not? No harm, perhaps, in letting that young lady get into her head that I was one who had chosen to turn my back upon the life of cities, and taken upon myself the guise of a servant, for all I was a man of parts, that could lay on water to a house. But when I had dressed, I felt myself that my working clothes were better suited to me now; I took off my best things again, and hid them carefully in my bag.

But, as it happened, it was not Frøkenen at all who received me on that Sunday afternoon, but Fruen. She talked to me for quite a while, and she had spread a little white cloth under my cup.

“That trick of yours with the egg is likely to cost us something before we've done with it,” said Fruen, with a kindly laugh. “The boy's used up half a dozen eggs already.”

I had taught Harald the trick of passing a hard boiled egg with the shell off through the neck of a decanter, by thinning the air inside. It was about the only experiment in physics that I knew.

“But that one with breaking the stick in the two paper loops was really interesting,” Fruen went on. “I don't understand that sort of thing myself, but.... When will the well be done?”

“The well is done. We're going to start on the trench tomorrow.”

“And how long will that take to do?”

“About a week. Then the man can come and lay the pipes.”

“No! really?”

I said my thanks and went out. Fruen had a way she had kept, no doubt, from earlier years; now and again she would glance at one sideways, though there was nothing the least bit artful in what she said....

Now the woods showed a yellowing leaf here and there, and earth and air began to smell of autumn. Only the fungus growths were now at their best, shooting up everywhere, and flourishing fine and thick on woolly stems--milk mushrooms, and the common sort, and the brown. Here and there a toadstool thrust up its speckled top, flaming its red all unashamed. A wonderful thing! Here it is growing on the same spot as the edible sorts, fed by the same soil, given sun and rain from heaven the same as they; rich and strong it is, and good to eat, save, only, that it is full of impertinent muscarin. I once thought of making up a fine old story about the toadstool, and saying I had read it in a book.

It has always been a pleasure to me to watch the flowers and insects in their struggle to keep alive. When the sun was hot they would come to life again, and give themselves up for an hour or so to the old delight; the big, strong flies were just as much alive as in midsummer. There was a peculiar sort of earth-bug here that I had not seen before--little yellow things, no bigger than a small-type comma, yet they could jump several thousand times their own length. Think of the strength of such a body in proportion to its size! There is a tiny spider here with its hinder part like a pale yellow pearl. And the pearl is so heavy that the creature has to clamber up a stalk of grass back downwards. When it comes upon an obstacle the pearl cannot pass, it simply drops straight down and starts to climb another. Now, a little pearl-spider like that is not just a spider and no more. If I hold out a leaf towards it to help it to its footing on a floor, it fumbles about for a while on the leaf, and thinks to itself: “H'm, something wrong about this!” and backs away again, refusing to be in any way entrapped on to a floor....

Some one calls me by name from down in the wood. It is Harald; he has started a Sunday school with me. He gave me a lesson out of Pontoppidan to learn, and now I'm to be heard. It is touching to be taught religion now as I should have taught it myself when I was a child.

IX

The well was finished, the trench was dug, and the man had come to lay the pipes. He chose Grindhusen to help him with the work, and I was set to cutting a way for the pipes up from the cellar through the two floors of the house.

Fruen came down one day when I was busy in the cellar. I called out to her to mind the hole in the floor; but she took it very calmly.

“There's no hole there now, is there?” she asked, pointing one way. “Or there?” But at last she missed her footing after all, and slipped down into the hole where I was. And there we stood. It was not light there anyway; and for her, coming straight in from the daylight outside, it must have seemed quite dark. She felt about the edge, and said:

“Now, how am I to get up again?”

I lifted her up. It was no matter to speak of; she was slight of figure, for all she had a big girl of her own.

“Well, I must say....” She stood shaking the earth from her dress. “One, two, three, and up!--as neatly as could be.... Look here, I'd like you to help me with something upstairs one day, will you? I want to move some things. Only we must wait till a day when my husband's over at the annexe; he doesn't like my changing things about. How long will it be before you've finished all there is to do here?”

I mentioned a time, a week or thereabout.

“And where are you going then?”

“To the farm just by. Grindhusen's fixed it up for us to go and dig potatoes there....”

Then came the work in the kitchen; I had to saw through the floor there. Frøken Elisabeth came in once or twice while I was there; it could hardly have been otherwise, seeing it was the kitchen. And for all her dislike of me, she managed to say a word or two, and stand looking at the work a little.

“Only fancy, Oline,” she said to the maid, “when it's all done, and you'll only have to turn on a tap.”

But Oline, who was old, did not look anyways delighted. It was like going against Providence, she said, to go sending water through a pipe right into the house. She'd carried all the water she'd a use for these twenty years; what was she to do now?

“Take a rest,” said I.

“Rest, indeed! We're made to work, I take it, not to rest.”

“And sew things against the time you get married,” said Frøken Elisabeth, with a smile.

It was only girlish talk, but I was grateful to her for taking a little part in the talk with us, and staying there for a while. And heavens, how I did try to behave, and talk smartly and sensibly, showing off like a boy. I remember it still. Then suddenly Frøken Elisabeth seemed to remember it wasn't proper for her to stay out here with us any longer, and so she went.

That evening I went up to the churchyard, as I had done so many times before, but seeing Frøkenen already there, I turned away, and took myself off into the woods. And afterwards I thought: now she will surely be touched by my humility, and think: poor fellow, he showed real delicacy in that. And the next thing, of course, was to imagine her coming after me. I would get up from the stone where I was sitting, and give a greeting. Then she would be a little embarrassed, and say: “I was just going for a walk--it's such a lovely evening--what are you doing here?” “Just sitting here,” say I, with innocent eyes, as if my thoughts had been far away. And when she hears that I was just sitting there in the late of the evening, she must realize that I am a dreamer and a soul of unknown depth, and then she falls in love with me....

She was in the churchyard again the following evening, and a thought of high conceit flew suddenly into my mind: it was myself she came to see! But, watching her more closely, I saw that she was busy, doing something about a grave, so it was not me she had come for. I stole away up to the big ant-heap in the wood and watched the insects as long as I could see; afterwards, I sat listening to the falling cones and clusters of rowan berries. I hummed a tune, and whispered to myself and thought; now and again I had to get up and walk a little to get warm. The hours passed, the night came on, and I was so in love I walked there bare-headed, letting myself be stared out of all countenance by the stars.

“How's the time?” Grindhusen might ask when I came back to the barn.

“Just gone eleven,” I would say, though it might be two or three in the morning.

“Huh! And a nice time to be coming to bed. _Fansmagt!_ Waking folk up when they've been sleeping decently!”

And Grindhusen turns over on the other side, to fall asleep again in a moment. There was no trouble with Grindhusen.