Growth of the Soil (World's Classics Series). Knut Hamsun
of imprisonment; if she behaved well, she would no doubt be allowed to see it now and again. Or perhaps she had been merely indifferent, and had gone off carelessly, despite her state….
Isak worked and toiled, dug ditches and broke new ground, set up his boundary lines between his land and the State's, and gained another season's stock of timber. But now that Inger was no longer there to wonder at his doings, he worked more from habit than for any joy in what he did. And he had let two sessions pass without having his title-deeds registered, caring little about it; at last, that autumn, he had pulled himself together and got it done. Things were not as they should be with Isak now. Quiet and patient as ever—yes, but now it was because he did not care. He got out hides because it had to be done—goatskins and calfskins—steeped them in the river, laid them in bark, and tanned them after a fashion ready for shoes. In the winter—at the very first threshing—he set aside his seed corn for the next spring, in order to have it done; best to have things done and done with; he was a methodical man. But it was a grey and lonely life; eyah, Herregud! a man without a wife again, and all the rest….
What pleasure was there now in sitting at home Sundays, cleanly washed, with a neat red shirt on, when there was no one to be clean and neat for! Sundays were the longest days of all, days when he was forced to idleness and weary thoughts; nothing to do but wander about over the place, counting up all that should have been done. He always took the children with him, always carried one on his arm. It was a distraction to hear their chatter, and answer their questions of everything.
He kept old Oline because there was no one else he could get. And Oline was, after all, of use in a way. Carding and spinning, knitting stockings and mittens, and making cheese—she could do all these things, but she lacked Inger's happy touch, and had no heart in her work; nothing of all she handled was her own. There was a thing Isak had bought once at the village store, a china pot with a dog's head on the lid. It was a sort of tobacco box, really, and stood on a shelf. Oline took off the lid and dropped it on the floor. Inger had left behind some cuttings of fuchsia, under glass. Oline took the glass off and, putting it back, pressed it down hard and maliciously; next day, all the cuttings were dead. It was not so easy for Isak to bear with such things; he looked displeased, and showed it, and, as there was nothing swanlike and gentle about Isak, it may well be that he showed it plainly. Oline cared little for looks; soft-spoken as ever, she only said: "Now, could I help it?"
"That I can't say," answered Isak. "But you might have left the things alone."
"I'll not touch her flowers again," said Oline. But the flowers were already dead.
Again, how could it be that the Lapps came up to Sellanraa so frequently of late? Os-Anders, for instance, had no business there at all, he should have passed on his way. Twice in one summer he came across the hills, and Os-Anders, it should be remembered, had no reindeer to look to, but lived by begging and quartering himself on other Lapps. As soon as he came up to the place, Oline left her work and fell to chatting with him about people in the village, and, when he left, his sack was heavy with no end of things. Isak put up with it for two years, saying nothing.
Then Oline wanted new shoes again, and he could be silent no longer. It was in the autumn, and Oline wore shoes every day, instead of going in wooden pattens or rough hide.
"Looks like being fine today," said Isak. "H'm." That was how he began.
"Ay," said Oline.
"Those cheeses, Eleseus," went on Isak again, "wasn't it ten you counted on the shelf this morning?"
"Ay," said Eleseus.
"Well, there's but nine there now."
Eleseus counted again, and thought for a moment inside his little head; then he said: "Yes, but then Os-Anders had one to take away; that makes ten."
There was silence for quite a while after that. Then little Sivert must try to count as well, and says after his brother: "That makes ten."
Silence again. At last Oline felt she must say something.
"Ay, I did give him a tiny one, that's true. I didn't think that could do any harm. But they children, they're no sooner able to talk than they show what's in them. And who they take after's more than I can think or guess. For 'tis not your way, Isak, that I do know."
The hint was too plain to pass unchecked. "The children are well enough," said Isak shortly. "But I'd like to know what good Os-Anders has ever done to me and mine."
"What good?"
"Ay, that's what I said."
"What good Os-Anders …?"
"Ay, since I'm to give him cheeses in return."
Oline has had time to think, and has her answer ready now.
"Well, now, I wouldn't have thought it of you, Isak, that I wouldn't. Was it me, pray, that first began with Os-Anders? I wish I may never move alive from this spot if I ever so much as spoke his name."
Brilliant success for Oline. Isak has to give in, as he has done many a time before.
But Oline had more to say. "And if you mean I'm to go here clean barefoot, with the winter coming on and all, and never own the like of a pair of shoes, why, you'll please to say so. I said a word of it three and four weeks gone, that I needed shoes, but never sign of a shoe to this day, and here I am."
Said Isak: "What's wrong with your pattens, then, that you can't use them?"
"What's wrong with them?" repeats Oline, all unprepared.
"Ay, that's what I'd like to know."
"With my pattens?"
"Ay."
"Well … and me carding and spinning, and tending cattle and sheep and all, looking after children here—have you nothing to say to that? I'd like to know; that wife of yours that's in prison for her deeds, did you let her go barefoot in the snow?"
"She wore her pattens," said Isak. "And for going to church and visiting and the like, why, rough hide was good enough for her."
"Ay, and all the finer for it, no doubt."
"Ay, that she was. And when she did wear her hide shoes in summer, she did but stuff a wisp of grass in them, and never no more. But you—you must wear stockings in your shoes all the year round."
Said Oline: "As for that, I'll wear out my pattens in time, no doubt. I'd no thought there was any such haste to wear out good pattens all at once." She spake softly and gently, but with half-closed eyes, the same sly Oline as ever. "And as for Inger," said she, "the changeling, as we called her, she went about with children of mine and learned both this and that, for years she did. And this is what we get for it. Because I've a daughter that lives in Bergen and wears a hat, I suppose that's what Inger must be gone away south for; gone to Trondhjem to buy a hat, he he!"
Isak got up to leave the room. But Oline had opened her heart now, unlocked the store of blackness within; ay, she gave out rays of darkness, did Oline. Thank Heaven, none of her children had their faces slit like a fire-breathing dragon, so to speak; but they were none the worse for that, maybe. No, 'twasn't every one was so quick and handy at getting rid of the young they bore—strangling them in a twinkling….
"Mind what you're saying," shouted Isak. And to make his meaning perfectly clear, he added: "You cursed old hag!"
But Oline was not going to mind what she was saying; not in the least, he he! She turned up her eyes to heaven and hinted that a hare-lip might be this or that, but some folk seemed to carry it too far, he he!
Isak may well have been glad to get safely out of the house at last. And what could he do but get Oline the shoes? A tiller of earth in the wilds; no longer even something of a god, that he could say to his servant, "Go!" He was helpless without Oline; whatever she did or said, she had nothing to fear, and she knew it.
The nights are colder now, with a full moon; the marshlands harden till they can almost bear, but thawing again when the sun comes out, to an impassable swamp once more. Isak goes down to the village one cold night, to order shoes