Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun [best self help books to read txt] 📗

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 spoke 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 everyone 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 harelip 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 for Oline. He takes a couple of cheeses with him, for Fru Geissler.

Halfway down to the village a new settler has appeared. A well-to-do man, no doubt, since he had called in folk from the village to build his house, and hired men to plough up a patch of sandy moorland for potatoes; he himself did little or nothing. The new man was Brede Olsen, Lensmand’s assistant, a man to go to when the doctor had to be fetched, or a pig to be killed. He was not yet thirty, but had four children to look after, not to speak of his wife, who was as good as a child herself. Oh, Brede was not so well off, perhaps, after all; ’twas no great money he could earn running hither and thither on all odd businesses, and collecting taxes from people that would not pay. So now he was trying a new venture on the soil. He had raised a loan at the bank to start house in the wilds. Breidablik, he called the place; and it was Lensmand Heyerdahl’s lady that had found that splendid name.

Isak hurries past the house, not wasting time on looking in, but he can see through the window that all the children are up already, early as it is. Isak has no time to lose, if he is to be back as far as this on the homeward journey next night, while the roads are hard. A man living in the wilds has much to think of, to reckon out and fit in as best can be. It is not the busiest time for him just now, but he is anxious about the children, left all alone with Oline.

He thinks, as he walks, of the first time he had come that way. Time has passed, the two last years had been long; there had been much that was good at Sellanraa, and a deal that was not⁠—eyah, Herregud! And now here was another man clearing ground in the wilds. Isak knew the place well; it was one of the kindlier spots he had noted himself on his way up, but he had gone on farther. It was nearer the