Part 9

Marit came rushing out of the door of the porch: "There was a fine city traveller came this way last night! He who was here two years ago, and had his shoes mended. I did not know anything better than to let him sleep in the blue chamber."

"Oh, ho! Student Grip! I suppose he is on his way towards home."

Ma looked at once at Inger-Johanna; she fell into a reverie. She stepped hurriedly out of the carriage.

"Jäger is going surveying to-morrow a long distance into the mountains,--clear over to the Grönnelid _saeters_," Ma said to him, when he came out of his room in the morning, "and there is so much that must be done."

"So--oh--and to-morrow early." The student hesitated. "My plan is to go home over the mountain, as I did last time--to get a little really fresh air, away from the stuffy town air and the lawbooks."

"But then you could go with Jäger? It will be thirty-five to forty miles you could go together up in the mountains--and for Jäger, it would be a real pleasure to have company. You won't have any objection, I suppose, to my putting up something for you to eat by the way?"

"Thanks--I thank you very much for all your kindness."

"She will not have me, that is plain," he muttered, while he wandered about the yard during the forenoon; they were all asleep except the mistress. But he did not come here to escort the captain.

In the afternoon, when it began to grow a little cool, the captain, Inger-Johanna, Jörgen, and Student Grip took the lonely road to the mill. Great-Ola and Aslak, the crofter, went with them--something was to be done to the mill-wheel, now that the stream was almost dry.

They stood there studying eagerly how the wheel could best be raised off the axis.

"That Jörgen, that Jörgen, he has got the hang of the wheel!" exclaimed the captain. "You can get Tore, the joiner, to help, Ola, as soon as you come back with the horses from the mountain--and let Jörgen show you how: he understands it, he does--if it is only not a book, he is clever enough."

"You will have to take hold of your forelock and try and cram, Jörgen; do as you did with the rye-pudding--the sooner it is eaten, the sooner it is over," said Grip, to comfort him.

"Look here, I came near forgetting the fish-lines for to-morrow. You will have to go down to the store this evening, Jörgen. We catch the trout ourselves up there, as you will see," said the captain, turning to Grip.

"Oh--oh--yes," he puffed, while they were sauntering toward home together. "I certainly need to go to the mountains now, I always come down again three or four pounds lighter."

"I have wandered about that part of the country from the time I was a schoolboy," remarked Grip. "We must put Lake Bygdin into the geography--that it was discovered only a few years ago, in the middle of a broad mountain plateau, which only some reindeer hunter or other knew anything about."

"Not laid down on any map, no--as blank as in the interior of Africa, marked out as unexplored," the captain pointed out. "But then there is traffic going on between the districts, both of people and cattle, and the mountains have their names from ancient times down among the common people."

"True, the natives also knew the interior of Africa, but on that account it is not called discovered by the civilized world," said Grip, smiling. "I always wondered what could be found in such a mysterious region in the middle of the country. There might be a great deal there: valleys entirely deserted from ancient times--old, sunken timber halls, and then wild reindeer rushing here and there over the wastes."

"Yes, shooting," agreed the captain; "we get many a tender reindeer steak from over there."

"It was that which attracted me, when I met the reindeer hunter two years ago: I wanted to explore a little, to see what there was there."

"Exactly like all that we imagined about the city," exclaimed Inger-Johanna.

"You ought to go with your father part of the way over the mountains, Miss Inger-Johanna--see if you could find some lofty bower."

"That is an idea, not at all stupid," broke in the captain, "not impossible, not at all! You could ride all the way to the Grönnelid _saeters_."

"Ah, if you could carry that through, father!" she exclaimed earnestly. "Now I have also taken a fancy to see what there is there--I believe we always thought the world ended over there at our own _saeter_ pastures."

"I have some blankets on the pack-saddle, and where they can get a roof over my head there will be room enough for you too.--Come, come, Morten, will you let people alone!" The captain took out a roll of tobacco and held a piece out to the stable goat, that was coming, leaping, towards them from the yard. "There, mumble-beard--he will have his allowance, the rascal.--Ma," he called, when he saw her coming from the storehouse, "what would you say if I should take Inger-Johanna with me to-morrow? Then they will have company home on Friday with Ola and the horses--she and Jörgen."

"But, dear Jäger, why should she go up there?"

"She can pass the night at Grönnelid _saeter_."

"Such a fatiguing trip! It is absolutely without a path and wild where you must go."

"She can ride the horse a good ways beyond the _saeter_. Svarten will go as steady as a minister with her and the pack-saddle--both on the mountain and in the bog. I will take the dun horse myself." He had become very eager at the prospect of taking her with him. "Certainly, you shall go. You must put a good lot in the provision bag, Ma. We must be off early to-morrow at five o'clock. Tronberg will join us with a horse farther up, so there will be a way of giving you a mount also, Grip."

Grip started on a run with Jörgen towards the yard, finally caught him, and drove him in through the open kitchen window.

The captain, with his neck burned brown, toiled, red and sweating in his shirt-sleeves, in the mountain fields up under Torsknut.

The packhorses went first with Inger-Johanna and all the equipment, and by the side of the captain walked some farmers who carried their coats on sticks over their shoulders on account of the heat, and eagerly pointed out bounds and marks, every time they stopped and he was to draw some line or other as a possible connection.

They had passed the night at the Grönnelid _saeters_ and been out on the moors making a sketch survey at five o'clock in the morning, had ridden over flat mountain wastes among willow thickets, while the horses, step by step, waded across windings of the same river.

Now they stopped again after a steep ascent to wait for Tronberg, whom they had seen below on the hills.

The captain took out his spy-glass, and after a cursory glance over the shining icy fields which lay like a distant sea of milk, turned it farther and farther down.

The perspiration rolled in great drops off his forehead and eyelids, so that the glass was blurred, and he was obliged to wipe it again with his large, worn silk handkerchief.

Then he rested the spy-glass on the back of the packhorse, and held it still a long time. "That must be the Rognelid folk, after all, who are moving there west of Braekstad heights. What do you say?"

The people to whom he turned needed only to shade their eyes to agree with him that it was the opposite party whom they were to meet the next morning at Lake Tiske. But they were too polite fellows to express it otherwise than by saying in a flattering manner, "What a spy-glass the captain has!"

During this surveying business he was borne, so to speak, on a royal cushion by the anxious interests of both parties to the contest; it contributed to the pleasure he took in his trips in the mountains in summer to feel himself in that way lifted up by their hands.

"Have you been fishing, Tronberg?" he shouted when the head of the subaltern's "Rauen" appeared nodding down in the steep path. "Trout! Caught to-day?"

"This morning, Captain."

The captain took up the string and looked at the gills. "Yes, they are to-day's."

The subaltern took off his hat, and dried his forehead and head. "One could easily have fried the fish on the rocky wall in the whole of that pan of a valley over there that I came through," Tronberg said.

"Fine fish. See that, Grip,--weighs at least three pounds."

"Goodness sake, the young lady here!" exclaimed the subaltern, involuntarily bringing himself up to a salute when Inger-Johanna turned her horse round and looked at the shiny speckled fish which hung on the pack-saddle.

But old Lars Opidalen, the one who had asked for the survey, gently passed his coarse hand over hers, while he counted the trout on the willow branch. "Can such also be of the earth?" he said, quietly wondering.

"Help the young lady, Lars, while she dismounts: it is not well to ride any longer on this smooth bare rock."

The path ascended, steeper and steeper, with occasional marshy breathing places in between--it was often entirely lost in the gray mountain.

The mournful cry of a fish eagle sounded over them. It circled around, cried, and went off when Jörgen shouted at it. It must have had a nest somewhere up on that rocky wall.

The captain's shotgun was brought out, and Tronberg attempted a shot, but could not get within range. If he could only lie in wait for it behind the great stones up here!

The eagle whirled around again near them with broad, outspread wings.

Suddenly there was a report up above on the slope strewn with stones, and the eagle made some vigorous, flapping strokes with its wings; it struggled so as not to fall down.

The shot had gone through one wing, so that daylight could be seen through the hole in the feathers. The bird evidently found it difficult to preserve its equilibrium.

"What a shame!--it is wounded," exclaimed Inger-Johanna.

"Who shot?" demanded the captain, taken aback.

"Jörgen ran off with the rifle," Tronberg replied.

"Jörgen! He can't make me believe it was his first shot, the rogue! But he shot himself free from a thrashing that time--for it was a good shot, Tronberg. The rascal! He has been most strictly forbidden to meddle with guns."

"Forbidden indeed," murmured Grip. "Is it not remarkable, Miss Inger-Johanna, it is always the forbidden thing in which we are most skilful? It is exactly these prohibitions that constitute our most potent education--But that is going the way of villains in growth, and leaves its marks behind--makes men with good heads but bad characters."

Grip and Inger-Johanna walked ahead with the horses. A strange, hazy warm smoke lay below over the marshes in the afternoon: it veiled the lines there. Up here on the mountain the air was so sparkling clear.

Foot by foot, the animals picked their way over the piles of stony débris between the enormous fallen masses which lay, scattered here and there, like moss-covered gray houses, with now and then a fairy forelock of dwarf birch upon them, while on the mountain ledges still hung yellow tufts of saxifrage.

"Only see all this warped, twisted, fairy creation. You could say that life is really turned to stone here,--and yet it bubbles up."

He stopped. "Do you know what I could wish, Miss Inger-Johanna?" There was no longer any trace of the strain of irony which usually possessed him. "Simply to be a schoolmaster!--teach the children to lay the first two sticks across by their own plain thoughts. It is the fundamental logs that are laid the wrong way in us. They ought to be allowed to believe just as much and as little as they could really swallow. And to the door with the whole host of these cherished, satisfactory prohibitions! I should only show the results--mix powder and matches together before their eyes till it went into the air, and then say, 'If you please, Jörgen, so far as I am concerned, you can go with the two things in your pocket as much as you like: it is you, yourself, who will be blown into the air.' It is the sense of responsibility that is to be cultivated while the boy is growing up, if he is to be made a man."

"You have an awful lot of ideas, Grip."

"Crotchets, you mean? If I had any talent with the pen,--but I am so totally dependent on word of mouth. You see, there are only four doors, and they are called theology, philology, medicine, and law, and I have temporarily knocked at the last. What I want there, I don't know. Have you heard of the cat which they put into a glass ball and pumped the air out? It noticed that there was something wrong. It was troubled for breath; the air was constantly getting thinner and thinner; and so it put one paw on the hole. I shall also allow myself to put one paw on the draught hole--for here is a vacuum--not up in the skies with the poets, of course. There it lightens and shines, and they write about working for the people and for freedom and for everything lofty and great in as many directions as there are points on a compass--but in reality, down on the earth--for a prosaic person who would take hold and set in motion a little of the phrases--there it is entirely closed. There is no use for all our best thoughts and ideas in the practical world, I can tell you; not even so much that a man can manage to make himself unhappy in them.

"And so one lives as best he can his other life with his comrades, and re-baptizes himself in punch with them every time he has been really untrue to himself in the tea parties. But taste this air--every blessed breath like a glass of the finest, finest--nay, what shall I call it?"

"Punch," was the rather short answer.

"No, life! With this free nature one does not feel incited to dispute. I am in harmony with the mountain, with the sun, with all these crooked tough birch-osiers. If people down there only were themselves! But that they never are, except in a good wet party when they have got themselves sufficiently elevated from the bottom of the well. There exists a whole freemasonry, the members of which do not know each other except in that form, or else in Westerman's steam baths when Westerman whips us with fresh birch leaves in a temperature of eighty degrees. The bath-house was our fathers' national club, did you know that?"

"No, indeed; I am learning a great many new things, I think," she said, with half concealed humor.

"Listen, listen! The golden plover whistling," whispered Jörgen.

The sound came from a little marshy spot which was white with cotton grass.

They stood listening.

"Did you ever hear anything so tremendously quiet," said Grip, "after a single little peep. There are such peeps here and there in the country. Abel, he died, he did--of what? Of drink, they said"--he shook his head--"of vacuum."

He was walking in his shirt-sleeves, and flung the willow stick, which he had broken off while he was talking, far down over the rocky incline.

"There, Captain, see the line, as it has been from ancient times for Opidalen," shouted old Lars--"straight, straight along by the Notch, where we shall go down and across the lake--straight toward Rödkampen on Torsknut--there where you see the three green islands under the rocks, Captain." He shook his stick in his eagerness. "For that I shall bring witnesses--and if they were all living here who have fished on our rights in the lake, both in my father's and grandfather's time, there would be a crowd of people against their villainies in Rognelien."

The afternoon shadows fell into the Notch, where the ice-water trickled down through the cracks in the black mountain wall. Here and there the sun still shone on patches of greenish yellow reindeer moss, on some violet, white, or yellow little clusters of high mountain flowers, which exemplified the miracle of living their tinted life of beauty up here close to the snow.

"There comes Mathis with the boat," exclaimed old Lars.

The boat, which was to carry them over to the shelter, crept like an insect far below them on the green mirror of the lake.

The going down was real recreation for the captain's rather stout body, short of breath as he was, and the prospect of being able to indulge in his favorite sport, fishing, contributed greatly to enlivening his temper.

"We are coming here just at the right time: they will bite," he suggested.

When they embarked in the square trough, which was waiting for them down by the fishing-hut, he had the line ready. He had already, with great activity, taken care of the bait, carried in a goat's horn.

Those of the train who could not be accommodated in the boat went around the lake with the horses. They saw them now and then on the crags, while they rowed out.

"What do you say to a trial along the shore there in the shade, Mathis? Don't you think they will take the hook there?--We are not rowing so straight over at once, I think," said the captain slyly.

Under the thwarts Mathis's own line was lying; and Inger-Johanna also wanted to try her hand at it.

The captain put the bait on for her. But she would not sit and wait till they reached the fishing place; she threw the line out at once and let it trail behind the boat, while, as they rowed, she, off and on, gave a strong pull at it.

"See how handy she is," exclaimed the captain; "it is inborn--you come from a race of fishermen, for I was brought up in the Bergen district, and my father before me. If I had a dollar for every codfish I have pulled out of Alverströmmen, there would be something worth inheriting from me--What! what!"

A swirl was heard far behind in the wake. Inger-Johanna gave a vigorous pull; the yellow belly of a fish appeared a moment in the sunlight above the surface of the water.

She continued, after the first feverish jerk upon the line, in a half risen position, to pull it in.

When she lifted the shining fish high upon the edge of the boat, she burst out into a triumphant cry, "The first fish I have ever caught!"

Grip took the fish off the hook, and threw it far off. "Then it shall also be allowed to keep its life!"

The captain angrily moved his heavy body, so that it shook the boat. But that the ill-timed offering to the deep was made for the honor of the apple of his eye greatly mitigated the stupidity.

And when they got in under the knoll, where he cast his line, he suddenly sang a verse from his youthful recollections of the Bergen quarter, which had slumbered in him for many a long year.

_I lay basking in the sun, While the boat was drifting in the current, I heard the sillock and climbed into the top, I was giddy with my dream. I awoke wet through, And the thwart was floating, While the boat was drifting in the current._

His deep bass came out with full force in the silence under the knoll.

The lake was like a mirror, and the captain took one trout after another.

Torsknut, with patches and fields of snow on the summit, stood on its head deep down below them, so that it almost caused a giddy feeling when they looked out over the boat-rail. And when they arrived under the cattle station, the steep green mountain side, with all the grazing cattle, was reproduced so clearly that they could count the horns in the water.

"Nay, here the cows walk like flies on the wall," said the captain. "If the milk-bucket falls up there, it will roll down to us into the boat."

The shelter was, in fact, nothing more than a little mud hut on the rocky slope, and a little wooden shed, with boulders on the roof, and a hole in it. There the captain was to be quartered, and Inger-Johanna was to sleep till the sun rose, and she, with Jörgen, Great-Ola, and Svarten, should go back again to the Grönnelid _saeters_.

They had eaten supper--the trout and an improvised cream porridge--and were now standing, watching the sun set behind the great mountains.

The captain was going about on the turf, in slippers and unbuttoned uniform coat, smoking his pipe with extreme satisfaction. He stopped now and then and gazed at the sun playing on the mountain peaks far away.

Then a range of hitherto dark blue peaks took fire in violet blushing tints, until they seemed an entire glowing flame. And now the snow-fields became rose-red in the east--wonderful fairy tales in towers and castles gleamed there--the three snowy peaks then were turned to blood, with a burning, shining flash on top of the middle one. And again in the distance, still unlighted, blue peaks, snow-drifts, and glens, on which the shadows were playing.

Jörgen was lying, with his father's spy-glass, watching the reindeer on the ice-fields.

"Good-by, Miss Inger-Johanna," said Grip. "I am going over the mountains to-night, with one of the men to guide me. There are more people here than the hut will accommodate. But first let me say to you," he added in a subdued tone, "that this open-hearted day on the high mountain has been one of the few of my life.... I have not found it necessary to say a single cowardly, bad witticism--nor to despise myself," he added roughly. "Yes, just so--just as you stand there, so fine and erect and haughty, under the great straw hat, I shall remember you till we meet in the city again."

"It is a good ten miles to Svartdalsbod," suggested the captain, when he took leave--"always welcome to Gilje, Grip."

He was already giving his farewell greetings a good distance up the steep ascent of Torsknut.

"Does not seem to know fatigue, that fellow," said the captain.

She stood looking at him. The last rays of the sun cast a pale yellow tinge in the evening with this transparent mirroring. There was such a warm life in her face!

Some kind of an insect--a humble-bee or a wasp--buzzed through the open window into the room newly tinted in blue--hummed so noisily on the window-pane that the young girl with the luxuriant black hair and the slightly dark, clear-cut face, who was lying sleeping into the morning, was almost aroused.

She lay sound asleep on her side, after having come home in the night. The impressions of the mountains' summits were still playing in her brain. She had another trout on the line--it flashed and floundered there in the lake--Grip came up with two sticks, which were to be placed crossways.

Surr-humm! straight into her face, so that she woke up.

The day was already far advanced.

There on the toilet table with white hangings above it surrounding the glass which had been put there for her return home, was the violet soap in silver paper.