IX

A tourist arrived at the farm: the first tourist. And the master of the

house himself went with him across the fjeld, and as for Solem, why, he,

too, went with him so that he might know the way for later tourists. We

found the fat, short, and thin-haired stranger standing in the yard, an

elderly, well-to-do man who walked for the sake of his health and the last

twenty years of his life. Josephine, the dear girl, made her feet a breeze

beneath her skirts, and got him into the living room, with its piano and

its earthenware bowls with beaded edges. When he was leaving, he brought

out his small change, which Josephine received in her gray, young-girl's

fingers. On the other side of the fjeld, Solem was given two crowns for

acting as guide, and that was good pay. All went so well that the master

himself was content.

"Now they'll be coming," he said. "If only they would leave us in peace,"

he added.

By this he meant he regretted the good, carefree days that he and his

household had enjoyed till now; but in a few weeks a motor road would be

opened in the neighboring valley, and then it was a question whether the

tourist traffic might not be deflected there. His wife and Josephine were

a little afraid it would be; but he himself had held as long as possible

to the opinion that all their regular visitors who had come again year

after year would remain faithful. No matter how many roads and motor cars

they might have in other places, they could not get the peaks of the Tore

range anywhere but here.

The master of the house had felt so confident that once more he had much

timber lying by the wall of the barn, ready to be built into new cottages,

with six new guestrooms, a great hall with reindeer horns and log chairs,

and a bathroom. But what was the matter with him today; was he beginning

to doubt? "If only they would leave us in peace," he said.

A week later Mrs. Brede arrived with her children; she had a cottage to

herself, as in previous summers. So she must be rich and fashionable, this

Mrs. Brede, since she had a cottage to herself. She was a charming lady,

and her little daughters were well-grown, handsome children. They curtsied

to me, making me feel, I don't know why, as though they were giving me

flowers. A strange feeling.

Then came Miss Torsen and Mrs. Molie, who were both to stay for the

summer. They were followed by Schoolmaster Staur, who would stay a week.

Later came two schoolmistresses, the Misses Johnsen and Palm, and still

later Associate Schoolmaster Höy and several others--tradesmen, telephone

operators, a few people from Bergen, one or two Danes. There were many of

us at table now, and the talk was lively. When Schoolmaster Staur was

asked if he wanted more soup, he replied: "No, thank you; I require no

more!" and then rolled his eyes at us to show that this was the correct

thing to say. Between meals we made up small parties, going this way and

that on the sides of the fjeld and in the woods. But of transient guests

there were few or none at all, and it was really on these that the house

would earn well--on rooms for a night, on single meals, on cups of coffee.

Josephine seemed to be worrying lately, and her young fingers grew more

greedy as they counted silver coins.

Lean brook trout, goat's-meat stew, and tinned foods. Some of the guests

were dissatisfied people who spoke of leaving; others praised both the

food and the wild mountain scenery. Schoolmistress Torsen wanted to leave.

She was tall and handsome and wore a red hat on her dark hair; but there

were no suitable young men here, and in the long run it was a bore to

waste her holidays so completely. Tradesman Batt, who had been in both

Africa and America, was the only possibility, for even the Bergensians

amounted to nothing.

"Where's Miss Torsen?" Batt would ask us.

"Here I am; I'm coming," the lady answered.

They did not care for walks up the fjeld, but preferred to go to the woods

together, where they talked for hours. But Tradesman Batt did not amount

to much either; he was short and freckled, and talked of nothing but money

and trade. Besides, he had only a small shop in the town, and dealt in

tobacco and fruit. No, he did not amount to much.

One day, during a long spell of rain, I sat talking with Miss Torsen. She

was an extraordinary girl, ordinarily proud and reserved, but sometimes

talkative, lively, and perhaps a little inconsiderate, too. We sat in the

living room, with people coming and going continually, but she did not let

that disturb her, and talked in high, clear tones; in her eagerness she

sometimes clasped her hands, and then dragged them apart again. After we

had been sitting there for some time, Tradesman Batt came in, listened to

her for a moment, and then said:

"I'm going out now, Miss Torsen; are you coming?"

She swept him once with her eyes from head to foot; then she turned away

and went on talking, looking very proud and determined as she did so. No

doubt she had many good qualities; she was twenty-seven, she said, and

sick and tired of a teacher's life.

But why had she ever entered on such a life in the first place?

"Oh, just doing what everybody else did," she replied. "The girls next

door were also going to walk the road of scholarship; to study languages,

as they called it, study grammar; it all sounded so fine. We were going to

be independent and earn a lot of money. That's what I thought! Have a

home, however small, that was quite my own. How we slogged away all

through school! Some of the girls had money, but those of us who were poor

couldn't dress like them, and we hadn't well-kept hands like theirs. And

so we came to avoid all work at home for the sake of our hands.

"And we played up to the boys at school, too. We thought them such fine

gentlemen; one of them had a riding horse, bit of a fool, of course, but

he was a millionaire's son and awfully decent, gave us banknotes--me,

anyhow--and he kissed me many times. His name was Flaten; his father was a

merchant. Of course, he being so handsome and dashing, we wanted to be

nice to him too. I should have done anything he asked; I used to pray to

God for him.

"I'm sure I wasn't the only one who wanted to be smart and pretty. That

was how we passed the time. Washing and cooking and mending fell to the

lot of my mother and sisters; we students wouldn't do anything but sit

round being very learned and getting seraphic hands. We were quite mad, as

I don't mind admitting. It was in the course of those years that we

acquired all the distorted ideas we've been burdened with since; we grew

dull with school wisdom, anaemic, unbalanced: sometimes terribly unhappy

about our sad lot, sometimes hysterically happy, and pluming ourselves on

our examinations and our importance. We were the pride of the family.

"And of course we were independent. We got jobs in offices, at forty

_kroner_ a month. Because now there was no longer anything in the

least extraordinary about us students--we were no rarity, there were

hundreds of us--forty _kroner_ was the most they gave us. Thirty went

to Father and Mother for our keep, and ten for ourselves. It wasn't

enough. We had to have pretty clothes for the office, and we were young,

we liked to walk out; but everything was too dear for us, we went into

debt, and some of us got engaged to poor devils like ourselves. The narrow

school life during our years of development did more than hurt our

intelligence; we wanted to show spirit, too, and not recoil before any

experience, so some of us went to the bad, others married--and with such

antecedents, of course, there was first-rate mismanagement in the home;

others disappeared to America. But probably all of them are still boasting

their languages and their examinations. It's all they have left--not

happiness or health or innocence, but their matriculation. Good God!"

"But surely some of you have become schoolmistresses with good salaries?"

"Good salaries! Anyhow, first we had to start studying all over again. As

though Father and Mother and brothers and sisters hadn't sacrificed enough

for our sakes already! There was cramming again for long periods, and then

we began life in the schoolroom--to give to others the same unnatural

upbringing we had had ourselves. Oh, yes, ours was a noble vocation; it

was almost like being missionaries. But now if you'll excuse me, I'd like

to talk about something besides this exalted position. Anything else you

please."

Tradesman Batt opened the door and said:

"Are you coming, Miss Torsen? It's stopped raining now."

"Oh, leave me alone," she replied.

Tradesman Batt withdrew.

"Why do you turn him away like that?" I asked.

"Because ... well, the weather is bad," she said, looking out of the

window. "Besides, he's such a fool. And he takes such liberties."

How sure of herself she looked, and how right she seemed!

Poor Miss Torsen! True or not, the news gradually spread that Miss Torsen

had recently lost her post at the school, where indulgence had been

exercised for a long time toward her eccentric methods of teaching.

So that was it.

But certainly what she had told me was nonetheless true.

X

The news has leaked out that the master of the homestead here owes a huge

debt, and that because he needs cash he has sold new, valuable plots of

land to his cotters. I am finding out many things now. Mrs. Brede with the

handsome, well-modeled head knows something about everything, for her many

summers at the farm have given her knowledge. When she talks about

conditions here, she need not grope for words.

The master has taken a large mortgage.

No one would believe that all is not well here; the many new buildings and

flagpoles, the curtains at the windows and the red-painted well house--all

give an impression of great prosperity. The rooms, too, make a good

impression. I shall not speak of the piano, but here are pictures on the

walls and photographs of the farm seen from all angles; good newspapers

are kept and there is a selection of novels on the tables; though guests

sometimes take books away with them, the books are never missed. Or take a

thing like this: you get your bill on a handsomely printed paper, with a

picture at the top of the farm and the Tore range in the background. In

short, no one would doubt for a moment that there is a fortune here. And

why not, after twenty years as a kind of resort for tourists and

pensioners?

Nevertheless, the truth is that this homestead with all its interior and

exterior furnishings costs more than the business is worth. Manufacturer

Brede, too, has put money into it, and that is why Mrs. Brede comes here

every year with her children, to get their dividends in board and lodging.

No wonder she has a house to herself; after all, it's her own house.

"It was a good place in the old days," says Mrs. Brede. "Travelers stopped

here and had a meal and a bed for the night; it cost nothing to run the

place then. But the tourist traffic has forced him to make improvements

and enlargements. You have to keep pace with development, and be as good

as other such places in the country; they're all competing. And probably

the master here is not the right man to carry on such an irregular and

capricious business; he has learned to like idleness too much, and lets

the farm take care of itself. But the two cotters are hard-working

fellows. They're nephews of his, and bit by bit they're buying the farm

from him and cultivating it. My husband often says it will end with the

cotters or their children buying this whole place of his, Paul's."

"How can the cotters get power to do that?"

"They work hard; they're peasants. They started in the forest with three

or four goats each, first one of them, then the other one, working down in

the village and coming home with food and money, and all the time clearing

their own ground. The goats grew more numerous, a cow was added, they

bought more virgin land, and they acquired still more livestock. They

sowed grain and planted potatoes and cultivated pasture land; the owner

here buys root vegetables from his cotters; he hasn't time to toil with

such things himself; there's a great deal of work in it. Oh, no, they

don't sow anything but green fodder for the stock here; Paul says it's not

worth-while. And in a way he's right. He's tried hiring enough men to run

the farm too, but it won't work. It's just in the spring season that the

tourists start coming, and then the men are constantly being interrupted

in their work on the farm to pilot tourists across the fjeld, or to do

this or that for the guests. And this goes on all through the short summer

months; for several years, they haven't even found the time to spread all

their manure. But the worst time is really the autumn, when the tourists

are all rushing to get home again, and it's quite impossible to do the

harvesting undisturbed. It's almost become a custom here now, my husband

says, for the cotters to get half the harvest of the farm's outlying

fields."

On my wondering at Mrs. Brede's knowledge of farming, she told me with a

shake of the head that she herself knew very little about it, and had all

her information from her husband. The fact was that every time these

cotters wanted to buy a fresh piece of land from Paul, her husband had to

give his consent. This was because of the mortgage, and this, too, was how

they had learned of these matters. Manufacturer Brede, as a matter of

fact, was most anxious to be released from his undertaking, but this was

by no means easy. It was with great apprehensions that he now regarded the

new automobile route.

Mrs. Brede was full of a maternal gentleness; she played with her little

girls, and seemed to enjoy an admirable balance of mind. One day, for

example, a goat came home with one of its hind legs broken, and all the

guests hurried out with brandy and lanolin and bandages for the wound; but

Mrs. Brede remained quietly where she was, experienced, wise, and a little

surprised at all the excitement.

"All you can do with such a goat," she said, "is to slaughter it."

The lady, I understood, must have married early, for her two little girls

were twelve and ten. Her husband seemed to deal in important business, for

he spent a large part of the year in Iceland, and traveled a good deal

elsewhere as well. This, too, the lady bore quietly. And yet she was still

young and handsome, a little plump, perhaps, for her height, but with a

lovely, unwrinkled skin. She was quite unlike Miss Torsen, the only other

good-looking lady at the farm; Miss Torsen was tall and dark.

But perhaps Mrs. Brede was not always so calm as she seemed. One evening

when she went down to the men's hut and asked Solem to do her a service, I

saw that her face was strange and covered with blushes. Would Solem come

to her room and repair a window-blind that had fallen down? It was late in

the evening, and the lady seemed to have been in bed already, and to have

risen again. Solem did not appear very willing. Suddenly their eyes met,

and clung for a moment. Yes, certainly, of course he would come....

What an iron face he had, and what a rogue he was!

Mrs. Brede departed.

But a moment later she returned to say that she had changed her mind.

Never mind, thank you, she would fix the blind in position herself.