Once more I was run into a party of English, the last for this year.
They arrived by steamer in the morning and stopped at the trading station
for a few hours, meanwhile sending up a detachment through the valley to
order a car to meet them. Stordalen, Stordalen, they said. So they had
apparently not yet seen Stordalen--an omission they must repair at once.
And what a sensation they made!
They came across by rowboat from the trading station; we could hear them a
long way off, an old man's voice drowning out all the others. Eilert
dropped everything he had in hand, and ran down to the landing place in
order to be the first on the spot. From Olaus's house, too, a man and a
few half-grown boys went down, and from all the houses round swarmed
curious and helpful crowds. There were so many spectators at the landing
place that the old man with the loud voice drew himself up to his full
height in the boat and majestically shouted his English at us, as though
his language must of course be ours as well:
"Where's the car? Bring the car down!"
Olaus, who was sharp, guessed what he meant and at once sent his two boys
up the valley to meet the car and hurry it on, for the Englishmen had
arrived.
They disembarked, they were in a great hurry, they could not understand
why the car had not come to meet them: "What was the meaning of this?"
There were four of them. "Stordalen!" they said. As they came up past
Eilert's house, they looked at their watches and swore because so many
minutes were being wasted. Where the devil was the car? The populace
followed at some distance, gazing with reverence on these dressed-up
fools.
I remember a couple of them: an old man--the one with the loud voice--who
wore a pleated kilt on each thigh and a jacket of green canvas with braid
and buckles and straps and innumerable pockets all over it. What a man,
what a power! His beard, streaming out from under his nose like the
northern lights, was greenish-white, and he swore like a madman. Another
of the party was tall and bent, a flagpole of sorts, astonishing,
stupendous, with sloping shoulders, a tiny cap perched above extravagantly
arched eyebrows; he was an upended Roman battering ram, a man on stilts. I
measured him with my eyes, and still there was something left over. Yet he
was bent and broken, old before his time, quite bald; but his mouth was
tight as a tiger's, and he had a madness in his head that kept him on the
move.
"Stordalen!" he cried.
England will soon have to open old people's homes for her sons. She
desexes her people with sport and obsessive ideas: were not other
countries keeping her in perpetual unrest, she would in a couple of
generations be converted to pederasty....
Then the horn of the car was heard tooting in the woods, and everyone
raced to meet it.
Of course Olaus's two boys had done an honest day's work in meeting the
car so far up the road, and urging the driver to hurry; were they not to
get any reward? True, they were allowed to sit in the back seat for their
return journey and thus enjoyed the drive of a lifetime; but money! They
had acquired enough brazenness in the course of the summer not to
hesitate, and approached the loud-voiced old man, holding out their palms
and clamoring: "Money!" But that did not suit the old man, who entered the
car forthwith, urging his companions to hurry. The driver, no doubt
thinking of his own tips, felt he would serve his passengers best by
driving off with them at once. So off he went. A toot of the horn, and a
rapid fanfare--tara-ra-boom-de-ay!
The spectators turned homeward, talking about the illustrious visitors.
Foreign lands--ah, no, this country will not bear comparison with them!
"Did you see how tall the younger lord was?" "And did you see the other
one, the one with the skirts and the northern lights?"
But some of the homeward-turning bumpkins, such as the Olaus family, had
more serious matters on their minds. Olaus for the first time understood
what he had read in the paper so many times, that the Norwegian elementary
school is a worthless institution because it does not teach English to the
children of the lower orders. Here were his boys, losing a handsome tip
merely because they could not swear back intelligibly at the gentleman
with the northern lights. The boys themselves had also something to think
about: "That driver, that scoundrel, that southerner! But just wait!" They
had heard that bits of broken bottle were very good for tires....
* * * * *
I return to her knapsack and her clothes, and the reason why I do so is
that Eilert is so little to be trusted. I want to count her clothes to
make sure none of them disappear; it was a mistake not to have done so at
once.
It may seem as though I kept returning to these clothes and thinking about
them; but why should I do that? At any rate it is now evident that I was
right in suspecting Eilert, for I heard him going upstairs, and when I
came in, he was turning out the bag and going through the clothes.
"What are you doing?" I said.
At first he tried to brazen it out.
"Never you mind," he replied. But my knowing something about him was so
much to my advantage that he soon drew in his horns. How I wronged him, he
complained, and exploited him:
"You haven't bought these clothes," he said. "I could have got more for
them if I'd sold them." He had been paid, but he still wanted more, like
the stomach, which goes on digesting after death. That was Eilert. Yet he
was not too bad; he had never been any better, and he certainly had grown
no worse with his new livelihood.
May no one ever grow worse with a new livelihood!
So I moved the knapsack and the clothes into my own room in order to take
better care of them. It was a slow job to tidy everything up for the
second time, but it had to be done. Later that evening I would resume my
journey, taking the knapsack with me. I had done with the place, and the
nights were moonlit again.
Enough of these clothes!