Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📗

ay, had said to him in as many words: “You don’t seem like remembering how I saved your life last winter!”

“ ’Twas Oline saved my life,” answered Axel.

“Ho, indeed! And didn’t I carry you down myself on my own poor shoulders? Anyway, you were clever enough to buy up my place in summertime and leave me homeless in the winter.” Ay, Brede was deeply offended; he went on:

“But you can take the telegraph for me, ay, all the rubble of it for me. I and mine we’ll go down to the village and start on something there⁠—you don’t know what it’ll be, but wait and see. What about a hotel place where folk can get coffee? You see but we’ll manage all right. There’s my wife can sell things to eat and drink as well as another, and I can go out on business and make a heap more than you ever did. But I don’t mind telling you, Axel, I could make things awkward for you in many odd ways, seeing all I know about the telegraph and things; ay, ’twould be easy enough both to pull down poles and cut the line and all. And then you to go running out after it midway in the busy time. That’s all I’ll say to you, Axel, and you bear it in mind.⁠ ⁠…”

Now Axel should have been down and brought up the machines from the quay⁠—all over gilt and colouring they were, like pictures to see. And he might have had them to look at all that day, and learn the manner of using them⁠—but now they must wait. ’Twas none so pleasant to have to put aside all manner of necessary work to run and see after a telegraph line. But ’twas the money.⁠ ⁠…

Up on the top of the hill he meets Aronsen. Ay, Aronsen the trader standing there looking and gazing out into the storm, like a vision himself. What did he want there? No peace in his mind now, it seems, but he must go up the fjeld himself and look at the mine with his own eyes. And this, look you, Trader Aronsen had done from sheer earnest thought of his own and his family’s future. Here he is, face to face with bare desolation on the forsaken hills, machines lying there to rust, carts and material of all sorts left out in the open⁠—’twas dismal to see. Here and there on the walls of the huts were placards, notices written by hand, forbidding anyone to damage or remove the company’s property⁠—tools, carts, or buildings.

Axel stops for a few words with the mad trader, and asks if he has come out shooting.

“Shooting? Ay, if I could only get within reach of him!”

“Him? Who, then?”

“Why, him that’s ruining me and all the rest of us hereabout. Him that won’t sell his bit of fjeld and let things get to work again, and trade and money passing same as before.”

“D’you mean him Geissler, then?”

“Ay, ’tis him I mean. Ought to be shot!”

Axel laughs at this, and says: “Geissler he was in town but a few days back; you should have talked to him there. But if I might be so bold as to say, I doubt you’d better leave him alone, after all.”

“And why?” asks Aron angrily.

“Why? I’ve a mind he’d be overwise and mysterious for you in the end.”

They argued over this for a while, and Aronsen grew more excited than ever. At last Axel asked jestingly: “Well, anyway, you’ll not be so hard on us all to run away and leave us to ourselves in the wilds?”

“Huh! Think I’m going to stay fooling about here in your bogs and never so much as making the price of a pipe?” cried Aron indignantly. “Find me a buyer and I’ll sell out.”

“Sell out?” says Axel. “The land’s good ordinary land if she’s handled as should be⁠—and what you’ve got’s enough to keep a man.”

“Haven’t I just said I’ll not touch it?” cried Aronsen again in the gale. “I can do better than that!”

Axel thought if that was so, ’twould be easy to find a buyer; but Aronsen laughed scornfully at the idea⁠—there was nobody there in the wilds had money to buy him out.

“Not here in the wilds, maybe, but elsewhere.”

“Here’s naught but filth and poverty,” said Aron bitterly.

“Why, that’s as it may be,” said Axel in some offence. “But Isak up at Sellanraa he could buy you out any day.”

“Don’t believe it,” said Aronsen.

“ ’Tis all one to me what you believe,” said Axel, and turned to go.

Aronsen called after him: “Hi, wait a bit! What’s that you say⁠—Isak might take the place, was that what you said?”

“Ay,” said Axel, “if ’twas only the money. He’s means enough to buy up five of your Storborg and all!”

Aronsen had gone round keeping wide of Sellanraa on his way up, taking care not to be seen; but, going back, he called in and had a talk with Isak. But Isak only shook his head and said nay, ’twas a matter he’d never thought of, and didn’t care to.

But when Eleseus came back home that Christmas, Isak was easier to deal with. True, he maintained that it was a mad idea to think of buying Storborg, ’twas nothing had ever been in his mind; still, if Eleseus thought he could do anything with the place, why, they might think it over.

Eleseus himself was midways between, as it were; not exactly eager for it, yet not altogether indifferent. If he did settle down here at home, then his career in one way was at an end. ’Twas not like being in a town. That autumn, when a lot of people from his parts had been up for cross-examination in a certain place, he had taken care not to show himself; he had no desire to meet any that knew him from that quarter; they belonged to another world. And was he now to go back to that same world himself?

His mother was all