Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (chromebook ebook reader txt) 📕

crowbar. When they had managed some specially difficult feat, they would hold a breathing-space, and talk together in a curious, reserved fashion of their own.

“Brede, he talks of selling out,” said the father.

“Ay,” said the son. “Wonder what he’ll be asking for the place?”

“Ay, I wonder.”

“You’ve not heard anything?”

“No.”

“I’ve heard two hundred.”

The father thought for a while, and said: “What d’you think, ’ll this be a good stone?”

“All depends if we can get this shell off him,” said Sivert, and was on his feet in a moment, giving the setting-hammer to his father, and taking the sledge himself. He grew red and hot, stood up to his full height and let the sledgehammer fall; rose again and let it fall; twenty strokes alike⁠—twenty thunder-strokes. He spared neither tool nor strength; it was heavy work; his shirt rucked up from his trousers at the waist, leaving him bare in front; he lifted on his toes each time to give the sledge a better swing. Twenty strokes.

“Now! Let’s look!” cried his father.

The son stops, and asks: “Marked him any?”

And they lay down together to look at the stone; look at the beast, the devil of a thing; no, not marked any as yet.

“I’ve a mind to try with the sledge alone,” said the father, and stood up. Still harder work this, sheer force alone, the hammer grew hot, the steel crushed, the pen grew blunt.

“She’ll be slipping the head,” he said, and stopped. “And I’m no hand at this any more,” he said.

Oh, but he never meant it; it was not his thought, that he was no hand at the work any more!

This father, this barge of a man, simple, full of patience and goodness, he would let his son strike the last few blows and cleave the stone. And there it lay, split in two.

“Ay, you’ve the trick of it,” said the father. “H’m, yes⁠ ⁠… Breidablik⁠ ⁠… might make something but of that place.”

“Ay, should think so,” said the son.

“Only the land was fairly ditched and turned.”

“The house’d have to be done up.”

“Ay, that of course. Place all done up⁠—’twould mean a lot of work at first, but⁠ ⁠… What I was going to say, d’you know if your mother was going to church come Sunday?”

“Ay, she said something like it.”

“Ho!⁠ ⁠… H’m. Keep your eyes open now and look out for a good big door-slab for the new house. You haven’t seen a bit would do?”

“No,” said Sivert.

And they fell to work again.

A couple of days later both agreed they had enough stone now for the walls. It was Friday evening; they sat taking a breathing-space, and talking together the while.

“H’m⁠—what d’you say?” said the father. “Should we think it over, maybe, about Breidablik?”

“How d’you mean?” asked the son. “What to do with it?”

“Why, I don’t know. There’s the school there, and it’s midway down this tract now.”

“And what then?” asked the son. “I don’t know what we’d do with it, though; it’s not worth much as it is.”

“That’s what you’ve been thinking of?”

“No, not that way.⁠ ⁠… Unless Eleseus he’d like to have the place to work on.”

“Eleseus? Well, no, I don’t know⁠—”

Long pause, the two men thinking hard. The father begins gathering tools together, packing up to go home.

“Ay, unless⁠ ⁠…” said Sivert. “You might ask him what he says.”

The father made an end of the matter thus: “Well, there’s another day, and we haven’t found that door-slab yet, either.”

Next day was Saturday, and they had to be off early to get across the hills with the child. Jensine, the servant-girl, was to go with them; that was one godmother, the rest they would have to find from among Inger’s folk on the other side.

Inger looked nice; she had made herself a dainty cotton dress, with white at the neck and wrists. The child was all in white, with a new blue silk ribbon drawn through the lower edge of its dress; but then she was a wonder of a child, to be sure, that could smile and chatter already, and lay and listened when the clock struck on the wall. Her father had chosen her name. It was his right; he was determined to have his say⁠—only trust to him! He had hesitated between Jacobine and Rebecca, as being both sort of related to Isak; and at last he went to Inger and asked timidly: “What d’you think, now, of Rebecca?”

“Why, yes,” said Inger.

And when Isak heard that, he grew suddenly independent and master in his own house. “If she’s to have a name at all,” he said sharply, “it shall be Rebecca! I’ll see to that.”

And of course he was going with the party to church, partly to carry, and partly for propriety’s sake. It would never do to let Rebecca go to be christened without a decent following! Isak trimmed his beard and put on a red shirt, as in his younger days; it was in the worst of the hot weather, but he had a nice new winter suit, that looked well on him, and he wore it. But for all that, Isak was not the man to make a duty of finery and show; as now, for instance, he put on a pair of fabulously heavy boots for the march.

Sivert and Leopoldine stayed behind to look after the place.

Then they rowed in a boat across the lake, and that was a deal easier than before, when they had had to walk round all the way. But halfway across, as Inger unfastened her dress to nurse the child, Isak noticed something bright hung in a string round her neck; whatever it might be. And in the church he noticed that she wore that gold ring on her finger. Oh, Inger⁠—it had been too much for her after all!

XVII

Eleseus came home.

He had been away now for some years, and had grown taller than his father, with long white hands and a little dark growth on his upper lip. He did not give himself airs, but seemed