The Great Hunger Part 32

Merle, as she went out and in, was thinking perhaps of the same thing, but her head was full of so much else--getting things in order and the household set going. Food had to be bought from the local shop; and how many litres of milk would she require in the morning? Where could she get eggs? She must go across at once to the Raastads' and ask. So the pale woman in the dark dress walked slowly with bowed head across the courtyard. But when she stopped to speak to people about the place, they would forget their manners and stare at her, she smiled so strangely.

"Father, there's a box of starlings on the wall here," said Louise as she lay in bed with her arms round Peer's neck saying good-night. "And there's a swallow's nest under the eaves too."

"Oh, yes, we'll have great fun at Raastad--just you wait and see."

Soon Merle and Peer too lay in their strange beds, looking out at the luminous summer night.

They were shipwrecked people washed ash.o.r.e here. But it was not so clear that they were saved.

Peer turned restlessly from side to side. He was so worn to skin and bone that his nerves seemed laid bare, and he could not rest in any position. Also there were three hundred wheels whirring in his head, and striking out sparks that flew up and turned to visions.

Rest? why had he never been content to rest in the days when all went well?

He had made his mark at the First Cataract, yes, and had made big sums of money out of his new pump; but all the time there were the gnawing questions: Why? and whither? and what then? He had been Chief Engineer and had built a railway, and could have had commissions to build more railways--but again the questions: Why? and what then? Home, then, home and strike root in his native land--well, and had that brought him rest?

What was it that drove him away again? The steel, the steel and the fire.

Ah! that day when he had stepped down from the mowing machine and had been ensnared by the idea of improving it. Why had he ever taken it up? Did he need money? No. Or was the work at a standstill? No. But the steel would on; it had need of a man; it had taken him by the throat and said, "You shall!"

Happiness? Rest? Ah no! For, you see, a stored-up ma.s.s of knowledge and experience turns one fine day into an army of evil powers, that lash you on and on, unceasingly. You may stumble, you may fall--what does it matter? The steel squeezes one man dry, and then grips the next. The flame of the world has need of fuel--bow thy head, Man, and leap into the fire.

To-day you prosper--to-morrow you are cast down into a h.e.l.l on earth.

What matter? You are fuel for the fire.

But I will not, I will not be swallowed up in the flame of the world, even though it be the only G.o.dhead in the universe. I will tear myself loose, be something in and for myself. I will have an immortal soul.

The world-transformation that progress may have wrought a thousand years hence--what is it to me?

Your soul? Just think of all your n.o.ble feelings towards that true-born half-brother of yours--ha-ha-ha! Shakespeare was wrong. It's the b.a.s.t.a.r.d that gets cheated.

"Dearest Peer, do, for G.o.d's sake, try to get to sleep."

"Oh yes. I'll get to sleep all right. But it's so hot." He threw off the clothes and lay breathing heavily.

"I'm sure you're lying thinking and brooding over things. Can't you do what the Swedish doctor told you--just try to think that everything is dark all round you."

Peer turns round, and everything around him is dark. But in the heart of that darkness waves arise, waves of melody, rolling nearer, nearer.

It is the sound of a hymn--it is Louise standing playing, his sister Louise. And what peace--O G.o.d, what peace and rest!

But soon Louise fades away, she fades away, and vanishes like a flame blown out. And there comes a roaring noise, nearer and nearer, grinding, crashing, rattling--and he knows now what it is only too well: it is the song of the steel.

The roar of steel from ships and from railway-trains, with their pairs of yellow evil eyes, rushing on, full of human captives, whither?

Faster, faster--driven by compet.i.tion, by the steel demon that hunts men on without rest or respite--that hurries on the pulse of the world to fever, to hallucination, to madness.

Crashing of steel girders falling, the hum of wheels, the clash of cranes and winches and chains, the clang of steam-hammers at work--all are in that roar. The fire flares up with h.e.l.lish eyes in every dark corner, and men swarm around in the red glow like evil angels. They are the slaves of steel and fire, lashed onwards, never resting.

Is this the spirit of Prometheus? Look, the will of steel is flinging men up into the air now. It is conquering the heavens. Why? That it may rush the faster. It craves for yet more speed, quicker, quicker, dizzier yet, hurrying--wherefore?--whither? Alas! it knows not itself.

Are the children of the earth grown so homeless? Do they fear to take a moment's rest? Do they dread to look inward and see their own emptiness?

Are they longing for something they have lost--some hymn, some harmony, some G.o.d?

G.o.d? They find a bloodthirsty Jehovah, and an ascetic on the cross. What G.o.ds are these for modern men? Religious history, not religion.

"Peer," says Merle again, "for G.o.d's sake try to sleep."

"Merle, do you think I shall get well here?"

"Why, don't you feel already how splendid the air is? Of course you'll get well."

He twined his fingers into hers, and at last the sound of Louise's hymn came to him once more, lifting and rocking him gently till his eyes closed.

Chapter II

A little road winds in among the woods, two wheel-tracks only, with a carpet of brown pine-needles between; but there are trees and the sky, quiet and peace, so that it's a real blessing to walk there. It rises and falls so gently, that no one need get out of breath; indeed, it seems to go along with one all the time, in mere friendliness, whispering: "Take it easy. Take your time. Have a good rest here." And so on it goes, winding in among the tree-trunks, slender and supple as a young girl.

Peer walked here every day. He would stop and look up into the tops of the fir trees, and walk on again; then sit down for a moment on a mossy stone; but only for a moment--always he was up again soon and moving on, though he had nowhere to go. But at least there was peace here. He would linger watching an insect as it crept along a fir branch, or listening to the murmur of the river in the valley far below, or breathing in the health-giving scent of the resin, thick in the warm air.

This present life of his was one way of living. As he lay, after a sleepless night, watching the window grow lighter with the dawn, he would think: Yet another new day--and nothing that I can do in it.

And yet he had to get up, and dress, and go down and eat. His bread had a slightly bitter taste to him--it tasted of charity and dependence, of the rich widow at Bruseth and the agent for English tweeds. And he must remember to eat slowly, to masticate each mouthful carefully, to rest after meals, and above all not to think--not to think of anything in the wide world. Afterwards, he could go out and in like other people, only that all his movements and actions were useless and meaningless in themselves; they were done only for the sake of health, or to keep thoughts away, or to make the time go by.

How had this come to pa.s.s? He found it still impossible to grasp how such senseless things can happen and no Providence interfere to set them right. Why should he have been so suddenly doomed to destruction?

Days, weeks and months of his best manhood oozing away into empty nothingness--why? Sleeplessness and tortured nerves drove him to do things that his will disowned; he would storm at his wife and children if a heel so much as sc.r.a.ped on the floor, and the remorse that followed, sometimes ending in childish tears, did no good, for the next time the same thing, or worse, would happen again. This was the burden of his days. This was the life he was doomed to live.

But up here on the little forest track he harms no one; and no racking noises come thrusting sharp knives into his spine. Here is a great peace; a peace that does a man good. Down on the gra.s.sy slope below stands a tumble-down grey barn; it reminds him of an old worn-out horse, lifting its head from grazing to gaze at you--a lonely forsaken creature it seems--to-morrow it will sink to the ground and rise no more--yet IT takes its lot calmly and patiently.

Ugh! how far he has got from Raastad. A cold sweat breaks out over his body for fear he may not have strength to walk back again uphill. Well, pull yourself together. Rest a little. And he lies down on his back in a field of clover, and stares up at the sky.

A stream of clean air, fresh from the snow, flows all day long down the valley; as if Jotunheim itself, where it lies in there beneath the sky, were breathing in easy well-being. Peer fills his lungs again and again with long deep draughts, drinking in the air like a saving potion. "Help me then, oh air, light, solitude! help me that I may be whole once more and fit to work, for this is the one and only religion left me to cling to."

High above, over the two mountain ranges, a blue flood stands immovable, and in its depths eternal rest is brooding. But is there a will there too, that is concerned with men on earth? You do not believe in it, and yet a little prayer mounts up to it as well! Help me--thou too. Who?

Thou that hearest. If Thou care at all for the miserable things called men that crawl upon the earth--help me! If I once prayed for a great work that could stay my hunger for things eternal, I repent me now and confess that it was pride and vanity. Make me a slave, toiling at servile tasks for food, so that Merle and the children be not taken from me. Hearest Thou?

Does anyone in heaven find comfort in seeing men tortured by blind fortune? Are my wife and my children slaves of an unmeaning chance--and yet can smile and laugh? Answer me, if Thou hearest--Thou of the many names.

A gra.s.shopper is shrilling in the gra.s.s about him. Suddenly he starts up sitting. A railway-train goes screaming past below.

And so the days go on.

Each morning Merle would steal a glance at her husband's face, to see if he had slept; if his eyes were dull, or inflamed, or calm. Surely he must be better soon! Surely their stay here must do him good. She too had lost faith in medicines, but this air, the country life, the solitude--rest, rest--surely there must soon be some sign that these were helping him.

Many a time she rose in the morning without having closed her eyes all night. But there were the children to look after, the house to see to, and she had made up her mind to get on without a maid if she possibly could.

"What has taken you over to the farm so much lately?" she asked one day.

"You have been sitting over there with old Raastad for hours together."

"I--I go over to amuse myself and pa.s.s the time," he said.