In a few minutes they came to a Gaard hanging over the hillside, which Clifford thought, from Bedstemor's description, must be Peer Gynt's homestead. He hurried on to inquire, and soon came back to the great rock where Katharine was resting.
"Yes," he said, "we have reached our destination. And that is supposed to be Peer Gynt's house—that old stue there. The other buildings making up the Gaard are newer, as you can see. The Gaardmand's wife says many people come to visit it."
So there they were, at last, at Peer Gynt's home, perched up on high, looking straight down on the valley and the river—a wild, isolated spot, fit abode for a wild, restless spirit. The Gaardmand's wife showed them over the old stue, which was very much like others they had seen, built of great tree-trunks, and black with age outside, and mouldy with age within; and when they had looked and looked, each of them remembering Knutty's injunction to enjoy, believe, and to be seized by the "spirit of place," she took them into the courtyard, and pointed out another old building used as stables.
"Peer Gynt was buried here," she said. "He was too wicked to be buried in the churchyard."
They lingered there for a long time, held in very truth by the spirit of place. Clifford knew his 'Peer Gynt' well, and Katharine, who had read it in English, understood a little of its real significance. He, knowing its whole scope from beginning to end, was able to make the poem real to her. He told her that Peer Gynt, brought up by his mother Ãse on legends and fairy tales, was typical to Ibsen's mind of the Norwegian nation, brought up on Sagas, and at the moment when the poem was written, not able to put away phantasms, and awake to the realities of life. He admired the poem intensely, and seemed delighted that she was interested in all he had to tell her about it. And he was moved at being in its very atmosphere. He had forgotten his doubts about the genuineness of the place.
"Cannot you see him coming down from the mountains after one of his escapades," he said, "his mother standing scolding him, and then listening entranced to his fantastic stories? Can't you see him seizing his mother when she was a nuisance to him, carrying her over the river and putting her on the grass-roof of the corn-house, where she could not interfere with him? Was there ever such a fellow? And there is the river—the very river!"
He pointed to it with almost a child's eagerness.
"He must have crossed there, you see, on his way to the wedding at which he stole the bride and took her away into the mountains," he said. "And where was it, I wonder, that he used to lie in the woods, dreaming his dreams of action and achievement which never came to anything? Perhaps yonder, sometimes, in that little copse over there."
Then he turned once more to the stue.
"And to think that there, actually there, poor Ãse died," he said. "Don't you remember how, even at her deathbed, he could not face the reality of the moment, but buoyed her and himself up with pitiful romancing? I can see the whole scene as I never saw it before."