“You! Are you still going about feeling your own pulse and wanting to live for ever? My dear fellow, YOU don’t exist. There is just one person on our side—the world-will. And that includes us all. That’s what I mean by ‘we.’ And we are working towards the day when we can make God respect us in good earnest. The spirit of man will hold a Day of Judgment, and settle accounts with Olympus—with the riddle, the almighty power beyond. It will be a great reckoning. And mark my words—that is the one single religious idea that lives and works in each and every one of us—the thing that makes us hold up our heads and walk upright, forgetting that we are slaves and things that die.”
Suddenly he looked at his watch. “Excuse me a moment. If the telegraph office is open . . .” and he rose and went in.
When he returned, Klaus and Peer were talking of the home of their boyhood and their early days together.
“Remember that time we went shark-fishing?” asked Klaus.
“Oh yes—that shark. Let me see—you were a hero, weren’t you, and beat it to death with your bare fists—wasn’t that it?” And then “Cut the line, cut the line, and row for your lives,” he mimicked, and burst out laughing.
“Oh, shut up now and don’t be so witty,” said Klaus. “But tell me, have you ever been back there since you came home?”
Peer told him that he had been to the village last year. His old foster-parents were dead, and Peter Ronningen too; but Martin Bruvold was there still, living in a tiny cottage with eight children.
“Poor devil!” said Klaus.
Ferdinand Holm had sat down again, and now he nodded towards the moon. “An old chum of yours? Well, why don’t we send him a thousand crowns?”
There was a little pause. “I hope you’ll let me join you,” went on Ferdinand, taking a note for five hundred crowns from his waistcoat pocket. “You don’t mind, do you?”