“Peer, you’re surely not going away just now? Oh, Peer, you mustn’t. You won’t leave me alone, Peer!”
“Merle, dear, now do be sensible. No, no—do let go, dear.” He tried to disengage her hands that were clasped behind his neck.
“Peer, you have never been like this before. Don’t you care for me any more—or the children?”
“Merle, dearest, you don’t imagine that I like going. But you surely don’t want me to have another big breach this year. It would be sheer ruin, I do assure you. Come, come now; let me go.”
But she held him fast. “And what happens to those dams up there is more to you now than what becomes of me!”
“You will be all right, dear. The doctor and the nurse have promised to be on the spot the moment you send word. And you managed so well before. . . . I simply cannot stay now, Merle. There’s too much at stake. There, there, goodbye! Be sure you telegraph—” He kissed her over the eyes, put her gently down into a chair, and hurried out of the room, feeling her terrified glance follow him as he went.
The April sun had cleared away the snow from the lowlands, but when Peer stepped out of the train up in Espedal he found himself back in winter—farms and fields still covered, and ridges and peaks deep in white dazzling snow. And soon he was sitting wrapped in his furs, driving a miserable dun pony up a side-valley that led out on to the uplands.
The road was a narrow track through the snow, yellow with horse-dung, and a mass of holes and ruts, worn by his own teams that had hauled their heavy loads of cement this way all through that winter and the last, up to the plateau and across the frozen lakes to Besna.
The steel will on. The steel cares nothing for human beings. Merle must come through it alone.
When a healthy, happy man is hampered and thwarted in a great work by annoyances and disasters, he behaves like an Arab horse on a heavy march. At first it moves at a brisk trot, uphill and downhill, and it goes faster and faster as its strength begins to flag. And when at last it is thoroughly out of breath and ready to drop, it breaks into an easy gallop.