The house was one of large low-ceiled rooms, with big stoves that would need a deal of firewood in winter. The furniture was a mixture of every possible sort and style: a mahogany sofa, cupboards with painted roses on the panels, chairs covered with “Old Norse” carving, and on the walls appalling pictures of foreign royal families and of the Crucifixion. “Good Heavens!” said Merle, as they went round the rooms alone: “how shall we ever get used to all this?”
But just then Louise came rushing in, breathless with news. “Mother—father—there are goats here!” And little Lorentz came toddling in after her: “Goats, mother,” he cried, stumbling over the doorstep.
The old house had stood empty and dead for years. Now it seemed to have wakened up again. Footsteps went in and out, and the stairs creaked once more under the tread of feet, small, pattering, exploring feet, and big feet going about on grown-up errands. There was movement in every corner: a rattle of pots and pans in the kitchen; fires blazed up, and smoke began to rise from the chimney; people passing by outside looked up at it and saw that the dead old house had come to life again.
Peer was weak still after his illness, but he could help a little with the unpacking. It took very little, though, to make him out of breath and giddy, and there was a sledge-hammer continually thumping somewhere in the back of his head. Suppose—suppose, after all, the change here does you no good? You are at the last stage. You’ve managed to borrow the money to keep you all here for a year. And then? Your wife and children? Hush!—better not think of that. Not that; think of anything else, only not that.
Clothes to be carried upstairs. Yes, yes—and to think it was all to end in your living on other people’s charity. Even that can’t go on long. If you should be no better next summer—or two years hence?—what then? For yourself—yes, there’s always one way out for you. But Merle and the children? Hush, don’t think of it! Once it was your whole duty to finish a certain piece of work in a certain time. Now it is your duty to get well again, to be as strong as a horse by next year. It is your duty. If only the sledge-hammer would stop, that cursed sledge-hammer in the back of your head.
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 ashore here. But it was not so clear that they were saved.