Chapter I
Some years had passed—a good many years—and once more summer had come, and June. A passenger steamer, bound from Antwerp to Christiania, was ploughing her way one evening over a sea so motionlessly calm that it seemed a single vast mirror filled with a sky of grey and pink-tinged clouds. There were plenty of passengers on board, and no one felt inclined for bed; it was so warm, so beautiful on deck. Some artists, on their way home from Paris or Munich, cast about for amusements to pass the time; some ordered wine, others had unearthed a concertina, and very soon, no one knew how, a dance was in full swing. “No, my dear,” said one or two cautious mothers to their girls, “certainly not.” But before long the mothers were dancing themselves. Then there was a doctor in spectacles, who stood up on a barrel and made a speech; and presently two of the artists caught hold of the grey-bearded captain and chaired him round the deck. The night was so clear, the skies so ruddily beautiful, the air so soft, and out here on the open sea all hearts were light and happy.
“Who’s that wooden-faced beggar over there that’s too high and mighty for a little fun?” asked Storaker the painter, of his friend the sculptor Praas.
“That fellow? Oh, he’s the one that was so infernally instructive at dinner, when we were talking about Egyptian vases.”
“So it is, by Jove! Schoolmaster abroad, I should think. When we got on to Athens and Greek sculpture he condescended to set us right about that, too.”
“I heard him this morning holding forth to the doctor on Assyriology. No wonder he doesn’t dance!”
The passenger they were speaking of was a man of middle height, between thirty and forty apparently, who lay stretched in a deck-chair a little way off. He was dressed in grey throughout, from his travelling-cap to the spats above his brown shoes. His face was sallow, and the short brown beard was flecked with grey. But his eyes had gay little gleams in them as they followed the dancers. It was Peer Holm.
As he sat there watching, it annoyed him to feel that he could not let himself go like the others. But it was so long since he had mixed with his own countrymen, that he felt insecure of his footing and almost like a foreigner among them. Besides, in a few hours now they should sight the skerries on the Norwegian coast; and the thought awoke in him a strange excitement—it was a moment he had dreamed of many and many a time out there in the wide world.
After a while stillness fell on the decks around him, and he too went below, but lay down in his cabin without undressing. He thought of the time when he had passed that way on the outward voyage, poor and unknown, and had watched the last island of his native land sink below the sea-rim. Much had happened since then—and now that he had at last come home, what life awaited him there?
A little after two in the morning he came on deck again, but stood still in astonishment at finding that the vessel was now boring her way through a thick woolly fog. The devil! thought he, beginning to tramp up and down the deck impatiently. It seemed that his great moment was to be lost—spoiled for him! But suddenly he stopped by the railing, and stood gazing out into the east.