Chapter II
He sat in the train on his way up-country, and from the carriage window watched farms and meadows and tree-lined roads slide past. Where was he going? He did not know himself. Why should not a man start off at haphazard, and get out when the mood takes him? At last he was able to travel through his own country without having to think of half-pennies. He could let the days pass over his head without care or trouble, and give himself good leisure to enjoy any beauty that came in his way.
There is Mjosen, the broad lake with the rich farmlands and long wooded ridges on either side. He had never been here before, yet it seemed as if something in him nodded a recognition to it all. Once more he sat drinking in the rich, fruitful landscape—the wooded hills, the fields and meadows seemed to spread themselves out over empty places in his mind.
But later in the day the landscape narrowed and they were in Gudbrandsdalen, where the sunburned farms are set on green slopes between the river and the mountains. Peer’s head was full of pictures from abroad, from the desert sands with their scorched palm-trees to the canals of Venice. But here—he nodded again. Here he was at home, though he had never seen the place before; just this it was which had been calling to him all through his long years of exile.
At last on a sudden he gathered up his traps and got out, without the least idea even of the name of the station. A meal at the hotel, a knapsack on his back, and hey!—there before him lies the road, up into the hills.
Alone? What matter, when there are endless things that greet him from every side with “Welcome home!” The road is steep, the air grows lighter, the homesteads smaller. At last the huts look like little matchboxes—from the valley, no doubt, it must seem as if the people up here were living among the clouds. But many and many a youth must have followed this road in the evenings, going up to court his Mari or his Kari at the saeter-hut, the same road and the same errand one generation after another. To Peer it seemed as if all those lads now bore him company—aye, as if he discovered in himself something of wanton youth that had managed to get free at last.
Puh! His coat must come off and his cap go into the knapsack. Now, as the valley sinks and sinks farther beneath him, the view across it widens farther and farther out over the uplands beyond. Brown hills and blue, ridges livid or mossy-grey in the setting sun, rising and falling wave behind wave, and beyond all a great snowfield, like a sea of white breakers foaming against the sky. But surely he had seen all this before?
Ah! now he knew; it was the Lofoten Sea over again—with its white foam-crested combers and long-drawn, heavy-breathing swell—a rolling ocean turned to rock. Peer halted a moment leaning on his stick, and his eyes half-closed. Could he not feel that same ocean-swell rising and sinking in his own being? Did not the same waves surge through the centuries, carrying the generations away with them upon great wanderings? And in daily life the wave rolls us along in the old familiar rhythm, and not one in ten thousand lifts his head above it to ask: whither and why! Even now just such a little wave has hold of him, taking him—whither and why? Well, the coming days might show; meanwhile, there beyond was the sea of stone rolling its eternal cadence under the endless sky.
He wiped his forehead and turned and went his way.
But what is that far off in the north-east? three sisters in white shawls, lifting their heads to heaven—that must be Rondane. And see how the evening sun is kindling the white peaks to purple and gold.