“Don’t I go in twice a day—cycle over to see how things are going? But with Rode for manager—that excellent and high-principled engineer—”
“Surely you could help him in some way?”
“He’s got to go on running along the line of rails he’s used to—nothing else for it, my darling. And four or five thousand crowns a year, net profit—why, it’s magnificent!”
“But couldn’t you extend the business?”
He raised his eyebrows, and his mouth pursed itself up.
“Extend—did you say extend? Extend a—a doll’s house!”
“Oh, Peer, you shouldn’t laugh at it—a thing that father took so much pains to set going!”
“And YOU shouldn’t go worrying me to get to work again in earnest, Merle. You shouldn’t really. One of these days I might discover that there’s no way to be happy in the world but to drag a plough and look straight ahead and forget that there’s anything else in existence. It may come to that one day—but give me a little breathing-space first, and you love me. Well, good-bye for a while.”
Merle, busying herself again in her pantry, glanced out of the window and saw him disappear into the stables. At first she had gone with him when he wandered about like this, touching and feeling all his possessions. In the cattle-stalls, it might be, stroking and patting, getting himself covered with hairs, and chattering away in childish glee. “Look, Merle—this cow is mine, child! Dagros her name is—and she’s mine. We have forty of them—and they’re all mine. And that nag there—what a sight he is! We have eight of them. They’re mine. Yours too, of course. But you don’t care a bit about it. You haven’t even hugged any of them yet. But when a man’s been as poor as I’ve been—and suddenly wakened up one day and found he owned all this—No, wait a minute, Merle—come and kiss old Brownie.” She knew the ritual now—he could go over it all again and again, and each time with the same happy wonder. Was it odious of her that she was beginning to find it a little comic? And how did it come about that often, when she might be filled with the deepest longing for him, and he burst in upon her boisterously, hungry for her caresses, she would grow suddenly cold, and put him aside? What was the matter? Why did she behave like this?
Perhaps it was because he was so much the stronger, so overwhelming in his effect on her that she had to keep a tight hold on herself to avoid being swept clean away and losing her identity. At one moment they might be sitting in the lamplight, chatting easily together, and so near in heart and mind; and the next it would be over—he would suddenly have started up and be pacing up and down the room, delivering a sort of lecture. Merle—isn’t it marvellous, the spiritual life of plants? And then would come a torrent of talk about strange plant-growths in the north and in the south, plants whose names she had never even heard—their struggle for existence, their loves and longings, their heroism in disease, the divine marvel of their death. Their inventions, their wisdom, aye, their religious sense—is it not marvellous, Merle? From this it was only a step to the earth’s strata, fossils, crystals—a fresh lecture. And finally he would sum up the whole into one great harmony of development, from the primary cell-life to the laws of gravitation that rule the courses of the stars. Was it not marvellous? One common rhythm beating through the universe—a symphony of worlds!—And then he must have a kiss!