“Why, as sure as I’m alive, he wants me to bury it in the ground.” Madam Hermansen laughed alarmingly.
“Now, does he mean? While it’s on you, that is?” Hoff blinked again.
“Now, this moment, if he could get me to do it. And then sit there for a week, for the juices of the earth to work a cure, if you please.”
“Well, mind you don’t take root,” said Hoff. His face was immobile, save for his eyes.
“What? Yes, and then all the worms and rats and things.... But how he can talk, that Egholm. Never knew such a man.”
Wassermann from the Customs House came down too, his galoshes leaving a long dragging trail in the dry sand. Under the gold-braided cap his red wig stuck out, stiff as a tuft of hay. It was said he had inherited it from his father. Be that as it may, he certainly kept it in use, wore it at all times, and stayed religiously at home while it was being mended once a year by Fru Egholm. His features seemed erased, with the exception of his mouth, which appeared as a black cavity like a rat’s hole in a white-washed wall. He stood for some minutes gaping over towards Egholm’s boat, then he shambled on again. His moribund perceptions had had their touch of excitement, and that sufficed.
Henrik Vang had settled himself almost as in a cave, half-way up the slope between two willow bushes. Sivert, who had likewise succumbed to the prevalent fever, and run off from his glazier work in the middle of a day, had brought him down a whole case of beer. The boy had run so fast with the barrow that half the bottles were broken.
“No harm done as far as I’m concerned,” said Vang solemnly as a funeral oration. “But it is a pity to waste good beer.”
The onlookers of the better class came up to him one by one, to shake hands and dispose of a bottle of beer, as quietly as might be.