Grip sat there mumbling.
The strong drink had plainly got more and more hold on him; he had been out in the cold the whole day. His boots were wet and in bad condition. But he continued to drink; almost alone he had disposed of the punch extract.
"Come, come, don't sit there so melancholy—or there won't be any more to get," Simensen prodded him.
"No, no—no, no—more syllogisms, you mean—something Reierstad also can understand." He nodded his head in quiet, dull self-communion. "Came across an emaciated, pale child, who was crying so utterly helplessly down here. There is much that screams helplessly—you know, Reierstad!—if one has once got an ear for the music, and has not a river of tears—there, you drink, drink. Give me the bottle."
"It were best to get him to bed over in the servants' room, now," suggested Simensen.
"Perhaps the pig is drunk," muttered Grip.
Monday morning he was off again, before daylight, without having tasted anything; he was shy so early, before he had got his first dram to stiffen him up.
Grip had his own tactics. He was known over very nearly the whole of the country south of the Dovrefjeld.
As he had had fits of drinking and going on a spree, so he had had corresponding periods when he had lived soberly in the capital, studying and giving instruction. Again and again he awoke the most well-grounded hopes in his few old comrades and friends who remained there. A man with such a talent for teaching and such a remarkable gift for grasping the roots of words and the laws of language, not only in Greek and Latin, but right up into the Sanscrit, might possibly even yet attain to something. Based on his total abstinence for three and four months and his own strong self-control, they would already begin to speak of bringing about his installation at some school of a higher grade, when all at once, unexpectedly, it was again reported that he had disappeared from the city.
Then he would pop up again after the lapse of some weeks—entirely destitute, in one of the country districts, shaking and thin and worn from drink, from exposure, from lying in outhouses and in haylofts, seldom undressed and in a proper bed.