"Forbidden indeed," murmured Grip. "Is it not remarkable, Miss Inger-Johanna, it is always the forbidden thing in which we are most skilful? It is exactly these prohibitions that constitute our most potent education—But that is going the way of villains in growth, and leaves its marks behind—makes men with good heads but bad characters."
Grip and Inger-Johanna walked ahead with the horses. A strange, hazy warm smoke lay below over the marshes in the afternoon: it veiled the lines there. Up here on the mountain the air was so sparkling clear.
Foot by foot, the animals picked their way over the piles of stony débris between the enormous fallen masses which lay, scattered here and there, like moss-covered gray houses, with now and then a fairy forelock of dwarf birch upon them, while on the mountain ledges still hung yellow tufts of saxifrage.
"Only see all this warped, twisted, fairy creation. You could say that life is really turned to stone here,—and yet it bubbles up."
He stopped. "Do you know what I could wish, Miss Inger-Johanna?" There was no longer any trace of the strain of irony which usually possessed him. "Simply to be a schoolmaster!—teach the children to lay the first two sticks across by their own plain thoughts. It is the fundamental logs that are laid the wrong way in us. They ought to be allowed to believe just as much and as little as they could really swallow. And to the door with the whole host of these cherished, satisfactory prohibitions! I should only show the results—mix powder and matches together before their eyes till it went into the air, and then say, 'If you please, Jörgen, so far as I am concerned, you can go with the two things in your pocket as much as you like: it is you, yourself, who will be blown into the air.' It is the sense of responsibility that is to be cultivated while the boy is growing up, if he is to be made a man."
"You have an awful lot of ideas, Grip."
"Crotchets, you mean? If I had any talent with the pen,—but I am so totally dependent on word of mouth. You see, there are only four doors, and they are called theology, philology, medicine, and law, and I have temporarily knocked at the last. What I want there, I don't know. Have you heard of the cat which they put into a glass ball and pumped the air out? It noticed that there was something wrong. It was troubled for breath; the air was constantly getting thinner and thinner; and so it put one paw on the hole. I shall also allow myself to put one paw on the draught hole—for here is a vacuum—not up in the skies with the poets, of course. There it lightens and shines, and they write about working for the people and for freedom and for everything lofty and great in as many directions as there are points on a compass—but in reality, down on the earth—for a prosaic person who would take hold and set in motion a little of the phrases—there it is entirely closed. There is no use for all our best thoughts and ideas in the practical world, I can tell you; not even so much that a man can manage to make himself unhappy in them.
"And so one lives as best he can his other life with his comrades, and re-baptizes himself in punch with them every time he has been really untrue to himself in the tea parties. But taste this air—every blessed breath like a glass of the finest, finest—nay, what shall I call it?"
"Punch," was the rather short answer.
"No, life! With this free nature one does not feel incited to dispute. I am in harmony with the mountain, with the sun, with all these crooked tough birch-osiers. If people down there only were themselves! But that they never are, except in a good wet party when they have got themselves sufficiently elevated from the bottom of the well. There exists a whole freemasonry, the members of which do not know each other except in that form, or else in Westerman's steam baths when Westerman whips us with fresh birch leaves in a temperature of eighty degrees. The bath-house was our fathers' national club, did you know that?"