“Well, talk to the Captain about it,” he said.
And the hope of regular work for the winter made this man a contented soul. He could manage well enough. No, Grindhusen had nothing much to trouble about.
But then there was myself. And I felt but little worth or use to myself now, Heaven help me!
That Sunday I wandered restlessly about. I was waiting for the Captain; he was to be back today. To make sure of things as far as I could, I went for a long walk up along the stream that fed our reservoir. I wanted to have another look at the two little waters up the hillside—“the sources of the Nile.”
Coming down on the way back, I met Lars Falkenberg; he was going home. The full moon was just coming up, red and huge, and turned things light all round. A touch of snow and frost there was, too; it was easy breathing. Lars was in a friendly mood: he had been drinking Brændevin somewhere, and talked a great deal. But I was not altogether pleased at meeting him.
I had stood there long up on the wooded hillside, listening to the soughing of earth and sky, and there was nothing else to hear. Then there might come a faint little rustling, a curled and shrunken leaf rolling and rustling down over the frozen branches. It was like the sound of a little spring. Then the soughing of earth and sky again. A gentleness came over me; a mute was set on all my strings.
Lars Falkenberg wanted to know where I had been and where I was going. Reservoir? A senseless business that reservoir thing. As if people couldn't carry water for themselves. The Captain went in too much for these new-fangled inventions and ploughing over standing crops and such-like; he'd find himself landed one day. A rich harvest, they said. Ho, yes, but they never troubled to think what it must cost, with machines for this and that, and a pack of men to every machine again. What mustn't it have cost, now, for Grindhusen and me that summer! And then himself this autumn. In the old days it had been music and plenty at Øvrebø, and some of us had been asked into the parlour to sing. “I'll say no more,” said Lars. “And now there's hardly a sizeable stick of timber left in the woods.”
“A few years' time and it'll be as thick as ever.”
“A few years! A many years, you mean. No, it's not enough to go about being Captain and commanding—brrrr! and there it is! And he's not even spokesman for the neighbours now, and you never see folk coming up now to ask him what he'd say was best to do in this or that....”