It was virgin soil, but it was overrun with heather and juniper- scrub, through which brambles and honeysuckle twined their way. Halfway up a perpendicular wall of rock hung the ash and the wild cherry, gripping the bare cliff with roots that looked like crippled hands. Crab-apple trees, sloe-bushes and wild rose-briars made an impenetrable jungle, which already bore traces of Lasse’s exertions. And in the midst of this luxuriant growth the rocky subsoil protruded its grim features, or came so near the surface that the sun had scorched the roots of the herbage.
“That’s a proper little Paradise,” said Lasse; “you can scarcely set foot in it without treading on the berries. But it’s got to be turned into arable if one is to live here.”
“Isn’t the soil rather middling?” said Pelle.
“Middling—when all that can grow and flourish there?” Lasse pointed to where birch and aspen stood waving their shining foliage to and fro in the breeze. “No, but it’ll be a damned rough bit of work to get it ready for ploughing; I’m sorry now that you aren’t at home.”
Lasse had several times made this allusion, but Pelle was deaf to it. All this was not what he had imagined; he felt no desire to play the landowner’s son at home in the way Lasse had in mind.
“It’ll be trouble enough here to manage about your daily bread,” he said, with remarkable precocity.
“Oh, it won’t be so difficult to earn our daily bread, even if we can’t hold a feast every day,” said Lasse, affronted. “And here at any rate a man can straighten his back without having a bailiff come yapping round him. Even if I were to work myself to death here, at least I’ve done with slavery. And you must not forget the pleasure of seeing the soil coming under one’s hands, day after day, and yielding something instead of lying there useless. That is indeed the finest task a man can perform—to till the earth and make it fruitful—I can think of none better! But you—have you lost the farmer’s instinct in town?”
Pelle did not reply. Although there might be something fine and splendid in working oneself to death over a bit of land, just so that something different might grow there, he himself was glad that he did not possess this farmer’s instinct.
“My father, and his father, and all of our family I have ever known, we’ve all had something in us so that we’ve been driven to improve the soil, without thinking of our own comfort. But it certainly never entered the mind of one of us that we should ever hear it ill spoken of—and by one of our own people too!” Lasse spoke with his face turned away—as did the Almighty when He was wroth with His people; and Pelle felt as though he were a hateful renegade, as bad as bad could be. But nevertheless he would not give in.
“I should be no use at all here,” he said apologetically, gazing in the direction of the sea. “I don’t believe in it.”