He failed! The legal proprietor took over a good piece of work and got it for nothing, and Stonemason Jörgensen stood up in a pair of cracked wooden shoes, with a load of debts which he would never be able to shake off. Every one rejoiced to see him return to the existence of a day-laborer. But he did not submit quietly. He took to drink. From time to time he broke out and raged like the devil himself. They could not get rid of him; he weighed upon the minds of all, like an angry rumbling; even when he was quietly going about his work they could not quite forget him. Under these conditions he squandered his last possessions, and he moved into the cottage by the refuse-heaps, where formerly no one had dwelt.
He had become another man since the grant for the great harbor project had been approved. He no longer touched any brandy; when Pelle went out to see his friends, the “Great Power” would be sitting at the window, busying himself with sketches and figures. His wife was moving about and weeping quietly to herself; the old woman was scolding. But Jörgensen turned his broad back upon them and pored silently over his own affairs. He was not to be shaken out of his self-sufficiency.
The mother received them out in the kitchen, when she heard their noisy approach. “You must move quietly—Father is calculating and calculating, poor fellow! He can get no peace in his head since the harbor plans have been seriously adopted. His ideas are always working in him. That must be so, he says, and that so! If he would only take life quietly among his equals and leave the great people to worry over their own affairs!”
He sat in the window, right in the sunlight, adding up some troublesome accounts; he whispered half to himself, and his mutilated forefinger, whose outer joint had been blown off, ran up and down the columns. Then he struck the table. “Oh, if only a man had learned something!” he groaned. The sunlight played on his dark beard; his weary labors had been powerless to stiffen his limbs or to pull him down. Drink had failed to hurt him—he sat there like strength personified; his great forehead and his throat were deeply bronzed by the sun.
“Look here, Morten!” he cried, turning to the boys. “Just look at these figures!”
Morten looked. “What is it, father?”
“What is it? Our earnings during the last week! You can see they are big figures!”
“No, father; what are they?” Morten twined his slender hand in his father’s beard.
The “Great Power’s” eyes grew mild under this caress.
“It’s a proposed alteration—they want to keep the channel in the old place, and that is wrong; when the wind blows in from the sea, one can’t get into the harbor. The channel must run out there, and the outer breakwater must curve like this”—and he pointed to his sketches. “Every fisherman and sailor will confirm what I say—but the big engineer gentlemen are so clever!”