“But are you going—again—to send in a tender?” Morten looked at his father, horrified. The man nodded.
“But you aren’t good enough for them—you know you aren’t! They just laugh at you!”
“This time I shall be the one to laugh,” retorted Jörgensen, his brow clouding at the thought of all the contempt he had had to endure.
“Of course they laugh at him,” said the old woman from the chimney- corner, turning her hawk-like head toward them; “but one must play at something. Peter must always play the great man!”
Her son did not reply.
“They say you know something about sketching, Pelle?” he said quietly. “Can’t you bring this into order a bit? This here is the breakwater—supposing the water isn’t there—and this is the basin —cut through the middle, you understand? But I can’t get it to look right—yet the dimensions are quite correct. Here above the water-line there will be big coping-stones, and underneath it’s broken stone.”
Pelle set to work, but he was too finicking.
“Not so exact!” said Jörgensen. “Only roughly!”
He was always sitting over his work when they came. From his wife they learned that he did not put in a tender, after all, but took his plans to those who had undertaken the contract and offered them his cooperation. She had now lost all faith in his schemes, and was in a state of continual anxiety. “He’s so queer—he’s always taken up with only this one thing,” she said, shuddering. “He never drinks —and he doesn’t go raging against all the world as he used to do.”
“But that’s a good thing,” said Morten consolingly.