“No, you stop there and let me get up,” said Karna, who lay against the wall—she had kept silence while the men-folk were speaking. “He gets this lumbago, I can tell you!” she declared, jumping out of bed.
“Ay, I’ve been at it a bit too hard. Work comes easy when a man’s his own master—it’s difficult to leave off. But it’ll be all right when once I’ve got things properly going. Work’s a good embrocation for the lumbago. And how goes it with you then? I was near believing you must be dead!”
So Pelle had to sit on the edge of the bed and tell about everything in town—about the workshop, and the young master’s lame leg, and everything. But he said nothing of the disagreeable things; it was not for men to dwell upon such things.
“Then you’ve been getting on well in foreign parts!” said Lasse, delighted. “And do they think well of you?”
“Yes!” This came a trifle slowly. In the first place, respect was just particularly what he had not won—but why trumpet forth his miseries? “The young master must like me—he often chats with me, even over the journeyman’s head.”
“Now, think of that! I have often wondered, I can tell you, how you were getting on, and whether we shouldn’t soon have good news of you. But everything takes time, that we know. And as you see, I’m in a very different position.”
“Yes, you’ve become a landowner!” said Pelle, smiling.
“The deuce, yes, so I am!” Lasse laughed, too, but then he groaned piteously with the pain in his back. “In the daytime, when I’m working hard, I get along well enough, but as soon as I lie down, then it comes on directly. And it’s the devil of a pain—as though the wheels of a heavy loaded wagon were going to and fro across your back, whatever name you like to give it. Well, well! It’s a fine thing, all the same, to be your own master! It’s funny how it takes me—but dry bread tastes better to me at my own table than—yes, by God, I can tell you, it tastes better than cake at any other body’s table! And then to be all alone on your own bit of land, and to be able to spit wherever you like to spit, without asking anybody’s leave! And the soil isn’t so bad; even if most of it has never been under cultivation, it has all been lying there storing up its power to produce since the beginning of the world. But about the people in the town—are they agreeable?”
Oh, Pelle had nothing to complain about. “But when were you married?” he asked suddenly.
“Well, you see,” and Lasse began to stumble over his own words, although he had been prepared for the boy to ask this very question; “in a way we aren’t exactly married. That takes money, and the work here is getting forward…. But it’s our intention, I needn’t say, as soon as we have time and money.” It was honestly Lasse’s opinion that one could just as well dispense with the ceremony; at least until children came, and demanded an honorable birth. But he could see that Pelle did not relish the idea; he was still the same pedantic little chap the moment a point of honor was in question. “As soon as we’ve got the harvest under shelter we’ll invite people to a grand feast,” he said resolutely.