Jörgensen moved restlessly to and fro. “She’s crying,” he muttered. “There’s no grit in her—she ought to have married some farmer’s lad, devil take it, if the truth must be told! It catches me here and presses as though some one were shoving an iron ferrule into my brain. Come on, ‘Great Power’! Come on! so that you can get some peace from it! I say every day. No, let be, I say then—you must keep a hold on yourself, or she just goes about crying! And she’s never been anything but good to you! But deuce take it, if it would only come out! And then one goes to bed and says, Praise God, the day is done—and another day, and another. And they stand there and stare—and wait; but let them wait; nothing happens, for now the ‘Great Power’ has got control of himself! And then all at once it’s there behind! Hit away! Eight in the thick of the heap! Send them all to hell, the scoundrels! ’Cause a man must drink, in order to keep his energies in check…. Well, and there she sits! Can one of you lend me a krone?”
“Not I!” said Jens.
“No, not you—he’d be a pretty duffer who’d expect anything from you! Haven’t I always said ‘he takes after the wrong side’? He’s like his mother. He’s got a heart, but he’s incapable. What can you really do, Jens? Do you get fine clothes from your master, and does he treat you like a son, and will you finish up by taking over the business as his son-in-law? And why not? if I may ask the question. Your father is as much respected as Morten’s.”
“Morten won’t be a son-in-law, either, if his master has no daughter,” Jens muttered.
“No. But he might have had a daughter, hey? But there we’ve got an answer. You don’t reflect. Morten, he’s got something there!” He touched his forehead.
“Then you shouldn’t have hit me on the head,” retorted Jens sulkily.
“On the head—well! But the understanding has its seat in the head. That’s where one ought to hammer it in. For what use would it be, I ask you, supposing you commit some stupidity with your head and I smack you on the behind? You don’t need any understanding there? But it has helped—you’ve grown much smarter. That was no fool’s answer you gave me just now: ‘Then you shouldn’t have hit me on the head!’” He nodded in acknowledgment. “No, but here is a head that can give them some trouble—there are knots of sense in this wood, hey?” And the three boys had to feel the top of his head.
He stood there like a swaying tree, and listened with a changing expression to the less frequent sobs of his wife; she was now sitting by the fire, just facing the door. “She does nothing but cry,” he said compassionately; “that’s a way the women have of amusing themselves nowadays. Life has been hard on us, and she couldn’t stand hardships, poor thing! For example, if I were to say now that I’d like to smash the stove”—and here he seized a heavy chair and waved it about in the air—“then she begins to cry. She cries about everything. But if I get on I shall take another wife —one who can make a bit of a show. Because this is nonsense. Can she receive her guests and make fine conversation? Pah! What the devil is the use of my working and pulling us all out of the mud? But now I’m going out again—God knows, it ain’t amusing here!”
His wife hurried across to him. “Ah, don’t go out, Peter—stay here, do!” she begged.
“Am I to hang about here listening to you maundering on?” he asked sulkily, shrugging his shoulders. He was like a great, good-natured boy who gives himself airs.