Tord stalked about with heavy lumps of clay under his shoes:
“How much can you get out of these miserable patches?”
“Oh, about three bushels of rye,” mumbled the bailiff, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. “The soil is good.”
“All right, I’ll pay you for three bushels! But get away now!”
And Tord took out some bank-notes.
But Mattson looked at his neighbour and shook his head:
“No, sir, you mustn’t make fun of an old man. I have ploughed this soil for forty years, I have. You put your money back again.”
Upon which Mattson made a sign to the drawers, who put their backs into the work again and continued their furrow as if nothing had happened.
From that day on Tord hated all that was Mattson’s. Incessantly he was running up against the object of his annoyance. Mattson’s cock woke him in the mornings with his obstinate moralisings on the dung heap. When he went down to his boat he swore because he had to dive under the old man’s nets, and on the juniper slope he was irritated by the stupid bleating of the sheep. In the midst of his land he was again reminded of Mattson by a lot of troublesome fences, cleverly built up of stones, branches and thorns. Such things irritate a free man strolling about on his own property. Tord did not step over them, no, he put his foot on the rubbish and enjoyed hearing it crash down, and he stepped through as proudly as if he were stepping over the walls of Jericho. But the next time he came strolling along he found to his fury that the fence had been repaired as if by magic.
It was work, patience, foresight, civilization that Tord hated in Mattson. This hatred occupied him fully the whole of the autumn. If he sat down to write and could not get into the right mood it was Mattson’s fault. If he got drunk it was as a protest against the sobriety of that damned old blockhead. When at last the gale came, Tord had his great day. A real raging south-easterly gale so that the old man could not get out and save his catch but had to go about waiting anxiously to haul in his torn nets full of seaweed and rubbish.