They both together stood up straight, gave a long-drawn sigh and went below.
“It’s getting dark,” said Jaak, wiping the sweat from his face. “The cows will be waiting.”
“Yes,” said Stafke. “It gets evening all at once. Well, Jaak, till Sunday.”
And Jaak went away, through the now moonlit drove, with a new bundle under his arm and thinking of the farm, of his twenty-nine cow-beasts and of Sunday and of Stafke’s pigeons....
Il y a des malheurs qui arrivent
d’un pas si lent et si sûr qu’ils
paraissent faire partie de la vie
journalière.
MONTALEMBERT.
IX. AN ACCIDENT
He had been half awake several times already, but each time he had slipped back into an uneasy doze, a restless, wearisome sojourn in a strange, drowsy world, in which he struggled with stupid, silly dream-spectres, all jumbled together in a huddled mass of incoherent, impossible thoughts and actions; a blank world in which all his workaday doings were forgotten; an after-life of tiring sleep following on the carouse of yesterday. He lay half-suffocated in the stifling heat of that tiled garret, lay tossing on a straw mattress. And suddenly, with a jolt that jerked him sleeping like a beast of burden. And now why couldn’t he take life as it came, like his mates, who just went through it anyhow, without any calculating, callously and cheerfully, something like a machine which, when the sun comes out and it is daylight, begins to move arms and legs, to twist and turn the whole day long and, when it is evening again and dark, falls down and remains lying dead, for a few hours, with all the other things?