Part 71 (1/2)

”Get away and wash your dirty mouth,” says Aronsen furiously.

”Ha ha ha! Nay, you've no call to dance about that way; keep still and look like a picture!”

Geissler is tired, tired out, even his smoked gla.s.ses do not help him now, his eyes keep closing in the glare.

”Good-bye, Sivert man,” says he all at once. ”No, I can't get up to Sellanraa this time, after all; tell your father. I've a heap of things to see to. But I'll come later on--say that....”

Aronsen spits after him, and says: ”Ought to be shot!”

For three days the caravan peddles its wares, selling out the contents of the sacks, and getting good prices. It was a brilliant piece of business. The village folk were still well supplied with money after the downfall of the mine, and were excellently in form in the way of spending; those stuffed birds on springs were the very thing they wanted; they set them up on chests of drawers in their parlours, and also bought nice paper-knives, the very thing for cutting the leaves of an almanac. Aronsen was furious. ”Just as if I hadn't things every bit as good in my store,” said he.

Trader Aronsen was in a sorry way; he had made up his mind to keep with these pedlars and their sacks, watching them all the time; but they went separate ways about the village, each for himself, and Aronsen almost tore himself to pieces trying to follow all at once.

First he gave up Fredrik Strom, who was quickest at saying unpleasant things; then Sivert, because he never said a word, but went on selling; at last he stuck to following his former clerk, and trying to set folk against him wherever he went in. Oh, but Andresen knew his master that was--knew him of old, and how little he knew of business and unlawful trading.

”Ho, you mean to say English thread's not prohibited?” said Aronsen, looking wise.

”I know it is,” answered Andresen. ”But I'm not carrying any this way; I can sell that elsewhere. I haven't a reel in my pack; look for yourself, if you like.”

”That's as it may be,” says Aronsen. ”Anyway, I know what's forbidden, and I've shown you, so don't try to teach me.”

Aronsen stood it for a whole day, then he gave up Andresen, too, and went home. The pedlars had no one to watch them after that.

And then things began to go swimmingly. It was in the day when womenfolk used to wear loose plaits in their hair; and Andresen, he was the man to sell loose plaits. Ay, at a pinch he could sell fair plaits to dark girls, and be sorry he'd nothing lighter; no grey plaits, for instance, for that was the finest of all. And every evening the three young salesmen met at an appointed place and went over the day's trade, each borrowing from another anything he'd sold out of; and Andresen would sit down, often as not, and take out a file and file away the German trade-mark from a sportsman's whistle, or rub out ”Faber” on the pens and pencils. Andresen was a trump, and always had been.

Sivert, on the other hand, was rather a disappointment. Not that he was any way slack, and failed to sell his goods--'twas he, indeed, sold most--but he did not get enough for them. ”You don't put in enough patter with it,” said Andresen.

No, Sivert was no hand at reeling off a lot of talk; he was a fieldworker, sure of what he said, and speaking calmly when he spoke at all. What was there to talk about here? Also, Sivert was anxious to be done with it and get back home, there was work to do in the fields.

”Tis that Jensine's calling him,” Fredrik Strom explained. Fredrik, himself, by the way, had work on his own fields to be done that spring, and little time to waste; but for all that, he must look in on Aronsen the last day and get up an argument with him. ”I'll sell him the empty sacks,” said he.

Andresen and Sivert stayed outside while he went in. They heard grand goings-on inside the store, both talking at once, and Fredrik setting up a laugh now and again; then Aronsen threw open the door and showed his visitor out. Oh, but Fredrik didn't come out--no, he took his time, and talked a lot more. The last thing they heard from outside was Fredrik trying to sell Aronsen a lot of rocking-horses.

Then the caravan went home again--three young men full of life and health. They marched and sang, slept a few hours in the open, and went on again. When they got back to Sellanraa on the Monday, Isak had begun sowing. The weather was right for it; the air moist, with the sun peeping out now and again, and a mighty rainbow strung right across the heavens.

The caravan broke up--_Farvel, Farvel_....

Isak at his sowing; a stump of a man, a barge of a man to look at, nothing more. Clad in homespun--wool from his own sheep, boots from the hide of his own cows and calves. Sowing--and he walks religiously bareheaded to that work; his head is bald just at the very top, but all the rest of him shamefully hairy; a fan, a wheel of hair and beard, stands out from his face. 'Tis Isak, the Margrave.

'Twas rarely he knew the day of the month--what need had he of that?

He had no bills to be met on a certain date; the marks on his almanac were to show the time when each of the cows should bear. But he knew St. Olaf's Day in the autumn, that by then his hay must be in, and he knew Candlemas in spring, and that three weeks after then the bears came out of their winter quarters; all seed must be in the earth by then. He knew what was needful.

A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.

Nay, there was nothing left to him now of the copper mine and its riches--the money had vanished into air. And who had anything left of all that wealth when the working stopped, and the hills lay dead and deserted? But the _Almenning_ was there still, and ten new holdings on that land, beckoning a hundred more.

Nothing growing there? All things growing there; men and beasts and fruit of the soil. Isak sowing his corn. The evening sunlight falls on the corn that flashes out in an arc from his hand, and falls like a dropping of gold to the ground. Here comes Sivert to the harrowing; after that the roller, and then the harrow again. Forest and field look on. All is majesty and power--a sequence and purpose of things.