Part 3 (1/2)

Will you stand, you dogs? No, the devil take me if they will stand.

Thanks, Jakob Skomager. Let's have another! Listen, comrade! Where's the road to the town? Stand, I tell you! Look, the beast is drunk. You drank like a toper, Jakob. Do you call that a drink of whiskey--you measure like a Turk.

(While he is speaking he falls and remains lying.)

Scene 8.

Baron Nilus. His Secretary. A Valet. Two Lackeys.

=Baron=--The prospects for a good crop are very promising. Just see how nice the barley stands.

=Secretary=--Yes, that is quite true, your Grace; but that means that a bushel of barley will not bring a higher price than five marks.

=Baron=--That makes no difference. The peasants always do better when the times are good.

=Secretary=--I don't know how it is, my lord, the peasants always complain and ask for seed grain whether the season is good or bad. When they have anything they drink all the more. Here is an innkeeper in the neighborhood by the name of Jakob Skomager who does much to make the peasants poor. They say that he puts salt in the beer so that the more they drink, the more they shall thirst.

=Baron=--We must get that fellow out of the way. But what is that lying there in the road? Why, that's a dead man. One hears of nothing but accidents. Run over there, one of you, and see what it is.

=A lackey=--That is Jeppe on the Hill, who has the shrewish wife. Wake up, Jeppe. No, he wouldn't wake up if we pounded him and pulled him around by the hair.

=Baron=--Just let him be, I would like to play a little trick on him. You used to be quite inventive fellows, can you devise something now to amuse me?

=Secretary=--It seems to me it would be clever if we tied a paper collar around his neck or clipped his hair.

=The valet=--It seems to me that it would be even more clever if we daubed his face with ink and stationed someone to see how his wife would receive him when he came home in such a predicament.

=Baron=--That's all very well, but what will you wager that Erik can devise something more clever than that? Give us your opinion, Erik!

=Erik, lackey=--It is my opinion that his clothes should all be taken off and that he should be laid in my lord's best bed, and in the morning when he awakes we should all act as though he were the lord of the manor, so that he should not know who or where he was. And when we have made him believe that he is the baron, we should make him as drunk again as he now is and lay him, in his old clothes, on the same dung heap. If this plan is carefully executed, it would have a strange effect and he would make himself believe either that he had dreamed about such glories or that he had really been in Paradise.

=Baron=--Erik, you are a great man and therefore you have only great ideas. But now if he should wake up in the meantime?

=Erik=--I am very sure that he will not, my lord. Since the same Jeppe on the Hill is one of the soundest sleepers in the whole district. Why, they tried the other year to fasten a rocket to the back of his neck, but even when the rocket was fired off he didn't wake up from his sleep.

=Baron=--Let us then proceed. Take him away immediately, clothe him in a fine s.h.i.+rt and lay him in my best bed.

(Curtain.)

ACT II.

Scene 1.

Jeppe.

(Jeppe is represented lying in the Baron's bed, a gold embroidered dressing gown on a chair; he awakes, rubs his eyes, looks around and becomes frightened; rubs his eyes again, feels of his head and finds a gold embroidered nightcap; he moistens his eyelids, rubs them again, turns the nightcap around and examines it, looks at his fine s.h.i.+rt, at the robe, at everything, with strange grimaces. Meanwhile soft music is heard, at which Jeppe folds his hands and weeps; when the music stops he begins to speak.)

But what is this? What sort of splendor is this and how have I come here? Do I dream, or am I awake? No, I am quite awake. Where is my wife, where are my children, where is my house, and where is Jeppe? Everything is changed, myself, too. Ah, what can it be? What can it be? (He calls softly and fearfully.) Nille! Nille! Nille! I believe that I have got into Heaven, Nille, and that without deserving it. But, can it be me? It seems to me it is; then again, it seems to me it isn't. When I feel of my back, which is still sore from the blows I got, when I hear myself speak, when I feel of my hollow tooth, it seems to me that it's me.