Читать книгу The Power of a Lie - Johan Bojer - Страница 4

MARIT NORBY was proud—with the peasant women, because she looked down upon them, and with the wives of the local authorities, because she was afraid they might look down upon her.

“Oh, of course,” she would say with her own peculiar smile, “we who live in the country know nothing at all!”

“You are late,” she said, when Knut came in. She was sitting with her knitting in the little room between the kitchen and the large sitting-rooms. She wore a little cap upon her silvery hair, like the pastor’s wife; and her face was refined and handsome, with a firm mouth and prominent chin.

“The school meeting was a lengthy one,” said Knut, as he stood rubbing his hands in front of the stove.

“How did it go?” she asked, meaning the matter that she knew Knut had wanted to carry in the school committee that day.

“It went of course as badly as it could go,” said Knut, turning his back to the stove. He thought he saw a sarcastic gleam in his wife’s eye when he faced her, and his anger rose. Was it not enough to have had strangers worrying him to-day, without having his own people begin too? Of course she thought him a poor creature; and what would she say when she heard about Wangen?

“It seems to me you always lose, Knut,” she said, sticking a knitting-needle into her hair.

“Always? No, indeed I do not!”

She knew that tone, and added adroitly, as she took the knitting-needle out again and went on knitting:

“Yes, you are always so much too good, while those who don’t possess a penny, and don’t pay a farthing in taxes, govern us and order us about, and we have just to say ‘Thank you’ and pay.”

This was a healing balm, as she gave expression to the very sentiment that Norby himself was accustomed to propound.

“I suppose you’ve heard what has happened to Wangen,” she said, smiling grimly at her knitting.

“She knows it, then, confound it!” thought the old man. He was standing in front of the stove with his hands behind him, black-bearded, bald, with his blue serge coat buttoned tightly across his broad chest. His large head drooped wearily upon his breast, and he glanced at his wife from beneath his eyebrows. He did not feel equal to any explanations this evening. He had been out in the cold for several hours, and the warmth of the house made him feel increasingly heavy and sleepy.

“Yes indeed!” he said with a yawn; “who would have thought of such a thing happening?”

She gave a little scornful laugh.

“It seems to me you have prophesied it often enough of late,” she said. “But you may be glad you’ve had nothing to do with him.”

“She doesn’t know,” thought Norby, with a feeling of relief.

“Ye—es,” he growled in an uncertain tone of voice, his eyes dropping once more. He was not equal to either the sacrament matter or Wangen this evening.

Hearing at that moment a well-known laugh in the adjoining room, he took the opportunity of slipping out.

When he entered the next room, his daughter-in-law was sitting by a steaming bath in the middle of the floor, occupied in undressing her two-year-old son, preparatory to giving him his bath.

The old man paused at the door, and his tired face suddenly lit up.

“Who is that?” asked the fair-haired young mother, looking at the child. The boy looked at his grandfather with large, round eyes, and laughed a little shyly; but no sooner was his vest drawn over his head than he wriggled down to the floor to run to Norby. On gaining his liberty, however, he discovered the fact that he was naked, and this was even more interesting than his grandfather. He began to run backwards and forwards upon the floor, slapping his little body and laughing. Then he caught sight of his small breasts, and touched them with his fore-finger, then evaded once more the grasp of his mother, who tried to catch him, and laughed in triumph as he escaped. The old man was obliged to sit down and laugh too.

“Well, I shall go and get something good from grandfather!” said his mother; and in a twinkling the boy had climbed upon the old man’s knee, and began an investigation of all his pockets, until a packet of sweets was brought to light.

The boy’s name was Knut, of course. His father, Norby’s eldest son, had been thrown from his sledge and killed when driving home from Lillehammer fair before the boy was born; and ever since the old man had had a horror of strong drink.

A secret worry very quickly assumes the dimensions of an actual misfortune. Just because the old man was tired and wanted to be left in peace, he felt the explanation he must have with his wife to be doubly painful. With his grandchild he always became a child himself; but this evening he could see nothing but Wangen all the time, and this irritated him. While he sat and smiled at the boy, he suddenly glanced aside, as much as to say: “Cannot you leave me in peace even here?” Wangen penetrated, as it were, into the old man’s holy of holies, and Norby wanted to turn him out. He began to look upon Wangen as his enemy because he had brought dissension into his house, and because Norby had been guilty of a little deception towards his wife, which would now have to be unveiled.

“Now it’s time for the bath,” said the mother, taking up her boy, and while he splashed and screamed in the water, the old man stood as he always did, and laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. But all the time he had a dim vision of Wangen’s brickfields, and remembered how last autumn Wangen had instituted an eight-hours working-day. It was just like the fool! It would be a nice thing to be a farmer if such mad ideas spread and made labour conditions even worse than they were! Was it to be wondered at if such men went bankrupt? But it wasn’t his fault if Wangen said more than he meant on that subject when it was a question of inducing people to stand surety for him. And the old man began to pace the floor.

“Won’t grandfather say good-night to us?” said his daughter-in-law, as the old man went to the door as if about to rush out in a rage. Norby woke up. The boy was ready for bed, and was stretching out his arms towards him.

The family had supper in the little room between the kitchen and the large rooms. Since the new house had been built, they had been literally homeless, for none of them were at ease in the large, sparely-furnished rooms, and they were too much cramped for space in the little room. The hanging lamp with its glass pendants shed its light upon the tea-things and the white cloth, and a large copper kettle shone upon the old sideboard. Five people sat down to supper. There were the two daughters, Ingeborg and Laura, who sat one on each side of their father; opposite him sat his wife, with a silver chain about her neck, and a reserved expression on her face, and her daughter-in-law by her side. They still had one son living, but he was in Christiania studying philology.

“I must get you to put out my forest clothes this evening,” said Norby to Ingeborg; “I must go and see to the timber-felling in the morning.”

Ingeborg was the good angel of the house. Her fiancé, a young doctor, had been found dead in his bed three days before their wedding, and since then she had never been the same. Although she was not much more than five-and-twenty, her hair was sprinkled with grey, her cheeks were hollow, and her eyes had a timid, far-away look in them. She was worrying already as to what would become of her when her parents died; and in order to run no risk of being left with a bad conscience, she was constantly occupied in attending to their wants, was the first up in the morning, was always busy in the kitchen and larder, shed tears of despair when she had forgotten anything, and in spite of all this thought herself quite useless in the house.

“Do you eat as inelegantly when you are in town as you do here?” said the mother to Laura, looking sternly at her.

Laura looked a little embarrassed, and tried to throw an obstinate lock of hair off her rosy face; but she was not long in regaining her cheerfulness.

She went to school in town, and now began to talk about her old teacher and her mincing ways, her snuff-box and her inky fingers. “Dear children,” she mimicked, making an exceedingly funny face, and pretending to take a pinch of snuff; “do sit still and don’t give me so much trouble!” Her sister-in-law laughed, showing as she did so the absence of a front tooth; her mother could not help smiling, and even the old man glanced merrily at the lively girl.

“I will write to him to-morrow,” he said to himself as he emptied his cup. “I am sure it was not more than two thousand, and if there is more——”

When at last he got into bed in his room on the first floor, he put out the light on the table by his bedside, and yawned wearily. “I’ll pretend to be asleep when she comes up,” he said to himself, “and then I shall be spared both sacrament and guarantee for this evening.”

As he lay looking at the red glow from the half-closed draught of the stove, the door opened, and Laura crept softly in. She seated herself on the edge of her father’s bed, stroked his beard two or three times, and then confided to him in a whisper that her monthly account was in terrible disorder. Her mother had not gone over it yet, but she might ask for it any day now.

“And you think you can cheat me as much as you like, do you?” said the old man from his pillows. The child withdrew her hand from his beard in some confusion, but he caught it, and as he felt how small and soft it was, he said in a sleepy voice:

“You must come into my office to-morrow, then, and we shall see!”

The girl stroked his beard once more, and laid her cheek against his, for she knew now that her deficit would be made good.

She had scarcely gone when the door opened again. The old man hastily closed his eyes; but it was Ingeborg with the clothes he had asked for upon her arm.

“Isn’t some one crossing the yard with a lantern?” asked her father, seeing a light upon the blind.

“Yes, it’s the dairymaid,” said Ingeborg; “she’s expecting a calf to-night.”

And now Ingeborg too came and upon sat his bed.

“There’s something I must tell you, father,” she began softly. “When I was at the post-office to-day, I heard that Lawyer Basting had been declaring that you would suffer too by this failure. I didn’t dare to tell mother until I had spoken to you about it.”

The old man had made up his mind to be left in peace for this evening, so he said:

“Poor Basting! He’s always got something or other to chatter about.”

“I was sure it was untrue,” said Ingeborg, rising; and after drawing the blind farther down, she quietly left the room again.

The next morning, before Norby rose, his wife asked him whether he had remembered to call at the clerk’s. Upon his saying that he had not, a scene ensued, and Marit left the room, slamming the door behind her, and threatening to go to the sacrament alone.

Norby lay in bed longer than usual, for when Marit was thoroughly roused, as she was to-day, she would sometimes not utter a word for a week at a time; and then neither of them was willing to stoop low enough to be the first to bridge the gulf that separated them, and break the silence.

When at last he came down and went out into the yard, one of the men came up to him and asked with a knowing smile whether it were really true that Wangen had forged somebody’s signature.

“It would be very like him if he had!” said Norby, looking up at the sky to see if it were weather for tree-felling. The man, who was busied in shovelling the snow from the road, leaned upon his spade, and looking askance at the old man, continued:

“We’ve heard that it’s your name. He’s been boasting that it’s Norby himself that is surety for him; but now we hear from the house servants that it’s a lie.”

“It’s no business of that idiot’s anyhow!” thought the old man, and passed on without answering.

But on going round by the barn, where threshing was in progress, he had the same question of Wangen’s forgery put to him. He still made no answer, but plunged his hand into the grain at the back of the machine, whereupon an old labourer said, as he scratched his head:

“Well, well; haven’t I always said that man would see the inside of a prison some day?”

This, however, made Norby a little uneasy. “If it comes out that I have circulated a report like that,” he thought, “he can make it unpleasant for me, and give people enough to talk about.” He was on the point of nipping the report in the bud by explaining matters, when he caught sight, through the barn-door, of the smith going along the road with a sack upon his back.

“Has the smith been in here?” he asked.

“Yes,” was the answer from several voices amidst the rustling of straw in the half-darkness.

“Then he knows it too!” thought Norby; “and by the evening it will be all over the parish. I must stop the smith!—Why, he was to have come and done the new sledges!” he said aloud as a pretext for rushing out and hastening down the road after the smith.

The snow-plough had not been driven along the road since the fall during the night, and it was heavy walking and still heavier running. The farther the old man ran, the angrier he became. “Here am I running like a madman,” he thought, “and all because I’ve helped that rogue!—Ola, Ola!” he shouted, waving his hand.

But the sack on the smith’s back could neither see nor hear, and the old man had to go on running. The tale must be stopped, or he might have to pay dearly for it.

At last the smith stopped because he met a man on ski; but before Norby came up to them the man had gone on down the hill.

“What’s this I hear?” said the smith, advancing a few steps towards Norby. “That Wangen is a nice fellow, he is! He’s fleeced me too. I’ve just got a bill from him for a sack of rye-flour that I paid for down!”

“It’s a lie!” cried Norby, thinking of the forgery, and breathless after his run.

“A lie? No, indeed it’s not; it’s as true as I’m standing here!” said the smith, thinking of his flour.

But now the old man recollected the man on ski.

“Did you tell that man about Wangen?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed I did,” said the smith. “Ah, they’re bad times these!”

Norby wiped the perspiration from his face, removing his cap and wiping the crown of his head, as he turned and gazed after the man on ski, who was now gaily scudding down towards the fjord, raising a cloud of snow as he went. And that story was flying down with him!

Knut Norby stood there utterly helpless, gazing after him.

“It’s no use now my making a fool of myself either to the smith or the men,” he said to himself; “for the devil himself’s gone off with the report, and I’m in a pretty fix!”

“You were calling to me, weren’t you?” said the smith. “Was there anything you wanted?”

“Yes, there was!” cried the old man, turning upon him angrily. “Confound you! You’ve promised for months past to come and fix up my sledges; but you’re a rascal, that’s what you are! You owe me money and you won’t pay. I’ll set the bailiff upon you this very day!” And Norby set off homewards, leaving the smith standing with his sack on his back, staring after him.

“This forgery must have made him daft!” he thought, as he turned and went slowly on his way.