Читать книгу Mothwise - Knut Hamsun - Страница 4

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No, Rolandsen did not wait a minute; he knew his Jomfru van Loos, and had no doubt as to what she wanted. Rolandsen was not easily persuaded to anything he did not care about himself.

A little way along the road he met a fisherman who had come out too late to be present at the arrival. This was Enok, a pious, inoffensive man, who always walked with downcast eyes and wore a kerchief tied round his head for earache.

“You’re too late,” said Rolandsen as he passed.

“Has he come?”

“He has. I shook hands with him.” Rolandsen passed on, and called back over his shoulder, “Enok, mark what I say. I envy that man his wife!”

Now saying a foolish and most improper thing like that to Enok was choosing the very man of all men. Enok would be sure to bring it about.

Rolandsen walked farther and farther along by the wood, and came to the river. Here was the fish-glue factory, owned by Trader Mack; some girls were employed on the place, and it was Rolandsen’s way to chaff them as often as he passed. He was a very firebrand for that, and none could deny it. Moreover, he was in high spirits to-day, and stayed longer than usual. The girls saw at once that he was splendidly in drink.

“You, Ragna, what d’you think it is makes me come up here every day?” says Rolandsen.

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” says Ragna.

“Oh, you think, of course, it’s old Mick.”

The girls laughed at that. “Old Mick, ha, ha! Old Nick, he means.”

“It’s for your salvation,” says Rolandsen. “You’d better take care of yourself with the fisher-lads about here; they’re a wicked lot.”

“Wicked, indeed! And what about yourself, then?” says another girl. “With two children of your own already. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Ah, Nicoline, now how can you say such a thing? You’ve been a thorn in my heart and near the death of me for more than I can say, and that you know. But as for you, Ragna, I’m going to see you saved, and that without mercy.”

“You go and talk to Jomfru van Loos,” says Ragna.

“But you’ve desperate little sense,” Rolandsen went on. “Now those fish-heads, for instance. How long do you steam them before you screw down the valve?”

“Two hours,” says Ragna.

Rolandsen nods to himself. He had reckoned that up and worked it out before. Ho, that firebrand Rolandsen, he knew well enough what it was took him up to the factory every day, chaffing the girls and sniffing about all the time.

“Don’t take that lid off, Pernille,” he cried suddenly. “Are you out of your senses, girl?”

Pernille flushes red. “Frederik he said I was to stir it round,” she says.

“Every time you lift the lid, some of the heat goes out,” says Rolandsen.

But a moment later, when Frederik Mack, the trader’s son, came up, Rolandsen turned off into his usual jesting tone once more.

“Wasn’t it you, Pernille, that was in service at the Lensmand’s one year, and bullied the life out of everyone in the place? Smashing everything to bits in a rage—all barring the bedclothes, perhaps.”

The other girls laughed; Pernille was the gentlest creature that ever lived, and weakly to boot. Moreover, her father was organ-blower at the church, which gave her a sort of godliness, as it were.

Coming down on to the road again, Rolandsen caught sight of Olga once more—coming from the store, no doubt. She quickened her pace, hurrying to avoid him; it would never do for Rolandsen to think she had been waiting about for him. But Rolandsen had no such idea; he knew that if he did not catch this young maid face to face she would always hurry away and disappear. And it did not trouble him in the least that he made no progress with her; far from it. It was not Olga by any means that filled his mind.

He comes home to the telegraph station, and walks in with his lordliest air, to ward off his assistant, who wanted to gossip. Rolandsen was not an easy man to work with just at present. He shut himself up in a little room apart, that no one ever entered save himself and one old woman. Here he lived and slept.

This room is Rolandsen’s world. Rolandsen is not all foolishness and drink, but a great thinker and inventor. There is a smell of acids and chemicals and medicine in that room of his; the smell oozed out into the passage and forced every stranger to notice it. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he kept all these medicaments about solely to mask the smell of the quantities of brændevin he was always drinking. But that again was Ove Rolandsen’s unfathomable artfulness. …

The truth of the matter was that he used those liquids in bottles and jars for his experiments. He had discovered a chemical process for the manufacture of fish-glue—a new method that would leave Trader Mack and his factory simply nowhere. Mack had set up his plant at considerable expense; his means of transport were inadequate, and his supplies of raw material restricted to the fishing season. Moreover, the business was superintended by his son Frederik, who was by no means an expert. Rolandsen could manufacture fish-glue from a host of other materials than fish heads, and also from the waste products of Mack’s own factory. Furthermore, from the last residue of all he could extract a remarkable dye.

Save for his weight of poverty and helplessness, Rolandsen of the Telegraphs would have made his invention famous by this time. But no one in the place could come by ready money except through the agency of Trader Mack, and, for excellent reasons, it was impossible to go to him in this case. He had once ventured to suggest that the fish-glue from the factory was over-costly to produce, but Mack had merely waved his hand in his lordly, careless way, and said that the factory was a gold-mine, nothing less. Rolandsen himself was burning to show forth the results of his work. He had sent samples of his product to chemists at home and abroad, and satisfied himself that it was good enough so far. But he got no farther. He had yet to give the pure, finished liquid to the world, and take out patents in all countries.

So that it was not without motive and vainly that Rolandsen had turned out that day to receive the new chaplain and his family. Rolandsen, the wily one, had a little plan of his own. For if the priest were a wealthy man, he could, no doubt, invest a little in a safe and important invention. “If no one else will do it, I will”—that was the thing he would say, no doubt. Rolandsen had hopes.

Alas, Rolandsen was always having hopes—a very little was enough to fire him. On the other hand he took his disappointments bravely; none could say otherwise than that he bore himself stiffly and proudly, and was not to be crushed. There was Mack’s daughter Elise, for instance, even she had not crushed him. A tall, handsome girl, with a brown skin and red lips, and twenty-three years of age. It was whispered that Captain Henriksen, of the coasting steamer, worshipped her in secret; but years came and years passed, and nothing happened. What could be the matter? Rolandsen had already made an eternal fool of himself three years back; when she was only twenty he had laid his heart at her feet. And she had been kind enough not to understand him. That was where Rolandsen ought to have stopped and drawn back, but he went forward instead, and now, last year, he had begun to speak openly. Elise Mack had been forced to laugh in his face, to make this presumptuous telegraph person realise the gulf between them. Was she not a lady, who had kept no less than Captain Henriksen waiting years for her consent?

And then it was that Rolandsen went off and got engaged to Jomfru van Loos. Ho, he was not the man to take his death of a refusal from high quarters!

But now it was spring again. And the spring was a thing well-nigh intolerable to a great heart. It drove creation to its uttermost limit; ay, it blew with spiced winds into innocent nostrils.