"Well, when all's said and done we have Switzerland to thank for being
able to sit here at our ease in this comfortable mountain resort. We get
tourists into the country on the Swiss model, and earn money and pay off
our debts. Ask this man if he would have been willing to do without all we
have learned from Switzerland...."
That evening Mrs. Brede asked,
"Why did you make Mr. Höy look so unreasonable today, Mrs. Molie?"
"I?" said Mrs., Molie innocently. "Well, really--!"
As a matter of fact, it seemed as though Mrs. Molie had really been
innocent, for the very next morning she and the Associate Master set off
up the fjeld together in a very gay mood, and remained away till midday.
If they had the matter out between them, then no doubt the lady spoke to
her much-tried friend as follows:
"Surely you can see I'm not interested in that lawyer-person! What an
idea! I only drew him out so you'd have the chance to give him a good
dressing down--don't you understand that? Really, you're the silliest,
sweetest--come here, let me kiss you...."
XIV
Since the departure of the great caravan, there have been no other
visitors. Some of us cannot understand it; others have in a manner of
speaking got a whiff of what is wrong; but all of us still believe there
will be more visitors, because after all we're the only ones that have the
Tore peaks!
But no one appears.
The women of the house do their daily work for the inmates and do not
complain, but they are not happy. Paul still takes things quietly; he
sleeps a great deal in his room behind the kitchen, but once or twice I
have seen him walking away from the house at night, walking in deep
thought toward the woods.
From the neighboring valley comes the rumor that the motor traffic has
started there now. So this is the explanation of the quiet in our valley!
Then one day a Dane came down to us from the fjeld. He had climbed the
Tore peaks from the other side, something that had been thought impossible
till now. He had simply driven in a car to the foot of the mountains and
walked across!
So we no longer had the Tore peaks to ourselves, either.
I wonder whether, after all, Paul is not going to try to sow green-fodder
in the long strip of land down by the river. That, at any rate, had been
his original intention, but then came the great caravan, and he neglected
it. Now, of course, the season is too far advanced for sowing, and there
will be nothing but docks and chickweed. Could not the field be turfed, at
least, and sown? Why didn't Paul think of such things instead of walking
the woods at night?
But Paul has many thoughts. At an early age, his interest in farming was
diverted to the tourist traffic, and there it has remained. He hears that
our lawyer is also an architect and asks him to draw a plan for the big
new house with the six rooms, the hall and the bathroom. Paul has already
ordered the log chairs and the reindeer horns for the hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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