Once more Peer stood in his workroom
down at the foundry, wrestling with fire and steel.
A working drawing is a useful thing;
an idea in one’s head is all very well.
But the men he employed to turn his plans into tangible
models worked slowly; why not use his own hands for
what had to be done?
When the workmen arrived at the foundry
in the morning there was hammering going on already
in the little room. And when they left in the
evening, the master had not stopped working yet.
When the good citizens of Ringeby went to bed, they
would look out of their windows and see his light
still burning.
Peer had had plenty to tire him out
even before he began work here. But in the old
days no one had ever asked if he felt strong enough
to do this or that. And he never asked himself.
Now, as before, it was a question of getting something
done, at any cost. And never before had there
been so much at stake.
The wooden model of the new machine
is finished already, and the castings put together.
The whole thing looks simple enough, and yet what
a distance from the first rough implement to this thing,
which seems almost to live a thing with
a brain of metal at least. Have not these wheels
and axles had their parents and ancestors their
pedigree stretching back into the past? The steel
has brought forth, and its descendants again in turn,
advancing always toward something finer, stronger,
more efficient. And here is the last stage reached
by human invention in this particular work up to now yet,
after all, is it good enough? An invention successful
enough to bring money in to the inventor that
is not all. It must be more; it must be a world-success,
a thing to make its way across the prairies, across
the enormous plains of India and Egypt that
is what is needed. Sleep? rest? food? What
are such things when so much is at stake!
There was no longer that questioning
in his ear: Why? Whither? What then?
Useless to ponder on these things. His horizon
was narrowed down to include nothing beyond this one
problem. Once he had dreamed of a work allied
to his dreams of eternity. This, certainly, was
not it. What does the gain amount to, after all,
when humanity has one more machine added to it?
Does it kindle a single ray of dawn the more in a human
soul?
Yet this work, such as it was, had
now become his all. It must and should be all.
He was fast bound to it.
When he looked up at the window, there
seemed to be faces at each pane staring in. “What?
Not finished yet?” they seemed to say. “Think
what it means if you fail!” Merle’s face,
and the children’s: “Must we be driven
from Loreng, out into the cold?” The faces of
old Uthoug and his wife: “Was it for this
you came into an honourable family? To bring it
to ruin?” And behind them, swarming, all the
town. All knew what was at stake, and why he
was toiling so. All stared at him, waiting.
The Bank Manager was there too waiting,
like the rest.
One can seize one’s neck in
iron pincers, and say: You shall! Tired?
difficulties? time too short? all that doesn’t
exist. You shall! Is this thing or that
impossible? Well, make it possible. It is
your business to make it possible.
He spent but little time at home now;
a sofa in the workshop was his bed. Often Merle
would come in with food for him, and seeing how pale
and grey and worn out he was, she did not dare to question
him. She tried to jest instead. She had
trained herself long ago to be gay in a house where
shadows had to be driven off with laughter.
But one day, as she was leaving, he
held her back, and looked at her with a strange smile.
“Well, dear?” she said, with a questioning
look.
He stood looking at her as before,
with the same far-off smile. He was looking through
her into the little world she stood for. This
home, this family that he, a homeless man, had won
through her, was it all to go down in shipwreck?
Then he kissed her eyes and let her go.
And as her footsteps died away, he
stood a moment, moved by a sudden desire to turn to
some Power above him with a prayer that he might succeed
in this work. But there was no such Power.
And in the end his eyes turned once more to the iron,
the fire, his tools, and his own hands, and it was
as though he sighed out a prayer to these: “Help
me help me, that I may save my wife and
children’s happiness.”
Sleep? rest? weariness? He had
only a year’s grace. The bank would only
wait a year.
Winter and spring passed, and one
day in July he came home and rushed in upon Merle
crying, “To-morrow, Merle! They will be
here to-morrow!”
“Who?”
“The people to look at the machine. We’re
going to try it to-morrow.”
“Oh, Peer!” she said breathlessly, gazing
at him.
“It’s a good thing that
I had connections abroad,” he went on. “There’s
one man coming from an English firm, and another from
America. It ought to be a big business.”
The morrow came. Merle stood
looking after her husband as he drove off, his hat
on the back of his head, through the haze that followed
the night’s rain. But there was no time
to stand trembling; they were to have the strangers
to dinner, and she must see to it.
Out in the field the machine stood
ready, a slender, newly painted thing. A boy
was harnessing the horses.
Two men in soft hats and light overcoats
came up; it was old Uthoug, and the Bank Manager.
They stopped and looked round, leaning on their sticks;
the results of the day were not a matter of entire
indifference to these two gentlemen. Ah! here
was the big carriage from Loreng, with the two strangers
and Peer himself, who had been down to fetch them from
the hotel.
He was a little pale as he took the
reins and climbed to his seat on the machine, to drive
it himself through the meadow of high, thick timothy-grass.
The horses pricked up their ears and
tried to break into a gallop, the noise of the machine
behind them startling them as usual at first, but
they soon settled down to a steady pace, and the steel
arm bearing the shears swept a broad swath through
the meadow, where the grass stood shining after the
rain.
The two strangers walked slowly in
the rear, bending down now and again to look at the
stubble, and see if the shears cut clean. The
tall man with the heavy beard and pince-nez
was the agent for John Fowler of Leeds; the little
clean-shaven one with the Jewish nose represented
Harrow & Co. of Philadelphia.
Now and again they called to Peer
to stop, while they investigated some part of the
machine.
They asked him then to try it on different
ground; on an uneven slope, over little tussocks;
and at last the agent for Fowler’s would have
it that it should be tried on a patch of stony ground.
But that would spoil the shears? Very likely,
but Fowler’s would like to know exactly how the
shears were affected by stones on the ground.
At last the trials were over, and
the visitors nodded thoughtfully to each other.
Evidently they had come on something new here.
There were possibilities in the thing that might drive
most other types out of the field, even in the intense
competition that rages all round the world in agricultural
machinery.
Peer read the expression in their
eyes these cold-blooded specialists had
seen the vision; they had seen gold.
But all the same there was a hitch a little
hitch.
Dinner was over, the visitors had
left, and Merle and Peer were alone. She lifted
her eyes to his inquiringly.
“It went off well then?” she asked.
“Yes. But there is just one little thing
to put right.”
“Still something to put right after
you have worked so hard all these months?” She
sat down, and her hands dropped into her lap.
“It’s only a small detail,”
he said eagerly, pacing up and down. “When
the grass is wet, it sticks between the steel fingers
above the shears and accumulates there and gets in
the way. It’s the devil and all that I
never thought of testing it myself in wet weather.
But once I’ve got that right, my girl, the thing
will be a world-success.”
Once more the machine was set up in
his workshop, and he walked around it, watching, spying,
thinking, racking his brain to find the little device
that should make all well. All else was finished,
all was right, but he still lacked the single happy
thought, the flash of inspiration that
given, a moment’s work would be enough to give
this thing of steel life, and wings with which to
fly out over the wide world.
It might come at any moment, that
happy thought. And he tramped round and round
his machine, clenching his fists in desperation because
it was so slow in coming.
The last touch only, the dot upon
an i, was wanting. A slight change in the shape
or position of the fingers, or the length of the shears what
was it he wanted? How could he sleep that night?
He felt that he stood face to face
with a difficulty that could have been easily solved
had he come fresh to the work, but that his tortured
brain was too worn out to overcome.
But when an Arab horse is ready to
drop with fatigue, then is the time when it breaks
into a gallop.
He could not wait. There were
the faces at the window again, staring and asking:
“Not finished yet?” Merle, the children,
Uthoug and his wife, the Bank Manager. And there
were his competitors the world over. To-day he
was a length ahead of them, but by to-morrow he might
be left behind. Wait? Rest? No!
It was autumn now, and sleepless nights
drove him to a doctor, who prescribed cold baths,
perfect quiet, sleeping draughts, iron and arsenic.
Ah, yes. Peer could swallow all the prescriptions the
one thing he could not do was rest or sleep.
He would sit late into the night,
prostrate with exhaustion, watching the dying embers
of the forge, the steel, the tools. And innumerable
sparks would begin to fly before his eyes, and masses
of molten iron to creep about like living things over
walls and floor. And over by the forge
was something more defined, a misty shape, that grew
in size and clearness and stood at last a bearded,
naked demigod, with fire in one hand and sledgehammer
in the other.
“What? Who is that?”
“Man, do you not know me?”
“Who are you, I ask?”
“I have a thing to tell you:
it is vain for you to seek for any other faith than
faith in the evolution of the universe. It will
do no good to pray. You may dream yourself away
from the steel and the fire, but you must offer yourself
up to them at last. You are bound fast to these
things. Outside them your soul is nothing.
God? happiness? yourself? eternal life for you?
All these are nothing. The will of the world rolls
on towards its eternal goal, and the individual is
but fuel for the fire.”
Peer would spring up, believing for
a moment that someone was really there. But there
was nothing, only the empty air.
Now and again he would go home to
Loreng, but everything there seemed to pass in a mist.
He could see that Merle’s eyes were red, though
she sang cheerily as she went about the house.
It seemed to him that she had begged him to go to
bed and rest, and he had gone to bed. It would
be delicious to sleep. But in the middle of the
night it was borne in upon him that the fault lay
in the shape of the shears after all, and then there
was no stopping him from getting up and hurrying in
to the workshop. Winter has come round again,
and he fights his way in through a snow-storm.
And in the quiet night he lights his lamp, kindles
the forge fire, screws off the blades of the shears
once more. But when he has altered them and fixed
them in place again, he knows at once that the defect
was not in them after all.
Coffee is a good thing for keeping
the brain clear. He took to making it in the
workshop for himself and at night especially
a few cups did him good. They were so satisfying
too, that he felt no desire for food. And when
he came to the conclusion that the best thing would
be to make each separate part of the machine over
again anew, coffee was great help, keeping him awake
through many a long night.
It began to dawn upon him that Merle
and his father-in-law and the Bank Manager had taken
to lurking about the place night and day, watching
and spying to see if the work were not nearly done.
Why in the devil’s name could they not leave
him in peace just one week more? In
any case, the machine could not be tried before next
summer. At times the workers at the foundry would
be startled by their master suddenly rushing out from
his inner room and crying fiercely: “No
one is to come in here. I will be left in
peace!”
And when he had gone in again, they
would look at each other and shake their heads.
One morning Merle came down and walked
through the outer shops, and knocked at the door of
her husband’s room. There was no answer;
and she opened the door and went in.
A moment after, the workmen heard
a woman’s shriek, and when they ran in she was
bending over her husband, who was seated on the floor,
staring up at her with blank, uncomprehending eyes.
“Peer,” she cried, shaking
his shoulder “Peer, do you hear?
Oh, for God’s sake what is it, my
darling
One April day there was a stir in
the little town of Ringeby, and a stream of people,
all in their best clothes (though it was only Wednesday),
was moving out along the fjord road to Loreng.
There were the two editors, who had just settled one
of their everlasting disputes, and the two lawyers,
each still intent on snatching any scraps of business
that offered; there were tradesmen and artisans; and
nearly everyone was wearing a long overcoat and a
grey felt hat. But the tanner had put on a high
silk hat, so as to look a little taller.
Where the road left the wood most
of them stopped for a moment to look up at Loreng.
The great white house seemed to have set itself high
on its hill to look out far and wide over the lake
and the country round. And men talked of the
great doings, the feasting and magnificence, the great
house had seen in days gone by, from the time when
the place had been a Governor’s residence until
a few years back, when Engineer Holm was in his glory.
But to-day the place was up to auction,
with stock and furniture, and people had walked or
driven over from far around. For the bank management
felt they would not be justified in giving any longer
grace, now that Peer Holm was lying sick in hospital,
and no doctor would undertake to say whether he would
ever be fit to work again.
The courtyard was soon crowded.
Inside, in the great hall, the auctioneer was beginning
to put up the lots already, but most people hung back
a little, as if they felt a reluctance to go in.
For the air in there seemed charged with lingering
memories of splendour and hospitality, from the days
when cavaliers with ruffles and golden spurs had done
homage there to ladies in sweeping silk robes down
to the last gay banquets to which the famous engineer
from Egypt had loved to gather all the gentry round
in the days of his prosperity.
Most of the people stood on the steps
and in the entrance-hall. And now and again they
would catch a glimpse of a pale woman, dressed in black,
with thick dark eyebrows, crossing the courtyard to
a servant’s house or a storehouse to give some
order for moving the things. It was Merle, now
mistress here no longer.
Old Lorentz D. Uthoug met his sister,
the mighty lady of Bruseth, on the steps. She
looked at him, and there was a gleam of derision in
her narrowed eyes. But he drew himself up, and
said as he passed her, “You’ve nothing
to be afraid of. I’ve settled things so
that I’m not bankrupt yet. And you shall
have your share in full.”
And he strode in, a broad-shouldered,
upright figure, looking calmly at all men, that all
might see he was not the man to be crushed by a reverse.
Late in the day the chestnut, Bijou,
was put up for sale. He was led across the courtyard
in a halter, and as he came he stopped for a moment,
and threw up his head, and neighed, and from the stables
the other horses neighed in answer. Was it a
farewell? Did he remember the day, years ago,
when he had come there first, dancing on his white-stockinged
feet, full of youth and strength?
But by the woodshed there stood as
usual a little grey old man, busy sawing and chopping,
as if nothing at all was the matter. One master
left, another took his place; one needed firewood,
it seemed to him, as much as the other. And if
they came and gave him notice why, thank
the Lord, he was stone deaf. Thud, thud, the
sound of the axe went on.
A young man came driving up the hill,
a florid-faced young man, with very blue eyes.
He took off his overcoat in the passage, revealing
a long black frock coat beneath and a large-patterned
waistcoat. It was Uthoug junior, general agent
for English tweeds. He had taken no part
in his brother-in-law’s business affairs, and
so he was able to help his father in this crisis.
But the auction at Loreng went on for several days.