Read Ebook: The Family at Gilje: A Domestic Story of the Forties by Lie Jonas Olson Julius E Author Of Introduction Etc Eastman Samuel Coffin Translator

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purpose of raising the average of human happiness.

In other words: the last fifteen years of Lie's authorship reveal him in full possession of the realistic powers of the preceding period, illuminated by a profound comprehension of the mystic forces of life that so often determine human fates.

Like Ibsen, Lie lived abroad for many years, mainly in Paris, but usually spending his summers in the Bavarian Alps, where most of his writing was done. There were too many distractions in Paris, where his home was a centre of the colony of Scandinavian artists and literary workers. In the summer of 1893, after an absence of ten years, he felt the need of visiting Norway again. An intense feeling of homesickness had seized him, as the following incident will indicate. He had called on a Norwegian family in Paris who had just received a plant from Norway in Norwegian earth. "Thinking himself unobserved," one of his daughters tells, "I saw him turn from the company, take a pinch of that earth and put it to his mouth. Whether he kissed it or ate it I do not know. But he looked very solemn."

In Norway he was received most cordially. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Brandes proclaimed him "the most amiable of geniuses." He was interviewed, banqueted, and serenaded almost to distraction, and was glad to get back to Paris, happy, however, in having experienced the touching devotion of his countrymen. A decade of arduous toil followed, after which he began to make plans for returning to Norway to spend the last years of his life. A cozy home was built at Fredriksvaern, on the southern coast, and in 1906 the family took possession of it. The next year, however, his faithful wife, the guardian of his genius, passed away. Dependent upon her companionship and solicitous care, he did not long survive her. He died July 5, 1908.

The Norwegian Storting took fitting cognizance of his death, and, as had been done at Ibsen's demise, decreed that interment should be made at the expense of the State.

"Blessed are the merciful," said the pastor at his bier.

"Be merciful!" is the sentiment that echoes and re?choes throughout Jonas Lie's pages.

JULIUS E. OLSON

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

It was a clear, cold afternoon in the mountain region. The air lay blue with the frost, with light rose tints over all the sharp crests, ravines, and peaks, which, like a series of gigantic drifts, tower above tower, floated up towards the horizon. Below, hills and wooded mountain slopes shut the region in with white walls, constantly narrower and narrower, nearer and nearer, always more contracting.

The snow was late this year, but in return, now that the Christmas season had come, lay so heavy on fir and spruce that it bent down both needles and twigs. The groves of birches stood up to their waists in snow; the small clusters of tile-roofed houses of the district were half buried, with snow-drifts pressing down over the roofs. The entrances to the farmyards were deeply dug paths, from which the gate and fence posts stuck up here and there like the masts of sunken boats.

The snow-plough had recently gone through the highway, and on the steep red-tiled roof of the captain's house men were busy shovelling down the great frozen snow-drifts, which hung threatening over the ends of the roof.

The captain's house was specially prominent in the district. It was unpainted and built of square logs, like the greater part of that kind of houses a generation ago.

Over the garden fence and almost up under the window-frames lay the snow-drifts with tracks of sleds and skis in their icy crust, which smoked a little in the frosty north wind under the sun.

It was the same cold, disagreeable north wind which, every time the outer door was opened, blew against the kitchen door until that opened too, and, if it was not closed again, soon after, one or another door on the next floor,--and that made the captain come down from his office, flushed and passionate, to make inquiries and fret and fume over the whole house as to who had gone there first and who had gone last. He could never understand why they did not keep the door shut, though the matter was most easily to be understood,--for the latch was old and loose, and the captain would never spend any money on the smith for a new one.

In the common room below, between the sofa and the stove, the captain's wife, in an old brown linsey-woolsey dress, sat sewing. She had a tall, stiff figure, and a strong, but gaunt, dried-up face, and had the appearance of being anxiously occupied at present by an intricate problem--the possibility of again being able to put a new durable patch on the seat of J?rgen's trousers; they were always bottomless--almost to desperation.

She had just seized the opportunity for this, while J?ger was up in his office, and the children were gone to the post-office; for she went about all day long like a horse grinding clay in a brickyard.

The mahogany sewing-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl and several different kinds of wood, which stood open before her, must have been a family heirloom; in its condition of faded antiquity, it reminded one not a little of her, and in any event did not at all correspond either with the high-backed, rickety, leather armchair, studded with brass nails, in which she sat, nor with the long birchen sofa covered with green linsey-woolsey, which stood like a solitary deserted land against the wall, and seemed to look longingly over to the brown, narrow folding-table, which, with its leaves let down, stood equally solitary and abandoned between the two windows.

The brown case with the four straight legs against the farther wall, with a heap of papers, books, hats, and the spy-glass upon it, was an old clavichord, which, with great trouble, she had had transported up into the mountain region, out of the effects of her home, and on which she had faithfully practised with her children the same pieces which she herself had learned.

The immense every-day room, with the bare timber walls, the unpainted sanded floor, and the small panes with short curtains fastened up in the middle, was in its whole extent extremely scantily furnished; it was half a mile from chair to chair, and everything had a rural meagreness such as one could often see in the homes of officials in the mountain districts in the forties. In the middle of the inner wall, before the great white fire-wall, the antique stove with the Naes iron-works stamp and the knotty wooden logs under it jutted out into the room like a mighty giant. Indeed, nothing less than such a mass of iron was needed to succeed in warming up the room; and in the woods of the captain's farm there was plenty of fuel.

Finally abandoning all more delicate expedients for the trousers, she had laid on a great patch covering everything, and was now sewing zealously. The afternoon sun was still shedding a pale yellow light in the window-frames; it was so still in the room that her movements in sewing were almost audible, and a spool of thread which fell down caused a kind of echo.

All at once she raised herself like a soldier at an order and gave attention. She heard her husband's quick, heavy step creaking on the stairs.

Was it the outside door again?

Captain J?ger, a red, round, and stout man in a threadbare uniform coat, came hastily in, puffing, with the still wet quill-pen in his mouth; he went straight to the window.

His wife merely sewed more rapidly; she wished to use the time, and also prudently to assume the defensive against what might come.

He breathed on the frosty pane in order to enlarge the part that could be seen through. "You will see there is something by the mail. The children are running a race down there in the road,--they are running away from J?rgen with the sled."

The needle only flew still faster.

"Ah, how they run!--Thinka and Thea. But Inger-Johanna! Come here, Ma, and see how she puts down her feet--isn't it as if she was dancing? Now she means to be the first in, and so she will be the first, that I promise you. It is no story when I tell you that the lass is handsome, Ma; that they all see. Ah, come and look how she gets ahead of Thinka! Just come now, Ma!"

But "Ma" did not stir. The needle moved with forced nervous haste. The captain's wife was sewing a race with what was coming; it was even possible that she might get the last of the patch finished before they entered, and just now the sun disappeared behind the mountain crest; they were short days it gave them up there.

The steps outside were taken in two or three leaps, and the door flew open.

Quite right--Inger-Johanna.

She rushed in with her cloak unfastened and covered with snow. She had untied the strings of her hood on the way up the steps, so that her black hair fell down in confusion over her hot face. Breathless, she threw her flowered Valders mittens on a chair. She stood a moment to get her breath, brushed her hair under her hood, and shouted out:

"An order for post-horses at the station, for Captain R?nnow and Lieutenant Mein. The horses are to be here at Gilje at six o'clock to-morrow morning. They are coming here."

"R?nnow, Ma!" roared the captain, surprised; it was one of the comrades of his youth.

Now the others also came storming in with the details.

The mother's pale face, with its marked features and smooth black hair in loops down over her cheeks in front of her cap, assumed a somewhat thoughtful, anxious expression. Should the veal roast be sacrificed which she had reserved for the dean, or the pig? The latter had been bought from the north district, and was fearfully poor.

"Well, well, I bet he is going to Stockholm," continued the captain, meditatively drumming on the window-frame. "Adjutant, perhaps; they would not let that fellow stay out there in the West. Do you know, Ma, I have thought of something of this sort ever since the prince had so much to do with him at the drill-ground. I often said to him, 'Your stories, R?nnow, will make your fortune,--but look out for the general, he knows a thing or two.' 'Pooh! that goes down like hot cakes,' said he. And it looks like it--the youngest captain!"

"The prince--" The captain's wife was just through with the trousers, and rose hastily. Her meagre, yellowish face, with its Roman nose, assumed a resolute expression: she decided on the fatted calf.

"Inger-Johanna, see to it that your father has his Sunday wig on," she exclaimed hurriedly, and hastened out into the kitchen.

The stove in the best room was soon packed full, and glowing. It had not been used since it had been rubbed up and polished with blacking last spring, and smoked now so that they were obliged to open door and windows to the cold, though it was below zero.

Great-Ola, the farm-hand, had been busy carrying large armfuls of long wood into the kitchen, and afterwards with brushing the captain's old uniform coat with snow out on the porch; it must not look as if he had dressed up.

The guest-chamber was made ready, with the beds turned down, and the fire started, so that the thin stove snapped, and the flies suddenly woke up and buzzed under the ceiling, while the wainscot was browned outside of the fire-wall and smelled of paint. J?rgen's hair was wet and combed; the girls changed their aprons to be ready to go down and greet the guests, and were set to work rolling up pipe-lighters for the card-table.

They kept looking out as long as the twilight lasted, both from the first and second story windows, while Great-Ola, with his red peaked cap, made a path in the snow to the carriage-road and the steps.

And now, when it was dark, the children listened with beating hearts for the slightest sound from the road. All their thoughts and longings went out towards the strange, distant world which so rarely visited them, but of which they heard so much that sounded grand and marvellous.

There are the bells!

But, no; Thinka was entirely wrong.

They had all agreed to that fact, when Inger-Johanna, who stood in the dark by a window which she held a little open, exclaimed, "But there they are!"

Quite right. They could hear the sleigh-bells, as the horse, moving by fits and starts, laboriously made his way up the Gilje hills.

The outside door was opened, and Great-Ola stood at the stairs, holding the stable lantern with a tallow candle in it, ready to receive them.

A little waiting, and the bells suddenly sounded plainly in the road behind the wood-shed. Now you could hear the snow creaking under the runners.

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