The Great Hunger

Chapter XIII

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—”

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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.