III.
The young couple had moved into Gunnar Haugen's barn—but for a house! It rested on studs so that the cold wind rose up through the floor; you could see through the cracks in the walls. When the blizzards came, snow swept over their bed as they lay asleep. The peasants had tried to daub and seal the cracks as best they could, but it didn’t help much. Now the priest had the house covered with cardboard inside and clad with bark on the outside, and slammed boards between the studs at the bottom, but it was still as if his feet turned to ice when he sat still for a while. And then it was just this one room. Alas, how different from the dreams of the pleasant rectory!
She could not help it, but tears ran down the cheeks of the pastor’s wife as she went and did housework. How could she arrange things and make them feel at home out of this! They had used carpets to divide the room into three parts. Behind one rug stood their bed in a corner, behind the other was the pastor's "study room," that is, a small table in front of one window with a stool by it. The rest of the room was the living room, a small space around the stove that stood in the middle, where the lady when the priest was out, usually sat in mute despair with her legs up on the grate to get some heat.
In the beginning they intended to cook inside the farmer's house and then carry the food across the farm if they did not want to eat in his living room; but as this was too desperately inconvenient, so she had the hallway outside the storehouse divided into a small room where a stove was set up. Of course there was no question of keeping a girl, and it was good because she always had something to take care of that distracted her thoughts, otherwise she would have gone mad. But the fine Miss Christian often sighed and had to stop to breathe every time she had to shake the heavy bedclothes or sweep the carpet. If there was only someone to talk to! The woman on the farm was kind and helpful and did not know how good she made it; but she could not speak of anything but hay, corn, cows, and pigs. Alas, she had not walked on Karl Johans Gate[i]—she had not been to the student balls, she had not seen a Laura Gundersen[ii]and Johannes Brun[iii] play, she had not thrown flowers at the king and received a nod from him in return.
At first the pastor’s wife was so overwhelmed by loneliness and the strange surroundings that she was actually afraid of being alone. She had also experienced her first thunderstorm. Lightning upon lightning flashed, it was as if the whole sky opened up with hundreds of flames of fire, hissing serpents of fire shot across the horizon, and it roared as if heaven and earth were collapsing. The pastor’s wife screamed loudly, she ran around like crazy, and at last she jumped down into Gunnar Haugen's basement.
When her husband came home, she was quite pale. She threw herself on his neck and asked him to be allowed to join him on his travels; she dared not be alone anymore. She also got permission, but she soon had to give it up. These awful distances! And then rattle in the car on the uneven roads or where there were no roads at all. And when one had then shaken one's life away or was frozen stiff, then had to enter the small, nasty, log-houses, where children's clothes often hung for drying, and where the air was utterly suffocating. And then having to eat and sleep in this air! Many of the farmers here were also from settlements in Norway, where they had little regard for clean food, and it was almost impossible to taste their well-intentioned dishes, set out in black wooden trays.
She had often resented the farmer's wives, who, when they came to her nest, clasped their hands in amazement at how nicely she had made it. She did not know if it was hypocrisy or what it was; but now, on the other hand, she understood it when she saw their own conditions. That a human being could endure such conditions! Small earthen holes in a hill, a wretched shed covered with black cardboard or a narrow log house where the clay fell out between the logs, and which was full of bedbugs and screaming, soiled kids. The same room to live in, cook in, and sleep in—it was a good deed, after all, that the doors were so far apart and went straight out to the prairie; thereby came then fresh air, but ah for a draft! It was enough to break down the strongest health! Could people really get used to it? It was almost to despise them, it was to sink down to the animal level. No, then her lonely chair in front of the oven at home with her legs on the oven rack was preferable.
Why had no one told her this before? Why had Cooper written about the gleaming lakes surrounded by impenetrable, secretive forests, filled with romantic Indians? Here there was not an Indian to be seen, just swampy plains full of ordinary Norwegians who were even more sloppily dressed than the sailors back home in Kristiania. Kristiania!—alas, to be the one who was there!—the one who could travel there today or tomorrow! Now the balls had begun—perhaps the first City Council Ball was over; she should have been there —where she should have danced—no, it was true she was not allowed to dance since she was engaged to a theologian—I wonder if her friends were still invited to Chocolate at Günther by the students or the cadets? Maybe Elisa Ring had inaugurated her light blue silk dress, which she sewed before she left?
She was awakened from her dreams by someone shouting "Hello!" outside the window. She leapt up. Out in the yard stood Gunnar Haugen with a bloody calfskin in his hand. "If Mrs. wanted some veal today, we just slaughtered it."
