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By Root 870 0

they couldn’t tolerate being interrupted. Heh-heh, they both had swag bellies and fat, pudgy fingers; their napkins were tucked under their chins. By rights, he ought to go back to the hotel and taunt them a little. What sort of high and mighty gentlemen were they anyway? Agents in grits, in American hides—God knows if it wasn’t in cheap crockery. Truly something to bowl you over! And yet they had put an end to his happy thoughts in an instant. They weren’t even particularly good-looking! Well, one of them didn’t look too bad, but the other—the one with the hides—had a crooked mouth that only opened on one side, so that it reminded you of a buttonhole. He also had a lot of gray hair growing out of his ears. He was ugly as sin, pfui! But, of course, one mustn’t express one’s joy in a snatch of song when that man had his face in the food trough!

No, people never changed, they certainly didn’t! The gentlemen discuss politics, the gentlemen have noted the latest government appointments; thank God, it wasn’t yet too late for Buskerud County to be saved for the Conservatives! Heh-heh, how amusing to observe their mine owners’ faces as they said it. As if Norwegian politics were anything but rotgut wisdom and peasant flimflam! I, Ola Olsen from Lista, agree to a compensation of one hundred and seventy-five kroner to a widow in Nordland, provided I get in return a parish road at three hundred kroner in Fjære parish, Ryfylke County. Heh-heh, flimflam.

But start up a merry song and disturb Ola Upnorth in his parliamentary business, and all hell breaks loose! That gets you into big trouble. For mind you, Ola is thinking, Ola is pondering something. What is he up to? What bill is he going to propose tomorrow? Heh-heh-heh, there he is, a trusted man in Norway’s minuscule world, elected by the people to contribute his lines to the country’s royal farce, dressed in the sacred national shaggy-goat style, puffing away to his heart’s content at his chewing-tobacco pipe, his paper collar soggy with true and honest sweat! Out of the way for the chosen one, stand aside, damn it, give him some elbowroom!4

Good Lord, how those fat round zeros make the numbers big!

Anyway, that’s the end of that. To hell with the zeros! You eventually get tired of humbug and can’t bother to touch it anymore. You take to the woods and lie down under the open sky; it has wider spaces, more room for the stranger and for the flying birds.... And you find yourself a lair in some wet spot, lie down on your stomach on the damp boggy ground and positively revel in getting badly soaked. And you bury your head in reed grass and spongy leaves, and crawling insects and worms and soft little lizards creep up your clothes and into your face, looking at you with their silky green eyes, while from all around comes the calm,5 silent soughing of the woods and the air, and while the Lord sits on high staring down at you as though you were the most fixed of all his idées fixes. Ho-ho, you begin to warm up, experiencing a rare, strange infernal glee the like of which you have never felt before; you do every wild thing imaginable, confound right and wrong, turn the world topsy-turvy and feel delighted by it, as though it were a meritorious deed. Why not? You are subject to peculiar influences and give in to them, letting yourself be carried away by desire and by a hardened joy. Everything you used to sneer at, you now feel an inordinate need to exalt and praise to the skies: you gloat over seeing your way to fight a royal battle for universal peace, you might want to appoint a commission for improving the footwear of mail carriers, you put in a good word for Pontus Wikner and vindicate the cosmos and God in general. To hell with the true interconnectedness of all things, it doesn’t concern you anymore; you let out a roar at it and let things take their course. Ho-ho and hooray, the sun shines on the brae! That’s right, you let yourself go, tune your harp and sing psalms and p-songs that defy all description!

At the same time you let your inmost being drift, given over to the worst