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Updated: May 22, 2025
For eighteen years past I have sat in cafes, calling for the waiter if a fork was not clean: I never call for Gunhild in the matter of forks clean or not! There's Grindhusen, now, I say to myself; did you mark when he lit his pipe, how he used the match to the very last of it, and never burned his horny fingers?
Two men could not shift the bookcase when I wanted to paint behind; it took three men and a cook to move it. One of the men was Grindhusen; he flushed under the weight of those poets of the home, and said: "I can't see what folk want with such a mighty crowd of books!" Grindhusen! As if he knew anything about it!
The two were brother and sister, no doubt. And the work went on easily enough with the young folk there looking on. Then evening came. Grindhusen went off home, leaving me behind. I slept in the hayloft for the night. Next day was Sunday.
In a couple of hours Grindhusen comes back, with a good set of bricklayer's tools in the boat. Stolen them somewhere, I think to myself. We shoulder each our load, and hide away the tools among the trees. Then it is night, and we go each our separate way. Grindhusen finishes his painting the following afternoon, but agrees to go on cutting wood till six o'clock to make up a full day's work.
I hummed a tune, and whispered to myself and thought; now and again I had to get up and walk a little to get warm. The hours passed, the night came on, and I was so in love I walked there bare-headed, letting myself be stared out of all countenance by the stars. "How's the time?" Grindhusen might ask when I came back to the barn.
I did my share of the work, and Grindhusen had no fault to find with me as a work-mate. "You'll turn out a first-rate hand at this, after all," he said. Then after we'd been working a bit, the priest came out to look, and we took off our hats.
Now I could go away the following day. That afternoon Grindhusen, too, was dismissed. The engineer had sent for him, given him a severe talking to for doing no work and staying in town and getting drunk; in a word, his services were no longer needed. I thought to myself: It was strangely sudden, this new burst of courage on the part of the engineer.
One day he asked me to go up and tell Grindhusen to come in to town. Was it Grindhusen, I wondered, that was to be dismissed? But Fruen had never so much as set eyes on Grindhusen since she came; what could he have done to offend her? I fetched Grindhusen in accordingly. He went up to the hotel at once to report, and the engineer put on his things and went out with him.
He gave himself barely time for a proper meal, but was out again at once, in the fields, the barn, the cattle-sheds, or up in the woods where the men were at work. "You'd better get to work on that water-supply," he said. "The ground's workable still, and may stay so for a long time yet. What help will you want?" "Grindhusen can help," I said. "But...." "Yes, and Lars. What were you going to say?"
I saw a fly crawling over his hand, but he simply let it crawl; perhaps he never noticed it was there. That is the way a man should feel towards flies.... In the evening, Grindhusen takes the boat and rows off. I wander along the beach, singing to myself a little, throwing stones at the water, and hauling bits of driftwood ashore. The stars are out, and there is a moon.
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