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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Ho, you and your talk!" says Brede scornfully, and turns to Axel: "Well, I'm glad I came in time help you back home. Not going too fast, eh?" "No." Talk to Oline, stand up and argue with Oline! Was never a man could do it but to his cost.
Oline made no complaint, but she flashed dangerous glances at her young mistress and changed her tone ever so little. "Ay, great folk, 'tis true. Axel, he was in town a while last harvest-time you didn't meet him there, maybe? Nay, that's true, you were in Bergen that time. But he went into town, he did; 'twas all to buy a mowing-machine and a harrow-machine.
Isak goes down to the village one cold night, to order shoes for Oline. He takes a couple of cheeses with him, for Fru Geissler. Half-way down to the village a new settler has appeared. A well-to-do man, no doubt, since he had called in folk from the village to build his house, and hired men to plough up a patch of sandy moorland for potatoes; he himself did little or nothing.
It did not occur to either of them that Brede might "do better" and keep the post himself. When they reached Maaneland, Oline was there already, on her way down. Ay, a strange creature, Oline, crawling about fat and round as a maggot, and over seventy years and all, but still getting about.
"Ay, a wall like that'll need a mighty lot of stone, to be sure." "Stone?" says Isak. "Tis like as if there'd never be enough." When Isak is gone, the two womenfolk get on nicely together for a while; they sit for hours talking of this and that. In the evening, Oline must go out and see how their live stock has grown: cows, a bull, two calves, and a swarm of sheep and goats.
Oh, for the moment she is all on Axel's side but next time she comes to Brede and sits talking to him over a cup of coffee, she will be on his. "Let me carry the ax and things, anyway," says Brede. "Nay," says Oline, speaking for Axel. "He'll take them himself." And Brede goes on again: "You might have called to me, anyway; we're not so deadly enemies that you couldn't say a word to a man?
Oline maybe old Sivert had for a moment thought of her as young, pretty, and rosy-cheeked, but now she is old, deformed, a picture of decay; she ought to have been dead. Where is she to be buried? She has no family vault of her own; nay, she will be lowered down in a graveyard to lie among the bones of strangers and unknown; ay, to that she comes at last Oline, born and died.
I said a word of it three and four weeks gone, that I needed shoes, but never sign of a shoe to this day, and here I am." Said Isak: "What's wrong with your pattens, then, that you can't use them?" "What's wrong with them?" repeats Oline, all unprepared. "Ay, that's what I'd like to know." "With my pattens?" "Ay."
"What I was going to say," she begins: "They gentlemen came up to Sellanraa that time; did you ever get to show them all those sacks of stone you'd got, eh, Brede?" "Axel," says Brede, "let me hoist you on my shoulders, and I'll carry you down rest of the way." "Nay," says Axel. "For all it's good of you to ask." So they go on; not far now to go. Oline must make the best of her time on the way.
"Don't know," says he "don't know what it can be...." But Oline knows, and tells him now with solemn words; ay, for she has saved a human creature from death, and she knows it; 'tis the Almighty has seen fit to lay on her this charge, where He might have sent legions of angels. Let Axel consider the grace and infinite wisdom of the Almighty even in this!
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