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Great changes here; the motor traffic in Stordalen must have completely altered all the other traffic since my last visit ten months ago. "Where can I stop for a few days?" I asked. "At the trading center, the other side of the islands. Or there's Eilert and Olaus; they're both on this side. You could go there; they've got big houses."
If only the Northern Railway could have come to Reisa with Cook's and Bennett's tours then Stordalen in its turn would have lain deserted. Meanwhile, the cotters who are cultivating the soil will probably go on harvesting half the crop of the outlying fields for the rest of time.
Now and then comes a stranger who is going across the fjeld, but things are no longer, I am told, as they were in other years, when visitors came in droves. And things will not improve until we, too, get roads and cars. Stordalen has all the advantages, even the name. But Paul, our host, calls the neighboring valley Little Valley, because, says Paul, the people there are so petty and avaricious.
Yet he was bent and broken, old before his time, quite bald; but his mouth was tight as a tiger's, and he had a madness in his head that kept him on the move. "Stordalen!" he cried. England will soon have to open old people's homes for her sons.
How was everybody at Tore Peak? Josephine had good news about all of them, but she shook her head over Paul. Not that he drank much now; but he did little of anything else either, and had definitely lost interest in his work. He wanted to sell the farm. He wanted to try carting and delivery by horse cart in Stordalen. I asked if he had any prospective purchaser.
Once more I was run into a party of English, the last for this year. They arrived by steamer in the morning and stopped at the trading station for a few hours, meanwhile sending up a detachment through the valley to order a car to meet them. Stordalen, Stordalen, they said. So they had apparently not yet seen Stordalen an omission they must repair at once. And what a sensation they made!
Seven of our permanent guests now left together: the telephone operators, Tradesman Batt, Schoolmistresses Johnsen and Palm, and two men who were in some sort of business, I don't quite know what. This whole party went across the fjeld to Stordalen to be driven about in cars. Cases of various kinds of foodstuffs arrived for Paul; they were carried up one evening by a man from the village.
The papers are all writing about the splendid progress the tourist traffic has made in Stordalen since the motor road was opened ought I not to go there and feel gratified? From old habit, I still take an interest in the few of us who are left; Miss Torsen is still here. Miss Torsen what more is there to be said about her?
Olaus, who was sharp, guessed what he meant and at once sent his two boys up the valley to meet the car and hurry it on, for the Englishmen had arrived. They disembarked, they were in a great hurry, they could not understand why the car had not come to meet them: "What was the meaning of this?" There were four of them. "Stordalen!" they said.
I was innocent, though I may not have appeared so. It cannot be helped. "It's too bad I've got somebody in the best room," said Eilert. "They're gentlefolk from the city. They came down here through Stordalen, and they had to walk because the cars have stopped for the season. They've been in my house for quite some days, and I think they'll be staying on a while yet.
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