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Updated: May 7, 2025
He stayed away till evening. He passed the two new clearings that had been started below Sellanraa, and talked to the men there; went right down to Maaneland to see what Axel Ström had got done that year. Nothing very great, it seemed; not as much as he might have wished, but he had put in some good work on the land. Geissler took an interest in this place, too, and asked him: "Got a horse?"
He addressed the corner of the room in a wheedling, flattering tone. "Come, you sweet, pretty little devil! What a white skin you have Strom would so like to stroke you a little! No, you didn't expect that! Are we getting too clever for you? What? You'd still bite, would you, you devil's brat? There, don't scowl like that!" Strom shut the window with an inward chuckle.
His face sullen, his eyes venomous, he walked across the street to the First Chance, and stood in the doorway, beside Balleau, who had been an interested onlooker. Then Strom Rogers moved. He wheeled slowly, flashing an inquiring glance at Deveny who still stood motionless.
Suddenly he felt utterly wretched about himself, and he broke down helplessly. "Now, now!" said Strom, raising his head. "Is it your turn now? Have you, too, something wicked to repent of, or what is it?" "I don't know." "You don't know? That's almost like the women crying is one of their pleasures.
For a while he strolled about amusing himself. "Strom is still man enough to clear up Hell itself!" he said, delighted. Pelle heard him go to bed, and he himself fell asleep. But in the night he awoke; Strom was beating time with his head against the board partition, while he lay tearfully singing "By the waters of Babylon!" But halfway through the psalm the diver stopped and stood up.
But Pelle must stay with him; he dared not put out the light and lie alone in the darkness. "Is it the devils?" asked Pelle. "What devils?" Strom knew nothing of any devils. "No, it's remorse," he replied. "The child and its mother are continually complaining of my faithlessness." But next moment he would spring out of bed and stand there whistling as though he was coaxing a dog.
She had entirely and without reserve absolved Axel Ström from any complicity whatever in the fact of her having taken his shirt instead of something of her own on her way to the water that is, on her way to the woods to gather juniper.
Speech had broken the tension under which Barbara had been laboring; the flow of words through her lips stimulated her thoughts and sent them skittering back to the salient incidents of her enforced confinement; they brought into her consciousness a recollection of the conversation she had heard between Meeder Lawson and Strom Rogers, regarding her father.
Strom was a famous worker who got twenty-five ores a day more than other autumn farm-hands, and his example was used as an incentive to coax work out of the laborers. "We shall soon get right into the inside of the earth." "Well, but it's burning hot in there." "Oh, nonsense: is it?" Pelle paused doubtfully in his digging. "Yes, the schoolmaster says so."
But Strom doesn't hang his head; he would like to be at peace with himself, if it weren't for a pair of child's eyes that look at him so reproachfully, day in and day out, and the crying of a girl! They're both at home there in Sweden, wringing their hands for their daily bread. And the one that should provide for them is away from them here and throws away his earnings in the beer-houses.
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