Norby

“ When Marit Norby entered, she saw the pastor’s wife and Fru Thora of Lidarende among the audience. They both gave her a friendly recognition, and made room for her between them.
When Wangen stood at the bar and protested his innocence, the pastor’s wife turned towards Marit Norby with a sigh and a look, which said: “Poor man, how foolish he is!”
Thora of Lidarende already felt as if she must burst into tears. Wangen was so pale and emaciated; his throat was so thin inside his collar, and the back of his head seemed so big. His back was actually bent. Poor man! If only he would confess! ”

“ A star seemed to have risen in the firmament of his consciousness, and pointed to an inquiry, acquittal, and reparation. Half unconsciously he felt that this would be salvation, not only as regarded this accusation, but also all others.
“Norby is one of those men of whom you never can make anything,” he answered. “It is quite possible that the couple of thousand now in question have quite robbed him of his wits.” ”

“ PART I CHAPTER I THE night was falling as Knut Norby drove homewards in his sledge from a meeting of the school committee. The ice on Lake Mjösen had not been safe for some little time, and he had promised his wife to go round by the high-road. But various annoyances in the course of the day had irritated the old man, and down by the craggy promontory he suddenly tightened the reins and turned off on to the ice. “It has borne others already to-day,” he thought, “and there is no reason why it shouldn’t bear me.” ”

“ He rose with an impetuous movement, and began to pace the floor.
“The only thing I’m afraid of,” he said demonstratively—for he was quite willing that Norby should hear this—“is that he’ll get off too easily. After thinking it over, I don’t think he ought to come out of prison any more.”
The pastor felt as if he had received a blow, and rose quickly. “If he is in the right,” he thought, “then Heaven help the right that has fallen into such hands! Can being in the right make a man so coarse and bad? No! He is guilty!” ”

“ When he came in sight of his house, which lay a little to the left of the dark mass of the brick-kilns, he saw a light in a single window. He remembered his wife’s condition and the bailiff’s visit. “Poor Karen!” he thought; “perhaps she was at home, alone too.” And a flood of anger filled his heart, anger this time not against himself, but against Norby. “Is he quite mad? What does he mean by this?” It was a relief to be able to turn his indignation against others than himself. ”

“ CHAPTER II THE parsonage was not far from Norby Farm. The day before the inquiry Pastor Borring began to wonder whether he could not bring about some reasonable agreement in this wicked and foolish case between two honest men.
No one knew that Pastor Borring had a secret trouble that caused him continual suffering. He believed neither in the atonement nor in the utility of the sacraments; and yet as pastor he had to say and do what was pure and true. He felt that he was too old to resign his living and start again in life ”

“ Knut rose slowly, pushing the rug aside. He gazed at her, opened his mouth and gazed. At last he passed his hand through his beard, and then over his bald head, and said in an uncomfortably ordinary tone of voice:
“Oh, have you been to the bailiff, Marit?”
[Pg 24]
“Yes! When there are no men on the farm, the women have to go out to work,” she said. “I didn’t come quite empty-handed when I became mistress at Norby, and I didn’t mean to let you give my share to tramps and beggars.”
Knut turned pale, but once more passed his hand over his bald crown and through his beard, and tried to laugh. ”

“ Fru Thora could not help laughing.
“Poor man!” said the schoolmaster, playing with his beard.
“Ye-es! It’s hard on him, and we won’t judge Wangen,” said she, “but as long as we live in an orderly community, I suppose we have the right to some protection; and it doesn’t do to go on as Wangen has done.”
Fru Heggen shook her head once more, said “No,” and looked at her husband.
“But the person who has suffered most during this time, dear friends, is Norby; and I’ve come to propose that we make him some reparation in one form or another.” ”

“ The pastor sat for a while with his lips compressed.
“Tell me, Wangen! Have you never caused suffering to any one else in this world?” he said.
The question startled Wangen, and he again forced a laugh.
“All I know is,” he said after a short pause, “that I’m innocent in this instance. And Norby has now tortured and worried me so long that he shall go to the prison that he intended for me. If he is so rich too he shall be made to pay. I won’t take a small compensation.”
“Ah! it’s all very well suffering when you get paid for it,” thought the pastor. “That man is the [Pg 97] guilty one.” ”

“ The little lamp threw a pale light about them, while the furniture in the rest of the room was lost in the darkness.
“Father came while the bailiff was here,” she said at last, looking straight before her.
“How did he take it?”
“Every one will believe you’re guilty,” she said. “And Norby is powerful. Father is coming again to-morrow. You’d promised to bring him from town the last ten thousand krones he got for you.”
Wangen’s head drooped. A vision of her father, with his white hair and red, watery eyes, came [Pg 42] before him. ”

“ If Norway is glorious, Greenland is in truth no less so. When one has once seen it, how dear to him is its recollection! I do not know if others feel as I do, but for me it is touched with all the dream-like beauty of the fairyland of my childish imagination. It seems as though I there found our own Norwegian scenery repeated in still nobler, purer forms.
It is strong and wild, this Nature, like a saga of antiquity carven in ice and stone, yet with moods of lyric delicacy and refinement. It is like cold steel with the shimmering colours of a sunlit cloud playing through it. ”

“ This was Nordland, one of the northerly provinces of Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle, under the glory of the midnight sun, where, however, a long and sunless winter fostered in the minds of the inhabitants a brooding melancholy which peopled mountain and sea, nature's every nook and cranny, with strange and awe-inspiring creatures. ”

“ On those still clear Norwegian nights, full of mystic light, lovely in their starlight stillness, the mind seemed enthralled, in a thousand pleasing fancies; the music of the waterfall; the voices on the breeze. The melody of nature, produced impressions we can never forget.
Norway is not the country for the sybarite, fainéant, and the flâneur; it is the home of the hardy mountaineer, the angler, the reindeer hunter, and nomad wanderer, the lover of nature and nature’s works in her wildest and most beautiful forms. ”

“ And in no other place can such deliciously flavoured strawberries or raspberries, nor such fragrant birch-boughs, be gathered as in Nordland.
If there is a home for a wonderfully beautiful idyl, it must be in the fjord-valleys of Nordland in the summer-time. It is as though the sun kisses Nature all the more lovingly, because he knows how short a time they have to be together, and as if they both, for the time, try to forget that they must part so soon. ”

“ Town-dwellers in all Norway number no more than the inhabitants of Manchester, and though force of circumstance necessitates their living in the towns, their thoughts are ever of the country—of the fjeld, the fjord, the forest, the mountain lake, or the salmon river. ”

“ At last, then, I bade farewell to my brethren, sisters and friends, and to Nordland with its many islands, fjords and great and beautiful mountains, forming a landscape so brilliantly equipped that it does not stand second to any that I have seen. The impressions which became stamped upon my mind during my mission up among the people of northern Norway, in the days of my youth, will never, I believe, leave me, for one might learn more up there than can be learned in a university. ”

“ The summits of the Norwegian Fjelds have only the charm of wildness and bleakness. I doubt whether any mountains of equal height exhibit less grandeur in their upper regions. The most imposing features of Norwegian scenery are its deep valleys, its tremendous gorges with their cataracts, flung like banners from steeps which seem to lean against the very sky, and, most of all, its winding, labyrinthine fjords—valleys of the sea, in which the phenomena of the valleys of the land are repeated. ”

“ The smooth and glassy surface of the tideless Fiord, hemmed in by lofty mountains, stands forth the grand characteristic of Norway. The weather-beaten rocks, rising abruptly from the water, have beauty and boldness on their broad, blank fronts; and how infinite is the loveliness of innumerable islands, clustered together, bearing vegetation of all hues and odours!
Whether it were in the air which I breathed, or whether it were caught from the solemn magnificence of the scenery, the same feeling of sublimity came over me as when I first saw the [Pg 205] land of Norway on my arrival from England ”

“ Leaving the Red Indian moon worshipper with his death rattle awhile and harking back to Europe, Norway stands out as the richest country in legendary lore, for old-time superstitions have lingered among the simple and credulous people, living pent up on the horrid crags, where torrents leap from cliff to valley. Their tales of goblins and spirits, tales of trolls, gnomes, and a legendary host of other uncanny creatures, point to the former nature [25] and ancestral worship of a people cut off from the advancing civilisation of their time. ”

“ The fact that forty per cent of the whole surface of Norway is over three thousand feet above the sea is certainly a corroboration of this legend.
This island fringe gives to the coast of Norway an indefinable charm,—the charm of endless maze, vista, expectation, and surprise; lure, also, suggestion, dim hint, and reticent revelation, like a character one cannot fathom, and behavior one can never reckon on. Though the ship sail in and out of the labyrinths never so safely and quickly, fancy is always busy at deep-sea soundings ”

“ Ibsen and Björnson may be better known in England, in America, and on the Continent of Europe, but Jonas Lie is dearer to the Norwegian heart. He has laid the scene of "The Visionary" in Nordland, the home of his childhood, the last district of Norway to receive the faith of Christendom, and even now the abode of superstitions which have survived centuries of Christian teaching. Except along the coast, and there towns and villages are few and far between, Nordland is very sparsely occupied by men of Norwegian birth. ”

“ Norway: Population, Resources, Pursuits of her People, Social Conditions, Laws and Institutions.
Norway is, as we know, a long and narrow strip of country in the west of the Scandinavian Peninsula, stretching through thirteen degrees of latitude, and in the north, extending almost three hundred miles into the arctic zone. Nearly a third of the entire country [1] is the domain of the midnight sun, where summer is the season of daylight and winter is one long unbroken night. Even in Southern Norway total darkness is unknown in summer, the night being merely a period of twilight. ”

“ They open thus the very heart of Norway to the commerce of the world. And as our steamer glided from one mountain-girdled basin into another, I realized why this western coast of Norway is one of the most remarkable land-formations on the globe. If we were able to look down upon it from an elevation, we should perceive that from the mountain chain, which forms, as it were, the backbone of the country, 50 a multitude of grooves stretch downward to the shore between the elevations, like spaces between the teeth of a comb. ”

“ Finnish admixture makes energetic, logical, bold, enterprising men; it has, to a great extent, given a backbone to the character of our Eastland and Trondhjem people. In Nordland, on the contrary, the Lap element is predominant, and has in a measure altered the character of the people. The Fin-Norwegian is master of Nordland nature; the Lap-Norwegian is subject to it, and suffers under its oppression.
Nature's contrasts in Nordland are too great and extreme for the mind of the race that lives there not to be exceedingly liable to receive permanent injury from them. ”

“ One great charm of Norway, then, is its people; another, and perhaps more to be appreciated by some, is its scenery.
“Is it like Switzerland?” No; Norway is only like Norway. It is not so grand as regards the height of its mountains, yet its grandeur is far more solemn. It has a dozen fjords more startling than the Lake of Lucerne; in a day’s journey you will pass waterfalls and cascades which would make a fortune to “proprietors” in Switzerland, and are not so much as mentioned in the Norwegian guide-books. ”

“ But then Norway is an empty country. It is as large as England, and it has a population of three million. You will see no towns on the long fourteen-hour journey from Bergen to Christiania. Only here and there a collection of scattered hutments and the long stretches of the fjords. And it is remarkable that so small a nation should have made such a considerable contribution to the literature of Europe. A useless, hopeless task it must sometimes seem, we felt, to the young Norwegian. ”

“ It seems to be the universal verdict of all travellers in Norway, that its people are more delightful and truer hearted than in any other country in Europe; and many Englishmen, after their first summer in Norway, return home to a diligent study of Norwegian, and in successive summers revisit the country, to become more intimately acquainted with its people, who have so deeply impressed them by their straightforward, kindly nature. ”