The Road Leads On | Page 6

meant a drugstore, too. After a span of years have elapsed, just see what we have here now: a post-office, a telegraph station, a Grand Hotel, a circuit courthouse, a bank and a cinema. Left over from a bygone day, a church and parsonage, but as the perfect fruit of today, a schoolhouse and a home for the schoolmaster, a lawyer and a sheriff, each with his separate establishment, a police department and a police station, a little printshop and the offices of the _Segelfoss News._ Aside from these, there was little that one could expect. Spreading out through the parish lay hosts of small farms and cottages, and the people lived on the yield from soil and sea.
Little remained of the original village and its people. A few whose history dated back to the regime of the old Lieutenant or the era of the mill still survived, but these were few in number and played no part in the present life of the town. They had hidden themselves away and were living secluded lives; like the ghosts of a vanished age, they were for the most part abroad only after dark, existed as the children of night and were glad to remain unseen. They no longer had sons and daughters over whom to watch and worry, for these had grown up and gone out into the world. Just man and wife remained now, alone, forgotten. Some of the men still went in for a bit of home fishing, others found occupation in cleaning up the town at night, two of the real old men were grave-diggers attached to the cemetery.
But once there was a time when these were human beings just like the others who live here, and not so very long ago, either. Theodore paa Bua was alive in those days, but now he is alive no more. One by one they die off and only the real old ones remain.... And at the hour of twilight of an evening, the old women come together about the pump to exchange their mighty memories: the mill was running then with work and good pay for their men, there were clothes to wear and a fire in the stove, coffee steaming in the pot and treacle to pour on their porridge. Now and then God was kind to them and there was a run of herring in the fjord or a good year for cod at Lofoten. And now and then there was a birth or a wedding or a funeral in their neighbourhood and all was so good, so blissful. And now there is that Lassen; he used to be from here and now at last he's got to be bishop and councillor to the King, just like Joseph at the court of Pharaoh in the land of Egypt.
No Grand Hotel, no cinema, no bank here then. Ah yes, but those were the days!

CHAPTER TWO
Life at Segelfoss was altered considerably under the new regime. The daily routine was on a somewhat grander scale with far less contact with the village folk. Gordon Tidemand chose to drive back and forth between the store and the Manor in a light phaeton, though the distance was anything but great, and he had put on other grand airs, as well. For instance, what business had he to wear those yellow gloves for so short a drive on a summer day? And he had invested in a smart little motor-boat without having a sign of practical use for it, simply for the purpose of racing out to meet incoming mail steamers; after circling about and calling out a couple of words to the captain, he would head straight in for shore. His point in this was possibly merely to show off for the benefit of the passengers lining the rails. Indeed he was a handsome fellow; there was something of the look of a foreigner about him, with his swarthy skin and dark hair, his aquiline nose, his sparkling brown eyes and his firm narrow mouth. He was always smartly attired, his shoes highly polished. No, here was no Per paa Bua, nor a true son of Theodore, either.
During his father's lifetime the seine-boats had fared forth regularly every year, each exploring its own corner of the sea, ofttimes twice a year, in the fall before the Lofoten fishing, and in the spring after the codfishing was over. The buying and selling of fish, Lofoten cod or herring trapped by his seiners, the salting down, the packing, the shipping--these were the interests upon which Theodore's mind had fed and from which he had derived his fortune. But these were not the undertakings of which Gordon Tidemand had learned in school or off on his travels abroad; his fund of knowledge consisted of accountancy, foreign