Straight before us as we rushed’twas as though there glittered suns.
Brown-backed eagles that were sailing
in the wide and dizzy void
half-way ’twixt us and the tarns,
dropped behind, like motes in air.
Ice-floes on the shores broke crashing,
but no murmur reached my ears.
Only sprites of dizziness sprang,
dancing, round;— they sang, they swung,
circle-wise, past sight and hearing!
ÅSE [dizzy]
Oh, God save me!
Peer
All at once,
at a desperate, break-neck spot,
rose a great cock-ptarmigan,
flapping, cackling, terrified,
from the crack where he lay hidden
at the buck’s feet on the Edge.
Then the buck shied half around,
leapt sky-high, and down we plunged
both of us into the depths!
[ÅSE totters, and catches at the trunk of a tree. PEER GYNT continues:]
Mountain walls behind us, black,
and below a void unfathomed!
First we clove through banks of mist,
then we clove a flock of sea-gulls,
so that they, in mid-air startled,
flew in all directions, screaming.
Downward rushed we, ever downward.
But beneath us something shimmered,
whitish, like a reindeer’s belly.—
Mother, ’twas our own reflection
in the glass-smooth mountain tarn,
shooting up towards the surface
with the same wild rush of speed
wherewith we were shooting downwards.
Åse [gasping for breath]
Peer! God help me —! Quickly, tell —!
Peer
Buck from over, buck from under,
in a moment clashed together,
scattering foam-flecks all around.
There we lay then, floating, plashing,—
But at last we made our way
somehow to the northern shore;
buck, he swam, I clung behind him:—
I ran homewards —
Åse
But the buck, dear?
Peer
He’s there still, for aught I know;—
[Snaps his fingers, turns on his heel, and adds:]
catch him, and you’re welcome to him!
Åse
And your neck you haven’t broken?
Haven’t broken both your thighs?
and your backbone, too, is whole?
Oh, dear Lord — what thanks, what praise,
should be thine who helped my boy!
There’s a rent, though, in your breeches;
but it’s scarce worth talking of
when one thinks what dreadful things
might have come of such a leap —!
[Stops suddenly, looks at him open-mouthed and wide-eyed; cannot find words for some time, but at last bursts out:]
Oh, you devil’s story-teller,
Cross of Christ, how you can lie!
All this screed you foist upon me,
I remember now, I knew it
when I was a girl of twenty.
Gudbrand Glesne it befell,
never you, you —
Peer
Me as well.
Such a thing can happen twice.
Åse [exasperated]
Yes, a lie, turned topsy-turvy,
can be prinked and tinselled out,
decked in plumage new and fine,
till none knows its lean old carcass.
That is just what you’ve been doing,
vamping up things, wild and grand,
garnishing with eagles’ backs
and with all the other horrors,
lying right and lying left,
filling me with speechless dread,
till at last I recognised not
what of old I’d heard and known!
Peer
If another talked like that
I’d half kill him for his pains.
Åse [weeping]
Oh, would God I lay a corpse;
would the black earth held me sleeping!
Prayers and tears don’t bite upon him.—
Peer, you’re lost, and ever will be!
Peer
Darling, pretty little mother,
