Title: Surutar
Romaani
Author: Hermann Sudermann
Release date: August 15, 2025 [eBook #76687]
Language: Finnish
Original publication: Helsinki: Otava, 1908
Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen
Just as Meyhöfer’s farm was going under the hammer, Paul, his third son, was born.
It was a tough time indeed!
Lady Elizabeth, her face lined with sorrow and a melancholy smile on her lips, lay in a large tent-roofed bed, the cradle of her newborn child beside her. She let her eyes wander restlessly from place to place and listened to every rustle that penetrated her sad sickroom from the yard and the living rooms. Every suspicious sound made her jump up, and every time a strange male voice was heard or a carriage rumbled past, she asked in anguish, clutching the side of the bed:
— Is that how far we’ve come? That far?
No one gave him an answer. The doctor had strictly ordered him to be protected from all emotional excitement, but he, that good man, had not thought that this constant anxiety and fear could trouble the sick man a thousand times worse than the most terrible certainty.
One morning—the fifth day after the birth of her son—she heard her husband, whom she had scarcely seen during this difficult time, pacing back and forth in the next room, sighing and groaning.—She could understand one word, a single word that the man kept repeating, the word: homeless!
Then Lady Elizabeth knew that she had come this far.
She placed her tired hand on the newborn’s head. The child slept quietly with a serious face, and the mother wet the pillow with tears.
After a while, she said to the maid who was looking after the little boy:
— Ask the gentleman here, I would like to speak to him.
And he came. — With heavy steps he stepped to the sick bed and turned towards him his face, which the forced expression of carelessness made doubly distorted and desperate.
“Max,” said Mrs. Elizabeth timidly, for she was always afraid of him, “
Max, don’t hide anything from me – I’m prepared for the worst.”
“Is that you?” the man asked suspiciously, remembering the doctor’s warning.
— When do we have to move from here?
Seeing his wife so calmly looking the accident in the eye, the man found it unnecessary to restrain his tongue and burst out in a rage:
— Today — tomorrow — how pleasing to the new master! It is only by his grace that we are still here — and if he permits, we may spend the next night on the road.
“It won’t be that bad, Max,” said Mrs. Elizabeth, struggling to maintain her composure, “when she hears that the little one was born just a couple of days ago…”
— Or so — I guess I have to go to him and beg — what?
— Oh, of course not! He does it himself. — Who is he then?
— Douglas is his name — of an Insterburg family — he was a very boastful gentleman, very boastful — he wanted to throw a hoe into the field.
— Do we have anything left?
He asked it quietly and hesitantly, looking at the newborn, whose young, fragile life perhaps depended on the answer. The man burst into a harsh laugh:
— Of course there was a tip — a whole two thousand dollars!
