The Road Leads On by Knut Hamsun

Author:Knut Hamsun [Hamsun, Knut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781494711955
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 1933-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

There was no mistaking it, if there was one thing Gordon Tidemand knew it was how to figure accounts.

He received his bank statement on the following day and found good cause to triumph: the credit balance had now shrunk to more than half the figure previously mentioned—to four-and-twenty thousand—including his own cash borrowings from the bank! His father's enormous debt to the bank had thus diminished to a mere twelve thousand, plus two thousand in interest!

There followed an attempted explanation: “The senseless error was due to several years' faulty posting in the late Herr Theodore Jensen's two accounts. Yours truly, the Segelfoss Savings Bank, J. C. Pettersen.”

“Hm!” said Gordon Tidemand ominously. “He'll take back this twelve thousand, too, along with this interest of his! Is he trying to fool with me? I'll show that—that—” He might have used the name “Buttonhead,” but an English gentleman does not call a man names, even in the privacy of his own office. “I'll give due consideration to the possibility of calling in the authorities,” he said. Ah, that sounded better at once!

He sent the errand boy with a note to the former president of the bank: “Dear Sir, The next time you are in this part of town, you would be conferring a favour upon me if you would stop in to answer me a question. Yours truly, Consul Gordon Tidemand.”

The man appeared immediately. He was a man of the parish, one Johnsen by name, a pensioned school teacher, familiar with all that went on in the district, old now, but still one of the bank's directors. The Consul apologized for having put him to this inconvenience and explained what he had come up against at the bank.

Johnsen shook his head and let fall a word to the effect that more than one had come up against Lawyer Pettersen. At the last directors' meeting he had come out with the definite suggestion to put Karel i Roten's farm up for public auction.

“Karel i Roten is deep in my books, too, but what of it!” said the Consul.

“No, he stops at nothing, that lawyer. He's too greedy.”

“Well, he'd better not come too close to me!” said the Consul. “Now what I really desired of you, Johnsen, is this: have you any recollection which would lead you to suppose that my father was in any way in debt to the Segelfoss Savings Bank when he died?”

“No, certainly he was not!” said Johnsen and laughed a bit at such an idea. “No, he was no man to owe anyone anything. He was too much of a man for that. And he always had a helping hand for those in need.”

“Then how can Lawyer Pettersen pin on him a debt of sixty thousand? Later reducing the amount to twelve thousand? How can he, for that matter, pin on him a debt of a single øre?”

Johnsen again shook that grey head of his and said: “That's one thing I can't understand. Unless he could have discovered some mistake in the books as I kept them in my time.

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