When they had returned home to the sand dunes, and people heard the story of this quarrel, they said that Jörgen was like a pot that easily boiled over, but that he was an honest pot, anyway.
"But he's no Jutlander. No one can call him a Jutland pot," was Morten's witty answer.
They were both young and healthy, well built, and with strong limbs. Jörgen was the more active.
Up in Norway the peasants go into the mountains and take their cattle there to find pasture. On the western coast of Jutland, the fisherman build huts among the sand dunes. They build them with planks from shipwrecks, and cover them over with heath and turf; here the fishermen live and sleep during the early spring. Each fisherman has a girl as a servant - she is called his aesepige; she supplies the bait for the hooks, must be ready on the wharf with warm ale to refresh him, and cooks his food when he returns to his hut, tired and hungry. The girls carry the fish up from the boat, cut it up, and, in short, have plenty to do.
Jörgen, his foster father, a few other fishermen, and their girls had a hut together; Morten lived in the next hut.
One of the girls, named Elsa, had known Jörgen ever since they were both little children; they were quite fond of each other and always happy to be together. They were much alike in disposition, but quite different in appearance, for Jörgen was very dark-complexioned, while her skin was white, her hair as yellow as flax, and her eyes as blue as the sea on a sunny day.
One day Elsa and Jörgen were walking together, and Jörgen was holding her hand in a warm, fervent grasp, when she said to him, "Jörgen, I want to unburden my heart to you. Let me be your aesepige, instead of Morten's. I know he has hired me, but you're like a brother to me, and Morten - he and I are sweethearts. But now, don't go and tell everybody else about it!"
Jörgen felt as if the sand dunes were whirling beneath him. He didn't say a word; he only nodded - and that was the same as saying, "Yes." This was all that was necessary to make him feel a bitter hatred in his heart for Morten. The more he thought about it, the clearer he realized that Morten had robbed him of the only creature he loved. Never before had he understood his own feelings toward Elsa, and now all hope of winning her for himself was gone.
When the fishermen are returning home over a fairly rough sea, it is interesting to see how the boats pass over the sand reefs. One man stands upright while the rest watch him, sitting with their oars ready to use the moment he signals that a great wave is coming which will lift the boat over the reef. It comes, and the vessel is tossed up so that its very keel can be seen from the shore; in another moment the entire boat vanishes from sight and neither boat, men, nor mast can be seen - you might imagine the ocean has swallowed everything up; another moment, and the boat reappears, crawling up the wave like a mighty sea monster, its oars moving like the creature's legs. The second and third reefs are crossed in the same way, and then the fisherman spring into shallow water and drag their boat ashore. Every wave helps them, until finally they have it beyond the reach of the breakers. But the slightest mistake in the signal when passing those reefs, the delay of a moment, and they would be shipwrecked.
"It would soon be all over with me and Morten too, if that happened," came into Jörgen's mind out at sea. They were approaching the outer reef when his foster father suddenly became seriously ill; the fever had seized him. Jörgen jumped up and stood in the bow. "Father, let me take your place!" he said; and his eyes moved from Morten to the sea, and from the sea back to Morten, as the oars swung on with the steady strokes, and the great wave rolled toward them. Then suddenly his look fell on the pale face of his foster father, and he could not obey his wicked impulse. The boat crossed the reefs in safety, and in safety they came ashore. But that evil thought still lurked in Jörgen's heart and roused every little fiber of bitterness that he remembered from his childhood days; but he could not weave the fibers together, so he dismissed it all from his mind.
He felt that Morten had robbed him, and that was reason enough to hate him. Some of the fishermen noticed the change in Jörgen, but Morten himself saw nothing; he was just the same as ever, ready to help and eager to talk - in fact, a little too much of the latter.
Jörgen's foster father took to his bed; it became his death bed, for a week later he was dead. Jörgen was his heir, now master of the cottage behind the sand dunes. It was a poor enough hut, but still it was something; and Morten didn't have so much.
"I suppose you won't go to sea again, Jörgen," said one of the old fishermen. "You'll always stay with us now."
But that was by no means Jörgen's thought; on the contrary, he thought about seeing some more of the world. The eel seller up at Fjaltring had a cousin up at Old Skagen, also a fisherman, but wealthy, and a shipowner too; they said he was a kindly old man with whom it would be very pleasant to take service. Old Skagen lies way up at the northern part of Jutland, as far away from the Hunsby sand dunes as one can go; that part of the idea pleased Jörgen best; he had no intention of attending the wedding of Elsa and Morten, which was to take place in a couple of weeks.