Hamsun has a kindness for this merry privateer and enjoys blowing the wind that swells little Theodor's sails, but underneath the froth and sparkle there is a bitter didactic purpose in this book. It shows the reverse side of modern progress, when a backward community learns to use the material conveniences of the age without any corresponding mental advancement. The workingmen have learned to make demands, but while they refuse to yield the old submission to authority, they have not learned any sense of responsibility to their own conscience, and therefore grow more and more lazy and inefficient. The women forget to cook and sew while they buy flimsy readymade clothes at the store and feed their families on food that is bought ready cooked and chewed and almost digested. Neither men nor women know what to do with their leisure, and general demoralization is the result.
"Segelfoss City," with its dying aristocracy, its captain of industry, and its spoiled working class, is a miniature mirror of the modern world as Hamsun sees it. In the same category belongs his last book, "Women at the Pump" (1920), but there the deterioration is more complete. The events recorded are only a grey dribble from a leaky town pump. "People in big cities have no idea of standards and dimensions in the small towns," so runs the opening paragraph. "They think they can come and stand in the market-place and smile and be superior. They think they can laugh at the houses and the pavements, indeed they often think so. But do not old people remember the time when the houses were still smaller and the pavements still worse? And there at least C. A. Johnson has built himself a tremendously big house, a perfect mansion. It has a veranda below and a balcony above and scroll work all the way around the roof.... The small town too has its great men, its solid families with their fine sons and daughters, its immutableness and authority. And the small world is absorbed in its great men and follows their career with interest. The good small town folk are really acting to their own advantage in doing this; they live in the shelter of authority, and it is good for them."
What indeed would the little town have been without Consul Johnson? What glory would there have been in life without his silk hat and his rotund face beaming on the crowds as they make way respectfully? When the story opens, the village is assembled to watch the departure of his steamer, the Fia, for foreign waters. While they wait, the women at the village pump, standing with buckets filled and hands under their aprons, are discussing a great event that happened six or seven years ago, but is still undimmed in memories not over-burdened with weighty affairs. It was the day when "Johnson on the Dock" was made consul, and everybody who came into his store was treated with sweet cakes and a drink. Since then other consuls had sprung up like mushrooms; there was "Barley-Olsen" and Henriksen at the Works, but Consul Johnson's glory outshone that of all others, and his scandals only gave an added nimbus to his name. The measure of difference between Hamsun's earlier books and "Women at the Pump" may be seen in the distance between the really magnificent reprobate Mack and the flabby Consul Johnson, a man who has become a village magnate by the accident of owning the only store in the neighborhood. But village dynasties rise and fall, and the Johnson dynasty seems tottering, when it is saved by the consul's young, aggressive, thoroughly modern son, Schelderup, who suddenly comes home and raises the house of Johnson to its old glory. The consul's day is over, however, and it is pathetic to see him shrink back into the obscurity from which accident had drawn him. In his fall he appeals to us as never before, and Hamsun makes us feel that the foolish old man is, in his innermost nature, better than the hard-headed son.