In their gossiping at the pumps the women express the poetry, the tawdriness and above all, the sheer vitality of life in Hamsun's small coastal town. A birth (where did those brown eyes come from?), a marriage (shotgun?), a death in strange circumstances (the victim flattened by a barrel of whale oil), the up and down career of the town's leading citizen and philanderer, the elderly spinster's pregnancy, the inking of the steamship that is the town's pride and joy.