One of Life's Slaves Part 3

"Show him my Sunday clothes, Barbara, and the patent leather shoes!" And Nikolai was allowed to look into the drawers at all Ludvig's and Lizzie's dresses and sashes and fine underclothes, and to peep into the toy-cupboard to be bewildered by all the old drums and trumpets and headless men and horses, and tin soldiers, and Noah's arks, with their belongings, all of which, Barbara said, they had been given because they were so good.

There was a pile of things in the lower part of the cupboard, so that Nikolai could understand that they must have been very, very good, and that his mother, too--and at this he felt a bitter disappointment--must, in return, be very, very fond of them. They must be very different children to what he was, if they never deserved a whipping, but always playthings. He became quite tired and downcast, as he stood there. If he ever met Ludvig anywhere, he would pay him out about the horse.

At last the hour of departure arrived, when he was to go with the pony-carriage that fetched the Consul from town at three o'clock. The two children both clung to his mother's skirt when she followed him out.

"Good-bye, Nikolai!" and she patted him in such a way on the cheek and head that he looked at her half doubtingly, "and give my respects to Holman and Mrs. Holman. Do you hear? Whatever you do, don't forget Mrs.

Holman. And--I declare you're kicking the varnish now! You must sit quite still, Nikolai, the whole way. Don't you know that you mustn't come near those fine carriage-cus.h.i.+ons with your boots? You should just see how nicely Ludvig and Lizzie sit, when they go for a drive--don't you, dears?"

And off he set.

It had indeed been a gala day, and he had been given a large, sugared twist to take with him, and it tasted delicious; but somehow or other he began to cry all at once on the way home.

The next day he had full confirmation of how delightful it had been.

While he was going up and down the pavement in his daily occupation of taking care of Silla, he caught fragments of Mrs. Holman's remarks to the housekeeper up stairs, as they stood under the archway; he never for a moment lost sight of her tall figure.

"You may well say so, Miss Damm. Take him into the room with their own children; there aren't many grand folks that would have done such an honour to one like him." ... "We must do so many things in this world, Miss Damm--we must scour the boards over the gutter, so to speak, and put up with them--and I don't mind saying that he showed that he was well cared-for from top to toe." ... "Such an honour! It might have been some respectable child they had asked there. He ought to remember it the whole of his life!" ... "So grand as she is now, she doesn't much care about coming out here and acknowledging the boy. It's nothing for those that can pay to get rid of their shame!"

Nikolai crushed with all his might an old decapitated c.o.c.k's head, which lay in the gutter, with the heel of his boot, until it was as flat as a penny.

When the terror of bogies and the devil in the coal-cellar had lost its power, one of Mrs. Holman's most powerful means of keeping Nikolai in order was a threat of sending him to the parish school--an inst.i.tution which stood before her imagination as a publicly authorised house of correction for youth, and a daily training-ground in the fulfilment of one's duty.

He never obtained any very clear idea of what would happen when he went to school; but that it was something quite indeterminably dreadful was evident from the constantly renewed disguised hints, and the repressed, mystical groans and nods by which they were accompanied.

One day the threat was really carried out: he was to go next Monday morning.

Thursday, Friday, Sat.u.r.day and Sunday, he counted on his fingers--he had all those days left. And how he took care of and played with Silla during them, and darted on errands like an arrow!

At last there was only the Sunday afternoon left.

He sat at tea-time with Silla and tried to take comfort from her opinions about school, heard that he was to have his Sunday clothes on to-morrow too, because it was the first time, and fell asleep that night with drops of perspiration on his forehead.

In the morning Nikolai was not to be found.

Mrs. Holman inquired, and sought, and called, promising liberally both torments and pardon if he would only come at once; but it was all of no use, he had vanished.

After dinner Maren upstairs was startled by seeing him emerge from under her bed. She gave him some food and asked him to promise to go home; and Nikolai said he would, only not before it was dark.

In the twilight he made an excursion down to the quay, where he amused himself for an hour by sitting and rocking in a s.h.i.+p's boat; then in the wet October darkness he slunk through the narrow, dripping pa.s.sages between the warehouses, until he was sure that there was no longer any light on the square, and spent the rest of the evening lying peeping over the paling at the light in the two cellar windows at home. He noticed how Holman came slinking cautiously up and stood a little while at the door before going in, and how they put Silla to bed. The light from the windows told him, like two dimly-glaring, merciless eyes, that if he came home now, the well-merited sentence of justice would most certainly be carried out.

Then the light was put out.

Through the drizzling rain late that night the gleam of a lantern glanced among the stacks of wet planks, and behind it was a pair of eyes which were accustomed to look in the dark for all kinds of persons who might think fit to hide themselves in the yard. The lantern wandered about among the narrow rows, sometimes standing still, while it threw its searching, reddish light as far as possible in between the planks.

No one was discovered that night. Among the many square s.p.a.ces which could give shelter, Nikolai, with a certain inborn instinct, had chosen the foremost and most unsuspicious looking one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness--school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher--his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down in the wet mud.

But that night under the wet sky, with Trondsen's planks for his bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling--showing certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman's solicitous care--that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent, free savage's consciousness in relation to everything that they might afterwards think fit to screw him into, the school no less than Mrs.

Holman's cellar steps; the planks in the timber-yard shone so white in bright weather, and when it grew dark, they stood there like his oft-tried, secret friends, who could screen him from the terrors at home.

He was taken to school, however, and one of his first timid, inquiring glances was to discover the thras.h.i.+ng-block with which Mrs. Holman had threatened him. He had pictured it to himself giving blow after blow with a rod, and beating incessantly, like the chicory factory at the bottom of the square.

Strangely enough there was no such block. But there were other things into which he was to be squeezed and forced like a last into a boot; and he was a hard last, which often would not go farther than the leg, and had to be hammered and knocked the rest of the way, where others more pliable glided smoothly down like eels.

There were things he understood, and things he did not understand. The former did not often happen to be explained to him, the latter he did not understand however many explanations were given; the result was a painful consciousness, a continual difference or falling short both in relation to his lessons and his teachers, which had to be adjusted by the cane and detention, while the majority of his schoolmates, in this particular also, more supple, worked themselves out like true virtuosi.

But what was even a whole day at school, with its full measure of misfortunes, in comparison to the endlessly long, dull hours of the evening, when Mrs. Holman, with her own eyes, "watched over him, to see that he learnt his lessons," and he hardly dared so much as to glance across at Silla.

As to Holman, experience had taught them that his fixed and staring eyes saw nothing: he sat mute and quiet the whole evening. In Mrs. Selvig's tap-room he found a remedy which made him insensible to moral lectures even the most reasonable and impressive. There he stood every evening a quarter of an hour after working-hours, as regular as clockwork, and when the hands of the clock drew near to eight, he just as regularly set off homewards, a punctuality which, be it said in pa.s.sing, had gained for him in the tap-room the t.i.tle of _General with order_.

CHAPTER III

A FIGHT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

That was a dangerous corner, where the wide street leading to the grammar school crossed the narrow one that led to the board school; and, on the days when the afternoon hours for the latter began just when the grammar school's long morning was over, it might happen that the free, exuberant spirits of those who were leaving school came into collision with the heavier and more bitter mood of those who were on their way to it.

Ludvig Veyergang, with his sealskin satchel on his back, had already travelled this road for several years. He had been nicknamed the Ostrich, because of his little head with the bird-like nose, his long bare neck, and the way he walked. When he met Nikolai, he pretended not to know him, and Nikolai whistled and clattered with his shoes on the pavement.

The board school's new slide ran along the gutter a good way out into the grammar school street. It was the product of the joint work of many for a whole week, and fate willed that Nikolai, at the head of a string of comrades, should come full speed down it, hallooing and shouting, just as Ludvig Veyergang and a few others came round the corner. Young Veyergang received a push that made him drop his pencil-case; and pens, lead and slate pencils lay strewn over the ground.

"Pick them up, you beggar!" he cried to Nikolai, for it was he who had knocked up against him. "I shall tell about you at home, you may be pretty sure. Pick them up, or--"

A kick sent a few loose lumps of snow in answer.

"You shall be made to bend soon enough, if that's what you want. Father shall be told, this very day, that you are the leader of the street cads in the town; and if no one else will tell your mother about it, I'll tell her myself, however much she cries!"

"Do you want to have your ostrich-beak pulled?"

"You'd better try it on! Perhaps you don't know that we pay for you at the blockmaker's. But I'll take care that you get thrashed until you beg my pardon: a fellow who doesn't even know who his father is, and his mother only wishes he had never been born!"

The last words were hardly out of his mouth when Nikolai sprang upon him with both fists like a pair of sledge-hammers, and for a few blissful seconds hammered out every trace of difference in birth and position.

Now he should feel "both his father and his mother!"

It was one of the board school's memorable and famous days, when the wine was tapped from Ludvig Veyergang's nose in the snow; and even the next day at dinner-time, two or three school cla.s.ses of interested spectators were searching for traces of red spots in the snow by the lamp-post.

But, though he enjoyed great honour and admiration during the whole afternoon at school, Nikolai knew that at home he would meet with an utterly different interpretation of the event, news of which the Holmans must already have received, surely and promptly, from the Veyergangs.

As he neared home, he went slower and slower. The thought of what might await him, made his feet grow heavier and heavier, and when he had separated from his last companion, he suddenly stopped and turned down by the chandler's, where the street led away from, and not towards his home.

It was now the third night Nikolai had been away, explained Mrs. Holman to the policeman outside; and it was not much wonder if he expected the reward he deserved, and felt his back smart. Lay hands on better people's children! And the son of Consul Veyergang, his own benefactor, too!

But where could he be? He could not possibly be in the timber-yard now, at this time of year.