by Jonas Lie
It was cool and airy sitting in the wind in the front of the boat and resting themselves after the fruitless roaming in the heat.
They went on shore from the crowded steamboat to the island, where the people gradually dispersed along the various shady walks.
Close to the way up from the pier, and commanding a view of the bay, stood the great place of amusement, with all its gates invitingly open, and the sound of dance-music floating out. Within was life and merriment.
Silla stopped to look in and listen to the music, but Georgina, highly scandalised, pulled her on.
Was that the place for a respectable girl to stop?
Silla followed slowly; there was inspiriting dance-music brightening all the path within the wooden paling, and she drank it in with both ears, while the rhythm rocked in her veins.
A little higher up, where the path turned off, she stopped again; she could not leave the music, and scandalised Georgina by going right up to the paling and trying to see in.
Georgina would leave her that very minute! She ought to have so much respect for herself as not to stand there! She had, at any rate, and cared too much for her good name even to want to listen to such a noise, and would go a long way round to avoid it.
She was extremely indignant.
Silla could really not comprehend how it could take the gloss off either of them if they stood there a little and listened; nor yet what they had come out for. Just where there was a little life and gaiety they were to shut their eyes and put their fingers in their ears. But where it was so “nice and proper” it had not been particularly amusing; and she would give her a new sixpence if Georgina could tell her of a “proper” amusement when they had a holiday: they had been searching for one now both long and carefully.
She sauntered on.
According to Georgina, there was still nice time before the evening traffic to the place of amusement began, and they spent it in diverse walks in the roads, though never so far that they could not keep an eye on the steamers and be standing in good time among the crowd that was thronging the pier.
Tired, cross and footsore, they at last reached home late in the evening, where Silla, in the middle of the account she was giving her mother of all the places they had been to, fell asleep in her chair.
The music was running in her head, and she dreamt she was at a ball.
* * * *
There was a pleasant crackling in the stove at Barbara’s in the chilly autumn days, when people who could not afford it so well were loth to begin fires.
It was, therefore, very comfortable to stand about at her counter talking, and still more so for the chosen few who were fortunate enough to be invited to partake of a cup of coffee.
But of late Barbara had not been nearly so even-tempered as formerly. She suffered from changeableness of spirits, was sometimes unnaturally stingy, so that it looked as if she wanted to count the groats or the coffee-beans, at other times in a different mood, open-handed and liberal to both guests and customers.
Whatever the reason might be, it was certain that now and then in quiet moments she would fall into a brown study. The bill for sugar, meal, flour and coffee had come in again.
The till was anything but prepared for such an achievement; it groaned and rattled whatever time in the day she pulled it out or pushed it in.
Time, however, went on inexorably, notwithstanding that the stove roared so cheerfully as if nothing were the matter.
And it had now gone so far that the day after tomorrow was the day for payment.
Barbara was in a—for her—most unnatural state of excitement. In the hope of obtaining a very last, further postponement, she had this afternoon carried out her long contemplated attack on the salesman down in his office, but had met with a decided refusal. If she did not pay now, after all she had promised, then—well, then, after the answer she received, it looked as if the wheel would suddenly come to a standstill.
It was this that Barbara, going feverishly in and out, with her best bonnet still loosely tied upon her head, was explaining to Nikolai, who was sitting in the kitchen.
Nikolai’s face did not look as if he saw any help for it. On the contrary, he sat bending forward with compressed lips, looking down at the floor and twirling his thumbs. His hair as well as the position of his shoulders and his whole expression looked combative.
Barbara sat down by the cooking-stove; she drew a heavy breath, and sighed out of an oppressed breast.
It would come to an execution as sure as she lived—and it was for thirty-eight dollars!
Nikolai knew well what she was coming to, and that she was only waiting for him to give her a word that she could hang on to; but this money that he had scraped together was held much faster. He knew what he wanted, and this trade was only going farther and farther backwards, in any case.
Barbara groaned. She might as well go into the black ground at once.
Nikolai only snapped his fingers and looked down, doubly decided, at the crack in the floor.
When the pause had become unbearable any longer, and she saw clearly that no answer was coming, she began to cry softly.
She had thought, she sobbed, that when she had a son who was a smith’s foreman, she would not stand quite helpless in the world.
“You know, mother, how badly I am in want of money myself.”
Again an obstinate silence, with continued sobbing and drying of eyes on Barbara’s side.
“It might be as well to consider whether the shop really paid?” suggested Nikolai at last cautiously.
“Would he like her to give up like a cow to be slaughtered before Christmas,” she exclaimed angrily—“and no more money than that was!”
“I only meant it would be better to stop in time.”
But these words had the effect of fire on gunpowder. She got up, as red as a tile. Just so! Now he wanted her to close!
She rushed—in a manner somewhat recalling the useful animal just mentioned by herself, when it is trying to get loose—into the shop and back again.
If Nikolai thought that she would give up and go bankrupt to be jeered at by everybody, when she only needed to go down and borrow that little of Ludvig, he was very much mistaken.
Barbara was quite flushed.
She would not let herself be ruined a second time for Nikolai’s sake. It was quite enough that he had injured her welfare once before in this world. Yes, he need not sit and look at her with open mouth. What else was she turned out of the Veyergangs’ house for, where she had been so important, if it was not because Nikolai had lifted his hand against the Consul-General’s Ludvig. Oh yes, he might wonder as much as he liked, but that was why she had been driven out helpless into the world, from comfortable circumstances. And then when an opportunity came for Nikolai to support her a little, he had some one else to spend his money upon.
But the most vexatious part of it was that Nikolai also wanted to forbid her to apply to one who was as good as her own child, when there was the necessity for it.
She would pay no attention to that however. If he would not help her, he must put up with her going to one who could, now that it was a question of closing the shop and the whole business.
No, she swore she would not go bankrupt. And she struck the table so that the coppers danced in the drawer.
It was a good thing that it was this week, for next week he was going abroad for two or three months; he had said so himself yesterday, so that both she and Silla heard it.
Nikolai sat quite pale. His mouth moved as if it were trembling, and he wiped his forehead once or twice with his sleeve.
He looked slowly up at his mother; it was as if he were afraid of getting to hate her.
“You shall have the money.”
He felt he was on the point of bursting
into tears, and must get away to have his rage out.
It was another postponement for him and Silla until the spring. And where was the end of it to be?
His hand shook and fumbled with the door-handle.
This fresh piece of information, which his mother had so unexpectedly given Nikolai, that it was he who had destroyed her well-being, was like yet another stone weighing him down.
It crushed him like a moral defeat. He could not rid himself of the thought that there was something in it. He felt his courage was weakened, and he went about disheartened.
He had lost another quarter as to his prospects of getting married, and if his mother required or rather claimed money from him again for her down-hill trade, what could he do?
It was like work without hope, and despondency began to take hold of him.
When he put his shillings away in the tin box on Saturday, it was with bitter thoughts. At any moment his mother might come and swallow the whole of it—as she, of course, had a right to do, since he in his time had wasted all hers.
He had always thought that when it came to the point, it was he who had a reckoning to demand of his mother, because she had brought him into the world without being able to give him a father, and then let him go.
But now it seemed to be just the other way. His mother, with her all-consuming business, was the great, lawful gulf for all his happiness.
He began to be weary of it all.
Amid all this there sometimes dawned and smouldered a faint glow of rebellion within him, although, in his honest endeavour to come to the bottom of the truth, it was some time before it blazed up.
Should he let Silla go, too, into this same gulf?
The answer blazed up clearly, so that the flames shone and flickered:
“Not while there was a rag left of what was called Nikolai!”
And with reference to his mother, and his having perhaps brought misfortune upon her, should he not have hit out, but just let himself be insulted and trampled upon, as he was going to be again now? His mother, tall and big, would just squeeze them to death with that shop, both he and Silla. They were not even to have leave or the right to sigh.
But he would not have that.
He had thrashed Veyergang, and only repented that he had not hit harder. As he had come into the world, he would be a human being, even if he were to have his head cut off for it afterwards.
The shop up there should not be fattened with another penny out of the tin box. If his mother ever came to want for food, she would always find a place in his room; but that she should put a stop to his ever getting a room of his own—no, thank you!
He was like another man when he had at last made this clear to himself. Yes, his name was Nikolai, and he was foreman at Mrs. Ellingsen’s.
CHAPTER XII
THE FAIR AND THE CONVICT
The winter was passing.
It was at the time of the fair in the beginning of February. The streets swarmed with people and the snow in the thaw had turned to powdered sugar with the traffic.
A motley row of stalls stretched from market-place to market-place. Trumpets brayed, buffoons shouted, the lottery-wheel went round, the cryers howled. Music filled the air in volleys of blustering flourishes, and amidst it all, over the whole town, pleasure-seeking, dancing and merriment, until far on into the night.
Dull noise and the sound of music penetrated up to the manufacturing part of the town. In the evenings the town lay beneath it in increased illumination.
There was a kind of intoxication in the air, and there was many an impatient, longing soul up there of such as look severely upon themselves, while plenty of the looser sort streamed down.
From year to year the accounts grew of the large fair-balls, of the trumpets, the coloured lamps in the garden, and the matadores who stood treat. It was tempting and attractive.
As early as the second day Kristofa came, excited and eager, with a solution of the question as far as she and Gunda and Silla were concerned—money for tickets and cakes too, for all three!
She behaved most mysteriously, talked all the time of a certain person, whom she dared not, for all the world, mention.
Silla had never before been to anything of the kind, the most she had ever done was to stand outside among the longing crowd, who had to content themselves with looking at the coloured lamps and listening to the music. Now at last there was a chance for her too.
Oh, if she dared!
She was restless the whole morning, and had two round red spots of colour on her cheeks.
At dinner-time her mother came up tired and out of breath from the town.
She had had to promise the Antonisens to stand at their cake-stall on the market-place through the fair-week and help sell. It was hardly-earned money in the cold there and in the middle of all that shouting and bawling; but she would do her duty, and not swerve from it when there was a penny to earn. It would not be closed and packed up before midnight, so she must stay down there these few nights.
There was a buzzing and singing in Silla’s ears; it was as if the door were opening to her of itself. She could go now if she liked.
She was almost frightened.
As she was taking some washing home in the afternoon, down the street, young Veyergang suddenly brushed close by her.
She almost screamed; then he had come back!
She dared not look up, and felt herself turn red, but had a momentary impression that he smiled and looked steadily at her and then nodded.
She knew the delicate scent of his cigar, and had a feeling that his clothes creaked, as it were, when he moved—a peculiarity which was connected with the romantic ideas of distinguished gentlemen that Kristofa had awakened in her.
It was he, she was quite sure now, who had given them the tickets.
Her heart beat and fluttered within her like a disturbed and frightened bird.
She went home in a reverie, so that at last Mrs. Holman had to ask if she were out of her mind.
She stole a glance into the looking-glass over the drawers.
Her eyes, were they so very black? The freckles were still there. There was a cure for freckles—but there were not so many as there looked to be; the old glass was so full of spots and holes in the quicksilver.
Mrs. Holman, to her surprise, saw Silla standing and rubbing, breathing on and polishing the mirror. Her daughter must have been seized with a new zeal.
On the evening of the third day of the fair, Nikolai strolled up to the factory district by lamplight.
He had been fairing on his own account, and had bought a workbox as a surprise for Silla—one with looking-glass inside the lid—and this afternoon he had put some mounting and a nice lock upon it.
He could surely in some way succeed in meeting her and showing it to her—so easily and with such a spring the lock went! And scissors and needle case he had put inside. She should have the key in her own keeping, and he would keep the box.
He had tied it in a handkerchief and put two cakes on the top, so that the person who could guess that it was anything but a workman’s bundle that he was carrying would be more than clever.
He passed close beneath his mother’s windows where there was a light, and peeped in to see if Silla might happen to be standing at the counter, and then strolled about indifferently up and down the streets.
It was so strangely deserted and empty here this evening.
And, look as he would through the gate and the paling, it was not possible for him to discover a light in Mrs. Holman’s window.
After having exhausted every artifice, he stationed himself on the watch for a long time where the roads crossed and one went up to the Valsets’ cottage.
But fortune did not favour him this evening; he remained standing there with
his workbox.
It was dark all down the street except near the lamp-post.
There was somebody! There she was!
He hurried up.
No, it was that Jakobina Silla had been so much with in the summer.
There would at any rate be no harm in asking her.
“Isn’t Mrs. Holman at home this evening?” he asked, taking off his cap.
“No; she’s down at the fair, helping sell.”
The inference flashed with a passionate joy upon Nikolai; then he would be able to go in and see Silla.
“And so, when the cat’s away the mice will play,” continued Jakobina. It was pretty well known that the smith came there for Silla’s sake, and her vexation at her three friends having got tickets, and not her, filled her with spiteful gaiety. “Silla has taken a little trip into the town, too!” she added, laughing.
“Silla!”
“Yes, why shouldn’t she? Mrs. Holman is sitting in the cold down there at a stall, kicking and stamping her feet; why shouldn’t her daughter do the same at the fair ball?”—Jakobina was great at saying witty things—“especially when she perhaps has some one who will both dance with her and treat her,” she said, letting off another shot, as Nikolai seemed to be struck dumb.
“Who’s put that lie into your head, girl?”
“If I’m lying, so’s Kristofa; and that Silla went down with her and Gunda a couple of hours ago I saw with my own eyes. The one I mean can afford to give fair-tickets to either three or six. But perhaps they were going to a prayer-meeting,” she added, winking with one eye.
“What nonsense are you talking! You’d better take care what you say!” he exclaimed angrily.
“Ha, ha!” she laughed; “you’re not such a stranger to him—he’s almost related. We’re so grand, we are! We heard enough of that from your mother last summer, when she got him to pay for that fine black dress, and they wouldn’t let her have credit for any more sewing materials for her shop.”
