Part 2 (1/2)

”Yes, there is some sense in tidying up now that the work is done,” said Margit, and followed him. She began to fix herself at once, and sang while she was doing so. Now Margit sang well, but sometimes there was a little huskiness in her voice.

”Stop that screaming,” said Nils; he had thrown himself on his back across the bed. Margit stopped.

Then the boy came storming in. ”There has come into the yard a great black dog, a dreadful looking”--

”Hold your tongue, boy,” said Nils from the bed, and thrust out one foot to stamp on the floor with it. ”A devilish noise that boy is always making,” he muttered afterward, and drew his foot up again.

The mother held up a warning finger to the boy. ”You surely must see that father is not in a good humor,” she meant. ”Will you not have some strong coffee with syrup in it?” said she; she wanted to put him in a good humor again. This was a drink the grandmother had liked, and the rest of them too. Nils did not like it at all, but had drunk it because the others did so. ”Will you not have some strong coffee with syrup in it?” repeated Margit; for he had made no reply the first time. Nils raised himself up on both elbows and shrieked, ”Do you think I will pour down such slops?”

Margit was struck with surprise, and, taking the boy with her, went out.

They had a number of things to attend to outside, and did not come in before supper-time. Then Nils was gone. Arne was sent out into the field to call him, but found him nowhere. They waited until the supper was nearly cold, then ate, and still Nils had not come. Margit became uneasy, sent the boy to bed, and sat down to wait. A little after midnight Nils appeared.

”Where have you been, dear?” asked she.

”That is none of your business,” he answered, and slowly sat down on the bench.

He was drunk.

After this, Nils often went out in the parish, and always came home drunk. ”I cannot stand it at home here with you,” said he once when he came in. She tried gently to defend herself, and then he stamped on the floor and bade her be silent: if he was drunk, it was her fault; if he was wicked, it was her fault too; if he was a cripple and an unfortunate being for his whole life, why, she was to blame too, and that infernal boy of hers.

”Why were you always dangling after me?” said he, and wept. ”What harm had I done you that you could not leave me in peace?”

”Lord have mercy on me!” said Margit. ”Was it I who went after you?”

”Yes, it was!” he shrieked as he arose, and amid tears he continued: ”You have succeeded in getting what you wanted. I drag myself about from tree to tree. I go every day and look at my own grave. But I could have lived in splendor with the finest gard girl in the parish. I might have traveled as far as the sun goes, had not you and your d.a.m.ned boy put yourselves in my way.”

She tried again to defend herself. ”It was, at all events, not the boy's fault.”

”If you do not hold your tongue, I will strike you!”--and he struck her.

After he had slept himself sober the next day, he was ashamed, and was especially kind to the boy. But soon he was drunk again, and then he struck the mother. At last he got to striking her almost every time he was drunk. The boy cried and lamented; then he struck him too. Sometimes his repentance was so deep that he felt compelled to leave the house.

About this time his fondness for dancing revived. He began to go about fiddling as in former days, and took the boy with him to carry the fiddle-case. Thus Arne saw a great deal. The mother wept because he had to go along, but dared not say so to the father. ”Hold faithfully to G.o.d, and learn nothing evil,” she begged, and tenderly caressed her boy.

But at the dances there was a great deal of diversion; at home with the mother there was none at all. Arne turned more and more from her and to the father; she saw this and was silent. At the dances Arne learned many songs, and he sang them at home to his father; this amused the latter, and now and then the boy could even get him to laugh. This was so flattering to Arne that he exerted himself to learn as many songs as possible; soon he noticed what kind the father liked best, and what it was that made him laugh. When there was not enough of this element in the songs he was singing, the boy added to it himself, and this early gave him practice in adapting words to music. It was chiefly lampoons and odious things about people who had risen to power and prosperity, that the father liked and the boy sang.

The mother finally concluded to take him with her to the stable of evenings; numerous were the pretexts he found to escape going, but when, nevertheless, she managed to take him with her, she talked kindly to him about G.o.d and good things, usually ending by taking him in her arms, and, amid blinding tears, begging him, entreating him not to become a bad man.

The mother taught the boy to read, and he was surprisingly quick at learning. The father was proud of this, and, especially when he was drunk, told Arne he had his head.

Soon the father fell into the habit, when drink got the better of him, of calling on Arne at dancing-parties to sing for the people. The boy always obeyed, singing song after song amid laughter and uproar; the applause pleased the son almost more than it did the father, and finally there was no end to the songs Arne could sing. Anxious mothers who heard this, went themselves to his mother and told her of it; their reason for so doing being that the character of these songs was not what it should be. The mother put her arms about her boy and forbade him, in the name of G.o.d and all that was sacred, to sing such songs, and now it seemed to Arne that everything he took delight in his mother opposed. For the first time he told his father what his mother had said. She had to suffer for this the next time the father was drunk; he held his peace until then. But no sooner had it become clear to the boy what he had done than in his soul he implored pardon of G.o.d and her; he could not bring himself to do so in spoken words. His mother was just as kind as ever to him, and this cut him to the quick.

Once, however, he forgot this. He had a faculty for mimicking people.

Above all, he could talk and sing as others did. The mother came in one evening when Arne was entertaining his father with this, and it occurred to the father, after she had gone out, that the boy should imitate his mother's singing. Arne refused at first, but his father, who lay over on the bed and laughed until it shook, insisted finally that he should sing like his mother. She is gone, thought the boy, and cannot hear it, and he mimicked her singing as it sounded sometimes when she was hoa.r.s.e and choked with tears. The father laughed until it seemed almost hideous to the boy, and he stopped of himself. Just then the mother came in from the kitchen; she looked long and hard at the boy, as she crossed the floor to a shelf after a milk-pan and turned to carry it out.

A burning heat ran through his whole body; she had heard it all. He sprang down from the table where he had been sitting, went out, cast himself on the ground, and it seemed as though he must bury himself out of sight. He could not rest, and got up feeling that he must go farther on. He went past the barn, and behind it sat the mother, sewing on a fine, new s.h.i.+rt, just for him. She had always been in the habit of singing a hymn over her work when she sat sewing, but now she was not singing. She was not weeping, either; she only sat and sewed. Arne could bear it no longer he flung himself down in the gra.s.s directly in front of her, looked up at her, and wept and sobbed bitterly. The mother dropped her work and took his head between her hands.

”Poor Arne!” said she, and laid her own beside his. He did not try to say a word, but wept as he had never done before. ”I knew you were good at heart,” said the mother, and stroked down his hair.

”Mother, you must not say no to what I am going to ask for,” was the first thing he could say.