The Great Hunger

Chapter V

In a narrow alley off Sea Street lived Gorseth the job-master, with a household consisting of a lean and skinny wife, two half-starved horses, and a few ramshackle flies and sledges. The job-master himself was a hulking toper with red nose and beery-yellow eyes, who spent his nights in drinking and got home in the small hours of the morning when his wife was just about getting up. All through the morning she went about the place scolding and storming at him for a drunken ne’er-do-well, while Gorseth himself lay comfortably snoring.

When Peer arrived on the scene with his box on his shoulder, Gorseth was on his knees in the yard, greasing a pair of leather carriage-aprons, while his wife, sunken-lipped and fierce-eyed, stood in the kitchen doorway, abusing him for a profligate, a swine, and the scum of the earth. Gorseth lay there on all-fours, with the sun shining on his bald head, smearing on the grease; but every now and then he would lift his head and snarl out, “Hold your jaw, you damned old jade!”

“Haven’t you a room to let?” Peer asked.

A beery nose was turned towards him, and the man dragged himself up and wiped his hands on his trousers. “Right you are,” said he, and led the way across the yard, up some stairs, and into a little room with two panes of glass looking on to the street and a half-window on the yard. The room had a bed with sheets, a couple of chairs, and a table in front of the half-window. Six and six a month. Agreed. Peer took it on the spot, paid down the first month’s rent, and having got rid of the man sat down on his chest and looked about him. Many people have never a roof to their heads, but here was he, Peer, with a home of his own. Outside in the yard the woman had begun yelping her abuse again, the horses in the stable beneath were stamping and whinnying, but Peer had lodged in fisher-booths and peasants’ quarters and was not too particular. Here he was for the first time in a place of his own, and within its walls was master of the house and his own master.

Food was the next thing. He went out and bought in supplies, stocking his chest with plain country fare. At dinner time he sat on the lid, as fishermen do, and made a good solid meal of flat bannocks and cold bacon.

And now he fell-to at his new work. There was no question of whether it was what he wanted or not; here was a chance of getting up in the world, and that without having to beg any one’s leave. He meant to get on. And it was not long before his dreams began to take a new shape from his new life. He stood at the bottom of a ladder, a blacksmith’s boy—but up at the top sat a mighty Chief Engineer, with gold spectacles and white waistcoat. That was where he would be one day. And if any schoolmaster came along and tried to keep him back this time—well, just let him try it. They had turned him out of a churchyard once—he would have his revenge for that some day. It might take him years and years to do it, but one fine day he would be as good as the best of them, and would pay them back in full.

In the misty mornings, as he tramped in to his work, dinner-pail in hand, his footsteps on the plank bridge seemed hammering out with concentrated will: “To-day I shall learn something new—new—new!”

The great works down at the harbour—shipyard, foundry, and machine shops—were a whole city in themselves. And into this world of fire and smoke and glowing iron, steam-hammers, racing wheels, and bustle and noise, he was thrusting his way, intent upon one thing, to learn and learn and ever learn. There were plenty of those by him who were content to know their way about the little corner where they stood—but they would never get any farther. They would end their days broken-down workmen—HE would carve his way through till he stood among the masters. He had first to put in some months’ work in the smithy, then he would be passed on to the machine shops, then to work with the carpenters and painters, and finally in the shipyard. The whole thing would take a couple of years. But the works and all therein were already a kind of new Bible to him; a book of books, which he must learn by heart. Only wait!

And what a place it was for new adventures! Many times a day he would find himself gazing at some new wonder; sheer miracle and revelation—yet withal no creation of God’s grace, but an invention of men. Press a button, and behold, a miracle springs to life. He would stare at the things, and the strain of understanding them would sometimes keep him awake at night. There was something behind this, something that must be—spirit, even though it did not come from God. These engineers were priests of a sort, albeit they did not preach nor pray. It was a new world.

One day he was put to riveting work on an enormous boiler, and for the first time found himself working with a power that was not the power of his own hands. It was a tube, full of compressed air, that drove home the rivets in quick succession with a clashing wail from the boiler that sounded all over the town. Peer’s head and ears ached with the noise, but he smiled all the same. He was used to toil himself, in weariness of body; now he stood here master, was mind and soul and directing will. He felt it now for the first time, and it sent a thrill of triumph through every nerve of his body.

But all through the long evenings he sat alone, reading, reading, and heard the horses stamping in the stable below. And when he crept into bed, well after midnight, there was only one thing that troubled him—his utter loneliness. Klaus Brock lived with his uncle, in a fine house, and went to parties. And he lay here all by himself. If he were to die that very night, there would be hardly a soul to care. So utterly alone he was—in a strange and indifferent world.

Sometimes it helped him a little to think of the old mother at Troen, or of the church at home, where the vaulted roof had soared so high over the swelling organ-notes, and all the faces had looked so beautiful. But the evening prayer was no longer what it had been for him. There was no grey-haired bishop any more sitting at the top of the ladder he was to climb. The Chief Engineer that was there now had nothing to do with Our Lord, or with life in the world to come. He would never come so far now that he could go down into the place of torment where his mother lay, and bring her up with him, up to salvation. And whatever power and might he gained, he could never stand in autumn evenings and lift up his finger and make all the stars break into song.

Something was past and gone for Peer. It was as if he were rowing away from a coast where red clouds hung in the sky and dream-visions filled the air—rowing farther and farther away, towards something quite new. A power stronger than himself had willed it so.

One Sunday, as he sat reading, the door opened, and Klaus Brock entered whistling, with his cap on the back of his head.

“Hullo, old boy! So this is where you live?”

“Yes, it is—and that’s a chair over there.”

But Klaus remained standing, with his hands in his pockets and his cap on, staring about the room. “Well, I’m blest!” he said at last. “If he hasn’t stuck up a photograph of himself on his table!”

“Well, did you never see one before? Don’t you know everybody has them?”

“Not their own photos, you ass! If anybody sees that, you’ll never hear the last of it.”

Peer took up the photograph and flung it under the bed. “Well, it was a rubbishy thing,” he muttered. Evidently he had made a mistake. “But what about this?”—pointing to a coloured picture he had nailed up on the wall.

Klaus put on his most manly air and bit off a piece of tobacco plug. “Ah! that!” he said, trying not to laugh too soon.

“Yes; it’s a fine painting, isn’t it? I got it for fourpence.”

“Painting! Ha-ha! that’s good! Why, you silly cow, can’t you see it’s only an oleograph?”

“Oh, of course you know all about it. You always do.”

“I’ll take you along one day to the Art Gallery,” said Klaus. “Then you can see what a real painting looks like. What’s that you’ve got there—English reader?”

“Yes,” put in Peer eagerly; “hear me say a poem.” And before Klaus could protest, he had begun to recite.

When he had finished, Klaus sat for a while in silence, chewing his quid. “H’m!” he said at last, “if our last teacher, Froken Zebbelin, could have heard that English of yours, we’d have had to send for a nurse for her, hanged if we wouldn’t!”

This was too much. Peer flung the book against the wall and told the other to clear out to the devil. When Klaus at last managed to get a word in, he said:

“If you are to pass your entrance at the Technical you’ll have to have lessons—surely you can see that. You must get hold of a teacher.”

“Easy for you to talk about teachers! Let me tell you my pay is twopence an hour.”

“I’ll find you one who can take you twice a week or so in languages and history and mathematics. I daresay some broken-down sot of a student would take you on for sevenpence a lesson. You could run to that, surely?”

Peer was quiet now and a little pensive. “Well, if I give up butter, and drink water instead of coffee—”

Klaus laughed, but his eyes were moist. Hard luck that he couldn’t offer to lend his comrade a few shillings—but it wouldn’t do.

So the summer passed. On Sundays Peer would watch the young folks setting out in the morning for the country, to spend the whole day wandering in the fields and woods, while he sat indoors over his books. And in the evening he would stick his head out of his two-paned window that looked on to the street, and would see the lads and girls coming back, flushed and noisy, with flowers and green boughs in their hats, crazy with sunshine and fresh air. And still he must sit and read on. But in the autumn, when the long nights set in, he would go for a walk through the streets before going to bed, as often as not up to the white wooden house where the manager lived. This was Klaus’s home. Lights in the windows, and often music; the happy people that lived here knew and could do all sorts of things that could never be learned from books. No mistake: he had a goodish way to go—a long, long way. But get there he would.

One day Klaus happened to mention, quite casually, where Colonel Holm’s widow lived, and late one evening Peer made his way out there, and cautiously approached the house. It was in River Street, almost hidden in a cluster of great trees, and Peer stood there, leaning against the garden fence, trembling with some obscure emotion. The long rows of windows on both floors were lighted up; he could hear youthful laughter within, and then a young girl’s voice singing—doubtless they were having a party. Peer turned up his collar against the wind, and tramped back through the town to his lodging above the carter’s stable.

For the lonely working boy Saturday evening is a sort of festival. He treats himself to an extra wash, gets out his clean underclothes from his chest, and changes. And the smell of the newly-washed underclothing calls up keenly the thought of a pock-marked old woman who sewed and patched it all, and laid it away so neatly folded. He puts it on carefully, feeling almost as if it were Sunday already.

Now and again, when a Sunday seemed too long, Peer would drift into the nearest church. What the parson said was all very good, no doubt, but Peer did not listen; for him there were only the hymns, the organ, the lofty vaulted roof, the coloured windows. Here, too, the faces of the people looked otherwise than in the street without; touched, as it were, by some reflection from all that their thoughts aspired to reach. And it was so homelike here. Peer even felt a sort of kinship with them all, though every soul there was a total stranger.

But at last one day, to his surprise, in the middle of a hymn, a voice within him whispered suddenly: “You should write to your sister. She’s as much alone in the world as you are.”

And one evening Peer sat down and wrote. He took quite a lordly tone, saying that if she wanted help in any way, she need only let him know. And if she would care to move in to town, she could come and live with him. After which he remained, her affectionate brother, Peer Holm, engineer apprentice.

A few days later there came a letter addressed in a fine slanting hand. Louise had just been confirmed. The farmer she was with wished to keep her on as dairymaid through the winter, but she was afraid the work would be too heavy for her. So she was coming in to town by the boat arriving on Sunday evening. With kind regards, his sister, Louise Hagen.

Peer was rather startled. He seemed to have taken a good deal on his shoulders.

On Sunday evening he put on his blue suit and stiff felt hat, and walked down to the quay. For the first time in his life he had some one else to look after—he was to be a father and benefactor from now on to some one worse off than himself. This was something new. The thought came back to him of the jolly gentleman who had come driving down one day to Troen to look after his little son. Yes, that was the way to do things; that was the sort of man he would be. And involuntarily he fell into something of his father’s look and step, his smile, his lavish, careless air. “Well, well—well, well—well, well,” he seemed saying to himself. He might almost, in his fancy, have had a neat iron-grey beard on his chin.

The little green steamboat rounded the point and lay in to the quay, the gangways were run out, porters jumped aboard, and all the passengers came bundling ashore. Peer wondered how he was to know her, this sister whom he had never seen.

The crowd on deck soon thinned, and people began moving off from the quay into the town.

Then Peer was aware of a young peasant-girl, with a box in one hand and a violin-case in the other. She wore a grey dress, with a black kerchief over her fair hair; her face was pale, and finely cut. It was his mother’s face; his mother as a girl of sixteen. Now she was looking about her, and now her eyes rested on him, half afraid, half inquiring.

“Is it you, Louise?”

“Is that you, Peer?”

They stood for a moment, smiling and measuring each other with their eyes, and then shook hands.

Together they carried the box up through the town, and Peer was so much of a townsman already that he felt a little ashamed to find himself walking through the streets, holding one end of a trunk, with a peasant-girl at the other. And what a clatter her thick shoes made on the pavement! But all the time he was ashamed to feel ashamed. Those blue arch eyes of hers, constantly glancing up at him, what were they saying? “Yes, I have come,” they said—“and I’ve no one but you in all the world—and here I am,” they kept on saying.

“Can you play that?” he asked, with a glance at her violin-case.

“Oh well; my playing’s only nonsense,” she laughed. And she told how the old sexton she had been living with last had not been able to afford a new dress for her confirmation, and had given her the violin instead.

“Then didn’t you have a new dress to be confirmed in?”

“No.”

“But wasn’t it—didn’t you feel horrible, with the other girls standing by you all dressed up fine?”

She shut her eyes for a moment. “Oh, yes—it WAS horrid,” she said.

A little farther on she asked: “Were you boarded out at a lot of places?”

“Five, I think.”

“Pooh—why, that’s nothing. I was at nine, I was.” The girl was smiling again.

When they came up to his room she stood for a moment looking round the place. It was hardly what she had expected to find. And she had not been in town lodgings before, and her nose wrinkled up a little as she smelt the close air. It seemed so stuffy, and so dark.

“We’ll light the lamp,” he said.

Presently she laughed a little shyly, and asked where she was to sleep.

“Lord bless us, you may well ask!” Peer scratched his head. “There’s only one bed, you see.” At that they both burst out laughing.

“The one of us’ll have to sleep on the floor,” suggested the girl.

“Right. The very thing,” said he, delighted. “I’ve two pillows; you can have one. And two rugs—anyway, you won’t be cold.”

“And then I can put on my other dress over,” she said. “And maybe you’ll have an old overcoat—”

“Splendid! So we needn’t bother any more about that.”

“But where do you get your food from?” She evidently meant to have everything cleared up at once.

Peer felt rather ashamed that he hadn’t money enough to invite her to a meal at an eating-house then and there. But he had to pay his teacher’s fees the next day; and his store-box wanted refilling too.

“I boil the coffee on the stove there overnight,” he said, “so that it’s all ready in the morning. And the dry food I keep in that box there. We’ll see about some supper now.” He opened the box, fished out a loaf and some butter, and put the kettle on the stove. She helped him to clear the papers off the table, and spread the feast on it. There was only one knife, but it was really much better fun that way than if he had had two. And soon they were seated on their chairs—they had a chair each—having their first meal in their own home, he and she together.

It was settled that Louise should sleep on the floor, and they both laughed a great deal as he tucked her in carefully so that she shouldn’t feel cold. It was not till afterwards, when the lamp was out, that they noticed that the autumn gales had set in, and there was a loud north-wester howling over the housetops. And there they lay, chatting to each other in the dark, before falling asleep.

It seemed a strange and new thing to Peer, this really having a relation of his own—and a girl, too—a young woman. There she lay on the floor near by him, and from now on he was responsible for what was to become of her in the world. How should he put that job through?

He could hear her turning over. The floor was hard, very likely.

“Louise?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see mother?”

“No.”

“Or your father?”

“My father?” She gave a little laugh.

“Yes, haven’t you ever seen him either?”

“Why, how should I, silly? Who says that mother knew herself who it was?”

There was a pause. Then Peer brought out, rather awkwardly: “We’re all alone, then—you and I.”

“Yes—we are that.”

“Louise! What are you thinking of taking to now?”

“What are you?”

So Peer told her all his plans. She said nothing for a little while—no doubt she was lying thinking of the grand things he had before him.

At last she spoke. “Do you think—does it cost very much to learn to be a midwife?”

“A midwife—is that what you want to be, girl?” Peer couldn’t help laughing. So this was what she had been planning in these days—since he had offered to help her on in the world.

“Do you think my hands are too big?” she ventured presently—he could just hear the whisper.

Peer felt a pang of pity. He had noticed already how ill the red swollen hands matched her pale clear-cut face, and he knew that in the country, when any one has small, fine hands, people call them “midwife’s hands.”

“We’ll manage it somehow, I daresay,” said Peer, turning round to the wall. He had heard that it cost several hundred crowns to go through the course at the midwifery school. It would be years before he could get together anything like that sum. Poor girl, it looked as if she would have a long time to wait.

After that they fell silent. The north-wester roared over the housetops, and presently brother and sister were asleep.

When Peer awoke the next morning, Louise was about already, making coffee over the little stove. Then she opened her box, took out a yellow petticoat and hung it on a nail, placed a pair of new shoes against the wall, lifted out some under-linen and woollen stockings, looked at them, and put them back again. The little box held all her worldly goods.

As Peer was getting up: “Gracious mercy!” she cried suddenly, “what is that awful noise down in the yard?”

“Oh, that’s nothing to worry about,” said Peer. “It’s only the job-master and his wife. They carry on like that every blessed morning; you’ll soon get used to it.”

Soon they were seated once more at the little table, drinking coffee and laughing and looking at each other. Louise had found time to do her hair—the two fair plaits hung down over her shoulders.

It was time for Peer to be off, and, warning the girl not to go too far from home and get lost, he ran down the stairs.

At the works he met Klaus Brock, and told him that his sister had come to town.

“But what are you going to do with her?” asked Klaus.

“Oh, she’ll stay with me for the present.”

“Stay with you? But you’ve only got one room and one bed, man!”

“Well—she can sleep on the floor.”

“She? Your sister? She’s to sleep on the floor—and you in the bed!” gasped Klaus.

Peer saw he had made a mistake again. “Of course I was only fooling,” he hastened to say. “Of course it’s Louise that’s to have the bed.”

When he came home he found she had borrowed a frying-pan from the carter’s wife, and had fried some bacon and boiled potatoes; so that they sat down to a dinner fit for a prince.

But when the girl’s eyes fell on the coloured print on the wall, and she asked if it was a painting, Peer became very grand at once. “That—a painting? Why, that’s only an oleograph, silly! No, I’ll take you along to the Art Gallery one day, and show you what real paintings are like.” And he sat drumming with his fingers on the table, and saying: “Well, well—well, well, well!”

They agreed that Louise had better look out at once for some work to help things along. And at the first eating-house they tried, she was taken on at once in the kitchen to wash the floor and peel potatoes.

When bedtime came he insisted on Louise taking the bed. “Of course all that was only a joke last night,” he explained. “Here in town women always have the best of everything—that’s what’s called manners.” As he stretched himself on the hard floor, he had a strange new feeling. The narrow little garret seemed to have widened out now that he had to find room in it for a guest. There was something not unpleasant even in lying on the hard floor, since he had chosen to do it for some one else’s sake.

After the lamp was out he lay for a while, listening to her breathing. Then at last:

“Louise.”

“Yes?”

“Is your father—was his name Hagen?”

“Yes. It says so on the certificate.”

“Then you’re Froken Hagen. Sounds quite fine, doesn’t it?”

“Uf! Now you’re making fun of me.”

“And when you’re a midwife, Froken Hagen might quite well marry a doctor, you know.”

“Silly! There’s no chance—with hands like mine.”

“Do you think your hands are too big for you to marry a doctor?”

“Uf! you ARE a crazy thing. Ha-ha-ha!”

“Ha-ha-ha!”

They both snuggled down under the clothes, with the sense of ease and peace that comes from sharing a room with a good friend in a happy humour.

“Well, good-night, Louise.”

“Good-night, Peer.”