by Jonas Lie
He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, gazing over the edge of the quay at a sunken sugar-loaf, which a crowd of small boys, amid noise and clamour, were labouring to get up. It lay already half melted on the green bottom, on which the sun drew wavy lines.
Silla might try all she could to get him into the smithy. Since they had tacked the word thief on to him, he had got soaked through with salt water, just like the sugar-loaf. And besides, to stand there and slave, when he could be his own——
“Hi, you boys! I’ll show you how to get the sugar-loaf up, but you will have to eat it yourselves.”
* * * *
The public-house—the one at Mrs. Selvig’s, with the green door and white window frames, farthest down the street—had seen Holman’s quiet, subdued, stooping figure come and go for many years. His grasp on the door-handle was just as precise, his walk up to the brown counter after having laid down his tools, exactly the same, though his face had a little more colour in it. He had a certain reputation there, which had allowed of his “chalking up” for several years past, and there was a regular proportion of his account, about which his inexorably correct wife had not the faintest idea—“for Holman had his weekly pocket-money.”
And as usual on Saturday evenings, Silla was walking about outside with the basket, waiting for him.
She was really quite nicely dressed in her cotton gown with a little white handkerchief tied round her neck; but clothes did not seem to set her off. The slight, overgrown figure seemed to show through everywhere.
She made a quick turn, when she thought she caught a glimpse of Nikolai at the bottom of the street. She had fancied the same thing last Saturday evening. She had not really spoken to him since early in the summer, when he got so angry because she wanted him to go into the smithy again.
She went quickly down the street—she was quite certain that it was he!
She hurried on farther, down to the bridge; but it was the same as last time—he was not to be seen. So she turned back again, disappointed, keeping constant watch on Mrs. Selvig’s green door. She knew her father would appear as the clock struck eight.
She went up towards it and down again: she began to grow impatient. It must be past the time. They were beginning to shut the shops here and there, and if she was to get anything bought this evening, it would be impossible to wait any longer.
She must really go up and see whether her father were sitting there still—whether he had not perhaps gone when she was down at the bridge: he never mistook the time.
She had gone up the street as far as the place where the stone pavement began, when she saw the green door open and slam quickly to again, as a bare-headed, half-dressed servant-girl ran out. Immediately after, a man came out in similar haste, and through the door which he left standing open behind him, a number of people, with and without hats, streamed out on to the steps.
Something was the matter!
Now a window was also opened, or rather hammered open, so that the pane clashed down on to the pavement.
Probably some drunken man or other, who could not stand any longer—it was Saturday evening, you know—and who was making a row, and must be taken by the police.
She had often seen such sights before, and was quite accustomed to them. She was not anxious about her father either: he never interfered in such matters.
But why did he not come out? Every one else had come out.
A faint, slanting gleam of evening light had fallen in through the empty square of window. Her father generally sat at the table just inside; he always kept the same place. And she went up and peered in between the flower-pots,—some half-stifled, dirty geraniums and hydrangeas, saturated with public-house effluvia.
Who was that—that man who was lying on the dirty counter, with his necktie and shirt unfastened and one arm hanging down—was it her father?
“If only some one had a lancet!—he moved just now—a lancet!”
What more they said on the steps she did not notice, except that some wanted to deny her entrance, and others again said that she was Holman’s daughter.
She awoke, as if after a fall from a great height during which she had lost consciousness, to find herself sitting by the counter supporting her father’s head. She thought she remembered clinging to his neck and begging him to answer her: but there was no rattling in his throat now.
They had placed an old, worn sofa-pillow and the seat of a chair under his head. Behind stood quart and pint measures, dram-glasses, tin funnels and beer-bottles pushed right up to the wall to make room. His wide-open eyes stared up at the once white-washed beams of the ceiling, and one side of his face was drawn up into a grin, which made him look as if he were unspeakably disgusted with the dirty ceiling.
A big man sat at the door. Silla knew him: he was the public-house bear, as he was called; he who turned people out for Mrs. Selvig. He was sitting silent on the bench.
There was perfect stillness in the room; she heard only the drip from the tap of the brandy-cask down into the dish beneath, and saw, through the half-open door to the inner room, Mrs. Selvig and her two daughters bustling about on tiptoe.
A young man in spectacles entered. He asked a few rapid questions, while he opened a case of instruments on the counter at the feet of the prostrate figure. He listened at its chest with the stethoscope and without it, and shook his head, pulled out a lancet, and pushed the shirt sleeve up the hanging arm.
“Hold the sleeve, so that it doesn’t slip down!” he said with a glance up at Silla; he took her to be a member of the household.
The lancet pierced and pierced again. The ashen grey face of the girl looked into his, as if she would beg him for only one drop of that which was the life.
There came out something like a thick, dark syrup.
He listened again, felt again; one more trial with the lancet, and it was with an air of superiority, and a mouth drawn up like his professor’s, that the young bachelor of medicine turned to those assembled and pronounced his concise verdict:
“Stone dead! The man’s stone dead!—from drink!”
His words were followed by a cry from Silla, who threw herself upon her father.
“Is that his daughter?” asked the young doctor. He carefully wiped his lancet at the light, and put his instruments together preparatory to going, but gazed at the same time over his spectacles at her. Heedless of everything, she cried incessantly over the body.
“You aren’t dead, are you, father? Father!”
It was a wild sorrow, without consideration or bashfulness, and the young doctor felt that he was witnessing an unpleasant scene from life in the outskirts of the town. He had done his duty and hastened out.
A twenty-year-old workshop apprentice, pale and overcome, was standing behind Silla, trying to recall her to herself. He took her by the shoulder, and whispered repeatedly, as loudly as respect for the dead would allow:
“Silla! Silla! don’t you hear? It’s me—Nikolai!”
And he tried in vain two or three times to lift her up from the body.
Meanwhile a policeman stood and examined Mrs. Selvig and the girls. He made notes, and took down the particulars of the death.
Just finished his usual quantity, a bottle of ale and four drams. The girl at the bar saw him quickly stretch out his hand—had the impression that he wanted another dram—and when he slowly sank down from his chair, supposed that he was drunk. Used never to be so drunk that he could not walk or stand, at any rate by supporting himself or holding on to convenient, firm things.
This last piece of evidence was deposed to by several of the regular customers, or as they were described in the police report—“Several of the regular visitors to the refreshment-room, whose testimony may be considered as thoroughly reliable.”
Several of these silent, somewhat tottering, figures
who had been thus aroused from their dull, Saturday evening drowsiness, had already disappeared from the scene. Bottles and glasses remained standing with their contents.
“Might there not possibly be some other direct or indirect cause?”
It was at first hesitatingly that Mrs. Selvig could think of anything of the sort.
Unwilling as she was to go to extremes with an old, regular customer, she yet had been obliged this evening to give him to understand that whatever he required in future must be paid for in cash. His bill had now, after all the years he had enjoyed credit in the tap-room, grown so enormous, that she, a widow with two daughters, could no longer feel justified in letting it run on. During all the years he had frequented her house, she had faithfully kept her word never to send a bill home to his house. But a bill cannot lie for ever on the threshold, as the police know. That is the way of the world: it is the same for one as it is for the other—so it must just be got by a distress warrant. That was what she had said to him, unwilling though she had been to do so, and so unpleasant, she could truthfully say, as it was to disturb such a quiet, decent man.
It was high time to rid the bar of its encumbrance. The public-house bear had hunted up a hand-barrow, but had to get a couple more men to help carry. And they must have a proper contrivance with a cloth over, so that the whole thing would look like a hospital stretcher—a dead man with nothing but a tablecloth over him would make too great a commotion out in the street!
It was something of this kind that Mrs. Selvig and her daughters were busy looking out and putting together, out of some green bed-hangings. One’s good name is dear to every one, and Mrs. Selvig felt that what had just taken place was a blow to the house.
It was now nearly dark in the tap-room. Holman’s dark figure had been moved on to the stretcher, which stood on the floor ready to be lifted, and a message had been sent to Mrs. Holman.
Perhaps they delayed purposely; a little later in the evening when it was darker, and an undesirable sensation in the street would be avoided.
Silla’s face was stiff with crying. There was no one in the room but her and Nikolai.
He stood by the counter, and she was sitting with her back to the window; there was no sound but the humming of a gnat in the half-darkness up under the curtain.
At last he broke the silence.
“He was kind, both to you and to me, as often as he dared be, you know.”
Silla did not answer.
“He always dreaded going home at night so, you know. He’ll be spared that now, and setting his foot inside this public-house again, too!”
“Father! Father!” broke from Silla, followed by a fit of violent sobbing.
“Listen, Silla!” he said, interrupted by the repressed weight on his own breast. “If you have no father, you have some one here who will take care of you, and knows what it is—I have never had any father either, nor ever seen any. And I will be a smith, as there won’t be any more block-making for you now. I only wanted to tell you, so that you can remember it afterwards,” he added softly—it did not look as if Silla were listening to him.
“And this evening I’ll follow you right to the corner, and I’ll stand there until everything is in, and I shall be outside to-night; so you know it, if anything is wanted.”
“Yes, stay outside, Nikolai!” she whispered.
The public-house bear and the two bearers came in. They lifted the stretcher out through the door, and, with a little difficulty at the turn, down the steps, where a few spectators stood.
And so they went up the street—the dead with the two bearers and the public-house bear in front, and Silla and Nikolai behind.
At the place where they were to part, he pressed the basket, which she had forgotten, into her hand, and then stood looking after them.
CHAPTER VI
THE FACTORY GIRLS
What becomes of all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large male and female fish?
Disease wields a broad broom in the earliest age. The harbour takes them into its embrace; the streets with their stray livelihoods, or a wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons and the house of correction take them. In later years, labour also, on a great scale, has taken them into its embrace—the factory doors stand wide open.
People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship, can draw a sigh of relief. The responsibility is at any rate diminished, as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour’s educating wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over into moral territory.
There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm’s great factory, and minded the whirring shuttles, balls and rollers—Swedish Lena, and Stina, and Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them. Had any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have been hard put to it for an answer.
The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling authorities turned his steps in that direction. They had to gesticulate, nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar, buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.
They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there: new-comers, more or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack. And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled, with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard. She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools, and now and then she looked up like a bird.
They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa’s new braided jacket. She need not try to persuade any one that she had got the money from her stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda nor Jakobina did! Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of last Sunday—she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree, in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she chanced to be the initiated one.
And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that Silla listened with both her ears. There was to be dancing on Sunday evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and finery—which some possessed and others had to borrow—and of who danced best and treated most liberally. Kristofa was able to inform them that there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and ordinary people and ships’ officers were to be there!
Some strangers who were going over the factory came up the room, and stopped and questioned and examined. And the young workwomen sat each in her place, with head bent over her work, as if she had no thought for anything but her reels.
The morning light shone with a kind of dizzy stillness in from the great windows high up in the wall, over human beings, machinery and bales.
It was nearly twelve. The last hour always dragged so slowly, and the smel
l of oil and the heat from the engines seemed to increase and become almost stupifying.
Still a few more long stifling minutes. At last the bell rang.
And dressed, as if by a stroke of magic, the factory girls swarmed down the steps, with their breakfast-tins in their hands, in their neat aprons, handkerchiefs nicely tied under their chins, and knitted shawls crossed over their chests.
Oh, the bright spring air!—to take a good breath of it! Silla, hot and thirsty, knocked off a bit of frozen snow from the fence with her tin and ate it.
With her head full of all that Kristofa had held out to her about the dance at the Letvindt, she wandered down arm-in-arm with a long row of her companions. The road out from the factory was quite crowded; lower down it widened out, with a street-like pavement.
“Look, look, Kristofa! Veyergang has come back from England already!” The young girls nudged each other, highly interested. “New topcoat; light, light brown!”
“Pooh! I saw him come by the steamer yesterday, him and a whole heap of English people. They were all brown together; I counted exactly seven different kinds of dirt-colour!” It was Josefa who was using her tongue; she had had practice at a milliner’s.
“He’ll have to take care of the oil!” tittered one.
“He’s awfully handsome! Look what a grand forehead! Oh, what a lovely red silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket!” whispered Kristofa to Silla.
The row squeezed themselves up against the fence. The person in question came by humming carelessly, with his head held high and swinging his walking-stick. All the young girls stared respectfully and stupidly straight in front of them, though not without a glance out of the corner of their eye. He disappeared up the stream, cleaving it like a salmon.
“He parts his hair at the back of his head!”—“His hat is like a pudding-basin!”—“Don’t breathe upon him, he is so thin!”—“He is his own father’s son!”—“Oh, what a conceited stick!”