The Rider on the White Horse Page 3

  The stout, somewhat apoplectic master of the house sat at the end of the well-scrubbed, shining table in an armchair with a bright-coloured cushion. He had folded his hands across his stomach, and was staring contentedly with his round eyes at the skeleton of a fat duck; knife and fork were resting in front of him on his plate.

  “Good day, dikemaster!” said Haien, and the gentleman thus addressed slowly turned his head and eyes toward him.

  “You here, Tede?” he replied, and the devoured fat duck had left its mark on his voice. “Sit down; it is quite a walk from your place over here!”

  “I have come, dikemaster,” said Tede Haien, while he sat down opposite the other in a corner on the bench that ran along the wall. “You have had trouble with your hired man and have agreed with my boy to put him in his place!”

  The dikemaster nodded: “Yes, yes, Tede; but—what do you mean by trouble? We people of the marshes, thank goodness, have something to take against troubles!”—and he took the knife before him and patted the skeleton of the poor duck almost affectionately. “This was my pet bird,” he added laughing smugly; “he fed out of my hand!”

  “I thought,” said old Haien, not hearing the last remark, “the boy had done harm in your stable.”

  “Harm? Yes, Tede; surely harm enough! That fat clown hadn’t watered the calves; but he lay drunk on the hayloft, and the beasts bellowed all night with thirst, so that I had to make up my lost sleep till noon; that’s not the way a farm can go on!”

  “No, dikemaster; but there is no danger of that happening with my boy.”

  Hauke stood, his hands in his pockets, by the door-post, and had thrown back his head and was studying the window frames opposite him.

  The dikemaster had raised his eyes and nodded toward him: “No, no, Tede,”—and now he nodded at the old man too; “your Hauke won’t disturb my night’s rest; the schoolmaster has told me before that he would rather sit with his slate and do arithmetic than with a glass of whiskey.”

  Hauke did not hear this encouragement, for Elke had stepped into the room and with her light hand took out the remnants from the table, meanwhile glancing at him carelessly with her dark eyes. Then his glances fell on her too. “By my faith,” he said to himself, “she doesn’t look so dull now either!”

  The girl had left the room. “You know, Tede,” the dikemaster began again, “the Lord has not granted me a son!”

  “Yes, dikemaster, but don’t let that worry you,” replied the other, “for they say that in the third generation the brains of a family run out; your grandfather, we all remember, was a man who protected the land!”

  The dikemaster, after some pondering, looked quite puzzled: “How do you mean, Tede Haien?” he said and sat up in his armchair; “I am in the third generation myself!”

  “Oh, indeed! Never mind, dikemaster; that’s just what people say!” And the lean Tede Haien looked at the old dignitary with rather mischievous eyes.

  The latter, however, spoke unconcerned: “You mustn’t let old women get nonsense like that into your head, Tede Haien; you don’t know my daughter yet—she can calculate three times better than I can! I only wanted to say, your Hauke will be able to make some profit outside of his field work in my room with pen and pencil, and that will do him no harm.”

  “Yes, yes, dikemaster, he can do that; there you are perfectly right;” said old Haien and then began to demand some privileges with the contract which his son had not thought of the night before. For instance, the latter should receive, besides his linen shirts, eight pair of woollen stockings in addition to his wages; also he wanted to have his son’s help at his own work for eight days in spring—and more of the sort. But the dikemaster agreed to everything; Hauke Haien appeared to him just the right servant.

  “Well, God help you, my boy,” said the old man, when they had just left the house, “if that man is to make the world clear to you!”

  But Hauke replied calmly: “Never mind, father; everything will turn out all right.”

  Hauke had not been wrong in his judgment. The world, or what the world meant to him, grew clearer to his mind, the longer he stayed in this house—perhaps all the more, the less he was helped by a wiser insight and the more, he had to depend on his own powers with which he had from the beginning helped himself. There was someone in the house, however, whom he did not seem to suit; that was Ole Peters, the head man, a good worker and a great talker. The former lazy and stupid but stocky hired man had been more to his liking, whose back he could load calmly with a barrel of oats and whom he could knock about to his heart’s content. Hauke, who was still more silent, but who surpassed him mentally, he could not treat in the same way; Hauke had too strange a way of looking at him. Nevertheless he managed to pick out tasks which might have been dangerous for the young man’s yet undeveloped body; and when the head man would say: “You ought to have seen fat Nick, he could do it without any trouble at all,” then Hauke would work with all his might and finish the task, although with difficulty. It was lucky for him that Elke usually could hinder this, either by herself or through her father. One may ask what it is that binds people who are complete strangers to each other; perhaps—well, they were both born arithmeticians, and the girl could not bear to see her comrade ruined by rough work.

  The conflict between head man and second man did not grow less when after Martinmas the different dike bills came in for revision.

  It happened on a May evening, but the weather was like November; inside the house one could hear the surf roar outside from behind the dike.

  “Hey, Hauke,” said the master of the house, “come in; now is your chance to show if you can do arithmetic!”

  “Master,” Hauke replied; “I’m supposed to feed the young cattle first.”

  “Elke!” called the dikemaster; “where are you, Elke? Go and tell Ole to feed the young cattle; I want Hauke to calculate!”

  So Elke hurried into the stable and gave the order to the head man who was just busy hanging the harness used during the day back in place.

  Ole Peters whipped the post beside which he had been busying himself with a bridle, as if he wanted to beat it to pieces: “The devil take that cursed scribbler!”

  She heard these words even before she had closed the stable door again.

  “Well?” asked the old man, as she stepped into the room.

  “Ole was willing to do it,” said his daughter, biting her lips a little, and sat down opposite Hauke on one of the roughly carved chairs which in those days were still made at home on winter evenings. Out of a drawer she had taken a white stocking with a red bird pattern on it, which she was now knitting; the long-legged creatures might have represented herons or storks. Hauke sat opposite her, deep in his arithmetic; the dikemaster himself rested in his armchair and blinked sleepily at Hauke’s pen. On the table, as always in the house of the dikemaster, two tallow candles were burning, and behind the windows with their leaden frames the shutters were closed and fastened from within; now the wind could bang against them as hard as it liked. Once in a while Hauke raised his head and glanced for a moment at the bird stockings or at the narrow, calm face of the girl.

  Suddenly from the armchair there rose a loud snore, and a glance and smile flew back and forth between the two young people; gradually the breathing grew more quiet, and one could easily talk a little—only Hauke did not know about what.

  But when she raised her knitting and the birds appeared in their whole length, he whispered across the table: “Where have you learned that, Elke?”

  “Learned what?” the girl returned.

  “This bird knitting?” said Hauke.

  “This? From Trin Jans out there on the dike; she can do all sorts of things. She was servant here to my grandfather a long time ago.”

  “At that time I don’t suppose you were born?” said Hauke.

  “I think not; but she has often come to the house since then.”

  “Does she like birds?” asked Hauke; “I thought only ca
ts were for her.”

  Elke shook her head: “Why, she raises ducks and sells them; but last spring, when you had killed her Angora cat, the rats got into the pen at the back of the house and made mischief; now she wants to build herself another in front of the house.”

  “Is that so?” said Hauke and whistled low through his teeth, “that’s why she dragged mud and stones from the upper land. But then she will get on to the inland road; has she a grant?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elke. But he had spoken the last word so loud that the dikemaster started out of his slumber.

  “What grant?” he asked and looked almost wildly from one to the other. “What about the grant?”

  But when Hauke had explained the matter to him, he slapped the young man’s shoulder, laughing: “Oh, well, the inland road is broad enough; God help the dikemaster if he has to worry about duck pens!”

  It weighed on Hauke’s heart that he should have delivered the old woman and her ducks over to the rats, but he allowed himself to be quieted by this objection. “But, master,” he began again, “it might be good for some people to be prodded a little, and if you don’t want to go after them yourself, why don’t you prod the overseers who ought to look out for order on the dike?”

  “How—what is the boy saying?” and the dikemaster sat up straight, and Elke let her fancy stocking sink down and turned an ear toward Hauke.

  “Yes, master,” Hauke went on, “you have already gone round on your spring inspection; but just the same Peter Jansen hasn’t weeded his lot to this day; and in summer the goldfinches will play round the red thistles as gaily as ever. And near by—I don’t know to whom it belongs—there is a hole like a cradle on the outer side of the dike; when the weather is good it is always full of little children that roll in it; but—God save us from high water!”

  The eyes of the old dikemaster had grown bigger and bigger.

  “And then—”said Hauke again.

  “Then what more, boy?” asked the dikemaster; “haven’t you finished yet?” and it seemed as if he had already had too much of his second man’s speech.

  “Yes; then, master,” Hauke went on; “you know that fat Vollina, the daughter of the overseer Harder, who always fetches her father’s horse from the fen—well, as soon as she sits with her round legs on the old yellow mare—Get up!—why, then every time she goes diagonally up the slope of the dike!”

  Hauke did not notice until now that Elke had fixed her intelligent eyes on him and was gently shaking her head.

  He was silent, but a bang on the table from the old man’s fist thundered in his ears. “Confound it!” he cried, and Hauke was almost frightened by the bear’s voice that suddenly broke out: “to the fens! Note down that fat creature in the fens, Hauke! That girl caught three of my young ducks last summer! Yes, yes, put it down,” he repeated, when Hauke hesitated; “I even believe there were four!”

  “Oh, father,” said Elke, “wasn’t it an otter that took the ducks?”

  “A big otter!” cried the old man, panting; I guess I can tell the fat Vollina and an otter apart! No, no, four ducks, Hauke—but as for the rest of what you have been chattering—last spring the dikemaster general and I, after we had breakfasted together at my house, drove by your weeds and your cradle-hole and yet couldn’t see anything. But you two,” and he nodded a few times significantly at Hauke and his daughter, “you can thank God that you are no dikemaster! Two eyes are all one has, and one is supposed to look with a hundred. Take the bills for the straw coverings, Hauke, and look them over; those rascals do keep their accounts in such a shiftless way!”

  Then he leaned back in his chair again, moved his heavy body a few times and soon gave himself over to care-free slumber.

  The same thing was repeated on many an evening. Hauke had sharp eyes, and when they sat together, he did not neglect to call the old man’s attention to one or the other violation or omission in dike matters, and as the latter could not always keep his eyes closed, unawares the management acquired a greater efficiency and those who in other times had gone on sinning in their old, careless ways and now, as it were, unexpectedly felt their mischievous or lazy fingers slapped, looked round indignantly and with astonishment to see whence these slaps had come. And Ole, the head man, did not hesitate to spread the information and in this way to rouse indignation among these people against Hauke and his father, who had to bear part of the guilt. The others, however, who were not affected or who were not concerned with the matter, laughed and rejoiced to see that the young man had at last got the old man going a bit. “It’s only too bad,” they said, “that the young fellow hasn’t enough ground under his feet; else he might make a dikemaster of the kind we used to have—but those few acres of his old man wouldn’t do, after all!”

  Next autumn, when the inspector and the dikemaster general came for the inspection, he looked at old Tede Volkerts from top to toe, while the latter was urging him to sit down to lunch.

  “I tell you, dikemaster,” he said, “I was thinking—you have actually grown ten years younger. You have set my blood coursing with all your proposals; if only we can get down with all that to-day!”

  “Oh, we shall, we shall, your Honor,” replied the old man with a smirk; “the roast goose over there will give us strength! Yes, thank God, I am still always well and brisk!” He looked round the room to make sure that Hauke was not about; then he added with calm dignity: “And so I hope I may fulfill the duties of my office a few more blessed years.”

  “And to this, my dear dikemaster,” returned his superior, “we want to drink this glass together.”

  Elke who had looked after the lunch laughed to herself as she left the room just when the glasses were clicking. Then she took a dish of scraps from the kitchen and walked through the stable to give them to the poultry in front of the outside door. In the stable stood Hauke Haien and with his pitch-fork put hay into the racks of the cows that had to be brought up here so early because of the bad weather. But when he saw the girl come, he stuck the pitchfork into the ground. “Well, Elke!” he said.

  She stood still and nodded at him: “All right, Hauke—but you should have been in there!”

  “Do you think so? Why, Elke?”

  “The dikemaster general has praised the master!”

  “The master? What has that to do with me?”

  “No, I mean, he has praised the dikemaster!”

  The young man’s face was flushed crimson: “I know very well,” he said, “what you are driving at.”

  “Don’t blush, Hauke; it was really you whom the dikemaster general praised!”

  Hauke looked at her with a half smile. “You too, Elke!” he said.

  But she shook her head: “No, Hauke; when I was helper alone, we got no praise. And then, I can only do arithmetic; but you see everything outdoors that the dikemaster is supposed to see for himself. You have cut me out!”

  “That isn’t what I intended—least of all you!” said Hauke timidly, and he pushed aside the head of a cow. “Come, Redskin, don’t swallow my pitchfork, you’ll get all you want!”

  “Don’t think that I’m sorry, Hauke;” said the girl after thinking a little while; “that really is a man’s business.”

  Then Hauke stretched out his arm toward her. “Elke, give me your hand, so that I can be sure.”

  Beneath her dark brows a deep crimson flushed the girl’s face. “Why? I’m not lying!” she cried.

  Hauke wanted to reply; but she had already left the stable, and he stood with his pitchfork in his hand and heard only the cackling and crowing of the ducks and the hens round her outside.

  In the January of Hauke’s third year of service a winter festival was to be held—“Eisboseln” they call it here. The winds had been calm on the coast and steady frost had covered all the ditches between the fens with a solid, even, crystal surface, so that the marked-off strips of land offered a wide field for the throwing at a goal of little wooden balls filled with lead. Day in, day out, a lig
ht northeast wind was blowing: everything had been prepared. The people from the higher land, inhabitants of the village that lay eastward above the marshes, who had won last year, had been challenged to a match and had accepted. From either side nine players had been picked. The umpire and the score-keepers had been chosen. The latter, who had to discuss a doubtful throw whenever a difference of opinion came up, were always chosen from among people who knew how to place their own case in the best possible light, preferably young fellows who not only had good common sense but also a ready tongue. Among these was, above all, Ole Peters, the head man of the dikemaster. “Throw away like devils!” he said; “I’ll do the talking for nothing!”

  Toward evening on the day before the holiday a number of throwers had appeared in the side room of the parish inn up on the higher land, in order to decide about accepting some men who had applied in the last moment. Hauke Haien was among these. At first he had not wanted to take part, although he was well aware of having arms skilled in throwing; but he was afraid that he might be rejected by Ole Peters who had a post of honor in the game, and he wanted to spare himself this defeat. But Elke had made him change his mind at the eleventh hour. “He won’t dare, Hauke,” she had said; “he is the son of a day laborer; your father has his cow and horse and is the cleverest man in the village.”

  “But if he should manage to, after all?”

  Half smiling she looked at him with her dark eyes. “Then he’ll get left,” she said, “in the evening, when he wants to dance with his master’s daughter.” Then Hauke had nodded to her with spirit.

  Now the young men who still hoped to be taken into the game stood shivering and stamping outside the parish inn and looked up at the top of the stone church tower which stood beside the tavern. The pastor’s pigeons which during the summer found their food on the fields of the village were just returning from the farmyards and barns of the peasants, where they had pecked their grain, and were disappearing into their nests underneath the shingles of the tower. In the west, over the sea, there was a glowing sunset.