The Great Hunger Part 7

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."

Chapter VI

So things went on till winter was far spent. Now that Louise, too, was a wage-earner, and could help with the expenses, they could dine luxuriously at an eating-house every day, if they pleased, on meat-cakes at fourpence a portion. They managed to get a bed for Peer that could be folded up during the day, and soon learned, too, that good manners required they should hang up Louise's big woollen shawl between them as a modest screen while they were dressing and undressing. And Louise began to drop her country speech and talk city-fashion like her brother.

One thought often came to Peer as he lay awake. "The girl is the very image of mother, that's certain--what if she were to go the same way?

Well, no, that she shall not. You're surely man enough to see to that.

Nothing of that sort shall happen, my dear Froken Hagen."

They saw but little of each other during the day, though, for they were apart from early in the morning till he came home in the evening. And when he lectured her, and warned her to be careful and take no notice of men who tried to speak to her, Louise only laughed. When Klaus Brock came up one day to visit them, and made great play with his eyes while he talked to her, Peer felt much inclined to take him by the scruff of the neck and throw him downstairs.

When Christmas-time was near they would wander in the long evenings through the streets and look in at the dazzlingly lit shop-windows, with their tempting, glittering show of gold and finery. Louise kept asking continually how much he thought this thing or that cost--that lace, or the cloak, or the stockings, or those gold brooches. "Wait till you marry that doctor," Peer would say, "then you can buy all those things." So far neither of them had an overcoat, but Peer turned up his coat-collar when he felt cold, and Louise made the most of her thick woollen dress and a pair of good country gloves that kept her quite warm. And she had adventured on a hat now, in place of her kerchief, and couldn't help glancing round, thinking people must notice how fine she was.

On Christmas Eve he carried up buckets of water from the yard, and she had a great scrubbing-out of the whole room. And then they in their turn had a good wash, helping each other in country fashion to scrub shoulders and back.

Peer was enough of a townsman now to have laid in a few little presents to give his sister; but the girl, who had not been used to such doings, had nothing for him, and wept a good deal when she realised it. They ate cakes from the confectioner's with syrup over them, and drank chocolate, and then Louise played a hymn-tune, in her best style, on her violin, and Peer read the Christmas lessons from the prayer-book--it was all just like what they used to do at Troen on Christmas Eve. And that night, after the lamp was put out, they lay awake talking over plans for the future. They promised each other that when they had got well on in the world, he in his line and she in hers, they would manage to live near each other, so that their children could play together and grow up good friends. Didn't she think that was a good idea? Yes, indeed she did. And did he really mean it? Yes, of course he meant it, really.

But later on in the winter, when she sat at home in the evenings waiting for him--he often worked overtime--she was sometimes almost afraid.

There was his step on the stairs! If it was hurried and eager she would tremble a little. For the moment he was inside the door he would burst out: "Hurrah, my girl! I've learnt something new to-day, I tell you!"

"Have you, Peer?" And then out would pour a torrent of talk about motors and power and pressures and cylinders and cranes and screws, and such-like. She would sit and listen and smile, but of course understood not a word of it all, and as soon as Peer discovered this he would get perfectly furious, and call her a little blockhead.

Then there were the long evenings when he sat at home reading, by himself or with his teacher and she had to sit so desperately still that she hardly dared take a st.i.tch with her needle. But one day he took it into his head that his sister ought to be studying too; so he set her a piece of history to learn by the next evening. But time to learn it--where was that to come from? And then he started her writing to his dictation, to improve her spelling--and all the time she kept dropping off to sleep. She had washed so many floors and peeled so many potatoes in the daytime that now her body felt like lead.

"Look here, my fine girl!" he would storm at her, raging up and down the room, "if you think you can get on in the world without education, you're most infernally mistaken." He succeeded in reducing her to tears--but it wasn't long before her head had fallen forward on the table again and she was fast asleep. So he realised there was nothing for it but to help her to bed--as quietly as possible, so as not to wake her up.

Some way on in the spring Peer fell sick. When the doctor came, he looked round the room, sniffed, and frowned. "Do you call this a place for human beings to live in?" he asked Louise, who had taken the day off. "How can you expect to keep well?"

He examined Peer, who lay coughing, his face a burning red. "Yes, yes--just as I expected. Inflammation of the lungs." He glanced round the room once more. "Better get him off to the hospital at once," he said.

Louise sat there in terror at the idea that Peer was to be taken away.

And then, as the doctor was going, he looked at her more closely, and said: "You'd do well to be a bit careful yourself, my good girl. You look as if you wanted a change to a decent room, with a little more light and air, pretty badly. Good-morning."

Soon after he was gone the hospital ambulance arrived. Peer was carried down the stairs on a stretcher, and the green-painted box on wheels opened its door and swallowed him up; and they would not even let her go with him. All through the evening she sat in their room alone, sobbing.

The hospital was one of the good old-fashioned kind that people don't come near if they can help it, because the walls seem to reek of the discomfort and wretchedness that reign inside. The general wards--where the poor folks went--were always so overcrowded that patients with all sorts of different diseases had to be packed into the same rooms, and often infected each other. When an operation was to be performed, things were managed in the most cheerfully casual way: the patient was laid on a stretcher and carried across the open yard, often in the depth of winter, and as he was always covered up with a rug, the others usually thought he was being taken off to the dead-house.

When Peer opened his eyes, he was aware of a man in a white blouse standing by the foot of his bed. "Why, I believe he's coming-to," said the man, who seemed to be a doctor. Peer found out afterwards from a nurse that he had been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours.

He lay there, day after day, conscious of nothing but the stabbing of a red-hot iron boring through his chest and cutting off his breathing.

Some one would come every now and then and pour port wine and naphtha into his mouth; and morning and evening he was washed carefully with warm water by gentle hands. But little by little the room grew lighter, and his gruel began to have some taste. And at last he began to distinguish the people in the beds near by, and to chat with them.