The sleigh bells rang silvery clear and melodious as the five sleighs began to move. Down through Main Street they went, the children shouting and waving to everyone they knew and people waving back and laughing at the procession.
As they got out of town the horses were really given their heads. The music of the sleigh bells rang still louder and more happily, steam rose from the horses like thin white smoke, and the warm, living smell of them drifted back to the people in the sleighs.
Up on the ridge Petter left the main road and took a little road that went through the forest to the Gjorlia farm. Apparently no one had been over it since the snow came except someone logging. It was so narrow that snow from the drifts alongside fell into the sleigh, and from the branches that almost interlocked above the road, white cascades descended upon the passing sleighs. And it was bumpety bump, bumpety bump, the whole way. In most places it would have been impossible to overturn, so high lay the snow on either side. But in other places the road ran along the edge of the precipitous slope above Gjorlia Creek—and here Mother and Thea held Tulla tightly, for the sleigh tipped so to one side that it seemed nearly to overhang the creek bed. Gunhild turned quite pale and pulled Brit close. But Brit laughed, and Tulla laughed. They thought it only fun to be tossed here and there. And Petter was such a skillful driver, and Rauen and Maja were so steady and dependable. But the freight sled behind would surely overturn—or at least two or three youngsters would roll out, thought Mother, rather uneasily—though, even if they did, they could not possibly get hurt in the deep snow.
But when they had got to the bottom of all the hills and were out on the road beside the lake, it became apparent that the trip had been made without the slightest mishap. Despite the fact that one of the horses they were using on the sled in which Grandmother and Aunt Signe sat, was a quite young and rather lively little mare.
It was on the way home, in Main Street, that Hans fell out of the freight sled. The flock of youngsters had gradually become quite wild, swatting and tickling one another and howling to high heaven—when suddenly Hans went kerplunk into the street, under the very feet of the horses of the sleigh behind.
It is true enough that a horse almost never steps on any living thing. Even a horse in full gallop is incredibly alert in this matter and manages to stop short or otherwise avoid stepping on anything that moves. It is only with inexperienced and high-strung horses that there is ever an accident.
But that young gray mare, Gurli, met the situation as if she were the staidest old horse in the world. All went well. Later Hans was downright proud because he alone, out of the entire party, had fallen out of the sleigh.
That evening on the dinner table were the three-pronged candles in honor of Hellig Tre Kongers Dag. It was the last dinner at which they would all be together—for this time. Gunhild and Brit had to leave that night, for tomorrow her husband’s boat would arrive. And Godfather and Aunt Signe were to leave next day, for the children had to get back to school.
But next morning as Aunt Signe was packing their bags and the cousins were outside skiing down the little hill a few more times just to say good-by, Anne-Lotte fell and wrenched her ankle. Kind Dr. Konow came up, felt her foot and said the best thing would be for her to stay off it completely a few days. She ought perhaps to stay here with her aunt for a while.
So Anne-Lotte lay on the sofa in the dining room, and on a table beside her she had chocolate with whipped cream, and cookies, and fruit that Thea had given her “for consolation.” Siri-Kari, Little Signe, and Ulla were more than a little envious of her as they bade her farewell. She would get out of school for one whole week more, and they knew that both Mother and Thea would spoil her with good things and amusing books and everything else they could think of to make her “sickness” a pleasant extra vacation.
That same afternoon Mrs. Jytte Hjorth called to say good-by. And she wanted so to say good-by to Anders too.
“The delightful boy,” she cried, rushing toward him as he came in and bowed his best dancing-school bow. Then she took his face between both her hands and gave him a resounding kiss on both cheeks. The poor boy’s face became as red as beetroot and he looked as if he did not know what to do with himself in his embarrassment.
“Here is a little something as a remembrance of the time you helped save my son’s life,” the lady said, thrusting a little package into his hand.
“Nobody saved Dr. Hjorth’s life!” Anders protested, visibly annoyed. “The doctor would have managed all right, even if no one had gone out looking for them. It was only that they were so dumb as to go out in bad weather. Otherwise the doctor was a smart fellow. He would have found his way out as soon as the weather cleared up.”
But then he realized what Mother meant by her winking and blinking at him and by all the weird faces she was making.
“Well, thank you a thousand times, Mrs. Hjorth. I just think it’s too much, that’s all. Oh, that’s wonderful! Oh, yes, yes, of course. Oh, you can be sure I am glad to have that!”
It was a fine fountain pen.
“I just think there’s no sense in it,” Anders said when the woman had left. “I didn’t do anything. If she had given us a present for the Boy Scout lodge there’d be more sense to it. There were five men from the lodge out looking. . . .
“It cost eighteen crowns at Stribold, mother,” he said, investigating, and full of admiration. “But you may have it for ten, mother, if you will buy it from me. Then I can give the money to our treasury.”
“Or you could give the fountain pen to the bazaar. You are going to have a bazaar next month,” Mother suggested.
“But if you buy it from me you won’t have to worry any more about what to give me for my birthday.”
Mother had to laugh.
“My boy, I think you are getting practical!”
“Practical? Say, if there is anything I am, it is a practical man.— Ouch, let go my hair!”
He pretended to cry and wriggled his head away from under Mother’s hand.
“First that Danish friend of yours pounces on me and kisses me, and then my very own mother tries to scalp me.”
PART II
THE SEVENTEENTH OF MAY
1
“WINTER-SPRING” IS THE NAME PEOPLE IN NORWAY give to that odd season that begins in February. When day after day the sun beams down from a high and cloudless deep-blue sky and every morning the whole world is encrusted with glistening frost crystals—but later in the day all the eaves are dripping. The sun licks the snow from the trees, and one sees the tops of the birches beginning to turn a shiny brown and the bark of the aspens taking on the greenish tinge that betokens spring.
Snowdrifts still lie high along the roads and fences and on the fields the snowcrust shines like silver in the sun, the ski tracks drawing bright lines in crisscross. Crows and magpies fly about with twigs in their bills. They have more or less begun to repair last year’s nests, and once in a while they pierce the stillness of the winter day with their squawks and chatter.
As soon as the sun goes down there is biting cold. But a reflection of the daylight remains, a fringe of flame, along the black-forested ridge to the southwest. For many hours afterward a light, the color of old green glass, lingers on the horizon. In the morning long icicles hang from all the eaves, but in the course of the forenoon shining drops begin to fall. And every day is a little longer and little lighter than the day before.
It is a glorious time of year for the children and the young people.
The boys came home from school and bolted their food—they were going over on the hill for ski training. And they did not come home until the first stars began to twinkle in the sky. After the evening meal there was coasting on the long roadways that wind with many a hairpin curve down from the mountain and straight across the town. These roads were far from safe for coasting. There was a great deal of traffic on them—cars and buses and trucks—and moreover they cut across Main Street, which also is the main road leading into th
e valley. Mothers could do nothing but warn: “Now do be careful!” And the sons pointed out that they certainly did not need to be told that! No one would go coasting and get killed for the fun of it.
When and how those same boys ever studied their lessons and wrote their exercises was hard to conceive. But they must have done so, somehow or other, for their grades at school were no lower than for the fall semester. Perhaps the teachers were more lenient at ski time. Every school had a ski tournament during the winter, and in place of physical training courses the boys were allowed to go with the physical training teacher on skiing trips up through the forest. And it was possible to “glance” at the lessons in the morning, before one had to start, for on skis or Swedish “kick-sled” it took only five minutes to get to school. So the boys did not leave home until after they really should have been at their desks.
“Kick-sledding” is a Swedish invention, but it had become tremendously popular in Norway in the course of a few years. It sounded disrespectful when Anders offered to kick Mother downtown, if she had some errands to do, and strange when Thea kicked Tulla a long way out in the sun every morning. Thea sought vainly to get her to keep her sunglasses on—Tulla took them off every time she saw her chance and slung them in the snow at the roadside.
There was always some accident or other. Little by little the ski courses and skiing roads became worn down to bare ice. It hurt to fall now. In homes all about the countryside were boys lying abed who had fallen and had water on the knee or a slight concussion of the brain. It was only strange that no one got seriously hurt more frequently. On those hills owned by the various ski clubs, where the real training took place, fresh snow was, of course, hauled in, and the snow on the slope below the jump was kept from getting packed and hard. But the slopes in the forests were frightful; many of them were being used for logging. Yet just when they were about to become impossible, a few days’ snowfall usually came and saved the situation—and all the courses were velvet again.
It was an enjoyable time for the grownups as well. The sun grew stronger day by day, and the potted plants in the windows had their own springtime. The Norwegians console themselves for the length of their winter with splendid window gardens. The rooms were fragrant with the odor of sprouting bulbs and tulips. The day it was possible to eat dinner without turning on the lights was always a red-letter day—even though one did have to turn them on the day following, if there was fish for dinner.
March is always colder than February, with frequent dark and foggy days, and occasionally a howling snowstorm that lasts from three to four days. But “March is not so bad, for she makes half the road bare,” the old saying goes and it always holds true. A strip of black earth grins up from the southerly edge of the road with-out fail before the month of March has ended.
Every day Hans came home at least an hour late for dinner, soaking wet from his leather boots to his hair and streaked with horse manure. He and his playmates could never resist the temptation to make canals of the ruts that were overflowing with water everywhere in the middle of the day. They built dams in them and measured the depth of the water by stepping into it!
“Now you must not go out on the Holme pond, Hans,” said Mother sternly. Hans stood, music case in hand, ready to leave for his music lesson. “Do you hear?”
“Oh, no, I won’t ever do that again,” Hans peered sorrowfully up at his mother. “Not after seeing that poor girl who tried to slide on the ice there. She plunked in, poor thing . . .” Hans heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his soul.
“What? What happened to her?”
“Oh, she’s lying there on the bottom yet, I suppose,” said Hans in a sepulchral voice. “She never came up again. Oh, she yelled so, mother. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was the last time I went to Mrs. Anker’s. That was when I saw it.”
“But to think you didn’t try—” began Mother, completely horrified. Then she continued rather more calmly. “How did it happen that you did not go out and save her? The Holme pond is no deeper than your waist anywhere. Hans, Hans, you simply must not run arourd and tell such stories! That’s lying, Hans!”
“Is it?” asked Hans, surprised. “I thought lying was when I lied when you asked if I’ve done something I’ve done that is naughty to do.”
“Yes, of course—that is the worst kind of lie. But it is also lying when you go around telling something you have made up, so that people think it is true.”
“Is it?” asked Hans again. “But, mother, then you lie too, when you tell us about the time you and Aunt Ragnhild and Aunt Signe were young?”
“I most certainly do not, Hans. I do not tell anything but what was really so.”
“Is it true that you went by steamboat to Denmark and went to a theater in Copenhagen when you were little girls?” asked Hans in deep wonder.
“Of course it is true. You know Grandmother’s father was living then and we went to visit him on our vacation. And Grandmother’s brother in Copenhagen took us to the Royal Theater.”
“I have never been on a steamboat.” Hans looked most disgruntled. “And I have been to the theater only once—the time we saw King Ragnar and Aslaug. And Anders said that was an awfully dumb play.”
“If we go to Oslo for Easter you may go to the theater —if there is anything playing that is suitable for children.”
“Don’t worry, there won’t be.” Hans spoke as a man who had no illusions left. “But, mother, when you write books, you make up what goes in them? Then you lie, don’t you?”
“At least the books I write are what we live on,” said Mother curtly—but then she had to laugh. “People know that what is in books is not true in the sense that everything has happened just that way.”
“Then I think I could learn to write good books, too,” said Hans brightly. “Because I can think up an awful lot of stuff, can’t I, mother?”
“Time will tell. But get along now—it’s already five of five. And you won’t go down and wade in the Holme pond, do you hear?”
“But, mother, you said yourself just now that it was not deep enough to drown in anywhere,” Hans laughed, then dashed out the door before Mother had a chance to say anything further on the matter.
In April the snow begins to melt in earnest down in the valley. On the slope above the kitchen garden the withered lawn peeped through, a bare spot that grew larger and larger every day. The ski jumps left from the Christmas holidays were only two patches of dirty snow out in the middle of the lawn. Here and there and everywhere as the snow melted Mother found mittens and caps and scarves—picking up a little of everything whenever she went for a walk in the garden to see whether the snowdrops and the daffodils had begun to sprout.
Anders went with her on these walks. He liked flowers and liked their garden, as long as he did not have to be bothered with it. But it was always Anders who brought Mother the first coltsfoot to turn up its bright eye from the edge of some ditch and the first white anemones from the birch groves on the other side of the creek.
The air over the valley was full of the sound of running water. Every creek and every ditch was flooding its banks. It was still freezing cold at night—the creek that flowed through Mother’s garden lowered its voice toward dawn, and there was a silvery tinkle in it when the thin crusts of ice forming along the edges broke as fast as they froze. The dogs dashed down to the creek the moment they were let out in the morning and lapped the muddy water, rolled in the wet, dead grass, and raced down to the big birch at the farthest end of the garden to tell off the magpies that lived in it—whereupon the magpie family replied point for point. But up in the mountains there was a fine ski course still, and the Easter holidays brought a new invasion of tourists to all the hotels. And every Sunday Anders disappeared early in the morning—he had to go up to the mountain and make use of the skiing roads while there was still something left of them.
About three o’clock one morning all the apple trees in the orchard were full of red-w
inged thrush that whistled and sang. It was light as day, and the sky the pale gold of dawn. The red-winged thrushes were only passing through—as soon as there was food to be found up in the forest they would leave. The chickadees that had kept themselves around the house all winter, living a life of ease in the Christmas sheaves, now went off in twos to play and sing their ti-ti-ty, ti-ti-ty and bustle in and out of all the birdhouses looking for housekeeping quarters. One day there were hundreds of chaffinches on the bare spots in the garden. They would wait here for their wives—the female of the species always arrived from the south a week later than the male. Mother and Thea scattered birdseed for them, and tried to keep the cats indoors. But that was easier said than done—to keep cats indoors in the spring.
Chestnut cats are the best mousers but the worst cats for killing birds, the peasants say, and this held true for Sissi. But Sissyfos pretended there was nothing in the world that interested him less than bird hunting. Then one day he disappeared and did not return. The boys maintained that he was out courting. Finally there came a message that the hired man at the Rand farm had shot Sissyfos. He had caught him in the act of killing all Mrs. Rand’s baby chicks out back of the barn. Now, it appeared that Sissyfos had been a great hunter. Only he had been clever enough never to hunt in his own neighborhood but went on his predatory expeditions in other parts of the community.
“At least he died a death worthy of a tomcat,” declared Anders.
But Hans wept a little over Sissyfos. And Mother felt bad because she feared Tulla would miss her very own cat.
Every day the roar of the cataract could be heard more clearly all over the little town. The mist-smoke lay like a white band along the river’s course, but underneath the bridge in Main Street it came down like a shower upon the passers-by.