German Fiction

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 cats 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 pitchfork 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!"