II
AT THE PARSONAGE
The boat bumped and scraped against the wharf. We had arrived. Hurrah!
The instant Karsten set foot on the wharf, he was off and away at full speed up the hill, and swinging into the avenue that led to the Parsonage.
On my way up, I happened to think of some strawberry patches I had known the summer before, and I simply had to go a little aside on the hill to look at them. Yes, there they were, with specks of red shining out between the leaves and stones. Good!
But now I could see Aunt Magda’s garden hat at the end of the avenue and I must hurry, for she would be wondering what had become of me. I began to run, and soon sprang into her open arms. I put both my arms around her and squeezed her frightfully hard till she shrieked. I always do that with any one I like awfully well, you see.
On the Parsonage steps sat Uncle’s friend, the queer old lawyer, Mr. Witt, with his mass of bristling white hair and his sharp eyes.
And now Great-Aunt came. She is aunt to Mother and Aunt Magda and is awfully old. Great-Aunt thinks she knows everything, I do believe. No matter what incredible thing happens in the town or in the world, she insists that she foresaw long ago that it would happen. “There! Didn’t I know it? No need to tell me,” says Great-Aunt.
Between you and me, I will own that I cannot like her; but she is frightfully clever, and Aunt Magda daren’t do a thing except just what Great-Aunt wishes.
“Well,” said Great-Aunt, looking me over, “seems to me you had better stop growing now. You will soon be so tall that you can look into people’s second-story windows.”
Great-Aunt is a good half a head taller than I, so she had better think of her own height; but I didn’t say that. I only curtsied nicely and gave her all the proper greetings from Mother and Father.
Karsten had done nothing but run around through the rooms without greeting any one, shouting, “Where is Hedvig? Where is Dan?” Ugh! that rude Karsten! What would Mother think of his not greeting anybody, but just running around asking for the milkmaid and the dog? I must say it was decidedly necessary that I should come and behave properly. When I choose, I can behave myself charmingly, almost like a grown-up young lady. I say, “What, please?” or “I beg your pardon?” to people sometimes even when I hear perfectly what they say; and when I drink from a cup or glass I curl my little finger out in the air, for that is what I have seen fine ladies do.
Well, there I sat and drank chocolate and talked grown-up talk; and presently Karsten, warm and out of breath, came in from the kitchen.
“My! Hedvig and Dan have grown awfully little since last summer,” said he.
“Is that so? Has Hedvig, too, grown little?” asked Great-Aunt.
Yes, Karsten thought she had shrunken remarkably.
Oh, that pleasant old living-room at the Parsonage! It has a low ceiling, and all the walls are crowded with pictures. There are Luther and Melancthon, and the King in Leire and Gustavus Adolphus and Wellington and Bishop Gislesen and his wife, and Skipper Marenssen from down on the shore, and William of Orange with his crown and sceptre. Uncle goes around and talks to them sometimes as if they were alive and could answer him.
There are green woven pieces over the sofas and chairs, and the windows are full of fuchsias, always in bloom. Great-Aunt and Aunt Magda sit, each on her own side of a table between the windows.
Great-Aunt has many interesting things in her work-box, a basket carved from a cherrystone, a corkscrew as little as a fly, and other queer things. I look at them when Great-Aunt is out. I should not dare to at any other time.
The door stood open, and summer fragrance was wafted in. Between the white rails of the garden fence, I could see bunches of currants, clear and red, and I knew that in the garden there were raspberries as big as the cook’s thimble, and garden strawberries so big they had the distinction of being laid out on pieces of roof tiles to ripen. Hurrah! What a good time we should have! Suddenly I sprang up and for pure joy leaped down the steps four or five at a time to the grass below.
“See that now!” said the old lawyer still sitting on the steps. “And I had thought you a grown-up young lady!” This embarrassed me a little, but I pretended not to notice it.
The whole of the first day, I went about visiting the places and the people I had known the year before. First, I went to the men’s room to see Jon. He was poorly, he said, and had a stitch in his side a foot long. It was a great deal worse because he had had to row out to the steamer for us,—which he needn’t have done if children only stayed in their own homes as was proper, he thought. He was not so very polite,—he usually isn’t—but I never trouble myself in the least about that.
“Oh, you’ll be all right soon, Jon,” I said.
“Humph! It would be pretty bad for other folk if I weren’t,” said Jon, looking much offended.
Later I was in the henhouse and saw a hen sitting on her nest, and in the pig-pen where I scratched a pig’s back with a stick. “Piggy, piggy, piggy!” “Uf, uf, uf,” said the pig. Then I went to the cow-house and the barn, and last of all to the churchyard,—the church is right near the Parsonage, you see,—where I went around and read all the verses on the gravestones, although I knew most of them by heart.
It is an awfully pleasant churchyard, with big, plump maple-trees, through which the sunlight falls in flecks and patches on the tall grass and sunken graves, where the old sailors and their wives lie buried. Some have beautiful gravestones with verses on them which Uncle wrote. Round the churchyard is a very broad stone wall. Karsten and I get up on it and play tag there.
At the very farthest end of the Parsonage garden I play, all by myself, a most delightful kind of play. I am awfully fond of cows and sheep and everything about a farm. That is why I used to think I would be a milkmaid, you see, but, as I told you, I have given up that idea. I prefer to be an author.
Well, far down in the garden where nobody ever comes, under some old gooseberry-bushes, I have lots of cattle,—cows and calves and sheep and lambs! The cows are big round smooth stones; they stand in their stalls with fresh green grass before them; the calves—smaller round stones,—stand in calf-pens. Everything is nicely arranged, I assure you. The sheep and lambs are pretty white stones that I find on the shore.
Near my barns I have built a little bit of a hut of moss and stone with a tiny piece of glass in it for a window. Inside the hut there are two dolls,—the milkmaids who take care of the cows. Oh, I love all such planning and arranging and pretending!
But when I happened to speak of it one day, that horrid old lawyer began to make fun of me because I at my age could find pleasure in such make-believe things. And somehow after that, I began to be tired of my cattle farm under the gooseberry-bushes. It would be a different matter if one could have a real cow to take care of.
In the south meadow that summer there was a big brown-and-white cow named Brownie. She was so quarrelsome that she could not be with the other cows. Great-Aunt told Karsten and me to look out for ourselves when near her, because she was very cross. But I used to go often to look at her, and soon I had a tremendous desire that Brownie should be my cow, as it were, and that I should take the entire care of her myself.
One day I decided that I would put Brownie in the old smithy that no one used any more; and there I would feed her and milk her every day. But first I must have a collar for her; so I went to the cow-house, where I found an old one. It was firmly fastened in a stall, but I jiggled and twisted and jerked and tugged at it until I finally got it out. Then I hammered it into the wall of the smithy. The next thing was to get Brownie into her new quarters.
The first time I went near her she gave me such a forcible push in my chest that I fell right over. However, I don’t give up very easily, and I coaxed and pushed and pulled at Brownie so long that at last I got her into the smithy and the collar on her neck. Hurrah! Now I had a cow-house and a cow with a collar on, just for myself alone. What fun!
I tore up a lot of grass and laid it before her so that she should not be hungry, and I fastened the door with a stick. Of course I must milk her. The milk I could set up on the shelf there in the smithy; perhaps I could churn butter! As for cream porridge, there would be no difficulty at all about having that now as often as I wished.
I stole into the kitchen to get something I could milk into, but Great-Aunt came upon me so suddenly that I couldn’t get hold of anything but a pint measure. That was pretty small for the use I had for it, but I must try to make it do.
I don’t know whether any of you ever tried to milk a cow, but I can tell you that it isn’t easy to milk one that kicks and thrashes its tail about—especially if you have to milk into a pint measure. At last I got the measure full, however, and set it up on the shelf. Of course it was rather sooty and dirty there, but I would wash the shelf in the morning. I gave Brownie a new supply of grass and then left her for the night. I had not said a word about all my plans for the cow to a single person.
Well! In the evening Hedvig, the milkmaid, came to the house frightened almost out of her wits. She couldn’t find Brownie anywhere, and I could see that she was ready to believe that the goblins had been at work. Excitement ran high, especially with Great-Aunt.
“Didn’t I know it? You shall soon both hear and see that something dreadful has happened to Brownie,” Great-Aunt said solemnly.
Then I had to tell where Brownie was, and that it was I who had taken her and put her in the smithy.
“There now! Did any one ever see such a girl?” said Great-Aunt. “You ought to be whipped, big as you are, to put a cow in such a place and give it neither food nor water.”
O dear! O dear! I had never thought to give the cow water the whole day!
Well, Hedvig went to the smithy and let Brownie out; so there was an end to that amusement. And when I went to get my pint measure of milk the next day, it had such a thick layer of soot and dust on it that I gave it to Dan, the dog, and I had hard work to get even him to drink it.
When we had been at the Parsonage about a fortnight, Peter, the dean’s son, came to make a visit, too. He had grown shyer and more freckled than ever since I saw him last, I thought. He spoke never a word when he was in the living-room, but it was rather jolly to have him with us, even though I now had two boys to look after instead of one. There is always something to see to with such boys,—that they cut the cheese nicely at the table, change their shirts often enough, comb their hair properly, and all such matters.
Great-Aunt was cross about many things, but one thing made her very angry, and that was if we ate any of her yellow raspberries. The red ones we might take a few of, but the yellow ones we mustn’t even think of touching.
One morning when I lay out on the grass under the avenue trees reading “Waldemar the Conqueror,” I heard all at once a mysterious rustling behind the raspberry-bushes in the garden. I peeped between the bushes and—wasn’t it just as I had thought?—there sat Karsten and Peter picking yellow raspberries and putting them into their straw hats.
When they heard me, they took to their heels, over the garden fence and off towards the churchyard. As I caught up with them, Peter said:
“If you’ll promise not to tell on us, Inger Johanne, you shall have some of the berries.” Both the boys had their hats half full.
Well, really, it is awfully mean to tattle, and the raspberries were so tempting, not one worm-eaten—and why should Peter and Karsten eat them all, I ask you? So we divided them equally and sat on one of the gravestones to eat them.
I had forgotten “Waldemar the Conqueror” that I had thrown down and left lying in the grass, and just think! When I went to get it, Dan was playing with it, and torn-out leaves were scattered all over the avenue.
“You bad, bad dog, let go, I say!”
At last I got it away from him, but he had torn out eight leaves, and crumpled and bitten several others. You may be sure I was disgusted with myself and my carelessness, but I said nothing about the book to any one. I always looked at it guiltily though, where it stood in the bookcase, knowing that Aunt Magda did not dream that anything was wrong with it. But she was always so very kind to us, that before I went away I was awfully sorry about “Waldemar the Conqueror” and those raspberries. Peter and Karsten weren’t the least bit sorry, they said, because the berries they picked were so near the ground that Great-Aunt, who is old and stout, couldn’t possibly have picked them or even have seen them; but I thought it was horrid of us, anyway.
At last I wrote a little bit of a note,—the paper wasn’t much more than an inch square,—which I gave to Aunt Magda asking her not to read it until after I had gone. In the note I told about the book and the raspberries and begged her not to be angry, as I was so sorry.
It was now towards the end of vacation. Soon there would be no more jumping in the haycocks or riding home on the big loads of hay, no more raspberries and cream for dessert at dinner, no more bonny-clabber at supper; and Saturday would be the last time that I could be Uncle’s driver this year.
When Uncle goes to the other parish church or to visit the sick, I am always allowed to drive him down to the shore. You see they have to go everywhere by boat from the Parsonage. Uncle has to ride in a funny way. He is so awfully stout that he has great difficulty in getting into a carriage, so he rides in a single sleigh, scraping over the road on wooden runners. I sit on the tiny high seat behind and crack the whip. We don’t go very fast on the road to the shore because Uncle is so heavy, but when I go back I sit in the sleigh and drive so fast that the sand spatters on my ears. It is great fun.
The day before we were to go home, one of the Cochin China hens was sick. It may have eaten some salt that had been spilled outside of the storehouse. At any rate, it was sick and ran round and round continually; it was horrid to see. The trouble must be in its head. I thought of putting a wet bandage on it, such as people use when they have headache, but to put a wet bandage on a hen that is spinning round and round would be a little difficult.
I ran in to Great-Aunt. “Oh, Great-Aunt, there is a hen that is sick and that keeps spinning round and round and round! What shall we do with it?”
“Oh, it will have to spin till it stops,” said Great-Aunt.
There was no use. Nobody here at the Parsonage understood about hens. When I went away no one would care about that poor sick thing, or do anything for it, I was sure.
I went out to the barn to speak to the milkmaid.
“Dear Hedvig, if you can’t cure that Cochin China hen, you must chop its head off, the minute I have gone.”
“Oh, no! I’d never dare do that unless Mistress herself said so.”
“Please, please do, Hedvig. No one will take any care of it when I’m not here.”
“But you know I don’t dare because of the old lady.” That was Great-Aunt.
“Oh, yes, Hedvig. You are so kind. Please do it and quickly, too.” I felt as if I ought to say this even if I didn’t believe she would do what I told her to do. The poor sick hen!
Well, our visit at the Parsonage was over and we were starting for home. Aunt Magda, Great-Aunt and Uncle and Mr. Witt, the old lawyer, went to the wharf with us, and they all stood there and waved and waved. Uncle waved his cane and Mr. Witt, who wore a linen dust-coat, waved his long coattails. Then what shouts from shore and boat!
“Good-bye!” “Good-bye!” “G-o-o-o-d-by-e!”
Jon was in the best of humors as he rowed us from the shore to the steamer. I didn’t know whether it was because he would now be rid of us for this year or the present of money I had given him, that made him so pleasant.
“Good luck to all three on your journey,” called Jon as he shoved his boat from the steamer.
For a while we could see the church tower and the roof of the Parsonage between the trees; then the steamer rounded an island and we saw them no more.