Recollections of My Childhood and Youth | Page 5

was closed.
We lived in the country ourselves, for that matter, out in the western suburb, near the Black Horse (as later during the cholera Summer), or along the old King's Road, where there were beautiful large gardens. In one such a huge garden I stood one Summer day by my mother's side in front of a large oblong bed with many kinds of flowers. "This bed shall be yours," said Mother, and happy was I. I was to rake the paths round it myself and tend and water the plants in it. I was particularly interested to notice that a fresh set of flowers came out for every season of the year. When the asters and dahlias sprang into bloom the Summer was over. Still the garden was not the real country. The real country was at Inger's, my dear old nurse's. She was called my nurse because she had looked after me when I was small. But she had not fed me, my mother had done that.
Inger lived in a house with fields round it near High Taastrup. There was no railway there then, and you drove out with a pair of horses. It was only later that the wonderful railway was laid as far as Roskilde. So it was an unparalleled event for the children, to go by train to Valby and back. Their father took them. Many people thought that it was too dangerous. But the children cared little for the danger. And it went off all right and they returned alive.
Inger had a husband whose name was Peer. He was nice, but had not much to say. Inger talked far more and looked after everything. They had a baby boy named Niels, but he was in the cradle and did not count. Everything at Inger and Peer's house was different from the town. There was a curious smell in the rooms, with their chests of drawers and benches, not exactly disagreeable, but unforgettable. They had much larger dishes of curds and porridge than you saw in Copenhagen. They did not put the porridge or the curds on plates. Inger and Peer and their little visitor sat round the milk bowl or the porridge dish and put their spoons straight into it. But the guest had a spoon to himself. They did not drink out of separate glasses, but he had a glass to himself.
It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow. Inger used to churn, and there was buttermilk to drink. It was great fun for a little Copenhagen boy to roll about in the hay and lie on the hay-waggons when they were driven home. And every time I came home from a visit to Inger Mother would laugh at me the moment I opened my mouth, for, quite unconsciously, I talked just like Inger and the other peasants.
VIII.
In the wood attic, a little room divided from the main garret by wooden bars, in which a quantity of split firewood and more finely chopped fir sticks, smelling fresh and dry, are piled up in obliquely arranged heaps, a little urchin with tightly closed mouth and obstinate expression has, for more than two hours, been bearing his punishment of being incarcerated there.
Several times already his anxious mother has sent the housemaid to ask whether he will beg pardon yet, and he has only shaken his head. He is hungry; for he was brought up here immediately after school. But he will not give in, for he is in the right. It is not his fault that the grown- up people cannot understand him. They do not know that what he is suffering now is nothing to what he has had to suffer. It is true that he would not go with the nurse and his little brother into the King's Gardens. But what do Father and Mother know of the ignominy of hearing all day from the other schoolboys: "Oh! so you are fetched by the nurse!" or "Here comes your nurse to fetch you!" He is overwhelmed with shame at the thought of the other boys' scorn. She is not his nurse, she is his brother's. He could find his way home well enough, but how can he explain to the other boys that his parents will not trust him with the little one yet, and so send for them both at the same time! Now there shall be an end to it; he will not go to the King's Gardens with the nurse again.
It is the housemaid, once more, come to ask if he will not beg pardon now. In vain. Everything has been tried with him, scolding, and even a box on the ear; but he has not been humbled. Now