The Rider on the White Horse | Page 4

by a half-scholar and a hired
man, inasmuch as he himself had not been over-prosperous, he sent his
big boy to the dike, where he had to cart earth from Easter until
Martinmas. "That will cure him of his Euclid," he said to himself.
And the boy carted; but his Euclid he always had with him in his
pocket, and when the workmen ate their breakfast or lunch, he sat on
his upturned wheelbarrow with the book in his hand. In autumn, when
the tide rose higher and sometimes work had to be stopped, he did not
go home with the others, but stayed and sat with his hands clasped over
his knees on the seaward slope of the dike, and for hours watched the
sombre waves of the North Sea beat always higher and higher against
the grass-grown scar of the dike. Not until the water washed over his
feet and the foam sprayed his face did he move a few feet higher, only
to stay and sit on. He did not hear the splash of the water, or the scream

of the gulls or strand birds that flew round him and almost grazed him
with their wings, flashing their black eyes at his own; nor did he see
how night spread over the wide wilderness of water. The only thing he
saw was the edge of the surf, which at high tide was again and again
hitting the same place with hard blows and before his very eyes
washing away the grassy scar of the steep dike.
After staring a long time, he would nod his head slowly and, without
looking up, draw a curved line in the air, as if he could in this way give
the dike a gentler slope. When it grew so dark that all earthly things
vanished from his sight and only the surf roared in his ears, then he got
up and marched home half drenched.
One night when he came in this state into the room where his father
was polishing his surveying instruments, the latter started. "What have
you been doing out there?" he cried. "You might have drowned; the
waters are biting into the dike to-day."
Hauke looked at him stubbornly.
"Don't you hear me? I say, you might have drowned!"
"Yes," said Hauke, "but I'm not drowned!"
"No," the old man answered after a while and looked into his face
absently-"not this time."
"But," Hauke returned, "our dikes aren't worth anything."
"What's that, boy?"
"The dikes, I say."
"What about the dikes?"
"They're no good, father," replied Hauke.
The old man laughed in his face. "What's the matter with you, boy? I
suppose you are the prodigy from Lübeck."

But the boy would not be put down. "The waterside is too steep," he
said; "if it happens some day as it has happened before, we can drown
here behind the dike too."
The old man pulled his tobacco out of his pocket, twisted off a piece
and pushed it behind his teeth. "And how many loads have you pushed
to-day?" he asked angrily, for he saw that the boy's work on the dike
had not been able to chase away his brainwork.
"I don't know, father," said the boy; "about as many as the others did,
or perhaps half a dozen more; but--the dikes have got to be changed!"
"Well," said the old man with a short laugh, "perhaps you can manage
to be made dikemaster; then you can change them."
"Yes, father," replied the boy.
The old man looked at him and swallowed a few times, then he walked
out of the door. He did not know what to say to the boy.
Even when, at the end of October, the work on the dike was over, his
walk northward to the farm was the best entertainment for Hauke Haien.
He looked forward to All Saints' Day, the time when the equinoctial
storms were wont to rage--a day on which we say that Friesland has a
good right to mourn--just as children nowadays look forward to
Christmas. When an early flood was coming, one could be sure that in
spite of storm and bad weather, he would be lying all alone far out on
the dike; and when the gulls chattered, when the waters pounded
against the dike and as they rolled back swept big pieces of the grass
cover with them into the sea, then one could have heard Hauke's
furious laughter.
"You aren't good for anything!" he cried out into the noise. "Just as the
people are no good!" And at last, often in darkness, he trotted home
from the wide water along the dike, until his tall figure had reached the
low door under his father's thatch roof and slipped into the little room.
Sometimes he