Arne; Early Tales and Sketches. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
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soon he was drunk again, and then he struck the mother. At last he got to striking her almost every time he was drunk. The boy cried and lamented; then he struck him too. Sometimes his repentance was so deep that he felt compelled to leave the house. About this time his fondness for dancing revived. He began to go about fiddling as in former days, and took the boy with him to carry the fiddle-case. Thus Arne saw a great deal. The mother wept because he had to go along, but dared not say so to the father. "Hold faithfully to God, and learn nothing evil," she begged, and tenderly caressed her boy. But at the dances there was a great deal of diversion; at home with the mother there was none at all. Arne turned more and more from her and to the father; she saw this and was silent. At the dances Arne learned many songs, and he sang them at home to his father; this amused the latter, and now and then the boy could even get him to laugh. This was so flattering to Arne that he exerted himself to learn as many songs as possible; soon he noticed what kind the father liked best, and what it was that made him laugh. When there was not enough of this element in the songs he was singing, the boy added to it himself, and this early gave him practice in adapting words to music. It was chiefly lampoons and odious things about people who had risen to power and prosperity, that the father liked and the boy sang.
The mother finally concluded to take him with her to the stable of evenings; numerous were the pretexts he found to escape going, but when, nevertheless, she managed to take him with her, she talked kindly to him about God and good things, usually ending by taking him in her arms, and, amid blinding tears, begging him, entreating him not to become a bad man.
The mother taught the boy to read, and he was surprisingly quick at learning. The father was proud of this, and, especially when he was drunk, told Arne he had his head.
Soon the father fell into the habit, when drink got the better of him, of calling on Arne at dancing-parties to sing for the people. The boy always obeyed, singing song after song amid laughter and uproar; the applause pleased the son almost more than it did the father, and finally there was no end to the songs Arne could sing. Anxious mothers who heard this, went themselves to his mother and told her of it; their reason for so doing being that the character of these songs was not what it should be. The mother put her arms about her boy and forbade him, in the name of God and all that was sacred, to sing such songs, and now it seemed to Arne that everything he took delight in his mother opposed. For the first time he told his father what his mother had said. She had to suffer for this the next time the father was drunk; he held his peace until then. But no sooner had it become clear to the boy what he had done than in his soul he implored pardon of God and her; he could not bring himself to do so in spoken words. His mother was just as kind as ever to him, and this cut him to the quick.
Once, however, he forgot this. He had a faculty for mimicking people. Above all, he could talk and sing as others did. The mother came in one evening when Arne was entertaining his father with this, and it occurred to the father, after she had gone out, that the boy should imitate his mother's singing. Arne refused at first, but his father, who lay over on the bed and laughed until it shook, insisted finally that he should sing like his mother. She is gone, thought the boy, and cannot hear it, and he mimicked her singing as it sounded sometimes when she was hoarse and choked with tears. The father laughed until it seemed almost hideous to the boy, and he stopped of himself. Just then the mother came in from the kitchen; she looked long and hard at the boy, as she crossed the floor to a shelf after a milk-pan and turned to carry it out.
A burning heat ran through his whole body; she had heard it all. He sprang down from the table where he had been sitting, went out, cast himself on the ground, and it seemed as though he must bury himself out of sight. He could not rest, and got up feeling that he must go farther on. He went past the barn, and behind it sat the mother, sewing on a fine, new shirt, just for him. She had always been in the habit of singing a hymn over her work when she sat sewing, but now she was not singing. She was not weeping, either; she only sat and sewed. Arne could bear it no longer he flung himself down in the grass directly in front of her, looked up at her, and wept and sobbed bitterly. The mother dropped her work and took his head between her hands.
"Poor Arne!" said she, and laid her own beside his. He did not try to say a word, but wept as he had never done before. "I knew you were good at heart," said the mother, and stroked down his hair.
"Mother, you must not say no to what I am going to ask for," was the first thing he could say.
"That you know I cannot do," answered she.
He tried to stop crying, and then stammered out, with his head still in her lap: "Mother, sing something for me."
"My dear, I cannot," said she, softly.
"Mother, sing something for me," begged the boy, "or I believe I will never be able to look at you again."
She stroked his hair, but was silent.
"Mother, sing, sing, I say! Sing," he begged, "or I will go so far away that I will never come home any more."
And while he, now fourteen in his fifteenth year as he was, lay there with his head in his mother's lap, she began to sing over him: —
"Father, stretch forth Thy mighty hand,
Thy Holy Spirit send yonder:
Bless Thou the child on the lonely strand,
Nor in its sports let it wander.
Slipp'ry the way, the water deep, —
Lord, in Thy arm but the darling keep,
Then through Thy mercy 't will never
Drown, but with Thee live forever.
"Missing her child, in disquiet sore,
Much for its safety fearing,
Often the mother calls from her door,
Never an answer hearing, —
Then comes the thought: where'er it be,
Blessed Lord, it is near to Thee;
Jesus will guide his brother
Home to the anxious mother."7
She sang several verses. Arne lay still: there descended upon him a blessed peace, and under its influence he felt a refreshing weariness. The last thing he distinctly heard was about Jesus: it bore him into the midst of a great light, and there it seemed as though twelve or thirteen were singing; but the mother's voice rose above them all. A lovelier voice he had never heard; he prayed that he might sing thus. It seemed to him that if he were to sing right softly he might do so; and now he sang softly, tried again softly, and still more softly, and then, rejoiced at the bliss that seemed almost dawning for him, he joined in with full voice, and the spell was broken. He awakened, looked about him, listened, but heard nothing, save the everlasting, mighty roar of the force, and the little creek that flowed past the barn, with its low and incessant murmuring. The mother was gone, – she had laid under his head the half-finished shirt and her jacket.
CHAPTER IV
When the time came to take the herds up into the woods, Arne wanted to tend them. His father objected; the boy had never tended cattle, and he was now in his fifteenth year. But he was so urgent that it was finally arranged as he wished; and the entire spring, summer, and autumn he was in the woods by himself the livelong day, only going home to sleep.
He took his books up there with him. He read and carved letters in the bark of the trees; he went about thinking, longing, and singing. When he came home in the evening his father was often drunk, and beat the mother, cursed her and the parish, and talked about how he might once have journeyed far away. Then the longing for travel entered the boy's mind too. There was no comfort at home, and the books opened other worlds to him; sometimes it seemed as though the air, too, wafted him far away over the lofty mountains.
So it happened about midsummer that he met Kristian, the captain's eldest son, who came with the servant boy to the woods after the horses, in order to get a ride home. He was a few years older than Arne, light-hearted and gay, unstable in all his thoughts, but nevertheless firm in his resolves. He spoke rapidly and in broken sentences, and usually about two things at once; rode horseback without a saddle, shot birds
Auber Forestier's translation.