CHAPTER XII

EARNINGS AND THE MONEY QUESTION

When the rest of the children went on their way, they were no longer so unhappy. They had so many wonderful things to talk about. First of all about the lovely lady with the gentle eyes, and then about the sheets with lace edgings and about the red quilts in the little girls’ beds, and about the fine food the little ones would have every day now.

‘And, you know, they have come to really good people, the kind mother would have liked,’ said Andy earnestly. ‘The lady sat by the bed last night and heard the little ones’ prayers, and then she said that they should pray God to protect their brothers and sisters who were homeless and make them good. I liked that, and that is why I let them stay.’

‘You would have had to let them stay at the big farm if they had wanted them there, even if the people there were mean and sour,’ said Anna-Lisa a little sneeringly.

‘Never in all the world!’ said Andy vehemently. ‘Don’t you dare say that!--there where the master swore so terribly. All sorts of evil can come to such a house, and the little girls would suffer from that too.’

‘But they had four horses and a gun on the wall, and the master had a sheath-knife that was real fancy, so the girls would have been well off in a way,’ thought Magnus.

‘You should see the sheath-knife I got from the forester,’ interrupted Andy. He showed a knife in a sheath, a knife with a shining black handle and a leather sheath, a knife with a gleaming sharp edge and a slender point.

‘Well, I never!’ Magnus stopped in the middle of the road as if turned to stone. ‘He must have a thousand kronor[10] if he can give away such a thing. How did it happen that he did that?’

[10] One krona is about twenty-seven cents.

‘I was going to help Dordi cut kindling wood and had only my old knife. I don’t know whether she said something to the forester, but when I went in to thank him for all of us, he gave me the knife. And then he said that a good Swede who knows how to use a knife right can always get along and live with honor.’

‘It sounds beautiful, such talk,’ said Maglena dreamily.

‘The lady there was so awfully good too, she gave me such nice yarn. Look here----’

Maglena took out a paper bag from the shawl which was bound about her waist. They stood still now, for they were in a grove of trees and away from the eyes of people. She sat down on the sled.

‘Look here--red yarn for roses and green for leaves and brown for stalks.’

‘But where--where in all the world are they going to be?’ asked Anna-Lisa, looking just as surprised as all the others, who gazed in the greatest astonishment at Maglena’s splendor. It included even a bone crochet hook, and a set of knitting needles stuck through a ball of gray yarn, in which sat also a shining darning needle.

‘This is what she said to me, that nice lady: “Can you knit?” said she.’

‘Good gracious! I should hope so,’ sniffed Anna-Lisa.

‘Yes, and I said so, so there! You might let me finish! “Yes,” said I.’

‘“Look here,” said she.’

‘What did you see then?’ asked Per-Erik, deeply interested, letting his hand slide over the yarn as if he wished to caress it.

‘Honestly, you ask and fuss until I eat up what I was going to say and can’t remember it.’

‘You were going to see something,’ Andy helped her.

‘So I was, but be quiet now. She showed me a pair of mittens, such nice mittens that you’ve never seen the like.’

‘They cost a lot of money, of course,’ said Magnus thoughtfully.

‘Yes, they did, but not for those who made them--then it costs only the yarn.’

‘The yarn, yes, but that doesn’t cost so little either,’ mused Anna-Lisa.

‘You’re all so awfully bothersome, the way you hunt up troubles, that I hardly want to finish,’ grumbled Maglena. But she graciously took out a half-finished mitten, to which the white worsted still clung.

It was crocheted, the way the women in Norrland used to crochet fine warm mittens with a little bone crochet hook. And on that half were sewed, with yarn, red roses, green leaves, and brown stalks.

‘Do you suppose you can guess now where the roses and leaves will be?’ Maglena let the little half-mitten pass between her brothers and sister.

‘Yes, but who is going to make them? You certainly can’t do anything so fine and so pretty,’ said Magnus superiorly, and with crushing conviction.

‘No, of course not,’ answered Maglena saucily. ‘I suppose you think you could do it better--you who darn stockings as if you were tying up a sack of flour, just pulling the hole together, no matter how big it is.’

‘Careful, Maglena, don’t be saucy,’ warned Andy. ‘It’s never nice when women-folk are like that.’

‘Well, then he can keep quiet when he doesn’t know anything about it.’

‘It’s because he doesn’t know that he asks,’ continued Andy patiently. ‘I don’t know either how you are going to make such roses or when you’ll have time for such things.’

‘Yes, but I know. When you were out yesterday and carried in wood for them and shoveled snow, I was with the lady and she helped me mend my jacket. And she let me sew this apron for myself.’

‘She let me sew one for me too,’ said Anna-Lisa proudly.

‘And when that was finished, she showed me how to crochet. Look here, now. But it is awfully hard, of course.’

With stiff, frost-reddened fingers, her mouth solemnly pinched together, Maglena showed what the others considered her marvelous ability to crochet.

‘And now comes the most wonderful.’

Importantly she threaded a tapestry needle with red yarn.

‘Then, you see--comes the really strange thing--that I can--sew--so beautifully.’

She sewed only a couple of stitches, but it aroused noticeable respect among the rest.

Suddenly she jumped up, tucked away the yarn, and beat the air wildly with her arms, for the place in the snow in zero weather was not the best for a sewing school.

‘After that, you see, I’ll knit mittens and sew roses on them and--_sell_ them, you see--and get money--and I’ll buy us a little house that looks like raspberries and cream and has windows that laugh up under the roof. The little girls and all of us will make mittens. _Swedish_ mittens--’cause the lady said that anything we do we should remember that Sweden’s name goes with it, and you must do everything you do so that you don’t shame your country, of course. As soon as spring comes, I’ll begin to knit while I walk. She said that women used to do that. I’ll knit stockings in the daytime, and in the evening, while we sit in some birch wood, I’ll crochet and sew roses that will be just as pretty as real briar-roses.’

‘Not that I’m going to start knitting mittens,’ said Magnus, as he straightened up and tucked in the overflow of long, dragging coat-sleeves at the wrists. ‘No, for my part, I am going to America and dig up so much gold that I can buy the whole Barren Moor parish and the church too, if I want to, and fill it with berries and cheese, raspberries and pork, and----’

Magnus flew to the side of the road. Shrieking and frightened he put his hand to his cheek. A box on the ear burned there. Andy, who had never punished the children while mother lived, and who had a marvelous patience with them, became suddenly furiously angry.

Magnus got a box on the ear, and Andy now continued to shake him as if he had been a sack of potatoes in which one needed more room.

‘Boy, aren’t you ashamed? Are you going to care more for a foreign land than for our own? “Go after gold”--like our uncle who was lost there? And, besides, that you should take that gold to buy the church, just so you could buy the beautiful church where they preach about God, for a storehouse? That’s making light of great things, Magnus, and I won’t stand such talk.’

The children walked quietly, considerably impressed by Andy’s unexpected outburst of anger, Magnus sulking and bellowing by turns.

‘It is better for a man to make mittens with honor than to take up sacksful of gold and use it for what is wrong--remember that, Magnus,’ continued Andy, still panting with indignation. He climbed through the drifts into the forest of low trees, and with the sharp knife cut off the top of a tree, on which the little branches sat so closely together as to make a good kitchen whisk. He was trying to be good again.

‘Now that the little girls don’t sit on the sled any longer,’ said he, ‘I thought I could carry stuff on it to work on in the evenings, when we come to some farm where there is fire on the hearth or in the laundry or in the farmhands’ room.’

‘Do you intend to make kitchen whisks and brooms?’ asked Anna-Lisa with a certain respect in her voice for the brave brother.

‘I’ve thought about it. Wooden spoons too. Grandfather at Sven Paul’s was good at making wooden spoons, but I never had a knife to try too.’

‘And I’ll paint them for you,’ called Maglena to Andy in the grove. ‘Such pretty little blue roses and daisies. I’ll make paint the way mother did, out of leaves and flowers and roots.’

‘May I help you make spoons when I get big?’ mumbled Magnus when he came near Andy out in the road.

‘That you shall, boy. Here, you can have my old knife, and then you can begin to get stuff together now, even if you are small.’

‘We can sell the spoons, too, Andy, and get money. But I won’t buy the church, because then the minister can’t read there.’

‘No, and we can’t sit there and listen, and sing and read, so that we get to be good people as mother wanted us to be.’