CHAPTER XX

IN THEIR OWN GREEN COTTAGE

Andy soon had a fire burning, and practically in the middle of the floor.

It did not go out, though the melting snow dripped down from the trunk and the snow-wet branches.

There was still food in the knapsack. But after they had eaten, it was evening again, and bedtime.

‘We can’t go to bed again now, when it’s so nice,’ said Maglena. ‘Besides, we don’t know whether it’s the middle of the night or toward morning.’

She fussed busily over the knapsack.

‘We don’t know! I guess I have a watch that tells what time it is!’

‘It is soon morning, I feel that ’cause I feel just like working. Funny the moon isn’t higher. It was just a little above the mountain when I was out. If it isn’t going down, maybe, instead.’

‘Have you ever heard of the moon going down in the east? But--but--I don’t know what’s the matter with the watch! It’s going, but it’s altogether wrong.’

Andy listened to the watch, shook it as he had seen big people do.

‘How far wrong is it?’

‘It says eight o’clock. It can’t be eight in the morning when it is dark and the moon is up.’

‘Well, it must be eight in the evening.’

Andy began to laugh.

‘I believe some wood-nymph has bewitched our eyes.’

‘And wits too,’ laughed Maglena, ‘’cause otherwise all the signs would have told us it was evening. The snow wouldn’t bear so the sun must have just gone down, and Orion is high in the sky. But I won’t go to bed yet. It’s a long time before night.’

Andy had been out and came in with his arms full of brush that he laid on the fire.

‘I hear some yelping far away that sounds like a dog,’ he said.

‘The foxes are out, you know. No wild animals will come here as long as we have a fire, and no ghosts either,’ she added with a stealthy glance out through the fir’s black branches. ‘We’ll put the sled in front of the fire, and then I’ll sew roses. I have two mittens to sew on.’

‘Then I’ll whittle and carve out wooden spoons.’ Andy took the materials out of the sled.

‘But eat first, said the peasant when the bath-house burned. I don’t milk only for the cat, you know; I suppose we can eat at the same time now that you are master and I am mistress.’

Maglena sat down on the sled beside Andy with the wooden bowl in her hand. The cat came and rubbed herself against her, purring.

Golden Horn pushed her head through the branches near them. In ‘the bed,’ Magnus snored loudly.

‘Oh, but it is fine here, Andy! It seems as though I can’t bear to think of going out to the settlements any more.’

‘You were happy at the wedding, I thought.’

‘Yes, because of the songs and dances and the people that were so good to us. They danced and sang this way: “Hi, ho, you scornful girl.”’

Maglena had finished her supper. She sprang up and began to repeat the songs and dances.

‘The mistresses on the farms don’t act like that,’ remarked Andy, but he looked very happy as he sat and carved spoons with the sharp knife gleaming in the firelight.

‘Goodness, no. I must darn our stockings. The roses will have to wait a while.’

She threw off her shoes and stockings and spread out her toes before the fire as she began to mend the holes, to-day quite large. It wasn’t so often she had a chance to work.

‘Kle-vitt, hu-itt!’ shrieked an owl that flew close to the ‘cottage door.’

‘Nasty noise,’ muttered Andy.

‘He is good, I think. He calls “look-it, look it, watch out,” so that mice and birds that he wants will have time to hide. Just think if he didn’t say anything, just came and took them.’

‘I don’t like it when they say that birds talk, now like the thrush. I don’t believe he says “knife thief, knife thief,” when he sits up in the fir and sings all night in the spring.’

‘No, I don’t believe it either. And not that the other thrush that he’s talking to says “poor soldier, poor soldier, why do you ride, why do you ride?”’

‘And not that the other one answers “horse cannot go on, horse cannot go on.” What fun would the little birds have if they only sat and made up such stuff?’ sniffed Maglena.

‘It’s people that have invented that, of course,’ said Andy, and held up the spoon against the firelight to see if the bowl was right. ‘They think they hear around them what they really hear inside themselves.’

‘He had stolen a knife, you think, the one that heard the thrush say “knife thief”?’

‘I think so.’

‘But “poor soldier.” What sense is there in that?’

‘I think,’ said Andy, and let his work drop while he gazed dreamily into the fire, ‘I think that those words are left from war-times here, you know, when the Russians were here and burned farms and were so cruel.’

‘Our thrushes didn’t think it was too bad about the Russians, I’m sure, or that they had to sit and ride,’ muttered Maglena. ‘No one could have felt sorry for the Russians.’

‘Well, it wasn’t only Russians that were soldiers,’ said Andy gently. ‘It could be soldiers from here that the thrush talked about. Grandfather was in the war and fought. And that’s why no one has been able to take our country away from us.’

‘Because grandfather was a soldier?’ teased Maglena.

‘Because _all_ the men here were soldiers, you see.’

Andy straightened up and his eyes became proud and earnest.

‘The Russians couldn’t take us, and no one else dared either. It was just as hard then as now, and they ate bark bread in hard years, grandfather said. But, you see, they were soldiers, anyway, every one.’

‘And walked in the woods and were tired,’ added Maglena, in a tender, compassionate voice. ‘Of course, it was for such people that the thrush sang “poor soldier.”’

‘Yes, and even though the soldier was poor and tired, he was careful of his horse, anyway. You know that’s the kind of people I think are real people. That’s the kind of soldier I’d like to be if I could have what I want above all things on earth.’

Andy took up his work and went on with it, quietly and eagerly, with a deeply secretive air. He had mumbled the last words so softly that Maglena had not paid any attention to them.

‘Take off your stockings so I can darn them,’ said Maglena without the slightest doubt of its being necessary. It was also without the least objection that Andy pulled up the stiff leather strings in his coarse shoes and worked off the stockings.

‘It is awfully nice to sit like this,’ said Maglena. ‘But you don’t want to be a soldier, do you?’

‘Yes, if there were war, I should. I shouldn’t want to let enemy people take our country away from us, should I?’

‘But you said once,’ continued Maglena stubbornly, ‘that you wanted to be a carpenter and think up all sorts of things to make. It was when we left the juryman’s out in the Nolen parish.’

‘Yes, because I’d never been in such a stable-room before.’

‘You’ve been in a lot this winter, too.’

‘That may be, and in most of them the master and men and boys have been making things. They’ve mended sleds. The farmhands have made traces and shafts, and the boys small shovels and rakes and such things.’

‘What did they do at the juryman’s that was different, then?’

‘What did they do! Well, you must know, the juryman himself was working at the finest sled with a driver’s seat and a nice curved front.’

‘Like the sled at the wedding-farm?’

‘Just exactly. All three boys, his sons and big fine fellows, were making an organ to play on. They say they have them in the lowland parishes, and the playing is supposed to sound like when people sing in church with four kinds of voices.’

‘Boy, if I go to the world’s end, I will see and hear such playing.’

Maglena struck her knee with her hand deep in Andy’s coarse gray goats’-hair stocking.

‘They had copied this after an organ at the minister’s in Sola. And even though they were so fine that they could do such wonderful things, they got up at five o’clock in the morning, anyway, and went to the woods with axes, and sat on the sled and drove. Never anything stuck-up about them. Now, these are real people, and when I saw them I thought I’d be a big farmer and fine carpenter, too, of course.’

‘Well, I saw that the mistress in the kitchen was fine too, but I didn’t think of being a juryman’s wife for all that,’ mused Maglena. She saw with pleasure how the giant hole in Andy’s stocking shrank under her nimble fingers.

‘Was she a carpenter, the juryman’s wife?’ asked Andy with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

‘Yes, she was! She made things in her way, and as women-folk do, when they are the right kind. If her husband put together sleds and shovels and organs, she put together linen thread and linen cloth and woolen yarn for stockings and homespun clothes and for dresses for the women-folk.’

‘That’s the kind of woman I’d like you to be!’

‘Her little girls helped with the spinning, and went out in the barn with the maids and milked, and still they were so jolly and nice to us, Magnus and me. And the grown women sang songs and verses while they sat spinning. And I’ve never seen such nice spinning. Do you know,’ Maglena added shyly and doubtfully, ‘do you know, Maja-Greta, their daughter, said that there were fairies on their farm, nice good fairies.’

‘The old farmhand said so to me too, when he was alone after the others had gone out to the peat bog.’

‘He--said so! What did he say?’

Maglena threw the darned stocking to Andy and stared at him with shining, frightened eyes.

‘He said that small fairies had always been there. They lived under the ground near the stable door. But they come up sometimes so they can see them. And they are good-natured to the farm-people.’

‘If the farm-people do as they want them to, yes,’ interrupted Maglena. ‘O-oh, how the owls scream here!’ She cast a frightened glance about her. ‘Kitty, kitty, come here and make me feel safe.’

She took the cat that lay on father’s old shirt up into her arms, caressed and fondled it.

‘Do you know, Andy,’ she continued, ‘that once a servant swore at a horse in the stable, and he got such a box on the ear that his face was swollen for several days.’

‘He deserved it. Look, what a fine spoon! Now I’m going to make some small spoons. It is hard for children to eat with these small troughs.’

‘Yes, he deserved it, the servant.’ Maglena took up the subject again, for, gruesome as she found it, she could not let it go. ‘A maid there that said she had such a pain she couldn’t spin and yet went to a dance secretly had the yarn so snarled when she was going to spin again that she was a whole skein behind the others, and she was disgraced.’

‘_She_ deserved that. Otherwise the fairies aren’t mean except three days before Christmas. We must remember to stay in then,’ said Andy, a little doubtfully, puzzled as to whether he ought to take it seriously or not.

‘’Cause then Lusse is out and wants to take Christian children with him under the ground,’ whispered Maglena with bright, frightened eyes.

‘Yes, he told about that too, the old man,’ assured Andy.

‘And once, Maja-Greta told me, her grandmother had told her what she saw, when she lay in the granary, and was young and had an abscess in her throat.’

Maglena spoke as if it were a part of youth to have an abscess in the throat.

‘It was midsummer,’ she continued, ‘and grandmother had fixed up in the granary, swept and brought in leaves and fruit blossoms.’

‘And lilies-of-the-valley too, I imagine,’ suggested Andy, who was deeply interested in Maglena’s story.

‘I don’t know. But while she lay there awake she saw tiny, tiny people come up out of the floor. There were fathers and mothers and old folks, just as with us, but only half an ell tall.’

‘Dressed like us?’

‘Yes, in skirts and waists, and the men in kilts with belts around the waist and gray breeches and beards.’

‘Then they were brownies, as we had too.’ Andy settled the question.

‘No, they were fairies. They were dressed nicer and weren’t as old as brownies. More like people. And then, what do you suppose, up came young people and small children that were only one fourth as high; and took hands and danced in a ring. Maja-Greta’s grandmother could hear the songs they sang. Maja-Greta sang them now, too, but I can’t remember them. Her brother can play them on the violin and they make you sad, said Maja-Greta. Yes; they make cowards out of some people.’

‘Then I don’t want to hear such songs.’

‘They hadn’t sounded sad though, when those _little_ people danced to them. They looked so awfully sweet and funny that grandmother laughed, and with that the abscess broke. The little folk were thirsty after dancing and wanted a drink and there wasn’t a drop of water in the granary. Grandmother felt sorry for the tiny things, so hot, and fanning themselves with their aprons, so she got up and went to the well after water in an earthenware dish.’

‘That was the right thing to do.’

‘Yes, it was, and when she came with the water, they were still dancing and playing. She dozed off, and when she woke up, she was well. And what do you think, boy, there was a silver spoon in the dish, and I’ve seen that spoon!’

‘They probably live in the woods too, the fairies,’ said Andy thoughtfully.

‘Those are wood-nymphs. They are women, tall, and with beautiful faces. They whirl and dance and bewitch people in the woods so that they forget God and the right. And then they laugh, and when you see their backs they are hollow like troughs. But it is dangerous to talk about wood-nymphs when you are in the woods. Oh, goodness gracious, Andy--there is something moving out there!’

Maglena crept close to her brother.

‘You must put more wood on the fire, but you mustn’t leave me. See now again? No, you don’t see anything; it isn’t everybody that can see. It looked like two eyes right in the black branches.’

‘There?--Dear me, don’t you know Golden Horn?’

‘Golden Horn, that lay there on the bed just now when I went after yarn?’

Maglena sounded astonished and unconvinced, as if the goat would not have been able to get out of such a well-timbered house unnoticed.

Magnus sat up yawning, not the least surprised at the ‘cottage,’ that was, after all, quite unusual. But of course he saw the fire and his brother and sister and Golden Horn and the cat. Maglena called to him. She had milk and bread for him beside the fire.

When he had eaten, it was much past their regular bedtime. It was nearly midnight. Magnus had to roll into bed again.

Andy looked ‘out’ before he curled up in bed. The moon shone still and clear. The stars beckoned and smiled like mother’s eyes. He felt protected and secure.

But Maglena found it pleasantest ‘in the house’; she couldn’t force herself to stick her nose outside the branches of the tree.