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Updated: May 13, 2025
"He struck out properly," he said, in surprise, turning his reddened hand with the palm inward. Little Nikas did not respond. He was not superstitious, but he did not like to hear ridicule cast upon the reality of things. "What shall I do?" asked Peter. "Are mate Jensen's boots ready?" The master looked at the clock. "Then you can nibble your shin-bones." It was time to stop work.
He drank brotherhood with little Nikas, and in the evening he went out and treated the other journeymen and came home drunk as a lord. Everything passed off just as it should. On the following day Jeppe came into the workshop. "Well, Emil, now you're a journeyman. What do you think of it? Do you mean to travel?
"Blom's are angry about the screw-block!" said Pelle. "Death and all the devils! We must see about putting it in repair and returning it; remember that, and take it with you to the smith's. Well, what in the world shall we do?" The young master stared helplessly from one to another. "Shoemaker Marker," suggested little Nikas. "We don't borrow from Marker," and the master wrinkled his forehead.
"That's the Sow!" he began. "She's a dreadful woman; up at Stone Farm " Smack! Little Nikas gave him such a box on the ear that he had to sit down on the woodcarver's steps. "One, two, three, four that's it; now come on!" He counted ten steps forward and set off again. "But God help you if you don't keep your distance!"
"To-night I shall go out and meet my girl," they would say, laughing. Little Nikas said nothing at all. Pelle had no friends to give him work, and he could not have done much. If the others had much to do after work-hours or on Sundays he had to help them; but he gained nothing by so doing. And he also had Nilen's shoes to keep mended, for old acquaintances' sake.
People were wearing out their old boots, or they went about in wooden shoes. Little Nikas was seldom in the workshop; he came in at meal-times and went away again, and he was always wearing his best clothes. "He earns his daily bread easily," said Jeppe. Over on the mainland they didn't feed their people through the winter; the moment there was no more work, they kicked them out.
"There's a bed made up for you in the cutting-out room," says the master. But Garibaldi rolls his coat under his head and lies down on the window-bench. "If I snore, just pull my nose," he says to Pelle, and goes to sleep. Next day he makes two pairs of kid boots with yellow stitching for little Nikas this would be a three days' job.
Only the knee-strap of little Nikas, the journeyman, kept him from jumping up then and there and throwing himself down like Paul. This knee-strap was a piece of undeniable reality in the midst of all his imaginings; in two months it had taught him never quite to forget who and where he was.
And about the middle of the afternoon the incomparable result is completed; a pair of wonderful satin shoes, slender as a neat's tongue, dazzling in their white brilliance, as though they had just walked out of the fairy-tale and were waiting for the feet of the Princess. "Look at them, damn it all!" says the master, and passes them to little Nikas, who passes them round the circle.
Little Nikas saluted many friendly maidservants in the houses of the neighborhood, and Pelle found it more amusing to walk beside him than to follow; two people who are together ought to walk abreast. But every time he walked beside the journeyman the latter pushed him into the gutter, and finally Pelle fell over a curbstone; then he gave it up.
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