But that night under the wet sky, with Trondsen’s planks for his bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling—­showing certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman’s solicitous care—­that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent, free savage’s consciousness in relation to everything that they might afterwards think fit to screw him into, the school no less than Mrs. Holman’s cellar steps; the planks in the timber-yard shone so white in bright weather, and when it grew dark, they stood there like his oft-tried, secret friends, who could screen him from the terrors at home.

He was taken to school, however, and one of his first timid, inquiring glances was to discover the thrashing-block with which Mrs. Holman had threatened him.  He had pictured it to himself giving blow after blow with a rod, and beating incessantly, like the chicory factory at the bottom of the square.

Strangely enough there was no such block.  But there were other things into which he was to be squeezed and forced like a last into a boot; and he was a hard last, which often would not go farther than the leg, and had to be hammered and knocked the rest of the way, where others more pliable glided smoothly down like eels.

There were things he understood, and things he did not understand.  The former did not often happen to be explained to him, the latter he did not understand however many explanations were given; the result was a painful consciousness, a continual difference or falling short both in relation to his lessons and his teachers, which had to be adjusted by the cane and detention, while the majority of his schoolmates, in this particular also, more supple, worked themselves out like true virtuosi.

But what was even a whole day at school, with its full measure of misfortunes, in comparison to the endlessly long, dull hours of the evening, when Mrs. Holman, with her own eyes, “watched over him, to see that he learnt his lessons,” and he hardly dared so much as to glance across at Silla.

As to Holman, experience had taught them that his fixed and staring eyes saw nothing:  he sat mute and quiet the whole evening.  In Mrs. Selvig’s tap-room he found a remedy which made him insensible to moral lectures even the most reasonable and impressive.  There he stood every evening a quarter of an hour after working-hours, as regular as clockwork, and when the hands of the clock drew near to eight, he just as regularly set off homewards, a punctuality which, be it said in passing, had gained for him in the tap-room the title of General with order.

CHAPTER III

A FIGHT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

That was a dangerous corner, where the wide street leading to the grammar school crossed the narrow one that led to the board school; and, on the days when the afternoon hours for the latter began just when the grammar school’s long morning was over, it might happen that the free, exuberant spirits of those who were leaving school came into collision with the heavier and more bitter mood of those who were on their way to it.