The following day his father took his hand and led him into the village, the first houses of which were a few hundred yards from Meyerhofer’s farm—at all events, a tolerable distance for such a little fellow.
But Paul kept up bravely. He had such fear of a thrashing from his father that he would have marched to the end of the world.
The school was a low, thatched building, not very different from a peasant’s hut; but near it there stood all sorts of long poles, ladders, and scaffoldings.
“That’s where lazy children are hanged,” explained his father.
Paul’s anxiety rose still higher; but when the teacher, a kind old man with a white stubby beard and greasy waistcoat, took him on his knee and showed him a beautiful, many-colored picture-book, he felt calmer; only the many strange faces that stared at him from the benches seemed to forebode no good to him.
He had to take the lowest place, and during two hours made pothooks on a slate.
During the time for recreation the big boys came up to him and asked about his luncheon, and when they saw that it was a sausage sandwich they took it away from him. He quietly yielded, for he thought it must needs be so. On the way home they beat him, and one stuffed some nettles inside his collar. He thought that, too, was only to be expected because he was the smallest; but when he had left the village behind him and was walking alone across the sunny heath, he began to cry. He threw himself down underneath a juniper-tree and gazed up at the blue sky, where the swallows flitted to and fro.
“Oh, if only one could fly like that, too,” he thought. Then the White House came into his mind; he raised himself up, and strained his eyes to look for it; it shone from afar (like the enchanted castles of which his mother spoke in her fairy tales); the windows sparkled like carbuncles, and the green bushes surrounded it like a hedge of thorns of a hundred years’ growth.
A feeling of pride and self-importance mixed with his grief. “You are big now,” he said to himself, “for you go to school. And if you were to undertake your pilgrimage now, nobody could say anything against it.”
And then fear overcame him again. The wicked bull and the mad dogs—one never knew. He resolved to consider the matter till next Sunday.