A hymn was sung at the graveside, the band accompanying. Peer took off his cap. He was too taken up to notice that one of the mourners was watching him intently, and presently left the group and came towards him. The man wore spectacles, and a shiny tall hat, and it was not until he began to sneeze that Peer recognised him. It was the schoolmaster, glaring at him now with a face so full of horror and fury that the spectacles almost seemed to be spitting fire.
“You—you—Are you mad?” he whispered in Peer’s face, clenching his black gloved hands. “What are you doing here? Do you want to cause a catastrophe to-day of all days? Go—get away at once, do you hear me? Go! For heaven’s sake, get away from here before any one sees.” Peer turned and fled, hearing behind him as he went a threatening “If ever you dare—again—,” while the voices and the band, swelling higher in the hymn, seemed to strike him in the back and drive him on.
He was far down in the town before he could stop and pull himself together. One thing was clear—after this he could never face that schoolmaster again. All was lost. Could he even be sure that what he had done wasn’t so frightfully wrong that he would have to go to prison for it?
Next day the Troen folk were sitting at their dinner when the eldest son looked out of the window and said: “There’s Peer coming.”
“Mercy on us!” cried the good-wife, as he came in. “What is the matter, Peer? Are you ill?”
Ah, it was good that night to creep in under the old familiar skin-rug once more. And the old mother sat on the bedside and talked to him of the Lord, by way of comfort. Peer clenched his hands under the clothes—somehow he thought now of the Lord as a sort of schoolmaster in a dressing-gown. Yet it was some comfort all the same to have the old soul sit there and talk to him.
Peer had much to put up with in the days that followed—much tittering and whispers of “Look! there goes the priest,” as he went by. At table, he felt ashamed of every mouthful he took; he hunted for jobs as day-labourer on distant farms so as to earn a little to help pay for his keep. And when the winter came he would have to do as the others did—hire himself out, young and small as he was, for the Lofoten fishing.
But one day after church Klaus Brock drew him aside and got him to talk things over at length. First, Klaus told him that he himself was going away—he was to begin in one of the mechanical workshops in town, and go from there to the Technical College, to qualify for an engineer. And next he wanted to hear the whole truth about what had happened to Peer that day in town. For when people went slapping their thighs and sniggering about the young would-be priest that had turned out a beggar, Klaus felt he would like to give the lot of them a darned good hammering.
So the two sixteen-year-old boys wandered up and down talking, and in the days to come Peer never forgot how his old accomplice in the shark-fishing had stood by him now. “Do like me,” urged Klaus. “You’re a bit of a smith already, man; go to the workshops, and read up in your spare time for the entrance exam to the Technical. Then three years at the College—the eighteen hundred crowns will cover that—and there you are, an engineer—and needn’t even owe any one a halfpenny.”
Peer shook his head; he was sure he would never dare to show his face before that schoolmaster again, much less ask for the money in the bank. No; the whole thing was over and done with for him.