“But how did you manage it? What did the schoolmaster say?”
“‘Do you suppose that you—you with your antecedents—could ever pass into the Technical College?’ he said. And I told him I HAD passed. ‘Good heavens! How could you possibly qualify?’ and he shifted his glasses down his nose. And then: ‘Oh, no! it’s no good coming here with tales of that sort, my lad.’ Well, then I showed him the certificate, and he got much meeker. ‘Really!’ he said, and ‘Dear me!’ and all that. But I say, Louise—there’s another Holm entered for the autumn term.”
“Peer, you don’t mean—your half-brother?”
“And old Dressing-gown said it would never do—never! But I said it seemed to me there must be room in the world for me as well, and I’d like that bank book now, I said. ‘You seem to fancy you have some legal right to it,’ he said, and got perfectly furious. Then I hinted that I’d rather ask a lawyer about it and make sure, and at that he regularly boiled with rage and waved his arms all about. But he gave in pretty soon all the same—said he washed his hands of the whole thing. ‘And besides,’ he said, ‘your name’s Troen, you know—Peer Troen.’ Ho-ho-ho—Peer Troen! Wouldn’t he like it! Tra-la-la-la!—I say, let’s go out and get a little fresh air.”
Peer said nothing then or after about Klaus Brock, and Klaus himself was going off home for the summer holidays. As the summer wore on the town lay baking in the heat, reeking of drains, and the air from the stable came up to the couple in the garret so heavy and foul that they were sometimes nearly stifled.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Peer one day, “we really must spend a few shillings more on house rent and get a decent place to live in.”
And Louise agreed. For till the time came for him to join the College in the autumn, Peer was obliged to stick to the workshops; he could not afford a holiday just now.
One morning he was just starting with a working gang down to Stenkjaer to repair some damage in the engine-room of a big Russian grain boat, when Louise came and asked him to look at her throat. “It hurts so here,” she said.
Peer took a spoon and pressed down her tongue, but could not see anything wrong. “Better go and see the doctor, and make sure,” he said.
But the girl made light of it. “Oh, nonsense!” she said; “it’s not worth troubling about.”