A little later, there came a man with a pole. He growled out something or other, but Sivert drew away shyly out of the ring of light.
Well, well, the man put out the lamp, and turned in towards the town again, leaving darkness behind him as he went.
Sivert stole on behind him, sobbing. The putting out of the lamps entered into his consciousness as a picture of his own desolation.
Late that night he squeezed himself up in the doorway of the old home in Nedergade, where he had not been since his mother left.
The gloomy place had something of homeliness about it; almost instinctively he stole in through the door to the washing cellar. There were tubs lying about, full of washing left to soak.
He stumbled in amongst them, and took a drink of water from the tap, not so much from thirst, but more from a fancy to use his familiar knowledge of the place. Then he recollected that it made a buzzing sound in the tenements upstairs when that tap was turned on, and he hurried away to the passage between the coal cellars. Egholms’ cellar used to be the fifth. Could he manage now to tear open the padlock with a smart twist? Wonderful—it was as easy as ever! That showed that God was with him after all. Full of thankfulness, Sivert slipped into the narrow space, and tried to concentrate his mind on the Lord’s Prayer, but fell asleep despite his efforts, and did not wake until the pale light of morning came filtering in to him through the cobwebbed windows. His back was like a boil from the knobs and points of the firewood he had been lying on.
Out in the washing cellars someone was rattling tubs and buckets, and the water was running.
Sivert pressed himself closer up in a corner. He stood there a long time, till his sense was dulled. There was a bottle in the window, that looked as if it had been used for oil. A cork was stuck half-way down the neck. And from among the broken lumps of peat and turf on the floor a lump of old iron pipe was sticking out.
Sivert looked at the two things—first one, then the other, a hundred times. Bottle—iron pipe—iron pipe—bottle. He thrust out his wooden shoe and kicked at the pipe to make a change. There was a brass tap on it. It emerged from the litter on the floor like a revelation.
“Father’s big tap,” he burst out in wondering recognition. They must have forgotten it. No, not forgotten; it had been left here for him to take with him.