“Look to your work,” said the blacksmith.
Fru Egholm had shaken her head at first, when she saw there was a boy wanted at Dorn’s smithy. Sivert a blacksmith? Never. But as there was no other job to be found in all Odense, and when Dorn explained that he wasn’t a blacksmith really, but a locksmith and general metal worker, she agreed, albeit with some mistrust.
The boy stood holding a metal plate, his master cutting through it along chalked-out lines. It was to be a weathercock, in the shape of a horse. Suddenly—just at an awkward turn—the plate slipped, and the smith snipped off one lifted foreleg.
For a second or two he seethed like a glowing bar of iron thrust into water. A box on the ears was not enough....
“Here, Valdemar!” he cried to his man. “Take hold of the little beast, and we’ll cut his fingers off. That’s it. So!”
Sivert wriggled and screamed, and even tried to kick. But the man behind only crushed him the harder in his blouse-clad arms, till the boy’s limbs hung limply down and his voice died to a hoarse gasp.
The smith opened the little white-knuckled hand with a grip as if shelling peas, and drew one finger between the shears, but managing carefully so that the boy could wrench it away at the critical moment.
This, of course, prolonged the joke, and made it all the funnier.
The man, too, began to find it interesting; his dull eyes glittered like molten metal newly set. There was a kind of anticipation in his mind—he realised that he would find considerable enjoyment in having Sivert all to himself when they went up to the bedroom they were to share at nights. It was but a vague thought as yet, a blind and pale Proteus moving uncertainly in the secret passages of his mind.
At dinner, while master and man sat over their porridge, Sivert was busy peeling potatoes for the next course. He sat on the wood box out in the kitchen, a tiny place, which was filled with the odour of Madam Dorn. She was the hugest piece of womankind Sivert had ever seen, and full of curious noises. Every other moment there came a threatening rumble from within like an approaching hurricane—perhaps she was hungry, too—then she would clear her throat with a thick, full sound, that seemed to rise from unknown depths. Sivert made the surprising discovery that her posterior part resembled a huge heart when she bent down. Was that perhaps an indication of general kindliness?