He sat at tea-time with Silla and tried to take comfort from her opinions about school, heard that he was to have his Sunday clothes on to-morrow too, because it was the first time, and fell asleep that night with drops of perspiration on his forehead.
In the morning Nikolai was not to be found.
Mrs. Holman inquired, and sought, and called, promising liberally both torments and pardon if he would only come at once; but it was all of no use, he had vanished.
After dinner Maren upstairs was startled by seeing him emerge from under her bed. She gave him some food and asked him to promise to go home; and Nikolai said he would, only not before it was dark.
In the twilight he made an excursion down to the quay, where he amused himself for an hour by sitting and rocking in a ship's boat; then in the wet October darkness he slunk through the narrow, dripping passages between the warehouses, until he was sure that there was no longer any light on the square, and spent the rest of the evening lying peeping over the paling at the light in the two cellar windows at home. He noticed how Holman came slinking cautiously up and stood a little while at the door before going in, and how they put Silla to bed. The light from the windows told him, like two dimly-glaring, merciless eyes, that if he came home now, the well-merited sentence of justice would most certainly be carried out.
Then the light was put out.
Through the drizzling rain late that night the gleam of a lantern glanced among the stacks of wet planks, and behind it was a pair of eyes which were accustomed to look in the dark for all kinds of persons who might think fit to hide themselves in the yard. The lantern wandered about among the narrow rows, sometimes standing still, while it threw its searching, reddish light as far as possible in between the planks.
No one was discovered that night. Among the many square spaces which could give shelter, Nikolai, with a certain inborn instinct, had chosen the foremost and most unsuspicious looking one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness—school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher—his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down in the wet mud.
But that night under the wet sky, with Trondsen's planks for his bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling—showing certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman's solicitous care—that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent, free savage's consciousness in relation to everything that they might afterwards think fit to screw him into, the school no less than Mrs. Holman's cellar steps; the planks in the timber-yard shone so white in bright weather, and when it grew dark, they stood there like his oft-tried, secret friends, who could screen him from the terrors at home.
He was taken to school, however, and one of his first timid, inquiring glances was to discover the thrashing-block with which Mrs. Holman had threatened him. He had pictured it to himself giving blow after blow with a rod, and beating incessantly, like the chicory factory at the bottom of the square.