They look at one another stupidly. “Strike—what is that?”
Then comes the young master. “Now it would do one good to warm one’s eyes a bit,” says Garibaldi.
“There’s a bed made up for you in the cutting-out room,” says the master. But Garibaldi rolls his coat under his head and lies down on the window-bench. “If I snore, just pull my nose,” he says to Pelle, and goes to sleep. Next day he makes two pairs of kid boots with yellow stitching—for little Nikas this would be a three days’ job. Master Andres has all his plans ready—Garibaldi is to be a partner. “We’ll knock out a bit of wall and put in a big shop-window!” Garibaldi agrees—he really does for once feel a desire to settle down. “But we mustn’t begin too big,” he says: “this isn’t Paris.” He drinks a little more and does not talk much; his eyes stray to the wandering clouds outside.
On the third day Garibaldi begins to show his capacities. He does not do much more work, but he breaks a heavy stick in two with one blow as it flies through the air, and jumps over a stick which he holds in both hands. “One must have exercise,” he says restlessly. He balances an awl on the face of a hammer and strikes it into a hole in the sole of a boot.
And suddenly he throws down his work. “Lend me ten kroner, master,” he says; “I must go and buy myself a proper suit. Now I’m settled and a partner in a business I can’t go about looking like a pig.”
“It will be better for you to get that finished,” says the master quietly, pushing Garibaldi’s work across to little Nikas. “We shan’t see him again!”
This is really the case. He will go into the town with the honorable intentions, to buy something, and then he will be caught and whirled out into the great world, far away, quite at hazard. “He’s on the way to Germany with some skipper already,” says the master.
“But he hasn’t even said good-bye!” The master shrugs his shoulders.
He was like a falling star! But for Pelle and the others he signified more than that; they learned more in three days than in the whole course of their apprenticeship. And they saw brilliant prospects for the craft; it was no hole-and-corner business after all; with Garibaldi, they traveled the whole wonderful world. Pelle’s blood burned with the desire to wander; he knew now what he wanted. To be capable as Garibaldi—that genius personified; and to enter the great cities with stick and knapsack as though to a flourish of trumpets.
They all retained traces of his fleeting visit. Something inside them had broken with a snap; they gripped their tools more freely, more courageously; and they had seen their handicraft pass before their eyes like a species of technical pageant. For a long time the wind of the passage of the great bird hung about the little workshop with its atmosphere of respectable citizenship.