“Well, you get one, then you needn’t let them sit on you. I’m flirting a bit just now with the master’s daughter—fine girl, she is, quite developed already—you know! But we have to look out when the old man’s about!”
“Then are you going to marry her when you are a journeyman?” asks Pelle, with interest.
“And have a wife and kids on my back? You are a duffer, Pelle! No need to trouble about that! But a woman—well, that’s only for when a man’s bored. See?” He stretches himself, yawning.
Nilen has become quite a young man, but a little crude in his manner of expressing himself. He sits there and looks at Pelle with a curious expression in his eyes. “Cobbler’s patch!” he says contemptuously, and thrusts his tongue into his cheek so as to make it bulge. Pelle says nothing; he knows he cannot thrash Nilen.
Nilen has lit his pipe and is lying on his back in bed—with his muddy shoes on—chattering. “What’s your journeyman like? Ours is a conceited ass. The other day I had to fetch him a box on the ears, he was so saucy. I’ve learned the Copenhagen trick of doing it; it soon settles a man. Only you want to keep your head about it.” A deuce of a fellow, this Nilen, he is so grown up! Pelle feels smaller and smaller.
But suddenly Nilen jumps up in the greatest hurry. Out in the bakery a sharp voice is calling. “Out of the window—to the devil with you!” he yelps—“the journeyman!” And Pelle has to get through the window, and is so slow about it that his boots go whizzing past him. While he is jumping down he hears the well-known sound of a ringing box on the ear.
When Pelle returned from his wanderings he was tired and languid; the stuffy workshop did not seem alluring. He was dispirited, too; for the watchmaker’s clock told him that he had been three hours away. He could not believe it.
The young master stood at the front door, peeping out, still in his leather jacket and apron of green baize; he was whistling softly to himself, and looked like a grown fledgling that did not dare to let itself tumble out of the nest. A whole world of amazement lay in his inquiring eyes.
“Have you been to the harbor again, you young devil?” he asked, sinking his claws into Pelle.
“Yes.” Pelle was properly ashamed.