Otherwise Garibaldi lets them come and stare and go as they like. It does not trouble him that he is an eminent and remarkable person; quite unperturbed, he puts the brandy-bottle to his lips and drinks just as long as he is thirsty. He sits there, playing thoughtlessly with knife and leather and silk, as though he had sat on the stool all his life, instead of having just fallen from the moon. And about the middle of the afternoon the incomparable result is completed; a pair of wonderful satin shoes, slender as a neat’s tongue, dazzling in their white brilliance, as though they had just walked out of the fairy-tale and were waiting for the feet of the Princess.
“Look at them, damn it all!” says the master, and passes them to little Nikas, who passes them round the circle. Garibaldi throws back his close-cropped gray head.
“You need not say who has made them—everybody can see that. Suppose now the shoes go to Jutland and are worn there and are thrown on the rubbish-heap. One day, years hence, some porridge-eater goes ploughing; a scrap of the instep comes to the surface; and a wandering journeyman, who is sitting in the ditch nibbling at his supper, rakes it toward him with his stick. That bit of instep, he says, that, or the Devil may fry me else, was part of a shoe made by Garibaldi—deuce take me, he says, but that’s what it was. And in that case the journeyman must be from Paris, or Nuremberg, or Hamburg—one or the other, that’s certain. Or am I talking nonsense, master?”
No; Master Andres can asseverate this is no nonsense—he who from childhood lived with Garibaldi on the highways and in great cities, who followed him so impetuously with that lame leg of his that he remembers Garibaldi’s heroic feats better than Garibaldi himself. “But now you will stay here,” he says persuasively. “Now we’ll work up the business—we’ll get all the fine work of the whole island.” Garibaldi has nothing against this; he has had enough of toiling through the world.
Klausen will gladly make one of the company; in the eyes of all those present this proposal is a dream which will once more raise the craft to its proper level; will perhaps improve it until the little town can compete with Copenhagen. “How many medals have you really received?” says Jeppe, as he stands there with a great framed diploma in his hand. Garibaldi shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know, old master; one gets old, and one’s hand gets unsteady. But what is this? Has Master Jeppe got the silver medal?”
Jeppe laughs. “For this I have to thank a tramp by the name of Garibaldi. He was here four years ago and won the silver medal for me!” Well—that is a thing Garibaldi has long forgotten! But medals are scattered about wherever he has been.
“Yes, there are a hundred masters knocking about who boast of their distinctions: first-class workshop—you can see it for yourself— ‘a silver medal.’ But who did the work? Who got his day’s wages and an extra drop of drink and then—good-bye, Garibaldi! What has one to show for it, master? There are plenty of trees a man can change his clothes behind—but the shirt?” For a moment he seems dejected. “Lorrain in Paris gave me two hundred francs for the golden medal I won for him; but otherwise it was always—Look in my waistcoat pocket! or—I’ve an old pair of trousers for you, Garibaldi! But now there’s an end to that, I tell you; Garibaldi has done with bringing water to the mill for the rich townsfolk; for now he’s a sosherlist!” He strikes the table so that the glass scrapers jingle. “That last was Franz in Cologne—gent’s boots with cork socks. He was a stingy fellow; he annoyed Garibaldi. I’m afraid this isn’t enough for the medal, master, I said; there’s too much unrest in the air. Then he bid me more and yet more—but it won’t run to the medal—that’s all I will say. At last he sends Madame to me with coffee and Vienna bread—and she was in other respects a lady, who drove with a lackey on the box. But we were furious by that time! Well, it was a glorious distinction—to please Madame.”
“Had he many journeymen?” asks Jeppe.
“Oh, quite thirty or forty.”
“Then he must have been somebody.” Jeppe speaks in a reproving tone.