A battle and a boy; a story for young people

Front matter

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II

Franzl’s fate presently stalked up to liim in the shape of a Suabian peasant, who scrutinized him as narrowly as if he were a horse. The solemn ruminating gaze wandered slowly over his small person, and inspected his loose waistcoat, broad leathern belt, short, tight trousers, the stockings, that began too late and ended too soon — for they did not approach the bare, brown knees or the ankles — the heavy shoes, with nails in the soles, the curly brown hair, and the pretty, green, pointed Tyrolean hat, beneath which the spirited face looked up curiously. His clothes were old, faded, patched, and shabby ; but they were the Sunday suit his mother had made for him long ago, and constituted his entire wardrobe. Some of the children laid on the ground before them small bundles containing all their worldly possessions. Franzl’s march had been impeded by no such weight.

“ Tyrolean — hm ? ” said the man.

The portentous “ hm ” puzzled Franzl. It

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sounded disparaging, and lie did not yet know enough of trade to understand that stupid people think it sharp to underrate the value of the wares they wish to buy.

“ From the Yenter Thai,” he replied.

“ lira — hm — ” repeated the peasant.

“ It’s a splendid valley,” Franzl returned, haughtily, offended that anybody should “ hm ” at his home ; “ it’s got snow mountains, high ones, the highest in the world — and rocks, big ones, the biggest in the world — and chamois, more chamois than there are anywhere else in the world.”

The man, as taciturn as Pauli’s mother was loquacious, stared, but otherwise paid no attention to these boasts. Puffing slowly at a long, brown, curving pipe, he measured the boy from head to foot.

“ Ever been out to work ? ” he finally asked.

“ What can you do ? ”

“ Anything any other fellow of my size can, I suppose.”

The peasant pinched the child’s arm, gave his shapely legs a few investigating slaps, looked well at the multitude of youngsters to satisfy himself anew that there was no healthier boy on the

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ground, and again uttered Ids enigmatic ' “ hm.” Franzl did not mind it now. He concluded it was part of the business.

“ Can you engage for a year ? ”

Poor homeless Franzl might have replied that he could engage himself for a dozen years, since there was nobody to miss him, but he merely said :

“ Don’t mind.”

“ Family?”

“ Yes,” said Franzl, cheerfully, “ I’ve got some.”

“ Hm, they’ll let you alone will they ? They won’t be coming after you ? ”

“ No danger,” returned the boy, reflecting that it would be long indeed before those ten pink toes would be coming after him.

A circle had formed round them, for the peasant was known as a man of means and importance, and a good judge of cattle. He had inspected several boys that morning without finding an article to his taste. He was so slow he gave one the impression that he expected to live a thousand years at least, and was paid by the hour for deliberating. While he stared and pondered, Franzl counted the silver buttons which in long dazzling rows adorned the farmer’s portly person.

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“ I’ll give you thirty marks,” he proposed.

Franzl felt disappointed and mortified. Why, the woman’s little Yroni would earn twenty — a girl — and he a big boy of eleven, as big and strong as some fellows of thirteen. Confused and depressed, he looked at the bystanders, who, however, showed no surprise at this unflattering estimate of his powers, and indifferently waited for his answer.

Suddenly, a little distance behind the peasant, Pauli’s red head and friendly freckled countenance bobbed into view, and nodded infinite encouragement. With frantic gestures, grins, and disrespectful grimaces at the peasant’s broad back, Pauli swung his arms like windmills, and silently cheered Franzl on to victory.

The pantomime might have been unintelligible to the wise and prudent, but it was not to Franzl, to whom it said : “ Go on, old fellow ! You’re all right. He’s a fraud. We’ll- manage him.”

Support and sympathy from an old and intimate friend — for so Pauli seemed at this crisis — did Franzl’s heart good and set his wits working.

“Why, they always begin low down,” he remembered. “ That’s what I’ve been hearing all the morning. What a fool I was to forget ! ”

It struck him that it would take less time and

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trouble if people would say at once how much they would pay, instead of beating about the bush so long. He did not quite know what he was worth — a nice question, indeed, for anyone at any time to decide for himself ; more than Vroni he was sure, but less than Pauli, who, haying been bound out before, belonged to the aristocrats of the market and could put on airs toward novices. Franzl was on the point of declaring he would not take a penny less than fifty marks, when he saw Pauli hold up eight fingers, and make hideous contortions with his mouth.

Franzl understood and was much excited.

“ He means eighty marks. But that’s what the very biggest fellows have.” Bits of talk and haggling which he had heard with indifference now recurred to him. “ Oh, yes, he must come up and I must come down. It’s a kind of hide-and-seek. He hides, then I hide.”

A merry -looking girl of fifteen or sixteen had joined Pauli, also another boy. All three telegraphed by private wire to Franzl that he must say “ eighty,” and eighty he said, boldly ; but he felt queer f somewhat as he had once felt when he was a very little boy and his father had told him to jump from a rock into a green, deep lake. He thought

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it was plain enough how he would get into the water, but how it would be down there, and how he would ever come up again — that was what he didn’t grasp. This, too, was a leap into the unknown ; still he said “ eighty,” in response to his privy counsellors.

“ Thirty-five,” the peasant offered, stolidly.

“Here we come,” Franzl thought, “one toward the other, like two donkeys crossing a bridge.” But he was in good spirits now, and roused to do his best.

With his hands behind him, and making himself as tall and manly as possible to increase his market value, he exclaimed :

“ Thirty-five marks for a big boy like me ! You must be joking. You mean seventy-five.”

The council of three grinned approval. Pauli waved his windmill arms.

Observing Franzl’s bright face looking often in one direction, the peasant turned to discover the attraction ; but as his rotund figure revolved slowly upon its axis, he saw nothing but people moving about, intent on their own affairs, and three most innocent figures, with heads thrown back and eyes fixed upon the ancient tower, like connoisseurs lost in contemplation of its architectural charms.

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“Forty,” he said, “and it’s more than you are worth. Forty marks is a good deal of money nowadays,” he remarked solemnly, and looked at the bystanders. His assertion met with sympathy.

“That’s true,” somebody responded. “Forty marks is a good deal of money. It doesn’t grow on every bush.”

“ Say seventy, and I’ll begin to listen,” returned Franzl ; but it was difficult for him to command his lordly tone, for forty marks seemed a fortune to him.

“ Forty,” reiterated the peasant. “ Forty is my price.”

Franzl hesitated. Over the private wire again came sound advice from experienced heads :

“ Say sixty, then come down to fifty, and hang on for your life.”

Franzl obeyed the instructions conveyed by the animated, expressive, and trustworthy “ code.”

“ Sixty,” he called, boldly.

The peasant puffed some time, regarding Franzl’s lithe, strong legs. It was those legs he wished to employ. They were the best ones on the market that day. Since they could run they had been trained in the mountains to climb and spring,

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sure-footed as a goat, while above them were an unusually deep, broad chest for a growing boy, and perfect lungs.

“ He is worth a hundred marks and more to me,” reflected the peasant ; “ I’ll give him fifty ; ” for he would not have enjoyed a golden crown in paradise unless he could feel that he had bought it for half price.

Meanwhile the allied juvenile forces and the enemy had arrived at the same conclusion. They were all determined upon fifty marks — the three children, because they had their special tariff, and fifty marks was the highest price which a new boy under fourteen could obtain ; Franzl, because they had inspired him with confidence, and it is always pleasant .to have one’s value set at a high figure ; the peasant, because such a boy was dirt-cheap on such terms. Nevertheless the peasant proposed forty-two, and Franzl came down slowly to fifty-eight, and there they remained balancing some time before they would deign to make further concessions. Finally, after a great deal of unnecessary shilly-shallying, they arrived, by reluctant degrees at fifty, which made all parties secretly triumphant, particularly the conspiracy of labor against capital.

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Franzl, who felt far richer than a Rothschild, still thought it, all in all, a silly performance, for he was only an ignorant little mountaineer, and hadn’t a suspicion that this sort of thing was not peculiar to the Rayenshurg market, but that roundabout ways were in high favor all over the world, and that statesmen, diplomates, lawyers, doctors, all sorts of wise old graybeards, frequently scorn to accomplish their objects with simplicity and directness, when they can possibly spin out preliminaries and waste time in not saying what they mean.

If Franzl had been uncertain as to the delicate matter of self-valuation, he was quite at his ease with respect of certain practical privileges which it was now his task to secure from his new master, and scarcely needed Pauli’s lively suggestions from the background.

“ You’ll give me two suits of clothes ” — what he really said was double clothes — “ a Sunday suit and a workday one ? ”

The peasant demurred and wrapped himself in smoke and silence to ostensibly consider the question, but this again was merely his idea of manners and dignity, for every child, according to old custom which nobody ever thought of evading, could claim two suits.

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“ Yes, two,” he agreed, at length.

“ Whole suits,” persisted Franzl ; “ jacket and trousers and waistcoat ? ”

After another season of profound meditation the peasant responded :

“Whole suits.”

“ And two pairs of shoes ? ”

The peasant puffed a while, stolid, inscrutable, and as important as if the fate of the Triple Alliance depended upon his answ r er.

“ Two pairs of shoes,” he repeated.

“ Shoes made out of shoe-leather ? ” Franzl stipulated, gravely.

The peasant nodded assent, and the bystanders laughed, but Franzl was quite serious. He had seen shoes made of wood, of felt, of carpet, even of an old coat, and he intended his should be out-and-out shoe-leather shoes, and no mean woolly imitations.

“ And school in the winter, Franzl — three months’ school,” prompted Pauli’s mother, who had listened to the closing conditions. Neither party to the sale was as grateful as he ought to have been for this judicious suggestion ; the farmer because he did not want to lose so much of the boy’s time, and Franzl for reasons which need not be dwelt upon, since they are evident to every eleven-year-

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old boy, unless lie be a little John Stuart Mill, who at the age of three preferred Greek to taffy.

Fianzl did not look elated, and something in his eyes expressed the wicked intention of shirking school if he could ; but Pauli’s mother came forward valiantly, leading little Yroni.

“ Now you must let him go to school, you know. Boys must have their schooling. My Pauli and my Josef will have their three months’ school. Speak up Franzl, and say you want to go to school. Fifty marks is good, and the clothes and shoes, and everything is all right except the school. I’ve walked three days from beyond Bregenz,” she confided to the peasant’s immovable countenance, “and I’ve sold three children this morning, and I ought to start for home again, for my man’s got a broken leg — broken in two places. I suppose he couldn’t help breaking it just at this busy time, with the spring coming on, but it does seem as if men made all the trouble they could. I’ve got five children younger than Yroni here. This is a world ! That’s why I have to sell some of them. I don’t fear for Pauli. He’s steady as a mill, like me. But Josef takes after his father, being a bit sulky in the temper, and strangers won’t know how to humor him ; and little Yroni — well, well, they say

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they’ll be easy with the child — it’s only twenty marks she gets ! If you have eight children, you know, and a man with a broken leg — broken in two places — spring’s an inconvenient season for broken legs. Well, well ! But it’s as much of a pull letting them go off among strangers as if you had only one. Nobody knows what they will find off there. It’s as bad as getting married — which is mostly pretty uncertain. I ought to be off. It’s no use waiting, now they are all sold. You will let Franzl go to school, won’t you ? It’s his right, you know.”

She might as well have addressed herself to the town-pump so far as sympathy and response were concerned. But happily all that she required was a listener. The sympathy and response she herself could provide. Undaunted by the peasant’s apathy, she went on energetically :

“ I’m looking a bit after Franzl. I told him I’d see that things were all right. He’s got a family, but they couldn’t come with him. They want him to go to school. It isn’t respectable not to get an education when you’re young and not good for much else. Speak up, Franzl. Say you want three months’ school. Tell him your mother wouldn’t want you to miss your schooling.”

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Franzl flushed, and without more delay muttered, ungraciously :

“Well — school then,” and the peasant grudgingly agreed.

The bargain was now completed. Franzl Reiner was bought and sold, and duly registered. He submitted his papers, which the peasant examined with his phenomenal slowness, then fished from the depths of a leather purse, as long as a stocking, a five-mark piece, which he gave the boy in proof of good faith. It was a large, heavy coin. Franzl longed to examine it, but the older boys were watching him, and pride led him to drop it carelessly into his pocket.

Little Yroni, however, was more guileless, and worked to unclasp her mother’s fingers, which held a similar but smaller coin.

“ There, little one,” she murmured in her loving and pretty dialect ; “ thou seest it, my child. It is thine. Mother will put it away that it may not be lost. And here is thy woman coming for thee. It is time to go. Be good, Yroni. Mother will come for thee some day. Run along, child.”

She gave the little girl a slap on the shoulder, did not kiss her — peasants have not much time to kiss their children — did not shed a tear as Yroni,

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somewhat dazed by her vast experiences that day, and led by the strange woman, walked out of the crowd and turned the corner of the street without once looking back. The mother watched, dry-eyed, until the small figure was out of sight, then dropped upon a bench in front of the Lamb, flung her apron over her face, buried her head in her hands, rocked to and fro, and sobbed and mourned for her children. But tears were a luxury which she could not afford long at a time.

“ Lord ! this is a world ! ” she muttered.

As she looked up with her wet red eyes, Pauli stood near — troubled and awkward — and Franzl hesitated at the door of the inn.

“ Oh, you boys,” she exclaimed, with a strange outbreak of irritation, “mind that you behave yourselves, mind that you are steady and decent, and grow into something worth having. Men -folks do an awful lot of harm — and women-folks have the worst of it — mostly. But there — what do you know about it ? Off with you, Pauli ! Josef’s gone — Yroni’s gone.” She stood, smoothed her apron, rubbed the back of her hand roughly across her eyes, and prepared to start on her homeward journey. “ Behave yourself, Franzl. Good-by, Pauli. There is nothing more for me to do

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here, and there’s enough work waiting somewhere else.”

She turned from him, suddenly looked back, a world of tenderness in her rugged face :

“ You’ve been a good, steady boy, Pauli. You have always worked better than any other boy.”

She strode away with the step of a man, and the queer man’s hat on her head — in her heart, heavy sorrow — the kind, womanly, pitiful heart that, in spite of its own burdens, could care for the interests of a lonely little boy by the wayside.

In the Lamb, packed close together on benches at long, bare tables, sat the peasants and the children who had sold themselves. It was their inalienable right to eat heartily of soup and meat, with beer, as the final ceremony of the market, and the one which they regarded as entirely satisfactory.

Neither Pauli nor Pranzl had had a morsel that day, and when they found themselves and their respective proprietors sitting before bowls of steaming hot soup, they fell to in silence and with ravenous appetites. The din of voices, the air dense with the smoke of a score of strong pipes and beer fumes could not destroy their zest. Pauli loved his mother honestly, and choked and

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felt queer when she left him ; but he was only thirteen. He could not comprehend her grief or her love ; he had never before in all his life had so much soup at once, and this felicity absorbed his being.

When, after a while, the two men moved to a table where great cattle-potentates were discussing prices and pounding with their fists, Pauli remarked with a chuckle :

“ Well, we nosed him about ! ”

“ Lucky for me ! ” returned Franzl.

“Oh, I didn’t mind doing you a good turn,” Pauli rejoined, with frank indifference. “ The mother wouldn’t leave you alone. But what I wanted most was to pay him off. He offered me forty marks this morning, and said that was all I was w r orth. He pretended there was something the matter wdth my knees. I’m an old boy, and a sixty-mark boy, and when I saw him put his eye on you I made up my mind I’d make the price, and he shouldn’t have you for less than fifty. That other fellow was angry with him, too, for some such trick. He and his sister and I, we sold you well. Knees indeed! Old Skinflint had to pay fifty. He’s rich as a king — ten or twelve cows and no end of vineyards.”

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Pranzl’s eyes opened wide at such visions of affluence, but he took exception to Pauli’s tone, and remarked, loftily :

u 0h, I could have sold myself alone. I was getting on all right.”

“We’d better eat all we can stuff,” observed the practical Pauli, in no respect moved by Pranzl’s ingratitude.

Whereupon the boys relapsed into silence and devoured everything that was set before them.

That night Pranzl, wedged between his master and another heavily built man, had his first ride on the railway. The carriage was crowded with peasants smoking their pipes and talking of the market, prices, cattle, vineyards, and crops. Pranzl was wildly excited by the movement, and although it was an accommodation-train of surpassing slowness, he held his breath with delight, and fancied himself flying. He must tell his mother about it, he resolved — the thump-thump, the other motion, and the rushing through the air. She would never believe it. She would say :

“Pranzl, thou art a little boy, but a great rogue.”

Ah, there was the lump in his throat again. He was always forgetting there wasn’t any mother any

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more. He couldn’t run home and tell her anything. She would never smile at him again, never speak again.

The lump grew very big. In the smoky, dim light, no one noticed the homesick, heartsick, tired little boy, squeezed between two broad peasants, the tears rolling down his face.

He wept till he fell asleep, and dreamed a happy dream of the swift mountain-brook foaming down the rocks behind the cottage.