was the refrain. The rosy-cheeked Dagmar only laughed at this ditty.
“You might have waited another year,” said Mother.
“I’m tired of slaving for the farmers,” replied Dagmar.
“You might get a job with better-people.”
“I don’t want to work for anyone. Life has other things to offer.”
Valter understood and guessed that his sister wanted to become upper-class herself, and he did not understand why Mother was against it. Three things were degrading: to beg, to be lazy, to have vermin. But what was there against being upper-class? He asked his mother about this.
“Each to his own,” said Soldier-Hulda. “Upper-class is upper-class. The others should never mix with them.”
“In this country, yes,” said Dagmar. “But in America all are equal.”
That was the reason so many went to America: to be considered as equals.
One evening Aldo Samuel came to call to persuade Dagmar to forget the America-journey and return to his service. He had not been able to find another maid, and a better one than Dagmar he would never find. The farmer praised and lauded her beyond reason. Then he promised to raise her wages: he would pay her ten crowns a month if she stayed one more year.
“Ten crowns a month!” repeated Hulda and took a step backward.
It was indeed high pay for a seventeen-year-old girl. Hulda had in her youth served a whole year for twelve crowns and a shift.
Dagmar did not answer, and Aldo Samuel increased his offer with one crown after another. Besides, he would be willing to give her two whole days free so she could attend the fair.
“No!” said Dagmar.
“Your conceit has grown beyond rhyme and reason,” said the farmer.
“I’m tired of spreading manure for you, Aldo Samuel.”
At this the peasant turned angry and began to argue so loudly that Valter got scared. Aldo Samuel swore at youth in general. Nowadays they had grown so uppity that they couldn’t even stand the smell of dung. Dagmar and her ilk had never learned respect and decency. And before he left he cursed America, which had turned the heads of servants. America was taking the best manpower from the land; what a pity that country in its entirety hadn’t sunk below with the city of San Francisco!
Afterward Father reproached Dagmar for having aroused Aldo Samuel; he was the most decent of the villagers; his bite wasn’t so bad as his bark.
Dagmar left on a spring evening when the crabapple tree had begun to shed its blooms. Gunnar and Valter each had picked a bouquet of flowers for their sister—buttercups, bluebells, fragrant lilies of the valley. Dagmar said she would keep them as a remembrance of her home, if they didn’t wither away on the Atlantic Ocean.
Aldo Samuel had not refused his wagon to Dagmar, and his hired hand drove the red mare that had pulled the wagon when Ivar and Albin left for America. Father and Mother stood at the wagon and looked solemn. His sister hugged Valter so hard that he almost felt ashamed of her farewell. Then Dagmar’s little America-chest was lifted up behind, while the restless mare pushed and pulled the wagon back and forth.
“Don’t let any menfolk fool you,” admonished Soldier-Sträng.
“I’ll take care of myself! I’m strong enough!”
But her voice was not quite so sure or so light as usual. She stepped up and sat down beside the driver. Mother turned for a moment toward the gooseberry bushes as the wheels began to roll.
And the wagon with Valter’s only sister moved slowly down the road and disappeared at the bend near the Little Field.
Soldier-Valter now wrote with pen and ink as he related his life’s experiences. He read the installment stories in the American papers and relived their happenings all alone. Then he himself wrote several novels. When he ran short of paper, he would pull off a piece of the wallpaper; he confined himself to spots behind the beds where it wouldn’t be noticed. He was writing a big novel entitled The Million-Dollar Inheritance. It was along the lines of the installment story he had read in The Swedish-American Weekly, about Count Eberhard in the Castle Waldhof, whose inheritance had been stolen by a swindler and who now must live in a forester’s poor cottage. The Million-Dollar Inheritance, Original Swedish Novel by Valter Sträng, was also about a count who had been swindled out of his inheritance and now lived in a cottage, hunting and fishing.
He hid his work well, against the roof bark in the attic. No outsider must see it. But there was a leak in the sod roof, water dripped through the bark exactly in the place where he had hidden his papers, and after a persistent rain he discovered that The Million-Dollar Inheritance had rained to pieces. No outsider ever saw his original novel.
Soldier-Valter demanded true answers to all questions and wanted to know the truth about all things. He wanted to know the truth about himself. He thought about this at times: he was Valter, the soldier’s son, one of seven children in this family. But this knowledge was not enough, now that he had grown. Mustn’t he be something more than Soldier-Valter?
God had created him, with the aid of Father and Mother; the circumstances that brought a child into the world he had discovered by himself. But why had God created him? Why had Father and Mother brought him into the world? He had asked them about this, but had not received a satisfactory answer; his parents only looked embarrassed. Perhaps they themselves did not know. They had only meant that he should live, that he should become Soldier-Valter. And he would live and grow old and die. It was not as he wished. Was he nothing beyond Soldier-Valter?
He thought and thought to discover himself. He must be someone in himself, not only someone else’s, not only the soldier’s. He wanted to be someone or something that no one else was. And he wanted to do something in this world that no one else had done.
Carpenter-Elof came to mend the roof that the wind and the rain had torn, and Valter helped him by handing up the sod. The religious Elof spoke to him about something no one else had spoken of before: man’s soul.
Carpenter-Elof said that Valter had a soul, and a soul was something that never died, that lived for all eternity. The most precious and most valuable human possession was the soul.
And this—the most precious and most valuable—he carried inside himself. Soldier-Valter was visible, but his soul was invisible. Soldier-Valter could die, but not his soul. Because he carried it invisibly within himself, he was something more.
Carpenter-Elof said that Valter had a white and innocent child-soul which could be compared with a newly washed and ironed shirt that had been given him by God and that God would someday take back. As he grew up, his shirt would become spotted and soiled with sins and vices. But God demanded that his soul must be pure and white when He took it back, as pure and unsoiled as when He had given it to Valter. Therefore the spots must first be removed with Christ’s blood. His soul must be washed in the Lamb’s blood and ironed with blueing of Grace, exactly as one washed a dirty shirt in lye soap and then put it on Sunday morning, starched and ironed.
Valter asked: How did it feel when the soul began to get dirty?
Old Carpenter-Elof pulled his red timberman’s-pencil from his mouth. “One feels it. It aches in one’s conscience.”
Thus Valter learned that it was his conscience that hurt him in his breast when he had done something wrong. It pained and ached as it did when one coughed with a bad cold. One’s conscience sat in there some place like a sensitive wound, a place that hurt. The greater a person’s sins, the greater the sensitive place. In cruel murderers, like the Atorp murderer he had read about in the papers, the whole inside of the breast was one great big wound, one sensitive conscience. That was why Atorp had been unable to endure living but had hanged himself in his cell, said Elof. It was because