The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg Read Free Book Online Page A

his feet, it whirled and bubbled between his toes, and he sat and watched it run away, passing by him, flowing under the bridge and hastening farther on. He saw the white bubbles of foam float on and disappear in the thicket of willows where the brook’s bed made a curve. This water was free; the water in the brook was not hired in Nybacken; it needn’t stay in the same place a whole year. It never remained in one place, it could travel anywhere. It could run all the way down to the sea, and then the way was open around the world, around the whole globe.
    There would be no harm if he sat half an hour and watched the brook, a last half-hour before he became a hired hand.
    In front of him in the creek bed there was a deep, black pool near a large stone. In this pool he had once drowned a cat, a gruesome memory. And there, beside the stone, a maid from Nybacken had drowned a few years ago. She had not drowned by will, she had slipped and fallen into the water as she stood on the stone and rinsed washing. The stone was so steep that she was unable to crawl up; her body was found in the pool. On the stone they had seen marks made by her fingernails: she had scratched and scraped with her nails, unable to get hold anywhere. Afterwards Robert had seen the marks and he could never forget them; the scratches told him of human terror at death.
    A manservant could drown in that pool as well as a maid. When a hired hand sank into the water of the brook, no service contract would hold, and no earnest money which the servant had accepted on earth would have to be accounted for. A drowned farmhand had no master.
    Robert considered this.
    He unfolded the paper around his books. His mother had laid a little myrtle branch between the leaves of the prayerbook, and the book opened where the green branch lay: “A Servant’s Prayer.”
    “O Lord Jesus Christe, God’s Son. You humbled Yourself in a servant’s shape. . . . Teach me to fear and love You in my daily work, and to be faithful, humble, and devoted to my temporal lords in all honesty. . . . What worldly good may fall to me I leave all to Your mild and fatherly pleasure. Teach me only to be godly at all times, and satisfied, and I will gain sufficiency. . . . Let me also find good and Christian masters who do not neglect or mistreat a poor servant, but keep me in love and patience. . . .”
    Through the myrtle branch between the leaves his mother spoke to the young servant: Read this prayer! And Dean Brusander required at the yearly examinations that farmhands and maids should “so act in their poor situation that they could say by heart ‘A Servant’s Prayer.’”
    But now Robert had in mind to read a piece from his History of Nature. He had turned the corner of the page and he found the place immediately:
“About the Size of the Sea:
“Many might wonder why the Creator has left so little space on the earth as home for man and beasts. For almost three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by water. But he who learns to understand why water takes so much space shall therein see another proof of the Creator’s omnipotence and kindness.
“These great bodies of water which surround the firm land on all sides, and which have salt water, are called Sea. . . .”
    Robert looked up from his book. He thought of the sea which was three times bigger than the firm land on which he sat. No one owned the sea. But the land was divided in homesteads, in quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and the farmers owned them. The one who owned no land became a servant to a landowner.
    He thought: On land there were many roads to follow. There were others besides the one which led to Nybacken. There was a parting of the ways close by, at the bridge over the mill brook: the right one led to Nybacken, the left one brought you to Åbro mill—and if you continued on that road you would never reach Nybacken.
    If you turned to the left you could disappear from the neighborhood. There were people who had