PAGE 11
Compelled To
by
“And he likes a glass of punch in the evening, and surely a married man can’t drink punch every evening of his life. And he doesn’t like children! It won’t turn out well,” he whispered. “Take my word for it, it won’t turn out well. And, gentlemen, there’s another thing,” (he rose from his seat, looked round and continued in a whisper), “I believe, I’m hanged if I don’t, that the old hypocrite has had a love affair of some sort. Do you remember that incident, gentlemen, with the–hihihi –sleeping suit? He’s one of those whom you don’t find where you leave them! Take care, Mrs. Blom! Mind what you are about! I’ll say no more!”
It was certainly a fact that the schoolmaster was engaged to be married and that the wedding was to take place within two months.
What happened after, does not belong to this story, and, moreover, it is difficult to know what goes on behind the convent walls of domesticity when the vow of silence is being kept.
It was also a fact that the schoolmaster, after his marriage, was never again seen at a public house.
The bookseller, who met him by himself in the street one evening, had to listen to a long exhortation on getting married. The schoolmaster had inveighed against all bachelors; he had called them egotists, who refused to do their duty by the State; in his opinion they ought to be heavily taxed, for all indirect taxes weighed most cruelly on the father of a family. He went so far as to say that he wished to see bachelorhood punished by the law of the land as a “crime against nature.”
The bookseller had a good memory. He said that he doubted the advisability of taking a fool into one’s house, permanently. But the schoolmaster replied that his wife was the most intelligent woman he had ever met.
Two years after the wedding the Pole saw the schoolmaster and his wife in the theatre; he thought that they looked happy; “ugh!”
Another three years went by. On a Midsummer day the proprietor of the restaurant made a pleasure trip on the Lake of Malar to Mariafred. There, before Castle Cripsholm, he saw the schoolmaster, pushing a perambulator over a green field, and carrying in his disengaged hand a basket containing food, while a whole crowd of young men and women, “who looked like country folk,” followed in the rear. After dinner the schoolmaster sang songs and turned somersaults with the youngsters. He looked ten years younger and had all the ways of a ladies’ man.
The proprietor, who was quite close to the party while they were having dinner, overheard a little conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Blom. When the young wife took a dish of crabs from the basket, she apologised to Albert, because she had not been able to buy a single female crab in the whole market. Thereupon the schoolmaster put his arm round her, kissed her and said that it didn’t matter in the least, because male or female crabs, it was all the same to him. And when one of the babies in the perambulator began to cry, the schoolmaster lifted it out and hushed it to sleep again.
Well, all these things are mere details, but how people can get married and bring up a family when they have not enough for themselves while they are bachelors, is a riddle to me. It almost looks as if babies brought their food with them when they come into this world; it really almost does look as if they did.