Kabanata Kabanata 3 · The Silver Skates

. The Silver Skates

Dame Brinker earned a scant support for her family by raising

vegetables, spinning, and knitting. Once she had worked on board the

barges plying up and down the canal and had occasionally been harnessed

with other women to the towing rope of a pakschuyt plying between Broek

and Amsterdam. But when Hans had grown strong and large, he had insisted

on doing all such drudgery in her place. Besides, her husband had become

so very helpless of late that he required her constant care. Although

not having as much intelligence as a little child, he was yet strong

of arm and very hearty, and Dame Brinker had sometimes great trouble in

controlling him.

“Ah! children, he was so good and steady,” she would sometimes say,

“and as wise as a lawyer. Even the burgomaster would stop to ask him a

question, and now, alack! he doesn’t know his wife and little ones. You

remember the father, Hans, when he was himself--a great brave man--don’t

you?”

“Yes, indeed, Mother, he knew everything and could do anything under the

sun--and how he would sing! Why, you used to laugh and say it was enough

to set the windmills dancing.”

“So I did. Bless me! how the boy remembers! Gretel, child, take that

knitting needle from your father, quick; he’ll get it in his eyes maybe;

and put the shoe on him. His poor feet are like ice half the time, but

I can’t keep ‘em covered, all I can do--” And then, half wailing, half

humming, Dame Brinker would sit down and fill the low cottage with the

whirr of her spinning wheel.

Nearly all the outdoor work, as well as the household labor, was

performed by Hans and Gretel. At certain seasons of the year the

children went out day after day to gather peat, which they would

stow away in square, bricklike pieces, for fuel. At other times, when

homework permitted, Hans rode the towing-horses on the canals, earning

a few stivers *{A stiver is worth about two cents of our money.} a day,

and Gretel tended geese for the neighboring farmers.

Hans was clever at carving in wood, and both he and Gretel were good

gardeners. Gretel could sing and sew and run on great, high homemade

stilts better than any other girl for miles around. She could learn a

ballad in five minutes and find, in its season, any weed or flower

you could name; but she dreaded books, and often the very sight of the

figuring board in the old schoolhouse would set her eyes swimming. Hans,

on the contrary, was slow and steady. The harder the task, whether in

study or daily labor, the better he liked it. Boys who sneered at him

out of school, on account of his patched clothes and scant leather

breeches, were forced to yield him the post of honor in nearly every

class. It was not long before he was the only youngster in the school

who had not stood at least ONCE in the corner of horrors, where hung a

dreaded whip, and over it this motto: “Leer, leer! jou luigaart, of dit

endje touw zal je leeren!” *{Learn! learn! you idler, or this rope’s end

shall teach you.}

It was only in winter that Gretel and Hans could be spared to attend

school, and for the past month they had been kept at home because their

mother needed their services. Raff Brinker required constant attention,

and there was black bread to be made, and the house to be kept

clean, and stockings and other things to be knitted and sold in the

marketplace.

While they were busily assisting their mother on this cold December

morning, a merry troop of girls and boys came skimming down the canal.

There were fine skaters among them, and as the bright medley of costumes

flitted by, it looked from a distance as though the ice had suddenly

thawed and some gay tulip bed were floating along on the current.

There was the rich burgomaster’s daughter Hilda van Gleck, with her

costly furs and loose-fitting velvet sack; and, nearby, a pretty peasant

girl, Annie Bouman, jauntily attired in a coarse scarlet jacket and

a blue skirt just short enough to display the gray homespun hose to

advantage. Then there was the proud Rychie Korbes, whose father, Mynheer

van Korbes, was one of the leading men of Amsterdam; and, flocking

closely around her, Carl Schummel, Peter and Ludwig van Holp, Jacob

Poot, and a very small boy rejoicing in the tremendous name of

Voostenwalbert Schimmelpenninck. There were nearly twenty other boys

and girls in the party, and one and all seemed full of excitement and

frolic.

Up and down the canal within the space of a half mile they skated,

exerting their racing powers to the utmost. Often the swiftest among

them was seen to dodge from under the very nose of some pompous lawgiver

or doctor who, with folded arms, was skating leisurely toward the town;

or a chain of girls would suddenly break at the approach of a fat old

burgomaster who, with gold-headed cane poised in air, was puffing his

way to Amsterdam. Equipped in skates wonderful to behold, with their

superb strappings and dazzling runners curving over the instep and

topped with gilt balls, he would open his fat eyes a little if one of

the maidens chanced to drop him a curtsy but would not dare to bow in

return for fear of losing his balance.

Not only pleasure seekers and stately men of note were upon the canal.

There were workpeople, with weary eyes, hastening to their shops and

factories; market women with loads upon their heads; peddlers bending

with their packs; bargemen with shaggy hair and bleared faces, jostling

roughly on their way; kind-eyed clergymen speeding perhaps to the

bedsides of the dying; and, after a while, groups of children with

satchels slung over their shoulders, whizzing past, toward the distant

school. One and all wore skates except, indeed, a muffled-up farmer

whose queer cart bumped along on the margin of the canal.

Before long our merry boys and girls were almost lost in the confusion

of bright colors, the ceaseless motion, and the gleaming of skates

flashing back the sunlight. We might have known no more of them had not

the whole party suddenly come to a standstill and, grouping themselves

out of the way of the passersby, all talked at once to a pretty little

maiden, whom they had drawn from the tide of people flowing toward the

town.

“Oh, Katrinka!” they cried in one breath, “have you heard of it? The

race--we want you to join!”

“What race?” asked Katrinka, laughing. “Don’t all talk at once, please,

I can’t understand.”

Everyone panted and looked at Rychie Korbes, who was their acknowledged

spokeswoman.

“Why,” said Rychie, “we are to have a grand skating match on the

twentieth, on Mevrouw van Gleck’s birthday. It’s all Hilda’s work. They

are going to give a splendid prize to the best skater.”

“Yes,” chimed in half a dozen voices, “a beautiful pair of silver

skates--perfectly magnificent--with, oh! such straps and silver bells

and buckles!”

“WHO said they had bells?” put in a small voice of the boy with the big

name.

“I say so, Master Voost,” replied Rychie.

“So they have”; “No, I’m sure they haven’t”; “OH, how can you say

so?”; “It’s an arrow”; “And Mynheer van Korbes told MY mother they

had bells”--came from the excited group, but Mynheer Voostenwalbert

Schimmelpenninck essayed to settle the matter with a decisive “Well, you

don’t any of you know a single thing about it; they haven’t a sign of a

bell on them, they--”

“Oh! oh!” and the chorus of conflicting opinions broke forth again.

“The girls’ pair is to have bells,” interposed Hilda quietly, “but

there is to be another pair for the boys with an arrow engraved upon the

sides.”

“THERE! I told you so!” cried nearly all the youngsters in one breath.

Katrinka looked at them with bewildered eyes.

“Who is to try?” she asked.

“All of us,” answered Rychie. “It will be such fun! And you must, too,

Katrinka. But it’s schooltime now, we will talk it all over at noon. Oh!

you will join, of course.”

Katrinka, without replying, made a graceful pirouette and laughing out a

coquettish, “Don’t you hear the last bell? Catch me!” darted off toward

the schoolhouse standing half a mile away on the canal.

All started, pell-mell, at this challenge, but they tried in vain to

catch the bright-eyed, laughing creature who, with golden hair streaming

in the sunlight, cast back many a sparkling glance of triumph as she

floated onward.

Beautiful Katrinka! Flushed with youth and health, all life and mirth

and motion, what wonder thine image, ever floating in advance, sped

through one boy’s dreams that night! What wonder that it seemed his

darkest hour when, years afterward, thy presence floated away from him

forever.