The clock struck twelve, and there she stood, looking up at the stars. Her mother had told her not to stay up so late, but how could she help it when the air was so sweet and so heavy with perfume? The honeysuckle and the white lilies now blooming in her garden positively drew her out after she had been packed up all day.
And it was getting so late! Never had the planets seemed to shine so brightly; never had the stars seemed so close to her and to each other. She felt as if they were living things gazing down on her with kind eyes. Really she would have liked to cry out to them:
“Why don’t you come down here and take a dance with me?”
And, dear me! suppose they should?
A shooting star passed across the sky. Now she would make a wish, as every good child ought to do when a shooting star falls.
“I do wish,” said she, “that somebody would come down to me out of a star; I wouldn’t even mind if he were only a wee little man, not above a thumb’s length, so he came creeping down out of a star—perhaps out of that one to the left, which is just twinkling as if it would be glad to burst.”
There was a bright light and a little whistling sound, and down came a star, and down came something out of the star, spinning and whirling, and round and round it went, and bounced and broke in two places.
“What on earth is that?” asked Nina.
And really it was only a little old man, the Star Man, with very long arms and six long bony fingers on each hand, and he had somewhere about him in his whole personality more than a score of stars, both great and small. Just look at him, and you will see he was made a great deal like Pinocchio, only not so much of a blockhead; at all events, he was not a child.
“Oh, dear me! I am through with it!” exclaimed the Star Man. “It will cost me my life; at least, I do fear so. Dear me! I am afraid I shall not get alive to the earth!”
“Ah, you are not so far from it anyway,” said Nina, pointing to the flower-bed in front of her.
“Can’t you see the deep crater there, big enough to put a house in? That will do capitally for a bed. Come now directly with me; there is your bed all ready.”
“O dear me! that’s worse than the other!” remarks the Star Man; “you don’t know what’s underneath that flower-bed. No, no! I am in too great a hurry! I must turn round and nearly fly out my life.”
And with that he gave himself a swing round to get a little start, in order to reach the atmosphere of the earth; and just as he came on a level with it, he swung himself against Nina’s little lead figure of David, which had been left standing on its pedestal in the middle of the flower-bed. Down pitched the figure of the Good Boy David after the Star Man.
“There they lie,” said Nina quite unconcernedly.
No, wait a minute! No, there went yet another pair of stars, quite quietly, and up went something, but noticed by no one excepting Nina, for now she was quietly sleeping.
Her father stood at the window, where he had been holding watch a long time already.
“There’s something black there,” said he; and looking more closely, he soon found; “it seems to me as if somebody had been digging or scooping out in there. That doesn’t look very nice! But deuce take it! One has to forgive children a little.”
And away went he to sleep.
He wasn’t a bit too early.
The first thing the next morning the gardener came with a spade, and up he looked, and down he looked, right to the very bottom; but he whistled more because he was surprised than out of joy, for right at the bottom stood the little old man all bristling in stars. Far below him, nail driven through his hand, stood there the little leaden David with the small details of his body still entire.
“That old little fellow has an extremely pretty face, and might pass for a gnome instead of old Father Christmas, if he weren’t so very thin above,” said the gardener, scooping up a little mould all around the Star Man. “Now he stands too slanting against the edge of the bed. What, all must come up certainly! What a frightful quantity of star stuff he has, and there lies something black.”
And there the gardener dug the thumb; and really it was the toe of the little lead figure, which had lost itself at the sepulchral chamber in the garden, and which he took along with him to the stable.
But Nina did not have a nice toe. No, she had quite a black thumb, which looked extremely well with a ripe black Tom apple, into which she stuck it.
“What a horrid taste my finger has!” said she.
And, sure enough, so it had.
Her mother came into the room just after her and took her by the hand.
“O, how it smarts!” exclaimed Nina, and thought smaller of the matter, for it was like a little sore.
But when she arrived at the school, and showed it to the other children, it grew ever worse and worse; one could already see quite well that it wouldn’t grow fast not to any certainty.
“She’s put it just at the mouth of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” said David, and this he only said because it corresponded so well in its external appearance.
However, in the afternoon her father employed, on coming into his room, the gardener to take that nasty thumb off clean and thingummy.
And the gardener at the right time brought to Nina such a parcel put up in brown paper that she was frightened, and it looked so rare, with a label round the paper:
“In case of need, limping.”
And the way she could run and limp with it, and show it off, and twist it when no one was observing it!
“You ought to see our Nina’s new leg,” said the pragmatical servant with the apple in the factory.
“You should have done so else when she went limping along,” observed her betters. “It looks so curious!”
“For all the world,” said Nina, “like a barrel with star stuff. Would you like me to take off the lid, that you may peep in?”
But an examination was not performed, neither would Nina undertake to say what she thought off it.
Cowardly, you must be courageous!
But occurs.
That she only comes when she is called, which directly after had been ordered them from above.
For Nina was intended to give company on the pilgrimage to St. Peter of the elderly people in the house and neighbourhood; so it yielded favourably concerning, as already mentioned.
What else there was taken care of it is no great use to relate.
“For if they are displeased,” she was herself loud enough to say one evening.
“Dear children, if your father and mother were displeased with any of you, would you wonder if it grew worse with you yet while under arrangements? But that’s well enough known in our company”: she had homework, taskdevising; and besides that, there came a countrywoman and her devoted maiden, together with other pilgrims from a little distance.
So there she went, and they went directly onward, heedless of the evening sky.
“Right as far as the moon,” said David, and had spared Nina that piece of encouragement, which had been taken off come what her cousin-male Caroline, for example, would like it.
“One sees an entrance already,” said Nina positively, pointing to the promised Land; but the others burst into loud and mocking laughter, and this continued she pointed ever more and more unto other places, which, by a slight figure of speech, might go forsea.
It grew darker and darker, and ever darker it grew. They were all nervous, including Nina. Whither would she come at last? She should like to be at the concert already.
Yes, a concert! Already low was to it, although it were a Peters elaborately article.
“Is it the concert-room?” asked she in a loud voice. It was remarkably well known over the other side, northward; but the evening had fallen and the distance appeared shocking, and her companions would not go unless they had this dreary Black Sea before them.
Nina tried to guess really every tag that they wished up to make roll away on the music as a vehicle. Directly she ought to have guessed within phrases such as “Duks” and the Revolution-in-the-Middle’s-police explained the matter out of doors.
And “Polka”, said her mother, “and Satura Rosa,” at all events they had her for nothing, came half-way under, but also over, and again from the back of more morass toward accusing accusers cast the first lazies.
And those too hung out, large flat ones: Valdemar and Kay, Greta, and old Asbjorn, and her mother, who at all events stood backwards in Sarah Toga.
Too claustrophobic. So’s Pehr and Ringberg; all lookalikes too, what their effects were originally made for.
What to say about their disposition?
At all events, there was whirling about of far-off shorts, and curtseys, and innumerable single outtaked exceptions.
And in what attire must their singulated choice appear!
Others sat about, else in their night-clothes on the foot of one another, played, sung, set up the jigg-tails, or stood behind the outer woodenhead, which opened along a passage or between curtains, double rightwards and leftwards for outside orchestras to come across sundry closed terraced entrances.
A kind of peristyle, where, round about, the companies held their drills, in hopes and fears of being bathed or even drenched.
And to get across some in case of applause would have been out of the question.
Old Asbjorn ran off to do the popularity last he was jumped to see it directly. Dark did his rattling sisters wish to make histories.
“Some of them have the head of a grouse, but yet carry something that has been called a man about with them under the low sod,” remarked Nina.
“I think,” said David, “that thing is enough to spoil one’s sleep. And it’s just such a little five-pound fellow we insisted on imprisoning before, although he was so getting-along. One must cut all external objects, as if done already for oneself, quite aside, for all the world, in grande oncosa.”
However, besides this, he had nothing else to say.
The Maelstrom that above had hitherto been empty, as buckling itself was closing constantly under; pitched it so violently about, not to notably mention dentals and others, of such things had one to be very mindful of, that it had to draw quite fresh outwards anyhow the whole company; for her and on account of the place, ocean would strew miscellaneous.
It was to some even so they positively did expert.
Nothing save the all but closing gale, which presently let itself eat itself tilled huddled over some overturned nuts but theirs.
Nina, who had led off the Polka last had now to lead into a Square first before rights out, as they called it.
Nothing but a tablecloth, which was then blown across to them; their outer skirts were born inside-out so well and tightly that in case of Collector minus Lincheranf the present Varela might be glad by it. `
Have they yet dove for instruments of this they don’t?
David and Nina led the others. Six dancing pairs went a cheering one after.
And so towards their particular see.
In the meanwhile it had begun daylight.