Then they left him alone. But it wasn’t long before grandmother stuck in her head and called that the king was coming riding with fifteen generals to congratulate Martin, and at the same moment he heard a rumbling over the bridge as if there was thunder. He jumped out of bed and threw on his clothes, but the noise came nearer, there was a cloud of dust over the road, horses’ hoofs rang on the ground and the bridge, and there were lightnings of drawn swords. When he came out on the porch, the foremost riders had already passed, but Martin’s mother consoled him with the fact that the king had not been with them. Instead it had been almost all his army, which was on its way to the region of Drottningsholm for maneuvers. There were hussars and dragoons and all the artillery from Stockholm, and the artillerists were shaking like sacks of potatoes on their caissons and were gray and black with dust and dirt. But Martin admired them all the more in that condition and wondered within himself if it wouldn’t be better to be an artillerist than a coasting skipper.
The martial array passed and was gone, a fresh wind came from the lake and took with it the odor of dirt and sweat which remained, and when Martin turned around, there stood beside the breakfast table a little table set especially for him; Maria had decorated it with flowers and green leaves. Then he got bashful and blushed again, but he was very happy too, for on the middle of the table stood a cake which his mother had baked for him, a big dish full of wild strawberries which Maria had picked under the oaks, a twenty-five-öre piece from papa, and a package of stockings which mother had knitted. Of all these things Martin cared most for the twenty-five-öre piece. For he had come to realize that a pair of stockings was just a pair of stockings, and a cake was a cake, but a twenty-five-öre piece was an indefinite number of fulfilled wishes in any direction whatever up to a certain limit, and experience had not yet taught him how narrow was that limit.
Martin went around and thanked everybody, and tasted the cake and the berries, and saw that the stockings were handsome with red borders, and put the twenty-five-öre piece in a match box, which was his savings bank. In it up to now there had been a couple of old copper coins and some small pebbles which he had come across in the sand and kept because they were so pretty.
Then the Bragë blew at Tysk Botten, and papa had to be off to the city, but Martin was allowed to go with mamma and grandmother and Maria to Drottningsholm. There stood the king’s white summer palace, mirrored in the bright inlet. The trees in the park were bigger than any other trees, and the shade under them was deep and cool. And over the dark waters of the ponds and canals the white swans glided with their stiffly outstretched necks, and Martin imagined that they never troubled themselves about anything else in the world than their own white dreams.
But grandmother had a French roll with her, which she broke into crumbs and fed to them as one feeds chickens.
Summer days, pleasure days, cornflowers in the yellow rye. …
It was near harvest time, and Martin was walking along the road with his mother. Maria was on the other side, and now and then she would pick a cornflower from out of the rye. Mother had a pink dress and a straw hat with a wide brim, and she was talking with them about mankind and the world and God.
“Look, Martin,” she said, “there are the heavy and the light ears of grain that we read about today in the arbor. You remember the full ear that bowed itself so deeply to the earth because it had so many grains to carry. The grains are ground into meal in the mill, and the meal is baked into bread, and the bread is good to eat when anyone is hungry. But the empty ear is good for nothing, the farmer throws it away or gives it to his horse to chew, and even the horse doesn’t get any fatter from it. And yet it raises itself so proudly aloft and looks down on the other ears which stand and bend around it.”
With that mother broke off the proud light ear and showed Martin that it was quite empty.
“Such are many among men,” she said. “You’ll come to see that when you’re big. You will also see people who go about hanging their heads to make others think they belong to the full ears. But they are just the emptiest of all.
“But you must also remember, children, that it is not your part to judge, either now or when you grow up, whether anyone belongs to the full or the empty ears. Such a thing no man can rightly know about another. That only God knows.”
When mother talked to Martin about God, he felt at the same time solemn and a little embarrassed, somewhat as a little dog might feel when one tries to talk to him as to a person. For when he heard his mother tell about paradise and Noah’s ark, he could follow along very well—he saw it all so clearly before his eyes,
