Robert’s employment and attempted escape from Aron of Nybacken

Robert’s employment and attempted escape from Aron of Nybacken turns a farm-service contract into the first major test of Robert’s wish to control his own life. His parents arrange the position because the crowded household cannot support another dependent, and the servant law makes the agreement difficult to undo. Robert tries to flee before the service has properly begun; Aron finds him, returns him to Nybacken, and makes the law’s authority personal. The relationship then recurs as a daily structure of work, supervision, and discipline, until Robert leaves the farm and emigrates with his family.## The Contract and the HouseholdRobert does not want to serve a master. He argues with his parents over the place arranged for him at Nybacken, asking whether he can avoid service. Nils and Märta answer from the pressures of the household: Robert is nearly fifteen, his sister Lydia has already served as a maid, and Karl Oskar cannot afford to keep another person at home. Nils has hired Robert to Aron and taken the earnest money under the servant law; the contract cannot simply be torn up. In return for the first year’s service, Aron is to provide wages, a wadmal suit, and boots. To his parents this is a practical arrangement for a boy who must earn his food and clothing; to Robert it is a life under a master he does not wish to have.That clash sets the terms of the relationship before Robert and Aron meet alone. Robert’s parents understand service as a necessary obligation, secured by law and justified by the family’s limited means. Robert experiences it as a loss of choice. His objection is not that work itself is unnecessary: it is that his working life will be governed by someone else. The employment therefore links household need to a wider system in which a farmhand’s mobility and time are restricted.## Flight and RecoveryIn May 1848, Robert leaves home carrying a small bundle of clothes and three books, including the Bible and his mother’s prayerbook. He takes the wrong road while trying to escape the service and makes for the mill, hoping to get closer to Karlshamn and the sea. At the mill the miller recognizes him as Nils of Korpamoen’s son. Aron arrives soon afterward, identifying Robert by his bare feet and lack of a jacket. The hoped-for ride away turns into a meeting with the very man from whom Robert is trying to get free.Aron first addresses him mildly, presenting himself as someone who can show the lost boy the way to Nybacken. He then takes hold of Robert and orders him to collect his things. Once they are outside, Aron’s manner changes: he accuses Robert of running away and of pretending to have drowned, and rebukes him for leaving a service to which he is bound. He gives Robert a box on the ear and brings him back in the wagon. Robert returns by the road he had meant to avoid; the attempt to take his first steps toward America ends in being delivered back to Nybacken.The incident establishes the imbalance between them. Robert’s movement is checked not by persuasion alone, but by the contract Aron invokes and the physical control he exercises. Aron frames obedience as a duty Robert owes both his parents and his master. The episode also foreshadows the larger conflict between Robert’s imagined escape and the actual constraints of work: at this point, the road toward the sea is available only in intention.## The Daily Order of ServiceAt Nybacken, Aron’s authority is repeated in the ordinary rhythm of labor. The farmhands perform most of the chores because Aron is lazy, and Robert, the youngest worker, is sent from one task to another by the master, the mistress, the old mistress, and the maids. The farm’s four horses require continual care: Robert fills their mangers, cleans their stalls, brings hay and oats, prepares fodder, and carries water. Sundays as well as weekdays are shaped by the animals’ needs. The work is not a single demand but a schedule that reaches from the early morning into the evening.Robert is woken at four o’clock and hurried to work. His first evenings teach him that service is not merely a contract on paper: it governs where he sleeps, what he does, and how little of the day belongs to him. The service year lasts 358 days, with only one free week. The comparison between animals and workers makes the constraint plain: the horses are bound in their stalls, while the farmhands are bound to their care. Within his first week, Robert decides that he must escape all his masters, human and animal. His private resolve is a response to the whole organization of service, not just to one encounter with Aron.The book does not present Nybacken’s conditions as the worst Robert could have faced. Arvid, who has worked on other farms, says that the food there could be worse; even at Nybacken it can include mildewed bread, rancid herring, sour milk, or cheese marked by rats. This comparison gives Robert’s service a social context without making it benign. The routine is hard, the farmhands are subordinate, and the fact that another place might be worse does not give Robert control over his own labor.## Discipline and the Servant LawAron’s power is reinforced by a rule that Robert has learned to accept as legitimate. After another blow, Robert says nothing to anyone: he considers himself lazy, ashamed, and properly punished. The servant law, repeated by Dean Brusander at the yearly examinations, permits a master to correct a servant inclined to idleness through suitable chastisement. Robert understands this not as a private injustice but as a recognized right. He believes Aron has fatherly authority over him under God’s ordinance and concludes that he has no grounds for complaint. His silence shows how thoroughly the social and religious language of obedience can make discipline appear deserved to the person subjected to it.Robert does not respond to Aron with hatred. He has seen Aron beaten by his wife with a byre besom and has felt pity for him rather than anger. This observation complicates the relation: Aron is the powerful employer who controls Robert’s work and administers punishment, yet Robert can also see him as vulnerable within his own household. That perception does not erase the unequal relation between master and hired boy; it helps explain why Robert’s response is not a simple opposition between a cruel master and a resentful servant. His central resistance is directed toward the condition of being bound to masters at all.## Departure and the Limits of EscapeRobert’s first escape attempt fails, but his intention to leave persists. When his family later prepares to emigrate, the old clothes chest is brought down from the attic and repurposed as the family’s packing case. The contrast is significant for Robert’s story: he once set out alone toward the sea and was turned back by Aron, whereas now departure is a family undertaking, equipped with tools, clothes, provisions, and shared plans. In the packed chest are practical things for establishing life elsewhere, including tools and fishing gear that Robert hopes will be useful in a land said to have abundant fish. His earlier desire to reach the sea has become part of an actual migration.On the journey, Robert compares farm service with work aboard ship. After a week at sea, he concludes that the ship’s work is dangerous and that the sailors are not free: they work watches, sleep closely packed, and are confined within the limits of the vessel. He remembers Nybacken’s stable room and recognizes that a farmhand on land had more freedom than a seaman at sea. The comparison does not undo his wish to leave Aron’s service; it shows that escape from one master does not guarantee freedom from labor’s demands. Shipboard life supplies a new setting in which the same question of who controls work and movement returns.Robert’s employment under Aron is therefore both a specific episode in his youth and an early pattern for the book’s account of migration. The contract is made to meet the household’s needs, but it places Robert under an authority he rejects. His failed flight shows how law, family necessity, and a master’s immediate power combine to return him to service; his eventual emigration gives that wish to leave a larger route and purpose. Yet the voyage complicates any simple equation between departure and liberty: leaving Nybacken changes Robert’s circumstances, while the struggle over time, danger, and control continues at sea.