Robert and Arvid’s Friendship

Robert and Arvid’s friendship grows out of shared farm service at Nybacken and becomes the trust that turns Robert’s private escape plan into a joint emigration. Arvid first teaches the younger man how to understand their workplace; Robert later protects him amid social ostracism and confides a dangerous plan, while Arvid offers secrecy and then chooses to leave with him. Their companionship moves from a stable room shared with bedbugs to the road toward Karlshamn, binding personal loyalty to the larger migration from Sweden.

Unequal Beginnings in the Stable Room

Arvid is the elder farmhand: a grown, strong man with a light beard, reddish skin, and old frostbites on his nose. The master calls him the big hand and Robert the little hand. Their room is in the barn beside the horses’ stalls, furnished with two straw beds and horse blankets; bedbugs fill its walls and beds. The setting is not incidental to their relationship: it is the private space where they sleep, talk, and eventually plan a future beyond service.

On Robert’s first evening, he asks what kind of place Nybacken is for a servant. Arvid answers from experience. The master’s laziness leaves much of the work to the hired hands, but the food, he explains, is no worse than what servants elsewhere may have to endure. His account places him in the role of the knowledgeable older comrade, while Robert enters the farm still needing to learn how its hierarchy works.

The difference between them is also a difference in how they have adapted. Arvid treats hard service as an ordinary condition, almost as routine as harnessing a horse or carrying water. Robert, the youngest worker, is sent from one task to another by everyone on the farm and must tend the four horses morning and evening, as well as curry them, clean their stalls, carry water, and fetch and prepare their fodder. The hired hand’s service year lasts 358 days, with only one free week. During his first week, Robert decides he must escape his human masters and the animals to which he is bound. Arvid’s friendship takes shape within this unequal system: he explains it, but Robert will ultimately refuse to accept it as permanent.

A Reputation That Is Not His Own

Arvid’s position at Nybacken is darkened by a rumor started by the old mistress. She had seen him take a white heifer into its stall at midday, but had witnessed nothing more; her insinuation nonetheless spread through the maids and then into the neighborhood. They avoided Arvid, recoiled from contact, and would not be left alone with him. A maid he had visited stopped seeing him, and other girls shunned him. The accusation cost him ordinary companionship and left him increasingly withdrawn.

Robert does not believe the accusation. His childhood experience of animals gives him no reason to imagine the act alleged of his friend, and he cannot bring himself to question Arvid directly. He recognizes, however, that Arvid knows what people are saying and that his earlier sociability has given way to painful shyness. When Robert is refused permission to visit his parents after a month at Nybacken, he learns that Arvid has not left the farm in half a year, despite his parents living only three miles away. The rumor helps explain why Arvid has kept apart; Robert’s understanding of that isolation deepens into loyalty.

Their closeness is not expressed through an easy conversation about the accusation. It emerges instead through Robert’s attention to what Arvid is enduring and through the confidence that follows. The friendship gives Arvid a listener who does not treat suspicion as proof, and gives Robert someone to trust with a plan that could put him at risk.

Protection and Confession

When the two farmhands struggle over an ax during a drunken episode, Robert fears that Arvid might injure himself. Arvid is larger and stronger and first takes the ax, but, unsteady, he falls and drops it. Robert retrieves it and throws it among the gooseberry bushes near the barn, preventing Arvid from reaching it. He then tries to calm him by insisting on their friendship and offering help. Arvid’s anger subsides into despair; he repeatedly says that he is unhappy, and later admits how much he hates the old mistress whom he blames for the accusation.

After Arvid cries, Robert understands that the public disgrace has become unbearable and that remaining in the neighborhood is no longer possible for him. The next evening, Robert acts on that realization by confiding in him. Alone in the stable room, he speaks in whispers as if the sheriff might be outside, and tells Arvid that he carries a heavy secret and asks whether he can rely on him. Arvid promises to keep silent even at the cost of his own head.

The pledge makes their friendship concrete. Robert reveals that he means to escape service, but not by repeating his earlier, unsuccessful attempt. He plans to wait until autumn, when men carry oak timber to Karlshamn. Since he can now drive, he expects to accompany the timbermen with Aron’s old mare; once out of sight, he will leave, and the mare will return without him. He intends to reach a ship bound for North America. Arvid is not merely the audience for the scheme: his promise of secrecy protects the plan at the moment it becomes real.

From a Private Plan to a Shared Emigration

Robert’s vision of America offers Arvid more than a route out of farm service. There, he believes, no one will know the rumor about the white heifer or call him the Bull behind his back. He imagines a place where women will not shun him and where he can meet other people’s eyes and be regarded like other men. The hope is specific to the injury he has suffered at home: emigration promises distance from a name imposed on him by others.

Arvid agrees immediately to go with Robert. They shake hands and resolve to cross the ocean together, while the stable-room lantern burns late as they plan. The contrast with their surroundings is sharp: the two men imagine a distant new life while bedbugs in the rotten walls share the secret deliberations. Robert’s original plan had been to depart covertly with a timber load; the first version of their future is thus not a grand public declaration but a confidential promise between two farmhands.

The emigration takes shape through practical arrangements as well as loyalty. Robert and Karl Oskar write to a firm in Karlshamn and secure passage on the Charlotta, a merchant ship scheduled to sail directly to New York. The down payment is one hundred daler for six people, and the departure is planned for the second week in April. When Danjel asks to join, Robert offers to obtain a passage contract for him if the ship has room. This wider migration grows through such connections, and Robert’s earlier bond with Arvid becomes part of a movement that gathers families and fellow travelers as well as the two friends.

The Road Together and the Limits of the Promise

By the time the emigrants assemble at Åkerby Junction, the escape Robert had first imagined has changed form. Nineteen people are present: sixteen emigrants, nine adults and seven children, while three drivers are to return from Karlshamn. Arvid rides with Jonas Petter’s group, and Robert moves to the same wagon, finding a seat between the driver and Elin. Behind him sits Arvid, who greets him with a broad grin. They are traveling to the New World together after all, though not by slipping away alone on a load of timber as they had once planned.

The departure places their friendship inside a larger collective undertaking. Their journey depends on hired wagons, the planned ship passage, and the company of other households; the two farmhands are no longer alone in the secret room, but neither has their shared purpose disappeared. The movement from Nybacken to the junction gives physical shape to a promise first sealed by a handshake.

At sea, Robert’s judgment of freedom becomes more complicated. After a week aboard, he concludes that a farmhand on land has more freedom than a seaman. He compares the animals that tied hired workers to their routines with sailors confined to the ship, their bunks crowded together and their movement limited to forty paces in length and eight in width. The comparison unsettles the simple hope that leaving one form of service automatically means freedom. It does not undo the choice he and Arvid made, but it places their emigration within a continuing struggle over work, mobility, and control of one’s life. Their friendship remains a decisive bond in that passage: it first gave Robert a confidant, gave Arvid a companion beyond the neighborhood’s rejection, and carried both from the stable room toward a future neither could yet know.