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Pelle the Conqueror — Volume 02

by Martin Andersen Nexø · English · Gutenberg #7792 · 571,477 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pelle the Conqueror — Volume 02

Author: Martin Andersen Nexø

Translator: Bernard Miall


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7792]
                Most recently updated: July 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7792

Credits: Eric Eldred, Earle Beach and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PELLE THE CONQUEROR — VOLUME 02 ***




Pelle the Conqueror

APPRENTICESHIP

by Martin Andersen Nexö

Translated from the Danish by Bernard Miall.




Pelle the Conqueror




II. APPRENTICESHIP




I


On that windy May-day morning when Pelle tumbled out of the nest, it so
happened that old Klaus Hermann was clattering into town with his
manure-cart, in order to fetch a load of dung. And this trifling
circumstance decided the boy’s position in life. There was no more
pother than this about the question: What was Pelle to be?

He had never put that question to himself. He had simply gone onward at
hazard, as the meaning of the radiant world unfolded itself. As to what
he should make of himself when he was really out in the world —well,
the matter was so incomprehensible that it was mere folly to think
about it. So he just went on.

Now he had reached the further end of the ridge. He lay down in the
ditch to recover his breath after his long walk; he was tired and
hungry, but in excellent spirits. Down there at his feet, only half a
mile distant, lay the town. There was a cheerful glitter about it; from
its hundreds of fireplaces the smoke of midday fires curled upward into
the blue sky, and the red roofs laughed roguishly into the beaming face
of the day. Pelle immediately began to count the houses; not wishing to
exaggerate, he had estimated them at a million only, and already he was
well into the first hundred.

But in the midst of his counting he jumped up. What did the people down
there get for dinner? They must surely live well there! And was it
polite to go on eating until one was quite full, or should one lay down
one’s spoon when one had only half finished, like the landowners when
they attended a dinner? For one who was always hungry this was a very
important question.

There was a great deal of traffic on the high-road. People were coming
and going; some had their boxes behind them in a cart, and others
carried their sole worldly possessions in a bag slung over their
shoulders, just as he did. Pelle knew some of these people, and nodded
to them benevolently; he knew something about all of them. There were
people who were going to the town—his town—and some were going farther,
far over the sea, to America, or even farther still, to serve the King
there; one could see that by their equipment and the frozen look on
their faces. Others were merely going into the town to make a hole in
their wages, and to celebrate May-day. These came along the road in
whole parties, humming or whistling, with empty hands and overflowing
spirits. But the most interesting people were those who had put their
boxes on a wheelbarrow, or were carrying them by both handles. These
had flushed faces, and were feverish in their movements; they were
people who had torn themselves away from their own country-side, and
their accustomed way of life, and had chosen the town, as he himself
had done.

There was one man, a cottager, with a little green chest on his
wheelbarrow; this latter was broad in the beam, and it was neatly
adorned with flowers painted by his own hand. Beside him walked his
daughter; her cheeks were red, and her eyes were gazing into the
unknown future. The father was speaking to her, but she did not look as
though she heard him. “Yes—now you must take it on you to look out for
yourself; you must think about it, and not throw yourself away. The
town is quite a good place for those who go right ahead and think of
their own advantage, but it thinks nothing of who gets trodden
underfoot. So don’t be too trusting, for the people there are wonderful
clever in all sorts of tricks to take you in and trip you up. At the
same time you want to be soft-spoken and friendly.” She did not reply
to this; she was apparently more taken up with the problem of putting
down her feet in their new shoes so that the heels should not turn
over.

There was a stream of people coming up from the town too. All the
forenoon Pelle had been meeting Swedes who had come that morning in the
steamer, and were now looking for a job on the land. There were old
folk, worn out with labor, and little children; there were maidens as
pretty as yellow-haired Marie, and young laborers who had the strength
of the whole world in their loins and muscles. And this current of life
was setting hither to fill up the gaps left by the swarms that were
going away—but that did not concern Pelle. For seven years ago he had
felt everything that made their faces look so troubled now; what they
were just entering upon he had already put behind him. So there was no
good in looking back.

Presently the old man from Neuendorf came along the road. He was got up
quite like an American, with a portmanteau and a silk neckerchief, and
the inside pockets of his open coat were stuffed full of papers. At
last he had made up his mind, and was going out to his betrothed, who
had already been three years away.

“Hullo!” cried Pelle, “so you are going away?”

The man came over to Pelle and set his portmanteau down by the side of
the ditch.

“Well, yes; it’s time to be going,” he said. “Laura won’t wait for me
any longer. So the old people must see how they can get along without a
son; I’ve done everything for them now for three years. Provided they
can manage all by themselves—”

“They can do that all right,” said Pelle, with an experienced air. “And
they had to get help formerly. There is no future for young people at
home.” He had heard his elders say this. He struck at the grass with
his stick, assuming a superior air.

“No,” said the other, “and Laura refuses to be a cottager’s wife. Well,
good-bye!” He held out his hand to Pelle and tried to smile, but his
features had it their own way; nothing but a rather twisted expression
came over them. He stood there a minute, looking at his boots, his
thumb groping over his face as though he wanted to wipe the tormented
look away; then he picked up his portmanteau and went. He was evidently
not very comfortable.

“I’ll willingly take over the ticket and the bride,” shouted Pelle
merrily. He felt in the deuce of a good humor.

Everybody to-day was treading the road along which Pelle’s own young
blood had called him—every young fellow with a little pluck, every
good-looking wench. Not for a moment was the road free of traffic; it
was like a vast exodus, an army of people escaping from places where
everyone had the feeling that he was condemned to live and die on the
very spot where he was born; an army of people who had chosen the
excitement of the unknown. Those little brick houses which lay
scattered over the green, or stood drawn up in two straight rows where
the high-road ran into the town—those were the cottages of the peasant
folk who had renounced the outdoor life, and dressed themselves in
townified clothes, and had then adventured hither; and down on the
sea-front the houses stood all squeezed and heaped together round the
church, so close that there looked to be no room between them; there
were the crowds who had gone wandering, driven far afield by the
longing in their hearts—and then the sea had set a limit to their
journey.

Pelle had no intention of allowing anything whatever to set a limit to
his journeying. Perhaps, if he had no luck in the town, he would go to
sea. And then one day he would come to some coast that interested him,
and he would land, and go to the gold-diggings. Over there the girls
went mother-naked, with nothing but some blue tattoo-work to hide their
shame; but Pelle had his girl sitting at home, true to him, waiting for
his return. She was more beautiful even than Bodil and yellow-haired
Marie put together, and whole crowds followed her footsteps, but she
sat at home and was faithful, and she would sing the old love-song:

“I had a lad, but he went away
    All over the false, false sea,
Three years they are gone, and now to-day
    He writes no more to me!”


And while she sang the letter came to the door. But out of every letter
that his father Lasse received fell ten-kroner banknotes, and one day a
letter came with steamer-tickets for the two of them. The song would
not serve him any further, for in the song they perished during the
voyage, and the poor young man spent the rest of his days on the
sea-shore, gazing, through the shadow of insanity, upon every rising
sail. She and Lasse arrived safely—after all sorts of difficulties,
that went without saying—and Pelle stood on the shore and welcomed
them. He had dressed himself up like a savage, and he carried on as
though he meant to eat them before he made himself known.

_Houp la!_ Pelle jumped to his feet. Up the road there was a rattling
and a clanking as though a thousand scythes were clashing together: an
old cart with loose plank sides came slowly jolting along, drawn by the
two most miserable moorland horses he had ever seen. On the driver’s
seat was an old peasant, who was bobbing about as though he would every
moment fall in pieces, like all the rest of his equipment. Pelle did
not at first feel sure whether it was the cart itself or the two bags
of bones between the shafts that made such a frightful din whenever
they moved, but as the vehicle at last drew level with him, and the old
peasant drew up, he could not resist the invitation to get up and have
a lift. His shoulders were still aching from carrying his sack.

“So you are going to town, after all?” said old Klaus, pointing to his
goods and chattels.

To town, yes indeed! Something seemed to grip hold of Pelle’s bursting
heart, and before he was aware of it he had delivered himself and his
whole future into the old peasant’s hands.

“Yes, yes—yes indeed—why, naturally!” said Klaus, nodding as Pelle came
forward. “Yes, of course! A man can’t do less. And what’s your idea
about what you are going to be in the long run—councillor or king?” He
looked up slowly. “Yes, goin’ to town; well, well, they all, take the
road they feel something calling them to take…. Directly a young
greyhound feels the marrow in his bones, or has got a shilling in his
pocket, he’s got to go to town and leave it there. And what do you
think comes back out the town? Just manure and nothing else! What else
have I ever in my life been able to pick up there? And now I’m
sixty-five. But what’s the good of talking? No more than if a man was
to stick his tail out and blow against a gale. It comes over them just
like the May-gripes takes the young calves— heigh-ho! and away they go,
goin’ to do something big. Afterward, then old Klaus Hermann can come
and clean up after them! They’ve no situation there, and no kinsfolk
what could put them up—but they always expect something big. Why, down
in the town there are beds made up in the streets, and the gutters are
running over with food and money! But what do you mean to do? Let’s
hear it now.”

Pelle turned crimson. He had not yet succeeded in making a beginning,
and already he had been caught behaving like a blockhead.

“Well, well, well,” said Klaus, in a good-humored tone, “you are no
bigger fool than all the rest. But if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go
to shoemaker Jeppe Kofod as apprentice; I am going straight to his
place to fetch manure, and I know he’s looking for an apprentice. Then
you needn’t go floundering about uncertain-like, and you can drive
right up to the door like the quality.”

Pelle winced all over. Never in his life had it entered his head that
he could ever become a shoemaker. Even back there on the land, where
people looked up to the handicrafts, they used always to say, if a boy
had not turned out quite right: “Well, we can always make a cobbler or
a tailor of him!” But Pelle was no cripple, that he must lead a
sedentary life indoors in order to get on at all; he was strong and
well-made. What he would be—well, that certainly lay in the hands of
fortune; but he felt very strongly that it ought to be something
active, something that needed courage and energy. And in any case he
was quite sure as to what he did not want to be. But as they jolted
through the town, and Pelle—so as to be beforehand with the great
world—kept on taking off his cap to everybody, although no one returned
his greeting, his spirits began to sink, and a sense of his own
insignificance possessed him. The miserable cart, at which all the
little town boys laughed and pointed with their fingers, had a great
deal to do with this feeling.

“Take off your cap to a pack like that!” grumbled Klaus; “why, only
look how puffed up they behave, and yet everything they’ve got they’ve
stolen from us others. Or what do you suppose—can you see if they’ve
got their summer seeds in the earth yet?” And he glared contemptuously
down the street.

No, there was nothing growing on the stone pavements, and all these
little houses, which stood so close that now and then they seemed to
Pelle as if they must be squeezed out of the row—these gradually took
his breath away. Here were thousands and thousands of people, if that
made any difference; and all his blind confidence wavered at the
question: where did all their food come from? For here he was once more
at home in his needy, familiar world, where no amount of smoke will
enable one to buy a pair of socks. All at once he felt thoroughly
humble, and he decided that it would be all he could do here to hold
his own, and find his daily bread among all these stones, for here
people did not raise it naturally from the soil, but got it—well, how
_did_ they get it?

The streets were full of servants. The girls stood about in groups,
their arms round one another’s waists, staring with burning eyes at the
cotton-stuffs displayed in the shops; they rocked themselves gently to
and fro as though they were dreaming. A ’prentice boy of about Pelle’s
age, with a red, spotty face, was walking down the middle of the
street, eating a great wheaten roll which he held with both hands; his
ears were full of scabs and his hands swollen with the cold. Farm
laborers went by, carrying red bundles in their hands, their overcoats
flapping against their calves; they would stop suddenly at a turning,
look cautiously round, and then hurry down a side street. In front of
the shops the salesmen were walking up and down, bareheaded, and if any
one stopped in front of their windows they would beg them, in the
politest manner, to step nearer, and would secretly wink at one another
across the street.

“The shopkeepers have arranged their things very neatly to-day,” said
Pelle.

Klaus nodded. “Yes, yes; to-day they’ve brought out everything they
couldn’t get rid of sooner. To-day the block-heads have come to
market—the easy purses. Those”—and he pointed to a side street, “those
are the publicans. They are looking this way so longingly, but the
procession don’t come as far as them. But you wait till this evening,
and then take a turn along here, and ask the different people how much
they’ve got left of their year’s wages. Yes, the town’s a fine
place—the very deuce of a fine place!” And he spat disgustedly.

Pelle had quite lost all his blind courage. He saw not a single person
doing anything by which he himself might earn his bread. And gladly as
he would have belonged to this new world, yet he could not venture into
anything where, perhaps without knowing it, he would be an associate of
people who would tear the rags off his old comrades’ backs. All the
courage had gone out of him, and with a miserable feeling that even his
only riches, his hands, were here useless, he sat irresolute, and
allowed himself to be driven, rattling and jangling, to Master Jeppe
Kofod’s workshop.




II


The workshop stood over an entry which opened off the street. People
came and went along this entry: Madame Rasmussen and old Captain
Elleby; the old maid-servant of a Comptroller, an aged pensioner who
wore a white cap, drew her money from the Court, and expended it here,
and a feeble, gouty old sailor who had bidden the sea farewell. Out in
the street, on the sharp-edged cobble-stones, the sparrows were
clamoring loudly, lying there with puffed-out feathers, feasting among
the horse-droppings, tugging at them and scattering them about to the
accompaniment of a storm of chirping and scolding.

Everything overlooking the yard stood open. In the workshop all four
windows were opened wide, and the green light sifted into the room and
fell on the faces of those present. But that was no help. Not a breath
of wind was blowing; moreover, Pelle’s heat came from within. He was
sweating with sheer anxiety.

For the rest, he pulled industriously at his cobbler’s wax, unless,
indeed, something outside captured his harassed mind, so that it
wandered out into the sunshine.

Everything out there was splashed with vivid sunlight; seen from the
stuffy workshop the light was like a golden river, streaming down
between the two rows of houses, and always in the same direction, down
to the sea. Then a speck of white down came floating on the air,
followed by whitish-gray thistle-seeds, and a whole swarm of gnats, and
a big broad bumble-bee swung to and fro. All these eddied, gleaming, in
the open doorway, and they went on circling as though there was
something there which attracted them all—doubtless an accident, or
perhaps a festival.

“Are you asleep, booby?” asked the journeyman sharply. Pelle shrank
into his shell and continued to work at the wax; he kneaded away at it,
holding it in hot water.

Inside the court, at the baker’s—the baker was the old master’s
brother—they were hoisting sacks of meal. The windlass squeaked
horribly, and in between the squeaking one could hear Master Jörgen
Kofod, in a high falsetto, disputing with his son. “You’re a noodle, a
pitiful simpleton—whatever will become of you? Do you think we’ve
nothing more to do than to go running out to prayer-meetings on a
working day? Perhaps that will get us our daily bread? Now you just
stay here, or, God’s mercy, I’ll break every bone in your body!” Then
the wife chimed in, and then of a sudden all was silent. And after a
while the son stole like a phantom along the wall of the opposite
house, a hymn-book in his hand. He was not unlike Howling Peter. He
squeezed himself against the wall, and his knees gave under him if any
one looked sharply at him. He was twenty-five years old, and he took
beatings from his father without a murmur. But when matters of religion
were in question he defied public opinion, the stick, and his father’s
anger.

“Are you asleep, booby? I shall really have to come over and teach you
to hurry!”

For a time no one spoke in the workshop—the journeyman was silent, so
the others had to hold their tongues. Each bent over his work, and
Pelle pulled the pitch out to as great a length as possible, kneaded
some grease into it, and pulled again. Outside, in the sunshine, some
street urchins were playing, running to and fro. When they saw Pelle,
they held their clenched fist under their noses, nodded to him in a
provocative manner, and sang—

“The cobbler has a pitchy nose,
The more he wipes it the blacker it grows!”


Pelle pretended not to see them, but he secretly ticked them all off in
his mind. It was his sincere intention to wipe them all off the face of
the earth.

Suddenly they all ran into the street, where a tremendous, monotonous
voice lifted itself and flowed abroad. This was the crazy watchmaker;
he was standing on his high steps, crying damnation on the world at
large.

Pelle knew perfectly well that the man was crazy, and in the words
which he so ponderously hurled at the town there was not the slightest
meaning. But they sounded wonderfully fine notwithstanding, and the
“ordeal by wax” was hanging over him like a sort of last judgment.
Involuntarily, he began to turn cold at the sound of this warning
voice, which uttered such solemn words and had so little meaning, just
as he did at the strong language in the Bible. It was just the voice
that frightened him; it was such a terrible voice, such a voice as one
might hear speaking out of the clouds; the sort of voice, in short,
that made the knees of Moses and Paul give under them; a portentous
voice, such as Pelle himself used to hear coming out of the darkness at
Stone Farm when a quarrel was going on.

Only the knee-strap of little Nikas, the journeyman, kept him from
jumping up then and there and throwing himself down like Paul. This
knee-strap was a piece of undeniable reality in the midst of all his
imaginings; in two months it had taught him never quite to forget who
and where he was. He pulled himself together, and satisfied himself
that all his miseries arose from his labors over this wretched
cobbler’s wax; besides, there was such a temptation to compare his
puddle of cobbler’s wax with the hell in which he was told he would be
tormented. But then he heard the cheerful voice of the young shoemaker
in the yard outside, and the whole trouble disappeared. The “ordeal by
wax” could not really be so terrible, since all the others had
undergone it—he had certainly seen tougher fellows than these in his
lifetime!

Jens sat down and ducked his head, as though he was expecting a box on
the ears;—that was the curse of the house which continually hung over
him. He was so slow at his work that already Pelle could overtake him;
there was something inside him that seemed to hamper his movements like
a sort of spell. But Peter and Emil were smart fellows—only they were
always wanting to thrash him.

Among the apple trees in the yard it was early summer, and close under
the workshop windows the pig stood smacking at his food. This sound was
like a warm breeze that blew over Pelle’s heart. Since the day when
Klaus Hermann had shaken the squeaking little porker out of his sack,
Pelle had begun to take root. It had squealed at first in a most
desolate manner, and something of Pelle’s own feeling of loneliness was
taken away from him by its cries. Now it complained simply because it
was badly fed, and it made Pelle quite furious to see the nasty trash
that was thrown to it—a young pig must eat well, that is half the
battle. They ought not to go running out every few minute to throw
something or other to the pig; when once the heat really set in it
would get acidity of the stomach. But there was no sense in these town
folk.

“Are you really asleep, booby? Why, you are snoring, deuce take me!”

The young master came limping in, took a drink, and buried himself in
his book. As he read he whistled softly in time with the hammer-
strokes of the others. Little Nikas began to whistle too, and the two
older apprentices who were beating leather began to strike in time with
the whistling, and they even kept double time, so that everything went
like greased lightning. The journeyman’s trills and quavers became more
and more extraordinary, in order to catch up with the blows—the blows
and the whistling seemed to be chasing one another—and Master Andres
raised his head from his book to listen. He sat there staring into the
far distance, as though the shadowy pictures evoked by his reading were
hovering before his eyes. Then, with a start, he was present and among
them all, his eyes running over them with a waggish expression; and
then he stood up, placing his stick so that it supported his diseased
hip. The master’s hands danced loosely in the air, his head and his
whole figure jerking crazily under the compulsion of the rhythm.

_Swoop!_—and the dancing hands fell upon the cutting-out knife, and the
master fingered the notes on the sharp edge, his head on one side and
his eyes closed—his whole appearance that of one absorbed in intent
inward listening. But then suddenly his face beamed with felicity, his
whole figure contracted in a frenzy of delight, one foot clutched at
the air as though bewitched, as though he were playing a harp with his
toes—Master Andres was all at once a musical idiot and a musical clown.
And _smack!_ the knife flew to the ground and he had the great tin
cover in his hand— _chin-da-da-da chin-da-da-da!_ Suddenly by a stroke
of magic the flute had turned into a drum and cymbals!

Pelle was doubled up with laughter: then he looked in alarm at the
knee-strap and again burst out laughing; but no one took any notice of
him. The master’s fingers and wrist were dancing a sort of devil’s
dance on the tin cover, and all of a sudden his elbows too were called
into requisition, so that the cover banged against the master’s left
knee, bounced off again and quick as lightning struck against his
wooden heel, which stuck out behind him; then against Pelle’s head, and
round about it went, striking the most improbable objects, _dum, dum,
dum_, as though in wild, demoniacal obedience to the flute-like tones
of the journeyman. There was no holding back. Emil, the oldest
apprentice, began boldly to whistle too, cautiously at first, and then,
as no one smacked his head, more forcefully. Then the next apprentice,
Jens—the music-devil, as he was called, because anything would produce
a note between his fingers—plucked so cleverly at his waxed-end that it
straightway began to give out a buzzing undertone, rising and falling
through two or three notes, as though an educated bumble-bee had been
leading the whole orchestra. Out of doors the birds came hopping on to
the apple-boughs; they twisted their heads inquisitively to one side,
frantically fluffed out their feathers, and then they too joined in
this orgy of jubilation, which was caused merely by a scrap of bright
blue sky. But then the young master had an attack of coughing, and the
whole business came to an end.

Pelle worked away at his cobbler’s wax, kneading the pitch and mixing
grease with it. When the black lump was on the point of stiffening, he
had to plunge both hands into hot water, so that he got hangnails. Old
Jeppe came tripping in from the yard, and Master Andres quickly laid
the cutting-board over his book and diligently stropped his knife.

“That’s right!” said Jeppe; “warm the wax, then it binds all the
better.”

Pelle had rolled the wax into balls, and had put them in the
soaking-tub, and now stood silent; for he had not the courage of his
own accord to say, “I am ready.” The others had magnified the “ordeal
by wax” into something positively terrible; all sorts of terrors lurked
in the mystery that was now awaiting him; and if he himself had not
known that he was a smart fellow—why—yes, he would have left them all
in the lurch. But now he meant to submit to it, however bad it might
be; he only wanted time to swallow first. Then at last he would have
succeeded in shaking off the peasant, and the handicraft would be open
to him, with its song and its wandering life and its smart journeyman’s
clothes. The workshop here was no better than a stuffy hole where one
sat and slaved over smelly greasy boots, but he saw that one must go
through with it in order to reach the great world, where journeymen
wore patent-leather shoes on workdays and made footwear fit for kings.
The little town had given Pelle a preliminary foreboding that the world
was almost incredibly great, and this foreboding filled him with
impatience. He meant to conquer it all!

“Now I am ready!” he said resolutely; now he would decide whether he
and the handicraft were made for one another.

“Then you can pull a waxed end—but make it as long as a bad year!” said
the journeyman.

The old master was all on fire at the idea. He went over and watched
Pelle closely, his tongue hanging out of his mouth; he felt quite young
again, and began to descant upon his own apprenticeship in Copenhagen,
sixty years ago. Those were times! The apprentices didn’t lie in bed
and snore in those days till six o’clock in the morning, and throw down
their work on the very stroke of eight, simply to go out and run about.
No; up they got at four, and stuck at it as long as there was work to
do. Then fellows _could_ work—and then they still learned something;
they were told things just once, and then—the knee-strap! Then, too,
the manual crafts still enjoyed some reputation; even the kings had to
learn a handicraft. It was very different to the present, with its
bungling and cheap retailing and pinching and paring everywhere.

The apprentices winked at one another. Master Andres and the journeyman
were silent. You might as well quarrel with the sewing-machine because
it purred. Jeppe was allowed to spin his yarn alone.

“Are you waxing it well?” said little Nikas. “It’s for pigskin.”

The others laughed, but Pelle rubbed the thread with a feeling as
though he were building his own scaffold.

“Now I am ready!” he said, in a low voice.

The largest pair of men’s lasts was taken down from the shelf, and
these were tied to one end of the waxed-end and were let right down to
the pavement. People collected in the street outside, and stood there
staring. Pelle had to lean right out of the window, and bend over as
far as he could, while Emil, as the oldest apprentice, laid the
waxed-end over his neck. They were all on their feet now, with the
exception of the young master; he took no part in this diversion.

“Pull, then!” ordered the journeyman, who was directing the solemn
business. “Pull them along till they’re right under your feet!”

Pelle pulled, and the heavy lasts joggled over the pavement, but he
paused with a sigh; the waxed-end was slipping over his warm neck. He
stood there stamping, like an animal which stamps its feet on the
ground, without knowing why; he lifted them cautiously and looked at
them in torment.

“Pull, pull!” ordered Jeppe. “You must keep the thing moving or it
sticks!” But it was too late; the wax had hardened in the hairs of his
nape—Father Lasse used to call them his “luck curls,” and prophesied a
great future for him on their account—and there he stood, and could not
remove the waxed-end, however hard he tried. He made droll grimaces,
the pain was so bad, and the saliva ran out of his mouth.

“Huh! He can’t even manage a pair of lasts!” said Jeppe jeeringly.
“He’d better go back to the land again and wash down the cows’
behinds!”

Then Pelle, boiling with rage, gave a jerk, closing his eyes and
writhing as he loosed himself. Something sticky and slippery slipped
through his fingers with the waxed-end; it was bloody hair, and across
his neck the thread had bitten its way in a gutter of lymph and molten
wax. But Pelle no longer felt the pain, his head was boiling so, and he
felt a vague but tremendous longing to pick up a hammer and strike them
all to the ground, and then to run through the street, banging at the
skulls of all he met. But then the journeyman took the lasts off him,
and the pain came back to him, and his whole miserable plight. He heard
Jeppe’s squeaky voice, and looked at the young master, who sat there
submissively, without having the courage to express his opinion, and
all at once he felt terribly sorry for himself.

“That was right,” buzzed old Jeppe, “a shoemaker mustn’t be afraid to
wax his hide a little. What? I believe it has actually brought the
water to his eyes! No, when I was apprentice we had a real ordeal; we
had to pass the waxed-end twice round our necks before we were allowed
to pull. Our heads used to hang by a thread and dangle when we were
done. Yes, those were times!”

Pelle stood there shuffling, in order to fight down his tears; but he
had to snigger with mischievous delight at the idea of Jeppe’s dangling
head.

“Then we must see whether he can stand a buzzing head,” said the
journeyman, getting ready to strike him.

“No, you can wait until he deserves it,” said Master Andres hastily.
“You will soon find an occasion.”

“Well, he’s done with the wax,” said Jeppe, “but the question is, can
he sit? Because there are some who never learn the art of sitting.”

“That must be tested, too, before we can declare him to be useful,”
said little Nikas, in deadly earnest.

“Are you done with your tomfoolery now?” said Master Andres angrily,
and he went his way.

But Jeppe was altogether in his element; his head was full of the
memories of his boyhood, a whole train of devilish tricks, which
completed the ordination. “Then we used to brand them indelibly with
their special branch, and they never took to their heels, but they
considered it a great honor as long as they drew breath. But now these
are weakly times and full of pretences; the one can’t do this and the
other can’t do that; and there’s leather colic and sore behinds and God
knows what. Every other day they come with certificates that they’re
suffering from boils from sitting down, and then you can begin all over
again. No, in my time we behaved very different—the booby got held
naked over a three-legged stool and a couple of men used to go at him
with knee-straps! That was leather on leather, and like that they
learned, damn and blast it all! how to put up with sitting on a stool!”

The journeyman made a sign.

“Now, is the seat of the stool ready consecrated, and prayed over? Yes,
then you can go over there and sit down.”

Pelle went stupidly across the room and sat down—it was all the same to
him. But he leaped into the air with a yell of pain, looked
malevolently about him, and in a moment he had a hammer in his hand.
But he dropped it again, and now he cried—wept buckets of tears.

“What the devil are you doing to him now?”

The young master came out of the cutting-out room. “What dirty tricks
are you hatching now?” He ran his hand over the seat of the stool; it
was studded with broken awl-points. “You are barbarous devils; any one
would think he was among a lot of savages!”

“What a weakling!” sneered Jeppe. “In these days a man can’t take a boy
as apprentice and inoculate him a bit against boils! One ought to
anoint the boobies back and front with honey, perhaps, like the kings
of Israel? But you are a freethinker!”

“You get out of this, father!” shouted Master Andres, quite beside
himself. “You get out of this, father!” He trembled, and his face was
quite gray. And then he pushed the old man out of the room before he
had struck Pelle on the shoulder and received him properly into the
handicraft.

Pelle sat there and reflected. He was altogether disillusioned. All the
covert allusions had evoked something terrifying, but at the same time
impressive. In his imagination the ordeal had grown into something that
constituted the great barrier of his life, so that one passed over to
the other side as quite a different being; it was something after the
fashion of the mysterious circumcision in the Bible, a consecration to
new things. And now the whole thing was just a spitefully devised
torture!

The young master threw him a pair of children’s shoes, which had to be
soled. So he was admitted to that department, and need no longer submit
to preparing waxed-ends for the others! But the fact did not give him
any pleasure. He sat there struggling with something irrational that
seemed to keep on rising deep within him; when no one was looking he
licked his fingers and drew them over his neck. He seemed to himself
like a half-stupefied cat which had freed itself from the snare and sat
there drying its fur.

Out of doors, under the apple-trees, the sunlight lay green and golden,
and a long way off, in the skipper’s garden, three brightly dressed
girls were walking and playing; they seemed to Pelle like beings out of
another world. “Fortune’s children on the sunbright shore,” as the song
had it. From time to time a rat made its appearance behind the pigsty,
and went clattering over the great heap of broken glass that lay there.
The pig stood there gobbling down its spoiled potatoes with that
despairing noise that put an end to all Pelle’s proud dreams of the
future, while it filled him with longing—oh, such a mad longing!

And everything that possibly could do so made its assault upon him at
this moment when he was feeling particularly victorious; the miseries
of his probation here in the workshop, the street urchins, the
apprentices, who would not accept him as one of themselves, and all the
sharp edges and corners which he was continually running up against in
this unfamiliar world. And then the smelly workshop itself, where never
a ray of sunlight entered. And no one here seemed to respect anything.

When the master was not present, little Nikas would sometimes indulge
in tittle-tattle with the older apprentices. Remarks were made at such
times which opened new spheres of thought to Pelle, and he had to ask
questions; or they would talk of the country, which Pelle knew better
than all of them put together, and he would chime in with some
correction. _Smack!_ came a box on his ears that would send him rolling
into the corner; he was to hold his tongue until he was spoken to. But
Pelle, who was all eyes and ears, and had been accustomed to discuss
everything in heaven or earth with Father Lasse, could not learn to
hold his tongue.

Each exacted with a strong hand his quantum of respect, from the
apprentices to the old master, who was nearly bursting with
professional pride in his handicraft; only Pelle had no claim to any
respect whatever, but must pay tribute to all. The young master was the
only one who did not press like a yoke on the youngster’s neck.
Easygoing as he was, he would disregard the journeyman and the rest,
and at times he would plump himself down beside Pelle, who sat there
feeling dreadfully small.

Outside, when the sun was shining through the trees in a particular
way, and a peculiar note came into the twittering of the birds, Pelle
knew it was about the time when the cows began to get on their feet
after their midday chewing of the cud. And then a youngster would come
out from among the little fir-trees, lustily cracking his whip; he was
the general of the whole lot—Pelle, the youngster—who had no one set
over him. And the figure that came stumbling across the arable yonder,
in order to drive the cows home—why, that was Lasse!

Father Lasse!

He did not know why, but it wrung a sob from him; it took him so
unawares. “Hold your row!” cried the journeyman threateningly. Pelle
was greatly concerned; he had not once made the attempt to go over and
see Lasse.

The young master came to get something off the shelf above his head,
and leaned confidentially on Pelle’s shoulder, his weak leg hanging
free and dangling. He stood there loitering for a time, staring at the
sky outside, and this warm hand on Pelle’s shoulder quieted him.

But there could be no talk of enjoyment when he thought where good
Father Lasse was. He had not seen his father since that sunny morning
when he himself had gone away and left the old man to his loneliness.
He had not heard of him; he had scarcely given a thought to him. He had
to get through the day with a whole skin, and to adapt himself to the
new life; a whole new world was before him, in which he had to find his
feet. Pelle had simply had no time; the town had swallowed him.

But at this moment his conduct confronted him as the worst example of
unfaithfulness the world had ever known. And his neck continued to hurt
him—he must go somewhere or other where no one would look at him. He
made a pretence of having to do something in the yard outside; he went
behind the washhouse, and he crouched down by the woodpile beside the
well.

There he lay, shrinking into himself, in the blackest despair at having
left Father Lasse so shamelessly in the lurch, just for the sake of all
these new strange surroundings. Yes, and then, when they used to work
together, he had been neither as good nor as heedful as he should have
been. It was really Lasse who, old as he was, had sacrificed himself
for Pelle, in order to lighten his work and take the worst of the
burden off him, although Pelle had the younger shoulders. And he had
been a little hard at times, as over that business between his father
and Madame Olsen; and he had not always been very patient with his
good-humored elderly tittle-tattle, although if he could hear it now he
would give his life to listen. He could remember only too plainly
occasions when he had snapped at Lasse, so unkindly that Lasse had
given a sigh and made off; for Lasse never snapped back—he was only
silent and very sad.

But how dreadful that was! Pelle threw all his high-and-mighty airs to
the winds and gave himself up to despair. What was he doing here, with
Father Lasse wandering among strangers, and perhaps unable to find
shelter? There was nothing with which he could console himself, no
evasion or excuse was possible; Pelle howled at the thought of his
faithlessness. And as he lay there despairing, worrying over the whole
business and crying himself into a state of exhaustion, quite a manful
resolve began to form within him; he must give up everything of his
own—the future, and the great world, and all, and devote his days to
making the old man’s life happy. He must go back to Stone Farm! He
forgot that he was only a child who could just earn his own keep. To
protect the infirm old man at every point and make his life easy—that
was just what he wanted. And Pelle was by no means disposed to doubt
that he could do it. In the midst of his childish collapse he took upon
himself all the duties of a strong man.

As he lay there, woe-begone, playing with a couple of bits of firewood,
the elder-boughs behind the well parted, and a pair of big eyes stared
at him wonderingly. It was only Manna.

“Did they beat you—or why are you crying?” she asked earnestly.

Pelle turned his face away.

Manna shook her hair back and looked at him fixedly. “Did they beat
you? What? If they did, I shall go in and scold them hard!”

“What is it to you?”

“People who don’t answer aren’t well-behaved.”

“Oh, hold your row!”

Then he was left in peace; over at the back of the garden Manna and her
two younger sisters were scrambling about the trellis, hanging on it
and gazing steadfastly across the yard at him. But that was nothing to
him; he wanted to know nothing about them; he didn’t want petticoats to
pity him or intercede for him. They were saucy jades, even if their
father had sailed on the wide ocean and earned a lot of money. If he
had them here they would get the stick from him! Now he must content
himself with putting out his tongue at them.

He heard their horrified outcry—but what then? He didn’t want to go
scrambling about with them any more, or to play with the great
conch-shells and lumps of coral in their garden! He would go back to
the land and look after his old father! Afterward, when that was done,
he would go out into the world himself, and bring such things home with
him—whole shiploads of them!

They were calling him from the workshop window. “Where in the world has
that little blighter got to?” he heard them say. He started, shrinking;
he had quite forgotten that he was serving his apprenticeship. He got
on his feet and ran quickly indoors.

Pelle had soon tidied up after leaving off work. The others had run out
in search of amusement; he was alone upstairs in the garret. He put his
worldly possessions into his sack. There was a whole collection of
wonderful things—tin steamboats, railway-trains, and horses that were
hollow inside—as much of the irresistible wonders of the town as he had
been able to obtain for five white krone pieces. They went in among the
washing, so that they should not get damaged, and then he threw the bag
out of the gable-window into the little alley. Now the question was how
he himself should slip through the kitchen without arousing the
suspicions of Jeppe’s old woman; she had eyes like a witch, and Pelle
had a feeling that every one who saw him would know what he was about.

But he went. He controlled himself, and sauntered along, so that the
people should think he was taking washing to the laundrywoman; but he
could only keep it up as far as the first turning; then he started off
as fast as he could go. He was homesick. A few street-boys yelled and
threw stones after him, but that didn’t matter, so long as he only got
away; he was insensible to everything but the remorse and homesickness
that filled his heart.

It was past midnight when he at last reached the outbuildings of Stone
Farm. He was breathless, and had a stitch in his side. He leaned
against the ruined forge, and closed his eyes, the better to recover
himself. As soon as he had recovered his breath, he entered the cowshed
from the back and made for the herdsman’s room. The floor of the
cowshed felt familiar to his feet, and now he came in the darkness to
the place where the big bull lay. He breathed in the scent of the
creature’s body and blew it out again—ah, didn’t he remember it! But
the scent of the cowherd’s room was strange to him. “Father Lasse is
neglecting himself,” he thought, and he pulled the feather-bed from
under the sleeper’s head. A strange voice began to upbraid him. “Then
isn’t this Lasse?” said Pelle. His knees were shaking under him.

“Lasse?” cried the new cowherd, as he sat upright. “Do you say Lasse?
Have you come to fetch that child of God, Mr. Devil? They’ve been here
already from Hell and taken him with them—in the living body they’ve
taken him there with them—he was too good for this world, d’ye see? Old
Satan was here himself in the form of a woman and took him away. You’d
better go there and look for him. Go straight on till you come to the
devil’s great-grandmother, and then you’ve only got to ask your way to
the hairy one.”

Pelle stood for a while in the yard below and considered. So Father
Lasse had gone away! And wanted to marry, or was perhaps already
married. And to Karna, of course. He stood bolt-upright, sunk in
intimate memories. The great farm lay hushed in moonlight, in deepest
slumber, and all about him rose memories from their sleep, speaking to
him caressingly, with a voice like that contented purring, remembered
from childhood, when the little kittens used to sleep upon his pillow,
and he would lay his cheek against their soft, quivering bodies.

Pelle’s memory had deep roots. Once, at Uncle Kalle’s, he had laid
himself in the big twins’ cradle and had let the other children rock
him—he was then fully nine years old—and as they rocked him a while the
surroundings began to take hold of him, and he saw a smoky, raftered
ceiling, which did not belong to Kalle’s house, swaying high over his
head, and he had a feeling that a muffled-up old woman, wrapped in a
shawl, sat like a shadow at the head of the cradle, and rocked it with
her foot. The cradle jolted with the over-vigorous rocking, and every
time the rocking foot slipped from the footboard it struck on the floor
with the sound of a sprung wooden shoe. Pelle jumped up—“she bumped
so,” he said, bewildered. “What? No, you certainly dreamed that!” Kalle
looked, smiling, under the rockers. “Bumped!” said Lasse. “That ought
to suit you first-rate! At one time, when you were little, you couldn’t
sleep if the cradle didn’t bump, so we had to make the rockers all
uneven. It was almost impossible to rock it. Bengta cracked many a good
wooden shoe in trying to give you your fancy.”

The farmyard here was like a great cradle, which swayed and swayed in
the uncertain moonlight, and now that Pelle had once quite surrendered
himself to the past, there was no end to the memories of childhood that
rose within him. His whole existence passed before him, swaying above
his head as before, and the earth itself seemed like a dark speck in
the abysm of space.

And then the crying broke out from the house—big with destiny, to be
heard all over the place, so that Kongstrup slunk away shamefaced, and
the other grew angry and ungovernable. … And Lasse … yes, where was
Father Lasse?

With one leap, Pelle was in the brew-house, knocking on the door of the
maid’s room.

“Is that you, Anders?” whispered a voice from within, and then the door
opened, and a pair of arms fastened themselves about him and drew him
in. Pelle felt about him, and his hands sank into a naked bosom—why, it
was yellow-haired Marie!

“Is Karna still here?” he asked. “Can’t I speak to Karna a moment?”

They were glad to see him again; and yellow-haired Marie patted his
cheeks quite affectionately, and just before that she kissed him too.
Karna could scarcely recover from her surprise; he had acquired such a
townsman’s air. “And now you are a shoemaker too, in the biggest
workshop in the town! Yes, we’ve heard; Butcher Jensen heard about it
on the market. And you have grown tall and townified. You do hold
yourself well!” Karna was dressing herself.

“Where is Father Lasse?” said Pelle; he had a lump in his throat only
from speaking of him.

“Give me time, and I’ll come out with you. How fine you dress now! I
should hardly have known you. Would you, Marie?”

“He’s a darling boy—he always was,” said Marie, and she pushed at him
with her arched foot—she was now in bed again.

“It’s the same suit as I always had,” said Pelle.

“Yes, yes; but then you held yourself different—there in town they all
look like lords. Well, shall we go?”

Pelle said good-by to Marie affectionately; it occurred to him that he
had much to thank her for. She looked at him in a very odd way, and
tried to draw his hand under the coverlet.

“What’s the matter with father?” said Pelle impatiently, as soon as
they were outside.

Well, Lasse had taken to his heels too! He couldn’t stand it when Pelle
had gone. And the work was too heavy for one. Where he was just at the
moment Karna could not say. “He’s now here, now there, considering
farms and houses,” she said proudly. “Some fine day he’ll be able to
take you in on his visit to town.”

“And how are things going here?” inquired Pelle.

“Well, Erik has got his speech back and is beginning to be a man
again—he can make himself understood. And Kongstrup and his wife, they
drink one against the other.”

“They drink together, do they, like the wooden shoemaker and his old
woman?”

“Yes, and so much that they often lie in the room upstairs soaking, and
can’t see one another for the drink, they’re that foggy. Everything
goes crooked here, as you may suppose, with no master. ‘Masterless,
defenceless,’ as the old proverb says. But what can you say about
it—they haven’t anything else in common! But it’s all the same to me—as
soon as Lasse finds something I’m off!”

Pelle could well believe that, and had nothing to say against it. Karna
looked at him from head to foot in surprise as they walked on. “They
feed you devilish well in the town there, don’t they?”

“Yes—vinegary soup and rotten greaves. We were much better fed here.”

She would not believe it—it sounded too foolish. “But where are all the
things they have in the shop windows—all the meats and cakes and sweet
things? What becomes of all them?”

“That I don’t know,” said Pelle grumpily; he himself had racked his
brains over this very question. “I get all I can eat, but washing and
clothes I have to see to myself.”

Karna could scarcely conceal her amazement; she had supposed that Pelle
had been, so to speak, caught up to Heaven while yet living. “But how
do you manage?” she said anxiously. “You must find that difficult. Yes,
yes, directly we set out feet under our own table we’ll help you all we
can.”

They parted up on the high-road, and Pelle, tired and defeated, set out
on his way back. It was broad daylight when he got back, and he crawled
into bed without any one noticing anything of his attempted flight.




III


Little Nikas had washed the blacking from his face and had put on his
best clothes; he wanted to go to the market with a bundle of washing,
which the butcher from Aaker was to take home to his mother, and Pelle
walked behind him, carrying the bundle. Little Nikas saluted many
friendly maidservants in the houses of the neighborhood, and Pelle
found it more amusing to walk beside him than to follow; two people who
are together ought to walk abreast. But every time he walked beside the
journeyman the latter pushed him into the gutter, and finally Pelle
fell over a curbstone; then he gave it up.

Up the street the crazy watchmaker was standing on the edge of his high
steps, swinging a weight; it was attached to the end of a long cord,
and he followed the swinging of the pendulum with his fingers, as
though he were timing the beats. This was very interesting, and Pelle
feared it would escape the journeyman.

“The watchmaker’s making an experiment,” he said cheerfully.

“Stop your jaw!” said the journeyman sharply. Then it occurred to Pelle
that he was not allowed to speak, so he closed his mouth tight.

He felt the bundle, in order to picture to himself what the contents
were like. His eyes swept all the windows and the side streets, and
every moment he carried his free hand to his mouth, as though he were
yawning, and introduced a crumb of black bread, which he had picked up
in the kitchen. His braces were broken, so he had continually to puff
out his belly; there were hundreds of things to look at, and the
coal-merchant’s dog to be kicked while, in all good faith, he snuffed
at a curbstone.

A funeral procession came toward them, and the journeyman passed it
with his head bared, so Pelle did the same. Eight at the back of the
procession came Tailor Bjerregrav with his crutch; he always followed
every funeral, and always walked light at the back because his method
of progression called for plenty of room. He would stand still and look
on the ground until the last of the other followers had gone a few
steps in advance, then he would set his crutch in front of him, swing
himself forward for a space, and then stand still again. Then he would
swing forward again on his lame legs, and again stand still and watch
the others, and again take a few paces, looking like a slowly wandering
pair of compasses which was tracing the path followed by the
procession.

But the funniest thing was that the tailor had forgotten to button up
the flap of his black mourning-breeches, so that it hung over his knees
like an apron. Pelle was not quite sure that the journeyman had noticed
this.

“Bjerregrav has forgotten—”

“Hold your jaw.” Little Nikas made a movement backward, and Pelle
ducked his head and pressed his hand tightly to his mouth.

Over in Staal Street there was a great uproar; an enormously fat woman
was standing there quarrelling with two seamen. She was in her nightcap
and petticoat, and Pelle knew her.

“That’s the Sow!” he began. “She’s a dreadful woman; up at Stone
Farm——”

_Smack!_ Little Nikas gave him such a box on the ear that he had to sit
down on the woodcarver’s steps. “One, two, three, four— that’s it; now
come on!” He counted ten steps forward and set off again. “But God help
you if you don’t keep your distance!”

Pelle kept his distance religiously, but he instantly discovered that
little Nikas, like old Jeppe, had too large a posterior. That certainly
came of sitting too much—and it twisted one’s loins. He protruded his
own buttocks as far as he could, smoothed down a crease in his jacket
over his hips, raised himself elegantly upon the balls of his feet and
marched proudly forward, one hand thrust into the breast of his coat.
If the journeyman scratched himself, Pelle did the same—and he swayed
his body in the same buoyant manner; his cheeks were burning, but he
was highly pleased with himself.

Directly he was his own master he went the round of the country
butchers, questioning them, in the hope of hearing some news of Lasse,
but no one could tell him anything. He went from cart to cart, asking
his questions. “Lasse Karlson?” said one. “Ah, he was cowherd up at
Stone Farm!” Then he called to another, asking him about Lasse —the old
cowherd at Stone Farm—and he again called to a third, and they all
gathered about the carts, in order to talk the matter over. There were
men here who travelled all over the island[1] in order to buy cattle;
they knew everything and everybody, but they could tell him nothing of
Lasse. “Then he’s not in the island,” said one, very decidedly. “You
must get another father, my lad!”

 [1] Bornholm


Pelle did not feel inclined for chaff, so he slipped away. Besides, he
must go back and get to work; the young master, who was busily going
from cart to cart, ordering meat, had called to him. They hung together
like the halves of a pea-pod when it was a question of keeping the
apprentices on the curb, although otherwise they were jealous enough of
one another.

Bjerregrav’s crutch stood behind the door, and he himself sat in stiff
funereal state by the window; he held a folded white handkerchief in
his folded hands, and was diligently mopping his eyes.

“Was he perhaps a relation of yours?” said the young master slyly.

“No; but it is so sad for those who are left—a wife and children. There
is always some one to mourn and regret the dead. Man’s life is a
strange thing, Andres.”

“Ah, and potatoes are bad this year, Bjerregrav!”

Neighbor Jörgen filled up the whole doorway. “Lord, here we have that
blessed Bjerregrav!” he shouted; “and in state, too! What’s on to-day
then—going courting, are you?”

“I’ve been following!” answered Bjerregrav, in a hushed voice.

The big baker made an involuntary movement; he did not like being
unexpectedly reminded of death. “You, Bjerregrav, you ought to be a
hearse-driver; then at least you wouldn’t work to no purpose!”

“It isn’t to no purpose when they are dead,” stammered Bjerregrav. “I
am not so poor that I need much, and there is no one who stands near to
me. No living person loses anything because I follow those who die. And
then I know them all, and I’ve followed them all in thought since they
were born,” he added apologetically.

“If only you got invited to the funeral feast and got something of all
the good things they have to eat,” continued the baker, “I could
understand it better.”

“The poor widow, who sits there with her four little ones and doesn’t
know how she’s to feed them—to take food from her—no, I couldn’t do it!
She’s had to borrow three hundred kroner so that her man could have a
respectable funeral party.”

“That ought to be forbidden by law,” said Master Andres; “any one with
little children hasn’t the right to throw away money on the dead.”

“She is giving her husband the last honors,” said Jeppe reprovingly.
“That is the duty of every good wife.”

“Of course,” rejoined Master Andres. “God knows, something must be
done. It’s like the performances on the other side of the earth, where
the widow throws herself on the funeral pyre when the husband dies, and
has to be burned to death.”

Baker Jörgen scratched his thighs and grimaced. “You are trying to get
us to swallow one of your stinking lies, Andres. You’d never get a
woman to do that, if I know anything of womankind.”

But Bjerregrav knew that the shoemaker was not lying, and fluttered his
thin hands in the air, as though he were trying to keep something
invisible from touching his body. “God be thanked that we came into the
world on this island here,” he said, in a low voice. “Here only
ordinary things happen, however wrongheaded they may be.”

“What puzzles me is where she got all that money!” said the baker.

“She’s borrowed it, of course,” said Bjerregrav, in a tone of voice
that made it clear that he wanted to terminate the conversation.

Jeppe retorted contemptuously, “Who’s going to lend a poor mate’s widow
three hundred kroner? He might as well throw it into the sea right
away.”

But Baker Jörgen gave Bjerregrav a great smack on the back. “You’ve
given her the money, it’s you has done it; nobody else would he such a
silly sheep!” he said threateningly.

“You let me be!” stammered Bjerregrav. “I’ve done nothing to you! And
she has had one happy day in the midst of all her sorrow.” His hands
were trembling.

“You’re a goat!” said Jeppe shortly.

“What is Bjerregrav really thinking about when he stands like this
looking down into the grave?” asked the young master, in order to
divert the conversation.

“I am thinking: Now you are lying there, where you are better off than
here,” said the old tailor simply.

“Yes, because Bjerregrav follows only poor people,” said Jeppe, rather
contemptuously.

“I can’t help it, but I’m always thinking,” continued Master Andres;
“just supposing it were all a take-in! Suppose he follows them and
enjoys the whole thing—and then there’s nothing! That’s why I never
like to see a funeral.”

“Ah, you see, that’s the question—supposing there’s nothing.” Baker
Jörgen turned his thick body. “Here we go about imagining a whole lot
of things; but what if it’s all just lies?”

“That’s the mind of an unbeliever!” said Jeppe, and stamped violently
on the floor.

“God preserve my mind from unbelief!” retorted brother Jörgen, and he
stroked his face gravely. “But a man can’t very well help thinking. And
what does a man see round about him? Sickness and death and halleluiah!
We live, and we live, I tell you, Brother Jeppe—and we live in order to
live! But, good heavens! all the poor things that aren’t born yet!”

He sank into thought again, as was usual with him when he thought of
Little Jörgen, who refused to come into the world and assume his name
and likeness, and carry on after him…. There lay his belief; there was
nothing to be done about it. And the others began to speak in hushed
voices, in order not to disturb his memories.

Pelle, who concerned himself with everything in heaven and earth, had
been absorbing every word that was spoken with his protruding ears, but
when the conversation turned upon death he yawned. He himself had never
been seriously ill, and since Mother Bengta died, death had never
encroached upon his world. And that was lucky for him, as it would have
been a case of all or nothing, for he had only Father Lasse. For Pelle
the cruel hands of death hardly existed, and he could not understand
how people could lay themselves down with their noses in the air; there
was so much to observe here below—the town alone kept one busy.

On the very first evening he had run out to look for the other boys,
just where the crowd was thickest. There was no use in waiting; Pelle
was accustomed to take the bull by the horns, and he longed to be taken
into favor.

“What sort of brat is that?” they said, flocking round him.

“I’m Pelle,” he said, standing confidently in the midst of the group,
and looking at them all. “I have been at Stone Farm since I was eight,
and that is the biggest farm in the north country.” He had put his
hands in his pockets, and spat coolly in front of him, for that was
nothing to what he had in reserve.

“Oh, so you’re a farmer chap, then!” said one, and the others laughed.
Rud was among them.

“Yes,” said Pelle; “and I’ve done a bit of ploughing, and mowing fodder
for the calves.”

They winked at one another. “Are you really a farmer chap?”

“Yes, truly,” replied Pelle, perplexed; they had spoken the word in a
tone which he now remarked.

They all burst out laughing: “He confesses it himself. And he comes
from the biggest farm in the country. Then he’s the biggest farmer in
the country!”

“No, the farmer was called Kongstrup,” said Pelle emphatically. “I was
only the herd-boy.”

They roared with laughter. “He doesn’t see it now! Why, Lord, that’s
the biggest farmer’s lout!”

Pelle had not yet lost his head, for he had heavier ammunition, and now
he was about to play a trump. “And there at the farm there was a man
called Erik, who was so strong that he could thrash three men, but the
bailiff was stronger still; and he gave Erik such a blow that he lost
his senses.”

“Oh, indeed! How did he manage that? Can you hit a farmer chap so that
he loses his senses? Who was it hit you like that?” The questions
rained upon him.

Pelle pushed the boy who had asked the last question, and fixed his
eyes upon his. But the rascal let fly at him again. “Take care of your
best clothes,” he said, laughing. “Don’t crumple your cuffs!”

Pelle had put on a clean blue shirt, of which the neckband and
wristbands had to serve as collar and cuffs. He knew well enough that
he was clean and neat, and now they were being smart at his expense on
that very account.

“And what sort of a pair of Elbe barges has he got on? Good Lord! Why,
they’d fill half the harbor!” This was in reference to Kongstrup’s
shoes. Pelle had debated with himself as to whether he should wear them
on a week-day. “When did you celebrate hiring-day?” asked a third. This
was in reference to his fat red cheeks.

Now he was ready to jump out of his skin, and cast his eyes around to
see if there was nothing with which he could lay about him, for this
would infallibly end in an attack upon the whole party. Pelle already
had them all against him.

But just then a long, thin lad came forward. “Have you a pretty
sister?” he asked.

“I have no sisters at all,” answered Pelle shortly.

“That’s a shame. Well, can you play hide-and-seek?”

Of course Pelle could!

“Well, then, play!” The thin boy pushed Pelle’s cap over his eyes, and
turned him with his face against the plank fence. “Count to a
hundred—and no cheating, I tell you!”

No, Pelle would not cheat—he would neither look nor count short— so
much depended on this beginning. But he solemnly promised himself to
use his legs to some purpose; they should all be caught, one after
another! He finished his counting and took his cap from his eyes. No
one was to be seen. “Say ‘peep’!” he cried; but no one answered. For
half an hour Pelle searched among timbers and warehouses, and at last
he slipped away home and to bed. But he dreamed, that night, that he
caught them all, and they elected him as their leader for all future
time.

The town did not meet him with open arms, into which he could fall,
with his childlike confidence, and be carried up the ladder. Here,
apparently, one did not talk about the heroic deeds which elsewhere
gave a man foothold; here such things merely aroused scornful laughter.
He tried it again and again, always with something new, but the answer
was always the same—“Farmer!” His whole little person was overflowing
with good-will, and he became deplorably dejected.

Pelle soon perceived that his whole store of ammunition was crumbling
between his hands, and any respect he had won at home, on the farm or
in the village, by his courage and good nature, went for nothing here.
Here other qualities counted; there was a different jargon, the clothes
were different, and people went about things in a different way.
Everything he had valued was turned to ridicule, even down to his
pretty cap with its ear-flaps and its ribbon adorned with
representations of harvest implements. He had come to town so calmly
confident in himself—to make the painful discovery that he was a
laughable object! Every time he tried to make one of a party, he was
pushed to one side; he had no right to speak to others; he must take
the hindmost rank!

Nothing remained to him but to sound the retreat all along the line
until he had reached the lowest place of all. And hard as this was for
a smart youngster who was burning to set his mark on everything, Pelle
did it, and confidently prepared to scramble up again. However sore his
defeat, he always retained an obstinate feeling of his own worth, which
no one could take away from him. He was persuaded that the trouble lay
not with himself but with all sorts of things about him, and he set
himself restlessly to find out the new values and to conduct a war of
elimination against himself. After every defeat he took himself
unweariedly to task, and the next evening he would go forth once more,
enriched by so many experiences, and would suffer defeat at a new
point. He wanted to conquer—but what must he not sacrifice first? He
knew of nothing more splendid than to march resoundingly through the
streets, his legs thrust into Lasse’s old boots—this was the essence of
manliness. But he was man enough to abstain from so doing—for here such
conduct would be regarded as boorish. It was harder for him to suppress
his past; it was so inseparable from Father Lasse that he was obsessed
by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he
wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and
opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so
soon as he felt sufficiently high-spirited.

What distressed him most was the fact that his handicraft was so little
regarded. However accomplished he might become, the cobbler was, and
remained, a poor creature with a pitchy snout and a big behind!
Personal performance counted for nothing; it was obvious that he must
as soon as possible escape into some other walk of life.

But at least he was in the town, and as one of its inhabitants— there
was no getting over that. And the town seemed still as great and as
splendid, although it had lost the look of enchantment it once had,
when Lasse and he had passed through it on their way to the country.
Most of the people wore their Sunday clothes, and many sat still and
earned lots of money, but no one knew how. All roads came hither, and
the town swallowed everything: pigs and corn and men—everything sooner
or later found its harbor here! The Sow lived here with Rud, who was
now apprenticed to a painter, and the twins were here! And one day
Pelle saw a tall boy leaning against a door and bellowing at the top of
his voice, his arms over his face, while a couple of smaller boys were
thrashing him; it was Howling Peter, who was cook’s boy on a vessel.
Everything flowed into the town!

But Father Lasse—he was not here!




IV


There was something about the town that made it hard to go to bed and
hard to get up. In the town there was no sunrise shining over the earth
and waking everybody. The open face of morning could not be seen
indoors. And the dying day poured no evening weariness into one’s
limbs, driving them to repose; life seemed here to flow in the reverse
direction, for here people grew lively at night!

About half-past six in the morning the master, who slept downstairs,
would strike the ceiling with his stick. Pelle, whose business it was
to reply, would mechanically sit up and strike the side of the bedstead
with his clenched fist. Then, still sleeping, he would fall back again.
After a while the process was repeated. But then the master grew
impatient. “Devil take it! aren’t you going to get up to-day?” he would
bellow. “Is this to end in my bringing you your coffee in bed?” Drunken
with sleep, Pelle would tumble out of bed. “Get up, get up!” he would
cry, shaking the others. Jens got nimbly on his feet; he always awoke
with a cry of terror, guarding his head; but Emil and Peter, who were
in the hobbledehoy stage, were terribly difficult to wake.

Pelle would hasten downstairs, and begin to set everything in order,
filling the soaking-tub and laying a sand-heap by the window-bench for
the master to spit into. He bothered no further about the others; he
was in a morning temper himself. On the days when he had to settle
right away into the cobbler’s hunch, without first running a few early
errands or doing a few odd tasks, it took hours to thaw him.

He used to look round to see whether on the preceding evening he had
made a chalk-mark in any conspicuous place; for then there must be
something that he had to remember. Memory was not his strong point,
hence this ingenious device. Then it was only a matter of not
forgetting what the mark stood for; if he forgot, he was no better off
than before.

When the workshop was tidy, he would hurry downstairs and run out for
Madame, to fetch morning rolls “for themselves.” He himself was given a
wheaten biscuit with his coffee, which he drank out in the kitchen,
while the old woman went grumbling to and fro. She was dry as a mummy
and moved about bent double, and when she was not using her hands she
carried one forearm pressed against her midriff. She was discontented
with everything, and was always talking of the grave. “My two eldest
are overseas, in America and Australia; I shall never see them again.
And here at home two menfolk go strutting about doing nothing and
expecting to be waited on. Andres, poor fellow, isn’t strong, and
Jeppe’s no use any longer; he can’t even keep himself warm in bed
nowadays. But they know how to ask for things, that they do, and they
let me go running all over the place without any help; I have to do
everything myself. I shall truly thank God when at last I lie in my
grave. What are you standing there for with your mouth and your eyes
wide open? Get away with you!” Thereupon Pelle would finish his
coffee—it was sweetened with brown sugar—out of doors, by the workshop
window.

In the mornings, before the master appeared, there was no great
eagerness to work; they were all sleepy still, looking forward to a
long, dreary day. The journeyman did not encourage them to work; he had
a difficulty in finding enough for himself. So they sat there
wool-gathering, striking a few blows with the hammer now and then for
appearance’s sake, and one or another would fall asleep again over the
table. They all started when three blows were struck on the wall as a
signal for Pelle.

“What are you doing? It seems to me you are very idle in there!” the
master would say, staring suspiciously at Pelle. But Pelle had remarked
what work each was supposed to have in hand, and would run over it all.
“What day’s this—Thursday? Damnation take it! Tell that Jens he’s to
put aside Manna’s uppers and begin on the pilot’s boots this
moment—they were promised for last Monday.” The master would struggle
miserably to get his breath: “Ah, I’ve had a bad night, Pelle, a
horrible night; I was so hot, with such a ringing in my ears. New blood
is so devilishly unruly; it’s all the time boiling in my head like
soda-water. But it’s a good thing I’m making it, God knows; I used to
be so soon done up. Do you believe in Hell? Heaven, now, that’s sheer
nonsense; what happiness can we expect elsewhere if we can’t be
properly happy here? But do you believe in Hell? I dreamed I’d spat up
the last bit of my lungs and that I went to Hell. ‘What the devil d’you
want here, Andres?’ they asked me; ‘your heart is still whole!’ And
they wouldn’t have me. But what does that signify? I can’t breathe with
my heart, so I’m dying. And what becomes of me then? Will you tell me
that?

“There’s something that bids a man enter again into his mother’s womb;
now if only a man could do that, and come into the world again with two
sound legs, you’d see me disappear oversea double-quick, whoop! I
wouldn’t stay messing about here any longer…. Well, have you seen your
navel yet to-day? Yes, you ragamuffin, you laugh; but I’m in earnest.
It would pay you well if you always began the day by contemplating your
navel.”

The master was half serious, half jesting. “Well, now, you can fetch me
my port wine; it’s on the shelf, behind the box with the laces in it.
I’m deadly cold.”

Pelle came back and announced that the bottle was empty. The master
looked at him mildly.

“Then run along and get me another. I’ve no money—you must say— well,
think it out for yourself; you’ve got a head.” The master looked at him
with an expression which went to Pelle’s heart, so that he often felt
like bursting into tears. Hitherto Pelle’s life had been spent on the
straight highway; he did not understand this combination of wit and
misery, roguishness and deadly affliction. But he felt something of the
presence of the good God, and trembled inwardly; he would have died for
the young master.

When the weather was wet it was difficult for the sick man to get
about; the cold pulled him down. If he came into the workshop, freshly
washed and with his hair still wet, he would go over to the cold stove,
and stand there, stamping his feet. His cheeks had quite fallen in.
“I’ve so little blood for the moment,” he said at such times, “but the
new blood is on the way; it sings in my ears every night.” Then he
would be silent a while. “There, by my soul, we’ve got a piece of lung
again,” he said, and showed Pelle, who stood at the stove brushing
shoes, a gelatinous lump. “But they grow again afterward!”

“The master will soon be in his thirtieth year,” said the journeyman;
“then the dangerous time is over.”

“Yes, deuce take it—if only I can hang together so long—only another
six months,” said the master eagerly, and he looked at Pelle, as though
Pelle had it in his power to help him; “only another six months! Then
the whole body renews itself—new lungs—everything new. But new legs,
God knows, I shall never get.”

A peculiar, secret understanding grew up between Pelle and the master;
it did not manifest itself in words, but in glances, in tones of the
voice, and in the whole conduct of each. When Pelle stood behind him,
it was as though even the master’s leather jacket emitted a feeling of
warmth, and Pelle followed him with his eyes whenever and wherever he
could, and the master’s behavior to Pelle was different from his
behavior to the others.

When, on his return from running errands in the town, he came to the
corner, he was delighted to see the young master standing in the
doorway, tightly grasping his stick, with his lame leg in an easy
position. He stood there, sweeping his eyes from side to side, gazing
longingly into the distance. This was his place when he was not
indoors, sitting over some book of adventure. But Pelle liked him to
stand there, and as he slipped past he would hang his head shyly, for
it often happened that the master would clutch his shoulder, so hard
that it hurt, and shake him to and fro, and would say affectionately:
“Oh, you limb of Satan!” This was the only endearment that life had
vouchsafed Pelle, and he sunned himself in it.

Pelle could not understand the master, nor did he understand his sighs
and groans. The master never went out, save as an exception, when he
was feeling well; then he would hobble across to the beerhouse and make
up a party, but as a rule his travels ended at the house door. There he
would stand, looking about him a little, and then he would hobble
indoors again, with that infectious good humor which transformed the
dark workshop into a grove full of the twittering of birds. He had
never been abroad, and he felt no craving to go; but in spite of this
his mind and his speech roamed over the whole wide world, so that Pelle
at times felt like falling sick from sheer longing. He demanded nothing
more than health of the future, and adventures hovered all about him;
one received the impression that happiness itself had fluttered to
earth and settled upon him. Pelle idolized him, but did not understand
him. The master, who at one moment would make sport of his lame leg and
the next moment forget that he had one, or jest about his poverty as
though he were flinging good gold pieces about him—this was a man Pelle
could not fathom. He was no wiser when he secretly looked into the
books which Master Andres read so breathlessly; he would have been
content with a much more modest adventure than a journey to the North
Pole or the center of the earth, if only he himself could have been of
the party.

He had no opportunity to sit still and indulge in fancies. Every moment
it was, “Pelle, run and do something or other!” Everything was
purchased in small quantities, although it was obtained on credit.
“Then it doesn’t run up so,” Jeppe used to say; it was all the same to
Master Andres. The foreman’s young woman came running in; she
absolutely must have her young lady’s shoes; they were promised for
Monday. The master had quite forgotten them. “They are in hand now,” he
said, undaunted. “To the devil with you, Jens!” And Jens had hastily
thrust a pair of lasts into the shoes, while Master Andres went outside
with the girl, and joked with her on the landing, in order to smooth
her down. “Just a few nails, so that they’ll hang together,” said the
master to Jens. And then, “Pelle, out you go, as quick as your legs
will carry you! Say we’ll send for them early to-morrow morning and
finish them properly! But run as though the devil were at your heels!”

Pelle ran, and when he returned, just as he was slipping into his
leather apron, he had to go out again. “Pelle, run out and borrow a few
brass nails—then we needn’t buy any to-day. Go to Klausen—no, go to
Blom, rather; you’ve been to Klausen already this morning.”

“Blom’s are angry about the screw-block!” said Pelle.

“Death and all the devils! We must see about putting it in repair and
returning it; remember that, and take it with you to the smith’s. Well,
what in the world shall we do?” The young master stared helplessly from
one to another.

“Shoemaker Marker,” suggested little Nikas.

“We don’t borrow from Marker,” and the master wrinkled his forehead.
“Marker’s a louse!” Marker had succeeded in stealing one of the oldest
customers of the workshop.

“There isn’t salt to eat an egg!”

“Well, what _shall_ I do?” asked Pelle, somewhat impatiently.

The master sat for a while in silence. “Well, take it, then!” he cried,
and threw a krone toward Pelle; “I have no peace from you so long as
I’ve got a farthing in my pocket, you demon! Buy a packet and pay back
Klausen and Blom what we’ve borrowed.”

“But then they’d see we’ve got a whole packet,” said Pelle.

“Besides, they owe us lots of other things that they’ve borrowed of
us.” Pelle showed circumspection in his dealings.

“What a rogue!” said the master, and he settled himself to read. “Lord
above us, what a gallows-bird!” He looked extremely contented.

And after a time it was once more, “Pelle, run out, etc.”

The day was largely passed in running errands, and Pelle was not one to
curtail them; he had no liking for the smelly workshop and its wooden
chairs. There was so much to be fetched and carried, and Pelle
considered these errands to be his especial duty; when he had nothing
else to do he roved about like a young puppy, and thrust his nose into
everything. Already the town had no more secrets from him.

There was in Pelle an honorable streak which subdued the whole. But
hitherto he had suffered only defeat; he had again and again sacrificed
his qualities and accomplishments, without so far receiving anything in
return. His timidity and distrust he had stripped from him indoors,
where it was of importance that he should open his defences on all
sides, and his solid qualities he was on the point of sacrificing on
the altar of the town as boorish. But the less protection he possessed
the more he gained in intrepidity, so he went about out-of-doors
undauntedly—the town should be conquered. He was enticed out of the
safe refuge of his shell, and might easily be gobbled up.

The town had lured him from the security of his lair, but in other
matters he was the same good little fellow—most people would have seen
no difference in him, except that he had grown taller. But Father Lasse
would have wept tears of blood to see his boy as he now walked along
the streets, full of uncertainty and uneasy imitativeness, wearing his
best coat on a workday, and yet disorderly in his dress.

Yonder he goes, sauntering along with a pair of boots, his fingers
thrust through the string of the parcel, whistling with an air of
bravado. Now and again he makes a grimace and moves cautiously—when his
trousers rub the sensitive spots of his body. He has had a bad day. In
the morning he was passing a smithy, and allowed the splendid display
of energy within, half in the firelight and half in the shadow, to
detain him. The flames and the clanging of the metal, the whole lively
uproar of real work, fascinated him, and he had to go in and ask
whether there was an opening for an apprentice. He was not so stupid as
to tell them where he came from, but when he got home, Jeppe had
already been told of it! But that is soon forgotten, unless, indeed,
his trousers rub against his sore places. Then he remembers it;
remembers that in this world everything has to be paid for; there is no
getting out of things; once one begins anything one has to eat one’s
way through it, like the boy in the fairy-tale. And this discovery is,
in the abstract, not so strikingly novel to Pelle.

He has, as always, chosen the longest way, rummaging about back yards
and side streets, where there is a possibility of adventure; and all at
once he is suddenly accosted by Albinus, who is now employed by a
tradesman. Albinus is not amusing. He has no right to play and loiter
about the warehouse in the aimless fashion that is possible
out-of-doors; nor to devote himself to making a ladder stand straight
up in the air while he climbs up it. Not a word can be got out of him,
although Pelle does his best; so he picks up a handful of raisins and
absconds.

Down at the harbor he boards a Swedish vessel, which has just arrived
with a cargo of timber. “Have you anything for us to do?” he asks,
holding one hand behind him, where his trousers have a hole in them.

“Klausen’s apprentice has just been here and got what there was,”
replied the skipper.

“That’s a nuisance—you ought to have given it to us,” says Pelle. “Have
you got a clay pipe?”

“Yes—just you come here!” The skipper reaches for a rope’s end, but
Pelle escapes and runs ashore.

“Will you give me a thrashing now?” he cries, jeering.

“You shall have a clay pipe if you’ll run and get me half a krone’s
worth of chewing ’bacca.”

“What will it cost?” asks Pelle, with an air of simplicity. The skipper
reaches for his rope’s end again, but Pelle is off already.

“Five öre worth of chewing tobacco, the long kind,” he cries, before he
gets to the door even. “But it must be the very best, because it’s for
an invalid.” He throws the money on the counter and puts on a cheeky
expression.

Old Skipper Lau rises by the aid of his two sticks and hands Pelle the
twist; his jaws are working like a mill, and all his limbs are twisted
with gout. “Is it for some one lying-in?” he asks slyly.

Pelle breaks off the stem of the clay pipe, lest it should stick out of
his pocket, boards the salvage steamer, and disappears forward. After a
time he reappears from under the cabin hatchway, with a gigantic pair
of sea-boots and a scrap of chewing tobacco. Behind the deck-house he
bites a huge mouthful off the brown Cavendish, and begins to chew
courageously, which makes him feel tremendously manly. But near the
furnace where the ship’s timbers are bent he has to unload his stomach;
it seems as though all his inward parts are doing their very utmost to
see how matters would be with them hanging out of his mouth. He drags
himself along, sick as a cat, with thumping temples; but somewhere or
other inside him a little feeling of satisfaction informs him that one
has to undergo the most dreadful consequences in order to perform any
really heroic deed.

In most respects the harbor, with its stacks of timber and its vessels
on the slips, is just as fascinating as it was on the day when Pelle
lay on the shavings and guarded Father Lasse’s sack. The black man with
the barking hounds still leans from the roof of the harbor warehouse,
but the inexplicable thing is that one could ever have been frightened
of him. But Pelle is in a hurry.

He runs a few yards, but he must of necessity stop when he comes to the
old quay. There the “strong man,” the “Great Power,” is trimming some
blocks of granite. He is tanned a coppery brown with wind and sun, and
his thick black hair is full of splinters of granite; he wears only a
shirt and canvas trousers, and the shirt is open on his powerful
breast; but it lies close on his back, and reveals the play of his
muscles. Every time he strikes a blow the air whistles— _whew!_—and the
walls and timber-stacks echo the sound. People come hurrying by, stop
short at a certain distance, and stand there looking on. A little group
stands there all the time, newcomers taking the place of those that
move on, like spectators in front of a cage of lions. It is as though
they expect something to happen— something that will stagger everybody
and give the bystanders a good fright.

Pelle goes right up to the “Great Power.” The “strong man” is the
father of Jens, the second youngest apprentice. “Good-day,” he says
boldly, and stands right in the giant’s shadow. But the stonecutter
pushes him to one side without looking to see who it is, and continues
to hew at the granite: _whew! whew!_

“It is quite a long time now since he has properly used his strength,”
says an old townsman. “Is he quieting down, d’you think?”

“He must have quieted down for good,” says another. “The town ought to
see that he keeps quiet.” And they move on, and Pelle must move on,
too—anywhere, where no one can see him.

“Cobbler, wobbler, groats in your gruel,
Smack on your back goes the stick—how cruel!”


It is those accursed street-urchins. Pelle is by no means in a warlike
humor; he pretends not to see them. But they come up close behind him
and tread on his heels, and before he knows what is happening they are
upon him. The first he knows about it is that he is lying in the
gutter, on his back, with all three on top of him. He has fallen
alongside of the curbstone and cannot move; he is faint, too, as a
result of his indiscretion; the two biggest boys spread his arms wide
open on the flagstones and press them down with all their might, while
the third ventures to deal with his face. It is a carefully planned
outrage, and all Pelle can do is to twist his head round under the
blows—and for once he is thankful for his disgracefully fat cheeks.

Then, in his need, a dazzling apparition appears before him; standing
in the doorway yonder is a white baker’s boy, who is royally amused. It
is no other than Nilen, the wonderful little devil Nilen, of his
schooldays, who was always fighting everybody like a terrier and always
came out of it with a whole skin. Pelle shuts his eyes and blushes for
himself, although he knows perfectly well that this is only an
apparition.

But then a wonderful thing happens; the apparition leaps down into the
gutter, slings the boys to one side, and helps him to his feet. Pelle
recognizes the grip of those fingers—even in his schooldays they were
like claws of iron.

And soon he is sitting behind the oven, on Nilen’s grimy bed. “So
you’ve become a cobbler?” says Nilen, to begin with, compassionately,
for he feels a deucedly smart fellow himself in his fine white clothes,
with his bare arms crossed over his naked breast. Pelle feels
remarkably comfortable; he has been given a slice of bread and cream,
and he decides that the world is more interesting than ever. Nilen is
chewing manfully, and spitting over the end of the bed.

“Do you chew?” asks Pelle, and hastens to offer him the leaf-tobacco.

“Yes, we all do; a fellow has to when he works all night.”

Pelle cannot understand how people can keep going day and night.

“All the bakers in Copenhagen do—so that the people can get fresh bread
in the morning—and our master wants to introduce it here. But it isn’t
every one can do it; the whole staff had to be reorganized. It’s worst
about midnight, when everything is turning round. Then it comes over
you so that you keep on looking at the time, and the very moment the
clock strikes twelve we all hold our breath, and then no one can come
in or go out any more. The master himself can’t stand the night shift;
the ’baccy turns sour in his mouth and he has to lay it on the table.
When he wakes up again he thinks it’s a raisin and sticks it in the
dough. What’s the name of your girl?”

For a moment Pelle’s thoughts caress the three daughters of old Skipper
Elleby—but no, none of them shall be immolated. No, he has no girl.

“Well, you get one, then you needn’t let them sit on you. I’m flirting
a bit just now with the master’s daughter—fine girl, she is, quite
developed already—you know! But we have to look out when the old man’s
about!”

“Then are you going to marry her when you are a journeyman?” asks
Pelle, with interest.

“And have a wife and kids on my back? You are a duffer, Pelle! No need
to trouble about that! But a woman—well, that’s only for when a man’s
bored. See?” He stretches himself, yawning.

Nilen has become quite a young man, but a little crude in his manner of
expressing himself. He sits there and looks at Pelle with a curious
expression in his eyes. “Cobbler’s patch!” he says contemptuously, and
thrusts his tongue into his cheek so as to make it bulge. Pelle says
nothing; he knows he cannot thrash Nilen.

Nilen has lit his pipe and is lying on his back in bed—with his muddy
shoes on—chattering. “What’s your journeyman like? Ours is a conceited
ass. The other day I had to fetch him a box on the ears, he was so
saucy. I’ve learned the Copenhagen trick of doing it; it soon settles a
man. Only you want to keep your head about it.” A deuce of a fellow,
this Nilen, he is so grown up! Pelle feels smaller and smaller.

But suddenly Nilen jumps up in the greatest hurry. Out in the bakery a
sharp voice is calling. “Out of the window—to the devil with you!” he
yelps—“the journeyman!” And Pelle has to get through the window, and is
so slow about it that his boots go whizzing past him. While he is
jumping down he hears the well-known sound of a ringing box on the ear.

When Pelle returned from his wanderings he was tired and languid; the
stuffy workshop did not seem alluring. He was dispirited, too; for the
watchmaker’s clock told him that he had been three hours away. He could
not believe it.

The young master stood at the front door, peeping out, still in his
leather jacket and apron of green baize; he was whistling softly to
himself, and looked like a grown fledgling that did not dare to let
itself tumble out of the nest. A whole world of amazement lay in his
inquiring eyes.

“Have you been to the harbor again, you young devil?” he asked, sinking
his claws into Pelle.

“Yes.” Pelle was properly ashamed.

“Well, what’s going on there? What’s the news?”

So Pelle had to tell it all on the stairs; how there was a Swedish
timber ship whose skipper’s wife was taken with childbirth out at sea,
and how the cook had to deliver her; of a Russian vessel which had run
into port with a mutiny on board; and anything else that might have
happened. To-day there were only these boots. “They are from the
salvage steamer—they want soling.”

“H’m!” The master looked at them indifferently. “Is the schooner
_Andreas_ ready to sail?”

But that Pelle did not know.

“What sort of a sheep’s head have you got, then? Haven’t you any eyes
in it? Well, well, go and get me three bottles of beer! Only stick them
under your blouse so that father don’t see, you monster!” The master
was quite good-tempered again.

Then Pelle got into his apron and buckled on the knee-strap. Everybody
was bending over his work, and Master Andres was reading; no sound was
to be heard but those produced by the workers, and now and again a word
of reprimand from the journeyman.

Every second afternoon, about five o’clock, the workshop door would
open slightly, and a naked, floury arm introduced the newspaper and
laid it on the counter. This was the baker’s son, Sören, who never
allowed himself to be seen; he moved about from choice like a thief in
the night. If the master—as he occasionally did—seized him and pulled
him into the workshop, he was like a scared faun strayed from his
thickets; he would stand with hanging head, concealing his eyes, and no
one could get a word from him; and when he saw an opportunity, he would
slip away.

The arrival of the newspaper caused quite a small commotion in the
workshop. When the master felt inclined, he would read aloud—of calves
with two heads and four pairs of legs; of a pumpkin that weighed fifty
pounds; of the fattest man in the world; of fatalities due to the
careless handling of firearms, or of snakes in Martinique. The dazzling
wonder of the whole world passed like a pageant, filling the dark
workshop; the political news was ignored. If the master happened to be
in one of his desperate humors, he would read the most damnable
nonsense: of how the Atlantic Ocean had caught fire, so that the people
were living on boiled codfish; or how the heavens had got torn over
America, so that angels fell right on to somebody’s supper-tray. Things
which one knew at once for lies—and blasphemous nonsense, too, which
might at any time have got him into trouble. Rowing people was not in
the master’s line, he was ill the moment there was any unpleasantness;
but he had his own way of making himself respected. As he went on
reading some one would discover that he was getting a wigging, and
would give a jump, believing that all his failings were in the paper.

When the time drew near for leaving off work, a brisker note sounded in
the workshop. The long working-day was coming to an end, and the day’s
weariness and satiety were forgotten, and the mind looked
forward—filling with thoughts of the sand-hills or the woods, wandering
down a road that was bright with pleasure. Now and again a neighbor
would step in, and while away the time with his gossip; something or
other had happened, and Master Andres, who was so clever, must say what
he thought about it. Sounds that had been confused during the day now
entered the workshop, so that those within felt that they were
participating in the life of the town; it was as though the walls had
fallen.

About seven o’clock a peculiar sound was heard in the street without,
approaching in very slowly _tempo;_ there was a dull thump and then two
clacking sounds; and then came the thump again, like the tread of a
huge padded foot, and once more the clack-clack. This was old
Bjerregrav, swinging toward the workshop on his crutches; Bjerregrav,
who moved more slowly than anybody, and got forward more quickly. If
Master Andres happened to be in one of his bad humors, he would limp
away, in order not to remain in the same room with a cripple; at other
times he was glad to see Bjerregrav.

“Well, you are a rare bird, aren’t you?” he would cry, when Bjerregrav
reached the landing and swung himself sideways through the door; and
the old man would laugh—he had paid this visit daily now for many
years. The master took no further notice of him, but went on reading;
and Bjerregrav sank into his dumb pondering; his pale hands feeling one
thing after another, as though the most everyday objects were unknown
to him. He took hold of things just as a newborn child might have done;
one had to smile at him and leave him to sit there, grubbing about like
the child he really was. It was quite impossible to hold a continuous
conversation with him; for even if he did actually make an observation
it was sure to be quite beside the mark; Bjerregrav was given to
remarking attributes which no one else noticed, or which no one would
have dwelt upon.

When he sat thus, pondering over and fingering some perfectly familiar
object, people used to say, “Now Bjerregrav’s questioning fit is coming
on!” For Bjerregrav was an inquirer; he would ask questions about the
wind and the weather, and even the food that he ate. He would ask
questions about the most laughable subjects— things that were
self-evident to any one else—why a stone was hard, or why water
extinguished fire. People did not answer him, but shrugged their
shoulders compassionately. “He is quite all there,” they would say;
“his head’s all right. But he takes everything the wrong way round!”

The young master looked up from his book. “Now, shall I inherit
Bjerregrav’s money?” he asked mischievously.

“No—you’ve always been good to me; I don’t want to cause you any
misfortune.”

“Worse things than that might befall me, don’t you think?”

“No, for you’ve got a fair competence. No one has a right to more, so
long as the many suffer need.”

“Certain people have money in the bank themselves,” said Master Andres
allusively.

“No, that’s all over,” answered the old man cheerfully. “I’m now
exactly as rich as you.”

“The devil! Have you run through the lot?” The young master turned
round on his chair.

“You and your ‘run through it all’! You always sit over me like a judge
and accuse me of things! I’m not conscious of having done anything
wrong; but it’s true that the need gets worse every winter. It’s a
burden to have money, Andres, when men are hungry all about you; and if
you help them then you learn afterward that you’ve done the man injury;
they say it themselves, so it must be true. But now I’ve given the
money to the Charity Organization Society, so now it will go to the
right people.”

“Five thousand kroner!” said the master, musing. “Then there ought to
be great rejoicing among the poor this winter.”

“Well, they won’t get it direct in food and firing,” said Bjerregrav,
“but it will come to them just as well in other ways. For when I’d made
my offer to the Society, Shipowner Monsen—you know him—came to me, and
begged me to lend him the money at one year. He would have gone
bankrupt if he hadn’t had it, and it was terrible to think of all the
poor people who would have gone without bread if that great business of
his had come to a standstill. Now the responsibility falls on me. But
the money is safe enough, and in that way it does the poor twice as
much good.”

Master Andres shook his head. “Suppose Bjerregrav has just sat himself
down in the nettles?”

“Why? But what else could I have done?” said the old man uneasily.

“The devil knows it won’t be long before he’s bankrupt. He’s a frothy
old rogue,” murmured the master. “Has Bjerregrav got a note of hand?”

The old man nodded; he was quite proud of himself.

“And interest? Five per cent.?”

“No, no interest. For money to stand out and receive interest—I don’t
like that. It has to suck the interest somewhere or other, and of
course it’s from the poor. Interest is blood-money, Andres —and it’s a
new-fangled contrivance, too. When I was young we knew nothing about
getting interest on our money.”

“Yes, yes:

‘Who gives to other folks his bread
And after suffers in their stead,
Why club him, club him, club him dead!’”


said the master, and went on reading.

Bjerregrav sat there sunk in his own thoughts. Suddenly he looked up.

“Can you, who are so well read, tell me what keeps the moon from
falling? I lay overnight puzzling over it, so as I couldn’t sleep. She
wanders and wanders through the sky, and you can see plainly there’s
nothing but air under her.”

“The devil may know,” said Master Andres thoughtfully. “She must have
strength of her own, so that she holds herself up.”

“I’ve thought that myself—for obligation isn’t enough. Now we can do
that—we walk and walk where we are put down, but then we’ve the earth
under us to support us. And you are always studying, aren’t you? I
suppose you have read nearly all the books in the world?” Bjerregrav
took the master’s book and felt it thoroughly. “That’s a good book,” he
said, striking his knuckles against the cover and holding the book to
his ear; “good material, that. Is it a lying story or a history book?”

“It’s a travel book. They go up to the North Pole, and they get frozen
in, and they don’t know if they’ll ever get home alive again.”

“But that’s terrible—that people should risk their lives so. I’ve often
thought about that—what it’s like at the end of the world—but to go and
find out—no, I should never have had the courage. Never to get home
again!” Bjerregrav, with an afflicted expression, looked first at one,
then at another.

“And they get frost-bite in their feet—and their toes have to be
amputated—in some cases, the whole foot.”

“No, be quiet! So they lose their health, poor fellows!—I don’t want to
hear any more!” The old man sat rocking himself to and fro, as though
he felt unwell. But a few moments later he asked inquisitively: “Did
the king send them up there to make war?”

“No; they went to look for the Garden of Eden. One of the people who
investigate writings has discovered that it is said to lie behind the
ice,” declared the master solemnly.

“The Garden of Eden—or they call it Paradise, too—but that lies where
the two rivers fall into a third, in the East! That is quite plainly
written. Consequently what you read there is false teaching.”

“It’s at the North Pole, God’s truth it is!” said the master, who was
inclined to be a free-thinker; “God’s truth, I tell you! The other’s
just a silly superstition.”

Bjerregrav maintained an angry silence. He sat for some time bending
low in his chair, his eyes roaming anywhere so that they did not meet
another’s. “Yes, yes,” he said, in a low voice; “everybody thinks
something new in order to make himself remarkable, but no one can alter
the grave.”

Master Andres wriggled impatiently to and fro; he could change his mood
like a woman. Bjerregrav’s presence began to distress him. “Now, I’ve
learned to conjure up spirits; will Bjerregrav make the experiment?” he
said suddenly.

“No, not at any price!” said the old man, smiling uneasily.

But the master pointed, with two fingers, at his blinking eyes, and
gazed at him, while he uttered the conjuration.

“In the name of the Blood, in the name of the Sap, in the name of all
the Humors of the Body, the good and the bad alike, and in the name of
the Ocean,” he murmured, crouching like a tom-cat.

“Stop it, I tell you! Stop it! I won’t have it!” Bjerregrav was hanging
helplessly between his crutches, swinging to and fro, with an eye to
the door, but he could not wrest himself away from the enchantment.
Then, desperately, he struck down the master’s conjuring hand, and
profited by the interruption of the incantation to slip away.

The master sat there blowing upon his hand. “He struck out properly,”
he said, in surprise, turning his reddened hand with the palm inward.

Little Nikas did not respond. He was not superstitious, but he did not
like to hear ridicule cast upon the reality of things.

“What shall I do?” asked Peter.

“Are mate Jensen’s boots ready?” The master looked at the clock. “Then
you can nibble your shin-bones.”

It was time to stop work. The master took his stick and hat and limped
over to the beer-house to play a game of billiards; the journeyman
dressed and went out; the older apprentices washed their necks in the
soaking-tub. Presently they too would go out and have a proper time of
it.

Pelle gazed after them. He too experienced a desperate need to shake
off the oppressive day, and to escape out of doors, but his stockings
were nothing but holes, and his working-blouse had to be washed so that
it should be dry by the following morning. Yes, and his shirt—and he
blushed up to his ears—was it a fortnight he had worn it, or was this
the fourth week? The time had slipped past so…. He had meant to defer
the disagreeable business of washing only for a few days—and now it had
mounted up to fourteen! His body had a horrible crawling feeling; was
his punishment come upon him because he had turned a deaf ear to the
voice of conscience, and had ignored Father Lasse’s warning, that
disgrace awaited those who did not keep themselves clean?

No, thank God! But Pelle had received a thorough fright, and his ears
were still burning as he scrubbed his shirt and blouse downstairs in
the yard. It would be well to take it as a timely warning from on high!

And then blouse and shirt were hanging on the fence, spreading
themselves abroad as though they wanted to hug the heavens for joy in
their cleanliness. But Pelle sat dejectedly upstairs, at the window of
the apprentices’ garret, one leg outside, so that part of him at least
was in the open air. The skillful darning which his father had taught
him was not put into practice here; the holes were simply cobbled
together, so that Father Lasse would have sunk into the earth for
shame. Gradually he crept right out on to the roof; below, in the
skipper’s garden, the three girls were wandering idly, looking over
toward the workshop, and evidently feeling bored.

Then they caught sight of him, and at once became different beings.
Manna came toward him, thrust her body impatiently against the stone
wall, and motioned to him with her lips. She threw her head back
imperiously, and stamped with her feet—but without making a sound. The
other two were bent double with suppressed laughter.

Pelle understood perfectly what this silent speech intended, but for a
time he courageously stood his ground. At last, however, he could
endure it no longer; he threw everything aside and next moment was with
the girls.

All Pelle’s dreams and unuttered longings hovered over those places
where men disported themselves. To him nothing was more ridiculous than
to run after petticoats. Women, for Pelle, were really rather
contemptible; they had no strength, and very little intelligence;
indeed, they understood nothing but the art of making themselves
ornamental. But Manna and her sisters were something apart; he was
still enough of a child to play, and they were excellent playmates.

Manna—the wild cat—was afraid of nothing; with her short skirts and her
pigtail and her skipping movements she reminded him of a frolicsome,
inquisitive young bird—Skip! out of the thicket and back again! She
could climb like a boy, and could carry Pelle all round the garden on
her back; it was really an oversight that she should have to wear
skirts. Her clothes wouldn’t keep on her, and she was always tumbling
into the workshop, having torn something or other off her shoes. Then
she would turn everything upside down, take the master’s stick away, so
that he could not move, and would even get her fingers among the
journeyman’s American tools.

She was on good terms with Pelle the very first day.

“Whose new boy are you?” she asked him, smacking him on the back. And
Pelle laughed, and returned her look frankly, with that immediate
comprehension which is the secret of our early years. There was no
trace of embarrassment between them; they had always known one another,
and could at any time resume their play just where they had left off.
In the evening Pelle used to station himself by the garden wall and
wait for her; then in a moment he was over and in the middle of some
game.

Manna was no ordinary cry-baby; not one who seeks to escape the
consequences of her action by a display of tears. If she let herself in
for a scuffle, she never sued for mercy, however hardly it went with
her. But Pelle was to a certain extent restrained by the fact of her
petticoats. And she, on one occasion, did not deny that she wished she
could only be a little stronger!

But she had courage, and Pelle, like a good comrade, gave as good as he
got, except in the workshop, where she bullied him. If she assailed him
from behind, dropping something down his neck or pushing him off his
wooden stool, he restrained himself, and was merely thankful that his
bones were still unbroken.

All his best hours were spent in the skipper’s garden, and this garden
was a wonderful place, which might well hold his senses captive. The
girls had strange outlandish names, which their father had brought home
with him on his long voyages: Aina, Dolores, and Sjermanna! They wore
heavy beads of red coral round their necks and in their ears. And about
the garden lay gigantic conch-shells, in which one could hear the
surging of the ocean, and tortoise-shells as big as a fifteen-pound
loaf, and whole great lumps of coral.

All these things were new to Pelle, but he would not allow them to
confound him; he enrolled them as quickly as possible among the things
that were matters of course, and reserved himself the right to
encounter, at any moment, something finer and more remarkable.

But on some evenings he would disappoint the girls, and would stroll
about the town where he could see real life—or go down to the dunes or
the harbor. Then they would stand dejectedly at the garden wall, bored
and quarrelsome. But on Sundays, as soon as he had finished in the
workshop, he would faithfully appear, and they would spin out their
games, conscious of a long day in front of them. They played games
innumerable, and Pelle was the center of them all; he could turn
himself to anything; he became everything in turn—lawful husband,
cannibal, or slave. He was like a tame bear in their hands; they would
ride on him, trample all over him, and at times they would all three
fall upon him and “murder” him. And he had to lie still, and allow them
to bury his body and conceal all traces of it. The reality of the
affair was enhanced by the fact that he was really covered with
earth—all but his face, which was left bare only from necessity—they
contented themselves with covering that with withered leaves. When he
cried afterward over the state of his fine confirmation clothes, they
brushed him with solicitous hands, and when he could scarcely be
comforted they all three kissed him. With them he was always referred
to as “Manna’s husband.”

So Pelle’s days went by. He had a certain grim humor rather than a
cheerful mind; he felt gloomy, and as though things were going badly
with him; and he had no one to lean upon. But he continued his campaign
against the town, undaunted; he thought of it night and day, and fought
it in his sleep.

“If you’re ever in a difficulty, you’ve always Alfred and Albinus to
help you out,” Uncle Kalle had said, when Pelle was bidding him
good-bye; and he did not fail to look them up. But the twins were
to-day the same slippery, evasive customers as they were among the
pastures; they ventured their skins neither for themselves nor for
anybody else.

In other respects they had considerably improved. They had come hither
from the country in order to better their positions, and to that end
had accepted situations which would serve them until they had saved
sufficient to allow them to commence a more distinguished career.
Albinus had advanced no further, as he had no inclination to any
handicraft. He was a good-tempered youth, who was willing to give up
everything else if only he could practise his acrobatic feats. He
always went about balancing something or other, taking pains to put all
sorts of objects to the most impossible uses. He had no respect for the
order of nature; he would twist his limbs into all imaginable
positions, and if he threw anything into the air he expected it to stay
there while he did something else. “Things must be broken in as well as
animals,” he would say, and persevere indefatigably. Pelle laughed; he
liked him, but he did not count on him any further.

Alfred had struck out in quite another direction. He no longer indulged
in hand-springs, but walked decorously on his legs, had always much ado
to pull down and straighten his collar and cuffs, and was in continual
anxiety as to his clothes. He was now apprentice to a painter, but had
a parting in his hair like a counter-jumper, and bought all sorts of
things at the chemist’s, which he smeared on his hair. If Pelle ran
across him in the street, Alfred always made some excuse to shake him
off; he preferred to associate with tradesmen’s apprentices, and was
continually greeting acquaintances right and left—people who were in a
better position than himself. Alfred put on airs of importance which
made Pelle long one fine day to cudgel him soundly.

The twins resembled one another in this—no one need look to them for
assistance of any kind. They laughed comfortably at the very idea, and
if any one made fun of Pelle they joined in the laughter.

It was not easy to get on. He had quite shaken off the farm-boy; it was
his poverty that gave him trouble now. He had recklessly bound himself
as apprentice for board and lodging; he had a few clothes on his body,
and he had not thought other requisites necessary for one who did not
stroll up and down and gad about with girls. But the town demanded that
he should rig himself out. Sunday clothes were here not a bit too good
for weekdays. He ought to see about getting himself a rubber
collar—which had the advantage that one could wash it oneself; cuffs he
regarded as a further desideratum. But that needed money, and the
mighty sum of five kroner, with which he had set out to conquer the
world, or, at the worst, to buy it—well, the town had enticed it out of
his pocket before he was aware of it.

Hitherto Father Lasse had taken all very difficult matters upon
himself; but now Pelle stood alone, and had only himself to rely on.
Now he stood face to face with life, and he struggled courageously
forward, like the excellent boy he was. But at times he broke down. And
this struggle was a drag upon all his boyish doings and strivings.

In the workshop he made himself useful and tried to stand well with
everybody. He won over little Nikas by drawing a somewhat extravagant
representation of his betrothed from a photograph. The face would not
come out quite right; it looked as though some one had trodden on it;
but the clothes and the brooch at the throat were capital. The picture
hung for a week in the workshop, and brought Pelle a wonderful piece of
luck: Carlsen, who ran errands for the stone-workers, ordered two large
pictures, one of himself and one of his wife, at the rate of
twenty-five öre apiece. “But you must show a few curls in my hair,” he
said, “for my mother’s always wished I had curls.”

Pelle could not promise the pictures in less than two months’ time; it
was tedious work if they were to be accurate.

“Well, well; we can’t spare the money sooner. This month there’s the
lottery, and next month the rent to pay.” Pelle could very well
appreciate that, for Carlsen earned eight kroner a week and had nine
children. But he felt that he could not well reduce the price. Truly,
people weren’t rolling in money here! And when for once he actually had
a shilling in hand, then it was sure to take to its heels under his
very nose, directly he began to rack his brains to decide how it could
most usefully be applied: on one such occasion, for example, he had
seen, in a huckster’s window, a pipe in the form of a boot-leg, which
was quite irresistible.

When the three girls called to him over the garden wall his childhood
found companionship, and he forgot his cares and struggles. He was
rather shy of anybody seeing him when he slipped across; he felt that
his intercourse with the children was not to his credit; moreover, they
were only “petticoats.” But he felt that he was lucky to be there,
where there were curious things which were useful to play with—Chinese
cups and saucers, and weapons from the South Sea Islands. Manna had a
necklace of white teeth, sharp and irregular, strung together in a
haphazard way, which she maintained were human teeth, and she had the
courage to wear them round her bare neck. And the garden was full of
wonderful plants; there were maize, and tobacco, and all sorts of other
plants, which were said, in some parts of the world, to grow as thick
as corn does at home.

They were finer of skin than other folk, and they were fragrant of the
strange places of the world. And he played with them, and they regarded
him with wonder and mended his clothes when he tore them; they made him
the center of all their games—even when he was not present. There was a
secret satisfaction in this—although he accepted it as a matter of
course, it was a portion of all that fate and good fortune had reserved
for him, a slight advance payment from the infinite fairy-tale of life.
He longed to rule over them absolutely, and if they were obstinate he
lectured them angrily, so that they suddenly gave in to him. He knew
well enough that every proper man makes his wife behave submissively.

So passed the early summer; time was moving onward. The townsfolk had
already, at Whitsuntide, provided themselves with what they needed for
the summer, and out in the country people had other things to think
about than trapesing into town with work for the artisans; the coming
harvest occupied all their thoughts. Even in the poorest quarters,
where no work was done for the peasants, one realized how utterly
dependent the little town was upon the country. It was as though the
town had in a moment forgotten its superiority; the manual workers no
longer looked down on the peasants; they looked longingly toward the
fields, spoke of the weather and the prospects of harvest, and had
forgotten all their urban interests. If by exception a farmer’s cart
came through the streets, people ran to the window to look after it.
And as the harvest stood almost at their doors, it seemed as though old
memories were calling to them, and they raised their heads to listen;
those who could gave up their town life and went into the country to
help in the work of harvest. Both the journeyman and the two
apprentices had left the workshop; Jens and Pelle could comfortably
manage the work.

Pelle saw nothing of this stagnant mood; he was occupied on all sides
in keeping a whole skin and getting the utmost out of life; there were
thousands of impressions of good and evil which had to be assimilated,
and which made a balanced whole—that remarkable thing, the town, of
which Pelle never knew whether he felt inclined to bless it or curse
it,—or it always held him in suspense.

And amidst all his activities, Lasse’s face rose up before him and made
him feel lonely in the midst of the bustle. Wherever could Father Lasse
be? Would he ever hear of him again? Every day he had expected, in
reliance on Karna’s word, to see him blundering in at the door, and
when anybody fumbled at the door-knocker he felt quite certain it was
Lasse. It became a silent grief in the boy’s mind, a note that sounded
through all that he undertook.




V


One Sunday evening, as Pelle was running down East Street, a cart
loaded with household goods came jolting in from the country. Pelle was
in a great hurry, but was obliged to look at it. The driver sat in
front, below the load, almost between the horses; he was tall and had
ruddy cheeks, and was monstrously wrapped up, in spite of the heat.
“Hallo!” Why, it was the worthy Due, Kalle’s son-in-law; and above him,
in the midst of all the lumber, sat Anna and the children, swaying to
and fro with the motion of the cart. “Hullo!” Pelle waved his cap, and
with one spring he had his foot on the shaft and was sitting next to
Due, who was laughing all over his face at the encounter.

“Yes, we’ve had enough of the farming country, and now we’ve come to
see if things aren’t better here in town,” said Due, in his quiet
manner. “And here you are, running about just like you did at home!”
There was amazement in his voice.

Anna came crawling over the load, and smiled down upon him.

“Have you news of Father Lasse?” Pelle asked her. This was always his
question when he met an acquaintance.

“Yes, that we have—he’s just going to buy a farm up on the heath. Now,
you devil, are you goin’ to behave?” Anna crawled backward, and a child
began to cry. Then she reappeared. “Yes, and we were to remember father
to you, and mother, and all the rest.”

But Pelle had no thoughts to spare for Uncle Kalle.

“Is it up by Stone Farm?” he asked.

“No—farther to the east, by the Witch’s Cell,” said Due. “It is a big
piece of land, but it’s not much more than stone. So long as he doesn’t
ruin himself over it—two have gone smash there before him. He’s
arranged it together with Karna.”

“Uncle Lasse will know what he’s about,” said Anna. “Karna has found
the money for it; she has something saved.”

Pelle couldn’t sit still; his heart leaped in his body at this news. No
more uncertainty—no more horrible possibilities: he had his father once
more! And the dream of Lasse’s life was about to be fulfilled: he could
now put his feet under his own table. He had become a landowner into
the bargain, if one didn’t use the term too precisely; and Pelle
himself—why, he was a landowner’s son!

By nine o’clock in the evening he had finished everything, and was able
to get off; his blood was pulsing with excitement…. Would there be
horses? Why, of course; but would there be laborers, too? Had Father
Lasse become one of those farmers who pay wages on a quarter-day, and
come into town on a Sunday afternoon, their fur-lined collars up to
their ears? Pelle could see the men quite plainly going up the stairs,
one after another, taking off their wooden shoes and knocking on the
door of the office—yes, they wanted to see about an advance on their
wages. And Lasse scratched the back of his head, looked at them
thoughtfully, and said: “Not on any account, you’d only waste it on
drink.” But he gave it to them finally, for all that. “One is much too
good-natured,” he said to Pelle….

For Pelle had bidden farewell to cobbling, and was living at home as a
landowner’s son. Really, Pelle managed the whole business—only it
wouldn’t do to say so. And at the Christmas feast he danced with the
buxom farmer’s daughters. There was whispering in the corners when
Pelle made his appearance; but he went straight across the room and
invited the Pastor’s daughter to a dance, so that she lost her breath,
and more besides, and begged him on the spot to marry her….

He hurried onward, still dreaming; longing drew him onward, and before
he knew it he had travelled some miles along the high-road. The road he
now turned into led him by pine woods and heath-covered hills; the
houses he passed were poorer, and the distance from one to another was
increasing.

Pelle took a turning a little farther on, which, to the best of his
knowledge, led in the required direction, and hurried forward with
awakened senses. The landscape was only half revealed by the summer
night, but it was all as familiar as the mends in the back of Father
Lasse’s waistcoat, although he had never been here before. The
poverty-stricken landscape spoke to him as with a mother’s voice. Among
these clay-daubed huts, the homes of poor cultivators who waged war
upon the rocky ground surrounding their handful of soil, he felt safe
as he had never felt before. All this had been his through many
generations, down to the rags thrust into the broken window-panes and
the lumber piled upon the thatch to secure it. Here was nothing for any
one to rack his brains over, as elsewhere in the world; here a man
could lie down at peace and rest. Yet it was not for him to till the
ground and to dwell amid all these things. For he had outgrown them, as
he had outgrown the shelter of his mother’s skirts.

The lane gradually became a deep cart-track, which meandered between
rocks and moorland. Pelle knew that he ought to keep to the east, but
the track went now to the south, now to the north. He soon had enough
of it, noted his direction exactly, and struck off obliquely. But it
was difficult to make his way; the moonlight deceived his eyes so that
he stumbled and sank into hollows, while the heather and the juniper
reached as high as his waist, and hampered every movement. And then he
turned obstinate, and would not turn back to the cart-track, but
labored forward, so that he was soon steaming with heat; clambering
over slanting ridges of rock, which were slippery with the dewfall on
the moss, and letting himself tumble at hazard over the ledges. A
little too late he felt a depth below him; it was as though a cold wave
washed through his heart, and he clutched wildly at the air for some
support. “Father Lasse!” he cried woefully; and at the same moment he
was caught by brambles, and sank slowly down through their interwoven
runners, which struck their myriad claws into him and reluctantly let
him pass, until he was cautiously deposited, deep down among the sharp
stones at the bottom of a ravine, shuddering and thanking his stars for
all the thorns that had mercifully flayed his hide in order that he
should not split his skull. Then he must needs grope forward, through
the darkness and running water, until he found a tree and was able to
climb to the surface.

Now he had lost his bearings, and when that became clear he lost his
head as well. Nothing was left of the confident Pelle of a while ago;
he ran blindly forward, in order to reach the summit of the hill. And
as he was hastening upward, so that he might take note of the crags
that lay about him, the ground rose and closed above him with a
frightful clamor, and the air turned black and full of noises, and he
could not see his hand before his eyes. It was like a stupendous
explosion—as though released by his cheerful stamping over the rocks,
the earth was hurled into the sky and dissolved in darkness, and the
darkness itself cried aloud with terror and eddied round him. His heart
pounded in his breast and robbed him of his last remnant of
understanding; he jumped for sheer unbridled terror and bellowed like a
maniac. The black mass drove over his head, so that he was forced to
duck, and gleaming rifts showed and disappeared; and the darkness
surged like the ocean and cried continually aloud with a hellish chaos
of sounds. Then it suddenly swung to one side, drifted northward, and
descended. And Pelle understood that he had stumbled upon a rookery.

He found himself behind a great rock. How he got there he did not know;
but he knew that he was a terrible duffer. How easily he could have
brought confusion on the fifty-odd crows by tossing a few stones into
the air!

He went along the slope, very valiant in his resolve, but with shaking
knees. In the far distance a fox sat upon a cliff and howled insanely
at the moon, and far to the north and the south lay a transient glimmer
of sea. Up here subterranean creatures had their home; when one trod
upon the rock it sounded hollow.

In the southern opening the sea lay silver in the moonlight, but as
Pelle looked again it disappeared, and the low-lying plain was drowned
in white. In every direction the land was disappearing; Pelle watched
in amazement while the sea slowly rose and filled every hollow. Then it
closed above the lesser hills; one by one it swallowed them, and then
it took the long ridge of hills to the east, until only the crests of
the pine-trees lifted themselves above it; but Pelle did not as yet
give himself up for lost; for behind all his anxiety lay a confused
conception of Mount Ararat, which kept up his courage. But then it
became so dreadfully cold that Pelle’s breeches seemed to stick to his
body. “That’s the water,” he thought, and he looked round in alarm; the
rock had become a little island, and he and it were floating on the
ocean.

Pelle was a sturdy little realist, who had already had all manner of
experiences. But now the fear had at last curdled his blood, and he
accepted the supernatural without a protest. The world had evidently
perished, and he himself was drifting—drifting out into space, and
space was terribly cold. Father Lasse, and the workshop, Manna and the
young master’s shining eyes—here was an end of them all. He did not
mourn them; he simply felt terribly lonely. What would be the end of it
all—or was this perhaps death? Had he perhaps fallen dead a little
while ago, when he tumbled over the precipice? And was he now voyaging
toward the land of the blessed? Or was this the end of the world
itself, of which he had heard such dreadful things said, as far back as
he could remember? Perhaps he was adrift on the last scrap of earth,
and was the only person still living? It did not in the least surprise
Pelle that he should be left where everybody else had perished; in this
moment of despair he found it quite natural.

He stood breathlessly silent and listened to the infinite; and he heard
the cudgel-like blows of his pulses. Still he listened, and now he
heard something more: far away in the night that surged against his
ears he heard the suggestion of a sound, the vibrating note of some
living creature. Infinitely remote and faint though it was, yet Pelle
was so aware of it that it thrilled him all through. It was a cow
feeding on the chain; he could follow the sound of her neck scrubbing
up and down against the post.

He ran down over the craggy declivity, fell, and was again on his feet
and running forward; the mist had swallowed him unawares. Then he was
down on arable that had once been woodland; then he trod on something
that felt familiar as it brushed against his feet—it was land that had
once been ploughed but had now been recaptured by the heath. The sound
grew louder, and changed to all those familiar sounds that one hears at
night coming from an open cowshed; and now a decayed farmhouse showed
through the mist. This could not of course be the farm Pelle was
looking for—Father Lasse had a proper farmhouse with four wings! But he
went forward.

Out in the country people do not lock everything up as carefully as
they do in town; so Pelle could walk right in. Directly he opened the
door of the sitting-room he was filled with an uplifting joy. The most
comfortable odor he had ever known struck upon his senses —the
foundation of everything fragrant—the scent of Father Lasse! It was
dark in the room, and the light of the night without could not make its
way through the low window. He heard the deep breathing of persons
asleep, and knew that they had not awakened—the night was not nearly
over yet. “Good-evening!” he said.

A hand began to grope for the matches.

“Is any one there?” said a drowsy woman’s voice.

“Good-evening!” he cried again, and went forward into the room. “It’s
Pelle!” He brought out the name in a singsong voice.

“So it’s you, boy!” Lasse’s voice quavered, and the hands could not
manage the matches; but Pelle stepped toward the voice and clasped his
wrist. “And how did you find your way here in the wilderness— and at
night, too? Yes, yes, I’ll get up!” he continued, and he tried, with a
groan, to sit up.

“No, you stop there and let me get up,” said Karna, who lay against the
wall—she had kept silence while the men-folk were speaking. “He gets
this lumbago, I can tell you!” she declared, jumping out of bed.

“Ay, I’ve been at it a bit too hard. Work comes easy when a man’s his
own master—it’s difficult to leave off. But it’ll be all right when
once I’ve got things properly going. Work’s a good embrocation for the
lumbago. And how goes it with you then? I was near believing you must
be dead!”

So Pelle had to sit on the edge of the bed and tell about everything in
town—about the workshop, and the young master’s lame leg, and
everything. But he said nothing of the disagreeable things; it was not
for men to dwell upon such things.

“Then you’ve been getting on well in foreign parts!” said Lasse,
delighted. “And do they think well of you?”

“Yes!” This came a trifle slowly. In the first place, respect was just
particularly what he had not won—but why trumpet forth his miseries?
“The young master must like me—he often chats with me, even over the
journeyman’s head.”

“Now, think of that! I have often wondered, I can tell you, how you
were getting on, and whether we shouldn’t soon have good news of you.
But everything takes time, that we know. And as you see, I’m in a very
different position.”

“Yes, you’ve become a landowner!” said Pelle, smiling.

“The deuce, yes, so I am!” Lasse laughed, too, but then he groaned
piteously with the pain in his back. “In the daytime, when I’m working
hard, I get along well enough, but as soon as I lie down, then it comes
on directly. And it’s the devil of a pain—as though the wheels of a
heavy loaded wagon were going to and fro across your back, whatever
name you like to give it. Well, well! It’s a fine thing, all the same,
to be your own master! It’s funny how it takes me—but dry bread tastes
better to me at my own table than—yes, by God, I can tell you, it
tastes better than cake at any other body’s table! And then to be all
alone on your own bit of land, and to be able to spit wherever you like
to spit, without asking anybody’s leave! And the soil isn’t so bad;
even if most of it has never been under cultivation, it has all been
lying there storing up its power to produce since the beginning of the
world. But about the people in the town—are they agreeable?”

Oh, Pelle had nothing to complain about. “But when were you married?”
he asked suddenly.

“Well, you see,” and Lasse began to stumble over his own words,
although he had been prepared for the boy to ask this very question;
“in a way we aren’t exactly married. That takes money, and the work
here is getting forward…. But it’s our intention, I needn’t say, as
soon as we have time and money.” It was honestly Lasse’s opinion that
one could just as well dispense with the ceremony; at least until
children came, and demanded an honorable birth. But he could see that
Pelle did not relish the idea; he was still the same pedantic little
chap the moment a point of honor was in question. “As soon as we’ve got
the harvest under shelter we’ll invite people to a grand feast,” he
said resolutely.

Pelle nodded eagerly. Now he was a landowner’s son, and he could make
the shabby-genteel boys of the town envious of him. But they mustn’t be
able to throw it in his face that his father was “living with a woman!”

Now Karna came in with some food. She looked at the boy with much
affection. “Now, fall to, and don’t despise our poor table, my son,”
she said, and gave his arm a friendly pat. Pelle fell to with a good
appetite. Lasse hung half out of the alcove, delighted.

“You haven’t lost your appetite down there,” he said. “Do you get
anything decent to eat? Karna thought the food wasn’t any too good.”

“It’s passable!” said Pelle obstinately. He repented of having betrayed
himself to Karna that evening, when he was so depressed.

The desire to eat awoke in Lasse, so that little by little he crept out
of the alcove. “You are sitting alone there,” he said, and sat down at
the table in his nightcap and pants. He was wearing a knitted nightcap,
one end of which fell loosely over his ear. He looked like a genuine
old farmer, one that had money in his mattress. And Karna, who was
moving to and fro while the menfolk ate, had a round, comfortable
figure, and was carrying a big bread-knife in her hand. She inspired
confidence, and she too looked a regular farmer’s wife.

A place was found for Pelle on the bed. He extinguished the tallow dip
before he undressed, and thrust his underclothing under the pillow.

He woke late; the sun had already left the eastern heavens. The most
delicious smell of coffee filled the room. Pelle started up hastily, in
order to dress himself before Karna could come in and espy his
condition; he felt under the pillow—and his shirt was no longer there!
And his stockings lay on a stool, and they had been darned!

When Karna came in he lay motionless, in obstinate silence; he did not
reply to her morning salutation, and kept his eyes turned toward the
alcove. She ought not to have gone rummaging among his things!

“I’ve taken your shirt and washed it,” she said serenely, “but you can
have it again this evening. After all, you can wear this until then.”
She laid one of Lasse’s shirts on the coverlet.

Pelle lay there for a time as though he had not heard Karna. Then he
sat up, feeling very cross and got into the shirt. “No, stay there
until you’ve drunk your coffee,” she said as he attempted to get up,
and she placed a stool by him. And so Pelle had his coffee in bed, as
he had dreamed it was to happen when Father Lasse remarried; and he
could not go on feeling angry. But he was still burning with shame, and
that made him taciturn.

During the morning Lasse and Pelle went out and inspected the property.

“It’ll be best if we go round it first; then you will see plainly where
the boundary lies,” said Lasse, who knew that the dimensions of the
place would be a surprise to Pelle. They wandered through heather and
brambles and thorns, striking across the moorland and skirting
precipitous slopes. It was several hours before they had finished their
round.

“It’s an awfully large holding,” Pelle said again and again.

And Lasse answered proudly. “Yes, there’s nearly seventy acres here—if
only it were all tilled!”

It was virgin soil, but it was overrun with heather and juniper- scrub,
through which brambles and honeysuckle twined their way. Halfway up a
perpendicular wall of rock hung the ash and the wild cherry, gripping
the bare cliff with roots that looked like crippled hands. Crab-apple
trees, sloe-bushes and wild rose-briars made an impenetrable jungle,
which already bore traces of Lasse’s exertions. And in the midst of
this luxuriant growth the rocky subsoil protruded its grim features, or
came so near the surface that the sun had scorched the roots of the
herbage.

“That’s a proper little Paradise,” said Lasse; “you can scarcely set
foot in it without treading on the berries. But it’s got to be turned
into arable if one is to live here.”

“Isn’t the soil rather middling?” said Pelle.

“Middling—when all that can grow and flourish there?” Lasse pointed to
where birch and aspen stood waving their shining foliage to and fro in
the breeze. “No, but it’ll be a damned rough bit of work to get it
ready for ploughing; I’m sorry now that you aren’t at home.”

Lasse had several times made this allusion, but Pelle was deaf to it.
All this was not what he had imagined; he felt no desire to play the
landowner’s son at home in the way Lasse had in mind.

“It’ll be trouble enough here to manage about your daily bread,” he
said, with remarkable precocity.

“Oh, it won’t be so difficult to earn our daily bread, even if we can’t
hold a feast every day,” said Lasse, affronted. “And here at any rate a
man can straighten his back without having a bailiff come yapping round
him. Even if I were to work myself to death here, at least I’ve done
with slavery. And you must not forget the pleasure of seeing the soil
coming under one’s hands, day after day, and yielding something instead
of lying there useless. That is indeed the finest task a man can
perform—to till the earth and make it fruitful—I can think of none
better! But you—have you lost the farmer’s instinct in town?”

Pelle did not reply. Although there might be something fine and
splendid in working oneself to death over a bit of land, just so that
something different might grow there, he himself was glad that he did
not possess this farmer’s instinct.

“My father, and his father, and all of our family I have ever known,
we’ve all had something in us so that we’ve been driven to improve the
soil, without thinking of our own comfort. But it certainly never
entered the mind of one of us that we should ever hear it ill spoken
of—and by one of our own people too!” Lasse spoke with his face turned
away—as did the Almighty when He was wroth with His people; and Pelle
felt as though he were a hateful renegade, as bad as bad could be. But
nevertheless he would not give in.

“I should be no use at all here,” he said apologetically, gazing in the
direction of the sea. “I don’t believe in it.”

“No, you’ve cut yourself loose from it all, you have!” retorted Lasse
bitterly. “But you’ll repent it some day, in the long run. Life among
the strangers there isn’t all splendor and enjoyment.”

Pelle did not answer; he felt at that moment too much of a man to bandy
words. He contained himself, and they went onward in silence.

“Well, of course, it isn’t an estate,” said Lasse suddenly, in order to
take the sting out of further criticism. Pelle was still silent.

Round the house the land was cultivated, and all round the cultivated
land the luxuriant heather revealed disappearing traces of cultivation,
and obliterated furrows.

“This was a cornfield once,” said Pelle.

“Well, to think of your seeing that right off!” exclaimed Lasse, half
sarcastically, half in real admiration. “The deuce of an eye you’ve
got, you truly have! I should certainly have noticed nothing particular
about the heath—if I had not known. Yes, that has been under
cultivation, but the heath has won it back again! That was under my
predecessor, who took in more than he could work, so that it ruined
him. But you can see now that something can be done with the land!”
Lasse pointed to a patch of rye, and Pelle was obliged to recognize
that it looked very well. But through the whole length of the field ran
high ridges of broken stone, which told him what a terrible labor this
soil demanded before it could be brought under cultivation. Beyond the
rye lay newly-broken soil, which looked like a dammed-up ice-field; the
plough had been driven through mere patches of soil. Pelle looked at it
all, and it made him sad to think of his father.

Lasse himself was undismayed.

“As it is, it needs two to hold the plough. Karna is very strong, but
even so it’s as though one’s arms would be torn from one’s body every
time the plough strikes. And most of it has to be broken up with pick
and drill—and now and again it takes a bit of a sneeze. I use dynamite;
it’s more powerful than powder, and it bites down into the ground
better,” he said proudly.

“How much is under cultivation here?” asked Pelle.

“With meadow and garden, almost fourteen acres; but it will be more
before the year is out.”

“And two families have been ruined already by those fourteen acres,”
said Karna, who had come out to call them in to dinner.

“Yes, yes; God be merciful to them—and now we get the fruit of their
labors! The parish won’t take the farm away again—not from us,” he
said. Lasse spoke in a tone full of self-reliance. Pelle had never seen
him stand so upright.

“I can never feel quite easy about it,” said Karna; “it’s as though one
were ploughing up churchyard soil. The first who was turned out by the
parish hanged himself, so they say.”

“Yes, he had a hut on the heath there—where you see the elder-trees
—but it’s fallen to pieces since then. I’m so glad it didn’t happen in
the house.” Lasse shuddered uncomfortably. “People say he haunts the
place when any misfortune is in store for those that come after him.”

“Then the house was built later?” asked Pelle, astonished, for it had
such a tumble-down appearance.

“Yes, my predecessor built that. He got the land from the parish free
for twenty years, provided he built a house and tilled a tonde of land
a year. Those were not such bad conditions. Only he took in too much at
a time; he was one of those people who rake away fiercely all the
morning and have tired themselves out before midday. But he built the
house well”—and Lasse kicked the thin mud-daubed wall—“and the
timber-work is good. I think I shall break a lot of stone when the
winter comes; the stone must be got out of the way, and it isn’t so bad
to earn a few hundred kroner. And in two or three years we will make
the old house into a barn and build ourselves a new house—eh, Karna?
With a cellar underneath and high steps outside, like they have at
Stone Farm. It could be of unhewn granite, and I can manage the walls
myself.”

Karna beamed with joy, but Pelle could not enter into their mood. He
was disillusioned; the descent from his dream to this naked reality was
too great. And a feeling rose within him of dull resentment against
this endless labor, which, inexperienced though he was, was yet part of
his very being by virtue of the lives of ten, nay, twenty generations.
He himself had not waged the hard-fought war against the soil, but he
had as a matter of course understood everything that had to do with
tilling the soil ever since he could crawl, and his hands had an inborn
aptitude for spade and rake and plough. But he had not inherited his
father’s joy in the soil; his thoughts had struck out in a new
direction. Yet this endless bondage to the soil lay rooted in him, like
a hatred, which gave him a survey unknown to his father. He was
reasonable; he did not lose his head at the sight of seventy acres of
land, but asked what they contained. He himself was not aware of it,
but his whole being was quick with hostility toward the idea of
spending one’s strength in this useless labor; and his point of view
was as experienced as though he had been Lasse’s father.

“Wouldn’t you have done better to buy a cottage-holding with twelve or
fourteen acres of land, and that in a good state of cultivation?” he
asked.

Lasse turned on him impatiently. “Yes, and then a man might stint and
save all his life, and never get beyond cutting off his fly to mend his
seat; he’d most likely spend twice what he made! What the deuce! I
might as well have stayed where I was. Here, it’s true, I do work
harder and I have to use my brains more, but then there’s a future
before me. When I’ve once got the place under cultivation this will be
a farm to hold its own with any of them!” Lasse gazed proudly over his
holding; in his mind’s eye it was waving with grain and full of prime
cattle.

“It would carry six horses and a score or two of cows easily,” he said
aloud. “That would bring in a nice income! What do you think, Karna?”

“I think the dinner will be cold,” said Karna, laughing. She was
perfectly happy.

At dinner Lasse proposed that Pelle should send his clothes to be
washed and mended at home. “You’ve certainly got enough to do without
that,” he said indulgently. “Butcher Jensen goes to market every
Saturday; he’d take it for you and put it down by the church, and it
would be odd if on a Sunday no one from the heath went to church, who
could bring the bundle back to us.”

But Pelle suddenly turned stubborn and made no reply.

“I just thought it would be too much for you to wash and mend for
yourself,” said Lasse patiently. “In town one must have other things to
think about, and then it isn’t really proper work for a man!”

“I’ll do it myself all right,” murmured Pelle ungraciously.

Now he would show them that he could keep himself decent. It was partly
in order to revenge himself for his own neglect that he refused the
offer.

“Yes, yes,” said Lasse meekly; “I just asked you. I hope you won’t take
it amiss.”

However strong Karna might be, and however willing to help in
everything, Lasse did greatly feel the need of a man to work with him.
Work of a kind that needed two had accumulated, and Pelle did not spare
himself. The greater part of the day was spent in heaving great stones
out of the soil and dragging them away; Lasse had knocked a sledge
together, and the two moorland horses were harnessed up to it.

“Yes, you mustn’t look at them too closely,” said Lasse, as he stroked
the two scarecrows caressingly. “Just wait until a few months have gone
by, and then you’ll see! But they’ve plenty of spirit now.”

There was much to be done, and the sweat was soon pouring down their
faces; but they were both in good spirits. Lasse was surprised at the
boy’s strength—with two or three such lads he could turn the whole
wilderness over. Once again he sighed that Pelle was not living at
home; but to this Pelle still turned a deaf ear. And before they were
aware of it Karna had come out again and was calling them to supper.

“I think we’ll harness the horses and drive Pelle halfway to town— as a
reward for the work he’s done,” said Lasse gaily. “And we’ve both
earned a drive.” So the two screws were put into the cart.

It was amusing to watch Lasse; he was a notable driver, and one could
not but be almost persuaded that he had a pair of blood horses in front
of him. When they met any one he would cautiously gather up the reins
in order to be prepared lest the horses should shy—“they might so
easily bolt,” he said solemnly. And when he succeeded in inducing them
to trot he was delighted. “They take some holding,” he would say, and
to look at him you would have thought they called for a strong pair of
wrists. “Damn it all, I believe I shall have to put the curb on them!”
And he set both his feet against the dashboard, and sawed the reins to
and fro.

When half the distance was covered Father Lasse wanted to drive just a
little further, and again a little further still—oh, well, then, they
might as well drive right up to the house! He had quite forgotten that
the following day would be a day of hard labor both for himself and for
the horses. But at last Pelle jumped out.

“Shan’t we arrange that about your washing?” asked Lasse.

“No!” Pelle turned his face away—surely they might stop asking him
that!

“Well, well, take care of yourself, and thanks for your help. You’ll
come again as soon as you can?”

Pelle smiled at them, but said nothing; he dared not open his mouth,
for fear of the unmanly lump that had risen in his throat. Silently he
held out his hand and ran toward the town.




VI


The other apprentices were able to provide themselves with clothes, as
they worked on their own account in their own time; they got work from
their friends, and at times they pirated the master’s customers, by
underbidding him in secret. They kept their own work under the bench;
when the master was not at home they got it out and proceeded with it.
“To-night I shall go out and meet my girl,” they would say, laughing.
Little Nikas said nothing at all.

Pelle had no friends to give him work, and he could not have done much.
If the others had much to do after work-hours or on Sundays he had to
help them; but he gained nothing by so doing. And he also had Nilen’s
shoes to keep mended, for old acquaintances’ sake.

Jeppe lectured them at great length on the subject of tips, as he had
promised; for the townsfolk had been complaining of this burdensome
addition to their expenditure, and in no measured terms had sworn
either to abate or abolish this tax on all retail transactions. But it
was only because they had read of the matter in the newspapers, and
didn’t want to be behind the capital! They always referred to the
subject when Pelle went round with his shoes, and felt in their purses;
if there was a shilling there they would hide it between their fingers,
and say that he should have something next time for certain—he must
remind them of it another time! At first he did remind them—they had
told him to do so—but then Jeppe received a hint that his youngest
apprentice must stop his attempts at swindling. Pelle could not
understand it, but he conceived an increasing dislike of these people,
who could resort to such a shameless trick in order to save a penny
piece, which they would never have missed.

Pelle, who had been thinking that he had had enough of the world of
poor folk, and must somehow contrive to get into another class, learned
once again to rely on the poor, and rejoiced over every pair of poor
folk’s shoes which the master anathematized because they were so worn
out. The poor were not afraid to pay a shilling if they had one; it
made him feel really sad to see how they would search in every corner
to get a few pence together, and empty their children’s money-boxes,
while the little ones stood by in silence, looking on with mournful
eyes. And if he did not wish to accept their money they were offended.
The little that he did receive he owed to people who were as poor as
himself.

Money, to these folk, no longer consisted of those round, indifferent
objects which people in the upper strata of human society piled up in
whole heaps. Here every shilling meant so much suffering or happiness,
and a grimy little copper would still the man’s angry clamor and the
child’s despairing cry for food. Widow Hoest gave him a ten-öre piece,
and he could not help reflecting that she had given him her mid-day
meal for two days to come!

One day, as he was passing the miserable hovels which lay out by the
northern dunes, a poor young woman came to her door and called to him;
she held the remains of a pair of elastic-sided boots in her hand. “Oh,
shoemaker’s boy, do be so kind as to mend these a bit for me!” she
pleaded. “Just sew them up anyhow, so that they’ll stick on my feet for
half the evening. The stone-masons are giving their feast, and I do so
want to go to it!” Pelle examined the boots; there was not much to be
done for them, nevertheless he took them, and mended them in his own
time. He learned from Jens that the woman was the widow of a
stone-cutter, who was killed by an explosion shortly after their
marriage. The boots looked quite decent when he returned them.

“Well, I’ve no money, but I do offer you many, many thanks!” she said,
looking delightedly at the boots; “and how nice you’ve made them look!
God bless you for it.”

“Thanks killed the blacksmith’s cat,” said Pelle smiling. Her pleasure
was contagious.

“Yes, and God’s blessing falls where two poor people share their bed,”
the young woman rejoined jestingly. “Still, I wish you everything good
as payment—now I can dance after all!”

Pelle was quite pleased with himself as he made off. But few doors
farther on another poor woman accosted him; she had evidently heard of
the success of the first, and there she stood holding a dirty pair of
children’s boots, which she earnestly begged him to mend. He took the
boots and repaired them although it left him still poorer; he knew too
well what need was to refuse. This was the first time that any one in
the town had regarded him as an equal, and recognized him at the first
glance as a fellow-creature. Pelle pondered over this; he did not know
that poverty is cosmopolitan.

When he went out after the day’s work he took a back seat; he went
about with the poorest boys and behaved as unobtrusively as possible.
But sometimes a desperate mood came over him, and at times he would
make himself conspicuous by behavior that would have made old Lasse
weep; as, for example, when he defiantly sat upon a freshly-tarred
bollard. He became thereby the hero of the evening; but as soon as he
was alone he went behind a fence and let down his breeches in order to
ascertain the extent of the damage. He had been running his errands
that day in the best clothes he possessed. This was no joke. Lasse had
deeply imbued him with his own moderation, and had taught him to treat
his things carefully, so that it seemed to Pelle almost a pious duty.
But Pelle felt himself forsaken by all the gods, and now he defied
them.

The poor women in the streets were the only people who had eyes for
him. “Now look at the booby, wearing his confirmation jacket on a
weekday!” they would say, and call him over in order to give him a
lecture, which as a rule ended in an offer to repair the damage. But it
was all one to Pelle; if he ran about out-of-doors in his best clothes
he was only doing as the town did. At all events he had a shirt on,
even if it was rather big! And the barber’s assistant himself, who
looked most important in tail-coat and top-hat, and was the ideal of
every apprentice, did not always wear a shirt; Pelle had once noticed
that fact as the youth was swinging some ladies. Up in the country,
where a man was appraised according to the number of his shirts, such a
thing would have been impossible. But here in town people did not
regard such matters so strictly.

He was no longer beside himself with astonishment at the number of
people—respectable folk for the most part—who had no abiding place
anywhere, but all through the year drifted in the most casual manner
from one spot to another. Yet the men looked contented, had wives and
children, went out on Sundays, and amused themselves; and after all why
should one behave as if the world was coming to an end because one
hadn’t a barrel of salt pork or a clamp of potatoes to see one through
the winter? Recklessness was finally Pelle’s refuge too; when all the
lights seemed to have gone out of the future it helped him to take up
the fairy-tale of life anew, and lent a glamor to naked poverty.
Imagination entered even into starvation: are you or are you not going
to die of it?

Pelle was poor enough for everything to be still before him, and he
possessed the poor man’s alert imagination; the great world and the
romance of life were the motives that drew him through the void, that
peculiar music of life which is never silent, but murmurs to the
reckless and the careful alike. Of the world he knew well enough that
it was something incomprehensibly vast—something that was always
receding; yet in eighty days one could travel right round it, to the
place where men walk about with their heads downward, and back again,
and experience all its wonders. He himself had set out into this
incomprehensible world, and here he was, stranded in this little town,
where there was never a crumb to feed a hungry imagination; nothing but
a teeming confusion of petty cares. One felt the cold breath of the
outer winds, and the dizziness of great spaces; when the little
newspaper came the small tradesmen and employers would run eagerly
across the street, their spectacles on their noses, and would speak,
with gestures of amazement, of the things that happened outside.
“China,” they would say; “America!” and fancy that they themselves made
part of the bustling world. But Pelle used to wish most ardently that
something great and wonderful might wander thither and settle down
among them just for once! He would have been quite contented with a
little volcano underfoot, so that the houses would begin to sway and
bob to one another; or a trifling inundation, so that ships would ride
over the town, and have to moor themselves to the weather-cock on the
church steeple. He had an irrational longing that something of this
kind should happen, something to drive the blood from his heart and
make his hair stand on end. But now he had enough to contend against
apart from matters of this sort; the world must look after itself until
times were better.

It was more difficult to renounce the old fairy-tales, for poverty
itself had sung them into his heart, and they spoke to him with Father
Lasse’s quivering voice. “A rich child often lies in a poor mother’s
lap,” his father used to say, when he prophesied concerning his son’s
future, and the saying sank deep into the boy’s mind, like the refrain
of a song. But he had learned this much, that there were no elephants
here, on whose necks a plucky youngster could ride astraddle, in order
to ride down the tiger which was on the point of tearing the King of
the Himalayas to pieces so that he would of course receive the king’s
daughter and half his kingdom as a reward for his heroic deed. Pelle
often loitered about the harbor, but no beautifully dressed little girl
ever fell into the water, so that he might rescue her, and then, when
he was grown up, make her his wife. And if such a thing did really
happen he knew now that his elders would cheat him out of any tip he
might receive. And he had quite given up looking for the golden coach
which was to run over him, so that the two terrified ladies, who would
be dressed in mourning, would take him into their carriage and carry
him off to their six- storied castle! Of course, they would adopt him
permanently in place of the son which they had just lost, and who,
curiously enough, was exactly the same age as himself. No, there were
no golden coaches here!

Out in the great world the poorest boy had the most wonderful
prospects; all the great men the books had ever heard of had been poor
lads like himself, who had reached their high estate through good
fortune and their own valor. But all the men in town who possessed
anything had attained their wealth by wearily plodding forward and
sucking the blood of the poor. They were always sitting and brooding
over their money, and they threw nothing away for a lucky fellow to
pick up; and they left nothing lying about, lest some poor lad should
come and take it. Not one of them considered it beneath him to pick up
an old trouser-button off the pavement, and carry it home.

One evening Pelle was running out to fetch half a pound of canister
tobacco for Jeppe. In front of the coal-merchant’s house the big dog,
as always, made for his legs, and he lost the twenty-five-öre piece.
While he was looking for it, an elderly man came up to him. Pelle knew
him very well; he was Monsen the shipowner, the richest man in the
town.

“Have you lost something, my lad?” he asked, and began to assist in the
search.

“Now he will question me,” thought Pelle. “And then I shall answer him
boldly, and then he will look at me attentively and say—”

Pelle was always hoping for some mysterious adventure, such as happens
to an able lad and raises him to fortune.

But the shipowner did nothing he was expected to do. He merely searched
eagerly, and inquired: “Where were you walking? Here, weren’t you? Are
you quite certain of that?”

“In any case he’ll give me another twenty-five öre,” thought Pelle.
“Extraordinary—how eager he is!” Pelle did not really want to go on
searching, but he could not very well leave off before the other.

“Well, well!” said the shipowner at last, “you may as well whistle for
those twenty-five öre. But what a booby you are!” And he moved on, and
Pelle looked after him for a long while before putting his hand into
his own pocket.

Later, as he was returning that way, he saw a man bowed over the
flagstones, striking matches as he searched. It was Monsen. The sight
tickled Pelle tremendously. “Have you lost anything?” he asked
mischievously, standing on the alert, lest he should get a box on the
ear. “Yes, yes; twenty-five öre;” groaned the shipowner. “Can’t you
help me to find it, my boy?”

Well, he had long understood that Monsen was the richest man in the
town, and that he had become so by provisioning ships with spoiled
foodstuffs, and refitting old crank vessels, which he heavily insured.
And he knew who was a thief and who a bankrupt speculator, and that
Merchant Lau only did business with the little shopkeepers, because his
daughter had gone to the bad. Pelle knew the secret pride of the town,
the “Top-galeass,” as she was called, who in her sole self represented
the allurements of the capital, and he knew the two sharpers, and the
consul with the disease which was eating him up. All this was very
gratifying knowledge for one of the rejected.

He had no intention of letting the town retain any trace of those
splendors with which he had once endowed it. In his constant ramblings
he stripped it to the buff. For instance, there stood the houses of the
town, some retiring, some standing well forward, but all so neat on the
side that faced the street, with their wonderful old doorways and
flowers in every window. Their neatly tarred framework glistened, and
they were always newly lime-washed, ochrous yellow or dazzling white,
sea-green, or blue as the sky. And on Sundays there was quite a festive
display of flags. But Pelle had explored the back quarters of every
house; and there were sinks and traps there, with dense slimy growths,
and stinking refuse-barrels, and one great dustbin with a drooping
elder-tree over it. And the spaces between the cobble-stones were foul
with the scales of herrings and the guts of codfish, and the lower
portions of the walls were covered with patches of green moss.

The bookbinder and his wife went about hand in hand when they set out
for the meeting of some religious society. But at home they fought, and
in chapel, as they sat together and sang out of the same hymn-book,
they would secretly pinch one another’s legs. “Yes,” people used to
say, “such a nice couple!” But the town couldn’t throw dust in Pelle’s
eyes; he knew a thing or two. If only he had known just how to get
himself a new blouse!

Some people didn’t go without clothes so readily; they were forever
making use of that fabulous thing—credit! At first it took his breath
away to discover that the people here in the town got everything they
wanted without paying money for it. “Will you please put it down?” they
would say, when they came for their boots; and “it’s to be entered,” he
himself would say, when he made a purchase for his employers. All spoke
the same magical formula, and Pelle was reminded of Father Lasse, who
had counted his shillings over a score of times before he ventured to
buy anything. He anticipated much from this discovery, and it was his
intention to make good use of the magic words when his own means became
exhausted.

Now, naturally, he was wiser. He had discovered that the very poor must
always go marketing with their money in their hands, and even for the
others there came a day of reckoning. The master already spoke with
horror of the New Year; and it was very unfortunate for his business
that the leather-sellers had got him in their pocket, so that he could
not buy his material where it was cheapest. All the small employers
made the same complaint.

But the fairy-tale of credit was not yet exhausted—there was still a
manner of drawing a draft upon fortune, which could be kept waiting,
and on the future, which redeems all drafts. Credit was a spark of
poetry in the scramble of life; there were people going about who were
poor as church mice, yet they played the lord. Alfred was such a lucky
fellow; he earned not a red cent, but was always dressed like a
counter-jumper, and let himself want for nothing. If he took a fancy to
anything he simply went in and got it on “tick”; and he was never
refused. His comrades envied him and regarded him as a child of
fortune.

Pelle himself had a little flirtation with fortune. One day he went
gaily into a shop, in order to procure himself some underclothing. When
he asked for credit they looked at him as though he could not be quite
sane, and he had to go away without effecting his object. “There must
be some secret about it that I don’t know,” he thought; and he dimly
remembered another boy, who couldn’t stir the pot to cook his porridge
or lay the table for himself, because he didn’t know the necessary
word. He sought Alfred forthwith in order to receive enlightenment.

Alfred was wearing new patent braces, and was putting on his collar. On
his feet were slippers with fur edging, which looked like feeding
pigeons. “I got them from a shopkeeper’s daughter,” he said; and he
coquetted with his legs; “she’s quite gone on me. A nice girl too— only
there’s no money.”

Pelle explained his requirements.

“Shirts! shirts!” Alfred chortled with delight, and clapped his hands
before his face. “Good Lord, he wants to gets shirts on tick! If only
they had been linen shirts!” He was near bursting with laughter.

Pelle tried again. As a peasant—for he was still that—he had thought of
shirts first of all; but now he wanted a summer overcoat and rubber
cuffs. “Why do you want credit?” asked the shopkeeper, hesitating. “Are
you expecting any money? Or is there any one who will give you a
reference?”

No, Pelle didn’t want to bring any one else into it; it was simply that
he had no money.

“Then wait until you have,” said the shopkeeper surlily. “We don’t
clothe paupers!” Pelle slunk away abashed.

“You’re a fool!” said Alfred shortly. “You are just like Albinus—he can
never learn how to do it!”

“How do you do it then?” asked Pelle meekly.

“How do I do it—how do I do it?” Alfred could give no explanation; “it
just came of itself. But naturally I don’t tell them that I’m poor! No,
you’d better leave it alone—it’ll never succeed with you!”

“Why do you sit there and pinch your upper lip?” asked Pelle
discontentedly.

“Pinch? You goat, I’m stroking my moustache!”




VII


On Saturday afternoon Pelle was busily sweeping the street. It was
getting on for evening; in the little houses there was already a fire
in the grate; one could hear it crackling at Builder Rasmussen’s and
Swedish Anders’, and the smell of broiled herrings filled the street.
The women were preparing something extra good in order to wheedle their
husbands when they came home with the week’s wages. Then they ran
across to the huckster’s for schnaps and beer, leaving the door wide
open behind them; there was just half a minute to spare while the
herring was getting cooked on the one side! And now Pelle sniffed it
afar off—Madame Rasmussen was tattling away to the huckster, and a
voice screeched after her: “Madame Rasmussen! Your herring is burning!”
Now she came rushing back, turning her head confusedly from house to
house as she scampered across the street and into her house. The blue
smoke drifted down among the houses; the sun fell lower and filled the
street with gold-dust.

There were people sweeping all along the street; Baker Jörgen, the
washerwoman, and the Comptroller’s maid-servant. The heavy boughs of
the mulberry-tree across the road drooped over the wall and offered
their last ripe fruits to whomsoever would pick them. On the other side
of the wall the rich merchant Hans—he who married the nurse-maid—was
pottering about his garden. He never came out, and the rumor ran that
he was held a prisoner by his wife and her kin. But Pelle had leaned
his ear against the wall, and had heard a stammering old voice
repeating the same pet names, so that it sounded like one of those
love-songs that never come to an end; and when in the twilight he
slipped out of his attic window and climbed on to the ridge of the
roof, in order to take a look at the world, he had seen a tiny little
white-haired man walking down there in the garden, with his arm round
the waist of a woman younger than himself. They were like a couple of
young lovers, and they had to stop every other moment in order to
caress one another. The most monstrous things were said of him and his
money; of his fortune, that once upon a time was founded on a paper of
pins, and was now so great that some curse must rest upon it.

From the baker’s house the baker’s son came slinking hymn-book in hand.
He fled across to the shelter of the wall, and hurried off; old Jörgen
stood there gobbling with laughter as he watched him, his hands folded
over his broomstick.

“O Lord, is that a man?” he cried to Jeppe, who sat at his window,
shaving himself before the milk-can. “Just look how he puffs! Now he’ll
go in and beg God to forgive him for going courting!”

Jeppe came to the window to see and to silence him; one could hear
Brother Jörgen’s falsetto voice right down the street. “Has he been
courting? However did you get him to venture such a leap?” he asked
eagerly.

“Oh, it was while we were sitting at table. I had a tussle with my
melancholy madman—because I couldn’t help thinking of the little
Jörgen. God knows, I told myself, no little Jörgen has come to carry on
your name, and the boy’s a weakling, and you’ve no one else to build
on! It’s all very well going about with your nose in the air all the
days God gives you—everything will be swept away and be to no purpose.
And everything of that sort—you know how I get thinking when ideas like
that get the upper hand with me. I sat there and looked at the boy, and
angry I felt with him, that I did; and right opposite him there was
sitting a fine bit of womanhood, and he not looking at her. And with
that I struck my hand on the table, and I says, ‘Now, boy, just you
take Marie by the hand and ask her whether she’ll be your wife—I want
to make an end of the matter now and see what you’re good for!’ The boy
all shrivels up and holds out his hand, and Marie, it don’t come amiss
to her. ‘Yes, that I will!’ she says, and grips hold of him before he
has time to think what he’s doing. And we shall be having the marriage
soon.”

“If you can make a boot out of that leather!” said Jeppe.

“Oh, she’s a warm piece—look at the way she’s built. She’s thawing him
already. Women, they know the way—he won’t freeze in bed.”

Old Jörgen laughed contentedly, and went off to his work. “Yes, why,
she’d breathe life into the dead,” he announced to the street at large.

The others went out in their finest clothes, but Pelle did not care to
go. He had not been able to accomplish his constant resolution to keep
himself neat and clean, and this failure weighed upon him and abashed
him. And the holes in his stockings, which were now so big that they
could no longer be darned, were disgustingly apparent, with his skin
showing through them, so that he had a loathing for himself.

Now all the young people were going out. He could see the sea in the
opening at the end of the street; it was perfectly calm, and had
borrowed the colors of the sunset. They would be going to the harbor or
the dunes by the sea; there would be dancing on the grass, and perhaps
some would get to fighting about a girl. But he wasn’t going to be
driven out of the pack like a mangy dog; he didn’t care a hang for the
whole lot of them!

He threw off his apron and established himself on a beer-barrel which
stood outside before the gate. On the bench opposite sat the older
inhabitants of the street, puffing at their pipes and gossiping about
everything under the sun. Now the bells sounded the hour for leaving
off work. Madame Rasmussen was beating her child and reviling it in
time with her blows. Then suddenly all was silent; only the crying of
the child continued, like a feeble evening hymn. Old Jeppe was talking
about Malaga—“when I ran ashore at Malaga!”— but Baker Jörgen was still
lamenting his want of an heir, and sighing: “Yes, yes; if only one
could see into the future!” Then he suddenly began to talk about the
Mormons. “It might really be great fun to see, some time, what they
have to offer you,” he said.

“I thought you’d been a Mormon a long time, Uncle Jörgen,” said Master
Andres. The old man laughed.

“Well, well; one tries all sorts of things in one’s time,” he said, and
looked out at the sky.

Up the street stood the watchmaker, on his stone steps, his face turned
up to the zenith, while he shouted his senseless warnings: “The new
time! I ask you about the new time, O God the Father!” he repeated.

Two weary stevedores were going homeward. “He’ll drive all poverty out
of the world and give us all a new life—that’s the form his madness
takes,” said one of them, with a dreary laugh.

“Then he’s got the millennium on the brain?” said the other.

“No, he’s just snarling at the world,” said old Jörgen, behind them.
“We shall certainly get a change in the weather.”

“Things are bad with him just now, poor fellow,” said Bjerregrav,
shuddering. “It was about this time of the year that he lost his wits.”

An inner voice admonished Pelle: “Don’t sit there with your hands in
your lap, but go in and look after your clothes!” But he could not
bring himself to do so—the difficulties had become too insurmountable.
On the following day Manna and the others called him, but he could not
spring over the wall to join them; they had begun to turn up their
noses at him and regard him critically. He did not very well understand
it, but he had become an outcast, a creature who no longer cared about
washing himself properly. But what was the use? He could not go on
contending against the invincible! No one had warned him in time, and
now the town had captured him, and he had given up everything else. He
must shuffle through life as best he could.

No one had a thought for him! When washing was being done for his
employers it never occurred to Madam to wash anything of his, and he
was not the boy to come forward of himself. The washerwoman was more
considerate; when she could she would smuggle in some of Pelle’s dirty
linen, although it meant more work for her. But she was poor herself;
as for the rest, they only wanted to make use of him. There was no one
in town who cared sufficiently for his welfare to take the trouble even
to open his mouth to tell him the truth. This was a thought that made
him feel quite weak about the knees, although he was fifteen years old
and had courage to tackle a mad bull. More than anything else it was
his loneliness that weakened his powers of resistance. He was helpless
alone among all these people, a child, who had to look after himself as
best he could, and be prepared for attacks from every quarter.

He sat there, making no effort to dispel the misery that had come over
him, and was working its will with him, while with half an ear he
listened to the life around him. But suddenly he felt something in his
waistcoat pocket—money! He felt immensely relieved at once, but he did
not hurry; he slipped behind the gate and counted it. One and a half
kroner. He was on the point of regarding it as a gift from on high, as
something which the Almighty had in His great goodness placed there,
but then it occurred to him that this was his master’s money. It had
been given him the day before for repairs to a pair of ladies’ shoes,
and he had forgotten to pay it in, while the master, strangely enough,
had quite forgotten to ask for it.

Pelle stood with bent back by the well outside, scrubbing himself over
a bucket until his blood tingled. Then he put on his best clothes, drew
his shoes on to his naked feet, to avoid the painful feeling of the
ragged stockings, and buttoned his rubber collar—for the last time
innocent of any tie—to his shirt. Shortly afterward he was standing
outside a shop-window, contemplating some large neckties, which had
just been put upon the market, and could be worn with any one of four
faces outward; they filled the whole of the waistcoat, so that one did
not see the shirt. Now he would be disdained no longer! For a moment he
ran to and fro and breathed the air; then he got upon the scent, and
ran at a breathless gallop toward the sea-dunes, where the young folk
of the town played late into the summer night that lay over the wan
sea.

Of course, it was only a loan. Pelle had to sole a pair of shoes for a
baker’s apprentice who worked with Nilen; as soon as they were finished
he would repay the money. He could put the money under the cutting-out
board in his master’s room; the master would find it there, would gaze
at it with a droll expression, and say: “What the devil is this?” And
then he would knock on the wall, and would treat Pelle to a long
rigmarole about his magical gifts—and then he would ask him to run out
and fetch a half-bottle of port.

He did not receive the money for soling the shoes; half the sum he had
to pay out for leather, and the rest was a long time coming, for the
baker’s apprentice was a needy wretch. But he did not doubt his own
integrity; the master might be as sure of his money as if it had been
in the bank. Yet now and again he forgot to give up petty sums —if some
necessity or other was pressing him unexpectedly. They were, of course,
all loans—until the golden time came. And that was never far away.

One day he returned home as the young master was standing at the door,
staring at the driving clouds overhead. He gave Pelle’s shoulder a
familiar squeeze. “How was it they didn’t pay you for the shoes at the
Chamberlain’s yesterday?”

Pelle went crimson and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket. “I forgot
it,” he said in a low voice.

“Now, now!” The master shook him good-naturedly. “It’s not that I
mistrust you. But just to be methodical!”

Pelle’s heart pounded wildly in his body; he had just decided to use
the money to buy a pair of stockings, the very next time he went out
—and then what would have happened? And the master’s belief in him! And
all at once his offence showed itself to him in all its shameful
treachery; he felt as if he was on the point of being sick, so
disturbed was he. Until this moment he had preserved through everything
the feeling of his own worth, and now it was destroyed; there could not
be any one wickeder than he in all the world. In future no one could
trust him any more, and he could no longer look people straight in the
face; unless he went to the master at once and cast himself and his
shame unconditionally on his mercy. There was no other salvation, that
he knew.

But he was not certain that the master would conceive the matter in its
finer aspect, or that everything would turn out for the best; he had
given up believing in fairy-tales. Then he would simply be turned away,
or perhaps be sent to the courthouse, and it would be all up with him.

Pelle resolved to keep it to himself; and for many days he went about
suffering from a sense of his own wickedness. But then necessity
gripped him by the throat and brushed all else aside; and in order to
procure himself the most necessary things he was forced to resort to
the dangerous expedient of stating, when the master gave him money to
buy anything, that it was to be put down. And then one day it was all
up with him. The others were ready to pull down the house about his
ears; they threw his things out of the garret and called him a filthy
beast. Pelle wept; he was quite convinced that not he was the guilty
person, but Peter, who was always keeping company with the nastiest
women, but he could get no hearing. He hurried away, with the resolves
that he would never come back.

On the dunes he was captured by Emil and Peter, who had been sent out
after him by old Jeppe. He did not want to go back with them, but they
threw him down and dragged him back, one taking his head and one his
legs. People came to the door and laughed and asked questions, and the
other two gave their explanation of the matter, which was a terrible
disgrace for Pelle.

And then he fell ill. He lay under the tiled roof raving with fever;
they had thrown his bed into the loft. “What, isn’t he up yet?” said
Jeppe, astounded, when he came in to the workshop. “No? Well, he’ll
soon get up when he gets hungry.” It was no joke to take a sick
apprentice his meals in bed. But Pelle did not come down.

Once the young master threw all considerations overboard and took some
food up to him. “You’re making yourself ridiculous,” sneered Jeppe;
“you’ll never be able to manage people like that!” And Madam scolded.
But Master Andres whistled until he was out of hearing.

Poor Pelle lay there, in delirium; his little head was full of fancies,
more than it would hold. But now the reaction set in, and he lay there
stuffing himself with all that was brought him.

The young master sat upstairs a great deal and received enlightenment
on many points. It was not his nature to do anything energetically, but
he arranged that Pelle’s washing should be done in the house, and he
took care that Lasse should be sent for.




VIII


Jeppe was related to about half the island, but he was not greatly
interested in disentangling his relationship. He could easily go right
back to the founder of the family, and trace the generations through
two centuries, and follow the several branches of the family from
country to town and over the sea and back again, and show that Andres
and the judge must be cousins twice removed. But if any insignificant
person asked him: “How was it, then—weren’t my father and you first
cousins?” he would answer brusquely, “Maybe, but the soup grows too
thin after a time. This relationship!”

“Then you and I, good Lord! are second cousins, and you are related to
the judge as well,” Master Andres would say. He did not grudge people
any pleasure they could derive from the facts of relationship. Poor
people regarded him gratefully—they said he had kind eyes; it was a
shame that he should not be allowed to live.

Jeppe was the oldest employer in the town, and among the shoemakers his
workshop was the biggest. He was able, too, or rather he had been, and
he still possessed the manual skill peculiar to the old days. When it
came to a ticklish job he would willingly show them how to get on with
it, or plan some contrivance to assist them. Elastic-sided boots and
lace-up boots had superseded the old footwear, but honest skill still
meant an honest reputation. And if some old fellow wanted a pair of
Wellingtons or Bluchers of leather waterproofed with grease, instead of
by some new-fangled devilry, he must needs go to Jeppe—no one else
could shape an instep as he could. And when it came to handling the
heavy dressed leathers for sea-boots there was no one like Jeppe. He
was obstinate, and rigidly opposed to everything new, where everybody
else was led away by novelty. In this he was peculiarly the
representative of the old days, and people respected him as such.

The apprentices alone did not respect him. They did everything they
could to vex him and to retaliate on him for being such a severe
task-master. They all laid themselves out to mystify him, speaking of
the most matter-of-fact things in dark and covert hints, in order to
make old Jeppe suspicious, and if he spied upon them and caught them at
something which proved to be nothing at all they had a great day of it.

“What does this mean? Where are you going without permission?” asked
Jeppe, if one of them got up to go into the court; he was always
forgetting that times had altered. They did not answer, and then he
would fly into a passion. “I’ll have you show me respect!” he would
cry, stamping on the floor until the dust eddied round him. Master
Andres would slowly raise his head. “What’s the matter with you this
time, father?” he would ask wearily. Then Jeppe would break out into
fulminations against the new times.

If Master Andres and the journeyman were not present, the apprentices
amused themselves by making the old man lose his temper; and this was
not difficult, as he saw hostility in everything. Then he would snatch
up a knee-strap and begin to rain blows upon the sinner. At the same
time he would make the most extraordinary grimaces and give vent to a
singular gurgling sound. “There, take that, although it grieves me to
use harsh measures!” he would mew. “And that, too—and that! You’ve got
to go through with it, if you want to enter the craft!” Then he would
give the lad something that faintly resembled a kick, and would stand
there struggling for breath. “You’re a troublesome youngster—you’ll
allow that?” “Yes, my mother used to break a broomstick over my head
every other day!” replied Peter, the rogue, snorting. “There, you see
you are! But it may all turn out for the best even now. The
foundation’s not so bad!” Jeppe doddered to and fro, his hands behind
his back. The rest of the day he was inclined to solemnity, and did his
best to obliterate all remembrance of the punishment. “It was only for
your own good!” he would say, in a propitiatory tone.

Jeppe was first cousin to the crazy Anker, but he preferred not to lay
claim to the fact; the man could not help being mad, but he made his
living, disgracefully enough, by selling sand in the streets—a
specialist in his way. Day by day one saw Anker’s long, thin figure in
the streets, with a sackful of sand slung over his sloping shoulders;
he wore a suit of blue twill and white woollen stockings, and his face
was death-like. He was quite fleshless. “That comes of all his
digging,” people said. “Look at his assistant!”

He never appeared in the workshop with his sack of sand; he was afraid
of Jeppe, who was now the oldest member of the family. Elsewhere he
went in and out everywhere with his clattering wooden shoes; and people
bought of him, as they must have sand for their floors, and his was as
good as any other. He needed next to nothing for his livelihood; people
maintained that he never ate anything, but lived on his own vitals.
With the money he received he bought materials for the “New Time,” and
what was left he threw away, in his more exalted moments, from the top
of his high stairs. The street-urchins always came running up when the
word went round that the madness about the “new time” was attacking
him.

He and Bjerregrav had been friends as boys. Formerly they had been
inseparable, and neither of them was willing to do his duty and marry,
although each was in a position to keep a wife and children. At an age
when others were thinking about how to find favor with the womenfolk,
these two were running about with their heads full of rubbish which
enraged people. At that time a dangerous revolutionist was living with
Bjerregrav’s brother; he had spent many years on Christiansö, but then
the Government had sent him to spend the rest of his term of captivity
on Bornholm. Dampe was his name; Jeppe had known him when an apprentice
in Copenhagen; and his ambition was to overthrow God and king. This
ambition of his did not profit him greatly; he was cast down like a
second Lucifer, and only kept his head on his shoulders by virtue of an
act of mercy. The two young people regarded him as then justification,
and he turned their heads with his venomous talk, so that they began to
ponder over things which common folk do better to leave alone.
Bjerregrav came through this phase with a whole skin, but Anker paid
the penalty by losing his wits. Although they both had a comfortable
competence, they pondered above all things over the question of
poverty—as though there was anything particular to be discovered about
that!

All this was many years ago; it was about the time when the craze for
freedom had broken out in the surrounding nations with fratricide and
rebellion. Matters were not so bad on the island, for neither Anker nor
Bjerregrav was particularly warlike; yet everybody could see that the
town was not behind the rest of the world. Here the vanity of the town
was quite in agreement with Master Jeppe, but for the rest he roundly
condemned the whole movement. He always looked ready to fall upon
Bjerregrav tooth and nail if the conversation turned on Anker’s
misfortune.

“Dampe!” said Jeppe scornfully, “he has turned both your heads!”

“That’s a lie!” stammered Bjerregrav. “Anker went wrong later than
that—after King Frederick granted us liberty. And it’s only that I’m
not very capable; I have my wits, thank God!” Bjerregrav solemnly
raised the fingers of his right hand to his lips, a gesture which had
all the appearance of a surviving vestige of the sign of the cross.

“You and your wits!” hissed Jeppe contemptuously. “You, who throw your
money away over the first tramp you meet! And you defend an abominable
agitator, who never goes out by daylight like other people, but goes
gallivanting about at night!”

“Yes, because he’s ashamed of humanity; he wants to make the world more
beautiful!” Bjerregrav blushed with embarrassment when he had said
this.

But Jeppe was beside himself with contempt. “So gaol-birds are ashamed
of honest people! So that’s why he takes his walks at night! Well, the
world would of course be a more beautiful place if it were filled with
people like you and Dampe!”

The pitiful thing about Anker was that he was such a good craftsman. He
had inherited the watchmaker’s trade from his father and grandfather,
and his Bornholm striking-clocks were known all over the world; orders
came to him from Funen as well as from the capital. But when the
Constitution was granted he behaved like a child—as though people had
not always been free on Bornholm! Now, he said, the new time had begun,
and in its honor he intended, in his insane rejoicing, to make an
ingenious clock which should show the moon and the date and the month
and year. Being an excellent craftsman, he completed it successfully,
but then it entered his head that the clock ought to show the weather
as well. Like so many whom God had endowed with His gifts, he ventured
too far and sought to rival God Himself. But here the brakes were
clapped on, and the whole project was nearly derailed. For a long time
he took it greatly to heart, but when the work was completed he
rejoiced. He was offered a large price for his masterpiece, and Jeppe
bade him close with the offer, but he answered crazily—for he was now
definitely insane—“This cannot be bought with money. Everything I made
formerly had its value in money, but not this. Can any one buy _me_?”

For a long time he was in a dilemma as to what he should do with his
work, but then one day he came to Jeppe, saying: “Now I know; the best
ought to have the clock. I shall send it to the King. He has given us
the new time, and this clock will tell the new time.” Anker sent the
clock away, and after some time he received two hundred thalers, paid
him through the Treasury.

This was a large sum of money, but Anker was not satisfied; he had
expected a letter of thanks from the King’s own hand. He behaved very
oddly about this, and everything went wrong with him; over and over
again trouble built its nest with him. The money he gave to the poor,
and he lamented that the new time had not yet arrived. So he sank even
deeper into his madness, and however hard Jeppe scolded him and
lectured him it did no good. Finally he went so far as to fancy that he
was appointed to create the new time, and then he became cheerful once
more.

Three or four families of the town—very poor people, so demoralized
that the sects would have nothing to do with them—gathered around
Anker, and heard the voice of God in his message. “_They_ lose nothing
by sitting under a crazy man,” saw Jeppe scornfully. Anker himself paid
no attention to them, but went his own way. Presently he was a king’s
son in disguise, and was betrothed to the eldest daughter of the
King—and the new time was coming. Or when his mood was quieter, he
would sit and work at an infallible clock which would not show the
time; it would _be_ the time—the new time itself.

He went to and fro in the workshop, in order to let Master Andres see
the progress of his invention; he had conceived a blind affection for
the young master. Every year, about the first of January, Master Andres
had to write a letter for him, a love-letter to the king’s daughter,
and had also to take it upon him to despatch it to the proper quarter;
and from time to time Anker would run in to ask whether an answer had
yet arrived; and at the New Year a fresh love-letter was sent off.
Master Andres had them all put away.

One evening—it was nearly time to knock off—there was a thundering
knock on the workshop door, and the sound of some one humming a march
drifted in from the entry. “Can you not open?” cried a solemn voice:
“the Prince is here!”

“Pelle, open the door quick!” said the master. Pelle flung the door
wide open, and Anker marched in. He wore a paper hat with a waving
plume, and epaulettes made out of paper frills; his face was beaming,
and he stood there with his hand to his hat as he allowed the march to
die away. The young master rose gaily and shouldered arms with his
stick.

“Your Majesty,” he said, “how goes it with the new time?”

“Not at all well!” replied Anker, becoming serious. “The pendulums that
should keep the whole in motion are failing me.” He stood still, gazing
at the door; his brain was working mysteriously.

“Ought they to be made of gold?” The master’s eyes were twinkling, but
he was earnestness personified.

“They ought to be made of eternity,” said Anker unwillingly, “and first
it has got to be invented.”

For a long time he stood there, staring in front of him with his gray,
empty eyes, without speaking a word. He did not move; only his temples
went on working as though some worm was gnawing at them and seeking its
way out.

Suddenly it became uncomfortable; his silence was sometimes like a
living darkness that surrounded those about him. Pelle sat there with
palpitating heart.

Then the lunatic came forward and bent over the young master’s ear.
“Has an answer come from the king?” he asked, in a penetrating whisper.

“No, not yet; but I expect it every day. You can be quite easy,” the
master whispered back. Anker stood for a few moments in silence; he
looked as though he must be meditating, but after his own fashion. Then
he turned round and marched out of the workshop.

“Go after him and see he gets home all right,” said the young master.
His voice sounded mourn

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