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Pelle the Conqueror — Volume 03

by Martin Andersen Nexø · English · Gutenberg #7793 · 741,378 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pelle the Conqueror — Volume 03

Author: Martin Andersen Nexø

Translator: Bernard Miall


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7793]
                Most recently updated: July 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7793

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PELLE THE CONQUEROR — VOLUME 03 ***




Pelle the Conqueror

THE GREAT STRUGGLE

by Martin Andersen Nexö

Translated from the Danish by Bernard Miall.




Pelle the Conqueror




III. THE GREAT STRUGGLE




I


A swarm of children was playing on the damp floor of the shaft. They
hung from the lower portions of the timber-work, or ran in and out
between the upright supports, humming tunes, with bread-and-dripping in
their hands; or they sat on the ground and pushed themselves forward
across the sticky flagstones. The air hung clammy and raw, as it does
in an old well, and already it had made the little voices husky, and
had marked their faces with the scars of scrofula. Yet out of the
tunnel- like passage which led to the street there blew now and again a
warm breath of air and the fragrance of budding trees—from the world
that lay behind those surrounding walls.

They had finished playing “Bro-bro-brille,” for the last rider had
entered the black cauldron; and Hansel and Gretel had crept safely out
of the dwarf Vinslev’s den, across the sewer-grating, and had reached
the pancake-house, which, marvelously enough, had also a grating in
front of the door, through which one could thrust a stick or a cabbage-
stalk, in order to stab the witch. Sticks of wood and cabbage-stalks
were to be found in plenty in the dustbins near the pancake-house, and
they knew very well who the witch was! Now and again she would pop up
out of the cellar and scatter the whole crowd with her kitchen tongs!
It was almost a little too lifelike; even the smell of pancakes came
drifting down from where the well-to-do Olsens lived, so that one could
hardly call it a real fairy tale. But then perhaps the dwarf Vinslev
would come out of his den, and would once again tell them the story of
how he had sailed off with the King’s gold and sunk it out yonder, in
the King’s Deep, when the Germans were in the land. A whole ship’s crew
took out the King’s treasure, but not one save Vinslev knew where it
was sunk, and even he did not know now. A terrible secret that, such as
well might make a man a bit queer in the head. He would explain the
whole chart on his double-breasted waistcoat; he had only to steer from
this button to that, and then down yonder, and he was close above the
treasure. But now some of the buttons had fallen off, and he could no
longer make out the chart. Day by day the children helped him to trace
it; this was an exciting bit of work, for the King was getting
impatient!

There were other wonderful things to do; for instance, one could lie
flat down on the slippery flagstones and play Hanne’s game—the “Glory”
game. You turned your eyes from the darkness down below, looking up
through the gloomy shaft at the sky overhead, which floated there
blazing with light, and then you suddenly looked down again, so that
everything was quite dark. And in the darkness floated blue and yellow
rings of color, where formerly there had been nothing but dustbins and
privies. This dizzy flux of colors before the eyes was the journey far
out to the land of happiness, in search of all the things that cannot
be told. “I can see something myself, and I know quite well what it is,
but I’m just not going to tell,” they murmured, blinking mysteriously
up into the blue.

However, one could have too much of a good thing…. But the round
grating under the timbers yonder, where Hanne’s father drowned himself,
was a thing one never grew weary of. The depths were forever bubbling
upward, filling the little children with a secret horror; and the half-
grown girls would stand a-straddle over the grating, shuddering at the
cold breath that came murmuring up from below. The grating was sure
enough the way down to hell, and if you gazed long enough you could see
the faintest glimmer of the inky stream that was flowing down below.
Every moment it sent its putrid breath up into your face; that was the
Devil, who sat panting down there in a corner. If you turned your eyes
away from the depths the twilight of the well had turned to brightest
day, so you could make the world light or dark just as you wished.

A few children always lay there, on all fours, gazing down with anxious
faces; and all summer through, directly over the grating, hung a cloud
of midges, swaying in the breath of the depths. They would rise to a
certain height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a
juggler’s balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole
swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like
a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little
girls would gaze at it, lift their petticoats, and take a few graceful
steps. Olsen’s Elvira had learned her first dance-steps here, and now
she was dancing respectable citizens into the poor-house. And the
furniture broker’s daughter was in Petersburg, and was _almost_ a Grand
Duchess!

On the walls of the narrow shaft projecting porches hung crazily, so
that they left only a small free space, and here the clothes-lines ran
to and fro, loaded with dishclouts and children’s clothing. The
decaying wooden staircases ran zig-zag up the walls, disappearing into
the projecting porches and coming out again, until they reached the
very garrets.

From the projecting porches and the galleries, doors led into the
various tenements, or to long corridors that connected the inner
portions of the house. Only in Pipman’s side there were neither porches
nor galleries, from the second story upward; time had devoured them, so
that the stairs alone remained in place. The ends of the joists stuck
out of the wall like decaying tooth stumps, and a rope hung from above,
on which one could obtain a hold. It was black and smooth from the grip
of many hands.

On one of those hot June days when the heavens shone like a blazing
fire above the rift overhead, the heavy, mouldering timbers came to
life again, as if their forest days had returned. People swarmed in and
out on the stairs, shadows came and went, and an incessant chattering
filled the twilight. From porch to porch dropped the sour-smelling suds
from the children’s washing, until at last it reached the ground, where
the children were playing by the sluggish rivulets which ran from the
gutters. The timbers groaned continually, like ancient boughs that rub
together, and a clammy smell as of earth and moist vegetation saturated
the air, while all that one touched wore a coating of slime, as in
token of its exuberant fertility.

One’s gaze could not travel a couple of steps before it was checked by
wooden walls, but one felt conscious of the world that lay behind them.
When the doors of the long passages opened and shut, one heard the
rumor of the innumerable creatures that lived in the depths of the
“Ark”; the crying of little children, the peculiar fidgeting sound of
marred, eccentric individuals, for many a whole life’s history unfolded
itself within there, undisturbed, never daring the light of day. On
Pipman’s side the waste-pipes stuck straight out of the wall, like
wood-goblins grinning from the thicket with wide-open mouths, and long
gray beards, which bred rose-pink earthworms, and from time to time
fell with a heavy smack into the yard. Green hanging bushes grew out of
holes in the wall. The waste water trickled through them and dripped
continually as though from the wet locks of the forest. Inside, in the
greenish, dripping darkness, sat curiously marked toads, like little
water-nymphs, each in her grotto, shining with unwholesome humidity.
And up among the timbers of the third story hung Hanne’s canary,
singing quite preposterously, its beak pointing up toward the spot of
fiery light overhead. Across the floor of the courtyard went an endless
procession of people, light-shy creatures who emerged from the womb of
the “Ark” or disappeared into it. Most of them were women, weirdly
clad, unwholesomely pale, but with a layer of grime as though the
darkness had worked into their skins, with drowsy steps and fanatical,
glittering eyes.

Little old men, who commonly lay in their dark corners waiting for
death, came hobbling out on the galleries, lifted their noses toward
the blazing speck of sky overhead, and sneezed three times. “That’s the
sun!” they told one another, delighted. “Artishu! One don’t catch cold
so easy in winter!”




II


High up, out of Pipman’s garret, a young man stepped out onto the
platform. He stood there a moment turning his smiling face toward the
bright heavens overhead. Then he lowered his head and ran down the
break-neck stairs, without holding on by the rope. Under his arm he
carried something wrapped in a blue cloth.

“Just look at the clown! Laughing right into the face of the sun as
though there was no such thing as blindness!” said the women, thrusting
their heads out of window. “But then, of course, he’s from the country.
And now he’s going to deliver his work. Lord, how long is he going to
squat up there and earn bread for that sweater? The red’ll soon go from
his cheeks if he stops there much longer!” And they looked after him
anxiously.

The children down in the courtyard raised their heads when they heard
his steps above them.

“Have you got some nice leather for us to-day, Pelle?” they cried,
clutching at his legs.

He brought out of his pockets some little bits of patent-leather and
red imitation morocco.

“That’s from the Emperor’s new slippers,” he said, as he shared the
pieces among the children. Then the youngsters laughed until their
throats began to wheeze.

Pelle was just the same as of old, except that he was more upright and
elastic in his walk, and had grown a little fair moustache. His
protruding ears had withdrawn themselves a little, as though they were
no longer worked so hard. His blue eyes still accepted everything as
good coin, though they now had a faint expression that seemed to say
that all that happened was no longer to their liking. His “lucky curls”
still shone with a golden light.

The narrow streets lay always brooding in a dense, unbearable
atmosphere that never seemed to renew itself. The houses were grimy and
crazy; where a patch of sunlight touched a window there were stained
bed- clothes hung out to dry. Up one of the side streets was an
ambulance wagon, surrounded by women and children who were waiting
excitedly for the bearers to appear with their uneasy burden, and Pelle
joined them; he always had to take part in everything.

It was not quite the shortest way which he took. The capital was quite
a new world to him; nothing was the same as at home; here a hundred
different things would happen in the course of the day, and Pelle was
willing enough to begin all over again; and he still felt his old
longing to take part in it all and to assimilate it all.

In the narrow street leading down to the canal a thirteen-year-old girl
placed herself provocatively in his way. “Mother’s ill,” she said,
pointing up a dark flight of steps. “If you’ve got any money, come
along!” He was actually on the point of following her, when he
discovered that the old women who lived in the street were flattening
their noses against their windowpanes. “One has to be on one’s guard
here!” he told himself, at least for the hundredth time. The worst of
it was that it was so easy to forget the necessity.

He strolled along the canal-side. The old quay-wall, the apple-barges,
and the granaries with the high row of hatchways overhead and the
creaking pulleys right up in the gables awakened memories of home.
Sometimes, too, there were vessels from home lying here, with cargoes
of fish or pottery, and then he was able to get news. He wrote but
seldom. There was little success to be reported; just now he had to
make his way, and he still owed Sort for his passage-money.

But it would soon come…. Pelle hadn’t the least doubt as to the future.
The city was so monstrously large and incalculable; it seemed to have
undertaken the impossible; but there could be no doubt of such an
obvious matter of course as that he should make his way. Here wealth
was simply lying in great heaps, and the poor man too could win it if
only he grasped at it boldly enough. Fortune here was a golden bird,
which could be captured by a little adroitness; the endless chances
were like a fairy tale. And one day Pelle would catch the bird; when
and how he left confidingly to chance.

In one of the side streets which ran out of the Market Street there was
a crowd; a swarm of people filled the whole street in front of the
iron- foundry, shouting eagerly to the blackened iron-workers, who
stood grouped together by the gateway, looking at one another
irresolutely.

“What’s up here?” asked Pelle.

“This is up—that they can’t earn enough to live on,” said an old man.
“And the manufacturers won’t increase their pay. So they’ve taken to
some new-fangled fool’s trick which they say has been brought here from
abroad, where they seem to have done well with it. That’s to say, they
all suddenly chuck up their work and rush bareheaded into the street
and make a noise, and then back to work again, just like school
children in play-time. They’ve already been in and out two or three
times, and now half of them’s outside and the others are at work, and
the gate is locked. Nonsense! A lot that’s going to help their wages!
No; in my time we used to ask for them prettily, and we always got
something, too. But, anyhow, we’re only working-folks, and where’s it
going to come from? And now, what’s more, they’ve lost their whole
week’s wages!”

The workmen were at a loss as to what they should do; they stood there
gazing mechanically up at the windows of the counting-house, from which
all decisions were commonly issued. Now and again an impatient shudder
ran through the crowd, as it made threats toward the windows and
demanded what was owing it. “He won’t give us the wages that we’ve
honestly earned, the tyrant!” they cried. “A nice thing, truly, when
one’s got a wife and kids at home, and on a Saturday afternoon, too!
What a shark, to take the bread out of their mouths! Won’t the gracious
gentleman give us an answer—just his greeting, so that we can take it
home with us?—just his kind regards, or else they’ll have to go hungry
to bed!” And they laughed, a low, snarling laugh, spat on the pavement,
and once more turned their masterless faces up to the counting-house
windows.

Proposals were showered upon them, proposals of every kind; and they
were as wise as they were before. “What the devil are we to do if
there’s no one who can lead us?” they said dejectedly, and they stood
staring again. That was the only thing they knew how to do.

“Choose a few of your comrades and send them in to negotiate with the
manufacturer,” said a gentleman standing by.

“Hear, hear! Forward with Eriksen! He understands the deaf-and-dumb
alphabet!” they shouted. The stranger shrugged his shoulders and
departed.

A tall, powerful workman approached the group. “Have you got your
killer with you, Eriksen?” cried one, and Eriksen turned on the
staircase and exhibited his clenched fist.

“Look out!” they shouted at the windows. “Look out we don’t set fire to
the place!” Then all was suddenly silent, and the heavy house-door was
barred.

Pelle listened with open mouth. He did not know what they wanted, and
they hardly knew, themselves; none the less, there was a new note in
all this! These people didn’t beg for what they wanted; they preferred
to use their fists in order to get it, and they didn’t get drunk first,
like the strong man Eriksen and the rest at home. “This is the
capital!” he thought, and again he congratulated himself for having
come thither.

A squad of policemen came marching up. “Room there!” they cried, and
began to hustle the crowd in order to disperse it. The workmen would
not be driven away. “Not before we’ve got our wages!” they said, and
they pressed back to the gates again. “This is where we work, and we’re
going to have our rights, that we are!” Then the police began to drive
the onlookers away; at each onset they fell back a few steps,
hesitating, and then stood still, laughing. Pelle received a blow in
the back; he turned quickly round, stared for a moment into the red
face of a policeman, and went his way, muttering and feeling his back.

“Did he hit you?” asked an old woman. “Devil take him, the filthy lout!
He’s the son of the mangling-woman what lives in the house here, and
now he takes up the cudgels against his own people! Devil take him!”

“Move on!” ordered the policeman, winking, as he pushed her aside with
his body. She retired to her cellar, and stood there using her tongue
to such purpose that the saliva flew from her toothless mouth.

“Yes, you go about bullying old people who used to carry you in their
arms and put dry clouts on you when you didn’t know enough to ask…. Are
you going to use your truncheon on me, too? Wouldn’t you like to,
Fredrik? Take your orders from the great folks, and then come yelping
at us, because we aren’t fine enough for you!” She was shaking with
rage; her yellowish gray hair had become loosened and was tumbling
about her face; she was a perfect volcano.

The police marched across the Knippel Bridge, escorted by a swarm of
street urchins, who yelled and whistled between their fingers. From
time to time a policeman would turn round; then the whole swarm took to
its heels, but next moment it was there again. The police were nervous:
their fingers were opening and closing in their longing to strike out.
They looked like a party of criminals being escorted to the court-house
by the extreme youth of the town, and the people were laughing.

Pelle kept step on the pavement. He was in a wayward mood. Somewhere
within him he felt a violent impulse to give way to that absurd longing
to leap into the air and beat his head upon the pavement which was the
lingering result of his illness. But now it assumed the guise of
insolent strength. He saw quite plainly how big Eriksen ran roaring at
the bailiff, and how he was struck to the ground, and thereafter
wandered about an idiot. Then the “Great Power” rose up before him,
mighty in his strength, and was hurled to his death; they had all been
like dogs, ready to fall on him, and to fawn upon everything that smelt
of their superiors and the authorities. And he himself, Pelle, had had
a whipping at the court-house, and people had pointed the finger at
him, just as they pointed at the “Great Power.” “See, there he goes
loafing, the scum of humanity!” Yes, he had learned what righteousness
was, and what mischief it did. But now he had escaped from the old
excommunication, and had entered a new world, where respectable men
never turned to look after the police, but left such things to the
street urchins and old women. There was a great satisfaction in this;
and Pelle wanted to take part in this world; he longed to understand
it.

It was Saturday, and there was a crowd of journeymen and seamstresses
in the warehouse, who had come to deliver their work. The foreman went
round as usual, grumbling over the work, and before he paid for it he
would pull at it and crumple it so that it lost its shape, and then he
made the most infernal to-do because it was not good enough. Now and
again he would make a deduction from the week’s wages, averring that
the material was ruined; and he was especially hard on the women, who
stood there not daring to contradict him. People said he cheated all
the seamstresses who would not let him have his way with them.

Pelle stood there boiling with rage. “If he says one word to me, we
shall come to blows!” he thought. But the foreman took the work without
glancing at it—ah, yes, that was from Pipman!

But while he was paying for it a thick-set man came forward out of a
back room; this was the court shoemaker, Meyer himself. He had been a
poor young man with barely a seat to his breeches when he came to
Copenhagen from Germany as a wandering journeyman. He did not know much
about his craft, but he knew how to make others work for him! He did
not answer the respectful greetings of the workers, but stationed
himself before Pelle, his belly bumping against the counter, wheezing
loudly through his nose, and gazing at the young man.

“New man?” he asked, at length. “That’s Pipman’s assistant,” replied
the foreman, smiling. “Ah! Pipman—he knows the trick, eh? You do the
work and he takes the money and drinks it, eh?” The master shoemaker
laughed as at an excellent joke.

Pelle turned red. “I should like to be independent as soon as
possible,” he said.

“Yes, yes, you can talk it over with the foreman; but no unionists
here, mind that! We’ve no use for those folks.”

Pelle pressed his lips together and pushed the cloth wrapper into the
breast of his coat in silence. It was all he could do not to make some
retort; he couldn’t approve of that prohibition. He went out quickly
into Kobmager Street and turned out of the Coal Market into Hauser
Street, where, as he knew, the president of the struggling Shoemakers’
Union was living. He found a little cobbler occupying a dark cellar.
This must be the man he sought; so he ran down the steps. He had not
understood that the president of the Union would be found in such a
miserable dwelling-place.

Under the window sat a hollow-cheeked man bowed over his bench, in the
act of sewing a new sole on to a worn-out shoe. The legs of the
passers- by were just above his head. At the back of the room a woman
stood cooking something on the stove; she had a little child on her
arm, while two older children lay on the ground playing with some
lasts. It was frightfully hot and oppressive.

“Good day, comrade!” said Pelle. “Can I become a member of the Union?”

The man looked up, astonished. Something like a smile passed over his
mournful face.

“Can you indulge yourself so far?” he asked slowly. “It may prove a
costly pleasure. Who d’you work for, if I may ask?”

“For Meyer, in Kobmager Street.”

“Then you’ll be fired as soon as he gets to know of it!”

“I know that sure enough; all the same, I want to join the Union. He’s
not going to tell me what I can and what I can’t do. Besides, we’ll
soon settle with him.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But there’s too few of us. You’ll be
starved out of the Union as soon as you’ve joined.”

“We must see about getting a bit more numerous,” said Pelle cheerfully,
“and then one fine day we’ll shut up shop for him!”

A spark of life gleamed in the tired eyes of the president. “Yes, devil
take him, if we could only make him shut up shop!” he cried, shaking
his clenched fist in the air. “He tramples on all those hereabouts that
make money for him; it’s a shame that I should sit here now and have
come down to cobbling; and he keeps the whole miserable trade in
poverty! Ah, what a revenge, comrade!” The blood rushed into his hollow
cheeks until they burned, and then he began to cough. “Petersen!” said
the woman anxiously, supporting his back. “Petersen!” She sighed and
shook her head, while she helped him to struggle through his fit of
coughing. “When the talk’s about the Court shoemaker Petersen always
gets like one possessed,” she said, when he had overcome it. “He really
don’t know what he’s doing. No—if everybody would only be as clever as
Meyer and just look after his own business, then certain people would
be sitting there in good health and earning good money!”

“Hold your tongue!” said Petersen angrily. “You’re a woman—you know
nothing about the matter.” At which the woman went back to her cooking.

Petersen filled out a paper, and Pelle signed his name to it and paid
his subscription for a week. “And now you must try to break away from
that bloodsucker as soon as possible!” said Petersen earnestly. “A
respectable workman can’t put up with such things!”

“I was forced into it,” said Pelle. “And I learned nothing of this at
home. But now that’s over and done with.”

“Good, comrade! There’s my hand on it—and good luck to you! We must
work the cause up, and perhaps we shall succeed yet; I tell you, you’ve
given me back my courage! Now you persuade as many as you can, and
don’t miss the meetings; they’ll be announced in _The Working Man_.” He
shook Pelle’s hand eagerly. Pelle took a brisk walk out to the
northward. He felt pleased and in the best of spirits.

It was about the time when the workers are returning home; they drifted
along singly and in crowds, stooping and loitering, shuffling a little
after the fatigue of the day. There was a whole new world out here,
quite different from that of the “Ark.” The houses were new and
orderly, built with level and plumb-line; the men went their appointed
ways, and one could see at a glance what each one was.

This quarter was the home of socialism and the new ideas. Pelle often
strolled out thither on holidays in order to get a glimpse of these
things; what they were he didn’t know, and he hadn’t dared to thrust
himself forward, a stranger, as he still felt himself to be there; but
it all attracted him powerfully. However, to-day he forgot that he was
a stranger, and he went onward with a long, steady stride that took him
over the bridge and into North Bridge Street. Now he himself was a
trades unionist; he was like all these others, he could go straight up
to any one if he wished and shake him by the hand. There was a strong
and peculiar appeal about the bearing of these people, as though they
had been soldiers. Involuntarily he fell into step with them, and felt
himself stronger on that account, supported by a feeling of community.
He felt solemnly happy, as on his birthday; and he had a feeling as
though he must do something. The public houses were open, and the
workmen were entering them in little groups. But he had no desire to
sit there and pour spirits down his throat. One could do that sort of
thing when everything had gone to the dogs.

He stationed himself in front of a pastry cook’s window, eagerly
occupied in comparing the different kinds of cakes. He wanted to go
inside and expend five and twenty öre in celebration of the day. But
first of all the whole affair must be properly and methodically planned
out, so that he should not be disappointed afterward. He must, of
course, have something that he had never eaten before, and that was
just the difficult part. Many of the cakes were hollow inside too, and
the feast would have to serve as his evening meal.

It was by no means easy, and just as Pelle was on the point of solving
the difficulty he was startled out of the whole affair by a slap on the
shoulder. Behind him was Morten, smiling at him with that kindly smile
of his, as though nothing had gone wrong between them. Pelle was
ashamed of himself and could not find a word to say. He had been
unfaithful to his only friend; and it was not easy for him to account
for his behavior. But Morten didn’t want any explanations; he simply
shook Pelle by the hand. His pale face was shining with joy. It still
betrayed that trace of suffering which was so touching, and Pelle had
to surrender at discretion. “Well, to think we should meet here!” he
cried, and laughed good-naturedly.

Morten was working at the pastry cook’s, and had been out; now he was
going in to get some sleep before the night’s work. “But come in with
me; we can at least sit and talk for half an hour; and you shall have a
cake too.” He was just the same as in the old days.

They went in through the gate and up the back stairs; Morten went into
the shop and returned with five “Napoleons.” “You see I know your
taste,” he said laughing.

Morten’s room was right up under the roof; it was a kind of turret-room
with windows on both sides. One could look out over the endless mass of
roofs, which lay in rows, one behind the other, like the hotbeds in a
monstrous nursery garden. From the numberless flues and chimneys rose a
thin bluish smoke, which lay oppressively over all. Due south lay the
Kalvebod Strand, and further to the west the hill of Frederiksberg with
its castle rose above the mist. On the opposite side lay the Common,
and out beyond the chimneys of the limekilns glittered the Sound with
its many sails. “That’s something like a view, eh?” said Morten
proudly.

Pelle remained staring; he went from one window to another and said
nothing. This was the city, the capital, for which he and all other
poor men from the farthest corners of the land, had longed so
boundlessly; the Fortunate Land, where they were to win free of
poverty!

He had wandered through it in all directions, had marvelled at its
palaces and its treasures, and had found it to be great beyond all
expectation. Everything here was on the grand scale; what men built one
day they tore down again on the morrow, in order to build something
more sumptuous. So much was going on here, surely the poor man might
somehow make his fortune out of it all!

And yet he had had no true conception of the whole. Now for the first
time he saw the City! It lay there, a mighty whole, outspread at his
feet, with palaces, churches, and factory chimneys rising above the
mass of houses. Down in the street flowed a black, unending stream, a
stream of people continually renewed, as though from a mighty ocean
that could never be exhausted. They all had some object; one could not
see it, but really they were running along like ants, each bearing his
little burden to the mighty heap of precious things, which was gathered
together from all the ends of the earth.

“There are millions in all this!” said Pelle at last, drawing a deep
breath. “Yes,” said Morten standing beside him. “And it’s all put
together by human hands—by the hands of working people!”

Pelle started. That was a wonderful idea. But it was true enough, if
one thought about it.

“But now it has fallen into very different hands!” he exclaimed,
laughing. “Yes, they’ve got it away from us by trickery, just as one
wheedles a child out of a thing,” cried Morten morosely. “But there’s
no real efficiency in anything that children do—and the poor have never
been anything more than children! Only now they are beginning to grow
up, look you, and one fine day they’ll ask for their own back.”

“It would go ill with us if we went and tried to take it for
ourselves,” said Pelle.

“Not if we were united about it—but we are only the many.”

Pelle listened; it had never occurred to him that the question of
organization was so stupendous. Men combined, sure enough, but it was
to secure better conditions in their trade.

“You are like your father!” he said. “He always had big ideas, and
wanted to get his rights. I was thinking about him a little while ago,
how he never let himself be trampled on. Then you used to be ashamed of
him; but….”

Morten hung his head. “I couldn’t bear the contempt of respectable
folks,” he said half under his breath. “I understood nothing beyond the
fact that he was destroying our home and bringing disgrace on us. And I
was horribly afraid, too, when he began to lay about him; I wake up
sometimes now quite wet and cold with sweat, when I’ve been dreaming of
my childhood. But now I’m proud that I’m the son of the ‘Great Power.’
I haven’t much strength myself; yet perhaps I’ll do something to
surprise the city folks after all.”

“And I too!”

Power! It was really extraordinary that Morten should be the son of the
giant stone-cutter, so quiet and delicate was he. He had not yet quite
recovered the strength of which Bodil had robbed him in his early
boyhood; it was as though that early abuse was still wasting him.

He had retained his girlish love of comfort. The room was nicely kept;
and there were actually flowers in a vase beneath the looking-glass.
Flowers, good Lord! “How did you get those?” asked Pelle.

“Bought them, of course!”

Pelle had to laugh. Was there another man in the world who would pay
money for flowers?

But he did not laugh at the books. There seemed to be a sort of
mysterious connection between them and Morten’s peculiar, still energy.
He had now a whole shelf full. Pelle took a few down and looked into
them.

“What sort of stuff is this, now?” he asked doubtfully. “It looks like
learning!”

“Those are books about us, and how the new conditions are coming, and
how we must make ready for them.”

“Ah, you’ve got the laugh of me,” said Pelle. “In a moment of
depression you’ve got your book-learning to help you along. But we
other chaps can just sit where we are and kick our heels.” Morten
turned to him hastily.

“That’s the usual complaint!” he cried irritably. “A man spits on his
own class and wants to get into another one. But that’s not the point
at stake, damn it all! We want to stay precisely where we are,
shoemakers and bakers, all together! But we must demand proper
conditions! Scarcely one out of thousands can come out on top; and then
the rest can sit where they are and gape after him! But do you believe
he’d get a chance of rising if it wasn’t that society needs him—wants
to use him to strike at his own people and keep them down? ‘Now you can
see for yourself what a poor man can do if he likes!’ That’s what they
tell you. There’s no need to blame society.

“No, the masses themselves are to blame if they aren’t all rich men!
Good God! They just don’t want to be! So they treat you like a fool,
and you put up with it and baa after them! No, let them all together
demand that they shall receive enough for their work to live on
decently. I say a working man ought to get as much for his work as a
doctor or a barrister, and to be educated as well. That’s my Lord’s
Prayer!”

“Now I’ve set you off finely!” said Pelle good-naturedly. “And it’s
just the same as what your father was raving about when he lay dying in
the shed. He lay there delirious, and he believed the ordinary workman
had got pictures on the wall and a piano, just like the fine folks.”

“Did he say that?” cried Morten, and he raised his head. Then he fell
into thought. For he understood that longing. But Pelle sat there
brooding. Was this the “new time” all over again? Then there was really
some sense in banding people together—yes, and as many as possible.

“I don’t rightly understand it,” he said at last. “But to-day I joined
the trade union. I shan’t stand still and look on when there’s anything
big to be done.”

Morten nodded, faintly smiling. He was tired now, and hardly heard what
Pelle was saying. “I must go to bed now so that I can get up at one.
But where do you live? I’ll come and see you some time. How queer it is
that we should have run across one another here!”

“I live out in Kristianshavn—in the ‘Ark,’ if you know where that is!”

“That’s a queer sort of house to have tumbled into! I know the ‘Ark’
very well, it’s been so often described in the papers. There’s all
sorts of people live there!”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Pelle, half offended. “I like
the people well enough…. But it’s capital that we should have run into
one another’s arms like this! What bit of luck, eh? And I behaved like
a clown and kept out of your way? But that was when I was going to the
dogs, and hated everybody! But now nothing’s going to come between us
again, you may lay to that!”

“That’s good, but now be off with you,” replied Morten, smiling; he was
already half-undressed.

“I’m going, I’m going!” said Pelle, and he picked up his hat, and stood
for a moment gazing out over the city. “But it’s magnificent, what you
were saying about things just now!” he cried suddenly. “If I had the
strength of all us poor folks in me, I’d break out right away and
conquer the whole of it! If such a mass of wealth were shared out
there’d never be any poverty any more!” He stood there with his arms
uplifted, as though he held it all in his hands. Then he laughed
uproariously. He looked full of energy. Morten lay half asleep, staring
at him and saying nothing. And then he went.

Pipman scolded Pelle outrageously when at last he returned. “Curse it
all, what are you thinking of? To go strolling about and playing the
duke while such as we can sit here working our eyes out of our heads!
And we have to go thirsty too! Now don’t you dream of being insolent to
me, or there’ll be an end of the matter. I am excessively annoyed!”

He held out his hand in pathetic expostulation, although Pelle had no
intention of answering him. He no longer took Pipman seriously. “Devil
fry me, but a man must sit here and drink the clothes off his body
while a lout like you goes for a stroll!”

Pelle was standing there counting the week’s earnings when he suddenly
burst into a loud laugh as his glance fell upon Pipman. His blue naked
shanks, miserably shivering under his leather apron, looked so
enormously ridiculous when contrasted with the fully-dressed body and
the venerable beard.

“Yes, you grin!” said Pipman, laughing too. “But suppose it was you had
to take off your trousers in front of the old clothes’ man, and wanted
to get upstairs respectably! Those damned brats! ‘Pipman’s got D. T.,’
they yell. ‘Pipman’s got D. T. And God knows I haven’t got D. T., but I
haven’t got any trousers, and that’s just the trouble! And these
accursed open staircases! Olsen’s hired girl took the opportunity, and
you may be sure she saw all there was to see! You might lend me your
old bags!”

Pelle opened his green chest and took out his work-day trousers.

“You’d better put a few more locks on that spinach-green lumber-chest
of yours,” said Pipman surlily. “After all, there might be a thief
here, near heaven as we are!”

Pelle apparently did not hear the allusion, and locked the chest up
again. Then, his short pipe in his hand, he strolled out on to the
platform. Above the roofs the twilight was rising from the Sound. A few
doves were flying there, catching the last red rays of the sun on their
white pinions, while down in the shaft the darkness lay like a hot
lilac mist. The hurdy-gurdy man had come home and was playing his
evening tune down there to the dancing children, while the inhabitants
of the “Ark” were gossiping and squabbling from gallery to gallery. Now
and again a faint vibrating note rose upward, and all fell silent. This
was the dwarf Vinslev, who sat playing his flute somewhere in his den
deep within the “Ark.” He always hid himself right away when he played,
for at such times he was like a sick animal, and sat quaking in his
lair. The notes of his flute were so sweet, as they came trickling out
of his hiding place, that they seemed like a song or a lament from
another world. And the restless creatures in the “Ark” must perforce be
silent and listen. Now Vinslev was in one of his gentle moods, and one
somehow felt better for hearing him. But at times, in his dark moods,
the devil seemed to enter into him, and breathed such music into his
crazy mind that all his hearers felt a panic terror. Then the decaying
timbers of the “Ark” seemed to expand and form a vast monstrous,
pitch-black forest, in which all terror lay lurking, and one must
strike out blindly in order to avoid being trampled on. The
hearse-driver in the fourth story, who at other times was so gentle in
his cups, would beat his wife shamefully, and the two lay about in
their den drinking and fighting in self-defence. And Vinslev’s devilish
flute was to blame when Johnsen vainly bewailed his miserable life and
ended it under the sewer-grating. But there was nothing to be said
about the matter; Vinslev played the flute, and Johnsen’s suicide was a
death like any other.

Now the devil was going about with a ring in his nose; Vinslev’s
playing was like a gentle breeze that played on people’s hearts, so
that they opened like flowers. This was his good time.

Pelle knew all this, although he had not long been here; but it was
nothing to him. For he wore the conqueror’s shirt of mail, such as
Father Lasse had dreamed of for him.

Down in the third story, on the built-out gallery, another sort of
magic was at work. A climbing pelargonium and some ivy had wound
themselves round the broken beams and met overhead, and there hung a
little red paper lantern, which cast a cheerful glow over it all.

It was as though the summer night had found a sanctuary in the heart of
this wilderness of stone. Under the lantern sat Madam Johnsen and her
daughter sewing; and Hanne’s face glowed like a rose in the night, and
every now and then she turned it up toward Pelle and smiled, and made
an impatient movement of her head. Then Pelle turned away a little, re-
crossed his leg, and leant over on the other side, restless as a horse
in blinkers.

Close behind him his neighbor, Madam Frandsen, was bustling about her
little kitchen. The door stood open on to the platform, and she
chattered incessantly, half to herself and half to Pelle, about her
gout, her dead husband, and her lout of a son. She needed to rest her
body, did this old woman. “My God, yes; and here I have to keep slaving
and getting his food ready for Ferdinand from morning to night and from
night to morning again. And he doesn’t even trouble himself to come
home to it. I can’t go looking into his wild ways; all I can do is to
sit here and worry and keep his meals warm. Now that’s a tasty little
bit; and he’ll soon come when he’s hungry, I tell myself. Ah, yes, our
young days, they’re soon gone. And you stand there and stare like a
baa-lamb and the girl down there is nodding at you fit to crick her
neck! Yes, the men are a queer race; they pretend they wouldn’t
dare—and yet who is it causes all the misfortunes?”

“She doesn’t want anything to do with me!” said Pelle grumpily; “she’s
just playing with me.”

“Yes, a girl goes on playing with a white mouse until she gets it! You
ought to be ashamed to stand there hanging your head! So young and
well- grown as you are too! You cut her tail-feathers off, and you’ll
get a good wife!” She nudged him in the side with her elbow.

Then at last Pelle made up his mind to go clattering down the stairs to
the third story, and along the gallery.

“Why have you been so stand-offish to-day?” said Madam Johnsen, making
room for him. “You know you are always very welcome. What are all these
preliminaries for?”

“Pelle is short-sighted; he can’t see as far as this,” said Hanne,
tossing her head. She sat there turning her head about; she gazed at
him smiling, her head thrown back and her mouth open. The light fell on
her white teeth.

“Shall we get fine weather to-morrow?” asked the mother.

Pelle thought they would; he gazed up at the little speck of sky in a
weather-wise manner. Hanne laughed.

“Are you a weather-prophet, Pelle? But you haven’t any corns!”

“Now stop your teasing, child!” said the mother, pretending to slap
her. “If it’s fine to-morrow we want to go into the woods. Will you
come with us?”

Pelle would be glad to go; but he hesitated slightly before answering.

“Come with us, Pelle,” said Hanne, and she laid her hand invitingly on
his shoulder. “And then you shall be my young man. It’s so tedious
going to the woods with the old lady; and then I want to be able to do
as I like.” She made a challenging movement with her head.

“Then we’ll go from the North Gate by omnibus; I don’t care a bit about
going by train.”

“From the North Gate? But it doesn’t exist any longer, mummy! But there
are still omnibuses running from the Triangle.”

“Well then, from the Triangle, you clever one! Can I help it if they go
pulling everything down? When I was a girl that North Gate was a
splendid place. From there you could get a view over the country where
my home was, and the summer nights were never so fine as on the wall.
One didn’t know what it was to feel the cold then. If one’s clothes
were thin one’s heart was young.”

Hanne went into the kitchen to make coffee. The door stood open. She
hummed at her task and now and again joined in the conversation. Then
she came out, serving Pelle with a cracked tea-tray. “But you look very
peculiar tonight!” She touched Pelle’s face and gazed at him
searchingly.

“I joined the trade union to-day,” answered Pelle; he still had the
feeling that of something unusual, and felt as though everybody must
notice something about him.

Hanne burst out laughing. “Is that where you got that black sign on
your forehead? Just look, mother, just look at him! The trade mark!”
She turned her head toward the old woman.

“Ah, the rogue!” said the old woman, laughing. “Now she’s smeared soot
over your face!” She wetted her apron with her tongue and began to rub
the soot away, Hanne standing behind him and holding his head in both
hands so that he should not move. “Thank your stars that Pelle’s a
good- natured fellow,” said the old woman, as she rubbed. “Or else he’d
take it in bad part!”

Pelle himself laughed shamefacedly.

The hearse-driver came up through the trap in the gallery and turned
round to mount to the fourth story. “Good evening!” he said, in his
deep bass voice, as he approached them; “and good digestion, too, I
ought to say!” He carried a great ham under his arm.

“Lord o’ my body!” whispered Madam Johnsen. “There he is again with his
ham; that means he’s wasted the whole week’s wages again. They’ve
always got more than enough ham and bacon up there, poor things, but
they’ve seldom got bread as well.”

Now one sound was heard in the “Ark,” now another. The crying of
children which drifted so mournfully out of the long corridors whenever
a door was opened turned to a feeble clucking every time some belated
mother came rushing home from work to clasp the little one to her
breast. And there was one that went on crying whether the mother was at
home or at work. Her milk had failed her.

From somewhere down in the cellars the sleepy tones of a cradle-song
rose up through the shaft; it was only “Grete with the child,” who was
singing her rag-doll asleep. The real mothers did not sing.

“She’s always bawling away,” said Hanne; “those who’ve got real
children haven’t got strength left to sing. But her brat doesn’t need
any food; and that makes a lot of difference when one is poor.”

“To-day she was washing and ironing the child’s things to make her fine
for to-morrow, when her father comes. He is a lieutenant,” said Hanne.

“Is he coming to-morrow, then?” asked Pelle naively.

Hanne laughed loudly. “She expects him every Sunday, but she has never
seen him yet!”

“Well, well, that’s hardly a thing to laugh about,” said the old woman.
“She’s happy in her delusions, and her pension keeps her from need.”




III


Pelle awoke to find Hanne standing by his bed and pulling his nose, and
imitating his comical grimaces. She had come in over the roof. “Why are
you stopping here, you?” she said eagerly. “We are waiting for you!”

“I can’t get up!” replied Pelle piteously. “Pipman went out overnight
with my trousers on and hasn’t come back, so I lay down to sleep
again!” Hanne broke into a ringing laugh. “What if he never comes back
at all? You’ll have to lie in bed always, like Mother Jahn!”

At this Pelle laughed too.

“I really don’t know what I shall do! You must just go without me.”

“No, that we shan’t!” said Hanne very decidedly. “No, we’ll fetch the
picnic-basket and spread the things on your counterpane! After all,
it’s green! But wait now, I know what!” And she slipped through the
back door and out on to the roof. Half an hour later she came again and
threw a pair of striped trousers on the bed. “He’s obliging, is Herr
Klodsmajor! Now just hurry yourself a bit. I ran round to see the
hearse-driver’s Marie, where she works, and she gave me a pair of her
master’s week-day breeches. But she must have them again early
to-morrow morning, so that his lordship doesn’t notice it.”

Directly she had gone Pelle jumped into the trousers. Just as he was
ready he heard a terrific creaking of timbers. The Pipman was coming up
the stairs. He held the rope in one hand, and at every turn of the
staircase he bowed a few times outward over the rope. The women were
shrieking in the surrounding galleries and landings. That amused him.
His big, venerable head beamed with an expression of sublime joy.

“Ah, hold your tongue!” he said good-naturedly, as soon as he set eyes
on Pelle. “You hold your tongue!” He propped himself up in the doorway
and stood there staring.

Pelle seized him by the collar. “Where are my Sunday trousers?” he
asked angrily. The Pipman had the old ones on, but where were the new?

The Pipman stared at him uncomprehending, his drowsy features working
in the effort to disinter some memory or other. Suddenly he whistled.
“Trousers, did you say, young man? What, what? Did you really say
trousers? And you ask me where your trousers have got to? Then you
might have said so at once! Because, d’you see, your bags … I’ve … yes
… why, I’ve pawned them!”

“You’ve pawned my best trousers?” cried Pelle, so startled that he
loosed his hold.

“Yes, by God, that’s what I did! You can look for yourself—there’s no
need to get so hot about it! You can’t eat me, you know. That goes
without saying. Yes, that’s about it. One just mustn’t get excited!”

“You’re a scoundrelly thief!” cried Pelle. “That’s what you are!”

“Now, now, comrade, always keep cool! Don’t shout yourself hoarse.
Nothing’s been taken by me. Pipman’s a respectable man, I tell you.
Here, you can see for yourself! What’ll you give me for that, eh?” He
had taken the pawnticket from his pocket and held it out to Pelle,
deeply offended.

Pelle fingered his collar nervously; he was quite beside himself with
rage. But what was the use? And now Hanne and her mother had come out
over yonder. Hanne was wearing a yellow straw hat with broad ribbons.
She looked bewitching; the old lady had the lunch-basket on her arm.
She locked the door carefully and put the key under the doorstep. Then
they set out.

There was no reasoning with this sot of a Pipman! He edged round Pelle
with an uncertain smile, gazed inquisitively into his face, and kept
carefully just out of his reach. “You’re angry, aren’t you?” he said
confidingly, as though he had been speaking to a little child.
“Dreadfully angry? But what the devil do you want with two pairs of
trousers, comrade? Yes, what do you want with two pairs of trousers?”
His voice sounded quite bewildered and reproachful.

Pelle pulled out a pair of easy-looking women’s shoes from under his
bed, and slipped out through the inner door. He squeezed his way
between the steep roof and the back wall of the room, ducked under a
beam or two, and tumbled into the long gangway which ran between the
roof- buildings and had rooms on either side of it. A loud buzzing
sound struck suddenly on his ears. The doors of all the little rooms
stood open on to the long gangway, which served as a common livingroom.
Wrangling and chattering and the crying of children surged together in
a deafening uproar; here was the life of a bee-hive. Here it’s really
lively, thought Pelle. To-morrow I shall move over here! He had thought
over this for a long time, and now there should be an end of his
lodging with Pipman.

In front of one of the doors stood a little eleven-years-old maiden,
who was polishing a pair of plump-looking boy’s boots; she wore an
apron of sacking which fell down below her ankles, so that she kept
treading on it. Within the room two children of nine and twelve were
moving backward and forward with mighty strides, their hands in their
pockets. Then enjoyed Sundays. In their clean shirt-sleeves, they
looked like a couple of little grown-up men. This was the “Family”;
they were Pelle’s rescuers.

“Here are your shoes, Marie,” said Pelle. “I couldn’t do them any
better.”

She took them eagerly and examined the soles. Pelle had repaired them
with old leather, and had therefore polished the insteps with cobbler’s
wax. “They’re splendid now!” she whispered, and she looked at him
gratefully. The boys came and shook hands with Pelle. “What will the
shoes cost?” asked the elder, feeling for his purse with a solemn
countenance.

“We’d better let that stand over, Peter; I’m in a hurry to-day,” said
Pelle, laughing. “We’ll put it on the account until the New Year.”

“I’m going out, too, to-day with the boys,” said Marie, beaming with
delight. “And you are going to the woods with Hanne and her mother, we
know all about it!” Hopping and skipping, she accompanied him to the
steps, and stood laughing down at him. To-day she was really like a
child; the shrewd, old, careful woman was as though cast to the winds.
“You can go down the main staircase,” she cried.

A narrow garret-stairs led down to the main staircase, which lay inside
the building and was supposed to be used only by those who lived on the
side facing the street. This was the fashionable portion of the “Ark”;
here lived old sea-dogs, shipbuilders, and other folks with regular
incomes. The tradesmen who rented the cellars—the coal merchant, the
old iron merchant, and the old clothes dealer, also had their dwellings
here.

These dwellings were composed of two splendid rooms; they had no
kitchen or entry, but in a corner of the landing on the main staircase,
by the door, each family had a sink with a little board cover. When the
cover was on one could use the sink as a seat; this was very
convenient.

The others had almost reached the Knippels Bridge when he overtook
them. “What a long time you’ve been!” said Hanne, as she took his arm.
“And how’s the ‘Family?’ Was Marie pleased with the shoes? Poor little
thing, she hasn’t been out for two Sundays because she had no soles to
her shoes.”

“She had only to come to me; I’m ever so much in her debt!”

“No, don’t you believe she’d do that. The ‘Family’ is proud. I had to
go over and steal the shoes somehow!”

“Poor little things!” said Madam Johnsen, “it’s really touching to see
how they hold together! And they know how to get along. But why are you
taking Pelle’s arm, Hanne? You don’t mean anything by it.”

“Must one always mean something by it, little mother? Pelle is my young
man to-day, and has to protect me.”

“Good Lord, what is he to protect you from? From yourself, mostly, and
that’s not easy!”

“Against a horde of robbers, who will fall upon me in the forest and
carry me away. And you’ll have to pay a tremendous ransom!”

“Good Lord, I’d much rather pay money to get rid of you! If I had any
money at all! But have you noticed how blue the sky is? It’s splendid
with all this sun on your back—it warms you right through the cockles
of your heart.”

At the Triangle they took an omnibus and bowled along the sea-front.
The vehicle was full of cheerful folk; they sat there laughing at a
couple of good-natured citizens who were perspiring and hurling silly
witticisms at one another. Behind them the dust rolled threateningly,
and hung in a lazy cloud round the great black waterbutts which stood
on their high trestles along the edge of the road. Out in the Sound the
boats lay with sails outspread, but did not move; everything was
keeping the Sabbath.

In the Zoological Gardens it was fresh and cool. The beech-leaves still
retained their youthful brightness, and looked wonderfully light and
festive against the century-old trunks. “Heigh, how beautiful the
forest is!” cried Pelle. “It is like an old giant who has taken a young
bride!”

He had never been in a real beech-wood before. One could wander about
here as in a church. There were lots of other people here as well; all
Copenhagen was on its legs in this fine weather. The people were as
though intoxicated by the sunshine; they were quite boisterous, and the
sound of their voices lingered about the tree-tops and only challenged
them to give vent to their feelings. People went strolling between the
tree-trunks and amusing themselves in their own way, laying about them
with great boughs and shouting with no other object than to hear their
own voices. On the borders of the wood, a few men were standing and
singing in chorus; they wore white caps, and over the grassy meadows
merry groups were strolling or playing touch or rolling in the grass
like young kittens.

Madam Johnsen walked confidently a few steps in advance; she was the
most at home out here and led the way. Pelle and Hanne walked close
together, in order to converse. Hanne was silent and absent; Pelle took
her hand in order to make her run up a hillock, but she did not at
first notice that he was touching her, and the hand was limp and
clammy. She walked on as in a sleep, her whole bearing lifeless and
taciturn. “She’s dreaming!” said Pelle, and released her hand,
offended. It fell lifelessly to her side.

The old woman turned round and looked about her with beaming eyes.

“The forest hasn’t been so splendid for many years,” she said. “Not
since I was a young girl.”

They climbed up past the Hermitage and thence out over the grass and
into the forest again, until they came to the little ranger’s house
where they drank coffee and ate some of the bread-and-butter they had
brought with them. Then they trudged on again. Madam Johnsen was paying
a rare visit to the forest and wanted to see everything. The young
people raised objections, but she was not to be dissuaded. She had
girlhood memories of the forest, and she wanted to renew them; let them
say what they would. If they were tired of running after her they could
go their own way. But they followed her faithfully, looking about them
wearily and moving along dully onward, moving along rather more
stupidly than was justifiable.

On the path leading to Raavad there were not so many people.

“It’s just as forest-like here as in my young days!” said the old
woman. “And beautiful it is here. The leaves are so close, it’s just
the place for a loving couple of lovers. Now I’m going to sit down and
take my boots off for a bit, my feet are beginning to hurt me. You look
about you for a bit.”

But the young people looked at one another strangely and threw
themselves down at her feet. She had taken off her boots, and was
cooling her feet in the fresh grass as she sat there chatting. “It’s so
warm to-day the stones feel quite burning—but you two certainly won’t
catch fire. Why do you stare in that funny way? Give each other a kiss
in the grass, now! There’s no harm in it, and it’s so pretty to see!”

Pelle did not move. But Hanne moved over to him on her knees, put her
hands gently round his head, and kissed him. When she had done so she
looked into his eyes, lovingly, as a child might look at her doll. Her
hat had slipped on to her shoulders. On her white forehead and her
upper lip were little clear drops of sweat. Then, with a merry laugh,
she suddenly released him. Pelle and the old woman had gathered flowers
and boughs of foliage; these they now began to arrange. Hanne lay on
her back and gazed up at the sky.

“You leave that old staring of yours alone,” said the mother. “It does
you no good.”

“I’m only playing at ‘Glory’; it’s such a height here,” said Hanne.
“But at home in the ‘Ark’ you see more. Here it’s too light.”

“Yes, God knows, one does see more—a sewer and two privies. A good
thing it’s so dark there. No, one ought to have enough money to be able
to go into the forests every Sunday all the summer. When one has grown
up in the open air it’s hard to be penned in between dirty walls all
one’s life. But now I think we ought to be going on. We waste so much
time.”

“Oh Lord, and I’m so comfortable lying here!” said Hanne lazily.
“Pelle, just push my shawl under my head!”

Out of the boughs high above them broke a great bird. “There, there,
what a chap!” cried Pelle, pointing at it. It sailed slowly downward,
on its mighty outspread wings, now and again compressing the air
beneath it with a few powerful strokes, and then flew onward, close
above the tree- tops, with a scrutinizing glance.

“Jiminy, I believe that was a stork!” said Madam Johnsen. She reached
for her boots, alarmed. “I won’t stay here any longer now. One never
knows what may happen.” She hastily laced up her boots, with a prudish
expression on her face. Pelle laughed until the tears stood in his
eyes.

Hanne raised her head. “That was surely a crane, don’t you think so?
Stupid bird, always to fly along like that, staring down at everything
as though he were short-sighted. If I were he I should fly straight up
in the air and then shut my eyes and come swooping down. Then, wherever
one got to, something or other would happen.”

“Sure enough, this would happen, that you’d fall into the sea and be
drowned. Hanne has always had the feeling that something has got to
happen; and for that reason she can never hold on to what she’s got in
her hands.”

“No, for I haven’t anything in them!” cried Hanne, showing her hands
and laughing. “Can you hold what you haven’t got, Pelle?”

About four o’clock they came to the Schleswig Stone, where the Social-
Democrats were holding a meeting. Pelle had never yet attended any big
meeting at which he could hear agitators speaking, but had obtained his
ideas of the new movements at second hand. They were in tune with the
blind instinct within him. But he had never experienced anything really
electrifying—only that confused, monotonous surging such as he had
heard in his childhood when he listened with his ear to the hollow of
the wooden shoe.

“Well, it looks as if the whole society was here!” said Madam Johnsen
half contemptuously. “Now you can see all the Social-Democrats of
Copenhagen. They never have been more numerous, although they pretend
the whole of society belongs to them. But things don’t always go so
smoothly as they do on paper.”

Pelle frowned, but was silent. He himself knew too little of the matter
to be able to convert another.

The crowd affected him powerfully; here were several thousands of
people gathered together for a common object, and it became exceedingly
clear to him that he himself belonged to this crowd. “I belong to them
too!” Over and over again the words repeated themselves rejoicingly in
his mind. He felt the need to verify it all himself, and to prove
himself grateful for the quickly-passing day. If the Court shoemaker
hadn’t spoken the words that drove him to join the Union he would still
have been standing apart from it all, like a heathen. The act of
subscribing the day before was like a baptism. He felt quite different
in the society of these men—he felt as he did not feel with others. And
as the thousands of voices broke into song, a song of jubilation of the
new times that were to come, a cold shudder went through him. He had a
feeling as though a door within him had opened, and as though something
that had lain closely penned within him had found its way to the light.

Up on the platform stood a darkish man talking earnestly in a mighty
voice. Shoulder to shoulder the crowd stood breathless, listening open-
mouthed, with every face turned fixedly upon the speaker. A few were so
completely under his spell that they reproduced the play of his
features. When he made some particular sally from his citadel a murmur
of admiration ran through the crowd. There was no shouting. He spoke of
want and poverty, of the wearisome, endless wandering that won no
further forward. As the Israelites in their faith bore the Ark of the
Covenant through the wilderness, so the poor bore their hope through
the unfruitful years. If one division was overthrown another was ready
with the carrying-staves, and at last the day was breaking. Now they
stood at the entrance to the Promised Land, with the proof in their
hands that they were the rightful dwellers therein. All that was quite
a matter of course; if there was anything that Pelle had experienced it
was that wearisome wandering of God’s people through the wilderness.
That was the great symbol of poverty. The words came to him like
something long familiar. But the greatness of the man’s voice affected
Pelle; there was something in the speech of this man which did not
reach him through the understanding, but seemed somehow to burn its way
in through the skin, there to meet something that lay expanding within
him. The mere ring of anger in his voice affected Pelle; his words beat
upon one’s old wounds, so that they broke open like poisonous ulcers,
and one heaved a deep breath of relief. Pelle had heard such a voice,
ringing over all, when he lived in the fields and tended cows. He felt
as though he too must let himself go in a great shout and subdue the
whole crowd by his voice —he too! To be able to speak like that, now
thundering and now mild, like the ancient prophets!

A peculiar sense of energy was exhaled by this dense crowd of men, this
thinking and feeling crowd. It produced a singular feeling of strength.
Pelle was no longer the poor journeyman shoemaker, who found it
difficult enough to make his way. He became one, as he stood there,
with that vast being; he felt its strength swelling within him; the
little finger shares in the strength of the whole body. A blind
certainty of irresistibility went out from this mighty gathering, a
spur to ride the storm with. His limbs swelled; he became a vast,
monstrous being that only needed to go trampling onward in order to
conquer everything. His brain was whirling with energy, with
illimitable, unconquerable strength!

Pelle had before this gone soaring on high and had come safely to earth
again. And this time also he came to ground, with a long sigh of
relief, as though he had cast off a heavy burden. Hanne’s arm lay in
his; he pressed it slightly. But she did notice him; she too now was
far away. He looked at her pretty neck, and bent forward to see her
face. The great yellow hat threw a golden glimmer over it. Her active
intelligence played restlessly behind her strained, frozen features;
her eyes looked fixedly before her. It has taken hold of her too, he
thought, full of happiness; she is far away from here. It was something
wonderful to know that they were coupled together in the same
interests—were like man and wife!

At that very moment he accidentally noticed the direction of her fixed
gaze, and a sharp pain ran through his heart. Standing on the level
ground, quite apart from the crowd, stood a tall, handsome man,
astonishingly like the owner of Stone Farm in his best days; the
sunlight was coming and going over his brown skin and his soft beard.
Now that he turned his face toward Pelle his big, open features
reminded him of the sea.

Hanne started, as though awakening from a deep sleep, and noticed
Pelle.

“He is a sailor!” she said, in a curious, remote voice, although Pelle
had not questioned her. God knows, thought Pelle, vexedly, how is it
she knows him; and he drew his arm from hers. But she took it again at
once and pressed it against her soft bosom. It was as though she
suddenly wanted to give him a feeling of security.

She hung heavily on his arm and stood with her eyes fixed unwaveringly
on the speakers’ platform. Her hands busied themselves nervously about
her hair. “You are so restless, child,” said the mother, who had seated
herself at their feet. “You might let me lean back against your knee; I
was sitting so comfortably before.”

“Yes,” said Hanne, and she put herself in the desired position. Her
voice sounded quite excited.

“Pelle,” she whispered suddenly, “if he comes over to us I shan’t
answer him. I shan’t.”

“Do you know him, then?”

“No, but it does happen sometimes that men come and speak to one. But
then you’ll say I belong to you, won’t you?”

Pelle was going to refuse, but a shudder ran through her. She’s
feverish, he thought compassionately; one gets fever so easily in the
“Ark.” It comes up with the smell out of the sewer. She must have lied
to me nicely, he thought after a while. Women are cunning, but he was
too proud to question her. And then the crowd shouted “Hurrah!” so that
the air rang. Pelle shouted with them; and when they had finished the
man had disappeared.

They went over to the Hill, the old woman keeping her few steps in
advance. Hanne hummed as she went; now and then she looked
questioningly at Pelle—and then went on humming.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” said Pelle morosely. “But it’s not right
of you to have lied to me.”

“I lie to you? But Pelle!” She gazed wonderingly into his eyes.

“Yes, that you do! There’s something between you and him.”

Hanne laughed, a clear, innocent laugh, but suddenly broken off. “No,
Pelle, no, what should I have to do with him? I have never even seen
him before. I have never even once kissed a man—yes, you, but you are
my brother.”

“I don’t particularly care about being your brother—not a straw, and
you know that!”

“Have I done anything to offend you? I’m sorry if I have.” She seized
his hand.

“I want you for my wife!” cried Pelle passionately.

Hanne laughed. “Did you hear, mother? Pelle wants me for his wife!” she
cried, beaming.

“Yes, I see and hear more than you think,” said Madam Johnsen shortly.

Hanne looked from one to the other and became serious. “You are so
good, Pelle,” she said softly, “but you can’t come to me bringing me
something from foreign parts—I know everything about you, but I’ve
never dreamed of you at night. Are you a fortunate person?”

“I’ll soon show you if I am,” said Pelle, raising his head. “Only give
me a little time.”

“Lord, now she’s blethering about fortune again,” cried the mother,
turning round. “You really needn’t have spoiled this lovely day for us
with your nonsense. I was enjoying it all so.”

Hanne laughed helplessly. “Mother will have it that I’m not quite right
in my mind, because father hit me on the head once when I was a little
girl,” she told Pelle.

“Yes, it’s since then she’s had these ideas. She’ll do nothing but go
rambling on at random with her ideas and her wishes. She’ll sit whole
days at the window and stare, and she used to make the children down in
the yard even crazier than herself with her nonsense. And she was
always bothering me to leave everything standing—poor as we were after
my man died—just to go round and round the room with her and the dolls
and sing those songs all about earls. Yes, Pelle, you may believe I’ve
wept tears of blood over her.”

Hanne wandered on, laughing at her mother’s rebuke, and humming—it was
the tune of the “Earl’s Song.”

“There, you hear her yourself,” said the old woman, nudging Pelle.
“She’s got no shame in her—there’s nothing to be done with her!”

Up on the hill there was a deafening confusion of people in playful
mood; wandering to and fro in groups, blowing into children’s trumpets
and “dying pigs,” and behaving like frolicsome wild beasts. At every
moment some one tooted in your ear, to make you jump, or you suddenly
discovered that some rogue was fixing something on the back of your
coat. Hanne was nervous; she kept between Pelle and her mother, and
could not stand still. “No, let’s go away somewhere—anywhere!” she
said, laughing in bewilderment.

Pelle wanted to treat them to coffee, so they went on till they found a
tent where there was room for them. Hallo! There was the hurdy-gurdy
man from home, on a roundabout, nodding to him as he went whirling
round. He held his hand in front of his mouth like a speaking-trumpet
in order to shout above the noise. “Mother’s coming up behind you with
the Olsens,” he roared.

“I can’t hear what he says at all,” said Madam Johnsen. She didn’t care
about meeting people out of the “Ark” to-day.

When the coffee was finished they wandered up and down between the
booths and amused themselves by watching the crowd. Hanne consented to
have her fortune told; it cost five and twenty öre, but she was
rewarded by an unexpected suitor who was coming across the sea with
lots of money. Her eyes shone.

“I could have done it much better than that!” said Madam Johnsen.

“No, mother, for you never foretell me anything but misfortune,”
replied Hanne, laughing.

Madam Johnsen met an acquaintance who was selling “dying pigs.” She sat
down beside her. “You go over there now and have a bit of a dance while
I rest my tired legs,” she said.

The young people went across to the dancing marquee and stood among the
onlookers. From time to time they had five öre worth of dancing. When
other men came up and asked Hanne to dance, she shook her head; she did
not care to dance with any one but Pelle.

The rejected applicants stood a little way off, their hats on the backs
of their heads, and reviled her. Pelle had to reprove her. “You have
offended them,” he said, “and perhaps they’re screwed and will begin to
quarrel.”

“Why should I be forced to dance with anybody, with somebody I don’t
know at all?” replied Hanne. “I’m only going to dance with you!” She
made angry eyes, and looked bewitching in her unapproachableness. Pelle
had nothing against being her only partner. He would gladly have fought
for her, had it been needful.

When they were about to go he discovered the foreigner right at the
back of the dancing-tent. He urged Hanne to make haste, but she stood
there, staring absent-mindedly in the midst of the dancers as though
she did not know what was happening around her. The stranger came over
to them. Pelle was certain that Hanne had not seen him.

Suddenly she came to herself and gripped Pelle’s arm. “Shan’t we go,
then?” she said impatiently, and she quickly dragged him away.

At the doorway the stranger came to meet them and bowed before Hanne.
She did not look at him, but her left arm twitched as though she wanted
to lay it across his shoulders.

“My sweetheart isn’t dancing any more; she is tired,” said Pelle
shortly, and he led her away.

“A good thing we’ve come out from there,” she cried, with a feeling of
deliverance, as they went back to her mother. “There were no amusing
dancers.”

Pelle was taken aback; then she had not seen the stranger, but merely
believed that it had been one of the others who had asked her to dance!
It was inconceivable that she should have seen him; and yet a peculiar
knowledge had enveloped her, as though she had seen obliquely through
her down-dropped eyelids; and then it was well known women could see
round corners! And that twitch of the arm! He did not know what to
think. “Well, it’s all one to me,” he thought, “for I’m not going to be
led by the nose!”

He had them both on his arm as they returned under the trees to the
station. The old woman was lively; Hanne walked on in silence and let
them both talk. But suddenly she begged Pelle to be quiet a moment; he
looked at her in surprise.

“It’s singing so beautifully in my ears; but when you talk then it
stops!”

“Nonsense! Your blood is too unruly,” said the mother, “and mouths were
meant to be used.”

During the journey Pelle was reserved. Now and again he pressed Hanne’s
hand, which lay, warm and slightly perspiring, in his upon the seat.

But the old woman’s delight was by no means exhausted, the light
shining from the city and the dark peaceful Sound had their message for
her secluded life, and she began to sing, in a thin, quavering
falsetto:

“Gently the Night upon her silent wings
Comes, and the stars are bright in east and west;
And lo, the bell of evening rings;
And men draw homewards, and the birds all rest.”


But from the Triangle onward it was difficult for her to keep step; she
had run herself off her legs.

“Many thanks for to-day,” she said to Pelle, down in the courtyard.
“To- morrow one must start work again and clean old uniform trousers.
But it’s been a beautiful outing.” She waddled forward and up the
steps, groaning a little at the numbers of them, talking to herself.

Hanne stood hesitating. “Why did you say ‘my sweetheart’?” she asked
suddenly. “I’m not.”

“You told me to,” answered Pelle, who would willingly have said more.

“Oh, well!” said Hanne, and she ran up the stairs. “Goodnight, Pelle!”
she called down to him.




IV


Pelle was bound to the “Family” by peculiar ties. The three orphans
were the first to reach him a friendly helping hand when he stood in
the open street three days after his landing, robbed of his last penny.

He had come over feeling important enough. He had not slept all night
on his bench between decks among the cattle. Excitement had kept him
awake; and he lay there making far-reaching plans concerning himself
and his twenty-five kroner. He was up on deck by the first light of
morning, gazing at the shore, where the great capital with its towers
and factory-chimneys showed out of the mist. Above the city floated its
misty light, which reddened in the morning sun, and gave a splendor to
the prospect. And the passage between the forts and the naval harbor
was sufficiently magnificent to impress him. The crowd on the
landing-stage before the steamer laid alongside and the cabmen and
porters began shouting and calling, was enough to stupefy him, but he
had made up his mind beforehand that nothing should disconcert him. It
would have been difficult enough in any case to disentangle himself
from all this confusion.

And then Fortune herself was on his side. Down on the quay stood a
thick-set, jovial man, who looked familiarly at Pelle; he did not shout
and bawl, but merely said quietly, “Good-day, countryman,” and offered
Pelle board and lodging for two kroner a day. It was good to find a
countryman in all this bustle, and Pelle confidingly put himself in his
hands. He was remarkably helpful; Pelle was by no means allowed to
carry the green chest. “I’ll soon have that brought along!” said the
man, and he answered everything with a jolly “I’ll soon arrange that;
you just leave that to me!”

When three days had gone by, he presented Pelle with a circumstantial
account, which amounted exactly to five and twenty kroner. It was a
curious chance that Pelle had just that amount of money. He was not
willing to be done out of it, but the boarding-house keeper, Elleby,
called in a policeman from the street, and Pelle had to pay.

He was standing in the street with his green box, helpless and
bewildered, not knowing what to be about. Then a little boy came
whistling up to him and asked if he could not help him. “I can easily
carry the box alone, to wherever you want it, but it will cost twenty-
five öre and ten öre for the barrow. But if I just take one handle it
will be only ten öre,” he said, and he looked Pelle over in a business-
like manner. He did not seem to be more than nine or ten years old.

“But I don’t know where I shall go,” said Pelle, almost crying. “I’ve
been turned out on the street and have nowhere where I can turn. I am
quite a stranger here in the city and all my money has been taken from
me.”

The youngster made a gesture in the air as though butting something
with his head. “Yes, that’s a cursed business. You’ve fallen into the
hands of the farmer-catchers, my lad. So you must come home with us—you
can very well stay with us, if you don’t mind lying on the floor.”

“But what will your parents say if you go dragging me home?”

“I haven’t any parents, and Marie and Peter, they’ll say nothing. Just
come with me, and, after all, you can get work with old Pipman. Where
do you come from?”

“From Bornholm.”

“So did we! That’s to say, a long time ago, when we were quite
children. Come along with me, countryman!” The boy laughed delightedly
and seized one handle of the chest.

It was also, to be sure, a fellow-countryman who had robbed him; but
none the less he went with the boy; it was not in Pelle’s nature to be
distrustful.

So he had entered the “Ark,” under the protection of a child. The
sister, a little older than the other two, found little Karl’s action
entirely reasonable, and the three waifs, who had formerly been shy and
retiring, quickly attached themselves to Pelle. They found him in the
street and treated him like an elder comrade, who was a stranger, and
needed protection. They afforded him his first glimpse of the great
city, and they helped him to get work from Pipman.

On the day after the outing in the forest, Pelle moved over to the row
of attics, into a room near the “Family,” which was standing empty just
then. Marie helped him to get tidy and to bring his things along, and
with an easier mind he shook himself free of his burdensome relations
with Pipman. There was an end of his profit-sharing, and all the
recriminations which were involved in it. Now he could enter into
direct relations with the employers and look his comrades straight in
the eyes. For various reasons it had been a humiliating time; but he
had no feeling of resentment toward Pipman; he had learned more with
him in a few months than during his whole apprenticeship at home.

He obtained a few necessary tools from an ironmonger, and bought a
bench and a bed for ready money. From the master-shoemaker he obtained
as a beginning some material for children’s shoes, which he made at odd
times. His principal living he got from Master Beck in Market Street.

Beck was a man of the old school; his clientele consisted principally
of night watchmen, pilots, and old seamen, who lived out in
Kristianshavn. Although he was born and had grown up in Copenhagen, he
was like a country shoemaker to look at, going about in canvas slippers
which his daughter made for him, and in the mornings he smoked his long
pipe at the house-door. He had old-fashioned views concerning handwork,
and was delighted with Pelle, who could strain any piece of greased
leather and was not afraid to strap a pair of old dubbin’d boots with
it. Beck’s work could not well be given out to do at home, and Pelle
willingly established himself in the workshop and was afraid of no work
that came his way. But he would not accept bed and board from his
master in the old-fashioned way.

From the very first day this change was an improvement. He worked heart
and soul and began to put by something with which to pay off his debt
to Sort. Now he saw the day in the distance when he should be able to
send for Father Lasse.

In the morning, when the dwellers on the roof, drunken with sleep,
tumbled out into the long gangway, in order to go to their work, before
the quarter-to-six whistle sounded, Pelle already sat in his room
hammering on his cobbler’s last. About seven o’clock he went to Beck’s
workshop, if there was anything for him to do there. And he received
orders too from the dwellers in the “Ark.”

In connection with this work he acquired an item of practical
experience, an idea which was like a fruitful seed which lay
germinating where it fell and continually produced fresh fruit. It was
equivalent to an improvement in his circumstances to discover that he
had shaken off one parasite; if only he could send the other after him
and keep all his profits for himself!

That sounded quite fantastic, but Pelle had no desire to climb up to
the heights only to fall flat on the earth again. He had obtained
certain tangible experience, and he wanted to know how far it would
take him. While he sat there working he pursued the question in and out
among his thoughts, so that he could properly consider it.

Pipman was superfluous as a middleman; one could get a little work
without the necessity of going to him and pouring a flask of brandy
down his thirsty gullet. But was it any more reasonable that the shoes
Pelle made should go to the customer by way of the Court shoemaker and
yield him carriages and high living? Could not Pelle himself establish
relations with his customers? And shake off Meyer as he had shaken off
Pipman? Why, of course! It was said that the Court shoemaker paid taxes
on a yearly income of thirty thousand kroner. “That ought to be evenly
divided among all those who work for him!” thought Pelle, as he
hammered away at his pegs. “Then Father Lasse wouldn’t need to stay at
home a day longer, or drag himself through life so miserably.”

Here was something which he could take in hand with the feeling that he
was setting himself a practical problem in economics—and one that
apparently had nothing to do with his easy belief in luck. This idea
was always lurking somewhere in secrecy, and held him upright through
everything—although it did not afford him any definite assistance. A
hardly earned instinct told him that it was only among poor people that
this idea could be developed. This belief was his family inheritance,
and he would retain it faithfully through all vicissitudes; as millions
had done before him, always ready to cope with the unknown, until they
reached the grave and resigned the inherited dream. There lay hope for
himself in this, but if he miscarried, the hope itself would remain in
spite of him. With Fortune there was no definite promise of tangible
success for the individual, but only a general promise, which was
maintained through hundreds of years of servitude with something of the
long patience of eternity.

Pelle bore the whole endless wandering within himself: it lay deep in
his heart, like a great and incomprehensible patience. In his world,
capacity was often great enough, but resignation was always greater. It
was thoroughly accustomed to see everything go to ruin and yet to go on
hoping.

Often enough during the long march, hope had assumed tones like those
of “David’s City with streets of gold,” or “Paradise,” or “The splendor
of the Lord returns.” He himself had questioningly given ear; but never
until now had the voice of hope sounded in a song that had to do with
food and clothing, house and farm; so how was he to find his way?

He could only sit and meditate the problem as to how he should obtain,
quickly and easily, a share in the good things of this world;
presumptuously, and with an impatience for which he himself could not
have accounted.

And round about him things were happening in the same way. An awakening
shudder was passing through the masses. They no longer wandered on and
on with blind and patient surrender, but turned this way and that in
bewildered consultation. The miracle was no longer to be accomplished
of itself when the time was fulfilled. For an evil power had seized
upon their great hope, and pressed her knees together so that she could
not bring forth; they themselves must help to bring happiness into the
world!

The unshakable fatalism which hitherto had kept them on their difficult
path was shattered; the masses would no longer allow themselves to be
held down in stupid resignation. Men who all their lives had plodded
their accustomed way to and from their work now stood still and asked
unreasonable questions as to the aim of it all. Even the simple
ventured to cast doubts upon the established order of things. Things
were no longer thus because they must be; there was a painful cause of
poverty. That was the beginning of the matter; and now they conceived a
desire to master life; their fingers itched to be tearing down
something that obstructed them—but what it was they did not know.

All this was rather like a whirlpool; all boundaries disappeared.
Unfamiliar powers arose, and the most good-natured became suspicious or
were frankly bewildered. People who had hitherto crawled like dogs in
order to win their food were now filled with self-will, and preferred
to be struck down rather than bow down of their own accord. Prudent
folks who had worked all their lives in one place could no longer put
up with the conditions, and went at a word. Their hard-won endurance
was banished from their minds, and those who had quietly borne the
whole burden on their shoulders were now becoming restive; they were as
unwilling and unruly as a pregnant woman. It was as though they were
acting under the inward compulsion of an invisible power, and were
striving to break open the hard shell which lay over something new
within them. One could perceive that painful striving in their
bewildered gaze and in their sudden crazy grasp at the empty air.

There was something menacing in the very uncertainty which possessed
the masses. It was as though they were listening for a word to sound
out of the darkness. Swiftly they resolved to banish old custom and
convention from their minds, in order to make room there. On every side
men continually spoke of new things, and sought blindly to find their
way to them; it was a matter of course that the time had come and the
promised land was about to be opened to them. They went about in
readiness to accomplish something—what, they did not know; they formed
themselves into little groups; they conducted unfortunate strikes,
quite at random. Others organized debating societies, and began in
weighty speech to squabble about the new ideas—which none of them knew
anything about. These were more particularly the young men. Many of
them had come to the city in search of fortune, as had Pelle himself,
and these were full of burning restlessness. There was something
violent and feverish about them.

Such was the situation when Pelle entered the capital. It was chaotic;
there was no definite plan by which they could reach their goal. The
masses no longer supported one another, but were in a state of
solution, bewildered and drifting about in the search for something
that would weld them together. In the upper ranks of society people
noted nothing but the insecurity of the position of the workers; people
complained of their restlessness, a senseless restlessness which
jeopardized revenue and aggravated foreign competition. A few
thoughtful individuals saw the people as one great listening ear; new
preachers were arising who wanted to lead the crowd by new ways to God.
Pelle now and again allowed the stream to carry him into such quarters,
but he did allow himself to be caught; it was only the old story over
again; there was nothing in it. Nobody now was satisfied with
directions how to reach heaven—the new prophets disappeared as quickly
as they had arisen.

But in the midst of all this confusion there was one permanent center,
one community, which had steadily increased during the years, and had
fanatically endured the scorn and the persecution of those above and
below, until it at last possessed several thousand of members. It stood
fast in the maelstrom and obstinately affirmed that its doctrines were
those of the future. And now the wind seemed to be filling its sails;
it replied after its own fashion to the impatient demands for a heaven
to be enjoyed here on earth and an attainable happiness.

Pelle had been captured by the new doctrines out by the Schleswig
Stone, and had thrown himself, glowing and energetic, into the heart of
the movement. He attended meetings and discussions, his ears on the
alert to absorb anything really essential; for his practical nature
called for something palpable whereupon his mind could get to work.
Deep within his being was a mighty flux, like that of a river beneath
its ice; and at times traces of it rose to the surface, and alarmed
him. Yet he had no power to sound the retreat; and when he heard the
complaint, in respect of the prevailing unrest, that it endangered the
welfare of the nation, he was not able to grasp the connection.

“It’s preposterous that they should knock off work without any reason,”
he once told Morten, when the baker’s driver had thrown up his place.
“Like your driver, for example—he had no ground for complaint.”

“Perhaps he suddenly got a pain between the legs because his ancestor
great-grandfather was once made to ride on a wooden horse—he came from
the country,” said Morten solemnly.

Pelle looked at him quickly. He did not like Morten’s ambiguous manner
of expressing himself. It made him feel insecure.

“Can’t you talk reasonably?” he said. “I can’t understand you.”

“No? And yet that’s quite reason enough—there have been lots of reasons
since his great-grandfather’s days. What the devil—why should they want
a reason referring to yesterday precisely? Don’t you realize that the
worker, who has so long been working the treadmill in the belief that
the movement was caused by somebody else, has suddenly discovered that
it’s he that keeps the whole thing in motion? For that’s what is going
on. The poor man is not merely a slave who treads the wheel, and had a
handful of meal shoved down his gullet now and again to keep him from
starving to death. He is on the point of discovering that he performs a
higher service, look you! And now the movement is altering—it is
continuing of itself! But that you probably can’t see,” he added, as he
noted Pelle’s incredulous expression.

“No, for I’m not one of the big-bellies,” said Pelle, laughing, “and
you’re no prophet, to prophesy such great things. And I have enough
understanding to realize that if you want to make a row you must
absolutely have something definite to make a fuss about, otherwise it
won’t work. But that about the wooden horse isn’t good enough!”

“That’s just the point about lots of fusses,” Morten replied. “There’s
no need to give a pretext for anything that everybody’s interested in.”

Pelle pondered further over all this while at work. But these
deliberations did not proceed as in general; as a rule, such matters as
were considered in his world of thought were fixed by the generations
and referred principally to life and death. He had to set to work in a
practical manner, and to return to his own significant experience.

Old Pipman was superfluous; that Pelle himself had proved. And there
was really no reason why he should not shake off the Court shoemaker as
well; the journeymen saw to the measuring and the cutting-out; indeed,
they did the whole work. He was also really a parasite, who had placed
himself at the head of them all, and was sucking up their profits. But
then Morten was right with his unabashed assertion that the working-man
carried on the whole business! Pelle hesitated a little over this
conclusion; he cautiously verified the fact that it was in any case
valid in his craft. There was some sense in winning back his own—but
how?

His sound common-sense demanded something that would take the place of
Meyer and the other big parasites. It wouldn’t do for every journeyman
to sit down and botch away on his own account, like a little employer;
he had seen that plainly enough in the little town at home; it was mere
bungling.

So he set himself to work out a plan for a cooperative business. A
number of craftsmen should band together, each should contribute his
little capital, and a place of business would be selected. The work
would be distributed according to the various capacities of the men,
and they would choose one from their midst who would superintend the
whole. In this way the problem could be solved—every man would receive
the full profit of his work.

When he had thoroughly thought out his plan, he went to Morten.

“They’ve already put that into practice!” cried Morten, and he pulled
out a book. “But it didn’t work particularly well. Where did you get
the idea from?”

“I thought it out myself,” answered Pelle self-consciously.

Morten looked a trifle incredulous; then he consulted the book, and
showed Pelle that his idea was described there—almost word for word—as
a phase of the progressive movement. The book was a work on Socialism.

But Pelle did not lose heart on that account! He was proud to have hit
on something that others had worked out before him—and learned people,
too! He began to have confidence in his own ideas, and eagerly attended
lectures and meetings. He had energy and courage, that he knew. He
would try to make himself efficient, and then he would seek out those
at the head of things, who were preparing the way, and would offer them
his services.

Hitherto Fortune had always hovered before his eyes, obscurely, like a
fairy-tale, as something that suddenly swooped down upon a man and
lifted him to higher regions, while all those who were left behind
gazed longingly after him—that was the worst of it! But now he
perceived new paths, which for all those that were in need led on to
fortune, just as the “Great Power” had fancied in the hour of his
death. He did not quite understand where everything was to come from,
but that was just the thing he must discover.

All this kept his mind in a state of new and unaccustomed activity. He
was not used to thinking things out for himself, but had until now
always adhered to the ideas which had been handed down from generation
to generation as established—and he often found it difficult and
wearisome. Then he would try to shelve the whole subject, in order to
escape from it; but it always returned to him.

When he was tired, Hanne regained her influence over him, and then he
went over to see her in the evenings. He knew very well that this would
lead to nothing good. To picture for himself a future beside Hanne
seemed impossible; for her only the moment existed. Her peculiar nature
had a certain power over him—that was all. He often vowed to himself
that he would not allow her to make a fool of him—but he always went
over to see her again. He must try to conquer her—and then take the
consequences.

One day, when work was over, he strolled across to see her. There was
no one on the gallery, so he went into the little kitchen.

“Is that you, Pelle?” Hanne’s voice sounded from the living-room. “Come
in, then!”

She had apparently been washing her body, and was now sitting in a
white petticoat and chemise, and combing her beautiful hair. There was
something of the princess about her; she took such care of her body,
and knew how it should be done. The mirror stood before her, on the
window- sill; from the little back room one could see, between the
roofs and the mottled party-wall, the prison and the bridge and the
canal that ran beneath it. Out beyond the Exchange the air was gray and
streaked with the tackle of ships.

Pelle sat down heavily by the stove, his elbows on his knees, and gazed
on the floor. He was greatly moved. If only the old woman would come!
“I believe I’ll go out,” he thought, “and behave as though I were
looking out for her.” But he remained sitting there. Against the wall
was the double bed with its red-flowered counterpane, while the table
stood by the opposite wall, with the chairs pushed under it. “She
shouldn’t drive me too far,” he thought, “or perhaps it’ll end in my
seizing her, and then she’ll have her fingers burnt!”

“Why don’t you talk to me, Pelle?” said Hanne.

He raised his head and looked at her in the mirror. She was holding the
end of her plait in her mouth, and looked like a kitten biting its
tail.

“Oh, what should I talk about?” he replied morosely.

“You are angry with me, but it isn’t fair of you—really, it isn’t fair!
Is it my fault that I’m so terrified of poverty? Oh, how it does
frighten me! It has always been like that ever since I was born, and
you are poor too, Pelle, as poor as I am! What would become of us both?
We know the whole story!”

“What will become of us?” said Pelle.

“That I don’t know, and it’s all the same to me—only it must be
something I don’t know all about. Everything is so familiar if one is
poor—one knows every stitch of one’s clothes by heart; one can watch
them wearing out. If you’d only been a sailor, Pelle!”

“Have you seen _him_ again?” asked Pelle.

Hanne laughingly shook her head. “No; but I believe something will
happen—something splendid. Out there lies a great ship—I can see it
from the window. It’s full of wonderful things, Pelle.”

“You are crazy!” said Pelle scornfully. “That’s a bark—bound for the
coal quay. She comes from England with coals.”

“That may well be,” replied Hanne indifferently. “I don’t mind that.
There’s something in me singing, ‘There lies the ship, and it has
brought something for me from foreign parts.’ And you needn’t grudge me
my happiness.”

But now her mother came in, and began to mimic her.

“Yes, out there lies the ship that has brought me something—out there
lies the ship that has brought me something! Good God! Haven’t you had
enough of listening to your own crazy nonsense? All through your
childhood you’ve sat there and made up stories and looked out for the
ship! We shall soon have had enough of it! And you let Pelle sit there
and watch you uncovering your youth—aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“Pelle’s so good, mother—and he’s my brother, too. He thinks nothing of
it.”

“Thinks nothing of it? Yes, he does; he thinks how soft and white your
bosom is! And he’s fit to cry inside of him because he mustn’t lay his
head there. I, too, have known what it is to give joy, in my young
days.”

Hanne blushed from her bosom upward. She threw a kerchief over her
bosom and ran into the kitchen.

The mother looked after her.

“She’s got a skin as tender as that of a king’s daughter. Wouldn’t one
think she was a cuckoo’s child? Her father couldn’t stand her. ‘You’ve
betrayed me with some fine gentleman’—he used so often to say that. ‘We
poor folks couldn’t bring a piece like that into the world!’ ‘As God
lives, Johnsen,’ I used to say, ‘you and no other are the girl’s
father.’ But he used to beat us—he wouldn’t believe me. He used to fly
into a rage when he looked at the child, and he hated us both because
she was so fine. So its no wonder that she had gone a bit queer in the
head. You can believe she’s cost me tears of blood, Pelle. But you let
her be, Pelle. I could wish you could get her, but it wouldn’t be best
for you, and it isn’t good for you to have her playing with you. And if
you got her after all, it would be even worse. A woman’s whims are poor
capital for setting up house with.”

Pelle agreed with her in cold blood; he had allowed himself to he
fooled, and was wasting his youth upon a path that led nowhere. But now
there should be an end of it.

Hanne came back and looked at him, radiant, full of visions. “Will you
take me for a walk, Pelle?” she asked him.

“Yes!” answered Pelle joyfully, and he threw all his good resolutions
overboard.




V


Pelle and his little neighbor used to compete as to which of them
should be up first in the morning. When she was lucky and had to wake
him her face was radiant with pride. It sometimes happened that he
would lie in bed a little longer, so that he should not deprive her of
a pleasure, and when she knocked on the wall he would answer in a voice
quite stupid with drowsiness. But sometimes her childish years demanded
the sleep that was their right, when Pelle would move about as quietly
as possible, and then, at half-past six, it would be his turn to knock
on the wall. On these occasions she would feel ashamed of herself all
the morning. Her brothers were supposed to get their early coffee and
go to work by six o’clock. Peter, who was the elder, worked in a
tin-plate works, while Earl sold the morning papers, and undertook
every possible kind of occasional work as well; this he had to hunt
for, and you could read as much in his whole little person. There was
something restless and nomadic about him, as though his thoughts were
always seeking some outlet.

It was quite a lively neighborhood at this time of day; across the
floor of the well, and out through the tunnel-like entry there was an
endless clattering of footsteps, as the hundreds of the “Ark” tumbled
out into the daylight, half tipsy with sleep, dishevelled, with
evidence of hasty rising in their eyes and their garments, smacking
their lips as though they relished the contrast between the night and
day, audibly yawning as they scuttled away. Up in Pelle’s long gangway
factory girls, artisans, and newspaper women came tumbling out, half
naked; they were always late, and stood there scolding until their turn
came to wash themselves. There was only one lavatory at either end of
the gangway, and there was only just time to sluice their eyes and wake
themselves up. The doors of all the rooms stood open; the odors of
night were heavy on the air.

On the days when Pelle worked at home little Marie was in high spirits.
She sang and hummed continually, with her curiously small voice, and
every few minutes she would run in and offer Pelle her services. At
such times she would station herself behind him and stand there in
silence, watching the progress of his work, while her breathing was
audibly perceptible, as a faint, whistling sound. There was a curious,
still, brooding look about her little under-grown figure that reminded
Pelle of Morten’s unhappy sister; something hard and undeveloped, as in
the fruit of a too-young tree. But the same shadow did not lie upon
her; childish toil had not steeped her as with a bitter sap; only her
outer shell was branded by it. There was about her, on the contrary, a
gleam of careful happiness, as though things had turned out much better
than she had expected. Perhaps this was because she could see the
result of her hard childish labors; no one could scatter that to the
winds.

She was a capable little housewife, and her brothers respected her, and
faithfully brought home what they earned. Then she took what she
needed, laid something by toward the rent, in a box which was put away
in the chest of drawers, and gave them something wherewith to amuse
themselves. “They must have something!” she told people; “besides, men
always need money in their pockets. But they deserve it, for they have
never yet spent a farthing in drink. On Saturday nights they always
come straight home with their earnings. But now I must get on with my
work; it’s dreadful how the time runs through one’s hands.”

She talked just like a young married woman, and Pelle inwardly chuckled
over her.

After a while she would peep in again; it was time for Pelle to have a
bite of something; or else she would bring her mending with her and sit
down on the edge of a chair.

She was always in a fidget lest a saucepan should boil over, or
something else go amiss.

At such times they had long, sensible talks. Little Marie did not care
about gossip; but there were plenty of serious things which had to be
talked over; the difficult times, Marie’s parents, and then the
wonderful fact that they had met one another once before, a long time
ago; that was an event which provided her with an inexhaustible mine of
discussion, although she herself could not remember the occasion.

But Pelle remembered it all quite well, and over and over again he had
to tell her how one day at home he had gone down to the harbor, in
order to show old Thatcher Holm the steamers; and she always laughed
when she heard how Holm had run away in his alarm every time the
steam-crane blew off steam. And then? Yes, the steamer was just on the
point of taking on board a heap of furniture, old beds, tables, and the
like.

“That was all ours!” cried Marie, clapping her hands. “We still had a
few things then. We took them to the pawn-shop when father lay ill
after his fall.” And then she would meet his gaze, asking for more.

And in the midst of all the furniture stood a man with a fine old
mirror in his arms. Thatcher Holm knew him, and had a talk with him.

“He was crying, wasn’t he?” asked Marie compassionately. “Father was so
unhappy, because things were going so badly with us.”

And then she herself would talk about the hotel, down among the cliffs
of the east coast, and of the fine guests who came there in summer.
Three years they had kept the hotel, and Pelle had to name the sum out
of which her father had been cheated. She was proud that they had once
possessed so much. Ten thousand kroner!

Over here her father had found work as a stonemason’s laborer, but one
day he trod on a loose beam and fell. For a few months he lay sick, and
all their household goods found their way to the pawn-shop; then he
died, and then they came to the “Ark.” Their mother did washing out of
doors, but at last she became queer in the head. She could not bear
unhappiness, and neglected her housework, to run about seeking
consolation from all sorts of religious sects. At last she was quite
demented, and one day she disappeared. It was believed that she had
drowned herself in the canal. “But things are going well with us now,”
Marie always concluded; “now there’s nothing to worry about.”

“But don’t you get tired of having all this to look after?” Pelle would
ask, wondering.

She would look at him in astonishment. “Why should I be tired? There’s
not more than one can manage—if one only knows how to manage. And the
children never make things difficult for me; they are pleased with
everything I do.”

The three orphans struggled on as well as they could, and were quite
proud of their little household. When things went badly with them, they
went hungry, and took serious counsel together; but they accepted help
from no one. They lived in the continual fear that the police would get
to know of their position, and haul them off to school. Then they would
be forcibly separated and brought up at the expense of the poor-rates.
They were shy, and “kept themselves to themselves.” In the “Ark”
everybody liked them, and helped them to keep their secret. The other
inmates managed their family affairs as best they could; there was
always a scandal somewhere. It was a sort of satisfaction to have these
three children living so decently in the midst of all this hotch-potch.
People thought a great deal of their little model household, and
protected it as though it had been a sanctuary.

To Pelle they attached themselves blindly. They had picked him up out
of the streets, and they certainly regarded him to some extent as a
foundling who was still under their protection. When Marie had given
the boys their morning coffee, she carried some in to Pelle—it was no
use protesting. And in the mornings, when she was busy indoors by
herself, she would go round to him with broom and bucket. Her
precocious, intelligent face was beaming with circumspection and the
desire to help. She did not ask permission, but set to work where need
was. If Pelle was away at Beck’s workshop, he always found his room
clean and tidy in the evening.

If he had work at home, she would bring coffee for the two of them
during the morning. He did not dare to drive her away, for she would
take that to heart, and would go about offended all the rest of the
day; so he would run below to fetch a roll of white bread. Marie always
found some pretext for putting aside her share for the boys; it gave
her no real pleasure to enjoy anything by herself.

Pelle felt that he was making headway; and he was conscious of his own
youth. He was continually in the rosiest of humors, and even Hanne
could not throw any real shadow over his existence. In his relations
with her there was something of a beautiful unreality; they left no
permanent scar upon his heart.

He felt quite simply ashamed in the presence of this much tried child,
whenever something cropped up to put him out of temper. He felt it was
his duty to brighten her poverty-stricken life with his high spirits.
He chatted merrily to her, chaffed her, teased her, to charm her from
her unnatural solemnity. And she would smile, in her quiet, motherly
fashion, as one smiles at a much-loved child who seeks to drive away
our cares—and would then offer to do something for him.

“Shall I wash out your blouse or do up your shirt?” she would ask. Her
gratitude always found its expression in some kind of work.

“No, thanks, Marie; Hanne and her mother look after that.”

“But that’s not work for the Princess—I can do it much better.”

“The Princess?” said Pelle, raising his head. “Is that what they call
her?”

“Only us children—we don’t mean it unkindly. But we always played at
there being a princess when she was with us—and she was always the
princess. But do you know what? Some one will come and take her away—
some one very distinguished. She has been promised from the cradle to a
fine gentleman.”

“What nonsense!” said Pelle crossly.

“But that’s really true! When it rained we used to sit under the
gallery—in the corner by the dustbin—and she used to tell us—and it’s
really true! And, besides, don’t you think she’s fascinating? She’s
really just like a princess—like that!” Marie made a gesture in the air
with her fingers outspread. “And she knows everything that is going to
happen. She used to run down to us, in the courtyard, in her long
dress, and her mother used to stand up above and call her; then she’d
sit on the grating as if it was a throne and she was the queen and we
were her ladies. She used to braid our hair, and then dress it
beautifully with colored ribbons, and when I came up here again mother
used to tear it all down and make my hair rough again. It was a sin
against God to deck one’s self out like that, she said. And when mother
disappeared I hadn’t time to play down there any more.”

“Poor little girl!” said Pelle, stroking her hair.

“Why do you say that?” she asked him, looking at him in astonishment.

He enjoyed her absolute confidence, and was told things that the boys
were not allowed to know. She began to dress more carefully, and her
fine fair hair was always brushed smoothly back from her forehead. She
was delighted when they both had some errand in the city. Then she put
on her best and went through the streets at his side, her whole face
smiling. “Now perhaps people will think we are a couple of lovers—but
what does it matter? Let them think it!” Pelle laughed; with her
thirteen years she was no bigger than a child of nine, so backward in
growth was she.

She often found it difficult to make both ends meet; she would say
little or nothing about it, but a kind of fear would betray itself in
her expression. Then Pelle would speak cheerfully of the good times
that would soon be coming for all poor people. It cost him a great deal
of exertion to put this in words so as to make it sound as it ought to
sound. His thoughts were still so new—even to himself. But the children
thought nothing of his unwieldy speech; to them it was easier to
believe in the new age than it was to him.




VI


Pelle was going through a peculiar change at this time. He had seen
enough need and poverty in his life; and the capital was simply a
battlefield on which army upon army had rushed forward and had
miserably been defeated. Round about him lay the fallen. The town was
built over them as over a cemetery; one had to tread upon them in order
to win forward and harden one’s heart. Such was life in these days; one
shut one’s eyes—like the sheep when they see their comrades about to be
slaughtered—and waited until one’s own turn came. There was nothing
else to do.

But now he was awake and suffering; it hurt him with a stabbing pain
whenever he saw others suffer; and he railed against misfortune,
unreasonable though it might be.

There came a day when he sat working at home. At the other end of the
gangway a factory girl with her child had moved in a short while
before. Every morning she locked the door and went to work—and she did
not return until the evening. When Pelle came home he could hear the
sound of crying within the room.

He sat at his work, wrestling with his confused ideas. And all the time
a curious stifled sound was in his ears—a grievous sound, as though
something were incessantly complaining. Perhaps it was only the dirge
of poverty itself, some strophe of which was always vibrating upon the
air.

Little Marie came hurrying in. “Oh, Pelle, it’s crying again!” she
said, and she wrung her hands anxiously upon her hollow chest. “It has
cried all day, ever since she came here—it is horrible!”

“We’ll go and see what’s wrong,” said Pelle, and he threw down his
hammer.

The door was locked; they tried to look through the keyhole, but could
see nothing. The child within stopped its crying for a moment, as
though it heard them, but it began again at once; the sound was low and
monotonous, as though the child was prepared to hold out indefinitely.
They looked at one another; it was unendurable.

“The keys on this gangway do for all the doors,” said Marie, under her
breath. With one leap Pelle had rushed indoors, obtained his key, and
opened the door.

Close by the door sat a little four-year-old boy; he stared up at them,
holding a rusty tin vessel in his hand. He was tied fast to the stove;
near him, on an old wooden stool, was a tin plate containing a few
half- nibbled crusts of bread. The child was dressed in filthy rags and
presented a shocking appearance. He sat in his own filth; his little
hands were covered with it. His tearful, swollen face was smeared all
over with it. He held up his hands to them beseechingly.

Pelle burst into tears at the horrible sight and wanted to pick the
child up. “Let me do that!” cried Marie, horrified. “You’ll make
yourself filthy!”

“What then?” said Pelle stupidly. He helped to untie the child; his
hands were trembling.

To some extent they got the child to rights and gave him food. Then
they let him loose in the long gangway. For a time he stood stupidly
gaping by the doorpost; then he discovered that he was not tied up, and
began to rush up and down. He still held in his hand the old
tea-strainer which he had been grasping when they rescued him; he had
held on to it convulsively all the time. Marie had to dip his hand in
the water in order to clean the strainer.

From time to time he stood in front of Pelle’s open door, and peeped
inside. Pelle nodded to him, when he went storming up and down again—he
was like a wild thing. But suddenly he came right in, laid the tea-
strainer in Pelle’s lap and looked at him. “Am I to have that?” asked
Pelle. “Look, Marie, he is giving me the only thing he’s got!”

“Oh, poor little thing!” cried Marie pityingly. “He wants to thank
you!”

In the evening the factory girl came rushing in; she was in a rage, and
began to abuse them for breaking into her room. Pelle wondered at
himself, that he was able to answer her so quietly instead of railing
back at her. But he understood very well that she was ashamed of her
poverty and did not want any one else to see it. “It is unkind to the
child,” was all he said. “And yet you are fond of it!”

Then she began to cry. “I have to tie him up, or he climbs out over the
window-sill and runs into the street—he got to the corner once before.
And I’ve no clothes, to take him to the crêche!”

“Then leave the door open on the gangway! We will look after him, Marie
and I.”

After this the child tumbled about the gangway and ran to and fro.
Marie looked after him, and was like a mother to him. Pelle bought some
old clothes, and they altered them to fit him. The child looked very
droll in them; he was a little goblin who took everything in good part.
In his loneliness he had not learned to speak, but now speech came
quickly to him.

In Pelle this incident awakened something quite novel. Poverty he had
known before, but now he saw the injustice that lay beneath it, and
cried to heaven. His hands would suddenly clench with anger as he sat
so quietly in his room. Here was something one must hasten forward,
without intermission, day and night, as long as one drew breath—Morten
was right about that! This child’s father was a factory hand, and the
girl dared not summon him before the magistrates in order to make him
pay for its support for fear of being dismissed from her place. The
whole business seemed so hopeless—society seemed so unassailable—yet he
felt that he must strike a blow. His own hands alone signified so
little; but if they could only strike the blow all together—then
perhaps it would have some effect.

In the evenings he and Morten went to meetings where the situation was
passionately discussed. Those who attended these meetings were mostly
young people like himself. They met in some inn by the North Bridge.
But Pelle longed to see some result, and applied himself eagerly to the
organization of his own craft.

He inspired the weary president with his own zeal, and they prepared
together a list of all the members of their trade—as the basis of a
more vigorous agitation. When the “comrades” were invited to a meeting
through the press, they turned lazy and failed to appear. More
effectual means were needed; and Pelle started a house-to-house
agitation. This helped immediately; they were in a dilemma when one got
them face to face, and the Union was considerably increased, in spite
of the persecution of the big masters.

Morten began to treat him with respect; and wanted him to read about
the movement. But Pelle had no time for that. Together with Peter and
Karl, who were extremely zealous, he took in _The Working Man_, and
that was enough for him. “I know more about poverty than they write
there,” he said.

There was no lack of fuel to keep this fire burning. He had
participated in the march of poverty, from the country to the town and
thence to the capital, and there they stood and could go no farther for
all their longing, but perished on a desert shore. The many lives of
the “Ark” lay always before his eyes as a great common possession,
where no one need conceal himself, and where the need of the one was
another’s grief.

His nature was at this time undergoing a great change. There was an end
of his old careless acceptance of things. He laughed less and performed
apparently trivial actions with an earnestness which had its comical
side. And he began to display an appearance of self-respect which
seemed ill-justified by his position and his poverty.

One evening, when work was over, as he came homeward from Beck’s
workshop, he heard the children singing Hanne’s song down in the
courtyard. He stood still in the tunnel-like entry; Hanne herself stood
in the midst of a circle, and the children were dancing round her and
singing:

“I looked from the lofty mountain
Down over vale and lea,
And I saw a ship come sailing,
    Sailing, sailing,
I saw a ship come sailing,
And on it were lordlings three.”


On Hanne’s countenance lay a blind, fixed smile; her eyes were tightly
closed. She turned slowly about as the children sang, and she sang
softly with them:

“The youngest of all the lordlings
Who on the ship did stand…”


But suddenly she saw Pelle and broke out of the circle. She went up the
stairs with him. The children, disappointed, stood calling after her.

“Aren’t you coming to us this evening?” she asked. “It is so long since
we have seen you.”

“I’ve no time. I’ve got an appointment,” replied Pelle briefly.

“But you must come! I beg you to, Pelle.” She looked at him pleadingly,
her eyes burning.

Pelle’s heart began to thump as he met her gaze. “What do you want with
me?” he asked sharply.

Hanne stood still, gazing irresolutely into the distance.

“You must help me, Pelle,” she said, in a toneless voice, without
meeting his eye.

“Yesterday I met…. Yesterday evening, as I was coming out of the
factory … he stood down below here … he knows where I live. I went
across to the other side and behaved as though I did not see him; but
he came up to me and said I was to go to the New Market this evening!”

“And what did you say to that?” answered Pelle sulkily.

“I didn’t say anything—I ran as hard as I could!”

“Is that all you want me for?” cried Pelle harshly. “You can keep away
from him, if you don’t want him!”

A cold shudder ran through her. “But if he comes here to look for me?…
And you are so…. I don’t care for anybody in the world but you and
mother!” She spoke passionately.

“Well, well, I’ll come over to you,” answered Pelle cheerfully.

He dressed himself quickly and went across. The old woman was delighted
to see him. Hanne was quite frolicsome; she rallied him continually,
and it was not long before he had abandoned his firm attitude and
allowed himself to be drawn into the most delightful romancing. They
sat out on the gallery under the green foliage, Hanne’s face glowing to
rival the climbing pelargonium; she kept on swinging her foot, and
continually touched Pelle’s leg with the tip of her shoe.

She was nervously full of life, and kept on asking the time. When her
mother went into the kitchen to make coffee, she took Pelle’s hand and
smilingly stroked it.

“Come with me,” she said. “I should so like to see if he is really so
silly as to think I’d come. We can stand in a corner somewhere and look
out.”

Pelle did not answer.

“Mother,” said Hanne, when Madam Johnsen returned with the coffee, “I’m
going out to buy some stuff for my bodice. Pelle’s coming with me.”

The excuse was easy to see through. But the old woman betrayed no
emotion. She had already seen that Hanne was well disposed toward Pelle
to-day; something was going on in the girl’s mind, and if Pelle only
wanted to, he could now bridle her properly. She had no objection to
make if both the young people kicked over the traces a little. Perhaps
then they would find peace together.

“You ought to take your shawl with you,” she told Hanne. “The evening
air may turn cold.”

Hanne walked so quickly that Pelle could hardly follow her. “It’ll be a
lark to see his disappointment when we don’t turn up,” she said,
laughing. Pelle laughed also. She stationed herself behind one of the
pillars of the Town Hall, where she could peep out across the market.
She was quite out of breath, she had hurried so.

Gradually, as the time went by and the stranger did not appear, her
animation vanished; she was silent, and her expression was one of
disappointment.

“No one’s going to come!” she said suddenly, and she laughed shortly.

“I only made up the whole thing to tell you, to see what you’d say.”

“Then let’s go!” said Pelle quietly, and he took her hand.

As they went down the steps, Hanne started; and her hand fell limply
from his. The stranger came quickly up to her. He held out his hand to
Hanne, quietly and as a matter of course, as though he had known her
for years. Pelle, apparently, he did not see.

“Will you come somewhere with me—where we can hear music, for example?”
he asked, and he continued to hold her hand. She looked irresolutely at
Pelle.

For a moment Pelle felt an inordinate longing to throw himself upon
this man and strike him to the ground, but then he met Hanne’s eyes,
which wore an expression as though she was longing for some means of
shaking him off. “Well, it looks as if one was in the way here!” he
thought. “And what does it all matter to me?” He turned away from her
and sauntered off down a side street.

Pelle strolled along to the quays by the gasworks, and he stood there,
sunk in thought, gazing at the ships and the oily water. He did not
suffer; it was only so terribly stupid that a strange hand should
appear out of the unknown, and that the bird which he with all his
striving could not entice, should have hopped right away on to that
hand.

Below the quay-wall the water plashed with a drowsy sound; fragments of
wood and other rubbish floated on it; it was all so home-like! Out by
the coal-quay lay a three-master. It was after working hours; the crew
were making an uproar below decks, or standing about on deck and
washing themselves in a bucket. One well-grown young seaman in blue
clothes and a white neckerchief came out of the cabin and stared up at
the rigging as though out of habit, and yawned. Then he strolled
ashore. His cap was on the back of his head, and between his teeth was
a new pipe. His face was full of freakish merriment, and he walked with
a swing of the hips. As he came up to Pelle he swayed to and fro a few
times and then bumped into him. “Oh, excuse me!” he said, touching his
cap. “I thought it was a scratching-post, the gentleman stood so stiff.
Well, you mustn’t take it amiss!” And he began to go round and round
Pelle, bending far forward as though he were looking for something on
him, and finally he pawed his own ears, like a friendly bear, and shook
with laughter. He was overflowing with high spirits and good humor.

Pelle had not shaken off his feeling of resentment; he did not know
whether to be angry or to laugh at the whole thing.

He turned about cautiously, so as to keep his eye on the sailor, lest
the latter should pull his feet from under him. He knew the grip, and
also how it should be parried; and he held his hands in readiness.
Suddenly something in the stooping position struck him as familiar.
This was Per Kofod—Howling Peter, from the village school at home, in
his own person! He who used to roar and blubber at the slightest word!
Yes, this was he!

“Good evening, Per!” he cried, delighted, and he gave him a thump in
the back.

The seaman stood up, astonished. “What the devil! Good evening! Well,
that I should meet you here, Pelle; that’s the most comical thing I’ve
ever known! You must excuse my puppy-tricks! Really!” He shook Pelle
heartily by the hand.

They loafed about the harbor, chatting of old times. There was so much
to recall from their schooldays. Old Fris with his cane, and the games
on the beach! Per Kofod spoke as though he had taken part in all of
them; he had quite forgotten that he used always to stand still
gripping on to something and bellowing, if the others came bawling
round him. “And Nilen, too, I met him lately in New Orleans. He is
second mate on a big American full-rigged ship, and is earning big
money. A smart fellow he is. But hang it all, he’s a tough case! Always
with his revolver in his hand. But that’s how it has to be over
there—among the niggers. Still, one fine day they’ll slit his belly up,
by God they will! Now then, what’s the matter there?”

From some stacks of timber near by came a bellowing as of some one in
torment, and the sound of blows. Pelle wanted, to turn aside, but Per
Kofod seized his arm and dragged him forward.

In among the timber-stacks three “coalies” were engaged in beating a
fourth. He did not cry out, but gave vent to a muffled roar every time
he received a blow. The blood was flowing down his face.

“Come on!” shouted Per Kofod, hitching up his trousers. And then, with
a roar, he hurled himself into their midst, and began to lay about him
in all directions. It was like an explosion with its following hail of
rocks. Howling Peter had learned to use his strength; only a sailor
could lay about him in that fashion. It was impossible to say where his
blows were going to fall; but they all went home. Pelle stood by for a
moment, mouth and eyes open in the fury of the fray; then he, too,
tumbled into the midst of it, and the three dock-laborers were soon
biting the dust.

“Damn it all, why did you interfere!” said Pelle crossly, when it was
over, as he stood pulling his collar straight.

“I don’t know,” said Howling Peter. “But it does one no harm to bestir
one’s self a bit for once!”

After the heat of the battle they had all but forgotten the man
originally attacked; he lay huddled up at the foot of a timber-stack
and made no sound. They got him on his legs again, but had to hold him
upright; he stood as limp as though asleep, and his eyes were staring
stupidly. He was making a heavy snoring sound, and at every breath the
blood made two red bubbles at his nostrils. From time to time he ground
his teeth, and then his eyes turned upward and the whites gleamed
strangely in his coal-blackened face.

The sailor scolded him, and that helped him so far that he was able to
stand on his feet. They drew a red rag from his bulging jacket-pocket,
and wiped the worst of the blood away. “What sort of a fellow are you,
damn it all, that you can’t stand a drubbing?” said Per Kofod.

“I didn’t call for help,” said the man thickly. His lips were swollen
to a snout.

“But you didn’t hit back again! Yet you look as if you’d strength
enough. Either a fellow manages to look after himself or he sings out
so that others can come to help him. D’ye see, mate?”

“I didn’t want to bring the police into it; and I’d earned a thrashing.
Only they hit so damned hard, and when I fell they used their clogs.”

He lived in the Saksogade, and they took each an arm. “If only I don’t
get ill now!” he groaned from time to time. “I’m all a jelly inside.”
And they had to stop while he vomited.

There was a certain firm for which he and his mates had decided no
longer to unload, as they had cut down the wages offered. There were
only four of them who stuck to their refusal; and what use was it when
others immediately took their place? The four of them could only hang
about and play the gentleman at large; nothing more came of it. But of
course he had given his word—that was why he had not hit back. The
other three had found work elsewhere, so he went back to the firm and
ate humble pie. Why should he hang about idle and killing time when
there was nothing to eat at home? He was damned if he understood these
new ways; all the same, he had betrayed the others, for he had given
his word. But they had struck him so cursedly hard, and had kicked him
in the belly with their clogs.

He continued rambling thus, like a man in delirium, as they led him
along. In the Saksogade they were stopped by a policeman, but Per Kofod
quickly told him a story to the effect that the man had been struck on
the head by a falling crane. He lived right up in the attics. When they
opened the door a woman who lay there in child-bed raised herself up on
the iron bedstead and gazed at them in alarm. She was thin and anemic.
When she perceived the condition of her husband she burst into a
heartrending fit of crying.

“He’s sober,” said Pelle, in order to console her; “he has only got a
bit damaged.”

They took him into the kitchen and bathed his head over the sink with
cold water. But Per Kofod’s assistance was not of much use; every time
the woman’s crying reached his ears he stopped helplessly and turned
his head toward the door; and suddenly he gave up and tumbled
head-foremost down the back stairs.

“What was really the matter with you?” asked Pelle crossly, when he,
too, could get away. Per was waiting at the door for him.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear her hymn-singing, you blockhead! But, anyhow,
you saw her sitting up in bed and looking like wax? It’s beastly, I
tell you; it’s infamous! He’d no need to go making her cry like that! I
had the greatest longing to thrash him again, weak as a baby though he
was. The devil—what did he want to break his word for?”

“Because they were starving, Per!” said Pelle earnestly. “That does
happen at times in this accursed city.”

Kofod stared at him and whistled. “Oh, Satan! Wife and child, and the
whole lot without food—what? And she in childbed. They were married,
right enough, you can see that. Oh, the devil! What a honeymoon! What
misery!”

He stood there plunging deep into his trouser pockets; he fetched out a
handful of things: chewing-tobacco, bits of flock, broken matches, and
in the midst of all a crumpled ten-kroner note. “So I thought!” he
said, fishing out the note. “I was afraid the girls had quite cleaned
me out last night! Now Pelle, you go up and spin them some sort of a
yarn; I can’t do it properly myself; for, look you, if I know that
woman she won’t stop crying day and night for another twenty-four
hours! That’s the last of my pay. But—oh, well, blast it … we go to sea
to-morrow!”

“She stopped crying when I took her the money,” said Pelle, when he
came down again.

“That’s good. We sailors are dirty beasts; you know; we do our business
into china and eat our butter out of the tarbucket; all the same, we—I
tell you, I should have left the thing alone and used the money to have
made a jolly night of it to-night….” He was suddenly silent; he chewed
at his quid as though inwardly considering his difficult philosophy.
“Damn it all, to-morrow we put to sea!” he cried suddenly.

They went out to Alleenberg and sat in the gardens. Pelle ordered beer.
“I can very well stand a few pints when I meet a good pal,” he said,
“but at other times I save like the devil. I’ve got to see about
getting my old father over here; he’s living on charity at home.”

“So your father’s still living? I can see him still so plainly—he had a
love-affair with Madam Olsen for some time, but then bo’sun Olsen came
home unexpectedly; they thought he’d remain abroad.”

Pelle laughed. Much water had run into the sea since those days. Now he
was no longer ashamed of Father Lasse’s foolish prank.

Light was gleaming from the booths in the garden. Young couples
wandered about and had their fortunes told; they ventured themselves on
the Wheel of Happiness, or had their portraits cut out by the
silhouette artist. By the roundabout was a mingled whirl of cries and
music and brightly colored petticoats. Now and again a tremendous
outcry arose, curiously dreadful, over all other sounds, and from the
concert-pavilion one heard the cracked, straining voices of one-time
“stars.” Wretched little worldlings came breathlessly hurrying thither,
pushing through the crowd, and disappeared into the pavilion, nodding
familiarly to the man in the ticket-office window.

“It’s really quite jolly here,” said Per Kofod. “You have a damn good
time of it on land!”

On the wide pathway under the trees apprentices, workmen, soldiers, and
now and again a student, loitered up and down, to and fro, looking
sideways at the servant-girls, who had stationed themselves on either
side of the walk, standing there arm-in-arm, or forming little groups.
Their eyes sent many a message before ever one of them stopped and
ventured to speak. Perhaps the maiden turned away; if so, that was an
end of the matter, and the youngster began the business all over again.
Or perhaps she ran off with him to one of the closed arbors, where they
drank coffee, or else to the roundabouts. Several of the young people
were from Pelle’s home; and every time he heard the confident voices of
the Bornholm girls Pelle’s heart stirred like a bird about to fly away.

Suddenly his troubles returned to his mind. “I really felt inclined,
this evening, to have done with the whole thing…. Just look at those
two, Per!” Two girls were standing arm-in-arm under a tree, quite close
to their table. They were rocking to and fro together, and now and
again they glanced at the two young men.

“Nothing there for me—that’s only for you land-lubbers,” said Per
Kofod. “For look you now, they’re like so many little lambs whose ears
you’ve got to tickle. And then it all comes back to you in the nights
when you take the dog-watch alone; you’ve told her lies, or you
promised to come back again when she undid her bodice…. And in the end
there she is, planted, and goin’ to have a kid! It don’t do. A sailor
ought to keep to the naughty girls.”

“But married women can be frisky sometimes,” said Pelle.

“That so, really? Once I wouldn’t have believed that any one could have
kicked a good woman; but after all they strangle little children…. And
they come and eat out of your hand if you give ’em a kind word—that’s
the mischief of it…. D’you remember Howling Peter?”

“Yes, as you ask me, I remember him very well.”

“Well, his father was a sailor, too, and that’s just what he did…. And
she was just such a girl, one who couldn’t say no, and believed
everything a man told her. He was going to come back again—of course.
‘When you hear the trap-door of the loft rattle, that’ll be me,’ he
told her. But the trap-door rattled several times, and he didn’t come.
Then she hanged herself from the trap-door with a rope. Howling Peter
came on to the parish. And you know how they all scorned him. Even the
wenches thought they had the right to spit at him. He could do nothing
but bellow. His mother had cried such a lot before he was born, d’ye
see? Yes, and then he hanged himself too—twice he tried to do it. He’d
inherited that! After that he had a worse time than ever; everybody
thought it honorable to ill-use him and ask after the marks on his
throat. No, not you; you were the only one who didn’t raise a hand to
him. That’s why I’ve so often thought about you. ‘What has become of
him?’ I used to ask myself. ‘God only knows where he’s got to!’” And he
gazed at Pelle with a pair of eyes full of trust.

“No, that was due to Father Lasse,” said Pelle, and his tone was quite
childlike. “He always said I must be good to you because you were in
God’s keeping.”

“In God’s keeping, did he say?” repeated Per Kofod thoughtfully. “That
was a curious thing to say. That’s a feeling I’ve never had. There was
nothing in the whole world at that time that could have helped me to
stand up for myself. I can scarcely understand how it is that I’m
sitting here talking to you—I mean, that they didn’t torment the life
out of my body.”

“Yes, you’ve altered very much. How does it really come about that
you’re such a smart fellow now?”

“Why, such as I am now, that’s really my real nature. It has just waked
up, that’s what I think. But I don’t understand really what was the
matter with me then. I knew well enough I could knock you down if I had
only wanted to. But I didn’t dare strike out, just out of sheer
wretchedness. I saw so much that you others couldn’t see. Damn it all,
I can’t make head nor tail of it! It must have been my mother’s
dreadful misery that was still in my bones. A horror used to come over
me—quite causeless—so that I had to bellow aloud; and then the farmers
used to beat me. And every time I tried to get out of it all by hanging
myself, they beat me worse than ever. The parish council decided I was
to be beaten. Well, that’s why I don’t do it, Pelle—a sailor ought to
keep to women that get paid for it, if they have anything to do with
him—that is, if he can’t get married. There, you have my opinion.”

“You’ve had a very bad time,” said Pelle, and he took his hand. “But
it’s a tremendous change that’s come over you!”

“Change! You may well say so! One moment Howling Peter—and the next,
the strongest man on board! There you have the whole story! For look
here now, at sea, of course, it was just the same; even the ship’s boy
felt obliged to give me a kick on the shins in passing. Everybody who
got a blow on a rowing passed it on to me. And when I went to sea in an
American bark, there was a nigger on board, and all of them used to
hound him down; he crawled before them, but you may take your oath he
hated them out of the whites of his devil’s eyes. But me, who treated
him with humanity, he played all manner of tricks on—it was nothing to
him that I was white. Yet even with him I didn’t dare to fetch him one—
there was always like a flabby lump in my midriff. But once the thing
went too far—or else the still-born something inside me was exhausted.
I just aimed at him a bit with one arm, so that he fell down. That
really was a rummy business. It was, let’s say, like a fairy tale where
the toad suddenly turns into a man. I set to then and there and
thrashed him till he was half dead. And while I was about it, and in
the vein, it seemed best to get the whole thing over, so I went right
ahead and thrashed the whole crew from beginning to end. It was a
tremendous moment, there was such a heap of rage inside me that had got
to come out!”

Pelle laughed. “A lucky thing that I knew you a little while ago, or
you would have made mincemeat of me, after all!”

“Not me, mate, that was only a little joke. A fellow is in such high
spirits when he comes ashore again. But out at sea it’s—thrash the
others, or they’ll thrash you! Well, that’s all right, but one ought to
be good to the women. That’s what I’ve told the old man on board; he’s
a fellow-countryman, but a swine in his dealings with women. There
isn’t a single port where he hasn’t a love-affair. In the South, and on
the American coast. It’s madman’s work often, and I have to go along
with him and look out that he doesn’t get a knife between his ribs.
‘Per,’ he says, ‘this evening we’ll go on the bust together.’ ‘All
right, cap’n,’ I say. ‘But it’s a pity about all the women.’ ‘Shut your
mouth, Per,’ he says; ‘they’re most of them married safe enough.’ He’s
one of us from home, too—from a little cottage up on the heath.”

“What’s his name, then?” said Pelle, interested.

“Albert Karlsen.”

“Why, then he’s Uncle Kalle’s eldest, and in a way my cousin—Kalle,
that is to say, isn’t really his father. His wife had him before she
was married—he’s the son of the owner of Stone Farm.”

“So he’s a Kongstrup, then!” cried Per Kofod, and he laughed loudly.
“Well, that’s as it should be!”

Pelle paid, and they got up to go. The two girls were still standing by
the tree. Per Kofod went up to one of them as though she had been a
bird that might escape him. Suddenly he seized her round the waist; she
withdrew herself slowly from his grip and laughed in his big fair face.
He embraced her once again, and now she stood still; it was still in
her mind to escape, for she laughingly half-turned away. He looked deep
into her eyes, then released her and followed Pelle.

“What’s the use, Pelle—why, I can hear her complaining already! A
fellow ought to be well warned,” he said, with a despairing accent.
“But, damn it all, why should a man have so much compassion when he
himself has been so cruelly treated? And the others; they’ve no
compassion. Did you see how gentle her eyes were? If I’d money I’d
marry her right away.”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t have you,” replied Pelle. “It doesn’t do to take
the girls for granted.”

In the avenue a few men were going to and fro and calling; they were
looking for their young women, who had given them the slip. One of them
came up to Per and Pelle—he was wearing a student’s cap. “Have the
gentlemen seen anything of our ladies?” he asked. “We’ve been sitting
with them and treating them all the evening, and then they said they’d
just got to go to a certain place, and they’ve gone off.”

They went down to the harbor. “Can’t you come on board with me and say
how d’ye-do to the old man?” said Per. “But of course, he’s ashore to-
night. I saw him go over the side about the time we knocked off—rigged
out for chasing the girls.”

“I don’t know him at all,” said Pelle; “he was at sea already when I
was still a youngster. Anyhow, I’ve got to go home to bed now—I get to
work early in the mornings.”

They stood on the quay, taking leave of one another. Per Kofod promised
to look Pelle up next time he was in port. While they were talking the
door of the after-cabin rattled. Howling Peter drew Pelle behind a
stack of coal. A powerful, bearded man came out, leading a young girl
by the hand. She went slowly, and appeared to resist. He set her
ceremoniously ashore, turned back to the cabin, and locked the door
behind him. The girl stood still for a moment. A low ’plaint escaped
her lips. She stretched her arms pleadingly toward the cabin. Then she
turned and went mournfully along the quay.

“That was the old man,” whispered Per Kofod. “That’s how he treats them
all—and yet they don’t want to give him up.”

Pelle could not utter a word; he stood there cowering, oppressed as by
some terrible burden. Suddenly he pulled himself together, pressed his
comrade’s hand, and set off quickly between the coal-stacks.

After a time he turned aside and followed the young girl at a little
distance. Like a sleep-walker, she staggered along the quay and went
over the long bridge. He feared she would throw herself in the water,
so strangely did she behave.

On the bridge she stood gazing across at the ship, with a frozen look
on her face. Pelle stood still; turned to ice by the thought that she
might see him. He could not have borne to speak to her just then—much
less look into her eyes.

But then she moved on. Her bearing was broken; from behind she looked
like one of those elderly, shipwrecked females from the “Ark,” who
shuffled along by the house-walls in trodden-down men’s shoes, and
always boasted a dubious past. “Good God!” thought Pelle, “is her dream
over already? Good God!”

He followed her at a short distance down the narrow street, and as soon
as he knew that she must have reached her dwelling he entered the
tunnel.




VII


In the depths of Pelle’s soul lay a confident feeling that he was
destined for something particular; it was his old dream of fortune,
which would not be wholly satisfied by the good conditions for all men
which he wanted to help to bring about. His fate was no longer in his
eyes a grievous and crushing predestination to poverty, which could
only be lifted from him by a miracle; he was lord of his own future,
and already he was restlessly building it up!

But in addition to this there was something else that belonged only to
him and to life, something that no one else in the world could
undertake. What it was he had not yet figured to himself; but it was
something that raised him above all others, secretly, so that only he
was conscious of it. It was the same obscure feeling of being a pioneer
that had always urged him forward; and when it did take the form of a
definite question he answered it with the confident nod of his
childhood. Yes, he would see it through all right! As though that which
was to befall him was so great and so wonderful that it could not be
put into words, nor even thought of. He saw the straight path in front
of him, and he sauntered on, strong and courageous. There were no other
enemies than those a prudent man might perceive; those lurking forces
of evil which in his childhood had hovered threateningly above his head
were the shadows of the poor man’s wretchedness. There was nothing else
evil, and that was sinister enough. He knew now that the shadows were
long. Morten was right. Although he himself when a child had sported in
the light, yet his mind was saddened by the misery of all those who
were dead or fighting in distant parts of the earth; and it was on this
fact that the feeling of solidarity must be based. The miraculous
simply had no existence, and that was a good thing for those who had to
fight with the weapon of their own physical strength. No invisible
deity sat overhead making his own plans for them or obstructing others.
What one willed, that could one accomplish, if only he had strength
enough to carry it through. Strength—it was on that and that alone that
everything depended. And there was strength in plenty. But the strength
of all must be united, must act as the strength of one. People always
wondered why Pelle, who was so industrious and respectable, should live
in the “Ark” instead of in the northern quarter, in the midst of the
Movement. He wondered at himself when he ever thought about it at all;
but he could not as yet tear himself away from the “Ark.” Here, at the
bottom of the ladder, he had found peace in his time of need. He was
too loyal to turn his back on those among whom he had been happy.

He knew they would feel it as a betrayal; the adoration with which the
inmates of the “Ark” regarded the three orphan children was also
bestowed upon him; he was the foundling, the fourth member of the
“Family,” and now they were proud of him too!

It was not the way of the inmates of the “Ark” to make plans for the
future. Sufficient to the day was the evil thereof; to-morrow’s cares
were left for the morrow. The future did not exist for them. They were
like careless birds, who had once suffered shipwreck and had forgotten
it. Many of them made their living where they could; but however down
in the world they were, let the slightest ray of sunlight flicker down
to them, and all was forgotten. Of the labor movement and other new
things they gossiped as frivolously as so many chattering starlings,
who had snapped up the news on the wind.

But Pelle went so confidently out into the world, and set his shoulders
against it, and then came back home to them. He had no fear; he could
look Life straight in the face, he grappled boldly with the future,
before which they shudderingly closed their eyes. And thereby his name
came to be spoken with a particular accent; Pelle was a prince; what a
pity it was that he wouldn’t, it seemed, have the princess!

He was tall and well-grown, and to them he seemed even taller. They
went to him in their misery, and loaded it all on his strong young
shoulders, so that he could bear it for them. And Pelle accepted it all
with an increasing sense that perhaps it was not quite aimlessly that
he lingered here—so near the foundations of society!

At this time Widow Frandsen and her son Ferdinand came upon the scene.
Misfortune must house itself somewhere!

Ferdinand was a sturdy young fellow of eighteen years, with a
powerfully modelled head, which looked as though it had originally been
intended to absorb all the knowledge there is in all the world. But he
used it only for dispensing blows; he had no other use for it whatever.

Yet he was by no means stupid; one might even call him a gifted young
man. But his gifts were of a peculiar quality, and had gradually become
even more peculiar.

As a little child he had been forced to fight a besotted father, in
order to protect his mother, who had no other protector. This unequal
battle _had_ to be fought; and it necessarily blunted his capacity for
feeling pain, and particularly his sense of danger. He knew what was in
store for him, but he rushed blindly into the fray the moment his
mother was attacked; just as a dog will attack a great beast of prey,
so he hung upon the big man’s fists, and would not be shaken off. He
hated his father, and he longed in his heart to be a policeman when he
was grown up. With his blind and obtuse courage he was particularly
adapted to such a calling; but he actually became a homeless vagabond.

Gradually as he grew in height and strength and the battle was no
longer so unequal, his father began to fear him and to think of
revenge; and once, when Ferdinand had thoroughly thrashed him, he
reported him, and the boy was flogged. The boy felt this to be a
damnable piece of injustice; the flogging left scars behind it, and
another of its results was that his mother was no longer left in peace.

From that time onward he hated the police, and indulged his hatred at
every opportunity. His mother was the only being for whom he still
cared. It was like a flash of sunshine when his father died. But it
came too late to effect any transformation; Ferdinand had long ago
begun to look after his mother in his own peculiar way—which was partly
due to the conditions of his life.

He had grown up in the streets, and even when quite a child was one of
those who are secretly branded. The police knew him well, and were only
awaiting their opportunity to ask him inside. Ferdinand could see it in
their eyes—they reckoned quite confidently on that visit, and had got a
bed already for him in their hotel on the New Market.

But Ferdinand would not allow himself to be caught. When he had
anything doubtful in hand, he always managed to clear himself. He was
an unusually strong and supple young fellow, and was by no means afraid
to work; he obtained all kinds of occasional work, and he always did it
well. But whenever he got into anything that offered him a future, any
sort of regular work which must be learned and attacked with patience,
he could never go on with it.

“You speak to him, Pelle!” said his mother. “You are so sensible, and
he does respect you!” Pelle did speak to him, and helped him to find
some calling for which he was suited; and Ferdinand set to work with a
will, but when he got to a certain point he always threw it up.

His mother never lacked actual necessaries; although sometimes he only
procured them at the last moment. When not otherwise engaged, he would
stand in some doorway on the market-place, loafing about, his hands in
his pockets, his supple shoulders leaning against the wall. He was
always in clogs and mittens; at stated intervals he spat upon the
pavement, his sea-blue eyes following the passers-by with an
unfathomable expression. The policeman, who was aggressively pacing up
and down his beat, glanced at him in secret every time he passed him,
as much as to say, “Shan’t we ever manage to catch the rogue? Why
doesn’t he make a slip?”

And one day the thing happened—quite of itself, and not on account of
any clumsiness on his part—in the “Ark” they laid particular stress
upon that. It was simply his goodness of heart that was responsible.
Had Ferdinand not been the lad he was, matters had not gone awry, for
he was a gifted young man.

He was in the grocer’s shop on the corner of the Market buying a few
coppers’ worth of chewing-tobacco. An eight-year-old boy from the “Ark”
was standing by the counter, asking for a little flour on credit for
his mother. The grocer was making a tremendous fuss about the affair.
“Put it down—I dare say! One keeps shop on the corner here just to feed
all the poor folks in the neighborhood! I shall have the money
to-morrow? Peculiar it is, that in this miserable, poverty-stricken
quarter folks are always going to have money the very next day! Only
the next day never comes!”

“Herre Petersen can depend on it,” said the child, in a low voice.

The grocer continued to scoff, but began to weigh the meal. Before the
scales there was a pile of yard brooms and other articles, but
Ferdinand could see that the grocer was pressing the scale with his
fingers. He’s giving false weight because it’s for a poor person,
thought Ferdinand, and he felt an angry pricking in his head, just
where his thoughts were.

The boy stood by, fingering something concealed in his hand. Suddenly a
coin fell on the floor and went rolling round their feet. Quick as
lightning the grocer cast a glance at the till, as he sprang over the
counter and seized the boy by the scruff of the neck. “Ay, ay,” he said
sharply, “a clever little rogue!”

“I haven’t stolen anything!” cried the boy, trying to wrench himself
loose and to pick up his krone-piece. “That’s mother’s money!”

“You leave the kid alone!” said Ferdinand threateningly. “He hasn’t
done anything!”

The grocer struggled with the boy, who was twisting and turning in
order to recover his money. “Hasn’t done anything!” he growled,
panting, “then why did he cry out about stealing before ever I had
mentioned the word? And where does the money come from? He wanted
credit, because they hadn’t got any! No, thanks—I’m not to be caught
like that.”

“The money belongs to mother!” shrieked the youngster, twisting
desperately in the grocer’s grip. “Mother is ill—I’m to get medicine
with it!” And he began to blubber.

“It’s quite right—his mother is ill!” said Ferdinand, with a growl.
“And the chemist certainly won’t give credit. You’d best let him go,
Petersen.” He took a step forward.

“You’ve thought it out nicely!” laughed the grocer scornfully, and he
wrenched the shop-door open. “Here, policeman, here!”

The policeman, who was keeping watch at the street corner, came quickly
over to the shop. “Here’s a lad who plays tricks with other folks’
money,” said the grocer excitedly. “Take care of him for a bit,
Iversen!”

The boy was still hitting out in all directions; the policeman had to
hold him off at arm’s length. He was a ragged, hungry little fellow.
The policeman saw at a glance what he had in his fingers, and proceeded
to drag him away; and there was no need to have made any more ado about
the matter.

Ferdinand went after him and laid his hand on the policeman’s arm.
“Mister Policeman, the boy hasn’t done anything,” he said. “I was
standing there myself, and I saw that he did nothing, and I know his
mother!”

The policeman stood still for a moment, measuring Ferdinand with a
threatening eye; then he dragged the boy forward again, the latter
still struggling to get free, and bellowing: “My mother is ill; she’s
waiting for me and the medicine!” Ferdinand kept step with them, in his
thin canvas shoes.

“If you drag him off to the town hall, I shall come with you, at all
events, and give evidence for him,” he continued; “the boy hasn’t done
anything, and his mother is lying sick and waiting for the medicine at
home.”

The policeman turned about, exasperated. “Yes, you’re a nice witness.
One crow don’t pick another’s eyes out. You mind your own business—and
just you be off!”

Ferdinand stood his ground. “Who are you talking to, you Laban?” he
muttered, angrily looking the other up and down. Suddenly he took a run
and caught the policeman a blow in the neck so that he fell with his
face upon the pavement while his helmet rolled far along the street.
Ferdinand and the boy dashed off, each in a different direction, and
disappeared.

And now they had been hunting him for three weeks already. He did not
dare go home. The “Ark” was watched night and day, in the hope of
catching him—he was so fond of his mother. God only knew where he might
be in that rainy, cold autumn. Madam Frandsen moved about her attic,
lonely and forsaken. It was a miserable life. Every morning she came
over to beg Pelle to look in _The Working Man_, to see whether her son
had been caught. He was in the city—Pelle and Madam Frandsen knew that.
The police knew it also; and they believed him responsible for a series
of nocturnal burglaries. He might well be sleeping in the outhouses and
the kennels of the suburban villas.

The inmates of the “Ark” followed his fate with painful interest. He
had grown up beneath their eyes. He had never done anything wrong
there; he had always respected the “Ark” and its inhabitants; that at
least could be said of him, and he loved his mother dearly. And he had
been entirely in the right when he took the part of the boy; a brave
little fellow he was! His mother was very ill; she lived at the end of
one of the long gangways, and the boy was her only support. But it was
a mad undertaking to lay hands on the police; that was the greatest
crime on earth! A man had far better murder his own parents—as far as
the punishment went. As soon as they got hold of him, he would go to
jail, for the policeman had hit his handsome face against the
flagstones; according to the newspaper, anybody but a policeman would
have had concussion of the brain.

Old Madam Frandsen loved to cross the gangway to visit Pelle, in order
to talk about her son.

“We must be cautious,” she said. At times she would purse up her mouth,
tripping restlessly to and fro; then he knew there was something
particular in the wind.

“Shall I tell you something?” she would ask, looking at him
importantly.

“No; better keep it to yourself,” Pelle would reply. “What one doesn’t
know one can’t give evidence about.”

“You’d better let me chatter, Pelle—else I shall go running in and
gossiping with strangers. Old chatterbox that I am, I go fidgeting
round here, and I’ve no one I can trust; and I daren’t even talk to
myself! Then that Pipman hears it all through the wooden partition;
it’s almost more than I can bear, and I tremble lest my toothless old
mouth should get him into trouble!”

“Well, then, tell it me!” said Pelle, laughing. “But you mustn’t speak
loud.”

“He’s been here again!” she whispered, beaming. “This morning, when I
got up, there was money for me in the kitchen. Do you know where he had
put it? In the sink! He’s such a sensible lad! He must have come
creeping over the roofs—otherwise I can’t think how he does it, they
are looking for him so. But you must admit that—he’s a good lad!”

“If only you can keep quiet about it!” said Pelle anxiously. She was so
proud of her son!

“M—m!” she said, tapping her shrunken lips. “No need to tell me that—
and do you know what I’ve hit on, so that the bloodhounds shan’t wonder
what I live on? I’m sewing canvas slippers.”

Then came little Marie with mop and bucket, and the old woman hobbled
away.

It was a slack time now in Master Beck’s workshop, so Pelle was working
mostly at home. He could order his hours himself now, and was able to
use the day, when people were indoors, in looking up his fellow-
craftsmen and winning them for the organization. This often cost him a
lengthy argument, and he was proud of every man he was able to
inscribe. He very quickly learned to classify all kinds of men, and he
suited his procedure to the character of the man he was dealing with;
one could threaten the waverers, while others had to be enticed or got
into a good humor by chatting over the latest theories with them. This
was good practice, and he accustomed himself to think rapidly, and to
have his subject at his fingers’ ends. The feeling of mastery over his
means continually increased in strength, and lent assurance to his
bearing.

He had to make up for neglecting his work, and at such times he was
doubly busy, rising early and sitting late at his bench.

He kept away from his neighbors on the third story; but when he heard
Hanne’s light step on the planking over there, he used to peep
furtively across the well. She went her way like a nun—straight to her
work and straight home again, her eyes fixed on the ground. She never
looked up at his window, or indeed anywhere. It was as though her
nature had completed its airy flutterings, as though it now lay quietly
growing.

It surprised him that he should now regard her with such strange and
indifferent eyes, as though she had never been anything to him. And he
gazed curiously into his own heart—no, there was nothing wrong with
him. His appetite was good, and there was nothing whatever the matter
with his heart. It must all have been a pleasant illusion, a mirage
such as the traveller sees upon his way. Certainly she was beautiful;
but he could not possibly see anything fairy-like about her. God only
knew how he had allowed himself to be so entangled! It was a piece of
luck that he hadn’t been caught—there was no future for Hanne.

Madam Johnsen continued to lean on him affectionately, and she often
came over for a little conversation; she could not forget the good
times they had had together. She always wound up by lamenting the
change in Hanne; the old woman felt that the girl had forsaken her.

“Can you understand what’s the matter with her, Pelle? She goes about
as if she were asleep, and to everything I say she answers nothing but
‘Yes, mother; yes, mother!’ I could cry, it sounds so strange and
empty, like a voice from the grave. And she never says anything about
good fortune now—and she never decks herself out to be ready for it! If
she’d only begin with her fool’s tricks again—if she only cared to look
out and watch for the stranger—then I should have my child again. But
she just goes about all sunk into herself, and she stares about her as
if she was half asleep, as though she were in the middle of empty
space; and she’s never in any spirits now. She goes about so
unmeaning—like with her own dreary thoughts, it’s like a wandering
corpse. Can you understand what’s wrong with her?”

“No, I don’t know,” answered Pelle.

“You say that so curiously, as if you did know something and wouldn’t
come out with it—and I, poor woman, I don’t know where to turn.” The
good-natured woman began to cry. “And why don’t you come over to see us
any more?”

“Oh, I don’t know—I’ve so much on hand, Madam Johnsen,” answered Pelle
evasively.

“If only she’s not bewitched. She doesn’t enter into anything I tell
her; you might really come over just for once; perhaps that would cheer
her up a little. You oughtn’t to take your revenge on us. She was very
fond of you in her way—and to me you’ve been like a son. Won’t you come
over this evening?”

“I really haven’t the time. But I’ll see, some time,” he said, in a low
voice.

And then she went, drooping and melancholy. She was showing her fifty
years. Pelle was sorry for her, but he could not make up his mind to
visit her.

“You are quite detestable!” said Marie, stamping angrily on the floor.
“It’s wretched of you!”

Pelle wrinkled his forehead. “You don’t understand, Marie.”

“Oh, so you think I don’t know all about it? But do you know what the
women say about you? They say you’re no man, or you would have managed
to clip Hanne’s feathers.”

Pelle gazed at her, wondering; he said nothing, but looked at her and
shook his head.

“What are you staring at me for?” she said, placing herself
aggressively in front of him. “Perhaps you think I’m afraid to say what
I like to you? Don’t you stare at me with that face, or you’ll get one
in the mouth!” She was burning red with shame. “Shall I say something
still worse? with you staring at me with that face? Eh? No one need
think I’m ashamed to say what I like!” Her voice was hard and hoarse;
she was quite beside herself with rage.

Pelle was perfectly conscious that it was shame that was working in
her. She must be allowed to run down. He was silent, but did not avert
his reproachful gaze. Suddenly she spat in his face and ran into her
own room with a malicious laugh.

There she was very busy for a time.

There for a time she worked with extreme vigor, but presently grew
quieter. Through the stillness Pelle could hear her gently sobbing. He
did not go in to her. Such scenes had occurred between them before, and
he knew that for the rest of the day she would be ashamed of herself,
and it would he misery for her to look him in the face. He did not wish
to lessen that feeling.

He dressed himself and went out.




VIII


The “Ark” now showed as a clumsy gray mass. It was always dark; the
autumn daylight was unable to penetrate it. In the interior of the mass
the pitch-black night brooded continually; those who lived there had to
grope their way like moles. In the darkness sounds rose to the surface
which failed to make themselves noticeable in the radiance of summer.
Innumerable sounds of creatures that lived in the half-darkness were
heard. When sleep had laid silence upon it all, the stillness of night
unveiled yet another world: then the death-watches audibly bored their
way beneath the old wall-papers, while rats and mice and the larvae of
wood-beetles vied with one another in their efforts. The darkness was
full of the aromatic fragrance of the falling worm-dust. All through
this old box of a building dissolution was at work, with thousands of
tiny creatures to aid it. At times the sound of it all rose to a
tremendous crash which awoke Pelle from sleep, when some old worm-eaten
timber was undermined and sagged in a fresh place. Then he would turn
over on the other side.

When he went out of an evening he liked to make his way through the
cheerful, crowded streets, in order to share in the brightness of it
all; the rich luxury of the shops awakened something within him which
noted the startling contrast between this quarter of the town and his
own. When he passed from the brightly lit city into his own quarter,
the streets were like ugly gutters to drain the darkness, and the “Ark”
rose mysteriously into the sky of night like a ponderous mountain. Dark
cellar-openings led down into the roots of the mountain, and there, in
its dark entrails, moved wan, grimy creatures with smoky lamps; there
were all those who lived upon the poverty of the “Ark”—the old iron
merchant, the old clothes merchant, and the money-lender who lent money
upon tangible pledges. They moved fearfully, burrowing into strange-
looking heaps. The darkness was ingrained in them; Pelle was always
reminded of the “underground people” at home. So the base of the cliffs
had opened before his eyes in childhood, and he had shudderingly
watched the dwarfs pottering about their accursed treasure. Here they
moved about like greedy goblins, tearing away the foundations from
under the careless beings in the “Ark,” so that one day these might
well fall into the cellars—and in the meantime they devoured them hair
and hide. At all events, the bad side of the fairy tale was no lie!

One day Pelle threw down his work in the twilight and went off to carry
out his mission. Pipman had some days earlier fallen drunk from the
rickety steps, and down in the well the children of the quarter
surrounded the place where he had dropped dead, and illuminated it with
matches. They could quite plainly see the dark impress of a shape that
looked like a man, and were all full of the spectacle.

Outside the mouth of the tunnel-like entry he stopped by the window of
the old clothes dealer’s cellar. Old Pipman’s tools lay spread out
there in the window. So she had got her claws into them too! She was
rummaging about down there, scurfy and repulsive to look at, chewing an
unappetizing slice of bread-and-butter, and starting at every sound
that came from above, so anxious was she about her filthy money! Pelle
needed a new heel-iron, so he went in and purchased that of Pipman. He
had to haggle with her over the price.

“Well, have you thought over my proposal?” she asked, when the deal was
concluded.

“What proposal?” said Pelle, in all ignorance.

“That you should leave your cobbling alone and be my assistant in the
business.”

So that was what she meant? No, Pelle hadn’t thought over it
sufficiently.

“I should think there isn’t much to think over. I have offered you more
than you could earn otherwise, and there’s not much to do. And I keep a
man who fetches and carries things. It’s mostly that I have a fancy to
have a male assistant. I am an old woman, going about alone here, and
you are so reliable, I know that.”

She needed some one to protect all the thousands of kroner which she
had concealed in these underground chambers. Pelle knew that well
enough— she had approached him before on the subject.

“I should scarcely be the one for that—to make my living out of the
poverty of others,” said Pelle, smiling. “Perhaps I might knock you
over the head and distribute all your pennies to the poor!”

The old woman stared at him for a moment in alarm. “Ugh, what a
horrible thing to say!” she cried, shuddering. “You libel your good
heart, joking about such things. Now I shan’t like to stay here in the
cellar any longer when you’ve gone. How can you jest so brutally about
life and death? Day and night I go about here trembling for my life,
and yet I’ve nothing at all, the living God knows I’ve nothing. That is
just gossip! Everybody looks at me as much as to say, ‘I’d gladly
strike you dead to get your money!’ And that’s why I’d like to have a
trustworthy man in the business; for what good is it to me that I’ve
got nothing when they all believe I have? And there are so many
worthless fellows who might fall upon one at any moment.”

“If you have nothing, you can be easy,” said Pelle teasingly. “No need
for an empty stomach to have the nightmare!”

“Have nothing! Of course one always has something! And Pelle”—she
leaned confidentially over him with a smirk on her face—“now Mary will
soon come home, perhaps no later than this summer. She has earned so
much over there that she can live on it, and she’ll still be in the
prime of her youth. What do you think of that? In her last letter she
asked me to look out for a husband for her. He need only be handsome,
for she has money enough for two. Then she’d rent a big house in the
fine part of the city, and keep her own carriage, and live only for her
handsome husband. What do you say to that, Pelle?”

“Well, that is certainly worth thinking over!” answered Pelle; he was
in overflowing high spirits.

“Thinking over? Is that a thing to think over? Many a poor lord would
accept such an offer and kiss my hand for it, if only he were here.”

“But I’m not a lord, and now I must be going.”

“Won’t you just see her pictures?” The old woman began to rummage in a
drawer.

“No.” Pelle only wanted to be gone. He had seen these pictures often
enough, grimed with the air of the cellar and the old woman’s filthy
hands; pictures which represented Mary now as a slim figure, striped
like a tiger-cat, as she sang in the fashionable variety theaters of
St. Petersburg, now naked, with a mantle of white furs, alone in the
midst of a crowd of Russian officers—princes, the old woman said. There
was also a picture from the aquarium, in which she was swimming about
in a great glass tank amid some curious-looking plants, with nothing on
her body but golden scales and diamond ornaments. She had a magnificent
body—that he could plainly see; but that she could turn the heads of
fabulously wealthy princes and get thousands out of their pockets
merely by undressing herself—that he could not understand. And he was
to take her to wife, was he?—and to get all that she had hoarded up!
That was tremendously funny! That beat everything!

He went along the High Street with a rapid step. It was raining a
little; the light from the street lamps and shop-windows was reflected
in the wet flagstones; the street wore a cheerful look. He went onward
with a feeling that his mind was lifted above the things of everyday;
the grimy old woman who lived as a parasite on the poverty of the “Ark”
and who had a wonderful daughter who was absorbing riches like a leech.
And on top of it all the little Pelle with the “lucky curl,” like the
curly-haired apprentice in the story! Here at last was the much-longed-
for fairy tale!

He threw back his head and laughed. Pelle, who formerly used to feel
insults so bitterly, had achieved a sense of the divinity of life.

That evening his round included the Rabarber ward. Pelle had made
himself a list, according to which he went forth to search each ward of
the city separately, in order to save himself unnecessary running
about. First of all, he took a journeyman cobbler in Smith Street; he
was one of Meyer’s regular workers, and Pelle was prepared for a hard
fight. The man was not at home. “But you can certainly put him down,”
said his wife. “We’ve been talking it over lately, and we’ve come to
see it’s really the best thing.” That was a wife after Pelle’s heart.
Many would deny that their husbands were at home when they learned what
Pelle wanted; or would slam the door in his face; they were tired of
his running to and fro.

He visited various houses in Gardener Street, Castle Street, Norway
Street, making his way through backyards and up dark, narrow stairs, up
to the garrets or down to the cellars.

Over all was the same poverty; without exception the cobblers were
lodged in the most miserable holes. He had not a single success to
record. Some had gone away or were at fresh addresses; others wanted
time to consider or gave him a direct refusal. He promised himself that
he would presently give the wobblers another call; he would soon bring
them round; the others he ticked off, keeping them for better times—
their day too would come before long! It did not discourage him to meet
with refusals; he rejoiced over the single sheep. This was a work of
patience, and patience was the one thing in which he had always been
rich.

He turned into Hunter Street and entered a barrack-like building,
climbing until he was right under the roof, when he knocked on a door.
It was opened by a tall thin man with a thin beard. This was Peter, his
fellow-’prentice at home. They were speedily talking of the days of
their apprenticeship, and the workshop at home with all the curious
company there. There was not much that was good to be said of Master
Jeppe. But the memory of the young master filled them with warmth. “I
often think of him in the course of the year,” said Peter. “He was no
ordinary man. That was why he died.”

There was something abstracted about Peter; and his den gave one an
impression of loneliness. Nothing was left to remind one of the
mischievous fellow who must always be running; but something hostile
and obstinate glowed within his close-set eyes. Pelle sat there
wondering what could really be the matter with him. He had a curious
bleached look as though he had shed his skin; but he wasn’t one of the
holy sort, to judge by his conversation.

“Peter, what’s the truth of it—are you one of us?” said Pelle suddenly.

A disagreeable smile spread over Peter’s features. “Am I one of you?
That sounds just like when they ask you—have you found Jesus? Have you
become a missionary?”

“You are welcome to call it that,” replied Pelle frankly, “if you’ll
only join our organization. We want you.”

“You won’t miss me—nobody is missed, I believe, if he only does his
work. I’ve tried the whole lot of them—churches and sects and all—and
none of them has any use for a man. They want one more listener, one
more to add to their list; it’s the same everywhere.” He sat lost in
thought, looking into vacancy. Suddenly he made a gesture with his
hands as though to wave something away. “I don’t believe in anything
any longer, Pelle—there’s nothing worth believing in.”

“Don’t you believe in improving the lot of the poor, then? You haven’t
tried joining the movement?” asked Pelle.

“What should I do there? They only want to get more to eat—and the
little food I need I can easily get. But if they could manage to make
me feel that I’m a man, and not merely a machine that wants a bit more
greasing, I’d as soon be a thin dog as a fat one.”

“They’d soon do that!” said Pelle convincingly. “If we only hold
together, they’ll have to respect the individual as well, and listen to
his demands. The poor man must have his say with the rest.”

Peter made an impatient movement. “What good can it do me to club folks
on the head till they look at me? It don’t matter a damn to me! But
perhaps they’d look at me of their own accord—and say, of their own
accord—‘Look, there goes a man made in God’s image, who thinks and
feels in his heart just as I do!’ That’s what I want!”

“I honestly don’t understand what you mean with your ‘man,’” said Pelle
irritably. “What’s the good of running your head against a wall when
there are reasonable things in store for us? We want to organize
ourselves and see if we can’t escape from slavery. Afterward every man
can amuse himself as he likes.”

“Well, well, if it’s so easy to escape from slavery! Why not? Put down
my name for one!” said Peter, with a slightly ironical expression.

“Thanks, comrade!” cried Pelle, joyfully shaking his hand. “But you’ll
do something for the cause?”

Peter looked about him forlornly. “Horrible weather for you to be out
in,” he said, and he lighted Pelle down the stairs.

Pelle went northward along Chapel Street. He wanted to look up Morten.
The wind was chasing the leaves along by the cemetery, driving the rain
in his face. He kept close against the cemetery wall in order to get
shelter, and charged against the wind, head down. He was in the best of
humors. That was two new members he had won over; he was getting on by
degrees! What an odd fish Peter had become; the word, “man, man,”
sounded meaningless to Pelle’s ears. Well, anyhow, he had got him on
the list.

Suddenly he heard light, running steps behind him. The figure of a man
reached his side, and pushed a little packet under Pelle’s arm without
stopping for a moment. At a short distance he disappeared. It seemed to
Pelle as though he disappeared over the cemetery wall.

Under one of the street lamps he stopped and wonderingly examined the
parcel; it was bound tightly with tape. “For mother” was written upon
it in an awkward hand. Pelle was not long in doubt—in that word
“mother” he seemed plainly to hear Ferdinand’s hoarse voice. “Now Madam
Frandsen will be delighted,” he thought, and he put it in his pocket.
During the past week she had had no news of Ferdinand. He dared no
longer venture through Kristianshavn. Pelle could not understand how
Ferdinand had lit upon him. Was he living out here in the Rabarber
ward?

Morten was sitting down, writing in a thick copybook. He closed it
hastily as Pelle entered.

“What is that?” asked Pelle, who wanted to open the book; “are you
still writing in your copybook?”

Morten, confused, laid his hand on the book. “No. Besides—oh, as far as
that goes,” he said, “you may as well know. I have written a poem. But
you mustn’t speak of it.”

“Oh, do read it out to me!” Pelle begged.

“Yes; but you must promise me to be silent about it, or the others will
just think I’ve gone crazy.”

He was quite embarrassed, and he stammered as he read. It was a poem
about poor people, who bore the whole world on their upraised hands,
and with resignation watched the enjoyment of those above them. It was
called, “Let them die!” and the words were repeated as the refrain of
every verse. And now that Morten was in the vein, he read also an
unpretentious story of the struggle of the poor to win their bread.

“That’s damned fine!” cried Pelle enthusiastically. “Monstrously good,
Morten! I don’t understand how you put it together, especially the
verse. But you’re a real poet. But I’ve always thought that—that you
had something particular in you. You’ve got your own way of looking at
things, and they won’t clip your wings in a hurry. But why don’t you
write about something big and thrilling that would repay reading—
there’s nothing interesting about us!”

“But I find there is!”

“No, I don’t understand that. What can happen to poor fellows like us?”

“Then don’t you believe in greatness?”

To be sure Pelle did. “But why shouldn’t we have splendid things right
away?”

“You want to read about counts and barons!” said Morten. “You are all
like that. You regard yourself as one of the rabble, if it comes to
that! Yes, you do! Only you don’t know it! That’s the slave-nature in
you; the higher classes of society regard you as such and you
involuntarily do the same. Yes, you may pull faces, but it’s true, all
the same! You don’t like to hear about your own kind, for you don’t
believe they can amount to anything! No, you must have fine folks—
always rich folks! One would like to spit on one’s past and one’s
parents and climb up among the fine folks, and because one can’t manage
it one asks for it in books.” Morten was irritated.

“No, no,” said Pelle soothingly, “it isn’t as bad as all that!”

“Yes, it is as bad as all that!” cried Morten passionately. “And do you
know why? Because you don’t yet understand that humanity is holy, and
that it’s all one where a man is found!”

“Humanity is holy?” said Pelle, laughing. “But I’m not holy, and I
didn’t really think you were!”

“For your sake, I hope you are,” said Morten earnestly, “for otherwise
you are no more than a horse or a machine that can do so much work.”
And then he was silent, with a look that seemed to say that the matter
had been sufficiently discussed.

Morten’s reserved expression made Pelle serious. He might jestingly
pretend that this was nonsense, but Morten was one of those who looked
into things—perhaps there was something here that he didn’t understand.

“I know well enough that I’m a clown compared with you,” he said good-
naturedly, “but you needn’t be so angry on that account. By the way, do
you still remember Peter, who was at Jeppe’s with your brother Jens and
me? He’s here, too—I—I came across him a little while ago. He’s always
looking into things too, but he can’t find any foundation to anything,
as you can. He believes in nothing in the whole world. Things are in a
bad way with him. It would do him good if he could talk with you.”

“But I’m no prophet—you are that rather than I,” said Morten
ironically.

“But you might perhaps say something of use to him. No, I’m only a
trades unionist, and that’s no good.”

On his way home Pelle pondered honestly over Morten’s words, but he had
to admit that he couldn’t take them in. No, he had no occasion to
surround his person with any sort of holiness or halo; he was only a
healthy body, and he just wanted to do things.




IX


Pelle came rushing home from Master Beck’s workshop, threw off his coat
and waistcoat, and thrust his head into a bucket of water. While he was
scrubbing himself dry, he ran over to the “Family.” “Would you care to
come out with me? I have some tickets for an evening entertainment—only
you must hurry up.”

The three children were sitting round the table, doing tricks with
cards. The fire was crackling in the stove, and there was a delicious
smell of coffee. They were tired after the day’s work and they didn’t
feel inclined to dress themselves to go out. One could see how they
enjoyed feeling that they were at home. “You should give Hanne and her
mother the tickets,” said Marie, “they never go out.”

Pelle thought the matter over while he was dressing. Well, why not?
After all, it was stupid to rake up an old story.

Hanne did not want to go with him. She sat with downcast eyes, like a
lady in her boudoir, and did not look at him. But Madam Johnsen was
quite ready to go—the poor old woman quickly got into her best clothes.

“It’s a long time since we two have been out together, Pelle,” she said
gaily, as they walked through the city. “You’ve been so frightfully
busy lately. They say you go about to meetings. That is all right for a
young man. Do you gain anything by it?”

“Yes, one could certainly gain something by it—if only one used one’s
strength!”

“What can you gain by it, then? Are you going to eat up the Germans
again, as in my young days, or what is it you are after?”

“We want to make life just a little happier,” said Pelle quietly.

“Oh, you don’t want to gain anything more than happiness? That’s easy
enough, of course!” said Madam Johnsen, laughing loudly. “Why, to be
sure, in my pretty young days too the men wanted to go to the capital
to make their fortunes. I was just sixteen when I came here for
purposes of my own—where was a pretty girl to find everything splendid,
if not here? One easily made friends—there were plenty to go walking
with a nice girl in thin shoes, and they wanted to give her all sorts
of fine things, and every day brought its happiness with it. But then I
met a man who wanted to do the best thing by me, and who believed in
himself, too. He got me to believe that the two of us together might
manage something lasting. And he was just such a poor bird as I was,
with empty hands—but he set to valiantly. Clever in his work he was,
too, and he thought we could make ourselves a quiet, happy life, cozy
between our four walls, if only we’d work. Happiness—pooh! He wanted to
be a master, at all costs—for what can a journeyman earn! And more than
once we had scraped a little together, and thought things would be
easier now; but misfortune always fell on us and took it all away. It’s
always hovering like a great bird over the poor man’s home; and you
must have a long stick if you want to drive it away! It was always the
same story whenever we managed to get on a little. A whole winter he
was ill. We only kept alive by pawning all we’d got, stick by stick.
And when the last thing had gone to the devil we borrowed a bit on the
pawn-ticket.” The old woman had to pause to recover her breath.

“Why are we hurrying like this?” she said, panting. “Any one would
think the world was trying to run away from us!”

“Well, there was nothing left!” she continued, shuffling on again. “And
he was too tired to begin all over again, so we moved into the ‘Ark.’
And when he’d got a few shillings he sought consolation—but it was a
poor consolation for me, who was carrying Hanne, that you may believe!
She was like a gift after all that misfortune; but he couldn’t bear
her, because our fancy for a little magnificence was born again in her.
She had inherited that from us—poor little thing!—with rags and dirt to
set it off. You should just have seen her, as quite a little child,
making up the fine folks’ world out of the rags she got together out of
the dustbins. ‘What’s that?’ Johnsen he said once—he was a little less
full than usual. ‘Oh, that’s the best room with the carpet on the
floor, and there by the stove is your room, father. But you mustn’t
spit on the floor, because we are rich people.’”

Madam Johnsen began to cry. “And then he struck her on the head. ‘Hold
your tongue!’ he cried, and he cursed and swore at the child something
frightful. ‘I don’t want to hear your infernal chatter!’ That’s the
sort he was. Life began to be a bit easier when he had drowned himself
in the sewer. The times when I might have amused myself he’d stolen
from me with his talk of the future, and now I sit there turning old
soldiers’ trousers that fill the room with filth, and when I do two a
day I can earn a mark. And Hanne goes about like a sleep-walker.
Happiness! Is there a soul in the ‘Ark’ that didn’t begin with a firm
belief in something better? One doesn’t move from one’s own choice into
such a mixed louse’s nest, but one ends up there all the same. And is
there anybody here who is really sure of his daily bread? Yes, Olsens
with the warm wall, but they’ve got their daughter’s shame to thank for
that.”

“All the more reason to set to work,” said Pelle.

“Yes, you may well say that! But any one who fights against the
unconquerable will soon be tired out. No, let things be and amuse
yourself while you are still young. But don’t you take any notice of my
complaining—me—an old whimperer, I am—walking with you and being in the
dumps like this—now we’ll go and amuse ourselves!” And now she looked
quite contented again.

“Then take my arm—it’s only proper with a pair of sweethearts,” said
Pelle, joking. The old woman took his arm and went tripping youthfully
along. “Yes, if it had been in my young days, I would soon have known
how to dissuade you from your silly tricks,” she said gaily. “I should
have been taking you to the dance.”

“But you didn’t manage to get Johnsen to give them up,” said Pelle in
reply.

“No, because then I was too credulous. But no one would succeed in
robbing me of my youth now!”

The meeting was held in a big hall in one of the side streets by the
North Bridge. The entertainment, which was got up by some of the
agitators, was designed principally for young people; but many women
and young girls were present. Among other things a poem was read which
dealt with an old respectable blacksmith who was ruined by a strike.
“That may be very fine and touching,” whispered Madam Johnsen,
polishing her nose in her emotion, “but they really ought to have
something one can laugh over. We see misfortune every day.”

Then a small choir of artisans sang some songs, and one of the older
leaders mounted the platform and told them about the early years of the
movement. When he had finished, he asked if there was no one else who
had something to tell them. It was evidently not easy to fill out the
evening.

There was no spirit in the gathering. The women were not finding it
amusing, and the men sat watching for anything they could carp at.
Pelle knew most of those present; even the young men had hard faces, on
which could be read an obstinate questioning. This homely, innocent
entertainment did not appease the burning impatience which filled their
hearts, listening for a promise of better things.

Pelle sat there pained by the proceedings; the passion for progress and
agitation was in his very blood. Here was such an opportunity to strike
a blow for unification, and it was passing unused. The women only
needed a little rousing, the factory-girls and the married women too,
who held back their husbands. And they stood up there, frittering away
the time with their singing and their poetry-twaddle! With one leap he
stood on the platform.

“All these fine words may be very nice,” he cried passionately, “but
they are very little use to all those who can’t live on them! The
clergyman and the dog earn their living with their mouths, but the rest
of us are thrown on our own resources when we want to get anything. Why
do we slink round the point like cats on hot bricks, why all this
palaver and preaching? Perhaps we don’t yet know what we want? They say
we’ve been slaves for a thousand years! Then we ought to have had time
enough to think it out! Why does so little happen, although we are all
waiting for something, and are ready? Is there no one anywhere who has
the courage to lead us?”

Loud applause followed, especially from the young men; they stamped and
shouted. Pelle staggered down from the platform; he was covered with
sweat.

The old leader ascended the platform again and thanked his colleagues
for their acceptable entertainment. He turned also with smiling thanks
to Pelle. It was gratifying that there was still fire glowing in the
young men; although the occasion was unsuitable. The old folks had led
the movement through evil times; but they by no means wished to prevent
youth from testing itself.

Pelle wanted to stand up and make some answer, but Madam Johnsen held
him fast by his coat. “Be quiet, Pelle,” she whispered anxiously;
“you’ll venture too far.” She would not let go of him, so he had to sit
down again to avoid attracting attention. His cheeks were burning, and
he was as breathless as though he had been running up a hill. It was
the first time he had ventured on a public platform; excitement had
sent him thither.

The people began to get up and to mix together. “Is it over already?”
asked Madam Johnsen. Pelle could see that she was disappointed.

“No, no; now we’ll treat ourselves to something,” he said, leading the
old woman to a table at the back of the hall. “What can I offer you?”

“Coffee, please, for me! But you ought to have a glass of beer, you are
so warm!”

Pelle wanted coffee too. “You’re a funny one for a man!” she said,
laughing. “First you go pitching into a whole crowd of men, and then
you sit down here with an old wife like me and drink coffee! What a
crowd of people there are here; it’s almost like a holiday!” She sat
looking about her with shining eyes and rosy cheeks, like a young girl
at a dance. “Take some more of the skin of the milk, Pelle; you haven’t
got any. This really is cream!”

The leader came up to ask if he might make Pelle’s acquaintance. “I’ve
heard of you from the president of your Union,” he said, giving Pelle
his hand. “I am glad to make your acquaintance; you have done a pretty
piece of work.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” said Pelle, blushing. “But it really would be
fine if we could really get to work!”

“I know your impatience only too well,” retorted the old campaigner,
laughing. “It’s always so with the young men. But those who really want
to do something must be able to see to the end of the road.” He patted
Pelle on the shoulders and went.

Pelle felt that the people were standing about him and speaking of him.
God knows whether you haven’t made yourself ridiculous, he thought.
Close by him two young men were standing, who kept on looking at him
sideways. Suddenly they came up to him.

“We should much like to shake hands with you,” said one of them. “My
name is Otto Stolpe, and this is my brother Frederik. That was good,
what you said up there, we want to thank you for it!” They stood by for
some little while, chatting to Pelle. “It would please my father and
mother too, if they could make your acquaintance,” said Otto Stolpe.
“Would you care to come home with us?”

“I can’t very well this evening; I have some one with me,” replied
Pelle.

“You go with them,” said Madam Johnsen. “I see some folks from
Kristianshavn back there, I can go home with them.”

“But we were meaning to go on the spree a bit now that we’ve at last
come out!” said Pelle, smiling.

“God forbid! No, we’ve been on the spree enough for one evening, my old
head is quite turned already. You just be off; that’s a thing I haven’t
said for thirty years! And many thanks for bringing me with you.” She
laughed boisterously.

The Stolpe family lived in Elm Street, on the second floor of one of
the new workmen’s tenement houses. The stairs were roomy, and on the
door there was a porcelain plate with their name on it. In the entry an
elderly, well-dressed woman up to them.

“Here is a comrade, mother,” said Otto.

“Welcome,” she said, as she took Pelle’s hand. She held it a moment in
her own as she looked at him.

In the living room sat Stolpe, a mason, reading _The Working Man_. He
was in shirt sleeves, and was resting his heavy arms on the table. He
read whispering to himself, he had not noti

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