Pelle the Conqueror, Vol 2 by Martin Anderson Nexø (page 3)

He had become another being since his illness; his movements were more deliberate, and the features of his round childish face had become more marked and prominent. Those two weeks of illness had dislodged his cares, but they were imprinted on his character, to which they lent a certain gravity. He still roamed about alone, encompassing himself with solitude, and he observed the young master in his own assiduous way. He had an impression that the master was putting him to the proof, and this wounded him. He himself knew that that which lay behind his illness would never be repeated, and he writhed uneasily under suspicion.

One day he could bear it no longer. He took the ten kroner which Lasse had given him so that he might buy a much-needed winter overcoat, and went in to the master, who was in the cutting-out room, and laid them on the table. The master looked at him with a wondering expression, but there was a light in his eyes.

“What the devil is that?” he asked, drawling.

“That’s master’s money,” said Pelle, with averted face.

Master Andres gazed at him with dreamy eyes, and then he seemed to return, as though from another world, and Pelle all at once understood what every one said–that the young master was going to die. Then he burst into tears.

But the master himself could not understand.

“What the deuce. But that means nothing!” he cried, and he tossed the ten kroner in the air. “Lord o’ me! what a lot of money! Well, you aren’t poor!” He stood there, not knowing what to believe, his hand resting on Pelle’s shoulder.

“It’s right,” whispered Pelle. “I’ve reckoned it up exactly. And the master mustn’t suspect me–I’ll never do it again.”

Master Andres made a gesture of refusal with his hand, and wanted to speak, but at that very moment he was attacked by a paroxysm of coughing. “You young devil!” he groaned, and leaned heavily on Pelle; his face was purple. Then came a fit of sickness, and the sweat beaded his face. He stood there for a little, gasping for breath while his strength returned, and then he slipped the money into Pelle’s hand and pushed him out of the room.

Pelle was greatly dejected. His uprightness was unrewarded, and what had become of his vindication? He had been so glad to think that he would shake himself free of all the disgrace. But late in the afternoon the master called him into the cutting-out room. “Here, Pelle,” he said confidentially, “I want to renew my lottery ticket; but I’ve no money. Can you lend me those ten kroner for a week?” So it was all as it should be; his one object was to put the whole disgrace away from him.

Jens and Morten helped him in that. There were three of them now; and Pelle had a feeling that he had a whole army at his back. The world had grown no smaller, no less attractive, by reason of the endless humiliations of the year. And Pelle knew down to the ground exactly where he stood, and that knowledge was bitter enough. Below him lay the misty void, and the bubbles which now and again rose to the surface and broke did not produce in him any feeling of mystical wonder as to the depths. But he did not feel oppressed thereby; what was, was so because it must be. And over him the other half of the round world revolved in the mystery of the blue heavens, and again and again he heard its joyous _Forward! On!_

IX

In his loneliness Pelle had often taken his way to the little house by the cemetery, where Due lived in two little rooms. It was always a sort of consolation to see familiar faces, but in other respects he did not gain much by his visits; Due was pleasant enough, but Anna thought of nothing but herself, and how she could best get on. Due had a situation as coachman at a jobmaster’s, and they seemed to have a sufficiency.

“We have no intention of being satisfied with driving other people’s horses,” Anna would say, “but you must crawl before you can walk.” She had no desire to return to the country.

“Out there there’s no prospects for small people, who want something more than groats in their belly and a few rags on their back. You are respected about as much as the dirt you walk on, and there’s no talk of any future. I shall never regret that we’ve come away from the country.”

Due, on the contrary, was homesick. He was quite used to knowing that there was a quarter of a mile between him and the nearest neighbor, and here he could hear, through the flimsy walls, whether his neighbors were kissing, fighting, or counting their money. “It is so close here, and then I miss the earth; the pavements are so hard.”

“He misses the manure–he can’t come treading it into the room,” said Anna, in a superior way; “for that was the only thing there was plenty of in the country. Here in the town too the children can get on better; in the country poor children can’t learn anything that’ll help them to amount to something; they’ve got to work for their daily bread. It’s bad to be poor in the country!”

“It’s worse here in town,” said Pelle bitterly, “for here only those who dress finely amount to anything!”

“But there are all sorts of ways here by which a man can earn money, and if one way doesn’t answer, he can try another. Many a man has come into town with his naked rump sticking out of his trousers, and now he’s looked up to! If a man’s only got the will and the energy –well, I’ve thought both the children ought to go to the municipal school, when they are older; knowledge is never to be despised.”

“Why not Marie as well?” asked Pelle.

“She? What? She’s not fitted to learn anything. Besides, she’s only a girl.”

Anna, like her brother Alfred, had set herself a lofty goal. Her eyes were quite bright when she spoke of it, and it was evidently her intention to follow it regardless of consequences. She was a loud-voiced, capable woman with an authoritative manner; Due simply sat by and smiled and kept his temper. But in his inmost heart, according to report, he knew well enough what he wanted. He never went to the public-house, but came straight home after work; and in the evening he was never happier than when all three children were scrambling over him. He made no distinction between his own two youngsters and the six-year-old Marie, whom Anna had borne before she married him.

Pelle was very fond of little Marie, who had thrived well enough so long as her child-loving grandparents had had her, but now she was thin and had stopped growing, and her eyes were too experienced. She gazed at one like a poor housewife who is always fretted and distressed, and Pelle was sorry for her. If her mother was harsh to her, he always remembered that Christmastide evening when he first visited his Uncle Kalle, and when Anna, weeping and abashed, had crept into the house, soon to be a mother. Little Anna, with the mind of a merry child, whom everybody liked. What had become of her now?

One evening, as Morten was not at liberty, he ran thither. Just as he was on the point of knocking, he heard Anna storming about indoors; suddenly the door flew open and little Marie was thrown out upon the footpath. The child was crying terribly.

“What’s the matter, then?” asked Pelle, in his cheerful way.

“What’s the matter? The matter is that the brat is saucy and won’t eat just because she doesn’t get exactly the same as the others. Here one has to slave and reckon and contrive–and for a bad girl like that! Now she’s punishing herself and won’t eat. Is it anything to her what the others have? Can she compare herself with them? She’s a bastard brat and always will be, however you like to dress it up!”

“She can’t help that!” said Pelle angrily.

“Can’t help it! Perhaps I can help it? Is it my fault that she didn’t come into the world a farmer’s daughter, but has to put up with being a bastard? Yes, you may believe me, the neighbors’ wives tell me to my face she hasn’t her father’s eyes, and they look at me as friendly as a lot of cats! Am I to be punished all my life, perhaps, because I looked a bit higher, and let myself be led astray in a way that didn’t lead to anything? Ah, the little monster!” And she clenched her fists and shook them in the direction from which the child’s crying could still be heard.

“Here one goes and wears oneself out to keep the house tidy and to be respectable, and then no one will treat me as being as good as themselves, just because once I was a bit careless!” She was quite beside herself.

“If you aren’t kind to little Marie, I shall tell Uncle Kalle,” said Pelle warningly.

She spat contemptuously. “Then you can tell him. Yes, I wish to God you’d do it! Then he’d come and take her away, and delighted I should be!”

But now Due was heard stamping on the flags outside the door, and they could hear him too consoling the child. He came in holding her by the hand, and gave his wife a warning look, but said nothing. “There, there–now all that’s forgotten,” he repeated, in order to check the child’s sobs, and he wiped away the grimy tears from her cheeks with his great thumbs.

Anna brought him his food, sulkily enough, and out in the kitchen she muttered to herself. Due, while he ate his supper of bacon and black bread, stood the child between his knees and stared at her with round eyes. “Rider!” she said, and smiled persuasively. “Rider!” Due laid a cube of bacon on a piece of bread.

“There came a rider riding
On his white hoss, hoss, hoss, hoss!”

he sang, and he made the bread ride up to her mouth. “And then?”

“Then, _pop_ he rode in at the gate!” said the child, and swallowed horse and rider.

While she ate she kept her eyes fixed upon him unwaveringly, with that painful earnestness which was so sad to see. But sometimes it happened that the rider rode right up to her mouth, and then, with a jerk, turned about, and disappeared, at a frantic gallop, between Due’s white teeth. Then she smiled for a moment.

“There’s really no sense shoving anything into her,” said Anna, who was bringing coffee in honor of the visitor. “She gets as much as she can eat, and she’s not hungry.”

“She’s hungry, all the same!” hummed Due.

“Then she’s dainty–our poor food isn’t good enough for her. She takes after her father, I can tell you! And what’s more, if she isn’t naughty now she soon will be when once she sees she’s backed up.”

Due did not reply. “Are you quite well again now?” he asked, turning to Pelle.

“What have you been doing to-day?” asked Anna, filling her husband’s long pipe.

“I had to drive a forest ranger from up yonder right across the whole of the moor. I got a krone and a half for a tip.”

“Give it to me, right away!”

Due passed her the money, and she put it into an old coffeepot. “This evening you must take the bucket to the inspector’s,” she said.

Due stretched himself wearily. “I’ve been on the go since half-past four this morning,” he said.

“But I’ve promised it faithfully, so there’s nothing else to be done. And then I thought you’d see to the digging for them this autumn; you can see when we’ve got the moonlight, and then there’s Sundays. If we don’t get it some one else will–and they are good payers.”

Due did not reply.

“In a year or two from now, I’m thinking, you’ll have your own horses and won’t need to go scraping other people’s daily bread together,” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder, “Won’t you go right away and take the bucket? Then it’s done. And I must have some small firewood cut before you go to bed.”

Due sat there wearily blinking. After eating, fatigue came over him. He could hardly see out of his eyes, so sleepy was he. Marie handed him his cap, and at last he got on his legs. He and Pelle went out together.

The house in which Due lived lay far up the long street, which ran steeply down to the sea. It was an old watercourse, and even now when there was a violent shower the water ran down like a rushing torrent between the poor cottages.

Down on the sea-road they met a group of men who were carrying lanterns in their hands; they were armed with heavy sticks, and one of them wore an old leather hat and carried a club studded with spikes. This was the night-watch. They moved off, and behind them all went the new policeman, Pihl, in his resplendent uniform. He kept well behind the others, in order to show off his uniform, and also to ensure that none of the watch took to their heels. They were half drunk, and were taking their time; whenever they met any one they stood still and related with much detail precisely why they had taken the field. The “Great Power” was at his tricks again. He had been refractory all day, and the provost had given the order to keep an eye on him. And quite rightly, for in his cups he had met Ship- owner Monsen, on Church Hill, and had fallen upon him with blows and words of abuse: “So you take the widow’s bread out of her mouth, do you? You told her the _Three Sisters_ was damaged at sea, and you took over her shares for next to nothing, did you? Out of pure compassion, eh, you scoundrel? And there was nothing the matter with the ship except that she had done only too well and made a big profit, eh? So you did the poor widow a kindness, eh?” A scoundrel, he called him and at every question he struck him a blow, so that he rolled on the ground. “We are all witnesses, and now he must go to prison. A poor stone-cutter oughtn’t to go about playing the judge. Come and help us catch him, Due–you are pretty strong!”

“It’s nothing to do with me,” said Due.

“You do best to keep your fingers out of it,” said one of the men derisively; “you might get to know the feel of his fist.” And they went on, laughing contemptuously.

“They won’t be so pleased with their errand when they’ve done,” said Due, laughing. “That’s why they’ve got a nice drop stowed away– under their belts. To give them courage. The strong man’s a swine, but I’d rather not be the one he goes for.”

“Suppose they don’t get him at all!” said Pelle eagerly.

Due laughed. “They’ll time it so that they are where he isn’t. But why don’t he stick to his work and leave his fool’s tricks alone? He could have a good drink and sleep it off at home–he’s only a poor devil, he ought to leave it to the great people to drink themselves silly!”

But Pelle took another view of the affair. The poor man of course ought to go quietly along the street and take his hat off to everybody; and if anybody greeted him in return he’d be quite proud, and tell it to his wife as quite an event, as they were going to bed. “The clerk raised his hat to me to-day–yes, that he did!” But Stonecutter Jorgensen looked neither to right nor to left when he was sober, and in his cups he trampled everybody underfoot.

Pelle by no means agreed with the pitiful opinions of the town. In the country, whence he came, strength was regarded as everything, and here was a man who could have taken strong Erik himself and put him in his pocket. He roamed about in secret, furtively measuring his wrists, and lifted objects which were much too heavy for him; he would by no means have objected to be like the “Great Power,” who, as a single individual, kept the whole town in a state of breathless excitement, whether he was in one of his raging moods or whether he lay like one dead. The thought that he was the comrade of Jens and Morten made him quite giddy, and he could not understand why they bowed themselves so completely to the judgment of the town, as no one could cast it in their teeth that they were on the parish, but only that their father was a powerful fellow.

Jens shrank from continually hearing his father’s name on all lips, and avoided looking people in the eyes, but in Morten’s open glance he saw no trace of this nameless grief.

One evening, when matters were quite at their worst, they took Pelle home with them. They lived in the east, by the great clay-pit, where the refuse of the town was cast away. Their mother was busy warming the supper in the oven, and in the chimney-corner sat a shrivelled old grandmother, knitting. It was a poverty-stricken home.

“I really thought that was father,” said the woman, shivering. “Has any of you heard of him?”

The boys related what they had heard; some one had seen him here, another there. “People are only too glad to keep us informed,” said Jens bitterly.

“Now it’s the fourth evening that I’ve warmed up his supper to no purpose,” the mother continued. “Formerly he used to take care to look in at home, however much they were after him–but he may come yet.”

She tried to smile hopefully, but suddenly threw her apron in front of her eyes and burst into tears. Jens went about with hanging head, not knowing what he ought to do; Morten put his arm behind the weary back and spoke soothingly: “Come, come; it isn’t worse than it has often been!” And he stroked the projecting shoulder-blades.

“No, but I did feel so glad that it was over. A whole year almost he never broke out, but took his food quietly when he came home from work, and then crawled into bed. All that time he broke nothing; he just slept and slept; at last I believed he had become weak-minded, and I was glad for him, for he had peace from those terrible ideas. I believed he had quieted down after all his disgraces, and would take life as it came; as the rest of his comrades do. And now he’s broken out again as audacious as possible, and it’s all begun over again!” She wept desolately.

The old woman sat by the stove, her shifting glance wandering from one to another; she was like a crafty bird of prey sitting in a cage. Then her voice began, passionless and uninflected:

“You’re a great donkey; now it’s the fourth evening you’ve made pancakes for your vagabond; you’re always at him, kissing and petting him! I wouldn’t sweeten my husband’s sleep if he had behaved so scandalously to his wife and family; he could go to bed and get up again hungry, and dry too, for all I cared; then he’d learn manners at last. But there’s no grit in you–that’s the trouble; you put up with all his sauciness.”

“If I were to lay a stone in his way–why, who would be good to him, if his poor head wanted to lie soft? Grandmother ought to know how much he needs some one who believes in him. And there’s nothing else I can do for him.”

“Yes, yes; work away and wear yourself out, so that there’s always something for the great fellow to smash if he has a mind to! But now you go to bed and lie down; I’ll wait up for Peter and give him his food, if he comes; you must be half dead with weariness, you poor worm.”

“There’s an old proverb says, ‘A man’s mother is the devil’s pother,’ but it don’t apply to you, grandmother,” said the mother of the boys mildly. “You always take my part, although there’s no need. But now you go to bed! It’s far past your bed-time, and I’ll look after Peter. It’s so easy to manage him if only he knows that you mean well by him.”

The old woman behaved as though she did not hear; she went on knitting. The boys remembered that they had brought something with them; a bag of coffee-beans, some sugar-candy, and a few rolls.

“You waste all your hard-earned shillings on me,” said the mother reproachfully, and put the water to boil for the coffee, while her face beamed with gratitude.

“They’ve no young women to waste it on,” said the old woman dryly.

“Grandmother’s out of humor this evening,” said Morten. He had taken off the old woman’s glasses and looked smilingly into her gray eyes.

“Out of humor–yes, that I am! But time passes, I tell you, and here one sits on the edge of the grave, waiting for her own flesh and blood to get on and do something wonderful, but nothing ever happens! Energies are wasted–they run away like brook-water into the sea– and the years are wasted too–or is it lies I’m telling you? All want to be masters; no one wants to carry the sack; and one man seizes hold of another and clambers over him just to reach an inch higher. And there ought to be plenty in the house–but there’s poverty and filth in every corner. I should think the dear God will soon have had enough of it all! Not an hour goes by but I curse the day when I let myself be wheedled away from the country; there a poor man’s daily bread grows in the field, if he’ll take it as it comes. But here he must go with a shilling in his fist, if it’s only that he wants a scrap of cabbage for his soup. If you’ve money you can have it; if you haven’t, you can leave it. Yes, that’s how it is! But one must live in town in order to have the same luck as Peter! Everything promised splendidly, and I, stupid old woman, have always had a craving to see my own flesh and blood up at the top. And now I sit here like a beggar-princess! Oh, it has been splendid–I’m the mother of the biggest vagabond in town!”

“Grandmother shouldn’t talk like that,” said the mother of the boys.

“Yes, yes; but I’m sick of it all–and yet I can’t think about dying! How can I go and lay me down–who would take a stick to Peter?–the strong man!” she said contemptuously.

“Grandmother had better go quietly and lie down; I can manage Peter best if I’m alone with him,” said the wife, but the old woman did not move.

“Can’t you get her to go, Morten?” whispered the mother. “You are the only one she will listen to.”

Morten lectured the old woman until he had enticed her away; he had to promise to go with her and arrange the bedclothes over her feet.

“Now, thank goodness, we’ve got her out of the way!” said the mother, relieved. “I’m always so afraid that father might forget what he’s doing when he’s like he is now; and she doesn’t think of giving in to him, so it’s flint against flint. But now I think you ought to go where the rest of the young folks are, instead of sitting here and hanging your heads.”

“We’ll stay and see whether father comes,” declared Morten.

“But what does it matter to you–you can say good-day to father at any time. Go now–listen–father prefers to find me alone when he’s like this and comes home merry. Perhaps he takes me in his arms and swings me round–he’s so strong–so that I feel as giddy as a young girl. ‘Ho, heigh, wench, here’s the “Great Power”!’ he says, and he laughs as loud as he used to in his rowdy young days. Yes, when he’s got just enough in him he gets as strong and jolly as ever he was in his very best days. I’m glad it’s soon over. But that’s not for you –you had better go.” She looked at them appealingly, and shrank back as some one fumbled at the door. Out-of-doors it was terrible weather.

It was only the youngest, who had come home from her day’s work. She might have been ten or twelve years old and was small for her age, although she looked older; her voice was harsh and strident, and her little body seemed coarsened and worn with work. There was not a spot about her that shed or reflected a single ray of light; she was like some subterranean creature that has strayed to the surface. She went silently across the room and let herself drop into her grandmother’s chair; she leaned over to one side as she sat, and now and again her features contracted.

“She’s got that mischief in her back,” said the mother, stroking her thin, unlovely hair. “She got it always carrying the doctor’s little boy–he’s so tall and so heavy. But as long as the doctor says nothing, it can’t be anything dangerous. Yes, you did really leave home too early, my child; but, after all, you get good food and you learn to be smart. And capable, that she is; she looks after the doctor’s three children all by herself! The eldest is her own age, but she has to dress and undress her. Such grand children, they don’t even learn how to do things for themselves!”

Pelle stared at her curiously. He himself had put up with a good deal, but to cripple himself by dragging children about, who were perhaps stronger than himself–no, no one need expect that of him! “Why do you carry the over-fed brat?” he asked.

“They must have some one to look after them,” said the mother, “and their mother, who’s the nearest to them, she doesn’t feel inclined to do it. And they pay her for it.”

“If it was me, I’d let the brat fall,” said Pelle boldly.

The little girl just glanced at him with her dull eyes, and a feeble interest glimmered in them. But her face retained its frozen indifference, and it was impossible to say what she was thinking, so hard and experienced was her expression.

“You mustn’t teach her anything naughty,” said the mother; “she has enough to struggle against already; she’s got an obstinate nature. And now you must go to bed, Karen”–she caressed her once more– “Father can’t bear to see you when he’s had too much. He’s so fond of her,” she added helplessly.

Karen drew away from the caress without the slightest change of expression; silently she went up to the garret where she slept. Pelle had not heard her utter a sound.

“That’s how she is,” said the mother, shivering. “Never a word to say ‘good night’! Nothing makes any impression on her nowadays– neither good nor bad; she’s grown up too soon. And I have to manage so that father doesn’t see her when he’s merry. He goes on like a wild beast against himself and everybody else when it comes across his mind how she’s been put upon.” She looked nervously at the clock. “But go now–do listen! You’ll do me a great favor if you’ll go!” She was almost crying.

Morten stood up, hesitating, and the others followed his example. “Pull your collars up and run,” said the mother, and buttoned up their coats. The October gale was beating in gusts against the house, and the rain was lashing violently against the window-panes.

As they were saying good night a fresh noise was heard outside. The outer door banged against the wall, and they heard the storm burst in and fill the entry. “Ah, now it’s too late!” lamented the mother reproachfully. “Why didn’t you go sooner?” A monstrous breathing sounded outside, like the breathing of a gigantic beast, sniffing up and down at the crack of the door, and fumbling after the latch with its dripping paws. Jens wanted to run and open the door. “No, you mustn’t do that!” cried his mother despairingly, and she pushed the bolt. She stood there, rigid, her whole body trembling. Pelle too began to shiver; he had a feeling that the storm itself was lying there in the entry like a great unwieldy being, puffing and snorting in a kind of gross content, and licking itself dry while it waited for them.

The woman bent her ear to the door, listening in frantic suspense. “What is he up to now?” she murmured; “he is so fond of teasing!” She was crying again. The boys had for the moment forgotten her.

Then the outer door was beaten in, and the monster got up on all four dripping paws, and began to call them with familiar growls. The woman turned about in her distress; waving her hands helplessly before her, and then clapping them to her face. But now the great beast became impatient; it struck the door sharply, and snarled warningly. The woman shrank back as though she herself were about to drop on all fours and answered him. “No, no!” she cried, and considered a moment. Then the door was burst in with one tremendous blow, and Master Bruin rolled over the threshold and leaped toward them in clumsy jumps, his head thrown somewhat backward as though wondering why his little comrade had not rushed to meet him, with an eager growl. “Peter, Peter, the boy!” she whispered, bending over him; but he pushed her to the floor with a snarl, and laid one heavy paw upon her. She tore herself away from him and escaped to a chair.

“Who am I?” he asked, in a stumbling, ghostly voice, confronting her.

“The great strong man!” She could not help smiling; he was ramping about in such a clumsy, comical way.

“And you?”

“The luckiest woman in all the world!” But now her voice died away in a sob.

“And where is the strong man to rest to-night?” He snatched at her breast.

She sprang up with blazing eyes. “You beast–oh, you beast!” she cried, red with shame, and she struck him in the face.

The “Great Power” wiped his face wonderingly after each blow. “We’re only playing,” he said. Then, in a flash, he caught sight of the boys, who had shrunk into a corner. “There you are!” he said, and he laughed crazily; “yes, mother and I, we’re having a bit of a game! Aren’t we, mother?”

But the woman had run out of doors, and now stood under the eaves, sobbing.

Jorgensen moved restlessly to and fro. “She’s crying,” he muttered. “There’s no grit in her–she ought to have married some farmer’s lad, devil take it, if the truth must be told! It catches me here and presses as though some one were shoving an iron ferrule into my brain. Come on, ‘Great Power’! Come on! so that you can get some peace from it! I say every day. No, let be, I say then–you must keep a hold on yourself, or she just goes about crying! And she’s never been anything but good to you! But deuce take it, if it would only come out! And then one goes to bed and says, Praise God, the day is done–and another day, and another. And they stand there and stare–and wait; but let them wait; nothing happens, for now the ‘Great Power’ has got control of himself! And then all at once it’s there behind! Hit away! Eight in the thick of the heap! Send them all to hell, the scoundrels! ‘Cause a man must drink, in order to keep his energies in check…. Well, and there she sits! Can one of you lend me a krone?”

“Not I!” said Jens.

“No, not you–he’d be a pretty duffer who’d expect anything from you! Haven’t I always said ‘he takes after the wrong side’? He’s like his mother. He’s got a heart, but he’s incapable. What can you really do, Jens? Do you get fine clothes from your master, and does he treat you like a son, and will you finish up by taking over the business as his son-in-law? And why not? if I may ask the question. Your father is as much respected as Morten’s.”

“Morten won’t be a son-in-law, either, if his master has no daughter,” Jens muttered.

“No. But he might have had a daughter, hey? But there we’ve got an answer. You don’t reflect. Morten, he’s got something there!” He touched his forehead.

“Then you shouldn’t have hit me on the head,” retorted Jens sulkily.

“On the head–well! But the understanding has its seat in the head. That’s where one ought to hammer it in. For what use would it be, I ask you, supposing you commit some stupidity with your head and I smack you on the behind? You don’t need any understanding there? But it has helped–you’ve grown much smarter. That was no fool’s answer you gave me just now: ‘Then you shouldn’t have hit me on the head!'” He nodded in acknowledgment. “No, but here is a head that can give them some trouble–there are knots of sense in this wood, hey?” And the three boys had to feel the top of his head.

He stood there like a swaying tree, and listened with a changing expression to the less frequent sobs of his wife; she was now sitting by the fire, just facing the door. “She does nothing but cry,” he said compassionately; “that’s a way the women have of amusing themselves nowadays. Life has been hard on us, and she couldn’t stand hardships, poor thing! For example, if I were to say now that I’d like to smash the stove”–and here he seized a heavy chair and waved it about in the air–“then she begins to cry. She cries about everything. But if I get on I shall take another wife –one who can make a bit of a show. Because this is nonsense. Can she receive her guests and make fine conversation? Pah! What the devil is the use of my working and pulling us all out of the mud? But now I’m going out again–God knows, it ain’t amusing here!”

His wife hurried across to him. “Ah, don’t go out, Peter–stay here, do!” she begged.

“Am I to hang about here listening to you maundering on?” he asked sulkily, shrugging his shoulders. He was like a great, good-natured boy who gives himself airs.

“I won’t maunder–I’m ever so jolly–if only you’ll stay!” she cried, and she smiled through her tears. “Look at me–don’t you see how glad I am? Stay with me, do, ‘Great Power!'” She breathed warmly into his ear; she had shaken off her cares and pulled herself together, and was now really pretty with her glowing face.

The “Great Power” looked at her affectionately; he laughed stupidly, as though he was tickled, and allowed himself to be pulled about; he imitated her whisper to the empty air, and was overflowing with good humor. Then he slyly approached his mouth to her ear, and as she listened he trumpeted loudly, so that she started back with a little cry. “Do stay, you great baby!” she said, laughing. “I won’t let you go; I can hold you!” But he shook her off, laughing, and ran out bareheaded.

For a moment it looked as though she would run after him, but then her hands fell, and she drooped her head. “Let him run off,” she said wearily; “now things must go as they will. There’s nothing to be done; I’ve never seen him so drunk. Yes, you look at me, but you must remember that he carries his drink differently to every one else–he is quite by himself in everything!” She said this with a certain air of pride. “And he has punished the shipowner–and even the judge daren’t touch him. The good God Himself can’t be more upright than he is.”

X

Now the dark evenings had come when the lamp had to be lit early for the workers. The journeyman left while it was still twilight; there was little for him to do. In November the eldest apprentice had served his time. He was made to sit all alone in the master’s room, and there he stayed for a whole week, working on his journeyman’s task–a pair of sea-boots. No one was allowed to go in to him, and the whole affair was extremely exciting. When the boots were ready and had been inspected by some of the master-shoemakers, they were filled to the top with water and suspended in the garret; there they hung for a few days, in order to show that they were water-tight. Then Emil was solemnly appointed a journeyman, and had to treat the whole workshop. He drank brotherhood with little Nikas, and in the evening he went out and treated the other journeymen–and came home drunk as a lord. Everything passed off just as it should.

On the following day Jeppe came into the workshop. “Well, Emil, now you’re a journeyman. What do you think of it? Do you mean to travel? It does a freshly baked journeyman good to go out into the world and move about and learn something.”

Emil did not reply, but began to bundle his things together. “No, no; it’s not a matter of life and death to turn you out. You can come to the workshop here and share the light and the warmth until you’ve got something better–those are good conditions, it seems to me. Now, when I was learning, things were very different–a kick behind, and out you went! And that’s for young men–it’s good for them!”

He could sit in the workshop and enumerate all the masters in the whole island who had a journeyman. But that was really only a joke –it never happened that a new journeyman was engaged. On the other hand, he and the others knew well enough how many freshly-baked journeymen had been thrown on to the streets that autumn.

Emil was by no means dejected. Two evenings later they saw him off on the Copenhagen steamer. “There is work enough,” he said, beaming with delight. “You must promise me that you’ll write to me in a year,” said Peter, who had finished his apprenticeship at the same time. “That I will!” said Emil.

But before a month had passed they heard that Emil was home again. He was ashamed to let himself be seen. And then one morning he came, much embarrassed, slinking into the workshop. Yes, he had got work –in several places, but had soon been sent away again. “I have learned nothing,” he said dejectedly. He loitered about for a time, to enjoy the light and warmth of the workshop, and would sit there doing some jobs of cobbling which he had got hold of. He kept himself above water until nearly Christmas-time, but then he gave in, and disgraced his handicraft by working at the harbor as an ordinary stevedore.

“I have wasted five years of my life,” he used to say when they met him; “Run away while there’s time! Or it’ll be the same with you as it was with me.” He did not come to the workshop any longer out of fear of Jeppe, who was extremely wroth with him for dishonoring his trade.

It was cozy in the workshop when the fire crackled in the stove and the darkness looked in at the black, uncovered window-panes. The table was moved away from the window so that all four could find place about it, the master with his book and the three apprentices each with his repairing job. The lamp hung over the table, and smoked; it managed to lessen the darkness a little. The little light it gave was gathered up by the great glass balls which focussed it and cast it upon the work. The lamp swayed slightly, and the specks of light wriggled hither and thither like tadpoles, so that the work was continually left in darkness. Then the master would curse and stare miserably at the lamp.

The others suffered with their eyes, but the master sickened in the darkness. Every moment he would stand up with a shudder. “Damn and blast it, how dark it is here; it’s as dark as though one lay in the grave! Won’t it give any light to-night?” Then Pelle would twist the regulator, but it was no better.

When old Jeppe came tripping in, Master Andres looked up without trying to hide his book; he was in a fighting mood.

“Who is there?” he asked, staring into the darkness. “Ah, it’s father!”

“Have you got bad eyes?” asked the old man derisively. “Will you have some eye-water?”

“Father’s eye-water–no thanks! But this damned light–one can’t see one’s hand before one’s face!”

“Open your mouth, then, and your teeth will shine!” Jeppe spat the words out. This lighting was always a source of strike between them.

“No one else in the whole island works by so wretched a light, you take my word, father.”

“In my time I never heard complaints about the light,” retorted Jeppe. “And better work has been done under the glass ball than any one can do now with all their artificial discoveries. But it’s disappearing now; the young people to-day know no greater pleasure than throwing their money out of the window after such modern trash.”

“Yes, in father’s time–then everything was so splendid!” said Master Andres. “That was when the angels ran about with white sticks in their mouths!”

In the course of the evening now one and another would drop in to hear and tell the news. And if the young master was in a good temper they would stay. He was the fire and soul of the party, as old Bjerregrav said; he could, thanks to his reading, give explanations of so many things.

When Pelle lifted his eyes from his work he was blind. Yonder, in the workshop, where Baker Jorgen and the rest sat and gossiped, he could see nothing but dancing specks of light, and his work swam round in the midst of them; and of his comrades he saw nothing but their aprons. But in the glass ball the light was like a living fire, in whose streams a world was laboring.

“Well, this evening there’s a capital light,” said Jeppe, if one of them looked to the lamp.

“You mean there’s no light at all!” retorted Master Andres, twisting the regulator.

But one day the ironmonger’s man brought something in a big basket –a hanging lamp with a round burner; and when it was dark the ironmonger himself came in order to light it for the first time, and to initiate Pelle into the management of the wonderful contrivance. He went to work very circumstantially and with much caution. “It can explode, I needn’t tell you,” he said, “but you’d have to treat the mechanism very badly first. If you only set to work with care and reason there is no danger whatever.”

Pelle stood close to him, holding the cylinder, but the others turned their heads away from the table, while the young master stood right at the back, and shuffled to and fro. “Devil knows I don’t want to go to heaven in my living body!” he said, with a comical expression; “but deuce take it, where did you get the courage, Pelle? You’re a saucy young spark!” And he looked at him with his wide, wondering gaze, which held in it both jest and earnest.

At last the lamp shone out; and even on the furthest shelf, high up under the ceiling, one could count every single last. “That’s a regular sun!” said the young master, and he put his hand to his face; “why, good Lord, I believe it warms the room!” He was quite flushed, and his eyes were sparkling.

The old master kept well away from the lamp until the ironmonger had gone; then he came rushing over to it. “Well, aren’t you blown sky-high?” he asked, in great astonishment. “It gives an ugly light –oh, a horrible light! Poof, I say! And it doesn’t shine properly; it catches you in the eyes. Well, well, you can spoil your sight as far as I’m concerned!”

But for the others the lamp was a renewal of life. Master Andres sunned himself in its rays. He was like a sun-intoxicated bird; as he sat there, quite at peace, a wave of joy would suddenly come over him. And to the neighbors who gathered round the lamp in order to discover its qualities he held forth in great style, so that the light was doubled. They came often and stayed readily; the master beamed and the lamp shone; they were like insects attracted by the light–the glorious light!

Twenty times a day the master would go out to the front door, but he always came in again and sat by the window to read, his boot with the wooden heel sticking out behind him. He spat so much that Pelle had to put fresh sand every day under his place.

“Is there some sort of beast that sits in your chest and gnaws?” said Uncle Jorgen, when Andres’ cough troubled him badly. “You look so well otherwise. You’ll recover before we know where we are!”

“Yes, thank God!” The master laughed gaily between two attacks.

“If you only go at the beast hard enough, it’ll surely die. Now, where you are, in your thirtieth year, you ought to be able to get at it. Suppose you were to give it cognac?”

Jorgen Kofod, as a rule, came clumping in with great wooden shoes, and Jeppe used to scold him. “One wouldn’t believe you’ve got a shoemaker for a brother!” he would say crossly; “and yet we all get our black bread from you.”

“But what if I can’t keep my feet warm now in those damned leather shoes? And I’m full through and through of gout–it’s a real misery!” The big baker twisted himself dolefully.

“It must be dreadful with gout like that,” said Bjerregrav. “I myself have never had it.”

“Tailors don’t get gout,” rejoined Baker Jorgen scornfully. “A tailor’s body has no room to harbor it. So much I do know–twelve tailors go to a pound.”

Bjerregrav did not reply.

“The tailors have their own topsy-turvy world,” continued the baker. “I can’t compare myself with them. A crippled tailor–well, even he has got his full strength of body.”

“A tailor is as fine a fellow as a black-bread baker!” stammered Bjerregrav nervously. “To bake black bread–why, every farmer’s wife can do that!”

“Fine! I believe you! Hell and blazes! If the tailor makes a cap he has enough cloth left over to make himself a pair of breeches. That’s why tailors are always dressed so fine!” The baker was talking to the empty air.

“Millers and bakers are always rogues, everybody says.” Old Bjerregrav turned to Master Andres, trembling with excitement. But the young master stood there looking gaily from one to the other, his lame leg dangling in the air.

“For the tailor nothing comes amiss–there’s too much room in me!” said the baker, as though something were choking him. “Or, as another proverb says–it’s of no more consequence than a tailor in hell. They are the fellows! We all know the story of the woman who brought a full-grown tailor into the world without even knowing she was with child.”

Jeppe laughed. “Now, that’s enough, really; God knows neither of you will give in to the other.”

“Well, and I’ve no intention of trampling a tailor to death, if it can anyhow be avoided–but one can’t always see them.” Baker Jorgen carefully lifted his great wooden shoes. “But they are not men. Now is there even one tailor in the town who has been overseas? No, and there were no men about while the tailor was being made. A woman stood in a draught at the front door, and there she brought forth the tailor.” The baker could not stop himself when once he began to quiz anybody; now that Soren was married, he had recovered all his good spirits.

Bjerregrav could not beat this. “You can say what you like about tailors,” he succeeded in saying at last. “But people who bake black bread are not respected as handicraftsmen–no more than the washerwoman! Tailoring and shoemaking, they are proper crafts, with craftman’s tests, and all the rest.”

“Yes, shoemaking of course is another thing,” said Jeppe.

“But as many proverbs and sayings are as true of you as of us,” said Bjerregrav, desperately blinking.

“Well, it’s no longer ago than last year that Master Klausen married a cabinet-maker’s daughter. But whom must a tailor marry? His own serving-maid?”

“Now how can you, father!” sighed Master Andres. “One man’s as good as another.”

“Yes, you turn everything upside down! But I’ll have my handicraft respected. To-day all sorts of agents and wool-merchants and other trash settle in the town and talk big. But in the old days the handicraftsmen were the marrow of the land. Even the king himself had to learn a handicraft. I myself served my apprenticeship in the capital, and in the workshop where I was a prince had learned the trade. But, hang it all, I never heard of a king who learned tailoring!”

They were capable of going on forever in this way, but, as the dispute was at its worst, the door opened, and Wooden-leg Larsen stumped in, filling the workshop with fresh air. He was wearing a storm-cap and a blue pilot-coat. “Good evening, children!” he said gaily, and threw down a heap of leather ferrules and single boots on the window-bench.

His entrance put life into all. “Here’s a playboy for us! Welcome home! Has it been a good summer?”

Jeppe picked up the five boots for the right foot, one after another, turned back the uppers, and held heels and soles in a straight line before his eyes. “A bungler has had these in hand,” he growled, and then he set to work on the casing for the wooden leg. “Well, did the layer of felt answer?” Larsen suffered from cold in his amputated foot.

“Yes; I’ve not had cold feet any more.”

“Cold feet!” The baker struck himself on the loins and laughed.

“Yes, you can say what you like, but every time my wooden leg gets wet I get a cold in the head!”

“That’s the very deuce!” cried Jorgen, and his great body rolled like a hippopotamus. “A funny thing, that!”

“There are many funny things in the world,” stammered Bjerregrav. “When my brother died, my watch stopped at that very moment–it was he who gave it me.”

Wooden-leg Larsen had been through the whole kingdom with his barrel-organ, and had to tell them all about it; of the railway- trains which travelled so fast that the landscape turned round on its own axis, and of the great shops and places of amusement in the capital.

“It must be as it will,” said Master Andres. “But in the summer I shall go to the capital and work there!”

“In Jutland–that’s where they have so many wrecks!” said the baker. “They say everything is sand there! I’ve heard that the country is shifting under their feet–moving away toward the east. Is it true that they have a post there that a man must scratch himself against before he can sit down?”

“My sister has a son who has married a Jutland woman and settled down there,” said Bjerregrav. “Have you seen anything of them?”

The baker laughed. “Tailors are so big–they’ve got the whole world in their waistcoat pocket. Well, and Funen? Have you been there, too? That’s where the women have such a pleasant disposition. I’ve lain before Svendborg and taken in water, but there was no time to go ashore.” This remark sounded like a sigh.

“Can you stand it, wandering so much?” asked Bjerregrav anxiously.

Wooden-leg Larsen looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav’s congenital club-foot–he had received his own injury at Heligoland, at the hands of an honorable bullet. “If one’s sound of limb,” he said, spitting on the floor by the window.

Then the others had to relate what had happened in town during the course of the summer; of the Finnish barque which had stranded in the north, and how the “Great Power” had broken out again. “Now he’s sitting in the dumps under lock and key.”

Bjerregrav took exception to the name they gave him; he called it blasphemy, on the ground that the Bible said that power and might belonged to God alone.

Wooden-leg Larsen said that the word, as they had used it, had nothing to do with God; it was an earthly thing; across the water people used it to drive machinery, instead of horses.

“I should think woman is the greatest power,” said Baker Jorgen, “for women rule the world, God knows they do! And God protect us if they are once let loose on us! But what do you think, Andres, you who are so book-learned?”

“The sun is the greatest power,” said Master Andres. “It rules over all life, and science has discovered that all strength and force come from the sun. When it falls into the sea and cools, then the whole world will become a lump of ice.”

“Then the sea is the greatest power!” cried Jeppe triumphantly. “Or do you know of anything else that tears everything down and washes it away? And from the sea we get everything back again. Once when I went to Malaga—-“

“Yes, that really is true,” said Bjerregrav, “for most people get their living from the sea, and many their death. And the rich people we have get all their money from the sea.”

Jeppe drew himself up proudly and his glasses began to glitter. “The sea can bear what it likes, stone or iron, although it is soft itself! The heaviest loads can travel on its back. And then all at once it swallows everything down. I have seen ships which sailed right into the weather and disappeared when their time came.”

“I should very much like to know whether the different countries float on the water, or whether they stand firm on the bottom of the sea. Don’t you know that, Andres?” asked Bjerregrav.

Master Andres thought they stood on the bottom of the sea, far below the surface; but Uncle Jorgen said: “Nay! Big as the sea is!”

“Yes, it’s big, for I’ve been over the whole island,” said Bjerregrav self-consciously; “but I never got anywhere where I couldn’t see the sea. Every parish in all Bornholm borders on the sea. But it has no power over the farmers and peasants–they belong to the land, don’t they?”

“The sea has power over all of us,” said Larsen. “Some it refuses; they go to sea for years and years, but then in their old age they suffer from sea-sickness, and then they are warned. That is why Skipper Andersen came on shore. And others it attracts, from right away up in the country! I have been to sea with such people–they had spent their whole lives up on the island, and had seen the sea, but had never been down to the shore. And then one day the devil collared them and they left the plough and ran down to the sea and hired themselves out. And they weren’t the worse seamen.”

“Yes,” said Baker Jorgen, “and all of us here have been to sea, and Bornholmers sail on all the seas, as far as a ship can go. And I have met people who had never been on the sea, and yet they were as though it was their home. When I sailed the brig _Clara_ for Skipper Andersen, I had such a lad on board as ordinary seaman. He had never bathed in the sea; but one day, as we were lying at anchor, and the others were swimming around, he jumped into the water too–now this is God’s truth–as though he were tumbling into his mother’s arms; he thought that swimming came of its own accord. He went straight to the bottom, and was half dead before we fished him up again.”

“The devil may understand the sea!” cried Master Andres breathlessly. “It is curved like an arch everywhere, and it can get up on its hind legs and stand like a wall, although it’s a fluid! And I have read in a book that there is so much silver in the sea that every man in the whole world might be rich.”

“Thou righteous God!” cried Bjerregrav, “such a thing I have never heard. Now does that come from all the ships that have gone down? Yes, the sea–that, curse it, is the greatest power!”

“It’s ten o’clock,” said Jeppe. “And the lamp is going out–that devil’s contrivance!” They broke up hastily, and Pelle turned the lamp out.

But long after he had laid his head on his pillow everything was going round inside it. He had swallowed everything, and imaginary pictures thronged in his brain like young birds in an over-full nest, pushing and wriggling to find a place wherein to rest. The sea was strong; now in the wintertime the surging of the billows against the cliffs was continually in his ear. Pelle was not sure whether it would stand aside for him! He had an unconscious reluctance to set himself limits, and as for the power about which they had all been disputing, it certainly had its seat in Pelle himself, like a vague consciousness that he was, despite all his defeats, invincible.

At times this feeling manifested itself visibly and helped him through the day. One afternoon they were sitting and working, after having swallowed their food in five minutes, as their custom was; the journeyman was the only one who did not grudge himself a brief mid-day rest, and he sat reading the newspaper. Suddenly he raised his head and looked wonderingly at Pelle. “Now what’s this? Lasse Karlson–isn’t that your father?”

“Yes,” answered Pelle, with a paralyzed tongue, and the blood rushed to his cheeks. Was Father Lasse in the news? Not among the accidents? He must have made himself remarkable in one way or another through his farming! Pelle was nearly choking with excitement, but he did not venture to ask, and Little Nikas simply sat there and looked secretive. He had assumed the expression peculiar to the young master.

But then he read aloud: “Lost! A louse with three tails has escaped, and may be left, in return for a good tip, with the landowner Lasse Karlson, Heath Farm. Broken black bread may also be brought there.”

The others burst into a shout of laughter, but Pelle turned an ashen gray. With a leap he was across the table and had pulled little Nikas to the ground underneath him; there he lay, squeezing the man’s throat with his fingers, trying to throttle him, until he was overpowered. Emil and Peter had to hold him while the knee-strap put in its work.

And yet he was proud of the occurrence; what did a miserable thrashing signify as against the feat of throwing the journeyman to the ground and overcoming the slavish respect he had felt for him! Let them dare to get at him again with their lying allusions, or to make sport of Father Lasse! Pelle was not inclined to adopt circuitous methods.

And the circumstances justified him. After this he received more consideration; no one felt anxious to bring Pelle and his cobbler’s tools on top of him, even although the boy could be thrashed afterward.

XI

The skipper’s garden was a desert. Trees and bushes were leafless; from the workshop window one could look right through them, and over other gardens beyond, and as far as the backs of the houses in East Street. There were no more games in the garden; the paths were buried in ice and melting snow, and the blocks of coral, and the great conch-shells which, with their rosy mouths and fish-like teeth, had sung so wonderfully of the great ocean, had been taken in on account of the frost.

Manna he saw often enough. She used to come tumbling into the workshop with her school satchel or her skates; a button had got torn off, or a heel had been wrenched loose by a skate. A fresh breeze hovered about her hair and cheeks, and the cold made her face glow. “There is blood!” the young master would say, looking at her delightedly; he laughed and jested when she came in. But Manna would hold on to Pelle’s shoulder and throw her foot into his lap, so that he could button her boots. Sometimes she would pinch him secretly and look angry–she was jealous of Morten. But Pelle did not understand; Morten’s gentle, capable mind had entirely subjugated him and assumed the direction of their relations. Pelle was miserable if Morten was not there when he had an hour to spare. Then he would run, with his heart in his mouth, to find him; everything else was indifferent to him.

One Sunday morning, as he was sweeping the snow in the yard, the girls were in their garden; they were making a snowman.

“Hey, Pelle!” they cried, and they clapped their mittens; “come over here! You can help us to build a snow-house. We’ll wall up the door and light some Christmas-tree candles: we’ve got some ends. Oh, do come!”

“Then Morten must come too–he’ll be here directly!”

Manna turned up her nose. “No, we don’t want Morten here!”

“Why not? He’s so jolly!” said Pelle, wounded.

“Yes, but his father is so dreadful–everybody is afraid of him. And then he’s been in prison.”

“Yes, for beating some one–that’s nothing so dreadful! My father was too, when he was a young man. That’s no disgrace, for it isn’t for stealing.”

But Manna looked at him with an expression exactly like Jeppe’s when he was criticizing somebody from his standpoint as a respectable citizen.

“But, Pelle, aren’t you ashamed of it? That’s how only the very poorest people think–those who haven’t any feelings of shame!”

Pelle blushed for his vulgar way of looking at things. “It’s no fault of Morten’s that his father’s like that!” he retorted lamely.

“No, we won’t have Morten here. And mother won’t let us. She says perhaps we can play with you, but not with anybody else. We belong to a very good family,” she said, in explanation.

“My father has a great farm–it’s worth quite as much as a rotten barge,” said Pelle angrily.

“Father’s ship isn’t rotten!” rejoined Manna, affronted. “It’s the best in the harbor here, and it has three masts!”

“All the same, you’re nothing but a mean hussy!” Pelle spat over the hedge.

“Yes, and you’re a Swede!” Manna blinked her eyes triumphantly, while Dolores and Aina stood behind her and put out their tongues.

Pelle felt strongly inclined to jump over the garden wall and beat them; but just then Jeppe’s old woman began scolding from the kitchen, and he went on with his work.

Now, after Christmas, there was nothing at all to do. People were wearing out their old boots, or they went about in wooden shoes. Little Nikas was seldom in the workshop; he came in at meal-times and went away again, and he was always wearing his best clothes. “He earns his daily bread easily,” said Jeppe. Over on the mainland they didn’t feed their people through the winter; the moment there was no more work, they kicked them out.

In the daytime Pelle was often sent on a round through the harbor in order to visit the shipping. He would find the masters standing about there in their leather aprons, talking about nautical affairs; or they would gather before their doors, to gossip, and each, from sheer habit, would carry some tool or other in his hand.

And the wolf was at the door. The “Saints” held daily meetings, and the people had time enough to attend them. Winter proved how insecurely the town was established, how feeble were its roots; it was not here as it was up in the country, where a man could enjoy himself in the knowledge that the earth was working for him. Here people made themselves as small and ate as little as possible, in order to win through the slack season.

In the workshops the apprentices sat working at cheap boots and shoes for stock; every spring the shoemakers would charter a ship in common and send a cargo to Iceland. This helped them on a little. “Fire away!” the master would repeat, over and over again; “make haste–we don’t get much for it!”

The slack season gave rise to many serious questions. Many of the workers were near to destitution, and it was said that the organized charities would find it very difficult to give assistance to all who applied for it. They were busy everywhere, to their full capacity. “And I’ve heard it’s nothing here to what it is on the mainland,” said Baker Jorgen. “There the unemployed are numbered in tens of thousands.”

“How can they live, all those thousands of poor people, if the unemployment is so great?” asked Bjerregrav. “The need is bad enough here in town, where every employer provides his people with their daily bread.”

“Here no one starves unless he wants to,” said Jeppe. “We have a well-organized system of relief.”

“You’re certainly becoming a Social Democrat, Jeppe,” said Baker Jorgen; “you want to put everything on to the organized charities!”

Wooden-leg Larsen laughed; that was a new interpretation.

“Well, what do they really want? For they are not freemasons. They say they are raising their heads again over on the mainland.”

“Well, that, of course, is a thing that comes and goes with unemployment,” said Jeppe. “The people must do something. Last winter a son of the sailmaker’s came home–well, he was one of them in secret. But the old folks would never admit it, and he himself was so clever that he got out of it somehow.”

“If he’d been a son of mine he would have got the stick,” said Jorgen.

“Aren’t they the sort of people who are making ready for the millennium? We’ve got a few of their sort here,” said Bjerregrav diffidently.

“D’you mean the poor devils who believe in the watchmaker and his ‘new time’? Yes, that may well be,” said Jeppe contemptuously. “I have heard they are quite wicked enough for that. I’m inclined to think they are the Antichrist the Bible foretells.”

“Ah, but what do they really want?” asked Baker Jorgen. “What is their madness really driving at?”

“What do they want?” Wooden-leg Larsen pulled himself together. “I’ve knocked up against a lot of people, I have, and as far as I can understand it they want to get justice; they want to take the right of coining money away from the Crown and give it to everybody. And they want to overthrow everything, that is quite certain.”

“Well,” said Master Andres, “what they want, I believe, is perfectly right, only they’ll never get it. I know a little about it, on account of Garibaldi.”

“But what _do_ they want, then, if they don’t want to overthrow the whole world?”

“What do they want? Well, what do they want? That everybody should have exactly the same?” Master Andres was uncertain.

“Then the ship’s boy would have as much as the captain! No, it would be the devil and all!” Baker Jorgen smacked his thigh and laughed.

“And they want to abolish the king,” said Wooden-leg Larsen eagerly.

“Who the devil would reign over us then? The Germans would soon come hurrying over! That’s a most wicked thing, that Danish people should want to hand over their country to the enemy! All I wonder is that they don’t shoot them down without trial! They’d never be admitted to Bornholm.”

“That we don’t really know!” The young master smiled.

“To the devil with them–we’d all go down to the shore and shoot them: they should never land alive!”

“They are just a miserable rabble, the lot of them,” said Jeppe. “I should very much like to know whether there is a decent citizen among them.”

“Naturally, it’s always the poor who complain of poverty,” said Bjerregrav. “So the thing never comes to an end.”

Baker Jorgen was the only one of them who had anything to do. Things would have to be bad indeed before the people stopped buying his black bread. He even had more to do than usual; the more people abstained from meat and cheese, the more bread they ate. He often hired Jeppe’s apprentices so that they might help him in the kneading.

But he was not in a happy frame of mind. He was always shouting his abuse of Soren through the open doors, because the latter would not go near his buxom young wife. Old Jorgen had taken him and put him into bed with her with his own hands, but Soren had got out of the business by crying and trembling like a new-born calf.

“D’you think he’s perhaps bewitched?” asked Master Andres.

“She’s young and pretty, and there’s not the least fault to be found with her–and we’ve fed him with eggs right through the winter. She goes about hanging her head, she gets no attention from him. ‘Marie! Soren!’ I cry, just to put a little life into them–he ought to be the sort of devil I was, I can tell you! She laughs and blushes, but Soren, he simply sneaks off. It’s really a shame–so dainty as she is too, in every way. Ah, it ought to have been in my young days, I can tell you!”

“You are still young enough, Uncle Jorgen!” laughed Master Andres.

“Well, a man could almost bring himself to it–when he considers what a dreadful injustice is going on under his own eyes. For, look you, Andres, I’ve been a dirty beast about all that sort of thing, but I’ve been a jolly fellow too; people were always glad to be on board with me. And I’ve had strength for a booze, and a girl; and for hard work in bad weather. The life I’ve led–it hasn’t been bad; I’d live it all over again the same. But Soren–what sort of a strayed weakling is he? He can’t find his own way about! Now, if only you would have a chat with him–you’ve got some influence over him.”

“I’ll willingly try.”

“Thanks; but look here, I owe you money.” Jorgen took ten kroner and laid them on the table as he was going.

“Pelle, you devil’s imp, can you run an errand for me?” The young master limped into the cutting-out room, Pelle following on his heels.

A hundred times a day the master would run to the front door, but he hurried back again directly; he could not stand the cold. His eyes were full of dreams of other countries, whose climates were kinder, and he spoke of his two brothers, of whom one was lost in South America–perhaps murdered. But the other was in Australia, herding sheep. He earned more at that than the town magistrate received as salary, and was the cleverest boxer in the neighborhood. Here the master made his bloodless hands circle one round the other, and let them fall clenched upon Pelle’s back. “That,” he said, in a superior tone, “is what they call boxing. Brother Martin can cripple a man with one blow. He is paid for it, the devil!” The master shuddered. His brother had on several occasions offered to send him his steamer-ticket, but there was that damned leg. “Tell me what I should do over there, eh, Pelle?”

Pelle had to bring books from the lending library every day, and he soon learned which writers were the most exciting. He also attempted to read himself, but he could not get on with it; it was more amusing to stand about by the skating-pond and freeze and watch the others gliding over the ice. But he got Morten to tell him of exciting books, and these he brought home for the master; such was the “Flying Dutchman.” “That’s a work of poetry, Lord alive!” said the master, and he related its contents to Bjerregrav, who took them all for reality.

“You should have played some part in the great world, Andres–I for my part do best to stay at home here. But you could have managed it–I’m sure of it.”

“The great world!” said the master scornfully. No, he didn’t take much stock in the world–it wasn’t big enough. “If I were to travel, I should like to look for the way into the interior of the earth– they say there’s a way into it in Iceland. Or it would be glorious to make a voyage to the moon; but that will always be just a story.”

At the beginning of the new year the crazy Anker came to the young master and dictated a love-letter to the eldest daughter of the king. “This year he will surely answer,” he said thoughtfully. “Time is passing, and fortune disappears, and there are few that have their share of it; we need the new time very badly.”

“Yes, we certainly do,” said Master Andres. “But if such a misfortune should happen that the king should refuse, why, you are man enough to manage the matter yourself, Anker!”

It was a slack season, and, just as it was at its very worst, shoemaker Bohn returned and opened a shop on the marketplace. He had spent a year on the mainland and had learned all sorts of modern humbug. There was only one pair of boots in his window, and those were his own Sunday boots. Every Monday they were put out and exhibited again, so that there should be something to look at.

If he himself was in the shop, talking to the people, his wife would sit in the living-room behind and hammer on a boot, so that it sounded as though there were men in the workshop.

But at Shrovetide Jeppe received some orders. Master Andres came home quite cheerfully one day from Bjerhansen’s cellar; there he had made the acquaintance of some of the actors of a troupe which had just arrived. “They are fellows, too!” he said, stroking his cheeks. “They travel continually from one place to another and give performances–they get to see the world!” He could not sit quiet.

The next morning they came rioting into the workshop, filling the place with their deafening gabble. “Soles and heels!” “Heels that won’t come off!” “A bit of heel-work and two on the snout!” So they went on, bringing great armfuls of boots from under their cloaks, or fishing them out of bottomless pockets, and throwing them in heaps on the window-bench, each with his droll remarks. Boots and shoes they called “understandings”; they turned and twisted every word, tossing it like a ball from mouth to mouth, until not a trace of sense was left in it.

The apprentices forgot everything, and could scarcely contain themselves for laughing, and the young master overflowed with wit– he was equal to the best of them. Now one saw that he really might have luck with the women: there was no boasting or lying about it. The young actress with the hair like the lightest flax could not keep her eyes off him, although she evidently had all the others at her petticoat-tails; she made signs to her companions that they should admire the master’s splendid big mustache. The master had forgotten his lame leg and thrown his stick away; he was on his knees, taking the actress’s measure for a pair of high boots with patent tops and concertina-like folds in the legs. She had a hole in the heel of her stocking, but she only laughed over it; one of the actors cried “Poached egg!” and then they laughed uproariously.

Old Jeppe came tumbling into the room, attracted by the merriment. The blonde lady called him “Grandfather,” and wanted to dance with him, and Jeppe forgot his dignity and laughed with the rest. “Yes, it’s to us they come when they want to have something good,” he said proudly. “And I learned my trade in Copenhagen, and I used to carry boots and shoes to more than one play-actor there. We had to work for the whole theater; Jungfer Patges, who became so famous later on, got her first dancing shoes from us.”

“Yes, those are the fellows!” said Master Andres, as at last they bustled out; “devil take me, but those are the chaps!” Jeppe could not in the least understand how they had found their way thither, and Master Andres did not explain that he had been to the tavern. “Perhaps Jungfer Patges sent them to me,” he said, gazing into the distance. “She must somehow have kept me in mind.”

Free tickets poured in on them; the young master was in the theater every evening. Pelle received a gallery ticket every time he went round with a pair of boots. He was to say nothing–but the price was plainly marked on the sole with chalk.

“Did you get the money?” the master would ask eagerly; he used to stand on the stairs all the time, waiting. No, Pelle was to present their very best wishes, and to say they would come round and settle up themselves.

“Well, well, people of that sort are safe enough,” said the master.

One day Lasse came stamping into the workshop and into the midst of them all, looking the picture of a big farmer, with his fur collar drawn round his ears. He had a sack of potatoes outside; it was a present to Pelle’s employers, because Pelle was learning his trade so well. Pelle was given leave and went out with his father; and he kept looking furtively at the fur collar. At last he could contain himself no longer, but turned it up inquiringly. Disillusioned, he let it fall again.

“Ah, yes–er–well–that’s just tacked on to my driving-cloak. It looks well, and it keeps my ears nice and warm. You thought I’d blossomed out into a proper fur coat? No, it won’t run to that just yet–but it will soon. And I could name you more than one big farmer who has nothing better than this.”

Yes, Pelle was just a trifle disappointed. But he must admit that there was no difference to be perceived between this cloak and the real bear-skin. “Are things going on all right?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; at present I am breaking stone. I’ve got to break twenty cords if I’m to pay everybody what’s owing to him by the Devil’s birthday. [Footnote: The 11th December–the general pay-day and hiring-day.–TB.] So long as we keep our health and strength, Karna and I.”

They drove to the merchant’s and put up the horses. Pelle noticed that the people at the merchant’s did not rush forward to Lasse quite so eagerly as they did to the real farmers; but Lasse himself behaved in quite an important manner. He stumped right into the merchant’s counting-house, just like the rest, filled his pipe at the barrel, and helped himself to a drink of brandy. A cold breath of air hung about him as he went backward and forward from the cart with buttoned-up cloak, and he stamped as loudly on the sharp cobble-stones as though his boot-soles too were made of stone.

Then they went on to Due’s cottage; Lasse was anxious to see how matters were prospering there. “It isn’t always easy when one of the parties brings a love-child into the business.”

Pelle explained to him how matters stood. “Tell them at Uncle Kalle’s that they must take little Maria back again. Anna ill-treats her. They are getting on well in other ways; now they want to buy a wagon and horses and set up as carriers.”

“Do they? Well, it’s easy for those to get on who haven’t any heart.” Lasse sighed.

“Look, father,” said Pelle suddenly, “there’s a theater here now, and I know all the players. I take them their boots, and they give me a ticket every evening. I’ve seen the whole thing.”

“But, of course, that’s all lies, eh?” Lasse had to pull up, in order to scrutinize Pelle’s face. “So you’ve been in a proper theater, eh? Well, those who live in the town have got the devil to thank for it if they are cleverer than a peasant. One can have everything here!”

“Will you go with me to-night? I can get the tickets.”

Lasse was uneasy. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go; but the whole thing was so unaccustomed. However, it was arranged that he should sleep the night at Due’s, and in the evening they both went to the theater.

“Is it here?” asked Lasse, astounded. They had come to a great building like a barn, before which a number of people were standing. But it was fine inside. They sat right up at the top, at the back, where the seats were arranged like the side of a hill, and they had a view over the whole theater. Down below, right in front, sat some ladies who, so far as Lasse could see, were naked. “I suppose those are the performers?” he inquired.

Pelle laughed. “No, those are the grandest ladies in the town–the doctor’s wife, the burgomaster’s lady, and the inspector’s wife, and such like.”

“What, they are so grand that they haven’t enough clothes to wear!” cried Lasse. “With us we call that poverty! But where are the players, then?”

“They are the other side of the curtain.”

“Then have they begun already?”

“No, you can see they haven’t–the curtain has to go up first.”

There was a hole in the curtain, and a finger came through it, and began to turn from side to side, pointing at the spectators. Lasse laughed. “That’s devilish funny!” he cried, slapping his thighs, as the finger continued to point.

“It hasn’t begun yet,” said Pelle.

“Is that so?” This damped Lasse’s spirits a little.

But then the big crown-light began suddenly to run up through a hole in the ceiling; up in the loft some boys were kneeling round the hole, and as the light came up they blew out the lamps. Then the curtain went up, and there was a great brightly-lit hall, in which a number of pretty young girls were moving about, dressed in the most wonderful costumes–and they were speaking! Lasse was quite astonished to find that he could understand what they said; the whole thing seemed so strange and foreign to him; it was like a peep into dreamland. But there was one maiden who sat there all alone at her spinning wheel, and she was the fairest of them all.

“That’s surely a fine lady?” asked Lasse.

But Pelle whispered that she was only a poor forest maiden, whom the lord of the castle had robbed, and now he wanted to force her to be his sweetheart. All the others were making a tremendous lot of her, combing her golden hair and kneeling before her; but she only looked unhappier than before. And sometimes her sadness was more than she could bear; then she opened her beautiful mouth and her wounded heart bled in song, which affected Lasse so that he had to fetch a long sighing breath.

Then a tall man with a huge red beard came stamping into the hall. Lasse saw that he was dressed like a man who has been keeping Carnival.

“That’s the one we made the fine boots for,” whispered Pelle: “the lord of the castle, who wants to seduce her.”

“An ugly devil he looks too!” said Lasse, and spat. “The master at Stone Farm is a child of God compared with him!” Pelle signed to him to be quiet.

The lord of the castle drove all the other women away, and then began to tramp stormily to and fro, eyeing the forest maiden and showing the whites of his eyes. “Well, have you at last decided?” he roared, and snorted like a mad bull. And suddenly he sprang at her as if to take her by force.

“Ha! Touch me not!” she cried, “or by the living God, I will plunge this dagger into my heart! You believe you can buy my innocence because I am poor, but the honor of the poor is not to be bought with gold!”

“That’s a true word!” said Lasse loudly.

But the lord of the castle gave a malicious laugh, and tugged at his red beard. He rolled his r’s dreadfully.

“Is my offer not enough for you? Come, stay this night with me and you shall receive a farm with ten head of cattle, so that to-morrow you can stand at the altar with your huntsman!”

“Hold your tongue, you whoremonger!” said Lasse angrily.

Those round about him tried to calm him; one or another nudged him in the ribs. “Well, can’t a man speak any longer?” Lasse turned crossly to Pelle. “I’m no clergyman, but if the girl doesn’t want to, let him leave her alone; at any rate he shan’t slake his lust publicly in the presence of hundreds of people with impunity! A swine like that!” Lasse was speaking loudly, and it seemed as though his words had had their effect on the lord of the castle. He stood there awhile staring in front of him, and then called a man, and bade him lead the maiden back to the forest.

Lasse breathed easily again as the curtain fell and the boys overhead by the hole in the ceiling relit the lamps and let them down again. “So far she’s got out of it all right,” he told Pelle, “but I don’t trust the lord–he’s a scoundrel!” He was perspiring freely, and did not look entirely satisfied.

The next scene which was conjured up on the stage was a forest. It was wonderfully fine, with pelargoniums blooming on the ground, and a spring which was flowing out of something green. “That is a covered beer-barrel!” said Pelle, and now Lasse too could see the tap, but it was wonderfully natural. Right in the background one could see the lord’s castle on a cliff, and in the foreground lay a fallen tree-trunk; two green-clad huntsmen sat astride of it, concocting their evil schemes. Lasse nodded–he knew something of the wickedness of the world.

Now they heard a sound, and crouched down behind the tree-trunk, each with a knife in his hand. For a moment all was silent; then came the forest maiden and her huntsman, wandering all unawares down the forest path. By the spring they took a clinging and affectionate farewell; then the man came forward, hurrying to his certain death.

This was too much. Lasse stood up. “Look out!” he cried in a choking voice: “look out!” Those behind him pulled his coat and scolded him. “No, devil take you all, I won’t hold my tongue!” he cried, and laid about him. And then he leaned forward again: “Look where you’re going, d’you hear! Your life is at stake! They’re hiding behind the fallen tree!”

The huntsman stood where he was and stared up, and the two assassins had risen to their feet and were staring, and the actors and actresses came through from the wings and gazed upward over the auditorium. Lasse saw that the man was saved, but now he had to suffer for his services; the manager wanted to throw him out. “I can perfectly well go by myself,” he said. “An honorable man is one too many in this company!” In the street below he talked aloud to himself; he was in a blazing temper.

“It was only a play,” said Pelle dejectedly. In his heart he was ashamed of his father.

“You needn’t try to teach me about that! I know very well that it all happened long ago and that I can do nothing to alter it, not if I was to stand on my head. But that such low doings should be brought to life again! If the others had felt as I did we should have taken the lord and thrashed him to death, even if it did come a hundred years too late!”

“Why–but that was Actor West, who comes to our workshop every day.”

“Is that so? Actor West, eh? Then you are Actor Codfish, to let yourself be imposed on like that! I have met people before now who had the gift of falling asleep and conjuring up long dead people in their place–but not so real as here, you understand. If you had been behind the curtain you would have seen West lying there like dead, while he, the other one–the Devil–was carrying on and ordering everybody about. It’s a gift I’d rather not have; a dangerous game! If the others forget the word of command that brings him back into the body it would be all up with him, and the other would take his place.”

“But that is all superstition! When I know it’s West in a play–why, I recognized him at once!”

“Oh, of course! You are always the cleverer! You’d like a dispute with the devil himself every day! So it was only a show? When he was rolling the whites of his eyes in his frantic lust! You believe me–if she hadn’t had that knife he would have fallen on her and satisfied his desire in front of everybody! Because if you conjure up long bygone times the action has to have its way, however many there are to see. But that they should do it for money–for money –ugh! And now I’m going home!” Lasse would say nothing more, but had the horses harnessed.

“You had best not go there again,” he said at parting. “But if it has got hold of you already, at least put a knife in your pocket. Yes, and we’ll send you your washing by Butcher Jensen, one Saturday, soon.”

Pelle went to the theater as before; he had a shrewd idea that it was only a play, but there _was_ something mysterious about it; people must have a supernatural gift who evening after evening could so entirely alter their appearance and so completely enter into the people they represented. Pelle thought he would like to become an actor if he could only climb high enough.

The players created a considerable excitement when they strolled through the streets with their napping clothes and queer head-gear; people ran to their windows to see them, the old folk peeping over their shoulders. The town was as though transformed as long as they were in it.

Every mind had taken a perverse direction. The girls cried out in their sleep and dreamed of abductions; they even left their windows a little open; and every young fellow was ready to run away with the players. Those who were not theater-mad attended religious meetings in order to combat the evil.

And one day the players disappeared–as they had come–and left a cloud of debts behind them. “Devil’s trash!” said the master with his despondent expression. “They’ve tricked us! But, all the same, they were fine fellows in their way, and they had seen the world!”

But after these happenings he could by no means get warm again. He crawled into bed and spent the best part of the month lying there.

XII

It can be very cozy on those winter evenings when everybody sits at home in the workshop and passes the time by doing nothing, because it is so dark and cold out of doors, and one has nowhere to go to. To stand about by the skating-ponds and to look on, frozen, while others go swinging past–well, Pelle has had enough of it; and as for strolling up the street toward the north, and then turning about and returning toward the south, and turning yet again, up and down the selfsame street–well, there is nothing in it unless one has good warm clothes and a girl whose waist one can hold. And Morten too is no fresh-air disciple; he is freezing, and wants to sit in the warmth.

So they slink into the workshop as soon as it begins to grow dark, and they take out the key and hang it on the nail in the entry, in order to deceive Jeppe, and then they secretly make a fire in the stove, placing a screen in front of it, so that Jeppe shall not see the light from it when he makes his rounds past the workshop windows. They crouch together on the ledge at the bottom of the stove, each with an arm round the other’s shoulder, and Morten tells Pelle about the books he has read.

“Why do you do nothing but read those stupid books?” asks Pelle, when he has listened for a time.

“Because I want to know something about life and about the world,” answers Morten, out of the darkness.

“Of the world?” says Pelle, in a contemptuous tone. “I want to go out into the world and see things–what’s in the books is only lies. But go on.”

And Morten goes on, good-natured as always. And in the midst of his narrative something suddenly occurs to him, and he pulls a paper packet from his breast-pocket: “That’s chocolate from Bodil,” he says, and breaks the stick in two.

“Where had she put it?” asks Pelle.

“Under the sheet–I felt something hard under my back when I lay down.”

The boys laugh, while they nibble at the chocolate. Suddenly Pelle says: “Bodil, she’s a child-seducer! She enticed Hans Peter away from Stone Farm–and he was only fifteen!”

Morten does not reply; but after a time his head sinks on Pelle’s shoulder–his body is twitching.

“Well, you are seventeen,” says Pelle, consoling. “But it’s silly all the same; she might well be your mother–apart from her age.” And they both laugh.

It can be still cozier on work-day evenings. Then the fire is burning openly in the stove, even after eight o’clock, and the lamp is shining, and Morten is there again. People come from all directions and look in for a moment’s visit, and the cold, an impediment to everything else, awakens all sorts of notable reminiscences. It is as though the world itself comes creeping into the workshop. Jeppe conjures up his apprentice years in the capital, and tells of the great bankruptcy; he goes right back to the beginning of the century, to a wonderful old capital where the old people wore wigs, and the rope’s-end was always at hand and the apprentices just kept body and soul together, begging on Sundays before the doors of the townsfolk. Ah, those were times! And he comes home and wants to settle down as master, but the guild won’t accept him; he is too young. So he goes to sea as cook, and comes to places down south where the sun burns so fiercely that the pitch melts in the seams and the deck scorches one’s feet. They are a merry band, and Jeppe, little as he is, by no means lags behind the rest. In Malaga they storm a tavern, throw all the Spaniards out of the window, and sport with the girls–until the whole town falls upon them and they have to fly to their boat. Jeppe cannot keep up with them, and the boat shoves off, so that he has to jump into the water and swim for it. Knives fall splashing about him in the water, and one sticks shivering in his shoulder-blades. When Jeppe comes to this he always begins to strip his back to show the scar, and Master Andres holds him back. Pelle and Morten have heard the story many a time, but they are willing always to hear it again.

And Baker Jorgen, who for the greater part of his life has been a seaman on the big vessels sailing the northern and southern oceans, talks about capstans and icebergs and beautiful black women from the West Indies. He sets the capstan turning, so that the great three-master makes sail out of the Havana roadstead, and all his hearers feel their hearts grow light.

“Heave ho, the capstan,
Waltz her well along!
Leave the girl a-weeping,
Strike up the song!”

So they walk round and round, twelve men with their breasts pressed against the heavy capstan-bars; the anchor is weighed, and the sail fills with the wind–and behind and through his words gleam the features of a sweetheart in every port. Bjerregrav cannot help crossing himself–he who has never accomplished anything, except to feel for the poor; but in the young master’s eyes everybody travels–round and round the world, round and round the world. And Wooden-leg Larsen, who in winter is quite the well-to-do pensioner, in blue pilot-coat and fur cap, leaves his pretty, solidly-built cottage when the Spring comes, and sallies forth into the world as a poor organ-grinder–he tells them of the Zoological Gardens on the hill, and the adventurous Holm-Street, and of extraordinary beings who live upon the dustbins in the back-yards of the capital.

But Pelle’s body creaks whenever he moves; his bones are growing and seeking to stretch themselves; he feels growth and restlessness in every part and corner of his being. He is the first to whom the Spring comes; one day it announces itself in him in the form of a curiosity as to what his appearance is like. Pelle has never asked himself this question before; and the scrap of looking-glass which he begged from the glazier from whom he fetches the glass scrapers tells him nothing truly. He has at bottom a feeling that he is an impossible person.

He begins to give heed to the opinions of others respecting his outward appearance; now and again a girl looks after him, and his cheeks are no longer so fat that people can chaff him about them. His fair hair is wavy; the lucky curl on his forehead is still visible as an obstinate little streak; but his ears are still terribly big, and it is of no use to pull his cap over them, in order to press them close to his head. But he is tall and well-grown for his age, and the air of the workshop has been powerless to spoil his ruddy complexion; and he is afraid of nothing in the world– particularly when he is angry. He thinks out a hundred different kinds of exercise in order to satisfy the demands of his body, but it is of no use. If he only bends over his hammer-work he feels it in every joint of his body.

And then one day the ice breaks and goes out to sea. Ships are fitted out again, and provisioned, and follow the ice, and the people of the town awake to the idea of a new life, and begin to think of green woods and summer clothing.

And one day the fishing-boats arrive! They come gliding across from Hellavik and Nogesund on the Swedish coast. They cut swiftly through the water, heeling far over under their queer lateen sails, like hungry sea-birds that sweep the waves with one wing-tip in their search for booty. A mile to seaward the fishermen of the town receive them with gunshots; they have no permission to anchor in the fishing port, but have to rent moorings for themselves in the old ship’s harbor, and to spread out the gear to dry toward the north. The craftsmen of the town come flocking down to the harbor, discussing the foreign thieves who have come from a poorer country in order to take the bread out of the mouths of the townsfolk; for they are inured to all weathers, and full of courage, and are successful in their fishing. They say the same things every Spring, but when they want to buy herrings they deal with the Swedes, who sell more cheaply than the Bornholmers. “Perhaps our fishermen wear leather boots?” inquires Jeppe. “No, they wear wooden shoes week- days and Sunday alike. Let the wooden-shoe makers deal with them–I buy where the fish is cheapest!”

It is as though the Spring in person has arrived with these thin, sinewy figures, who go singing through the streets, challenging the petty envy of the town. There are women, too, on every boat, to mend and clean the gear, and they pass the workshop in crowds, searching for their old lodgings in the poor part of the town near the “Great Power’s” home. Pelle’s heart leaps at the sight of these young women, with pretty slippers on their feet, black shawls round their oval faces, and many fine colors in their dress. His mind is full of shadowy memories of his childhood, which have lain as quiet as though they were indeed extinguished; vague traditions of a time that he has experienced but can no longer remember; it is like a warm breath of air from another and unknown existence.

If it happens that one or another of these girls has a little child on her arm, then the town has something to talk about. Is it Merchant Lund again, as it was last year? Lund, who since then had been known only as “the Herring Merchant”? Or is it some sixteen- year-old apprentice, a scandal to his pastor and schoolmaster, whose hands he has only just left?

Then Jens goes forth with his concertina, and Pelle makes haste with his tidying up, and he and Morten hurry up to Gallows Hill, hand-in- hand, for Morten finds it difficult to run so quickly. All that the town possesses of reckless youth is there; but the Swedish girls take the lead. They dance and whirl until their slippers fly off, and little battles are fought over them. But on Saturdays the boats do not go to sea; then the men turn up, with smouldering brows, and claim their women, and then there is great slaughter.

Pelle enters into it all eagerly; here he finds an opportunity of that exercise of which his handicraft deprives his body. He hungers for heroic deeds, and presses so close to the fighters that now and again he gets a blow himself. He dances with Morten, and plucks up courage to ask one of the girls to dance with him; he is shy, and dances like a leaping kid in order to banish his shyness; and in the midst of the dance he takes to his heels and leaves the girl standing there. “Damned silly!” say the onlookers, and he hears them laughing behind him. He has a peculiar manner of entering into all this recklessness which lets the body claim its due without thought for the following day and the following year. If some man-hunting young woman tries to capture his youth he lashes out behind, and with a few wanton leaps he is off and away. But he loves to join in the singing when the men and women go homeward with closely-twined arms, and he and Morten follow them, they too with their arms about each other. Then the moon builds her bridge of light across the sea, and in the pinewood, where a white mist lies over the tree-tops, a song rises from every path, heard as a lulling music in the haunts of the wandering couples; insistently melancholy in its meaning, but issuing from the lightest hearts. It is just the kind of song to express their happiness.

“Put up, put up thy golden hair;
A son thou’lt have before a year– No help in thy clamor and crying!
In forty weeks may’st look for me. I come to ask how it fares with thee.
The forty weeks were left behind.
And sad she was and sick of mind,
And fell to her clamor and crying–“

And the song continues as they go through the town, couple after couple, wandering as they list. The quiet winding closes ring with songs of love and death, so that the old townsfolk lift their heads from their pillows, and, their nightcaps pushed to one side, wag gravely at all this frivolity. But youth knows nothing of this; it plunges reveling onward, with its surging blood. And one day the old people have the best of it; the blood surges no longer, but there they are, and there are the consequences, and the consequences demand paternity and maintenance. “Didn’t we say so?” cry the old folk; but the young ones hang their heads, and foresee a long, crippled existence, with a hasty marriage or continual payments to a strange woman, while all through their lives a shadow of degradation and ridicule clings to them; both their wives and their company must be taken from beneath them. They talk no longer of going out into the world and making their way; they used to strut arrogantly before the old folk and demand free play for their youth, but now they go meekly in harness with hanging heads, and blink shamefacedly at the mention of their one heroic deed. And those who cannot endure their fate must leave the country secretly and by night, or swear themselves free.

The young master has his own way of enjoying himself. He takes no part in the chase after the girls; but when the sunlight is really warm, he sits before the workshop window and lets it warm his back. “Ah, that’s glorious!” he says, shaking himself. Pelle has to feel