Pelle the Conqueror

THE GREAT STRUGGLE

by Martin Andersen Nexö

Translated from the Danish by Bernard Miall.

Pelle the Conqueror

III. THE GREAT STRUGGLE

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s up here?” asked Pelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For Meyer, in Kobmager Street.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And I too!”

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

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

“Bought them, of course!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pelle himself laughed shamefacedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

At this Pelle laughed too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you know him, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“From Bornholm.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What will become of us?” said Pelle.

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

“Have you seen him again?” asked Pelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mother looked after her.

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What nonsense!” said Pelle crossly.

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanne stood still, gazing irresolutely into the distance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pelle did not answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Albert Karlsen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I don’t know,” answered Pelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There she was very busy for a time.

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

He dressed himself and went out.

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But I find there is!”

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

“Then don’t you believe in greatness?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the living room sat Stolpe, a mason, reading The Working Man. He was in shirt sleeves, and was resting his heavy arms on the table. He read whispering to himself, he had not noticed that a guest was in the room.

“Here’s some one who would like to say how-d’ye-do to father,” said Otto, laying his hand on his father’s arm.

Stolpe raised his head and looked at Pelle. “Perhaps you would like to join the Union?” he asked, rising with difficulty, with one hand pressed on the table. He was tall, his hair was sprinkled with gray; his eyes were mottled from the impact of splinters of limestone.

“You and your Union!” said Madam Stolpe. “Perhaps you think there’s no one in it but you!”

“No, mother; little by little a whole crowd of people have entered it, but all the same I was the first.”

“I’m already in the Union,” said Pelle. “But not in yours. I’m a shoemaker, you know.”

“Shoemaker, ah, that’s a poor trade for a journeyman; but all the same a man can get to be a master; but to-day a mason can’t do that—there’s a great difference there. And if one remains a journeyman all his life long, he has more interest in modifying his position. Do you understand? That’s why the organization of the shoemakers has never been of more than middling dimensions. Another reason is that they work in their own rooms, and one can’t get them together. But now there’s a new man come, who seems to be making things move.”

“Yes, and this is he, father,” said Otto, laughing.

“The deuce, and here I stand making a fool of myself! Then I’ll say how- d’ye-do over again! And here’s good luck to your plans, young comrade.” He shook Pelle by the hand. “I think we might have a drop of beer, mother?”

Pelle and Stolpe were soon engaged in a lively conversation; Pelle was in his element. Until now he had never found his way to the heart of the movement. There was so much he wanted to ask about, and the old man incontinently told him of the growth of the organization from year to year, of their first beginning, when there was only one trades unionist in Denmark, namely, himself, down to the present time. He knew all the numbers of the various trades, and was precisely informed as to the development of each individual union. The sons sat silent, thoughtfully listening. When they had something to say, they always waited until the old man nodded his head to show that he had finished. The younger, Frederik, who was a mason’s apprentice, never said “thou” to his father; he addressed him in the third person, and his continual “father says, father thinks,” sounded curious to Pelle’s ears.

While they were still talking Madam Stolpe opened the door leading into an even prettier room, and invited them to go in and to drink their coffee. The living-room had already produced an extremely pleasant impression on Pelle, with its oak-grained dining-room suite and its horse-hair sofa. But here was a red plush suite, an octagonal table of walnut wood, with a black inlaid border and twisted wooden feet, and an étagère full of knick-knacks and pieces of china; mostly droll, impudent little things. On the walls hung pictures of trades unions and assemblies and large photographs of workshops; one of a building during construction, with the scaffolding full of the bricklayers and their mortar-buckets beside them, each with a trowel or a beer-bottle can in his hand. On the wall over the sofa hung a large half-length portrait of a dark, handsome man in a riding-cloak. He looked half a dreamy adventurer, half a soldier.

“That’s the grand master,” said Stolpe proudly, standing at Pelle’s side. “There was always a crowd of women at his heels. But they kept themselves politely in the background, for a fire went out of him at such times—do you understand? Then it was—Men to the front! And even the laziest fellow pricked up his ears.”

“Then he’s dead now, is he?” asked Pelle, with interest.

Stolpe did not answer. “Well,” he said briefly, “shall we have our coffee now?” Otto winked at Pelle; here evidently was a matter that must not be touched upon.

Stolpe sat staring into his cup, but suddenly he raised his head. “There are things one doesn’t understand,” he cried earnestly. “But this is certain, that but for the grand master here I and a whole host of other men wouldn’t perhaps be respectable fathers of families to-day. There were many smart fellows among us young comrades, as is always the case; but as a rule the gifted ones always went to the dogs. For when a man has no opportunity to alter things, he naturally grows impatient, and then one fine day he begins to pour spirit on the flames in order to stop his mouth. I myself had that accursed feeling that I must do something, and little by little I began to drink. But then I discovered the movement, before it existed, I might venture to say; it was in the air like, d’you see. It was as though something was coming, and one sniffed about like a dog in order to catch a glimpse of it. Presently it was, Here it is! There it is! But when one looked into it, there was just a few hungry men bawling at one another about something or other, but the devil himself didn’t know what it was. But then the grand master came forward, and that was like a flash of light for all of us. For he could say to a nicety just where the shoe pinched, although he didn’t belong to our class at all. Since that time there’s been no need to go searching for the best people—they were always to be found in the movement! Although there weren’t very many of them, the best people were always on the side of the movement.”

“But now there’s wind in the sails,” said Pelle.

“Yes, now there’s talk of it everywhere. But to whom is that due? God knows, to us old veterans—and to him there!”

Stolpe began to talk of indifferent matters, but quite involuntarily the conversation returned to the movement; man and wife lived and breathed for nothing else. They were brave, honest people, who quite simply divided mankind into two parts: those who were for and those who were against the movement. Pelle seemed to breathe more freely and deeply in this home, where the air was as though steeped in Socialism.

He noticed a heavy chest which stood against the wall on four twisted legs. It was thickly ornamented with nail-heads and looked like an old muniment chest.

“Yes—that’s the standard!” said Madam Stolpe, but she checked herself in alarm. Mason Stolpe knitted his brows.

“Ah, well, you’re a decent fellow, after all,” he said. “One needn’t slink on tiptoe in front of you!” He took a key out of a secret compartment in his writing-table. “Now the danger’s a thing of the past, but one still has to be careful. That’s a vestige of the times when things used to go hardly with us. The police used to be down on all our badges of common unity. The grand master himself came to me one evening with the flag under his cloak, and said to me, ‘You must look out for it, Stolpe, you are the most reliable of us all.’”

He and his wife unfolded the great piece of bunting. “See, that’s the banner of the International. It looks a little the worse for wear, for it has undergone all sorts of treatment. At the communist meetings out in the fields, when the troops were sent against us with ball cartridge, it waved over the speaker’s platform, and held us together. When it flapped over our heads it was as though we were swearing an oath to it. The police understood that, and they were mad to get it. They went for the flag during a meeting, but nothing came of it, and since then they’ve hunted for it so, it’s had to be passed from man to man. In that way it has more than once come to me.”

“Yes, and once the police broke in here and took father away as we were sitting at supper. They turned the whole place upside down, and dragged him off to the cells without a word of explanation. The children were little then, and you can imagine how miserable it seemed to me. I didn’t know when they would let him out again.”

“Yes, but they didn’t get the colors,” said Stolpe, and he laughed heartily. “I had already passed them on, they were never very long in one place in those days. Now they lead a comparatively quiet life, and mother and the rest of us too!”

The young men stood in silence, gazing at the standard that had seen so many vicissitudes, and that was like the hot red blood of the movement. Before Pelle a whole new world was unfolding itself; the hope that had burned in the depths of his soul was after all not so extravagant. When he was still running, wild at home, playing the games of childhood or herding the cows, strong men had already been at work and had laid the foundations of the cause…. A peculiar warmth spread through him and rose to his head. If only it had been he who had waved the glowing standard in the face of the oppressor—he, Pelle!

“And now it lies here in the chest and is forgotten!” he said dejectedly.

“It is only resting,” said Stolpe. “Forgotten, yes; the police have no idea that it still exists. But fix it on a staff, and you will see how the comrades flock about it! Old and young alike. There’s fire in that bit of cloth! True fire, that never goes out!”

Carefully they folded the colors and laid them back in the chest. “It won’t do even now to speak aloud of the colors! You understand?” said Stolpe.

There was a knock, and Stolpe made haste to lock the chest and hide the key, while Frederik went to the door. They looked at one another uneasily and stood listening.

“It is only Ellen,” said Frederik, and he returned, followed by a tall dark girl with an earnest bearing. She had a veil over her face, and before her mouth her breath showed like a pearly tissue.

“Ah, that’s the lass!” cried Stolpe, laughing. “What folly—we were quite nervous, just as nervous as in the old days. And you’re abroad in the streets at this hour of night! And in this weather?” He looked at her affectionately; one could see that she was his darling. Outwardly they were very unlike.

She greeted Pelle with the tiniest nod, but looked at him earnestly. There was something still and gracious about her that fascinated him. She wore dark clothes, without the slightest adornment, but they were of good sound stuff.

“Won’t you change?” asked the mother, unbuttoning her cloak. “You are quite wet, child.”

“No, I must go out again at once,” Ellen replied. “I only wanted to peep in.”

“But it’s really very late,” grumbled Stolpe. “Are you only off duty now?”

“Yes, it’s not my going-out day.”

“Not to-day again? Yes, it’s sheer slavery, till eleven at night!”

“That’s the way things are, and it doesn’t make it any better for you to scold me,” said Ellen courageously.

“No, but you needn’t go out to service. There’s no sense in our children going out to service in the houses of the employers. Don’t you agree with me?” He turned to Pelle.

Ellen laughed brightly. “It’s all the same—father works for the employers as well.”

“Yes, but that’s a different thing. It’s from one fixed hour to another, and then it’s over. But this other work is a home; she goes from one home to another and undertakes all the dirty work.”

“Father’s not in a position to keep me at home.”

“I know that very well, but all the same I can’t bear it. Besides, you could surely get some other kind of work.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to! I claim the right to dispose of myself!” she replied heatedly.

The others sat silent, looking nervously at one another. The veins swelled on Stolpe’s forehead; he was purple, and terribly angry. But Ellen looked at him with a little laugh. He got up and went grumbling into the other room.

Her mother shook her head at Ellen. She was quite pale. “Oh, child, child!” she whispered.

After a while Stolpe returned with some old newspapers, which he wanted to show Pelle. Ellen stood behind his chair, looking down at them; she rested her arm on his shoulders and idly ruffled his hair. The mother pulled at her skirt. The papers were illustrated, and went back to the stirring times.

The clock struck the half-hour; it was half-past eleven. Pelle rose in consternation; he had quite forgotten the time.

“Take the lass with you,” said Stolpe. “You go the same way, don’t you, Ellen? Then you’ll have company. There’s no danger going with her, for she’s a saint.” It sounded as though he wanted to make up for his scolding. “Come again soon; you will always be welcome here.”

They did not speak much on the way home. Pelle was embarrassed, and he had a feeling that she was considering him and thinking him over as they walked, wondering what sort of a fellow he might be. When he ventured to say something, she answered briefly and looked at him searchingly. And yet he found it was an interesting walk. He would gladly have prolonged it.

“Many thanks for your company,” he said, when they stood at her house- door. “I should be very glad to see you again.”

“You will if we meet,” she said taciturnly; but she gave him her hand for a moment.

“We are sure to meet again! Be sure of that!” cried Pelle jovially. “But you are forgetting to reward me for my escort?” He bent over her.

She gazed at him in astonishment—with eyes that were turning him to stone, he thought. Then she slowly turned and went indoors.

X

One day, after his working hours, Pelle was taking some freshly completed work to the Court shoemaker’s. The foreman took it and paid for it, and proceeded to give out work to the others, leaving Pelle standing. Pelle waited impatiently, but did no more than clear his throat now and again. This was the way of these people; one had to put up with it if one wanted work. “Have you forgotten me?” he said at last, a little impatiently.

“You can go,” said the foreman. “You’ve finished here.”

“What does that mean?” asked Pelle, startled.

“It means what you hear. You’ve got the sack—if you understand that better.”

Pelle understood that very well, but he wanted to establish the fact of his persecution in the presence of his comrades. “Have you any fault to find with my work?” he asked.

“You mix yourself up too much with things that don’t concern you, my good fellow, and then you can’t do the work you ought to do.”

“I should like very much to know what fault you have to find with my work,” said Pelle obstinately.

“Go to the devil! I’ve told you already!” roared the foreman.

The Court shoemaker came down through the door of the back room and looked about him. When he saw Pelle, he went up to him.

“You get out of here, and that at once!” he cried, in a rage. “Do you think we give bread to people that undermine us? Out, out of my place of business, Mossoo Trades-Unionist!”

Pelle stood his ground, and looked his employer in the eyes; he would have struck the man a blow in the face rather than allow himself to be sent away. “Be cool, now; be cool!” he said to himself. He laughed, but his features were quivering. The Court shoemaker kept a certain distance, and continued to shout, “Out with him! Here, foreman, call the police at once!”

“Now you can see, comrades, how they value one here,” said Pelle, turning his broad back on Meyer. “We are dogs; nothing more!”

They stood there, staring at the counter, deaf and dumb in their dread of taking sides. Then Pelle went.

He made his way northward. His heart was full of violent emotion. Indignation raged within him like a tempest, and by fits and starts found utterance on his lips. Meyer’s work was quite immaterial to him; it was badly paid, and he only did it as a stop-gap. But it was disgusting to think they could buy his convictions with badly-paid work! And there they stood not daring to show their colors, as if it wasn’t enough to support such a fellow with their skill and energy! Meyer stood there like a wall, in the way of any real progress, but he needn’t think he could strike at Pelle, for he’d get a blow in return if he did!

He went straight to Mason Stolpe, in order to talk the matter over with him; the old trades unionist was a man of great experience.

“So he’s one of those who go in for the open slave-trade!” said Stolpe. “We’ve had a go at them before now. ‘We’ve done with you, my good man; we can make no use of agitators!’ And if one steals a little march on them ‘Off you go; you’re done with here!’ I myself have been like a hunted cur, and at home mother used to go about crying. I could see what she was feeling, but when I put the matter before her she said, ‘Hold out, Stolpe, you shan’t give in!’ ‘You’re forgetting our daily bread, mother,’ I say. ‘Oh, our daily bread. I can just go out washing!’ That was in those days—they sing another tune to us now! Now the master politely raises his hat to old Stolpe! If he thinks he can allow himself to hound a man down, an embargo must be put on him!”

Pelle had nothing to say against that. “If only it works,” he said. “But our organization looks weak enough as yet.”

“Only try it; in any case, you can always damage him. He attacks your livelihood in order to strike at your conscience, so you hit back at his purse—that’s where his conscience is! Even if it does no good, at least it makes him realize that you’re not a slave.”

Pelle sat a while longer chatting. He had secretly hoped to meet Ellen again, but he dared not ask whether that was her day for coming home. Madam Stolpe invited him to stay and to have supper with them she was only waiting for her sons. But Pelle had no time; he must be off to think out instructions for the embargo. “Then come on Sunday,” said the mother; “Sunday is Ellen’s birthday.”

With rapid strides he went off to the president of the Union; the invitation for the following Sunday had dissipated the remains of his anger. The prospect of a tussle with Meyer had put him in the best of tempers. He was certain of winning the president, Petersen, for his purpose, if only he could find him out of bed; he himself had in his time worked for wholesale shoemakers, and hated them like the plague. It was said that Petersen had worked out a clever little invention—a patent button for ladies’ boots—which he had taken to Meyer, as he himself did not know how to exploit it. But Meyer had, without more ado, treated the invention as his own, inasmuch as it was produced by one of his workmen. He took out a patent and made a lot of money by it, trifling as the thing was. When Petersen demanded a share of the profits, he was dismissed. He himself never spoke of the matter; he just sat in his cellar brooding over the injustice, so that he never managed to recover his position. Almost his whole time had been devoted to the Union, so that he might revenge himself through it; but it never really made much progress. He fired up passionately enough, but he was lacking in persistence. And his lungs were weak.

He trembled with excitement when Pelle explained his plan. “Great God in heaven, if only we could get at him!” he whispered hoarsely, clenching his skinny fists which Death had already marked with its dusky shadows. “I would willingly give my miserable life to see the scoundrel ruined! Look at that!” He bent down, whispering, and showed Pelle a file ground to a point, which was fastened into a heavy handle. “If I hadn’t the children, he would have got that between his ribs long before this!” His gray, restless eyes, which reminded Pelle of Anker, the crazy clockmaker, had a cold, piercing expression.

“Yes, yes,” said Pelle, laying his hand soothingly on the other’s; “but it’s no use to do anything stupid. We shall only do what we want to do if we all stand together.”

The day was well spent; on the very next evening the members of the Union were summoned to a meeting. Petersen spoke first, and beginning with a fiery speech. It was like the final efforts of a dying man. “You organize the struggle,” said Petersen. “I’m no good nowadays for that— and I’ve no strength. But I’ll sound the assault—ay, and so that they wake up. Then you yourself must see to keeping the fire alight in them.” His eyes burned in their shadowy sockets; he stood there like a martyr upholding the necessity of the conflict. The embargo was agreed upon unanimously!

Then Pelle came forward and organized the necessary plan of campaign. It was his turn now. There was no money in the chest, but every man had to promise a certain contribution to be divided among those who were refusing to work. Every man must do his share to deprive Meyer of all access to the labor market. And there was to be no delirious enthusiasm —which they would regret when they woke up next morning. It was essential that every man should form beforehand a clear conception of the difficulties, and must realize what he was pledging himself to. And then—three cheers for a successful issue!

This business meant a lot of running about. But what of that! Pelle, who had to sit such a lot, wouldn’t suffer from getting out into the fresh air! He employed the evenings in making up for lost time. He got work from the small employers in Kristianshavn, who were very busy in view of Christmas, which made up for that which he had lost through the Court shoemaker.

On the second day after his dismissal, the declaration of the embargo appeared under the “Labor Items” in The Working Man. “Assistance strictly prohibited!” It was like the day’s orders, given by Pelle’s own word of mouth. He cut the notice out, and now and again, as he sat at his work, he took it out and considered it. This was Pelle—although it didn’t say so—Pelle and the big employer were having a bit of a tussle! Now they should see which was the stronger!

Pelle went often to see Stolpe. Strangely enough, his visits always coincided with Ellen’s days off. Then he accompanied her homeward, and they walked side by side talking of serious things. There was nothing impetuous about them—they behaved as though a long life lay before them. His vehemence cooled in the conflict with Meyer. He was sure of Ellen’s character, unapproachable though she was. Something in him told him that she ought to be and would remain so. She was one of those natures to whom it is difficult to come out of their shell, so as to reveal the kernel within; but he felt that there was something that was growing for him within that reserved nature, and he was not impatient.

One evening he had as usual accompanied her to the door, and they stood there bidding one another good night. She gave him her hand in her shy, awkward manner, which might even mean reluctance, and was then about to go indoors.

“But are we going on like this all our lives?” said Pelle, holding her fingers tightly. “I love you so!”

She stood there a while, with an impenetrable expression, then advanced her face and kissed him mechanically, as a child kisses, with tightly closed lips. She was already on her way to the house when she suddenly started back, drew him to herself, and kissed him passionately and unrestrainedly. There was something so violent, so wild and fanatical in her demeanor, that he was quite bewildered. He scarcely recognized her, and when he had come to himself she was already on her way up the kitchen steps. He stood still, as though blinded by a rain of fire, and heard her running as though pursued.

Since that day she had been another creature. Her love was like the spring that comes in a single night. She could not be without him for a day; when she went out to make purchases, she came running over to the “Ark.” Her nature had thrown off its restraint; there was tension in her manner and her movements; and this tension now and again escaped from within in little explosions. She did not say very much; when they were together, she clung to him passionately as though to deaden some pain, and hid her face; if he lifted it, she kept her eyes persistently closed. Then she breathed deeply, and sat down smiling and humming to herself when he spoke to her.

It was as though she was delving deep into his inmost being, and Pelle, who felt the need to reach and to know that inner nature, drew confidence from her society. No matter what confronted him, he had always sought in his inner self for his natural support, anxiously listening for that which came to the surface, and unconsciously doubting and inquiring. And now, so surely as she leaned silently on his arm, she confirmed something deep within him, and her steadfast gaze vibrated within him like a proud vocation, and he felt himself infinitely rich. She spoke to something deep within him when she gazed at him so thoughtfully. But what she said he did not know—nor what answer she received. When he recalled her from that gaze of hers, as of one bewitched, she only sighed like one awaking, and kissed him.

Ellen was loyal and unselfish and greatly valued by her employers. There was no real development to be perceived in her—she longed to become his—and that was all. But the future was born on Pelle’s own lips under her dreamy gaze, as though it was she who inspired him with the illuminating words. And then she listened with an absent smile—as to something delightful; but she herself seemed to give no thought to the future. She seemed full of a hidden devotion, that filled Pelle with an inward warmth, so that he held up his head very high toward the light. This constant devotion of Ellen’s made the children “Family” teasingly call her “the Saint.”

It gave him much secret pleasure to be admitted to her home, where the robust Copenhagen humor concealed conditions quite patriarchal in their nature. Everything was founded on order and respect for the parents, especially the father, who spoke the decisive word in every matter, and had his own place, in which no one else ever sat. When he came home from his work, the grown-up sons would always race to take him his slippers, and the wife always had some extra snack for him. The younger son, Frederik, who was just out of his apprenticeship, was as delighted as a child to think of the day when he should become a journeyman and be able to drink brotherhood with the old man.

They lived in a new, spacious, three-roomed tenement with a servant’s room thrown in; to Pelle, who was accustomed to find his comrades over here living in one room with a kitchen, this was a new experience. The sons boarded and lodged at home; they slept in the servant’s room. The household was founded on and supported by their common energies; although the family submitted unconditionally to the master of the house, they did not do so out of servility; they only did as all others did. For Stolpe was the foremost man in his calling, an esteemed worker and the veteran of the labor movement. His word was unchallenged.

Ellen was the only one who did not respect his supremacy, but courageously opposed him, often without any further motive than that of contradiction. She was the only girl of the family, and the favorite; and she took advantage of her position. Sometimes it looked as though Stolpe would be driven to extremities; as though he longed to pulverize her in his wrath; but he always gave in to her.

He was greatly pleased with Pelle. And he secretly admired his daughter more than ever. “You see, mother, there’s something in that lass! She understands how to pick a man for himself!” he would cry enthusiastically.

“Yes; I’ve nothing against him, either,” Madam Stolpe would reply. “A bit countrified still, but of course he’s growing out of it.”

“Countrified? He? No, you take my word, he knows what he wants. She’s really found her master there!” said Stolpe triumphantly.

In the two brothers Pelle found a pair of loyal comrades, who could not but look up to him.

XI

With the embargo matters were going so-so. Meyer replied to it by convoking the employers to a meeting with a view to establishing an employers’ union, which would refuse employment to the members of the trade union. Then the matter would have been settled at one blow.

However, things did not go so far as that. The small employers were afraid the journeymen would set up for themselves and compete against them. And instinctively they feared the big employers more than the journeymen, and were shy of entering the Union with them. The inner tendency of the industrial movement was to concentrate everything in a few hands, and to ruin the small business. The small employers had yet another crow to pluck with Meyer, who had extended his business at the expense of their own.

Through Master Beck, Pelle learned what was taking place among the employers. Meyer had demanded that Beck should discharge Pelle, but Beck would not submit to him.

“I can’t really complain of you,” he said. “Your trades-unionism I don’t like—you would do better to leave it alone. But with your work I am very well satisfied. I have always endeavored to render justice to all parties. But if you can knock Meyer’s feet from under him, we small employers will be very grateful to your Union, for he’s freezing us out.”

To knock his feet from under him—that wasn’t an easy thing to do. On the contrary, he was driving the weaker brethren out of the Union, and had always enough workers—partly Swedes, with whom he had a written contract, and whom he had to pay high wages. The system of home employment made it impossible to get to grips with him. Pelle and the president of the Union carefully picketed the warehouse about the time when the work was delivered, in order to discover who was working for him. And they succeeded in snatching a few workers away from him and in bringing them to reason, or else their names were published in The Working Man. But then the journeymen sent their wives or children with the work—and there was really nothing that could be done. It cost Meyer large sums of money to keep his business going, but the Union suffered more. It had not as yet sufficient authority, and the large employers stood by Meyer and would not employ members of the Union as long as the embargo lasted. So it was finally raised.

That was a defeat; but Pelle had learned something, none the less! The victory was to the strong, and their organization was not as yet sufficient. They must talk and agitate, and hold meetings! The tendency to embrace the new ideas certainly inclined the men to organize themselves, but their sense of honor was as yet undeveloped. The slightest mishap dispersed them.

Pelle did not lose heart; he must begin all over again, that was all.

On the morning after the defeat was an accomplished fact he was up early. His resolution to go ahead with redoubled energies, he had, so to speak, slept into him, so that it pervaded his body and put energy and decision into his hammer-strokes.

He whistled as the work progressed rapidly under his hands. The window stood open so that the night air might escape; hoar frost lay on the roofs, and the stars twinkled overhead in the cold heavens. But Pelle was not cold! He had just awakened the “Family” and could hear them moving about in their room. People were beginning to tumble out into the gangway, still drunken with sleep. Pelle was whistling a march. On the previous evening he had sent off the last instalment of his debt to Sort, and at the same time had written definitely to Father Lasse that he was to come. And now the day was dawning!

Marie came and reached him his coffee through the door. “Good morning!” she cried merrily, through the crack of the door. “We’re going to have fine weather to-day, Pelle!” She was not quite dressed yet and would not let herself be seen. The boys nodded good morning as they ran out. Karl had his coat and waistcoat under his arm. These articles of clothing he always used to put on as he ran down the stairs.

When it was daylight Marie came in to set the room in order. She conversed with him as she scrubbed.

“Look here, Marie!” cried Pelle suddenly. “Ellen came here yesterday and asked you to bring me a message when I came home. You didn’t do it.”

Marie’s face became set, but she did not reply.

“It was only by pure chance that I met her yesterday, otherwise we should have missed one another.”

“Then I must have forgotten it,” said Marie morosely.

“Why, of course you forgot it. But that’s the second time this week. You must be in love!” he added, smiling.

Marie turned her back on him. “I’ve got nothing to do with her—I don’t owe her anything!” suddenly she cried defiantly. “And I’m not going to clean your room any longer, either—let her do it—so there!” She seized her pail and scrubbing-brush and ran into her own room. After a time he heard her voice from within the room; at first he thought she was singing a tune to herself, but then he heard sobs.

He hurried into the room; she was lying on the bed, weeping, biting the pillow and striking at it angrily with her roughened hands. Her thin body burned as if with fever.

“You are ill, Marie dear,” said Pelle anxiously, laying his hand on her forehead. “You ought to go to bed and take something to make you sweat. I’ll warm it up for you.”

She was really ill; her eyes were dry and burning, and her hands were cold and clammy. But she would agree to nothing. “Go away!” she said angrily, “and attend to your own work! Leave me alone!” She had turned her back on him and nudged him away defiantly with her shoulder. “You’d best go in and cuddle Ellen!” she cried suddenly, with a malicious laugh.

“Why are you like this, Marie?” said Pelle, distressed. “You are quite naughty!”

She buried her face in the bed and would neither look at him nor answer him. So he went back to his work.

After a time she came into his room again and resumed her work of cleaning. She banged the things about; pulling down some work of his that he had set to dry by the stove, and giving him a malicious sidelong look. Then a cup containing paste fell to the ground and was broken. “She did that on purpose,” he thought unhappily, and he put the paste into an empty box. She stood watching him with a piercing, malicious gaze.

He turned to his work again, and made as though nothing had happened. Suddenly he felt her thin arms about his neck. “Forgive me!” she said, weeping, and she hid her face against his shoulder.

“Come, come, nothing very dreadful has happened! The silly old cup!” he said consolingly, as he stroked her head. “You couldn’t help it!”

But at that she broke down altogether, and it seemed as though her crying would destroy her meager body. “Yes, I did it on purpose!” she bellowed. “And I threw down the boots on purpose, and yesterday I didn’t give you the message on purpose. I would have liked to hurt you still more, I’m so bad, bad, bad! Why doesn’t some one give me a good beating? If you’d only once be properly angry with me!”

She was quite beside herself and did not know what she was saying.

“Now listen to me at once—you’ve got to be sensible!” said Pelle decidedly, “for this sort of thing is not amusing. I was pleased to think I was going to be at home to-day, so as to work beside you, and then you go and have an attack just like a fine lady!”

She overcame her weeping by a tremendous effort, and went back to her room, gently sobbing. She returned at once with a cracked cup for the paste and a small tin box with a slit in the lid. This was her money- box.

“Take it,” she said, pushing the box onto his lap. “Then you can buy yourself lasts and needn’t go asking the small employers for work. There’s work enough here in the ‘Ark.’”

“But, Marie—that’s your rent!” said Pelle, aghast.

“What does that matter? I can easily get the money together again by the first.”

Oh, she could easily do that! Pelle laughed, a bewildered laugh. How cheerfully she threw her money about, the money that cost her thirty days of painful thought and saving, in order to have it ready each month!

“What do you think Peter and Karl would say to your chucking your money about like that? Put the box away again safely—and be quick about it!”

“Oh, take it!” she cried persistently, thrusting the box upon him again. “Yes—or I’ll throw it out of the window!” She quickly opened one of the sashes. Pelle stood up.

“It’s true I still owe you for the last washing,” he said, offering to put a krone in the box.

“A good thing you reminded me.” She stared at him with an impenetrable expression and ran back to her room.

In there she moved about singing in her harsh voice. After a while she went out to make some purchases clad in a gray shawl, with her house- wife’s basket on her arm. He could follow her individual step, which was light as a child’s, and yet sounded so old—right to the end of the tunnel. Then he went into the children’s room and pulled out the third drawer in the chest of drawers. There she always hid her money-box, wrapped up in her linen. He still possessed two kroner, which he inserted in the box.

He used always to pay her in this way. When she counted out her money and found there was too much, she believed the good God had put the money in her box, and would come jubilantly into his room to tell him about it. The child believed blindly in Fortune, and accepted the money as a sign of election; and for her this money was something quite different to that which she herself had saved.

About noon she came to invite him into her room. “There’s fried herring, Pelle, so you can’t possibly say no,” she said persuasively, “for no Bornholmer could! Then you needn’t go and buy that stuffy food from the hawker, and throw away five and twenty öre.” She had bought half a score of the fish, and had kept back five for her brothers when they came home. “And there’s coffee after,” she said. She had set out everything delightfully, with a clean napkin at one end of the table.

The factory girl’s little Paul came in and was given a mouthful of food. Then he ran out into the gangway again and tumbled about there, for the little fellow was never a moment still from the moment his mother let him out in the morning; there was so much to make up for after his long imprisonment. From the little idiot whom his mother had to tie to the stove because he had water on the brain and wanted to throw himself out of the window, he had become a regular vagabond. Every moment he would thrust his head in at the door and look at Pelle; and he would often come right in, put his hand on Pelle’s knee, and say, “You’s my father!” Then he would rush off again. Marie helped him in all his infantile necessities—he always appealed to her!

After she had washed up, she sat by Pelle with her mending, chattering away concerning her household cares. “I shall soon have to get jackets for the boys—it’s awful what they need now they’re grown up. I peep in at the second-hand clothes shop every day. And you must have a new blouse, too, Pelle; that one will soon be done for; and then you’ve none to go to the wash. If you’ll buy the stuff, I’ll soon make it up for you—I can sew! I made my best blouse myself—Hanne helped me with it! Why, really, don’t you go to see Hanne any longer?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Hanne has grown so peculiar. She never comes down into the courtyard now to dance with us. She used to. Then I used to watch out of the window, and run down. It was so jolly, playing with her. We used to go round and round her and sing! ‘We all bow to Hanne, we curtsy all to Hanne, we all turn round before her!’ And then we bowed and curtsied and suddenly we all turned round. I tell you, it was jolly! You ought to have taken Hanne.”

“But you didn’t like it when I took Ellen. Why should I have taken Hanne?”

“Oh, I don’t know … Hanne….” Marie stopped, listened, and suddenly wrenched the window open.

Down in the “Ark” a door slammed, and a long hooting sound rose up from below, sounding just like a husky scream from the crazy Vinslev’s flute or like the wind in the long corridors. Like a strange, disconnected snatch of melody, the sound floated about below, trickling up along the wooden walls, and breaking out into the daylight with a note of ecstasy: “Hanne’s with child! The Fairy Princess is going to be confined!”

Marie went down the stairs like a flash. The half-grown girls were shrieking and running together in the court below; the women on the galleries were murmuring to others above and below. Not that this was in itself anything novel; but in this case it was Hanne herself, the immaculate, whom as yet no tongue had dared to besmirch. And even now they dared hardly speak of it openly; it had come as such a shock. In a certain sense they had all entered into her exaltation, and with her had waited for the fairy-tale to come true; as quite a child she had been elected to represent the incomprehensible; and now she was merely going to have a child! It really was like a miracle just at first; it was such a surprise to them all!

Marie came back with dragging steps and with an expression of horror and astonishment. Down in the court the grimy-nosed little brats were screeching, as they wheeled hand in hand round the sewer-grating—it was splendid for dancing round—

“Bro-bro-brille-brid
Hanne’s doin’ to have a tid!”

They couldn’t speak plainly yet.

And there was “Grete with the baby,” the mad-woman, tearing her cellar- window open, leaning out of it backward, with her doll on her arm, and yelling up through the well, so that it echoed loud and shrill: “The Fairy Princess has got a child, and Pelle’s its father!”

Pelle bent over his work in silence. Fortunately he was not the king’s son in disguise in this case! But he wasn’t going to wrangle with women.

Hanne’s mother came storming out onto her gallery. “That’s a shameless lie!” she cried. “Pelle’s name ain’t going to be dragged into this—the other may be who he likes!”

Overhead the hearse-driver came staggering out onto his gallery. “The princess there has run a beam into her body,” he rumbled, in his good- natured bass. “What a pity I’m not a midwife! They’ve got hold of the wrong end of it!”

“Clear off into your hole and hold your tongue, you body-snatcher!” cried Madam Johnsen, spitting with rage. “You’ve got to stick your brandy-nose into everything!”

He stood there, half drunk, leaning over the rail, babbling, teasing, without returning Madam Johnsen’s vituperation. But then little Marie flung up a window and came to her assistance, and up from her platform Ferdinand’s mother emerged. “How many hams did you buy last month? Fetch out your bear hams, then, and show us them! He kills a bear for every corpse, the drunkard!” From all sides they fell upon him. He could do nothing against them, and contented himself with opening his eyes and his mouth and giving vent to a “Ba-a-a!” Then his red-haired wife came out and hailed him in.

XII

From the moment when the gray morning broke there was audible a peculiar note in the buzzing of the “Ark,” a hoarse excitement, which thrust all care aside. Down the long corridors there was a sound of weeping and scrubbing; while the galleries and the dark wooden stair-cases were sluiced with water. “Look out there!” called somebody every moment from somewhere, and then it was a question of escaping the downward-streaming flood. During the whole morning the water poured from one gallery to another, as over a mill-race.

But now the “Ark” stood freezing in its own cleanliness, with an expression that seemed to say the old warren didn’t know itself. Here and there a curtain or a bit of furniture had disappeared from a window —it had found its way to the pawn shop in honor of the day. What was lacking in that way was made up for by the expectation and festive delight on the faces of the inmates.

Little fir-trees peeped out of the cellar entries in the City Ward, and in the market-place they stood like a whole forest along the wall of the prison. In the windows of the basement-shops hung hearts and colored candles, and the grocer at the corner had a great Christmas goblin in his window—it was made of red and gray wool-work and had a whole cat’s skin for its beard.

On the stairs of the “Ark” the children lay about cleaning knives and forks with sand sprinkled on the steps.

Pelle sat over his work and listened in secret. His appearance usually had a quieting effect on these crazy outbursts of the “Ark,” but he did not want to mix himself up with this affair. And he had never even dreamed that Hanne’s mother could be like this! She was like a fury, turning her head, quick as lightning, now to one side, now to the other, and listening to every sound, ready to break out again!

Ah, she was protecting her child now that it was too late! She was like a spitting cat.

“The youngest of all the lordlin’s,”

sang the children down in the court. That was Hanne’s song. Madam Johnsen stood there as though she would like to swoop down on their heads. Suddenly she flung her apron over her face and ran indoors, sobbing.

“Ah!” they said, and they slapped their bellies every time an odor of something cooking streamed out into the court. Every few minutes they had to run out and buy five or ten öre worth of something or other; there was no end to the things that were needed in preparation for Christmas Eve. “We’re having lovely red beetroot!” said one little child, singing, making a song of it—“We’re having lovely red beetroot, aha, aha, aha!” And they swayed their little bodies to and fro as they scoured.

“Frederik!” a sharp voice cried from one of the corridors. “Run and get a score of firewood and a white roll—a ten-öre one. But look out the grocer counts the score properly and don’t pick out the crumb!”

Madam Olsen with the warm wall was frying pork. She couldn’t pull her range out onto the gallery, but she did let the pork burn so that the whole courtyard was filled with bluish smoke. “Madam Olsen! Your pork is burning!” cried a dozen women at once.

“That’s because the frying-pan’s too small!” replied Frau Olsen, thrusting her red head out through the balusters. “What’s a poor devil to do when her frying-pan’s too small?” And Madam Olsen’s frying-pan was the biggest in the whole “Ark”!

Shortly before the twilight fell Pelle came home from the workshop. He saw the streets and the people with strange eyes that diffused a radiance over all things; it was the Christmas spirit in his heart. But why? he asked himself involuntarily. Nothing in particular was in store for him. To-day he would have to work longer than usual, and he would not be able to spend the evening with Ellen, for she had to be busy in her kitchen, making things jolly for others. Why, then, did this feeling possess him? It was not a memory; so far as he could look back he had never taken part in a genuine cheerful Christmas Eve, but had been forced to content himself with the current reports of such festivities. And all the other poor folks whom he met were in the same mood as he himself. The hard questioning look had gone from their faces; they were smiling to themselves as they went. To-day there was nothing of that wan, heavy depression which commonly broods over the lower classes like the foreboding of disaster; they could not have looked more cheerful had all their hopes been fulfilled! A woman with a feather-bed in her arms passed him and disappeared into the pawn-shop; and she looked extremely well pleased. Were they really so cheerful just because they were going to have a bit of a feast, while to do so they were making a succession of lean days yet leaner? No, they were going to keep festival because the Christmas spirit prevailed in their hearts, because they must keep holiday, however dearly it might cost them!

It was on this night to be sure that Christ was born. Were the people so kind and cheerful on that account?

Pelle still knew by heart most of the Bible texts of his school-days. They had remained stowed away somewhere in his mind, without burdening him or taking up any room, and now and again they reappeared and helped to build up his knowledge of mankind. But of Christ Himself he had formed his own private picture, from the day when as a boy he first stumbled upon the command given to the rich: to sell all that they had and to give to the starving. But they took precious good care not to do so; they took the great friend of the poor man and hanged him on high! He achieved no more than this, that He became a promise to the poor; but perhaps it was this promise that, after two thousand years, they were now so solemnly celebrating!

They had so long been silent, holding themselves in readiness, like the wise virgins in the Bible, and now at last it was coming! Now at last they were beginning to proclaim the great Gospel of the Poor—it was a goodly motive for all this Christmas joy! Why did they not assemble the multitudes on the night of Christ’s birth and announce the Gospel to them? Then they would all understand the Cause and would join it then and there! There was a whirl of new living thoughts in Pelle’s head. He had not hitherto known that that in which he was participating was so great a thing. He felt that he was serving the Highest.

He stood a while in the market-place, silently considering the Christmas-trees—they led his thoughts back to the pasture on which he had herded the cows, and the little wood of firs. It pleased him to buy a tree, and to take the children by surprise; the previous evening they had sat together cutting out Christmas-tree decorations, and Karl had fastened four fir-tree boughs together to make a Christmas-tree.

At the grocer’s he bought some sweets and Christmas candles. The grocer was going about on tip-toe in honor of the day, and was serving the dirty little urchins with ceremonious bows. He was “throwing things in,” and had quite forgotten his customary, “Here, you, don’t forget that you still owe for two lots of tea and a quarter of coffee!” But he was cheating with the scales as usual.

Marie was going about with rolled-up sleeves, and was very busy. But she dropped her work and came running when she saw the tree. “It won’t stand here yet, Pelle,” she cried, “it will have to be cut shorter. It will have to be cut still shorter even now! Oh, how pretty it is! No, at the end there—at the end! We had a Christmas-tree at home; father went out himself and cut it down on the cliffs; and we children went with him. But this one is much finer!” Then she ran out into the gangway, in order to tell the news, but it suddenly occurred to her that the boys had not come home yet, so she rushed in to Pelle once more.

Pelle sat down to his work. From time to time he lifted his head and looked out. The seamstress, who had just moved into Pipman’s old den, and who was working away at her snoring machine, looked longingly at him. Of course she must be lonely; perhaps there was nowhere where she could spend the evening.

Old Madam Frandsen came out on her platform and shuffled down the steep stairs in her cloth slippers. The rope slipped through her trembling hands. She had a little basket on her arm and a purse in her hand—she too looked so lonely, the poor old worm! She had now heard nothing of her son for three months. Madam Olsen called out to her and invited her in, but the old woman shook her head. On the way back she looked in on Pelle.

“He’s coming this evening,” she whispered delightedly. “I’ve been buying brandy and beefsteak for him, because he’s coming this evening!”

“Well, don’t be disappointed, Madam Frandsen,” said Pelle, “but he daren’t venture here any more. Come over to us instead and keep Christmas with us.”

She nodded confidently. “He’ll come tonight. On Christmas Eve he has always slept in mother’s bed, ever since he could crawl, and he can’t do without it, not if I know my Ferdinand!” She had already made up a bed for herself on the chairs, so certain was she.

The police evidently thought as she did, for down in the court strange footsteps were heard. It was just about twilight, when so many were coming and going unremarked. But at these steps a female head popped back over the balustrade, a sharp cry was heard, and at the same moment every gallery was filled with women and children. They hung over the rails and made an ear-splitting din, so that the whole deep, narrow shaft was filled with an unendurable uproar. It sounded as though a hurricane came raging down through the shaft, sweeping with it a hailstorm of roofing-slates. The policeman leaped back into the tunnel- entry, stupefied. He stood there a moment recovering himself before he withdrew. Upstairs, in the galleries, they leaned on the rails and recovered their breath, exhausted by the terrific eruption; and then fell to chattering like a flock of small birds that have been chasing a flying hawk.

“Merry Christmas!” was now shouted from gallery to gallery. “Thanks, the same to you!” And the children shouted to one another, “A jolly feast and all the best!” “A dainty feast for man and beast!”

Christmas Eve was here! The men came shuffling home at a heavy trot, and the factory-girls came rushing in. Here and there a feeble wail filtered out of one of the long corridors, so that the milk-filled breast ached. Children incessantly ran in and out, fetching the last ingredients of the feast. Down by the exit into the street they had to push two tramps, who stood there shuddering in the cold. They were suspicious-looking people. “There are two men down there, but they aren’t genuine,” said Karl. “They look as if they came out of a music-hall.”

“Run over to old Madam Frandsen and tell her that,” said Pelle. But her only answer was, “God be thanked, then they haven’t caught him yet!”

Over at Olsen’s their daughter Elvira had come home. The blind was not drawn, and she was standing at the window with her huge hat with flowers in it, allowing herself to be admired. Marie came running in. “Have you seen how fine she is, Pelle?” she said, quite stupefied. “And she gets all that for nothing from the gentlemen, just because they think she’s so pretty. But at night she paints her naked back!”

The children were running about in the gangway, waiting until Pelle should have finished. They would not keep Christmas without him. But now he, too, had finished work; he pulled on a jacket, wrapped up his work, and ran off.

Out on the platform he stood still for a moment. He could see the light of the city glimmering in the deep, star-filled sky. The night was so solemnly beautiful. Below him the galleries were forsaken; they were creaking in the frost. All the doors were closed to keep the cold out and the joy in. “Down, down from the green fir-trees!”—it sounded from every corner. The light shone through the window and in all directions through the woodwork. Suddenly there was a dull booming sound on the stairs—it was the hearse-driver staggering home with a ham under either arm. Then all grew quiet—quiet as it never was at other times in the “Ark,” where night or day some one was always complaining. A child came out and lifted a pair of questioning eyes, in order to look at the Star of Bethlehem! There was a light at Madam Frandsen’s. She had hung a white sheet over the window today, and had drawn it tight; the lamp stood close to the window, so that any one moving within would cast no shadow across it.

The poor old worm! thought Pelle, as he ran past; she might have spared herself the trouble! When he had delivered his work he hurried over to Holberg Street, in order to wish Ellen a happy Christmas.

The table was finely decked out in his room when he got home; there was pork chops, rice boiled in milk, and Christmas beer. Marie was glowing with pride over her performance; she sat helping the others, but she herself took nothing.

“You ought to cook a dinner as good as this every day, lass!” said Karl, as he set to. “God knows, you might well get a situation in the King’s kitchen.”

“Why don’t you eat any of this nice food?” said Pelle.

“Oh, no, I can’t,” she replied, touching her cheeks; her eyes beamed upon him.

They laughed and chattered and clinked their glasses together. Karl came out with the latest puns and the newest street-songs; so he had gained something by his scouring of the city streets. Peter sat there looking impenetrably now at one, now at another; he never laughed, but from time to time he made a dry remark by which one knew that he was amusing himself. Now and again they looked over at old Madam Frandsen’s window— it was a pity that she wouldn’t be with them.

Five candles were now burning over there—they were apparently fixed on a little Christmas tree which stood in a flowerpot. They twinkled like distant stars through the white curtain, and Madam Frandsen’s voice sounded cracked and thin: “O thou joyful, O thou holy, mercy-bringing Christmas-tide!” Pelle opened his window and listened; he wondered that the old woman should be so cheerful.

Suddenly a warning voice sounded from below: “Madam Frandsen, there are visitors coming!”

Doors and windows flew open on the galleries round about. People tumbled out of doorways, their food in their hands, and leaned over the railings. “Who dares to disturb our Christmas rejoicings?” cried a deep, threatening voice.

“The officers of the law!” the reply came out of the darkness. “Keep quiet, all of you—in the name of the law!”

Over on Madam Frandsen’s side two figures became visible, noiselessly running up on all fours. Upstairs nothing was happening; apparently they had lost their heads. “Ferdinand, Ferdinand!” shrieked a girl’s voice wildly; “they’re coming now!”

At the same moment the door flew open, and with a leap Ferdinand stood on the platform. He flung a chair down at his pursuers, and violently swayed the hand-rope, in order to sweep them off the steps. Then he seized the gutter and swung himself up onto the roof. “Good-bye, mother!” he cried from above, and his leap resounded in the darkness. “Good-bye, mother, and a merry Christmas!” A howl like that of a wounded beast flung the alarm far out into the night, and they heard the stumbling pursuit of the policemen over the roofs. And then all was still.

They returned unsuccessful. “Well, then you haven’t got him!” cried Olsen, leaning out of his window down below.

“No; d’you think we are going to break our necks for the like of him?” retorted the policemen, as they scrambled down. “Any one going to stand a glass of Christmas beer?” As no response followed, they departed.

Old Madam Frandsen went into her room and locked up; she was tired and worried and wanted to go to bed. But after a time she came shuffling down the long gangway. “Pelle,” she whispered, “he’s in bed in my room! While they were scrambling about on the roofs he slipped quietly back over the garrets and got into my bed! Good God, he hasn’t slept in a bed for four months! He’s snoring already!” And she slipped out again.

Yes, that was an annoying interruption! No one felt inclined to begin all over again excepting Karl, and Marie did not count him, as he was always hungry. So she cleared away, gossiping as she went in and out; she did not like to see Pelle so serious.

“But the secret!” she cried of a sudden, quite startled. The boys ran in to her; then they came back, close together, with Marie behind them, carrying something under her apron. The two boys flung themselves upon Pelle and closed his eyes, while Marie inserted something in his mouth. “Guess now!” she cried, “guess now!” It was a porcelain pipe with a green silken tassel. On the bowl of the pipe, which was Ellen’s Christmas gift, was a representation of a ten-kroner note. The children had inserted a screw of tobacco. “Now you’ll be able to smoke properly,” said Marie, pursing her lips together round the mouthpiece; “you are so clever in everything else.”

The children had invited guests for the Christmas-tree; the seamstress, the old night-watchman from the courtyard, the factory-hand with her little boy; all those who were sitting at home and keeping Christmas all alone. They didn’t know themselves, there were so many of them! Hanne and her mother were invited too, but they had gone to bed early—they were not inclined for sociability. One after another they were pulled into the room, and they came with cheerful faces. Marie turned the lamp out and went in to light up the Christmas tree.

They sat in silence and expectation. The light from the stove flickered cheerfully to and fro in the room, lighting up a face with closed eyelids and eager features, and dying away with a little crash. The factory hand’s little boy was the only one to chatter; he had sought a refuge on Pelle’s knee and felt quite safe in the darkness; his childish voice sounded strangely bright in the firelight. “Paul must be quite good and quiet,” repeated the mother admonishingly.

“Mus’n’t Paul ’peak?” asked the child, feeling for Pelle’s face.

“Yes, to-night Paul can do just as he likes,” replied Pelle. Then the youngster chattered on and kicked out at the darkness with his little legs.

“Now you can come!” cried Marie, and she opened the door leading to the gangway. In the children’s room everything had been cleared away. The Christmas-tree stood in the middle, on the floor, and was blazing with light. And how splendid it was—and how tall! Now they could have a proper good look! The lights were reflected in their eyes, and in the window-panes, and in the old mahogany-framed mirror, and the glass of the cheap pictures, so that they seemed suddenly to be moving about in the midst of myriads of stars, and forgot all their miseries. It was as though they had escaped from all their griefs and cares, and had entered straightway into glory, and all of a sudden a pure, clear voice arose, tremulous with embarrassment, and the voice sang:

“O little angel, make us glad!
Down from high Heaven’s halls
Through sunshine flown, in splendor clad,
Earth’s shadow on thee falls!”

It sounded like a greeting from the clouds. They closed their eyes and wandered, hand in hand, about the tree. Then the seamstress fell silent, blushing. “You aren’t singing with me!” she cried.

“We’ll sing the Yule Song—we all know that,” said Pelle.

“Down, down from the high green tree!”—It was Karl who struck up. And they just did sing that! It fitted in so admirably—even the name of Peter fitted in! And it was great fun, too, when all the presents cropped up in the song; every single person was remembered! Only, the lines about the purse, at the end, were all too true! There wasn’t much more to be said for that song! But suddenly the boys set the ring-dance going; they stamped like a couple of soldiers, and then they all went whirling round in frantic movement—a real witches’ dance!

“Hey dicker dick,
My man fell smack;
It was on Christmas Eve!
I took a stick
And broke it on his back,
It was on Christmas Eve!”

How hot all the candles made it, and how it all went to one’s head! They had to open the door on to the gangway.

And there outside stood the inmates of the garrets, listening and craning their necks. “Come inside,” cried the boys. “There’s room enough if we make two rings!” So once again they moved round the tree, singing Christmas carols. Every time there was a pause somebody struck up a new carol, that had to be sung through. The doors opposite were open too, the old rag-picker sat at the head of his table singing on his own account. He had a loaf of black bread and a plate of bacon in front of him, and after every carol he took a mouthful. In the other doorway sat three coal-porters playing “sixty-six” for beer and brandy. They sat facing toward the Christmas-tree, and they joined in the singing as they played; but from time to time they broke off in the middle of a verse in order to say something or to cry “Trumped!” Now they suddenly threw down their cards and came into the room. “We don’t want to sit here idle and look on while others are working,” they said, and they joined the circle.

Finally they had all had enough of circling round the tree and singing. So chairs and stools were brought in from the other rooms; they had to squeeze close together, right under the sloping roof, and some sat up on the window-sill. There was a clear circle left round the Christmas-tree. And there they sat gossiping, crouching in all sorts of distorted postures, as though that was the only way in which their bodies could really find repose, their arms hanging loosely between their knees. But their faces were still eager and excited; and the smoke from the candles and the crackling fir-boughs of the tree veiled them in a bluish cloud, through which they loomed as round as so many moons. The burning turpentine gave the smoke a mysterious, alluring fragrance, and the devout and attentive faces were like so many murmuring spirits, hovering in the clouds, each above its outworn body.

Pelle sat there considering them till his heart bled for them—that was his Christmas devotion. Poor storm-beaten birds, what was this splendid experience which outweighed all their privations? Only a little light! And they looked as though they could fall down before it and give up their lives! He knew the life’s story of each one of them better than they knew. But their faces were still eager and excited; and they themselves; when they approached the light they always burned themselves in it, like the moths, they were so chilled!

“All the same, that’s a queer invention, when one thinks about it,” said one of the dockers, nodding toward the Christmas-tree. “But it’s fine. God knows what it really is supposed to mean!”

“It means that now the year is returning toward the light again,” said the old night-watchman.

“No; it stands for the joy of the shepherds over the birth of Christ,” said the rag-picker, stepping into the doorway.

“The shepherds were poor folks, like ourselves, who lived in the darkness. That’s why they rejoiced so over Him, because He came with the light.”

“Well, it don’t seem to me we’ve been granted such a terrible deal of light! Oh, yes, the Christmas-tree here, that’s splendid, Lord knows it is, and we should all of us like to thank the children for it—but one can’t have trees like that to set light to every day; and as for the sun—well, you see, the rich folks have got a monopoly of that!”

“Yes, you are right there, Jacob,” said Pelle, who was moving about round the tree, taking down the hearts and packages for the children, who distributed the sweets. “You are all three of you right—curiously enough. The Christmas-tree is to remind us of Christ’s birth, and also that the year is returning toward the sun—but that’s all the same thing. And then it’s to remind us, too, that we too ought to have a share in things; Christ was born especially to remind the poor of their rights! Yes, that is so! For the Lord God isn’t one to give long-winded directions as to how one should go ahead; He sends the sun rolling round the earth every day, and each of us must look out for himself, and see how best he himself can get into the sunshine. It’s just like the wife of a public-house keeper I remember at home, who used to tell travellers, ‘What would you like to eat? You can have ducks or pork chops or sweets—anything you’ve brought with you!’”

“That was a devilish funny statement!” said his hearers, laughing.

“Yes, it’s easy enough to invite one to all sorts of fine things when all the time one has to bring them along one’s self! You ought to have been a preacher.”

“He’d far better be the Devil’s advocate!” said the old rag-picker. “For there’s not much Christianity in what he says!”

“But you yourself said that Christ came bringing light for the poor,” said Pelle; “and He Himself said as much, quite plainly; what He wanted was to make the blind to see and the dead to walk, and to restore consideration to the despised and rejected. Also, He wanted men to have faith!”

“The blind shall see, the lame shall walk, the leper shall be clean, the deaf shall hear, and the dead shall arise, and the Word shall be preached to the poor,” said the rag-picker, correcting Pelle. “You are distorting the Scriptures, Pelle.”

“But I don’t believe He meant only individual cripples—no, He meant all of us in our misery, and all the temptations that lie in wait for us. That’s how Preacher Sort conceived it, and he was a godly, upright man. He believed the millennium would come for the poor, and that Christ was already on the earth making ready for its coming.”

The women sat quite bemused, listening with open mouths; they dared scarcely breathe. Paul was asleep on his mother’s lap.

“Can He really have thought about us poor vermin, and so long beforehand?” cried the men, looking from one to another. “Then why haven’t we long ago got a bit more forward than this?”

“Yes, I too don’t understand that,” said Pelle, hesitating. “Perhaps we ourselves have got to work our way in the right direction—and that takes time.”

“Yes, but—if He would only give us proper conditions of life. But if we have to win them for ourselves we don’t need any Christ for that!”

This was something that Pelle could not explain even to himself, although he felt it within him as a living conviction, A man must win what was due to him himself—that was clear as the day, and he couldn’t understand how they could be blind to the fact; but why he must do so he couldn’t—however he racked his brains—explain to another person. “But I can tell you a story,” he said.

“But a proper exciting story!” cried Earl, who was feeling bored. “Oh, if only Vinslev were here—he has such droll ideas!”

“Be quiet, boy!” said Marie crossly. “Pelle makes proper speeches— before whole meetings,” she said, nodding solemnly to the others. “What is the story called?”

“Howling Peter.”

“Oh, it’s a story with Peter in it—then it’s a fairy-tale! What is it about?”

“You’ll know that when you hear it, my child,” said the old night- watchman.

“Yes, but then one can’t enjoy it when it comes out right. Isn’t it a story about a boy who goes out into the world?”

“The story is about”—Pelle bethought himself a moment; “the story is about the birth of Christ,” he said quickly, and then blushed a deep red at his own audacity. But the others looked disappointed, and settled themselves decently and stared at the floor, as though they had been in church.

And then Pelle told them the story of Howling Peter; who was born and grew up in poverty and grief, until he was big and strong, and every man’s cur to kick. For it was the greatest pity to see this finely-made fellow, who was so full of fear and misery that if even a girl so much as touched him he must flood himself with tears; and the only way out of his misery was the rope. What a disgrace it was, that he should have earned his daily bread and yet have been kept in the workhouse, as though they did him a kindness in allowing him a hole to creep into there, when with his capacity for work he could have got on anywhere! And it became quite unendurable as he grew up and was still misused by all the world, and treated like a dog. But then, all of a sudden, he broke the magic spell, struck down his tormentors, and leaped out into the daylight as the boldest of them all!

They drew a deep breath when he had finished. Marie clapped her hands. “That was a real fairy-tale!” she cried. Karl threw himself upon Peter and pummeled away at him, although that serious-minded lad was anything but a tyrant!

They cheerfully talked the matter over. Everybody had something to say about Howling Peter. “That was damned well done,” said the men; “he thrashed the whole crew from beginning to end; a fine fellow that! And a strong one too! But why the devil did he take such a long time about it? And put up with all that?”

“Yes, it isn’t quite so easy for us to understand that—not for us, who boast such a lot about our rights!” said Pelle, smiling.

“Well, you’re a clever chap, and you’ve told it us properly!” cried the cheerful Jacob. “But if ever you need a fist, there’s mine!” He seized and shook Pelle’s hand.

The candles had long burned out, but they did not notice it.

Their eyes fastened on Pelle’s as though seeking something, with a peculiar expression in which a question plainly came and went. And suddenly they overwhelmed him with questions. They wanted to know enough, anyhow! He maintained that a whole world of splendors belonged to them, and now they were in a hurry to get possession of them. Even the old rag-picker let himself be carried away with the rest; it was too alluring, the idea of giving way to a little intoxication, even if the everyday world was to come after it.

Pelle stood among them all, strong and hearty, listening to all their questions with a confident smile. He knew all that was to be theirs— even if it couldn’t come just at once. It was a matter of patience and perseverance; but that they couldn’t understand just now. When they had at last entered into their glory they would know well enough how to protect it. He had no doubts; he stood there among them like their embodied consciousness, happily growing from deeply-buried roots.

XIII

From the foundations of the “Ark” rose a peculiar sound, a stumbling, countrified footstep, dragging itself in heavy footgear over the flagstones. All Pelle’s blood rushed to his heart; he threw down his work, and with a leap was on the gallery, quite convinced that this was only an empty dream…. But there below in the court stood Father Lasse in the flesh, staring up through the timbers, as though he couldn’t believe his own eyes. He had a sack filled with rubbish on his back.

“Hallo!” cried Pelle, taking the stairs in long leaps. “Hallo!”

“Good-day, my lad!” said Lasse, in a voice trembling with emotion, considering his son with his lashless eyes. “Yes, here you have Father Lasse—if you will have him. But where, really, did you come from? Seems to me you fell down from heaven?”

Pelle took his father’s sack. “You just come up with me,” he said. “You can trust the stairs all right; they are stronger than they look.”

“Then they are like Lasse,” answered the old man, trudging up close behind him; the straps of his half-Wellingtons were peeping out at the side, and he was quite the old man. At every landing he stood still and uttered his comments on his surroundings. Pelle had to admonish him to be silent.

“One doesn’t discuss everything aloud here. It might so easily be regarded as criticism,” he said.

“No, really? Well, one must learn as long as one lives. But just look how they stand about chattering up here! There must be a whole courtyard-full! Well, well. I won’t say any more. I knew they lived one on top of another, but I didn’t think there’d be so little room here. To hang the backyard out in front of the kitchen door, one on top of another, that’s just like the birds that build all on one bough. Lord God, suppose it was all to come tumbling down one fine day!”

“And do you live here?” he cried, gazing in a disillusioned manner round the room with its sloping ceiling. “I’ve often wondered how you were fixed up over here. A few days ago I met a man at home who said they were talking about you already; but one wouldn’t think so from your lodgings. However, it isn’t far to heaven, anyhow!”

Pelle was silent. He had come to love his den, and his whole life here; but Father Lasse continued to enlarge upon his hopes of his son’s respectability and prosperity, and he felt ashamed. “Did you imagine I was living in one of the royal palaces?” he said, rather bitterly.

Lasse looked at him kindly and laid both hands on his shoulders. “So big and strong as you’ve grown, lad,” he said, wondering. “Well, and now you have me here too! But I won’t be a burden to you. No, but at home it had grown so dismal after what happened at Due’s, that I got ready without sending you word. And then I was able to come over with one of the skippers for nothing.”

“But what’s this about Due?” asked Pelle. “I hope nothing bad?”

“Good God, haven’t you heard? He revenged himself on his wife because he discovered her with the Consul. He had been absolutely blind, and had only believed the best of her, until he surprised her in her sin. Then he killed her, her and the children they had together, and went to the authorities and gave himself up. But the youngest, whom any one could see was the Consul’s, he didn’t touch. Oh, it was a dreadful misfortune! Before he gave himself up to the police he came to me; he wanted just one last time to be with some one who would talk it over with him without hypocrisy. ‘I’ve strangled Anna,’ he said, as soon as he had sat down. ‘It had to be, and I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry. The children that were mine, too. I’ve dealt honestly with them.’ Yes, yes, he had dealt honestly with the poor things! ‘I just wanted to say goodbye to you, Lasse, for my life’s over now, happy as I might have been, with my contented nature. But Anna always wanted to be climbing, and if I got on it was her shame I had to thank for it. I never wanted anything further than the simple happiness of the poor man—a good wife and a few children—and now I must go to prison! God be thanked that Anna hasn’t lived to see that! She was finer in her feelings than the rest, and she had to deceive in order to get on in the world.’ So he sat there, talking of the dead, and one couldn’t notice any feeling in him. I wouldn’t let him see how sick at heart he made me feel. For him it was the best thing, so long as his conscience could sleep easy. ‘Your eyes are watering, Lasse,’ he said quietly; ‘you should bathe them a bit; they say urine is good.’ Yes, God knows, my eyes did water! God of my life, yes! Then he stood up. ‘You, too, Lasse, you haven’t much longer life granted you,’ he said, and he gave me his hand. ‘You are growing old now. But you must give Pelle my greetings—he’s safe to get on!’”

Pelle sat mournfully listening to the dismal story. But he shuddered at the last words. He had so often heard the expression of that anticipation of his good fortune, which they all seemed to feel, and had rejoiced to hear it; it was, after all, only an echo of his own self- confidence. But now it weighed upon him like a burden. It was always those who were sinking who believed in his luck; and as they sank they flung their hopes upward toward him. A grievous fashion was this in which his good fortune was prophesied! A terrible and grievous blessing it was that was spoken over him and his success in life by this man dedicated to death, even as he stepped upon the scaffold. Pelle sat staring at the floor without a sign of life, a brooding expression on his face; his very soul was shuddering at the foreboding of a superhuman burden; and suddenly a light was flashed before his eyes; there could never be happiness for him alone—the fairy-tale was dead! He was bound up with all the others—he must partake of happiness or misfortune with them; that was why the unfortunate Due gave him his blessing. In his soul he was conscious of Due’s difficult journey, as though he himself had to endure the horror of it. And Fine Anna, who must clamber up over his own family and tread them in the dust! Never again could he wrench himself quite free as before! He had already encountered much unhappiness and had learned to hate its cause. But this was something more—this was very affliction itself!

“Yes,” sighed Lasse, “a lucky thing that Brother Kalle did not live to see all this. He worked himself to skin and bone for his children, and now, for all thanks, he lied buried in the poorhouse burying-ground. Albinus, who travels about the country as a conjurer, was the only one who had a thought for him; but the money came too late, although it was sent by telegraph. Have you ever heard of a conjuring-trick like that— to send money from England to Bornholm over the telegraph cable? A devilish clever acrobat! Well, Brother Kalle, he knew all sorts of conjuring-tricks too, but he didn’t learn them abroad. They had heard nothing at all of Alfred at the funeral. He belongs to the fine folks now and has cut off all connection with his poor relations. He has been appointed to various posts of honor, and they say he’s a regular bloodhound toward the poor—a man’s always worst toward his own kind. But the fine folks, they say, they think great things of him.”

Pelle heard the old man’s speech only as a monotonous trickle of sound.

Due, Due, the best, the most good-natured man he knew, who championed Anna’s illegitimate child against her own mother, and loved her like his own, because she was defenceless and needed his love—Due was now to lay his head on the scaffold! So dearly bought was the fulfilment of his wish, to obtain a pair of horses and become a coachman! He had obtained the horses and a carriage on credit, and had himself made up for the instalments and the interest—the Consul had merely stood security for him. And for this humble success he was now treading the path of shame! His steps echoed in Pelle’s soul; Pelle did not know how he was going to bear it. He longed for his former obtuseness.

Lasse continued to chatter. For him it was fate—grievous and heavy, but it could not be otherwise. And the meeting with Pelle had stirred up so many memories; he was quite excited. Everything he saw amused him. However did anybody hit on the idea of packing folks away like this, one on top of another, like herrings in a barrel? And at home on Bornholm there were whole stretches of country where no one lived at all! He did not venture to approach the window, but prudently stood a little way back in the room, looking out over the roofs. There, too, was a crazy arrangement! One could count the ears in a cornfield as easily as the houses over here!

Pelle called Marie, who had discreetly remained in her own room. “This is my foster-mother,” he said, with his arm round her shoulders. “And that is Father Lasse, whom you are fond of already, so you always say. Now can you get us some breakfast?” He gave her money.

“She’s a good girl, that she is,” said Lasse, feeling in his sack. “She shall have a present. There’s a red apple,” he said to Marie, when she returned; “you must eat it, and then you’ll be my sweetheart.” Marie smiled gravely and looked at Pelle.

They borrowed the old clothes dealer’s handcart and went across to the apple barges to fetch Lasse’s belongings. He had sold most of them in order not to bring too great a load to the city. But he had retained a bedstead with bedding, and all sorts of other things. “And then I have still to give you greetings from Sort and Marie Nielsen,” he said.

Pelle blushed. “I owe her a few words, but over here I quite forgot it somehow! And I have half promised her my portrait. I must see now about sending it.”

“Yes, do,” said Father Lasse. “I don’t know how close you two stand to each other, but she was a good woman. And those who stay behind, they’re sad when they’re forgotten. Remember that.”

At midday Lasse had tidied himself a trifle and began to brush his hat.

“What now?” inquired Pelle. “You don’t want to go out all alone?”

“I want to go out and look at the city a bit,” replied Lasse, as though it were quite a matter of course. “I want to find some work, and perhaps I’ll go and have a peep at the king for once. You need only explain in which direction I must go.”

“You had better wait until I can come with you—you’ll only lose yourself.”

“Shall I do that?” replied Lasse, offended. “But I found my way here alone, I seem to remember!”

“I can go with the old man!” said Marie.

“Yes, you come with the old man, then no one can say he has lost his youth!” cried Lasse jestingly, as he took her hand. “I think we two shall be good friends.”

Toward evening they returned. “There are folks enough here,” said Lasse, panting, “but there doesn’t seem to be a superfluity of work. I’ve been asking first this one and then that, but no one will have me. Well, that’s all right! If they won’t, I can just put a spike on my stick and set to work collecting the bits of paper in the streets, like the other old men; I can at least do that still.”

“But I can’t give my consent to that,” replied Pelle forcibly. “My father shan’t become a scavenger!”

“Well—but I must get something to do, or I shall go back home again. I’m not going to go idling about here while you work.”

“But you can surely rest and enjoy a little comfort in your old days, father. However, we shall soon see.”

“I can rest, can I? I had better lie on my back and let myself be fed like a long-clothes child! Only I don’t believe my back would stand it!”

They had placed Lasse’s bed with the footboard under the sloping ceiling; there was just room enough for it. Pelle felt like a little boy when he went to bed that night; it was so many years since he had slept in the same room as Father Lasse. But in the night he was oppressed by evil dreams; Due’s dreadful fate pursued him in his sleep. His energetic, good-humored face went drifting through the endless grayness, the head bowed low, the hands chained behind him, a heavy iron chain was about his neck, and his eyes were fixed on the ground as though he were searching the very abyss. When Pelle awoke it was because Father Lasse stood bending over his bed, feeling his face, as in the days of his childhood.

XIV

Lasse would not sit idle, and was busily employed in running about the city in search of work. When he spoke to Pelle he put a cheerful face on a bad business; and looked hopeful; but the capital had already disillusioned him. He could not understand all this hubbub, and felt that he was too old to enter into it and fathom its meaning—besides, perhaps it had none! It really looked as though everybody was just running to and fro and following his own nose, without troubling in the least about all the rest. And there were no greetings when you passed folks in the street; the whole thing was more than Lasse could understand. “I ought to have stayed at home,” he would often think.

And as for Pelle—well, Pelle was taken up with his own affairs! That was only to be expected in a man. He ran about going to meetings and agitating, and had a great deal to do; his thoughts were continually occupied, so that there was no time for familiar gossip as in the old days. He was engaged, moreover, so that what time was not devoted to the Labor movement was given to his sweetheart. How the boy had grown, and how he had altered, bodily and in every way! Lasse had a feeling that he only reached up to Pelle’s belt nowadays. He had grown terribly serious, and was quite the man; he looked as though he was ready to grasp the reins of something or other; you would never, to look at him, have thought that he was only a journeyman cobbler. There was an air of responsibility about him—just a little too much may be!

Marie got into the way of accompanying the old man. They had become good friends, and there was plenty for them to gossip over. She would take him to the courtyard of the Berlingske Tidende, where the people in search of work eddied about the advertisement board, filling up the gateway and forming a crowd in the street outside.

“We shall never get in there!” said Lasse dejectedly. But Marie worked herself forward; when people scolded her she scolded them back. Lasse was quite horrified by the language the child used; but it was a great help!

Marie read out the different notices, and Lasse made his comments on every one, and when the bystanders laughed Lasse gazed at them uncomprehendingly, then laughed with them, and nodded his head merrily. He entered into everything.

“What do you say? Gentleman’s coachman? Yes, I can drive a pair of horses well enough, but perhaps I’m not fine enough for the gentry—I’m afraid my nose would drip!”

He looked about him importantly, like a child that is under observation. “But errand boy—that isn’t so bad. We’ll make a note of that. There’s no great skill needed to be everybody’s dog! House porter! Deuce take it—there one need only sit downstairs and make angry faces out of a basement window! We’ll look in there and try our luck.”

They impressed the addresses on their minds until they knew them by heart, and then squeezed their way out through the crowd. “Damn funny old codger!” said the people, looking after him with a smile—Lasse was quite high-spirited. They went from house to house, but no one had any use for him. The people only laughed at the broken old figure with the wide-toed boots.

“They laugh at me,” said Lasse, quite cast down; “perhaps because I still look a bit countrified. But that after all can soon be overcome.

“I believe it’s because you are so old and yet want to get work,” said Marie.

“Do you think it can be on that account? Yet I’m only just seventy, and on both my father’s and mother’s side we have almost all lived to ninety. Do you really think that’s it? If they’d only let me set to work they’d soon see there’s still strength in old Lasse! Many a younger fellow would sit on his backside for sheer astonishment. But what are those people there, who stand there and look so dismal and keep their hands in their pockets?”

“Those are the unemployed; it’s a slack time for work, and they say it will get still worse.”

“And all those who were crowding round the notice-board—were they idle hands too?”

Marie nodded.

“But then it’s worse here than at home—there at least we always have the stone-cutting when there is nothing else. And I had really believed that the good time had already begun over here!”

“Pelle says it will soon come,” said Marie consolingly.

“Yes, Pelle—he can well talk. He is young and healthy and has the time before him.”

Lasse was in a bad temper; nothing seemed right to him. In order to give him pleasure, Marie took him to see the guard changed, which cheered him a little.

“Those are smart fellows truly,” he said. “Hey, hey, how they hold themselves! And fine clothes too. But that they know well enough themselves! Yes—I’ve never been a king’s soldier. I went up for it when I was young and felt I’d like it; I was a smart fellow then, you can take my word for it! But they wouldn’t have me; my figure wouldn’t do, they said; I had worked too hard, from the time I was quite a child. They’d got it into their heads in those days that a man ought to be made just so and so. I think it’s to please the fine ladies. Otherwise I, too, might have defended my country.”

Down by the Exchange the roadway was broken up; a crowd of navvies were at work digging out the foundation for a conduit. Lasse grew quite excited, and hurried up to them.

“That would be the sort of thing for me,” he said, and he stood there and fell into a dream at the sight of the work. Every time the workers swung their picks he followed the movement with his old head. He drew closer and closer. “Hi,” he said to one of the workers, who was taking a breath, “can a man get taken on here?”

The man took a long look at him. “Get taken on here?” he cried, turning more to his comrades than to Lasse. “Ah, you’d like to, would you? Here you foreigners come running, from Funen and Middlefart, and want to take the bread out of the mouths of us natives. Get away with you, you Jutland carrion!” Laughing, he swung his pick over his head.

Lasse drew slowly hack. “But he was angry!” he said dejectedly to Marie.

In the evening Pelle had to go to all his various meetings, whatever they might be. He had a great deal to do, and, hard as he worked, the situation still remained unfavorable. It was by no means so easy a thing, to break the back of poverty!

“You just look after your own affairs,” said Lasse. “I sit here and chat a little with the children—and then I go to bed. I don’t know why, but my body gets fonder and fonder of bed, although I’ve never been considered lazy exactly. It must be the grave that’s calling me. But I can’t go about idle any longer—I’m quite stiff in my body from doing it.”

Formerly Lasse never used to speak of the grave; but now he had seemingly reconciled himself to the idea. “And the city is so big and so confusing,” he told the children. “And the little one has put by soon runs through one’s fingers.”

He found it much easier to confide his troubles to them. Pelle had grown so big and so serious that he absolutely inspired respect. One could take no real pleasure in worrying him with trivialities.

But with the children he found himself in tune. They had to contend with little obstacles and difficulties, just as he did, and could grasp all his troubles. They gave him good, practical advice, and in return he gave them his senile words of wisdom.

“I don’t exactly know why it is so,” he said, “but this great city makes me quite confused and queer in the head. To mention nothing else, no one here knows me and looks after me when I go by. That takes all the courage out of my knees. At home there was always one or another who would turn his head and say to himself, ‘Look, there goes old Lasse, he’ll be going down to the harbor to break stone; devil take me, but how he holds himself! Many a man would nod to me too, and I myself knew every second man. Here they all go running by as if they were crazy! I don’t understand how you manage to find employment here, Karl?”

“Oh, that’s quite easy,” replied the boy. “About six in the morning I get to the vegetable market; there is always something to be delivered for the small dealers who can’t keep a man. When the vegetable market is over I deliver flowers for the gardeners. That’s a very uncertain business, for I get nothing more than the tips. And besides that I run wherever I think there’s anything going. To the East Bridge and out to Frederiksburg. And I have a few regular places too, where I go every afternoon for an hour and deliver goods. There’s always something if one runs about properly.”

“And does that provide you with an average good employment every day?” said Lasse wonderingly. “The arrangement looks to me a little uncertain. In the morning you can’t be sure you will have earned anything when the night comes.”

“Ah, Karl is so quick,” said Marie knowingly. “When the times are ordinarily good he can earn a krone a day regularly.”

“And that could really be made a regular calling?” No, Lasse couldn’t understand it.

“Very often it’s evening before I have earned anything at all, but one just has to stir one’s stumps; there’s always something or other if one knows where to look for it.”

“What do you think—suppose I were to go with you?” said Lasse thoughtfully.

“You can’t do that, because I run the whole time. Really you’d do much better to hide one of your arms.”

“Hide one of my arms?” said Lasse wonderingly.

“Yes—stick one arm under your coat and then go up to people and ask them for something. That wouldn’t be any trouble to you, you look like an invalid.”

“Do I, indeed?” asked Lasse, blinking his eyes. “I never knew that before. But even if that were so I shouldn’t like to beg at people’s doors. I don’t think any one will get old Lasse to do that.”

“Then go along to the lime works—they are looking for stone-breakers these days,” said the omniscient youngster.

“Now you are talking!” said Lasse; “so they have stone here? Yes, I brought my stone-cutter’s tools with me, and if there’s one thing on earth I long to do it is to be able to bang away at a stone again!”

XV

Pelle was now a man; he was able to look after his own affairs and a little more besides; and he was capable of weighing one circumstance against another. He had thrust aside his horror concerning Due’s fate, and once again saw light in the future. But this horror still lurked within his mind, corroding everything else, lending everything a gloomy, sinister hue. Over his brow brooded a dark cloud, as to which he himself was not quite clear. But Ellen saw it and stroked it away with her soft fingers, in order to make it disappear. It formed a curious contrast to his fresh, ruddy face, like a meaningless threat upon a fine spring day.

He began to be conscious of confidence like a sustaining strength. It was not only in the “Ark” that he was idolized; his comrades looked up to him; if there was anything important in hand their eyes involuntarily turned to him. Although he had, thoughtlessly enough, well-nigh wrecked the organism in order to come to grips with Meyer, he had fully made up for his action, and the Union was now stronger than ever, and this was his doing. So he could stretch his limbs and give a little thought to his own affairs.

He and Ellen felt a warm longing to come together and live in their own little home. There were many objections that might be opposed to such a course, and he was not blind to them. Pelle was a valiant worker, but his earnings were not so large that one could found a family on them; it was the naked truth that even a good worker could not properly support a wife and children. He counted on children as a matter of course, and the day would come also when Father Lasse would no longer be able to earn his daily bread. But that day lay still in the remote future, and, on the other hand, it was no more expensive to live with a companion than alone—if that companion was a good and saving wife. If a man meant to enjoy some little share of the joy of life, he must close his eyes and leap over all obstacles, and for once put his trust in the exceptional.

“It’ll soon be better, too,” said Mason Stolpe. “Things look bad now in most trades, but you see yourself, how everything is drawing to a great crisis. Give progress a kick behind and ask her to hurry herself a little—there’s something to be gained by that. A man ought to marry while he’s still young; what’s the good of going about and hankering after one another?”

Madam Stolpe was, as always, of his opinion. “We married and enjoyed the sweetness of it while our blood was still young. That’s why we have something now that we can depend on,” she said simply, looking at Pelle.

So it was determined that the wedding should be held that spring. In March the youngest son would complete his apprenticeship, so that the wedding feast and the journeyman’s feast could be celebrated simultaneously.

On the canal, just opposite the prison, a little two-roomed dwelling was standing vacant, and this they rented. Mason Stolpe wanted to have the young couple to live out by the North Bridge, “among respectable people,” but Pelle had become attached to this quarter. Moreover, he had a host of customers there, which would give him a foothold, and there, too, were the canals. For Pelle, the canals were a window opening on the outer world; they gave his mind a sense of liberty; he always felt oppressed among the stone walls by the North Bridge. Ellen let him choose—it was indifferent to her where they lived. She would gladly have gone to the end of the world with him, in order to yield herself.

She had saved a little money in her situation, and Pelle also had a little put by; he was wise in his generation, and cut down all their necessities. When Ellen was free they rummaged about buying things for their home. Many things they bought second-hand, for cheapness, but not for the bedroom; there everything was to be brand-new!

It was a glorious time, in which every hour was full of its own rich significance; there was no room for brooding or for care. Ellen often came running in to drag him from his work; he must come with her and look at something or other—one could get it so cheap—but quickly, quickly, before it should be gone! On her “off” Sundays she would reduce the little home to order, and afterward they would walk arm in arm through the city, and visit the old people.

Pelle had had so much to do with the affairs of others, and had given so little thought to his own, that it was delightful, for once in a way, to be able to rest and think of himself. The crowded outer world went drifting far away from him; he barely glanced at it as he built his nest; he thought no more about social problems than the birds that nest in spring.