Pelle the Conqueror Part 10

V

Pelle was not long in finding out all about the man who had been sent by G.o.d, and had the grave, reproachful eyes. He proved to be nothing but a little shoemaker down in the village, who spoke at the meeting-house on Sundays; and it was also said that his wife drank. Rud went to his Sunday-school, and he was poor; so he was nothing out of the ordinary.

Moreover, Gustav had got a cap which could turn out three different crowns--one of blue duffle, one of water-proof American cloth, and one of white canvas for use in sunny weather. It was an absorbingly interesting study that threw everything else into the background, and exercised Pelle's mind for many days; and he used this miraculous cap as a standard by which to measure everything great and desirable. But one day he gave Gustav a beautifully carved stick for permission to perform the trick of turning the crown inside out himself; and that set his mind at rest at last, and the cap had to take its place in his everyday world like everything else.

But what did it look like in Farmer Kongstrup's big rooms? Money lay upon the floor there, of course, the gold in one place and the silver in another; and in the middle of each heap stood a half-bushel measure.

What did the word _"practical"_ mean, which the bailiff used when he talked to the farmer? And why did the men call one another _"Swede"_ as a term of abuse? Why, they were all Swedes! What was there away beyond the cliffs where the stone-quarry lay? The farm-lands extended as far as that on the one side. He had not been there yet, but was going with his father as soon as an opportunity presented itself. They had learnt quite by chance that La.s.se had a brother who owned a house over there; so of course they knew the place comparatively well.

Down there lay the sea; he had sailed upon it himself! Ships both of iron and wood sailed upon it, though how iron could float when it was so heavy he did not know! The sea must be strong, for in the pond, iron went to the bottom at once. In the middle of the pond there was no bottom, so there you'd go on sinking forever! The old thatcher, when he was young, had had more than a hundred fathoms of rope down there with a drag, to fish up a bucket, but he never reached the bottom. And when he wanted to pull up the rope again, there was some one deep down who caught hold of the drag and tried to pull him down, so he had to let the whole thing go.

G.o.d ... well, He had a long white beard like the farmer at Kaase Farm; but who kept house for Him now He was old? Saint Peter was His bailiff, of course!... How could the old, dry cows have just as young calves as the young ones? And so on, and so on.

There was one subject about which, as a matter of course, there could be no question, nor any thought at all in that sense, because it was the very foundation of all existence--Father La.s.se. He was there, simply, he stood like a safe wall behind everything that one did. He was the real Providence, the last great refuge in good and ill; he could do whatever he liked--Father La.s.se was almighty.

Then there was one natural centre in the world--Pelle himself.

Everything grouped itself about him, everything existed for him--for him to play with, to shudder at, or to put on one side for a great future.

Even distant trees, houses and rocks in the landscape, that he had never been up to, a.s.sumed an att.i.tude toward him, either friendly or hostile; and the relation had to be carefully decided in the case of each new thing that appeared upon his horizon.

His world was small; he had only just begun to create it. For a good arm's-length on all sides of him, there was more or less _terra firma_; but beyond that floated raw matter, chaos. But Pelle already found his world immense, and was quite willing to make it infinite. He attacked everything with insatiable appet.i.te; his ready perceptions laid hold of all that came within their reach; they were like the mouth of a machine, into which matter was incessantly rushing in small, whirling particles.

And in the draught they raised, came others and again others; the entire universe was on its way toward him.

Pelle shaped and set aside twenty new things in the course of a second.

The earth grew out under him into a world that was rich in excitement and grotesque forms, discomfort and the most everyday things. He went about in it uncertainly, for there was always something that became displaced and had to be revalued or made over again; the most matter-of-fact things would change and all at once become terrifying marvels, or _vice versa_. He went about in a state of continual wonderment, and a.s.sumed an expectant att.i.tude even with regard to the most familiar things; for who could tell what surprises they might give one?

As an instance; he had all his life had opportunities of verifying the fact that trouser-b.u.t.tons were made of bone and had five holes, one large one in the middle and four smaller ones round it. And then one day, one of the men comes home from the town with a pair of new trousers, the b.u.t.tons of which are made of bright metal and are no larger than a sixpenny-piece! They have only four holes, and the thread is to lie across them, not from the middle outward, as in the old ones.

Or take the great eclipse of the sun, that he had wondered so much about all the summer, and that all the old people said would bring about the destruction of the world. He had looked forward to it, especially the destruction part of it; it would be something of an adventure, and somewhere within him there was a little bit of confident a.s.surance that it would all come right as far as he was concerned. The eclipse did come too, as it was meant to; it grew dark too, as if it were the Last Day, and the birds became so quiet, and the cattle bellowed and wanted to run home. But then it grew light again and it all came to nothing.

Then there were fearful terrors that all at once revealed themselves as tiny, tiny things--thank goodness! But there were also antic.i.p.ated pleasures that made your heart beat, and when you got up to them they were dullness itself.

Far out in the misty ma.s.s, invisible worlds floated by that had nothing to do with his own. A sound coming out of the unknown created them in a twinkling. They came into existence in the same way that the land had done that morning he had stood upon the deck of the steamer, and heard voices and noise through the fog, thick and big, with forms that looked like huge gloves without fingers.

And inside one there was blood and a heart and a soul. The heart Pelle had found out about himself; it was a little bird shut up in there.

But the soul bored its way like a serpent to whatever part of the body desire occupied. Old thatcher Holm had once drawn the soul like a thin thread out of the thumb of a man who couldn't help stealing. Pelle's own soul was good; it lay in the pupils of his eyes, and reflected Father La.s.se's image whenever he looked into them.

The blood was the worst, and so Father La.s.se always let himself be bled when there was anything the matter with him; the bad humors had to be let out. Gustav thought a great deal about blood, and could tell the strangest things about it; and he cut his fingers only to see whether it was ripe. One evening he came over to the cow-stable and exhibited a bleeding finger. The blood was quite black. "Now I'm a man!" he said, and swore a great oath; but the maids only made fun of him, and said that he had not carried his four bushels of peas up into the loft yet.

Then there was h.e.l.l and heaven, and the stone-quarry where they struck one another with heavy hammers when they were drunk. The men in the stone-quarry were the strongest men in the world. One of them had eaten ten poached eggs at one time without being ill; and there is nothing so strengthening as eggs.

Down in the meadow, will-o'-the-wisps hopped about looking for something in the deep summer nights. There was always one of them near the stream, and it stood and danced on the top of a little heap of stones that lay in the middle of the meadow. A couple of years ago a girl had one night given birth to a child out there among the dunes and as she did not know what to do about a father for it, she drowned it in one of the pools that the brook makes where it turns. Good people raised the little cairn, so that the place should not be forgotten; and over it the child's soul used to burn at dead of night at the time of year at which it was born. Pelle believed that the child itself was buried beneath the stones, and now and then ornamented the mound with a branch of fir; but he never played at that part of the stream. The girl was sent across the sea, sentenced to penal servitude for many years, and people wondered at the father. She had not named any one, but every one knew who it was all the same. He was a young, well-to-do fisherman down in the village, and the girl was one of the poorest, so there could never have been any question of their marrying. The girl must have preferred this to begging help of him for the child, and living in the village with an illegitimate child, an object of universal derision. And he had certainly put a bold face on the matter, where many another would have been ashamed and gone away on a long voyage.

This summer, two years after the girl went to prison, the fisherman was going home one night along the sh.o.r.e toward the village with some nets on his back. He was of a callous nature, and did not hesitate to take the shortest way across the meadow; but when he got in among the dunes, he saw a will-o'-the-wisp following in his steps, grew frightened, and began to run. It began to gain upon him, and when he leaped across the brook to put water between himself and the spirit, it seized hold of the nets. At this he shouted the name of G.o.d, and fled like one bereft of his senses. The next morning at sunrise he and his father went to fetch the nets. They had caught on the cairn, and lay right across the stream.

Then the young man joined the Revivalists, and his father abandoned his riotous life and followed him. Early and late the young fisherman was to be found at their meetings, and at other times he went about like a malefactor with his head hanging down, only waiting for the girl to come out of prison, so that he could marry her.

Pelle was up in it all. The girls talked shudderingly about it as they sat upon the men's knees in the long summer evenings, and a lovesick fellow from inland had made up a ballad about it, which Gustav sang to his concertina. Then all the girls on the farm wept, and even Lively Sara's eyes filled with tears, and she began to talk to Mons about engagement rings.

One day when Pelle was lying on his face in the gra.s.s, singing and clapping his naked feet together in the clear air, he saw a young man standing by the cairn and putting on it stones which he took out of his pocket; after which he knelt down. Pelle went up to him.

"What are you doing?" he asked boldly, feeling that he was in his own domain. "Are you saying your prayers?"

The man did not answer, but remained in a kneeling posture. At last he rose, and spat out tobacco-juice.

"I'm praying to Him Who is to judge us all," he said, looking steadily at Pelle.

Pelle recognized that look. It was the same in expression as that of the man the other day--the one that had been sent by G.o.d. Only there was no reproach in it.

"Haven't you any bed to sleep in then?" asked Pelle. "I always say my prayers under the clothes. He hears them just as well! G.o.d knows everything."

The young man nodded, and began moving about the stones on the cairn.

"You mustn't hurt that," said Pelle firmly, "for there's a little baby buried there."

The young man turned upon him a strange look.

"That's not true!" he said thickly; "for the child lies up in the churchyard in consecrated earth."

"O--oh, inde--ed?" said Pelle, imitating his father's slow tones. "But I know it was the parents that drowned it--and buried it here." He was too proud of his knowledge to relinquish it without a word.

The man looked as if he were about to strike him, and Pelle retreated a little, and then, having confidence in his legs, he laughed openly.

But the other seemed no longer aware of his presence, and stood looking dully past the cairn. Pelle drew nearer again.

The man started at Pelle's shadow, and heaved a deep sigh. "Is that you?" he said apathetically, without looking at Pelle. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

"It's _my_ field," said Pelle, "because I herd here; but you may stay here if you won't hit me. And you mustn't touch the cairn, because there's a little baby buried there."

The young man looked gravely at Pelle. "It's not true what you say! How dare you tell such a lie? G.o.d hates a lie. But you're a simple-hearted child, and I'll tell you all about it without hiding anything, as truly as I only want to walk wholly in G.o.d's sight."

Pelle looked at him uncomprehendingly. "I should think I ought to know all about it," he said, "considering I know the whole song by heart. I can sing it to you, if you like. It goes like this." Pelle began to sing in a voice that was a little tremulous with shyness--

"So happy are we in our childhood's first years, Neither sorrow nor sin is our mead; We play, and there's nought in our path to raise fears That it straight into prison doth lead.

Right many there are that with voice sorrowful Must oft for lost happiness long.

To make the time pa.s.s in this prison so dull, I now will write down all my song.

I played with my father, with mother I played, And childhood's days came to an end; And when I had grown up into a young maid, I played still, but now with my friend.

I gave him my day and I gave him my night, And never once thought of deceit; But when I him told of my sorrowful plight, My trust I had cause to regret.

'I never have loved you,' he quickly did say; 'Begone! I'll ne'er see you again!'

He turned on his heel and went angry away.

'Twas then I a murd'ress became."

Here Pelle paused in astonishment, for the grown-up man had sunk forward as he sat, and he was sobbing. "Yes, it was wicked," he said. "For then she killed her child and had to go to prison." He spoke with a certain amount of contempt; he did not like men that cried. "But it's nothing that you need cry about," he added carelessly, after a little.

"Yes, it is; for she'd done nothing. It was the child's father that killed it; it was me that did the dreadful thing; yes, I confess that I'm a murderer! Haven't I openly enough acknowledged by wrongdoing?" He turned his face upward, as though he were speaking to G.o.d.

"Oh, was it you?" said Pelle, moving a little away from him. "Did you kill your own child? Father La.s.se could never have done that! But then why aren't you in prison? Did you tell a lie, and say _she'd_ done it?"