Pelle the Conqueror Part 135

"Ach, one knows these things--it's part of one's business. You'll get five to six years, Pelle, till you are stiff with it. Prison, of course--not penal servitude."

Pelle shuddered.

"You'll freeze in there," said Ferdinand compa.s.sionately. "As for me, I can settle down very well in there. But listen, Pelle--you've been so good, and you've tried to save me--next to mother you are the only person I care anything about. If you would like to go abroad I can soon hide you and find the pa.s.sage-money."

"Where will you get it?" asked Pelle, hesitating.

"Ach, I go in for the community of goods," said Ferdinand with a broad smile. "The prefect of police himself has just five hundred kroner lying in his desk. I'll try to get it for you if you like."

"No," said Pelle slowly, "I would rather undergo my punishment. But thanks for your kind intentions--and give my best wishes to your old mother. And if you ever have anything to spare, then give it to Widow Johnsen. She and the child have gone hungry since Hanne's death."

And then there was nothing more to do or say; it was all over.... He went straight across the market-place toward the court-house. There it stood, looking so dismal! He strolled slowly past it, along the ca.n.a.l, in order to collect himself a little before going in. He walked along the quay, gazing down into the water, where the boats and the big live-boxes full of fish were just visible. By Holmens Church he pulled himself together and turned back--he must do it now! He raised his head with a sudden resolve and found himself facing Marie. Her cheeks glowed as he gazed at her.

"Pelle," she cried, rejoicing, "are you still at liberty? Then it wasn't true! I have been to the meeting, and they said there you had been arrested. Ach, we have been so unhappy!"

"I shall be arrested--I am on the way now."

"But, Pelle, dear Pelle!" She gazed at him with tearful eyes. Ah, he was still the foundling, who needed her care! Pelle himself had tears in his eyes; he suddenly felt weak and impressible. Here was a human child whose heart was beating for him--and how beautiful she was, in her grief at his misfortune!

She stood before him, slender, but generously formed; her hair--once so thin and uncared-for--fell in heavy waves over her forehead. She had emerged from her stunted sh.e.l.l into a glorious maturity. "Pelle," she said, with downcast eyes, gripping both his hands, "don't go there to-night--wait till tomorrow! All the others are rejoicing over the victory to-night--and so should you! ... Come with me, to my room, Pelle, you are so unhappy." Her face showed him that she was fighting down her tears. She had never looked so much a child as now.

"Why do you hesitate? Come with me! Am I not pretty? And I have kept it all for you! I have loved you since the very first time I ever saw you, Pelle, and I began to grow, because I wanted to be beautiful for you. I owe nothing to any one but you, and if you don't want me I don't want to go on living!"

No, she owed nothing to any one, this child from nowhere, but was solely and entirely her own work. Lovely and untouched she came to him in her abandonment, as though she were sent by the good angel of poverty to quicken his heart. Beautiful and pure of heart she had grown up out of wretchedness as though out of happiness itself, and where in the world should he rest his head, that was wearied to death, but on the heart of her who to him was child and mother and beloved?

"Pelle, do you know, there was dancing to-day in the Federation building after the meeting on the Common, and we young girls had made a green garland, and I was to crown you with it when you came into the hall.

Oh, we did cry when some one came up and called out to us that they had taken you! But now you have won the wreath after all, haven't you? And you shall sleep sweetly and not think of to-morrow!"

And Pelle fell asleep with his head on her girlish bosom. And as she lay there gazing at him with the eyes of a mother, he dreamed that Denmark's hundred thousand workers were engaged in building a splendid castle, and that he was the architect. And when the castle was finished he marched in at the head of the army of workers; singing they pa.s.sed through the long corridors, to fill the shining halls. But the halls were not there--the castle had turned into a prison! And they went on and on, but could not find their way out again.

IV. DAYBREAK

I

Out in the middle of the open, fertile country, where the plough was busy turning up the soil round the numerous cheerful little houses, stood a gloomy building that on every side turned bare walls toward the smiling world. No panes of gla.s.s caught the ruddy glow of the morning and evening sun and threw back its quivering reflection; three rows of barred apertures drank in all the light of day with insatiable avidity.

They were always gaping greedily, and seen against the background of blue spring sky, looked like holes leading into the everlasting darkness. In its heavy gloom the ma.s.s of masonry towered above the many smiling homes, but their peaceable inhabitants did not seem to feel oppressed. They ploughed their fields right up to the bare walls, and wherever the building was visible, eyes were turned toward it with an expression that told of the feeling of security that its strong walls gave.

Like a landmark the huge building towered above everything else. It might very well have been a temple raised to G.o.d's glory by a grateful humanity, so imposing was it; but if so, it must have been in by-gone ages, for no dwellings--even for the Almighty--are built nowadays in so barbaric a style, as if the one object were to keep out light and air!

The ma.s.sive walls were saturated with the dank darkness within, and the centuries had weathered their surface and made on it luxuriant cultures of fungus and mould, and yet they still seemed as if they could stand for an eternity.

The building was no fortress, however, nor yet a temple whose dim recesses were the abode of the unknown G.o.d. If you went up to the great, heavy door, which was always closed you could read above the arch the one word _Prison_ in large letters and below it a simple Latin verse that with no little pretentiousness proclaimed:

"I am the threshold to all virtue and wisdom; Justice flourishes solely for my sake."

One day in the middle of spring, the little door in the prison gate opened, and a tall man stepped out and looked about him with eyes blinking at the light which fell upon his ashen-white face. His step faltered and he had to lean for support against the wall; he looked as if he were about to go back again, but he drew a deep breath and went out on to the open ground.

The spring breeze made a playful a.s.sault upon him, tried to ruffle his prison-clipped, slightly gray hair, which had been curly and fair when last it had done so, and penetrated gently to his bare body like a soft, cool hand. "Welcome, Pelle!" said the sun, as it peeped into his distended pupils in which the darkness of the prison-cell still lay brooding. Not a muscle of his face moved, however; it was as though hewn out of stone. Only the pupils of his eyes contracted so violently as to be almost painful, but he continued to look earnestly before him.

Whenever he saw any one, he stopped and gazed eagerly, perhaps in the hope that it was some one coming to meet him.

As he turned into the King's Road some one called to him. He turned round in sudden, intense joy, but then his head dropped and he went on without answering. It was only a tramp, who was standing half out of a ditch in a field a little way off, beckoning to him. He came running over the ploughed field, crying hoa.r.s.ely: "Wait a little, can't you?

Here have I been waiting for company all day, so you might as well wait a little!"

He was a broad-shouldered, rather puffy-looking fellow, with a flat back and the nape of his neck broad and straight and running right up into his cap without forming any projection for the back of his head, making one involuntarily think of the scaffold. The bone of his nose had sunk into his purple face, giving a bull-dog mixture of brutality and stupid curiosity to its expression.

"How long have you been in?" he asked, as he joined him, breathless.

There was a malicious look in his eyes.

"I went in when Pontius Pilate was a little boy, so you can reckon it out for yourself," said Pelle shortly.

"My goodness! That was a good spell! And what were you copped for?"

"Oh, there happened to be an empty place, so they took me and put me in--so that it shouldn't stand empty, you know!"

The tramp scowled at him. "You're laying it on a little too thick! You won't get any one to believe that!" he said uncertainly. Suddenly he put himself in front of Pelle, and pushed his bull-like forehead close to the other's face. "Now, I'll just tell you something, my boy!" he said.

"I don't want to touch any one the first day I'm out, but you'd better take yourself and your confounded uppishness somewhere else; for I've been lying here waiting for company all day."

"I didn't mean to offend any one," said Pelle absently. He looked as if he had not come back to earth, and appeared to have no intention of doing anything.

"Oh, didn't you! That's fortunate for you, or I might have taken a color-print of your doleful face, however unwillingly. By the way, mother said I was to give you her love."

"Are you Ferdinand?" asked Pelle, raising his head.

"Oh, don't pretend!" said Ferdinand. "Being in gaol seems to have made a swell of you!"

"I didn't recognize you," said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the world around him.

"Oh, all right--if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it bashed in the evening after I'd buried mother. I was to give you her love, by the way."

"Thank you!" said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the "Ark" filled his mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. "Is it long since your mother died?" he asked sympathetically.

Ferdinand nodded. "It was a good thing, however," he said, "for now there's no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I'd made up my mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age, and I was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little robbery and got eight months. That was just after you got in--but of course you know that."

"No! How could I know it?"

"Well, I telegraphed it over to you. I was just opposite you, in Wing A, and when I'd reckoned out your cell, I bespoke the whole line one evening, and knocked a message through to you. But there was a sanctimonious parson at the corner of your pa.s.sage, one of those moral folk--oh, you didn't even know that, then? Well, I'd always suspected him of not pa.s.sing my message on, though a chap like that's had an awful lot of learning put into him. Then when I came out I said to myself that there must be an end to all this, for mother'd taken it very much to heart, and was failing. I managed to get into one of the streets where honest thieves live, and went about as a colporteur, and it all went very well. It would have been horribly mean if she'd died of hunger. And we had a jolly good time for six months, but then she slipped away all the same, and I can just tell you that I've never been in such low spirits as the day they put her underground in the cemetery. Well, I said to myself, there lies mother smelling the weeds from underneath, so you can just as well give it all up, for there's nothing more to trouble about now. And I went up to the office and asked for a settlement, and they cheated me of fifty subscribers, the rogues!

"Of course I went to the police: I was stupid enough to do that at that time. But they're all a lot of rogues together. They thought it wouldn't do to believe a word that I said, and would have liked to put me in prison at once; but for all they poked about they couldn't find a peg to hang their hat upon. 'He's managing to hide it well this time, the sly fellow!' they said, and let me go. But there soon was something, for I settled the matter myself, and you may take your oath my employers didn't get the best of the arrangement. You see there are two kinds of people--poor people who are only honest when they let themselves be robbed, and all the others. Why the devil should one go about like a shorn sheep and not rob back! Some day of course there'll be a bust-up, and then--'three years, prisoner!' I shall be in again before long."

"That depends upon yourself," said Pelle slowly.

"Oh, well, of course you can do _something_; but the police are always getting sharper, and the man isn't born who won't fall into the trap sooner or later."