Pelle the Conqueror Part 144

He could not bear to think this; he had become cautious about deciding for others. The money might be obtained, if in no other way, by giving security in his furniture and tools. If the plan did not succeed, it would be certain ruin; but perhaps Ellen thought him a wet blanket.

One day he threw down his leather ap.r.o.n and went out to raise the money. It was late when he came home, and Ellen was standing at the door waiting for him with a face of anxiety.

"Here's the money, my dear! What'll you give me for it?" he said gaily, and counted out into her hand a hundred and eighty krones (10) in notes. Ellen gazed in surprise at the money; she had never held so large a sum in her hands before.

"Wherever did you get all that money from?" she asked at last.

"Well, I've trudged all day from place to place," said Pelle cheerfully, "and at last I was directed to a man in Blaagaard Street. He gave me two hundred krones (11) on the furniture."

"But there's only one hundred and eighty (10) here!"

"Oh, well, he took off twenty krones (1 2_s_.). The loan's to be repaid in instalments of twenty krones (1 2_s_.) a month for fifteen months.

I had to sign a statement that I had borrowed three hundred krones (16 10_s_.), but then we shan't have to pay any interest."

Ellen stared at him in amazement. "Three hundred krones, and we've only got a hundred and eighty, Pelle!" But she suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him pa.s.sionately. "Thank you!" she whispered. He felt quite dazed; it was not like her to be so vehement.

She had plenty to do, after hiring the room, in putting it in order. The loose beams had to be fixed up, and the walls plastered and whitewashed a little. The old peasant was willing enough to let it, but he would not hear of going to any expense. Ellen at last succeeded, however, in getting him to agree to pay half the repairs on condition that she took the room for a year and payed the rent in advance. "We can get my brother Frederik to do some of the repairs on Sunday morning," she said to Pelle, "and then perhaps we shall get it done for nothing." She was altogether very energetic.

There was need for it too. The rent swallowed up the hundred krones (5 10_s_.), and then there were all the things that had to be got. She bought a quant.i.ty of cheap print, and hung it up so as to divide one side of the room into a number of small compartments each provided with a second-hand bed and hay mattress, and a washing-stand. "Artistes are not so particular," she said, "and I'm sure they'll be glad to have the room to practise in." Finally there were the two little anterooms, which were to be furnished a little better for more particular artistes. There was not nearly enough money, and some of the things had to be taken on credit.

At last it was all ready to receive the guests. It looked quite smart for the amount spent on it, and Pelle could not but admire her cleverness in making a little go a long way. The only thing now left to do was to catch the birds, but here Ellen's practical sense ceased to act; she had no idea how to proceed. "We must advertise," she said, and counted up her remaining pence.

Pelle laughed at her. A lot of good it would be to advertise for people who were goodness knows where on railways and steamers! "What shall we do then?" she said, looking anxiously to him for help. After all, he was the man for it all.

Well, first of all there must be a German placard down on the street-door, and then they must make the rooms known. Pelle had studied both German and English in the prison, and he made up the placard himself. He had cards printed, and left them in the artistes' tavern at the corner of Vesterbro Street, went there himself two or three times after midnight when the artistes gathered there when their work was finished, and stationed himself at the stage-entrances of the music-halls. He soon came to look upon it as a task to be performed, like everything with which he occupied himself; and this _should_ succeed!

Ellen looked on wondering and helpless. She had all at once grown frightened, and followed each of his movements with anxious attention.

Soon, however, things began to move. The girls whose washing Ellen had done took an interest in the undertaking, and sent lodgers to her; and La.s.se Frederik, who had the run of the circus stables, often returned with some Russian groom or other who did a turn as a rustic dancer or a Cossack horseman. Sometimes there lived with her people from the other side of the world where they walk with their heads down--fakirs and magicians from India and j.a.pan, snake-charmers from Tetuan, people with shaven heads or a long black pigtail, with oblique, sorrowful eyes, loose hips and skin that resembled the greenish leather that Pelle used for ladies' boots. Sister was afraid of them, but it was the time of his life to La.s.se Frederik. There were fat Tyrolese girls, who came three by three; they jodeled at the music-halls, and looked dreadful all day, much to Ellen's despair. Now and then a whole company would come, and then trapezes and rings creaked in the great room, Spanish dancers went through their steps, and jugglers practised new feats.

They were all people who should preferably not be seen off the stage.

Ellen often went to the circus and music-halls now, but could never quite believe that the performers were the same men and women who went about at home looking like scarecrows. Most of them required nothing except that the lodging should be cheap; they boarded themselves, and goodness knows what they lived on. Some of them simply lighted a fire on a sheet of iron on the floor and made a mixture of rice or something of the sort. They could not eat Danish food, Pelle said. Sometimes they went away without paying, and occasionally took something with them; and they often broke things. There was no fortune to be made out of them, but in the meantime Ellen was satisfied as long as she could keep it going, so that it paid the rent and instalments on the loan and left her a little for her trouble. It was her intention to weed out the more worthless subjects, and raise the whole tone of the business when it had got into good order.

"You really might refuse the worst work now, and save yourself a little," she said to Pelle when he was sitting over some worn-out factory shoes that had neither sole nor upper. Most boots and shoes had done service somewhere else before they reached this neighborhood; and when they came to Pelle there was not much left of them. "Say no to it!"

said Ellen. "It's far too hardly earned for you! And we shall get on now without having to take everything." In the kindness of her heart she wanted him to be able to read his books, since he had a weakness for them. Her intention was good, but Pelle had no thought of becoming an aesthetic idler, who let his wife keep him while he posed as a learned man. There were enough of them in the neighborhood, and the inhabitants looked up to them; but they were not interesting. They were more or less another form of drunkard.

To Pelle books were a new power, grown slowly out of his sojourn in prison. He had sat there alone with his work, thrown on himself for occupation, and he had examined himself in every detail. It was like having companionship when he brought to light anything new and strange in himself; and one day he chanced upon the mistiness of his own being, and discovered that it consisted of experience that others had gone through before him. The Bible, which always lay on the prisoner's table for company, helped him; its words had the sound of a well-known voice that reminded him strongly of Father La.s.se's in his childhood. From the Bible he went on further and discovered that the serious books were men who sat in solitude like himself, and spoke out.

Was solitude so dreadful then when you had such company? Pelle was no longer able to comprehend his own fear of it. As a child he had been a creature in the widest sense, and found companionship in everything; he could converse with trees, animals, and stones. Those fibers had withered, and no longer conveyed nourishment; but then he became one with the ma.s.ses, and thought and felt exactly as they did. That was crumbling away too now; he was being isolated distinctly, bit by bit, and he was interested in discovering a plan in it. He had made Nature subject to him even as a child, and had afterward won the ma.s.ses! It was solitude now that had to be taken, and he himself was going about in the midst of it, large and wonderful! It was already leaving indelible traces in his mind, although he had seen nothing of it yet. He felt strangely excited, very much as he had felt when, in his childhood, he arrived in Bornholm with his father and could see nothing, but heard the movement of thronging life behind the mist. A new and unknown world, full of wonders and throbbing with antic.i.p.ation, would meet him in there.

Pelle's action was not due to his own volition. He might as well try to lift himself up by his hair as determine that now he would be a human being by himself. It was an awakening of new powers. He no longer let sunshine and rain pa.s.s unnoticed over his head. A strange thing happened to him--he looked wonderingly at everything that he had formerly pa.s.sed by as commonplace, and saw it all in a new, brilliant light. He had to go all over it from the beginning, look at every detail. How wonderfully everything was connected, sorrow and joy and apparent trifles, to make him, Pelle, who had ruled over hundreds of thousands and yet had to go to prison in order to feel himself rich! Something had been ignited in him that could never be extinguished, a sacred fire to which everything must bear fuel, whether it would or not. He could not be conquered now; he drew strength from infinity itself.

The bare cell--three paces one way and six the other--with its tiny window and the mysterious peephole in the door which was like a watchful eye upon one always, how much it had held! It had always been the lot of the poor man to create worlds out of the void, beautiful mirages which suddenly broke and threw him back even poorer and more desolate. But this lasted. All the threads of life seemed to be joined together in the bare cell. It was like the dark, underground place in large buildings where the machinery is kept that admits and excludes light and heat to the whole block. There he discovered how rich and varied life is.

Pelle went about in a peculiarly elevated frame of mind. He felt that something greater and finer than himself had taken up its abode within him and would grow on to perfection there.

It was a new being that yet was himself; it remained there and drew nourishment from everything that he did. He went about circ.u.mspectly and quietly, with an introspective expression as though he were weighing everything: there was so much that was not permissible because it might injure _it_! There were always two of them now--Pelle and this wonderful, invisible ego, which lay securely and weightily within him like a living thing, with its roots in the darkness.

Pelle's relations to books were deeply grounded: he had to find out what the world meant now. He was a little distrustful of works of fiction; you got at their subject-matter too easily, and that could not be right.

They were made up, too! He needed real stuff, facts. There were great s.p.a.ces in his brain that longed to be filled with a tangible knowledge of things. His favorite reading was historical works, especially social history; and at present he read everything that came in his way, raw and unsweetened; it would have to sort itself out. It was a longing that had never been satisfied, and now seemed insatiable.

He minded his work punctiliously, however. He had made it a principle never to touch a book as long as any work lay waiting unfinished on the floor. In prison he had dreamt of a reasonable working-day of--for instance--eight hours, so that he would have time and strength to occupy himself with intellectual matters; but now he took it off his night's sleep instead. This was at any rate a field out of which they need not try to keep him; he would have his share in the knowledge of the times.

He felt it was a weapon. The poor man had long enough retired willingly into the corner for want of enlightenment, and whenever he put out his head he was laughed back again. Why did he not simply wrest the prerogative from the upper cla.s.ses? It cost only toil, and in that coin he was accustomed to pay! He was scarcely deficient in ability; as far as Pelle could see at present, almost all the pioneers of the new state of things came from the lower cla.s.ses.

He discovered with pleasure that his inward searching did not carry him away from the world, for far in there he came out again into the light--the light itself! He followed the secret laws for his own inward being, and found himself once more deep in the question of the welfare of the mult.i.tude. His practical sense required this confirmation of the conditions. There were also outward results. Even now history could no longer be used to light him and his ideas home; he knew too much. And his vision grew from day to day, and embraced an ever-widening horizon.

Some day he would simply take the magic word from the trolls and wake the giant with it!

He worked hard and was as a rule full of confidence. When the last of the artistes came home from their _cafe_, he was often sitting working by the light of his shoemaker's lamp. They would stop before the open bas.e.m.e.nt window and have a chat with him in their broken Danish. His domestic circ.u.mstances were somewhat straitened; the instalments in repayment of the loan, and the debt on the furniture still swallowed all that they were able to sc.r.a.pe together, and Pelle had no prospect of getting better work. But work is the bearer of faith, and he felt sure that a way would open out if only he kept on with it unweariedly.

He took Ellen's unspoken mistrust of his projects quietly. He felt himself to be greater than she in this; she could not reach up to the level of his head!

VI

Pelle was awake as early as four o'clock, although he had gone to bed late. He slept lightly at this time, when the summer night lay lightly upon his eyelids. He stole out into the kitchen and washed himself under the tap, and then went down to his work. The gray spirit of the night was still visible down in the street, but a tinge of red was appearing above the roofs. "The sun's rising now over the country," he thought, recalling the mornings of his childhood, the fields with their sheen of silvery dew, and the sun suddenly coming and changing them into thousands of sparkling diamond drops. Ah, if one could once more run bare-footed, if a little shrinkingly, out into the dewy gra.s.s, and shout a greeting to the dawning day: "Get up, Sun! Pelle is here already!"

The night-watchman came slowly past the open window on his way home.

"Up already?" he exclaimed in a voice hoa.r.s.e with the night air, as he nodded down to Pelle. "Well, it's the early bird that catches the worm!

You'll be rich one of these days, shoemaker!" Pelle laughed; he _was_ rich!

He thought of his wife and children while he worked. It was nice to think of them sleeping so securely while he sat here at work; it emphasized the fact that he was their bread-winner. With every blow of his hammer the home grew, so he hammered away cheerfully. They were poor, but that was nothing in comparison with the fact that if he were taken away now, things would go to pieces. He was the children's Providence; it was always "Father's going to," or "Father said so." In their eyes he was infallible. Ellen too began to come to him with her troubles; she no longer kept them to herself, but recognized that he had the broader back.

It was all so undeserved--as if good spirits were working for him.

Shameful though it was that the wife should work to help to keep the family, he had not been able to exempt her from it. And what had he done for the children? It was not easy to build everything up at once from a bare foundation, and he was sometimes tempted to leave something alone so as to accomplish the rest the more quickly. As it was now, he was really nothing! Neither the old Pelle nor the new, but something indeterminate, in process of formation, something that was greatly in need of indulgence! A removing van full of furniture on its way to a new dwelling.

He often enough had occasion to feel this from outside; both old enemies and old friends looked upon him as a man who had gone very much down in the world. Their look said: "Is that really all that remains of that stalwart fellow we once knew?" His own people, on the other hand, were lenient in their judgment. "Father hasn't got time," Sister would say in explanation to herself when she was playing about down in his work-room--"but he will have some day!" And then she would picture to herself all the delightful things that would happen then. It affected Pelle strangely; he would try to get through this as quickly as possible.

It was a dark and pathless continent into which he had ventured, but he was now beginning to find his way in it. There were ridges of hills that constantly repeated themselves, and a mountain-top here and there that was reached every time he emerged from the thicket. It was good to travel there. Perhaps it was the land he and the others had looked for.

When he had got through, he would show it to them.

Pelle had a good memory, and remembered all that he read. He could quote much of it verbatim, and in the morning, before the street had wakened, he used to go through it all in his mind while he worked. It surprised him to find how little history concerned itself with his people; it was only in quite recent times that they had been included. Well, that did not trouble him! The Movement _was_ really something new, and not one of history's everlasting repet.i.tions. He now wanted to see its idea in print, and one day found him sitting with a strange solemnity in the library with Marx and Henry George in front of him. Pelle knew something about this subject too, but this was nevertheless like drawing up a net from the deep; a brilliant world of wonders came up with it. There were incontrovertible logical proofs that he had a right apprehension, though it had been arrived at blindly. The land of fortune was big enough for all; the greater the number that entered it, the larger did it become.

He felt a desire to hit out again and strike a fresh blow for happiness!

Suddenly an avalanche seemed to fall from the top to the bottom of the house, a brief, all-pervading storm that brought him back to his home.

It was only La.s.se Frederik ushering in the day; he took a flight at each leap, called a greeting down to his father, and dashed off to his work, b.u.t.toning the last b.u.t.ton of his braces as he ran. A little later Ellen came down with coffee.

"Why didn't you call me when you got up?" she said sulkily. "It's not good to sit working so long without having had something to eat."

Pelle laughed and kissed her good-morning. "Fine ladies don't get up until long after their husbands," he said teasingly.

But Ellen would not be put off with a jest. A proper wife would be up before her husband and have something ready for him. "I _will_ have you call me!" she said decidedly, her cheeks very red. It suited her to get roused now and then.

While he drank his coffee, she sat and talked to him about her affairs, and they discussed the plans for the day, after which she went upstairs to help the children to dress.

Later in the morning Pelle laid aside his work, dressed himself and went out to deliver it. While he was out he would go into the Library and look up something in the large dictionaries.

The street lived its own quiet life here close up to the greater thoroughfares--the same life day after day. The fat second-hand dealer from Jutland was standing as usual at his door, smoking his wooden pipe.