Pelle the Conqueror Part 153

"No, where is he?" asked Pelle eagerly.

"He's a swell now. He's got a business in Adel Street; but he won't enjoy it long."

"Why not? Is there anything wrong with his affairs?"

"Nothing more than that some day we'll pull the whole thing down upon all your heads. There'll soon be quite a number of us. I say, you might speak one evening in our a.s.sociation, and tell us something about your prison life. I think it would interest them. We don't generally have outsiders, for we speak for ourselves; but I don't think there'd be any difficulty in getting you introduced."

Pelle promised.

"He's a devil-may-care fellow, isn't he?" exclaimed Morten when he had shut the door on Peter, "but he's no fool. Did you notice that he never asked for anything? They never do. When they're hungry they go up to the first person they meet and say: 'Let me have something to eat!' It's all the same to them what's put into their mouths so long as it's satisfying, and they never thank gratefully. Nothing affects them.

They're men who put the thief above the beggar. I don't dislike it really; there's a new tone in it. Perhaps our well-behaved ruminant's busy doing away with one stomach and making up the spare material into teeth and claws."

"If only they'd come forward and do work!" said Pelle. "Strong words don't accomplish much."

"How's it going with your peaceable revolution?" asked Morten with a twinkle in his eye. "Do you see any progress in the work?"

"Oh, yes, it's slow but sure. Rome wasn't built in a day. I didn't think though that you were interested in it."

"I think you're on the right tack, Pelle," answered Morten seriously.

"But let the young ones light the fire underneath, and it'll go all the quicker. That new eventualities crop up in this country is no disadvantage; the governing body may very well be made aware that there's gunpowder under their seats. It'll immensely strengthen their sense of responsibility! Would you like to see Johanna? She's been wanting very much to see you. She's ill again unfortunately."

"Ellen sent me out to propose that she should come to stay with us in the country. She thinks the child must be a great trouble to you and cannot be properly looked after here either."

"It's very kind of your wife to think of it, but hasn't she enough to do already?"

"Oh, Ellen can manage a great deal," said Pelle heartily. "You would be giving her a pleasure."

"Then I'll say 'Thank you' for the offer," exclaimed Morten. "It'll be a great relief to me, if only she can stand the moving. It isn't that she gives me any trouble now, for we get on capitally together. Johanna is good and manageable, really a splendid character in spite of her spoiling. You won't have any difficulty with her. And I think it'll be good for her to be away from me here, and be somewhere where there's a woman to see to her--and children. She doesn't get much attention here."

They went in to her and found her asleep, her pale face covered with large drops of moisture. "It's exhaustion," whispered Morten. "She's not got much strength yet." Their presence made her sleep disturbed, and she tossed from side to side and then, suddenly opening her eyes, gazed about her with an expression of wild terror. In a moment she recognized them and smiled; and raising herself a little she held out both her hands to Pelle with a charming expression of childish coquetry.

"Tell me about the house out there and Boy Comfort," she said, making room for him on the edge of the bed. "It's so tiresome here, and Mr.

Morten's so serious." And she threw a glance of defiance at him.

"Is he?" said Pelle. "That must be because he writes books."

"No, but I must keep up a little dignity," said Morten, a.s.suming a funny, schoolmasterish expression. "This young lady's beginning to be saucy!"

Johanna lay and laughed to herself, her eyes travelling from one to the other of them. "He ought to have a pair of spectacles, and then he'd be like a real one," she said. She spoke hardly above a whisper, it was all she had strength for; but her voice was mischievous.

"You must come to us if he's so bad," said Pelle, "and then you can play with the children and lie in the sunshine out in the garden. You don't know how lovely it is there now? Yes, I'm really in earnest," he continued, as she still smiled. "Ellen asked me to come and say so."

She suddenly became grave and looked from the one to the other; then looking down, and with her face turned away, she asked: "Will Morten be there too?"

"No, Johanna, I must stay here, of course; but I'll come out to see you."

"Every day?" Her face was turned to the wall, and she scratched the paper with her nails.

"I shall come and see my little sweetheart just as often as I can," said Morten, stroking her hair.

The red blood suffused her neck in a sudden wave, and was imperceptibly absorbed in the paleness of her skin, like a dying ember. Hanne's blood came and went in the same way for the merest trifle. Johanna had inherited her mother's bashfulness and unspeakable charm, and also her capricious temper.

She lay with her back turned toward them and made no reply to their persuasions. It was not easy to say whether she even heard them, until suddenly she turned to Morten with an expression of hatred on her face.

"You don't need to trouble," she said, with glowing eyes; "you can easily get rid of me!"

Morten only looked at her sorrowfully, but Pelle was angry. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself for taking it like that," he said. "Is that all the thanks Morten gets for what he's done? I must say you're a grateful child!"

Johanna took the scolding without moving a muscle of her face, but when he ceased she quietly took his hand and laid it over her delicate, thin face, which it quite covered. There she lay peeping out at him and Morten between the large fingers, with a strangely resigned expression that was meant to be roguish. "I know it was horrid of me," she said dully, moving Pelle's middle finger backward and forward in front of her eyes so that she squinted; "but I'll do what you tell me. Elle-Pelle, Morten-Porten-I can talk the P-language!" And she laughed an embarra.s.sed laugh.

"You don't know how much better and happier you'll be when you get out to Pelle's," said Morten.

"I could easily get up and do the work of the house, so that you didn't need to have a woman," she whispered, gazing at him pa.s.sionately with her big eyes. "I'm well enough now."

"My dear child, that's not what I mean at all! It's for your sake. Don't you understand that?" said Morten earnestly, bending over her.

Johanna's gaze wandered round hopelessly, as if she had given up all thought of being understood any more.

"I don't think we'll move her against her will," said Morten, as he went down with Pelle. "She is so capricious in her moods. I think, too, I should miss her, for she's a good little soul. When she's up she goes creeping about and is often quite touching in her desire to make me comfortable. And suddenly recollections of her former life awaken in her and darken her mind; she's still very mistrustful and afraid of being burdensome. But she needs the companionship of women, some one to whom she can talk confidentially. She has too much on her mind for a child."

"Couldn't you both move out to us? You can have the two upstairs rooms."

"That's not a bad idea," exclaimed Morten. "May I have two or three days to think it over? And my love to Ellen and the children!"

XIII

When the workshop closed, Pelle often went on working for an hour or two in the shop, getting the accounts straight and arranging the work for the following day in the intervals of attending to customers. A little before six he closed the shop, mounted his bicycle and hastened home with longing for the nest in his heart.

Every one else seemed to feel as he did. There was a peculiar homeward current in the traffic of the streets. Cyclists overtook him in whole flocks, and raced in shoals in front of the trams, which looked as if they squirted them away from the lines as they worked their way along with incessant, deafening ringing, bounding up and down under the weight of the overfilled platforms.

Crowds of men and women were on their way out, and met other crowds whose homes were in the opposite quarter. On the outskirts of the town the factory whistles were crowing like a choir of giant c.o.c.ks, a single one beginning, the others all joining in. Sooty workmen poured out of the gates, with beer-bottles sticking out of coat-pockets and dinner handkerchiefs dangling from a finger. Women who had been at work or out making purchases, stood with their baskets on their arms, waiting for their husbands at the corner of the street. Little children tripping along hand in hand suddenly caught sight of a man far off in the crowd, and set off at a run to throw themselves at his legs.

Sister often ran right across the fields to meet her father, and Ellen stood at the gate of "Daybreak" and waited. "Good-day, Mr.

Manufacturer!" she cried as he approached. She was making up for so much now, and was glowing with health and happiness. It was no use for Pelle to protest, and declare that in his world there were only workmen; she would not give up the t.i.tle. He was the one who directed the whole thing, and she did not mind about the fellowship. She was proud of him, and he might call himself an errand-boy if he liked; men must always have some crochet or other in their work, or else it would not satisfy them. The arrangement about the equal division she did not understand, but she was sure that her big, clever husband deserved to have twice as much as any of the others. She did not trouble her head about that, however; she lived her own life and was contented and happy.

Pelle had feared that she would tire of the country, and apparently she did not take to it. She weeded and worked in the garden with her customary energy, and by degrees acquired a fair knowledge of the work; but it did not seem to afford her any peculiar enjoyment. It was no pleasure to her to dig her fingers into the mould. Pelle and the children throve here, and that determined her relations to the place; but she did not strike root on her own account. She could thrive anywhere in the world if only they were there; and their welfare was hers. She grew out from them, and had her own wonderful growth inward.

Within her there were strange hidden forces that had nothing to do with theories or systems, but produced the warmth that bore up the whole.

Pelle no longer desired to force his way in there. What did he care about logical understanding between man and woman? It was her heart with which he needed to be irradiated. He required to be understood by his friends. His great satisfaction in being with, for instance, Morten, was that in perfect unanimity they talked until they came to a stopping-place, and if they were then silent their thoughts ran on parallel lines and were side by side when they emerged once more. But even if he and Ellen started from the same point, the shortest pause would take their thoughts in different directions; he never knew where she would appear again. No matter how well he thought he knew her, she always came up just as surprisingly and unexpectedly behind him. And was it not just that he loved? Why then contend with it on the basis of the claims of a poor logic?

She continued to be just as unfathomable, no matter how much of her he thought he had mastered. She became greater and greater with it, and she brought him a new, strange world--the mysterious unknown with which he had always had to strive, allowed itself to be tenderly embraced. He no longer demanded the whole of her; in his inmost soul probably every human being was lonely. He guessed that she was going through her own development in concealment, and wondered where she would appear again.

It had formerly been a grief to him that she did not join the Movement; she was not interested in political questions and the suffrage. He now dimly realized that that was just her strength, and in any case he did not wish her otherwise. She seldom interfered definitely with what he did, and why should she? She exerted a silent influence upon everything he did, stamped each of his thoughts from the moment they began to shoot up. For the very reason that she did not know how to discuss, she could not be refuted; what to him was downright logic had no effect whatever upon her. He did not get his own thoughts again stale from her lips, and did not wish to either; her wonderful power over him lay in the fact that she rested so securely on her own, and answered the most crushing arguments with a smile. Pelle was beginning to doubt as to the value of superiority of intellect; it seemed to have undisputed rule over the age, but did not accomplish chiefly good. As compared with Ellen's nature, it seemed to him poor. The warmth in a kiss convinced her better than a thousand sensible reasons, and yet she seldom made a mistake.

And she herself gave out warmth. They went to her, both he and the children, when there was anything wrong. She did not say much, but she warmed. She still always seemed to him like a pulse that beat, living and palpable, out from the invisible, with a strangely tranquil speech.

When his head was hot and tired with adverse happenings, there was nothing more delightful than to rest it upon her bosom and listen, only half awake, to the dull, soothing murmur within like that of the earth's springs when, in his childhood, he laid his ear to the gra.s.s.