Pelle the Conqueror Part 47

Pelle turned his face away.

Manna shook her hair back and looked at him fixedly. "Did they beat you?

What? If they did, I shall go in and scold them hard!"

"What is it to you?"

"People who don't answer aren't well-behaved."

"Oh, hold your row!"

Then he was left in peace; over at the back of the garden Manna and her two younger sisters were scrambling about the trellis, hanging on it and gazing steadfastly across the yard at him. But that was nothing to him; he wanted to know nothing about them; he didn't want petticoats to pity him or intercede for him. They were saucy jades, even if their father had sailed on the wide ocean and earned a lot of money. If he had them here they would get the stick from him! Now he must content himself with putting out his tongue at them.

He heard their horrified outcry--but what then? He didn't want to go scrambling about with them any more, or to play with the great conch-sh.e.l.ls and lumps of coral in their garden! He would go back to the land and look after his old father! Afterward, when that was done, he would go out into the world himself, and bring such things home with him--whole shiploads of them!

They were calling him from the workshop window. "Where in the world has that little blighter got to?" he heard them say. He started, shrinking; he had quite forgotten that he was serving his apprenticeship. He got on his feet and ran quickly indoors.

Pelle had soon tidied up after leaving off work. The others had run out in search of amus.e.m.e.nt; he was alone upstairs in the garret. He put his worldly possessions into his sack. There was a whole collection of wonderful things--tin steamboats, railway-trains, and horses that were hollow inside--as much of the irresistible wonders of the town as he had been able to obtain for five white krone pieces. They went in among the washing, so that they should not get damaged, and then he threw the bag out of the gable-window into the little alley. Now the question was how he himself should slip through the kitchen without arousing the suspicions of Jeppe's old woman; she had eyes like a witch, and Pelle had a feeling that every one who saw him would know what he was about.

But he went. He controlled himself, and sauntered along, so that the people should think he was taking washing to the laundrywoman; but he could only keep it up as far as the first turning; then he started off as fast as he could go. He was homesick. A few street-boys yelled and threw stones after him, but that didn't matter, so long as he only got away; he was insensible to everything but the remorse and homesickness that filled his heart.

It was past midnight when he at last reached the outbuildings of Stone Farm. He was breathless, and had a st.i.tch in his side. He leaned against the ruined forge, and closed his eyes, the better to recover himself.

As soon as he had recovered his breath, he entered the cowshed from the back and made for the herdsman's room. The floor of the cowshed felt familiar to his feet, and now he came in the darkness to the place where the big bull lay. He breathed in the scent of the creature's body and blew it out again--ah, didn't he remember it! But the scent of the cowherd's room was strange to him. "Father La.s.se is neglecting himself,"

he thought, and he pulled the feather-bed from under the sleeper's head.

A strange voice began to upbraid him. "Then isn't this La.s.se?" said Pelle. His knees were shaking under him.

"La.s.se?" cried the new cowherd, as he sat upright. "Do you say La.s.se?

Have you come to fetch that child of G.o.d, Mr. Devil? They've been here already from h.e.l.l and taken him with them--in the living body they've taken him there with them--he was too good for this world, d'ye see? Old Satan was here himself in the form of a woman and took him away. You'd better go there and look for him. Go straight on till you come to the devil's great-grandmother, and then you've only got to ask your way to the hairy one."

Pelle stood for a while in the yard below and considered. So Father La.s.se had gone away! And wanted to marry, or was perhaps already married. And to Karna, of course. He stood bolt-upright, sunk in intimate memories. The great farm lay hushed in moonlight, in deepest slumber, and all about him rose memories from their sleep, speaking to him caressingly, with a voice like that contented purring, remembered from childhood, when the little kittens used to sleep upon his pillow, and he would lay his cheek against their soft, quivering bodies.

Pelle's memory had deep roots. Once, at Uncle Kalle's, he had laid himself in the big twins' cradle and had let the other children rock him--he was then fully nine years old--and as they rocked him a while the surroundings began to take hold of him, and he saw a smoky, raftered ceiling, which did not belong to Kalle's house, swaying high over his head, and he had a feeling that a m.u.f.fled-up old woman, wrapped in a shawl, sat like a shadow at the head of the cradle, and rocked it with her foot. The cradle jolted with the over-vigorous rocking, and every time the rocking foot slipped from the footboard it struck on the floor with the sound of a sprung wooden shoe. Pelle jumped up--"she b.u.mped so," he said, bewildered. "What? No, you certainly dreamed that!" Kalle looked, smiling, under the rockers. "b.u.mped!" said La.s.se. "That ought to suit you first-rate! At one time, when you were little, you couldn't sleep if the cradle didn't b.u.mp, so we had to make the rockers all uneven. It was almost impossible to rock it. Bengta cracked many a good wooden shoe in trying to give you your fancy."

The farmyard here was like a great cradle, which swayed and swayed in the uncertain moonlight, and now that Pelle had once quite surrendered himself to the past, there was no end to the memories of childhood that rose within him. His whole existence pa.s.sed before him, swaying above his head as before, and the earth itself seemed like a dark speck in the abysm of s.p.a.ce.

And then the crying broke out from the house--big with destiny, to be heard all over the place, so that Kongstrup slunk away shamefaced, and the other grew angry and ungovernable. ... And La.s.se ... yes, where was Father La.s.se?

With one leap, Pelle was in the brew-house, knocking on the door of the maid's room.

"Is that you, Anders?" whispered a voice from within, and then the door opened, and a pair of arms fastened themselves about him and drew him in. Pelle felt about him, and his hands sank into a naked bosom--why, it was yellow-haired Marie!

"Is Karna still here?" he asked. "Can't I speak to Karna a moment?"

They were glad to see him again; and yellow-haired Marie patted his cheeks quite affectionately, and just before that she kissed him too.

Karna could scarcely recover from her surprise; he had acquired such a townsman's air. "And now you are a shoemaker too, in the biggest workshop in the town! Yes, we've heard; Butcher Jensen heard about it on the market. And you have grown tall and townified. You do hold yourself well!" Karna was dressing herself.

"Where is Father La.s.se?" said Pelle; he had a lump in his throat only from speaking of him.

"Give me time, and I'll come out with you. How fine you dress now! I should hardly have known you. Would you, Marie?"

"He's a darling boy--he always was," said Marie, and she pushed at him with her arched foot--she was now in bed again.

"It's the same suit as I always had," said Pelle.

"Yes, yes; but then you held yourself different--there in town they all look like lords. Well, shall we go?"

Pelle said good-by to Marie affectionately; it occurred to him that he had much to thank her for. She looked at him in a very odd way, and tried to draw his hand under the coverlet.

"What's the matter with father?" said Pelle impatiently, as soon as they were outside.

Well, La.s.se had taken to his heels too! He couldn't stand it when Pelle had gone. And the work was too heavy for one. Where he was just at the moment Karna could not say. "He's now here, now there, considering farms and houses," she said proudly. "Some fine day he'll be able to take you in on his visit to town."

"And how are things going here?" inquired Pelle.

"Well, Erik has got his speech back and is beginning to be a man again--he can make himself understood. And Kongstrup and his wife, they drink one against the other."

"They drink together, do they, like the wooden shoemaker and his old woman?"

"Yes, and so much that they often lie in the room upstairs soaking, and can't see one another for the drink, they're that foggy. Everything goes crooked here, as you may suppose, with no master. 'Masterless, defenceless,' as the old proverb says. But what can you say about it--they haven't anything else in common! But it's all the same to me--as soon as La.s.se finds something I'm off!"

Pelle could well believe that, and had nothing to say against it. Karna looked at him from head to foot in surprise as they walked on. "They feed you devilish well in the town there, don't they?"

"Yes--vinegary soup and rotten greaves. We were much better fed here."

She would not believe it--it sounded too foolish. "But where are all the things they have in the shop windows--all the meats and cakes and sweet things? What becomes of all them?"

"That I don't know," said Pelle grumpily; he himself had racked his brains over this very question. "I get all I can eat, but washing and clothes I have to see to myself."

Karna could scarcely conceal her amazement; she had supposed that Pelle had been, so to speak, caught up to Heaven while yet living. "But how do you manage?" she said anxiously. "You must find that difficult. Yes, yes, directly we set out feet under our own table we'll help you all we can."

They parted up on the high-road, and Pelle, tired and defeated, set out on his way back. It was broad daylight when he got back, and he crawled into bed without any one noticing anything of his attempted flight.

III

Little Nikas had washed the blacking from his face and had put on his best clothes; he wanted to go to the market with a bundle of washing, which the butcher from Aaker was to take home to his mother, and Pelle walked behind him, carrying the bundle. Little Nikas saluted many friendly maidservants in the houses of the neighborhood, and Pelle found it more amusing to walk beside him than to follow; two people who are together ought to walk abreast. But every time he walked beside the journeyman the latter pushed him into the gutter, and finally Pelle fell over a curbstone; then he gave it up.

Up the street the crazy watchmaker was standing on the edge of his high steps, swinging a weight; it was attached to the end of a long cord, and he followed the swinging of the pendulum with his fingers, as though he were timing the beats. This was very interesting, and Pelle feared it would escape the journeyman.

"The watchmaker's making an experiment," he said cheerfully.

"Stop your jaw!" said the journeyman sharply. Then it occurred to Pelle that he was not allowed to speak, so he closed his mouth tight.

He felt the bundle, in order to picture to himself what the contents were like. His eyes swept all the windows and the side streets, and every moment he carried his free hand to his mouth, as though he were yawning, and introduced a crumb of black bread, which he had picked up in the kitchen. His braces were broken, so he had continually to puff out his belly; there were hundreds of things to look at, and the coal-merchant's dog to be kicked while, in all good faith, he snuffed at a curbstone.

A funeral procession came toward them, and the journeyman pa.s.sed it with his head bared, so Pelle did the same. Eight at the back of the procession came Tailor Bjerregrav with his crutch; he always followed every funeral, and always walked light at the back because his method of progression called for plenty of room. He would stand still and look on the ground until the last of the other followers had gone a few steps in advance, then he would set his crutch in front of him, swing himself forward for a s.p.a.ce, and then stand still again. Then he would swing forward again on his lame legs, and again stand still and watch the others, and again take a few paces, looking like a slowly wandering pair of compa.s.ses which was tracing the path followed by the procession.