Pelle the Conqueror Part 61

Jorgen Kofod, as a rule, came clumping in with great wooden shoes, and Jeppe used to scold him. "One wouldn't believe you've got a shoemaker for a brother!" he would say crossly; "and yet we all get our black bread from you."

"But what if I can't keep my feet warm now in those d.a.m.ned leather shoes? And I'm full through and through of gout--it's a real misery!"

The big baker twisted himself dolefully.

"It must be dreadful with gout like that," said Bjerregrav. "I myself have never had it."

"Tailors don't get gout," rejoined Baker Jorgen scornfully. "A tailor's body has no room to harbor it. So much I do know--twelve tailors go to a pound."

Bjerregrav did not reply.

"The tailors have their own topsy-turvy world," continued the baker. "I can't compare myself with them. A crippled tailor--well, even he has got his full strength of body."

"A tailor is as fine a fellow as a black-bread baker!" stammered Bjerregrav nervously. "To bake black bread--why, every farmer's wife can do that!"

"Fine! I believe you! h.e.l.l and blazes! If the tailor makes a cap he has enough cloth left over to make himself a pair of breeches. That's why tailors are always dressed so fine!" The baker was talking to the empty air.

"Millers and bakers are always rogues, everybody says." Old Bjerregrav turned to Master Andres, trembling with excitement. But the young master stood there looking gaily from one to the other, his lame leg dangling in the air.

"For the tailor nothing comes amiss--there's too much room in me!" said the baker, as though something were choking him. "Or, as another proverb says--it's of no more consequence than a tailor in h.e.l.l. They are the fellows! We all know the story of the woman who brought a full-grown tailor into the world without even knowing she was with child."

Jeppe laughed. "Now, that's enough, really; G.o.d knows neither of you will give in to the other."

"Well, and I've no intention of trampling a tailor to death, if it can anyhow be avoided--but one can't always see them." Baker Jorgen carefully lifted his great wooden shoes. "But they are not men. Now is there even one tailor in the town who has been overseas? No, and there were no men about while the tailor was being made. A woman stood in a draught at the front door, and there she brought forth the tailor." The baker could not stop himself when once he began to quiz anybody; now that Soren was married, he had recovered all his good spirits.

Bjerregrav could not beat this. "You can say what you like about tailors," he succeeded in saying at last. "But people who bake black bread are not respected as handicraftsmen--no more than the washerwoman!

Tailoring and shoemaking, they are proper crafts, with craftman's tests, and all the rest."

"Yes, shoemaking of course is another thing," said Jeppe.

"But as many proverbs and sayings are as true of you as of us," said Bjerregrav, desperately blinking.

"Well, it's no longer ago than last year that Master Klausen married a cabinet-maker's daughter. But whom must a tailor marry? His own serving-maid?"

"Now how can you, father!" sighed Master Andres. "One man's as good as another."

"Yes, you turn everything upside down! But I'll have my handicraft respected. To-day all sorts of agents and wool-merchants and other trash settle in the town and talk big. But in the old days the handicraftsmen were the marrow of the land. Even the king himself had to learn a handicraft. I myself served my apprenticeship in the capital, and in the workshop where I was a prince had learned the trade. But, hang it all, I never heard of a king who learned tailoring!"

They were capable of going on forever in this way, but, as the dispute was at its worst, the door opened, and Wooden-leg La.r.s.en stumped in, filling the workshop with fresh air. He was wearing a storm-cap and a blue pilot-coat. "Good evening, children!" he said gaily, and threw down a heap of leather ferrules and single boots on the window-bench.

His entrance put life into all. "Here's a playboy for us! Welcome home!

Has it been a good summer?"

Jeppe picked up the five boots for the right foot, one after another, turned back the uppers, and held heels and soles in a straight line before his eyes. "A bungler has had these in hand," he growled, and then he set to work on the casing for the wooden leg. "Well, did the layer of felt answer?" La.r.s.en suffered from cold in his amputated foot.

"Yes; I've not had cold feet any more."

"Cold feet!" The baker struck himself on the loins and laughed.

"Yes, you can say what you like, but every time my wooden leg gets wet I get a cold in the head!"

"That's the very deuce!" cried Jorgen, and his great body rolled like a hippopotamus. "A funny thing, that!"

"There are many funny things in the world," stammered Bjerregrav. "When my brother died, my watch stopped at that very moment--it was he who gave it me."

Wooden-leg La.r.s.en had been through the whole kingdom with his barrel-organ, and had to tell them all about it; of the railway-trains which travelled so fast that the landscape turned round on its own axis, and of the great shops and places of amus.e.m.e.nt in the capital.

"It must be as it will," said Master Andres. "But in the summer I shall go to the capital and work there!"

"In Jutland--that's where they have so many wrecks!" said the baker.

"They say everything is sand there! I've heard that the country is shifting under their feet--moving away toward the east. Is it true that they have a post there that a man must scratch himself against before he can sit down?"

"My sister has a son who has married a Jutland woman and settled down there," said Bjerregrav. "Have you seen anything of them?"

The baker laughed. "Tailors are so big--they've got the whole world in their waistcoat pocket. Well, and Funen? Have you been there, too?

That's where the women have such a pleasant disposition. I've lain before Svendborg and taken in water, but there was no time to go ash.o.r.e." This remark sounded like a sigh.

"Can you stand it, wandering so much?" asked Bjerregrav anxiously.

Wooden-leg La.r.s.en looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav's congenital club-foot--he had received his own injury at Heligoland, at the hands of an honorable bullet. "If one's sound of limb," he said, spitting on the floor by the window.

Then the others had to relate what had happened in town during the course of the summer; of the Finnish barque which had stranded in the north, and how the "Great Power" had broken out again. "Now he's sitting in the dumps under lock and key."

Bjerregrav took exception to the name they gave him; he called it blasphemy, on the ground that the Bible said that power and might belonged to G.o.d alone.

Wooden-leg La.r.s.en said that the word, as they had used it, had nothing to do with G.o.d; it was an earthly thing; across the water people used it to drive machinery, instead of horses.

"I should think woman is the greatest power," said Baker Jorgen, "for women rule the world, G.o.d knows they do! And G.o.d protect us if they are once let loose on us! But what do you think, Andres, you who are so book-learned?"

"The sun is the greatest power," said Master Andres. "It rules over all life, and science has discovered that all strength and force come from the sun. When it falls into the sea and cools, then the whole world will become a lump of ice."

"Then the sea is the greatest power!" cried Jeppe triumphantly. "Or do you know of anything else that tears everything down and washes it away? And from the sea we get everything back again. Once when I went to Malaga----"

"Yes, that really is true," said Bjerregrav, "for most people get their living from the sea, and many their death. And the rich people we have get all their money from the sea."

Jeppe drew himself up proudly and his gla.s.ses began to glitter. "The sea can bear what it likes, stone or iron, although it is soft itself! The heaviest loads can travel on its back. And then all at once it swallows everything down. I have seen ships which sailed right into the weather and disappeared when their time came."

"I should very much like to know whether the different countries float on the water, or whether they stand firm on the bottom of the sea. Don't you know that, Andres?" asked Bjerregrav.

Master Andres thought they stood on the bottom of the sea, far below the surface; but Uncle Jorgen said: "Nay! Big as the sea is!"

"Yes, it's big, for I've been over the whole island," said Bjerregrav self-consciously; "but I never got anywhere where I couldn't see the sea. Every parish in all Bornholm borders on the sea. But it has no power over the farmers and peasants--they belong to the land, don't they?"

"The sea has power over all of us," said La.r.s.en. "Some it refuses; they go to sea for years and years, but then in their old age they suffer from sea-sickness, and then they are warned. That is why Skipper Andersen came on sh.o.r.e. And others it attracts, from right away up in the country! I have been to sea with such people--they had spent their whole lives up on the island, and had seen the sea, but had never been down to the sh.o.r.e. And then one day the devil collared them and they left the plough and ran down to the sea and hired themselves out. And they weren't the worse seamen."

"Yes," said Baker Jorgen, "and all of us here have been to sea, and Bornholmers sail on all the seas, as far as a ship can go. And I have met people who had never been on the sea, and yet they were as though it was their home. When I sailed the brig _Clara_ for Skipper Andersen, I had such a lad on board as ordinary seaman. He had never bathed in the sea; but one day, as we were lying at anchor, and the others were swimming around, he jumped into the water too--now this is G.o.d's truth--as though he were tumbling into his mother's arms; he thought that swimming came of its own accord. He went straight to the bottom, and was half dead before we fished him up again."

"The devil may understand the sea!" cried Master Andres breathlessly.

"It is curved like an arch everywhere, and it can get up on its hind legs and stand like a wall, although it's a fluid! And I have read in a book that there is so much silver in the sea that every man in the whole world might be rich."