Pelle the Conqueror, Martin Andersen Nexø [best fantasy books to read .TXT] 📗

It was like a dance on red-hot iron, so quickly did he pick up his feet, and spring from one place to another. The water spurted up from the pieces of ice as he touched them, and behind him stretched a crooked track of disturbed ice and water right back to the place where the boys stood and held their breath. There was nobody like Pelle, not one of them could do what he had done there! When with a final leap he threw himself upon the breakwater, they cheered him. Pelle had triumphed in his flight!

He lay upon the breakwater, exhausted and gasping for breath, and gazed without interest at a brig that had cast anchor off the village. A boat was rowing in⁠—perhaps with a sick man to be put in quarantine. The weather-beaten look of the vessel told of her having been out on a winter voyage, in ice and heavy seas.

Fishermen came down from the cottages and strolled out to the place where the boat would come in, and all the schoolchildren followed. In the stern of the boat sat an elderly, weather-beaten man with a fringe of beard round his face; he was dressed in blue, and in front of him stood a sea-chest. “Why, it’s Boatswain Olsen!” Pelle heard one fisherman say. Then the man stepped ashore, and shook hands with them all; and the fisherman and the schoolchildren closed round him in a dense circle.

Pelle made his way up, creeping along behind boats and sheds; and as soon as he was hidden by the school-building, he set off running straight across the fields to Stone Farm. His vexation burnt his throat, and a feeling of shame made him keep far away from houses and people. The parcel that he had had no opportunity of delivering in the morning was like a clear proof to everybody of his shame, and he threw it into a marl-pit as he ran.

He would not go through the farm, but thundered on the outside door to the stable. “Have you come home already?” exclaimed Lasse, pleased.

“Now⁠—now Madam Olsen’s husband’s come home!” panted Pelle, and went past his father without looking at him.

To Lasse it was as if the world had burst and the falling fragments were piercing into his flesh. Everything was failing him. He moved about trembling and unable to grasp anything; he could not talk, everything in him seemed to have come to a standstill. He had picked up a piece of rope, and was going backward and forward, backward and forward, looking up.

Then Pelle went up to him. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked harshly.

Lasse let the rope fall from his hand and began to complain of the sadness and poverty of existence. One feather fell off here, and another there, until at last you stood trampling in the mud like a featherless bird⁠—old and worn-out and robbed of every hope of a happy old age. He went on complaining in this way in an undertone, and it eased him.

Pelle made no response. He only thought of the wrong and the shame that had come upon them, and found no relief.

Next morning he took his dinner and went off as usual, but when he was halfway to school he lay down under a thorn. There he lay, fuming and half-frozen, until it was about the time when school would be over, when he went home. This he did for several days. Toward his father he was silent, almost angry. Lasse went about lamenting, and Pelle had enough with his own trouble; each moved in his own world, and there was no bridge between; neither of them had a kind word to say to the other.

But one day when Pelle came stealing home in this way, Lasse received him with a radiant face and weak knees. “What on earth’s the good of fretting?” he said, screwing up his face and turning his blinking eyes upon Pelle⁠—for the first time since the bad news had come. “Look here at the new sweetheart I’ve found! Kiss her, laddie!” And Lasse drew from the straw a bottle of gin, and held it out toward him.

Pelle pushed it angrily from him.

“Oh, you’re too grand, are you?” exclaimed Lasse. “Well, well, it would be a sin and a shame to waste good things upon you.” He put the bottle to his lips and threw back his head.

“Father, you shan’t do that!” exclaimed Pelle, bursting into tears and shaking his father’s arm so that the liquid splashed out.

“Ho-ho!” said Lasse in astonishment, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “She’s uncommonly lively, ho-ho!” He grasped the bottle with both hands and held it firmly, as if it had tried to get away from him. “So you’re obstreperous, are you?” Then his eye fell upon Pelle. “And you’re crying! Has anyone hurt you? Don’t you know that your father’s called Lasse⁠—Lasse Karlsson from Kungstorp? You needn’t he afraid, for Lasse’s here, and he’ll make the whole world answer for it.”

Pelle saw that his father was quickly becoming more fuddled, and ought to be put to bed for fear someone should come and find him lying there. “Come now, father!” he begged.

“Yes, I’ll go now. I’ll make him pay for it, if it’s old Beelzebub himself! You needn’t cry!” Lasse was making for the yard.

Pelle stood in front of him. “Now you must come with me, father! There’s no one to make pay for anything.”

“Isn’t there? And yet you’re crying! But the farmer shall answer to me for all these years. Yes, my fine landed gentleman, with your nose turned up at everyone!”

This made Pelle afraid. “But father, father!” he cried. “Don’t go up there! He’ll be in such a rage, he’ll turn us out! Remember you’re drunk!”

“Yes, of course I’m drunk, but there’s no harm in me.” He stood fumbling with the hook that fastened the lower half of the door.

It was wrong to lay a hand