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

earn his own keep. To protect the infirm old man at every point and make his life easy⁠—that was just what he wanted. And Pelle was by no means disposed to doubt that he could do it. In the midst of his childish collapse he took upon himself all the duties of a strong man.

As he lay there, woebegone, playing with a couple of bits of firewood, the elder-boughs behind the well parted, and a pair of big eyes stared at him wonderingly. It was only Manna.

“Did they beat you⁠—or why are you crying?” she asked earnestly.

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-shells 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 amusement; 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 everyone 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 stitch 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 Lasse is neglecting himself,” he thought, and he pulled the featherbed from under the sleeper’s head. A strange voice began to upbraid him. “Then isn’t this Lasse?” said Pelle. His knees were shaking under him.

“Lasse?” cried the new cowherd, as he sat upright. “Do you say Lasse? Have you come to fetch that child of God, Mr. Devil? They’ve been here already from Hell 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 Lasse 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 muffled-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