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

what a lot of money! Well, you aren’t poor!” He stood there, not knowing what to believe, his hand resting on Pelle’s shoulder.

“It’s right,” whispered Pelle. “I’ve reckoned it up exactly. And the master mustn’t suspect me⁠—I’ll never do it again.”

Master Andres made a gesture of refusal with his hand, and wanted to speak, but at that very moment he was attacked by a paroxysm of coughing. “You young devil!” he groaned, and leaned heavily on Pelle; his face was purple. Then came a fit of sickness, and the sweat beaded his face. He stood there for a little, gasping for breath while his strength returned, and then he slipped the money into Pelle’s hand and pushed him out of the room.

Pelle was greatly dejected. His uprightness was unrewarded, and what had become of his vindication? He had been so glad to think that he would shake himself free of all the disgrace. But late in the afternoon the master called him into the cutting-out room. “Here, Pelle,” he said confidentially, “I want to renew my lottery ticket; but I’ve no money. Can you lend me those ten kroner for a week?” So it was all as it should be; his one object was to put the whole disgrace away from him.

Jens and Morten helped him in that. There were three of them now; and Pelle had a feeling that he had a whole army at his back. The world had grown no smaller, no less attractive, by reason of the endless humiliations of the year. And Pelle knew down to the ground exactly where he stood, and that knowledge was bitter enough. Below him lay the misty void, and the bubbles which now and again rose to the surface and broke did not produce in him any feeling of mystical wonder as to the depths. But he did not feel oppressed thereby; what was, was so because it must be. And over him the other half of the round world revolved in the mystery of the blue heavens, and again and again he heard its joyous Forward! On!

IX

In his loneliness Pelle had often taken his way to the little house by the cemetery, where Due lived in two little rooms. It was always a sort of consolation to see familiar faces, but in other respects he did not gain much by his visits; Due was pleasant enough, but Anna thought of nothing but herself, and how she could best get on. Due had a situation as coachman at a jobmaster’s, and they seemed to have a sufficiency.

“We have no intention of being satisfied with driving other people’s horses,” Anna would say, “but you must crawl before you can walk.” She had no desire to return to the country.

“Out there there’s no prospects for small people, who want something more than groats in their belly and a few rags on their back. You are respected about as much as the dirt you walk on, and there’s no talk of any future. I shall never regret that we’ve come away from the country.”

Due, on the contrary, was homesick. He was quite used to knowing that there was a quarter of a mile between him and the nearest neighbor, and here he could hear, through the flimsy walls, whether his neighbors were kissing, fighting, or counting their money. “It is so close here, and then I miss the earth; the pavements are so hard.”

“He misses the manure⁠—he can’t come treading it into the room,” said Anna, in a superior way; “for that was the only thing there was plenty of in the country. Here in the town too the children can get on better; in the country poor children can’t learn anything that’ll help them to amount to something; they’ve got to work for their daily bread. It’s bad to be poor in the country!”

“It’s worse here in town,” said Pelle bitterly, “for here only those who dress finely amount to anything!”

“But there are all sorts of ways here by which a man can earn money, and if one way doesn’t answer, he can try another. Many a man has come into town with his naked rump sticking out of his trousers, and now he’s looked up to! If a man’s only got the will and the energy⁠—well, I’ve thought both the children ought to go to the municipal school, when they are older; knowledge is never to be despised.”

“Why not Marie as well?” asked Pelle.

“She? What? She’s not fitted to learn anything. Besides, she’s only a girl.”

Anna, like her brother Alfred, had set herself a lofty goal. Her eyes were quite bright when she spoke of it, and it was evidently her intention to follow it regardless of consequences. She was a loud-voiced, capable woman with an authoritative manner; Due simply sat by and smiled and kept his temper. But in his inmost heart, according to report, he knew well enough what he wanted. He never went to the public-house, but came straight home after work; and in the evening he was never happier than when all three children were scrambling over him. He made no distinction between his own two youngsters and the six-year-old Marie, whom Anna had borne before she married him.

Pelle was very fond of little Marie, who had thrived well enough so long as her child-loving grandparents had had her, but now she was thin and had stopped growing, and her eyes were too experienced. She gazed at one like a poor housewife who is always fretted and distressed, and Pelle was sorry for her. If her mother was harsh to her, he always remembered that Christmas-tide evening when he first visited his Uncle Kalle, and when Anna, weeping and abashed, had crept into the house, soon to be a mother. Little Anna, with the mind of a merry child, whom everybody liked. What had become of her now?

One evening, as Morten was not at liberty, he ran thither. Just as he was