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

this way, but, as the dispute was at its worst, the door opened, and Wooden-leg Larsen 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?” Larsen 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 Jörgen, 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 Larsen 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 amusement 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 ashore.” This remark sounded like a sigh.

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

Wooden-leg Larsen looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav’s congenital clubfoot⁠—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 God alone.

Wooden-leg Larsen said that the word, as they had used it, had nothing to do with God; 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 Jörgen, “for women rule the world, God knows they do! And God 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 glasses 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 Jörgen 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 Larsen. “Some it refuses; they go to sea for years and years, but then in their old age they suffer from seasickness, and then they are warned. That is why Skipper Andersen came on shore. 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 shore. 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 Jörgen, “and all of us here have