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

will confirm what I say⁠—but the big engineer gentlemen are so clever!”

“But are you going⁠—again⁠—to send in a tender?” Morten looked at his father, horrified. The man nodded.

“But you aren’t good enough for them⁠—you know you aren’t! They just laugh at you!”

“This time I shall be the one to laugh,” retorted Jörgensen, his brow clouding at the thought of all the contempt he had had to endure.

“Of course they laugh at him,” said the old woman from the chimney-corner, turning her hawk-like head toward them; “but one must play at something. Peter must always play the great man!”

Her son did not reply.

“They say you know something about sketching, Pelle?” he said quietly. “Can’t you bring this into order a bit? This here is the breakwater⁠—supposing the water isn’t there⁠—and this is the basin⁠—cut through the middle, you understand? But I can’t get it to look right⁠—yet the dimensions are quite correct. Here above the waterline there will be big coping-stones, and underneath it’s broken stone.”

Pelle set to work, but he was too finicking.

“Not so exact!” said Jörgensen. “Only roughly!”

He was always sitting over his work when they came. From his wife they learned that he did not put in a tender, after all, but took his plans to those who had undertaken the contract and offered them his cooperation. She had now lost all faith in his schemes, and was in a state of continual anxiety. “He’s so queer⁠—he’s always taken up with only this one thing,” she said, shuddering. “He never drinks⁠—and he doesn’t go raging against all the world as he used to do.”

“But that’s a good thing,” said Morten consolingly.

“Yes, you may talk, but what do you know about it? If he looks after his daily bread, well, one knows what that means. But now, like this.⁠ ⁠… I’m so afraid of the reaction if he gets a setback. Don’t you believe he’s changed⁠—it’s only sleeping in him. He’s the same as ever about Karen; he can’t endure seeing her crooked figure; she reminds him always too much of everything that isn’t as it should be. She mustn’t go to work, he says, but how can we do without her help? We must live! I daren’t let him catch sight of her. He gets so bitter against himself, but the child has to suffer for it. And he’s the only one she cares anything about.”

Karen had not grown during the last few years; she had become even more deformed; her voice was dry and shrill, as though she had passed through a frozen desert on her way to earth. She was glad when Pelle was there and she could hear him talk; if she thought he would come in the evening, she would hurry home from her situation. But she never joined in the conversation and never took part in anything. No one could guess what was going on in her mind. Her mother would suddenly break down and burst into tears if her glance by chance fell upon her.

“She really ought to leave her place at once,” said her mother over and again. “But the doctor’s wife has one child after another, and then they ask so pleadingly if she can’t stay yet another half-year. They think great things of her; she is so reliable with children.”

“Yes, if it was Pelle, he’d certainly let them fall.” Karen laughed⁠—it was a creaking laugh. She said nothing more; she never asked to be allowed to go out, and she never complained. But her silence was like a silent accusation, destroying all comfort and intimacy.

But one day she came home and threw some money on the table. “Now I needn’t go to Doctor’s any more.”

“What’s the matter? Have you done something wrong?” asked the mother, horrified.

“The doctor gave me a box on the ear because I couldn’t carry Anna over the gutter⁠—she’s so heavy.”

“But you can’t be sent away because he has struck you! You’ve certainly had a quarrel⁠—you are so stubborn!”

“No; but I accidentally upset the perambulator with little Erik in it⁠—so that he fell out. His head is like a mottled apple.” Her expression was unchanged.

The mother burst into tears. “But how could you do such a thing?” Karen stood there and looked at the other defiantly. Suddenly her mother seized hold of her. “You didn’t do it on purpose? Did you do it on purpose?”

Karen turned away with a shrug of the shoulders and went up to the garret without saying good night. Her mother wanted to follow her.

“Let her go!” said the old woman, as though from a great distance. “You have no power over her! She was begotten in wrath.”

XV

All the winter Jens had smeared his upper lip with fowl’s dung in order to grow a moustache; now it was sprouting, and he found himself a young woman; she was nursemaid at the Consul’s. “It’s tremendous fun,” he said; “you ought to get one yourself. When she kisses me she sticks out her tongue like a little kid.” But Pelle wanted no young woman⁠—in the first place, no young woman would have him, branded as he was; and then he was greatly worried.

When he raised his head from his work and looked out sideways over the manure-sheds and pigsties, he saw the green half-twilight of the heart of the apple-tree, and he could dream himself into it. It was an enchanted world of green shadows and silent movement; countless yellow caterpillars hung there, dangling to and fro, each on its slender thread; chaffinches and yellowhammers swung themselves impetuously from bough to bough, and at every swoop snapped up a caterpillar; but these never became any fewer. Without a pause they rolled themselves down from the twigs, and hung there, so enticingly yellow, swinging to and fro in the gentle breath of the summer day, and waited to be gobbled up.

And deeper still in the green light⁠—as though on the floor of a green sea⁠—three brightly-clad maidens moved and played. Now and