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

could lay about him in that fashion. It was impossible to say where his blows were going to fall; but they all went home. Pelle stood by for a moment, mouth and eyes open in the fury of the fray; then he, too, tumbled into the midst of it, and the three dock-laborers were soon biting the dust.

“Damn it all, why did you interfere!” said Pelle crossly, when it was over, as he stood pulling his collar straight.

“I don’t know,” said Howling Peter. “But it does one no harm to bestir one’s self a bit for once!”

After the heat of the battle they had all but forgotten the man originally attacked; he lay huddled up at the foot of a timber-stack and made no sound. They got him on his legs again, but had to hold him upright; he stood as limp as though asleep, and his eyes were staring stupidly. He was making a heavy snoring sound, and at every breath the blood made two red bubbles at his nostrils. From time to time he ground his teeth, and then his eyes turned upward and the whites gleamed strangely in his coal-blackened face.

The sailor scolded him, and that helped him so far that he was able to stand on his feet. They drew a red rag from his bulging jacket-pocket, and wiped the worst of the blood away. “What sort of a fellow are you, damn it all, that you can’t stand a drubbing?” said Per Kofod.

“I didn’t call for help,” said the man thickly. His lips were swollen to a snout.

“But you didn’t hit back again! Yet you look as if you’d strength enough. Either a fellow manages to look after himself or he sings out so that others can come to help him. D’ye see, mate?”

“I didn’t want to bring the police into it; and I’d earned a thrashing. Only they hit so damned hard, and when I fell they used their clogs.”

He lived in the Saksogade, and they took each an arm. “If only I don’t get ill now!” he groaned from time to time. “I’m all a jelly inside.” And they had to stop while he vomited.

There was a certain firm for which he and his mates had decided no longer to unload, as they had cut down the wages offered. There were only four of them who stuck to their refusal; and what use was it when others immediately took their place? The four of them could only hang about and play the gentleman at large; nothing more came of it. But of course he had given his word⁠—that was why he had not hit back. The other three had found work elsewhere, so he went back to the firm and ate humble pie. Why should he hang about idle and killing time when there was nothing to eat at home? He was damned if he understood these new ways; all the same, he had betrayed the others, for he had given his word. But they had struck him so cursedly hard, and had kicked him in the belly with their clogs.

He continued rambling thus, like a man in delirium, as they led him along. In the Saksogade they were stopped by a policeman, but Per Kofod quickly told him a story to the effect that the man had been struck on the head by a falling crane. He lived right up in the attics. When they opened the door a woman who lay there in childbed raised herself up on the iron bedstead and gazed at them in alarm. She was thin and anemic. When she perceived the condition of her husband she burst into a heartrending fit of crying.

“He’s sober,” said Pelle, in order to console her; “he has only got a bit damaged.”

They took him into the kitchen and bathed his head over the sink with cold water. But Per Kofod’s assistance was not of much use; every time the woman’s crying reached his ears he stopped helplessly and turned his head toward the door; and suddenly he gave up and tumbled head-foremost down the back stairs.

“What was really the matter with you?” asked Pelle crossly, when he, too, could get away. Per was waiting at the door for him.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear her hymn-singing, you blockhead! But, anyhow, you saw her sitting up in bed and looking like wax? It’s beastly, I tell you; it’s infamous! He’d no need to go making her cry like that! I had the greatest longing to thrash him again, weak as a baby though he was. The devil⁠—what did he want to break his word for?”

“Because they were starving, Per!” said Pelle earnestly. “That does happen at times in this accursed city.”

Kofod stared at him and whistled. “Oh, Satan! Wife and child, and the whole lot without food⁠—what? And she in childbed. They were married, right enough, you can see that. Oh, the devil! What a honeymoon! What misery!”

He stood there plunging deep into his trouser pockets; he fetched out a handful of things: chewing-tobacco, bits of flock, broken matches, and in the midst of all a crumpled ten-kroner note. “So I thought!” he said, fishing out the note. “I was afraid the girls had quite cleaned me out last night! Now Pelle, you go up and spin them some sort of a yarn; I can’t do it properly myself; for, look you, if I know that woman she won’t stop crying day and night for another twenty-four hours! That’s the last of my pay. But⁠—oh, well, blast it⁠ ⁠… we go to sea tomorrow!”

“She stopped crying when I took her the money,” said Pelle, when he came down again.

“That’s good. We sailors are dirty beasts; you know; we do our business into china and eat our butter out of the tarbucket; all the same, we⁠—I tell you, I should have left the thing alone and used the money to have made a jolly night of it tonight.⁠ ⁠…” He was suddenly silent; he chewed at