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

Overhead the hearse-driver came staggering out onto his gallery. “The princess there has run a beam into her body,” he rumbled, in his good-natured bass. “What a pity I’m not a midwife! They’ve got hold of the wrong end of it!”

“Clear off into your hole and hold your tongue, you body-snatcher!” cried Madam Johnsen, spitting with rage. “You’ve got to stick your brandy-nose into everything!”

He stood there, half drunk, leaning over the rail, babbling, teasing, without returning Madam Johnsen’s vituperation. But then little Marie flung up a window and came to her assistance, and up from her platform Ferdinand’s mother emerged. “How many hams did you buy last month? Fetch out your bear hams, then, and show us them! He kills a bear for every corpse, the drunkard!” From all sides they fell upon him. He could do nothing against them, and contented himself with opening his eyes and his mouth and giving vent to a “Ba-a-a!” Then his red-haired wife came out and hailed him in.

From the moment when the gray morning broke there was audible a peculiar note in the buzzing of the “Ark,” a hoarse excitement, which thrust all care aside. Down the long corridors there was a sound of weeping and scrubbing; while the galleries and the dark wooden staircases were sluiced with water. “Look out there!” called somebody every moment from somewhere, and then it was a question of escaping the downward-streaming flood. During the whole morning the water poured from one gallery to another, as over a millrace.

But now the “Ark” stood freezing in its own cleanliness, with an expression that seemed to say the old warren didn’t know itself. Here and there a curtain or a bit of furniture had disappeared from a window⁠—it had found its way to the pawn shop in honor of the day. What was lacking in that way was made up for by the expectation and festive delight on the faces of the inmates.

Little fir-trees peeped out of the cellar entries in the City Ward, and in the marketplace they stood like a whole forest along the wall of the prison. In the windows of the basement-shops hung hearts and colored candles, and the grocer at the corner had a great Christmas goblin in his window⁠—it was made of red and gray wool-work and had a whole cat’s skin for its beard.

On the stairs of the “Ark” the children lay about cleaning knives and forks with sand sprinkled on the steps.

Pelle sat over his work and listened in secret. His appearance usually had a quieting effect on these crazy outbursts of the “Ark,” but he did not want to mix himself up with this affair. And he had never even dreamed that Hanne’s mother could be like this! She was like a fury, turning her head, quick as lightning, now to one side, now to the other, and listening to every sound, ready to break out again!

Ah, she was protecting her child now that it was too late! She was like a spitting cat.

“The youngest of all the lordlin’s,”

sang the children down in the court. That was Hanne’s song. Madam Johnsen stood there as though she would like to swoop down on their heads. Suddenly she flung her apron over her face and ran indoors, sobbing.

“Ah!” they said, and they slapped their bellies every time an odor of something cooking streamed out into the court. Every few minutes they had to run out and buy five or ten öre worth of something or other; there was no end to the things that were needed in preparation for Christmas Eve. “We’re having lovely red beetroot!” said one little child, singing, making a song of it⁠—“We’re having lovely red beetroot, aha, aha, aha!” And they swayed their little bodies to and fro as they scoured.

“Frederik!” a sharp voice cried from one of the corridors. “Run and get a score of firewood and a white roll⁠—a ten-öre one. But look out the grocer counts the score properly and don’t pick out the crumb!”

Madam Olsen with the warm wall was frying pork. She couldn’t pull her range out onto the gallery, but she did let the pork burn so that the whole courtyard was filled with bluish smoke. “Madam Olsen! Your pork is burning!” cried a dozen women at once.

“That’s because the frying-pan’s too small!” replied Frau Olsen, thrusting her red head out through the balusters. “What’s a poor devil to do when her frying-pan’s too small?” And Madam Olsen’s frying-pan was the biggest in the whole “Ark”!

Shortly before the twilight fell Pelle came home from the workshop. He saw the streets and the people with strange eyes that diffused a radiance over all things; it was the Christmas spirit in his heart. But why? he asked himself involuntarily. Nothing in particular was in store for him. Today he would have to work longer than usual, and he would not be able to spend the evening with Ellen, for she had to be busy in her kitchen, making things jolly for others. Why, then, did this feeling possess him? It was not a memory; so far as he could look back he had never taken part in a genuine cheerful Christmas Eve, but had been forced to content himself with the current reports of such festivities. And all the other poor folks whom he met were in the same mood as he himself. The hard questioning look had gone from their faces; they were smiling to themselves as they went. Today there was nothing of that wan, heavy depression which commonly broods over the lower classes like the foreboding of disaster; they could not have looked more cheerful had all their hopes been fulfilled! A woman with a featherbed in her arms passed him and disappeared into the pawnshop; and she looked extremely well pleased. Were they really so cheerful just because they were going to have a bit of a feast,