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

Pelle went forward in a sort of intoxication of power, produced by the sense of the multiplying hosts. He was like an embodiment of those hosts, and he heard their step echoing in his own; it was natural that the situation should assume large dimensions. He was a product of an ancient culture, but a culture that had always dwelt in the shadow, and was based on stern and narrow tenets, each of which summed up a lifetime of bitter experience. The need of light and sunshine, continually suppressed, had been accumulating, through illimitable years, until it had resulted in a monstrous tension. Now it had exploded, and was mounting dizzily upward. His mind was reeling in the heights, in a blinding cloud of light!

But fundamentally he was still the sturdy realist and stood with his feet on the earth! The generations beneath him had been disciplined by the cold, and had learned to content themselves with bare necessities; a lesson which they handed down to him, simply and directly, with no inheritance of frivolity. In his world, cause and effect were in a direct line; an obtrusive odor did not translate itself into a spectral chattering of the teeth. The result was in a direct line with the cause⁠—but their relation was often that of the match and the bonfire. Herein lay the strength of his imagination; this was why he could encompass all things with so simple a preparation.

He was not afraid to consider the fate of the masses; when he could not see ahead, his old fatalism came to his help. His words flamed high despite himself and kept the hope alive in many who did not themselves understand the meaning of the whole movement, but saw that its adherents grew ever more numerous, and that in other respects they were just as well off. Where he himself could not see he was like a lens that collects the half-darkness and gives it out again as a beam of light.

Morten he preferred to avoid. Pelle had gradually absorbed all the theories of the labor movement, and they comfortably filled his mind. And how could one accomplish more than by remaining in harmony with the whole? Morten had an unfruitful tendency to undermine the certainty of one’s mind; he always brought forth his words from his inner consciousness, from places where no one else had ever been, and he delivered them as though they had been God’s voice in the Bible, which always made people pause in their designs. Pelle respected his peculiar nature, which never marched with the crowd, and avoided him.

But his thoughts often returned to him. Morten had first thrown a light upon chaos⁠—upon the knowledge of Pelle’s world, the poor man’s world; and when he was confronted by any decisive question he involuntarily asked himself how Morten would have dealt with it.

At times they met at meetings called together by the workers themselves, and at which they both collaborated. Morten had no respect for the existing laws and little for the new. He did not play a very zealous part in the work of party organization, and was rather held at arm’s length by the leaders. But his relations with the man in the street were of the closest. He worked independently; there was scarcely his match in individual cases of need or injustice; and he was always laboring to make people think for themselves.

And they loved him. They looked up to Pelle and the rest, and made way for them with shining eyes; but they smilingly put themselves in Morten’s way. They wanted to press his hand⁠—he could scarcely make his way to the speaker’s platform. His pale face filled them with joy⁠—women and children hung on to him. When he passed through the streets of the poor quarters in his simple clothes, the women smiled at him. “That’s him, the master-journeyman, who is so good and so book-learned,” they would say. “And now he has sold all his books in order to help a poor child!” And they gave their own children a little push, and the children went up to him and held out their hands and followed him right to the end of the street.

When Pelle went now and again to the “Ark,” to see his brothers and sister, the news of his visit spread quickly through the building. “Pelle is here!” sounded from gallery to gallery, and they hurried up the stairs in order to nod to him and to seek to entice him to swallow a cup of coffee. Old Madam Frandsen had moved; she disappeared when Ferdinand came out of prison⁠—no one knew whither. Otherwise there were no changes. A few factory women left by night on account of their rent, and others had taken their places. And from time to time someone completed his term, and was carried out of the dark corridors and borne away on the dead-cart⁠—as always. But in the “Ark” there was no change to be observed.

It happened one day that he went over to call on Widow Johnsen. She looked very melancholy sitting there as she turned her old soldiers’ trousers and attended to Hanne’s child, which promised to be a fine girl. She had aged; she was always sitting at home and scolding the child; when Pelle visited her he brought a breath of fresh air into her joyless existence. Then she recalled the excursion to the forest, and the cozy evenings under the hanging lantern, and sighed. Hanne never looked at Pelle. When she came running home from the factory, she had no eyes for anything but her little girl, who threw herself upon her mother and immediately wanted to play. For the remainder of the day the child was close under her eyes, and Hanne had to hold her hand as she moved about, and play with her and the doll.

“Far up the