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

Stolpe, striking the table. “But you won’t do it, you shan’t do it! God damn me, I couldn’t live through the shame of seeing the comrades condemning my own brother in the open street! And I shall be with them! I shall be the first to give you a kick, if you are my brother!” He was quite beside himself.

“Well, well, we can still talk it over,” said the carpenter quietly. “But now you know⁠—I didn’t want to do anything behind your back.” And then he went.

Stolpe paced up and down the room, moving from one object to another. He picked them up and put them down again, quite unthinkingly. His hands were trembling violently; and finally he went to the other room and shut himself in. After a time his wife entered the room. “You had better go, Pelle! I don’t think father is fit for company today. He’s lying there quite gray in the face⁠—if he could only cry even! Oh, those two brothers have always been so much to each other till now! They were so united in everything!”

Pelle went; he was thinking earnestly. He could see that Stolpe, in his integrity, would consider it his duty to treat his brother more harshly than others, dearly as he loved him; perhaps he himself would undertake the picketing of the place where his brother went to work.

Out by the lakes he met a squad of pickets who were on their way out of the city; he accompanied them for some distance, in order to make certain arrangements. Across the road a young fellow came out of a doorway and slunk round the corner. “You there, stop!” cried one of the comrades. “There he is⁠—the toff!” A few pickets followed him down Castle Street and came back leading him among them. A crowd began to form round the whole party, women and children speedily joining it.

“You are not to do anything to him,” said Pelle decisively.

“God knows no one wants to touch him!” they retorted. For a while they stood silently gazing at him, as though weighing him in their minds; then one after another spat at him, and they went their way. The fellow went silently into a doorway and stood there wiping the spittle from his face with his sleeve. Pelle followed him in order to say a kind word to him and lead him back into the organization. The lad pulled himself up hastily as Pelle approached.

“Are you coming to spit at me?” he said contemptuously. “You forgot it before⁠—why didn’t you do it then?”

“I don’t spit at people,” said Pelle, “but your comrades are right to despise you. You have left them in the lurch. Come with me, and I’ll enter you in the organization again, and no one shall molest you.”

“I am to go about as a culprit and be taunted⁠—no, thanks!”

“Do you prefer to injure your own comrades?”

“I ask for permission to look after my old mother. The rest of you can go to the devil. My mother isn’t going to hang about courtyards singing, and picking over the dustbins, while her son plays the great man! I leave that to certain other people!”

Pelle turned crimson. He knew this allusion was meant for Father Lasse; the desperate condition of the old man was lurking somewhere in his mind like an ingrowing grief, and now it came to the surface. “Dare you repeat what you said?” he growled, pressing close up to the other.

“And if I were married I shouldn’t let my wife earn my daily bread for me⁠—I should leave that to the pimps!”

Oho! That was like the tattlers, to blacken a man from behind! Evidently they were spreading all sorts of lying rumors about him, while he had placed all that he possessed at their disposal. Now Pelle was furious; the leader could go to hell! He gave the fellow a few sound boxes on the ear, and asked him which he would rather do⁠—hold his mouth or take some more?

Morten appeared in the doorway⁠—this had happened in the doorway of the house in which he worked. “This won’t do!” he whispered, and he drew Pelle away with him. Pelle could make no reply; he threw himself on Morten’s bed. His eyes were still blazing with anger at the insult, and he needed air.

“Things are going badly here now,” said Morten, looking at him with a peculiar smile.

“Yes, I know very well you can’t stand it⁠—all the same, they must hold together.”

“And supposing they don’t get better conditions?”

“Then they must accept the consequences. That’s better than the whole Cause should go to the wall!”

“Are those the new ideas? I think the ignorant have always had to take the consequences! And there has never been lacking someone to spit on them!” said Morten sadly.

“But, listen!” cried Pelle, springing to his feet. “You’ll please not blame me for spitting at anybody⁠—the others did that!” He was very near losing his temper again, but Morten’s quiet manner mastered him.

“The others⁠—that was nothing at all! But it was you who spat seven times over into the poor devil’s face⁠—I was standing in the shop, and saw it.”

Pelle stared at him, speechless. Was this the truth-loving Morten who stood there lying?

“You say you saw me spit at him?”

Morten nodded. “Do you want to accept the applause and the honor, and sneak out of the beastliness and the destruction? You have taken a great responsibility on yourself, Pelle. Look, how blindly they follow you⁠—at the sight of your bare face, I’m tempted to say. For I’m not myself quite sure that you give enough of yourself. There is blood on your hands⁠—but is any of it your own blood?”

Pelle sat there heavily pondering; Morten’s words always forced his thoughts to follow paths they had never before known. But now he understood him; and a dark shadow passed over his face, which left its traces behind it. “This business has cost me my home,” he said quietly. “Ellen cares