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

you could read above the arch the one word “Prison” in large letters and below it a simple Latin verse that with no little pretentiousness proclaimed:

“I am the threshold to all virtue and wisdom;
Justice flourishes solely for my sake.”

One day in the middle of spring, the little door in the prison gate opened, and a tall man stepped out and looked about him with eyes blinking at the light which fell upon his ashen-white face. His step faltered and he had to lean for support against the wall; he looked as if he were about to go back again, but he drew a deep breath and went out on to the open ground.

The spring breeze made a playful assault upon him, tried to ruffle his prison-clipped, slightly gray hair, which had been curly and fair when last it had done so, and penetrated gently to his bare body like a soft, cool hand. “Welcome, Pelle!” said the sun, as it peeped into his distended pupils in which the darkness of the prison-cell still lay brooding. Not a muscle of his face moved, however; it was as though hewn out of stone. Only the pupils of his eyes contracted so violently as to be almost painful, but he continued to look earnestly before him. Whenever he saw anyone, he stopped and gazed eagerly, perhaps in the hope that it was someone coming to meet him.

As he turned into the King’s Road someone called to him. He turned round in sudden, intense joy, but then his head dropped and he went on without answering. It was only a tramp, who was standing half out of a ditch in a field a little way off, beckoning to him. He came running over the ploughed field, crying hoarsely: “Wait a little, can’t you? Here have I been waiting for company all day, so you might as well wait a little!”

He was a broad-shouldered, rather puffy-looking fellow, with a flat back and the nape of his neck broad and straight and running right up into his cap without forming any projection for the back of his head, making one involuntarily think of the scaffold. The bone of his nose had sunk into his purple face, giving a bulldog mixture of brutality and stupid curiosity to its expression.

“How long have you been in?” he asked, as he joined him, breathless. There was a malicious look in his eyes.

“I went in when Pontius Pilate was a little boy, so you can reckon it out for yourself,” said Pelle shortly.

“My goodness! That was a good spell! And what were you copped for?”

“Oh, there happened to be an empty place, so they took me and put me in⁠—so that it shouldn’t stand empty, you know!”

The tramp scowled at him. “You’re laying it on a little too thick! You won’t get anyone to believe that!” he said uncertainly. Suddenly he put himself in front of Pelle, and pushed his bull-like forehead close to the other’s face. “Now, I’ll just tell you something, my boy!” he said. “I don’t want to touch anyone the first day I’m out, but you’d better take yourself and your confounded uppishness somewhere else; for I’ve been lying here waiting for company all day.”

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” said Pelle absently. He looked as if he had not come back to earth, and appeared to have no intention of doing anything.

“Oh, didn’t you! That’s fortunate for you, or I might have taken a color-print of your doleful face, however unwillingly. By the way, mother said I was to give you her love.”

“Are you Ferdinand?” asked Pelle, raising his head.

“Oh, don’t pretend!” said Ferdinand. “Being in gaol seems to have made a swell of you!”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Pelle earnestly, suddenly recalled to the world around him.

“Oh, all right⁠—if you say so. It must be the fault of my nose. I got it bashed in the evening after I’d buried mother. I was to give you her love, by the way.”

“Thank you!” said Pelle heartily. Old memories from the “Ark” filled his mind and sent his blood coursing through his veins once more. “Is it long since your mother died?” he asked sympathetically.

Ferdinand nodded. “It was a good thing, however,” he said, “for now there’s no one I need go and have a bad conscience about. I’d made up my mind that she deserved to have things comfortable in her old age, and I was awfully careful; but all the same I was caught for a little robbery and got eight months. That was just after you got in⁠—but of course you know that.”

“No! How could I know it?”

“Well, I telegraphed it over to you. I was just opposite you, in Wing A, and when I’d reckoned out your cell, I bespoke the whole line one evening, and knocked a message through to you. But there was a sanctimonious parson at the corner of your passage, one of those moral folk⁠—oh, you didn’t even know that, then? Well, I’d always suspected him of not passing my message on, though a chap like that’s had an awful lot of learning put into him. Then when I came out I said to myself that there must be an end to all this, for mother’d taken it very much to heart, and was failing. I managed to get into one of the streets where honest thieves live, and went about as a colporteur, and it all went very well. It would have been horribly mean if she’d died of hunger. And we had a jolly good time for six months, but then she slipped away all the same, and I can just tell you that I’ve never been in such low spirits as the day they put her underground in the cemetery. Well, I said to myself, there lies mother smelling the weeds from underneath, so you can just as well give it all up, for there’s nothing more to trouble about now. And I went up