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

the right to vote. He couldn’t get even with the business in any other way than by putting a rope over the lamp-hook in the ceiling. I’ve looked at the matter myself all round, you see, but I can’t make anything of it.” He walked on a little without speaking, and then said: “Would you hit out properly now? There’s need of a kind word.”

Pelle did not answer; it was all too sad. He did not even hear the question.

“It was chiefly what you said that made me believe in a better time coming,” Jacob continued persistently, “or perhaps my brother and me would have done differently and things might have gone better with both of us. Well, I suppose you believed it yourself, but what do you think now? Do you still believe in that about the better time? For I should like to be an honest man again.”

Of course Pelle still believed in it.

“For there aren’t many who’d give a brass farthing for that story now; but if you say so⁠—I’ve got faith in you all the same. Others wouldn’t have the brains to think of anything for themselves, and it was like the cork going off, so to speak, for us poor people when you went away; everything went flat. If anything happens, it doesn’t do for a poor devil to look on; and every time anyone wants to complain, he gets a voting-paper pushed into his hand and they say: Go and vote and things will be altered! But confound it, that can’t rouse a fellow who’s not learnt anything from the time he was small. They’d taken a lot of trouble about me now⁠—whitewashing me so that I could use my right to vote; but they can’t make me so that no one looks down on me. And so I say, Thank you for nothing! But if you still believe in it, so will I, for I’ve got faith in you. Here’s my hand on it!”

Jacob was the same simple, good-hearted fellow that he had been in former days when he lived in the attic in the “Ark.” There might very well have been a little more evil in him. But his words warmed Pelle’s heart. Here was someone who needed him, and who still believed in him although he had been maimed in the fight. He was the first of the disabled ones, and Pelle was prepared to meet with more and to hear their accusations. Many of them would turn against him now that he was powerless, but he would have to put up with that. He felt as though he had the strength for it now.

Pelle went into the street again, letting his feet carry him where they would, while he thought of the past and the future. They had been so certain that a new age would dawn upon them at once! The new, great truth had been so self-evident that it seemed as if all the old conditions must fall before it as at a magic word; and now the everyday reality had worn the gloss off it. As far as he could see, nothing particular had happened, and what was there to happen? That was not the way to overturn systems. From Merry Jacob’s opinion he could draw his own, but he was no longer despondent, he did not mind what happened. He would have had no objection to challenge the opinion of his old comrades at once, and find out how he stood.

He had passed through several side streets when he suddenly found himself in front of a large, well-lighted building with a broad flight of steps, up which people were flocking. It was one of the workingmen’s halls, and festivities were being held in it to celebrate the elections. Pelle went, by force of habit, with the stream.

He remained at the back of the hall, and used his eyes as though he had just dropped down from some other planet; strange feelings welled up within him when he found himself once more among the people. For a moment he felt a vehement desire to cry: Here I am! and stretch out his arms to them all; but he quickly controlled it, and his face regained its stony composure.

This then was his army from the conflict. They were decidedly better clothed than on the day when he led them in triumph into the city as its true citizens; they carried their heads higher too, did not get behind one another, but claimed room for themselves. They had more to eat, he could see, for their faces shone more; and their eyes had become indolent in expression, and no longer looked hungrily out into uncertainty but moved quietly and unhesitatingly from place to place. They were prepared for another long march, and perhaps it was as well; great things did not happen in the twinkling of an eye.

He was aroused from his thoughts by discovering that the people nearest to him were turning and gazing at him. The number of faces looking round at him increased, and the words, “Pelle is here!” passed in a murmur through the crowd. Hundreds of eyes were directed toward him questioningly and searchingly, some of them in evident expectation of something unusual happening at once.

The movement became general⁠—a wave that carried him resistlessly to the front of the hall and up onto the platform. A great roar like the breaking of surf arose on all sides of him and stupefied his sensitive brain in which silence sat always putting together a fine new world about which no one else knew. Suddenly everything was still, so still that the solitude was again audible to his ear.

Pelle spoke quietly and with confidence. His words were a greeting to them from a world they as yet did not know, the great solitude through which man must move alone⁠—without loud-voiced companions to encourage him⁠—and listen until he hears his own heart beat within it. He sits in