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

of herself, often slept out in the open, and stole now and then, but soon learned to earn money for herself. When it became cold she went as scullery-maid to the inns or maid-of-all-work to the women in Dannebrog Street. Strange to say, she always eluded the police. At first there were two or three times when she started to return to her grandmother, but went no farther than the stairs; she was afraid of being punished, and could not endure the thought of having to listen to the old lady’s complaints. Later on she became accustomed to her new way of living, and no longer felt any desire to leave it, probably because she had begun to take strong drink. Now and again, however, she stole in to the Home and caught a glimpse of her grandmother. She could not explain why she did it, and firmly maintained that she could not endure her. The old woman’s unreasonable complaint that she was an encumbrance to her had eaten deeply into the child’s mind. During the last year she had been a waitress for some time at a sailors’ tavern down in Nyhavn with an innkeeper Elleby, the confidence-man who had fleeced Pelle on his first arrival in the city. It was Elleby’s custom to adopt young girls so as to evade the law and have women-servants for his sailors; and they generally died in the course of a year or two: he always wore a crape band round his sleeve. Johanna was also to have been adopted, but ran away in time.

She slowly confessed it all to Pelle, coarse and horrible as it was, with the instinctive confidence that the inhabitants of the “Ark” had placed in him, and which had been inherited by her from her mother and grandmother. What an abyss of horrors! And he had been thinking that there was no hurry, that life was richer than that! But the children, the children! Were they to wait too, while he surveyed the varied forms of existence⁠—wait and go to ruin? Was there on the whole any need of knowledge and comprehensiveness of survey in order to fight for juster conditions? Was anything necessary beyond the state of being good? While he sat and read books, children were perhaps being trodden down by thousands. Did this also belong to life and require caution? For the first time he doubted himself.

“Now you must lie down and go to sleep,” he said gently, and stroked her forehead. It was burning hot and throbbed, and alarmed he felt her pulse. Her hand dropped into his, thin and worn, and her pulse was irregular. Alas, Hanne’s fever was raging within her!

She held his hand tight when he rose to go. “Were you and mother sweethearts, then?” she asked in a whisper, with a look of expectation in the bright eyes that she fixed upon him. And suddenly he understood the reiterated question and all her strange compliance with his wishes.

For a moment he looked waveringly into her expectant eyes. Then he nodded slowly. “Yes, Johanna; you’re my little daughter!” he said, bending down over her. Her pale face was lighted with a faint smile, and she shyly touched his stubbly chin and then turned over to go to sleep.

In a few words Pelle told Morten the child’s previous history⁠—Madam Johnsen and her husband’s vain fight to get on, his horrible death in the sewer, how Hanne had grown up as the beautiful princess of the “Ark”⁠—Hanne who meant to have happiness, and had instead this poor child!

“You’ve never told me anything about Hanne,” said Morten, looking at him.

“No,” said Pelle slowly. “She was always so strangely unreal to me, like an all too beautiful dream. Do you know she danced herself to death! But you must pretend to the child that I’m her father.”

Morten nodded. “You might go out to the Home for me, and hear about the old lady. It’s a pity she should have to spend her old age there!” He looked round the room.

“You can’t have her here, however,” said Pelle.

“It might perhaps be arranged. She and the child belong to one another.”

Pelle first went home to Ellen with the money and then out to the Home.

Madam Johnsen was in the infirmary, and could not live many days. It was a little while before she recognized Pelle, and she seemed to have forgotten the past. It made no impression whatever on her when he told her that her grandchild had been found. She lay most of the time, talking unintelligibly; she thought she still had to get money for the rent and for food for herself and the child. The troubles of old age had made an indelible impression upon her. “She gets no pleasure out of lying here and being comfortable,” said an old woman who lay in the next bed to hers. “She’s always trying and trying to get things, and when she’s free of that, she goes to Jutland.”

At the sound of the last word, Madam Johnsen fixed her eyes upon Pelle. “I should so like to see Jutland again before I die,” she said. “Ever since I came over here in my young days, I’ve always meant to use the first money I had over on an excursion home; but I never managed it. Hanne’s child had to live too, and they eat a lot at her age.” And so she was back in her troubles again.

The nurse came and told Pelle that he must go now, and he rose and bent over the old woman to say farewell, strangely moved at the thought that she had done so much for him, and now scarcely knew him. She felt for his hand and held it in both hers like a blind person trying to recognize, and she looked at him with her expressionless eyes that were already dimmed by approaching death. “You still have a good hand,” she said slowly, with the far-sounding voice