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

Shivering children stood on tiptoe with their money clasped convulsively in one hand, and their chin supported on the edge of the counter, staring greedily at the eatables, while the light was reflected from their ravenous eyes.

Pelle walked quickly to reach the open country. He did not like these desolate streets on the outskirts of the city, where poverty rose like a seabirds’ nesting-place on both sides of the narrow cleft, and the darkness sighed beneath so much. When he entered an endless brick channel such as these, where one- and two-roomed flats, in seven stories extended as far as he could see, he felt his courage forsaking him. It was like passing through a huge churchyard of disappointed hopes. All these thousands of families were like so many unhappy fates; they had set out brightly and hopefully, and now they stood here, fighting with the emptiness.

Pelle walked quickly out along the field road. It was pitch-dark and raining, but he knew every ditch and path by heart. Far up on the hill there shone a light which resembled a star that hung low in the sky. It must be the lamp in Brun’s bedroom. He wondered at the old man being up still, for he was soon tired now that he had given up the occupation of a long lifetime, and generally went to bed early. Perhaps he had forgotten to put out the lamp.

Pelle had turned his coat-collar up about his ears, and was in a comfortable frame of mind. He liked walking alone in the dark. Formerly its yawning emptiness had filled him with a panic of fear, but the prison had made his mind familiar with it. He used to look forward to these lonely night walks home across the fields. The noises of the city died away behind him, and he breathed the pure air that seemed to come straight to him out of space. All that a man cannot impart to others arose in him in these walks. In the daily struggle he often had a depressing feeling that the result depended upon pure chance. It was not easy to obtain a hearing through the thousand-voiced noise. A sensation was needed in order to attract attention, and he had presented himself with only quite an ordinary idea, and declared that without stopping a wheel it could remodel the world. No one took the trouble to oppose him, and even the manufacturers in his trade took his enterprise calmly and seemed to have given up the war against him. He had expected great opposition, and had looked forward to overcoming it, and this indifference sometimes made him doubt himself. His invincible idea would simply disappear in the motley confusion of life!

But out here in the country, where night lay upon the earth like great rest, his strength returned to him. All the indifference fell away, and he saw that like the piers of a bridge, his reality lay beneath the surface. Insignificant though he appeared, he rested upon an immense foundation. The solitude around him revealed it to him and made him feel his own power. While they overlooked his enterprise he would make it so strong that they would run their head against it when they awoke.

Pelle was glad he lived in the country, and it was a dream of his to move the workmen out there again some day. He disliked the town more and more, and never became quite familiar with it. It was always just as strange to go about in this humming hive, where each seemed to buzz on his own account, and yet all were subject to one great will⁠—that of hunger. The town exerted a dull power over men’s minds, it drew the poor to it with lies about happiness, and when it once had them, held them fiendishly fast. The poisonous air was like opium; the most miserable beings dream they are happy in it; and when they have once got a taste for it, they had not the strength of mind to go back to the uneventful everyday life again. There was always something dreadful behind the town’s physiognomy, as though it were lying in wait to drag men into its net and fleece them. In the daytime it might be concealed by the multitudinous noises, but the darkness brought it out.

Every evening before Pelle went to bed he went out to the end of the house and gazed out into the night. It was an old peasant-custom that he had inherited from Father Lasse and his father before him. His inquiring gaze sought the town where his thoughts already were. On sunny days there was only smoke and mist to be seen, but on a dark night like this there was a cheerful glow above it. The town had a peculiar power of shedding darkness round about it, and lighting white artificial light in it. It lay low, like a bog with the land sloping down to it on all sides, and all water running into it. Its luminous mist seemed to reach to the uttermost borders of the land; everything came this way. Large dragonflies hovered over the bog in metallic splendor; gnats danced above it like careless shadows. A ceaseless hum rose from it, and below lay the depth that had fostered them, seething so that he could hear it where he stood.

Sometimes the light of the town flickered up over the sky like the reflection from a gigantic forge-fire. It was like an enormous heart throbbing in panic in the darkness down there; his own caught the infection and contracted in vague terror. Cries would suddenly rise from down there, and one almost wished for them; a loud exclamation was a relief from the everlasting latent excitement. Down there beneath the walls of the city the darkness was always alive; it glided along like a heavy life-stream, flowing slowly among taverns and low music-halls and barracks, with their fateful contents of want