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

must admit! But it’s not so easy to be a passive spectator of these topsy-turvy conditions. It’s affirmed that the workmen prefer to receive a starvation allowance to doing any work; and judging by what they’ve hitherto got out of their work it’s easy to understand that it’s true. But during the month that the excavations here have been going on, at least a thousand unemployed have come every day ready to turn to; and we pay them for refraining from doing anything! They can at a pinch receive support, but at no price obtain work. It’s as insane as it’s possible to be! You feel you’d like to give the machinery a little push and set it going again.”

“It wants a good big push,” said Pelle. “They’re not trifles that are in the way.”

“They look absurdly small, at any rate. The workmen are not in want because they’re out of work, as our social economists want us to believe; but they’re out of work because they’re in want. What a putting of the cart before the horse! The procession of the unemployed is a disgrace to the community; what a waste⁠—also from a purely mercantile point of view⁠—while the country and the nation are neglected! If a private business were conducted on such principles, it would be doomed from the very first.”

“If the pitiable condition arose only from a wrong grasp of things, it would be easily corrected,” said Pelle; “but the people who settle the whole thing can’t at any rate be charged with a lack of mercantile perception. It would be a good thing if they had the rest in as good order! Believe me, not a sparrow falls to the ground unless it is to the advantage of the money-power; if it paid, in a mercantile sense, to have country and people in perfect order, it would take good care that they were so. But it simply can’t be done; the welfare of the many and the accumulation of property by the few are irreconcilable contradictions. I think there is a wonderful balance in humanity, so that at any time it can produce exactly enough to satisfy all its requirements; and when one claims too much, others let go. It’s on that understanding indeed that we want to remove the others and take over the management.”

“Yes, yes! I didn’t mean that I wanted to protect the existing state of affairs. Let those who make the venture take the responsibility. But I’ve been wondering whether we couldn’t find a way to gather up all this waste so that it should benefit the cooperative works?”

“How could we? We can’t afford to give occupation to the unemployed.”

“Not for wages! But both the Movement and the community have begun to support them, and what would be more natural than that one required work of them in return? Only, remember, letting it benefit them!”

“You mean that, for instance, unemployed bricklayers and carpenters should build houses for the workmen?” asked Pelle, with animation.

“Yes, as an instance. But the houses should be ensured against private speculation, in the same way as those we’re building, and always belong to the workmen. As we can’t be suspected of trying to make profits, we should be suitable people for its management, and it would help on the cooperative company. In that way the refuse of former times would fertilize the new seed.”

Pelle sat lost in thought, and the old man lay and looked at him in suspense. “Well, are you asleep?” he asked at last impatiently.

“It’s a fine idea,” said Pelle, raising his head. “I think we should get the organizations on our side; they’re already beginning to be interested in cooperation. When the committee sits, I’ll lay your plan before them. I’m not so sure of the community, however, Brun! They have occasional use for the great hunger-reserve, so they’ll go on just keeping life in it; if they hadn’t, it would soon be allowed to die of hunger. I don’t think they’ll agree to have it employed, so to speak, against themselves.”

“You’re an incorrigible pessimist!” said Brun a little irritably.

“Yes, as regards the old state of things,” answered Pelle, with a smile.

Thus they would discuss the possibilities for the fixture in connection with the events of the day when Pelle sat beside the old man in the evening, both of them engrossed in the subject. Sometimes the old man felt that he ran off the lines. “It’s the blood,” he said despondently. “I’m not, after all, quite one of you. It’s so long since one of my family worked with his hands that I’ve forgotten it.”

During this time he often touched upon his past, and every evening had something to tell about himself. It was as though he were determined to find a law that would place him by Pelle’s side.

Brun belonged to an old family that could be traced back several hundred years to the captain of a ship, who traded with the Tranquebar coast. The founder of the family, who was also a whaler and a pirate, lived in a house on one of the Kristianshavn canals. When his ship was at home, she lay to at the wharf just outside his street-door. The Bruns’ house descended from father to son, and was gradually enlarged until it became quite a mansion. In the course of four generations it had become one of the largest trading-houses of the capital. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the members of the family had gone over into the world of stockbrokers and bankers, and thence the changes went still further. Brun’s father, the well-known Kornelius Brun, stuck to the old business, his brothers making over their share to him and entering the diplomatic service, one of them receiving a high Court appointment.

Kornelius Brun felt it his duty to carry on the old business, and in order to keep on a level with his brothers as regarded rank,