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

on the ears with his fur cap. He’s a fine man, that doctor, and fearfully clever; they say that he has one kind of mixture that he cures all kinds of illness with.”

They were sitting in the herdsman’s room upon the green chest, and Lasse had brought out a little gin. “Drink, brother!” he said again and again. “It takes something to keep out this October drizzle.”

“Many thanks, but you must drink! But I was going to say, you should see grandmother! She goes round peeping at everything with her one eye; if it’s only a button, she keeps on staring at it. So that’s what that looks like, and that! She’s forgotten what the things look like, and when she sees a thing, she goes to it to feel it afterward⁠—to find out what it is, she actually says. She would have nothing to do with us the first few days; when she didn’t hear us talk or walk, she thought we were strangers, even though she saw us there before her eyes.”

“And the little ones?” asked Lasse.

“Thank you, Anna’s is fat and well, but our own seems to have come to a standstill. After all, it’s the young pigs you ought to breed with. By the by”⁠—Kalle took out his purse⁠—“while we’re at it, don’t let me forget the ten krones I got from you for the christenings.”

Lasse pushed it away. “Never mind that,” he said. “You may have a lot to go through yet. How many mouths are there now? Fourteen or fifteen, I suppose?”

“Yes; but two take their mother’s milk, like the parson’s wife’s chickens; so that’s all saved. And if things became difficult, one’s surely man enough to wring a few pence out of one’s nose?” He seized his nose and gave it a rapid twist, and held out his hand. A folded ten-krone note lay in it.

Lasse laughed at the trick, but would not hear of taking the money; and for a time it passed backward and forward between them. “Well, well!” said Kalle at last, keeping the note; “thank you very much, then! And goodbye, brother! I must be going.” Lasse went out with him, and sent many greetings.

“We shall come and look you up very soon,” he called out after his brother.

When after a little while he returned to his room, the note lay upon the bed. Kalle must have seen his opportunity to put it there, conjurer that he was. Lasse put it aside to give to Kalle’s wife, when an occasion presented itself.

Long before the time, Lasse was on the lookout for Pelle. He found the solitude wearisome, now that he was used to having the boy about him from morning till night. At last he came, out of breath with running, for he had longed to get home too.

Nothing either terrible or remarkable had happened at school. Pelle had to give a circumstantial account, point by point, “Well, what can you do?” the master had asked, taking him by the ear⁠—quite kindly, of course. “I can pull the mad bull to the water without Father Lasse helping at all,” Pelle had answered, and then the whole class had laughed.

“Yes, yes, but can you read?”

No, Pelle could not do that⁠—“or else I shouldn’t have come here,” he was on the point of adding. “It was a good thing you didn’t answer that,” said Lasse; “but what more then?” Well, then Pelle was put upon the lowest bench, and the boy next him was set to teach him his letters.

“Do you know them, then?”

No, Pelle did not know them that day, but when a couple of weeks had passed, he knew most of them, and wrote them with chalk on the posts. He had not learned to write, but his hand could imitate anything he had seen, and he drew the letters just as they stood in print in the spelling-book.

Lasse went and looked at them during his work, and had them repeated to him endlessly; but they would not stick properly. “What’s that one there?” he was perpetually asking.

Pelle answered with a superior air: “That? Have you forgotten it already? I knew that after I’d only seen it once! That’s M.”

“Yes, of course it is! I can’t think where my head is today. M, yes⁠—of course it’s M! Now what can that be used for, eh?”

“It’s the first letter in the word ‘empty,’ of course!” said Pelle consequentially.

“Yes, of course! But you didn’t find that out for yourself; the master told you.”

“No, I found it out by myself.”

“Did you, now? Well, you’ve become clever⁠—if only you don’t become as clever as seven fools.”

Lasse was out of spirits; but very soon he gave in, and fell into wholehearted admiration of his son. And the instruction was continued while they worked. It was fortunate for Pelle that his father was so slow, for he did not get on very fast himself, when once he had mastered all that was capable of being picked up spontaneously by a quick intelligence. The boy who had to teach him⁠—Sloppy, he was called⁠—was the dunce of the class and had always been bottom until now Pelle had come and taken his place.

Two weeks of school had greatly changed Pelle’s ideas on this subject. On the first few days he arrived in a state of anxious expectation, and all his courage forsook him as he crossed the threshold of the school. For the first time in his life he felt that he was good for nothing. Trembling with awe, he opened his perceptions to this new and unfamiliar thing that was to unveil for him all the mysteries of the world, if only he kept his ears open; and he did so. But there was no awe-inspiring man, who looked at them affectionately through gold-rimmed spectacles while he told them about the sun and the moon and all the wonders of the world. Up and down the middle passage walked a man in a