Chapter IV: Daybreak (4)

It was a new being that yet was himself; it remained there and drew nourishment from everything that he did. He went about circumspectly and quietly, with an introspective expression as though he were weighing everything: there was so much that was not permissible because it might injure _it_! There were always two of them now—Pelle and this wonderful, invisible ego, which lay securely and weightily within him like a living thing, with its roots in the darkness.

Pelle’s relations to books were deeply grounded: he had to find out what the world meant now. He was a little distrustful of works of fiction; you got at their subject-matter too easily, and that could not be right. They were made up, too! He needed real stuff, facts. There were great spaces in his brain that longed to be filled with a tangible knowledge of things. His favorite reading was historical works, especially social history; and at present he read everything that came in his way, raw and unsweetened; it would have to sort itself out. It was a longing that had never been satisfied, and now seemed insatiable.

He minded his work punctiliously, however. He had made it a principle never to touch a book as long as any work lay waiting unfinished on the floor. In prison he had dreamt of a reasonable working-day of—for instance—eight hours, so that he would have time and strength to occupy himself with intellectual matters; but now he took it off his night’s sleep instead. This was at any rate a field out of which they need not try to keep him; he would have his share in the knowledge of the times. He felt it was a weapon. The poor man had long enough retired willingly into the corner for want of enlightenment, and whenever he put out his head he was laughed back again. Why did he not simply wrest the prerogative from the upper classes? It cost only toil, and in that coin he was accustomed to pay! He was scarcely deficient in ability; as far as Pelle could see at present, almost all the pioneers of the new state of things came from the lower classes.

He discovered with pleasure that his inward searching did not carry him away from the world, for far in there he came out again into the light— the light itself! He followed the secret laws for his own inward being, and found himself once more deep in the question of the welfare of the multitude. His practical sense required this confirmation of the conditions. There were also outward results. Even now history could no longer be used to light him and his ideas home; he knew too much. And his vision grew from day to day, and embraced an ever-widening horizon. Some day he would simply take the magic word from the trolls and wake the giant with it!

He worked hard and was as a rule full of confidence. When the last of the artistes came home from their _café_, he was often sitting working by the light of his shoemaker’s lamp. They would stop before the open basement window and have a chat with him in their broken Danish. His domestic circumstances were somewhat straitened; the instalments in repayment of the loan, and the debt on the furniture still swallowed all that they were able to scrape together, and Pelle had no prospect of getting better work. But work is the bearer of faith, and he felt sure that a way would open out if only he kept on with it unweariedly.

He took Ellen’s unspoken mistrust of his projects quietly. He felt himself to be greater than she in this; she could not reach up to the level of his head!

VI

Pelle was awake as early as four o’clock, although he had gone to bed late. He slept lightly at this time, when the summer night lay lightly upon his eyelids. He stole out into the kitchen and washed himself under the tap, and then went down to his work. The gray spirit of the night was still visible down in the street, but a tinge of red was appearing above the roofs. “The sun’s rising now over the country,” he thought, recalling the mornings of his childhood, the fields with their sheen of silvery dew, and the sun suddenly coming and changing them into thousands of sparkling diamond drops. Ah, if one could once more run bare-footed, if a little shrinkingly, out into the dewy grass, and shout a greeting to the dawning day: “Get up, Sun! Pelle is here already!” The night-watchman came slowly past the open window on his way home. “Up already?” he exclaimed in a voice hoarse with the night air, as he nodded down to Pelle. “Well, it’s the early bird that catches the worm! You’ll be rich one of these days, shoemaker!” Pelle laughed; he _was_ rich!

He thought of his wife and children while he worked. It was nice to think of them sleeping so securely while he sat here at work; it emphasized the fact that he was their bread-winner. With every blow of his hammer the home grew, so he hammered away cheerfully. They were poor, but that was nothing in comparison with the fact that if he were taken away now, things would go to pieces. He was the children’s Providence; it was always “Father’s going to,” or “Father said so.” In their eyes he was infallible. Ellen too began to come to him with her troubles; she no longer kept them to herself, but recognized that he had the broader back.

It was all so undeserved—as if good spirits were working for him. Shameful though it was that the wife should work to help to keep the family, he had not been able to exempt her from it. And what had he done for the children? It was not easy to build everything up at once from a bare foundation, and he was sometimes tempted to leave something alone so as to accomplish the rest the more quickly. As it was now, he was really nothing! Neither the old Pelle nor the new, but something indeterminate, in process of formation, something that was greatly in need of indulgence! A removing van full of furniture on its way to a new dwelling.

He often enough had occasion to feel this from outside; both old enemies and old friends looked upon him as a man who had gone very much down in the world. Their look said: “Is that really all that remains of that stalwart fellow we once knew?” His own people, on the other hand, were lenient in their judgment. “Father hasn’t got time,” Sister would say in explanation to herself when she was playing about down in his work-room —“but he will have some day!” And then she would picture to herself all the delightful things that would happen then. It affected Pelle strangely; he would try to get through this as quickly as possible.

It was a dark and pathless continent into which he had ventured, but he was now beginning to find his way in it. There were ridges of hills that constantly repeated themselves, and a mountain-top here and there that was reached every time he emerged from the thicket. It was good to travel there. Perhaps it was the land he and the others had looked for. When he had got through, he would show it to them.

Pelle had a good memory, and remembered all that he read. He could quote much of it verbatim, and in the morning, before the street had wakened, he used to go through it all in his mind while he worked. It surprised him to find how little history concerned itself with his people; it was only in quite recent times that they had been included. Well, that did not trouble him! The Movement _was_ really something new, and not one of history’s everlasting repetitions. He now wanted to see its idea in print, and one day found him sitting with a strange solemnity in the library with Marx and Henry George in front of him. Pelle knew something about this subject too, but this was nevertheless like drawing up a net from the deep; a brilliant world of wonders came up with it. There were incontrovertible logical proofs that he had a right apprehension, though it had been arrived at blindly. The land of fortune was big enough for all; the greater the number that entered it, the larger did it become. He felt a desire to hit out again and strike a fresh blow for happiness!

Suddenly an avalanche seemed to fall from the top to the bottom of the house, a brief, all-pervading storm that brought him back to his home. It was only Lasse Frederik ushering in the day; he took a flight at each leap, called a greeting down to his father, and dashed off to his work, buttoning the last button of his braces as he ran. A little later Ellen came down with coffee.

“Why didn’t you call me when you got up?” she said sulkily. “It’s not good to sit working so long without having had something to eat.”

Pelle laughed and kissed her good-morning. “Fine ladies don’t get up until long after their husbands,” he said teasingly.

But Ellen would not be put off with a jest. A proper wife would be up before her husband and have something ready for him. “I _will_ have you call me!” she said decidedly, her cheeks very red. It suited her to get roused now and then.

While he drank his coffee, she sat and talked to him about her affairs, and they discussed the plans for the day, after which she went upstairs to help the children to dress.

Later in the morning Pelle laid aside his work, dressed himself and went out to deliver it. While he was out he would go into the Library and look up something in the large dictionaries.

The street lived its own quiet life here close up to the greater thoroughfares—the same life day after day. The fat second-hand dealer from Jutland was standing as usual at his door, smoking his wooden pipe. “Good-morning, shoemaker!” he cried. A yellow, oblique-eyed oriental in slippers and long black caftan was balancing himself carelessly on the steps of the basement milk-shop with a bowl of cream in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. Above on the pavement two boys were playing hopscotch, just below the large red lamp which all night long advertised its “corn-operator” right up to the main thoroughfare. Two girls in cycling costume came out of a gateway with their machines; they were going to the woods. “Good-day, Pelle! How is Ellen’s business getting on?” they asked familiarly. They were girls for whom she had washed.

Pelle was fond of this busy part of the town where new shops with large plate-glass windows stood side by side with low-roofed cottages where retail business was carried on behind ordinary windows with wallflowers and dahlias in them as they might be in any provincial town. A string was stretched above the flower-pots, with a paper of safety-pins or a bundle of shoelaces hanging from it. There were poor people enough here, but life did not run in such hard grooves as out at Nörrebro. People took existence more easily; he thought them less honorable, but also less self-righteous. They seemed to be endowed with a more cheerful temperament, did not go so steadily and methodically to and from their fixed work, but, on the other hand, had several ways of making a living.

There was everywhere a feeling of breaking up, which corresponded well with Pelle’s own condition; the uncertainty of life enveloped everything in a peculiarly tense atmosphere. Poverty did not come marching in close columns of workmen; its clothing was plentiful and varied; it might appear in the last woollen material from the big houses of old Copenhagen, or in gold-rimmed spectacles and high hat. Pelle thought he knew all the trades, but here there were hundreds of businesses that could not be organized; every day he discovered new and remarkable trades. He remembered how difficult it had been to organize out here; life was too incalculable.

There was room here for everything; next door to one another lived people whom the Movement had not yet gathered in, and people who had been pushed up out of it in obstinate defiance. There was room here for him too; the shadow he had dreaded did not follow him. The people had seen too much of life to interfere in one another’s affairs; respectable citizenship had not been able to take possession of the poor man. There was something of the “Ark” about this part of the town, only not its hopelessness; on the contrary, all possibilities were to be found here. The poor man had conquered this ground from the rich citizens, and it seemed as if the development had got its direction from them. Here it was the proletariat whose varied nature forced its way upward, and leavened—so to speak—the whole. In the long side streets, which were full of second-hand dealers and pawnbrokers, existence had not resolved itself into its various constituents. Girls and gamblers were next-door neighbors to old, peaceable townsfolk, who lived soberly on the interest of their money, and went to church every Sunday with their hymn-books in their hands. The ironmonger had gold watches and antique articles among the lumber in his cellar.

Pelle went along Vesterbro Street. The summer holidays were just over, and the pavement on the Figaro side was crowded with sunburnt people— business-men, students and college girls—who were conspicuous in the throng by their high spirits. They had just returned to town, and still had the scent of fresh breeze and shore about them: it was almost as good as a walk in the country. And if he wanted to go farther out into the world, he could do that too; there were figures enough in the Vesterbro neighborhood to arrest his fancy and carry him forth. It was like a quay on which people from all parts of the world had agreed to meet—artists, seamen and international agents. Strange women came sailing through the crowd, large, exotic, like hot-house fruits; Pelle recognized them from the picture of the second-hand dealer’s daughter in the “Ark,” and knew that they belonged to the international nursing corps. They wore striped costumes, and their thick, fair hair emitted a perfume of foreign lands, of many ports and routes, like the interior of steamers; and their strong, placid faces were big with massage. They floated majestically down the current like full-rigged vessels. In their wake followed some energetic little beings who also belonged to the show, and had decked themselves out to look like children, with puffed sleeves, short skirts, and hair tied up with ribbons. Feeble old men, whom the sun had enticed out, stood in silent wonder, following the lovely children with their eyes.

Pelle felt a peculiar pleasure in being carried along with this stream which flowed like life itself, broad and calm. The world was greater than he had thought, and he took no side for or against anything, but merely wondered over its variety.

He came home from the library at two, with a large volume of statistics under his arm. Ellen received him with red eyes.

“Have your lodgers been making things unpleasant for you again?” he asked, looking into her face. She turned her head away.

“Did you get the money for your work?” she asked instead of answering.

“No, the man wasn’t in the shop himself. They’re coming here to pay.”

“Then we haven’t got a farthing, and I’ve got no dinner for you!” She tried to smile as she spoke, but her heavy eyelids quivered.

“Is that all?” said Pelle, putting his arm round her. “Why didn’t you make me some porridge? I should have liked a good plateful of that.”

“I have made it, but you’ll get hardly anything else, and that’s no food for a man.”

He took her round the waist with both hands, lifted her up and put her carefully down upon the kitchen table. “That’s porridge, my dear!” he said merrily. “I can hardly walk, I’m so strong!”

But there was no smile to be coaxed out of Ellen; something had happened that she did not want to tell him. At last he got out of her that the two musical clowns had gone off without paying. They had spoiled her good bed-clothes by lying in them with their clothes on, and had made them so filthy that nothing could be done with them. She was unwilling to tell Pelle, because he had once advised her against it; but all at once she gave in completely. “You mustn’t laugh at me!” she sobbed, hiding her face on his shoulder.

Pelle attempted to comfort her, but it was not so easily done. It was not the one misfortune but the whole fiasco that had upset her so; she had promised herself so much from her great plan. “It isn’t all lost yet,” he said to comfort her. “We’ll just keep on and you’ll see it’ll be all right.”

Ellen was not to be hoodwinked, however. “You know you don’t mean it,” she said angrily. “You only say it because of me! And the second-hand dealer sent up word this morning that if he didn’t soon get the rest of his money, he’d take all the furniture back again.”

“Then let him take it, and that’ll be an end of the matter.”

“But then we shall lose all that we’ve paid!” she exclaimed quickly, drying her eyes.

Pelle shrugged his shoulders. “That can’t be helped.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to get the things sold little by little? We only owe a third on them.”

“We can’t do that; it’s punishable. We’ve got a contract for the hire of the furniture, and as long as we owe a farthing on it, it’s his. But we’re well and strong all of us; what does it matter?”

“That’s true enough,” answered Ellen, trying to smile, “but the stronger we are, the more food we need.”

A girl came running up with a pair of boots that were to be soled as quickly as possible. They were “Queen Theresa’s,” and she was going to wear them in the evening. “That’ll bring us in a few pence!” said Ellen, brightening. “I’ll help you to get them done quickly.”

They seated themselves one on each side of the counter, and set to work. It reminded them of the early days of their married life. Now and then they stopped to laugh, when Ellen had forgotten some knack. In an hour and a half the boots were ready, and Pelle went himself with them to make sure of the money.

“You’ll most likely find her in the tavern,” said Ellen. “The artistes generally have their dinner at this hour, and she’s probably there.”

It was a busy time in the artistes’ restaurant. At the small tables sat bony, close-cropped men of a peculiar rubicund type, having dinner with some girl or other from the neighborhood. They were acrobats, clowns, and wrestlers, people of a homogeneous type, dressed in loud checks, with enormous cuffs and boots with almost armor-plated toes. They chewed well and looked up stupidly at the call of the girls; they wore a hard, brutal mask for a face, and big diamond rings on their fingers. Some of them had such a powerful lower jaw that they looked as if they had developed it for the purpose of taking blows in a boxing-match. In the adjoining room some elegant young men were playing billiards while they secretly kept an eye on what was going on at the tables. They had curls on their forehead, and patent leather shoes.

“Queen Theresa” was not there, so Pelle went to Dannebrog Street, where she lived, but found she was not at home. He had to hand in the boots to a neighbor, and go back empty-handed.

Well, it was no more than might have been expected. When you needed a thing most, chance played with you as a cat played with a mouse. Pelle was not nearly so cheerful as he appeared to be when he faced Ellen. The reality was beginning to affect him. He went out to Morten, but without any faith in the result; Morten had many uses for what he earned.

“You’ve just come at the right moment!” said Morten, waving two notes in the air. “I’ve just had twenty krones (a guinea) sent me from _The Working Man_, and we can divide them. It’s the first money I’ve got from that quarter, so of course I’ve spat upon it three times.”

“Then they’ve found their way to you, after all!” exclaimed Pelle joyfully.

Morten laughed. “I got tired of seeing my work repeated in their paper,” he said, “when they’ll have nothing to do with me up there; and I went up to them and drew their attention to the paragraph about piracy. You should have seen their expression! Goodness knows it’s not pleasant to have to earn your bread on wretchedness, so to speak, but it’s still more painful when afterward you have to beg for your hard-earned pence. You mustn’t think I should do it either under other circumstances; I’d sooner starve; but at any rate I won’t be sweated, by my own side! It’s a long time since you were here.”

“I’ve been so busy. How’s Johanna?” The last words were spoken in a whisper.

“Not well just now; she’s keeping her bed. She’s always asking after you.”

“I’ve been very busy lately, and unfortunately I can’t find out anything about her. Is she just as cross?”

“When she’s in a bad temper she lets me understand that she could easily help to put us on the right track if she wanted to. I think it amuses her to see us fooled.”

“A child can’t be so knowing!”

“Don’t be so sure of that! Remember she’s not a child; her experiences have been too terrible. I have an idea that she hates me and only meditates on the mischief she can do me. You can’t imagine how spiteful she can be; it’s as though the exhalations from down there had turned to poison in her. If any one comes here that she notices I like, she reviles them as soon as they’re gone, says some poisonous thing about them in order to wound me. You’re the only one she spares, so I think there must be some secret link between you. Try to press her on the subject once more.”

They went in to her. As the door opened she slipped hastily down beneath the clothes—she had been listening at the door—and pretended to be asleep. Morten went back to his work and closed the door after him.

“Well, Johanna,” said Pelle, seating himself on the edge of the bed. “I’ve got a message for you. Can you guess who it’s from?”

“From grandmother!” she exclaimed, sitting up eagerly; but the next moment she was ashamed at having been outwitted, and crept down under the clothes, where she lay with compressed lips, and stole distrustful glances at Pelle. There was something in the glance and the carriage of her head that awakened dormant memories in him, but he could not fix them.

“No, not grandmother,” he said. “By-the-bye, where is she now? I should like to speak to her. Couldn’t you go out to her with me when you get well?”

She looked at him with sparkling eyes and a mocking expression. “Don’t you wish you may get it!” she answered.

“Tell me where she lives, Johanna,” Pelle went on, taking her thin hand in his, “there’s a good girl!”

“Oh, yes, at night!”

Pelle frowned. “You must be very heartless, when you can leave your old grandmother and not even like others to help her. I’m certain she’s in want somewhere or other.”

Johanna looked at him angrily. “I whipped her too,” she exclaimed malignantly, and then burst into a laugh at Pelle’s expression. “No, I didn’t really,” she said reassuringly. “I only took away her stick and hid her spectacles so that she couldn’t go out and fetch the cream. So she was obliged to send me, and I drank up all the cream and put water in the can. She couldn’t see it, so she scolded the milk people because they cheated.”

“You’re making all this up, I think,” said Pelle uncertainly.

“I picked the crumb out of the loaf too, and let her eat the crust,” Johanna continued with a nod.

“Now stop that,” said Pelle, stroking her damp forehead. “I know quite well that I’ve offended you.”

She pushed away his hand angrily. “Do you know what I wish?” she said suddenly. “I wish you were my father.”

“Would you like me to be?”

“Yes, for when you became quite poor and ill, I’d treat you just as well as I’ve treated grandmother.” She laughed a harsh laugh.

“I’m certain you’ve only been kind to grandmother,” said Pelle gravely.

She looked hard at him to see whether he meant this too, and then turned her face to the wall. He could see from the curve of her body that she was struggling to keep back her tears, and he tried to turn her round to him; but she stiffened herself.

“I won’t live with grandmother!” she whispered emphatically, “I won’t!”

“And yet you’re fond of her!”

“No, I’m not! I can’t bear her! She told the woman next door that I was only in the way! It was that confounded child’s fault that she couldn’t get into the Home, she said; I heard her myself! And yet I went about and begged all the food for her. But then I left her!” She jerked the sentences out in a voice that was quite hoarse, and crumpled the sheet up in her hands.

“But do tell me where she is!” said Pelle earnestly. “I promise you you shan’t go to her if you don’t want to.”

The child kept a stubborn silence. She did not believe in promises.

“Well, then, I must go to the police to find her, but I don’t want to do that.”

“No, because you’ve been in prison!” she exclaimed, with a short laugh.

A pained expression passed over Pelle’s face. “Do you think that’s so funny?” he said, winking his eyes fast. “I’m sure grandmother didn’t laugh at it.”

Johanna turned half round. “No, she cried!” she said. “There was no one to give us food then, and so she cried.”

It began to dawn upon him who she was. “What became of you two that day on the common? We were going to have dinner together,” he said.

“When you were taken up? Oh, we couldn’t find you, so we just went home.” Her face was now quite uncovered, and she lay looking at him with her large gray eyes. It was Hanne’s look; behind it was the same wondering over life, but here was added to it a terrible knowledge. Suddenly her face changed; she discovered that she had been outwitted, and glared at him.

“Is it true that you and mother were once sweethearts?” she suddenly asked mischievously.

Pelle’s face flushed. The question had taken him by surprise. “I’ll tell you everything about your mother if you’ll tell me what you know,” he said, looking straight at her.

“What is it you want to know?” she asked in a cross-questioning tone. “Are you going to write about me in the papers?”

“My dear child, we must find your grandmother! She may be starving.”

“I think she’s at the ‘Generality,’” said the child quietly. “I went there on Thursday when the old things had leave to go out and beg for a little coffee; and one day I saw her.”

“Didn’t you go up to her then?”

“No; I was tired of listening to her lamentations!”

Johanna was no longer stiff and defiant. She lay with her face turned away and answered—a little sullenly—Pelle’s questions, while she played nervously with his fingers. Her brief answers made up for him one connected, sad story.

Widow Johnsen was not worth much when once the “Ark” was burnt down. She felt old and helpless everywhere else, and when Pelle went to prison, she collapsed entirely. She and the little girl suffered want, and when Johanna felt herself in the way, she ran away to a place where she could be comfortable. Her grandmother had also been in her way. She had her mother’s whimsical, dreamy nature, and now she gave up everything and ran away to meet the wonderful. An older playfellow seduced her and took her out to the boys of the timber-yard. There she was left to take care 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 of old age. “Hanne should have taken you, and then things would have been very different.’”

VII

People wondered, at the library, over the grave, silent working-man who took hold of books as if they were bricks. They liked him and helped him to find what he wanted.

Among the staff there was an old librarian who often came and asked Pelle if there were anything he could help him with. He was a little wizened man with gold spectacles and thin white hair and beard that gave a smiling expression to his pale face. He had spent his time among the stacks of books during the greater part of his life; the dust of the books had attacked his chest, and every minute his dry cough sounded through the room.

Librarian Brun was a bachelor and was said to be very rich. He was not particularly neat or careful in his dress, but there was something unspoiled about his person that made one think he could never have been subjected to the world’s rough handling. In his writings he was a fanatical worshipper of the ego, and held up the law of conscience as the only one to which men should be subject. Personally he was reserved and shy, but something drew him to Pelle, who, he knew, had once been the soul in the raising of the masses; and he followed with wonder and curiosity the development of the new working-man. Now and then he brought one of his essays to Pelle and asked him to read it. It often treated of the nature of personality, took as its starting-point the ego of some philosopher or other, or of such and such a religion, and attempted to get at the questions of the day. They conversed in whispers on the subject. The old, easily-approached philosopher, who was read by very few, cherished an unrequited affection for the general public, and listened eagerly to what a working-man might be able to make out of his ideas. Quiet and almost timid though his manner was, his views were strong, and he did not flinch from the thought of employing violent measures; but his attitude toward the raising of the lower classes was sceptical. “They don’t know how to read,” he said. “The common people never touch a real book.” He had lived so long among books that he thought the truths of life were hidden away in them.

They gradually became well acquainted with one another. Brun was the last descendant of an old, decayed family, which had been rich for many generations. He despised money, and did not consider it to be one of the valuable things of life. Never having known want, he had few pretensions, and often denied himself to help others. It was said that he lived in a very Spartan fashion, and used a large proportion of his income for the relief of the poor. On many points he agreed with the lower classes, not only theoretically but purely organically; and Pelle saw, to his amazement, that the dissolution of existing conditions could also take place from the upper grades of society. Perhaps the future was preparing itself at both extremities!

One day Brun carefully led the conversation on to Pelle’s private affairs: he seemed to know something about them. “Isn’t there anything you want to start?” he asked. “I should be so glad if you would allow me to help you.”

Pelle was not yet clear as to what was to be done about the future. “At present,” he said, “the whole thing is just a chaos to me.”

“But you must live! Will you do me the favor of taking a loan from me at any rate, while you’re looking about you? Money is necessary to make one capable and free,” he continued, when Pelle refused it. “It’s a pity, but so it is. You don’t _take_ what you want anyhow, so you must either get the money in the way that offers, or do without.”

“Then I’ll do without,” said Pelle.

“It seems to me that’s what you and yours have always done, and have you ever succeeded in heaping coals of fire on the head of society by it? You set too high a value upon money; the common people have too great respect for the property of others. And upon my word it’s true! The good old poor man could scarcely find it in his heart to put anything into his own miserable mouth; his wife was to have all the good pieces. So he is mourned as lost to our side; he was so easy to get wealth by. His progeny still go about with a good deal of it.”

“Money makes you dependent,” Pelle objected.

“Not always,” answered Brun, laughing. “In my world people borrow and take on credit without a thought: the greater the debt, the better it is; they never treat a man worse than when they owe him money. On that point we are very much more emancipated than you are, indeed that’s where the dividing line goes between the upper classes and the common people. This fear of becoming indebted to any one, and carefulness to do two services in return for one, is all very nice and profitable in your own world; but it’s what you’ll be run down by in your relations to us. We don’t know it at all; how otherwise would those people get on who have to let themselves be helped from their cradle to their grave, and live exclusively upon services received?”

Pelle looked at him in bewilderment. “Poor people have nothing but their sense of honor, and so they watch over it,” he said.

“And you’ve really never halted at this sense of honor that works so splendidly in our favor?” asked Brun in surprise. “Just examine the existing morals, and you’ll discover that they must have been invented by us—for your use. Yes, you’re surprised to hear me say that, but then I’m a degenerate upper-class man, one of those who fall outside the established order of things. I saw your amazement at my not having patted you on the shoulder and said: ‘Poor but proud! Go on being so, young man!’ But you mustn’t draw too far-reaching conclusions from that; as I told you, I’m not that sort. Now mayn’t I give you a helping hand?”

No, Pelle was quite determined he should not. Something had been shattered within him, and the knowledge made him restive.

“You’re an obstinate plebeian,” said Brun, half vexed.

On his way home Pelle thought it all over. Of course he had always been quite aware that the whole thing resembled a gentleman’s carriage, in which he and others like him had to be the horses; the laws and general arrangement were the reins and harness, which made them draw the carriage well. The only thing was that it was always denied from the other side; he was toiling at history and statistics in order to furnish incontrovertible proof of this. But here was some one who sat in the carriage himself, and gave evidence to the effect that it was right enough; and this was not a book, but a living man with whom he stood face to face. It gave an immense support to his belief.

There was need enough for it too, for at home things were going badly. The letting of rooms was at a standstill, and Ellen was selling the furniture as fast as she could. “It’s all the same to me what the law is!” was her reply to Pelle’s warnings. “There surely can be no sense in our having to make the furniture-dealer a present of all we’ve paid upon it, just because he has a scrap of paper against us. When the furniture’s sold, he shall have the rest of what we owe him.”

He did not get the whole, however, for in the first place they had to live. The remainder of the debt hung like a threat over them; if he discovered that the furniture was sold, it might end badly for them. “Remember I’ve been in prison before,” said Pelle.

“They surely can’t punish you for what I’ve done?” said Ellen, looking at him in terror. “Pelle, Pelle, what have I done! Why didn’t I do what you told me!” For a time she collapsed, but then suddenly rose energetically, saying: “Then we must get it paid at once. It’s surely possible to find twenty krones (a guinea)!” And hastening up to their flat, she quickly returned in her hat and jacket.

“What are you going to do?” asked Pelle in amazement.

“What am I going to do? I’m going to ‘Queen Theresa.’ She _can_ get it! Don’t be afraid!” she said, bending down and kissing him. She soon returned with the money. “I may pay it back by _washing_,” she said cheerfully.

So that matter was settled, and they would have been glad if the loan had been the same. It scarcely moved, however; the instalments ate themselves up in some wonderful way. Two or three times they had had to ask for a postponement, and each time the usurer added the amount of the instalment to the sum still owing; he called it punishment interest.

Pelle read seldom; he felt no wish to do so. He was out early and late looking for a job. He fetched and took back furniture in the town for the second-hand dealer, and did anything else that came to hand.

One evening Ellen came up with a newspaper cutting that “Queen Theresa” had sent her, an advertisement of a good, well-paid situation for a trustworthy man, who had been trained as a shoemaker. “It’s this morning’s,” said Ellen anxiously, “so I only hope it isn’t too late. You must go out there at once.” She took out Pelle’s Sunday clothes quickly, and helped him to make himself tidy. It was for a boot-factory in Borger Street. Pelle took the tram in order to get there quickly, but he had no great hopes of getting the place. The manufacturer was one of his most bitter opponents among the employers at the time when he was organizing the trade—a young master-shoemaker who had had the good sense to follow the development and take the leap over to manufacturer.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said. “Well, well, old differences shan’t stand between us if we can come to an agreement in other ways. What I want is a man who’ll look a little after everything, a kind of right- hand man who can take something off my shoulders in a general way, and superintend the whole thing when I’m travelling. I think you’ll do capitally for that, for you’ve got influence with the men; and I’d like things to go nicely and smoothly with them, without giving in to them too much, you understand. One may just as well do things pleasantly; it doesn’t cost an atom more, according to my experience, and now one belongs to the party one’s self.”

“Do you?” said Pelle, hardly able to believe his ears.

“Yes! Why shouldn’t an employer be a fellow-partisan? There’s nothing to be afraid of when once you’ve peeped in behind the scenes; and it has its advantages, of course. In ten years’ time every sensible man will be a social democrat.”

“That’s not at all unlikely,” said Pelle, laughing.

“No, is it! So one evening I said to my wife: ‘I say, you know it won’t do soon to own that you don’t belong to the party; in other countries millionaires and counts and barons already belong to it.’ She didn’t quite like it, but now she’s quite satisfied. They’re quite nice people, as she said herself. There are even persons of rank among them. Well, it wasn’t conviction that drove me at first, but now I agree because what they say’s very sensible. And upon my word it’s the only party that can thrash the anarchists properly, don’t you think so? In my opinion all should unite in fighting against them, and that’ll be the end of it, I suppose. I’ve reflected a good deal upon politics and have come to the conclusion that we employers behaved like asses from the beginning. We oughtn’t to have struggled against the Movement; it only drove it to extremes. Just see how well-behaved it’s become since we began to take off our hats to it! You _become_ what you’re _treated_ as, let me tell you. You wouldn’t have acted so harshly if we others had been a little kinder to you. Don’t you allow that? You’re exactly like every one else: you want to have good food and nice clothes—be considered respectable people. So it was wise to cut off the lower end; you can’t rise when you’ve too much lumber as ballast. Fellows who pull up paving- stones and knock you down are no company for me. You must have patience and wait until the turn comes to your party to come in for a share: those are my politics. Well, what do you think about the job?”

“I don’t understand the machines,” said Pelle.

“You’ll soon get into that! But it’s not that that matters, if only you know how to treat the workmen, and that of course you do. I’ll pay you thirty-five krones (£2) a week—that’s a good weekly wage—and in return you’ll have an eye to my advantage of course. One doesn’t join the party to be bled—you understand what I mean? Then you get a free house—in the front building of course—so as to be a kind of vice-landlord for the back building here; there are three stairs with one-roomed flats. I can’t be bothered having anything to do with that; there’s so much nonsense about the mob. They do damage and don’t pay if they can help it, and when you’re a little firm with them they fly to the papers and write spiteful letters. Of course I don’t run much risk of that, but all the same I like things to go smoothly, partly because I aspire to become a member of the management. So you get eighteen hundred krones (£100) a year and a flat at four hundred (£22), which makes two thousand two hundred krones (£l22)—a good wage, though perhaps I oughtn’t to say so myself; but good pay makes good work. Well, is it a bargain?”

Pelle wanted to have till the next day to think it over.

“What do you want to think over? One ought never to think over things too much; our age requires action. As I said before, an expert knowledge is not the main thing; it’s your authority that I chiefly want. In other words, you’ll be my confidential man. Well, well, then you’ll give me your answer to-morrow.”

Pelle went slowly homeward. He did not know why he had asked time to think it over; the matter was settled. If you wanted to make a home, you must take the consequences of it and not sneak away the first time a prospect offered of making it a little comfortable for your wife and children. So now he was the dog set to watch his companions.

He went down the King’s New Market and into the fashionable quarter. It was bright and gay here, with the arc-lamps hanging like a row of light- birds above the asphalt, now and then beating their wings to keep themselves poised. They seemed to sweep down the darkness of night, and great shadows flickered through the street and disappeared. In the narrow side streets darkness lay, and insistent sounds forced their way out of it—a girl’s laugh, the crying of a lonely child, the ceaseless bickering of a cowed woman. But people strolled, quietly conversing, along the pavement in couples and heard nothing. They had got out their winter coats, and were luxuriating in the first cold weather.

Music sounded from the large _cafés_, which were filled to overflowing. People were sitting close together in small select companies, and looked gay and happy. On the tables round which they sat, stood the wine-cooler with the champagne bottle pointing obliquely upward as though it were going to shoot down heaven itself to them. How secure they appeared to feel! Had they no suspicion that they were sitting upon a thin crust, with the hell of poverty right beneath them? Or was that perhaps why they were enjoying themselves—to-day your turn, to-morrow mine? Perhaps they had become reconciled to the idea, and took what they could get without listening too carefully to the hoarse protests of the back streets!

Under one of the electric lamp-posts on the Town Hall Square a man was standing selling papers. He held one out to Pelle, saying: “A halfpenny if you can afford it, if not you can have it for nothing!” He was pale, with dark shadows under his eyes, and he had a dark beard. He looked as if he were suffering from some internal complaint which was slowly consuming him. Pelle looked at him, and saw to his surprise that it was Peter Dreyer, his comrade of long ago!

“Do you go about selling newspapers?” he exclaimed in astonishment, holding out his hand.

Peter Dreyer quietly returned his greeting. He had the same heavy, introspective look that he had had when Pelle met him in the garret in Jager Street, but looked even more perplexed.

“Yes, I’ve become a newspaper man,” he said, “but only after working hours. It’s a little paper that I write and print myself. It may perhaps do you good to read it.”

“What’s it about?”

“About you and me.”

“It’s anarchistic, I suppose?” said Pelle, looking at the title of the paper. “You were so strange last time I met you.”

“Well, you can read it. A halfpenny if you can afford it, if not gratis!” he cried, holding out a copy to the passers-by. A policeman was standing a little way off observing him. He gradually drew nearer.

“I see you’re under observation!” said Pelle, drawing his attention to the policeman.

“I’m used to that. Once or twice they’ve seized my inoffensive little paper.”

“Then it can’t have been altogether inoffensive?” said Pelle, smiling.

“I only advise people to think for themselves.”

“That advice may be dangerous enough too, if it’s followed.”