Pelle the Conqueror Part 149

Neither Pelle nor Ellen demanded much of life now. They had settled down in resignation side by side like a pair of carthorses that were accustomed to share manger and toil. It would have been a great thing now to have done with that confounded loan, so that they need not go about with their lives in their hands continually; but even that was requiring too much! All that could be sc.r.a.ped together went every month to the money-lender, and they were no nearer the end. On the one hundred and eighty krones (10) that Pelle had received they had now in all paid off one hundred and twenty (7), and yet they still owed two hundred and forty (more than 13). It was the "punishment interest" that made it mount up whenever they came only a day or two too late with the instalments or whatever it might be. In any case it was an endless screw that would go on all their life pumping out whatever they could sc.r.a.pe together into the money-lender's pocket.

But now Pelle meant to put an end to this. He had not paid the last instalment and meant to pay no more, but let things go as they liked.

"You ought to borrow of Herr Brun and pay off that money-lender," said Ellen, "or else he'll only come down on us and take our furniture." But Pelle was obstinate and would not listen to reason. The consciousness that a parasite had fastened upon him and sucked him dry in spite of all his resistance, made him angry. He would like to see them touching his things!

When the money-lender came to fetch his instalment, Pelle shut the door in his face. For the rest he took everything with the calmness of resignation; but when the subject cropped up, he fired up and did not know what he said. Ellen had to keep silence and let his mood work itself out.

One afternoon he sat working at the bas.e.m.e.nt window. The librarian was sitting on the chair by the door, with a child on each knee, feeding them with dates. Pelle was taking no notice, but bent over his work with the expression of a madman who is afraid of being spoken to. His work did not interest him as it had formerly done, and progressed slowly; a disturbing element had entered, and whenever he could not instantly find a tool, he grew angry and threw the things about.

Brun sat watching him anxiously, though apparently taken up with the children. A pitying expression would have made Pelle furious. Brun guessed that there was some money trouble, but dared not offer his a.s.sistance; every time he tried to begin a conversation Pelle repelled him with a cunning look which said: "You're seeking for an opportunity to come with your money, but you won't get it!" Something or other had gone wrong with him, but it would all come right in the end.

A cab stopped outside the door, and three men stepped out and went into the house. A little while after Ellen burst into the workshop. "Pelle!"

she cried, without noticing Brun, "they've come to take away our things!" She broke into a fit of weeping, and seeing their mother crying, the children began to cry too.

Pelle rose and seized a hammer. "I'll soon get _them_ out!" he said between his teeth in a low tone as he moved toward the door. He did not hurry, but went with lowered head, not looking at any one.

Brun seized him by the arm and stopped him.

"You forget that there's something called Prison!" he said with peculiar emphasis.

Pelle gazed at him in astonishment, and for a moment it looked as if he were going to strike the old man; then the hammer dropped from his hand and he broke down.

IX

Now and then a comrade from the good old days would come up and want Pelle to go with him to a meeting. Old fighting memories wakened within him. Perhaps it was there the whole point lay. He threw off his leather ap.r.o.n and went. Ellen's eyes followed him to the door, wondering that he could still wish to have anything to do with that after what _he_ had got out of it.

But it was not there after all! He remembered the tremendous ferment in men's minds during the Movement, and it seemed to him that the excitement had died down. People only came forward before the elections, otherwise they went about their own business as if there had never been any rallying idea. They were all organized, but there was nothing new and strong in that fact; they were born--so to speak--in organization, and connected nothing great and elevating with it. His old a.s.sociates had cooled down remarkably; they must have discovered that success was neither so romantic nor so easy as they had thought. They had no longer simply to open the gate into the land of success and stream through it; there was a long and difficult road before that. So they each arranged his own matters, and disposed of the doubtful future for small present advantages which were immediately swallowed up by the existing conditions.

The Movement had not reached to the bottom. There was an accusation against himself in this fact; it had not been designed with sufficient breadth. Even at that time it had pa.s.sed over the heads of the inhabitants of the "Ark," and now a large proletariat was left with their own expectations of the future. The good old cla.s.s of the common people had split up into a cla.s.s of petty tradesmen--who seemed to be occupied solely in establis.h.i.+ng themselves--and this proletariat.

But there was nothing new in this. One stratum moved up and revealed a new one below; it had always been thus in history. Was it then everlastingly determined that at the bottom of existence there should always be the same innumerable crowd of those who were thrust down, who bore the burden of the whole, the great hunger reserve? Was it only possible to be happy when one knew how to push the difficulties down, just as one might push the folds of a material until at last they were heaped up in one place? It was the old question over again. Formerly he had had his clear faith with which to beat down doubt, but now he could not be content with a blind hope; he required to be shown an expedient.

If the Movement had failed through having been begun crookedly, the causes with which one had to do were practical causes, and it was possible to do the whole thing over again.

There were also others engaged in taking the whole thing up from the bottom, and through Peter Dreyer he came into contact with young men of an entirely new type. They had emerged from the Movement, shot up surprisingly out of its sediment, and now made new ambitious claims upon life. By unknown paths they had reached the same point as he himself had done, and demanded first and foremost to be human beings. The sacredness of the ego filled them, and made them rebel at all yokes; they began from within by shaking them off, did not smoke or drink, would be slaves to nothing. They kept out of the Movement and had their own places of meeting out about the South Boulevard, where they read and discussed new social forms. They were intelligent, well-paid working-men, who persistently shared the conditions of the proletariat; fanatics who gave away their week's wages if they met a man who was poorer than themselves; hot-headed enthusiasts who awaited revolution. Several of them had been in prison for agitating against the social order. There were also country people among them--sons of the men who stood in the ditches and peat-pits out there. "The little man's children," Morten called them.

These were the offspring of those who had made the Movement; that was how it should go on. By being contented they kept themselves free from the ensnaring expedients of capitalism, they despised the petty tradesman's inclination for comfort, and were always ready for action.

In them the departure was at any rate a fact!

They wanted to get hold of Pelle. "Come over to us!" Peter Dreyer often said.

Pelle, however, was not easily enticed out; he had his home where he hid himself like a snail in its sh.e.l.l. He had the responsibility for this little world of five people, and he had not even succeeded in securing it. His strength and industry were not enough even to keep one little home above water; a benefactor was needed for that! It was not the time to tend jealously one's own honor when wife and children would be the sufferers; and now that it was all arranged he felt deeply grateful to the old librarian. It was nevertheless a disgraceful fact which did not encourage him to have anything to do with the affairs of others.

The violent language used by the young men frightened him too. He had rebelled against the old conditions just as they had done, but he met with different experiences. From the time he could crawl he had struggled to accommodate himself to the great connection of things; even the life of the prison had not placed him outside it, but had only united him the more closely with the whole. He had no inclination to cut the knot, but demanded that it should be untied.

"You're no good," said Morten and the others when they tried to rouse him, "for you can't hate." No, the cold in his mind was like the night-frost; it melted at the first sunbeam. When he looked back there were redeeming ties that held the whole together in spite of all the evil; and now the old librarian had brought him close up to the good in the other side of the cleft too. He had settled down to his shoemaking again and refused to be roused by the others' impatience; but he looked as if he had an eternity in which to unravel his affairs.

Sister was often down with him and filled the workshop with her chatter.

At about eight, when it began to grow light, he heard her staggering step on the stair, and she remained with him until Ellen took her up in the evening by main force to put her to bed. She dragged all the tools together and piled them up in front of Pelle on the bench so that he could hardly move, and called it helping. Then she rested, standing with her hands upon the edge of the bench and talking to him. "Sister's clever!" she said appreciatively, pointing with satisfaction to her work. "Big girl!" And if he did not answer she repeated it and did not leave off until he had praised her.

"Yes, you're very clever!" he said, "but can you put the things back in their places?"

The child shook her head. "Sister's tired," she declared with decision, and immediately after brought another tool and pushed it slowly up onto the heap while she kept her eyes upon his face to see whether she might do it. "Sister's helping!" she repeated in explanation; but Pelle pretended not to hear.

For a time she was quiet, but then came to him with her pinafore full of old boots and shoes that she had pulled out from behind the stove.

He tried to look stern, but had to bend down over his work. It made the little girl feel uncertain. She emptied her pinafore onto the platform, and sitting on her heels with her hands on her little knees, she tried to see what his expression was. It was not satisfactory, so she got up and, putting her hands on his knee, said, with an ingratiating look into his face: "You're so clever, father! You can do everything! You're the cleverest in the whole world!" And after a little pause--"We're both clever, aren't we, father?"

"Oh, that's it, is it!" exclaimed Pelle. "One of us is very conceited at any rate!"

"It's not me!" answered the child confidently, shaking her head.

"You seem to be very happy together," said Ellen when she came down with Boy Comfort on her arm to fetch Anna. The child did not want to go up with her, and pushed round into the corner behind Pelle's chair; and Boy Comfort struggled to be put down onto the floor to play with the lasts.

"Well, then," said Ellen, sitting down, "we'll all stay here together."

She looked quiet and resigned; her defeat had told upon her. She no longer spoke of the future, but was glad that they had escaped from the clutches of the money-lender; the thought of it filled her with a quiet but not altogether unspoiled happiness. She no longer dreamed of anything better, but was grateful for what she possessed; and it seemed to Pelle that something had died within her together with the dissatisfaction. It was as though she had at last given everything she had; her resignation to the gray everyday life made her dull and ordinary. "She needs suns.h.i.+ne," he thought.

And again his thoughts wandered in their search for a way out into the future--his one idea--in the same track that they had followed a hundred times before. He did not even enter it fully, but merely recognized that the problem was being worn threadbare. In his trade there was no compromise; there was only room for extortioners and extortionized, and he was not suited for either part. When he took up other possibilities, however, his thoughts returned of themselves to his work, like a roving dog that always comes back and snuffs at the same scent. There was something in him that with fatalistic obstinacy made him one with his trade, in spite of its hopelessness; he had staked everything there, and there the question should be solved. Behind the fatalism of the common people lies the recognition that there is plan and perspective in their life too; such and such a thing is so because it must be so. And this recognition Pelle had no reason to do away with.

He grew confused with the continual dwelling of his thoughts on the same subject, but it seemed to possess him, was with him while he slept, and seized him as soon as he awoke. There was an old dream that persistently haunted him at this time--a forgotten youthful idea from his earliest partic.i.p.ation in the rising, the plan for a common workshop that would make the court shoemaker superfluous. The plan had been laid aside at the time as impossible, but now he took it up again and went over it step by step. He could easily find some capable, reliable fellow-workmen who would stand by him through thick and thin with regard to work and profits; and there would be no difficulty about discipline, for during the past years the workmen had learned to subordinate themselves to their own people. Here was a way for the small man to a.s.sert himself within his trade and join the development; what one was not able to do could be done by several joining together, namely, turn the modern technics to account and divide the work into sections. He arranged it all most carefully, and went over it again and again to make sure that every detail was correct. When he slept he dreamed of his system of profit-sharing, and then it was a fact. He stood working in a bright room among comrades; there was no master and no servant, the machinery whirred, and the workmen sang and whistled while they minded it. Their hours of labor were short, and they all had happy homes waiting for them.

It was hard to wake up and know the reality. Alas! all the cleverest and most industrious hands in the world had no influence in their several trades--could not so much as sew a single st.i.tch--until capital started them. If that refused its support, they could do nothing at all, but were cut off, as it were, at once.

Machinery cost money. Pelle could get the latter from Brun, the old man having often enough offered him capital to start something or other; but he already owed him money, and capital might run his undertaking down.

It was at its post, and allowed no activity of that kind beside it. He was seized with uncertainty; he dared not venture the stakes.

The old philosopher came almost daily. Pelle had become a part of his life, and he watched his young friend's condition with anxiety. Was it the prison life--or was it perhaps the books--that had transformed this young man, who had once gone ahead with tempestuous recklessness, into a hesitating doubter who could not come to a decision? Personality was of doubtful value when it grew at the expense of energy. It had been the old man's hope that it would have developed greater energy through being replanted in fresh, untouched soil, and he tried to rouse Pelle out of his lethargy.

Pelle gave an impatient jerk. They were poking him up on all sides, wanting him to come to a decision, and he could not see his way to it.

Of course he was half asleep; he knew it himself. He felt that he wanted rest; his ent.i.ty was working for him out there in the uncertainty.

"I don't know anything," he said, half irritated, "so what can be the use? I thought books would lead me to a place from which I could bring everything together; but now I'm all abroad. I know too much to dash on blindly, and too little to find the pivot on which the whole thing turns. It doesn't matter what I touch, it resolves itself into something _for_ and something _against_." He laughed in desperation.

One day Brun brought him a book. "This book," he said with a peculiar smile, "has satisfied many who were seeking for the truth. Let's see whether it can satisfy you too!" It was Darwin's "Origin of Species."

Pelle read as in a mist. The point lay here--the whole thing powerfully put into one sentence! His brain was in a ferment, he could not lay the book down, but went on reading all night, bewitched and horrified at this merciless view. When Ellen in surprise came down with his morning coffee, he had finished the book. He made no reply to her gentle reproaches, but drank the coffee in silence, put on his hat and went out into the deserted streets to cool his burning brow.

It was very early and the working-men had not yet turned out; at the morning coffee-rooms the shutters were just being taken down; warmly-clad tram-men were tramping through the streets in their wooden-soled boots; slipshod, tired women ran stumbling along to their early jobs, s.h.i.+vering with cold and weary of life, weary before they had begun their day. Here and there a belated woman toiled along the street carrying a clothes-basket, a mother taking her baby to the creche before she went to her work.

Suddenly the feeling of rebellion came over Pelle, hot, almost suffocating him. This cruelly cold doctrine of the right of the strong, which gave him the choice between becoming brutal or going to the dogs--this was the key to an understanding of life? It p.r.o.nounced a sentence of death upon him and his fellows, upon the entire world of the poor. From this point of view, the existing conditions were the only ones possible--they were simply ideal; the sweater and the money-lender, whom he hated, were in the most harmonious agreement with the fundamental laws of life! And the terrible thing was that from this standpoint the social fabric was clearly illuminated: he could not deny it. He who best learned to accommodate himself to the existing state of things, conquered; no matter how vile the existing state of things might be.

The book threw at once a dazzling light upon society, but where was his own cla.s.s in this doctrine--all the poor? They were not taken into account! Society was thus in reality only those in possession, and here he had their religion, the moral support for the uncompromising utilization. It had always been difficult to understand how men could misuse others; but here it was a sacred duty to give stones for bread.

The greatest oppressor was in reality nearest to life's holy, maternal heart; for he was appointed to carry on the development.

The poor had no share in this doctrine. When a bad workman was in difficulties, the others did not press him until he had to go down, not even when he himself was to blame for his lack of means. The poor did not let the weak fall, but took him under their wing. They placed themselves outside the pale of the law and gave themselves no chance; the race could not be won with a wounded comrade on one's back. But in this fact there lay the admission that they did not belong to the existing order of things, but had the right to demand their own time of happiness. A new age must come, in which all that was needed in order that they might share in it--kindness of heart, solidarity--was predominant. Thus even the great union he had helped to effect pointed in the right direction. It had been the opposite of one against all-it had built upon the law of reciprocity.

And the poor man was not a miserable wretch, condemned by the development to be ruined, a visionary, who, as a consequence of an empty stomach, dreamed of a Utopia. Pelle had pa.s.sed his childhood in the country and gone about with the rest of creation in all kinds of weather. He had seen the small singing-birds throw themselves in whole clouds at the hawk when it had seized one of their number, and pursue it until it dropped its prey in confusion. When he caught an ant in a split straw, the other ants flocked to the straw and gnawed their comrade out: they could not be frightened away. If he touched them, they squirted their poison against his hand and went on working. Their courage amused him, the sprinklings of poison were so tiny that he could not see them; but if he quickly raised his hand to his nose, he detected a sharp acid smell. Why did they not leave their comrade in his dilemma, when there were so many of them and they were so busy? They did not even stop to have a meal until they had liberated him.