PELLE THE CONQUEROR 30 page

"If you only go at the beast hard enough, it'll surely die. Now, where you are, in your thirtieth year, you ought to be able to get at it. Suppose you were to give it cognac?"

Jorgen Kofod, as a rule, came clumping in with great wooden shoes, and Jeppe used to scold him. "One wouldn't believe you've got a shoemaker for a brother!" he would say crossly; "and yet we all get our black bread from you."

"But what if I can't keep my feet warm now in those damned leather shoes? And I'm full through and through of gout—it's a real misery!" The big baker twisted himself dolefully.

"It must be dreadful with gout like that," said Bjerregrav. "I myself have never had it."

"Tailors don't get gout," rejoined Baker Jorgen scornfully. "A tailor's body has no room to harbor it. So much I do know—twelve tailors go to a pound."

Bjerregrav did not reply.

"The tailors have their own topsy-turvy world," continued the baker. "I can't compare myself with them. A crippled tailor—well, even he has got his full strength of body."

"A tailor is as fine a fellow as a black-bread baker!" stammered Bjerregrav nervously. "To bake black bread—why, every farmer's wife can do that!"

"Fine! I believe you! Hell and blazes! If the tailor makes a cap he has enough cloth left over to make himself a pair of breeches. That's why tailors are always dressed so fine!" The baker was talking to the empty air.

"Millers and bakers are always rogues, everybody says." Old
Bjerregrav turned to Master Andres, trembling with excitement.
But the young master stood there looking gaily from one to the
other, his lame leg dangling in the air.

"For the tailor nothing comes amiss—there's too much room in me!" said the baker, as though something were choking him. "Or, as another proverb says—it's of no more consequence than a tailor in hell. They are the fellows! We all know the story of the woman who brought a full-grown tailor into the world without even knowing she was with child."

Jeppe laughed. "Now, that's enough, really; God knows neither of you will give in to the other."

"Well, and I've no intention of trampling a tailor to death, if it can anyhow be avoided—but one can't always see them." Baker Jorgen carefully lifted his great wooden shoes. "But they are not men. Now is there even one tailor in the town who has been overseas? No, and there were no men about while the tailor was being made. A woman stood in a draught at the front door, and there she brought forth the tailor." The baker could not stop himself when once he began to quiz anybody; now that Soren was married, he had recovered all his good spirits.

Bjerregrav could not beat this. "You can say what you like about tailors," he succeeded in saying at last. "But people who bake black bread are not respected as handicraftsmen—no more than the washerwoman! Tailoring and shoemaking, they are proper crafts, with craftman's tests, and all the rest."

"Yes, shoemaking of course is another thing," said Jeppe.

"But as many proverbs and sayings are as true of you as of us," said Bjerregrav, desperately blinking.

"Well, it's no longer ago than last year that Master Klausen married a cabinet-maker's daughter. But whom must a tailor marry? His own serving-maid?"

"Now how can you, father!" sighed Master Andres. "One man's as good as another."

"Yes, you turn everything upside down! But I'll have my handicraft respected. To-day all sorts of agents and wool-merchants and other trash settle in the town and talk big. But in the old days the handicraftsmen were the marrow of the land. Even the king himself had to learn a handicraft. I myself served my apprenticeship in the capital, and in the workshop where I was a prince had learned the trade. But, hang it all, I never heard of a king who learned tailoring!"

They were capable of going on forever in this way, but, as the dispute was at its worst, the door opened, and Wooden-leg Larsen stumped in, filling the workshop with fresh air. He was wearing a storm-cap and a blue pilot-coat. "Good evening, children!" he said gaily, and threw down a heap of leather ferrules and single boots on the window-bench.

His entrance put life into all. "Here's a playboy for us! Welcome home! Has it been a good summer?"

Jeppe picked up the five boots for the right foot, one after another, turned back the uppers, and held heels and soles in a straight line before his eyes. "A bungler has had these in hand," he growled, and then he set to work on the casing for the wooden leg. "Well, did the layer of felt answer?" Larsen suffered from cold in his amputated foot.

"Yes; I've not had cold feet any more."

"Cold feet!" The baker struck himself on the loins and laughed.

"Yes, you can say what you like, but every time my wooden leg gets wet I get a cold in the head!"

"That's the very deuce!" cried Jorgen, and his great body rolled like a hippopotamus. "A funny thing, that!"

"There are many funny things in the world," stammered Bjerregrav. "When my brother died, my watch stopped at that very moment—it was he who gave it me."

Wooden-leg Larsen had been through the whole kingdom with his barrel-organ, and had to tell them all about it; of the railway- trains which travelled so fast that the landscape turned round on its own axis, and of the great shops and places of amusement in the capital.

"It must be as it will," said Master Andres. "But in the summer
I shall go to the capital and work there!"

"In Jutland—that's where they have so many wrecks!" said the baker. "They say everything is sand there! I've heard that the country is shifting under their feet—moving away toward the east. Is it true that they have a post there that a man must scratch himself against before he can sit down?"

"My sister has a son who has married a Jutland woman and settled down there," said Bjerregrav. "Have you seen anything of them?"

The baker laughed. "Tailors are so big—they've got the whole world in their waistcoat pocket. Well, and Funen? Have you been there, too? That's where the women have such a pleasant disposition. I've lain before Svendborg and taken in water, but there was no time to go ashore." This remark sounded like a sigh.

"Can you stand it, wandering so much?" asked Bjerregrav anxiously.

Wooden-leg Larsen looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav's congenital club-foot—he had received his own injury at Heligoland, at the hands of an honorable bullet. "If one's sound of limb," he said, spitting on the floor by the window.

Then the others had to relate what had happened in town during the course of the summer; of the Finnish barque which had stranded in the north, and how the "Great Power" had broken out again. "Now he's sitting in the dumps under lock and key."

Bjerregrav took exception to the name they gave him; he called it blasphemy, on the ground that the Bible said that power and might belonged to God alone.

Wooden-leg Larsen said that the word, as they had used it, had nothing to do with God; it was an earthly thing; across the water people used it to drive machinery, instead of horses.

"I should think woman is the greatest power," said Baker Jorgen, "for women rule the world, God knows they do! And God protect us if they are once let loose on us! But what do you think, Andres, you who are so book-learned?"

"The sun is the greatest power," said Master Andres. "It rules over all life, and science has discovered that all strength and force come from the sun. When it falls into the sea and cools, then the whole world will become a lump of ice."

"Then the sea is the greatest power!" cried Jeppe triumphantly.
"Or do you know of anything else that tears everything down and
washes it away? And from the sea we get everything back again.
Once when I went to Malaga——"

"Yes, that really is true," said Bjerregrav, "for most people get their living from the sea, and many their death. And the rich people we have get all their money from the sea."

Jeppe drew himself up proudly and his glasses began to glitter. "The sea can bear what it likes, stone or iron, although it is soft itself! The heaviest loads can travel on its back. And then all at once it swallows everything down. I have seen ships which sailed right into the weather and disappeared when their time came."

"I should very much like to know whether the different countries float on the water, or whether they stand firm on the bottom of the sea. Don't you know that, Andres?" asked Bjerregrav.

Master Andres thought they stood on the bottom of the sea, far below the surface; but Uncle Jorgen said: "Nay! Big as the sea is!"

"Yes, it's big, for I've been over the whole island," said Bjerregrav self-consciously; "but I never got anywhere where I couldn't see the sea. Every parish in all Bornholm borders on the sea. But it has no power over the farmers and peasants—they belong to the land, don't they?"

"The sea has power over all of us," said Larsen. "Some it refuses; they go to sea for years and years, but then in their old age they suffer from sea-sickness, and then they are warned. That is why Skipper Andersen came on shore. And others it attracts, from right away up in the country! I have been to sea with such people—they had spent their whole lives up on the island, and had seen the sea, but had never been down to the shore. And then one day the devil collared them and they left the plough and ran down to the sea and hired themselves out. And they weren't the worse seamen."

"Yes," said Baker Jorgen, "and all of us here have been to sea, and Bornholmers sail on all the seas, as far as a ship can go. And I have met people who had never been on the sea, and yet they were as though it was their home. When I sailed the brig Clara for Skipper Andersen, I had such a lad on board as ordinary seaman. He had never bathed in the sea; but one day, as we were lying at anchor, and the others were swimming around, he jumped into the water too—now this is God's truth—as though he were tumbling into his mother's arms; he thought that swimming came of its own accord. He went straight to the bottom, and was half dead before we fished him up again."

"The devil may understand the sea!" cried Master Andres breathlessly. "It is curved like an arch everywhere, and it can get up on its hind legs and stand like a wall, although it's a fluid! And I have read in a book that there is so much silver in the sea that every man in the whole world might be rich."

"Thou righteous God!" cried Bjerregrav, "such a thing I have never heard. Now does that come from all the ships that have gone down? Yes, the sea—that, curse it, is the greatest power!"

"It's ten o'clock," said Jeppe. "And the lamp is going out—that devil's contrivance!" They broke up hastily, and Pelle turned the lamp out.

But long after he had laid his head on his pillow everything was going round inside it. He had swallowed everything, and imaginary pictures thronged in his brain like young birds in an over-full nest, pushing and wriggling to find a place wherein to rest. The sea was strong; now in the wintertime the surging of the billows against the cliffs was continually in his ear. Pelle was not sure whether it would stand aside for him! He had an unconscious reluctance to set himself limits, and as for the power about which they had all been disputing, it certainly had its seat in Pelle himself, like a vague consciousness that he was, despite all his defeats, invincible.

At times this feeling manifested itself visibly and helped him through the day. One afternoon they were sitting and working, after having swallowed their food in five minutes, as their custom was; the journeyman was the only one who did not grudge himself a brief mid-day rest, and he sat reading the newspaper. Suddenly he raised his head and looked wonderingly at Pelle. "Now what's this? Lasse Karlson—isn't that your father?"

"Yes," answered Pelle, with a paralyzed tongue, and the blood rushed to his cheeks. Was Father Lasse in the news? Not among the accidents? He must have made himself remarkable in one way or another through his farming! Pelle was nearly choking with excitement, but he did not venture to ask, and Little Nikas simply sat there and looked secretive. He had assumed the expression peculiar to the young master.

But then he read aloud: "Lost! A louse with three tails has escaped, and may be left, in return for a good tip, with the landowner Lasse Karlson, Heath Farm. Broken black bread may also be brought there."

The others burst into a shout of laughter, but Pelle turned an ashen gray. With a leap he was across the table and had pulled little Nikas to the ground underneath him; there he lay, squeezing the man's throat with his fingers, trying to throttle him, until he was overpowered. Emil and Peter had to hold him while the knee-strap put in its work.

And yet he was proud of the occurrence; what did a miserable thrashing signify as against the feat of throwing the journeyman to the ground and overcoming the slavish respect he had felt for him! Let them dare to get at him again with their lying allusions, or to make sport of Father Lasse! Pelle was not inclined to adopt circuitous methods.

And the circumstances justified him. After this he received more consideration; no one felt anxious to bring Pelle and his cobbler's tools on top of him, even although the boy could be thrashed afterward.

XI

The skipper's garden was a desert. Trees and bushes were leafless; from the workshop window one could look right through them, and over other gardens beyond, and as far as the backs of the houses in East Street. There were no more games in the garden; the paths were buried in ice and melting snow, and the blocks of coral, and the great conch-shells which, with their rosy mouths and fish-like teeth, had sung so wonderfully of the great ocean, had been taken in on account of the frost.

Manna he saw often enough. She used to come tumbling into the workshop with her school satchel or her skates; a button had got torn off, or a heel had been wrenched loose by a skate. A fresh breeze hovered about her hair and cheeks, and the cold made her face glow. "There is blood!" the young master would say, looking at her delightedly; he laughed and jested when she came in. But Manna would hold on to Pelle's shoulder and throw her foot into his lap, so that he could button her boots. Sometimes she would pinch him secretly and look angry—she was jealous of Morten. But Pelle did not understand; Morten's gentle, capable mind had entirely subjugated him and assumed the direction of their relations. Pelle was miserable if Morten was not there when he had an hour to spare. Then he would run, with his heart in his mouth, to find him; everything else was indifferent to him.

One Sunday morning, as he was sweeping the snow in the yard, the girls were in their garden; they were making a snowman.

"Hey, Pelle!" they cried, and they clapped their mittens; "come over here! You can help us to build a snow-house. We'll wall up the door and light some Christmas-tree candles: we've got some ends. Oh, do come!"

"Then Morten must come too—he'll be here directly!"

Manna turned up her nose. "No, we don't want Morten here!"

"Why not? He's so jolly!" said Pelle, wounded.

"Yes, but his father is so dreadful—everybody is afraid of him.
And then he's been in prison."

"Yes, for beating some one—that's nothing so dreadful! My father was too, when he was a young man. That's no disgrace, for it isn't for stealing."

But Manna looked at him with an expression exactly like Jeppe's when he was criticizing somebody from his standpoint as a respectable citizen.

"But, Pelle, aren't you ashamed of it? That's how only the very poorest people think—those who haven't any feelings of shame!"

Pelle blushed for his vulgar way of looking at things. "It's no fault of Morten's that his father's like that!" he retorted lamely.

"No, we won't have Morten here. And mother won't let us. She says perhaps we can play with you, but not with anybody else. We belong to a very good family," she said, in explanation.

"My father has a great farm—it's worth quite as much as a rotten barge," said Pelle angrily.

"Father's ship isn't rotten!" rejoined Manna, affronted. "It's the best in the harbor here, and it has three masts!"

"All the same, you're nothing but a mean hussy!" Pelle spat over the hedge.

"Yes, and you're a Swede!" Manna blinked her eyes triumphantly, while Dolores and Aina stood behind her and put out their tongues.

Pelle felt strongly inclined to jump over the garden wall and beat them; but just then Jeppe's old woman began scolding from the kitchen, and he went on with his work.

Now, after Christmas, there was nothing at all to do. People were wearing out their old boots, or they went about in wooden shoes. Little Nikas was seldom in the workshop; he came in at meal-times and went away again, and he was always wearing his best clothes. "He earns his daily bread easily," said Jeppe. Over on the mainland they didn't feed their people through the winter; the moment there was no more work, they kicked them out.

In the daytime Pelle was often sent on a round through the harbor in order to visit the shipping. He would find the masters standing about there in their leather aprons, talking about nautical affairs; or they would gather before their doors, to gossip, and each, from sheer habit, would carry some tool or other in his hand.

And the wolf was at the door. The "Saints" held daily meetings, and the people had time enough to attend them. Winter proved how insecurely the town was established, how feeble were its roots; it was not here as it was up in the country, where a man could enjoy himself in the knowledge that the earth was working for him. Here people made themselves as small and ate as little as possible, in order to win through the slack season.

In the workshops the apprentices sat working at cheap boots and shoes for stock; every spring the shoemakers would charter a ship in common and send a cargo to Iceland. This helped them on a little. "Fire away!" the master would repeat, over and over again; "make haste—we don't get much for it!"

The slack season gave rise to many serious questions. Many of the workers were near to destitution, and it was said that the organized charities would find it very difficult to give assistance to all who applied for it. They were busy everywhere, to their full capacity. "And I've heard it's nothing here to what it is on the mainland," said Baker Jorgen. "There the unemployed are numbered in tens of thousands."

"How can they live, all those thousands of poor people, if the unemployment is so great?" asked Bjerregrav. "The need is bad enough here in town, where every employer provides his people with their daily bread."

"Here no one starves unless he wants to," said Jeppe. "We have a well-organized system of relief."

"You're certainly becoming a Social Democrat, Jeppe," said Baker
Jorgen; "you want to put everything on to the organized charities!"

Wooden-leg Larsen laughed; that was a new interpretation.

"Well, what do they really want? For they are not freemasons. They say they are raising their heads again over on the mainland."

"Well, that, of course, is a thing that comes and goes with unemployment," said Jeppe. "The people must do something. Last winter a son of the sailmaker's came home—well, he was one of them in secret. But the old folks would never admit it, and he himself was so clever that he got out of it somehow."

"If he'd been a son of mine he would have got the stick," said
Jorgen.

"Aren't they the sort of people who are making ready for the millennium? We've got a few of their sort here," said Bjerregrav diffidently.

"D'you mean the poor devils who believe in the watchmaker and his 'new time'? Yes, that may well be," said Jeppe contemptuously. "I have heard they are quite wicked enough for that. I'm inclined to think they are the Antichrist the Bible foretells."

"Ah, but what do they really want?" asked Baker Jorgen. "What is their madness really driving at?"

"What do they want?" Wooden-leg Larsen pulled himself together. "I've knocked up against a lot of people, I have, and as far as I can understand it they want to get justice; they want to take the right of coining money away from the Crown and give it to everybody. And they want to overthrow everything, that is quite certain."

"Well," said Master Andres, "what they want, I believe, is perfectly right, only they'll never get it. I know a little about it, on account of Garibaldi."

"But what do they want, then, if they don't want to overthrow the whole world?"

"What do they want? Well, what do they want? That everybody should have exactly the same?" Master Andres was uncertain.

"Then the ship's boy would have as much as the captain! No, it would be the devil and all!" Baker Jorgen smacked his thigh and laughed.

"And they want to abolish the king," said Wooden-leg Larsen eagerly.

"Who the devil would reign over us then? The Germans would soon come hurrying over! That's a most wicked thing, that Danish people should want to hand over their country to the enemy! All I wonder is that they don't shoot them down without trial! They'd never be admitted to Bornholm."

"That we don't really know!" The young master smiled.

"To the devil with them—we'd all go down to the shore and shoot them: they should never land alive!"

"They are just a miserable rabble, the lot of them," said Jeppe. "I should very much like to know whether there is a decent citizen among them."

"Naturally, it's always the poor who complain of poverty," said
Bjerregrav. "So the thing never comes to an end."

Baker Jorgen was the only one of them who had anything to do. Things would have to be bad indeed before the people stopped buying his black bread. He even had more to do than usual; the more people abstained from meat and cheese, the more bread they ate. He often hired Jeppe's apprentices so that they might help him in the kneading.

But he was not in a happy frame of mind. He was always shouting his abuse of Soren through the open doors, because the latter would not go near his buxom young wife. Old Jorgen had taken him and put him into bed with her with his own hands, but Soren had got out of the business by crying and trembling like a new-born calf.

"D'you think he's perhaps bewitched?" asked Master Andres.

"She's young and pretty, and there's not the least fault to be found with her—and we've fed him with eggs right through the winter. She goes about hanging her head, she gets no attention from him. 'Marie! Soren!' I cry, just to put a little life into them—he ought to be the sort of devil I was, I can tell you! She laughs and blushes, but Soren, he simply sneaks off. It's really a shame—so dainty as she is too, in every way. Ah, it ought to have been in my young days, I can tell you!"

"You are still young enough, Uncle Jorgen!" laughed Master Andres.

"Well, a man could almost bring himself to it—when he considers what a dreadful injustice is going on under his own eyes. For, look you, Andres, I've been a dirty beast about all that sort of thing, but I've been a jolly fellow too; people were always glad to be on board with me. And I've had strength for a booze, and a girl; and for hard work in bad weather. The life I've led—it hasn't been bad; I'd live it all over again the same. But Soren—what sort of a strayed weakling is he? He can't find his own way about! Now, if only you would have a chat with him—you've got some influence over him."

"I'll willingly try."

"Thanks; but look here, I owe you money." Jorgen took ten kroner and laid them on the table as he was going.

"Pelle, you devil's imp, can you run an errand for me?" The young master limped into the cutting-out room, Pelle following on his heels.

A hundred times a day the master would run to the front door, but he hurried back again directly; he could not stand the cold. His eyes were full of dreams of other countries, whose climates were kinder, and he spoke of his two brothers, of whom one was lost in South America—perhaps murdered. But the other was in Australia, herding sheep. He earned more at that than the town magistrate received as salary, and was the cleverest boxer in the neighborhood. Here the master made his bloodless hands circle one round the other, and let them fall clenched upon Pelle's back. "That," he said, in a superior tone, "is what they call boxing. Brother Martin can cripple a man with one blow. He is paid for it, the devil!" The master shuddered. His brother had on several occasions offered to send him his steamer-ticket, but there was that damned leg. "Tell me what I should do over there, eh, Pelle?"

Pelle had to bring books from the lending library every day, and he soon learned which writers were the most exciting. He also attempted to read himself, but he could not get on with it; it was more amusing to stand about by the skating-pond and freeze and watch the others gliding over the ice. But he got Morten to tell him of exciting books, and these he brought home for the master; such was the "Flying Dutchman." "That's a work of poetry, Lord alive!" said the master, and he related its contents to Bjerregrav, who took them all for reality.

"You should have played some part in the great world, Andres—I for my part do best to stay at home here. But you could have managed it—I'm sure of it."

"The great world!" said the master scornfully. No, he didn't take much stock in the world—it wasn't big enough. "If I were to travel, I should like to look for the way into the interior of the earth— they say there's a way into it in Iceland. Or it would be glorious to make a voyage to the moon; but that will always be just a story."

At the beginning of the new year the crazy Anker came to the young master and dictated a love-letter to the eldest daughter of the king. "This year he will surely answer," he said thoughtfully. "Time is passing, and fortune disappears, and there are few that have their share of it; we need the new time very badly."

"Yes, we certainly do," said Master Andres. "But if such a misfortune should happen that the king should refuse, why, you are man enough to manage the matter yourself, Anker!"

It was a slack season, and, just as it was at its very worst, shoemaker Bohn returned and opened a shop on the marketplace. He had spent a year on the mainland and had learned all sorts of modern humbug. There was only one pair of boots in his window, and those were his own Sunday boots. Every Monday they were put out and exhibited again, so that there should be something to look at.

If he himself was in the shop, talking to the people, his wife would sit in the living-room behind and hammer on a boot, so that it sounded as though there were men in the workshop.

But at Shrovetide Jeppe received some orders. Master Andres came home quite cheerfully one day from Bjerhansen's cellar; there he had made the acquaintance of some of the actors of a troupe which had just arrived. "They are fellows, too!" he said, stroking his cheeks. "They travel continually from one place to another and give performances—they get to see the world!" He could not sit quiet.

The next morning they came rioting into the workshop, filling the place with their deafening gabble. "Soles and heels!" "Heels that won't come off!" "A bit of heel-work and two on the snout!" So they went on, bringing great armfuls of boots from under their cloaks, or fishing them out of bottomless pockets, and throwing them in heaps on the window-bench, each with his droll remarks. Boots and shoes they called "understandings"; they turned and twisted every word, tossing it like a ball from mouth to mouth, until not a trace of sense was left in it.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 370