Pelle the Conqueror by Martin Andersen Nexø (great novels to read .TXT) 📕

luck in the town, he would go to sea. And then one day he would come to some coast that interested him, and he would land, and go to the gold-diggings. Over there the girls went mother-naked, with nothing but some blue tattoo-work to hide their shame; but Pelle had his girl sitting at home, true to him, waiting for his return. She was more beautiful even than Bodil and yellow-haired Marie put together, and whole crowds followed her footsteps, but she sat at home and was faithful, and she would sing the old love-song:

“I had a lad, but he went away
All over the false, false sea,
Three years they are gone, and now today
He writes no more to me!”

And while she sang the letter came to the door. But out of every letter that his father Lasse received fell ten-kroner banknotes, and one day a letter came with steamer-tickets for the two of them. The song would not serve him any further, for in the song they perished during the voyage, and the poor young man spent the rest of his days on the seashore, gazing, through the shadow of insanity, upon every rising sail. She and Lasse arrived safely⁠—after all sorts of difficulties, that went without saying⁠—and Pelle stood on the shore and welcomed them. He had dressed himself up like a savage, and he carried on as though he meant to eat them before he made himself known.

Houp la! Pelle jumped to his feet. Up the road there was a rattling and a clanking as though a thousand scythes were clashing together: an old cart with loose plank sides came slowly jolting along, drawn by the two most miserable moorland horses he had ever seen. On the driver’s seat was an old peasant, who was bobbing about as though he would every moment fall in pieces, like all the rest of his equipment. Pelle did not at first feel sure whether it was the cart itself or the two bags of bones between the shafts that made such a frightful din whenever they moved, but as the vehicle at last drew level with him, and the old peasant drew up, he could not resist the invitation to get up and have a lift. His shoulders were still aching from carrying his sack.

“So you are going to town, after all?” said old Klaus, pointing to his goods and chattels.

To town, yes indeed! Something seemed to grip hold of Pelle’s bursting heart, and before he was aware of it he had delivered himself and his whole future into the old peasant’s hands.

“Yes, yes⁠—yes indeed⁠—why, naturally!” said Klaus, nodding as Pelle came forward. “Yes, of course! A man can’t do less. And what’s your idea about what you are going to be in the long run⁠—councillor or king?” He looked up slowly. “Yes, goin’ to town; well, well, they all, take the road they feel something calling them to take.⁠ ⁠… Directly a young greyhound feels the marrow in his bones, or has got a shilling in his pocket, he’s got to go to town and leave it there. And what do you think comes back out the town? Just manure and nothing else! What else have I ever in my life been able to pick up there? And now I’m sixty-five. But what’s the good of talking? No more than if a man was to stick his tail out and blow against a gale. It comes over them just like the May-gripes takes the young calves⁠—heigh-ho! and away they go, goin’ to do something big. Afterward, then old Klaus Hermann can come and clean up after them! They’ve no situation there, and no kinsfolk what could put them up⁠—but they always expect something big. Why, down in the town there are beds made up in the streets, and the gutters are running over with food and money! But what do you mean to do? Let’s hear it now.”

Pelle turned crimson. He had not yet succeeded in making a beginning, and already he had been caught behaving like a blockhead.

“Well, well, well,” said Klaus, in a good-humored tone, “you are no bigger fool than all the rest. But if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go to shoemaker Jeppe Kofod as apprentice; I am going straight to his place to fetch manure, and I know he’s looking for an apprentice. Then you needn’t go floundering about uncertain-like, and you can drive right up to the door like the quality.”

Pelle winced all over. Never in his life had it entered his head that he could ever become a shoemaker. Even back there on the land, where people looked up to the handicrafts, they used always to say, if a boy had not turned out quite right: “Well, we can always make a cobbler or a tailor of him!” But Pelle was no cripple, that he must lead a sedentary life indoors in order to get on at all; he was strong and well-made. What he would be⁠—well, that certainly lay in the hands of fortune; but he felt very strongly that it ought to be something active, something that needed courage and energy. And in any case he was quite sure as to what he did not want to be. But as they jolted through the town, and Pelle⁠—so as to be beforehand with the great world⁠—kept on taking off his cap to everybody, although no one returned his greeting, his spirits began to sink, and a sense of his own insignificance possessed him. The miserable cart, at which all the little town boys laughed and pointed with their fingers, had a great deal to do with this feeling.

“Take off your cap to a pack like that!” grumbled Klaus; “why, only look how puffed up they behave, and yet everything they’ve got they’ve stolen from us others. Or what do you suppose⁠—can you see if they’ve got their summer seeds in the earth yet?” And he glared contemptuously down the street.

No,