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

She sniffed contemptuously. “Work! So you think I need do that? Kongstrup has to pay me for bringing up his son, and then there are friends that come to me, now one and now another, and bring a little with them⁠—when they haven’t spent it all in drink. You may come down and see me this evening. I’ll be good to you too.”

“No, thank you!” said Lasse, gravely. “I am a human being too, but I won’t go to one who’s sat on my knee as if she’d been my own child.”

“Have you any gin, then?” she asked, giving him a sharp nudge.

Lasse thought there was some, and went to see. “No, not a drop,” he said, returning with the bottle. “But I’ve got something for you here that your mother asked me to give you as a keepsake. It was lucky I happened to remember it.” And he handed her a packet, and looked on happily while she opened it, feeling pleased on her account. It was a hymnbook. “Isn’t it a beauty?” he said. “With a gold cross and clasp⁠—and then, it’s your mother’s.”

“What’s the good of that to me?” asked Johanna. “I don’t sing hymns.”

“Don’t you?” said Lasse, hurt. “But your mother has never known but that you’ve kept the faith you had as a child, so you must forgive her this once.”

“Is that all you’ve got for me?” she asked, pushing the book off her lap.

“Yes, it is,” said Lasse, his voice trembling; and he picked up the book.

“Who’s going to have the rest, then?”

“Well, the house was leased, and there weren’t many things left, for it’s a long time since your father died, remember. Where you should have been, strangers have filled the daughter’s place; and I suppose those who’ve looked after her will get what there is. But perhaps you’d still be in time, if you took the first steamer.”

“No, thank you! Go home and be stared at and play the penitent⁠—no, thank you! I’d rather the strangers got what’s left. And mother⁠—well, if she’s lived without my help, I suppose she can die without it too. Well, I must be getting home. I wonder what’s become of the future master of Stone Farm?” She laughed loudly.

Lasse would have taken his oath that she had been quite sober, and yet she walked unsteadily as she went behind the calves’ stables to look for her son. It was on his lips to ask whether she would not take the hymnbook with her, but he refrained. She was not in the mood for it now, and she might mock God; so he carefully wrapped up the book and put it away in the green chest.

At the far end of the cow-stable a space was divided off with boards. It had no door, and the boards were an inch apart, so that it resembled a crate. This was the herdsman’s room. Most of the space was occupied by a wide legless bedstead made of rough boards knocked together, with nothing but the stone floor to rest on. Upon a deep layer of rye straw the bedclothes lay in a disordered heap, and the thick striped blankets were stiff with dried cow-dung, to which feathers and bits of straw had adhered.

Pelle lay curled up in the middle of the bed with the down quilt up to his chin, while Lasse sat on the edge, turning over the things in the green chest and talking to himself. He was going through his Sunday devotions, taking out slowly, one after another, all the little things he had brought from the broken-up home. They were all purely useful things⁠—balls of cotton, scraps of stuff, and suchlike, that were to be used to keep his own and the boy’s clothes in order; but to him each thing was a relic to be handled with care, and his heart bled every time one of them came to an end. With each article he laid down, he slowly repeated what Bengta had said it was for when she lay dying and was trying to arrange everything for him and the boy: “Wool for the boy’s gray socks. Pieces to lengthen the sleeves of his Sunday jacket. Mind you don’t wear your stockings too long before you mend them.” They were the last wishes of the dying woman, and they were followed in the smallest detail. Lasse remembered them word for word, in spite of his bad memory.

Then there were little things that had belonged to Bengta herself, cheap finery that all had its happy memory of fairs and holidays, which he recalled in his muttered reverie.

Pelle liked this subdued murmur that he did not need to listen to or answer, and that was so pleasant to doze off in. He lay looking out sleepily at the bright sky, tired and with a vague feeling of something unpleasant that was past.

Suddenly he started. He had heard the door of the cow-stable open, and steps upon the long foddering-passage. It was the pupil. He recognized the hated step at once.

He thrilled with delight. Now that fellow would be made to understand that he mustn’t do anything to boys with fathers who could hold a man out at arm’s length and scold! oh, much worse than the bailiff. He sat up and looked eagerly at his father.

“Lasse!” came a voice from the end of the tables.

The old man growled sullenly, stirred uneasily, but did not rise.

“Las-se!” came again, after a little, impatiently and in a tone of command.

“Yes,” said Lasse slowly, rising and going out.

“Can’t you answer when you’re called, you old Swedish rascal? Are you deaf?”

“Oh, I can answer well enough,” said Lasse, in a trembling voice. “But Mr. Pupil oughtn’t to⁠—I’m a father, let me tell you⁠—and a father’s heart⁠—”

“You may be a monthly nurse for all I care, but you’ve got to answer when you’re called, or else I’ll get the bailiff to give you a talking-to. Do you understand?”

“Yes,