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

of people drowned in the ocean of life. He soon found himself cozily settled among all these dishevelled nestlings, whom the pitiless wind had driven oversea, and who were now washed ashore by the waves.

A tall man with a full beard and a pair of good childlike eyes stood up among the benches, beating the time of a hymn⁠—he was Dam, the smith. He led the singing, and as he stood there he bent his knees in time, and they all sang with him, with tremulous voices, each in his own key, of that which had passed over them. The notes forced their way through the parched, worn throats, cowering, as though afraid, now that they had flown into the light. Hesitatingly they unfurled their fragile, gauzy wings, and floated out into the room, up from the quivering lips. And under the roof they met with their hundreds of sisters, and their defilement fell from them. They became a jubilation, loud and splendid, over some unknown treasure, over the kingdom of happiness, that was close at hand. To Pelle it seemed that the air must be full of butterflies winged with sunshine:

“O blessed, blessed shall we be
When we, from care and mis’ry free,
The splendor of Thy kingdom see,
And with our Saviour come to Thee!”

“Mother, I’m hungry!” said a child’s voice, as the hymn was followed by silence. The mother, herself emaciated, silenced the child with a shocked expression, and looked wonderingly about her. What a stupid idea of the child’s! “You’ve just had your food!” she said loudly, as though she had been comfortably off. But the child went on crying: “Mother, I’m so hungry!”

Then Baker Jörgen’s Sören came by, and gave the child a roll. He had a whole basket full of bread. “Are there any more children who are hungry?” he asked aloud. He looked easily in people’s faces, and was quite another creature to what he was at home; here no one laughed at him, and no one whispered that he was the brother of his own son.

An old white-bearded man mounted the pulpit at the back of the hall. “That’s him,” was whispered in every direction, and they all hastened to clear their throats by coughing, and to induce the children to empty their mouths of food. He took the cry of the little one as his text: “Mother, I am so hungry!” That was the voice of the world⁠—that great, terrible cry⁠—put into the mouth of a child. He saw no one there who had not writhed at the sound of that cry on the lips of his own flesh and blood⁠—no one who, lest he should hear it again, had not sought to secure bread during his lifetime⁠—no one who had not been beaten back. But they did not see God’s hand when that hand, in its loving-kindness, changed that mere hunger for bread into a hunger for happiness. They were the poor, and the poor are God’s chosen people. For that reason they must wander in the desert, and must blindly ask: “Where is the Promised Land?” But the gleam of which the faithful followed was not earthly happiness! God himself led them to and fro until their hunger was purged and became the true hunger⁠—the hunger of the soul for eternal happiness!

They did not understand much of what he said; but his words set free something within them, so that they engaged in lively conversation over everyday things. But suddenly the buzz of conversation was silenced; a little hunchbacked man had clambered up on a bench and was looking them over with glittering eyes. This was Sort, the traveling shoemaker from the outer suburb.

“We want to be glad and merry,” he said, assuming a droll expression; “God’s children are always glad, however much evil they have to fight against, and they can meet with no misfortune⁠—God is Joy!” He began to laugh, as boisterously as a child, and they all laughed with him; one infected the next. They could not control themselves; it was as though an immense merriment had overwhelmed them all. The little children looked at the grownups and laughed, till their little throats began to cough with laughing. “He’s a proper clown!” said the men to their wives, their own faces broad with laughter, “but he’s got a good heart!”

On the bench next to Pelle sat a silent family, a man and wife and three children, who breathed politely through their raw little noses. The parents were little people, and there was a kind of inward deftness about them, as though they were continually striving to make themselves yet smaller. Pelle knew them a little, and entered into conversation with them. The man was a clay-worker, and they lived in one of the miserable huts near the “Great Power’s” home.

“Yes, that is true⁠—that about happiness,” said the wife. “Once we too used to dream of getting on in the world a little, so that we might be sure of our livelihood; and we scraped a little money together, that some good people lent us, and we set up in a little shop, and I kept it while father went to work. But it wouldn’t answer; no one supported us, and we got poorer goods because we were poor, and who cares about dealing with very poor people? We had to give it up, and we were deeply in debt, and we’re still having to pay it off⁠—fifty öre every week, and there we shall be as long as we live, for the interest is always mounting up. But we are honorable people, thank God!” she concluded. The man took no part in the conversation.

Her last remark was perhaps evoked by a man who had quietly entered the hall, and was now crouching on a bench in the background; for he was not an honorable man. He had lived on a convict’s bread and water; he was “Thieving Jacob,” who about ten years earlier had smashed in the window