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

two when she sat at the bench facing him and talked to him as she helped him. Pelle really found their little nest quite comfortable, but Ellen’s mind was full of plans for improvement and progress. His business was to support a respectable home with dainty furniture and all sorts of other things; she was counting on these already. This home, which to him was like a beloved face that one cannot imagine other than it is, was to her only a temporary affair, which would by degrees be replaced by something finer and better. Behind her intimate gossip of everyday trivialities she concealed a far-reaching ambition. He must do his utmost if he was to accomplish all she expected of him!

Ellen by no means neglected her housekeeping, and nothing ever slipped through her fingers. When Pelle was away at the workshop she turned the whole place upside down, sweeping and scrubbing, and had always something good on the table for him. In the evening she was waiting for him at the door of the workshop. Then they would take a stroll along the canal, and across the green rampart where the children played. “Oh, Pelle, how I’ve longed for you today!” she would say haltingly. “Now, I’ve got you, and yet I’ve still got quite a pain in my breasts; they don’t know yet that you’re with me!”

“Shan’t we work a little this evening⁠—just a quarter of an hour?” she would say, when they had eaten, “so that you can become a master all the sooner and make things more comfortable for yourself.” Pelle perhaps would rather have taken a walk through the city with her, or have gone somewhere where they could enjoy the sunset, but her dark eyes fixed themselves upon him.

She was full of energy from top to toe, and it was all centered on him. There was something in her nature that excluded the possibility of selfishness. In relation to herself, everything was indifferent; she only wanted to be with him⁠—and to live for him. She was beneficent and intact as virgin soil; Pelle had awakened love in her⁠—and it took the shape of a perpetual need of giving. He felt, humbly, that she brought all she had and was to him as a gift, and all he did was done to repay her generosity.

He had refused to undertake the direction of the labor organization. His life together with Ellen and the maintenance of the newly established household left him no time for any effectual efforts outside his home. Ellen did not interfere in the matter; but when he came home after spending the evening at a meeting he could see she had been crying. So he stopped at home with her; it was weak of him, but he did not see what else he could do. And he missed nothing; Ellen more than made amends. She knew how to make their little home close itself about him, how to turn it into a world of exuberant inner life. There was no greater pleasure than to set themselves to achieve some magnificent object⁠—as, for instance, to buy a china flowerpot, which could stand on the windowsill and contain an aspidistra. That meant a week of saving, and when they had got it they would cross over to the other side of the canal, arm in arm, and look up at the window in order to see the effect. And then something else would be needed; a perforating machine, an engraved nameplate for the door; every Saturday meant some fresh acquisition.

The Working Man lay unread. If Pelle laid down his work a moment in order to glance at it, there was Ellen nipping his ear with her lips; his free time belonged to her, and it was a glorious distraction in work-time, to frolic as carelessly as a couple of puppies, far more delightful than shouldering the burden of the servitude of the masses! So the paper was given up; Ellen received the money every week for her savings-bank. She had discovered a corner in Market Street where she wanted to set up a shop and workroom with three or four assistants⁠—that was what she was saving for. Pelle wondered at her sagacity, for that was a good neighborhood.

After their marriage they did not visit Ellen’s parents so often. Stolpe found Pelle was cooling down, and used to tease him a little, in order to make him answer the helm; but that angered Ellen, and resulted in explosions⁠—she would tolerate no criticism of Pelle. She went to see them only when Pelle proposed it; she herself seemed to feel no desire to see her family, but preferred staying at home. Often they pretended they were not at home when “the family” knocked, in order to go out alone, to the Zoological Gardens or to Lyngby.

They did not see much of Lasse. Ellen had invited him once for all to eat his supper with them. But when he came home from work he was too tired to change his clothes, and wash himself, and make himself tidy, and Ellen was particular about her little home. He had a great respect for her, but did not feel properly at home in her living-room.

He had taken Pelle’s old room, and was boarding with the three orphans. They thought great things of him, and all their queer care for the big foundling Pelle was now transferred to old Lasse. And here they fell on better soil. Lasse was becoming a child again, and had felt the need of a little pampering. With devout attention he would listen to Marie’s little troubles, and the boy’s narrations of everything that they did and saw. In return he told them the adventures of his boyhood, or related his experiences in the stone-breaking yard, swaggering suitably, in order not to be outdone. When Pelle came to fetch his father the four of them would be sitting down to some childish game. They would