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

their wives and children, cheered by the possibility of work; the men felt no inclination to go home with bad news, so they loafed about in the vicinity.

They came there long before daybreak in order to be the first, although there was not much hope. There was at least an excuse to leave one’s bed; idleness was burning like hell fire in their loins. When the foreman came they thronged silently about him, with importunate eyes. One woman brought her husband; he walked modestly behind her, kept his eyes fixed upon her, and did precisely as she did. He was a great powerful fellow, but he did nothing of his own accord⁠—did not even blow his nose unless she nudged him. “Come here, Thorvald!” she said, cuffing him so hard as to hurt him. “Keep close behind me!” She spoke in a harsh voice, into the empty air, as though to explain her behavior to the others; but no one looked at her. “He can’t speak for himself properly, you see,” she remarked at random. Her peevish voice made Pelle start; she was from Bornholm. Ah, those smart young girls at home, they were a man’s salvation! “And the children have got to live too!” she continued. “We have eight. Yes, eight.”

“Then he’s some use for something,” said a workman who looked to be perishing with the cold.

The woman worked her way through them, and actually succeeded in getting her man accepted. “And now you do whatever they tell you, nicely, and don’t let them tempt you to play the fool in any way!” she said, and she gave him a cuff which set him off working in his place. She raised her head defiantly as contemptuous laughter sounded about her.

The place was like a slave-market. The foreman, went to and fro, seeking out the strongest, eyeing them from head to foot and choosing them for their muscular development and breadth of back. The contractor too was moving about and giving orders. “One of them rich snobs!” said the laborers, grumbling; “all the laborers in town have to march out here so that he can pick himself the best. And he’s beaten down the day’s wages to fifty öre. He’s been a navvy himself, too; but now he’s a man who enjoys his hundred thousand a year. A regular bloodsucker, he is!”

The crowd continued to stand there and to loaf about all the day, in the hope that someone would give up, or fall ill⁠—or go crazy⁠—so that someone could take his place. They could not tear themselves away; the mere fact that work was being done chained them to the spot. They looked as though they might storm the works at any moment, and the police formed a ring about the place. They stood pressing forward, absorbed by their desire for work, with a sick longing in their faces. When the crowd had pressed forward too far it hesitatingly allowed itself to be pushed back again. Suddenly there was a break in the ranks; a man leaped over the rail and seized a pickaxe. A couple of policemen wrested the tool from his hand and led him away.

And as they stood there a feeling of defiance rose within them, a fierce contempt for their privations and the whole shameless situation. It expressed itself in an angry half-suppressed growl. They followed the contractor with curious eyes as though they were looking for something in him but could not conceive what it was.

In his arrogance at receiving such an excessive offer of labor, he decided to go further, and to lengthen the working day by an hour. The workers received an order to that effect one morning, just as they had commenced work. But at the same moment the four hundred men, all but two, threw down their implements and returned to their comrades. They stood there discussing the matter, purple with rage. So now their starving condition was to be made use of, in order to enrich the contractor by a further hundred thousand! “We must go to the city authorities,” they cried. “No, to the newspaper!” others replied. “The paper! The paper is better!”

“It’s no use going to the city council⁠—not until we have elected members of our own party to it,” cried Pelle. “Remember that at the elections, comrades! We must elect men of our party everywhere, their encroachments will never be stopped until then. And now we must stand together and be firm! If it’s got to be, better starve to death at once than do it slowly!”

They did not reply, but pressed closely about him, heavily listening. There was something altogether too fierce and profound in their attention. These men had declared a strike in midwinter, as their only remedy. What were they thinking of doing now? Pelle looked about him and was daunted by their dumb rage. This threatening silence wouldn’t do; what would it lead to? It seemed as though something overwhelming, and uncontrollable, would spring from this stony taciturnity. Pelle sprang upon a heap of road-metal.

“Comrades!” he cried, in a powerful voice. “This is merely a change, as the fox said when they flayed his skin off. They have deprived us of clothes and food and drink, and comfort at home, and now they want to find a way of depriving us of our skins too! The question today is⁠—forward or back? Perhaps this is the great time of trial, when we shall enter into possession of all we have desired! Hold together, comrades! Don’t scatter and don’t give way! Things are difficult enough now, but remember, we are well on in the winter, and it promises to break up early. The night is always darkest before daybreak! And shall we be afraid to suffer a little⁠—we, who have suffered and been patient for hundreds of years? Our wives are sitting at home and fretting⁠—perhaps they will be angry with us. We might at least have accepted what was offered us, they may