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

detail. How wonderfully everything was connected, sorrow and joy and apparent trifles, to make him, Pelle, who had ruled over hundreds of thousands and yet had to go to prison in order to feel himself rich! Something had been ignited in him that could never be extinguished, a sacred fire to which everything must bear fuel, whether it would or not. He could not be conquered now; he drew strength from infinity itself.

The bare cell⁠—three paces one way and six the other⁠—with its tiny window and the mysterious peephole in the door which was like a watchful eye upon one always, how much it had held! It had always been the lot of the poor man to create worlds out of the void, beautiful mirages which suddenly broke and threw him back even poorer and more desolate. But this lasted. All the threads of life seemed to be joined together in the bare cell. It was like the dark, underground place in large buildings where the machinery is kept that admits and excludes light and heat to the whole block. There he discovered how rich and varied life is.

Pelle went about in a peculiarly elevated frame of mind. He felt that something greater and finer than himself had taken up its abode within him and would grow on to perfection there.

It was a new being that yet was himself; it remained there and drew nourishment from everything that he did. He went about circumspectly and quietly, with an introspective expression as though he were weighing everything: there was so much that was not permissible because it might injure it! There were always two of them now⁠—Pelle and this wonderful, invisible ego, which lay securely and weightily within him like a living thing, with its roots in the darkness.

Pelle’s relations to books were deeply grounded: he had to find out what the world meant now. He was a little distrustful of works of fiction; you got at their subject-matter too easily, and that could not be right. They were made up, too! He needed real stuff, facts. There were great spaces in his brain that longed to be filled with a tangible knowledge of things. His favorite reading was historical works, especially social history; and at present he read everything that came in his way, raw and unsweetened; it would have to sort itself out. It was a longing that had never been satisfied, and now seemed insatiable.

He minded his work punctiliously, however. He had made it a principle never to touch a book as long as any work lay waiting unfinished on the floor. In prison he had dreamt of a reasonable working-day of⁠—for instance⁠—eight hours, so that he would have time and strength to occupy himself with intellectual matters; but now he took it off his night’s sleep instead. This was at any rate a field out of which they need not try to keep him; he would have his share in the knowledge of the times. He felt it was a weapon. The poor man had long enough retired willingly into the corner for want of enlightenment, and whenever he put out his head he was laughed back again. Why did he not simply wrest the prerogative from the upper classes? It cost only toil, and in that coin he was accustomed to pay! He was scarcely deficient in ability; as far as Pelle could see at present, almost all the pioneers of the new state of things came from the lower classes.

He discovered with pleasure that his inward searching did not carry him away from the world, for far in there he came out again into the light⁠—the light itself! He followed the secret laws for his own inward being, and found himself once more deep in the question of the welfare of the multitude. His practical sense required this confirmation of the conditions. There were also outward results. Even now history could no longer be used to light him and his ideas home; he knew too much. And his vision grew from day to day, and embraced an ever-widening horizon. Some day he would simply take the magic word from the trolls and wake the giant with it!

He worked hard and was as a rule full of confidence. When the last of the artistes came home from their café, he was often sitting working by the light of his shoemaker’s lamp. They would stop before the open basement window and have a chat with him in their broken Danish. His domestic circumstances were somewhat straitened; the instalments in repayment of the loan, and the debt on the furniture still swallowed all that they were able to scrape together, and Pelle had no prospect of getting better work. But work is the bearer of faith, and he felt sure that a way would open out if only he kept on with it unweariedly.

He took Ellen’s unspoken mistrust of his projects quietly. He felt himself to be greater than she in this; she could not reach up to the level of his head!

VI

Pelle was awake as early as four o’clock, although he had gone to bed late. He slept lightly at this time, when the summer night lay lightly upon his eyelids. He stole out into the kitchen and washed himself under the tap, and then went down to his work. The gray spirit of the night was still visible down in the street, but a tinge of red was appearing above the roofs. “The sun’s rising now over the country,” he thought, recalling the mornings of his childhood, the fields with their sheen of silvery dew, and the sun suddenly coming and changing them into thousands of sparkling diamond drops. Ah, if one could once more run barefooted, if a little shrinkingly, out into the dewy grass, and shout a greeting to the dawning day: “Get up, Sun! Pelle is here already!” The night-watchman came slowly past the open window on his way