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

fellowship. She was proud of him, and he might call himself an errand-boy if he liked; men must always have some crochet or other in their work, or else it would not satisfy them. The arrangement about the equal division she did not understand, but she was sure that her big, clever husband deserved to have twice as much as any of the others. She did not trouble her head about that, however; she lived her own life and was contented and happy.

Pelle had feared that she would tire of the country, and apparently she did not take to it. She weeded and worked in the garden with her customary energy, and by degrees acquired a fair knowledge of the work; but it did not seem to afford her any peculiar enjoyment. It was no pleasure to her to dig her fingers into the mould. Pelle and the children throve here, and that determined her relations to the place; but she did not strike root on her own account. She could thrive anywhere in the world if only they were there; and their welfare was hers. She grew out from them, and had her own wonderful growth inward.

Within her there were strange hidden forces that had nothing to do with theories or systems, but produced the warmth that bore up the whole. Pelle no longer desired to force his way in there. What did he care about logical understanding between man and woman? It was her heart with which he needed to be irradiated. He required to be understood by his friends. His great satisfaction in being with, for instance, Morten, was that in perfect unanimity they talked until they came to a stopping-place, and if they were then silent their thoughts ran on parallel lines and were side by side when they emerged once more. But even if he and Ellen started from the same point, the shortest pause would take their thoughts in different directions; he never knew where she would appear again. No matter how well he thought he knew her, she always came up just as surprisingly and unexpectedly behind him. And was it not just that he loved? Why then contend with it on the basis of the claims of a poor logic?

She continued to be just as unfathomable, no matter how much of her he thought he had mastered. She became greater and greater with it, and she brought him a new, strange world⁠—the mysterious unknown with which he had always had to strive, allowed itself to be tenderly embraced. He no longer demanded the whole of her; in his inmost soul probably every human being was lonely. He guessed that she was going through her own development in concealment, and wondered where she would appear again.

It had formerly been a grief to him that she did not join the Movement; she was not interested in political questions and the suffrage. He now dimly realized that that was just her strength, and in any case he did not wish her otherwise. She seldom interfered definitely with what he did, and why should she? She exerted a silent influence upon everything he did, stamped each of his thoughts from the moment they began to shoot up. For the very reason that she did not know how to discuss, she could not be refuted; what to him was downright logic had no effect whatever upon her. He did not get his own thoughts again stale from her lips, and did not wish to either; her wonderful power over him lay in the fact that she rested so securely on her own, and answered the most crushing arguments with a smile. Pelle was beginning to doubt as to the value of superiority of intellect; it seemed to have undisputed rule over the age, but did not accomplish chiefly good. As compared with Ellen’s nature, it seemed to him poor. The warmth in a kiss convinced her better than a thousand sensible reasons, and yet she seldom made a mistake.

And she herself gave out warmth. They went to her, both he and the children, when there was anything wrong. She did not say much, but she warmed. She still always seemed to him like a pulse that beat, living and palpable, out from the invisible, with a strangely tranquil speech. When his head was hot and tired with adverse happenings, there was nothing more delightful than to rest it upon her bosom and listen, only half awake, to the dull, soothing murmur within like that of the earth’s springs when, in his childhood, he laid his ear to the grass.

The spring was beautiful, and they were much out in it; when no one could see them they walked hand-in-hand along the dikes like two young lovers. Then Pelle talked and showed her things. Look! there it grew in that way, and here in quite a different way. Was it not strange? He lived over again all his childhood’s excitement in spring. Ellen listened to him, smiling; she was not astonished at anything so natural as that things grew; she was merely transformed! The earth simply sent up its juices into her too.

The fresh air and the work in the garden tanned her bare arms, and gave strength and beauty to her figure, while her easy circumstances freed her from care. One day a new being showed in her eyes, and looked at Pelle with the inquisitiveness of a kid. “Shall we play?” it said. Was it he or the spring that set fire to her? No matter! The pleasure was his! The sunshine entered the innermost corners of his soul, the musty corners left by the darkness of his prison-cell, and cured him completely; her freedom from care infected him, and he was entirely happy. It was Ellen who had done it all; at last she had taken upon herself to be the messenger between joy and him!

She became gentler and more vigorous in disposition every day. The