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

“Silence, people!” cried Pelle in a loud voice. “Are you grown men and yet will get up a row beside the dead body of a comrade?”

“What do you know about it?” answered one. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I do know at any rate that at a place out by Vesterbro there sits a woman with a child, waiting for Peter, and he will not come. Would you have more like them? What are you thinking of, wanting to jump into the sea and drown yourselves because you’re wet through? Will those you leave behind be well off? For if you think so, it’s your duty to sacrifice yourselves. But don’t you think rather that the community will throw you into a great common pit, and leave your widows and fatherless children to weep over you?”

“It’s all very well for you to talk!” someone shouted. “Yours are safe enough!”

“I’m busy making yours safe for you, and you want to spoil it by stupidity! It’s all very well for me to talk, you say! But if there’s any one of you who dares turn his face to heaven and say he has gone through more than I have, let him come up here and take my place.”

He was silent and looked out over the crowd. Their wasted faces told him that they were in need of food, but still more of fresh hope. Their eyes gazed into uncertainty. A responsibility must be laid upon them⁠—a great responsibility for such prejudiced beings⁠—if possible, great enough to carry them on to the goal.

“What is the matter with you?” he went on. “You suffer want, but you’ve always done that without getting anything for it; and now when there’s some purpose in it, you won’t go any further. We aren’t just from yesterday, remember! Wasn’t it us who fought the great battle to its end together? Now you scorn it and the whole Movement and say they’ve brought nothing; but it was then we broke through into life and won our right as men.

“Before that time we have for centuries borne our blind hope safely through oppression and want. Is there any other class of society that has a marching route like ours? Forced by circumstances, we prepared for centuries of wandering in the desert and never forgot the country; the good God had given us some of His own infinite long-suffering to carry us through the toilsome time. And now, when we are at the border, you’ve forgotten what we were marching for, and sacrifice the whole thing if only you can be changed from thin slaves to fat slaves!”

“There are no slaves here!” was the threatening cry on all sides.

“You’re working horses, in harness and with blinkers on! Now you demand good feeding. When will the scales fall from your eyes, so that you take the responsibility upon yourselves? You think you’re no end of fine fellows when you dare to bare your chest to the bayonets, but are we a match for brutality? If we were, the future would not be ours.”

“Are you scoffing at Peter Dreyer?” asked a sullen voice.

“No, I am not. Peter Dreyer was one of those who go on in advance, and smear the stones on the road with their hearts’ blood, so that the rest of us may find our way. But you’ve no right to compare yourselves with him. He sank under the weight of a tremendous responsibility; and what are you doing? If you want to honor Peter’s memory as it deserves, go quietly home, and join the Movement again. There you have work to do that will transform the world when you all set about it. What will it matter if your strength ebbs and you suffer hunger for a little longer while you’re building your own house? You were hungry too when you were building for others.

“You referred to Peter Dreyer, but we are none of us great martyrs; we are everyday, ordinary men, and there’s where our work lies. Haven’t the thousands who have suffered and died in silence a still greater claim to be followed? They have gone down peacefully for the sake of the development, and have the strongest right to demand our belief in a peaceable development. It is just we that come from the lowest stratum who must preserve the historic development; never has any movement had so long and sad a previous history as ours! Suffering and want have taught us to accept the leadership, when the good has justice done to it; and you want to throw the whole thing overboard by an act of violence.”

They listened to him in silence now. He had caught their minds, but it was not knowledge they absorbed. At present they looked most like weary people who are told that they still have a long way to go. But he would get them through!

“Comrades!” he cried earnestly, “perhaps we who are here shall not live to see the new, but it’s through us that it’ll some day become reality. Providence has stopped at us, and has appointed us to fight for it. Is that not an honor? Look! we come right from the bottom of everything⁠—entirely naked; the old doesn’t hang about our clothes, for we haven’t any; we can clothe ourselves in the new. The old God, with His thousands of priests as a defence against injustice, we do not know; the moral of war we have never understood⁠—we who have always been its victims. We believe in the Good, because we know that without the victory of goodness there will be no future. Our mind is light and can receive the light; we will lift up our little country and show that it has a mission on the earth. We who are little ourselves will show how the little ones keep up and assert themselves by the principle of goodness. We wish no harm to anyone, therefore the good is on our side.