Chapter 68

His mind was young and intact and worked well in the cold weather; he restlessly drew comparisons and formed conclusions in respect of everything he came into contact with. The individual did not seem to change. The agitation was especially directed to awakening what was actually existent. For the rest, they must live their day and be replaced by a younger generation in whom demands for compensation came more readily to the tongue. So far as he could survey the evolution of the movement, it did not proceed through the generations, but in some amazing fashion grew out of the empty space between them. So youth, even at the beginning, was further ahead than age had been where it left off.

The movements of the mind had an obscure and mystical effect upon him, as had the movement of his blood in childhood; sometimes he felt a mysterious shudder run through him, and he began to understand what Morten had meant when he said that humanity was sacred. It was terrible that human beings should suffer such need, and Pelle’s resentment grew deeper.

Through his contact with so many individuals he learned that Morten was not so exceptional; the minds of many betrayed the same impatience, and could not understand that a man who is hungry should control himself and be content with the fact of organization. There was a revolutionary feeling abroad; a sterner note was audible, and respectable people gave the unemployed a wide berth, while old people prophesied the end of the world. The poor had acquired a manner of thinking such as had never been known.

One day Pelle stood in a doorway with some other young people, discussing the aspect of affairs; it was a cold meeting-place, but they had not sufficient means to call a meeting in the usual public room. The discussion was conducted in a very subdued tune; their voices were bitter and sullen. A well-dressed citizen went by. “There’s a fine overcoat,” cried one; “I should like to have one like that! Shall we fetch him into the doorway and pull his coat off?” He spoke loudly, and was about to run out into the street.

“No stupidity!” said Pelle sadly, seizing him by the arm. “We should only do ourselves harm! Remember the authorities are keeping their eyes on us!”

“Well, what’s a few weeks in prison?” the man replied. “At least one would get board and lodging for so long.” There was a look that threatened mischief in his usually quiet and intelligent eyes.

XXIV

There were rumors that the city authorities intended to intervene in order to remedy the condition of the unemployed, and shortly before Christmas large numbers of navvies were given employment. Part of the old ramparts was cleared away, and the space converted into parks and boulevards. Pelle applied among a thousand others and had the good fortune to be accepted. The contractor gave the preference to youthful energy.

Every morning the workers appeared in a solid phalanx; the foreman of the works chose those he had need of, and the rest were free to depart. At home sat 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 some one would give up, or fall ill—or go crazy—so that some one 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 to-day 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 say. But we can’t go on seeing our dear ones at home fading away in spite of our utmost exertions! Hitherto the poor man’s labor has been like an aimless prayer to Heaven: Deliver us from hunger and dirt, from misery, poverty, and cold, and give us bread, and again bread! Deliver our children from our lot—let not their limbs wither and their minds lapse into madness! That has been our prayer, but there is only one prayer that avails, and that is, to defy the wicked! We are the chosen people, and for that reason we must cry a halt! We will no longer do as we have done—for our wives’ sakes, and our children’s, and theirs again! Ay, but what is posterity to us? Of course it is something to us—precisely to us! Were your parents as you are? No, they were ground down into poverty and the dust, they crept submissively before the mighty. Then whence did we get all that makes us so strong and causes us to stand together? Time has stood still, comrades! It has placed its finger on our breast and he said, ‘Thus you shall do!’ Here where we stand, the old time ceases and the new time begins; and that is why we have thrown down our tools, with want staring us in the face—such a thing as has never been seen before! We want to revolutionize life—to make it sweet for the poor man! And for all time! You, who have so often staked your life and welfare for a florin—you now hold the whole future in your hands! You must endure, calmly and prudently! And you will never be forgotten, so long as there are workers on the earth! This winter will be the last through which we shall have to endure—for yonder lies the land toward which we have been wandering! Comrades! Through us the day shall come!”

Pelle himself did not know what words he uttered. He felt only that something was speaking through him—something supremely mighty, that never lies. There was a radiant, prophetic ring in his voice, which carried his hearers off their feet; and his eyes were blazing. Before their eyes a figure arose from the hopeless winter, towering in radiance, a figure that was their own, and yet that of a young god. He rose, new-born, out of misery itself, struck aside the old grievous idea of fate, and in its place gave them a new faith—the radiant faith in their own might! They cried up to him—first single voices, then all. He gathered up their cries into a mighty cheer, a paean in honor of the new age!

Every day they stationed themselves there, not to work, but to stand there in dumb protest. When the foreman called for workers they stood about in silent groups, threatening as a gloomy rock. Now and again they shouted a curse at those who had left them in the lurch. The city did nothing. They had held out a helping hand to the needy, and the latter had struck it away—now they must accept the consequences. The contractor had received permission to suspend the work entirely, but he kept it going with a few dozen strike-breakers, in order to irritate the workers.

All over the great terrace a silence as of death prevailed, except in that corner where the little gang was at work, a policeman beside it, as though the men had been convicts. The wheelbarrows lay with their legs in the air; it was as though the pest had swept over the works.

The strike-breakers were men of all callings; a few of the unemployed wrote down their names and addresses, in order to insert them in _The Working Man_. One of Stolpe’s fellow-unionists was among them; he was a capable pater-familias, and had taken part in the movement from its earliest days. “It’s a pity about him,” said Stolpe; “he’s an old mate of mine, and he’s always been a good comrade till now. Now they’ll give it him hard in the paper—we are compelled to. It does the trade no good when one of its representatives goes and turns traitor.”

Madame Stolpe was unhappy. “It’s such a nice family,” she said; “we have always been on friendly terms with them; and I know they were hungry a long time. He has a young wife, father; it’s not easy to stand out.”

“It hurts me myself,” replied Stolpe. “But one is compelled to do it, otherwise one would be guilty of partisanship. And no one shall come to me and say that I’m a respecter of persons.”

“I should like to go and have a talk with them,” said Pelle. “Perhaps they’d give it up then.”

He got the address and went there after working hours. The home had been stripped bare. There were four little children. The atmosphere was oppressive. The man, who was already well on in years, but was still powerful, sat at the table with a careworn expression eating his supper, while the children stood round with their chins on the edge of the table, attentively following every bite he took. The young wife was going to and fro; she brought him his simple food with a peculiarly loving gesture.

Pelle broached the question at issue. It was not pleasant to attack this old veteran. But it must be done.

“I know that well enough,” said the man, nodding to himself. “You needn’t begin your lecture—I myself have been in the movement since the first days, and until now I’ve kept my oath. But now it’s done with, for me. What do you want here, lad? Have you a wife and children crying for bread? Then think of your own!”

“We don’t cry, Hans,” said the woman quietly.

“No, you don’t, and that makes it even worse! Can I sit here and look on, while you get thinner day by day, and perish with the cold? To hell with the comrades and their big words—what have they led to? Formerly we used to go hungry just for a little while, and now we starve outright—that’s the difference! Leave me alone, I tell you! Curse it, why don’t they leave me in peace?”

He took a mouthful of brandy from the bottle. His wife pushed a glass toward him, but he pushed it violently away.

“You’ll be put in the paper to-morrow,” said Pelle, hesitating. “I only wanted to tell you that.”

“Yes, and to write of me that I’m a swine and a bad comrade, and perhaps that I beat my wife as well. You know yourself it’s all lies; but what is that to me? Will you have a drink?”

No, Pelle wouldn’t take anything. “Then I will myself,” said the man, and he laughed angrily. “Now you can certify that I’m a hog—I drink out of the bottle! And another evening you can come and listen at the keyhole—perhaps then you’ll hear me beating my wife!”

The woman began to cry.

“Oh, damn it all, they might leave me in peace!” said the man defiantly.

Pelle had to go with nothing effected.

XXV

The “Ark” was now freezing in the north wind; all outward signs of life were stripped from it. The sounds that in summer bubbled up from its deep well-like shaft were silent now; the indistinguishable dripping of a hundred waste-pipes, that turned the court into a little well with green slimy walls, was silent too. The frost had fitted them all with stoppers; and where the toads had sat gorging themselves in the cavities of the walls—fantastic caverns of green moss and slimy filaments—a crust of ice hung over all; a grimy glacier, which extended from the attics right down to the floor of the court.

Where were they now, the grimy, joyful children? And what of the evening carouse of the hearse-driver, for which his wife would soundly thrash him? And the quarrelsome women’s voices, which would suddenly break out over this or that railing, criticizing the whole court, sharp as so many razors?

The frost was harder than ever! It had swept all these things away and had locked them up as closely as might be. The hurdy-gurdy man lay down below in his cellar, and had as visitor that good friend of the north wind, the gout; and down in the deserted court the draught went shuffling along the dripping walls. Whenever any one entered the tunnel- entry the draught clutched at his knees with icy fingers, so that the pain penetrated to the very heart.

There stood the old barrack, staring emptily out of its black windows. The cold had stripped away the last shred of figured curtain, and sent it packing to the pawn-shop. It had exchanged the canary for a score of firewood, and had put a stop to the day-long, lonely crying of the little children behind the locked doors—that hymn of labor, which had ceased only in the evening, when the mothers returned from the factories. Now the mothers sat with their children all day long, and no one but the cold grudged them this delight. But the cold and its sister, hunger, came every day to look in upon them.

On the third floor, away from the court, Widow Johnsen sat in the corner by the stove. Hanne’s little girl lay cowering on the floor, on a tattered patchwork counterpane. Through the naked window one saw only ice, as though the atmosphere were frozen down to the ground. Transparent spots had formed on the window-panes every time the child had breathed on them in order to look out, but they had soon closed up again. The old woman sat staring straight into the stove with big, round eyes; her little head quivered continually; she was like a bird of ill omen, that knew a great deal more than any one could bear to hear.

“Now I’m cold again, grandmother,” said the child quietly.

“Don’t keep from shivering, then you’ll be warm,” said the old woman.

“Are you shivering?”

“No, I’m too old and stiff for it—I can’t shiver any more. But the cold numbs my limbs, so that I can’t feel them. I could manage well enough if it wasn’t for my back.”

“You lean your back against the cold stove too!”

“Yes, the cold grips my poor back so.”

“But that’s stupid, when the stove isn’t going.”

“But if only my back would get numb too!” said the old woman piteously.

The child was silent, and turned her head away.

Over the whole of the wall were tiny glittering crystals. Now and again there was a rustling sound under the wall-paper.

“Grandmother, what’s that funny noise?” asked the child.

“That’s the bugs—they are coming down,” said the old woman. “It’s too cold for them up there in the attics, and they don’t like it here. You should see them; they go to Olsen’s with the warm wall; they stay there in the cold.”

“Is the wall at Olsen’s always warm, then?”

“Yes, when there’s fire in the boiler of the steam mill.”

Then the child was silent a while, wearily turning her head from side to side. A dreadful weariness was stamped on her face. “I’m cold,” she complained after a time.

“See if you can’t shiver!”

“Hadn’t I better jump a bit?”

“No, then you’d just swallow down the cold—the air is like ice. Just keep still, and soon mother will be here, and she’ll bring something!”

“She never gets anything,” said the child. “When she gets there it’s always all over.”

“That’s not true,” said Madam Johnsen severely. “There’s food enough in the soup kitchens for all; it’s just a matter of understanding how to go about it. The poor must get shame out of their heads. She’ll bring something to-day!”

The child stood up and breathed a hole in the ice on the window-pane.

“Look now, whether it isn’t going to snow a little so that the poor man can get yet another day’s employment,” said the old woman.

No, the wind was still blowing from the north, although it commonly shuffled along the canal; but now, week after week, it blew from the Nicolai tower, and played the flute on the hollow bones of poverty. The canals were covered with ice, and the ground looked horribly hard. The naked frost chased the people across it like withered leaves. With a thin rustling sound they were swept across the bridges and disappeared.

A great yellow van came driving by. The huge gates of the prison opened slowly and swallowed it. It was the van containing the meat for the prisoners. The child followed it with a desolate expression.

“Mother isn’t coming,” she said. “I am so hungry.”

“She will soon come—you just wait! And don’t stand in the light there; come here in the corner! The light strikes the cold right through one.”

“But I feel colder in the dark.”

“That’s just because you don’t understand. I only long now for the pitch darkness.”

“I long for the sun!” retorted the child defiantly.

There was a creaking of timber out in the yard. The child ran out and opened the door leading to the gallery. It was only the people opposite, who were tearing a step away.

But then came mother, with a tin pail in her hand, and a bundle under her arm; and there was something in the pail—it looked heavy. Tra-la- la! And the bundle, the bundle! What was in that? “Mother, mother!” she cried shrilly, leaning far over the rickety rail.

Hanne came swiftly up the stairs, with open mouth and red cheeks; and a face peeped out of every little nest.

“Now Widow Hanne has taken the plunge,” they said. They knew what a point of honor it had been with her to look after her mother and her child unaided. She was a good girl.

And Widow Hanne nodded to them all, as much as to say, “Now it’s done, thank God!”

She stood leaning over the table, and lifted the cover off the pail. “Look!” she said, as she stirred the soup with a ladle: “there’s pearl barley and pot-herbs. If only we had something we could warm it up with!”

“We can tear away a bit of the woodwork like other people,” said the mother.

“Yes,” replied Hanne breathlessly, “yes, why not? If one can beg one can do that!”

She ran out onto the gallery and tore away a few bits of trellis, so that the sound re-echoed through the court. People watched her out of all the dark windows. Widow Hanne had knocked off the head of her pride!

Then they sat down to their soup, the old woman and the child. “Eat!” said Hanne, standing over them and looking on with glowing eyes. Her cheeks were burning. “You look like a flower in the cold!” said her mother. “But eat, yourself, or you’ll starve to death.”

No, Hanne would not eat. “I feel so light,” she said, “I don’t need any food.” She stood there fingering her bundle; all her features were quivering, and her mouth was like that of a person sick of a fever.

“What have you there?” asked Madam Johnsen.

“Clothes for you and little Marie. You were so cold. I got them downstairs from the old clothes woman—they were so cheap.”

“Do you say you bought them?”

“Yes—I got them on credit.”

“Well, well, if you haven’t given too much for them! But it will do one good to have something warm on one’s back!”

Hanne undid the bundle, while the others looked on in suspense. A light summer dress made its appearance, pleated and low-necked, blue as little Marie’s eyes, and a pair of thin kid shoes. The child and the old woman gazed wonderingly at the dress. “How fine!” they said. They had forgotten everything, and were all admiration. But Hanne stood staring with horror, and suddenly burst into sobs.

“Come, come, Hanne!” said her mother, clapping her on the back. “You have bought a dress for yourself—that’s not so dreadful! Youth will have its rights.”

“No, mother, no, I didn’t buy it at all! I knew you both needed something to keep you warm, so I went into a fine house and asked if they hadn’t any cast-off things, and there was a young lady—she gave me this—and she was so kind. No, I didn’t know at all what was in the bundle—I really didn’t know, dear mother!”

“Well, well, they are fine enough!” said the old woman, spreading the dress out in front of her. “They are fine things!” But Hanne put the things together and threw them into the corner by the stove.