Chapter 72

Morten he met repeatedly. Privation had called him out of his retirement. He did not believe that the campaign would lead to better conditions, and on that account he took no part in it. But want he knew as did no other; his insight in that direction was mysteriously keen. The distribution of relief in the form of provisions could not have been entrusted to better hands. He superintended the whole business of distribution, but what he liked best was to stand, knife in hand, cutting up pork for the families of locked-out workers. The portions were strictly weighed; none the less, the women always thronged about him. There was a blessing in that faint smile of his—they felt sure his portions were the biggest!

Morten and Pelle were in disagreement on almost every point. Even now, when everything depended on a strict cohesion, Morten could never be trusted to behave with severity. “Remember, they aren’t of age yet,” he would say continually. And it could not be gainsaid that there were many to whom the conflict was unintelligible—they understood nothing of it, although otherwise they were thoughtful and intelligent enough. These were mostly people who had come in from the provinces at a somewhat advanced age; indeed some had been small employers there. For them trades unionism was a sort of lynch law, and they profited by the strike in all simplicity in order to obtain well-paid employment. When they were reviled as strikebreakers or “gentlemen,” they laughed like little children who are threatened with a revolver. Slow-witted as they were, in this respect, they took the consequences to heart, although they could not see the reason for them. These must be compelled to obey.

The iron industry was doing its utmost to keep going, as a trade which must fulfill its contracted engagements, under penalty of seeing the business fall into foreign hands. This industry had if possible to be disabled. The pickets were at work, and _The Working Man_ published the names and addresses of the strike-breakers. When these left the factory they encountered a crowd of people who treated them with scorn and contempt; they had to be escorted by the police. But the resentment aroused by their treachery followed them home even to the barracks they lived in. The wives and children of the locked-out workers resumed the battle and carried on hostilities against the families of the strike- breakers, so that they had to move. One saw them of a night, with all their possessions on a handcart, trudging away to seek a new home under cover of the darkness. But the day revealed them, and again they were fugitives, until the police took them in hand and found lodging for them.

One day a large factory by the North Bridge resumed operations with the help of foreign labor and strike-breakers. Pelle set to work to prepare a warm reception for the workers when they went homeward, but in the course of the day a policeman who was friendly to the workers tipped him the wink that two hundred police would be concealed in a neighboring school, ready for the workers’ departure.

In the afternoon people began to collect—unemployed workers, poor women, and children. They came early, for it well might be that the workers would be released an hour before their time, in order to avoid a clash, and they were missing nothing by waiting there. Finally several thousand people stood before the gates of the factory, and the police were moving to and fro through the crowd, which stood many men deep, but they had to give up the effort to drive them asunder. The street urchins began to make an uproar, and to egg the watchers on. They felt the need of warming themselves a little, so they gradually began to bait the police.

“Hullo, there!” suddenly shouted a mighty voice. “In the school over there are two hundred police, waiting for us to make a disturbance, so that they can come and use their truncheons on us. Hadn’t we better leave them where they are? I think it’s quite as well they should go back to school for a time!”

“Hurrah!” they cried. “Hurrah! Long live ‘Lightning’!” A movement went through the crowd. “That’s Pelle!” The whisper passed from mouth to mouth, and the women stood on tiptoe to see him.

Pelle and Stolpe were standing against a wall, surrounded by a few dozen pickets. The police went up to them and reprimanded them. They had orders to hinder the picketing, but they had no desire to meddle with Pelle. They lived in the workers’ quarter, were at home there, and a word from him would make the city impossible for them.

The usual time for stopping work came round, but the workers were not released from the factory. The crowd used its wits to keep itself warm; punning remarks concerning strike-breakers and capitalists buzzed through the air. But suddenly an alarm ran through the crowd. The street urchins, who are always the first to know everything, were whistling between their fingers and running down the side streets. Then the crowd began to move, and the police followed at a quick march, keeping to the middle of the street. The factory had discharged the workers by a back door. They were moving down Guldberg Street by now, disheartened and with never a glance behind them, while a whole escort of police accompanied them. They were soon overtaken and brought home to the accompaniment of a sinister concert, which now and again was interrupted by cries of, “Three cheers for the gentlemen!”

The pickets walked in a long file, close to the procession, zealously occupied in noting each individual worker, while Pelle moved in the midst of the crowd, endeavoring to prevent over-hasty action. There was need to be careful. Several men were still in prison because during the winter they had come to blows with the strike-breakers, and the police had received stringent orders from the authorities. The press of the propertied classes was daily calling for stricter measures, demanding that every meeting in the streets, and especially before the gates of a factory, should be broken up by the police.

Now and then a strike-breaker parted from the squad and ran into the door of his dwelling, followed by a long whistle.

Among the workers was a solitary, elderly man, still powerful, whom Pelle recognized. He kept at the extreme edge of the police, walking heavily, with bowed head, along the pavement close to the houses. His hair was quite gray, and his gait was almost crippled. This was Mason Hansen, Stolpe’s old comrade and fellow-unionist, whom Pelle had interviewed in the winter, in the hope of persuading him to refrain from strikebreaking.

“It’s going badly with him,” thought Pelle, involuntarily keeping his eyes on him. The results of strike-breaking had dealt hardly with him.

By St. Hans Street he turned the corner, winking at the policeman who was about to follow him, and went down the street alone, looking neither to right nor left, embarrassed, and with hanging head. Every time a child cried aloud, he started. Then he stood as though riveted to the ground, for in front of his door a heap of poverty-stricken household goods lay in the gutter. A crowd of gaping children stood round the heap, and in the midst of the group stood a youngish woman, with four children, who were keeping tearful watch over the heap of trash. The man pressed through the crowd and exchanged a few words with the woman, then clenched his fists and shook them threateningly at the tenement house.

Pelle went up to him. “Things aren’t going well with you, comrade,” he said, laying his hand on the other’s shoulder. “And you are much too good for what you are doing. You had better come with me and re-enter the organization.”

The man slowly turned his head. “Oh, it’s you!” he said, shaking Pelle’s hand away with a jerk. “And you seem as cool and impudent as ever. Poverty hasn’t dealt hardly with you! It’s not at all a bad business, growing fat on the pence of the workers, eh?”

Pelle grew crimson with anger, but he controlled himself. “Your insults don’t hurt me,” he said. “I have gone hungry for the Cause while you have been playing the turncoat. But that will be forgotten if you’ll come with me.”

The man laughed bitterly, pointing at the tenement-house. “You’d better go and give them a medal. Three months now they’ve tormented me and made hell hot for my wife and children, in order to drive us away. And as that didn’t answer, they went to the landlord and forced him to give me notice. But Hansen is obstinate—he wouldn’t be shown the door. So now they’ve got the bailiffs to turn me out, see?” He gave a hollow laugh. “But these few sticks, why, we can soon carry them up again, damn it all! Shall we begin, mother?”

“I’ll willingly speak to the landlord. Remember, you are an old unionist.”

“An old—yes, I was in it from the very beginning.” The man drew himself proudly erect. “But for all that I don’t let my wife and children starve. So you want to go begging favors for me, eh? You be gone—at once, will you? Be off, to the devil, or I’ll beat you to a jelly with this!” He seized a table-leg; his eyes were quite blood-shot. His young wife went up to him and took his hand. “Hansen!” she said quietly. He let his weapon fall. Pelle felt the woman’s pleading eyes upon him, and went.

XXXI

When Pelle, tired to death, made his way homeward in the evening, he had lost the feeling of invincibility and his thoughts turned to Ellen.

In the daytime he felt neither hesitation nor certainty. When he set to work it was always with thousands behind him. He felt the great body of workers at his back, whether he was fighting in the open or waiting with close-buttoned coat to deal with the leaders of the opposing camp. But when he went home to Ellen he had only himself to rely on for support. And he could not get near her. Strongly as he was drawn by the life away from home, she still held the secret of his life in her hands. She was strong and would not be swept aside. He was forced to ponder over her nature and to search for a solution.

Pelle had to deal with countless numbers of families, and what he saw was not always edifying. Home was a conception which was only now forcing its way downward from the middle classes. Even in periods of normal employment the workers earned little enough when it came to providing a decent family life, and the women knew nothing of making a comfortable home. The man might be tidy and well-dressed when one met him out of doors, but if you went to his home it was always the same thing; a dark, grimy den and a worn-out wife, who moved about scolding amidst a swarm of children. Wages were enough for one only to live in comfort. The man represented the household out of doors. He must take sandwiches to his work, and he must have something decent too when he got home. The others managed with a little bread and coffee; it was of no use to talk of regular family meals. And the man must have clothes; he was the visible portion of the household, and he supported it. It was of no use to look for anything further in the way of ideas from these women; they saw nothing but unemployment and the want at home, and when the husband showed himself they drove him out of the house with their scolding ways. “You go out and meddle with everything you can think of that doesn’t concern us—politics and big talk—instead of doing your work properly and leaving the fools to squabble among themselves!” The result was that they did their work for the organization in the taverns. Many of them held positions of confidence, and Pelle went to the taverns to confer with them. They were dejected, when they arrived, and had before all else to be thawed out.

There Pelle came to them, with his brilliant hopes. When they lamented in their dejection, he promised great things of the future. “Our wives will soon see that we are in the right. The day will soon come when we shall be able to go home with a proper week’s wages, that will be enough for the whole family.”

“And suppose it doesn’t come off?” they would say.

“It will come off—if only we hold out!” he cried, smiting the table.

Yes, he might well see the bright side of things. He had a wife who came from a long-established home, who kept things clean and tidy for him, and knew how to make much do the work of little; the daughter of an old unionist who had grown up in the midst of the movement—a wife who saw her husband’s doings with understanding eyes; yes, he might well smile! As to the last, Pelle was silent.

In this particular she had accepted neither inheritance nor teaching; she was as she was, and she would never be different, whatever might pass over her head. Pelle was sacrificing wife and children to a fixed idea, in order not to leave a few indifferent comrades in the lurch! That, and the strike, and the severe condemnation of those who would not keep step, was, and remained, for her, so much tavern nonsense. It was something the workers had got into their heads as a result of talking when they were not precisely sober.

That was what it was, and it filled her heart with pain and mortification that she and hers should be set aside for people who were nothing to them. And this pain made her beautiful, and justified her in her own eyes.

She did not complain in words, and she was always careful to set before Pelle whatever the house could provide. He always found everything in order, and he understood what efforts it must cost her—considering the smallness of the means which she had at her disposal. There was no weak point in her defences; and this made the position still more oppressive; he could not evoke an explosion, a ventilation of her grievances; it was impossible to quarrel with her and make friends again.

Often he wished that Ellen would become neglectful, like so many others. But she was always attentive; the more the circumstances enabled her to condemn him, the more correctly did she behave.

If only he could have explained her lack of comprehension by supposing that her mind was barren and self-seeking! But in his eyes she had always been quite simple and single-minded, and yet her nature was to him a continual enigma! It was true she was not excessively benevolent or sympathetic where others were concerned; but on the other hand she asked nothing for herself—her thoughts were all for him and the children. He must admit that she had, without a thought, sacrificed everything to him—her home, her whole world—and that she had a right to ask something in return.

And she was still unchangeably the same. She was indifferent where she herself was concerned, if only Pelle and the children had something she was contented; she herself needed so little, yet she seemed to take enough when he watched her eating. Pelle often wondered that she retained her healthy appearance, although the food she ate was so inferior. Perhaps she helped herself in secret—but he drove the thought away, and was ashamed. She was always completely indifferent as to what she ate; she did not notice what it was, but served him and the children with the best of it—especially himself—yet she seemed to thrive. Yes, even now she gave the best to him. It was as though she was fulfilling some deep-rooted law of her nature, which was independent of their relations to one another. In this nothing could alter her habits. She might have been compared to a great beautiful bitch that lies attentively marking the appetite of her young, although none can tell, from her deliberate quiet, that her own bowels are twisted with hunger. If they left anything, she noticed it. “I have eaten,” she would say, so quietly that she succeeded as a rule in deceiving them. Yes, it made him feel desperate to think about it; the more he thought of it the more unendurable it was. She was sacrificing herself for him, yet she must condemn all his doings! She knew how to defy starvation far better than he—and she did not understand why they must go hungry!

But from all these painful deliberations she emerged always more prominently capable, incomprehensible, and beautiful in all her strangeness! And he would hurry home, full of burning longing and devotion, continually hoping that this time she would come to him glowing with love, to hide her eyes, full of confusion, on his shoulder. The disappointment only flung him yet more violently into the struggle; the longing of his heart for a tender, careless hand made his own hard.

He was always exerting himself to find some means of making money. At first, of course, there was no way, and he became so completely absorbed in the conflict that finally the question no longer occupied his mind. It lurked in his consciousness, like a voluptuous wish that merely tinged his daily existence; it was as though something within his mind had taken possession of his talent for design, and was always designing beautiful paper money and displaying it to his imagination.

One day when he reached home he found Widow Rasmussen tending the children and working on a pair of canvas shoes. Drunken Valde had left her again—had flown out into the spring! Ellen had gone out to work. A sudden pain shot through him. Her way of doing this, without saying a word to him, was like a blow in the face, and at first he was angry. But disloyalty was foreign to his nature. He had to admit that she was within her rights; and with that his anger evaporated, leaving him bewildered; something within him seemed tottering; surely this was a topsy-turvy world! “I might as well stay at home and look after the children,” he thought bitterly.

“I’ll stay with the children now, Madam Rasmussen!” he said. The woman put her work together.

“Yes, they’ve got a lot to go through,” she said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t myself understand what it’s all about, but one must always do something! That’s my motto. For things can’t be worse than they are. ‘Widow’! Pooh! They won’t let us behave ourselves! A man can scarcely look after himself, let alone a family, in this accursed world —and one needn’t call one’s self Madam to get children! Here have I been knocking about all my life, ruining my health and happiness, and have I earned as much from all my blackguards as would pay for the rags I’ve worn? No; I’ve had to beg them nicely of the fine folks for whom I do washing! Yes, they are ready to skin one alive—Madam Rasmussen has proved that. So I say, one must always try something! To-day the boy comes home and says, ‘Mother, they’ve put up the price of firewood again—an öre the two dozen!’ ‘What does that matter to us, boy? Can we buy two dozen at once?’ I say. ‘Yes, mother, but then the one dozen will cost an öre more.’ And eggs, they cost one krone twenty a score where the rich folks buy them—but here! ‘No, my dear madam, if you take two eggs you must pay fifteen öre!’ That makes eight öre for an egg, for if one takes the smallest quantity the profits aren’t in proportion. It’s hard to be poor. If it’s never going to be better, may the devil take him that’s made it all! That was a fine swear!”

Pelle sat playing with Young Lasse. Madam Rasmussen’s words had aroused something in him. That was the eternal complaint, the old, old cry! Whenever he heard it, the world of the poor man became even more plainly visible for what it was—and he ought to know it! It was a frightful abyss that he looked down into; it was bottomless; and it seemed forever to reveal fresh depths. And he was right—he was right.

He sat carelessly drawing something for the child on a scrap of paper, thinking of things quite different; but involuntarily the drawing took shape from within his hand. “That’s money, that’s money!” cried Young Lasse, clapping his hands. Pelle waked up and examined his drawing; sure enough, there was a rough sketch of a ten-kroner note! It flattered his father’s heart that the child had recognized it; and he was seized by the desire to see how like it was. But where in all the world was he to get a “blue”? Pelle, who at this time superintended the collection and distributing of millions, did not possess ten kroner! The pipe! The pipe! That was what the boy got his idea from! His old Christmas present, queerly enough, had a ten-kroner note on the bowl—and that gave him an idea! He got it out and compared it; it was a long time since he had smoked the pipe—he couldn’t afford it. He began eagerly to fill in the drawing while Young Lasse stood by, amusing himself by watching the rapid movements of the pencil. “Father is clever—Father draw!” he said, and wanted to wake his sister so that she could take part in the game.

No, the result was not good! The design would have to be cut in wood and printed in color for the appearance really to be similar. But then Ellen came home, and he hid it away.

“Won’t you give up going out to work?” he said. “I’ll provide what is absolutely necessary.”

“Why?” she retorted resolutely. “I’m not too good to do anything!” There was no tone in her voice from which he could elicit anything; so he got ready to go to the meeting.

Now, when Ellen went out to work, he ran home as often as he had time in order to look after the children. He had obtained a piece of hard wood and a ten-kroner note. With great care he transferred the design onto the wood, and began to engrave it while he sat there chattering to the children. This task occupied unused faculties; it engrossed him as an artistic exercise, which lingered at the back of his mind and automatically continued to carry itself out, even when he was away from home. This work filled his mind with a peculiar beauty so long as he was engaged on it. A warm, blissful world was evoked by the sight of this ten-kroner note, which shone ever more plainly out of the darkness and swept all privations aside. When Pelle sat at this work his mind soared above all oppression as though intoxicated; unhappy things no longer existed for him. He became an optimist and mentally made Ellen all sorts of costly presents.

It was all fundamentally so simple—it was only a misunderstanding— nothing more! He must speak to her, and she would see at once what a happy life they were going to live—if only they held out. Silence had filled her with resentment. Fortune! Fortune! It was nearer than ever now, greater and more splendid than on that other occasion when it had knocked at their door! Why, he did not know—that did not seem very clear!

But when he heard her step on the stairs his dream was shattered. He was awake. He concealed his work, ashamed to think that she should come home from work and find him at play.

At times he was oppressed by a feeling of the unattainable in his relations with Ellen. Even to himself he could not explain the contradiction between the constant longing for more ample and stable conditions, for triumph and victory, and his impotency at home, where his fortunes were declining. He wearied himself in trying to puzzle it out, and he was seized by a desire that he might become indifferent to the whole matter. He felt no inclination to drink, but none the less something was working convulsively within him; a certain indifference as to his own welfare, causing him to run risks, not caring whether he might not commit some stupidity that would do him harm. And at such times a voice cried loudly within him, especially when he was confronted by the bitter utterances of want. “That is my old complaint,” he thought, and he became observant. In his childhood it had been a sort of seizure; now it had become a voice.

XXXII