Chapter 2

“Good, comrade! There’s my hand on it—and good luck to you! We must work the cause up, and perhaps we shall succeed yet; I tell you, you’ve given me back my courage! Now you persuade as many as you can, and don’t miss the meetings; they’ll be announced in _The Working Man_.” He shook Pelle’s hand eagerly. Pelle took a brisk walk out to the northward. He felt pleased and in the best of spirits.

It was about the time when the workers are returning home; they drifted along singly and in crowds, stooping and loitering, shuffling a little after the fatigue of the day. There was a whole new world out here, quite different from that of the “Ark.” The houses were new and orderly, built with level and plumb-line; the men went their appointed ways, and one could see at a glance what each one was.

This quarter was the home of socialism and the new ideas. Pelle often strolled out thither on holidays in order to get a glimpse of these things; what they were he didn’t know, and he hadn’t dared to thrust himself forward, a stranger, as he still felt himself to be there; but it all attracted him powerfully. However, to-day he forgot that he was a stranger, and he went onward with a long, steady stride that took him over the bridge and into North Bridge Street. Now he himself was a trades unionist; he was like all these others, he could go straight up to any one if he wished and shake him by the hand. There was a strong and peculiar appeal about the bearing of these people, as though they had been soldiers. Involuntarily he fell into step with them, and felt himself stronger on that account, supported by a feeling of community. He felt solemnly happy, as on his birthday; and he had a feeling as though he must do something. The public houses were open, and the workmen were entering them in little groups. But he had no desire to sit there and pour spirits down his throat. One could do that sort of thing when everything had gone to the dogs.

He stationed himself in front of a pastry cook’s window, eagerly occupied in comparing the different kinds of cakes. He wanted to go inside and expend five and twenty öre in celebration of the day. But first of all the whole affair must be properly and methodically planned out, so that he should not be disappointed afterward. He must, of course, have something that he had never eaten before, and that was just the difficult part. Many of the cakes were hollow inside too, and the feast would have to serve as his evening meal.

It was by no means easy, and just as Pelle was on the point of solving the difficulty he was startled out of the whole affair by a slap on the shoulder. Behind him was Morten, smiling at him with that kindly smile of his, as though nothing had gone wrong between them. Pelle was ashamed of himself and could not find a word to say. He had been unfaithful to his only friend; and it was not easy for him to account for his behavior. But Morten didn’t want any explanations; he simply shook Pelle by the hand. His pale face was shining with joy. It still betrayed that trace of suffering which was so touching, and Pelle had to surrender at discretion. “Well, to think we should meet here!” he cried, and laughed good-naturedly.

Morten was working at the pastry cook’s, and had been out; now he was going in to get some sleep before the night’s work. “But come in with me; we can at least sit and talk for half an hour; and you shall have a cake too.” He was just the same as in the old days.

They went in through the gate and up the back stairs; Morten went into the shop and returned with five “Napoleons.” “You see I know your taste,” he said laughing.

Morten’s room was right up under the roof; it was a kind of turret-room with windows on both sides. One could look out over the endless mass of roofs, which lay in rows, one behind the other, like the hotbeds in a monstrous nursery garden. From the numberless flues and chimneys rose a thin bluish smoke, which lay oppressively over all. Due south lay the Kalvebod Strand, and further to the west the hill of Frederiksberg with its castle rose above the mist. On the opposite side lay the Common, and out beyond the chimneys of the limekilns glittered the Sound with its many sails. “That’s something like a view, eh?” said Morten proudly.

Pelle remained staring; he went from one window to another and said nothing. This was the city, the capital, for which he and all other poor men from the farthest corners of the land, had longed so boundlessly; the Fortunate Land, where they were to win free of poverty!

He had wandered through it in all directions, had marvelled at its palaces and its treasures, and had found it to be great beyond all expectation. Everything here was on the grand scale; what men built one day they tore down again on the morrow, in order to build something more sumptuous. So much was going on here, surely the poor man might somehow make his fortune out of it all!

And yet he had had no true conception of the whole. Now for the first time he saw the City! It lay there, a mighty whole, outspread at his feet, with palaces, churches, and factory chimneys rising above the mass of houses. Down in the street flowed a black, unending stream, a stream of people continually renewed, as though from a mighty ocean that could never be exhausted. They all had some object; one could not see it, but really they were running along like ants, each bearing his little burden to the mighty heap of precious things, which was gathered together from all the ends of the earth.

“There are millions in all this!” said Pelle at last, drawing a deep breath. “Yes,” said Morten standing beside him. “And it’s all put together by human hands—by the hands of working people!”

Pelle started. That was a wonderful idea. But it was true enough, if one thought about it.

“But now it has fallen into very different hands!” he exclaimed, laughing. “Yes, they’ve got it away from us by trickery, just as one wheedles a child out of a thing,” cried Morten morosely. “But there’s no real efficiency in anything that children do—and the poor have never been anything more than children! Only now they are beginning to grow up, look you, and one fine day they’ll ask for their own back.”

“It would go ill with us if we went and tried to take it for ourselves,” said Pelle.

“Not if we were united about it—but we are only the many.”

Pelle listened; it had never occurred to him that the question of organization was so stupendous. Men combined, sure enough, but it was to secure better conditions in their trade.

“You are like your father!” he said. “He always had big ideas, and wanted to get his rights. I was thinking about him a little while ago, how he never let himself be trampled on. Then you used to be ashamed of him; but….”

Morten hung his head. “I couldn’t bear the contempt of respectable folks,” he said half under his breath. “I understood nothing beyond the fact that he was destroying our home and bringing disgrace on us. And I was horribly afraid, too, when he began to lay about him; I wake up sometimes now quite wet and cold with sweat, when I’ve been dreaming of my childhood. But now I’m proud that I’m the son of the ‘Great Power.’ I haven’t much strength myself; yet perhaps I’ll do something to surprise the city folks after all.”

“And I too!”

Power! It was really extraordinary that Morten should be the son of the giant stone-cutter, so quiet and delicate was he. He had not yet quite recovered the strength of which Bodil had robbed him in his early boyhood; it was as though that early abuse was still wasting him.

He had retained his girlish love of comfort. The room was nicely kept; and there were actually flowers in a vase beneath the looking-glass. Flowers, good Lord! “How did you get those?” asked Pelle.

“Bought them, of course!”

Pelle had to laugh. Was there another man in the world who would pay money for flowers?

But he did not laugh at the books. There seemed to be a sort of mysterious connection between them and Morten’s peculiar, still energy. He had now a whole shelf full. Pelle took a few down and looked into them.

“What sort of stuff is this, now?” he asked doubtfully. “It looks like learning!”

“Those are books about us, and how the new conditions are coming, and how we must make ready for them.”

“Ah, you’ve got the laugh of me,” said Pelle. “In a moment of depression you’ve got your book-learning to help you along. But we other chaps can just sit where we are and kick our heels.” Morten turned to him hastily.

“That’s the usual complaint!” he cried irritably. “A man spits on his own class and wants to get into another one. But that’s not the point at stake, damn it all! We want to stay precisely where we are, shoemakers and bakers, all together! But we must demand proper conditions! Scarcely one out of thousands can come out on top; and then the rest can sit where they are and gape after him! But do you believe he’d get a chance of rising if it wasn’t that society needs him—wants to use him to strike at his own people and keep them down? ‘Now you can see for yourself what a poor man can do if he likes!’ That’s what they tell you. There’s no need to blame society.

“No, the masses themselves are to blame if they aren’t all rich men! Good God! They just don’t want to be! So they treat you like a fool, and you put up with it and baa after them! No, let them all together demand that they shall receive enough for their work to live on decently. I say a working man ought to get as much for his work as a doctor or a barrister, and to be educated as well. That’s my Lord’s Prayer!”

“Now I’ve set you off finely!” said Pelle good-naturedly. “And it’s just the same as what your father was raving about when he lay dying in the shed. He lay there delirious, and he believed the ordinary workman had got pictures on the wall and a piano, just like the fine folks.”

“Did he say that?” cried Morten, and he raised his head. Then he fell into thought. For he understood that longing. But Pelle sat there brooding. Was this the “new time” all over again? Then there was really some sense in banding people together—yes, and as many as possible.

“I don’t rightly understand it,” he said at last. “But to-day I joined the trade union. I shan’t stand still and look on when there’s anything big to be done.”

Morten nodded, faintly smiling. He was tired now, and hardly heard what Pelle was saying. “I must go to bed now so that I can get up at one. But where do you live? I’ll come and see you some time. How queer it is that we should have run across one another here!”

“I live out in Kristianshavn—in the ‘Ark,’ if you know where that is!”

“That’s a queer sort of house to have tumbled into! I know the ‘Ark’ very well, it’s been so often described in the papers. There’s all sorts of people live there!”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Pelle, half offended. “I like the people well enough…. But it’s capital that we should have run into one another’s arms like this! What bit of luck, eh? And I behaved like a clown and kept out of your way? But that was when I was going to the dogs, and hated everybody! But now nothing’s going to come between us again, you may lay to that!”

“That’s good, but now be off with you,” replied Morten, smiling; he was already half-undressed.

“I’m going, I’m going!” said Pelle, and he picked up his hat, and stood for a moment gazing out over the city. “But it’s magnificent, what you were saying about things just now!” he cried suddenly. “If I had the strength of all us poor folks in me, I’d break out right away and conquer the whole of it! If such a mass of wealth were shared out there’d never be any poverty any more!” He stood there with his arms uplifted, as though he held it all in his hands. Then he laughed uproariously. He looked full of energy. Morten lay half asleep, staring at him and saying nothing. And then he went.

Pipman scolded Pelle outrageously when at last he returned. “Curse it all, what are you thinking of? To go strolling about and playing the duke while such as we can sit here working our eyes out of our heads! And we have to go thirsty too! Now don’t you dream of being insolent to me, or there’ll be an end of the matter. I am excessively annoyed!”

He held out his hand in pathetic expostulation, although Pelle had no intention of answering him. He no longer took Pipman seriously. “Devil fry me, but a man must sit here and drink the clothes off his body while a lout like you goes for a stroll!”

Pelle was standing there counting the week’s earnings when he suddenly burst into a loud laugh as his glance fell upon Pipman. His blue naked shanks, miserably shivering under his leather apron, looked so enormously ridiculous when contrasted with the fully-dressed body and the venerable beard.

“Yes, you grin!” said Pipman, laughing too. “But suppose it was you had to take off your trousers in front of the old clothes’ man, and wanted to get upstairs respectably! Those damned brats! ‘Pipman’s got D. T.,’ they yell. ‘Pipman’s got D. T. And God knows I haven’t got D. T., but I haven’t got any trousers, and that’s just the trouble! And these accursed open staircases! Olsen’s hired girl took the opportunity, and you may be sure she saw all there was to see! You might lend me your old bags!”

Pelle opened his green chest and took out his work-day trousers.

“You’d better put a few more locks on that spinach-green lumber-chest of yours,” said Pipman surlily. “After all, there might be a thief here, near heaven as we are!”

Pelle apparently did not hear the allusion, and locked the chest up again. Then, his short pipe in his hand, he strolled out on to the platform. Above the roofs the twilight was rising from the Sound. A few doves were flying there, catching the last red rays of the sun on their white pinions, while down in the shaft the darkness lay like a hot lilac mist. The hurdy-gurdy man had come home and was playing his evening tune down there to the dancing children, while the inhabitants of the “Ark” were gossiping and squabbling from gallery to gallery. Now and again a faint vibrating note rose upward, and all fell silent. This was the dwarf Vinslev, who sat playing his flute somewhere in his den deep within the “Ark.” He always hid himself right away when he played, for at such times he was like a sick animal, and sat quaking in his lair. The notes of his flute were so sweet, as they came trickling out of his hiding place, that they seemed like a song or a lament from another world. And the restless creatures in the “Ark” must perforce be silent and listen. Now Vinslev was in one of his gentle moods, and one somehow felt better for hearing him. But at times, in his dark moods, the devil seemed to enter into him, and breathed such music into his crazy mind that all his hearers felt a panic terror. Then the decaying timbers of the “Ark” seemed to expand and form a vast monstrous, pitch-black forest, in which all terror lay lurking, and one must strike out blindly in order to avoid being trampled on. The hearse-driver in the fourth story, who at other times was so gentle in his cups, would beat his wife shamefully, and the two lay about in their den drinking and fighting in self-defence. And Vinslev’s devilish flute was to blame when Johnsen vainly bewailed his miserable life and ended it under the sewer-grating. But there was nothing to be said about the matter; Vinslev played the flute, and Johnsen’s suicide was a death like any other.

Now the devil was going about with a ring in his nose; Vinslev’s playing was like a gentle breeze that played on people’s hearts, so that they opened like flowers. This was his good time.

Pelle knew all this, although he had not long been here; but it was nothing to him. For he wore the conqueror’s shirt of mail, such as Father Lasse had dreamed of for him.

Down in the third story, on the built-out gallery, another sort of magic was at work. A climbing pelargonium and some ivy had wound themselves round the broken beams and met overhead, and there hung a little red paper lantern, which cast a cheerful glow over it all.

It was as though the summer night had found a sanctuary in the heart of this wilderness of stone. Under the lantern sat Madam Johnsen and her daughter sewing; and Hanne’s face glowed like a rose in the night, and every now and then she turned it up toward Pelle and smiled, and made an impatient movement of her head. Then Pelle turned away a little, re- crossed his leg, and leant over on the other side, restless as a horse in blinkers.

Close behind him his neighbor, Madam Frandsen, was bustling about her little kitchen. The door stood open on to the platform, and she chattered incessantly, half to herself and half to Pelle, about her gout, her dead husband, and her lout of a son. She needed to rest her body, did this old woman. “My God, yes; and here I have to keep slaving and getting his food ready for Ferdinand from morning to night and from night to morning again. And he doesn’t even trouble himself to come home to it. I can’t go looking into his wild ways; all I can do is to sit here and worry and keep his meals warm. Now that’s a tasty little bit; and he’ll soon come when he’s hungry, I tell myself. Ah, yes, our young days, they’re soon gone. And you stand there and stare like a baa-lamb and the girl down there is nodding at you fit to crick her neck! Yes, the men are a queer race; they pretend they wouldn’t dare—and yet who is it causes all the misfortunes?”

“She doesn’t want anything to do with me!” said Pelle grumpily; “she’s just playing with me.”

“Yes, a girl goes on playing with a white mouse until she gets it! You ought to be ashamed to stand there hanging your head! So young and well- grown as you are too! You cut her tail-feathers off, and you’ll get a good wife!” She nudged him in the side with her elbow.

Then at last Pelle made up his mind to go clattering down the stairs to the third story, and along the gallery.

“Why have you been so stand-offish to-day?” said Madam Johnsen, making room for him. “You know you are always very welcome. What are all these preliminaries for?”

“Pelle is short-sighted; he can’t see as far as this,” said Hanne, tossing her head. She sat there turning her head about; she gazed at him smiling, her head thrown back and her mouth open. The light fell on her white teeth.

“Shall we get fine weather to-morrow?” asked the mother.

Pelle thought they would; he gazed up at the little speck of sky in a weather-wise manner. Hanne laughed.

“Are you a weather-prophet, Pelle? But you haven’t any corns!”

“Now stop your teasing, child!” said the mother, pretending to slap her. “If it’s fine to-morrow we want to go into the woods. Will you come with us?”

Pelle would be glad to go; but he hesitated slightly before answering.

“Come with us, Pelle,” said Hanne, and she laid her hand invitingly on his shoulder. “And then you shall be my young man. It’s so tedious going to the woods with the old lady; and then I want to be able to do as I like.” She made a challenging movement with her head.

“Then we’ll go from the North Gate by omnibus; I don’t care a bit about going by train.”

“From the North Gate? But it doesn’t exist any longer, mummy! But there are still omnibuses running from the Triangle.”

“Well then, from the Triangle, you clever one! Can I help it if they go pulling everything down? When I was a girl that North Gate was a splendid place. From there you could get a view over the country where my home was, and the summer nights were never so fine as on the wall. One didn’t know what it was to feel the cold then. If one’s clothes were thin one’s heart was young.”

Hanne went into the kitchen to make coffee. The door stood open. She hummed at her task and now and again joined in the conversation. Then she came out, serving Pelle with a cracked tea-tray. “But you look very peculiar tonight!” She touched Pelle’s face and gazed at him searchingly.

“I joined the trade union to-day,” answered Pelle; he still had the feeling that of something unusual, and felt as though everybody must notice something about him.

Hanne burst out laughing. “Is that where you got that black sign on your forehead? Just look, mother, just look at him! The trade mark!” She turned her head toward the old woman.

“Ah, the rogue!” said the old woman, laughing. “Now she’s smeared soot over your face!” She wetted her apron with her tongue and began to rub the soot away, Hanne standing behind him and holding his head in both hands so that he should not move. “Thank your stars that Pelle’s a good- natured fellow,” said the old woman, as she rubbed. “Or else he’d take it in bad part!”

Pelle himself laughed shamefacedly.

The hearse-driver came up through the trap in the gallery and turned round to mount to the fourth story. “Good evening!” he said, in his deep bass voice, as he approached them; “and good digestion, too, I ought to say!” He carried a great ham under his arm.

“Lord o’ my body!” whispered Madam Johnsen. “There he is again with his ham; that means he’s wasted the whole week’s wages again. They’ve always got more than enough ham and bacon up there, poor things, but they’ve seldom got bread as well.”

Now one sound was heard in the “Ark,” now another. The crying of children which drifted so mournfully out of the long corridors whenever a door was opened turned to a feeble clucking every time some belated mother came rushing home from work to clasp the little one to her breast. And there was one that went on crying whether the mother was at home or at work. Her milk had failed her.

From somewhere down in the cellars the sleepy tones of a cradle-song rose up through the shaft; it was only “Grete with the child,” who was singing her rag-doll asleep. The real mothers did not sing.

“She’s always bawling away,” said Hanne; “those who’ve got real children haven’t got strength left to sing. But her brat doesn’t need any food; and that makes a lot of difference when one is poor.”

“To-day she was washing and ironing the child’s things to make her fine for to-morrow, when her father comes. He is a lieutenant,” said Hanne.

“Is he coming to-morrow, then?” asked Pelle naively.

Hanne laughed loudly. “She expects him every Sunday, but she has never seen him yet!”

“Well, well, that’s hardly a thing to laugh about,” said the old woman. “She’s happy in her delusions, and her pension keeps her from need.”

III

Pelle awoke to find Hanne standing by his bed and pulling his nose, and imitating his comical grimaces. She had come in over the roof. “Why are you stopping here, you?” she said eagerly. “We are waiting for you!”

“I can’t get up!” replied Pelle piteously. “Pipman went out overnight with my trousers on and hasn’t come back, so I lay down to sleep again!” Hanne broke into a ringing laugh. “What if he never comes back at all? You’ll have to lie in bed always, like Mother Jahn!”

At this Pelle laughed too.

“I really don’t know what I shall do! You must just go without me.”

“No, that we shan’t!” said Hanne very decidedly. “No, we’ll fetch the picnic-basket and spread the things on your counterpane! After all, it’s green! But wait now, I know what!” And she slipped through the back door and out on to the roof. Half an hour later she came again and threw a pair of striped trousers on the bed. “He’s obliging, is Herr Klodsmajor! Now just hurry yourself a bit. I ran round to see the hearse-driver’s Marie, where she works, and she gave me a pair of her master’s week-day breeches. But she must have them again early to-morrow morning, so that his lordship doesn’t notice it.”