Chapter 4

Why was he not still a small, impersonal fraction of this great stream which day after day mechanically followed the same round in the mill? Solitude had made his view of mankind a new and wondering one; he now, in every strange face he met, involuntarily sought for a little of that which makes each individual a world in himself. But these men were all alike, he thought; they came hurrying out of the darkness of the side streets, and were not fully awake and steady on their feet until they joined the throng, but then they did walk capitally. He recognized the firm beat again: he had himself taught it to them.

Daylight came stealing in over Vesterbro, gray and heavy with spring moisture and the city smoke. That part of the town was not quite awake yet; the step sounding in the main street was that of the belated night- wanderer. He turned down Victoria Street, looking about him in surprise; he had never been here before. He read the door-plates: Artists’ Bureau, Artisan Heim, Lodging for Artists, Masseur & Chiropodist, Costumes for Hire. Most of the announcements were in foreign languages. There was also a Gymnasium for Equilibrists and a Conservatorium for Singing and Music, Dancing and Deportment. Nor did there seem to be a scarcity of pawnbrokers and dealers in second-hand goods. How had Ellen drifted into this strange atmosphere of perfumes and old clothes and foreign countries? Behind the windows in the low rooms he saw wonderful dresses thrown over chair-backs—burnouses and red fezes; and a little dark figure with a long pigtail and bare feet in yellow slippers, glided noiselessly past him in the old-fashioned, palatial doorway of No. 20.

He mounted the stairs with a beating heart. The steps were worn and groaned ominously when trodden on. The door of the flat stood ajar, and he heard the sound of sweeping in the front room, while farther in a child was talking to itself or its doll. He had to stand a little while on the landing to take breath and to regain his composure.

Ellen was sweeping under the sofa with quick movements. She rose and gazed at him in bewilderment; the broom fell from her hand and she swayed to and fro. Pelle caught her, and she leaned inert and helpless against him, and remained thus for a considerable time, pale and with closed eyes. When at last he turned her inanimate face toward him and kissed it, she burst into tears.

He spoke gently and reassuringly to her as to a child. She kept her eyes closed, as she had always done when anything overwhelmed her. She lay back on his arm, and he felt her body tremble at the sound of his voice. Her tears seemed to soften her, and from the yielding of her body now he could see how stiffly she must have held herself, and was filled with joy. It had all been for his sake, and with a tremendous effort of her will she had defied fate until he came. She now placed it all at his feet and lay prostrate. How tired she must be! But now she and the children should have a good time; he would live for her now!

He had laid her on the sofa and sat bending over her and telling her quietly how he had repented and longed for her. She made no answer, but held his hand in a convulsive grasp, now and then opening her eyes and stealing a glance at him. Suddenly she discovered how worn and lined his face was, and as she passed her hand over it as if to soften the features, she broke into a storm of weeping.

“You have suffered so, Pelle!” she exclaimed vehemently, passing her trembling fingers through his iron-gray hair. “I can feel by your poor head how badly they’ve treated you. And I wasn’t even with you! If I could only do something really nice to make you look happy!”

She drew his head down onto her bosom and stroked it as a mother might her child’s, and Pelle’s face changed as would a child’s when taken to its mother’s breast. It was as though the well of life flowed through him, the hardness of his expression disappeared, and life and warmth took its place. “I didn’t think you’d come back to us,” said Ellen. “Ever since Lasse Frederik met you yesterday I’ve been expecting you to come.”

Pelle suddenly noticed how exhausted she looked. “Haven’t you been to bed all night?” he asked.

She smilingly shook her head. “I had to take care that the street-door wasn’t locked. Whenever any one came home, I ran down and unlocked it again. You mustn’t be angry with the boy for being afraid of you just at first. He was sorry for it afterward, and ran about the town all the evening trying to find you.”

A clear child’s voice was calling from the bedroom more and more persistently: “Man! Good-morning, man!”

It was Sister, sitting up in Ellen’s bed and playing with a feather that she had pulled out of the corner of the down-quilt. She readily allowed herself to be kissed, and sat there with pouting mouth and the funniest little wrinkled nose. “You’re man!” she said insinuatingly.

“Yes, that’s true enough,” answered Pelle, laughing: “but what man?”

“Man!” she repeated, nodding gravely.

Sister shared Ellen’s bed now. At the foot of the big bed stood her own little cot, which had also been Lasse Frederik’s, and in it lay——. Well, Pelle turned to the other side of the room, where Lasse Frederik lay snoring in a small bed, with one arm beneath his head. He had kicked off the quilt, and lay on his stomach in a deep sleep, with his limbs extended carelessly. The little fellow was well built, thought Pelle.

“Now, lazy-bones, you’d better be thinking of getting up!” cried Pelle, pulling him by the leg.

The boy turned slowly. When he saw his father, he instantly became wide awake, and raised his arm above his head as though to ward off a blow.

“There’s no box on the ears in the air, my boy,” said Pelle, laughing. “The game only begins to-day!”

Lasse Frederik continued to hold his arm in the same position, and lay gazing indifferently out into the front room, as if he had no idea to what his father was referring; but his face was scarlet.

“Don’t you even say good-morning to your father?” said Ellen, whereupon he sullenly extended his hand and then turned his face to the wall. He was vexed at his behavior of the day before, and perhaps expected a blowing-up. On a nail above his head hung his blouse and cap.

“Is Lasse Frederik a milk-boy?” asked Pelle.

“Yes,” said Ellen, “and he’s very good at it. The drivers praise him.”

“Isn’t he going to get up then, and go? I’ve met several milk-carts.”

“No, for we’re on strike just now,” murmured the boy without turning round.

Pelle became quite interested. “What fellows you are! So you’re on strike, are you? What’s it for—is it wages?”

The boy had to explain, and gradually turned his face round, but did not look at his father.

Ellen stood in the doorway and listened to them smilingly. She looked frail. “Lasse Frederik’s the leader,” she said gently.

“And he’s lying here instead of being out on the watch for blacklegs?” exclaimed Pelle quite irritably. “You’re a nice leader!”

“Do you suppose any boy would be so mean as to be a blackleg?” said Lasse Frederik. “No, indeed! But people fetch their own milk from the carts.”

“Then you must get the drivers to join you.”

“No, we don’t belong to a real union, so they won’t support us.”

“Well then, make a union! Get up, boy, and don’t lie there snoring when there’s anything of this sort on! Do you imagine that anything in this world is to be got by sleeping?”

The boy did not move. He did not seem to think there was any reason for taking his father very seriously; but he met a reproachful look from Ellen, and he was out of bed and dressed in a trice. While they sat in the front room, drinking their coffee, Pelle gave him a few hints as to how he should proceed in the matter. He was greatly interested, and went thoroughly into the subject; it seemed to him as though it were only yesterday that he had occupied himself with the people. How many pleasant memories of the fight crowded into his mind! And now every child knew that the meanest thing on earth was to become a blackleg! How he had fought to make even intelligent fellow-workmen understand this! It was quite comical to think that the strike—which filled the workmen with horror the first time he had employed it—was now a thing that children made use of. Time passed with a fleet foot out here in the day; and if you wanted to keep pace you must look sharp!

When the boy had gone, Ellen came to Pelle and stroked his hair. “Welcome home!” she said softly, and kissed his furrowed brow.

He pressed her hand. “Thank you for having a home for me,” he answered, looking into her eyes; “for if you hadn’t, I think I should have gone to the dogs.”

“The boy has had his share in that, you know! He’s worked well, or it might have gone badly with me many a time. You mustn’t be angry with him, Pelle, even if he is a little sullen to you. You must remember how much he’s gone through with the other boys. Sometimes he’s come home quite disheartened.”

“Because of me?” asked Pelle in a low voice.

“Yes, for he couldn’t bear them to say anything about you. At one time he was always fighting, but now I think he’s taught them to leave him alone; for he never gave in. But it may have left its marks on him.”

She lingered by him; there was something she wanted to say to him, but she had a difficulty in beginning. “What is it?” he asked, in order to help her, his heart beating rapidly. He would have liked to get over this without speech.

She drew him gently into the bedroom and up to the little cot. “You haven’t looked at Boy Comfort,” she said.

He bent in embarrassment over the little boy who lay and gazed at him with large, serious eyes. “You must give me a little time,” he said.

“It’s little Marie’s boy,” said Ellen, with a peculiar intonation.

He stood up quickly, and looked in bewilderment at her. It was a little while before he comprehended.

“Where is Marie?” he asked with difficulty.

“She’s dead, Pelle,” answered Ellen, and came to his aid by holding out her hand to him. “She died when the child was born.”

A gray shadow passed across Pelle’s face.

III

The house in which Pelle and his wife lived—the “Palace,” the inhabitants of the street called it—was an old, tumble-down, three- storied building with a mansard roof. Up the middle of the façade ran the remains of some fluted pilasters through the two upper stories, making a handsome frame to the small windows. The name “Palace” had not been given to the house entirely without reason; the old woman who kept the ironmonger’s shop in the back building could remember that in her childhood it had been a general’s country-house, and stood quite by itself. At that time the shore reached to where Isted Street now runs, and the fruit-gardens went right into Council House Square. Two ancient, worm-eaten apple-trees, relics of that period, were still standing squeezed in among the back buildings.

Since then the town had pushed the fruit-gardens a couple of miles farther back, and in the course of time side streets had been added to the bright neighborhood of Vesterbro—narrow, poor-men’s streets, which sprang up round the scattered country-houses, and shut out the light; and poor people, artistes and street girls ousted the owners and turned the luxuriant summer resort into a motley district where booted poverty and shoeless intelligence met.

The “Palace” was the last relic of a vanished age. The remains of its former grandeur were still to be seen in the smoke-blackened stucco and deep windows of the attics; but the large rooms had been broken up into sets of one or two rooms for people of small means, half the wide landing being boarded off for coal-cellars.

From Pelle’s little two-roomed flat, a door and a couple of steps led down into a large room which occupied the entire upper floor of the side building, and was not unlike the ruins of a former banqueting-hall. The heavy, smoke-blackened ceiling went right up under the span roof and had once been decorated; but most of the plaster had now fallen down, and the beams threatened to follow it.

The huge room had been utilized, in the course of time, both as a brewery and as a warehouse; but it still bore the stamp of its former splendor. The children of the property at any rate thought it was grand, and picked out the last remains of panelling for kindling-wood, and would sit calling to one another for hours from the high ledges above the brick pillars, upon which there had once stood busts of famous men.

Now and again a party of Russian or Polish emigrants hired the room and took possession of it for a few nights. They slept side by side upon the bare floor, each using his bundle for a pillow; and in the morning they would knock at the door of Ellen’s room, and ask by gestures to be allowed to come to the water-tap. At first she was afraid of them and barricaded the door with her wardrobe cupboard; but the thought of Pelle in prison made her sympathetic and helpful. They were poor, needy beings, whom misery and misfortune had driven from their homes. They could not speak the language and knew nothing about the world; but they seemed, like birds of passage, to find their way by instinct. In their blind flight it was at the “Palace” that they happened to alight for rest.

With this exception the great room lay unused. It went up through two stories, and could have been made into several small flats; but the owner of the property—an old peasant from Glostrup—was so miserly that he could not find it in his heart to spend money on it, notwithstanding the great advantage it would be to him. _Ellen_ had no objection to this! She dried her customers’ washing there, and escaped all the coal- dust and dirt of the yard.

Chance, which so often takes the place of Providence in the case of poor people, had landed her and her children here when things had gone wrong with them in Chapel Road. Ellen had at last, after hard toil, got her boot-sewing into good working order and had two pupils to help her, when a long strike came and spoiled it all for her. She struggled against it as well as she could, but one day they came and carried her bits of furniture down into the street. It was the old story: Pelle had heard it several times before. There she stood with the children, mounting guard over her belongings until it grew dark. It was pouring with rain, and they did not know what to do. People stopped as they hurried by, asked a few questions and passed on; one or two advised her to apply to the committee for housing the homeless. This, however, both Ellen and Lasse Frederik were too proud to do. They took the little ones down to the mangling-woman in the cellar, and themselves remained on guard over their things, in the dull hope that something would happen, a hope of which experience never quite deprives the poor.

After they had stood there a long time something really did happen. Out of Nörrebro Street came two men dashing along at a tremendous pace with a four-wheeled cart of the kind employed by the poor of Copenhagen when they move—preferably by night—from one place to another. One of the men was at the pole of the cart, while the other pushed behind and, when the pace was at its height, flung himself upon his stomach on the cart, putting on the brake with the toes of his boots upon the road so as to twist the cart into the gutter. Upon the empty cart sat a middle-aged woman, singing, with her feet dangling over the side; she was big and wore an enormous hat with large nodding flowers, of the kind designed to attract the male sex. The party zig-zagged, shouting and singing, from one side of the street to the other, and each time the lady shrieked.

“_There’s_ a removing cart!” said Lasse Frederik, and as he spoke the vehicle pulled up in the gutter just in front of them.

“What are you doing, Thorvald?” said one of the men; then, staring straight into Ellen’s face, “Have you hurt your eye?”

The woman had jumped down from the cart. “Oh, get out of the way, you ass!” she said, pushing him aside. “Can’t you see they’ve been turned out? Is it your husband that’s chucked you out?” she asked, bending sympathetically over Ellen.

“No, the landlord’s turned us out!” said Lasse Frederik.

“What a funny little figure! And you’ve got nowhere to sleep to-night? Here, Christian, take and load these things on the cart, and then they can stand under the gateway at home for the night. They’ll be quite spoilt by the rain here.”

“Yes,” answered Christian, “the chair-legs have actually begun to take root!” The two men were in a boisterous humor.

“Now you can just come along with me,” said the woman, when the things were piled upon the cart, “and I’ll find you a place to sleep in. And then to-morrow Providence’ll perhaps be at home himself!”

“She’s a street-woman,” whispered Lasse Frederik again and again, pulling Ellen’s dress; but Ellen did not care now, if only she could avoid having to accept poor relief. She no longer held her head so high.

It was “Queen Theresa” herself they had met, and in a sense this meeting had made their fortune. She helped Ellen to find her little flat, and got her washing to do for the girls of the neighborhood. It was not very much, though the girls of Vesterbro went in for fine clothes as far as they could; but it afforded her at any rate a livelihood.

Pelle did not like Ellen going on with all this dirty work; he wanted to be the one to provide for the family. Ellen moreover had had her turn, and she looked tired and as if she needed to live a more comfortable life. It was as though she fell away now that he was there and able once more to assume the responsibility; but she would not hear of giving up the washing. “It’s never worth while to throw away the dirty water until you’ve got the clean!” she said.

Every morning he set out furnished with a brand-new trades-union book, and went from workshop to workshop. Times were bad for his branch of trade; many of his old fellow-workmen had been forced to take up other occupations—he met them again as conductors, lamplighters, etc.; machinery had made them unnecessary, they said. It was the effect of the great lock-out; it had killed the little independent businesses that had formerly worked with one or two men, and put wind into the sails of large industries. The few who could manage it had procured machines and become manufacturers; the rest were crowded out and sat in out-of-the- way basements doing repairs. To set to work again, on the old conditions was what had been farthest from Pelle’s thoughts; and he now went about and offered to become an apprentice again in order to serve his new master, the machinery, and was ready to be utilized to the utmost. But the manufacturers had no use for him; they still remembered him too well. “You’ve been too long away from the work,” said one and another of them meaningly.

Well, that was only tit for tat; but he felt bitterly how even his past rose up against him. He had fought and sacrificed everything to improve the conditions in his branch; and the machines were the discouraging answer that the development gave to him and his fellows.

He was not alone in his vain search in this bright springtime. A number of other branches had had the same fate as his own. Every new day that dawned brought him into a stream of men who seemed to be condemned to wear out the pavement in their hopeless search for work—people who had been pushed out by the machines and could not get in again. “There must be something wrong with them,” Pelle thought while he stood and listened to always the same story of how they had suddenly been dropped, and saw the rest of the train steaming away. It must have been their own fault that they were not coupled on to a new one; perhaps they were lazy or drunkards. But after a time he saw good, tried men standing in the row, and offering their powers morning after morning without result; and he began to realize with a chill fear that times were changing.

He would certainly have managed to make both ends meet if there had been anything to be got. The prices were all right; their only defect was that they were not eatable. Altogether it seemed as if a change for the worse had overtaken the artisan; and to make it still more serious the large businesses stood in the way of his establishing himself and becoming independent. There was not even a back door left open now! Pelle might just as well put that out of his head first as last; to become a master now required capital and credit. The best thing that the future held was an endless and aimless tramp to and from the factory.

At one stroke he was planted in the middle of the old question again; all the circumstances passed before him, and it was useless to close his eyes. He was willing enough to mind his own affairs and did not seek for anything; but the one thing was a consequence of the other, and whether he wished it or not, it united in a general view of the conditions.

The union had stood the test outwardly. The workmen were well organized and had vindicated their right to negotiate; their corporations could no longer be disregarded. Wages were also to some extent higher, and the feeling for the home had grown in the workmen themselves, many of them having removed from their basements into new two- or three-roomed flats, and bought good furniture. They demanded more from life, but everything had become dearer, and they still lived from hand to mouth. He could see that the social development had not kept pace with the mechanical; the machines wedged themselves quietly but inexorably in between the workmen and the work, and threw more and more men out of employment. The hours of labor were not greatly shortened. Society did not seem to care to protect the workers, but it interested itself more in disabled workmen than before, and provision for the poor was well organized. Pelle could not discover _any_ law that had a regulating effect, but found a whole number of laws that plastered up the existing conditions. A great deal of help was given, always just on the borders of starvation; and more and more men had to apply for it. It did not rob them of their rights as citizens, but made them a kind of politically _kept_ proletariat.

It was thus that the world of adventure which Pelle had helped to conquer appeared now when he returned and looked at it with new eyes. The world had not been created anew, and the Movement did not seem to have produced anything strong and humanly supporting. It seemed as if the workmen would quietly allow themselves to be left out of the game, if only they received money for doing nothing! What had become of their former pride? They must have acquired the morals of citizens, since they willingly agreed to accept a pension for rights surrendered. They were not deficient in power; they could make the whole world wither and die without shedding a drop of blood, only by holding together. It was a sense of responsibility that they lacked; they had lost the fundamental idea of the Movement.

Pelle looked at the question from all sides while he trudged up and down in his vain search. The prospect obtruded itself upon him, and there were forces at work, both within and without, trying to push him into the Movement and into the front rank among the leaders, but he repelled the idea: he was going to work for his home now.

He managed to obtain some repairs for the neighbors, and also helped Ellen to hang up clothes and turn the mangle. One must pocket one’s pride and be glad _she_ had something. She was glad of his help, but did not want any one to see him doing this woman’s work.

“It’s not work for a man,” she said, looking at him with eyes which said how pleased she was to have his company.