VI

The other apprentices were able to provide themselves with clothes, as

they worked on their own account in their own time; they got work from

their friends, and at times they pirated the master’s customers, by

underbidding him in secret. They kept their own work under the bench;

when the master was not at home they got it out and proceeded with it.

“To-night I shall go out and meet my girl,” they would say, laughing.

Little Nikas said nothing at all.

Pelle had no friends to give him work, and he could not have done much.

If the others had much to do after work-hours or on Sundays he had to

help them; but he gained nothing by so doing. And he also had Nilen’s

shoes to keep mended, for old acquaintances’ sake.

Jeppe lectured them at great length on the subject of tips, as he had

promised; for the townsfolk had been complaining of this burdensome

addition to their expenditure, and in no measured terms had sworn

either to abate or abolish this tax on all retail transactions. But it

was only because they had read of the matter in the newspapers, and

didn’t want to be behind the capital! They always referred to the

subject when Pelle went round with his shoes, and felt in their purses;

if there was a shilling there they would hide it between their fingers,

and say that he should have something next time for certain—he must

remind them of it another time! At first he did remind them—they had

told him to do so—but then Jeppe received a hint that his youngest

apprentice must stop his attempts at swindling. Pelle could not

understand it, but he conceived an increasing dislike of these people,

who could resort to such a shameless trick in order to save a penny

piece, which they would never have missed.

Pelle, who had been thinking that he had had enough of the world of

poor folk, and must somehow contrive to get into another class, learned

once again to rely on the poor, and rejoiced over every pair of poor

folk’s shoes which the master anathematized because they were so worn

out. The poor were not afraid to pay a shilling if they had one; it

made him feel really sad to see how they would search in every corner

to get a few pence together, and empty their children’s money-boxes,

while the little ones stood by in silence, looking on with mournful

eyes. And if he did not wish to accept their money they were offended.

The little that he did receive he owed to people who were as poor as

himself.

Money, to these folk, no longer consisted of those round, indifferent

objects which people in the upper strata of human society piled up in

whole heaps. Here every shilling meant so much suffering or happiness,

and a grimy little copper would still the man’s angry clamor and the

child’s despairing cry for food. Widow Hoest gave him a ten-öre piece,

and he could not help reflecting that she had given him her mid-day

meal for two days to come!

One day, as he was passing the miserable hovels which lay out by the

northern dunes, a poor young woman came to her door and called to him;

she held the remains of a pair of elastic-sided boots in her hand. “Oh,

shoemaker’s boy, do be so kind as to mend these a bit for me!” she

pleaded. “Just sew them up anyhow, so that they’ll stick on my feet for

half the evening. The stone-masons are giving their feast, and I do so

want to go to it!” Pelle examined the boots; there was not much to be

done for them, nevertheless he took them, and mended them in his own

time. He learned from Jens that the woman was the widow of a

stone-cutter, who was killed by an explosion shortly after their

marriage. The boots looked quite decent when he returned them.

“Well, I’ve no money, but I do offer you many, many thanks!” she said,

looking delightedly at the boots; “and how nice you’ve made them look!

God bless you for it.”

“Thanks killed the blacksmith’s cat,” said Pelle smiling. Her pleasure

was contagious.

“Yes, and God’s blessing falls where two poor people share their bed,”

the young woman rejoined jestingly. “Still, I wish you everything good

as payment—now I can dance after all!”

Pelle was quite pleased with himself as he made off. But few doors

farther on another poor woman accosted him; she had evidently heard of

the success of the first, and there she stood holding a dirty pair of

children’s boots, which she earnestly begged him to mend. He took the

boots and repaired them although it left him still poorer; he knew too

well what need was to refuse. This was the first time that any one in

the town had regarded him as an equal, and recognized him at the first

glance as a fellow-creature. Pelle pondered over this; he did not know

that poverty is cosmopolitan.

When he went out after the day’s work he took a back seat; he went

about with the poorest boys and behaved as unobtrusively as possible.

But sometimes a desperate mood came over him, and at times he would

make himself conspicuous by behavior that would have made old Lasse

weep; as, for example, when he defiantly sat upon a freshly-tarred

bollard. He became thereby the hero of the evening; but as soon as he

was alone he went behind a fence and let down his breeches in order to

ascertain the extent of the damage. He had been running his errands

that day in the best clothes he possessed. This was no joke. Lasse had

deeply imbued him with his own moderation, and had taught him to treat

his things carefully, so that it seemed to Pelle almost a pious duty.

But Pelle felt himself forsaken by all the gods, and now he defied

them.

The poor women in the streets were the only people who had eyes for

him. “Now look at the booby, wearing his confirmation jacket on a

weekday!” they would say, and call him over in order to give him a

lecture, which as a rule ended in an offer to repair the damage. But it

was all one to Pelle; if he ran about out-of-doors in his best clothes

he was only doing as the town did. At all events he had a shirt on,

even if it was rather big! And the barber’s assistant himself, who

looked most important in tail-coat and top-hat, and was the ideal of

every apprentice, did not always wear a shirt; Pelle had once noticed

that fact as the youth was swinging some ladies. Up in the country,

where a man was appraised according to the number of his shirts, such a

thing would have been impossible. But here in town people did not

regard such matters so strictly.

He was no longer beside himself with astonishment at the number of

people—respectable folk for the most part—who had no abiding place

anywhere, but all through the year drifted in the most casual manner

from one spot to another. Yet the men looked contented, had wives and

children, went out on Sundays, and amused themselves; and after all why

should one behave as if the world was coming to an end because one

hadn’t a barrel of salt pork or a clamp of potatoes to see one through

the winter? Recklessness was finally Pelle’s refuge too; when all the

lights seemed to have gone out of the future it helped him to take up

the fairy-tale of life anew, and lent a glamor to naked poverty.

Imagination entered even into starvation: are you or are you not going

to die of it?

Pelle was poor enough for everything to be still before him, and he

possessed the poor man’s alert imagination; the great world and the

romance of life were the motives that drew him through the void, that

peculiar music of life which is never silent, but murmurs to the

reckless and the careful alike. Of the world he knew well enough that

it was something incomprehensibly vast—something that was always

receding; yet in eighty days one could travel right round it, to the

place where men walk about with their heads downward, and back again,

and experience all its wonders. He himself had set out into this

incomprehensible world, and here he was, stranded in this little town,

where there was never a crumb to feed a hungry imagination; nothing but

a teeming confusion of petty cares. One felt the cold breath of the

outer winds, and the dizziness of great spaces; when the little

newspaper came the small tradesmen and employers would run eagerly

across the street, their spectacles on their noses, and would speak,

with gestures of amazement, of the things that happened outside.

“China,” they would say; “America!” and fancy that they themselves made

part of the bustling world. But Pelle used to wish most ardently that

something great and wonderful might wander thither and settle down

among them just for once! He would have been quite contented with a

little volcano underfoot, so that the houses would begin to sway and

bob to one another; or a trifling inundation, so that ships would ride

over the town, and have to moor themselves to the weather-cock on the

church steeple. He had an irrational longing that something of this

kind should happen, something to drive the blood from his heart and

make his hair stand on end. But now he had enough to contend against

apart from matters of this sort; the world must look after itself until

times were better.

It was more difficult to renounce the old fairy-tales, for poverty

itself had sung them into his heart, and they spoke to him with Father

Lasse’s quivering voice. “A rich child often lies in a poor mother’s

lap,” his father used to say, when he prophesied concerning his son’s

future, and the saying sank deep into the boy’s mind, like the refrain

of a song. But he had learned this much, that there were no elephants

here, on whose necks a plucky youngster could ride astraddle, in order

to ride down the tiger which was on the point of tearing the King of

the Himalayas to pieces so that he would of course receive the king’s

daughter and half his kingdom as a reward for his heroic deed. Pelle

often loitered about the harbor, but no beautifully dressed little girl

ever fell into the water, so that he might rescue her, and then, when

he was grown up, make her his wife. And if such a thing did really

happen he knew now that his elders would cheat him out of any tip he

might receive. And he had quite given up looking for the golden coach

which was to run over him, so that the two terrified ladies, who would

be dressed in mourning, would take him into their carriage and carry

him off to their six- storied castle! Of course, they would adopt him

permanently in place of the son which they had just lost, and who,

curiously enough, was exactly the same age as himself. No, there were

no golden coaches here!

Out in the great world the poorest boy had the most wonderful

prospects; all the great men the books had ever heard of had been poor

lads like himself, who had reached their high estate through good

fortune and their own valor. But all the men in town who possessed

anything had attained their wealth by wearily plodding forward and

sucking the blood of the poor. They were always sitting and brooding

over their money, and they threw nothing away for a lucky fellow to

pick up; and they left nothing lying about, lest some poor lad should

come and take it. Not one of them considered it beneath him to pick up

an old trouser-button off the pavement, and carry it home.

One evening Pelle was running out to fetch half a pound of canister

tobacco for Jeppe. In front of the coal-merchant’s house the big dog,

as always, made for his legs, and he lost the twenty-five-öre piece.

While he was looking for it, an elderly man came up to him. Pelle knew

him very well; he was Monsen the shipowner, the richest man in the

town.

“Have you lost something, my lad?” he asked, and began to assist in the

search.

“Now he will question me,” thought Pelle. “And then I shall answer him

boldly, and then he will look at me attentively and say—”

Pelle was always hoping for some mysterious adventure, such as happens

to an able lad and raises him to fortune.

But the shipowner did nothing he was expected to do. He merely searched

eagerly, and inquired: “Where were you walking? Here, weren’t you? Are

you quite certain of that?”

“In any case he’ll give me another twenty-five öre,” thought Pelle.

“Extraordinary—how eager he is!” Pelle did not really want to go on

searching, but he could not very well leave off before the other.

“Well, well!” said the shipowner at last, “you may as well whistle for

those twenty-five öre. But what a booby you are!” And he moved on, and

Pelle looked after him for a long while before putting his hand into

his own pocket.

Later, as he was returning that way, he saw a man bowed over the

flagstones, striking matches as he searched. It was Monsen. The sight

tickled Pelle tremendously. “Have you lost anything?” he asked

mischievously, standing on the alert, lest he should get a box on the

ear. “Yes, yes; twenty-five öre;” groaned the shipowner. “Can’t you

help me to find it, my boy?”

Well, he had long understood that Monsen was the richest man in the

town, and that he had become so by provisioning ships with spoiled

foodstuffs, and refitting old crank vessels, which he heavily insured.

And he knew who was a thief and who a bankrupt speculator, and that

Merchant Lau only did business with the little shopkeepers, because his

daughter had gone to the bad. Pelle knew the secret pride of the town,

the “Top-galeass,” as she was called, who in her sole self represented

the allurements of the capital, and he knew the two sharpers, and the

consul with the disease which was eating him up. All this was very

gratifying knowledge for one of the rejected.

He had no intention of letting the town retain any trace of those

splendors with which he had once endowed it. In his constant ramblings

he stripped it to the buff. For instance, there stood the houses of the

town, some retiring, some standing well forward, but all so neat on the

side that faced the street, with their wonderful old doorways and

flowers in every window. Their neatly tarred framework glistened, and

they were always newly lime-washed, ochrous yellow or dazzling white,

sea-green, or blue as the sky. And on Sundays there was quite a festive

display of flags. But Pelle had explored the back quarters of every

house; and there were sinks and traps there, with dense slimy growths,

and stinking refuse-barrels, and one great dustbin with a drooping

elder-tree over it. And the spaces between the cobble-stones were foul

with the scales of herrings and the guts of codfish, and the lower

portions of the walls were covered with patches of green moss.

The bookbinder and his wife went about hand in hand when they set out

for the meeting of some religious society. But at home they fought, and

in chapel, as they sat together and sang out of the same hymn-book,

they would secretly pinch one another’s legs. “Yes,” people used to

say, “such a nice couple!” But the town couldn’t throw dust in Pelle’s

eyes; he knew a thing or two. If only he had known just how to get

himself a new blouse!

Some people didn’t go without clothes so readily; they were forever

making use of that fabulous thing—credit! At first it took his breath

away to discover that the people here in the town got everything they

wanted without paying money for it. “Will you please put it down?” they

would say, when they came for their boots; and “it’s to be entered,” he

himself would say, when he made a purchase for his employers. All spoke

the same magical formula, and Pelle was reminded of Father Lasse, who

had counted his shillings over a score of times before he ventured to

buy anything. He anticipated much from this discovery, and it was his

intention to make good use of the magic words when his own means became

exhausted.

Now, naturally, he was wiser. He had discovered that the very poor must

always go marketing with their money in their hands, and even for the

others there came a day of reckoning. The master already spoke with

horror of the New Year; and it was very unfortunate for his business

that the leather-sellers had got him in their pocket, so that he could

not buy his material where it was cheapest. All the small employers

made the same complaint.

But the fairy-tale of credit was not yet exhausted—there was still a

manner of drawing a draft upon fortune, which could be kept waiting,

and on the future, which redeems all drafts. Credit was a spark of

poetry in the scramble of life; there were people going about who were

poor as church mice, yet they played the lord. Alfred was such a lucky

fellow; he earned not a red cent, but was always dressed like a

counter-jumper, and let himself want for nothing. If he took a fancy to

anything he simply went in and got it on “tick”; and he was never

refused. His comrades envied him and regarded him as a child of

fortune.

Pelle himself had a little flirtation with fortune. One day he went

gaily into a shop, in order to procure himself some underclothing. When

he asked for credit they looked at him as though he could not be quite

sane, and he had to go away without effecting his object. “There must

be some secret about it that I don’t know,” he thought; and he dimly

remembered another boy, who couldn’t stir the pot to cook his porridge

or lay the table for himself, because he didn’t know the necessary

word. He sought Alfred forthwith in order to receive enlightenment.

Alfred was wearing new patent braces, and was putting on his collar. On

his feet were slippers with fur edging, which looked like feeding

pigeons. “I got them from a shopkeeper’s daughter,” he said; and he

coquetted with his legs; “she’s quite gone on me. A nice girl too— only

there’s no money.”

Pelle explained his requirements.

“Shirts! shirts!” Alfred chortled with delight, and clapped his hands

before his face. “Good Lord, he wants to gets shirts on tick! If only

they had been linen shirts!” He was near bursting with laughter.

Pelle tried again. As a peasant—for he was still that—he had thought of

shirts first of all; but now he wanted a summer overcoat and rubber

cuffs. “Why do you want credit?” asked the shopkeeper, hesitating. “Are

you expecting any money? Or is there any one who will give you a

reference?”

No, Pelle didn’t want to bring any one else into it; it was simply that

he had no money.

“Then wait until you have,” said the shopkeeper surlily. “We don’t

clothe paupers!” Pelle slunk away abashed.

“You’re a fool!” said Alfred shortly. “You are just like Albinus—he can

never learn how to do it!”

“How do you do it then?” asked Pelle meekly.

“How do I do it—how do I do it?” Alfred could give no explanation; “it

just came of itself. But naturally I don’t tell them that I’m poor! No,

you’d better leave it alone—it’ll never succeed with you!”

“Why do you sit there and pinch your upper lip?” asked Pelle

discontentedly.

“Pinch? You goat, I’m stroking my moustache!”