The punishment itself was nothing. It was almost laughable, those few
strokes, laid on through his trousers, by the stick of the old gaoler;
Pelle had known worse thrashings. But he was branded, an outcast from
the society even of the very poorest; he read as much into the
compassion of the people to whom he carried boots and shoes. “Good
Lord, this miserable booby! Has it gone as far as that with him!” This
was what he read in their eyes. Everybody would always stare at him
now, and when he went down the street he saw faces in the “spy” mirrors
fixed outside the windows. “There goes that shoemaker boy!”
The young master was the only one who treated him precisely as before;
and Pelle repaid him for that with the most limitless devotion. He
bought on credit for him and saved him from blows where only he could.
If the young master in his easy-going way had promised to have
something completed and had then forgotten it, Pelle would sit in his
place and work overtime on it. “What’s it matter to us?” Jens used to
say. But Pelle would not have the customers coming to scold Master
Andres, nor would he allow him to suffer the want of anything that
would keep him on his feet.
He became more intimate than ever with Jens and Morten; they all
suffered from the same disgrace; and he often accompanied them home,
although no pleasure awaited them in their miserable cottage. They were
among the very poorest, although the whole household worked. It was all
of no avail.
“Nothing’s any use,” the “Great Power” himself would say when he was
disposed to talk; “poverty is like a sieve: everything goes straight
through it, and if we stop one hole, it’s running through ten others at
the same time. They say I’m a swine, and why shouldn’t I be? I can do
the work of three men—yes, but do I get the wages of three? I get my
day’s wages and the rest goes into the pockets of those who employ me.
Even if I wanted to keep myself decent, what should we gain by it? Can
a family get decent lodging and decent food and decent clothing for
nine kroner a week? Will the means of a laborer allow him to live
anywhere but by the refuse-heaps, where only the pigs used to be kept?
Why should I be housed like a pig and live like a pig and yet be no
pig—is there any sense in that? My wife and children have to work as
well as me, and how can things be decent with us when wife and children
have to go out and make things decent for other people? No, look here!
A peg of brandy, that makes everything seem decent, and if that doesn’t
do it, why, then, a bottle!” So he would sit talking, when he had been
drinking a little, but otherwise he was usually silent.
Pelle knew the story of the “Great Power” now, from the daily gossip of
the townsfolk, and his career seemed to him sadder than all the rest;
it was as though a fairy-tale of fortune had come to a sudden end.
Among the evil reports which were continually in circulation respecting
Stone-cutter Jörgensen—it seemed that there was never an end of them—it
was said that in his youth he had strolled into town from across the
cliffs, clad in canvas trousers, with cracked wooden shoes on his feet,
but with his head in the clouds as though the whole town belonged to
him. Brandy he did not touch. He had a better use for his energies, he
said: he was full of great ideas of himself and would not content
himself with ordinary things. And he was thoroughly capable—he was
quite absurdly talented for a poor man. And at once he wanted to begin
turning everything topsy-turvy. Just because he was begotten among the
cliffs and crags by an old toil- worn stone-cutter, he behaved like a
deity of the rocks; he brushed long-established experience aside, and
introduced novel methods of work which he evolved out of his own mind.
The stone was as though bewitched in his hands. If one only put a
sketch before him, he would make devils’ heads and subterranean
monsters and sea-serpents —the sort of thing that before his time had
to be ordered from the sculptors in Copenhagen. Old deserving
stone-masons saw themselves suddenly set aside and had then and there
to take to breaking stones; and this young fellow who had strayed into
the town straightway ignored and discounted the experience of their
many years. They tried, by the most ancient of all methods, to teach
the young man modesty. But they gave it up. Peter Jörgensen had the
strength of three men and the courage of ten. It was not good to meddle
with one who had stolen his capacities from God himself, or perhaps was
in league with Satan. So they resigned themselves, and avenged
themselves by calling him the “Great Power”—and they put their trust in
misfortune. To follow in his footsteps meant to risk a broken neck. And
whenever the brave townsfolk made the journey, something of its dizzy
quality remained with them.
In the night he would sit sketching and calculating, so that no one
could understand when he slept; and on Sundays, when decent people went
to church, he would stop at home and cut the queerest things out of
stone—although he never got a penny for it.
It was at this time that the famous sculptor came from the capital of
Germany to hew a great lion out of granite, in honor of Liberty. But he
could not get forward with his toolbox full of butter-knives; the stone
was too hard for one who was accustomed to stand scratching at marble.
And when for once he really did succeed in knocking off a bit of
granite, it was always in the wrong place.
Then the “Great Power” asserted himself, and undertook to hew the lion
out of granite, according to a scale model of some sort which the
sculptor slapped together for him! All were persuaded that he would
break down in this undertaking, but he negotiated it so cleverly that
he completed the work to the utmost satisfaction of those concerned. He
received a good sum of money for this, but it was not enough for him;
he wanted half the honor, and to be spoken of in the newspapers like
the sculptor himself; and as nothing came of it he threw down his tools
and refused to work any more for other people. “Why should I do the
work and others have the honor of it?” he asked, and sent in a tender
for a stone-cutting contract. In his unbounded arrogance he sought to
push to one side those who were born to ride on the top of things. But
pride comes before a fall; his doom was already hanging over him.
He had sent in the lowest tender for the work on the South Bridge. They
could not disregard it; so they sought to lay every obstacle in his
path; they enticed his workmen away from him and made it difficult for
him to obtain materials. The district judge, who was in the conspiracy,
demanded that the contract should be observed; so the “Great Power” had
to work day and night with the few men left to him in order to complete
the work in time. A finer bridge no one had ever seen. But he had to
sell the shirt off his body in order to meet his engagements.
He lived at that time in a pretty little house that was his own
property. It lay out on the eastern highway, and had a turret on the
mansard—Jens and Morten had spent their early childhood there. A little
garden, with tidy paths, and a grotto which was like a heap of rocks,
lay in front of it. Jörgenson had planned it all himself. It was taken
from him, and he had to remove to a poor quarter of the town, to live
among the people to whom he rightly belonged, and to rent a house
there. But he was not yet broken. He was cheerful in spite of his
downfall, and more high-and-mighty than ever in his manners. It was not
easy to hit him! But then he sent in a tender for the new
crane-platform. They could have refused him the contract on the pretext
that he had no capital at his disposal. But now he _should_ be struck
down! He got credit from the savings-bank, in order to get well under
way, and workers and material were his to dispose of. And then, as he
was in the midst of the work, the same story was repeated—only this
time he was to break his neck! Rich and poor, the whole town was at one
in this matter. All demanded the restoration of the old certainty, high
and low, appointed by God Himself. The “Great Power” was of the
humblest descent; now he could quietly go back to the class he was born
in!
He failed! The legal proprietor took over a good piece of work and got
it for nothing, and Stonemason Jörgensen stood up in a pair of cracked
wooden shoes, with a load of debts which he would never be able to
shake off. Every one rejoiced to see him return to the existence of a
day-laborer. But he did not submit quietly. He took to drink. From time
to time he broke out and raged like the devil himself. They could not
get rid of him; he weighed upon the minds of all, like an angry
rumbling; even when he was quietly going about his work they could not
quite forget him. Under these conditions he squandered his last
possessions, and he moved into the cottage by the refuse-heaps, where
formerly no one had dwelt.
He had become another man since the grant for the great harbor project
had been approved. He no longer touched any brandy; when Pelle went out
to see his friends, the “Great Power” would be sitting at the window,
busying himself with sketches and figures. His wife was moving about
and weeping quietly to herself; the old woman was scolding. But
Jörgensen turned his broad back upon them and pored silently over his
own affairs. He was not to be shaken out of his self-sufficiency.
The mother received them out in the kitchen, when she heard their noisy
approach. “You must move quietly—Father is calculating and calculating,
poor fellow! He can get no peace in his head since the harbor plans
have been seriously adopted. His ideas are always working in him. That
must be so, he says, and that so! If he would only take life quietly
among his equals and leave the great people to worry over their own
affairs!”
He sat in the window, right in the sunlight, adding up some troublesome
accounts; he whispered half to himself, and his mutilated forefinger,
whose outer joint had been blown off, ran up and down the columns. Then
he struck the table. “Oh, if only a man had learned something!” he
groaned. The sunlight played on his dark beard; his weary labors had
been powerless to stiffen his limbs or to pull him down. Drink had
failed to hurt him—he sat there like strength personified; his great
forehead and his throat were deeply bronzed by the sun.
“Look here, Morten!” he cried, turning to the boys. “Just look at these
figures!”
Morten looked. “What is it, father?”
“What is it? Our earnings during the last week! You can see they are
big figures!”
“No, father; what are they?” Morten twined his slender hand in his
father’s beard.
The “Great Power’s” eyes grew mild under this caress.
“It’s a proposed alteration—they want to keep the channel in the old
place, and that is wrong; when the wind blows in from the sea, one
can’t get into the harbor. The channel must run out there, and the
outer breakwater must curve like this”—and he pointed to his sketches.
“Every fisherman and sailor will confirm what I say—but the big
engineer gentlemen are so clever!”
“But are you going—again—to send in a tender?” Morten looked at his
father, horrified. The man nodded.
“But you aren’t good enough for them—you know you aren’t! They just
laugh at you!”
“This time I shall be the one to laugh,” retorted Jörgensen, his brow
clouding at the thought of all the contempt he had had to endure.
“Of course they laugh at him,” said the old woman from the chimney-
corner, turning her hawk-like head toward them; “but one must play at
something. Peter must always play the great man!”
Her son did not reply.
“They say you know something about sketching, Pelle?” he said quietly.
“Can’t you bring this into order a bit? This here is the
breakwater—supposing the water isn’t there—and this is the basin —cut
through the middle, you understand? But I can’t get it to look
right—yet the dimensions are quite correct. Here above the water-line
there will be big coping-stones, and underneath it’s broken stone.”
Pelle set to work, but he was too finicking.
“Not so exact!” said Jörgensen. “Only roughly!”
He was always sitting over his work when they came. From his wife they
learned that he did not put in a tender, after all, but took his plans
to those who had undertaken the contract and offered them his
cooperation. She had now lost all faith in his schemes, and was in a
state of continual anxiety. “He’s so queer—he’s always taken up with
only this one thing,” she said, shuddering. “He never drinks —and he
doesn’t go raging against all the world as he used to do.”
“But that’s a good thing,” said Morten consolingly.
“Yes, you may talk, but what do you know about it? If he looks after
his daily bread, well, one knows what that means. But now, like this….
I’m so afraid of the reaction if he gets a set-back. Don’t you believe
he’s changed—it’s only sleeping in him. He’s the same as ever about
Karen; he can’t endure seeing her crooked figure; she reminds him
always too much of everything that isn’t as it should be. She mustn’t
go to work, he says, but how can we do without her help? We must live!
I daren’t let him catch sight of her. He gets so bitter against
himself, but the child has to suffer for it. And he’s the only one she
cares anything about.”
Karen had not grown during the last few years; she had become even more
deformed; her voice was dry and shrill, as though she had passed
through a frozen desert on her way to earth. She was glad when Pelle
was there and she could hear him talk; if she thought he would come in
the evening, she would hurry home from her situation. But she never
joined in the conversation and never took part in anything. No one
could guess what was going on in her mind. Her mother would suddenly
break down and burst into tears if her glance by chance fell upon her.
“She really ought to leave her place at once,” said her mother over and
again. “But the doctor’s wife has one child after another, and then
they ask so pleadingly if she can’t stay yet another half-year. They
think great things of her; she is so reliable with children.”
“Yes, if it was Pelle, he’d certainly let them fall.” Karen laughed —it
was a creaking laugh. She said nothing more; she never asked to be
allowed to go out, and she never complained. But her silence was like a
silent accusation, destroying all comfort and intimacy.
But one day she came home and threw some money on the table. “Now I
needn’t go to Doctor’s any more.”
“What’s the matter? Have you done something wrong?” asked the mother,
horrified.
“The doctor gave me a box on the ear because I couldn’t carry Anna over
the gutter—she’s so heavy.”
“But you can’t be sent away because he has struck you! You’ve certainly
had a quarrel—you are so stubborn!”
“No; but I accidentally upset the perambulator with little Erik in
it—so that he fell out. His head is like a mottled apple.” Her
expression was unchanged.
The mother burst into tears. “But how could you do such a thing?” Karen
stood there and looked at the other defiantly. Suddenly her mother
seized hold of her. “You didn’t do it on purpose? Did you do it on
purpose?”
Karen turned away with a shrug of the shoulders and went up to the
garret without saying good night. Her mother wanted to follow her.
“Let her go!” said the old woman, as though from a great distance. “You
have no power over her! She was begotten in wrath.”