There were rumors that the city authorities intended to intervene in
order to remedy the condition of the unemployed, and shortly before
Christmas large numbers of navvies were given employment. Part of the
old ramparts was cleared away, and the space converted into parks and
boulevards. Pelle applied among a thousand others and had the good
fortune to be accepted. The contractor gave the preference to youthful
energy.
Every morning the workers appeared in a solid phalanx; the foreman of
the works chose those he had need of, and the rest were free to depart.
At home sat their wives and children, cheered by the possibility of
work; the men felt no inclination to go home with bad news, so they
loafed about in the vicinity.
They came there long before daybreak in order to be the first, although
there was not much hope. There was at least an excuse to leave one’s
bed; idleness was burning like hell fire in their loins. When the
foreman came they thronged silently about him, with importunate eyes.
One woman brought her husband; he walked modestly behind her, kept his
eyes fixed upon her, and did precisely as she did. He was a great
powerful fellow, but he did nothing of his own accord—did not even blow
his nose unless she nudged him. “Come here, Thorvald!” she said,
cuffing him so hard as to hurt him. “Keep close behind me!” She spoke
in a harsh voice, into the empty air, as though to explain her behavior
to the others; but no one looked at her. “He can’t speak for himself
properly, you see,” she remarked at random. Her peevish voice made
Pelle start; she was from Bornholm. Ah, those smart young girls at
home, they were a man’s salvation! “And the children have got to live
too!” she continued. “We have eight. Yes, eight.”
“Then he’s some use for something,” said a workman who looked to be
perishing with the cold.
The woman worked her way through them, and actually succeeded in
getting her man accepted. “And now you do whatever they tell you,
nicely, and don’t let them tempt you to play the fool in any way!” she
said, and she gave him a cuff which set him off working in his place.
She raised her head defiantly as contemptuous laughter sounded about
her.
The place was like a slave-market. The foreman, went to and fro,
seeking out the strongest, eyeing them from head to foot and choosing
them for their muscular development and breadth of back. The contractor
too was moving about and giving orders. “One of them rich snobs!” said
the laborers, grumbling; “all the laborers in town have to march out
here so that he can pick himself the best. And he’s beaten down the
day’s wages to fifty öre. He’s been a navvy himself, too; but now he’s
a man who enjoys his hundred thousand a year. A regular bloodsucker, he
is!”
The crowd continued to stand there and to loaf about all the day, in
the hope that some one would give up, or fall ill—or go crazy—so that
some one could take his place. They could not tear themselves away; the
mere fact that work was being done chained them to the spot. They
looked as though they might storm the works at any moment, and the
police formed a ring about the place. They stood pressing forward,
absorbed by their desire for work, with a sick longing in their faces.
When the crowd had pressed forward too far it hesitatingly allowed
itself to be pushed back again. Suddenly there was a break in the
ranks; a man leaped over the rail and seized a pickaxe. A couple of
policemen wrested the tool from his hand and led him away.
And as they stood there a feeling of defiance rose within them, a
fierce contempt for their privations and the whole shameless situation.
It expressed itself in an angry half-suppressed growl. They followed
the contractor with curious eyes as though they were looking for
something in him but could not conceive what it was.
In his arrogance at receiving such an excessive offer of labor, he
decided to go further, and to lengthen the working day by an hour. The
workers received an order to that effect one morning, just as they had
commenced work. But at the same moment the four hundred men, all but
two, threw down their implements and returned to their comrades. They
stood there discussing the matter, purple with rage. So now their
starving condition was to be made use of, in order to enrich the
contractor by a further hundred thousand! “We must go to the city
authorities,” they cried. “No, to the newspaper!” others replied. “The
paper! The paper is better!”
“It’s no use going to the city council—not until we have elected
members of our own party to it,” cried Pelle. “Remember that at the
elections, comrades! We must elect men of our party everywhere, their
encroachments will never be stopped until then. And now we must stand
together and be firm! If it’s got to be, better starve to death at once
than do it slowly!”
They did not reply, but pressed closely about him, heavily listening.
There was something altogether too fierce and profound in their
attention. These men had declared a strike in midwinter, as their only
remedy. What were they thinking of doing now? Pelle looked about him
and was daunted by their dumb rage. This threatening silence wouldn’t
do; what would it lead to? It seemed as though something overwhelming,
and uncontrollable, would spring from this stony taciturnity. Pelle
sprang upon a heap of road-metal.
“Comrades!” he cried, in a powerful voice. “This is merely a change, as
the fox said when they flayed his skin off. They have deprived us of
clothes and food and drink, and comfort at home, and now they want to
find a way of depriving us of our skins too! The question to-day is—
forward or back? Perhaps this is the great time of trial, when we shall
enter into possession of all we have desired! Hold together, comrades!
Don’t scatter and don’t give way! Things are difficult enough now, but
remember, we are well on in the winter, and it promises to break up
early. The night is always darkest before daybreak! And shall we be
afraid to suffer a little—we, who have suffered and been patient for
hundreds of years? Our wives are sitting at home and fretting—perhaps
they will be angry with us. We might at least have accepted what was
offered us, they may say. But we can’t go on seeing our dear ones at
home fading away in spite of our utmost exertions! Hitherto the poor
man’s labor has been like an aimless prayer to Heaven: Deliver us from
hunger and dirt, from misery, poverty, and cold, and give us bread, and
again bread! Deliver our children from our lot—let not their limbs
wither and their minds lapse into madness! That has been our prayer,
but there is only one prayer that avails, and that is, to defy the
wicked! We are the chosen people, and for that reason we must cry a
halt! We will no longer do as we have done—for our wives’ sakes, and
our children’s, and theirs again! Ay, but what is posterity to us? Of
course it is something to us—precisely to us! Were your parents as you
are? No, they were ground down into poverty and the dust, they crept
submissively before the mighty. Then whence did we get all that makes
us so strong and causes us to stand together? Time has stood still,
comrades! It has placed its finger on our breast and he said, ‘Thus you
shall do!’ Here where we stand, the old time ceases and the new time
begins; and that is why we have thrown down our tools, with want
staring us in the face—such a thing as has never been seen before! We
want to revolutionize life—to make it sweet for the poor man! And for
all time! You, who have so often staked your life and welfare for a
florin—you now hold the whole future in your hands! You must endure,
calmly and prudently! And you will never be forgotten, so long as there
are workers on the earth! This winter will be the last through which we
shall have to endure—for yonder lies the land toward which we have been
wandering! Comrades! Through us the day shall come!”
Pelle himself did not know what words he uttered. He felt only that
something was speaking through him—something supremely mighty, that
never lies. There was a radiant, prophetic ring in his voice, which
carried his hearers off their feet; and his eyes were blazing. Before
their eyes a figure arose from the hopeless winter, towering in
radiance, a figure that was their own, and yet that of a young god. He
rose, new-born, out of misery itself, struck aside the old grievous
idea of fate, and in its place gave them a new faith—the radiant faith
in their own might! They cried up to him—first single voices, then all.
He gathered up their cries into a mighty cheer, a paean in honor of the
new age!
Every day they stationed themselves there, not to work, but to stand
there in dumb protest. When the foreman called for workers they stood
about in silent groups, threatening as a gloomy rock. Now and again
they shouted a curse at those who had left them in the lurch. The city
did nothing. They had held out a helping hand to the needy, and the
latter had struck it away—now they must accept the consequences. The
contractor had received permission to suspend the work entirely, but he
kept it going with a few dozen strike-breakers, in order to irritate
the workers.
All over the great terrace a silence as of death prevailed, except in
that corner where the little gang was at work, a policeman beside it,
as though the men had been convicts. The wheelbarrows lay with their
legs in the air; it was as though the pest had swept over the works.
The strike-breakers were men of all callings; a few of the unemployed
wrote down their names and addresses, in order to insert them in _The
Working Man_. One of Stolpe’s fellow-unionists was among them; he was a
capable pater-familias, and had taken part in the movement from its
earliest days. “It’s a pity about him,” said Stolpe; “he’s an old mate
of mine, and he’s always been a good comrade till now. Now they’ll give
it him hard in the paper—we are compelled to. It does the trade no good
when one of its representatives goes and turns traitor.”
Madame Stolpe was unhappy. “It’s such a nice family,” she said; “we
have always been on friendly terms with them; and I know they were
hungry a long time. He has a young wife, father; it’s not easy to stand
out.”
“It hurts me myself,” replied Stolpe. “But one is compelled to do it,
otherwise one would be guilty of partisanship. And no one shall come to
me and say that I’m a respecter of persons.”
“I should like to go and have a talk with them,” said Pelle. “Perhaps
they’d give it up then.”
He got the address and went there after working hours. The home had
been stripped bare. There were four little children. The atmosphere was
oppressive. The man, who was already well on in years, but was still
powerful, sat at the table with a careworn expression eating his
supper, while the children stood round with their chins on the edge of
the table, attentively following every bite he took. The young wife was
going to and fro; she brought him his simple food with a peculiarly
loving gesture.
Pelle broached the question at issue. It was not pleasant to attack
this old veteran. But it must be done.
“I know that well enough,” said the man, nodding to himself. “You
needn’t begin your lecture—I myself have been in the movement since the
first days, and until now I’ve kept my oath. But now it’s done with,
for me. What do you want here, lad? Have you a wife and children crying
for bread? Then think of your own!”
“We don’t cry, Hans,” said the woman quietly.
“No, you don’t, and that makes it even worse! Can I sit here and look
on, while you get thinner day by day, and perish with the cold? To hell
with the comrades and their big words—what have they led to? Formerly
we used to go hungry just for a little while, and now we starve
outright—that’s the difference! Leave me alone, I tell you! Curse it,
why don’t they leave me in peace?”
He took a mouthful of brandy from the bottle. His wife pushed a glass
toward him, but he pushed it violently away.
“You’ll be put in the paper to-morrow,” said Pelle, hesitating. “I only
wanted to tell you that.”
“Yes, and to write of me that I’m a swine and a bad comrade, and
perhaps that I beat my wife as well. You know yourself it’s all lies;
but what is that to me? Will you have a drink?”
No, Pelle wouldn’t take anything. “Then I will myself,” said the man,
and he laughed angrily. “Now you can certify that I’m a hog—I drink out
of the bottle! And another evening you can come and listen at the
keyhole—perhaps then you’ll hear me beating my wife!”
The woman began to cry.
“Oh, damn it all, they might leave me in peace!” said the man
defiantly.
Pelle had to go with nothing effected.