It is spring once more in Denmark.
It has been coming for a long time. The lark came before the frost was
out of the ground, and then the starling appeared. And one day the air
seemed suddenly to have become high and light so that the eye could
once more see far out; there was a peculiar broad airiness in the
wind—the breath of spring. It rushed along with messages of young,
manly strength, and people threw back their shoulders and took deep
breaths. “Ah! the south wind!” they said, and opened their minds in
anticipation.
There he comes riding across the sea from the south, in the middle of
his youthful train. Never before has his coming been so glorious! Is he
not like the sun himself? The sea glitters under golden hoofs, and the
air is quivering with sunbeam-darts caught and thrown in the wild
gallop over the waves. Heigh-ho! Who’ll be the first to reach the
Danish shore?
Like a broad wind the spring advances over islands and belts, embracing
the whole in arrogant strength. He sings in the children’s open mouths
as in a shell, and is lavish of his airy freshness. Women’s teeth grow
whiter with his kiss, and vie with their eyes in brightness; their
cheeks glow beneath his touch, though they remain cool—like sun-ripe
fruit under the morning dew. Men’s brains whirl once more, and expand
into an airy vault, as large as heaven itself, giddy with expectancy.
From high up comes the sound of the passage birds in flight; the air is
dizzy with its own infinitude.
Bareheaded and with a sunny smile the spring advances like a young
giant intoxicated with his own strength, stretches out his arms and
wakens everything with his song. Nothing can resist him. He touches
lightly the heart of the sleeping earth, calling merrily into her dull
ears to awake. And deep down the roots of life begin to stir and wake,
and send the sap circulating once more. Hedgehogs and field-mice emerge
sleepily and begin to busy themselves in the hedges. From the darkness
below old decayed matter ferments and bubbles up, and the stagnant
water in the ditches begins to run toward the sea.
Men stand and gaze in amazement after the open-handed giant, until they
feel the growth in themselves and can afford something. All that was
impossible before has suddenly become possible, and more besides. The
farmer has long since had his plough in the earth, and the sower straps
his basket on: the land is to be clothed again.
The days lengthen and become warmer; it is delightful to watch them and
know that they are going upward. One day Ellen opens wide the double
doors out to the garden; it is like a release. But what a quantity of
dirt the light reveals!
“We shall have to be busy now, Petra Dreyer!” says Ellen. The little
deformed sewing-woman smiles with her sad eyes, and the two women begin
to sweep floors and wash windows. Now and then a little girl comes in
from the garden complaining that she is not allowed to play with Anna’s
big doll. Boy Comfort is in the fields from morning to night, helping
Grandfather Stolpe to build the new workmen’s houses. A fine help his
is! When Ellen fetches him in to meals, he is so dirty that she nearly
loses all patience.
“I wonder how Old Brun is!” says Ellen suddenly, in the middle of her
work. “We haven’t heard from him now for three days. It’s quite sad to
think he’s so far away. I only hope they’ll look after him properly.”
Pelle is tremendously busy, and they do not see much of him. The
Movement has taken up his idea now in earnest, and he is to have the
management of it all, so that he has his hands full. “Have I got a
husband or not?” says Ellen, when she gets hold of him now and again.
“It’ll soon be better,” he answers. “When once we’ve got the machinery
properly started, it’ll go by itself.”
Morten is the only one who has not set seriously to work on anything,
and in the midst of all the bustle has an incongruous effect. “He’s
thinking!” says Ellen, stopping in the middle of beating a carpet.
“Thank goodness we’re not all authors!”
Pelle would like to draw him into the business. “There’s so much to
write and lecture about,” he says, “and you could do all that so much
better than I.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” says Morten. “Your work’s growing in me too. I’m
always thinking about it and have thought of giving a hand too, but I
can’t. If I ever contribute anything to your great work, it’ll be in
some other way.”
“You’re doing nothing with your book about the sun either,” says Pelle
anxiously.
“No, because whenever I set to work on it, it mixes up so strangely
with your work, and I can’t keep the ideas apart. At present I feel
like a mole, digging blindly in the black earth under the mighty tree
of life. I dig and search, and am continually coming across the thick
roots of the huge thing above the surface. I can’t see them, but I can
hear sounds from above there, and it hurts me not to be able to follow
them into their strong connection up in the light.”
One Sunday morning at the end of May they were sitting out in the
garden. The cradle had been moved out into the sun, and Pelle and Ellen
were sitting one on either side, talking over domestic matters. Ellen
had so much to tell him when she had him to herself. The child lay
staring up into the sky with its dark eyes that were the image of
Ellen’s. He was brown and chubby; any one could see that he had been
conceived in sunshine and love.
Lasse Frederik was sitting by the hedge painting a picture that Pelle
was not to see until it was finished. He went to the drawing-school
now, and was clever. He had a good eye for figures, and poor people
especially he hit off in any position. He had a light hand, and in two
or three lines could give what his father had had to work at carefully.
“You cheat!” Pelle often said, half resentfully. “It won’t bear looking
closely at.” He had to admit, however, that it was a good likeness.
“Well, can’t I see the picture soon?” he called across. He was very
curious.
“Yes, it’s finished now,” said Lasse Frederik, coming up with it.
The picture represented a street in which stood a solitary milk-cart,
and behind the cart lay a boy with bleeding head. “He fell asleep
because he had to get up so early,” Lasse Frederik explained; “and then
when the cart started he tumbled backward.” The morning emptiness of
the street was well done, but the blood was too brilliantly red.
“It’s very unpleasant,” said Ellen, with a shudder. “But it’s true.”
Morten came home from town with a big letter which he handed to Pelle,
saying: “Here’s news for you from Brun.” Pelle went into the house to
read it undisturbed, and a little while after came out again.
“Yes, important news this time,” he said with some emotion. “Would you
like to hear it?” he asked, sitting down.
“DEAR PELLE:
“I am sitting up in bed to write to you. I am poorly, and have been for
some days; but I hope it is nothing serious. We all have to die some
day, but I should like to start on the great voyage round the world
from your home. I long to see ‘Daybreak’ and all of you, and I feel
very lonely. If the business could do without you for a few days, I
should be so glad if you would come down here. Then we could go home
together, for I should not like to venture on the journey by myself.
“The sun is just going down, and sends its last rays in to me. It has
been gray and gloomy all day, but now the sun has broken through the
clouds, and kisses the earth and me, poor old man, too, in farewell. It
makes me want to say something to you, Pelle, for my day was like this
before I knew you—endlessly long and gray! When you are the last member
of a dying family, you have to bear the gray existence of the others
too.
“I have often thought how wonderful the hidden force of life is.
Intercourse with you has been like a lever to me, although I knew well
that I should not accomplish anything more, and had no one to come
after me. I feel, nevertheless, through you, in alliance with the
future. You are in the ascendant and must look upon me as something
that is vanishing. But look how life makes us all live by using us each
in his own way. Be strong in your faith in the future; with you lies
the development. I wish with all my heart that I were an awakening
proletary and stood in the dawn of day; but I am nevertheless glad
because my eyes will be closed by the new in you.
“I have imagined that life was tiresome and dull and far too well
known. I had it arranged in my catalogues. And look how it renews
itself! In my old age I have experienced its eternal youth. Formerly I
had never cared about the country; in my mind it was a place where you
waded either in dust or mud. The black earth appeared to me horrible
rather than anything else; it was only associated in my mind with the
churchyard. That shows how far I was from nature. The country was
something that farmers moved about in—those big, voracious creatures,
who almost seemed like a kind of animal trying to imitate man. Rational
beings could not possibly live out there. That was the view in my
circle, and I had myself a touch of the same complaint, although my
university training of course paraphrased and veiled it all to some
extent. All this about our relations to nature seemed to me very
interesting aesthetically, but with more or less of a contradictory,
not to say hostile, character. I could not understand how any one could
see anything beautiful in a ploughed field or a dike. It was only when
I got to know you that something moved within me and called me out;
there was something about you like the air from out there.
“Now I also understand my forefathers! Formerly they seemed to me only
like thick-skinned boors, who scraped together all the money that two
generations of us have lived upon without doing a pennyworth of good.
They enabled us, however, to live life, I have always thought, and I
considered it the only excuse for their being in the family, coarse and
robust as they were. Now I see that it was they who lived, while we
after them, with all our wealth, have only had a bed in life’s inn.
“For all this I thank you. I am glad to have become acquainted through
you with men of the new age, and to be able to give my fortune back. It
was made by all those who work, and gathered together by a few; my
giving it back is merely a natural consequence. Others will come to do
as I am doing, either of their own free will or by compulsion, until
everything belongs to everybody. Then only can the conflict about human
interests begin. Capitalism has created wonderful machines, but what
wonderful men await us in the new age! Happy the man who could have
lived to see it!
“I have left all my money to you and Morten. As yet there is no
institution that I could give it to, so you must administer it in the
name of cooperation. You two are the best guardians of the poor, and I
know you will employ it in the best manner. I place it with confidence
in your hands. The will is at my lawyer’s; I arranged it all before I
left home.
“My greetings to all at ‘Daybreak’—Ellen, the children, and Morten. If
the baby is christened before I get home, remember that he is to be
called after me. But I am hoping that you will come.”
Ellen drew a deep breath when Pelle had finished the letter. “I only
hope he’s not worse than he makes out,” she said. “I suppose you’ll
go?”
“Yes, I’ll arrange what’s necessary at the works to-morrow early, and
take the morning express.”
“Then I must see to your things,” exclaimed Ellen, and went in.
Pelle and Morten went for a stroll along the edge of the hill, past the
half-finished houses, whose red bricks shone in the sun.
“Everything seems to turn out well for you, Pelle,” said Morten
suddenly.
“Yes,” said Pelle; “nothing has succeeded in injuring me, so I suppose
what Father Lasse and the others said is right, that I was born with a
caul. The ill-usage I suffered as a child taught me to be good to
others, and in prison I gained liberty; what might have made me a
criminal made a man of me instead. Nothing has succeeded in injuring
me! So I suppose I may say that everything has turned out well.”
“Yes, you may, and now I’ve found a subject, Pelle! I’m not going to
hunt about blindly in the dark; I’m going to write a great work now.”
“I congratulate you! What will it be about? Is it to be the work on the
sun?”
“Yes, both about the sun and about him who conquers. It’s to be a book
about you, Pelle!”
“About me?” exclaimed Pelle.
“Yes, about the naked Pelle with the caul! It’s about time to call out
the naked man into the light and look at him well, now that he’s going
to take over the future. You like to read about counts and barons, but
now I’m going to write a story about a prince who finds the treasure
and wins the princess. He’s looked for her all over the world and she
wasn’t there, and now there’s only himself left, and there he finds
her, for he’s taken her heart. Won’t that be a good story?”
“I think it’s a lot of rubbish,” said Pelle, laughing. “And you’ll have
to lay the lies on thick if you’re going to make me into a prince. I
don’t think you’ll get the workpeople to take it for a real book; it’ll
all be so well known and ordinary.”
“They’ll snatch at it, and weep with delight and pride at finding
themselves in it. Perhaps they’ll name their children after it out of
pure gratitude!”
“What are you going to call it then?” asked Pelle.
“I’m going to call it ‘PELLE THE CONQUEROR.’”