Pelle the Conqueror, Vol. 1 by Martin Anderson Nexo

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Rud went on talking, with many gestures.

"You're afraid," he said, "and it's because you're Swedish. But
when you're afraid, you should just shut your eyes--so--and open
your mouth. Then you pretend to put the mouse right into your mouth,
and then--" Rud had his mouth wide open, and held his hand close
to his mouth; Pelle was under his influence, and imitated his
movements--"and then--" Pelle received a blow that sent the little
mouse halfway down his throat. He retched and spat; and then his
hands fumbled in the grass and got hold of a stone. But by the time
he was on his feet and was going to throw it, Rud was far away up
the fields. "I must go home now!" he shouted innocently. "There's
something I've got to help mother with."

Pelle did not love solitude, and the prospect of a blockade
determined him at once for negotiations. He dropped the stone
to show his serious wish for a reconciliation, and had to swear
solemnly that he would not bear malice. Then at last Rud came back,
tittering.

"I was going to show you something funny with the mouse," he said
by way of diversion; "but you held on to it like an idiot." He did
not venture to come quite close up to Pelle, but stood watching his
movements.

Pelle was acquainted with the little white lie when the danger of
a thrashing was imminent, but the lie as an attack was still unknown
to him. If Rud, now that the whole thing was over, said that he
only wanted to have shown him something funny, it must be true. But
then why was he mistrustful? Pelle tried, as he had so often done
before, to bend his little brain round the possible tricks of his
playmate, but failed.

"You may just as well come up close," he said stoutly. "For if I
wanted to, I could easily catch you up."

Rud came. "Now we'll catch big mice." he said. "That's better fun."

They emptied Pelle's milk-bottle, and hunted up a mouse's nest that
appeared to have only two exits, one up in the meadow, the other
halfway down the bank of the stream. Here they pushed in the mouth
of the bottle, and widened the hole in the meadow into a funnel;
and they took it in turns to keep an eye on the bottle, and to carry
water up to the other hole in their caps. It was not long before
a mouse popped out into the bottle, which they then corked.

What should they do with it? Pelle proposed that they should tame it
and train it to draw their little agricultural implements; but Rud,
as usual, got his way--it was to go out sailing.

Where the stream turned, and had hollowed out its bed into a hole
as big as a cauldron, they made an inclined plane and let the bottle
slide down into the water head foremost, like a ship being launched.
They could follow it as it curved under the water until it came up
slantingly, and stood bobbing up and down on the water like a buoy,
with its neck up. The mouse made the funniest leaps up toward the
cork to get out; and the boys jumped up and down on the grass with
delight.

"It knows the way it got in quite well!" They imitated its
unsuccessful leaps, lay down again and rolled about in exuberant
mirth. At last, however, the joke became stale.

"Let's take out the cork!" suggested Rud.

"Yes--oh, yes!" Pelle waded quickly in, and was going to set the
mouse at liberty.

"Wait a minute, you donkey!" Rud snatched the bottle from him, and
holding his hand over the mouth, put it back, into the water. "Now
we'll see some fun!" he cried, hastening up the bank.

It was a little while before the mouse discovered that the way was
open, but then it leaped. The leap was unsuccessful, and made the
bottle rock, so that the second leap was slanting and rebounded
sideways. But then followed with lightning rapidity a number of
leaps--a perfect bombardment; and suddenly the mouse flew right
out of the bottle, head foremost into the water.

"That was a leap and a half!" cried Pelle, jumping straight up
and down in the grass, with his arms at his sides. "It could just
squeeze its body through, just exactly!" And he jumped again,
squeezing himself together.

The mouse swam to land, but Rud was there, and pushed it out again
with his foot. "It swam well," he said, laughing. It made for the
opposite bank. "Look out for the fellow!" Rud roared, and Pelle
sprang forward and turned it away from the shore with a good kick.
It swam helplessly backward and forward in the middle of the pool,
seeing one of the two dancing figures every time it approached a
bank, and turning and turning endlessly. It sank deeper and deeper,
its fur becoming wet and dragging it down, until at last it swam
right under water. Suddenly it stretched out its body convulsively,
and sank to the bottom, with all four legs outspread like a wide
embrace.

Pelle had all at once comprehended the perplexity and helplessness
--perhaps was familiar with it. At the animal's final struggle, he
burst into tears with a little scream, and ran, crying loudly, up
the meadow toward the fir-plantation. In a little while he came back
again. "I really thought Cupid had run away," he said repeatedly,
and carefully avoided looking Rud in the face. Quietly he waded into
the water, and fished up the dead mouse with his foot.

They laid it upon a stone in the sun, so that it might come to life
again. When that failed, Pelle remembered a story about some people
who were drowned in a lake at home, and who came to themselves again
when cannons were fired over them. They clapped their hollowed hands
over the mouse, and when that too brought about no result, they
decided to bury it.

Rud happened to remember that his grandmother in Sweden was being
buried just now, and this made them go about the matter with a
certain amount of solemnity. They made a coffin out of a matchbox,
and ornamented it with moss; and then they lay on their faces and
lowered the coffin into the grave with twine, taking every possible
care that it should not land upon its head. A rope might give way;
such things did sometimes happen, and the illusion did not permit
of their correcting the position of the coffin afterward with their
hands. When this was done, Pelle looked down into his cap, while Rud
prayed over the deceased and cast earth upon the coffin; and then
they made up the grave.

"I only hope it's not in a trance and going to wake up again!"
exclaimed Pelle suddenly. They had both heard many unpleasant
stories of such cases, and went over all the possibilities--how
they woke up and couldn't get any air, and knocked upon the lid,
and began to eat their own hands--until Pelle could distinctly hear
a knocking on the lid below. They had the coffin up in a trice, and
examined the mouse. It had not eaten its forepaws, at any rate, but
it had most decidedly turned over on its side. They buried it again,
putting a dead beetle beside it in the coffin for safety's sake,
and sticking a straw down into the grave to supply it with air.
Then they ornamented the mound, and set up a memorial stone.

"It's dead now!" said Pelle, gravely and with conviction.

"Yes, I should just think so--dead as a herring." Rud had put his
ear to the straw and listened.

"And now it must be up with God in all His glory--right high,
high up."

Rud sniffed contemptuously. "Oh, you silly! Do you think it can
crawl up there?"

"Well, can't mice crawl, I should like to know?" Pelle was cross.

"Yes; but not through the air. Only birds can do that."

Pelle felt himself beaten off the field and wanted to be revenged.

"Then your grandmother isn't in heaven, either!" he declared
emphatically. There was still a little rancor in his heart from
the young mouse episode.

But this was more than Rud could stand. It had touched his family
pride, and he gave Pelle a dig in the side with his elbow. The next
moment they were rolling in the grass, holding one another by the
hair, and making awkward attempts to hit one another on the nose
with their clenched fists. They turned over and over like one lump,
now one uppermost, now the other; they hissed hoarsely, groaned and
made tremendous exertions. "I'll make you sneeze red," said Pelle
angrily, as he rose above his adversary; but the next moment he was
down again, with Rud hanging over him and uttering the most fearful
threats about black eyes and seeing stars. Their voices were thick
with passion.

And suddenly they were sitting opposite one another on the grass
wondering whether they should set up a howl. Rud put out his tongue,
Pelle went a step further and began to laugh, and they were once
more the best of friends. They set up the memorial stone, which had
been overturned in the heat of battle, and then sat down hand in
hand, to rest after the storm, a little quieter than usual.

It was not because there was more evil in Pelle, but because the
question had acquired for him an importance of its own, and he must
understand it, that a meditative expression came into his eyes, and
he said thoughtfully:

"Well, but you've told me yourself that she was paralyzed in
her legs!"

"Well, what if she was?"

"Why, then she couldn't crawl up into heaven."

"Oh, you booby! It's her spirit, of course!"

"Then the mouse's spirit can very well be up there too."

"No, it can't, for mice haven't got any spirit."

"Haven't they? Then how is it they can breathe?" [Footnote: In Danish,
spirit = aand, and to breathe = aande.]

That was one for Rud! And the tiresome part of it was that he
attended Sunday-school. His fists would have come in handy again
now, but his instinct told him that sooner or later Pelle would get
the better of him in fighting. And anyhow his grandmother was saved.

"Yes," he said, yielding; "and it certainly could breathe. Well,
then, it was its spirit flying up that overturned the stone--that's
what it was!"

A distant sound reached them, and far off near the cottage they
could see the figure of a fat woman, beckoning threateningly.

"The Sow's calling you," said Pelle. The two boys never called her
anything but "the Sow" between themselves.

So Rud had to go. He was allowed to take the greater part of the
contents of the dinner-basket with him, and ate as he ran. They had
been too busy to eat.

Pelle sat down among the dunes and ate his dinner. As usual when Rud
had been with him, he could not imagine what had become of the day.
The birds had ceased singing, and not one of the cattle was still
lying down, so it must be at least five o'clock.

Up at the farm they were busy driving in. It went at full gallop--
out and in, out and in. The men stood up in the carts and thrashed
away at the horses with the end of the reins, and the swaying loads
were hurried along the field-roads, looking like little bristling,
crawling things, that have been startled and are darting to their
holes.

A one-horsed vehicle drove out from the farm, and took the high-road
to the town at a quick trot. It was the farmer; he was driving so
fast that he was evidently off to the town on the spree. So there
was something gone wrong at home, and there would be crying at the
farm that night.

Yes, there was Father Lasse driving out with the water-cart, so it
was half-past five. He could tell that too by the birds beginning
their pleasant evening twittering, that was soft and sparkling like
the rays of the sun.

Far inland above the stone-quarry, where the cranes stood out
against the sky, a cloud of smoke rose every now and then into the
air, and burst in a fountain of pieces of rock. Long after came the
explosion, bit by bit in a series of rattling reverberations. It
sounded as if some one were running along and slapping his thigh
with fingerless gloves.

The last few hours were always long--the sun was so slow about it.
And there was nothing to fill up the time either. Pelle himself was
tired, and the tranquillity of evening had the effect of subduing
his voice. But now they were driving out for milking up there, and
the cattle were beginning to graze along the edge of the meadow that
turned toward the farm; so the time was drawing near.

At last the herd-boys began to jodel over at the neighboring farms,
first one, and then several joining in:

"Oh, drive home, o-ho, o-o-ho!
O-ho, o-ho!
O-ho, o-ho!
Oh, drive home, o-o-ho!
O-ho!"

From all sides the soft tones vibrated over the sloping land,
running out, like the sound of happy weeping, into the first glow of
evening; and Pelle's animals began to move farther after each pause
to graze. But he did not dare to drive them home yet, for it only
meant a thrashing from the bailiff or the pupil if he arrived too
early.

He stood at the upper end of the meadow, and called his homeward-
drifting flock together; and when the last tones of the call had
died away, he began it himself, and stepped on one side. The animals
ran with a peculiar little trot and heads extended. The shadow of
the grass lay in long thin stripes across the ground, and the
shadows of the animals were endless. Now and then a calf lowed
slowly and broke into a gallop. They were yearning for home, and
Pelle was yearning too.

From behind a hollow the sun darted long rays out into space, as if
it had called all its powers home for the night, and now poured them
forth in one great longing, from west to east. Everything pointed in
long thin lines, and the eager longing of the cattle seemed visible
in the air.

To the mind of the child there was nothing left out of doors now;
everything was being taken in, and he longed for his father with
a longing that was almost a pain. And when at last he turned the
corner with the herd, and saw old Lasse standing there, smiling
happily with his red-rimmed eyes, and opening the gate to the fold,
the boy gave way and threw himself weeping into his father's arms.

"What's the matter, laddie? What's the matter?" asked the old
man, with concern in his voice, stroking the child's face with a
trembling hand. "Has any one been unkind to you? No? Well, that's
a good thing! They'd better take care, for happy children are in
God's own keeping. And Lasse would be an awkward customer if it
came to that. So you were longing for me, were you? Then it's good
to be in your little heart, and it only makes Lasse happy. But go
in now and get your supper, and don't cry any more." And he wiped
the boy's nose with his hard, crooked fingers, and pushed him
gently away.

V

Pelle was not long in finding out all about the man who had been
sent by God, and had the grave, reproachful eyes. He proved to be
nothing but a little shoemaker down in the village, who spoke at
the meeting-house on Sundays; and it was also said that his wife
drank. Rud went to his Sunday-school, and he was poor; so he was
nothing out of the ordinary.

Moreover, Gustav had got a cap which could turn out three different
crowns--one of blue duffle, one of water-proof American cloth, and
one of white canvas for use in sunny weather. It was an absorbingly
interesting study that threw everything else into the background,
and exercised Pelle's mind for many days; and he used this
miraculous cap as a standard by which to measure everything great
and desirable. But one day he gave Gustav a beautifully carved stick
for permission to perform the trick of turning the crown inside out
himself; and that set his mind at rest at last, and the cap had to
take its place in his everyday world like everything else.

But what did it look like in Farmer Kongstrup's big rooms? Money
lay upon the floor there, of course, the gold in one place and
the silver in another; and in the middle of each heap stood a
half-bushel measure. What did the word _"practical"_ mean,
which the bailiff used when he talked to the farmer? And why did
the men call one another _"Swede"_ as a term of abuse? Why,
they were all Swedes! What was there away beyond the cliffs where
the stone-quarry lay? The farm-lands extended as far as that on the
one side. He had not been there yet, but was going with his father
as soon as an opportunity presented itself. They had learnt quite
by chance that Lasse had a brother who owned a house over there;
so of course they knew the place comparatively well.

Down there lay the sea; he had sailed upon it himself! Ships both
of iron and wood sailed upon it, though how iron could float when
it was so heavy he did not know! The sea must be strong, for in the
pond, iron went to the bottom at once. In the middle of the pond
there was no bottom, so there you'd go on sinking forever! The old
thatcher, when he was young, had had more than a hundred fathoms
of rope down there with a drag, to fish up a bucket, but he never
reached the bottom. And when he wanted to pull up the rope again,
there was some one deep down who caught hold of the drag and tried
to pull him down, so he had to let the whole thing go.

God ... well, He had a long white beard like the farmer at Kaase
Farm; but who kept house for Him now He was old? Saint Peter was
His bailiff, of course!... How could the old, dry cows have just
as young calves as the young ones? And so on, and so on.

There was one subject about which, as a matter of course, there
could be no question, nor any thought at all in that sense, because
it was the very foundation of all existence--Father Lasse. He was
there, simply, he stood like a safe wall behind everything that one
did. He was the real Providence, the last great refuge in good and
ill; he could do whatever he liked--Father Lasse was almighty.

Then there was one natural centre in the world--Pelle himself.
Everything grouped itself about him, everything existed for him--for
him to play with, to shudder at, or to put on one side for a great
future. Even distant trees, houses and rocks in the landscape, that
he had never been up to, assumed an attitude toward him, either
friendly or hostile; and the relation had to be carefully decided
in the case of each new thing that appeared upon his horizon.

His world was small; he had only just begun to create it. For
a good arm's-length on all sides of him, there was more or less
_terra firma_; but beyond that floated raw matter, chaos. But
Pelle already found his world immense, and was quite willing to
make it infinite. He attacked everything with insatiable appetite;
his ready perceptions laid hold of all that came within their
reach; they were like the mouth of a machine, into which matter was
incessantly rushing in small, whirling particles. And in the draught
they raised, came others and again others; the entire universe was
on its way toward him.

Pelle shaped and set aside twenty new things in the course of a
second. The earth grew out under him into a world that was rich in
excitement and grotesque forms, discomfort and the most everyday
things. He went about in it uncertainly, for there was always
something that became displaced and had to be revalued or made over
again; the most matter-of-fact things would change and all at once
become terrifying marvels, or _vice versa_. He went about in
a state of continual wonderment, and assumed an expectant attitude
even with regard to the most familiar things; for who could tell
what surprises they might give one?

As an instance; he had all his life had opportunities of verifying
the fact that trouser-buttons were made of bone and had five holes,
one large one in the middle and four smaller ones round it. And then
one day, one of the men comes home from the town with a pair of new
trousers, the buttons of which are made of bright metal and are no
larger than a sixpenny-piece! They have only four holes, and the
thread is to lie across them, not from the middle outward, as in
the old ones.

Or take the great eclipse of the sun, that he had wondered so much
about all the summer, and that all the old people said would bring
about the destruction of the world. He had looked forward to it,
especially the destruction part of it; it would be something of
an adventure, and somewhere within him there was a little bit of
confident assurance that it would all come right as far as he was
concerned. The eclipse did come too, as it was meant to; it grew
dark too, as if it were the Last Day, and the birds became so quiet,
and the cattle bellowed and wanted to run home. But then it grew
light again and it all came to nothing.

Then there were fearful terrors that all at once revealed
themselves as tiny, tiny things--thank goodness! But there were
also anticipated pleasures that made your heart beat, and when
you got up to them they were dullness itself.

Far out in the misty mass, invisible worlds floated by that had
nothing to do with his own. A sound coming out of the unknown
created them in a twinkling. They came into existence in the same
way that the land had done that morning he had stood upon the deck
of the steamer, and heard voices and noise through the fog, thick
and big, with forms that looked like huge gloves without fingers.

And inside one there was blood and a heart and a soul. The heart
Pelle had found out about himself; it was a little bird shut up in
there. But the soul bored its way like a serpent to whatever part
of the body desire occupied. Old thatcher Holm had once drawn the
soul like a thin thread out of the thumb of a man who couldn't help
stealing. Pelle's own soul was good; it lay in the pupils of his
eyes, and reflected Father Lasse's image whenever he looked into
them.

The blood was the worst, and so Father Lasse always let himself be
bled when there was anything the matter with him; the bad humors had
to be let out. Gustav thought a great deal about blood, and could
tell the strangest things about it; and he cut his fingers only to
see whether it was ripe. One evening he came over to the cow-stable
and exhibited a bleeding finger. The blood was quite black. "Now I'm
a man!" he said, and swore a great oath; but the maids only made fun
of him, and said that he had not carried his four bushels of peas up
into the loft yet.

Then there was hell and heaven, and the stone-quarry where they
struck one another with heavy hammers when they were drunk. The men
in the stone-quarry were the strongest men in the world. One of them
had eaten ten poached eggs at one time without being ill; and there
is nothing so strengthening as eggs.

Down in the meadow, will-o'-the-wisps hopped about looking for
something in the deep summer nights. There was always one of them
near the stream, and it stood and danced on the top of a little heap
of stones that lay in the middle of the meadow. A couple of years
ago a girl had one night given birth to a child out there among the
dunes and as she did not know what to do about a father for it, she
drowned it in one of the pools that the brook makes where it turns.
Good people raised the little cairn, so that the place should not
be forgotten; and over it the child's soul used to burn at dead of
night at the time of year at which it was born. Pelle believed that
the child itself was buried beneath the stones, and now and then
ornamented the mound with a branch of fir; but he never played at
that part of the stream. The girl was sent across the sea, sentenced
to penal servitude for many years, and people wondered at the
father. She had not named any one, but every one knew who it was all
the same. He was a young, well-to-do fisherman down in the village,
and the girl was one of the poorest, so there could never have been
any question of their marrying. The girl must have preferred this
to begging help of him for the child, and living in the village with
an illegitimate child, an object of universal derision. And he had
certainly put a bold face on the matter, where many another would
have been ashamed and gone away on a long voyage.

This summer, two years after the girl went to prison, the fisherman
was going home one night along the shore toward the village with
some nets on his back. He was of a callous nature, and did not
hesitate to take the shortest way across the meadow; but when he
got in among the dunes, he saw a will-o'-the-wisp following in his
steps, grew frightened, and began to run. It began to gain upon him,
and when he leaped across the brook to put water between himself and
the spirit, it seized hold of the nets. At this he shouted the name
of God, and fled like one bereft of his senses. The next morning at
sunrise he and his father went to fetch the nets. They had caught
on the cairn, and lay right across the stream.

Then the young man joined the Revivalists, and his father abandoned
his riotous life and followed him. Early and late the young
fisherman was to be found at their meetings, and at other times
he went about like a malefactor with his head hanging down, only
waiting for the girl to come out of prison, so that he could marry
her.

Pelle was up in it all. The girls talked shudderingly about it as
they sat upon the men's knees in the long summer evenings, and a
lovesick fellow from inland had made up a ballad about it, which
Gustav sang to his concertina. Then all the girls on the farm wept,
and even Lively Sara's eyes filled with tears, and she began to talk
to Mons about engagement rings.

One day when Pelle was lying on his face in the grass, singing and
clapping his naked feet together in the clear air, he saw a young
man standing by the cairn and putting on it stones which he took out
of his pocket; after which he knelt down. Pelle went up to him.

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