Pelle the Conqueror — Complete

by Martin Andersen Nexø

A squad of policemen came marching up. “Room there!” they cried, and began to hustle the crowd in order to disperse it. The workmen would not be driven away. “Not before we’ve got our wages!” they said, and they pressed back to the gates again. “This is where we work, and we’re going to have our rights, that we are!” Then the police began to drive the onlookers away; at each onset they fell back a few steps, hesitating, and then stood still, laughing. Pelle received a blow in the back; he turned quickly round, stared for a moment into the red face of a policeman, and went his way, muttering and feeling his back.

“Did he hit you?” asked an old woman. “Devil take him, the filthy lout! He’s the son of the mangling-woman what lives in the house here, and now he takes up the cudgels against his own people! Devil take him!”

“Move on!” ordered the policeman, winking, as he pushed her aside with his body. She retired to her cellar, and stood there using her tongue to such purpose that the saliva flew from her toothless mouth.

“Yes, you go about bullying old people who used to carry you in their arms and put dry clouts on you when you didn’t know enough to ask…. Are you going to use your truncheon on me, too? Wouldn’t you like to, Fredrik? Take your orders from the great folks, and then come yelping at us, because we aren’t fine enough for you!” She was shaking with rage; her yellowish gray hair had become loosened and was tumbling about her face; she was a perfect volcano.

The police marched across the Knippel Bridge, escorted by a swarm of street urchins, who yelled and whistled between their fingers. From time to time a policeman would turn round; then the whole swarm took to its heels, but next moment it was there again. The police were nervous: their fingers were opening and closing in their longing to strike out. They looked like a party of criminals being escorted to the court-house by the extreme youth of the town, and the people were laughing.

Pelle kept step on the pavement. He was in a wayward mood. Somewhere within him he felt a violent impulse to give way to that absurd longing to leap into the air and beat his head upon the pavement which was the lingering result of his illness. But now it assumed the guise of insolent strength. He saw quite plainly how big Eriksen ran roaring at the bailiff, and how he was struck to the ground, and thereafter wandered about an idiot. Then the “Great Power” rose up before him, mighty in his strength, and was hurled to his death; they had all been like dogs, ready to fall on him, and to fawn upon everything that smelt of their superiors and the authorities. And he himself, Pelle, had had a whipping at the court-house, and people had pointed the finger at him, just as they pointed at the “Great Power.” “See, there he goes loafing, the scum of humanity!” Yes, he had learned what righteousness was, and what mischief it did. But now he had escaped from the old excommunication, and had entered a new world, where respectable men never turned to look after the police, but left such things to the street urchins and old women. There was a great satisfaction in this; and Pelle wanted to take part in this world; he longed to understand it.

It was Saturday, and there was a crowd of journeymen and seamstresses in the warehouse, who had come to deliver their work. The foreman went round as usual, grumbling over the work, and before he paid for it he would pull at it and crumple it so that it lost its shape, and then he made the most infernal to-do because it was not good enough. Now and again he would make a deduction from the week’s wages, averring that the material was ruined; and he was especially hard on the women, who stood there not daring to contradict him. People said he cheated all the seamstresses who would not let him have his way with them.

Pelle stood there boiling with rage. “If he says one word to me, we shall come to blows!” he thought. But the foreman took the work without glancing at it—ah, yes, that was from Pipman!

But while he was paying for it a thick-set man came forward out of a back room; this was the court shoemaker, Meyer himself. He had been a poor young man with barely a seat to his breeches when he came to Copenhagen from Germany as a wandering journeyman. He did not know much about his craft, but he knew how to make others work for him! He did not answer the respectful greetings of the workers, but stationed himself before Pelle, his belly bumping against the counter, wheezing loudly through his nose, and gazing at the young man.

“New man?” he asked, at length. “That’s Pipman’s assistant,” replied the foreman, smiling. “Ah! Pipman—he knows the trick, eh? You do the work and he takes the money and drinks it, eh?” The master shoemaker laughed as at an excellent joke.