He noticed a heavy chest which stood against the wall on four twisted legs. It was thickly ornamented with nail-heads and looked like an old muniment chest.
“Yes—that’s the standard!” said Madam Stolpe, but she checked herself in alarm. Mason Stolpe knitted his brows.
“Ah, well, you’re a decent fellow, after all,” he said. “One needn’t slink on tiptoe in front of you!” He took a key out of a secret compartment in his writing-table. “Now the danger’s a thing of the past, but one still has to be careful. That’s a vestige of the times when things used to go hardly with us. The police used to be down on all our badges of common unity. The grand master himself came to me one evening with the flag under his cloak, and said to me, ‘You must look out for it, Stolpe, you are the most reliable of us all.’”
He and his wife unfolded the great piece of bunting. “See, that’s the banner of the International. It looks a little the worse for wear, for it has undergone all sorts of treatment. At the communist meetings out in the fields, when the troops were sent against us with ball cartridge, it waved over the speaker’s platform, and held us together. When it flapped over our heads it was as though we were swearing an oath to it. The police understood that, and they were mad to get it. They went for the flag during a meeting, but nothing came of it, and since then they’ve hunted for it so, it’s had to be passed from man to man. In that way it has more than once come to me.”
“Yes, and once the police broke in here and took father away as we were sitting at supper. They turned the whole place upside down, and dragged him off to the cells without a word of explanation. The children were little then, and you can imagine how miserable it seemed to me. I didn’t know when they would let him out again.”
“Yes, but they didn’t get the colors,” said Stolpe, and he laughed heartily. “I had already passed them on, they were never very long in one place in those days. Now they lead a comparatively quiet life, and mother and the rest of us too!”
The young men stood in silence, gazing at the standard that had seen so many vicissitudes, and that was like the hot red blood of the movement. Before Pelle a whole new world was unfolding itself; the hope that had burned in the depths of his soul was after all not so extravagant. When he was still running, wild at home, playing the games of childhood or herding the cows, strong men had already been at work and had laid the foundations of the cause…. A peculiar warmth spread through him and rose to his head. If only it had been he who had waved the glowing standard in the face of the oppressor—he, Pelle!
“And now it lies here in the chest and is forgotten!” he said dejectedly.
“It is only resting,” said Stolpe. “Forgotten, yes; the police have no idea that it still exists. But fix it on a staff, and you will see how the comrades flock about it! Old and young alike. There’s fire in that bit of cloth! True fire, that never goes out!”
Carefully they folded the colors and laid them back in the chest. “It won’t do even now to speak aloud of the colors! You understand?” said Stolpe.