Pelle bent over his work in silence. Fortunately he was not the king’s son in disguise in this case! But he wasn’t going to wrangle with women.
Hanne’s mother came storming out onto her gallery. “That’s a shameless lie!” she cried. “Pelle’s name ain’t going to be dragged into this—the other may be who he likes!”
Overhead the hearse-driver came staggering out onto his gallery. “The princess there has run a beam into her body,” he rumbled, in his good- natured bass. “What a pity I’m not a midwife! They’ve got hold of the wrong end of it!”
“Clear off into your hole and hold your tongue, you body-snatcher!” cried Madam Johnsen, spitting with rage. “You’ve got to stick your brandy-nose into everything!”
He stood there, half drunk, leaning over the rail, babbling, teasing, without returning Madam Johnsen’s vituperation. But then little Marie flung up a window and came to her assistance, and up from her platform Ferdinand’s mother emerged. “How many hams did you buy last month? Fetch out your bear hams, then, and show us them! He kills a bear for every corpse, the drunkard!” From all sides they fell upon him. He could do nothing against them, and contented himself with opening his eyes and his mouth and giving vent to a “Ba-a-a!” Then his red-haired wife came out and hailed him in.
XII
From the moment when the gray morning broke there was audible a peculiar note in the buzzing of the “Ark,” a hoarse excitement, which thrust all care aside. Down the long corridors there was a sound of weeping and scrubbing; while the galleries and the dark wooden stair-cases were sluiced with water. “Look out there!” called somebody every moment from somewhere, and then it was a question of escaping the downward-streaming flood. During the whole morning the water poured from one gallery to another, as over a mill-race.
But now the “Ark” stood freezing in its own cleanliness, with an expression that seemed to say the old warren didn’t know itself. Here and there a curtain or a bit of furniture had disappeared from a window —it had found its way to the pawn shop in honor of the day. What was lacking in that way was made up for by the expectation and festive delight on the faces of the inmates.
Little fir-trees peeped out of the cellar entries in the City Ward, and in the market-place they stood like a whole forest along the wall of the prison. In the windows of the basement-shops hung hearts and colored candles, and the grocer at the corner had a great Christmas goblin in his window—it was made of red and gray wool-work and had a whole cat’s skin for its beard.
On the stairs of the “Ark” the children lay about cleaning knives and forks with sand sprinkled on the steps.