Pelle the Conqueror — Complete

by Martin Andersen Nexø

The place was like a slave-market. The foreman, went to and fro, seeking out the strongest, eyeing them from head to foot and choosing them for their muscular development and breadth of back. The contractor too was moving about and giving orders. “One of them rich snobs!” said the laborers, grumbling; “all the laborers in town have to march out here so that he can pick himself the best. And he’s beaten down the day’s wages to fifty öre. He’s been a navvy himself, too; but now he’s a man who enjoys his hundred thousand a year. A regular bloodsucker, he is!”

The crowd continued to stand there and to loaf about all the day, in the hope that some one would give up, or fall ill—or go crazy—so that some one could take his place. They could not tear themselves away; the mere fact that work was being done chained them to the spot. They looked as though they might storm the works at any moment, and the police formed a ring about the place. They stood pressing forward, absorbed by their desire for work, with a sick longing in their faces. When the crowd had pressed forward too far it hesitatingly allowed itself to be pushed back again. Suddenly there was a break in the ranks; a man leaped over the rail and seized a pickaxe. A couple of policemen wrested the tool from his hand and led him away.

And as they stood there a feeling of defiance rose within them, a fierce contempt for their privations and the whole shameless situation. It expressed itself in an angry half-suppressed growl. They followed the contractor with curious eyes as though they were looking for something in him but could not conceive what it was.

In his arrogance at receiving such an excessive offer of labor, he decided to go further, and to lengthen the working day by an hour. The workers received an order to that effect one morning, just as they had commenced work. But at the same moment the four hundred men, all but two, threw down their implements and returned to their comrades. They stood there discussing the matter, purple with rage. So now their starving condition was to be made use of, in order to enrich the contractor by a further hundred thousand! “We must go to the city authorities,” they cried. “No, to the newspaper!” others replied. “The paper! The paper is better!”

“It’s no use going to the city council—not until we have elected members of our own party to it,” cried Pelle. “Remember that at the elections, comrades! We must elect men of our party everywhere, their encroachments will never be stopped until then. And now we must stand together and be firm! If it’s got to be, better starve to death at once than do it slowly!”

They did not reply, but pressed closely about him, heavily listening. There was something altogether too fierce and profound in their attention. These men had declared a strike in midwinter, as their only remedy. What were they thinking of doing now? Pelle looked about him and was daunted by their dumb rage. This threatening silence wouldn’t do; what would it lead to? It seemed as though something overwhelming, and uncontrollable, would spring from this stony taciturnity. Pelle sprang upon a heap of road-metal.

“Comrades!” he cried, in a powerful voice. “This is merely a change, as the fox said when they flayed his skin off. They have deprived us of clothes and food and drink, and comfort at home, and now they want to find a way of depriving us of our skins too! The question to-day is— forward or back? Perhaps this is the great time of trial, when we shall enter into possession of all we have desired! Hold together, comrades! Don’t scatter and don’t give way! Things are difficult enough now, but remember, we are well on in the winter, and it promises to break up early. The night is always darkest before daybreak! And shall we be afraid to suffer a little—we, who have suffered and been patient for hundreds of years? Our wives are sitting at home and fretting—perhaps they will be angry with us. We might at least have accepted what was offered us, they may say. But we can’t go on seeing our dear ones at home fading away in spite of our utmost exertions! Hitherto the poor man’s labor has been like an aimless prayer to Heaven: Deliver us from hunger and dirt, from misery, poverty, and cold, and give us bread, and again bread! Deliver our children from our lot—let not their limbs wither and their minds lapse into madness! That has been our prayer, but there is only one prayer that avails, and that is, to defy the wicked! We are the chosen people, and for that reason we must cry a halt! We will no longer do as we have done—for our wives’ sakes, and our children’s, and theirs again! Ay, but what is posterity to us? Of course it is something to us—precisely to us! Were your parents as you are? No, they were ground down into poverty and the dust, they crept submissively before the mighty. Then whence did we get all that makes us so strong and causes us to stand together? Time has stood still, comrades! It has placed its finger on our breast and he said, ‘Thus you shall do!’ Here where we stand, the old time ceases and the new time begins; and that is why we have thrown down our tools, with want staring us in the face—such a thing as has never been seen before! We want to revolutionize life—to make it sweet for the poor man! And for all time! You, who have so often staked your life and welfare for a florin—you now hold the whole future in your hands! You must endure, calmly and prudently! And you will never be forgotten, so long as there are workers on the earth! This winter will be the last through which we shall have to endure—for yonder lies the land toward which we have been wandering! Comrades! Through us the day shall come!”

Pelle himself did not know what words he uttered. He felt only that something was speaking through him—something supremely mighty, that never lies. There was a radiant, prophetic ring in his voice, which carried his hearers off their feet; and his eyes were blazing. Before their eyes a figure arose from the hopeless winter, towering in radiance, a figure that was their own, and yet that of a young god. He rose, new-born, out of misery itself, struck aside the old grievous idea of fate, and in its place gave them a new faith—the radiant faith in their own might! They cried up to him—first single voices, then all. He gathered up their cries into a mighty cheer, a paean in honor of the new age!

Every day they stationed themselves there, not to work, but to stand there in dumb protest. When the foreman called for workers they stood about in silent groups, threatening as a gloomy rock. Now and again they shouted a curse at those who had left them in the lurch. The city did nothing. They had held out a helping hand to the needy, and the latter had struck it away—now they must accept the consequences. The contractor had received permission to suspend the work entirely, but he kept it going with a few dozen strike-breakers, in order to irritate the workers.

All over the great terrace a silence as of death prevailed, except in that corner where the little gang was at work, a policeman beside it, as though the men had been convicts. The wheelbarrows lay with their legs in the air; it was as though the pest had swept over the works.