When he went downstairs the men crowded about him, in order to hear the result. “Now your fortune’s made!” they said; “they’ll put you to machine-drawing now, and if you know your business you’ll get independent work and become a constructor. That’s the way Director Jeppesen got on; he started down here on the moulding-floor, and now he’s a great man!” Their faces were beaming with delight in his good fortune. He looked at them, and realized that they regarded him as capable of anything.
He spent the rest of the day as in a dream, and hurried home to share the news with Ellen. He was quite confused; there was a surging in his ears, as in childhood, when life suddenly revealed one of its miracles to him. Ellen flung her arms round his neck in her joy; she would not let him go again, but held him fast gazing at him wonderingly, as in the old days. “I’ve always known you were intended for something!” she said, looking at him with pride. “There’s no one like you! And now, only think. But the children, they must know too!” And she snatched little sister from her sleep, and informed her what had happened. The child began to cry.
“You are frightening her, you are so delighted,” said Pelle, who was himself smiling all over his face.
“But now—now we shall mix with genteel people,” said Ellen suddenly, as she was laying the table. “If only I can adapt myself to it! And the children shall go to the middle-class school.”
When Pelle had eaten he was about to sit down to his cobbling. “No!” said Ellen decidedly, taking the work away, “that’s no work for you any longer!”
“But it must be finished,” said Pelle; “we can’t deliver half-finished work!”
“I’ll soon finish it for you; you just put your best clothes on; you look like a—”
“Like a working-man, eh?” said Pelle, smiling.
Pelle dressed himself and went off to the “Ark” to give Father Lasse the news. Later he would meet the others at his father-in-law’s. Lasse was at home, and was eating his supper. He had fried himself an egg over the stove, and there was beer and brandy on the table. He had rented a little room off the long corridor, near crazy Vinslev’s; there was no window, but there was a pane of glass over the door leading into the gloomy passage. The lime was falling from the walls, so that the cob was showing in great patches.
“Well, well,” said Lasse, delighted, “so it’s come to this! I’ve often wondered to myself why you had been given such unprofitable talents— such as lying about and painting on the walls or on paper—you, a poor laborer’s son. Something must be intended by that, I used to tell myself, in my own mind; perhaps it’s the gift of God and he’ll get on by reason of it! And now it really seems as if it’s to find its use.”