Pelle the Conqueror — Complete

by Martin Andersen Nexø

He grew confused with the continual dwelling of his thoughts on the same subject, but it seemed to possess him, was with him while he slept, and seized him as soon as he awoke. There was an old dream that persistently haunted him at this time—a forgotten youthful idea from his earliest participation in the rising, the plan for a common workshop that would make the court shoemaker superfluous. The plan had been laid aside at the time as impossible, but now he took it up again and went over it step by step. He could easily find some capable, reliable fellow-workmen who would stand by him through thick and thin with regard to work and profits; and there would be no difficulty about discipline, for during the past years the workmen had learned to subordinate themselves to their own people. Here was a way for the small man to assert himself within his trade and join the development; what one was not able to do could be done by several joining together, namely, turn the modern technics to account and divide the work into sections. He arranged it all most carefully, and went over it again and again to make sure that every detail was correct. When he slept he dreamed of his system of profit-sharing, and then it was a fact. He stood working in a bright room among comrades; there was no master and no servant, the machinery whirred, and the workmen sang and whistled while they minded it. Their hours of labor were short, and they all had happy homes waiting for them.

It was hard to wake up and know the reality. Alas! all the cleverest and most industrious hands in the world had no influence in their several trades—could not so much as sew a single stitch—until capital started them. If that refused its support, they could do nothing at all, but were cut off, as it were, at once.

Machinery cost money. Pelle could get the latter from Brun, the old man having often enough offered him capital to start something or other; but he already owed him money, and capital might run his undertaking down. It was at its post, and allowed no activity of that kind beside it. He was seized with uncertainty; he dared not venture the stakes.

The old philosopher came almost daily. Pelle had become a part of his life, and he watched his young friend’s condition with anxiety. Was it the prison life—or was it perhaps the books—that had transformed this young man, who had once gone ahead with tempestuous recklessness, into a hesitating doubter who could not come to a decision? Personality was of doubtful value when it grew at the expense of energy. It had been the old man’s hope that it would have developed greater energy through being replanted in fresh, untouched soil, and he tried to rouse Pelle out of his lethargy.

Pelle gave an impatient jerk. They were poking him up on all sides, wanting him to come to a decision, and he could not see his way to it. Of course he was half asleep; he knew it himself. He felt that he wanted rest; his entity was working for him out there in the uncertainty.

“I don’t know anything,” he said, half irritated, “so what can be the use? I thought books would lead me to a place from which I could bring everything together; but now I’m all abroad. I know too much to dash on blindly, and too little to find the pivot on which the whole thing turns. It doesn’t matter what I touch, it resolves itself into something for and something against.” He laughed in desperation.

One day Brun brought him a book. “This book,” he said with a peculiar smile, “has satisfied many who were seeking for the truth. Let’s see whether it can satisfy you too!” It was Darwin’s “Origin of Species.”

Pelle read as in a mist. The point lay here—the whole thing powerfully put into one sentence! His brain was in a ferment, he could not lay the book down, but went on reading all night, bewitched and horrified at this merciless view. When Ellen in surprise came down with his morning coffee, he had finished the book. He made no reply to her gentle reproaches, but drank the coffee in silence, put on his hat and went out into the deserted streets to cool his burning brow.

It was very early and the working-men had not yet turned out; at the morning coffee-rooms the shutters were just being taken down; warmly- clad tram-men were tramping through the streets in their wooden-soled boots; slipshod, tired women ran stumbling along to their early jobs, shivering with cold and weary of life, weary before they had begun their day. Here and there a belated woman toiled along the street carrying a clothes-basket, a mother taking her baby to the crêche before she went to her work.

Suddenly the feeling of rebellion came over Pelle, hot, almost suffocating him. This cruelly cold doctrine of the right of the strong, which gave him the choice between becoming brutal or going to the dogs— this was the key to an understanding of life? It pronounced a sentence of death upon him and his fellows, upon the entire world of the poor. From this point of view, the existing conditions were the only ones possible—they were simply ideal; the sweater and the money-lender, whom he hated, were in the most harmonious agreement with the fundamental laws of life! And the terrible thing was that from this standpoint the social fabric was clearly illuminated: he could not deny it. He who best learned to accommodate himself to the existing state of things, conquered; no matter how vile the existing state of things might be.