Pelle would like to draw him into the business. “There’s so much to write and lecture about,” he says, “and you could do all that so much better than I.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” says Morten. “Your work’s growing in me too. I’m always thinking about it and have thought of giving a hand too, but I can’t. If I ever contribute anything to your great work, it’ll be in some other way.”
“You’re doing nothing with your book about the sun either,” says Pelle anxiously.
“No, because whenever I set to work on it, it mixes up so strangely with your work, and I can’t keep the ideas apart. At present I feel like a mole, digging blindly in the black earth under the mighty tree of life. I dig and search, and am continually coming across the thick roots of the huge thing above the surface. I can’t see them, but I can hear sounds from above there, and it hurts me not to be able to follow them into their strong connection up in the light.”
One Sunday morning at the end of May they were sitting out in the garden. The cradle had been moved out into the sun, and Pelle and Ellen were sitting one on either side, talking over domestic matters. Ellen had so much to tell him when she had him to herself. The child lay staring up into the sky with its dark eyes that were the image of Ellen’s. He was brown and chubby; any one could see that he had been conceived in sunshine and love.
Lasse Frederik was sitting by the hedge painting a picture that Pelle was not to see until it was finished. He went to the drawing-school now, and was clever. He had a good eye for figures, and poor people especially he hit off in any position. He had a light hand, and in two or three lines could give what his father had had to work at carefully. “You cheat!” Pelle often said, half resentfully. “It won’t bear looking closely at.” He had to admit, however, that it was a good likeness.
“Well, can’t I see the picture soon?” he called across. He was very curious.
“Yes, it’s finished now,” said Lasse Frederik, coming up with it.
The picture represented a street in which stood a solitary milk-cart, and behind the cart lay a boy with bleeding head. “He fell asleep because he had to get up so early,” Lasse Frederik explained; “and then when the cart started he tumbled backward.” The morning emptiness of the street was well done, but the blood was too brilliantly red.