“It’s very unpleasant,” said Ellen, with a shudder. “But it’s true.”
Morten came home from town with a big letter which he handed to Pelle, saying: “Here’s news for you from Brun.” Pelle went into the house to read it undisturbed, and a little while after came out again.
“Yes, important news this time,” he said with some emotion. “Would you like to hear it?” he asked, sitting down.
“DEAR PELLE:
“I am sitting up in bed to write to you. I am poorly, and have been for some days; but I hope it is nothing serious. We all have to die some day, but I should like to start on the great voyage round the world from your home. I long to see ‘Daybreak’ and all of you, and I feel very lonely. If the business could do without you for a few days, I should be so glad if you would come down here. Then we could go home together, for I should not like to venture on the journey by myself.
“The sun is just going down, and sends its last rays in to me. It has been gray and gloomy all day, but now the sun has broken through the clouds, and kisses the earth and me, poor old man, too, in farewell. It makes me want to say something to you, Pelle, for my day was like this before I knew you—endlessly long and gray! When you are the last member of a dying family, you have to bear the gray existence of the others too.
“I have often thought how wonderful the hidden force of life is. Intercourse with you has been like a lever to me, although I knew well that I should not accomplish anything more, and had no one to come after me. I feel, nevertheless, through you, in alliance with the future. You are in the ascendant and must look upon me as something that is vanishing. But look how life makes us all live by using us each in his own way. Be strong in your faith in the future; with you lies the development. I wish with all my heart that I were an awakening proletary and stood in the dawn of day; but I am nevertheless glad because my eyes will be closed by the new in you.
“I have imagined that life was tiresome and dull and far too well known. I had it arranged in my catalogues. And look how it renews itself! In my old age I have experienced its eternal youth. Formerly I had never cared about the country; in my mind it was a place where you waded either in dust or mud. The black earth appeared to me horrible rather than anything else; it was only associated in my mind with the churchyard. That shows how far I was from nature. The country was something that farmers moved about in—those big, voracious creatures, who almost seemed like a kind of animal trying to imitate man. Rational beings could not possibly live out there. That was the view in my circle, and I had myself a touch of the same complaint, although my university training of course paraphrased and veiled it all to some extent. All this about our relations to nature seemed to me very interesting aesthetically, but with more or less of a contradictory, not to say hostile, character. I could not understand how any one could see anything beautiful in a ploughed field or a dike. It was only when I got to know you that something moved within me and called me out; there was something about you like the air from out there.
“Now I also understand my forefathers! Formerly they seemed to me only like thick-skinned boors, who scraped together all the money that two generations of us have lived upon without doing a pennyworth of good. They enabled us, however, to live life, I have always thought, and I considered it the only excuse for their being in the family, coarse and robust as they were. Now I see that it was they who lived, while we after them, with all our wealth, have only had a bed in life’s inn.
“For all this I thank you. I am glad to have become acquainted through you with men of the new age, and to be able to give my fortune back. It was made by all those who work, and gathered together by a few; my giving it back is merely a natural consequence. Others will come to do as I am doing, either of their own free will or by compulsion, until everything belongs to everybody. Then only can the conflict about human interests begin. Capitalism has created wonderful machines, but what wonderful men await us in the new age! Happy the man who could have lived to see it!