“There’s the factories,” replied the captain.
“The factories, the factories!” Jeppe laughed disdainfully, but with a touch of uncertainty. “You’ll tell me next that they can make shoes by machinery—cut out and peg and sew and fix the treads and all? No, damn it, that can only be done by human hands directed by human intelligence. Shoemaking is work for men only. Perhaps I myself might be replaced by a machine—by a few cog-wheels that go round and round! Bah! A machine is dead, I know that, and it can’t think or adapt itself to circumstances; you may have to shape the boot in a particular way for a special foot, on account of tender toes, or—here I give the sole a certain cut in the instep, so that it looks smart, or—well, one has to be careful, or one cuts into the upper!”
“There are machines which make boots, and they make them cheaper than you, too,” said the skipper brusquely.
“I should like to see them! Can you show me a boot that hasn’t been made by human hands?” Jeppe laughed contemptuously. “No; there’s something behind all this, by God! Some one is trying to play us a trick!” The skipper went his way, offended.
Jeppe stuck to it that there was something uncanny about it—the idea of a machine making boots was enough to haunt him. He kept on returning to it.
“They’ll be making human beings by machinery too, soon!” he exclaimed angrily.
“No,” said Baker Jörgen; “there, I believe, the old method will survive!”
One day the skipper came in at the workshop door, banged a pair of shoes down on the window-bench, and went out again. They had been bought in England, and belonged to the helmsman of a bark which had just come into the harbor. The young master looked at them, turned them over in his hands, and looked at them again. Then he called Jeppe. They were sewn throughout—shoes for a grown man, yet sewn throughout! Moreover, the factory stamp was under the sole.
In Jeppe’s opinion they were not worth a couple of shillings. But he could not get over the fact that they were machine-made.
“Then we are superfluous,” he said, in a quavering voice. All his old importance seemed to have fallen from him. “For if they can make the one kind on a machine, they can make another. The handicraft is condemned to death, and we shall all be without bread one fine day! Well, I, thank God, have not many years before me.” It was the first time that Jeppe had admitted that he owed his life to God.