“Cobbler, wobbler, groats in your gruel,
Smack on your back goes the stick—how cruel!”
It is those accursed street-urchins. Pelle is by no means in a warlike humor; he pretends not to see them. But they come up close behind him and tread on his heels, and before he knows what is happening they are upon him. The first he knows about it is that he is lying in the gutter, on his back, with all three on top of him. He has fallen alongside of the curbstone and cannot move; he is faint, too, as a result of his indiscretion; the two biggest boys spread his arms wide open on the flagstones and press them down with all their might, while the third ventures to deal with his face. It is a carefully planned outrage, and all Pelle can do is to twist his head round under the blows—and for once he is thankful for his disgracefully fat cheeks.
Then, in his need, a dazzling apparition appears before him; standing in the doorway yonder is a white baker’s boy, who is royally amused. It is no other than Nilen, the wonderful little devil Nilen, of his schooldays, who was always fighting everybody like a terrier and always came out of it with a whole skin. Pelle shuts his eyes and blushes for himself, although he knows perfectly well that this is only an apparition.
But then a wonderful thing happens; the apparition leaps down into the gutter, slings the boys to one side, and helps him to his feet. Pelle recognizes the grip of those fingers—even in his schooldays they were like claws of iron.
And soon he is sitting behind the oven, on Nilen’s grimy bed. “So you’ve become a cobbler?” says Nilen, to begin with, compassionately, for he feels a deucedly smart fellow himself in his fine white clothes, with his bare arms crossed over his naked breast. Pelle feels remarkably comfortable; he has been given a slice of bread and cream, and he decides that the world is more interesting than ever. Nilen is chewing manfully, and spitting over the end of the bed.
“Do you chew?” asks Pelle, and hastens to offer him the leaf-tobacco.
“Yes, we all do; a fellow has to when he works all night.”
Pelle cannot understand how people can keep going day and night.
“All the bakers in Copenhagen do—so that the people can get fresh bread in the morning—and our master wants to introduce it here. But it isn’t every one can do it; the whole staff had to be reorganized. It’s worst about midnight, when everything is turning round. Then it comes over you so that you keep on looking at the time, and the very moment the clock strikes twelve we all hold our breath, and then no one can come in or go out any more. The master himself can’t stand the night shift; the ’baccy turns sour in his mouth and he has to lay it on the table. When he wakes up again he thinks it’s a raisin and sticks it in the dough. What’s the name of your girl?”
For a moment Pelle’s thoughts caress the three daughters of old Skipper Elleby—but no, none of them shall be immolated. No, he has no girl.