“Now he will question me,” thought Pelle. “And then I shall answer him boldly, and then he will look at me attentively and say—”
Pelle was always hoping for some mysterious adventure, such as happens to an able lad and raises him to fortune.
But the shipowner did nothing he was expected to do. He merely searched eagerly, and inquired: “Where were you walking? Here, weren’t you? Are you quite certain of that?”
“In any case he’ll give me another twenty-five öre,” thought Pelle. “Extraordinary—how eager he is!” Pelle did not really want to go on searching, but he could not very well leave off before the other.
“Well, well!” said the shipowner at last, “you may as well whistle for those twenty-five öre. But what a booby you are!” And he moved on, and Pelle looked after him for a long while before putting his hand into his own pocket.
Later, as he was returning that way, he saw a man bowed over the flagstones, striking matches as he searched. It was Monsen. The sight tickled Pelle tremendously. “Have you lost anything?” he asked mischievously, standing on the alert, lest he should get a box on the ear. “Yes, yes; twenty-five öre;” groaned the shipowner. “Can’t you help me to find it, my boy?”
Well, he had long understood that Monsen was the richest man in the town, and that he had become so by provisioning ships with spoiled foodstuffs, and refitting old crank vessels, which he heavily insured. And he knew who was a thief and who a bankrupt speculator, and that Merchant Lau only did business with the little shopkeepers, because his daughter had gone to the bad. Pelle knew the secret pride of the town, the “Top-galeass,” as she was called, who in her sole self represented the allurements of the capital, and he knew the two sharpers, and the consul with the disease which was eating him up. All this was very gratifying knowledge for one of the rejected.
He had no intention of letting the town retain any trace of those splendors with which he had once endowed it. In his constant ramblings he stripped it to the buff. For instance, there stood the houses of the town, some retiring, some standing well forward, but all so neat on the side that faced the street, with their wonderful old doorways and flowers in every window. Their neatly tarred framework glistened, and they were always newly lime-washed, ochrous yellow or dazzling white, sea-green, or blue as the sky. And on Sundays there was quite a festive display of flags. But Pelle had explored the back quarters of every house; and there were sinks and traps there, with dense slimy growths, and stinking refuse-barrels, and one great dustbin with a drooping elder-tree over it. And the spaces between the cobble-stones were foul with the scales of herrings and the guts of codfish, and the lower portions of the walls were covered with patches of green moss.
The bookbinder and his wife went about hand in hand when they set out for the meeting of some religious society. But at home they fought, and in chapel, as they sat together and sang out of the same hymn-book, they would secretly pinch one another’s legs. “Yes,” people used to say, “such a nice couple!” But the town couldn’t throw dust in Pelle’s eyes; he knew a thing or two. If only he had known just how to get himself a new blouse!
Some people didn’t go without clothes so readily; they were forever making use of that fabulous thing—credit! At first it took his breath away to discover that the people here in the town got everything they wanted without paying money for it. “Will you please put it down?” they would say, when they came for their boots; and “it’s to be entered,” he himself would say, when he made a purchase for his employers. All spoke the same magical formula, and Pelle was reminded of Father Lasse, who had counted his shillings over a score of times before he ventured to buy anything. He anticipated much from this discovery, and it was his intention to make good use of the magic words when his own means became exhausted.