In the daytime Pelle was often sent on a round through the harbor in order to visit the shipping. He would find the masters standing about there in their leather aprons, talking about nautical affairs; or they would gather before their doors, to gossip, and each, from sheer habit, would carry some tool or other in his hand.
And the wolf was at the door. The “Saints” held daily meetings, and the people had time enough to attend them. Winter proved how insecurely the town was established, how feeble were its roots; it was not here as it was up in the country, where a man could enjoy himself in the knowledge that the earth was working for him. Here people made themselves as small and ate as little as possible, in order to win through the slack season.
In the workshops the apprentices sat working at cheap boots and shoes for stock; every spring the shoemakers would charter a ship in common and send a cargo to Iceland. This helped them on a little. “Fire away!” the master would repeat, over and over again; “make haste—we don’t get much for it!”
The slack season gave rise to many serious questions. Many of the workers were near to destitution, and it was said that the organized charities would find it very difficult to give assistance to all who applied for it. They were busy everywhere, to their full capacity. “And I’ve heard it’s nothing here to what it is on the mainland,” said Baker Jörgen. “There the unemployed are numbered in tens of thousands.”
“How can they live, all those thousands of poor people, if the unemployment is so great?” asked Bjerregrav. “The need is bad enough here in town, where every employer provides his people with their daily bread.”
“Here no one starves unless he wants to,” said Jeppe. “We have a well-organized system of relief.”
“You’re certainly becoming a Social Democrat, Jeppe,” said Baker Jörgen; “you want to put everything on to the organized charities!”
Wooden-leg Larsen laughed; that was a new interpretation.
“Well, what do they really want? For they are not freemasons. They say they are raising their heads again over on the mainland.”
“Well, that, of course, is a thing that comes and goes with unemployment,” said Jeppe. “The people must do something. Last winter a son of the sailmaker’s came home—well, he was one of them in secret. But the old folks would never admit it, and he himself was so clever that he got out of it somehow.”