And one day the players disappeared—as they had come—and left a cloud of debts behind them. “Devil’s trash!” said the master with his despondent expression. “They’ve tricked us! But, all the same, they were fine fellows in their way, and they had seen the world!”
But after these happenings he could by no means get warm again. He crawled into bed and spent the best part of the month lying there.
XII
It can be very cozy on those winter evenings when everybody sits at home in the workshop and passes the time by doing nothing, because it is so dark and cold out of doors, and one has nowhere to go to. To stand about by the skating-ponds and to look on, frozen, while others go swinging past—well, Pelle has had enough of it; and as for strolling up the street toward the north, and then turning about and returning toward the south, and turning yet again, up and down the selfsame street—well, there is nothing in it unless one has good warm clothes and a girl whose waist one can hold. And Morten too is no fresh-air disciple; he is freezing, and wants to sit in the warmth.
So they slink into the workshop as soon as it begins to grow dark, and they take out the key and hang it on the nail in the entry, in order to deceive Jeppe, and then they secretly make a fire in the stove, placing a screen in front of it, so that Jeppe shall not see the light from it when he makes his rounds past the workshop windows. They crouch together on the ledge at the bottom of the stove, each with an arm round the other’s shoulder, and Morten tells Pelle about the books he has read.
“Why do you do nothing but read those stupid books?” asks Pelle, when he has listened for a time.
“Because I want to know something about life and about the world,” answers Morten, out of the darkness.
“Of the world?” says Pelle, in a contemptuous tone. “I want to go out into the world and see things—what’s in the books is only lies. But go on.”
And Morten goes on, good-natured as always. And in the midst of his narrative something suddenly occurs to him, and he pulls a paper packet from his breast-pocket: “That’s chocolate from Bodil,” he says, and breaks the stick in two.
“Where had she put it?” asks Pelle.