Pelle had been captured by the new doctrines out by the Schleswig Stone, and had thrown himself, glowing and energetic, into the heart of the movement. He attended meetings and discussions, his ears on the alert to absorb anything really essential; for his practical nature called for something palpable whereupon his mind could get to work. Deep within his being was a mighty flux, like that of a river beneath its ice; and at times traces of it rose to the surface, and alarmed him. Yet he had no power to sound the retreat; and when he heard the complaint, in respect of the prevailing unrest, that it endangered the welfare of the nation, he was not able to grasp the connection.
“It’s preposterous that they should knock off work without any reason,” he once told Morten, when the baker’s driver had thrown up his place. “Like your driver, for example—he had no ground for complaint.”
“Perhaps he suddenly got a pain between the legs because his ancestor great-grandfather was once made to ride on a wooden horse—he came from the country,” said Morten solemnly.
Pelle looked at him quickly. He did not like Morten’s ambiguous manner of expressing himself. It made him feel insecure.
“Can’t you talk reasonably?” he said. “I can’t understand you.”
“No? And yet that’s quite reason enough—there have been lots of reasons since his great-grandfather’s days. What the devil—why should they want a reason referring to yesterday precisely? Don’t you realize that the worker, who has so long been working the treadmill in the belief that the movement was caused by somebody else, has suddenly discovered that it’s he that keeps the whole thing in motion? For that’s what is going on. The poor man is not merely a slave who treads the wheel, and had a handful of meal shoved down his gullet now and again to keep him from starving to death. He is on the point of discovering that he performs a higher service, look you! And now the movement is altering—it is continuing of itself! But that you probably can’t see,” he added, as he noted Pelle’s incredulous expression.
“No, for I’m not one of the big-bellies,” said Pelle, laughing, “and you’re no prophet, to prophesy such great things. And I have enough understanding to realize that if you want to make a row you must absolutely have something definite to make a fuss about, otherwise it won’t work. But that about the wooden horse isn’t good enough!”
“That’s just the point about lots of fusses,” Morten replied. “There’s no need to give a pretext for anything that everybody’s interested in.”
Pelle pondered further over all this while at work. But these deliberations did not proceed as in general; as a rule, such matters as were considered in his world of thought were fixed by the generations and referred principally to life and death. He had to set to work in a practical manner, and to return to his own significant experience.
Old Pipman was superfluous; that Pelle himself had proved. And there was really no reason why he should not shake off the Court shoemaker as well; the journeymen saw to the measuring and the cutting-out; indeed, they did the whole work. He was also really a parasite, who had placed himself at the head of them all, and was sucking up their profits. But then Morten was right with his unabashed assertion that the working-man carried on the whole business! Pelle hesitated a little over this conclusion; he cautiously verified the fact that it was in any case valid in his craft. There was some sense in winning back his own—but how?