Pelle the Conqueror Part 113

A few days later he summoned a general meeting of the Union, laid before them the draft of a new tariff which was adapted to the times, and proposed that they should at once begin the fight for its adoption. "We could never have a better opportunity," he said. "Now they have seen what we can do! With the tariff question we struck down Meyer! We must strike the iron while it is hot!"

He reckoned that his comrades were just in the mood for battle, despite all the privations that the struggle had entailed, and he was not mistaken. His proposal was unanimously accepted.

But there was no fight for better wages. Meyer was now making the rounds of the employers' establishments with the sample-box of one of the leather firms. The sight of this once so mighty man had a stimulating effect. The masters' Union appointed a few employers with whom the workers' Union could discuss the question of the tariff.

XXI

It often happened that Pelle would look back with longing on his quiet home-life with Ellen and the child, and he felt dejectedly that they lived in a happier world, and were on the point of accustoming themselves to live without him. "When once you have got this out of hand you can live really comfortably with them again," he thought.

But one thing inevitably followed on another, and one question arose from the solution of another, and the poor man's world unfolded itself like the development of a story. The fame of his skill as organizer spread itself abroad; everywhere men were at work with the idea of closing up the ranks, and many began to look toward him with expectant eyes.

Frequently workers came to him begging him to help them to form an organization--no one had such a turn for the work as he. Then they called a meeting together, and Pelle explained the process to them.

There was a certain amount of fancifulness and emphasis in his speech, but they understood him very well. "He talks so as to make your ears itch," they told one another. He was the man they trusted, and he initiated them into the practical side of the matter.

"But you must sacrifice your wages--so that you can start a fund," he told them continually; "without money nothing can be done. Remember, it's capital itself we are fighting against!"

"Will it be any use to understand boxing when the fight comes on?" asked a simple-minded workman one day.

"Yes--cash-boxing!" retorted Pelle swiftly. They laughed, and turned their pitiful pockets inside out. They gazed a moment at the money before they gave it away. "Oh, well, it's of no consequence," they said.

"The day will soon come when it will be of consequence--if we only hang together," said Pelle confidently.

It was the dripping they had sc.r.a.ped off their bread--he knew that well, but there was no help for it! In these days he was no better situated than they were.

His activities were leading him abroad, in wider and wider circles, until he found himself at length in the very midst of the ma.s.ses. Their number did not astonish him; he had always really been conscious of that. And he grew by this contact, and measured himself and the movement by an ever-increasing standard.

At this time he underwent a noticeable change in his outer man. In his forehead were always those deep creases which in young men speak of a gloomy childhood; they were the only bitter token of that which he had taken upon himself, and reminded one of a clouded sky. Otherwise he looked fresh and healthy enough; his hard life was not undermining his strength; he thrived on the sense of community, and was almost always cheerful. His cheeks grew round as those of a cornet-player, and his distended nostrils spoke of his fiery zeal; he needed much air, and always wore his clothes open upon his chest. His carriage was upright and elastic; his whole appearance was arresting, challenging. When he spoke at meetings there was energy in his words; he grew deeply flushed, and wet with perspiration. Something of this flush remained in his face and neck, and there was always a feeling of heat in his body. When he strode forward he looked like a trumpeter at the head of a column.

The many--that was his element. There were many who were to be brought under one hat. Yet most of them lacked a clear understanding; old suspicions suddenly came to light; and many doubts were abroad among the ma.s.ses. Some believed blindly; others said, "It's all one whether this party or that does the plucking of us!" Nothing of palpable importance occurred, such as to catch the eye; but they came to trust in his personality as the blind man trusts his leader, and they were forever demanding to hear his voice. Pelle became their darling speaker. He felt that their blind confidence bore him up, and for them he gazed far over the hubbub and confusion. He had always been a familiar of Fortune; now he saw it plainly, far out along the route of march, and inflamed them all with his enthusiasm.

One evening he was summoned to rouse a calling that was in low water.

It was the dustmen who applied to him. In order to stimulate their self-consciousness he showed them what a vast power they possessed in their despised activity. He imagined, as an example, that they refused to work, and painted, with much humor, the results which their action would have for the world of rich people. This had a tremendous effect on the meeting. The men stared at one another as if they had just discovered themselves, and then sat laughing like one man. To follow up his effect, he showed how one kind of work depends on another, and imagined one calling to support another, until a general strike had laid its paralyzing hand on the city. What a fantastic picture it was! Pelle knew nothing of the theory of the labor movement, but his energy and enthusiasm lifted the veil from the remotest consequences. Stimulated and startled by the terrible power which lay in their hands, the dustmen went home.

There was something in all this that did not satisfy him; it was in his nature to create, not to destroy. But if only the poor would, they could make society all over again--so Morten had one day said, and the words had never ceased to haunt Pelle's mind. But he could not endure the idea of violent revolution; and now he had found a good way out of his difficulty. He felt convinced that cohesion was irresistible, and that life would undergo a peaceful change.

He had welded his own Union together so that the members hung together through thick and thin. He had accomplished something there, but if a real result were to be achieved the Unions here must work in conjunction with those of all the cities in the country, and that was being done to a certain small extent, in his own trade as well as in others. But all these federations of local Unions must be combined in a mighty whole, so that the whole country would be of one single mind. In other countries matters were progressing as here, so why not summon all countries to one vast work of cooperation?

Before Pelle was aware, he had included the whole world in his solidarity. He knew now that poverty is international. And he was convinced that the poor man felt alike all the world over.

The greatness of this idea did not go to his head. It had evolved naturally on the lines of his own organization--it was just like the idea at the base of the latter. But he continued to play with it until it a.s.sumed a definite form. Then he went with his plan to his father-in-law, who was a member of the party executive, and through him was invited to lay the matter before the Central Committee.

Pelle was a practised speaker by now, but he was feverishly excited when he stood in the presence of the actual heart of the labor movement. His words delighted the many, but would he succeed in winning over these tried and experienced men, the leaders who stood behind the whole movement, while quietly going about their own business? He felt that this was the most significant day in his life.

These were men with quieter temperaments than his own. They sat there immovable, listening with half-closed eyes; his big words brought the faintest smile to their lips--they had long got over that sort of thing!

They were artisans and craftsmen who worked hard all day for a living, as did he himself, but several of them had given themselves a considerable education; they must be regarded as scholarly persons. In the evening and on Sundays they worked for the Cause, devising political schemes and devoting themselves to keeping accounts and the ever-increasing work of administration. They were awkward at these unaccustomed tasks, which had hitherto been reserved by quite a different cla.s.s of society, and had had to grow accustomed thereto; their heads were gray and wrinkled.

Pelle felt that he was still only at the beginning. These men gave him the impression of a great secret council; outside they looked like any one else, but here at the green table they sat creating the vast organization into which he merely drove the ma.s.ses. Here high politics came into play. There was something impious in this--as though one saw ants making plans to overturn a mountain; and he must do the same if he wanted to accomplish anything! But here something more than big words was needed! He involuntarily moderated his tone and did his best to speak in a dry, professional manner.

He received no applause when he had finished; the men sat there gazing in front of them with a slightly pondering expression. The silence and the great empty room had the effect of making him feel dizzy. All his faculties were directed outward, drawing strength from the echo from without of the many who had shaped him. But at this decisive moment they were silent, leaving him in suspense, without any kind of support. Was the whole stupendous plan of federation a piece of madness, and was he a fool to propound it? No one replied. The leaders quietly asked him the details of his plan, and undertook to consider it.

Pelle left in a state of dreadful suspense. He felt that he had touched upon something on which a great decision depended, and he wanted corroboration of the fact that he had set about the matter rightly.

In this moment of need he turned to himself. It was not his way to ask questions of his inner self, but now no other could answer him. He must look to himself for recognition.

This was the first time that Pelle had sought refuge in his own ego, or learned to fall back upon it in critical moments. But solitude did not suit him and he sought it only under the compulsion of necessity. His heart beat uncontrollably within him when he learned that his plan was approved. A committee was appointed to put it into execution, and Pelle was on the committee.

At one stroke the National Federation made a single army of the many divisions, and was effective merely by the attractive virtue of its ma.s.s. It became a heavy and fatiguing task to organize the swarms that came streaming in, as water rushes to the sea, by virtue of a natural law. It needed the talent of a great general to marshal them for a conclusive battle and to lead them into the line of fire.

Pelle was naturally placed in the front ranks of the organization; his work was properly that of the pioneer and agitator; no one possessed the ear of the crowd as he did. He had received regular employment from one of the larger employers, which amounted to a recognition of the organization, and the increased rate of wages meant that he earned a moderate income. He did not object to the fact that the work had to be done away from home. Life at home had lost its radiance. Ellen was loving enough, but she had always some purpose in view--and he would not allow himself to be tied!

When he went home--and as a rule he managed to include a meal--it was only to make himself ready and to rush out again--to general or committee meetings. Father La.s.se was there as a rule in the evenings, and he gazed longingly after Pelle when the latter left his wife and child; he did not understand it, but he did not venture to say anything--he felt a great respect for the lad's undertakings. Ellen and the old man had discovered one another; they were like a pair of horses in harness; there was a great consolation in that.

Pelle went forward in a sort of intoxication of power, produced by the sense of the multiplying hosts. He was like an embodiment of those hosts, and he heard their step echoing in his own; it was natural that the situation should a.s.sume large dimensions. He was a product of an ancient culture, but a culture that had always dwelt in the shadow, and was based on stern and narrow tenets, each of which summed up a lifetime of bitter experience. The need of light and suns.h.i.+ne, continually suppressed, had been acc.u.mulating, through illimitable years, until it had resulted in a monstrous tension. Now it had exploded, and was mounting dizzily upward. His mind was reeling in the heights, in a blinding cloud of light!

But fundamentally he was still the st.u.r.dy realist and stood with his feet on the earth! The generations beneath him had been disciplined by the cold, and had learned to content themselves with bare necessities; a lesson which they handed down to him, simply and directly, with no inheritance of frivolity. In his world, cause and effect were in a direct line; an obtrusive odor did not translate itself into a spectral chattering of the teeth. The result was in a direct line with the cause--but their relation was often that of the match and the bonfire.

Herein lay the strength of his imagination; this was why he could encompa.s.s all things with so simple a preparation.

He was not afraid to consider the fate of the ma.s.ses; when he could not see ahead, his old fatalism came to his help. His words flamed high despite himself and kept the hope alive in many who did not themselves understand the meaning of the whole movement, but saw that its adherents grew ever more numerous, and that in other respects they were just as well off. Where he himself could not see he was like a lens that collects the half-darkness and gives it out again as a beam of light.

Morten he preferred to avoid. Pelle had gradually absorbed all the theories of the labor movement, and they comfortably filled his mind.

And how could one accomplish more than by remaining in harmony with the whole? Morten had an unfruitful tendency to undermine the certainty of one's mind; he always brought forth his words from his inner consciousness, from places where no one else had ever been, and he delivered them as though they had been G.o.d's voice in the Bible, which always made people pause in their designs. Pelle respected his peculiar nature, which never marched with the crowd, and avoided him.

But his thoughts often returned to him. Morten had first thrown a light upon chaos--upon the knowledge of Pelle's world, the poor man's world; and when he was confronted by any decisive question he involuntarily asked himself how Morten would have dealt with it.

At times they met at meetings called together by the workers themselves, and at which they both collaborated. Morten had no respect for the existing laws and little for the new. He did not play a very zealous part in the work of party organization, and was rather held at arm's length by the leaders. But his relations with the man in the street were of the closest. He worked independently; there was scarcely his match in individual cases of need or injustice; and he was always laboring to make people think for themselves.

And they loved him. They looked up to Pelle and the rest, and made way for them with s.h.i.+ning eyes; but they smilingly put themselves in Morten's way. They wanted to press his hand--he could scarcely make his way to the speaker's platform. His pale face filled them with joy--women and children hung on to him. When he pa.s.sed through the streets of the poor quarters in his simple clothes, the women smiled at him. "That's him, the master-journeyman, who is so good and so book-learned," they would say. "And now he has sold all his books in order to help a poor child!" And they gave their own children a little push, and the children went up to him and held out their hands and followed him right to the end of the street.

XXII

When Pelle went now and again to the "Ark," to see his brothers and sister, the news of his visit spread quickly through the building.

"Pelle is here!" sounded from gallery to gallery, and they hurried up the stairs in order to nod to him and to seek to entice him to swallow a cup of coffee. Old Madam Frandsen had moved; she disappeared when Ferdinand came out of prison--no one knew whither. Otherwise there were no changes. A few factory women left by night on account of their rent, and others had taken their places. And from time to time some one completed his term, and was carried out of the dark corridors and borne away on the dead-cart--as always. But in the "Ark" there was no change to be observed.

It happened one day that he went over to call on Widow Johnsen. She looked very melancholy sitting there as she turned her old soldiers'

trousers and attended to Hanne's child, which promised to be a fine girl. She had aged; she was always sitting at home and scolding the child; when Pelle visited her he brought a breath of fresh air into her joyless existence. Then she recalled the excursion to the forest, and the cozy evenings under the hanging lantern, and sighed. Hanne never looked at Pelle. When she came running home from the factory, she had no eyes for anything but her little girl, who threw herself upon her mother and immediately wanted to play. For the remainder of the day the child was close under her eyes, and Hanne had to hold her hand as she moved about, and play with her and the doll.

"Far up the mountain did I climb,"

sang Hanne, and the child sang with her--she could sing already! Hanne's clear, quiet eyes rested on the child, and her expression was as joyful as though fortune had really come to her. She was like a young widow who has lived her share of life, and in the "Ark" every one addressed her as Widow Hanne. This was a mark of respect paid to her character; they threw a widow's veil over her fate because she bore it so finely. She had expected so much, and now she centered everything in her child, as though the Stranger could have brought her no more valuable present.

Peter's misfortune had struck the little home a serious blow. They had always only just kept their heads above water; and now he earned less than ever with his crippled hand. Karl wanted to get on in the world, and was attending confirmation cla.s.ses, which cost money and clothes.

They had made up for Peter's loss of earning power by giving up Father La.s.se's room and moving his bed into their own room. But all three were growing, and needed food and clothing.