Pelle the Conqueror, vol 3 | Page 3

the "Ark" or disappeared into it. Most of them were women, weirdly
clad, unwholesomely pale, but with a layer of grime as though the
darkness had worked into their skins, with drowsy steps and fanatical,
glittering eyes.
Little old men, who commonly lay in their dark corners waiting for
death, came hobbling out on the galleries, lifted their noses toward the
blazing speck of sky overhead, and sneezed three times. "That's the
sun!" they told one another, delighted. "Artishu! One don't catch cold
so easy in winter!"

II
High up, out of Pipman's garret, a young man stepped out onto the
platform. He stood there a moment turning his smiling face toward the
bright heavens overhead. Then he lowered his head and ran down the

break-neck stairs, without holding on by the rope. Under his arm he
carried something wrapped in a blue cloth.
"Just look at the clown! Laughing right into the face of the sun as
though there was no such thing as blindness!" said the women,
thrusting their heads out of window. "But then, of course, he's from the
country. And now he's going to deliver his work. Lord, how long is he
going to squat up there and earn bread for that sweater? The red'll soon
go from his cheeks if he stops there much longer!" And they looked
after him anxiously.
The children down in the courtyard raised their heads when they heard
his steps above them.
"Have you got some nice leather for us to-day, Pelle?" they cried,
clutching at his legs.
He brought out of his pockets some little bits of patent-leather and red
imitation morocco.
"That's from the Emperor's new slippers," he said, as he shared the
pieces among the children. Then the youngsters laughed until their
throats began to wheeze.
Pelle was just the same as of old, except that he was more upright and
elastic in his walk, and had grown a little fair moustache. His
protruding ears had withdrawn themselves a little, as though they were
no longer worked so hard. His blue eyes still accepted everything as
good coin, though they now had a faint expression that seemed to say
that all that happened was no longer to their liking. His "lucky curls"
still shone with a golden light.
The narrow streets lay always brooding in a dense, unbearable
atmosphere that never seemed to renew itself. The houses were grimy
and crazy; where a patch of sunlight touched a window there were
stained bed- clothes hung out to dry. Up one of the side streets was an
ambulance wagon, surrounded by women and children who were
waiting excitedly for the bearers to appear with their uneasy burden,
and Pelle joined them; he always had to take part in everything.
It was not quite the shortest way which he took. The capital was quite a
new world to him; nothing was the same as at home; here a hundred
different things would happen in the course of the day, and Pelle was
willing enough to begin all over again; and he still felt his old longing
to take part in it all and to assimilate it all.

In the narrow street leading down to the canal a thirteen-year-old girl
placed herself provocatively in his way. "Mother's ill," she said,
pointing up a dark flight of steps. "If you've got any money, come
along!" He was actually on the point of following her, when he
discovered that the old women who lived in the street were flattening
their noses against their windowpanes. "One has to be on one's guard
here!" he told himself, at least for the hundredth time. The worst of it
was that it was so easy to forget the necessity.
He strolled along the canal-side. The old quay-wall, the apple-barges,
and the granaries with the high row of hatchways overhead and the
creaking pulleys right up in the gables awakened memories of home.
Sometimes, too, there were vessels from home lying here, with cargoes
of fish or pottery, and then he was able to get news. He wrote but
seldom. There was little success to be reported; just now he had to
make his way, and he still owed Sort for his passage-money.
But it would soon come.... Pelle hadn't the least doubt as to the future.
The city was so monstrously large and incalculable; it seemed to have
undertaken the impossible; but there could be no doubt of such an
obvious matter of course as that he should make his way. Here wealth
was simply lying in great heaps, and the poor man too could win it if
only he grasped at it boldly enough. Fortune here was a golden bird,
which could be captured by a little adroitness; the endless chances were
like a fairy tale.