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Updated: June 23, 2025
It had been Pelle's plan to put a good face on a crooked job, and cautiously to feel his way; but now he grew angry. "You had better think what you're doing before you call honorable men idiots," he retorted violently. "Do you know what you are? Swine! You lie there eating your fill and pouring the drink down your throats and living easy on the need of your comrades!
So Pelle thought better of it and began to undress; and at last Lasse got off. When Lasse reached Madam Olsen's house, it was shut up and in darkness. He recognized it easily from Pelle's descriptions, and walked round it two or three times to see how the walls stood.
"Yes, Pelle," said Lasse proudly, "there's nothing he can't do; devil knows where he gets it from, for he doesn't get it from his father." And they all laughed. Carpenter Stolpe's good lady sat considering the drawing with amazement, quite bewildered, looking first at Pelle's fingers and then at the drawing again.
"Here, Hans!" she said, "this is Pelle, whose doing it is that we two belong to each other!" Then she laughed aloud for sheer delight, and Hans, smiling, held out his hand to Pelle. "I ought to thank you for it," he said. "Yes, it was that dance," she said. "If my dancing-shoes hadn't been mended Hans would have run off with somebody else!" She seized Pelle's arm.
There was everywhere a feeling of breaking up, which corresponded well with Pelle's own condition; the uncertainty of life enveloped everything in a peculiarly tense atmosphere.
For a long time the wind of the passage of the great bird hung about the little workshop with its atmosphere of respectable citizenship. And this fresh wind in one's ears was the spirit of handicraft itself which hovered above their heads borne upon its two mighty pinions genius and debauchery. But one thing remained in Pelle's mind as a meaningless fragment the word "strike." What did it mean?
The big farm, the country life, the stone-quarry and the sea they all made up a fairy-story for the two children of the pavement; the boy Pelle's battle with the great oxen for the supremacy, his wonderful capture of the twenty-five-ore piece each incident was more exciting than the one before it. Most exciting of all was the story of the giant Eric, who became an idiot from a blow.
"Now she's smeared soot over your face!" She wetted her apron with her tongue and began to rub the soot away, Hanne standing behind him and holding his head in both hands so that he should not move. "Thank your stars that Pelle's a good- natured fellow," said the old woman, as she rubbed. "Or else he'd take it in bad part!" Pelle himself laughed shamefacedly.
But for Pelle and the others he signified more than that; they learned more in three days than in the whole course of their apprenticeship. And they saw brilliant prospects for the craft; it was no hole-and-corner business after all; with Garibaldi, they traveled the whole wonderful world. Pelle's blood burned with the desire to wander; he knew now what he wanted.
Then they would all understand the Cause and would join it then and there! There was a whirl of new living thoughts in Pelle's head. He had not hitherto known that that in which he was participating was so great a thing. He felt that he was serving the Highest.
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