Pelle would like to draw him into the business. “There’s so much to write and lecture about,” he says, “and you could do all that so much better than I.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” says Morten. “Your work’s growing in me too. I’m always thinking about it and have thought of giving a hand too, but I can’t. If I ever contribute anything to your great work, it’ll be in some other way.”
“You’re doing nothing with your book about the sun either,” says Pelle anxiously.
“No, because whenever I set to work on it, it mixes up so strangely with your work, and I can’t keep the ideas apart. At present I feel like a mole, digging blindly in the black earth under the mighty tree of life. I dig and search, and am continually coming across the thick roots of the huge thing above the surface. I can’t see them, but I can hear sounds from above there, and it hurts me not to be able to follow them into their strong connection up in the light.”
One Sunday morning at the end of May they were sitting out in the garden. The cradle had been moved out into the sun, and Pelle and Ellen were sitting one on either side, talking over domestic matters. Ellen had so much to tell him when she had him to herself. The child lay staring up into the sky with its dark eyes that were the image of Ellen’s. He was brown and chubby; anyone could see that he had been conceived in sunshine and love.
Lasse Frederik was sitting by the hedge painting a picture that Pelle was not to see until it was finished. He went to the drawing-school now, and was clever. He had a good eye for figures, and poor people especially he hit off in any position. He had a light hand, and in two or three lines could give what his father had had to work at carefully. “You cheat!” Pelle often said, half resentfully. “It won’t bear looking closely at.” He had to admit, however, that it was a good likeness.
“Well, can’t I see the picture soon?” he called across. He was very curious.
“Yes, it’s finished now,” said Lasse Frederik, coming up with it.
The picture represented a street in which stood a solitary milk-cart, and behind the cart lay a boy with bleeding head. “He fell asleep because he had to get up so early,” Lasse Frederik explained; “and then when the cart started he tumbled backward.” The morning emptiness of the street was well done, but the blood was too brilliantly red.
“It’s very unpleasant,” said Ellen, with a shudder. “But it’s true.”
Morten came home from town with a big letter which he handed to Pelle, saying: “Here’s news for you from Brun.” Pelle went into the house to read it undisturbed, and a little while after came out again.
“Yes, important news this time,” he said with some emotion. “Would you like to hear it?” he asked, sitting down.
“Dear Pelle:
“I am sitting up in bed to write to you. I am poorly, and have been for some days; but I hope it is nothing serious. We all have to die some day, but I should like to start on the great voyage round the world from your home. I long to see ‘Daybreak’ and all of you, and I feel very lonely. If the business could do without you for a few days, I should be so glad if you would come down here. Then we could go home together, for I should not like to venture on the journey by myself.
“The sun is just going down, and sends its last rays in to me. It has been gray and gloomy all day, but now the sun has broken through the clouds, and kisses the earth and me, poor old man, too, in farewell. It makes me want to say something to you, Pelle, for my day was like this before I knew you—endlessly long and gray! When you are the last member of a dying family, you have to bear the gray existence of the others too.
“I have often thought how wonderful the hidden force of life is. Intercourse with you has been like a lever to me, although I knew well that I should not accomplish anything more, and had no one to come after me. I feel, nevertheless, through you, in alliance with the future. You are in the ascendant and must look upon me as something that is vanishing. But look how life makes us all live by using us each in his own way. Be strong in your faith in the future; with you lies the development. I wish with all my heart that I were an awakening proletary and stood in the dawn of day; but I am nevertheless glad because my eyes will be closed by the new in you.
“I have imagined that life was tiresome and dull and far too well known. I had it arranged in my catalogues. And look how it renews itself! In my old age I have experienced its eternal youth. Formerly I had never cared about the country; in my mind it was a place where you waded either in dust or mud. The black earth appeared to me horrible rather than anything else; it was only associated in my mind with the churchyard. That shows how far I was from nature. The country was something that farmers moved about in—those big, voracious creatures, who almost seemed like a kind of animal trying to imitate man. Rational beings could not possibly live out there. That was the view in my circle, and I had myself a touch of the same complaint, although my university training of course paraphrased and veiled it all to some extent. All this
