Pelle sat lost in thought, and the old man lay and looked at him in suspense. “Well, are you asleep?” he asked at last impatiently.
“It’s a fine idea,” said Pelle, raising his head. “I think we should get the organizations on our side; they’re already beginning to be interested in cooperation. When the committee sits, I’ll lay your plan before them. I’m not so sure of the community, however, Brun! They have occasional use for the great hunger-reserve, so they’ll go on just keeping life in it; if they hadn’t, it would soon be allowed to die of hunger. I don’t think they’ll agree to have it employed, so to speak, against themselves.”
“You’re an incorrigible pessimist!” said Brun a little irritably.
“Yes, as regards the old state of things,” answered Pelle, with a smile.
Thus they would discuss the possibilities for the fixture in connection with the events of the day when Pelle sat beside the old man in the evening, both of them engrossed in the subject. Sometimes the old man felt that he ran off the lines. “It’s the blood,” he said despondently. “I’m not, after all, quite one of you. It’s so long since one of my family worked with his hands that I’ve forgotten it.”
During this time he often touched upon his past, and every evening had something to tell about himself. It was as though he were determined to find a law that would place him by Pelle’s side.
Brun belonged to an old family that could be traced back several hundred years to the captain of a ship, who traded with the Tranquebar coast. The founder of the family, who was also a whaler and a pirate, lived in a house on one of the Kristianshavn canals. When his ship was at home, she lay to at the wharf just outside his street-door. The Bruns’ house descended from father to son, and was gradually enlarged until it became quite a mansion. In the course of four generations it had become one of the largest trading-houses of the capital. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the members of the family had gone over into the world of stockbrokers and bankers, and thence the changes went still further. Brun’s father, the well-known Kornelius Brun, stuck to the old business, his brothers making over their share to him and entering the diplomatic service, one of them receiving a high Court appointment.