“God knows no one wants to touch him!” they retorted. For a while they stood silently gazing at him, as though weighing him in their minds; then one after another spat at him, and they went their way. The fellow went silently into a doorway and stood there wiping the spittle from his face with his sleeve. Pelle followed him in order to say a kind word to him and lead him back into the organization. The lad pulled himself up hastily as Pelle approached.
“Are you coming to spit at me?” he said contemptuously. “You forgot it before—why didn’t you do it then?”
“I don’t spit at people,” said Pelle, “but your comrades are right to despise you. You have left them in the lurch. Come with me, and I’ll enter you in the organization again, and no one shall molest you.”
“I am to go about as a culprit and be taunted—no, thanks!”
“Do you prefer to injure your own comrades?”
“I ask for permission to look after my old mother. The rest of you can go to the devil. My mother isn’t going to hang about courtyards singing, and picking over the dustbins, while her son plays the great man! I leave that to certain other people!”
Pelle turned crimson. He knew this allusion was meant for Father Lasse; the desperate condition of the old man was lurking somewhere in his mind like an ingrowing grief, and now it came to the surface. “Dare you repeat what you said?” he growled, pressing close up to the other.
“And if I were married I shouldn’t let my wife earn my daily bread for me—I should leave that to the pimps!”
Oho! That was like the tattlers, to blacken a man from behind! Evidently they were spreading all sorts of lying rumors about him, while he had placed all that he possessed at their disposal. Now Pelle was furious; the leader could go to hell! He gave the fellow a few sound boxes on the ear, and asked him which he would rather do—hold his mouth or take some more?
Morten appeared in the doorway—this had happened in the doorway of the house in which he worked. “This won’t do!” he whispered, and he drew Pelle away with him. Pelle could make no reply; he threw himself on Morten’s bed. His eyes were still blazing with anger at the insult, and he needed air.