“I suppose I have,” Pelle answered gloomily. “I’ve had good reason to, anyhow. And how have you been? Are you married?”
“No, I’m as solitary as ever. The one I want still doesn’t care about me, and the others I don’t want. I thought you’d thrown me over too, but you’ve come after all.”
“I had too much prosperity, and that makes you self-important.”
“Oh, well, it does. But in prison—why did you send my letters back? It was almost too hard.”
Pelle looked up in astonishment. “It would never have occurred to the prisoner that he could hurt anybody, so you do me an injustice there,” he said. “It was myself I wanted to punish!”
“You’ve been ill then, Pelle!”
“Yes, ill! You should only know what one gets like when they stifle your right to be a human being and shut you in between four bare walls. At one time I hated blindly the whole world; my brain reeled with trying to find out a really crushing revenge, and when I couldn’t hit others I helped to carry out the punishment upon myself. There was always a satisfaction in feeling that the more I suffered, the greater devils did it make the others appear. And I really did get a hit at them; they hated with all their hearts having to give me a transfer.”
“Wasn’t there any one there who could speak a comforting word—the chaplain, the teachers?”
Pelle smiled a bitter smile. “Oh, yes, the lash! The jailer couldn’t keep me under discipline; I was what they call a difficult prisoner. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I had quite lost my balance. You might just as well expect a man to walk steadily when everything is whirling round him. They saw, I suppose, that I couldn’t come right by myself, so one day they tied me to a post, pulled my shirt up over my head and gave me a thrashing. It sounds strange, but that did it; the manner of procedure was so brutal that everything in me was struck dumb. When such a thing as that could happen, there was nothing more to protest against. They put a wet sheet round me and I was lifted onto my pallet, so that was all right. For a week I had to lie on my face and couldn’t move for the pain; the slightest movement made me growl like an animal. The strokes had gone right through me and could be counted on my chest; and there I lay like a lump of lead, struck down to the earth in open- mouthed astonishment. ‘This is what they do to human beings!’ I groaned inwardly; ‘this is what they do to human beings!’ I could no longer comprehend anything.”
Pelle’s face had become ashen gray; all the blood had left it, and the bones stood out sharply as in a dead face. He gulped two or three times to obtain control over his voice.