“I could easily get up and do the work of the house, so that you didn’t need to have a woman,” she whispered, gazing at him passionately with her big eyes. “I’m well enough now.”
“My dear child, that’s not what I mean at all! It’s for your sake. Don’t you understand that?” said Morten earnestly, bending over her.
Johanna’s gaze wandered round hopelessly, as if she had given up all thought of being understood any more.
“I don’t think we’ll move her against her will,” said Morten, as he went down with Pelle. “She is so capricious in her moods. I think, too, I should miss her, for she’s a good little soul. When she’s up she goes creeping about and is often quite touching in her desire to make me comfortable. And suddenly recollections of her former life awaken in her and darken her mind; she’s still very mistrustful and afraid of being burdensome. But she needs the companionship of women, some one to whom she can talk confidentially. She has too much on her mind for a child.”
“Couldn’t you both move out to us? You can have the two upstairs rooms.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” exclaimed Morten. “May I have two or three days to think it over? And my love to Ellen and the children!”
XIII
When the workshop closed, Pelle often went on working for an hour or two in the shop, getting the accounts straight and arranging the work for the following day in the intervals of attending to customers. A little before six he closed the shop, mounted his bicycle and hastened home with longing for the nest in his heart.
Every one else seemed to feel as he did. There was a peculiar homeward current in the traffic of the streets. Cyclists overtook him in whole flocks, and raced in shoals in front of the trams, which looked as if they squirted them away from the lines as they worked their way along with incessant, deafening ringing, bounding up and down under the weight of the overfilled platforms.
Crowds of men and women were on their way out, and met other crowds whose homes were in the opposite quarter. On the outskirts of the town the factory whistles were crowing like a choir of giant cocks, a single one beginning, the others all joining in. Sooty workmen poured out of the gates, with beer-bottles sticking out of coat-pockets and dinner handkerchiefs dangling from a finger. Women who had been at work or out making purchases, stood with their baskets on their arms, waiting for their husbands at the corner of the street. Little children tripping along hand in hand suddenly caught sight of a man far off in the crowd, and set off at a run to throw themselves at his legs.