“With us the cripples are taught to work so that they can earn their living in a respectable way.”
“Hardly enough anyhow to buy a villa,” said Jenny, laughing.
“Can you imagine anything more demoralizing than to make one’s living by exposing one’s deformity?”
“It is always demoralizing to know that one is a cripple in one way or another.”
“But to live by invoking people’s compassion.”
“A cripple knows that he will be pitied in any case, and has to accept help from men—or God.”
Jenny mounted some steps and lifted the corner of a curtain that looked like a thin mattress. They entered a small church. Candles were burning on the altar. The light was reflected manifold on the halo of the tabernacle, fluttered on candlesticks and brass ornaments and made the paper roses in the altar vases look red and yellow. A priest stood with his back turned to them, reading silently from a book; a pair of acolytes moved to and fro, bowed, made the sign of the cross and various other movements which seemed meaningless to Helge.
The little church was dark; in the two side chapels tiny nightlight flames flickered, hanging from brass chains in front of images blacker than the darkness itself.
Jenny Winge knelt on a rush stood. Her folded hands rested on the prie-Dieu, and her head was raised, showing her profile clearly outlined against the soft candlelight, which trembled in the fair waves of her hair and stole down the delicate bend of her bare neck.
Heggen and Ahlin took two chairs quietly from the pile against one of the pillars.