“Kotrina!”
“Yes, she’s been selling papers, too. She does best, because she’s a girl. Only the cold is so bad—it’s terrible coming home at night, Jurgis. Sometimes they can’t come home at all—I’m going to try to find them tonight and sleep where they do, it’s so late and it’s such a long ways home. I’ve had to walk, and I didn’t know where it was—I don’t know how to get back, either. Only mother said I must come, because you would want to know, and maybe somebody would help your family when they had put you in jail so you couldn’t work. And I walked all day to get here—and I only had a piece of bread for breakfast, Jurgis. Mother hasn’t any work either, because the sausage department is shut down; and she goes and begs at houses with a basket, and people give her food. Only she didn’t get much yesterday; it was too cold for her fingers, and today she was crying—”
So little Stanislovas went on, sobbing as he talked; and Jurgis stood, gripping the table tightly, saying not a word, but feeling that his head would burst; it was like having weights piled upon him, one after another, crushing the life out of him. He struggled and fought within himself—as if in some terrible nightmare, in which a man suffers an agony, and cannot lift his hand, nor cry out, but feels that he is going mad, that his brain is on fire—
Just when it seemed to him that another turn of the screw would kill him, little Stanislovas stopped. “You cannot help us?” he said weakly.
Jurgis shook his head.
“They won’t give you anything here?”
He shook it again.
“When are you coming out?”
“Three weeks yet,” Jurgis answered.
And the boy gazed around him uncertainly. “Then I might as well go,” he said.