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Updated: May 2, 2025
It was as though Father Lasse's untiring care still hovered protectingly about him. But he must move on. The arrest weighed upon his mind and made him restless. He wandered through the city, keeping continually to the narrow side-streets, where the darkness concealed him. This was the field of battle how restful it was now! Thank God, it was not they who condemned him!
The hardest blow of all was when he discovered that he was of no importance to the girls, had no place at all in their thoughts of men. In Lasse's world there was no word that carried such weight as the word "man"; and in the end it was the girls who decided whether you were one or not. Lasse was not one; he was not dangerous!
Lasse went on talking to himself as he walked, calculating the boy's future with large, round figures, that yielded a little for him too; for, however great his future might be, it would surely come in time to allow of Lasse's sharing and enjoying it in his very old age.
Or at all events, as soon as they had got their best clothes back from the pawn-shop! They must have a bit of an airing before the winter came, and they had to go back into pawn! They were so overjoyed at the mere thought of peace that they quite forgot, for the moment, to demand anything new! Pelle had taken part in the concluding negotiations; after Father Lasse's burial he was himself again.
It was more difficult to renounce the old fairy-tales, for poverty itself had sung them into his heart, and they spoke to him with Father Lasse's quivering voice. "A rich child often lies in a poor mother's lap," his father used to say, when he prophesied concerning his son's future, and the saying sank deep into the boy's mind, like the refrain of a song.
"Well, perhaps I'll go down to the harbor and be doing nothing, and a little girl'll fall into the water and I shall save her. But the little girl will be a gentleman's daughter, and so " Pelle left the rest to Lasse's imagination. "Then you'd have to learn to swim first," said Lasse gravely. "Or you'd only be drowned." Screams were heard from the men's bedroom. It was Long Ole.
He went about well scrubbed and combed, and looked at everything with wide-open eyes, and with his hands in his pockets. The blue clothes which he had gone to his confirmation- classes in, had been washed and newly mangled, and he still looked very well in them; and the tabs of the old leather boots, which were a relic of Lasse's prosperous days, stuck out almost as much as his ears.
In the backyard, in a shed, which looked like the remains of an old farm cottage, was Lasse's home. It looked as though it had once been used as a fuel-shed; the floor was of beaten earth and the roof consisted of loose boards. Under the roof cords were stretched, on which rags, paper, and other articles from the dustbins were hung to dry.
He must have had quite a clear idea of what had happened the day before, for suddenly he touched Pelle's arm. "You're like Noah's good son, that covered up his father's shame!" he said; "but Lasse's a beast. It's been a hard blow on me, as you may well believe! But I know quite well that it doesn't mend matters to drink one's self silly.
As he trudged along, his mental excuses became audible. "Confound it!" he exclaimed, as he jerked the sack higher up his back. "It doesn't do to take the first thing that comes. Lasse's responsible for two, and he knows what he wants so there! It isn't the first time he's been abroad! And the best always comes last, you know, laddie." Pelle was not paying much attention.
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