"If food will set you right, I can help you; fortunately I have some money."
"Of course it will set me right," whispered Ygberg faintly.
But it was not so. When they were sitting in the dining-room and food was served to them, Ygberg grew worse, and Falk had to take him to his room, which fortunately was not very far off.
The house was an old, one-story house built of wood; it had climbed on to a rock and looked as if it suffered from hip-disease. It was spotted like a leper; a long time ago it was going to be painted, but when the old paint had been burned off, nothing more was done to it; it looked in every respect miserable, and it was hard to believe the legend of the sign of the Fire Insurance Office, rusting on the wall, namely, that a phœnix should rise from the ashes.
At the base of the house grew dandelions, nettles, and roadweed, the faithful companions of poverty; sparrows were bathing in the scorching sand and scattering it about; pale-faced children with big stomachs, looking as if they were being brought up on 90 per cent. of water, were making dandelion chains and trying to embitter their sad lives by annoying and insulting each other.
Falk and Ygberg climbed a rotten, creaking staircase and came to a large room. It was divided into three parts by chalk lines. The first and second divisions served a joiner and a cobbler as workshops; the third was exclusively devoted to the more intimate pursuits of family life.
Whenever the children screamed, which happened once in every quarter of an hour, the joiner flew into a rage and burst out scolding and swearing; the cobbler remonstrated with quotations from the Bible. The joiner's nerves were so shattered by these constant screams, the unceasing punishments and scoldings, that five minutes after partaking of the snuff of reconciliation offered by the cobbler, he flew into a fresh temper in spite of his firm resolve to be patient. Consequently he was nearly all day long in a red-hot fury. But the worst passages were when he asked the woman, "why these infernal females need bring so many children into the world;" then the woman in question came on the tapis and his antagonist gave him as good as he brought.
Falk and Ygberg had to pass this room to gain the latter's garret, and although both of them went on tiptoe, they wakened two of the children; immediately the mother began humming a lullaby, thereby interrupting a discussion between cobbler and joiner; naturally the latter nearly had a fit.
"Hold your tongue, woman!"
"Hold your tongue yourself! Can't you let the children sleep?"