“Have you any money?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Nearly three dollars, Jurgis.”

“Give it to me.”

Kotrina, frightened by his manner, glanced at the others.  “Give it to me!” he commanded again, and she put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a lump of coins tied in a bit of rag.  Jurgis took it without a word, and went out of the door and down the street.

Three doors away was a saloon.  “Whisky,” he said, as he entered, and as the man pushed him some, he tore at the rag with his teeth and pulled out half a dollar.  “How much is the bottle?” he said.  “I want to get drunk.”

Chapter 20

But a big man cannot stay drunk very long on three dollars.  That was Sunday morning, and Monday night Jurgis came home, sober and sick, realizing that he had spent every cent the family owned, and had not bought a single instant’s forgetfulness with it.

Ona was not yet buried; but the police had been notified, and on the morrow they would put the body in a pine coffin and take it to the potter’s field.  Elzbieta was out begging now, a few pennies from each of the neighbors, to get enough to pay for a mass for her; and the children were upstairs starving to death, while he, good-for-nothing rascal, had been spending their money on drink.  So spoke Aniele, scornfully, and when he started toward the fire she added the information that her kitchen was no longer for him to fill with his phosphate stinks.  She had crowded all her boarders into one room on Ona’s account, but now he could go up in the garret where he belonged—­and not there much longer, either, if he did not pay her some rent.

Jurgis went without a word, and, stepping over half a dozen sleeping boarders in the next room, ascended the ladder.  It was dark up above; they could not afford any light; also it was nearly as cold as outdoors.  In a corner, as far away from the corpse as possible, sat Marija, holding little Antanas in her one good arm and trying to soothe him to sleep.  In another corner crouched poor little Juozapas, wailing because he had had nothing to eat all day.  Marija said not a word to Jurgis; he crept in like a whipped cur, and went and sat down by the body.

Perhaps he ought to have meditated upon the hunger of the children, and upon his own baseness; but he thought only of Ona, he gave himself up again to the luxury of grief.  He shed no tears, being ashamed to make a sound; he sat motionless and shuddering with his anguish.  He had never dreamed how much he loved Ona, until now that she was gone; until now that he sat here, knowing that on the morrow they would take her away, and that he would never lay eyes upon her again—­never all the days of his life.  His old love, which had been starved to death, beaten to death, awoke in him again; the floodgates of memory were lifted—­he saw all their life together,