Hunger Part 23

"Sh--sh. Hold your jaw! I just like to hear the way you swear, too, as if you had been in a brothel for years. Now, in with you."

"No, I won't."

"Yes, you will."

"No, I won't."

I stand up in the window and see that the mother's temper is rising; this disagreeable scene excites me frightfully. I can't endure it any longer. I call down to the boy to come up to me for a minute; I call twice, just to distract them--to change the scene. The last time I call very loudly, and the mother turns round flurriedly and looks up at me.

She regains her self-possession at once, looks insolently at me, nay, downright maliciously, and enters the house with a chiding remark to her offspring. She talks loudly, so that I may hear it, and says to him, "Fie, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to let people see how naughty you are."

Of all this that I stood there and observed not one thing, not even one little accessory detail, was lost on me; my attention was acutely keen; I absorbed carefully every little thing as I stood and thought out my own thought, about each thing according as it occurred. So it was impossible that there could be anything the matter with my brain. How could there, in this case, be anything the matter with it?

Listen; do you know what, said I all at once to myself, that you have been worrying yourself long enough about your brain, giving yourself no end of worry in this matter? Now, there must be an end to this tomfoolery. Is it a sign of insanity to notice and apprehend everything as accurately as you do? You make me almost laugh at you, I reply. To my mind it is not without its humorous side, if I am any judge of such a case. Why, it happens to every man that he once in a way sticks fast, and that, too, just with the simplest question. It is of no significance, it is often a pure accident. As I have remarked before, I am on the point of having a good laugh at your expense. As far as that huckster account is concerned, that paltry five-sixteenths of beggar-man's cheese, I can happily dub it so. Ha, ha!--a cheese with cloves and pepper in it; upon my word, a cheese in which, to put the matter plainly, one could breed maggots. As far as that ridiculous cheese is concerned, it might happen to the cleverest fellow in the world to be puzzled over it! Why, the smell of the cheese was enough to finish a man; ... and I made the greatest fun of this and all other Dutch cheeses.... No; set me to reckon up something really eatable, said I--set me, if you like, at five-sixteenths of good dairy b.u.t.ter.

That is another matter.

I laughed feverishly at my own whim, and found it peculiarly diverting.

There was positively no longer anything the matter with me. I was in good form--was, so to say, still in the best of form; I had a level head, nothing was wanting there, G.o.d be praised and thanked! My mirth rose in measure as I paced the floor and communed with myself. I laughed aloud, and felt amazingly glad. Besides, it really seemed, too, as if I only needed this little happy hour, this moment of airy rapture, without a care on any side, to get my head into working order once more.

I seated myself at the table, and set to work at my allegory; it progressed swimmingly, better than it had done for a long time; not very fast, 'tis true, but it seemed to me that what I did was altogether first-rate. I worked, too, for the s.p.a.ce of an hour without getting tired.

I am sitting working at a most crucial point in this Allegory of a Conflagration in a Bookshop. It appears to me so momentous a point, that all the rest I have written counted as nothing in comparison. I was, namely, just about to weave in, in a downright profound way, this thought. It was not books that were burning, it was brains, human brains; and I intended to make a perfect Bartholomew's night of these burning brains.

Suddenly my door was flung open with a jerk and in much haste; my landlady came sailing in. She came straight over to the middle of the room, she did not even pause on the threshold.

I gave a little hoa.r.s.e cry; it was just as if I had received a blow.

"What?" said she, "I thought you said something. We have got a traveller, and we must have this room for him. You will have to sleep downstairs with us tonight. Yes; you can have a bed to yourself there too." And before she got my answer, she began, without further ceremony, to bundle my papers together on the table, and put the whole of them into a state of dire confusion.

My happy mood was blown to the winds; I stood up at once, in anger and despair. I let her tidy the table, and said nothing, never uttered a syllable. She thrust all the papers into my hand.

There was nothing else for me to do. I was forced to leave the room.

And so this precious moment was spoilt also. I met the new traveller already on the stairs; a young man with great blue anchors tattooed on the backs of his hands. A quay porter followed him, bearing a sea-chest on his shoulders. He was evidently a sailor, a casual traveller for the night; he would therefore not occupy my room for any lengthened period.

Perhaps, too, I might be lucky tomorrow when the man had left, and have one of my moments again; I only needed an inspiration for five minutes, and my essay on the conflagration would be completed. Well, I should have to submit to fate.

I had not been inside the family rooms before, this one common room in which they all lived, both day and night--the husband, wife, wife's father, and four children. The servant lived in the kitchen, where she also slept at night. I approached the door with much repugnance, and knocked. No one answered, yet I heard voices inside.

The husband did not speak as I stepped in, did not acknowledge my nod even, merely glanced at me carelessly, as if I were no concern of his.

Besides, he was sitting playing cards with a person I had seen down on the quays, with the by-name of "Pane o' gla.s.s." An infant lay and prattled to itself over in the bed, and an old man, the landlady's father, sat doubled together on a settle-bed, and bent his head down Over his hands as if his chest or stomach pained him. His hair was almost white, and he looked in his crouching position like a poke-necked reptile that sat c.o.c.king its ears at something.

"I come, worse luck, to beg for house-room down here tonight," I said to the man.

"Did my wife say so?" he inquired.

"Yes; a new lodger came to my room."

To this the man made no reply, but proceeded to finger the cards. There this man sat, day after day, and played cards with anybody who happened to come in--played for nothing, only just to kill time, and have something in hand. He never did anything else, only moved just as much as his lazy limbs felt inclined, whilst his wife bustled up and down stairs, was occupied on all sides, and took care to draw customers to the house. She had put herself in connection with quay-porters and dock-men, to whom she paid a certain sum for every new lodger they brought her, and she often gave them, in addition, a shelter for the night. This time it was "Pane o' gla.s.s" that had just brought along the new lodger.

A couple of the children came in--two little girls, with thin, freckled, gutter-snipe faces; their clothes were positively wretched. A while after the landlady herself entered. I asked her where she intended to put me up for the night, and she replied that I could lie in here together with the others, or out in the ante-room on the sofa, as I thought fit. Whilst she answered me she fussed about the room and busied herself with different things that she set in order, and she never once looked at me.

My spirits were crushed by her reply.

I stood down near the door, and made myself small, tried to make it appear as if I were quite content all the same to change my room for another for one night's sake. I put on a friendly face on purpose not to irritate her and perhaps be hustled right out of the house.

"Ah, yes," I said, "there is sure to be some way I . . .," and then held my tongue.

She still bustled about the room.

"For that matter, I may as well just tell you that I can't afford to give people credit for their board and lodging," said she, "and I told you that before, too."

"Yes; but, my dear woman, it is only for these few days, until I get my article finished," I answered, "and I will willingly give you an extra five shillings--willingly."

But she had evidently no faith in my article, I could see that; and I could not afford to be proud, and leave the house, just for a slight mortification; I knew what awaited me if I went out.

A few days pa.s.sed over.

I still a.s.sociated with the family below, for it was too cold in the ante-room where there was no stove. I slept, too, at night on the floor of the room.

The strange sailor continued to lodge in my room, and did not seem like moving very quickly. At noon, too, my landlady came in and related how he had paid her a month in advance, and besides, he was going to take his first-mate's examination before leaving, that was why he was staying in town. I stood and listened to this, and understood that my room was lost to me for ever.

I went out to the ante-room, and sat down. If I were lucky enough to get anything written, it would have perforce to be here where it was quiet. It was no longer the allegory that occupied me; I had got a new idea, a perfectly splendid plot; I would compose a one-act drama--"The Sign of the Cross." Subject taken from the Middle Ages. I had especially thought out everything in connection with the princ.i.p.al characters: a magnificently fanatical harlot who had sinned in the temple, not from weakness or desire, but for hate against heaven; sinner right at the foot of the altar, with the altar-cloth under her head, just out of delicious contempt for heaven.

I grew more and more obsessed by this creation as the hours went on.

She stood at last, palpably, vividly embodied before my eyes, and was exactly as I wished her to appear. Her body was to be deformed and repulsive, tall, very lean, and rather dark; and when she walked, her long limbs should gleam through her draperies at every stride she took.

She was also to have large outstanding ears. Curtly, she was nothing for the eye to dwell upon, barely endurable to look at. What interested me in her was her wonderful shamelessness, the desperately full measure of calculated sin which she had committed. She really occupied me too much, my brain was absolutely inflated by this singular monstrosity of a creature, and I worked for two hours, without a pause, at my drama.

When I had finished half-a score of pages, perhaps twelve, often with much effort, at times with long intervals, in which I wrote in vain and had to tear the page in two, I had become tired, quite stiff with cold and fatigue, and I arose and went out into the street. For the last half-hour, too, I had been disturbed by the crying of the children inside the family room, so that I could not, in any case, have written any more just then. So I took a long time up over Drammensveien, and stayed away till the evening, pondering incessantly, as I walked along, as to how I would continue my drama. Before I came home in the evening of this day, the following happened:

I stood outside a shoemaker's shop far down in Carl Johann Street, almost at the railway square. G.o.d knows why I stood just outside this shoemaker's shop. I looked into the window as I stood there, but did not, by the way, remember that I needed shoes then; my thoughts were far away in other parts of the world. A swarm of people talking together pa.s.sed behind my back, and I heard nothing of what was said.

Then a voice greeted me loudly:

"Good-evening."

It was "Missy" who bade me good-evening! I answered at random, I looked at him, too, for a while, before I recognized him.

"Well, how are you getting along?" he inquired.

"Oh, always well ... as usual."

"By the way, tell me," said he, "are you, then, still with Christie?"

"Christie?"

"I thought you once said you were book-keeper at Christie's?"

"Ah, yes. No; that is done with. It was impossible to get along with that fellow; that came to an end very quickly of its own accord."

"Why so?"