Falk, as usual, could not think of a suitable answer until it was too late; when he thought of one, he was already in the street. A cellar window which happened to stand wide open (and was not covered with advertisements) received biography and portrait into safe keeping.
Then Falk went to the nearest newspaper office, handed in a protest against the Torch of Reconciliation, and resigned himself to starve.
VIII
Poor Mother Country
The clock on the Riddarholms Church struck ten as Falk arrived, a few days later, at the Parliamentary buildings to assist the representative of the Red Cap in reporting the proceedings of the Second Chamber.
He hastened his footsteps, convinced that here, where the pay was good, strict punctuality would be looked upon as a matter of course. He climbed the Committee stairs and was shown to the reporters’ gallery on the left. A feeling of awe overcame him as he walked across the few boards, hung up under the roof like a pigeon house, where the men of “free speech listen to the discussion of the country’s most sacred interests by the country’s most worthy representatives.”
It was a new sensation to Falk; but he was far from being impressed as he looked down from his scaffolding into the empty hall which resembled a Lancastrian school. It was five minutes past ten, but with the exception of himself, not a soul was present. All of a sudden the silence was broken by a scraping noise. A rat! he thought, but almost immediately he discovered, on the opposite gallery, across the huge, empty hall, a short, abject figure sharpening a pencil on the rail. He watched the chips fluttering down and settling on the tables below.
His eyes scanned the empty walls without finding a resting-place, until finally they fell on the old clock, dating from the time of Napoleon I, with its imperial newly lit emblems, symbolical of the old story, and its hands, now pointing to ten minutes past ten, symbolical in the spirit of irony—of something else. At the same moment the doors in the background opened and a man entered. He was old; his shoulders stooped under the burden of public offices; his back had shrunk under the weight of communal commissions; the long continuance in damp offices, committee-rooms and safe deposits had warped his neck; there was a suggestion of the pensioner in his calm footsteps, as he walked up the coconut matting towards the chair. When he had reached the middle of the long passage and had come into line with the imperial clock, he stopped; he seemed accustomed to stopping halfway and looking round and backwards; but now he stopped to compare his watch with the clock; he shook his old, worn out head with a look of discontent: “Fast! Fast!” he murmured. His features expressed a supernatural calm and the assurance that his watch could not be slow. He continued his way with the same deliberate footsteps; he might be walking towards the goal of his life; and it was very much a question whether he had not attained it when he arrived at the venerable chair on the platform. When he was standing close by it he pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose; his eyes roamed over the brilliant audience of chairs and tables, announcing an important event: “Gentlemen, I have blown my nose.” Then he sat down and sank into a presidential calm which might have been sleep, if it had not been waking; and, alone in the large room, as he imagined, alone with his God, he prepared to summon strength for the business of the day, when a loud scraping on the left, high up, underneath the roof, pierced the stillness; he started and turned his head to kill with a three-quarter look the rat which dared to gnaw in his presence. Falk, who had omitted to take into account the resonant capacity of the pigeon house, received the deadly thrust of the murderous glance; but the glance softened as it slid down from the eaves-mouldings, whispering—“Only a reporter; I was afraid it might be a rat.” And deep regret stole over the murderer, contrition at the sin committed by his eye; he buried his face in his hands and—wept? Oh, no! he rubbed off the spot which the appearance of a repulsive object had thrown on his retina.
Presently the doors were flung wide open; the delegates were beginning to arrive, while the hands on the clock crept forward—forward. The president rewarded the good with friendly nods and pressures of the hand, and punished the evildoers by turning away his head; he was bound to be just as the Most High.
The reporter of the Red Cap arrived, an unprepossessing individual, not quite sober and only half awake. In spite of this he seemed to find pleasure in answering truthfully the questions put by the newcomer.
Once more the doors were flung open and in stalked a man with as much self-assurance as if he were in his own home: he was the treasurer of the Inland Revenue Office and actuary of the Board of Payment of Employees’ Salaries; he approached the chair, greeted the president like an old acquaintance and began to rummage in the papers as if they were his own.
“Who’s this?” asked Falk.
“The chief clerk,” answered his friend from the Red Cap.
“What? Do they write here, too, then?”
“Too? You’ll soon see! They keep a story full of clerks; the attics are full of clerks and they’ll soon have clerks in the cellars.”
The room below was now presenting the aspect of an ant-heap. A rap of the hammer and there was silence. The head clerk read the minutes of the last meeting, and they were signed without comment. Then the same man read a petition for
