“It is really too confoundedly crabbed writing,” I exclaimed, in despair. “Why, God bless me, here is ⁵⁄₁₆ths of a pound of cheese entered—ha, ha! did anyone ever hear the like? Yes, look here; you can see for yourself.”
“Yes,” she said; “it is often put down like that; it is a kind of Dutch cheese. Yes, that is all right—five-sixteenths is in this case five ounces.”
“Yes, yes; I understand that well enough,” I interrupted, although in truth I understand nothing more whatever.
I tried once more to get this little account right, that I could have totted up in a second some months ago. I sweated fearfully, and thought over these enigmatical figures with all my might, and I blinked my eyes reflectingly, as if I was studying this matter sharply, but I had to give it up. These five ounces of cheese finished me completely; it was as if something snapped within my forehead. But yet, to give the impression that I still worked out my calculation, I moved my lips and muttered a number aloud, all the while sliding farther and farther down the reckoning as if I were steadily coming to a result. She sat and waited. At last I said:
“Well, now, I have gone through it from first to last, and there is really no mistake, as far as I can see.”
“Isn’t there?” replied the woman, “isn’t there really?” But I saw well that she did not believe me, and she seemed all at once to throw a dash of contempt into her words, a slightly careless tone that I had never heard from her before. She remarked that perhaps I was not accustomed to reckon in sixteenths; she mentioned also that she must only apply to someone who had a knowledge of sixteenths, to get the account properly revised. She said all this, not in any hurtful way to make me feel ashamed, but thoughtfully and seriously. When she got as far as the door, she said, without looking at me:
“Excuse me for taking up your time then.”
Off she went.
A moment after, the door opened again, and she re-entered. She could hardly have gone much farther than the stairs before she had turned back.
“That’s true,” said she; “you mustn’t take it amiss; but there is a little owing to me from you now, isn’t there? Wasn’t it three weeks yesterday since you came?” Yes, I thought it was. “It isn’t so easy to keep things going with such a big family, so that I can’t give lodging on credit, more’s the …”
I stopped her. “I am working at an article that I think I told you about before,” said I, “and as soon as ever that is finished, you shall have your money; you can make yourself quite easy. …”
“Yes; but you’ll never get that article finished, though.”
“Do you think that? Maybe the spirit will move me tomorrow, or perhaps already, tonight; it isn’t at all impossible but that it may move me some time tonight, and then my article will be completed in a quarter of an hour at the outside. You see, it isn’t with my work as with other people’s; I can’t sit down and get a certain amount finished in a day. I have just to wait for the right moment, and no one can tell the day or hour when the spirit may move one—it must have its own time. …”
My landlady went, but her confidence in me was evidently much shaken.
As soon as I was left alone I jumped up and tore my hair in despair. No, in spite of all, there was really no salvation for me—no salvation! My brain was bankrupt! Had I then really turned into a complete dolt since I could not even add up the price of a piece of Dutch cheese? But could it be possible I had lost my senses when I could stand and put such questions to myself? Had not I, into the bargain, right in the midst of my efforts with the reckoning, made the lucid observation that my landlady was in the family way? I had no reason for knowing it, no one had told me anything about it, neither had it occurred to me gratuitously. I sat and saw it with my own eyes, and I understood it at once, right at a despairing moment where I sat and added up sixteenths. How could I explain this to myself?
I went to the window and gazed out; it looked out into Vognmandsgade. Some children were playing down on the pavement; poorly dressed children in the middle of a poor street. They tossed an empty bottle between them and screamed shrilly. A load of furniture rolled slowly by; it must belong to some dislodged family, forced to change residence between “flitting time.”6 This struck me at once. Bedclothes and furniture were heaped on the float, moth-eaten beds and chests of drawers, red-painted chairs with three legs, mats, old iron, and tinware. A little girl—a mere child, a downright ugly youngster, with a running cold in her nose—sat up on top of the load, and held fast with her poor little blue hands in order not to tumble off. She sat on a heap of frightfully stained mattresses, that children must have lain on, and looked down at the urchins who were tossing the empty bottle to one another. …
I stood gazing at all this; I had no difficulty in apprehending everything that passed before me. Whilst I stood there at the window and observed this, I could hear my landlady’s servant singing in the kitchen right alongside of my room. I knew the air she was singing, and I listened to hear if she would sing false, and I said to myself that an idiot could not have done all this. I was, God be praised, as right in my
