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. God 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 passed 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 recognised 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 bookkeeper 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?”
“Well, I happened to make a mis-entry one day, and so—”
“A false entry, eh?”
False entry! There stood “Missy,” and asked me straight in the face if I had done this thing. He even asked eagerly, and evidently with much interest. I looked at him, felt deeply insulted, and made no reply.
“Yes, well, Lord! that might happen to the best fellow,” he said, as if to console me. He still believed I had made a false entry designedly.
“What is it that, ‘Yes, well, Lord! indeed might happen to the best fellow’?” I inquired. “To do that. Listen, my good man. Do you stand there and really believe that I could for a moment be guilty of such a mean trick as that? I!”
“But, my dear fellow, I thought I heard you distinctly say that.”
“No; I said that I had made a mis-entry once, a bagatelle; if you want to know, a false date on a letter, a single stroke of the pen wrong—that was my whole crime. No, God be praised, I can tell right from wrong yet a while. How would it fare with me if I were, into the bargain, to sully my honour? It is simply my sense of honour that keeps me afloat now. But it is strong enough too; at least, it has kept me up to date.”
I threw back my head, turned away from “Missy,” and looked down the street. My eyes rested on a red dress that came towards us; on a woman at a man’s side. If I had not had this conversation with “Missy,” I would not have been hurt by his coarse suspicion, and I would not have given this toss of my head, as I turned away in offence; and so perhaps this red dress would have passed me without my having noticed it. And at bottom what did it concern me? What was it to me if it were the dress of the Hon. Miss Nagel, the lady-in-waiting? “Missy” stood and talked, and tried to make good his mistake again. I did not listen to him at all; I stood the whole time and stared at the red dress that was coming nearer up the street, and a stir thrilled through my breast, a gliding delicate dart, I whispered in thought without moving my lips:
“Ylajali!”
Now “Missy” turned round also and noticed the two—the lady and the man with her—raised his hat to them, and followed them with his eyes. I did not raise my hat, or perhaps I did unconsciously. The red dress glided up Carl Johann, and disappeared.
“Who was it was with her?” asked “Missy.”
“The Duke, didn’t you see? The so-called ‘Duke.’ Did you know the lady?”
“Yes, in a sort of way. Didn’t you know her?”
“No,” I replied.
“It appears to me you saluted profoundly enough.”
“Did I?”
“Ha, ha! perhaps you didn’t,” said “Missy.” “Well, that is odd. Why, it was only at you she looked, too, the whole time.”
“When did you get to know her?” I asked.
He did not really know her. It dated from
