“You are a stranger here?” he said.
“Yes.” Could he not even read the name of the paper he held in his hand?
“Barely.” For that matter, he could hear directly that I was a stranger. There was something in my accent which told him. It did not need much; he could hear so well. At night, when everyone slept, he could hear people in the next room breathing. …
“What I was going to say was, ‘where do you live?’ ”
On the spur of the moment a lie stood, ready-made, in my head. I lied involuntarily, without any object, without any arrière pensée, and I answered—
“St. Olav’s Place, No. 2.”
“Really?” He knew every stone in St. Olav’s Place. There was a fountain, some lampposts, a few trees; he remembered all of it. “What number do you live in?”
Desirous to put an end to this, I got up. But my notion about the newspaper had driven me to my wits’ end; I resolved to clear the thing up, at no matter what cost.
“When you cannot read the paper, why—”
“In No. 2, I think you said,” continued the man, without noticing my disturbance. “There was a time I knew every person in No. 2; what is your landlord’s name?”
I quickly found a name to get rid of him; invented one on the spur of the moment, and blurted it out to stop my tormentor.
“Happolati!” said I.
“Happolati, ay!” nodded the man; and he never missed a syllable in this difficult name.
I looked at him with amazement; there he sat, gravely, with a considering air. Before I had well given utterance to the stupid name which jumped into my head the man had accommodated himself to it, and pretended to have heard it before.
In the meantime, he had laid his package on the seat, and I felt my curiosity quiver through my nerves. I noticed there were a few grease spots on the paper.
“Isn’t he a seafaring man, your landlord?” queried he, and there was not a trace of suppressed irony in his voice; “I seem to remember he was.”
“Seafaring man? Excuse me, it must be the brother you know; this man is namely J. A. Happolati, the agent.”
I thought this would finish him; but he willingly fell in with everything I said. If I had found a name like Barrabas Rosebud it would not have roused his suspicions.
“He is an able man, I have heard?” he said, feeling his way.
“Oh, a clever fellow!” answered I; “a thorough business head; agent for every possible thing going. Cranberries from China; feathers and down from Russia; hides, pulp, writing-ink—”
“He, he! the devil he is?” interrupted the old chap, highly excited.
This began to get interesting. The situation ran away with me, and one lie after another engendered in my head. I sat down again, forgot the newspaper, and the remarkable documents, grew lively, and cut short the old fellow’s talk.
The little goblin’s unsuspecting simplicity made me foolhardy; I would stuff him recklessly full of lies; rout him out o’ field grandly, and stop his mouth from sheer amazement.
Had he heard of the electric psalm-book that Happolati had invented?
“What? Elec—”
“With electric letters that could give light in the dark! a perfectly extraordinary enterprise. A million crowns to be put in circulation; foundries and printing-presses at work, and shoals of regular mechanics to be employed; I had heard as many as seven hundred men.”
“Ay, isn’t it just what I say?” drawled out the man, calmly.
He said no more, he believed every word I related, and for all that, he was not taken aback. This disappointed me a little; I had expected to see him utterly bewildered by my inventions.
I searched my brain for a couple of desperate lies, went the whole hog, hinted that Happolati had been Minister of State for nine years in Persia. “You perhaps have no conception of what it means to be Minister of State in Persia?” I asked. It was more than king here, or about the same as Sultan, if he knew what that meant, but Happolati had managed the whole thing, and was never at a loss. And I related about his daughter Ylajali, a fairy, a princess, who had three hundred slaves, and who reclined on a couch of yellow roses. She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen; I had, may the Lord strike me, never seen her match for looks in my life!
“So‑o; was she so lovely?” remarked the old fellow, with an absent air, as he gazed at the ground.
“Lovely? She was beauteous, she was sinfully fascinating. Eyes like raw silk, arms of amber! Just one glance from her was as seductive as a kiss; and when she called me, her voice darted like a wine-ray right into my soul’s phosphor. And why shouldn’t she be so beautiful?” Did he imagine she was a messenger or something in the fire brigade? She was simply a Heaven’s wonder, I could just inform him, a fairy tale.
“Yes, to be sure!” said he, not a little bewildered. His quiet bored me; I was excited by the sound of my own voice and spoke in utter seriousness; the stolen archives, treaties with some foreign power or other, no longer occupied my thoughts; the little flat bundle of paper lay on the seat between us, and I had no longer the smallest desire to examine it or see what it contained. I was entirely absorbed in stories of my own which floated in singular visions across my mental eye. The blood flew to my head, and I roared with laughter.
At this moment the little man seemed about to go. He stretched himself, and in order not to break off too abruptly, added: “He is said to own much property, this Happolati?”
How dared this bleary-eyed, disgusting old man toss about the rare name I had invented as if it were a common name stuck up over every huckster-shop in the town? He never stumbled over
