dangling on her neck, and from every fold of her dress a toad peered out and croaked like a wheezy pug. It was very unpleasant. “But everyone else down here looks terrible too,” she consoled herself.
But worst of all was the dreadful hunger she felt. Couldn’t she bend and break off a piece of the bread she was standing on? No, her back had stiffened; her arms and hands were stiff. Her whole body was like a stone statue. She could only move the eyes in her head. She could turn them completely around and see backwards, and it was an awful sight. And then the flies came. They crawled all over her eyes, back and forth. She blinked her eyes, but the flies didn’t fly. They couldn’t because their wings had been torn off. They had become crawlers. It was a torment, and then there was the hunger—at last she thought that her insides had eaten themselves up, and she was empty inside, so hideously empty.
“If this continues much longer I won’t be able to stand it,” she said, but she had to stand it, and it did continue.
Then a burning tear fell down on her head and rolled over her face and breast right down to the bread. Another tear fell, and many more. Who was crying over little Inger? Didn’t she have a mother up on earth? Tears of sorrow that a mother cries for her child always reach the child, but they don’t set it free—they only burn and make the torment greater. And then this unbearable hunger and not being able to reach the bread she stepped on with her foot! Finally she had the sensation that everything inside of her had eaten itself up. She was like a thin, empty pipe that pulled every sound into itself. She could hear clearly everything that concerned her up on earth, and everything she heard was bad and hard. Her mother was indeed crying deeply and sadly, but she said, “Pride goes before a fall! That was your misfortune, Inger! How you grieved your mother!”
Her mother and everyone up there knew about her sin, how she had stepped on the bread and sunk in the mud and disappeared. The cow herder had told them. He had himself seen it from the slope.
“How you have grieved your mother, Inger!” said her mother, “but this is what I thought would happen.”
“I wish I’d never been born!” thought Inger at this. “It would have been much better for me. It doesn’t help that my mother is crying now.”
She heard how the master and mistress, those good-natured people who had been like parents to her, talked. “She was a sinful child,” they said. “She didn’t respect the Lord’s gifts but trod them underfoot. The doors of mercy will be hard for her to open.”
“They should have disciplined me better,” thought Inger, “and cured me of that nonsense.”
She heard that a ballad had been written about her:
“That I have to keep hearing about it! And suffer so much for it!” thought Inger. “The others should also suffer for their sins. There would be a lot to punish! Oh, how I’m tormented!”
And her mind became even harder than her shell.
“You certainly can’t improve here in this company! And I don’t want to be better. Look how they glare at me!” And her mind was angry and hateful to all people.
“Now they have something to talk about up there! Oh, how I am tormented!”
And she heard them tell her story to the children, and the little ones called her the ungodly Inger. “She was so horrid!” they said. “So awful, she deserves to be tormented.”
The children spoke nothing but hard words against her.
But one day as indignation and hunger gnawed in her hollow shell, she heard her name mentioned and her story told for an innocent child, a little girl. Then she perceived that the little one burst into tears at the story of the arrogant, finery-lov ing Inger.
“But won’t she ever come back up?” asked the little girl.
And the answer came:
“She’ll never come back up.”
“But if she asked for pardon and promised never to do it again?”
“But she won’t ask for pardon,” they said.
“I really wish she would,” said the little girl. She was quite inconsolable. “I will give my dollhouse if she can come back up again. It’s so horrible for poor Inger!”
And those words reached down into Inger’s heart and seemed to do her some good. It was the first time that anyone had said “poor Inger,” and not added the slightest mention of her mistake. A little innocent child cried and begged for her. It made her feel so strange. She would have liked to cry herself, but she couldn’t cry, and that was also a torment.
As years passed up above, there was no change down there. She heard sounds from above less often. She was spoken of less and less. Then one day she perceived a sigh, “Inger, Inger how you grieved me! I thought you would.” It was her mother, who was dying.
Sometimes she heard her name mentioned by her old master and mistress, and the mistress’ words were the gentlest. “I wonder if I’ll ever see you again, Inger. You never know where you will go.”
But Inger understood that her fine old mistress would never come where she was.
More time passed, long and bitter.
Then again Inger heard her name mentioned and saw above her something like two bright stars shining. They were two gentle eyes that closed on the earth. So many years had passed from the time that the little girl had cried inconsolably over “poor Inger” that the child had become an old woman who was now being called to the Lord. And just in this moment when thoughts from her whole life raised up, did she also remember how she as a little child had cried so bitterly when she had heard the story about Inger. That time and that impression were so vivid to the old woman at her time of death that she exclaimed aloud, “Lord, my God, haven’t I, like Inger, often stepped on your blessed gifts without thinking about it? Have not I also walked with arrogance in my heart? But in your mercy you have not let me sink, you have held me up! Don’t desert me in my last hour!”
And the old woman’s eyes closed, and the eyes of the soul opened for what had been hidden, and since Inger was so vividly in her last thoughts, she saw her, saw how far she had sunk, and with that sight the good woman
