The Red Room, August Strindberg [the mitten read aloud txt] 📗

better still, work; much work and well-paid work. But the ladies had better not go and see them, for one of them is down with smallpox.⁠ ⁠…”

“Smallpox!” screamed Mrs. Homan, “and nobody said a word about it! Come along Eugenia, let’s at once inform the police! What a disgusting set of people they are!”

“But the children? Whose children are these? Answer!” said Mrs. Falk, holding up her pencil, threateningly.

“They’re mine, lady,” answered the mother.

“But your husband? Where’s your husband?”

“Disappeared!” said the joiner.

“We’ll set the police on his track! He shall be sent to the Penitentiary. Things must be changed here! I said it was a good house, Evelyn.”

“Won’t the ladies sit down?” asked the joiner. “It’s so much easier to keep up a conversation sitting down. We’ve no chairs, but that doesn’t matter; we’ve no beds either; they went for taxes, for the lighting of the street, so that you need not go home from the theatre in the dark. We’ve no gas, as you can see for yourselves. They went in payment of the water-rate⁠—so that your servants should be saved running up and down stairs; the water’s not laid on here. They went towards the keeping up of the hospitals, so that your sons will not be laid up at home when.⁠ ⁠…”

“Come away, Eugenia, for God’s sake! This is unbearable!”

“I agree with you, ladies, it is unbearable,” said the joiner. “And the day will come when things will be worse; on that day we shall come down from the White Mountains with a great noise, like a waterfall, and ask for the return of our beds. Ask? We shall take them! And you shall lie on wooden benches, as I’ve had to do, and eat potatoes until your stomachs are as tight as a drum and you feel as if you had undergone the torture by water, as we.⁠ ⁠…”

But the ladies had fled, leaving behind them a pile of pamphlets.

“Ugh! What a beastly smell of eau de cologne! It smells of prostitutes!” said the joiner. “A pinch of snuff, cobbler!”

He wiped his forehead with his blue apron and took up his plane while the others reflected silently.

Ygberg, who had been asleep during the whole of the scene, now awoke and made ready to go out again with Falk. Once more Mrs. Homan’s voice floated through the open window:

“What did she mean when she said your father was on the flagship? Your father is a captain, isn’t he?”

“That’s what he’s called. It’s the same thing. Weren’t they an insolent crowd? I’ll never go there again. But it will make a fine report. To the restaurant Hasselbacken, driver!”

XVII Natura⁠ ⁠…

Falander was at home studying a part one afternoon, when he was disturbed by a gentle tapping, two double-raps, at his door. He jumped up, hastily donned a coat and opened.

“Agnes! This is a rare visit!”

“I had to come and see you, it’s so damned slow!”

“What dreadful language!”

“Let me curse! It relieves my feelings.”

“Hm! hm!”

“Give me a cigar; I haven’t had a smoke these last six weeks. This education makes me frantic.”

“Is he so severe?”

“Curse him!”

“For shame, Agnes!”

“I’ve been forbidden to smoke, to curse, to drink punch, to go out in the evening! But wait until we are married! I’ll let him see!”

“Is he really serious about it?”

“Absolutely! Look at this handkerchief!”

“A. R. with a crown and nine balls.”

“Our initials are the same and he’s making me use his design. Isn’t it lovely?”

“Yes, very nice. It’s gone as far as that, has it?”

The angel, dressed in blue, threw herself on the sofa and puffed at her cigar. Falander looked at her body as if he were making an estimate, and said:

“Will you have a glass of punch?”

“Rather!”

“Are you in love with your fiancé?”

“He doesn’t belong to the class of men with whom one can really be in love. But I don’t know. Love? Hm! What is love?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. He’s very respectable, awfully respectable, but, but, but.⁠ ⁠…”

“But?”

“He’s so proper.”

She looked at Falander with a smile which would have saved the absent fiancé, if he could have seen it.

“He isn’t demonstrative enough?” asked Falander curiously, in an unsteady voice.

She drank her glass of punch, paused, shook her head, and said with a theatrical sigh:

“No!”

The reply seemed to satisfy Falander; it obviously relieved him. He continued his cross-examination.

“It may be a long time before you can get married. He’s never played a single part yet.”

“No, I know.”

“Won’t you find the waiting dull?”

“One must be patient.”

I must use the thumbscrew, thought Falander.

“I suppose you know that Jenny and I are lovers?”

“The ugly, old hag!”

A whole shower of white northern lights flamed across her face and every muscle twitched, as if she were under the influence of a galvanic battery.

“She isn’t as old as all that,” said Falander coldly. “Have you heard that the waiter Gustav is going to play Don Diego in the new piece, and that Rehnhjelm has been given the part of his servant? The waiter is bound to have a success, for the part plays itself; but poor Rehnhjelm will die with shame.”

“Good heavens! Is it true?”

“It’s true enough.”

“It shan’t happen!”

“Who’s to prevent it?”

She jumped up from the sofa, emptied her glass and began to sob wildly.

“Oh! How bitter the world is, how bitter!” she sobbed. “It’s just as if an evil power were spying on us, finding out our wishes, merely to cross them; discerning our hopes, so as to shatter them; anticipating our thoughts so as to paralyse them. If it were possible to long for evil to happen to oneself, one ought to do it just for the sake of making a fool of that power.”

“Quite true, my dear; therefore one should always be prepared for a bad ending. But that’s not the worst. I’ll give you a thought which will comfort you. You know that every success you attain entails someone else’s failure; if you are given a part to play, some other woman is disappointed; it makes her