The sky was darkened by swart birds, with tufted tails, and a look in
their clay-coloured eyes as of millions of stifled croaks; the rain
fell in grizzled sheets like the streaming hair and beard of some
Titanic lunatic, and the thunder boomed over the town as if it had
just discovered another epoch-making novel.
Night fell; I lit my lamp and closed the shutters, drew my curtains,
so as to shut out any gleaming cats' eyes that might be peering at me
through the chinks, and mixed myself a tumbler of hot punch.
As I finished it, a wild piercing shriek rose from the universe, as
though someone had run a pin into the Great Unknown, and a shining
blue-white ball came down the chimney and burnt a hole in the
yellow-green gloom of my hearthrug.
I looked up; a strange man was sitting right in front of me. His
crested hair had a blue-white gleam, like the electric light in a
mountain hotel when the storm is nearly ended; it stuck out in a
spiral fringe round his cheeks and chin; his mouth was prim like a
purse; but his spectacles twinkled with laughter like the new ferrule
on a gingham umbrella.
"I am the Shaker of Society's Pillars, I have discovered that the Tree
of Knowledge of Good and Evil bears nothing but rotten apples. There
are milestones on the Bergen road--but I can see through most of them.
I am the New Generation knocking at the old stage-door. I am also
the Dramatiser of Social Conundrums to which there will never be any
answer."
Time passed--a second or an hour. I began to wish he would go.
"I am the great Wizard that has ennobled and purified Humanity by
showing that they are all the morbid victims of a diseased heredity.
The great fire at Christiania was _not_ the fire in which _Mrs.
Solness's_ nine dolls were burnt. I am he who has emancipated Woman by
convincing her that she has the _right_ to be hysterical."
Again time passed--an hour or a second. I fancy I must have dropped
off to sleep.
[Illustration: "I fancy I must have dropped off to sleep."]
"I am he who has broken through the conventions of the
well-constructed drama. When we lived at Drontheim, BERNICK'S gander
was stolen by tinkers. I am the original eld, and also the child who
instructs the grandmotherly critic in the art of sucking problematic
eggs; but I, too, am a master-builder of magnificent bathos."
And again time passed--a second or an hour. I wondered whether he had
come to stay the night.
"Read, I am called 'dramatic'; acted, I am called 'impossible.'"
With that the cock crew. The stranger had flown before I had an
opportunity of asking him his name or asking him to look in again some
evening.
I was rather sorry, for he seemed to have a flow of agreeable small
talk, though it was perhaps a little egotistic.
* * * * *