The Red Room - August Strindberg (best summer reads TXT) 📗

you were nabbed by the police, weren’t you?”

“Who cares for the police? I don’t!”

“Don’t you? Come along of us tonight then; we’re going to pinch some pears.”

“There’s a savage dog behind the fence!”

“Garn! Chimney-sweep’s Peter’ll climb over and a kick’ll do for the dog.”

The polishing was interrupted by a maidservant who came out of the house and began to scatter pine branches on the grass-grown street.

“Who’s going to be buried?”

“The deputy’s wife’s baby!”

“He’s a proper old Satan, the deputy, isn’t he?”

Instead of replying, the other began whistling an unknown and very peculiar tune.

“Let’s thrash his red-haired cubs when they come home from school! I say! Doesn’t his old woman fancy herself? The old she-devil locked us out in the snow the other night because we couldn’t pay the rent, and we had to spend the night in the barn.”

The conversation flickered out; the last item of conversation had not made the smallest impression on Janne’s friend.

After this introduction to the status of the tenants by the two urchins, Falk entered the house not with the pleasantest of sensations. He was received at the door by Struve, who looked distressed, and took Falk’s arm as if he were going to confide a secret to him, or suppress a tear⁠—he had to do something, so he embraced him.

Falk found himself in a big room with a dining-table, a sideboard, six chairs, and a coffin. White sheets were hanging before the windows through which the daylight filtered and broke at the red glow of the tallow candles; on the table stood a tray with green wine glasses, and a soup tureen filled with dahlias, stocks, and white asters.

Struve seized Falk’s hand and led him to the coffin where the baby lay bedded on shavings, covered with tulle, and strewn with fuchsias.

“There!” he said, “there!”

Falk felt nothing but the quite commonplace emotion the living always feel in the presence of the dead; he could think of nothing suitable to say, and therefore he confined himself to pressing the father’s hand. “Thank you, thank you,” stammered Struve, and disappeared in an adjoining room.

Falk was left alone; he could hear excited whispering behind the door through which Struve had vanished; then it grew still for a while; but presently a murmur from the other end of the room penetrated the matchboard wall. A strident treble seemed to be reciting long verses with incredible volubility.

“Babebibobubybäbö⁠—Babebibobubybäbö⁠—Babebibobubybäbö,” it sounded.

An angry man’s voice answered to the accompaniment of a plane which said hwitcho⁠—hwitcho⁠—hwitch⁠—hwitch⁠—hitch⁠—hitch.

And a long-drawn, rumbling mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum replied, seemingly anxious to calm the storm. But the plane spat and sneezed again its hwitch⁠—hwitch, and immediately after a storm of Babili⁠—bebili⁠—bibili⁠—bobili⁠—bubili⁠—bybili⁠—bäbili⁠—bö⁠—broke out with fresh fury.

Falk guessed the subject under discussion, and a certain intonation gave him the idea that the dead baby was involved in the argument.

The whispering, occasionally interrupted by loud sobs, began again behind the door through which Struve had disappeared; finally it was pushed open and Struve appeared leading by the hand a woman who looked like a laundress; she was dressed in black, and her eyelids were red and swollen with weeping. Struve introduced her with all the dignity of a father of a family:

“My wife, Mr. Falk, my old friend.”

Falk clasped a hand, hard as a beetle, and received a vinegary smile. He cast about for a few platitudes containing the words “wife” and “grief,” and as he was fairly successful, he was rewarded by Struve with an embrace.

Mrs. Struve, anxious not to be left out in the cold, began brushing the back of her husband’s coat.

“It’s dreadful how you seem to pick up every bit of dirt, Christian,” she said; “your back’s always dusty. Don’t you think that my husband always looks like a pig, Mr. Falk?”

There was no need for poor Falk to reply to this tender remark; behind the mother’s back now appeared two heads, regarding the visitor with a grin. The mother patted them affectionately.

“Have you ever seen plainer boys before, Mr. Falk?” she asked. “Don’t they look exactly like young foxes?”

This statement was so undeniably accurate that Falk felt compelled to deny it eagerly.

The opening of the hall door and the entrance of two men stopped all further civilities. The first of the newcomers was a man of thirty, broad-shouldered, with a square head, the front of which was supposed to represent the face; the skin looked like the half-rotten plank of a bridge in which worms have ploughed their labyrinths; the wide mouth, always slightly open, showed the four shining eyeteeth; whenever he smiled his face seemed to split into two parts; his mouth opened as far back as the fourth back tooth; not a single hair grew in the barren soil; the nose was so badly put on that one could see through it far into the head; on the upper part of the skull grew something which looked like coconut matting.

Struve, who possessed the faculty of ennobling his environment, introduced Candidate Borg as Dr. Borg. The latter, without a sign of either pleasure or annoyance, held out his arm to his companion, who pulled off the coat and hung it on the hinge of the front door, an act which drew from Mrs. Struve the remark that the old house was in such bad repair that there was not even a hall-stand.

The man who had helped Borg off with his overcoat was introduced as Mr. Levi. He was a tall, overgrown youth; the skull seemed but a backward development of the nasal bone, and the trunk which reached to the knees, looked as if it had been drawn through a wire plate, in the way in which wire is drawn; the shoulders slanted like eaves; there was no trace of hips, the shanks ran up into the thighs; the feet were worn out of shape like a pair of old shoes; the instep had given way. The legs curved outward and downward, like the legs of a working man who has carried heavy loads, or stood for the greater part of his life. He was