No. II.—The Illustrious Stranger.
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.
"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.