STRANGER. What place is that? Oh, the tavern—"The Last Nail"—where the hearse-drivers used to stop, and where, once upon a time, condemned culprits were given a final glass before they were taken to the gallows—Who is keeping it?
RUDOLPH. Mrs. Westerlund, who used to be my nurse.
STRANGER. Mrs. Westerlund—I remember her. It is as if the bench sank from under me, and I was sent tumbling through the past, sixty whole years, down into my childhood. I breathe the nursery air and feel it pressing on my chest. You older ones weighed me down, and you made so much noise that I was always kept in a state of fright. My fears made me hide in the garden—then I was dragged forward and given a spanking—always spankings—but I never knew why, and I don't know it yet. And yet she was my mother——
RUDOLPH. Please!
STRANGER. Yes, you were the favourite, and as such you always had her support—Then we got a stepmother. Her father was an undertaker's assistant, and for years we had been seeing him drive by with funerals. At last he came to know us so well by sight that he used to nod and grin at us, as if he meant to say: "Oh, I'll come for you sooner or later!" And then he came right into our house one day, and had to be called grandfather—when our father took his daughter for his second wife.
RUDOLPH. There was nothing strange in that.
STRANGER. No, but somehow, as our own destinies, and those of other people, were being woven into one web——
RUDOLPH. Oh, that's what happens everywhere——
STRANGER. Exactly! It's the same everywhere. In your youth you see the web set up. Parents, relatives, comrades, acquaintances, servants form the warp. Later on in life the weft becomes visible. And then the shuttle of fate runs back and forth with the thread—sometimes it breaks, but is tied up again, and it goes on as before. The reed clicks, the thread is packed together into curlicues, and one day the web lies ready. In old age, when the eye has learned how to see, you discover that those curlicues form a pattern, a monogram, an ornament, a hieroglyph, which only then can be interpreted: that's life! The world-weaver has woven it! [Pause; he rises] Over there, in that scrap-heap, I notice the family album. [He walks a few steps to the right and picks up a photograph album] That's the book of our family fate. Grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, brothers and sisters, relatives, acquaintances—or so-called "friends"—schoolmates, servants, godparents. And, strange to say, wherever I have gone, in America or Australia, to Hongkong or the Congo, everywhere I found at least one countryman, and as we began to dig it always came out that this man knew my family, or at least some godfather or maid servant—that, in a word, we had some common acquaintances. I even found a relative in the island of Formosa——
RUDOLPH. What has put those ideas into your head?