He had fancied he could eat himself into oblivion, and was trying now—with just as little effect—to drink his trouble away. But it only grew the worse.
It was Anna’s eyes that would keep rising up before him.
Anna’s grey-green eyes, with their frightened look, in a setting of swollen, blue, and bloodshot flesh, that hung in pouches down on either side of her nose.
It was not that he felt remorse for what he had done; that did not cost him a thought. But the effects of it—those eyes—haunted him now, following him everywhere he turned, relentlessly, cruelly. He writhed, and sighed, overflowing with self-pity for his troubles.
Eating did not help him, drinking was equally futile; there was but one thing to do, then—to start talking again, before it grew worse. It was nothing to what it might be yet. And Egholm launched out into a sea of talk, diving into it, swimming out into it, hoping to leave the thing that followed him outdistanced on the shore.
“And the money I made in Aalborg when the Austrians were there—you’ve no idea. My studio was simply besieged by all those black-bearded soldiers with their strings and stripes—and they’d no lack of cash, I can tell you. But then while they were sitting about waiting, there would come some slip of a lieutenant and turn the whole lot of them out to make way for him. And one dirty thief I remember that wouldn’t pay—between you and me, the photos were not much good, and that’s the truth. Showed him with three or four heads, you understand. But the General simply told him to pay up sharp, if he didn’t want his brains blown out. And that settled it. The General, of course, was a particular friend of mine. I’ll tell you while I think of it. It was this way. He wanted his photo taken, of course, like all the rest of them, but he must have it done up at the castle itself, in the great hall, and that was as dark as a cellar. I managed to get him out on the steps at last, though he cursed and swore all the time, and hacked about on the stone paving with his spurs. All the others got out of the way—sloped off like shadows—and there was I all alone with him, in a ghastly fright, and making a fearful mess of things with the camera. The interpreter had vanished, too. Then, just as I was ready, at the critical moment, you understand, I rapped out in German, ‘Now! Look pleasant, please!’ All photographers used to do that, you know, in those days. I said it without thinking.
“You should have seen him. First he swore like the very devil; you could almost see the blue flames dancing round him. But then he burst out laughing.
“He wanted me to go back to Austria with him. Tried all he knew to get me to go.”
Egholm sighed, and gazed vacantly before him, trying if the vision that haunted him were gone.
... Eyes, eyes. Eyes full of terror, set in patches of bruised flesh, and a drop of congealed blood just at the side of the nose....