Off she went.
A moment after, the door opened again, and she re-entered. She could hardly have gone much farther than the stairs before she had turned back.
"That's true," said she; "you mustn't take it amiss; but there is a little owing to me from you now, isn't there? Wasn't it three weeks yesterday since you came?" Yes, I thought it was. "It isn't so easy to keep things going with such a big family, so that I can't give lodging on credit, more's the...."
I stopped her. "I am working at an article that I think I told you about before," said I, "and as soon as ever that is finished, you shall have your money; you can make yourself quite easy...."
"Yes; but you'll never get that article finished, though."
"Do you think that? Maybe the spirit will move me tomorrow, or perhaps already, tonight; it isn't at all impossible but that it may move me some time tonight, and then my article will be completed in a quarter of an hour at the outside. You see, it isn't with my work as with other people's; I can't sit down and get a certain amount finished in a day. I have just to wait for the right moment, and no one can tell the day or hour when the spirit may move one--it must have its own time...."
My landlady went, but her confidence in me was evidently much shaken.
As soon as I was left alone I jumped up and tore my hair in despair. No, in spite of all, there was really no salvation for me--no salvation! My brain was bankrupt! Had I then really turned into a complete dolt since I could not even add up the price of a piece of Dutch cheese? But could it be possible I had lost my senses when I could stand and put such questions to myself? Had not I, into the bargain, right in the midst of my efforts with the reckoning, made the lucid observation that my landlady was in the family way? I had no reason for knowing it, no one had told me anything about it, neither had it occurred to me gratuitously. I sat and saw it with my own eyes, and I understood it at once, right at a despairing moment where I sat and added up sixteenths. How could I explain this to myself?
I went to the window and gazed out; it looked out into Vognmandsgade. Some children were playing down on the pavement; poorly dressed children in the middle of a poor street. They tossed an empty bottle between them and screamed shrilly. A load of furniture rolled slowly by; it must belong to some dislodged family, forced to change residence between "flitting time." [6] This struck me at once. Bed-clothes and furniture were heaped on the float, moth-eaten beds and chests of drawers, red-painted chairs with three legs, mats, old iron, and tin-ware. A little girl--a mere child, a downright ugly youngster, with a running cold in her nose--sat up on top of the load, and held fast with her poor little blue hands in order not to tumble off. She sat on a heap of frightfully stained mattresses, that children must have lain on, and looked down at the urchins who were tossing the empty bottle to one another....
I stood gazing at all this; I had no difficulty in apprehending everything that passed before me. Whilst I stood there at the window and observed this, I could hear my landlady's servant singing in the kitchen right alongside of my room. I knew the air she was singing, and I listened to hear if she would sing false, and I said to myself that an idiot could not have done all this.