MRS. WESTERLUND. What's that?
HEARSE-DRIVER. Oh, he had slabs of cork with pins on 'em, and a lot of flies—something beyond us here—but I guess that's the proper way—can I go out to the kitchen now?
MRS. WESTERLUND. Yes, if you use the back door, I think you can get something wet——
HEARSE-DRIVER. But I want to have a word with the dyer before I drive off—I've got my horses over at the stone-cutter's, who's my second cousin, you know. Haven't got any use for him, as you know, too, but we're doing business together, he and I—that is, I put in a word for him with the heirs, and so he lets me put my horses into his yard—just let me know when the dyer shows up—luck, wasn't it, that he didn't have his works here, too——
[He goes out, passing around the inn.MRS. WESTERLUNDgoes into the inn by the front door.ANDERSON,who has finished eating, begins to dig again.
[He goes out, passing around the inn.
MRS. WESTERLUNDgoes into the inn by the front door.
ANDERSON,who has finished eating, begins to dig again.
ANDERSON. Do you find anything?
ANDERSON. Nails and door-hinges—all the keys are hanging in a bunch over there by the front door.
ANDERSON. Did they hang there before, or did you put them there?
ANDERSON. No, they were hanging there when I got here.
ANDERSON. That's queer—for then somebody must have locked all the doors and taken out the keys before it began burning! That's queer!
ANDERSON. Yes, of course, it's a little queer, for in that way it was harder to get at the fire and save things. Yes—yes! [Pause.
ANDERSON. I worked for the dyer's father forty years ago, I did, and I know the people, both the dyer himself and his brother what went off to America, though they say he's back now. The father, he was a real man, he was, but the boys were always a little so-so. Mrs. Westerlund over here, she used to take care of Rudolph, and the two brothers never could get along, but kept scrapping and fighting all the time.—I've seen a thing or two, I have—yes, there's a whole lot what has happened in that house, so I guess it was about time to get it smoked out.—Ugh, but that was a house! One went this way and another that, but back they had to come, and here they died and here they were born, and here they married and were divorced.—And Arvid, the brother what went off to America—him they thought dead for years, and at least he didn't take what was coming to him after his father, but now they say he's come back, though nobody has seen him—and there's such a lot of talking—Look, there's the dyer back from the police station!
ANDERSON. He doesn't look happy exactly, but I suppose that's more than can be expected—Well, who's that student that lived in the attic? How does he hang together with the rest?
ANDERSON. Well, that's more than I know. He had his board there, and read with the children.
ANDERSON. And also with the lady of the house?
ANDERSON. No-o, they played something what they called tennis, and quarrelled the rest of the time—yes, quarrelling and backbiting, that's what everybody is up to in this quarter.
ANDERSON. Well, when they broke the student's door open they found hairpins on the floor—it had to come out, after all, even if the fire had to sweep over it first——
ANDERSON. I don't think it was the dyer that came, but our brother-in-law, Gustafson——
ANDERSON. He's always mad, and to-day I suppose he's worse than ever, and so he'll have to come and dun me for what I owe him, seeing what he has lost in the fire——
ANDERSON. Now you shut up!
GUSTAFSON. [Enters with a basketful of funeral wreaths and other products of his trade] I wonder if I am going to sell anything to-day so there'll be enough for food after all this rumpus?
ANDERSON. Didn't you carry any insurance?
GUSTAFSON. Yes, I used to have insurance on the glass panes over my hotbeds, but this year I felt stingy, and so I put in oiled paper instead—gosh, that I could be such a darned fool!—[Scratching his head] I don't get paid for that, of course. And now I've got to cut and paste and oil six hundred paper panes. It's as I have always said: that I was the worst idiot among us seven children. Gee, what an ass I was—what a booby! And then I went and got drunk yesterday. Why in hell did I have to get drunk that day of all days—when I need all the brains I've got to-day? It was the stone-cutter who treated, because our children are going to get married to-night, but I should have said no. I didn't want to, but I'm a ninny who can't say no to anybody. And that's the way when they come and borrow money of me—I can't say no—darned fool that I am! And then I got in the way of that policeman, who snared me with all sorts of questions. I should have kept my mouth shut, like the painter over there, but I can't, and so I let out this, that, and the other thing, and he put it all down, and now I am called as a witness!
ANDERSON. What was it you said?
GUSTAFSON. I said I thought—that it looked funny to me—and that somebody must have started it.
ANDERSON. Oh, that's what you said!
GUSTAFSON. Yes, pitch into me—I've deserved it, goose that I am!
ANDERSON. And who could have started it, do you think?—Don't mind the painter, and my old woman here never carries any tales.
GUSTAFSON. Who started it? Why, the student, of course, as it started in his room.
ANDERSON. No—underhis room!
GUSTAFSON. Under, you say? Then Ihavegone and done it!—Oh, I'll come to a bad end, I'm sure!—Underhis room, you say—what could have been there—the kitchen?
ANDERSON. No, a closet—see, over there! It was used by the cook.
GUSTAFSON. Then it must have been her.
ANDERSON. Yes, but don't you say so, as you don't know.
GUSTAFSON. The stone-cutter had it in for the cook last night—I guess he must have known a whole lot——
ANDERSON. You shouldn't repeat what the stone-cutter says, for one who has served isn't to be trusted——
GUSTAFSON. Ash, that's so long ago, and the cook's a regular dragon, for that matter—she'd always haggle over the vegetables——
ANDERSON. There comes the dyer from the station now—you'd better quit!
TheSTRANGERenters, dressed in a frock coat and a high hat with mourning on it; he carries a stick.
TheSTRANGERenters, dressed in a frock coat and a high hat with mourning on it; he carries a stick.
ANDERSON. It wasn't the dyer, but he looks a lot like him.
STRANGER. How much is one of those wreaths?
GARDENER. Fifty cents.
STRANGER. Oh, that's not much.
GARDENER. No, I am such a fool that I can't charge as I should.
STRANGER. [Looking around] Has there—been a fire—here?
GARDENER. Yes, last night.
STRANGER. Good God! [Pause] Who was the owner of the house?
GARDENER. Mr. Walström.
STRANGER. The dyer?
GARDENER. Yes, he used to be a dyer, all right. [Pause.
STRANGER. Where is he now?
GARDENER. He'll be here any moment.
STRANGER. Then I'll look around a bit—the wreath can lie here till I come back—I meant to go out to the cemetery later.
GARDENER. On account of the bishop's monument, I suppose?
STRANGER. What bishop?
GARDENER. Bishop Stecksen, don't you know—who belonged to the Academy.
STRANGER. Is he dead?
GARDENER. Oh, long ago!
STRANGER. I see!—Well, I'll leave the wreath for a while.
He goes out to the left, studying the ruins carefully as he passes by.
He goes out to the left, studying the ruins carefully as he passes by.
ANDERSON. Perhaps he came on account of the insurance.
ANDERSON. Not that one! Then he would have asked in a different way.
ANDERSON. But he looked like the dyer just the same.
ANDERSON. Only he was taller.
GUSTAFSON. Now, I remember something—I should have a bridal bouquet ready for to-night, and I should go to my son's wedding, but I have no flowers, and my black coat has been burned. Wouldn't that make you—Mrs. Westerlund was to furnish the myrtle for the bride's crown, being her godmother—that's the myrtle she stole a shoot of from the dyer's cook, who got hers from the dyer's first wife—she who ran away—and I was to make a crown of it, and I've clean forgotten it—well, if I ain't the worst fool that ever walked the earth! [He opens the inn door] Mrs. Westerlund, can I have the myrtle now, and I'll do the job!—I say, can I have that myrtle! Wreath, too, you say—have you got enough for it?—No?—Well, then I'll let the whole wedding go hang, that's all there is to it!—Let them walk up to the minister's and have him splice them together, but it'll make the stone-cutter mad as a hornet.—What do you think I should do?—No, I can't—haven't slept a wink the whole night.—It's too much for a poor human creature.—Yes, I am a ninny, I know—go for me, will you!—Oh, there's the pot—thanks! And then I need scissors, which I haven't got—and wire—and string—where am I to get them from?—No, of course, nobody wants to break off his work for a thing like that.—I'm tired of the whole mess—work fifty years, and then have it go up in smoke! I haven't got strength to begin over again—and the way it comes all at once, blow on blow—did you ever! I'm going to run away from it! [He goes out.
RUDOLPH WALSTRÖM. [Enters, evidently upset, badly dressed,his hands discoloured by the dyes] Is it all out now, Anderson?
ANDERSON. Yes, now it's out.
RUDOLPH. Has anything been discovered?
ANDERSON. That's a question! What's buried when it snows comes to light when it thaws!
RUDOLPH. What do you mean, Anderson?
ANDERSON. If you dig deep enough you find things.
RUDOLPH. Have you found anything that can explain how the fire started?
ANDERSON. Naw, nothing of that kind.
RUDOLPH. That means we are still under suspicion, all of us.
ANDERSON. Not me, I guess.
RUDOLPH. Oh, yes, for you have been seen up in the attic at unusual hours.
ANDERSON. Well, I can't always go at usual hours to look for my tools when I've left them behind. And I did leave my hammer behind when I fixed the stove in the student's room.
RUDOLPH. And the stone-cutter, the gardener, Mrs. Westerlund, even the painter over there—we are all of us under suspicion—the student, the cook, and myself more than the rest. Lucky it was that I had paid the insurance the day before, or I should have been stuck for good.—Think of it: the stone-cutter suspected of arson—he who's so afraid of doing anything wrong! He's so conscientiousnowadaysthat if you ask him what time it is he won't swear to it, as his watchmaybe wrong. Of course, we all know he got two years, but he's reformed, and I'll swear now he's the straightest man in the quarter.
ANDERSON. But the police suspect him because he went wrong once—and he ain't got his citizenship back yet.
RUDOLPH. Oh, there are so many ways of looking at a thing—so many ways, I tell you.—Well, Anderson, I guess you'd better quit for the day, seeing as you're going to the wedding to-night.
ANDERSON. Yes, that wedding—There was somebody looking for you a while ago, and he said he would be back.
RUDOLPH. Who was it?
ANDERSON. He didn't say.
RUDOLPH. Police, was it?
ANDERSON. Naw, I don't think so.—There he is coming now, for that matter. [He goes out, together with his wife.
TheSTRANGERenters.
TheSTRANGERenters.
RUDOLPH. [Regards him with curiosity at first, then with horror; wants to run away, but cannot move] Arvid!
STRANGER. Rudolph!
RUDOLPH. So it's you!
STRANGER. Yes. [Pause.
RUDOLPH. You're not dead, then?
STRANGER. In a way, yes!—I have come back from America after thirty years—there was something that pulled at me—
I wanted to see my childhood's home once more—and I found those ruins! [Pause] It burned down last night?
I wanted to see my childhood's home once more—and I found those ruins! [Pause] It burned down last night?
RUDOLPH. Yes, you came just in time. [Pause.
STRANGER. [Dragging his words] That's the place—such a tiny place for such a lot of destinies! There's the dining-room with the frescoed walls: palms, and cypresses, and a temple beneath a rose-coloured sky—that's the way I dreamt the world would look the moment I got away from home. And the stove with its pale blossoms growing out of conches. And the chimney cupboard with its metal doors—I remember as a child, when we had just moved in, somebody had scratched his name on the metal, and then grandmother told us it was the name of a man who had killed himself in that very room. I quickly forgot all about it, but when I later married a niece of the same man, it seemed to me as if my destiny had been foretold on that plate of metal.—You don't believe in that kind of thing, do you?—However, you know how my marriage ended!
RUDOLPH. Yes, I've heard——
STRANGER. And there's the nursery—yes!
RUDOLPH. Don't let us start digging in the ruins!
STRANGER. Why not? After the fire is out you can read things in the ashes. We used to do it as children, in the stove——
RUDOLPH. Come and sit down at the table here!
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?
STRANGER. The fact that life, however it shaped itself—I have been rich and poor, exalted and humbled; I have suffered a shipwreck and passed through an earthquake—but, however life shaped itself, I always became aware of connections and repetitions. I saw in one situation the result of another, earlier one. On meetingthisperson I was reminded ofthatone whom I had met in the past. There have been incidents in my life that have come back time and again, so that I have been forced to say to myself: this I have been through before. And I have met with occurrences that seemed to me absolutely inevitable, or predestined.
RUDOLPH. What have you done during all these years?
STRANGER. Everything! I have beheld life from every quarter, from every standpoint, from above and from below, and always it has seemed to me like a scene staged for my particular benefit. And in that way I have at last become reconciled to a part of the past, and I have come to excuse not only my own but also other people's so-called "faults." You and I, for instance, have had a few bones to pick with each other——
RUDOLPHrecoils with a darkening face.
RUDOLPHrecoils with a darkening face.
STRANGER. Don't get scared now——
RUDOLPH. I never get scared!
STRANGER. You are just the same as ever.
RUDOLPH. And so are you!
STRANGER. Am I? That's interesting!—Yes, you are still living in that delusion about your own bravery, and I remember exactly how this false idea became fixed in your mind. We were learning to swim, and one day you told how you had dived into the water, and then mother said: "Yes, Rudolph, he has courage!" That was meant for me—for me whom you had stripped of all courage and self-assurance. But then came the day when you had stolen some apples, and you were too cowardly to own up to it, and so you put it on me.
RUDOLPH. Haven't you forgotten that yet?
STRANGER. I haven't forgotten, but I have forgiven.—From here, where I am sitting, I can see that very tree, and that's what brought it into my mind. It's over there, you see, and it bears golden pippins.—If you look, you'll see that one of its biggest branches has been sawed off. For it so happened that I didn't get angry with you on account of my unjust punishment, but my anger turned against the tree. And two years later that big branch was all dried up and had to be sawed off. It made me think of the fig-tree that was cursed by the Saviour, but I was not led into any presumptuous conclusions.—However, I still know all those trees by heart, and once, when I had the yellow fever in Jamaica, I counted them over, every one. Most of them are still there, I see. There's the snow-apple which has red-striped fruit—a chaffinch used to nest in it. There's the melon-apple, standing right in front of the garret where I used to study for technological examinations; there's the spitzenburg, and the late astrachan; and the pear-tree that used to look like a poplar in miniature; and the one with pears that could only be used for preserves—they never ripened, and we despised them, but mother treasured them above all the rest; and in that tree there used to be a wryneck that was always twisting its head around and making a nasty cry—That was fifty years ago!
RUDOLPH. [Irately] What are you driving at?
STRANGER. Just as touchy and ill-tempered as ever! It's interesting.—There was no special purpose back of my chatter—my memories insist on pushing forward—I remember that the garden was rented to somebody else once, but we had the right to play in it. To me it seemed as if we had been driven out of paradise—and the tempter was standing behind every tree. In the fall, when the ground was strewn with ripe apples, I fell under a temptation that had become irresistible——
RUDOLPH. You stole, too?
STRANGER. Of course I did, but I didn't put it off on you!—When I was forty I leased a lemon grove in one of the Southern States, and—well, there were thieves after the trees every night. I couldn't sleep, I lost flesh, I got sick. And then I thought of—poor Gustafson here!
RUDOLPH. He's still living.
STRANGER. Perhaps he, too, stole apples in his childhood?
RUDOLPH. Probably.
STRANGER. Why are your hands so black?
RUDOLPH. Because I handle dyed stuffs all the time.—Did you have anything else in mind?
STRANGER. What could that have been?
RUDOLPH. That my hands were not clean.
STRANGER. Fudge!
RUDOLPH. Perhaps you are thinking of your inheritance?
STRANGER. Just as mean as ever! Exactly as you were when eight years old!
RUDOLPH. And you are just as heedless, and philosophical, and silly!
STRANGER. It's a curious thing—but I wonder how many times before we have said just what we are saying now? [Pause] I am looking at your album here—our sisters and brothers—five dead!
RUDOLPH. Yes.
STRANGER. And our schoolmates?
RUDOLPH. Some taken and some left behind.
STRANGER. I met one of them in South Carolina—Axel Ericson—do you remember him?
RUDOLPH. I do.
STRANGER. One whole night, while we were on a train together, he kept telling me how our highly respectable and respected family consisted of nothing but rascals; that it had made its money by smuggling—you know, the toll-gate was right here; and that this house had been built with double walls for the hiding of contraband. Don't you see that the walls are double?
RUDOLPH. [Crushed] So that's the reason why we had closets everywhere?
STRANGER. The father of that fellow, Ericson, had been in the custom-house service and knew our father, and the son told me a lot of inside stories that turned my whole world of imagined conditions topsyturvy.
RUDOLPH. You gave him a licking, I suppose?
STRANGER. Why should I lick him?—However, my hair turned grey that night, and I had to edit my entire life over again. You know how we used to live in an atmosphere of mutual admiration; how we regarded our family as better than all others, and how, in particular, our parents were looked up to with almost religious veneration. And then I had to paint new faces on them, strip them, drag them down, eliminate them. It was dreadful! Then the ghosts began to walk. The pieces of those smashed figures would come together again, but not properly, and the result would be a regular wax cabinet of monsters. All those grey-haired gentlemen whom we called uncles, and who came to our house to play cards and eat cold suppers, they were smugglers, and some of them had been in the pillory—Did you know that?
RUDOLPH. [Completely overwhelmed] No.
STRANGER. The dye works were merely a hiding-place for smuggled yarn, which was dyed in order to prevent identification. I can still remember how I used to hate the smell of the dyeing vat—there was something sickeningly sweet about it.
RUDOLPH. Why did you have to tell me all this?
STRANGER. Why should I keep silent about it and let you make yourself ridiculous by your boasting about that revered family of yours? Have you never noticed people grinning at you?
RUDOLPH. No-o! [Pause.
STRANGER. I am now looking at father's bookcase in the pile over there. It was always locked, you remember. But one day, when father was out, I got hold of the key. The books in front I had seen through the glass doors, of course. There were volumes of sermons, the collected works of great poets, handbooks for gardening, compilations of the statutes referring to customs duties and the confiscation of smuggled goods; the constitution; a volume about foreign coins; and a technical work that later determined my choice of a career. But back of those books there was room for other things, and I began to explore. First of all I found the rattan—and, do you know, I have since learned that that bitter plant bears a fruit from which we get the red dye known as "dragon's blood": now, isn't that queer! And beside the rattan stood a bottle labelled "cyanide of potassium."
RUDOLPH. I suppose it was meant for use over at the works.
STRANGER. Or elsewhere, perhaps. But this is what I had in mind: there were some bundles of pamphlets with illustrated covers that aroused my interest. And, to put it plain, they contained the notorious memoirs of a certain chevalier—I took them out and locked the case again. And beneath the big oak over there I studied them. We used to call that oak the Tree of Knowledge—and it was, all right! And in that way I left my childhood's paradise to become initiated, all too early, into those mysteries which—yes!
RUDOLPH. You, too?
STRANGER. Yes, I, too! [Pause] However—let us talk of something else, as all that is now in ashes.—Did you have any insurance?
RUDOLPH. [Angrily] Didn't you ask that a while ago?
STRANGER. Not that I can recall. It happens so often that I confuse what I have said with what I have intended to say, and mostly because I think so intensely—ever since that day when I tried to hang myself in the closet.
RUDOLPH. What is that you are saying?
STRANGER. I tried to hang myself in the closet.
RUDOLPH. [Speaking very slowly] Was that what happened that Holy Thursday Eve, when you were taken to the hospital—what the rest of us children were never permitted to know?
STRANGER. [Speaking in the same manner] Yes.—There you can see how little we know about those that are nearest to us, about our own homes and our own lives.
RUDOLPH. But why did you do it?
STRANGER. I was twelve years old, and tired of life! It was like groping about in a great darkness—I couldn't understand what I had to do here—and I thought the world a madhouse. I reached that conclusion one day when our school was turned out with torches and banners to celebrate "the destroyer of our country." For I had just read a book which proved that our country had been brought to destruction by the worst of all its kings—and that was the one whose memory we had to celebrate with hymns and festivities.[1]
[Pause.
[Pause.
RUDOLPH. What happened at the hospital?
STRANGER. My dear fellow, I was actually put into the morgue as dead. Whether I was or not, I don't know—but when I woke up, most of my previous life had been forgotten, and I began a new one, but in such a manner that the rest of you thought me peculiar.—Are you married again?
RUDOLPH. I have wife and children—somewhere.
STRANGER. When I recovered consciousness I seemed to myself another person. I regarded life with cynical calm: it probably had to be the way it was. And the worse it turned out the more interesting it became. After that I looked upon myself as if I were somebody else, and I observed and studied that other person, and his fate, thereby rendering myself callous to my own sufferings. But while dead I had acquired new faculties—I could see right through people, read their thoughts, hear their intentions. In company, I beheld them stripped naked—Where did you say the fire started?
RUDOLPH. Why, nobody knows.
STRANGER. But the newspapers said that it began in a closet right under the student's garret—what kind of a student is he?
RUDOLPH. [Appalled] Is it in the newspapers? I haven't had time to look at them to-day. What more have they got?
STRANGER. They have got everything.
RUDOLPH. Everything?
STRANGER. The double walls, the respected family of smugglers, the pillory, the hairpins——
RUDOLPH. What hairpins?
STRANGER. I don't know, but they are there. Do you know?
RUDOLPH. Naw!
STRANGER. Everything was brought to light, and you may look for a stream of people coming here to stare at all that exposed rottenness.
RUDOLPH. Lord have mercy! And you take pleasure at seeing your family dragged into scandal?
STRANGER. My family? I have never felt myself related to the rest of you. I have never had any strong feeling either for my fellow men or myself. I think it's interesting to watch them—that's all—What sort of a person is your wife?
RUDOLPH. Was there anything about her, too?
STRANGER. About her and the student.
RUDOLPH. Good! Then I was right. Just wait and you'll see!—There comes the stone-cutter.
STRANGER. You know him?
RUDOLPH. And so do you. A schoolmate—Albert Ericson.
STRANGER. Whose father was in the customs service and whose brother I met on the train—he who was so very well informed about our family.
RUDOLPH. That's the infernal cuss who has blabbed to the papers, then!
ERICSONenters with a pick and begins to look over the ruins.
ERICSONenters with a pick and begins to look over the ruins.
STRANGER. What a ghastly figure!
RUDOLPH. He's been in jail—two years. Do you know what he did? He made some erasures in a contract between him and myself——
STRANGER. You sent him to jail! And now he has had his revenge!
RUDOLPH. But the queerest part of it is that nowadays he is regarded as the most honest man in the whole district. He has become a martyr, and almost a saint, so that nobody dares say a word against him.
STRANGER. That's interesting, indeed!
DETECTIVE. [Entering, turns toERICSON] Can you pull down that wall over there?
ERICSON. The one by the closet?
DETECTIVE. That's the one.
ERICSON. That's where the fire started, and I'm sure you'll find a candle or a lamp around there—for I know the people!
DETECTIVE. Go ahead then!
ERICSON. The closet door was burned off, to be sure, but the ceiling came down, and that's why we couldn't find out, but now we'll use the beak on it! [He falls to with his pick] Ho-hey, ho-ho!—Ho-hey, leggo!—Ho-hey, for that one!—Do you see anything?
DETECTIVE. Not yet.
ERICSON. [Working away as before] Now I can see something!—The lamp has exploded, but the stand is left!—Who knows this forfeit for his own?—Didn't I see the dyer somewhere around here?
DETECTIVE. There he is sitting now. [He picks the lamp from the debris and holds it up] Do you recognise your lamp, Mr. Walström?
RUDOLPH. That isn't mine—it belonged to our tutor.
DETECTIVE. The student? Where is he now?
RUDOLPH. He's down-town, but I suppose he'll soon be here, as his books are lying over there.
DETECTIVE. How did his lamp get into the cook's closet? Did he have anything to do with her?
RUDOLPH. Probably!
DETECTIVE. The only thing needed now is that he identify the lamp as his own, and he will be arrested. What do you think of it, Mr. Walström?
RUDOLPH. I? Well, what is there to think?
DETECTIVE. What reason could he have for setting fire to another person's house?
RUDOLPH. I don't know. Malice, or mere mischief—you never can tell what people may do—Or perhaps there was something he wanted to cover up.
DETECTIVE. That would have been a poor way, as old rottenness always will out. Did he have any grudge against you?
RUDOLPH. It's likely, for I helped him once when he was hard up, and he has hated me ever since, of course.
DETECTIVE. Of course? [Pause] Who is he, then?
RUDOLPH. He was raised in an orphanage—born of unknown parents.
DETECTIVE. Haven't you a grown-up daughter, Mr. Walström?
RUDOLPH. [Angered] Of course I have!
DETECTIVE. Oh, you have! [Pause; then toERICSON] Now you bring those twelve men of yours and pull down the walls quick. Then we'll see what new things come to light.
[He goes out.
[He goes out.
ERICSON. That'll be done in a jiffy. [Goes out.
[Pause.
[Pause.
STRANGER. Have you really paid up your insurance?
RUDOLPH. Of course!
STRANGER. Personally?
RUDOLPH. No, I sent it in as usual.
STRANGER. You sent it—by somebody else! That's just like you!—Suppose we take a turn through the garden and have a look at the apple-trees.
RUDOLPH. All right, and then we'll see what happens afterward.
STRANGER. Now begins the most interesting part of all.
RUDOLPH. Perhaps not quite so interesting if you find yourself mixed up in it.
STRANGER. I?
RUDOLPH. Who can tell?
STRANGER. What a web it is!
RUDOLPH. There was a child of yours that went to the orphanage, I think?
STRANGER. God bless us!—Let's go over into the garden!
Curtain.