.png) FLUNG THE LOAF INTO THE MUD, THAT SHE MIGHT STEP ON IT AND COME OVER DRY-SHOD. |
grandmother, and she is a venomous old woman who is never unoccupied; she never goes out without taking her needlework with her, and so she had brought it here. She sewed running-leather to put into men's shoes, to make them restless; she embroidered lies, and crocheted heedless words that had fallen to the ground—everything was for injury and ruin. Yes, the old great-grandmother knew how to sew, and embroider, and crochet.
She saw Inger, and put up her eye-glass to her eye and looked again at her. "That is a girl with talent," she said; "I should like to have her as a reminiscence of my visit here: she will make a suitable statue in my great-grandson's anteroom."
And so she took her. In this way little Inger came to the infernal regions. People do not always go down there by the most direct way, but they can come by a roundabout way when they have talent.
It was an endless anteroom; one turns dizzy with looking forward or looking backward: and there stood there a crowd of weary people, waiting till the door should be opened. They would have to wait a long time! Great, fat, waddling spiders spun a web for thousands of years over their feet, and this web snared them as in a trap and
.png) BUT THE WORST OF ALL WAS THE HORRIBLE HUNGER WHICH SHE FELT. |
held them fast as with copper chains; and besides that, there was a perpetual anxiety in every soul, a torturing anxiety. The avaricious man stood there, and had forgotten the key to his money-box, and he knew that it was in the lock. Yes, it would be tedious to repeat all the kinds of pain and worry —they were innumerable. Inger thought it horrid to have to stand like a statue; it seemed as if she had grown to the loaf.
"That happens to one because one wishes to keep one's feet clean!" she said to herself. "See how they are staring at me." Yes, they were all looking at her; their evil inclinations shone out of their eyes and spoke silently from the corners of their mouths: they were dreadful to look at.
"It must be a pleasure to look at me!" thought little Inger; "I have a pretty face and good clothes!" And now she turned her eyes, for her neck was too stiff to turn. No; how dirty she had become in the bog-wife's brewhouse! she had not thought of that. Her clothes seemed to be covered with slime; a snake had entwined itself in her hair and hung down at the back of her neck, and a toad peeped forth from every fold in her frock and barked like an asthmatic pug. It was very disagreeable. "But the others down here look just as dreadful!" She comforted herself with that reflection.
But the worst of all was the horrible hunger which she felt; could she not then bend herself and break a piece off the loaf she was standing on? No; her back was stiff, her arms and hands were stiff, her whole body was like a stone column. She could only turn her eves in her head, turn them entirely round, so that they looked out behind, and that was a ghastly sight. And then the flies came. They crept across her eyes, backwards and forwards. She blinked her eyes,
