Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [124]
Yes, Nagel would get up right away.
Well, what was his answer to the program committee?
No, Nagel wouldn’t play.
He wouldn’t? But it was a cause of national importance! Was it right of him to refuse such a small favor?
Well, he couldn’t.
Tut, tut! With such a strong feeling in his favor right now, especially among the ladies; they had made a real nuisance of themselves last night, begging him to make it come off. Miss Andresen hadn’t given him a moment’s rest, and Miss Kielland had actually taken him aside and asked him to flatly refuse letting Nagel go until he had promised to come.
Ah, but Miss Kielland didn’t have the faintest idea how he played. She had never heard him.
Still, she was the most enthusiastic; she had even offered to accompany him.... “She ended by saying, ‘Tell him we all beg him to come....’ You could give us the pleasure of doing some ten or twelve strokes, couldn’t you?”
He couldn‘t, he just couldn’t!
Why, those were nothing but excuses; he could Thursday evening, right?
Nagel squirmed. Suppose he knew only this poor fragment, this incoherent potpourri, that he had practiced these few dances to the highest level he could achieve to astonish people some evening! And besides, his playing was criminally out of tune; he couldn’t bear listening to himself, no, by Jove, he couldn’t!
“Yes but—”
“Doctor, I won’t do it!” “If not tonight, how about tomorrow night? Tomorrow is Sunday, the last day of the bazaar, and we’re anticipating a big turnout.”
“No, you’ll have to excuse me, I won’t play tomorrow night either. It’s simply idiotic to touch a violin when one cannot play any better than I do. How curious that you didn’t hear any better!”
This appeal to the doctor was effective.
“Well,” he said, “I did feel you made a few mistakes here and there; but what the hell, we aren’t all of us connoisseurs, you know.”
It was no use, the doctor got nothing but no all along and had to leave.
Nagel began getting dressed. So, even Dagny had been eager to make him do this, she would even have accompanied him! Another trap, eh? She failed last night, and now she would use this to even the score? ... But oh dear, maybe he was doing her an injustice, perhaps she wouldn’t hate him any more now, but leave him alone! And in his heart, he begged her pardon for his distrustfulness. He looked out at Market Square; there was the most glorious sunshine, the sky as lofty as could be. He began humming to himself.
When he was almost ready to go down, Sara slipped a letter through the door; it hadn’t come through the mail, a messenger had brought it. The letter was from Martha and contained only a few lines: he mustn’t come this evening, after all, she had gone away. For heaven’s sake, he must forgive her everything and not call on her anymore; it would give her pain to see him again. Goodbye. At the bottom of the page, below her name, she had added that she would never forget him. “I’ll never forget you,” she wrote. Altogether, this letter of three or four lines was filled with a note of sadness; even the characters looked sad and pitiful.
He collapsed on a chair. Everything was lost, lost! Even there he had been rejected! How strange it was, the way everything was conspiring against him! Had he ever been more honest or more well-intentioned? And yet—and yet it didn’t help! He sits motionless for several minutes.
All at once he jumps up from his chair; he looks at his watch, it’s eleven. If he dashed off at once, perhaps he could still catch Martha before she left! He goes straight to her place; it’s locked and empty. He peeks through the windows of both rooms and sees no trace of anybody.
Beaten and speechless, he turns back to