Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [134]
“Goodbye!” he said again.
Then he turned abruptly and took a side road that led deeper into the forest.
Now he simply had to follow his nose and settle in any old place. Above all, no calculation and no sentimentality; look what Karlsen had come up with in his ridiculous despair! As if this trifling matter was worth making so much fuss about! ... Noticing that one of his shoelaces is undone, he stops, puts his foot on a tussock and ties it. A moment later he sits down.
He had sat down without thinking, without being aware of it. He looked about him: big pines, big pines everywhere, here and there a cluster of juniper, the ground covered with heather. Good, good!
He takes out his wallet, where he’s keeping the letters to Martha and Miniman. Dagny’s handkerchief is in a separate pocket, wrapped in paper; he takes it out, kisses it again and again, kneels and goes on kissing it, and then slowly tears it to shreds. This occupies him for a long time; it gets to be one, one-thirty, and he’s still tearing and tearing at these tiny little shreds. In the end he has made the handkerchief completely unrecognizable, hardly anything but threads is left. He gets up and puts it under a stone, hiding it very carefully so that nobody can find it, and sits down again. Well, was there anything else? He tries to remember, but can’t think of anything. Then he winds his watch, as he used to do every night before going to bed.
He peers about him, it’s rather dark in the forest; he cannot see anything suspicious. He listens, holds his breath and listens; there isn’t a sound, the birds are silent, the night is mild and dead. He puts his fingers into his vest pocket and takes out the little bottle.
The bottle has a glass stopper, and over the stopper is a triple paper cap tied on with blue pharmacist’s string. He unties the string and pulls out the stopper. Clear as water, with a faint scent of almonds! He holds the bottle up to his eyes—it’s half full. Right then he hears a sound far away, a couple of plangent strokes; it was the church bell striking two in town. He whispers, “The bell has tolled!” And he quickly raises the vial to his lips and empties it.
The first few moments he still sat upright, his eyes closed, the empty vial in one hand and the stopper in the other. The whole thing had gone so briskly that he hadn’t quite kept up with it. Now, afterward, his thoughts gradually began to crowd in on him, he opened his eyes and looked about him in a daze. These trees, this sky, this earth—all this he would now never see again. How strange! The poison was already sneaking about inside him, seeping through the fine tissues, making its blue way into his veins; in a moment he would go into convulsions, and a little later he would be dead and stiff.
He has a distinctly bitter taste in his mouth and feels his tongue crumpling up more and more. He makes absurd gestures with his arms to see how far he has already died, begins to count the trees around him, gets as far as ten and gives up. Why, was he going to die, really die tonight? No, oh no! No, not tonight, eh? How strange!
Yes, he was going to die, he clearly felt the acid doing something to his insides. No, why now, why at once? Good grief, it mustn’t happen just yet, must it? How his eyes were growing dim already! What a soughing was sweeping through the forest, though there wasn’t a breath of wind! And why were red clouds beginning to drift above the treetops? ... Ah, not just now, not just now! No, do you hear, no! What shall I do? I don’t want to! God in heaven, what shall I do?
And suddenly all sorts of thoughts crowd in on