Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [14]
When Sara had left, Nagel came to a halt in the middle of the room. Standing perfectly still, he stared quite absently at a particular spot on the wall, and except that his head fell more and more to one side, he didn’t move. This went on for a long time.
Below medium height, he had a swarthy face with curiously dark eyes and a sensitive, effeminate mouth. On one finger he wore a plain ring of lead or iron. He was very broad-shouldered and might be twenty-eight or, at most, thirty years old. His hair was turning gray at the temples.
He awoke from his thoughts with an abrupt start, so abrupt that it could have been feigned, as if he had contemplated making this start for a long time, though he was alone in the room. Then he took some keys, some loose change, and a kind of lifesaving medal on a sadly abused ribbon out of his trouser pocket and put them on the table by his bed. Next, he stuck his wallet under the pillow and fetched his watch and a vial from his vest pocket, a little medicine bottle labeled “Poison.” He held the watch in his hand a moment before putting it aside, but returned the vial to his pocket at once. Then he removed his ring and washed, brushing his hair back with his fingers; he didn’t once look in the mirror.
He had already gone to bed when he suddenly missed his ring, which had been left on the washstand, and as though he couldn’t be without that wretched iron ring, he got up and put it on again. Finally he opened the three telegrams, but even before he had finished reading the first one he burst into a brief, quiet chuckle. He lay there all alone laughing to himself; his teeth were exceptionally fine. Then his face grew serious again, and a moment later he tossed the telegrams aside with the utmost indifference. And yet they seemed to concern a matter of great importance; it was an offer of sixty-two thousand kroner for a landed property, the entire sum to be paid in cash if the sale came about immediately. They were brief, dry business telegrams with nothing ridiculous about them, but they were unsigned. A few minutes later Nagel had fallen asleep. The two candles on the table, which he had forgotten to put out, illuminated his chest and his clean-shaven face, and cast an unwavering light on the telegrams lying wide-open on the table....
The following morning Johan Nagel sent to the post office for his mail; there were some newspapers, including a couple of foreign ones, but no letter. He placed his violin case on a chair in the middle of the room, as if wishing to show it off; but he didn’t open it, leaving the instrument untouched.
In the course of the morning he did nothing except write a few letters and pace the floor of his room reading a book. He did buy a pair of gloves in a shop, and when he visited the marketplace a little later, he paid ten kroner for a small carrot-colored puppy, which he at once gave to the hotel keeper. To everybody’s amusement, he had baptized the puppy Jakobsen, regardless of the fact that it was a female.
And so he did nothing the whole day. He had no business to take care of in the town, visited no offices, and paid no calls, not knowing a soul. The people in the hotel were rather surprised by his marked indifference to nearly everything, even his own affairs. Thus, the three telegrams were still lying on the table in his room, open to everyone; he hadn’t touched them since the evening they arrived. He also failed to answer direct questions at times. Twice the hotel keeper had tried to get out of him who he was and what had brought him to the town, but he had brushed the matter aside both times.1 Another peculiar trait of his became evident in the course of the day: although he didn’t know a soul in the place