Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [163]
She walked in silence for a while, pondering this, but then she says again,
4 160/211. Deleted in CW: “But it’s the first time I’ve been so brutal, believe me.”
5 162/212. This sentence replaced the following paragraph in P:
Pause. Nobody spoke for a long time. She was waiting, looking up at Nagel and down at the road by turns.
6 166/214. From here to the beginning of the next sentence, P reads: How unlucky he always was in what he did! How he was continually forgetting himself! If only she would forgive him, forgive him once more, only this one time, or if, at least, she wouldn’t be angry with him! Wouldn’t she let him show her an example of what he could do, to make it up to her? If she just would suggest something to him, give him a hint, show a twinkle in the corner of her eye! Oh, he was prepared for anything....
7 167/214. Deleted in CW:
“May I?”
“Yes, an adventure!” she cried spontaneously. She was again as pleased as a child, and egged him on to tell his story. All right, if he insisted, he could carry her parasol; what pleasure was there in that anyway? But the adventure! Why didn’t he begin?
8 174-75/218. “Pause” replaced the following exchange in P:
“Yes—unfortunately!” Nagel replied.
Pause.
“Why do you say ‘unfortunately’?”
“Hm. That I can’t tell you.”
“Ha-ha-ha, he can’t tell me! All right, and then? Oh, how strange it all is!”
9 181/221. Deleted in CW: but Dagny didn’t answer. Finally he began to laugh and make light of it.
“After all, it happened eight years ago,” he said, “I didn’t experience it today. Tell me,
10 181-82/221. The first third of the next paragraph was added, the following passage deleted, in CW:
“Are you still thinking about my fairy-tale adventure?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
He again made light of it, said it was too long ago to concern oneself with, it wasn’t immediate. Besides, it wasn’t really that uncanny, was it? Ah, she should hear people from the tropics tell fairy tales! He had, and many a time his blood had run cold with terror.
“No, I don’t think your story was that uncanny,” she said, “simply strange, mysterious. Thank you.”
Delighted that she again became more vivacious, he began once more to enlarge upon what the inhabitants of the tropics could relate when they felt like it. Come down to Ceylon, the ancient Taprobane, come into the mountains and forests at Mehavilla and hear fairy tales that will completely take your breath away. There one came upon one of the oldest peoples on earth, the ancient Veddas, the aborigines of Ceylon. They lived the most wretched life, were chased into the woods by the Singhalese and the European rabble; but how they could tell stories!
11 182/221. Deleted in CW: This people [the Veddas] was one that had a destiny, with wonderful traditions; every individual felt like a descendant of their greatest fairy-tale king. Standing there in rags, they forced strangers to lower their eyes before them when they spoke. —The deleted sentences were replaced by “flying ... silver.”
12 183/221. “Beef” replaced P’s “oatmeal porridge—oh, that Norwegian oatmeal porridge!”
13 183/221. Dagny’s question and Nagel’s response up to this point replaced the following passage in P:
Dagny laughed and contradicted him. So, oatmeal porridge wasn’t good enough, eh? But didn’t we, too, have the most beautiful fairy tales? How about those of Asbjørnsen?
He grew excited. Of course, of course, oats were excellent fare in countries that had no sun, who could say anything else? But what if there was sun? Could she imagine a sun that shone rather extravagantly, foaming into white-crested waves of light? Oh well, there were the fairy tales of the mountains, the legends about the wood nymph, those crude phantoms of a
14 184/221. The two preceding sentences replaced the following in P: we hadn’t managed to contrive anything finer; we had even borrowed some frills from others, stolen a bit here and there.
15 184/221. Deleted in CW: Didn’t they produce exactly the same mood as one feels when hearing a fisherman come stomping up from the shore, his boots greased