Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [25]
“How much would you need to get out of your difficulty?” Nagel asks.
“God forbid!” Miniman cries in a loud voice. “Don’t mention it again, we’ve been more than amply helped out already. It was all a matter of six kroner, and here I sit with your twenty kroner in my pocket, may God reward you for it! True, we did owe those six kroner, to our grocer, for potatoes and some other things. He had sent us a bill, and we were both trying to figure out what to do about it. But now we’re no longer in need, we can sleep without a care in the world as far as that goes and face tomorrow quite contented.”
Pause.
“Well, perhaps we’d better drink up and say goodbye for now,” Nagel says, getting up. “Skoal! I do hope this won’t be the last time we see each other. In fact, you must promise to come again; I’m in Number 7, as you can see. Thanks, thanks for a nice evening!”
Nagel said this quite sincerely as he shook Miniman’s hand. He saw his visitor downstairs and walked him to the front door, where he bowed deeply, doffing his velvet cap as once before.
Miniman left. He bowed ever so many times as he walked backward up the street. But he couldn’t utter a word, though he kept trying to say something.
When Nagel entered the dining room he made an unduly polite apology to Sara for being late for supper.
IV
JOHAN NAGEL WAS AWAKENED in the morning by Sara knocking on his door to bring him his newspapers. He browsed through them, tossing them on the floor as he finished with them. A dispatch to the effect that Gladstone had been in bed with a cold for two days but was now on his feet again, he read through twice, followed by bursts of laughter. Then he crossed his arms behind his head and lapsed into the following train of thought, all the while talking aloud to himself from time to time:
It’s dangerous to walk in the woods with an open penknife in your hand. How easily one may stumble so awkwardly that the blade slashes not only one but two wrists. Just look what happened to Karlsen....1 Come to that, it’s also dangerous to walk around with a medicine vial in your vest pocket. You may fall on the road, the vial breaks, splinters penetrate your body, and the poison enters the blood stream. There’s some danger wherever you go. And so what? There is one road, however, where nobody takes a tumble—the one that Gladstone walks. I can picture Gladstone’s shrewd householder’s expression as he walks down that road: avoiding missteps, joining hands with Providence to protect him. And now he has gotten over his cold, too. Gladstone will live until he dies a natural death from too much well-being.
Pastor Karlsen, why did you poke your face into a puddle? Should we let the question remain open, whether it was to conceal the death agony, or whether the convulsions forced you to do so? At any rate, you chose your time like a child afraid of the dark, a clear day, the hour of noon, and you lay there with a farewell note in your hand. Poor Karlsen, poor Karlsen!
And why did you take to the wood with your brilliant little enterprise? Did you know the wood, and did it mean more to you than a field, a road, or a lake? “The little boy walked in the wood the livelong day, la la la la.” There are the Vardal Woods, for instance, on the way up from Gjøvik. You lie there dozing, leaving the world behind; you stare at the sky, peering like hell into the heavens, heh-heh, so that you can almost hear the tittle-tattle they’re whispering about you up there: That one there, says my dear departed mother, why, if he comes here I’ll be leaving, she says, prepared to cast a vote of no confidence. I reply with a heh-heh and say, Pst, don’t let me disturb you, just don’t let me disturb you! And I say this sufficiently loud to attract a modicum of attention from a couple of she-angels, venerated Jairus’s daughter and Svava Bjørnson. Heh-heh-heh.
What the hell do I lie here laughing at? Is it supposed to show my superiority? Only children should be allowed to laugh, and very young girls, nobody else. Laughter is a survival from simian