Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [61]
Was this payment for the rap she had given him? He looked capable of just about anything.22
She started up with a look of displeasure and replied, “Please, let him be. How could you!”
“I’m sorry,” he hastened to say, backing off. “It’s just that people are saying he was so sweet on you, and I can’t blame him for that—”
“Sweet on me?23 Aren’t they also saying that he killed himself because of me, with my penknife? Oh, let’s go.”
She got up. She had spoken in a rather mournful tone, without embarrassment or dissimulation. He was utterly astonished. Though aware that she had driven one of her admirers to his death, she made nothing much of it; she neither treated it as a joke nor exploited it to her own advantage, but spoke about it only as a deplorable incident and let it go at that.24 Her long blond back curls fell over the collar of her dress, and her cheeks had a warm, fresh glow, with a dim patina of nocturnal dew. She swung her high hips slightly when she walked.
They had come out of the forest into a light open space. A dog barked, and Nagel said, “There we have the parsonage already. How charming it looks—those large white buildings with the garden, the kennel and the flagpole in the middle of the thick forest. Don’t you think, Miss Kielland, that you’ll be homesick for this place when you leave some day, I mean, when you get married? Well, it depends on where you’ll be, of course.”
“I haven’t thought about that yet,” she replied. And she added, “I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
“You’ll rejoice when the time comes!” he said.
Pause. She seemed to be pondering his words.25
“Look,” she said, “you mustn’t be surprised that I’m going for a walk so late at night; I trust you won’t. We do it all the time. You see, we’re just peasants around here, children of nature. The teacher and I have often walked this road till daybreak, talking.”
“The teacher? He strikes me as a person of very few words.”
“Yes, I must admit I did most of the talking; that is, I asked questions and he answered them.... What will you do when you get back to the hotel?”
“Do?” Nagel replied. “When I get back? I’ll go to bed and sleep till—well, till about noon, sleep like a log, like the dead, without waking up once and without dreaming. What will you do?”
“But don’t you think? Don’t you lie awake for quite a while thinking about different things? Do you really fall asleep right away?”
“Instantly. Don’t you?”
“Listen, a bird is singing already. Why, it must be later than you said; may I look at your watch? Good Lord, it’s three o‘clock, almost four! Why did you say a moment ago that it was only one o’clock?”
“Forgive me!” he replied.
She looked at him, without a hint of displeasure, incidentally, and said, “You didn’t have to fool me, I would’ve stayed out this late anyway, that’s the honest truth. I hope you won’t read more into it than you should. I don’t have many diversions, and I accept with open arms the few I can find. That’s the way I’ve conducted myself since we came here, and I don’t think it has scandalized anyone. Well, I can’t know that, of course, but it doesn’t really matter. Papa, at any rate, hasn’t said anything, and he’s the one I go by. Come, let’s walk a little farther.”
They went past the parsonage, into the woods on the other side. The birds were singing, and the white streak of daylight in the east was growing wider and wider. The conversation