Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [77]
XI
THEN CAME JUNE 29. It was a Monday.
A couple of unusual things happened that day; there even appeared a stranger in town, a veiled lady who disappeared again after a two hours’ stay, following a visit at the hotel.
Early that morning Johan Nagel had been happily humming and whistling in his room. As he dressed, he kept whistling merry tunes as if he were extremely elated by something. All the previous day he’d been silent and quiet, after his big bender with Miniman Saturday night. He had paced the floor with long steps and drunk heaps of water. When he left the hotel Monday morning he was still humming and looked extremely contented; in a rush of exuberant joy he even accosted a woman standing at the foot of the steps and gave her a few pennies.
“Can you tell me where I could borrow a violin?” he asked. “Do you know whether anyone in town plays the violin?”
“No, I don’t,” the woman replied, surprised.
She didn’t know, but in his joy he gave her a few pennies anyway and hurried off. He had seen Dagny Kielland with her red parasol coming out of a shop and went straight after her. She was alone. He made a deep bow and spoke to her. She immediately turned scarlet as usual, and tried to hide it by tipping her parasol.
At first they spoke about their latest walk through the woods. She had been rather careless, despite everything; she had, in fact, caught a cold, although the weather was so warm, and still wasn’t quite well. She said this simply and sincerely, as if confiding in an old acquaintance.
“But you don’t regret it, do you?” he said, coming straight to the point.
“No,” she replied, looking surprised, “no, I don’t regret it. What makes you think that? It was an enjoyable night, I thought, though God knows I was scared stiff when you told me about that Jack-o’-Lantern. I’ve even dreamed about him. A terrible dream!”
They talked about Jack-o’-Lantern for a while. Nagel liked to chat today; he confessed that he, too, would have absurd attacks of dumb fear of one thing or another. Thus, he often couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without turning around at every step to see if someone might be following him. What was it? Ah, what it was! Something mysterious, something eerie which our miserable “omniscient” science was too square and too crude to grasp, a breath of some invisible power, an influence from the blind forces of life.
“You know something,” he said, “at this moment I feel like turning off this street into another one, because these houses you see, these guard stones on the left-hand side, and those three pear trees in the judge’s garden—it all instills a feeling of antipathy, filling me with a dull pain. When I’m alone, I never come by this street; I give it a wide berth, even if it takes me out of my way. So what would you call that?”
Dagny laughed. “I don’t know. Dr. Stenersen would call it nerves and superstition, I suppose.”
“Quite right, that’s what he would call it! Ah, what conceit, what stupidity! You come to a strange town one evening, let’s say this town, why not? The following day you walk about the streets to have a first look at the place. During your stroll you develop a certain obscure aversion for certain streets, certain buildings, while feeling attracted, made happy and delighted, by other streets. Nerves?