Victoria by Knut Hamsun Read Free Book Online Page B

sudden noise in the nocturnal silence, the rumble of a carriage in the street, would give his thinking a jolt and throw it off course.
    Make way for this carriage in the street, watch out!
    Why? Why should one watch out for this carriage? It rolled past, by now it may be at the corner. Perhaps a man is in the way; coatless and hatless, he stands there bent forward, meeting the carriage head-on—he’ll be run over, irreparably injured, killed. The man wants to die, that’s his affair. He no longer buttons his shirt, has stopped lacing his shoes in the morning, and goes about with everything open, his chest bare and emaciated; he is to die. . . . A man lying at death’s door wrote a letter to his friend, a note, a small request. The man died, leaving this letter. It had a date and a signature, it was written with capital and small letters, though he who wrote it was to die within the hour. It was so strange. He had even made the usual flourish under his name. And an hour later he was dead. . . . There was another man. He lies alone in a small room, painted blue and with wood paneling. So what? Oh, nothing. In the whole wide world, he’s the one who is going to die. Preoccupied by this, he thinks about it to the point of exhaustion. He can see it is evening, that the clock on the wall says eight, and he can’t figure out why it doesn’t strike. The clock doesn’t strike. Actually, it’s a few minutes past eight and it keeps on ticking, but it doesn’t strike. Poor man, his brain is already going to sleep, the clock has struck and he didn’t notice. He pricks a hole in his mother’s picture on the wall—what does he want with this picture now, and why should it remain whole when he’s gone? His weary eyes fall on the flowerpot on the table and, stretching out his hand, he slowly and deliberately pulls the large flowerpot to the floor, where it goes to pieces. Why should it stand there, whole? Then he throws his amber cigarette holder out the window. What does he need that for anymore? It seems quite obvious that it doesn’t have to be left behind. And in a week the man was dead. . . .
    Johannes stands up and paces the floor, up and down. His neighbor in the next room wakes up, his snoring has stopped and a sigh, a pained groan, is heard. Johannes tiptoes over to the table and sits down again. The wind whistles through the poplars outside his window, making him feel cold. The old poplars are stripped of their leaves and look like miserable freaks of nature; some gnarled branches grinding against the wall produce a creaking sound, like a wooden machine, a cracked stamping mill that runs and runs.
    He casts his eyes down at his papers and reads them through. To be sure, his imagination has led him astray again. He has nothing to do with death or with a passing carriage. He’s writing about a garden, about a lush, green garden near his home, the Castle garden. That is what he’s writing about. It’s dead and covered with snow now, and yet that is what he’s writing about, and it isn’t winter with snow at all, but spring with fragrance and mild breezes. And it’s evening. The lake below is still and deep, it’s like a leaden sea; there’s a scent of lilacs, hedge after hedge is in bud or green with foliage, and the air is so still that you can hear the blackcock’s mating call across the bay. In one of the garden walks stands Victoria, alone, dressed in white, with twenty summers behind her. There she stands. Her figure is taller than the tallest rosebushes; she’s looking out over the lake to the woods, toward the sleeping mountains in the distance. She appears like a white spirit in the middle of the green garden. Footsteps are heard from the road, she takes a few steps forward, down to the hidden pavilion, leans her elbows on the garden wall and looks downward. The man on the road doffs his hat, nearly sweeping the ground with it, and nods to her. She nods back. The man looks about him; seeing no spies