by Knut Hamsun
Time passed. I let myself sink down on the steps near me and wiped the sweat off my forehead and my neck, took a deep breath and forced myself to be calm. The sun was going down, the afternoon was wearing on. I began once more to brood on my situation. My hunger was getting outrageous, and in a few hours it would be night again; I had to think of a way out while there was still time. My thoughts began again to circle around the rooming house I had been driven away from; I certainly didn’t want to go back there but still couldn’t help thinking about it. Actually, the woman had every right in the world to throw me out. How could I expect people to put me up if I didn’t pay them! What’s more, she had given me food off and on; even last night, after I had provoked her, she had offered me two sandwiches, offered them to me out of kindness because she knew that I needed them. So I had nothing to complain about, and as I sat there on the steps I began to ask—no, beg—her forgiveness in my heart for the way I had behaved. Most of all, I was bitterly sorry I had shown myself ungrateful to her at the end and thrown that piece of paper in her face. . . .
The ten-krone bill! I gave a whistle. The letter the messenger brought, where did it come from? Only now, at this moment, did I think clearly about this, and I had a hunch right away what the story was. Sick with pain and shame, I whispered “Ylajali” several times in a hoarse voice and shook my head. Was it not me who had decided only yesterday to walk proudly past her when we met and to display the utmost indifference toward her? And instead of that I had merely aroused her compassion and coaxed her out of a pen nyworth of charity. No, no, no, there was no end to my degradation! Not even vis-à-vis her had I been able to maintain a respectable posture; I was sinking, sinking everywhere I turned, sinking to my knees, to my middle, going down in infamy never to come up again, never! That beat everything! To accept ten kroner of alms money without being able to throw it back at the secret donor, to scramble for pennies with both hands wherever they were offered, hang on to them, use them to pay the rent despite my own innermost repugnance!
Couldn’t I put my hands on those ten kroner again somehow or other? Going back to the landlady to get the bill returned wouldn’t do any good, of course; but there must be some other way if I stopped to think, if I just tried real hard to stop and think about it. Here, honest to God, it wasn’t sufficient to think just in the ordinary way, I had to think about some means of procuring those ten kroner till my whole body ached. I sat down to think hard.
It was probably around four by now, in a couple of hours I might get to see the theater manager if my play had been finished. I take out the manuscript on the spot and try to put together the three or four last scenes, by hook or by crook. I think and sweat and read it through from the beginning but can’t get anywhere. No nonsense now! I say, no bullheadedness there! And so I work for dear life on my play, writing down everything that comes to mind just to finish quickly and be off. I tried to convince myself I was having another big moment, lying to my face and openly deceiving myself while scribbling away as though there was no need to look for the right words. That’s good! That’s a real find! I whispered every so often, just get it down! Eventually, however, my most recent lines of dialogue began to sound suspicious to me: they contrasted so sharply with the dialogue in the early scenes. Besides, there wasn’t the slightest tinge of the Middle Ages about the monk’s words. I break my pencil between my teeth, jump up, tear my manuscript to bits, every single sheet, toss my hat in the gutter and trample it. “I’m lost!” I whisper to myself. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m lost!” I say nothing except these words as I stand there trampling my hat.
A few steps away a policeman is observing me; he stands in the middle of the street and doesn’t pay attention to anything else. Our eyes meet as I lift my head; maybe he had been standing there for quite a while just watching me. I pick up my hat, put it on, and walk over to the man.
“Do you know what time it is?” I ask.
He waits awhile before pulling out his watch, not taking his eyes off me for a moment.
“A little past four,” he says.
“Exactly!” I say. “A little past four, perfectly correct! You know your stuff, I see, and I’ll be thinking of you.”
With that I left him. I threw him into a state of the utmost astonishment, and he followed me with his eyes, mouth agape, still holding the watch in his hand. When I had reached the Royal Hotel I turned around and looked back; he was still standing in the same position, following me with his eyes.
Heh-heh, that’s the way to treat those brutes! With the most refined impudence! That impressed the brutes, gave them a fright. . . . I was extremely pleased with myself and began again to sing a snatch of song. Tense with excitement, feeling no pain anymore, or even any kind of discomfort, I walked through the whole market light as a feather, turned around at the Arcades and settled on a bench near Our Savior’s.
Might it not, after all, be a matter of indifference whether I returned a ten-krone bill or not? Once I had received it, it was mine, and there certainly wasn’t any want where it came from. Anyway, I couldn’t help accepting it, since it was sent expressly to me; it wouldn’t have made any sense to let the messenger keep it. Nor would it do to return an entirely different ten-krone bill than the one I had received. So, there was nothing to be done about it.
I tried to look at the traffic around the market in front of me and occupied my thoughts with indifferent things; but I didn’t succeed and was still taken up with the ten-krone bill. Finally I clenched my hands and got angry. She would feel hurt, I said, if I sent it back, so why should I do it? I was always ready to consider myself too good for this, that and the other, to shake my head arrogantly and say, No, thanks! Now I could see what it led to: I found myself once more on the street. Even when I had the best opportunity to do so, I didn’t hold on to my nice, warm lodging; I turned proud, jumped up at the first word and brazened it out, handed out ten kroner left and right and went my way. . . . I took myself sharply to task for having abandoned my lodging and once again landing myself in a quandary.
For the rest, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the whole business. I hadn’t asked for that ten-krone bill and had barely held it in my hands; I had given it away at once, paid it out to some total strangers I would never see again. That was the sort of man I was, always paying down to the last mite when something was at stake. If I knew Ylajali rightly, she wasn’t sorry she had sent me that money either, so what was I carrying on for? Actually, it was the least she could do, sending me a ten-krone bill every now and then. After all, the poor girl was in love with me, ha! perhaps even hopelessly in love with me. . . . And I sat there puffing myself up at this thought. There could be no doubt that she was in love with me, the poor girl! . . .
It turned five o’clock. After my long bout of nervous excitement, I collapsed anew and began once more to hear that empty buzzing in my head. My eyes fixed in a blank stare, I looked in the direction of the Elephant Pharmacy. Hunger was raging fiercely inside me and I was in great pain. As I sit thus looking into vacancy, a figure is gradually revealed to my fixed stare, one that I finally see quite distinctly and recognize: it is the cake vendor by the Elephant Pharmacy.
I give a start, draw myself up on the bench and start thinking. Yes, sure enough, it was the same woman in front of the same table in the same spot! I whistle a couple of times and snap my fingers, get up from the bench and start walking toward the pharmacy. No nonsense now! I didn’t give a damn whether it was the wages of sin or good Norwegian huckster’s money minted in silver at Kongsberg! I wasn’t going to be ridiculous, you could die from too much pride.
I walk over to the corner, aim for the woman and take my stand in front of her. I smile, nod familiarly, and frame my words as if it were a matter of course that I would be back someday.
“Hello!” I say. “Perhaps you don’t recognize me?”
“No,” she answers slowly, looking at me.
I smile even more broadly, as if it were only her funny little
joke that she didn’t know me, and say, “Don’t you remember that I gave you a stack of kroner one day? I didn’t say anything on that occasion as far as I remember, that’s true, I didn’t; I don’t usually do that. When you are dealing with honest people, it is unnecessary to make an agreement and, so to speak, sign a contract for every little thing. Heh-heh. Oh yes, it was I who handed over that money to you.”
“Really, so it was you! Yes, now I guess I know you too, when I think back a little.”
Wanting to forestall her thanking me for the money, I say quickly, letting my eyes wander around her table in search of eatables, “Well, here I’ve come to pick up the cakes.”
She doesn’t understand.
“The cakes,” I repeat, “I’ve come to pick them up. Some anyway, the first helping. I won’t need them all today.”
“You’ve come to pick them up?” she asks.
“Yes, I’ve come to pick them up, you bet I have!” I answer, laughing aloud, as though it ought to have been quite obvious to her from the very beginning that I had come to pick them up. And I grab a cake from the table, a kind of french roll, which I begin to eat.
When the woman sees this, she rises in her basement hole and makes an instinctive gesture to protect her merchandise, giving me to understand that she hadn’t expected me to be back to rob her of it.
“You hadn’t?” I say. “Indeed, you hadn’t?” What a funny woman she was! Had it ever happened to her that someone gave her a chunk of kroner for safekeeping without that person asking to get it back? No! Well, there you are! Maybe she thought it was stolen money, since I had tossed it to her like that? Ah, she didn’t! That was nice anyway, real nice. It was, if I might say so, sweet of her to take me for an honest man at least. Haw-haw! Oh, she was a good one, all right!
But why, then, did I give her the money? The woman was furious and raised a hue and cry.
I explained why I had given her the money, explained it quietly and emphatically: I was in the habit of acting like that because I had such faith in everybody. Whenever someone offered me a contract or an IOU, I always shook my head and said, No, thanks! As God was my witness, I did.
But the woman still didn’t understand.
I tried another tack, spoke sharply and refused to listen to any nonsense. Hadn’t it ever happened to her to be paid in advance in the same way? I asked. Of course, I meant by people who were well off, some of the consuls, for example? Never? Well, it wasn’t fair that I should suffer because she was unfamiliar with that social custom. It was accepted practice in foreign countries. But maybe she had never been abroad? Ah, there you are! Then she didn’t have a word to say in this matter. . . . And I made a grab for several cakes on the table.
She gave an angry growl, doggedly refusing to hand over anything from her table, she even snatched a piece of cake out of my hand and put it back in its place. I got mighty sore, banged the table and threatened her with the police. I would be easy on her, I said; if I took everything that belonged to me, her entire business would be ruined, because it was an awful lot of money I had given her that time. But I wouldn’t take that much—in fact, I was asking only for half my money’s worth. And as an extra I promised never to be back again. God forbid, seeing that she was that sort of person.
Finally she put out some cakes, at an outrageous price, four or five pieces which she appraised at the highest rate she could think of, told me to take them and get lost. I still bickered with her, insisting that she was cheating me out of at least one krone of the money and, what’s more, was bleeding me white with her gouging prices. “Don’t you know you can go to jail for such dirty tricks?” I said. “May God help you. You could get hard labor for life, you old fool!” She threw me yet another cake and, all but grinding her teeth, told me to be off.
I left.
Huh, who ever saw such a dishonest cake vendor! As I walked through the marketplace munching my cakes, I talked aloud without stopping about the woman and her insolence, repeating to myself what we had said to each other and thinking I’d had a big edge over her. I ate the cakes in front of everybody, talking about this.
The cakes disappeared one after another, but however much I put away it didn’t help, my hunger was just as bottomless. Good God, why didn’t it help? I was so greedy that I nearly laid hands on the last cake, which I had decided at the very outset to save for that little fellow down in Vognmand Street, the boy that the man with the red beard had spit in the head. I kept thinking of him all the time—I couldn’t make myself forget his expression as he leaped up, crying and cursing. He had turned around to my window when the man spit at him, and he had plainly checked whether I, too, would laugh at him. God only knew if I would find him when I got down there! I went all out to get to Vognmand Street in a hurry, passed the spot where I had torn up my play and where some bits of paper were still floating around, evaded the police officer whom I had so astonished by my behavior recently, and stood at last at the steps where the boy had been sitting.
He wasn’t there. The street was almost empty. It was beginning to get dark and I couldn’t spot the boy; maybe he had gone in. I put the cake down carefully, leaning it up against the door, knocked hard and ran off at once. He is sure to find it! I said to myself. He’ll find it first thing when he comes out! And my eyes grew moist with foolish glee at the thought that the little fellow would find the cake.
I came down to the Jærnbane Pier again.
I wasn’t hungry anymore, but the sweet food I had eaten was beginning to make me sick. My head was again awhirl with the wildest fancies: What if I secretly cut the hawser of one of those ships? What if I suddenly started yelling fire? I walk further out on the pier, find myself a crate to sit on and fold my hands, feeling my head getting more and more confused. I am quite motionless, not lifting a finger to tough it out any longer.
I sit there staring at Copégoro, the barque with the Russian flag. I make out a man at the rail; the red lantern on the port side shines down on his head, and I stand up and call out to him. I didn’t have any purpose in acting as I did, nor did I expect to get an answer. I said, “Do you sail tonight, Captain?”
“Yes, in a little while,” the man answers. He spoke Swedish. Then he was probably a Finn, I thought.7
“Hmm. You aren’t a man short, are you?” I didn’t care at that moment whether I was refused or not, it was all the same to me what answer the man would give me. I waited, looking at him.
“No,” he said. “Well, I could use a deck hand, maybe.”
A deck hand! I gave myself a shake, slipped my glasses off on the sly and put them in my pocket, stepped onto the gangway and strode on board.
“I’m not an able seaman,” I said, “but I can do whatever you bid me to. Where are you bound for?”
“We sail with ballast to Leeds, to take in coal for Cádiz.”
“Fine!” I said, forcing myself on the man. “It’s all one to me where we’re going. I’ll do my job.”
He stood awhile eyeing me, thinking it over.
“You haven’t gone to sea before, have you?” he asked.
“No. But as I’m telling you, give me a job and I’ll do it. I’m used to a little of everything.”
He thought it over again. I had already set my mind on going along, and I began to fear getting chased ashore again.
“So what do you say, Captain?” I asked at last. “I can really do anything, whatever you wish. What am I saying? I would have to be a poor fellow if I didn’t do more than just what I was set to do. I can take two watches in a row if necessary. It’ll do me a world of good, and I believe I can take it.”
“All right, we can give it a try,” he said, smiling faintly at my last words.8 “If it doesn’t pan out, we can always part company in England.”
“Of course!” I answered, overjoyed. And I repeated that we could part company in England if it didn’t pan out.
Then he put me to work.
Once out in the fjord I straightened up, wet with fever and fatigu
e, looked in toward the shore and said goodbye for now to the city, to Kristiania, where the windows shone so brightly in every home.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
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11 problem of time and space: In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) developed a view of time and space as “perceptual forms” rather than objective realities. Everything we perceive and know is, according to Kant, limited to phenomena; we cannot know “things in themselves.”
11 that old reverend: The narrator mistakenly calls Renan sognepræst (parish priest). Ernest Renan (1823-92) soon abandoned the study of theology and did his major scholarly work as a historian of Christianity. His Vie de Jésus (1863), in which he portrayed Jesus as a human being, with deep understanding and warm sympathy, cost him his chair at the Collège de France. He was reinstated in 1871.
13 Students’ Promenade: The Studenterlunden, which I have translated as “Students’ Promenade,” is a park-like area along Karl Johan Street extending between the Storting (Norway’s parliament) and the National Theater. Karl Johan Street, which runs from the Central Station to the Palace Park, is Oslo’s most popular mall.
25 “his name is Johan Arendt Happolati: The name Johan Arendt conceals a private joke of the author. Johann Arndt (1555-1621), the German Lutheran pastor, was widely known for his edifying religious writings. His books were translated into many languages and had a decisive influence on pietism. Hans Olsen, Hamsun’s tyrannical uncle and a strict pietist, must have had some of these books in his library.
