Look Back on Happiness by Knut Hamsun

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The two men followed me. The constable grinned and said:

"Did you _see_ a man pass by here yesterday?"

"No," I said.

They looked at each other, and took counsel together; then they left the
hut and returned to the village.

I thought: What zeal this policeman showed in the execution of his duties,
how he shone with public spirit! There will be bonuses for the capture and
transport of the criminal; there will be honor in having carried out the
deed. All mankind should adopt this man because he is its son, created in
its image! Where are the irons? He would rattle the links a little and
lift them on his arm like the train of a riding skirt, to make me feel his
terrifying power to put people in irons ... I feel nothing.

And what tradesmen--what kings of trade--we have today! They instantly
miss what a man can carry off in a sack, and notify the police.

From now on I begin to long for the spring. My peat hut lies still too
near to mankind, and I will build myself another when the frost has gone
out of the ground. On the other side of the Skjel, I have chosen a spot in
the forest which I think I shall like. It is twenty-four miles from the
village and eighteen across the fjeld.

IV

Have I said that I was too near men? Heaven help me, for some days in
succession I have been taking strolls in the forest, saying good morning
and pretending I was in human company. If it was a man I imagined beside
me, we carried on a long, intelligent conversation, but if it was a woman,
I was polite: "Let me carry your parcel, miss." Once it must have been the
Lapp's daughter I seemed to meet, for I flattered her most lavishly and
offered to carry her fur cloak if she would take it off and walk in her
skin; tut, tut.

Heaven help me, I am no longer too near men. And probably I will not build
that peat hut still further away from them.

The days grow longer, and I do not mind. The truth is that in the winter I
suffered privation and learned much in order to master myself. It has
taken time and sometimes a resolute will, so it cannot be denied that I am
paying for my education rather dearly. Sometimes I have been needlessly
stern with myself.

"There is a loaf of bread," I said. "It doesn't surprise me, it doesn't
interest me; I am used to it. But if you see no bread for twelve hours, it
will mean something to you," I said, and hid the bread away.

That was in the winter.

Were they dreary days? No, good days. My liberty was so great that I could
do and think as I pleased; I was alone, the bear of the forest. But even
in the heart of the forest no man dares speak aloud without looking round;
rather, he walks in silence. For a time you console yourself that it's
typically English to be silent, it's regal to be silent. But suddenly you
find this has gone too far, your mouth begins to wake, to stretch, and
suddenly to shout nonsense.

"Bricks for the palace! The calf is much stronger today!"

Perhaps if your voice is strong, the sound will carry for a quarter of a
mile--but then you feel a sting as though after a slap. If only you had
kept your regal silence! One day the postman who crosses the fjeld once a
month came on me just as I had shouted.

"What?" he called from the wood.

"Careful below!" I called back to save my face. "I've put out a trap."

But with the longer days, my courage grows; it must be the spring that
causes this mysterious revival within me, and I no longer fear a shout
more or less. I needlessly rattle my pots and pans as I cook, and I sing
at the top of my voice. It is spring.

Yesterday I stood on a hillock and looked out across the wintry woods.
They have a different expression now; they have gone gray and bedraggled,
and the midday sun has thawed down the snow and diminished it. There are
catkins everywhere, drifts of them in the underbrush, looking like letters
of the alphabet piled in a heap. The moon rises, the stars break forth. I
am cold and shiver a little, but I have nothing to do in the hut, and
prefer to shiver as long as possible. In the winter I did nothing so
foolish, but went home if I was cold. Now I'm tired of that, too. It is
the spring.

The sky is pure and cool, lying wide open to all the stars. There is a
great flock of worlds up in that endless meadow, tiny, teeming worlds, so
tiny that they are like the sound of a tinkling bell; as I look at them, I
can hear thousands of tiny bells. Yes, certainly I am being drawn more and
more toward the grassy slopes of spring.

V

I fill the fireplace with pine wood, hoist my belongings to my back, and
leave the hut. "Farewell, Madame."

That was the end.

I feel no pleasure at leaving my shelter, but a touch of sadness--as I
always do on leaving a place that has been my home for some time. But all
the world stands outside calling to me. Indeed I am like all lovers of the
woods and fields; wordlessly we had agreed to meet, and as I sat there
last night, I felt my eyes being drawn to the door.

Several times I look back at the hut, with the smoke rising up from the
chimney; the smoke billows and waves to me, and I wave back.

The silky pallor of the morning refreshes me; in a long blue haze over the
forest, a slow dawn rises. It looks like a cheerful piratical coast in the
sky before me. The mountains are all on my left.

After a few hours' march I am like new from top to toe, and I press on
swiftly. I beat the air with my stick, and it says "hoo" as it swishes;
whenever I think I deserve it, I sit down and give myself food.

No, you have not my pleasures in the town.

I beat my legs with my stick from the sheer exuberance of living, and
nearly cry out. I behave as though the burden on my back had no weight,
taking needless leaps, and overexerting myself a little; but an
overexertion to which one is driven by inner content is easy to bear. In
my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy
and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding
unless someone explains it to you. I play a little game with myself,
pretending to have discovered a remarkable kind of tree. At first I pay
little attention, then I stretch my neck and contract my eyelids and gaze.

"What!" I say to myself. "Surely it couldn't be--"

I throw down my burden and approach, inspect the tree and nod sagely,
saying it is a strange, fabled tree that I have discovered. And I take out
my notebook and describe it.

Merely jest and happiness, a queer little impulse to play. Children have
done it before me. And here comes no postman to surprise me. As suddenly
as I have begun the game, I end it again, as children do. But for a moment
I was transported back to the dear, foolish bliss of childhood.

Perhaps it was the anticipation of soon seeing men again that made me
playful and happy!

Next day, just as a raw mist descends on mountain and forest, I reach the
Lapp's house. I enter. But though I meet with nothing but kindness, a Lapp
hut contains little that is interesting. There are spoons and knives of
bone on the peat wall, and a small paraffin lamp hangs from the roof. The
Lapp himself is a dull nonentity who can neither tell fortunes nor
conjure. His daughter has gone across the field; she has learned to read,
but not to write, at the village school. The two old people, husband and
wife, are fools. The whole family share a sort of animal dumbness; if I
ask them a question, I may or may not get half a reply: "Mm-no, mm-yes." I
am not a Lapp, and so they distrust me.

All the afternoon the mist lay white on the forest. I slept a while. In
the evening, the sky was clear again, and there were a few degrees of
frost. I left the hut. The moon stood full and silent above the earth.

Heigh-ho--what untuned strings!

But where are the birds all gone away,
and what kind of place is this?
Here where I stand nothing moves or stirs,
in this world that is dead, no event occurs;
I stand in a silvermine.
My eyes sweep round, but I sorely miss
a homely, well-known outline.

And so he came to a silver wood--
thus ran an ancient tale.
Here rests a song of shimmering fire
as though it were sung by a starry choir.
And swift in my youth, I leap
to bind fast the troll, the cunning male,
and awaken a maid from her sleep.

Today I smile at childish tales,
old age has made me wise.
Once proudly in prodigal youth I trod,
now by age my foot is heavily shod;
yet my heart--my heart would fly.
I am driven by fire and bound by ice,
no rest nor repose have I.

A shuddering chill falls on the night,
like a cloud from the lungs in the cold.
There passed a great gust through the silver lace
of the woods, like a lion's royal pace
on paws that are soundless and still.
It may be a god on his evening stroll.
The roots of the forest thrill.

When I returned to the hut, the daughter had also returned home, and sat
eating after her long march. Olga the Lapp, tiny and queer, conceived in a
snowdrift, in the course of a greeting. "_Boris_!" they said and
fell on their noses.

She had bought red and blue pieces of cloth at the draper's shop in the
village, and no sooner had she finished eating than she pushed the cups
and plates away and began to embroider her Sunday jacket with pretty
strips of the cloth. All the while she never spoke a word, because a
stranger was in the room.

"You know me, Olga, don't you?"

"Mm."

"But you look so angry."

"M-no."

"How's the snow track across the fjeld?"

"All right."

I knew there was a deserted hut the family had once lived in, and asked:

"How far is it to your old hut?"

"Not far," said Olga.

Olga Lapp has someone to smile at surely, even if she will not smile at
me. Here she sits in the great forest, pandering to her vanity and sewing
wonderful scrolls on her jacket. On Sunday, no doubt, she will wear it to
church and meet the man whose eyes it is meant to gladden.

I was not anxious to stay any longer with these small beings, these human
grains of sand. As I had slept enough in the afternoon and the moon was
bright, I prepared to leave. After laying in a further supply of reindeer
cheese and whatever other food I could get, I left the hut. But what a
surprise: the bright moonlight was gone, and the sky was overcast; there
was no frost, only mild weather and wet woods. It was spring.

When Olga Lapp saw this, she advised me against leaving; but why should I
listen to her chatter? She came with me a little way into the woods to
direct me, then turned and went back, tiny and queer, her feathers ruffled
like a hen's.

VI

It was difficult to advance. Never mind. A few hours later I found myself
high up on the fjeld; I must have strayed from the path. What is that dark
shape there? A mountain peak. And that over there? Another peak. Let us
pitch camp on the spot, then.

There was a deep goodness and tenderness about this mild night. I sat in
the dark recalling forgotten memories of my childhood, and many
experiences in this place and that. And what a satisfaction it is, too, to
have money in one's pocket, even if one sleeps in the open!

During the night I woke up; I found it growing too warm for me under my
crag, and loosened my sleeping bag. It seemed to me, too, that a sound
still hummed in my ear, as though I had called out or sung in my sleep.
Suddenly I felt completely rested, and turned to look about me. It was
dark and mild, a stone-still world. The sky was paler than the ring of
mountains round me; I lay in the center of a city of peaks, at the foot of
a great cliff, huge to the point of deformity. The wind began to blow, and
suddenly there was a booming in the distance. Then came a streak of
lightning, and immediately after the thunder rolled down like a gigantic
avalanche between the most distant peaks. It was matchless to lie there
listening, and a supernatural delight, a thrill of enjoyment, ran through
me. A stranger madness filled me than I had ever felt before, and I gave
it expression by laughing aloud in wanton and humorous abandon. Many a
thought ran through my mind, witticisms alternating with moments of such
great sorrow that I lay sighing deeply. The lightning and thunder came
closer, and it began to rain--a torrential rain. The echoes were
overpowering; all nature was an uproar, a hullabalooing. I tried to
conquer the night by shouting at it, lest mysteriously it should rob me of
my strength and leave me without a will. These mountains, I thought, are
sheer incantations against my journey, great planted curses that block my
path. Or perhaps I have only strayed into a mountains' trade union? But I
nod my head repeatedly. That means I am brave and happy. Perhaps after all
they are only stuffed mountains.

More lightning and thunder and torrential rain; it felt as though the
near-by echo had slapped me, reverberating a hundred times through me.
Never mind. I have read about many battles and been in a rain of bullets
before this. Yet in a moment of sadness and humility in the presence of
the powers about me, I weep and think:

"Who am I now among men? Or am I lost already? Am I nothing already?"

And I cry out and call my name to hear if it still lives.

A wheel of gold turned before my eyes, and the thunder clapped over my
very head, on my own fjeld. Instantly I started out of the sleeping bag
and left my shelter. The thunder rolled on, there was lightning and more
thunder, worlds were uprooted. Why had I not listened to Olga's advice and
remained in the hut? Is it the Lapps whose magic powers are doing this?
The Lapps? Those human mites, those mountain dwarfs! What is all this
noise to me? I made a feeble effort to walk against it, but stopped again,
for I was among giants, and saw the foolishness of trying to battle with
the thunder.

I leaned against the side of the mountain: no longer did I stand shouting
and hurling challenges at my opponent, but looked at him with milk-blue
eyes. And now that I have yielded, none but a mountain would be so hard.
But I am not rhymes and rhythms alone; did you think I should waste my
good brain chasing such rainbows? You lie. Here I lean against the whole
world, and you, perhaps, believe the blue of my eyes....

At that, the lightning struck me. This was a miracle, and it happened to
me. It ran down my left elbow, scorching the sleeve of my jacket. The
lightning seemed like a ball of wool that dropped to the ground. I felt a
sensation of heat, and saw that the ground farther down the mountain was
struck a loud blow and then split. A great oppression held me down; a
spear of darkness shot through me. And then it thundered beyond all
measure, not long and rumbling, but firm and clear and rattling.

The storm passed on.

VII

Next day I arrived at the deserted hut, drenched to the skin, struck by
lightning, but in a strangely gentle and yielding mood, as after a
punishment. My good fortune in the midst of my ill-luck made me
overfriendly to everything; I tramped on without hurting the ground, and I
avoided sinful thoughts, though it was spring. I was not even out of
temper when I had to retrace my steps across the fjeld to find my way
again to the hut. I had time; there was no hurry. I was the first tourist
of the spring season, and far too early.

So I remained at my ease in the hut for a few days. Sometimes at night
verses and small poems blossomed in my mind as though I had become a real
poet. At any rate there were signs that great changes had taken place
within me since the winter, when I had desired nothing but to lie blinking
my eyes and be left in peace.

One day when everything was thawing in the sun, I left the hut and walked
about the mountains for some hours. I had lately been thinking of writing
some children's verses, addressed to a certain little girl, but nothing
had come of it. Now as I walked on the mountainside, I felt again a desire
for this pastime, and worked at it on several occasions, but could not get
it into shape. The night, when one has slept an hour or two, is the time
when such things come to one.

So I went straight on to the village and bought myself a good store of
food. There were many people in this district, and it did me good to hear
human speech and laughter again; but there was no place here where I could
stay, and in any case I had come too early. I had much to carry on my way
home to my hut again. About halfway I met a man, a casual laborer, a
vagabond, whose name was Solem. Later I heard that he was the bastard son
of a telegraph operator who had been in Rosenlund nearly a generation
before.

That this man should have stepped off the path to let me pass with my
burden was a good trait in him, and I thanked him and said, "I shouldn't
have run over you in any case, ha, ha!"

He asked me if there was much snow on the way to the village. I told him
it was much the same as here. "I see," he said, and turned away. I thought
that perhaps he had come a long way, and since he carried nothing that
looked like provisions, I offered him some of mine in order to make him
talk a little. He thanked me and accepted.

He was above middle height, and quite young, not more than in his
twenties, possibly just on thirty--a fine fellow. After the swaggering
fashion of wanderers, he had a lock of hair escaping from under the peak
of his cap; but he wore no beard. This full-grown man still shaved without
growing tired of doing so, and this, together with his fringe of hair and
his general manner, gave me the impression that he wished to seem younger
than he was.

We talked while he ate; he laughed readily and was in a cheerful mood, and
since his face was beardless and hard, it looked like a laughing iron
mask. But he was sensible and pleasant. There was only one thing: I had
been silent for so long that I talked now perhaps too readily; and if it
happened that both this boy Solem and I spoke at once, he would stop
immediately to let me have my say. When this had happened several times, I
grew tired of winning, and stopped too. But that merely made him nod and
say: "Go ahead."

I explained to him that I idled in solitude, studying strange trees, and
writing a thing or two about them, that I lived in a hut, but that today I
had finished my stock of provisions and had had to go to the village. When
he heard about the hut, he stopped chewing, and sat as though he were
listening; then he said hastily: "Yes, in a way I know these telegraph
poles across the mountains very well. Not these particular poles, but
others. I was a linesman till not long ago."

"Were you?" I said. "Haven't you passed my hut today?" I added.

He hesitated a moment, but when he saw that I was not trying to put him in
the wrong, he admitted that he had been in the hut and rested, and found
my crisp-bread there.

"It wasn't easy to sit there without taking some of it," he said.

We spoke of many things. His language was hardly coarse at all, nor did he
dawdle over his food. My own manners had run wild to such an extent that I
valued his good behavior.

He offered to help me carry my pack as a mark of his gratitude for the
food, and I accepted his offer. It was in this way that the stranger
returned to the hut with me. As soon as I came in I saw a note on the
table, a sort of thanks for the bread; it was an extremely ill-mannered
epistle, full of obscene expressions. When Solem saw what I was reading,
his iron face broke into a smile. I pretended not to understand the note
and threw it back on the table; he picked it up and tore it to shreds.

"I'm sorry you've seen it," he said. "We linesmen have a way of doing that
sort of thing, and I'd forgotten I'd left it here."

Soon after this he went out.

He stayed that night and next day, and found a means of repaying me by
washing some of my clothes and making himself useful in other ways. There
was a large tub outside the hut--had been since the Lapps lived there--
which was cracked and leaked abundantly, but Solem stopped the cracks with
bacon fat and boiled my clothes in it. It was very funny to watch him
imperturbably skimming off the fat that floated up.

He seemed to want to stay till we had finished the provisions again, and
then to go with me to the village; but when he heard I was going the other
way, to the mountain farm somewhere under the great peaks of the Tore,
where summer visitors stayed and many travelers passed, he wanted to go
there, too. He was a bird of passage.

"Can't I come with you and help you carry?" he asked me. "I'm used to farm
work, too, and perhaps I can get a job there."

VIII

The bustle of spring season had already started at the great farm; men and
animals were awake, the barn re-echoed with lowing the whole day long, and
the goats had long since been let out to pasture.

It was a long way between neighbors here; one or two cotters had cleared
an area in the forest, which they had then bought; apart from that, all
the land in sight belonged to the farm. Many new houses had been built
here as the traffic over the fjelds increased, and gargoyles, homelike and
Norwegian, sat on the gable ends, while the sound of a piano came from the
living-room. Do you know the place? You have been here, and the people of
the farm have asked after you.

Good days, nothing but good days: a suitable transition from solitude. I
speak to the young people who own the homestead now, and to the husband's
old father and young sister Josephine. The old man leaves his room to look
at me. He is terrifyingly old, perhaps ninety; his eyes are worn and
half-crazed, and his figure has shrunk to nothing. He toils with both
hands to drag himself into the day, and each time it is as though he left
his mother's womb anew and found a world before him:

"Look, how strange, there are houses on the farm," he thinks as he gazes
at them. And when the barn doors stand open, he looks at them, too, and
thinks:

"Just like a doorway; what can it be? Looks exactly like a doorway...."

And he stands still a long time staring at it.

But Josephine, the daughter of his latest marriage, is young and plays the
piano for me. Ah, Josephine! As she runs through the garden, her feet are
like a breeze under her skirt. How kind she is to the visitors! Surely she
has seen us coming a long way off, Solem and myself, and sat down to play
the piano. She has gray, pathetic, young girl's hands--hands which confirm
an old observation of mine that one's hands reveal one's sexual character,
showing chastity, indifference, or passion.

It is pleasant to watch Josephine crouch down to milk the goat. But she is
only doing this now to charm and please the stranger. Ordinarily she has
no time for such work, for she is too busy at her indoor tasks, waiting at
table and watering the flowers and chatting with me about who climbed the
Tore Peak last summer, and who did it the summer before that. These are
Josephine's tasks.

Refreshed and rejuvenated, I idle about, stand for a while watching Solem,
who has been put to carting manure, then drift on down through the wood to
the cotters' houses. Neat, compact houses, barns with room for two cows
and a couple of goats in each, half-naked children playing homemade games
outside the barns, quarrels and laughter and tears. The men at both places
cart manure on sleighs, seeking a path where the snow and ice still lie on
the ground, and doing very well with it. I do not descend to the houses,
but watch the work from my point of vantage. Well do I know the life of
labor, and well do I like it.

It was no small area these cotters had broken up; the homesteads were tiny
but the fences surrounding the land included a good section of forest.
When the ground was cleared all the way to the fence, this would be a farm
with five cows and a horse. Good luck!

The days pass, the windowpanes have thawed, the snow is melting away,
green things grow against south walls, and the leaves break out in the
woods. My original intention to make great irons hot within me is
unchanged; but if I ever thought this an easy task I must be an incredible
fool. I do not even know with any certainty if there are irons in me
still, or whether I can shape them if there are. Since the winter, life
has made me lonely and small; I idle and loiter here, remembering that
once things were different. Now that I have reached daylight and men
again, I begin to understand all this. I was a different person once. The
wave has its feathered crest, and so had I; wine has its fire, and so had
I. Neurasthenia, the ape of all the diseases, pursues me.

What then? No, I do not mourn this. Mourn? It is for women to mourn. Life
is only a loan, and I am grateful for the loan. At times I have had gold
and silver and copper and iron and other small metals; it was a great
delight to live in the world, much greater than an endless life away from
the world; but pleasure cannot last. I know of no one who has not been
through the same thing; but I know of no one who will admit it. How they
have declined! But they themselves have said:

"See how everything is better!"

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