Free Victoria by Knut Hamsun Page A

pounding. Camilla offered timorously, “Victoria is in love with her fiancé, of course. She’s just become engaged, don’t you know?”
    The doors to the dining room were thrown open.
     
    Johannes found his place and stopped in front of it. The whole table was rocking up and down before his eyes; he saw a great many people and heard a murmur of voices.
    “Yes, that’s your place, so please,” the hostess said amiably. “If only everybody would sit down at last.”
    “Pardon me!” Victoria said of a sudden from just behind him.
    He stepped aside.
    She took his card and moved it several places, seven places down, next to an old man who had once been a tutor at the Castle and had a reputation as a tippler. She brought another card back and sat down.
    He stood there watching it all. The hostess, feeling uncomfortable, made herself busy on the other side of the table and avoided his glance.
    Shaken and more bewildered than ever, he went to his new place; one of Ditlef’s city friends, a young man with diamond studs in his shirtfront, moved into the original one. On his left sat Victoria, on his right Camilla.
    The dinner began.
    The old tutor remembered Johannes as a child, and a conversation started up between them. He related that he too had pursued the art of poetry as a young man; the manuscripts were still lying around, he would let Johannes read them some day. And now he had been summoned to this house on its day of rejoicing so he could share in the family’s happiness at Victoria’s engagement. The master and mistress of the house had prepared this surprise for him for old times’ sake.
    “I haven’t read any of your things,” he said. “If I want to read something, I read my own things; I have both poems and stories in my drawer. They are to be published after my death; I do want the public to know who I was, after all. We who’ve been in the profession somewhat longer aren’t in such a hurry to bring everything to the printer’s as they are nowadays, alas. Skoal!”
    The dinner goes forward. The host taps his glass and rises. His lean, aristocratic face is quick with emotion, and he gives an impression of being extremely happy. Johannes bends his head very low. His glass is empty and no one offers him anything; he fills it to the brim himself and again lets his head droop. Now it would come!
    The speech was nice and long and was received with a good deal of noisy cheer; the engagement was announced. Lots of good wishes for the host’s daughter and the chamberlain’s son poured in from every corner of the table.
    Johannes emptied his glass.
    A few minutes later his agitation is gone, his composure has returned; the champagne burns with a low flame in his veins. Then he hears the chamberlain speak, followed by renewed shouts of bravo and hurrah and the clinking of glasses. He casts a glance to where Victoria is sitting; she’s pale, seems anguished, and doesn’t look up. Camilla, however, nods to him and smiles, and he nods back.
    The tutor goes on talking beside him. “It’s beautiful, beautiful, when two people find one another. That was not my lot. I was a young student, good prospects, great gifts; my father had an ancient name, a large house, wealth, many, many ships. So it would be no exaggeration to say I had very good prospects. She was young too, and high up in society. Well, I come to her and open my heart. ‘ No, ’ she says. Can you understand her? No, she didn’t want to, she said. I did what I could, got on with my work and took it like a man. Then came my father’s lean years, the shipwrecks, the surety claims, in short, he went bankrupt. And what did I do? Took it like a man again. But now the girl, the one I’m talking about, no longer shuns me. No, she comes back, looks me up in town. What was she after, you’re going to ask. I was poor, with only a small teaching job, all my prospects gone and my poems put away in a drawer. But now she came and wanted to. Yes, she wanted