And I shut the windows.

There lie two bird's feathers, I think to myself again. I seem to know them; they remind me of a little jest up in Nordland, just a little episode among a host of others. It is amusing to see those two feathers again. And suddenly I seem to see a face and hear a voice, and the voice says: "Her, Herr Lieutenant: here are your feathers."

"Your feathers."...

Cora, lie still--do you hear? I will kill you if you move!

The weather is hot, an intolerable heat is in the room; what was I thinking of to close the windows? Open them again--open the door too; open it wide--this way, merry souls, come in! Hey, messenger, an errand--go out and fetch me a host of people...

And the day pa.s.ses; but time stands still.

Now I have written this for my own pleasure only, and amused myself with it as best I could. No sorrow weighs on me, but I long to be away--where, I do not know, but far away, perhaps in Africa or India.

For my place is in the woods, in solitude...

GLAHN'S DEATH

A DOc.u.mENT OF 1861

I

The Glahn family can go on advertising as long as they please for Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, who disappeared; but he will never come back.

He is dead, and, what is more, I know how he died.

To tell the truth, I am not surprised that his people should still keep on seeking information; for Thomas Glahn was in many ways an uncommon and likable man. I admit this, for fairness' sake, and despite the fact that Glahn is still repellant to my soul, so that the bare memory of him arouses hatred. He was a splendidly handsome man, full of youth, and with an irresistible manner. When he looked at you with his hot animal eyes, you could not but feel his power; even I felt it so. A woman, they say, said: "When he looks at me, I am lost; I feel a sensation as if he were touching me."

But Thomas Glahn had his faults, and I have no intention of hiding them, seeing that I hate him. He could at times be full of nonsense like a child, so kindly natured was he; and perhaps it was that which made him so irresistible to women. G.o.d knows! He could chat with them and laugh at their senseless twaddle; and so he made an impression. Once, speaking of a very corpulent man in the place, he said that he looked as if he went about with his breeches full of lard. And he laughed at that joke himself, though I should have been ashamed of it. Another time, after we had come to live in the same house together, he showed his foolishness in an unmistakable way. My landlady came in one morning and asked what I would have for breakfast, and in my hurry I happened to answer: "A bread and a slice of egg." Thomas Glahn was sitting in my room at the time--he lived in the attic up above, just under the roof--and he began to chuckle and laugh childishly over my little slip of the tongue. "A bread and a slice of egg!" he repeated time over and over, until I looked at him in surprise and made him stop.

Maybe I shall call to mind other ridiculous traits of his later on. If so, I will write them down too, and not spare him, seeing that he is still my enemy. Why should I be generous? But I will admit that he talked nonsense only when he was drunk. But is it not a great mistake to be drunk at all?

When I first met him, in the autumn of 1859, he was a man of two-and-thirty--we were of an age. He wore a full beard at that time, and affected woolen sports shirts with an exaggerated lowness of neck; not content with that, he sometimes left the top b.u.t.ton undone. His neck appeared to me at first to be remarkably handsome; but little by little he made me his deadly enemy, and then I did not consider his neck handsomer than mine, though I did not show off mine so openly. I met him first on a river boat, and we were going to the same place, on a hunting trip; we agreed to go together up-country by ox-wagon when we came to the end of the railway. I purposely refrained from stating the place we were going to, not wishing to set anyone on the track. But the Glahns can safely stop advertising for their relative; for he died at the place we went to, which I will not name.

I had heard of Thomas Glahn, by the way, before I met him; his name was not unknown to me. I had heard of some affair of his with a young girl from Nordland, from a big house there, and that he had compromised her in some way, after which she broke it off. This he had sworn, in his foolish obstinacy, to revenge upon himself, and the lady calmly let him do as he pleased in that respect, considering it no business of hers.

From that time onwards, Thomas Glahn's name began to be well known; he turned wild, mad; he drank, created scandal after scandal, and resigned his commission in the army. A queer way of taking vengeance for a girl's refusal!

There was also another story of his relations with that young lady, to the effect that he had not compromised her in any way, but that her people had showed him the door, and that she herself had helped in it, after a Swedish Count, whose name I will not mention, had proposed to her. But this account I am less inclined to trust; I regard the first as true, for after all I hate Thomas Glahn and believe him capable of the worst. But, however it may have been, he never spoke himself of the affair with that n.o.ble lady, and I did not ask him about it. What business was it of mine?

As we sat there on the boat, I remember we talked about the little village we were making for, to which neither of us had been before.

"There's a sort of hotel there, I believe," said Glahn, looking at the map. "Kept by an old half-caste woman, so they say. The chief lives in the next village, and has a heap of wives, by all accounts--some of them only ten years old."

Well, I knew nothing about the chief and his wives, or whether there was a hotel in the place, so I said nothing. But Glahn smiled, and I thought his smile was beautiful.

I forgot, by the way, that he could not by any means be called a perfect man, handsome though he was. He told me himself that he had an old gunshot wound in his left foot, and that it was full of gout whenever the weather changed.

II

A week later we were lodged in the big hut that went by the name of hotel, with the old English half-caste woman. What a hotel it was! The walls were of clay, with a little wood, and the wood was eaten through by the white ants that crawled about everywhere. I lived in a room next the main parlor, with a green gla.s.s window looking on to the street--a single pane, not very clear at that--and Glahn had chosen a little bit of a hole up in the attic, much darker, and a poor place to live in. The sun heated the thatched roof and made his room almost insufferably hot at night and day; besides which, it was not a stair at all that led up to it, but a wretched bit of a ladder with four steps. What could I do?

I let him take his choice, and said:

"Here are two rooms, one upstairs and one down; take your choice."

And Glahn looked at the two rooms and took the upper one, possibly to give me the better of the two--but was I not grateful for it? I owe him nothing.

As long as the worst of the heat lasted, we left the hunting alone and stayed quietly in the hut, for the heat was extremely uncomfortable. We lay at night with a mosquito net over the bedplace, to keep off the insects; but even then it happened sometimes that blind bats would come flying silently against our nets and tear them. This happened too often to Glahn, because he was obliged to have a trap in the roof open all the time, on account of the heat; but it did not happen to me. In the daytime we lay on mats outside the hut, and smoked and watched the life about the other huts. The natives were brown, thick-lipped folk, all with rings in their ears and dead, brown eyes; they were almost naked, with just a strip of cotton cloth or plaited leaves round the middle, and the women had also a short petticoat of cotton stuff to cover them.

All the children went about stark naked night and day, with great big prominent bellies simply glistening with oil.

"The women are too fat," said Glahn.

And I too thought the women were too fat. Perhaps it was not Glahn at all, but myself, who thought so first; but I will not dispute his claim--I am willing to give him the credit. As a matter of fact, not all the women were ugly, though their faces were fat and swollen. I had met a girl in the village, a young half-Tamil with long hair and snow-white teeth; she was the prettiest of them all. I came upon her one evening at the edge of a rice field. She lay flat on her face in the high gra.s.s, kicking her legs in the air. She could talk to me, and we did talk, too, as long as I pleased. Glahn sat that evening in the middle of our village outside a hut with two other girls, very young--not more than ten years old, perhaps. He sat there talking nonsense to them, and drinking rice beer; that was the sort of thing he liked.

A couple of days later, we went out shooting. We pa.s.sed by tea gardens, rice fields, and gra.s.s plains; we left the village behind us and went in the direction of the river, and came into forests of strange foreign trees, bamboo and mango, tamarind, teak and salt trees, oil--and gum-bearing plants--Heaven knows what they all were; we had, between us, but little knowledge of the things. But there was very little water in the river, and so it remained until the rainy season. We shot wild pigeons and partridges, and saw a couple of panthers one afternoon; parrots, too, flew over our heads. Glahn was a terribly accurate shot; he never missed. But that was merely because his gun was better than mine; many times I too shot terribly accurately. I never boasted of it, but Glahn would often say: "I'll get that fellow in the tail," or "that one in the head." He would say that before he fired; and when the bird fell, sure enough, it was. .h.i.t in the tail or the head as he had said.

When we came upon the two panthers, Glahn was all for attacking them too with his shot-gun, but I persuaded him to give it up, as it was getting dusk, and we had no more than two or three cartridges left. He boasted of that too--of having had the courage to attack panthers with a shot-gun.

"I am sorry I did not fire at them after all," he said to me. "What do you want to be so infernally cautious for? Do you want to go on living?"

"I'm glad you consider me wiser than yourself," I answered.

"Well, don't let us quarrel over a trifle," he said.

Those were his words, not mine; if he had wished to quarrel, I for my part had no wish to prevent him. I was beginning to feel some dislike for him for his incautious behavior, and for his manner with women. Only the night before, I had been walking quietly along with Maggie, the Tamil girl that was my friend, and we were both as happy as could be.

Glahn sits outside his hut, and nods and smiles to us as we pa.s.s. It was then that Maggie saw him for the first time, and she was very inquisitive about him. So great an impression had he made on her that, when it was time to go, we went each our own way; she did not go back home with me.

Glahn would have put this by as of no importance when I spoke to him about it. But I did not forget it. And it was not to me that he nodded and smiled as we pa.s.sed by the hut! it was to Maggie.

"What's that she chews?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I answered. "She chews--I suppose that's what her teeth are for."

And it was no news to me either that Maggie was always chewing something; I had noticed it long before. But it was not betel she was chewing, for her teeth were quite white; she had, however, a habit of chewing all sorts of other things--putting them in her mouth and chewing as if they were something nice. Anything would do--a piece of money, a sc.r.a.p of paper, feathers--she would chew it all the same. Still, it was nothing to reproach her for, seeing that she was the prettiest girl in the village, anyway. Glahn was jealous of me, that was all.

I was friends again with Maggie, though, next evening, and we saw nothing of Glahn.

III