Look Back on Happiness | Page 8

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