Chapter IV

He went from London to Hamburg in the hope of finding acquaintances on his arrival who would help him on to Rügen. But he found the place as though under a spell of enchantment; everyone had gone to the country or somewhere else. He had to take a room in an hotel and telegraph first to Ilmarinen in Rügen, but the latter answered that he had no money. Then he telegraphed to Copenhagen and Christiania and received similar answers.

He felt now as though he had been enticed into a trap and overpowered. Since there had been an outbreak of cholera the previous year in Hamburg, they expected another when the heat returned, and that was the case just now. Therefore, if he did not get away soon, he had to expect, not death, to which he felt indifferent, but the quarantine.

The days passed slowly with terrible monotony, for he had no one to talk to, and with the threatened cholera outbreak hanging over his head. Helpless and in a perpetual rage against some invisible foe who seemed to have a grudge against him, he felt paralysed. He dared not move a finger in order to alter his destiny, for he feared failure and renewed disappointment of his hopes.

In order to pass the time he studied historical tables and wrote dates from morning to evening. But the days were still terribly long, and after four days he conceived a fixed idea that he would never get away from this infernal town where nothing but buying and selling went on. This impression became so strong that he determined to end his life in his uncanny bedroom. He unpacked his things and put out the photographs of his children and other relatives on the writing-table.

Loneliness and torment made the time seem double its real length. He began to be under the illusion that he was a native of Hamburg; he forgot for a while his past and the fact that he was married or had lived anywhere else than here. He regarded himself as a prisoner with the weird feeling that he did not know what crime he had committed, who had condemned him, or who was his jailer. But the black spectre of cholera haunted invisibly the dirty water of the canals and watched for him. Three times a day he asked the waiter about the cholera and always received the same answer: "They are not sure yet."

Then at last came a letter from his wife. She cried aloud from longing, fear, and unrest, and wished to know where he was. He answered in the same tone and felt wild with rage at the destiny which separated them.

On the morning of the fifth day he discovered in a newspaper that his Danish friend lived only half an hour's journey by rail from Hamburg.

If he had known that before, he would not have been obliged to undergo all these sufferings. Now, since he could not pay the hotel bill, he resolved to depart at once and not to return. His friend would give him money which he would send to the hotel, and he would have his things sent after him. He took his seat in the railway carriage with the feelings of a liberated prisoner, cast a pitying look on Hamburg and forgave the injuries it had done him, but vowed never to honour it with another visit, unless compelled.

His half-hour's journey put him in a good humour, and his mouth watered at the prospect of being able to give expression to all his vexation and perhaps to make light of his martyrdom, and give it a comic aspect. His divine frivolity returned, and he thought that he must be after all a lucky fellow to find one of his friends so unexpectedly. He stopped before the comfortable little house; the landlord stood in the doorway; he greeted him and asked if Mr ---- were at home.

"No; he went off this morning."

"Where?"

"To Denmark."

During the three hours which he had to wait for the train he had time to get over the blow. When he took his seat again in the train, he thought: "There is something wrong here; it is not the natural logic of events. It is certainly something else."

Then the spires of Hamburg reappeared and his hatred to the place awoke again, and rose to an incredible height when he saw a coffin at the station. "Now the cholera is here," he thought, "and I shall be in quarantine for fourteen days!"

But it was not the cholera, which was something to be thankful for. He did not feel so, however, for he felt sure it would break out on the same day that he received the money. And he calculated that he would never get away from Hamburg in this way. The money would delay so long till the hotel bill, which grew in geometrical progression, swallowed up the whole amount, and nothing would be left for his travelling expenses. In this way there would be a sort of perpetual movement which might last till the end of the world.

That his calculations were about correct was proved two days later when the money really came. He paid the bill, left the hotel in a cab, and drove to the station; then a hotel servant who had followed him expected a tip, and had, besides, a little additional bill, probably falsified, as usual. When he came to the booking-office and inquired the price of the ticket, he was two marks short. Accordingly he returned to the hotel.

It is not necessary to linger over details in order to give the reader a lively idea of what he suffered. In short, his silence cure still lasted some days; then he got away, and the cholera had not yet broken out.

His object in going to Rügen was partly to seek masculine society in order to get rid of the feminine atmosphere which had enveloped him, and partly to settle matters with Ilmarinen; but his chief purpose was probably to talk himself out. That was precisely why, he thought, destiny or whatever it was had relegated him to absolute silence in Hamburg, for "destiny" always sought out his secret wishes in order to frustrate them.

When at last he reached Rügen, hoping to have a good talk for half a night, he found Ilmarinen altered, chilly in demeanour and embarrassed. The latter had heard that his friend had married a lady from a rich family, as indeed was the fact, and therefore could not understand this sudden come down. When the new-comer asked whether they could have supper together, the Finn excused himself by saying that he had been invited to a birthday feast.

"I live, you know," he said, "with Lais's oldest friend, the Swede, who was in love with her, and who came last."

"Is he here?"

"Yes, he lives here, since Lais engaged herself to the Russian who left his wife and children."

"He hates me then also?"

"Yes, to speak the truth, your presence will certainly annoy him."

So he remained alone the first evening. Alone after a long double loneliness with his wife and with himself!

He felt as though he were under some curse, to be so treated by this insignificant, uncultivated Ilmarinen whom he had lifted up from nothingness, introduced to his own circle, fed and lodged, because he executed business matters for him with the theatres and publishers. This employment was partly an honour for the young unknown author, and partly an advantage, for it helped him to find openings for his own work. Now the pupil abandoned the teacher, because he thought there was nothing more to be gained from him, and because he considered he could now help himself.

The days which followed were now so dreadful, that again the thought occurred to him that this could not be natural, but that a black hand was guiding his destiny.

Since there was only one restaurant in this third-class watering-place, he had to sit at the same table with his countryman, who attributed to him the loss of Lais, and with Ilmarinen, who assumed a superior tone, because he regarded him as lost. Then the food resembled hog's flesh from which all the goodness had been cooked out. One rose hungry from table, and was hungry the whole day. Everything was adulterated, even the beer. As regards the meat, the restaurant keeper's family first cooked all the goodness out of it for themselves; the customers only got the sinews and bones, and were fed, in fact, just like dogs. Bitter looks, which his unfortunate fellow-countryman could not quite suppress, did not increase the imaginary pleasures of the table.

He spent a week in Rügen without hearing anything from his wife in London. At first he had found life on the island tolerable in contrast to that in the Hamburg hotel; but when he woke one day and reflected on his situation, it seemed to him simply hellish. He had hired an attic room and the sun beat fiercely on the iron plates of the roof, which was only a foot above his head. Sixteen years previously he had, as a young bachelor, left his garret at the top of five flights of stairs, in order to enter a house as a married man. Since that time it had been one of his nightmares to find himself crawling up the five flights of stairs to his old garret, where all the wretchedness and untidiness of a bachelor's room awaited him. Now he was again in an attic and a bachelor, although married. That was like a punishment after receiving warnings. But what crime he had committed he could not say.

Moreover, the whole surrounding soil consisted of light, loose sand, which had been so heated by the suns of midsummer that it did not become cool at night. It made one think at first of the hot sand-girdles which peasants use to cure inflammation of the lungs. Later on, after searching in his memory, he thought of the scene in Dante's Inferno where the blasphemers lie stretched out on hot sand. But as he did not think he believed in any good God, it seemed to him that blasphemies might be left unpunished.

After walking about for a week in the deep sand, it seemed to him really a hellish torture to have to take half a step backward for every one forward, and to be obliged to lift the foot six inches high in walking. Worst of all was the feeling of sinking through the earth like the girl in the fairy story who trod on bread. Never to find a firm foothold, nor to be able to run a race with one's thoughts, but to drag oneself about like an old man--that was hell. Besides this, there was a heat in the air which never abated. His attic was burning hot by day, and when he lay in bed at night with nothing on, he was scorched by the iron plates of the roof. The nearness of the sea would naturally have helped to relieve the heat, but that possibility had been carefully guarded against, like everything else. From his boyhood he had been accustomed to cast himself head foremost into the water because he did not like creeping into it. In connection with this also, he was persecuted by a frequently recurring nightmare, i.e. he used to dream that he was overheated and must plunge into the sea. The sea was there but was so shallow that he could not plunge into it, and when he did crawl into it, it was still so shallow that he could not duck his head. That was precisely the case here. "Have I come here for the fulfilment of all my bad dreams?" he asked himself.

And with reason. Ilmarinen grew more inquisitive every day; he asked when the Norwegian's wife was coming, and when a fortnight had passed, believed that she had quite abandoned him. This, naturally, pleased Lais's friend, and nothing was wanting to complete the Norwegian's hell. For there was something very humiliating in his position as a discarded husband. His correspondence with England had assumed such an ominous character that he did not know himself whether he was still married or separated. In one of his wife's letters, she dwelt on her inextinguishable love, the pain of separation, and the martyrdom of longing. They were, she said, Hero and Leander on opposite sides of the sea, and if she could swim, she would fly to her Leander, even at the risk of being washed up on his island a corpse. In her next letter she announced that she intended opening a theatre in London, and was trying to raise sufficient capital. At the same time she could not find enough capital to buy a steamer-ticket. A third letter contained the news that she was ill, and was full of complaints that the husband had left his sick wife in a foreign land. A fourth letter said that she was in a convent kept by English ladies, where she had been educated, and where she found again her youth and innocence; in it she also denounced the wickedness of the world and the hell of marriage.

It was impossible to give reasonable answers to these letters, for they poured on him like hail and crossed his own. If he wrote a gentle reply he received a scolding letter in answer to a previous sharp one of his, and vice versa. Their misunderstandings arrived at such a pitch that they bordered on lunacy, and when he ceased to write, she began to send telegrams.

This imbroglio lasted for a month, and during that time he looked back with longing to the hours he had spent in Hamburg; they seemed to him like memories of an indescribably happy time when compared with this.

At last he was cut down from the gallows. A letter came from his sister-in-law inviting him to his father-in-law's villa at Odense. His wife had also been invited; and it was arranged that they should meet again there.