Fair Haven and Foul Strand

by August Strindberg

"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.