When he now looked at his watch it was only eight o'clock. The long evening and night which were coming frightened him, for his head was too tired to work, but not sufficiently so to enable him to sleep. The wind blew fiercely round the house corners, the din of the waves and the roaring of the whistling buoy made him nervous. To free himself from the suggestions of these sounds, to which he would not be a slave, he placed in "sleeping bullets" which were small steel balls he had bought in Germany, which when placed in the ears, prevented every sound from penetrating and being perceived.
But when he thus had shut off perhaps the greatest line of communication with the outer world, his fantasy began to labor at a higher pressure. A mad curiosity to know what the burned letter could have contained, gripped him irresistibly, so that he opened the retort to try to read in the ashes. But even the ink was destroyed by fire, and there was no trace to be seen of the writing. Now the field was open for all kinds of doubts and guesses. Sometimes he believed he could draw conclusions as to what the letter had contained from all that had passed, sometimes he rejected this, remembering the girl's illogical way to think and act.
So finally he stopped at the decision that it was impossible to reason it out, and he decided not to worry over it any more. But his brain had become unrestrainable and was worrying on its own account, grinding and sifting, until he became completely exhausted, without being able to sleep. And with the increasing feebleness in the organ of thought the lower propensities awoke.
Enraged that his soul could not hold out in the battle with a fragile body, he finally undressed and took a dose of potassium bromide, and at once the brain stopped in its wild career, fantasies banished, the consciousness was stunned, and he fell asleep as heavily as though dead.
[CHAPTER FOURTEENTH]
The autumn had advanced, but on the skerry could not be seen that the summer had gone, for there was not a deciduous tree to turn yellow, and the lichens on the rocks had become more luxuriant, and swelled by the moisture, the heath and the crowberry vines had taken on a new verdure, the juniper and the dwarf pines, the eternally green trees of the north, were freshened and freed from dust by rain.
The fishermen had flown, as their labor for the fall was ended; the silence had again returned, and the provision store was closed. The wooden frame of the chapel became more naked, as the boards had been picked off for firewood and carpenter's lumber, so that there was only the studdings to be seen, which resembled a complex of gibbets.
The preacher was seldom seen now, for since he had become an abstainer, he had misused the china wine, which was a compound containing brandy, and he already had buzzings in his ears, palpitation of the heart and was sleeping most of the time.
The commissioner after a month of labor had succeeded in curing his soul of the shot wound he had received at the game of love. With potassium iodide and low diet he had subdued the desires, and when the tristesse of the solitude took him, he generated a portion of laughing gas from ammonium nitrate, for he had found a long time previous that intoxication from alcohol was vile and succeeded by greater dejection with mania for suicide. At first the wonderous nitrous oxide had cheered him up and made him laugh, but the banal giggle had dissolved all his great thoughts and struggles into a nothing, at which he laughed, but when he had found himself down among the gigglers, who had giggled at him, he felt the need of raising himself up again above his former self, and he missed his sorrows and his griefs.