Who compelled me to go? Who had a right to blame me if I returned?... Nobody! And yet!... Shame, the fear of making myself a laughing-stock, honour! No! No! I must abandon all hope. Moreover, the boat would not call anywhere on her way to Havre. Forward then, and courage!
But courage depends on strength of body and mind, and at the moment I lacked both. Haunted by my dreary thoughts, I turned towards the lower deck, for by now I knew the upper deck down to its smallest details, and the sight of its rails, rigging and tackling bored me like a book read until one knows it by heart. On my way I almost tumbled over a person seeking shelter from the wind behind the cabin. It was an old lady, dressed in black, with grey hair and a careworn face.
She gazed at me attentively, with sympathetic eyes. I walked up to her and spoke to her. She answered me in French, and we soon became acquainted.
After the exchange of a few commonplaces, we confided to each other the purpose of our journey. She was not travelling for pleasure. The widow of a timber-merchant, she had been staying with a relative in Stockholm, and was now on her way to visit her insane son, confined in a lunatic asylum at Havre.
Her account was so simple and yet so heartrending that it affected me strongly, and probably her story, impressing itself on the cells of my already overwrought brain, led up to what followed.
All of a sudden the lady ceased talking, and, gazing at me with a look of dismay, exclaimed, sympathetically—
"Are you ill?"
"I?"
"Yes, you look ill. You should try and get some sleep."
"To tell you the truth, I never closed my eyes last night, and I am over-tired. I've been suffering from sleeplessness for some time, and nothing seems to be able to procure me the much-needed rest."