"Have me put ashore at once—or I shall go mad!"
The captain looked at me sharply, scrutinisingly, and without vouchsafing a reply, dismayed as if he had looked into the face of an escaped lunatic, he called to the second officer and said, imperatively—
"Have this gentleman and his luggage put ashore. He is ill."
Before five minutes had elapsed, I was on board the pilot cutter; they rowed with such vigour that we landed in a very short time.
I possess the remarkable gift of becoming blind and deaf when it suits me. I was walking along the road leading to the hotel without having heard or seen anything hurtful to my vanity; neither a glance from the pilots, betraying that they guessed my secret, nor a disparaging remark from the man who was carrying my luggage.
Arrived at the hotel, I asked for a room, ordered an absinthe, lighted a cigar and began to reflect.
"Had I gone mad? Was I in such imminent peril of insanity that an immediate landing had been necessary?"
In my present state of mind I was incapable of forming an opinion, for a madman, according to the verdict of the doctors, is not conscious of his mental disorder, and the association of his ideas proves nothing against their irregularity. Like a scientist, I examined similar occurrences which had happened to me before.
When I was still a boy at college, my nervous excitability, exaggerated by exasperating events, passion, the suicide of a friend, distrust of the future, had been increased to such an extent that everything filled me with apprehension, even in broad daylight. I was afraid to stay in a room by myself; I was haunted by my own spectre, and my friends took it in turns to spend the night with me, while the candles burned and the fire crackled in the stove.
Another time, in an attack of wild despair, following on all sorts of misfortunes, I ran across country, wandered through the woods, and at last climbed to the top of a pine tree. There I sat astride on a branch and made a speech to the Scotch firs which spread out their branches below me, endeavouring to drown their voices, imagining that I was a speaker addressing an assembled crowd. It was not so very far from here, on an island where I had spent many summers, and the headland of which was plainly visible from where I stood.