"Oh, it's getting on."
"Then I shall be going away. You see, Mrs. Henriksen, I should very much have liked to stay, because this is really where I belong; but what more can I do here? I don't work; I merely idle. Do you understand me? I grieve continually, and my heart sits wrinkled. My most brilliant achievement is spinning coins: I toss a coin into the air and wait. When I came here last autumn I wasn't so bad, not nearly so bad. I was only half a year younger then, yet I was ten years younger. What has happened to me since? Nothing. Only--I'm not a better man than I was last autumn."
"But you've been all right all winter, haven't you? And three weeks ago, when you came back from the country, you were so happy!"
"Was I? I don't remember that. Ah, well, things don't move so fast, and nothing has happened to me in these three weeks. Well, never mind; at all events, I shall go away. I must travel when the spring comes. I have always done so in the past, and I want to do the same thing now. Sit down, Mrs. Henriksen."
"No, thank you, I'm too busy."
Too busy! Yes, you work--you're not ten years older than you were last autumn. You think it's hard work to rest on Sundays, don't you? Dear Madame Henriksen! You and your little daughter knit stockings for the whole family, you let your rooms, you keep your family together like a mother. But you mustn't let your little Louise sit for twelve years on a school form. If you do, you'll hardly ever see her all through her youth, those formative years of her life. And then she can't be like you or learn from you. She'll learn to have children easily enough, but she won't learn to be a mother, and when the time comes for her to keep her home and family together, she will not be able to do it. She'll only know "languages" and mathematics and the story of Bluebeard, but that is not food for the heart of a woman. That is twelve years of continual famine for her soul.
"Excuse my asking, but where are you going to?"
"I don't know, but I'm going. Why, where should I go? I shall go aboard a steamship and sail, and when I have sailed long enough, I will go ashore. If I find, on looking about me, that I have traveled too far or not far enough, I shall board a ship again and sail on. Once I walked across into Sweden as far as Kalmar and even Öland, but that was too far, so I turned back. No one cares to know where I am, least of all myself."
XXXVI
You get used to everything; you even get used to the passage of two years.