Fair Haven and Foul Strand by August Strindberg

Author:August Strindberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620137864
Publisher: Duke Classics

IV

*

He went from London to Hamburg in the hope of finding acquaintances on his arrival who would help him on to Rügen. But he found the place as though under a spell of enchantment; everyone had gone to the country or somewhere else. He had to take a room in an hotel and telegraph first to Ilmarinen in Rügen, but the latter answered that he had no money. Then he telegraphed to Copenhagen and Christiania and received similar answers.

He felt now as though he had been enticed into a trap and overpowered. Since there had been an outbreak of cholera the previous year in Hamburg, they expected another when the heat returned, and that was the case just now. Therefore, if he did not get away soon, he had to expect, not death, to which he felt indifferent, but the quarantine.

The days passed slowly with terrible monotony, for he had no one to talk to, and with the threatened cholera outbreak hanging over his head. Helpless and in a perpetual rage against some invisible foe who seemed to have a grudge against him, he felt paralysed. He dared not move a finger in order to alter his destiny, for he feared failure and renewed disappointment of his hopes.

In order to pass the time he studied historical tables and wrote dates from morning to evening. But the days were still terribly long, and after four days he conceived a fixed idea that he would never get away from this infernal town where nothing but buying and selling went on. This impression became so strong that he determined to end his life in his uncanny bedroom. He unpacked his things and put out the photographs of his children and other relatives on the writing-table.

Loneliness and torment made the time seem double its real length. He began to be under the illusion that he was a native of Hamburg; he forgot for a while his past and the fact that he was married or had lived anywhere else than here. He regarded himself as a prisoner with the weird feeling that he did not know what crime he had committed, who had condemned him, or who was his jailer. But the black spectre of cholera haunted invisibly the dirty water of the canals and watched for him. Three times a day he asked the waiter about the cholera and always received the same answer: "They are not sure yet."

Then at last came a letter from his wife. She cried aloud from longing, fear, and unrest, and wished to know where he was. He answered in the same tone and felt wild with rage at the destiny which separated them.

On the morning of the fifth day he discovered in a newspaper that his Danish friend lived only half an hour's journey by rail from Hamburg.

If he had known that before, he would not have been obliged to undergo all these sufferings. Now, since he could not pay the hotel bill, he resolved to depart at once and not to return.

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