But at least there was peace here. He would
linger watching an insect as it crept along a fir branch, or listening
to the murmur of the river in the valley far below, or breathing in the
health-giving scent of the resin, thick in the warm air.
This present life of his was one way of living. As he lay, after a
sleepless night, watching the window grow lighter with the dawn, he
would think: Yet another new day--and nothing that I can do in it.
And yet he had to get up, and dress, and go down and eat. His bread had
a slightly bitter taste to him--it tasted of charity and dependence, of
the rich widow at Bruseth and the agent for English tweeds. And he must
remember to eat slowly, to masticate each mouthful carefully, to rest
after meals, and above all not to think--not to think of anything in the
wide world. Afterwards, he could go out and in like other people, only
that all his movements and actions were useless and meaningless in
themselves; they were done only for the sake of health, or to keep
thoughts away, or to make the time go by.
How had this come to pass? He found it still impossible to grasp how
such senseless things can happen and no Providence interfere to set them
right. Why should he have been so suddenly doomed to destruction?
Days, weeks and months of his best manhood oozing away into empty
nothingness--why? Sleeplessness and tortured nerves drove him to do
things that his will disowned; he would storm at his wife and children
if a heel so much as scraped on the floor, and the remorse that
followed, sometimes ending in childish tears, did no good, for the next
time the same thing, or worse, would happen again.
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