Circumstances over which I had no control later obliged me,
however, to remain away almost another year. But that I could not
foresee, and I had no means whatever to enable me to do so. Several of
my acquaintances had had liberal allowances from the Ministry; Krieger
and Martensen had procured Heegaard L225 at once, when he had been
anxious to get away from Rasmus Nielsen's influence. It seemed to me
that this refusal to give me anything augured badly for the appointment
I was hoping for in Denmark. I could only earn a very little with my
pen: about 11_s_. 3_d_. for ten folio pages, and as I did not
feel able, while travelling, to write anything of any value, I did not
attempt it. It was with a sort of horror that, after preparing for long
travels that were to get me out of the old folds, I thought of the
earlier, narrow life I had led in Copenhagen. All the old folds seemed,
at this distance, to have been the folds of a strait-waistcoat.
XXXV.
With abominable slowness, and very late, "on account of the war," the
train crawled from Geneva, southwards. Among the travellers was a
rhetorical Italian master-mason, from Lyons, an old Garibaldist, the
great event of whose life was that Garibaldi had once taken lunch alone
with him at Varese. He preserved in his home as a relic the glass from
which the general had drunk.
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