But I will warrant that Ribe got no wink of sleep that night, the
while I fumed in a wayside Holstein inn. In my wild rush to get home
I had taken the wrong train from Hamburg, or forgot to change, or
something. I don't to this day know what. I know that night coming
on found me stranded in a little town I had never heard of, on a
spur of the road I didn't know existed, and there I had to stay,
raging at the railroad, at the inn, at everything. In the middle
of the night, while I was tossing sleepless on the big four-poster
bed, a drunken man who had gone wrong fell into my room with the
door and a candle. That man was my friend. I got up and kicked him
out, called the landlord and blew him up, and felt much better. The
sun had not risen when I was posting back to the junction, counting
the mile-posts as we sped, watch in hand.
If mother thought we had all gone mad together, there was certainly
something to excuse her. Here she had only a few weeks before
forwarded with a heavy heart to her son in America Elisabeth's flat
refusal to hear him, and when she expected gloom and despair, all
at once his letters overflowed with a hysterical happiness that
could only hail from a disordered mind.
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