III - Away from Home

*

Now he stands on the deck of a steamer far out at sea. He has had so much to look at on the journey that he has not felt any tedium. But now it is afternoon, which is always melancholy, like the beginning of old age. The shadows of the sun fall and alter everything without hiding everything, like the night. He begins to miss something. He has a feeling of emptiness, of being deserted, broken off. He wants to go home, but the consciousness that he cannot do so at once fills him with terror and despair and he weeps. When his brothers ask him why, he says he wants to go home to his mother. They laugh at him, but her image recurs to his mind, serious, mild, and smiling. He hears her last words at parting: "Be obedient and respectful to all, take care of your clothes, and don't forget your evening prayer." He thinks how disobedient he has been to her, and wonders whether she may be ill. Her image seems glorified, and draws him with unbreakable cords of longing. This feeling of loneliness and longing after his mother followed him all through his life. Had he come perhaps too early and incomplete into the world? What held him so closely bound to his mother?

To this question he found no answer either in books or in life. But the fact remained: he never became himself, was never liberated, never a complete individuality. He remained, as it were, a mistletoe, which could not grow except upon a tree; he was a climbing plant which must seek a support. He was naturally weak and timid, but he took part in all physical exercises; he was a good gymnast, could mount a horse when on the run, was skilled in the use of all sorts of weapons, was a bold shot, swimmer, and sailor, but only in order not to appear inferior to others. If no one watched him when bathing, he merely slipped into the water; but if anyone was watching, he plunged into it, head-over-heels, from the roof of the bathing-shed. He was conscious of his timidity, and wished to conceal it. He never attacked his school-fellows, but if anyone attacked him, he would strike back even a stronger boy than himself. He seemed to have been born frightened, and lived in continual fear of life and of men.

The ship steams out of the bay and there opens before them a blue stretch of sea without a shore. The novelty of the spectacle, the fresh wind, the liveliness of his brothers, cheer him up. It has just occurred to him that they have come eighteen miles by sea when the steamboat turns into the Nykopingså river.