with quite so forlorn a feeling
about it as deserted sands on a leaden evening. Was it only the evening
before that I had sailed away from Vilm in glory and in joy, leaving the
form of the abstruse but beautiful youth standing in such a golden
radiance that it was as the form of an angel? Down among the dunes,
where the grey ribbons of the sea-grass were violently fluttering and
indigo clouds lay in an unbroken level over leaden waves, I sat and ate
my rusks and was wretched. My soul rebelled both at the wretchedness and
at the rusks. Not for these had I come to Ruegen. I looked at the waves
and shuddered. I looked at the dunes and disliked them. I was haunted by
the image of the eight beds waiting in my garret for me, and of certain
portions of the wall from which the paper was torn--the summer before,
probably, by one or more of the eight struggling in the first onslaughts
of asphyxia--and had not been gummed on again. My thoughts drifted
miserably into solemn channels, in the direction of what Carlyle calls
the Immensities. I remembered how I was only a speck after all in
uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general
scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and
easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn
would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped
and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so
exactly my vacancy that it would even wear my gloves and stockings. The
last rusk, drier and drearier than any that had gone before, was being
eaten by the time my thoughts emerged from the gloom that hangs about
eternal verities to the desirable concreteness of gloves and stockings.
What, I wondered, became of the gloves and stockings of the recently
extinguished female speck? Its Gertrud would, I supposed, take
possession of its dresses; but my Gertrud, for instance, could not wear
my gloves, and I know believes only in those stockings she has knitted
herself. Still, she has nieces, and I believe aunts. She would send them
all the things she could not use herself, which would not be nice of
Gertrud. It would not matter, I supposed, but it would not be nice. She
would be letting herself down to being a kind of ghoul. I started up
with the feeling that I must go and remonstrate with her before it was
too late; and there, struggling in the wind and deep sand towards me,
her arms full of warm things and