Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part I - I
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rights now and take a delight in making fun of my letters
to her: just retribution for having laughed at his letters in
the company of his inamorata while she was staying here.
On the landing-stage, at the very moment of our
affectionate farewell, she made me promise to call on the
Baroness without delay. These were the last words we
exchanged.
The innocent daydreams, so different from the coarse
orgies of learned Bohemia, left a void in my heart which
craved to be filled. The friendly, seemingly harmless
intercourse with a gentlewoman, this intercourse between
two people of opposite sexes, had been sweet to me after
my long solitude, for I had quarrelled with my family and
was, therefore, very lonely. The love of home life, which
my Bohemian existence had deadened for a while, was
reawakened by my relations with a very ordinary but
respectable member of the other sex. And, therefore, one
evening at six o’clock, I found myself at the entrance gate
of a house in North Avenue.
How ominous! It was the old house which had
belonged to my father, the house in which I had spent
the most miserable years of my childhood, where I had
fought through the troubles and storms of adolescence,
where I had been confirmed, where my mother had died,
and where a stepmother had taken her place. I suddenly
felt ill at ease, and my first impulse was one of flight. I
was afraid to stir up the memories of the misery of my
youth and early manhood. There was the courtyard with
its tall ash trees; how impatiently I used to wait for the
tender young green on the return of spring; there was the
gloomy house, built against a sand-quarry, the
unavoidable collapse of which had lowered the rents.
But in spite of the feeling of depression caused by so
many melancholy memories, I pulled myself together,
entered, walked upstairs and rang the bell.
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