It was a couple of years ago in the north of Jutland. I had been giving a reading the previous evening in a town up there and this evening I was to give one in another town. I was tired; the train was moving slowly, as our expresses do, and there was no end to the journey.
Now we had stopped again. We came to a halt every five minutes.
I rose in my seat to see how many miles we still had to go, when my eye wandered from the sign beneath the station roof and fell on one of the green-framed windows.
This window was crammed with an abundance of rare flowers: palms and flowering cacti. And from among these flowers – its chin resting on two slender, white hands – a pale face was staring out at the train with the large, shiny eyes of a sick person. This young woman made no move. Quietly, with her head resting on her hands, she simply stared out at the line as long as I could see her.
Throughout my journey after that I saw this woman’s face in the midst of her flowers. Her gaze scarcely suggested longing – longing had perhaps fluttered its wings until it died by beating them against those constricting walls – but merely quiet resignation, silent sorrow.
And when the train had glided past, she would once more stare out in the same position and with the same look, across the heather-covered landscape, out across the wide and monotonous countryside.