Robinson’s return to Ferdinand’s life reopens a wound rather than restoring a friendship: the sudden encounter renews Ferdinand’s unease, disrupts his sleep, and makes him afraid to leave home in case he sees Robinson again. In Ferdinand’s account, the past does not stay past; Robinson’s presence makes old distress recur and turns the surrounding neighborhood into a field of reminders.

The Return and Its Immediate Effects

Ferdinand suspects that seeing Robinson is chiefly responsible for his trouble starting again. At first he pays little attention to his spells and continues dragging himself from one patient to another, but his uneasiness grows, as it had in New York, and he sleeps even worse than usual. He describes the meeting as a shock and says he seems to be falling sick again. The episode therefore registers less as a conversation or reconciliation than as a change in Ferdinand’s condition: the encounter brings back symptoms that he had been managing, and they intensify after Robinson reappears.

The return is sudden and unwanted. Robinson turns up in the neighborhood, apparently having searched for Ferdinand, while Ferdinand insists that he was not looking for Robinson. Ferdinand feels he will never be rid of him. Robinson’s misery, plainly visible on his face, seems to bring back a bad dream Ferdinand has been unable to shake for years. That image connects the present encounter to a longer history of distress without explaining away its force: for Ferdinand, the old trouble returns before he can master or neatly describe it.

Fear, Avoidance, and a Shattered Routine

The effect reaches beyond the moment of meeting. Ferdinand becomes afraid to go out in case he encounters Robinson. His medical work, already difficult to sustain, begins to falter: patients have to send for him two or three times before he makes up his mind to visit, and by the time he arrives they have often called in someone else. His account links private anxiety to professional consequence. The returning distress does not remain an inward feeling; it impairs the work by which he makes his living and separates him from the people who depend on him.

Ferdinand calls his head a shambles like life itself. The phrase places the recurrence within the wider disorder of his existence, but the details remain concrete: worsening sleep, reluctance to leave home, delayed visits, and lost patients. He does not describe a deliberate effort to help Robinson or any plan to resolve their past. Instead, Robinson’s appearance overwhelms Ferdinand’s ability to keep his usual routine intact.

Robinson as a Reminder of Human Misery

Ferdinand’s response expands from Robinson himself to the people he watches through the window. Ordinary figures walking in the street or talking in doorways make him think of Robinson. Their outwardly innocent appearance, in his suspicious reading, conceals the same human capacity for violence and suffering. He imagines people as wanting both to kill and to be killed, not necessarily in one decisive act but gradually, through accumulated sorrows, new miseries, and unnamed hatreds. Open warfare is presented as a quicker version of this process, not as something fundamentally separate from ordinary human life.

This movement from one man’s return to a general vision of violence is part of the event’s importance. Robinson is not simply an acquaintance Ferdinand happens to meet again; his presence concentrates a history of misery that Ferdinand sees repeated in the people around him. Yet the account remains filtered through Ferdinand’s alarm and revulsion. The broad judgment about humanity records the reach of his distress, rather than establishing that every person he sees shares Robinson’s history or intentions.

A Return That Repeats the Past

The recurrence is structured as a return of what Ferdinand cannot leave behind. He describes Robinson as bringing back a bad dream that has persisted for years, and the same distress seems to take hold again after their meeting. The parallel with New York gives the renewed uneasiness a prior pattern: Ferdinand recognizes the kind of decline even as he struggles to respond to it. His fear of another encounter then makes the present neighborhood feel inseparable from the past that Robinson carries into it.

The available scene establishes the consequences of Robinson’s reappearance for Ferdinand, but does not show them resolving the renewed conflict. Its decisive outcome is the reopening of Ferdinand’s distress and the breakdown of his everyday confidence: he sleeps less, hesitates to see patients, and becomes afraid to go out. Robinson’s return thus operates as a shock whose effects spread well beyond the encounter itself, leaving Ferdinand once again caught between the wish to avoid misery and the impossibility of keeping it at a distance.