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On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg · English · Gutenberg #44184 · 398,936 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

Author: August Strindberg

Translator: Elizabeth Clarke Westergren


        
Release date: November 15, 2013 [eBook #44184]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44184

Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE SEABOARD: A NOVEL OF THE BALTIC ISLANDS ***
ON THE SEABOARD

A NOVEL OF THE BALTIC ISLANDS

FROM THE SWEDISH OF

AUGUST STRINDBERG

AUTHOR OF

EASTER, LUCKY PEHR, ETC.


TRANSLATED BY

ELIZABETH CLARKE WESTERGREN

AUTHORIZED EDITION



NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

1913




PREFACE


August Strindberg's first literary productions were warmly received,
and would have aroused lasting enthusiasm and admiration had the young
author's prolific pen been less aggressive, in this, for his country,
a totally new style of novel. His intrepid sarcasm which emanated
from a physical disability, known only to a few of his most intimate
friends, called forth severe criticism from the old aristocrats and the
conservative element, which drove the gifted dramatist from his own
country to new spheres. Life's vicissitudes at Vierwaldstätter See, and
Berlin, also later on at Paris from whence his fame spread rapidly over
Europe, changed his realism to pessimism.

After years of ceaseless work, during which he dipped into almost every
branch of science, he suddenly determined to transfer his activities
to this side of the Atlantic, where he was desirous of becoming known.
For this purpose his most singular novel was chosen for translation;
meantime some invisible power drew him back to his birthplace,
Stockholm, and a new generation cheered his coming.

Later on critics called him "A demolisher and a reformer that came like
a cyclone, with his daring thought and daring words, which broke in
upon the everlasting tenets and raised Swedish culture."

His delineations are photographical exactness without retouch, bearing
always a strong reflection of his personality.

                                                    MAGNUS WESTERGREN.

Boston, Mass.
   April, 1913.




ON THE SEABOARD




CHAPTER FIRST


A fishing boat lay one May evening to beam-wind, out on Goosestone
bay. "Rokarna," known to all on the coast by their three pyramids,
were changing to blue, while upon the clear sky clouds were forming
just as the sun began to sink. Already there was dashing outside the
points, and a disagreeable flapping in the mainsail signified that the
land-breeze would soon break against newborn currents of air, from
above, from the sea and from aft.

At the tiller sat the Custom House Surveyor of the East Skerries, a
giant with black long full beard. Occasionally he exchanged a look with
two subordinates who were sitting in the bow, one of whom was tending
the clutch-pole, keeping the big square sail to the wind.

Sometimes the steersman cast a searching look at the little gentleman
who was crouching at the mast seemingly afraid and frozen, now and then
drawing his shawl closer round his body.

The surveyor must have found him ridiculous, for frequently he turned
leeward with a pretense of spitting tobacco juice to conceal a rising
laugh.

The little gentleman was dressed in a beaver-colored spring coat under
which a pair of wide moss-green pants peeped out, flaring at the bottom
round a pair of crocodile shagreen shoes topped with brown cloth and
black buttons. Nothing of his under dress was visible, but round his
neck was twisted a cream-colored foulard, while his hands were well
protected in a pair of salmon-colored three-button glacé-gloves, and
the right wrist was encircled by a gold bracelet carved in the form of
a serpent biting its tail. Ridges upon the gloves showed that rings
were worn beneath. The face, as much as could be seen, was thin and
haggard; a small black mustache with ends curled upwards increased the
paleness and gave it a foreign expression. The hat was turned back,
exposing a black closely cut bang resembling a calotte.

What seemed most to attract the indefatigable attention of the
steersman was the bracelet, mustache and bang.

During the long voyage from Dalaro this man, who was a great humorist,
had tried to get up a cheery conversation with the Fish Commissioner,
whom he had in charge to take to the station at the East Skerries, but
the young doctor had shown an injured unsusceptibility to his witty
importunities which convinced the surveyor that the "instructor" was
insolent.

Meanwhile the wind freshened as they passed Hanstone to windward and
the dangerous sail began to flutter. The fish commissioner, who had
been sitting with a navy chart in his hand, noting the answers to his
questions, placed it in his pocket and turned toward the man at the
tiller saying in a voice more like a woman's than a man's:

"Please sail more carefully!"

"Is the instructor afraid?" asked the helmsman scornfully.

"Yes, I am careful of my life and keep close hold of it," answered the
commissioner.

"But not of other's lives?" asked the helmsman.

"At least not so much as my own," returned the commissioner, "and
sailing is a dangerous occupation, especially with a square sail."

"So, sir, you have often sailed before with a square sail?"

"Never in my life, but I can see where the wind directs its power and
can reckon how much resistance the weight of the boat can make and well
judge when the sail will jibe."

"Well, take the tiller yourself then!" snubbingly remarked the surveyor.

"No! that is your place! I do not ride on the coachman's box when I
travel on the Crown's errands."

"Oh, you cannot manage a boat, of course."

"If I could not, it is certainly easy to learn, since every other
schoolboy can do it and every custom house subordinate, therefore I
need not be ashamed that I cannot, only sail carefully now as I would
not willingly have my gloves spoiled and get wet."

It was an order, and the surveyor, who was cock of the walk at the East
Skerries, felt himself degraded. After a movement on the tiller the
sail filled and the boat sped onward steadily towards the rock, with
its white custom house cottage brightly shining in the rays of the
setting sun.

The seaboard was vanishing, there was a feeling that all kindly
protection was left behind, when venturing out on the open boundless
water, with darkness threatening toward the east. There was no prospect
of crawling to leeward of islands or rocks, no possibility in case of
storm to lay up to and reef, out right into the middle of destruction,
over the black gulf, out to that little rock that looks no larger than
a buoy cast into the middle of the sea. The fish commissioner, as
signified before, held fast to his only life and was intelligent enough
to count his insignificant resistance against nature's superiority.
Now he felt depressed. He was too clear-sighted with his thirty-six
years to overestimate the insight and daring of the man at the tiller.
He did not look with reliance at his brown and whiskered visage, nor
would he believe that a muscular arm was equal to a wind which blew
with thousands of pounds pressure against a rocking sail. He viewed
such courage as founded upon faulty judgment. What stupidity, thought
he, to risk one's life in a little open boat when there exist deckers
and steamers. What incredible folly to hoist such a big sail on a
spruce mast, which bends like a bow when a strong wind strikes it. The
lee-shroud was hanging slack, likewise the forestay, and the whole wind
pressure was lying on the windward-shroud, which seemed rotten. Trust
to such an uncertain residue as a few flax ropes more or less cohesive,
he would not, and therefore he turned with the next gust of wind to
the subordinate who was sitting close to the halyard, and in a short
penetrating voice commanded, "Let the sail run!"

The two Inferiors looked toward the stern, awaiting the helmsman's
orders, but the fish commissioner repeated his command instantly and
with such emphasis that the sail sank.

The surveyor in the stern shrieked.

"Who the Devil commands the maneuvering of my boat?"

"I," answered the commissioner.

Whereupon he turned to the subordinates with the order.

"Put out the oars!"

The oars were put out and the boat gave a few rolls, for the surveyor
had left the tiller angrily at the command, exclaiming,

"Yes, then he can take the helm himself!"

The commissioner at once took his place in the stern and the tiller was
under his arm before the surveyor had ceased swearing.

The glacé-glove cracked instantly at the thumb, but the boat made even
speed while the surveyor sat with laughter in his whiskers, and one oar
ready to push out to give course to the boat. The commissioner had no
attention to bestow upon the doubting seaman, but stared attentively
windward and could soon discern a heaving sea with its swell many
meters long, from the surge with its short water fall, then after a
hasty glance astern he measured the leeway, and in the wake noted the
setting of the currents, it was perfectly clear what course must be
held not to drift past the East Skerries.

The surveyor, who had searched long to meet the black burning glances
that they might mark his laughter, became tired, for it looked as
though they would have no contact with anything that could soil or
disturb them. After a moment's beseeching the surveyor becoming absent
and dejected began to observe the maneuvering.

The sun had reached the horizon, the waves were breaking purple black
at the base, deep green at the side, and where the crests rose highest
they lighted up grass green. The foam sprouted and hissed red champagne
colored in the sun. The boat and men were now low down in the dusk,
or the next moment, on the crest of a wave, the four faces glowed and
instantly faded away.

Not every wave broke so high, some were only rocking slowly and
cradling the boat, lifting and sucking it forward. It seemed as
though the little man at the tiller could from a distance judge when
a gigantic wave would come, and with a slight push at the tiller held
firm or sneaked between the dreadful green walls, which threatened to
spring and form an arch over the boat.

The fact was that the danger had really increased through the sail
being furled, for the driving power had diminished and the sail's
lifting ability must be dispensed with, therefore the surveyor's
astonishment at the incredible fine maneuvering began to change to
admiration.

He looked at the changing expression on the pale face and the
movement in the black eyes, and felt that inside there was a combined
calculation. Then not to seem superfluous himself he put out his
oar, for he felt the time had come, and acknowledged willingly the
superiority before it was wrung from him, thus:

"Oh, he has been at sea before!"

The fish commissioner, who was deeply occupied, and would have no
intercourse whatever, as he was afraid of being surprised and deceived
in a moment's weakness by the apparent external superiority of the
giant, made no response.

His right glove had cracked round the thumb, and the bracelet had
fallen over the hand. When the flame faded from the crest of the waves
and the day closed, he took out with his left hand a lorgnette and
placed it in his right eye, moving his head quickly to several points
of the compass as though he would sight land, where no land was to be
seen, and then threw this brief question forward.

"Have you no lighthouse on the East Skerries?"

"God knows we have not," answered the surveyor.

"Have we any shoals?"

"Deep water."

"Shall we sight Landsort or Sandham's lighthouse?"

"Not much of Sandham but more to Landsort," replied the surveyor.

"Sit still at your places and we shall come out all right," finished
the commissioner, who seemed to have taken a bearing by the heads of
the three men and some unknown firm point in the distance.

The clouds had flocked together and the May dusk had given place to
obscurity. It was like a swing forwards into some thin impenetrable
material, without light. The sea was rising only as darker shadows
against the shadowy sky, the heads of the waves struck the bottom of
the boat and lifting it up on their backs dived down on the other side
and rolled out. But now to separate friend from foe was difficult and
the calculation more uncertain. Two oars were out to leeward and one to
windward, which if applied with more or less power at the right moment
would keep the boat buoyant.

The commissioner, who soon could not see more than the two lighthouses
in north and south, must now compensate the loss of sight by the ear
and before he could become used to the sea's roaring, sighing, hissing
and spouting, or distinguish between a dashing or a surging wave, the
water had already come into the boat, so that to save his fine shoes he
placed his feet on a thwart.

Soon he had studied the harmony of the waves, and could even hear from
the regular beating of the swell the danger approaching, and feel on
the right ear-drum when the wind pressed the harder and threatened to
toss the water higher. It was as though he had improvised nautical and
meteorological instruments out of his susceptible senses from which the
conductors connected with his big brain battery, hidden by that little
ridiculous hat and the black bang.

The men who at the moment of the water's intrusion muttered rebellious
words, became silenced when they felt how the boat shot forward, and at
each word of command, windward, or leeward, they knew which way to pull.

The commissioner had taken his bearings on the two lighthouses and
used the lorgnette quadrangle glass as a distance measure, but the
difficulty of holding the course was that no light could be seen from
the windows of the cottages since they were in the lee of the hillock.
When the dangerous voyage had been continued an hour or more, a dark
rise was observed forward against the horizon. The helmsman, who would
not, to gain doubtful advice, disturb his own intuitions on which he
relied most, bore down on what he supposed to be the East Skerries
or some of their points, consoling himself that arriving at a firm
object, whatever it might be, was always better than hovering between
air and water. The dark wall approached with a speed greater than that
of the boat so that suspicion dawned in the commissioner's mind that
everything was not right in their course. In order to ascertain what
it could be and at the same time give a signal in case the obscure
object should be a vessel which had neglected to put its lights out,
he took up his box of storm matches and lighting them all, held them
up in the air a moment, then threw them up so that they illuminated
a few meters around the boat. The light penetrated the darkness for
only, a second, but the picture which appeared like a magic-lantern
view was fixed before his eyes for several seconds, and he saw drifting
ice heaved upon a rock, against which a wave broke like a cave over
a gigantic rock of limespar, and a flock of long-tailed ducks and
sea-gulls that arose with numerous shrieks and were drowned in the
darkness. The sight of the breaking wave affected the commissioner as
it does the condemned to look upon the coffin in which his decapitated
body shall rest, and he felt in a moment of imagination the double pang
of cold and smothering, but the agony which paralyzed his muscles awoke
on the other hand all the concealed powers of the soul, so that he, in
a fraction of a second, could make a sure estimate of how great the
danger was, and count out the only way of escape, whereupon he cried
out, "Hold all!"

The men who had been sitting with their backs toward the wave and had
not observed it, rested on their oars, and the boat was sucked into
the wave which might have been three or four meters high. It broke
over the boat, forming a green cupola and fell on the other side with
all its mass of water. The boat was disgorged half filled with water
and the occupants half smothered from the dreadful compression of air.
Three outcries as from sleepers who have the nightmare were heard at a
time, but the fourth, the man at the tiller, was silent. He made only a
gesture with his hand toward the rock where now a light was shimmering,
only a few cable lengths to leeward, and then sank in the stern sheets
and lay there.

The boat ceased pitching for it had come into smooth water, the oarsmen
were all sitting as if intoxicated, dipping the oars, which were now
unnecessary for the boat was slowly wafted into harbor by the fair wind.

"What have you in the boat, good folks?" greeted an old fisherman after
he had said "Good evening," which the wind swept away.

"It should be a fish instructor!" whispered the surveyor as he pulled
the boat upon the beach.

"So it is such a one who comes to spy out the nets! Well, he shall be
treated as he seeks to be," said fisherman Oman, who seemed to be head
man for the few poor population of the island.

The custom house surveyor waited for the instructor to go on shore,
but he saw no sign of movement in that little bundle which lay in the
stern so he climbed uneasily into the boat and clasped both arms round
the prostrate body and carried it to the beach.

"Is he gone?" asked Oman, not without a certain tremor of hope.

"There isn't much of him left," answered the surveyor as he carried his
wet load up to the cottage.

The sight reminded of a giant and a lilliputian when the imposing
surveyor entered his brother's kitchen where his sister-in-law stood at
the fire, and as he laid down the little body on the sofa an expression
of compassion for the weaker man gleamed from the low-browed,
dark-whiskered visage.

"Here we have the fish inspector, Mary," he greeted his sister-in-law,
placing his arm round her waist. "Help us now to get something dry upon
him and something wet into him and then let him go to his room."

The commissioner made a wretched and ridiculous figure as he lay on
the hard wooden sofa. The white standing collar twisted around his
neck like a dirty rag, all of the fingers of the right hand peeped out
of the cracked glove over which the softened cuffs hung sticking with
the dissolved starch. The small crocodile shoes had lost all shine and
shape, and it was with the greatest effort that the surveyor and his
sister-in-law could pull them off the feet.

When he was finally deprived of most of his clothing and covered with
quilts, they carried him boiled milk and schnapps, each shaking an
arm, after which the surveyor raised the little body and slowly poured
the milk into it. Beneath the closed eyes the mouth gaped, but when
the sister-in-law would give him a dram, the smell seemed to act like
a quick poison; with a gesture of the hand he pushed the glass back,
and opening his eyes wide awake as though just finishing a refreshing
sleep, he asked for his room.

Of course it was not in order but it would be in about an hour if he
would only lie still and wait.

The commissioner was lying there spending an intolerable hour with his
eyes flitting over the tiresome arrangements of the chamber and its
occupants. It was the government's cottage for the surveyor of that
little department of the custom house on the East Skerries. Everything
was scanty, merely a roof over the head. The white, bare walls were
as narrow as the Crown's ideas, four white rectangles which enclosed
a room covered by a white rectangle. Strange, hard as a hotel room,
which is not to dwell in, only for lodging. To put on wall papers
for his successor or for the Crown, neither the surveyor nor his
predecessors had the heart. In the midst of this dead whiteness stood
dark, poor, factory-made furniture, with half modern shapes. A round
dining table of knotted pine stained with walnut and marked with white
rings from dishes, chairs of the same material with high backs, and
tilting on three legs, a bed-sofa, manufactured like ready-made men's
clothing, from the cheapest and least possible material. Nothing seemed
to fulfill its purpose of inviting rest and comfort, everything was
useless, and therefore unsightly, notwithstanding its ornaments of
papier maché.

The surveyor placed his broad buttock on a rattan chair and rested his
mighty back against it, the maneuver was followed by annoying creaks
and a morose exhortation from the sister-in-law, to be careful of other
folk's things, whereupon the surveyor answered with an impudent patting
followed by a look which left no doubt as to the relations existing
between them.

The oppression which the whole room had caused in the commissioner
was increased by the discovery of this discord. As naturalist he had
not the current ideas about what was permissible and what was not
permissible, but he had strongly impressed instinct of the designs in
certain arrangements of nature's laws and suffered internally when he
saw nature's commands violated. This was to him as though he should
have found in his laboratory an acid which since the world's creation
had only united with one base but was now, against its nature, forming
a union with two.

His imagination was stirred in remonstrance over evolution from common
sensuality to monogamy, and he felt himself back in the dark ages
among wild herds of human beings, who lived a coral life and existed
in masses, before selection and variation were attained to ordain
individual personal being and consanguinity.

When he saw a two-years-old girl with too big a head and fish eyes
walking around the chamber with timid footsteps, as though afraid to be
seen, he comprehended at once that a doubtful birth had sown its seeds
of discord which were working dissolution and disturbance, and he could
easily understand that the moment must come when this living testimony
would pay all the penalties of being an involuntary witness.

In the midst of these thoughts the door opened and the husband entered.

It was the surveyor's brother who had thus far remained a subordinate.
He was physically even better endowed than the surveyor, but he was a
blond with an open and friendly look.

After a cheerful "Good evening," he sat down at the table beside his
brother and, taking the child on his lap, kissed it.

"We have a visitor," said the surveyor, pointing to the sofa where the
commissioner lay. "It is the fish instructor, who will live upstairs."

"So, it is he?" said Vestman, as he rose to greet him.

With the child on his arm he approached the sofa, because he was host
of the cottage, while his brother was unmarried and only boarded with
him. Therefore he found it his place to welcome the guest.

"We have it simply out here," added he after a few words of welcome,
"but my wife isn't entirely at a loss in preparing food, since she
has served in better houses before, and married me three years ago,
yet since we got this brat here she has a little more to think of.
Yes, anybody can get children if they help each other,--as a matter of
course I am not in need of help, as they say."

The commissioner was surprised at the sudden turn the long sentence had
taken, and asked himself if the man was cognizant of anything, or if he
had only a feeling that there was something out of order. He himself
had seen in ten minutes the way things stood.

How then was it possible that he who was interested in the question had
seen nothing in a couple of years?

He was overcome with loathing at the whole thing, and turned to the
wall to blind his eyes, and with mental pictures of a pleasant nature
let the remaining half hour pass.

He could not make himself deaf, and heard against his will the talk,
which a short time before had been lively, becoming broken as though
the words were measured with a rule before spoken, and when there was a
silence the husband filled it out as though from aversion, and fearing
to hear something he would not hear, and could not be calm before his
own stream of words intoxicated him.

When the hour was finally to an end and no order concerning the room
had been given, the commissioner rising asked if it was ready.

O yes, it was ready in a way, but--

Here the commissioner asked in a tone of command to be shown to his
room at once, reminding them in fitting words that he had not come to
share a room with them, or for hospitality, he was traveling on the
Crown's errands and only asked for his rights--and those he would have
because of a memorial from the Civil Department through the Internal
Revenue Office, which had been sent to the Royal Custom House in Dalaro.

This straightened affairs at once, and Vestman, with a candle in his
fist, followed the severe gentleman upstairs to the gable chamber,
where nothing in the arrangements could explain the requested hour's
delay.

It was an ordinary, large room with walls as white as those downstairs,
the big window opened on the longest wall as a black hole through which
streamed the darkness unimpeded by any curtains.

A bed stood there ready for use, simple, only an elevation of the floor
to prevent drafts, a table, two chairs and a washstand comprised the
furniture. The commissioner threw a look of despair about him, when
he, who was used to feast his eyes to satisfaction on luxuries, saw
only these scattered articles placed about in space, where the candle
battled with the darkness and where the big window seemed to consume
every beam of light which was produced by the burning tallow.

He felt lost, as though after battling upwards for half his maturity
to attain refinement, good position and luxuries, he had fallen to
poverty, moved down to a lower class. It was as though his love of
beauty and wisdom were imprisoned, deprived of their nourishment and
subject to banishment. Those naked walls were a middle age cloister
cell where asceticism in image, and emptiness in the middle hurried
the famined fantasy to gnaw itself and bring forth lighter or darker
fancies only to become extricated from nothing. The white, the
shapeless, the colorless nothing in the whitewashed walls raised an
activity of the imagination such as a savage's cave or a green bough
hut never could have evoked, or the forest with its ever changing
colors and moving outlines would have dispensed. An activity that not
the field, nor the heath with the clouds' and sky's rich coloring, nor
yet the never tiring sea, could call forth.

He felt at once a rising desire instantly to paint the walls full of
sunny landscapes with palms and parrots, to stretch a Persian rug over
the ceiling and throw hides of deer upon the plank floor covering the
ruled-ledger appearance, to place sofas in the corners with small
tables in front, to suspend a hanging lamp over a round table strewn
with books and magazines, stand a piano against the short wall and
dress the long wall with book shelves, and away in the corner of
the sofa set a little woman's figure, no matter which one!--Just as
the candle on the table fought against the darkness, so his fantasy
rebelled against the room's arrangements, and thus it lost its hold,
everything disappeared, and the dreadful surroundings frightened him to
bed. Quenching the light he drew the blankets over his head.

The wind shook the whole gable, and the water caraff rattled against
the drinking glasses. The draft passed through the room from window to
door and sometimes touched his locks of hair, which were dried from
the sea wind, so that he fancied someone stroked them with his hand,
while between the gusts of wind, like the striking of the kettledrum
in an orchestra, beat and boomed the big breakers against the caverned
rocks out on the south point. And when he had finally become used to
the monotonous sound of wind and wave, he heard, shortly before he fell
asleep, a man's voice in the room below teaching a child its evening
prayer.




CHAPTER SECOND


When the commissioner, after a dead sleep induced by the efforts of the
preceding day and the strong sea air, awoke the next morning and looked
out of the blankets, he observed first an incomprehensible silence, and
found that his ear caught slight sounds that otherwise he would have
paid no attention to. He could hear each little movement of the sheet
as it rose and fell from his respiration, the friction of his locks
of hair against the pillow-case, the pulsations in the neck arteries,
the rickety bed repeating the heart beat on a small scale. He felt the
silence because the wind had gone down, and only the swell beat against
the compressed air in the hollows of the strand and returned once every
half minute. From the bed which was placed opposite the window he saw,
through the lower pane, something like a blue draw-curtain, bluer than
the air, and it kept moving toward him slowly, as though it would come
in through the window and overflow the room. He knew it was the sea,
but it looked so small,--and it rose like a perpendicular wall instead
of expanding as a horizontal surface, because the long breakers were
fully lighted by the sun and cast no shadows from which the eye could
form a perspective image.

He arose, and partly dressing himself opened the window. The raw, moist
air in the chamber rushed out, and from the sea came a warm green-house
air, warmed several hours by the radiant May sun. Below the window he
saw only low, jagged rocks in the crevices of which lay small dusty
drifts of snow, and near by bloomed small white rye-flowers, well
protected in beds of moss, and the poor wild pansies, pale yellow as
from famine, and blue as from chill, hoisting their poor country's
poor colors to the first spring sun. Lower down crept the heath and
the crowberry vine, looking down over the precipice, below which lay a
windrow of white sand, pulverized by the sea, and in which were stuck
scattered sand-oat stalks; then came the kelp belt as a dark sash or
braid on the white sand, highest up it was almost ivory black from last
year's kelp in which were sticking shells, leaves of fir, twigs, fish
bones, and toward the sea it was olive-brown from the last fresh kelp,
which with its curled and knotted fronds formed a garniture like a
chenille cord. Inside on the sandy side walk lay the top of a barkless
pine, sand scrubbed, washed by the water, polished by the wind,
bleached by the sun, resembling the ribs of a mammoth skeleton, and
around it a whole osteologist's museum of like skeletons or fragments
of the same.

A beacon, which had shown ships the way for years, lay thrown up, and
with its thick end looked like the thigh bone and condyle of a giraffe;
in another place a juniper shrub, like the carcass of a drowned cat,
with its white small roots stretching out for the tail.

Outside the strand lay reefs and rocks which one moment glanced wet in
the sunshine, the next were submerged by the swell which passed over
them with a splash, or if it had not sufficient power, rose, burst, and
threw a water-fall of foam into the air.

Outside the island lay the shining sea, that great flat, as the
fishermen called it, and now in the morning hour it stretched like
a blue canvas without a wrinkle but undulating like a flag. The big
round surface would have been tiresome had not a red buoy been anchored
outside the reef, and brightened up the monotony of the surface with
its minium spot like the seal on a letter.

This was the sea, certainly nothing new to Commissioner Borg who had
seen several corners of the world. Still it was the desolate sea seen
as it were in a _tête-à-tête_. It did not terrify like the forest with
its gloomy hiding places, it was quieting like an open, big, faithful
blue eye. Everything could be seen at once, no ambush, no lurking
place. It flattered the spectator when he saw this circle round him,
where he himself ever remained the center. The big water surface was
as a corporeity radiating from the beholder existing only in and with
the beholder. As long as he stood on shore, he felt himself intimate
with the now harmless power and superior to its enormous might, for he
was beyond its reach. When he reminded himself of the dangers he had
undergone the evening before, the agony and wrath he had endured in his
combat against this brutal enemy, which he had succeeded in eluding,
he smiled in magnanimity toward the vanquished and beaten foe, which
was after all only a blind tool at the wind's service, and was now
stretching itself out to resume its rest in the sunlight.

This was East Skerries, the classical, for they have their old history,
have lived long, flourished, and declined, the old East Skerries that
in the Middle Ages were a great fishing port where that important
article stromling was caught, and for which a special law of guild
was given and is still maintained up to to-day. The stromling serve
the same purpose in middle Sweden and Norrland as the herring does on
the west coast and in Norway, being only a kind of herring, a product
of the Baltic Sea, and suited to its small resources. It was sought
during the time when herring were scarce and dear, and less sought
after when they were plentiful. It has been for ages the winter food
for middle Sweden, and was eaten so continually that a song is still
preserved from the days of Queen Christina's enticing Frenchmen into
the country, who complained of the eternal hard bread and infinite
stromling. A man's age ago the great land-owners paid their laborers'
wages in natural products which consisted mostly of herring; after
herring-fishing declined they substituted salt stromling. The price
rose and the fishing which previously had been managed moderately and
for domestic use, now became an eager speculation. The shoals of the
East Skerries which are the richest on the coast of Sodermanland, began
to be used on a large scale, the fish were disturbed during spawning
time, the meshes of the nets were made closer and closer, and as a
natural consequence the fish diminished, not so much from extermination
perhaps as from the fact that they left their former spawning places
and sought the depths where as yet no fisherman has had the resolution
to search for the flown prey.

The learned puzzled long with investigations over the cause of the
diminution of the stromling supply, but the Academy of Agriculture took
the initiative, by appointing skillful fish commissioners, both to
learn the cause and find a remedy.

This was now Commissioner Borg's mission at the East Skerries for the
summer. The place was not lively as the Skerries are not situated on
one of the main courses to Stockholm. The big vessels from the south
usually pass by Landsort, Dalaro and Vaxholm, those from the east,
and during certain winds, even those from the south, seek passage by
Sandham and Vaxholm, while the merchants' vessels from Norrland and
Finland pass between Furusund and Vaxholm.

The eastern route is mostly used in case of necessity by the
Esthonians, who as a rule come from south-east, and by others in case
of wind, current and storm, who lie over at Landsort and Sandham.
Therefore the place has only a third-class custom house station under
one surveyor, and a little department of pilots who are under control
of Dalaro.

It is the end of the world--quiet, still, abandoned, except during
fishing time, fall and spring, and if there comes only a single
pleasure yacht during mid-summer it is greeted as an apparition from
a lighter, gayer world; but fish commissioner Borg, who had come on
another errand--to "spy," as the people called it--was greeted with
a noticeable coolness which had found its first utterance in the
indifference of the past evening and now took its expression in a
miserable and cold coffee which was brought to his chamber.

Although gifted with a keen sense of taste, he had acquired through
strong exercise an ability to restrain unpleasant perceptions,
therefore he swallowed the drink at a draught and arising went down to
see his environment and greet the people.

When he passed the custom-house man's cottage everything was hushed
and it seemed as though the occupants would make themselves invisible
--they shut the doors, and stopped talking in order not to be betrayed.

With this unpleasant impression of being unwelcome, he continued his
promenade out on the rock and came down to the harbor. There was a
group of small huts all of the simplest construction just as though
piled from pickings of stone shingles with a little smattering of
mortar here and there; the chimney alone was of brick, rising above the
fireplace. At one corner was a patched-up wooden addition for storage,
at another only a shed of driftwood and twigs, a harbor for swine,
which were shipped here during the fishing season for fattening. The
windows seemed to have been taken from shipwrecks, and the roof was
covered with everything that had length and width, and would absorb or
shed rain--kelp, sand-oats, moss, peat, earth. These were the shelters
now standing deserted, each of which housed about twenty sleepers
during the big fishing season, when every hut was a kitchen bar.

Outside the most prominent shanty stood the head man of the island,
fisherman Oman, scratching out a flounder net with a whip. He did not
in the least consider himself beneath a fish commissioner, nevertheless
he felt a pressure from this presence and bristling up, prepared to
answer sharply.

"Is the fishing good?" greeted the instructor.

"Not yet, but it may be now that the government has come to do it,"
answered Oman impolitely.

"Where do the stromling shoals lie?" asked the commissioner,
relinquishing the government to its fate.

"Oh! we thought the instructor knew better than we did, as he is paid
to teach us," said Oman.

"See here, you only know where the shoals lie, but I know where the
stromling are, which is a straw nearer."

"So," rallied Oman. "If we dip into the sea we shall get fish!--well
one is never too old to learn."

The wife came out of the cottage and began a lively talk with her
husband, so that the commissioner found it unprofitable to confer
longer with the hostile fisherman, and started toward the harbor.

Some pilots were sitting on the pier who zealously increased their
conversation and seemed inclined not to notice him.

He would not turn back but continued toward the strand, leaving the
habitations behind. The naked rock lay waste, without a tree, without
a bush, for everything that fire could burn was destroyed. He walked
along the water's edge, sometimes in fine soft sand, sometimes on
stones. When he had continued an hour, always turning to the right,
he found himself in the same place from which he had started, with a
feeling of being in captivity. The hillock of the little island crushed
him, and the sea's horizontal circle oppressed him, the old feeling of
not having room enough came over him, and he climbed to the highest
plateau of the hillock, which was about fifty feet above the sea level.
There he lay down on his back and looked up into space. Now when his
eyes could behold nothing, neither land nor sea, and he saw only the
blue cupola over him, he felt free, isolated, as a cosmic particle
floating in the ether only obeying the law of gravitation. He fancied
he was perfectly alone upon the globe, the earth was only a vehicle in
which he rode on its orbit, and he heard in the wind's faint rustle
only the air draft that the planet in its speed would awake in the
ether, and in the din of the waves he perceived the splashing which
the liquid must make as the big reservoir rolled round its axle. All
reminiscences of fellow creatures, community, law, customs, had blown
away, now that he did not see a single fragment of the earth to which
he was bound. He let his thoughts run like calves let loose, dashing
over all obstacles, all considerations, and therewith intoxicated
himself to stupefaction, as the India navel reverencers, who forgot
both heaven and earth in contemplating an inferior external part of
themselves.

Commissioner Borg was not a nature worshiper any more than were those
navel worshipers of India. On the contrary he was a self-conscious
being, standing highest in the terrestrial chain of creation and
entertained certain contempt for the lower forms of existence,
understanding very well that what the self-conscious spirit produces
is partly more subtle than that of the unconscious nature, and above
all else has more advantages to man, who creates his creations with
regard to the usefulness and beauty they may afford to their creator.
Out of nature he brought forth raw material for his work, and although
both light and air could be produced by machine, he preferred the sun's
unexcellable ether vibrations, and the atmosphere's inexhaustible well
of oxygen. He loved nature as an assistant, as an inferior who could
serve him, and it pleased him that he was able to fool this powerful
adversary to place its resources at his disposal.

After having lain an uncertain time and felt the great rest of
absolute solitude, freedom from influences, from pressure, he arose and
went down to seek his room.

When he entered his empty chamber it reëchoed his footsteps and he felt
himself entrapped. The white quadrant and rectangles that enclosed the
room where he must dwell, reminded him of human hands, but of a low
order, mastering only the simple forms of inorganic nature. He was
enclosed in a crystal, a hexaëdron or the like, and the straight lines
and the congruent surfaces, shaped his thoughts into squares, and ruled
his soul in lines, simplifying it from the organic life's liberty of
forms, and reduced his brain's rich tropical vegetation of changing
perceptions to nature's first childish attempt at classifying.

After he had called to the girl and let her bring in his chests, he
began at once the transformation of the room.

His first care was to regulate the entrance of light by a pair of heavy
garnet Persian curtains, that instantly gave the room a softer tone.
He opened the two leaves of the big dining table and the emptiness
of the big white floor was filled at once, but the white surface of
the table was still disturbing, so he concealed it under an oilcloth
of a solid warm moss-green color which harmonized with the curtains
and was restful. Then he placed his book shelves against the poorest
wall. This certainly was not an improvement as they only striped it in
columns like a time-table, and the white plastering contrasted more
against the black walnut colored wood, but he would first outline the
whole before he went into details.

From a nail in the ceiling he hung his bed curtains, this made as it
were, a room within the room, and the dormitory was separated from the
sitting room, as though under a tent.

The long white floor planks with their black: parallel cracks, where
dirt from shoes, dust from furniture and clothes, tobacco ashes,
scrubbing water and broom splinters, formed hot beds for fungi and
hiding places for wood worms, he covered here and there with rugs of
different colors and patterns, which lay like verdant blooming islets
on the big white flat.

Now that there was color and warmth added to the space he began to give
the finishing touches. He had first to create a forge, an altar to
labor which would be the center round which everything would be grouped
and radiating from it. Therefore he placed his big lamp on the writing
table, it was two feet high and rose like a lighthouse upon the green
cloth, its painted china stand with arabesques, flowers and animals,
which bore no resemblance to ordinary ones, but gave a cheerful
coloring and reminded with their ornaments, of the human spirit's
power to outrage nature's unchangeable shapes. Here had the painter
transformed a stiff spear thistle to a clinging vine, and forced a
rabbit to stretch himself out like a crocodile, and with a gun between
his fore paws with their tiger claw nails, to aim at a hunter with a
fox's head.

Round the lamp he placed a microscope, diopter, scales, plumb bobs, and
a sounding rod, whose varnished brasses diffused a warm sunlight yellow.

The inkstand, a big cube of glass cut in facets, which gave it the
faint blue light of water or ice, the penholders of porcupine quills
which suggested animal life with their indefinite oily coloring, sticks
of sealing wax in loud cinnabar, pen boxes with variegated labels,
scissors with cold steel glance, cigar dishes in lac and gold, paper
knife of bronze, all that mass of small trifles of use and beauty soon
filled the big table abundantly with points on which the eye could rest
a moment getting an impression, a memory, an impulse, keeping it always
active and never fatiguing.

Now for filling the spaces in the book shelves, and blow the breath
of life into the vacuum between the dark boards. There soon stood row
upon row a variegated collection of reference and handbooks, from
which the owner could get enlightenment on all that had happened in
the past and present time. Encyclopedias, which like an air telegraph
answered with a pressure on the right letter. Text-books in history,
philosophy, archeology, and natural sciences, journeys in all lands
with maps, all of Baedeker's handbooks so that the owner could sit at
home and plan the shortest and cheapest route to this or that place,
and decide which hotel, and know how much to give in drink money. But
as all of these works have an inevitable seed of decay, he had manned
a special shelf with an observation corps of scientific journals from
which he could immediately obtain reports concerning even the smallest
advancements of knowledge, even the slightest discoveries. And at
last a whole collection of skeleton keys to all present knowledge,
in bibliographical notices, publishers' catalogues, book-sellers'
newspapers, so that he, shut up in his room, could see precisely how
high or low the barometer stood with all the science that concerned him.

When he regarded the wall with the book shelf, it seemed to him as
though the room was now for the first time inhabited by living beings.
These books gave the impression of individuals for there were not two
works of the same exterior. One was a Baedeker in scarlet and gold,
like one who on a Monday morning leaves all behind him and travels away
from sorrow.

Others solemn, dressed in black, a whole procession, like the
Encyclopedia Britannica, and all the many paper covered ones in light,
gay, easy, spring coats, the salmon red Revue des deux Mondes, the
lemon yellow Comtemporaine, the rush green Fortnightly, the grass green
Morgenländische. From the backs big names saluted him as acquaintances
whom he had in his chamber, and here he had the best part of them, more
than they could give a traveler who came on a visit to trouble their
dinner naps or breakfast.

With the writing table and the book shelves placed in order, he felt
himself recovered after the voyage's disturbing influences; his soul
regained its strength since his implements were accessible, these
instruments and books which had grown fast to his being as new senses,
as other organs stronger and finer than those nature had given him as
an inheritance.

The occasional attack of fear which was caused from isolation, solitude
and from being pent-up with enemies--for thus he considered the
fishermen, with reason--gave way before the quiet which the installment
must induce, and now, the headquarters being raised, he sat down as a
well-armed general to plan for the campaign.




CHAPTER THIRD


The wind had shifted north-east during the night and the drifting ice
had floated down from Aland, when the commissioner took his boat to
make a preparatory investigation of the quality of the sea's bottom
depth of water, sea flora and sea fauna.

A pilot who was with him as oarsman, soon became tired of giving
explanations, when he saw that the commissioner by means of chart,
sounding lead and other different instruments, found out facts that
he had never thought of. Where the shoals lay was known to the pilot,
and he also knew on which shoal the stromling nets should be set, but
the commissioner was not satisfied with this and began to dredge at
different depths, taking up small creatures and vegetable slime on
which he believed the stromling fed. He lowered the lead to the bottom
and drew up samples of clay, sand, mud, mold and gravel, which he
assorted, numbered and placed in small glasses with labels.

Finally he took out a big spyglass which resembled a speaking trumpet,
and looked down into the sea. The pilot had never dreamed that one
could gaze into the water with an instrument and in his astonishment
asked permission to place his eye to the glass and look down into the
mysteries.

The commissioner on the one hand would not play wizard, and on the
other did not desire hastily to solve the problem which time would
clear up, or to inspire too high hopes about the results, he therefore
granted the pilot's entreaty and gave some popular explanation of the
living pictures which were unfolding down in the depths.

"Do you see that seaweed upon the shoal?" began the commissioner, "and
do you see that it is first olive yellow, lower down liver colored and
at the bottom red? That comes from the diminution of light!"

He took a few pulls at the oars, off the shallow, and kept constantly
to lee of the rock so as to keep free from the drifting ice.

"What do you see now?" he asked the man who lay on his stomach.

"Oh Jesus! I think it is stromling, and they are standing close, as
close as cards in a pack."

"Do you see now that the stromling go not on the shallows only, and do
you understand now that one could catch them from the depths, and do
you believe now when I tell you that one ought never to fish them on
the shallows where they only go up to spawn where the eggs are reached
by the sun's heat better than in deep water?"

The commissioner rowed on until he saw the water become greenish gray
on account of the nature of the clay bottom.

"What do you see now?" he continued, meanwhile resting on the oars.

"I believe, on my soul, there are serpents on the sea bottom! there
are real serpents' tails sticking out of the mud--and there are their
heads."

"They are eels, my boy!" informed the commissioner.

The pilot looked incredulous for he had never heard of eels in the
sea, but the commissioner would not give out his best card in advance
or lavish long explanations over intricate things, therefore he left
the oars and, taking his water telescope, leaned over the gunwale for
observation.

He seemed to seek something with uncommon ardor, something that must be
there, on this or that shoal but which he naturally had not seen there
before, never having investigated that water.

They rowed around for two hours as the commissioner indicated,
sometimes letting down his dredge, sometimes the lead line, and after
each haul lying face downwards and looking through the glass into the
water. His pale face contracted from the efforts and the eyes sunk
into his head while the hand which held the tube trembled and the arms
seemed stiff and numb as a stake. The cold, humid wind, which passed
through the pilot's jacket did not seem to bite the frail figure which
was only wrapped in a half-buttoned spring coat. His eyes watered
from the sea wind and the endeavor to look sharply down into the
half-impenetrable element which forms three-quarters of the earth's
surface, about the life of which the other quarter generally knows so
little and guesses so much.

Through the water telescope, which was not of his invention, but one he
had made from what he had heard from bridge builders and laborers in
marine blasting, he saw down into a lower world from which the great
creation above the waters had been evolved. The forest of seaweed which
had just advanced over the border from inorganic to organic life,
swayed in the cold bottom current and resembled whites of eggs just
coagulated, borrowing their shape from the surf and recalling frost
flowers, when water freezes on the window pane. Down in the depths
the kelp spread out like big parks with golden leaves, over which the
inhabitants of the sea bottom dragged themselves on their bellies
seeking cold and obscurity, concealing their shame of being behind
in their long wandering toward the sun and air. Lowest down in the
clay the flounder rests, partly dug into the ooze, lazy, immovable,
without inventive faculty to develop a swim-bladder with which to raise
himself, waiting a happy chance that leads the prey past his nose,
without the impulse of turning the random to his advantage, and from
pure laziness having twisted and stretched himself until his eyes for
convenience' sake have stopped on the right side of the twisted head.

The blenny has already put one pair of oars out forward, but is loaded
down by the stern and reminds one of the first trial at boat building,
showing between the kelp's heraldic foliage his architectonic stone
head with a Croat's mustache, lifting himself a moment from the mud to
sink again immediately into it.

The lump sucker with its seven ridges goes with a keel to the air,
the whole fish one enormous nose, smelling only for food and females,
lighting for a moment the blue-green water with its rose-colored
belly, spreading a faint aurora around him down in the gloom, and
hugging again quickly a stone with his sucker to await the issue of the
millions of years, which shall bring delivery to those left behind in
the endless path of evolution.

The dreadful sea scorpion, that fury incarnate, with malice expressed
in the spines of its face, whose swimming limbs are claws, but more
for torturing than for attack or defense, lying on one side pining for
enjoyment, and caressing his own body with his slimy tail.

Higher up in lighter and warmer water swims the handsome but profound
thinking perch, perhaps the most characteristic fish of the Baltic
Sea, well built and steady but still somewhat clumsy as a Koster boat,
bearing the peculiar blue-green color of the Baltic and a Norseman's
temper, part philosopher part pirate, a sociable hermit, a superficial
creature who likes to seek the depths, and sometimes reaches them, idle
and eccentric. He stands during long leisure moments and stares at the
stones on the beach until awakening he darts off like an arrow, tyrant
against his own but soon tamed, returns willingly to the same place,
and harbors seven intestinal worms.

And then the eagle of the sea, the king of Baltic fishes, the
light-built, cutter-rigged pike, who loves the sun and, as the
strongest, needs not shun the light, who stands with his nose at the
surface of the water, sleeping with the sun in his eyes, dreaming of
the flowery fields and birch pastures yonder, where he can never go,
and of the thin blue cupola which arches over his wet world, where he
would smother, and yet where the birds are swimming lightly with their
feathery pectoral-fins.

The boat had come between floating pieces of ice which cast moving
shadows over the kelp parks on the bottom, like scattered clouds. The
commissioner, who had searched several hours without finding what he
sought, lifted the telescope out of the water, dried it and laid it
aside.

Then he dropped upon the stern sheets and holding his hand before his
eyes as though to rest them from impression, seemed buried in sleep for
some minutes after which he gave the pilot a signal to row on.

The commissioner, who had given his attention the whole forenoon to the
depth seemed now for the first time to observe the grand panorama which
was unfolding on the sea surface. Ultra-marine blue the water segment
extended some distance ahead of the boat, until the drifting ice showed
a perfect arctic landscape. Islands, bays, coves, and sounds marked as
on a map, and where the ice rode up on the reef, mountains had formed,
through one block pressing down another and the following climbing
up on the preceding. Over the rocks the ice had likewise piled up,
made arches, formed caves and built towers, church-ruins, casemates,
bastions. The enchantment in these formations lay in the fact that
they seemed to have been shaped by an enormous human hand, for they
had not the unconscious nature's chance forms, they reminded of human
inventions in past historical periods. There had blocks piled into
Cyclopean walls, arranged themselves in terraces as the Assyrian-greek
temple, here had the waves through repeated impact dug out a Roman
barrel vault, and fretted a round arch, which had sunken to an Arabian
moresque, out of which the sunbeams and the spray from the waves had
hacked out stalactites and bicelles, and here out of an already heaped
wall, the whole wave front had eaten a line of arches of a Roman
aqueduct, there stood the foundation to a mediæval castle, marking the
remains of tumble down lancet arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles.

This fluctuation of thoughts between arctic landscapes and historicized
architecture brought the contemplator into a peculiar frame of mind,
out of which he was drawn by the noisy life which roving flocks of
birds were making all around on floating islands of ice and on the
clear blue waters.

In flocks of hundreds and hundreds floated the eider ducks, which
were resting here, while waiting for open water to Norrland. The
insignificant rust brown females were surrounded by the gorgeous
males, who floated high with their snow white backs, sometimes
rising for a short flight, exposing their soot black breasts. Loons
in small flocks showing their miniver breasts, their reptile necks
and drooping checkered wings. Legions of lively, long-tailed ducks
in black and white, swimming, diving, skimming. The guillemots and
sea parrots in small bands, mournful coal black scoters in marauding
parties, contrasting with goosanders and red-breasted mergansers, a
more brilliant retinue with panaches on their necks, and over the
whole diving and fluttering host of birds that live an amphibious life
hovered the mews and gulls, which had already selected the air for
their element, only using the water for fishing and bathing.

Smuggled into this industrial world of labor, on the point half hidden
sat a solitary crow, his low brow, his doubtful color, his thievish
manner, his criminal type, great shyness for water, and dirty look made
him an object of hatred to the strugglers who knew the nest plunderer,
the egg sucker.

From the whole of this winged world, whose throats could set
atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the
water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint
trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious
vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider
duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked
the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the
gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in
rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded
the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song.
An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter
how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making
an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or
beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the
earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.

It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore
disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator
enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator,
the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming
confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of
recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with
each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of
especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced
the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of
creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the
bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward
light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to
knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed
conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.

This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was
covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning
to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained
their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up
in daylight.

Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared,
swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant,
the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and
lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets,
the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still
farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but
out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped
over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in
primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day
in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself
was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed
by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation
and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this
chain.

The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only
it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations,
where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations
of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh
himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to
the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension
to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into
a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that
he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments,
when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive
forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the
foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.

How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated
to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to
be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of
trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been
permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto
secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded
impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated.
Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but
instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation
after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the
now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding
themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a
judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the
present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried
humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.

After these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin
and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal
evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search
for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.

He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided
type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and
cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after
the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing
because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all
forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted
within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again
as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state
as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was
improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure,
but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had
come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at
turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals
had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the
personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of
man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of
the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities,
who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries
to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an
artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical
systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of
no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through
natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found
ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the
burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who
were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them.
As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally
promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with
any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition
and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong
individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet
carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and
smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house
of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.

The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but
one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and
not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's
chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms
and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and
unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration
of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and
was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted
as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally
acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the
opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent
topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in
the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom,
which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one
glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually
the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with
a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole
physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new,
changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps
should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight
lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The
heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the
rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no
more be observed.

There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the
fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of
the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything
miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings
tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the
leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to
be denuded by natural agencies, he felt something of the creator in
himself. When he ordered tunnels bored, transferred sand ridges to
lakes, and filled up marshes, he did not fail to perceive that he had
taken in hand a remodeling of the earth ball, throwing the natural
geological formations topsy-turvy, and therewith his personal feelings
swelled incredibly.

Hereto was added his position as officer with numerous subordinates,
whom he only communicated with as one in authority, and who
consequently were considered as service muscles to his big determining
brain.

With a military's physical courage and resolution, the profoundness
of a savant, the full deliberation of a thinker, the calm of one
financially independent, and the dignity and self-esteem of a man
of honor, he exhibited a type of the highest rank, where beauty and
prudence combined to produce a well-measured, harmonious personality.

In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother
having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations,
and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with
books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to
be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of
the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of
life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and
the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood
highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the
creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in
nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature
worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an
acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By
this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear
of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of
his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator
of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ,
which through its perfected form separates the human being from the
beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should
govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up
a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses,
and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the
animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were
localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be
absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest
type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses
but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form.
Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment
and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue.
This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit,
which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of
the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely
worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure
thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had
taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad.
Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured,
just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring
could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability
to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure
sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant
Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future
before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered
because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and
the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time,
does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an
imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment
that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away.
All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the
inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack
of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own
sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and
syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe,
which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of
a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it
had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life
while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who
abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same
time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it
in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just
as the feelings which eventually would be laid aside, like the thyroid
gland, which has come into disuse by human beings but still remains on
its old place.

When the son could not refute these bitter truths with rational
arguments, declaring that his feelings, yes his most sacred feelings,
rose against such a dry tenet, the father declared him to be a hornet
which was still thinking with ganglia, and he warned him against
dissolute fancies, or conclusions on insufficient ground and want of
great material, not to be mistaken for scientific quick-reasoning,
where from seemingly few premises--appearing few because the middle
terms were omitted--new conclusions could be drawn, when, as if by
a chemical union, two older ideas enter each other and form a new
thought. Ontogenism had shown how the human fœtus was developed through
all the earlier stages from the amœba through the frog and up to the
anthropomorphic, how then could the youth question but that the
spirit of a child must pass through the history of man through the
animal and the savage upward, as long as the body was growing and that
consequently man stood far ahead of youth! He warned him especially not
to let the lowest of all our propensities, the sexual impulse cloud
his judgment, for by its power it had so long dazzled sound reason,
that erudite men still bore the superstition that woman was as high
a type as man, yes even higher according to the opinion of some men,
whereas she really is but an intermediate form between man and child,
as is shown by the fœtal development, where the male at a certain
stage is female but the female never male. To warn the young man of
the danger of being over-powered by sexual impulses, was the same as
to cast a shadow on woman, and the son soon commenced to make what the
father called ganglionic conclusions, the bearing of which was that the
Lieutenant-Colonel was a woman hater. And how could he do otherwise,
when always hearing his father narrating how this or that man had
thrown away his future on affairs with women, and how great geniuses
had wasted their talents by procreation, and sacrificed happiness and
position for a wife, who had been faithless and children who died
before of mature age. Propagation was only for the lesser spirits, the
greater ones should live in their works, and so forth.

Under such guidance the son grew up. He was born an unusually delicate
child but with a harmoniously developed body; he had finely organized
senses, quick and sure perception, keen understanding and a nobility
of mind which manifested itself in forbearance and approachableness
to mankind. He understood early how to regulate his life, to suppress
the plant and animal propensities, and when he had accumulated a
vast material of observations and knowledge, he began to work it up.
His brain soon showed its prolific capacity--from a couple of known
quantities to find the wanted unknown, from old thoughts to produce new
ones, in a word the capacity of what is called originality. He was the
coming regenerator and possessed ability to see the inter-relations in
disorder, to discover the invisible force behind the phenomena, and
even the concealed and extremely compound motives in the actions of
men. Therefore his schoolmates looked upon him with suspicion, and the
teachers discerned in him a silent critic of what they communicated as
unalterable facts.

His arrival at the university occurred contemporarily with the great
popular movements which concerned the parliamentary reform. Borg
perceived well the defects of the representation by a four-class
system, while the state consists of at least twenty classes with
different interests and different abilities to judge in so complicated
a problem as that of the government of a people, but on the other hand
he could not consent to revert to the organization of the hord or tribe
where everybody had equally much or equally little to say. He perceived
at once that this simplifying of the method of governing, where the
multitude should do it was not a reform suited to the needs of the
time, moreover he had lately seen the right of universal suffrage
in France produce an Emperor and a sham representation of lawyers,
merchants and army officers, with the exclusion of laborers, farmers,
savants and scientific men, thus only three classes, arbitrarily
selected by the Emperor, were represented. He had calculated that the
most correct would be a perfect class representation with proportional
rights of representation, well balanced according to the interests of
the respective classes and with due consideration given to the highest
interests, or the higher right of the wise to own the preponderance,
as they promote progress more than the ignorant. This, to be sure,
the authors of the two chamber systems had already had in mind, when
they perceived the necessity of referring questions to committees
and disentangling certain questions by special committees, even
by committees of experts. To complete the assembly, so that all
interests would be guarded and all points taken and all information
of the condition of the realm made accessible, each class of people,
from the highest to the lowest, should elect representatives in
proportion partly to their numbers and partly to their importance
for the advancement of the country as a whole. Neglecting the Royal
Court, which together with the monarch ought to be assorted under the
foreign department, to which they properly belong, for the monarch is
only permitted to represent the nation before foreign powers, this
consultative, though not a legislative, class parliament would be
constructed as follows, viz., First class: land owners and renters,
tenants, overseers, foremen on farms and so forth. The second class:
operators of mines and quarries, manufacturers and their laborers.
Third class: merchants, mariners, pilots, hotel owners, porters,
hackmen, and all employed in banks, custom houses, postal service,
railroads and telegraphs. Fourth class: civil and military officers,
clergymen, with servants, janitors and privates. Fifth class:
savants, teachers, literateurs, and artists. Sixth class: physicians,
apothecaries, superintendents of poorhouses. Seventh class: house
owners, capitalists and rentiers.

In what proportion to elect from each class was the question, which
could not be solved off hand, but it was necessary that skillful men
with knowledge in the science of government should probe the new
order of representation, which would therefore only and always be
provisional. Over this consultative assembly should sit a council of
specialists in the science of government, who had been professionally
trained for that difficult calling, so that this most complicated of
all arts would not be pursued by bunglers and enterprising amateurs, as
had hitherto been done, and statesmen's accession to office would be
preceded by a careful investigation of their past life, their private
financial and social situation. This would spur youth to self-education
and heedfulness of what they were doing, and would form a body of
excellent men, while so called irreproachable conduct, or negative
virtue, without talents would not as hitherto be the short cut to
advancement. This would constitute the new nobility which would succeed
the old military and court nobility, and the fact that this nobility
established itself only through a natural selection of the fittest was
a guarantee that the country would be ruled in the best manner. The
Reichstag by only having to vote an opinion, not any decision, would
thus furnish a vast material of investigation, not a legionary army
that could be bribed and wheedled to commit voting outrages.

The young man, however, was too prudent to express his opinions, at
a period, when noblemen were synonymous with the degenerated, left
behind and blasé, and the masses were pushing so blindly forward that
the mechanics were the ones that worked mostly into the hands of their
coming class enemies, the peasants; a prudent man could only smile and
wait. And he waited until he saw the four-chamber system succeeded by a
one-class representation, when the realm was henceforth governed by the
former peasantry alone. These historical events had, however, a very
great influence in directing the young man's thoughts and development.
He had there seen in what terrible confusion the thought mechanism of
the majority was, and when he read the protocols of the Reichstag, and
noticed the speeches of the most influential and brilliant speakers,
he observed that what he called ganglionic reasoning, causing valvular
contraction and congestion of the heart, exerted the greatest influence
on the public opinion. It seemed to him sometimes as though it was not
the question of the fatherland or progress, but only the motionary's
triumph to gain his own will by fallacies, gross blunders in logic and
hideous distortions of facts. In him was aroused, through observation,
the great suspicion that everything was intended as a struggle for
power, for the enjoyment of using the power of the brain for putting
other brains into consonance, of sowing seeds of thought in the brain
bark of others, where they would grow as parasites like the mistletoe,
while the mother tree would proudly lift her shoulders at the thought
that the parasites up in the crown still were nothing but parasites.
This was the foundation of his ambition, to satisfy which required
knowledge and experience through study, travel and conversation with
learned and illustrious men. In the midst of this eternally movable
chaos of contending forces and interests, he sought a place of
anchorage for his being, the center of the sphere which reality threw
around him--in himself. Instead of, like weak Christians assuming an
external support in God, he took the real, palpable in his own self and
sought to create his personality to a perfect type of man whose life
and deeds would not violate anyone's rights, convinced that the fruit
of a well-nursed tree could not fail to be of use and rejoicing to
others. All the confusion and awkwardness that he saw in the struggles
of those who say they are living for others while in reality they only
live on others, on others' gratitude, others' opinion and others'
acknowledgment, he avoided, holding his own straight course convinced
that a single great and strong individual could not help doing more
good than these masses of thoughtless people whose numbers stand in
inverse ratio to their usefulness.

By this setting of his _ego_ he enforced a norm for his life, which
led him to a high degree of morality, for, instead of relinquishing
the final settlement to the uncertain hereafter, he regulated his
deeds so that he had nothing left unsettled, he did not shift the
blame from himself to an innocently suffering Christ, but in conscious
self-responsibility he committed no acts that would awaken the need of
a scapegoat.

Thereby he learned to rely only upon himself and never to take advice,
always reflecting on the probable consequences of an act. This did not
prevent him from suffering with nervousness like his generation, which
was born and brought up during the period of steam and electricity when
the vital activity was increased in speed. How could it be otherwise
considering that he must destroy millions of old brain cells, storages
for antiquated impressions, that every moment when he would form a
judgment, he must carefully sift out superannuated axioms, which tried
to come forward as premises. It was a work of total reconstruction
which caused these disorders in the nervous system which are all
laid to our ancestors' alcoholism and sexual excesses, but which
pathological symptom was an uttering of increased vitality accompanied
by extreme sensibility, like the crawfish when it shifts its shell, or
the bird when molting. It was the regeneration of a genus or at least
a variety of man which appeared to the old as diseased or unsound
because it was in a process of development, something that they were
disinclined to acknowledge as they themselves would be the norm and
called themselves sound, although they were in a state of decomposition.

This nervous sensibility of the growing youth was enhanced by
moderation in eating and drinking, and vigorous disciplining of
the sexual desires. He found it debasing to place oneself into the
ungovernable state of a lunatic or a savage through the use of
fermented drinks, and his soul was far too aristocratic to play a
moment's illicit love with a prostitute. With this, however, followed
an increasing acuteness of the senses and a sensibility to disagreeable
impressions which sometimes brought him disgust where others of a
coarser nature would have found enjoyment.

Thus he felt abased for a few hours when his morning coffee was not
strong enough, and a poorly painted billiard ball or a soiled cue
constrained him to turn away in search of another place. A badly
wiped glass raised his loathing and he felt the smell of human being
on a newspaper which another had read, while he could on others'
furniture see human grease deposited on the polish, and he always
opened the window when the maid had arranged the room. However, if he
was traveling and necessity constrained, then he could shut off, as it
were, all conduits from his organs of perceptions and harden himself
against all disagreeable sensations.

When he had completed his studies at the University, in natural
science, that least dependent of all sciences, because opinion plays
a lesser roll than a collection of material, he received a place as
assistant in the Royal Academy of Science.

He had applied for a situation here for the purpose of obtaining a
view of the kingdoms of nature, collected and classified in one place,
and if possible to read therein and discover the great connection if
there was any, or the universal confusion which probably was there. His
intentions soon became manifest, especially when he could no longer
avoid the danger of their enticing from him, his project to classify
the birds after an entirely different method than the current one. The
professors, who of course did not want to be lowered to collectors of
material for a young man, and were not willing to become obsolete with
their works, took an instinctive aversion to the scrutinizer. The first
obstacle to the intruder was made by placing him to detail work of a
subordinate character which was disgusting to his sense of beauty,
during six months he had to change alcohol in the fish collection;
at first he was retching from the nauseating odor, but after he had
overcome this disagreeable perception he turned furiously to the study
of the fishes, and as he worked rapidly he had inside of the half
year thoroughly studied the great material. He had been standing the
whole winter in a cold, dirty and semi-dark kitchen where he had been
smelling bad alcohol, frozen his hands and contracted a severe chronic
cystitis.

Afterwards he was set to writing labels for the algæ. As he had
received no instructions in calligraphy at the University and by nature
he had a wreak, unsteady hand, all the labels were discarded and he
gained the name of being useless.--He could not even write.--But in
two months, during which time he attended a writing school, and in
the evenings sat at home over writing book and copy, he acquired a
beautiful and legible hand and at the same time gained a more complete
knowledge of the algæ than he had before, while into the bargain he
learned the inestimable art of penmanship. The professors who had
thought he would reject such subordinate work soon saw what kind of
grit he had and that he understood how to use all adversities for his
benefit, increasing his knowledge while turning aside softly from the
leash and warding off the blows.

His improved penmanship was to be a new source of humiliations, for he
was now placed at copying office records and letters, sinking finally,
as they believed, to an ordinary copyist's rôle. Without complaining he
took the occupation and, at the same time learning foreign languages,
he had the opportunity of glancing into the secrets of all these great
men, which they thought would be worthless to him. Thus he saw the
scientific questions of the period, debated through correspondence and
he discovered the ways to the secret meetings of learned societies,
gained knowledge about the subterranean passages to distinction, and
the opportunities to make his investigations fruitful. Thus he was
unassailable, and just as they believed they had crushed him he arose
again.

It was owing to this double quality of nobleman and independent
thinker, that he became isolated. His name did not sound scientific
and his fine and modern way of dressing was taken as a proof of
unscientific sense by those who remembered Berzelius' ragged pants; his
patient and apparent submission was taken as inferiority, and all his
meditations over science, as poetical effusions. Regretting to have
let him come behind the curtain, and in order to press him down again
they now placed him at another work which had been rejected by every
newcomer, and was called the proving stone. There was in the garret a
remnant collection of stones and minerals, which had come together
partly through gifts and legacies and partly through circumnavigations
and explorations, and as most of it had been discarded as duplicates,
at a time when geology was in its infancy, increasing knowledge
demanded that they again be overhauled and assorted. They were placed
in an attic room beneath the rooftiles and lay in a big heap decidedly
covered with dust and cobwebs. Borg who must now stand bent beneath
the heated rooftiles and inhale the dust, was about to give it up,
but when on the second day he found a new mineral which he suspected
to be unknown, he at once applied himself to the work and started
classifying. During this he made observations which shook his already
faint belief in the whole system of the science, and he commenced
seeing that the stones were not classified by nature but it was the
brain that classified the phenomena. Besides, everything might be
classified if one could only decide upon a basis of division, and
he soon saw that the basis employed here was not the most rational
one, the very foundation being an unsettled hypothesis; for instance,
that the primitive rocks had been formed through melting by fire,
contrasting with the stratified rocks which were positively regarded
as deposited in water; but some of the primitive rocks were also
stratified like the younger sedimentary formations; then he found
that all of it was twisted and guessed at and the whole system founded
on guess work. In the meanwhile he had analyzed his mineral and found
that it was hitherto unknown, whereupon he gave it to the professor
who sent it to the Berlin Academy and got his name attached to the
new mineral. Borg received no thanks, no mention, only a few taunting
words from the professor. Irritated thereby he undertook himself to
describe the next mineral which he found to be new and sent it to
Lyell; his paper was read in the Geological Society, of which he was
made a member. Comrades and superiors pretended to be ignorant of his
success, which was in a measure disparaging to the professor who had
overlooked the unknown mineral, and now repugnance grew into hate
which developed to persecution. But he turned aside, made himself
invisible and worked. This collection of minerals being gathered from
all countries in Europe, and as Borg understood how to give to each
discovery a touch of direct usefulness for the science of mining in the
respective countries, he succeeded in two years to gain membership in
most of the learned societies of Europe, and was decorated with badges
of the Italian Crown Order, the French "Instruction publique," the
Austrian Leopold order and the Russian St. Annae order, second class.
But nothing availed among his surroundings, and the laughter increased
at each mark of distinction which was nevertheless merited. When they
could not deny the facts, they underrated their value or pretended to
be ignorant of what had happened, which, however, did not prevent them
from using his trodden path in their own hunt.

When at last after seven years of tormenting service he inherited a
legacy from his father, who had died, and he retired from service
to travel abroad as a private man, he heard alternately that he
had failed in his calling and that it was a pity that he did not
become anything, or that he had been discharged from office. It was
with boundless disdain for human beings that he left his country to
continue his studies abroad. In hotels and pensions all over Europe
he met many, kinds of people with whom he formed acquaintances which
were soon broken by circumstances. But everywhere he saw how people
of the same period expressed the same mind about the same things,
pronounced the opinion of the majority as their own, spoke phrases
in place of thoughts, and he discovered thereby that it really was
the thoughts of a few spirits that were ruminated by the masses. Thus
he found that all geologists spoke Agassiz' and Lyell's ideas from
1830 and '40, all religious free thinkers exhaled Renan and Strauss,
all brisk politicians were living on Mill or Buckle, and all who
spoke up-to-date literature cast up Taine. It was then only a few
main batteries which had an annunciator and which could through the
conducting wires from their talents set all the small bells tinkling.
Through this he soon came to the domain of psychology, visited
spiritualists, hypnotizers and mind readers, saw behind these swindles
some new discoveries which would surely change humanity in its mode of
living thoughtlessly as cattle, perhaps contribute towards adjusting
the thought mechanism, and show that this whole battle about opinions
is only a strife for the power to set other people's brains in motion,
to force the masses to think as I. He had been a witness to scientific
encounters which had resulted in a conquest for the wrong opinion,
only because the victor had sufficient authority and was supported
by a majority. He had seen political and religious combats and in a
legislation directly contrary to sound reason and justice, founded on
approved errors, which were inherited by succeeding generations as
self-evident truths.

Yes, surely it concerned only how to make one's own will valid, and the
whole driving power behind the vindication of opinions were interest
and passion. Interest, it was nothing else than need, a need of food
and love, and to gain these required a certain amount of power. Whoever
did not strive for power was a weak one, whose desire of life was
attenuated, therefore the weak was always heard to demand rights,
the rights of the weak, while there was only a mathematical justice
given, an arithmetical truth, for the calculating of which was required
a strong mind capable of emancipating itself from the delusions of
interest and passions. When he searched his inner self and compared
himself with a great many others, he found that through a strict
self-education he had freed his judgment to a high degree, and that in
him was a specially developed thrift to seek abstract justice, that
truth which consists in the actual conditions, the pith of fact, why
he called himself a friend of truth in the highest sense, although not
prompted thereby to tell all his thoughts abroad nor prevented from
replying to importunate questions, when need be, with a prevarication.

In order to trace more closely the organization of the man-brute he
designed a special study of the mental faculties of all the lower
animals and thus guided himself up to man. He then made a ledger
over all the individuals that came in his way, from relatives,
nurses, maids, to schoolmates, university comrades, society friends
and superiors, in one word all who came within the circle of his
observation. This he completed through a collection of personalia,
baptismal certificates, and the testimonies of their acquaintances; he
wrote down their equation and tried a solution of the problem of their
life. It was an incredible amount of working material. When he had
straightened out the confusion he saw that the human beings could be
divided just as the animals and plants into large classes, orders and
families according to the basis chosen. By taking several bases he came
pretty near to the truth and threw the fullest illumination upon the
object of his observation.

Among other things he made a diagram of the human beings, with three
subdivisions, conscious, self-deceivers and unconscious. The conscious
or initiated stood highest, had discerned the deceit and believed in
nothing and nobody, and were usually called skeptics, feared and hated
by the self-deceivers, but recognized each other at once and usually
parted with the word rascal, and reciprocal accusations of bad motives.
As self-deceivers he counted all religious believers, hypnotic mediums,
prophets, party chiefs, politicians, charity spirits, and the whole
swarm of weak ambitious ones who pretend to live for others. To the
unconscious belonged children, most criminals, most women and some
idiots, all of whom still live on the semi-mammalian plane without the
ability to distinguish between subject and object.

Proceeding from another basis, or by ontogenesis from the fœtus up to
the highest standard of man, he got as the result, children, youths,
women and men.

He also used to search among his countrymen for ancestral race marks,
distinguished the central Swedes from the southern Swedes, could see
the Norwegian in the Vermlanders and Bohus-landers, pointed out the
Finn in some of the Norrlanders, kept record of immigrated Germans,
Wallons, Shemites and gypsies, which often gave him the key to various
traits in otherwise inexplicable characters.

He also had another basis for a division of characters according to
the dominant, as he called it, and he got the nutritive as the lowest
group including epicures, drunkards and the avaricious, the sexualic
or licentious, the affective or sensitive, and the intellectual or
thinkers who stood highest.

This science he developed to a high degree, and after some time
acquired the ability to judge human beings and give their equations. To
verify the truth of his observations he used himself as a psychological
preparation, cut himself up bodily, experimented with himself and
grafted fistulas and fontanelles, subjecting himself to unnatural
and often repulsive spiritual diet, but carefully guarded faults of
observation, and avoided forming a norm for others by his own sayings
and doings.

When he had finally become weary of traveling abroad, and his soul
was longing for its _milieu_, he returned home to seek a sphere of
activity. As it was immaterial to him what his occupation might be he
applied for the position of fish commissioner. As they were not anxious
to have him too near he was appointed as the first man of the inlet to
Stockholm.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here he awoke from the review of his evolution, from which he used
to regenerate himself by hastily living his life over again, thereby
tracing, as it were, his standpoint and, calculating his resources, he
cleared his course onward to his probable destiny and his prospects of
succeeding in his enterprises.

The pilot, who in the meantime had rowed the boat behind the rocks and
in lee of the ice cakes, had already decided that the Doctor, who was
sitting with introverted, expressionless eyes, was a little freaky,
took the occasion to ask if they should turn toward the harbor, whereto
the commissioner nodded consent.

Once more he glanced at the magnificent panorama yonder, where the ice
floes were driven onward, rent asunder, packed themselves, crowded
together, pushed over each other, turned on edge, changed their
horizontal position to big upheavals and tilting of the strata, forming
mountains, dales and hills. It seemed to him as though he beheld the
earth's crust being born, when on the incandescent sea the first hard
cake was broken to pieces, driven forward, pushed on edge, piled in
heaps to form the primitive mountains, skerries, rocks, islets, which
were but enormous packs of ice, icebergs, although formed from another
mineral than water. Over this repetition of the history of creation
vibrated the primitive, undivided white light of the ice beside the
deep blue of air and water, the first breaking of the darkness, and
here the God of the saga of creation who separated light from darkness,
came forth as a sensible explanation to his investigating mind. Once
again the first attempt at harmonious sounds of the reptiles, now
transformed into birds, rang out over the watery circle, the limitation
of himself, which must be the center wherever he went....

The boat floated into harbor, the smoke was rising from the chimneys,
it was dinner time.




CHAPTER FOURTH


One Sunday forenoon the fish commissioner sat at his open window; the
early summer had just come, there was a light blue color on the water
and a faint verdure in the crevices of the rocks, on the insignificant
remains of lichens and mosses. The flocks of birds had gone north and
only segregated pairs of eider ducks were swimming, two by two, in
the coves. The great solitude, as he called the Baltic Sea, impressed
him this day as he saw one vessel after another steering southward
under foreign flags with lively colors, perhaps coming accidentally,
perhaps regularly, all of these flags more luminous than the poor
blue and tawny yellow which is so easily soiled. He saw the exciting
tricolor on a brig which was lumber laden from Norrland, where it had
recently been with wine and oranges and was now passing down to more
sunny and populous coasts. The enfeebled dannebrog on a butter schooner
lay in the wake of a great German mail steamer carrying white bunting
with mourning border and the Crown mark like the ace of spades, above
something of red color. England's blood red standard, the Spanish
awning cloth, America's King cotton ticking, each of these was a
greeting from so many foreign nations to which he felt more affianced
than to those strangers whom he was condemned to call countrymen,
for he had a right to carry all of these colors on his gala coat but
not his own country's. And to-day, it seemed, these reminders of his
cosmopolitan citizenship came to him more invigorating than usual,
as during the last few days of his exile in this place he had been
surrounded by a full and open enmity. He had recently undertaken to
enforce a law adopted several years ago, though never applied, about
a certain measure of the meshes in nets and seines, and had thereby
encountered an opposition and open defiance which finally forced him
to send for the sheriff who confiscated the nets. He had, however,
first shown thoroughly how the interference of the government was
only prompted by concern for the welfare of the people, he had held
before them how they, while not wishing to divide a farm, preferring
to have one son prosperous and the family maintainer, still contrived,
by indiscriminate fishing, to make their children dependent of the
almshouse for their support. All to no avail. All these measures and
steps were regarded as the evil contrivance of a pack of idle officers
who were salaried with the people's money, for the special purpose of
tormenting them. He retorted in vain, that it was the farmers in the
Reichstag who had voted this law, whereupon the fishermen turned their
hate towards the farmers and government alike.

He observed that these fishing people really represent a remnant of
the aboriginal community, careless and inconsiderate, without the
peasant's forethought for the morrow and next year. They were like
the savage who hunts two days and sleeps eight, and like the savage
they possessed certain negative faculties to do without, and endure,
but lacked the positive ability to improve their situation through
investigation, having a decided and instinctive dislike for innovation,
thereby betraying their inability to adapt themselves to a higher
stage of culture. All these fishermen were bottom sediments of the
country's population; when the battle over fertile river valleys and
lake margins was going on they could not maintain their own, and fled
or were pressed out to the headlands where the soil ceased and only
the uncertain water left its winnings. Like gamblers they were as
unreliable as fortune, unscrupulous in their dealings, drawing small
advances beforehand from the ever expected great fishing, which a lucky
shipwreck might bring them. Therefore their hate immediately kindled
towards the new comer, and in their blindness they could not see
how he would if from ambition only improve their condition and free
them from labor. For instance, one duty of the head pilot was to make
meteorological reports; for him he had constructed a self-regulating
wind measure from cleft sardine boxes, which, however, was not accepted
but placed in the garret. He had offered to assist in cases of sickness
but had been rejected. He had offered to teach the wives how to prevent
the stoves from smoking, by the application of a stromling barrel as
a flue at the top of the chimney, but they had made grimaces at him
and continued to lament over the irremediable smoke. He would teach
a fisherman, who had tried to raise potatoes unsuccessfully, how to
fertilize the sandy strand with seaweed and the refuse from fish, as he
had seen the people on the coast of England do with marked success; all
was in vain. When he saw how the surplus of the big stromling fishing
of the spring lay decaying for lack of salt, he would teach them the
Faroe-islanders' method of salting with the ashes of seaweed in case
of necessity and for domestic use, this same preservative being always
used by said islanders in the manufacture of cheese.

The result of all his endeavors to teach them useful things, was that
he received the nickname of Doctor Know-all, was regarded as a fool,
and became the laughing stock of the coffee gatherings, and drinking
bouts. Even the children made faces as he passed by.

The incongruity between what he was, and what he was taken to be,
impressed him at the beginning as comical, but afterwards when the
hostilities succeeded the coldness he marked an unfavorable influence
on his mental state. It was as though a thundercloud of unequal
electricities hung over him, irritating his nerve current, trying to
annihilate it through neutralization. He felt as though the thoughts
directed towards him from these many would have the power to gradually
drag him down, cramp his opinion of his own value, so that the moment
would come when he could no longer rely upon himself and his mental
superiority, and finally their views that he was the idiot and they the
sound would grasp his brain and force him to agree with them.

Meanwhile as his thoughts wandered here and there a new object came
within the forty-five degrees of the horizon, which he commanded at
a glance from his window. A gunboat came to lee of the rock at half
speed, clewed up its sails and dropped anchor. Through the marine
glass he saw the sailors move about apparently in a hurly-burly, but
without crowding; each one hurried to his belaying pin, his line,
and his halyard, when the executive officer's whistle sounded. The
vessel's straight sides, the extended stem where the iron plates seemed
to sprawl asunder but combined their concentrated force In a forward
direction, radiating out as it were at the bowsprit, the exhaust
pipe and the smokestack's energetic smoking, the masts striving with
stay and shroud, the round circle of the cannon's mouth, everything
indicated an array of forces, regulated, curbing each other, reacting
and cooperating, the contemplation of which put him into a harmonic
state of mind. It was to him as though power and order streamed forth
from the wedge-shaped iron hull, where purpose, limitation and measure,
united into a unit of beauty, and conveyed a deeper enjoyment by
reflection than a handsome work of art commonly affords the superficial
observer by the way of feeling.

Something else came to him through reflecting on this little floating
community surrounded by water. He felt strengthened, as though he
had a support in this symbol of power, that was authorized by the
people's assembly and the royal government, with the appliance of
all the means of culture and science, and which protected the higher
developed against the pressure of barbarism from beneath; he saw with
satisfaction how a couple of the most knowing, who had been qualified
by due examinations, guided with a whistle this hundred of half
savages, who did not dare to pretend to understand, that which they
did not understand. He had never been beguiled to commit the modern
fault of observation of believing that the lower classes suffered from
their subordinate position and coarse food. He knew well that they were
precisely on the plane they should be, and that they suffered just
as little from their station as the fishes beneath would suffer from
not having been developed into amphibians, and as far as their coarse
food was concerned he knew from experience when he had invited a few
fishermen to dinner how they rejected all but that which filled the
belly; yes, he had seen them select the poor rye in the bread basket,
instead of the fine wheat. He had never believed in the talk about lack
of food excepting when misfortune came and then only accidentally, for
there existed state laws for the poor which are so often misused by
sluggards and the shrewd, who feign sickness and force the community
to support them. He had never adored the small, never needed to kneel
to the insignificant, notwithstanding that he himself was cast out
from the upper camp which during the common period of decay tricked
itself up with stolen reputations and lay pressing down that which
should grow. He did not even now let this induce him to overestimate
this approximate picture of the upper stratum, which in the shape of a
man-of-war inspired his admiration from a certain point of view, but
on the other hand was a reminder of a system of state, which executed
outrages on the minds with compressed gas and Bessemer cylinders.

Downstairs his host's door banged, and the tongues began to wag at the
entrance of Oman, whose net had been confiscated. The gin glasses rang
and the clamor rose at the repetition of yesterday's drunken spree.

"Idiots and destroyers of the people, who believe they know more than
sensible fishermen and who lie on the sofa and read books, and get
two thousand a year, snots, who would teach their father how to fish,
a pack of thieves and cigarette heroes who go about with sow's tails
under their noses...."

And now a wave broke against Vestman's elucidation of facts that he had
gleaned on board the "Jacob Bagge" about the commissioner's extraction,
his father's irregular sexual relations, his mother's low descent, and
he alluded to the commissioner's discharge from his first office and so
forth.

The listener tried to make himself deaf, and indifferent as usual, but
the words cut him, soiled him, hurt him against his will. Old doubts
about his father's integrity began to awaken, doubts of his own value
were aroused and fears as to the possibility of keeping himself dry in
this rain of mud, and to avoid a fight where he perhaps would fail from
nicety in choice of weapons.

Now struck the bell on the man-of-war, a drum whir rolled, and the
summer wind carried the tunes of a hymn from a hundred throats out
over the water, solemn, rhythmically arranged, submissive, all while
the clamor and threats from downstairs rumbled as from the cages in a
menagerie, and in the psalm's ferment rose to a howl, for a quarrel had
arisen between the parties, at the question of taking back the net by
force.

The commissioner, who regarded churches as archaeological collections
or interesting pagoda buildings from past times was reminded
involuntarily of the utterance which a young clergyman let fall one
night when at a discussion of the Christian cult.

"I do not believe in Christ's divinity and all that, but believe me,
the mob must be scared!" "The mob must be scared," repeated he to
himself silently, but dropped the thread immediately when he heard the
fray break out downstairs. Chairs were knocked over, heels were braced
and kicked against the furniture and roaring as from cattle was mixed
with hissing as from reptiles while during all this a woman's voice
sputtered and produced several hundred words a minute.

At this instant the steamer whistled, weighed anchor and hoisted sail,
the smokestack sent a soot cloud toward the blue summer sky. It was
with a feeling of regret and anxiety that he saw the steamer and its
beautiful cannon disappear southward; he felt as though he had lost a
support and as if the hate closed round him like a sack, he would flee,
out, anywhere.

Now a child cried, if from fear or pain he could not hear, for under
the tumult he had stolen down the staircase and reached the harbor,
cast off his painter and rowed out from the land as quickly as he could.

The rock he was in quest of was the eastern-most of a little
archipelago, which he had never paid attention to before, but now for
the first time when in need to be alone, he sought it. A hater of
strong body movements, which he found partly superfluous while there
existed locomotion by machinery, and partly detrimental to his nerve
and thought life for the fine tool which the brain capsule enclosed
could just as little stand jars as the house where the astronomer's
instruments of precision are kept. He had never learned how to row but
his sense of time and his well-weighed motion centers made him at once
a clever oarsman, and his studies of physics taught him how to improve
the old invention so that by raising the seat he economized arm power.

As he now saw the skerries receding from the stern of his boat he began
to breathe easier, and when he shortly landed on the first rock he was
seized by an irrepressible feeling of happiness. It was a sunny, long,
low islet whose strand rocks of gray gneiss formed a little harbor
into which the boat sped. The water near the beach was transparent
as condensed limpid air, and the soft color of the kelp shone at the
bottom as though molten into a mass of glass. The stones on the beach
lay washed, dried and polished, offering a variation in colors that
never tired, for there were no two alike, while between them the velvet
grass and sedges had sought hold for their tufts. Slowly the ledge
rose upward and in depressions in the moss lay the mews' eggs, three
by three, coffee brown with black spots, while their owners cried and
cawed above his head. He climbed higher up to where a pile of stones
had been laid up by marine surveyors, and were whitewashed by the
gulls, mews and terns. A few juniper bushes spread out as carpets
and beneath them a profusion of the white, subtle star flower had
improvised its bed, a connection of Middle Europe's highlands and the
shade of northern forests.

The little turnstone daring and gay fluttered uneasily around the
disturber of the peace to mislead him from her nest.

Not a shrub, not a tree pointed over the half naked ledges, and this
absence of shadows from coverts, gave the visitor a lighter and gayer
mood. Everything was open, overlooked at once, sunlit on this ledge
of rock, and the water which separated him from his lately left home
among the savages, seemed to surround him with an insurmountable limit
of pure transparency. The half arctic, half alpine landscape with its
primeval formation refreshed and rested him. When he had become rested,
he took the boat and rowed on further. He passed three polished rocks,
resembling three petrified waves, naked as a hand, without a trace of
organic life and which only aroused a scientific, geological interest
concerning their origin; he grazed a flat rock of reddish gneiss;
on its lee side stood a hundred years' mountain ash, solitary, moss
bedecked, gnarled, and in its ragged trunk a white wagtail hatched its
brood for lack of rooftile or stone wall. The little charming bird dove
down among the strand stones and would make the foe believe that in no
wise there existed a nest or gray white eggs there.

The solitary mountain ash stood on a grassy carpet of a few square feet
and looked so lonely, but so unusually strong in lack of competition,
and could better defy storm, salt water and cold than with jealous
equals wrangling over earth crumbs. He felt attracted to the lonely
veteran and longed, during a transitory moment, to raise a hut at its
feet, but he passed on and the feeling blew away.

A dark cliff came to view behind the last point, it was coal black
from the volcanic mineral diorite, and, as he approached it, he became
depressed. The black crystallized mass seemed to have been cast up
from the sea bottom, and after hardening had come into a terrible
fight with water or a thundercloud and had cracked into eight parts,
which had afterwards been carried away by the sea and ice or dragged
down into the depth. Steep, perpendicular stood the black glittering
wall out along the little harbor, and when the boat landed below it
he felt as though he was down in a coal mine or a sooty blacksmith's
shop. It depressed and awed him, he climbed up on the cliff, there
rose as a landmark a pole with a white painted keg at the top. This
trace of human beings out here where no people were to be seen, was a
mixed reminder of gibbet, shipwreck, coal, a crude contrast between
the unmixed colorless colors, black and white, of barren violent
nature devoid of organic life, there being no lichens or moss on the
whole body of the rock; further, this carpentry work without vegetable
transition between primeval nature and human hand work, was irritating,
disquieting and brutal. In the great Sunday stillness he heard beneath
his feet, where stones had rattled down and formed a roof over a
crevice, how the long breakers sucked in half way under the point, and
pressed the air forward with muffled sound, then drew back again with a
hissing and hollow sighing.

He stood a moment enjoying the oppression, while his thoughts wandered
back to old memories which always brought him loathing. He smelt coal
gas, saw manufactories, sooty, discontented people, heard machinery,
city rumbling and human voices, which spoke words that would eat their
way through his ears into his brain and sow seeds that would spring
up as weeds smothering his own sowing; transforming the field he had
cultivated with so much pains to a wild meadow like those of the others.

He climbed into his boat and turned his back on the gloomy sight; again
he enjoyed the infinite purity of the waters, the empty blue which
like an unwritten slate lay soothingly before him, for it did not
raise any memories, develop any inspirations, or call forth any strong
sensations. And now when he approached a larger island, he greeted it
as a new acquaintance who should tell him something else and efface the
recent impressions. New points and rocks were passed, each offering its
surprise, its special physiognomy, often with such small differences
that it required a sharply trained eye to see them. These small
cliffs, which seemed so naked, so tiresomely alike when viewed from a
passing boat, offered at nearer view the most changeable scenery, just
as variance of the same coins only to the numismatist betray their
secrets.

He now landed on a somewhat larger islet whose irregular jagged
appearance had allured him, especially when he saw protruding over the
tops of the rocks the crowns of trees with dense foliage. When he had
climbed up on the northern point, the black base of which was polished
smooth by the waves, he saw that the island was a cluster of at least
four others, that seemed to have been drifted together by different
winds, and by the congestion of different geological formations,
forming a whole conglomerate of landscape pictures, brought from every
zone. The northern part was composed of a cone of hornblende schist
which, down on the strand, was cleft in enormous blocks that had
fallen from the rocky wall, and was as yet unpolished by the water,
while between these cubes grew strangely, as though allured by secret
sympathy, an immense number of black currant shrubs, dusky in color
and harmonizing in tone with the black sparkling stones. It was so
unexpected to find these cultured deserters from the garden out here
in the wilderness that it appeared as a joke of nature, perhaps laid
in the bill of a wounded black-cock that had flown out here to die,
carrying the seeds of dawning culture. Farther up in the rock pile
stood a grove of deciduous trees with light verdure, but with cut tops
and white trunks, as though whitewashed with lime by fostering human
hand. He tried from a distance to guess their species, but they were
so different from all others he had seen in this latitude that his
thoughts revolved between acacias, beeches and Japan varnish trees, so
common in southern Europe, and when he finally heard the well known
rustle of the common aspen he would not believe his ears. He quickly
shunned a viper, which ran down between two stones like a stream of
water, and coming nearer, he saw that he had heard aright. It was the
slender and trim aspen of the groves and pastures, that the northern
wind, stony ground, drifting ice and salt water had pruned and trained
to this unrecognizable variety, and which in the battle against tempest
and cold had turned gray and lost its top, and therefore only consisted
of frozen sprouts that were continually shooting out indefatigably
renewing themselves, while the goats had peeled off the protecting bark
and let the sap run out. There was eternal youth in those soft light
green shoots on the gray whiskered branchless trunk, old age without
maturity, an abnormality which was refreshing because it was new and
transcended the banal.

When he had climbed up between the sharp stones and reached the height
it was as if he had ascended a field in ten minutes. The region of
deciduous trees lay below him, and upon the plateau appeared already
the alpine flora, with the field form of the juniper, and close by the
veritable northern cloud berry in the white moss of the moist crevices,
and here and there the little civilized cornel, perhaps the only
Swedish shrub on the seaboard. He slowly descended the southern slope,
through cowberry and bearberry vines, hair grass, sedges, cotton grass
and springy mosses, until suddenly he stood on a ravine, where the
islet had cracked and formed a channel between the black rocky walls.

With wild shrieks the saucy auks flew up as he stepped on a natural
stone bridge across the shallow channel, climbed another cliff of
lighter formations, and reached a new section of this wonderful islet.

The light elegant eurite, in which faint rose-colored feldspar was
mingled with a delicate blue-green quartz while mica was only betrayed
through a glistening like microscopical hoar frost, gave the little
landscape a gay aspect, and being cleft infinitely, it offered sofas
and real armchairs at every step. A compact vein of granular white
limestone passed as a belt straight through the rocky mass, and the
fertile gravel from this which had crumbled from rain and frost, was
amassed below between the rocky walls. And here a ravine began to
present such an enchanting view that he stopped amazed and sat down on
one of the stone stools to enjoy the surprising fairy scenery.

Before him, between the perpendicular walls whose bases disappeared
in the soil, there unfolded a grassy carpet interwoven with endless
flowers, choicer and more thrifty than those on the mainland. The blood
red geranium had stepped from the rock and sought moisture down here,
the honey white grass of Parnassus from the wet sedgy mead had here
met with the forest's blue yellow lily of the valley, and the southern
orchids, perhaps wind driven from the vineland Gotland, had fled here,
the hyacinth like orchis-sambucina, the pompous orchis militaris, the
stately cephalanthera, a kind of embellished lily of the valley, had
sought their nursery here in the forcing lime and moist sea air between
protecting walls in the most luxurious grass.

And far in the distance the walls of the cliffs were hidden by birch
and alder trees, which rose modestly in the air without daring to raise
their tops to the wind; self-sown here and there stood the cranberry
trees in the midst of the grassy carpet, with their white snowballs
hanging to the grapelike leaf; the dark green buckthorn leaned like an
espalier against the precipice and its glossy leaves faintly reminded
of the orange so famed in song, but were more juicy, more varied in
color, finer in design and more delicate structure.

It was a park with the characteristics of the mainland floating out
here, and when through a rent or depression in the rocks he saw a blue
horizontal streak of the sea, the contrast in the wonderful scenery
struck him.

After he had sat a moment and listened to the chaffinch's spring
time song, which was interrupted by the gulls' and guillemots' caws
and shrieks, and he felt the solitude enwrap him like a slumber, and
when the birds for a moment were hushed and only the faint sea breeze
rustled in the birch tops without reaching farther down, he heard
unexpectedly a cough. He started and looked around but saw no trace of
man.

The painful hollow sound from the chest of a human being in the midst
of this quiet nature awoke him suddenly and brought a disagreeable
feeling of loathing. Was it a lonely one like himself who sought
rest, or a nest plunderer? In either case he would free himself from
uneasiness, and find out who this was that disturbed him. Therefore he
climbed the rocky wall on natural steps in the limestone dyke and he
beheld now the third section of this polyp-like islet. Over a low stone
wall, apparently to protect the blooming field from grazing cattle,
he passed to a pine tree region on gneiss, walked under the branches,
trampled knee deep in ferns which formed an underbrush beneath the pine
trees and resembled dwarf palms but of fresher green and more elegant
foliage, while at their feet were seen the blushing strawberries.

When he came up out of the ravine he saw a cove with rushes where some
abandoned pole hooks were driven in the mud. He stopped to listen, and
soon he heard a voice which came from the other side of the knoll.
It rang high and soft as a child's and sank again so that he thought
it was some young yachtsman who had ventured out here. But the words
fell so passively, attractively, winningly, and invitingly, and he was
surprised to hear a boy expressing himself in so careful language. The
vocabulary was small and the language was that of ordinary conservation
in cultured society, but without force or diversity of expression,
and the objects spoken of were called by incorrect terms. The speaker
talked about the verdure of the trees without naming them, called the
mews gulls, the chaffinch a bird, gneiss granite and the bulrush a reed.

It might be a youth that insisted upon being heard and spoke so long
without allowing himself to be interrupted by the slow mumbling voice
of an old man, who every now and then muttered an objection or
information. Now the youthful voice laughed, a laughter without cause,
to judge from the conversation, a laughter to let the beautiful voice
be heard or show a set of white teeth, a laughter without merriment, a
succession of ringing sounds without other meaning than to jealously
divert the attention from something real, which would come between. A
signal, a bird call! There was no doubt, it was a young woman's voice.

He stepped unresistingly up onto the last knoll after having felt
of his necktie and hat, and he now saw beneath him a picture, whose
details ever after remained in his memory. On a little upland meadow,
under a group of old white beam trees around a white linen damask
tablecloth, in the center of which was a butter dish of Kolmord marble,
surrounded by the contents of a lunch basket, sat an old lady with
beautiful gray hair and a well fitting gown, and close beside her stood
a fisherman in his shirt sleeves with a sandwich in his hand, while
before him stood a young lady holding in her hand a glass of beer,
which she with a merry curtesy and the ripples of a dying laughter on
her lips, reached to the embarrassed boatman.

He was captivated at once by the young woman's looks, and although
his reflection at once whispered that she coquetted with the churl,
he felt an irresistible attraction in the dark olive complexion, the
black eyes, and the stately figure. It certainly was not the first
woman which had attracted him at once, but she belonged to that class
of women which never failed to attract him to them. The solitude and
absence of others was not the reason of the quick selection, because
he felt exactly the same as when he sought a color for a necktie and
after walking dejectedly from store to store without experiencing the
pleasant feeling that the article sought after would give, he finally
stopped before a show window where the right one was, and in the same
moment felt free from pressure as he quietly said to himself, this is
_the one_!

After having hesitated a moment whether to step forward and introduce
himself, or turn back, he made a movement which betrayed him. The girl
observed him first, her arms fell to her sides and she looked with the
expression of a frightened child at the unexpected appearance, which at
once gave the intruder courage to step forward and reassure the group
with an explanation.

Raising his hat with a low bow he stepped up to them.




CHAPTER FIFTH


Half an hour later the commissioner sat in the little company's
sailboat with his own dory in tow, he was already installed in the
position of guide to the two ladies, who had for their health sought
a resort for the summer on Fish Skerry and would consequently be
his neighbors. The conversation ran agreeably between the three new
acquaintances with a somewhat precipitate ardor to compete and show
their readiness and best side which is called forth in all who meet for
the first time. The one who made the least effort was the elderly lady,
who had introduced herself as mother of the young beauty. She seemed to
have reached a perfect harmony and resignation, worn off all corners
and was living in her memories and semi-indifferently regarding what
was going on around her, expecting nothing from others, prepared for
everything that life could offer her of good or ill and charming with
her even mild disposition.

An affinity had already arisen between the young man and the young
woman, and she seemed to enjoy receiving, and he, who had so long
waited to give, felt his powers growing now that the long-accumulated
surplus had found an outlet. And he gave for half an hour with lavish
hand from all he had stored of information that could be of interest
to them who were unacquainted with the conditions which would surround
them for awhile. He delineated all the resources of the skerry and its
deficiencies, depicted the life very alluringly as it at this moment
appeared to him to become, now when he was no longer alone. And the
young woman, who had never seen the skerry, received her first actual
impression of the same from his description. In imagination she saw
the red cottage where she was going to live with her mother, so neat
and cosy just as he wished that she would see it in order to feel at
home and tarry there. While he spoke it seemed to him as though he
received in return something good and strong, as though he heard new
thoughts, new points of view spoken by her lips which stood half open,
not as though to swallow what he reached her, but as though they spoke
themselves, and when her two big, faithful eyes looked admiringly
and surprisedly up to him he believed that all he said was true and
felt with rising esteem for himself new powers awakened, and old ones
growing in strength and tenacity. He felt so really thankful when the
boat touched land, just as after having received benefices when in
need, that he involuntarily thanked them heartily as he helped the
ladies out of the boat and carried their heavy valises on shore.

The young girl returned the politeness with "not at all," but as though
out of her treasures she had really given a trifle compared with what
she had in reserve.

When the commissioner had escorted the ladies to their new home which
turned out to be Oman's cottage, the young girl broke out into a flow
of rapture, being still under the influence of Borg's enchanting
description. The dilapidated house had something unusually picturesque
in its exterior, for there was not a single straight line. Storms, salt
water, frost and rain had destroyed every straight outline, and since
the mortar had fallen from the chimney it looked like a big tufa. Still
more agreeably surprising was the really homelike interior with its
old-fashioned comfort. The two rooms were located one on each side of
the hall, with a kitchen between them at the end; the best room was
spacious, with dark brown paper, which from smoke and age had assumed
a pleasing, quiet, even brown tone with which every color harmonized.
The low ceiling, which left no vacant space to be peopled by fancies,
showed the beams on which rested the attic floor. Two small windows,
with panes about half a foot square discolored by age, allowed a view
of the harbor and the sea, and the mass of light from outside was
pleasantly subdued by the white lace curtains which protected against
glances from outside without shutting out the daylight, and hung like
light summer clouds down over balsam and geraniums in English faience
mugs with Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson in yellow and green. The
furniture comprising a big white folding table, a Gustavian bedstead
on which were piled numerous eiderdown beds, a white painted wooden
sofa, a clock of Mora make that struck the hours, a bureau of birch
with its mirror frame veneered with the root of the alder, draped with
a bridal veil and loaded with porcelain knickknacks. On the bureau
stood a mounted parrot under a glass case, and on the wall hung colored
lithographic pictures from the Old Testament, among which the two
over the bed seemed to have been placed with questionable purpose,
one representing Samson and Delilah in a very unveiled delineation,
the other was Joseph and Potiphar's wife. In one corner was an open
fireplace which occupied considerable space and would have been
dreadful had not the black gap been covered by a white draw curtain.

It was homelike, idyllic and cleanly.

The other chamber was like the first, but had two beds and a commode;
the floor was covered with a rag carpet which with its variegated
colors formed an album of memories, from grandfather's jacket,
grandmother's blouse, mother's cotton gown and father's pilot uniform.
There were the red garters of the girls and the yellow gallows of the
land-wehr boys, blue bathing suits of the summer guests, beaver and
corduroy, cotton and baize, wool and crash, from all fashions and
wardrobes, poor men's and rich men's.

In this room stood a big white cupboard with fancy paintings on the
door panels, framed in ivy, wreaths painted with mosaic bronze,
wonderful small landscapes with dark blue coves, banks of rushes and
sailboats, trees of unknown species, from paradise or the carboniferous
age, turbulent seas with waves straight as furrows in a potato field,
a lighthouse like a column on a rocky ledge, everything as naïve as
a child's simple comprehension of rich nature's infinite variety of
shapes and colors, which only the highly trained eye can discern.

In all this old-fashioned simplicity lay the essential part of the cure
for a tired brain, which would seek rest in the past. The worn movement
of the watch would lay unwound awhile and let the spring be relieved
of tension to regain its spent powers. The association with the lower
classes which did not entice to battle for the morsel of power, but
themselves involuntarily every day and hour reminded those of the upper
class of their dearly earned position, would diminish the stimulus
and quiet those desirous of power by the thought that there already
existed passed by periods.

The commissioner had already prepared the minds of the visitors to
see and know all this, and neither of the ladies tired of expressing
their satisfaction with the new quarters and were so occupied by
investigating the location that they did not observe that their guide
had retreated to leave them undisturbed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The commissioner sat at his window on this Sunday afternoon and watched
the two ladies put things in order down in their cottage. When he
followed with his eyes their soft, but irregular movements, it was to
him as though he heard music. The same modulations that a series of
harmonizing tones develop on the ear drum and communicate to the nerve
system, the same mild vibrations were now produced through the eye, and
rang through the white strings which stretched from the cranium shell
out over the sounding board of the chest and transmitted the vibrations
through the foundation of his soul. A feeling of general pleasure
streamed through his being, when he saw these women's hands moving in
waving lines, as they picked trifles from their trunks and laid them on
the table and chairs, the rising and sinking of the hips and shoulders
imperceptible to the untrained eye, but still so elastic. And when the
young woman passed through the room, there arose no straight line, no
corners or edges when she turned, no angles when she bent over.

He was perfectly captivated in regarding this, so that for a moment he
did not notice the noise in the garret and the creaking of the stairs
and the raising of latches.

He was deeply occupied regarding the young lady whose exterior seemed
to him perfectly beautiful except in one point, which deficiency he
would try and accustom his eyes not to see. Her chin was a few lines
too big and indicated a lower jaw unnecessarily developed in one who
had ceased to catch, hold and tear uncooked meat, and when he saw it in
profile he could picture the coming witch physiognomy, when the time
came that the old woman's teeth loosened, the lips sunk and formed an
obtuse angle and the nose dropped down over the prominent chin. But he
must overcome this reminder of a beast of prey, and he pursued her face
with his glance and reshaped it in his fancy, forced his eyes when they
were fixed upon her face to see it in its entirety.

Now he heard footsteps and shouts down on the hill, and in a wild
rage Oman's wife appeared with a swarm of women, who were carrying in
triumph the rescued net down to the beach.

He instantly felt his authority infringed on, and taking his hat
went down to the surveyor to demand his help as he was in the Crown's
service and in duty bound to assist him.

In the room sat the custom house man at the coffee table, and as usual,
when Vestman was out fishing, he had his arm around the waist of his
sister-in-law. At the entrance of the commissioner he dropped his hold
and under influence of the fear of being discovered he showed a greater
officiousness than he otherwise would have done. He put on his uniform
cap and went out and in a hasty desire to be a just man he stormed
against the women and caught hold of the net.

"Damned old women, don't you know it is penitentiary to break the
Crown's lock and seal!"

The women answered in a chorus of imputations, which alluded to both
the commissioner and surveyor, the principal ones being that they did
not care and that the devil might take the Crown's lock and seal, and
that both gentlemen were of such characters that they could be put in
penitentiary at any time.

Whereupon the surveyor became enraged and cried to a subordinate to
bring the sheriff.

At the word sheriff the people gathered, crawled out of every hole and
corner like ants, when one scratches in an ant-hill.

The people seemed ready at once to take part with the women,
threatening words were uttered. The commissioner found it time for
him to interfere to avoid coming under a subordinate's protection.
Therefore he went up to the crowd and asked what they wanted.

But he received no answer, and turning to the women he spoke to them in
a polite but stern manner, saying:

"As I before informed you, the Reichstag or your own elected
representatives decided for the sake of your children and descendants
that the fishing must be protected through prohibiting the use of such
implements as spoil it without bringing you any advantage, and when you
have had three years to wear out your old nets, but are still making
new ones against the law, I have in the name of the Crown been forced
to confiscate the unlawful implements. Nevertheless and in spite of
the statute law you have broken the Crown's lock and seal, which can
be punished with penitentiary. Still I will use clemency instead of
justice if you comply and obey, therefore I ask you for the last time,
if you will willingly give back the nets."

To this the women answered with new shriek and a new shower of epithets.

"Well," finished the commissioner, "as I am not a policeman, and you
are the multitude, I beg the custom house surveyor to send for the
sheriff and his assistants and at the same time I will solicit an
order from the provincial governor to arrest Oman's wife."

As he spoke the last word, he felt two soft, warm hands grasp his right
hand, and two big childish eyes looked into his, while a falling voice
like that of a mother who begged for the life of her child, said:

"In the name of Heaven have compassion on a poor unhappy woman and
don't do her any ill;" it was the supplication of the young girl who
had at the beginning of the scene come out of the cottage.

The commissioner would free himself and turned away from the big eyes,
whose glance he could not endure, but he felt his hand clasped harder
and finally pressed against a soft bosom, heard words in melting tones,
and, completely vanquished, he whispered to the beauty, "Let me go and
I will drop the whole affair."

The girl loosened her hold, and the commissioner who made his plan
in half a minute caught the surveyor by his arm and led him up to
the custom house cottage, just as though he would give him some
orders. When they reached the door, the commissioner said shortly and
decisively as though he had come to a new conclusion.

"I shall communicate with the provincial governor myself in writing.
However, I thank you for your assistance."

Thereupon he went up to his room.

When he was alone and had collected his thoughts, he was obliged to
acknowledge that his last act had been dictated by lower motives, as
his sexual impulses had prevailed to such a high degree that he had
been fooled into an act contrary to the law, for one could not speak
of pity, for people who were comparatively well off, as they were
owners of houses, fishing grounds, boats and implements valued at many
hundreds of dollars, also owners of seal rookeries and bird islets,
and, besides, paid taxes on capital and a few small places that they
rented out. The false idea that a woman had vanquished him, however,
did not hold a place in his thoughts, for he knew very well, conscious
as he was in all points that he had fallen by his own propensity or
interest to gain something from this woman. But before the throng of
people his authority was ended, his reputation shaken and hereafter
there would not be an old woman or a boy but felt themselves above him.
This, to be sure, might be immaterial for it made no difference to
him whether he had power or not over these poor wretches. What seemed
worse to him was that this woman whom he now felt he must be bound to
in order to be happy, should from the first moment inure herself in the
belief that she had gained a conquest of him and thus the equilibrium
in a future union would be disturbed.

He had had many fancies for and engagements with women before, but his
distinct consciousness of man's superiority over the intermediate form
between man and child, which is called woman, had made it impossible
for him to conceal it long, and therefore his engagements had had but
short duration. He would be loved by a woman, who should look up to
him as the stronger, he would be the adored, not the adorer, he would
be the main trunk on which the frail shoot should be grafted, but he
was born at a period which was full of spiritual pestilence, when
womankind was devastated by an epidemic mania for greatness, produced
by degenerated, sickly men, and by political pygmies, who were in need
of the masses to vote. Therefore he had been obliged to live alone.
Well he knew that in love, man must give, must let himself be fooled
and that the only way to approach a woman was on all fours. And he had
crawled at intervals, and as long as he crawled everything had gone
well, but when he had finally straightened up, that was the end of it,
always with a multitude of reproaches that he had been false, that he
had dissembled submission, that he had never loved, and so on.

Moreover, as a possessor of the highest intellectual enjoyments, and
feeling himself an exceptional being, he had not harbored a lively
desire after the lower affections, never desired to be the supporter
of a parasite, never longed to feed competitors, and his stronger self
had rebelled against being the instrument of propagation for a woman's
lineage, the rôle he had seen most men of his age play.

But now he stood in just such a dilemma again, to assimilate a woman by
allowing himself to be assimilated. To dissemble or let his exterior
express what he did not feel, he could not, but he had a great ability
for adapting himself to his associations, and comprehending other
people's way of thinking and suffering, for he had never found in
the lives of others anything but past stages that he himself had
lived through, and consequently he had only to draw from memory or
experience, letting go his hold, and diminishing the tension onward. He
had always found pleasure in woman's company as a rest and diversion on
exactly the same ground and from the same reason that keeping company
with children makes one grow younger and is a strengthening amusement,
when it is not continued too long or becomes an effort.

Now he had felt the desire growing in him to own this woman, but
notwithstanding he was an investigator and knew that man was a mammal,
it was perfectly clear to him that human love had developed as
everything else, and has taken up the elements of a higher spiritual
quality without leaving the sensual foundation. He knew precisely
how much of unsound heavenliness sneaked in with the reaction of
Christianity against the purely brutish, should be eliminated, and
he did not believe in a primness which conceded matters that could
not be shown, just as little as he admitted that the only purpose of
the conjugal state was the bedfellowship. He wished for an intimate,
complete union as to body and soul, where he as the stronger acid
would neutralize the passive base, but not as in chemistry form a new
neutral body, but, on the contrary, would leave a surplus of free acid,
which would always give the union its character and lie in readiness
to neutralize any attempt of the combination to liberate itself, for
human love was not a chemical union, but a physical and organic, which
resembled the former in certain respects without being identical
with the same. He did not expect any augmentation of his own self,
no addition to his strength, only an increase of his vitality, and
instead of searching for a support he offered himself as a support to
learn his strength and feel the enjoyment of measuring out his power,
strewing with open hands his soul without being weakened thereby or
made destitute.

During these thoughts he glanced out of the window and saw at once what
he sought, for the young girl was standing on the door stoop receiving
hand shakings from women and men, patting the children on their heads
and seemed overcome by feelings, which so much public sympathy had
aroused.

"What a peculiar sympathy for criminals," thought the commissioner;
"what a love for the mentally poor! And how well they understood each
other's propensities, which they boasted of as feelings and which they
believed to be something more than clear, mature thoughts."

The whole scene was such a tangle of absurdities, that it could not be
cleared, reflecting the chaotic in the first weak attempt at reasoning,
by these brains and spinal cords.

There stood she who had fooled him into violating the law, and received
worship like an angel. Even now if his violation of the law was from
their point of view a fine noble action, then he who gave pardon
instead of justice ought to have the thanks. The opinion of the horde
was that he should not, for they well knew that the motive for his
action was not kindness towards them, but perhaps tender feelings for a
young girl, gallantry, or the hope of winning her. Yes, but the motive
for her appearance might then be to gain the good will of the crowd, to
become beloved and popular, and receive hand shakes; the horde here
played the same role as the society of the ballroom, the promenaders on
the street or in the square. And she had fooled him through personal
contact, innocently, perhaps, possibly with calculations, probably half
of each, to commit a weak action, for which she was worshiped.

But now he must win her, therefore he pocketed all of his reflections;
he saw in an instant that through this medium he could pass his ideas
and schemes down to the horde, that through this conductor he could
move the masses and force upon them his benefactions, make them his
vassals, and that he could afterwards sit and smile like a God at their
foolishness, when they believed that they themselves had created their
happiness, but were only pregnant with his thoughts, his schemes, were
eating the dregs from his great brewage, the strong malt drink which
would never reach their lips. For what did he care if these deserted
skerries supported a half starving, superfluous population or not. What
compassion could he feel for his natural enemies who represented the
inert mass, that had lain smothering his life, impeding his growth, who
were themselves lacking in every trace of pity for each other, and who
with the fury of wild beasts persecuted their benefactors whose only
revenge was new benedictions.

It would be his great and strong enjoyment to sit unobserved, regarded
as an idiot, and guide these peoples' fates, while they believed that
they had subdued him, cut off his connections, tied his hands. He would
strike them with blindness, pervert the vision of the fools, that they
should believe themselves to be his superiors and he their servant.

While these thoughts gathered and grew into a strong decision, there
was a knock at the door, and at the Commissioner's "come in," the
surveyor appeared to deliver an invitation to tea from the ladies.

The commissioner accepted it, and sent his thanks.

After he had arranged his toilet and thought over what to say and what
not to say, he went down.

On the porch he was met by Miss Mary, who with an excessive warmth took
his hands and pressed them, saying with emotion: "Thanks for what you
did for the poor woman! It was noble, it was grand!"

"No, madam, it was neither," replied the commissioner hastily; "for on
my side it was a bad action which I regret and it was dictated only
from politeness to you."

"You malign yourself from pure politeness, and I should appreciate much
more a little sincerity," replied the lady, and at the same moment the
mother appeared.

"Oh! You are a good child," interrupted the mother in a tone of the
most immovable conviction, and bade the commissioner step into the best
room where tea was ready to serve.

To avoid engaging in an endless conversation he went in. He saw at a
glance how the plain furniture of the fisherman's cottage had been
mixed with remnants of worn city luxury. On the bureau had been placed
alabaster vases yellowish from age, photographs in the windows between
the flowers; on one side of the fireplace stood an arm chair with
figured cretonne and brass tacks, a few books on a center table round a
parlor lamp.

It was neatly arranged, but with a careful mathematical exactness,
everything symmetrical but still a little awry and askance where it
was intended to be straight. The tea set of old Saxony china with
gold edges and cherry red monograms was cracked here and there and
the teapot cover had been mended with clasps. After he had studied
the portrait of the deceased father of the family without daring to
ask what position he had held, he saw that he had been a government
official, and he understood that here was _pauvres honteux_. In further
looking around the room, he noticed a knapsack left under a table and
bearing a tag which indicated that the old lady was the widow of a
councilor of the exchequer.

At first the conversation touched the objects that presented themselves
to the eyes, and then passed on to the event of the day, coming
finally to the people. The commissioner saw at once that the ladies
were interested in the affairs of other people and lived in a morbid
uneasiness for the welfare of the lower classes. As he had observed
that his sincerity had offended and the purpose of his visit was not
to hurt their feelings by giving them his ideas, he laid to and let
himself drift. Sometimes his resentment was aroused and he would
venture a little remark or information, but he felt at once as though
soft hands were placed on his mouth, and round arms wound about his
neck, so that the words were smothered. Besides, the views here were
so rooted, everything so fixed, and all questions settled, that they
only smiled in a friendly way, with mild forbearings, when they read
a doubt in him regarding their axioms. Then the conversation turned
to the moral and spiritual condition of the population, and here the
commissioner perfectly agreed with them. He delineated with fervor the
rudeness of the forenoon with its drunkenness and fray, pitying the
want of enlightenment, and finally narrating scenes which betrayed
complete paganism. He spoke of how the fishermen cast offerings on
stones, loaded their guns with lead from church windows, how they
talked about Thor's bucks when it thundered, and of Oden's wild hunt
when the gray geese came in the spring, and how those on the inner
islands let the magpies destroy the chickens for the people did not
dare to tear down the nests from fear of unknown avengers.

"Yes," completed the old lady, "it isn't their fault, and if they were
not so far from the church, it would be entirely different."

Thither the commissioner's thoughts had not gone, but in an instant he
saw what a great power he would get as an ally, and developing the seed
of thought he had got in the morning from observing the divine service
on board the navy steamer, he burst out with real rapture:

"Well, but one can build a meeting house at small cost. Just think of
it, if I should address a letter to the Home Mission Institute."

The ladies embraced the subject with the greatest ardor and promised
themselves to write to that institution and some societies and
projected a fair, but recollected that here was no dancing public.

The commissioner removed all difficulties by offering to advance the
money and provide the building, which could be bought ready made at
the factory, if the ladies would only find a preacher. "Yet," added
he, "one ought to select for this place now at the beginning, one of
the stern kind, who can lay hold of the people and produce a revival
movement of the most earnest nature, for no half measures will do here."

The ladies made mild objections and recommended charitable means, but
the commissioner showed, how fear was the elementary foundation on
which to build a first education; afterwards one could come with love.

A great common interest had welded these souls together, while
they overheated themselves at the great fire of love, and worked
themselves up to an overflowing omni-benevolence towards every living
thing, pressed each other's hands and separated with blessings and
congratulations that fate had brought together three good people, who
would work unanimously for the good of humanity.

When the commissioner came out, he shook himself, as though to clear
off some dust, and felt as when he had visited a flour mill, and taken
delight in seeing all objects coated with the soft, white tone of
flour, which harmonized Iron, wood, linen and glass in one accord, and
the same feeling of subdued pleasure as in touching locks, banisters
and sacks powdered with a soft dust of flour, but had at the same
time found it hard to breathe, obliged to cough and to take out a
handkerchief.

Nevertheless it had been a pleasant evening. This imperceptible
radiation of warmth from the mother which thawed the frigid thoughts,
this atmosphere of cordiality and childishness in the young woman,
which made him grow young again, this childish belief in that which
in his youth was the naïve idea of the day to lift up that which
was cast down, to protect what was dwarfed, sick and frail, all of
which he now knew was directly against everything that could promote
humanity's happiness and increase, and which he hated from instinct,
when he saw how all strength, every burst of originality was persecuted
by the unfortunate. And now he would form an alliance with them
against himself, work to his own destruction, lower himself to their
level, dissemble feeling for the enemy, bestow the war cash on the
antagonists. The thought of the enjoyment these proofs of power would
give intoxicated him, and he turned his footsteps towards the beach
that in the solitude he might recall himself. And when he now in the
still, mild summer night wandered on the sand, where he recognized
his own footsteps from previous days, where he knew every stone and
could tell where this or that herb grew, he noticed that everything
looked differently, had assumed a new form and gave entirely different
impressions than when he had walked there the day before. A change had
occurred, something new had intervened. He could no longer evolve the
great feeling of solitude, where he had felt as though alone before
nature and humanity, for somebody stood at his side or behind him. The
isolation was abolished, and he was soldered to the little banal life,
threads had been spun round his soul, considerations began to bind
his thoughts, and the cowardly fear of harboring other thoughts than
those his friends harbored clutched him. To build happiness on a false
foundation he dared not, for if he had it all hewn even to the ridge
pole it might sometime tumble, and then the fall would be greater, the
grief deeper, and still it must come to pass if he would own her, and
that he would do with all the mighty power of a mature man. Lift her
up to him? But how to do it? Not that he could make her from woman to
man, or redeem her from the uncurable propensities her sex had given
her. Not that he could give her his own education which had taken him
thirty years to acquire, nor could he give her the same evolution he
had passed through, the experiences and the knowledge he had battled
for and won. Therefore he must sink down to her, but the thought of
this sinking tormented him as the greatest possible evil, as sinking,
going down, beginning over again, which besides was impossible. It only
remained for him to make himself double, split himself in two, create
a personality, intelligible and easy of access to her, play the duped
lover, learn to admire her inferiority, get used to a role as she liked
to have it, and so in silence live the other half of his life in secret
and to himself, sleep with one eye and keep the other open.

He had mounted the skerry without observing it. And now he saw the
lights down in the fishing village and heard wild shrieks, the cries
of jubilee over the beaten foe, who would raise their children and
their children's children from poverty, save them labor, give them
new enjoyments. Once again there awoke in him the desire to see these
savages tamed, to see these worshipers of Thor kneeling for the white
Christ, the giants falling before the pale Asas. The barbarian must
pass through Christianity as a purgatory, learn veneration for the
power of the spirit in the frail bundles of muscles, the remainder of
the wandering tribes must have their middle age before they can reach
the renaissance of thinking and revolution of action.

Here should the chapel be raised on the highest ridge of the skerry
and its little spire point upwards over the look-out and flag pole to
greet the sailors at long distance as a reminder of.... Here he stopped
and reflected. With a look of scorn on his pale face, he bent over and
picked up four gneiss scales, which he laid in a rectangle from east
to west, after having measured thirty steps in length and twenty in
breadth.

"What an excellent landmark for the sailors!" he thought as he
descended the hill and went home to bed.




CHAPTER SIXTH


The commissioner had confined himself to his room two days to work,
and when on the morning of the third day he went out for a stroll on
the beach, he met by chance the widow of the deceased officer of the
exchequer. She had an anxious look, and when the commissioner inquired
after her daughter's health, he learned that she was indisposed.

"It is lack of entertainment," said he at random.

"Yes, but what shall one do in this solitude?" responded the anxious
mother.

"The lady must go out to sea, fishing and yachting and get exercise,"
prescribed he without thinking of what he said.

"Oh, yes," continued the mother; "but my poor Mary cannot go alone."

As there was only one reply, he answered:

"If it would please the ladies to have my company I shall be glad to be
of service to you."

The mother found him very good and accepted the offer, saying that she
would at once tell Mary to dress.

The commissioner went down to the harbor to outfit the boat, and on the
way his steps began to falter, as though going down hill, where the
weight pushed him faster than he would go. He felt reluctant at having
been so suddenly put in motion by an outside power, before he had had
time for deliberation, and now he would make resistance but could not.
It was too late and he let himself drift, conscious that nevertheless
he would always tend the rudder and determine the course.

He had hoisted the jib on his Bleking boat, shipped the rudder and
loosened the bowline ready to be cast off, when Mademoiselle and her
mother appeared on the beach. The girl was dressed in an ultra-marine
blue gown with white trimmings and wore a blue scotch woolen cap which
was very becoming and gave her something of a boyish, brisk expression,
totally unlike the angelic one she had shown a few days before.

As the commissioner greeted her and asked after her health, he offered
his hand to help them on board. The girl took the outstretched hand
and with a light bound was in the boat, where she was placed in the
stern at the tiller, but when afterwards the same hand was reached to
the mother, she explained that she could not accompany them as she
must prepare the dinner. The commissioner, who was suddenly surprised,
felt again the desire to make resistance against this soft power
which led him where he would not go, but was kept from doing so by the
fear of seeming ill-bred; so after a short regret that he must spare
the agreeable company of the mother, he threw off the bowline and
commanding Miss Mary to throw over the tiller, he put the main sheet in
her hand and hoisted the sail.

"But I cannot manage a boat," cried the girl; "I have never had my hand
on a tiller!"

"It is no art! Do only as I tell you and you will at once be able to
navigate a boat," replied the commissioner as he placed himself in
front of the girl and helped her with the maneuvering.

A light soft breeze was blowing and the boat glided out of the harbor
with the wind abeam.

The commissioner held the jib sheet and began by instructing the
beautiful navigator, grasping every now and then her wrists and
pressing the tiller to windward, until they were clear of land, had
speedway and were lying on the tack they were to keep to until they
reached the skerries.

The responsibility, the effort and the feeling of controlling the boat
which held two lives, awoke the numb powers in the woman's frail form,
and her eyes which attentively followed the position of the sails were
glowing with courage and reliance, when she saw how the boat obeyed
the slightest pressure of the hand. If she committed a fault, he
corrected it with a kind word, gave her courage to continue by praising
her watchfulness, removed difficulties through explaining the whole
proceeding as something that clears itself.

She was radiant with happiness, and commenced to talk of the past, of
her thirty-four years of life, how she had believed life and the desire
of living was past, how she felt herself young again, how she had
always dreamed of a life of activity, of manly activity above all else,
and to devote her powers to humanity, to others. She knew that she as a
woman was a pariah....

The commissioner listened to the whole as to well-known secrets,
formulas of an absurd struggle to make that equal which nature had
made purposely as unequal as possible, to spare humanity labor, but
to answer this now he regarded as without reward and he stuck to his
role as an appreciative listener, allowing her to give vent to her
diseased imaginations which the fresh wind would blow away. Instead
of taking out a knife and cutting off the tangled skeins which her
confused thoughts offered to him, he would simply pretend not to notice
them, but tuck them under and through gathering impressions which he
purposely developed, wind on the old tangles and use them as bobbins,
which should only serve as an underlayer for the new yarn, spun out
from his rich distaff.

In haste he improvised a scheme, how using the material which the
skerries afforded for object lessons, he would in living pictures,
without her observing it, in a few hours let her pass through
sensations which she should believe came from without, and in such a
manner he would smuggle his soul's net over her, and tune her strings
in harmony to his instrument. With a movement of the head he now
signified that the boat should tack, he slacked the sheet a little, and
the boat cleared land and dashed out on the open sea. The wide horizon,
the infinite sea of light where no object intervened, threw a light
over her beautiful face, the small lineaments were as magnified, half
perceptible wrinkles were smoothed out, the whole expression assumed
the character of freedom from daily cares, paltry thoughts, and the eye
that in one moment could overlook such a big part of the earth's body
seemed to see on a grand scale, so that the little self swelled and
felt its relative power, and when now the long sea waves slowly raised
and lowered the boat in powerful rhythm, he saw how transport was mixed
with a grain of fear, which kept it in check.

The commissioner, who observed that the grand scenery did not fail in
its impression, concluded now to place the text under the frail music
of the swells of the senses, and guide her dawning thoughts out on the
great highway, he would loosen the tegument on the swelling seed, so
that the plantlet would push out.

"It has the effect of a planet!" improvised he. "The earth, the banal,
the tiresome, the moldy, becomes a celestial body. Do we not feel as
though we were already participants of heaven, when the opposition
is dissolved, the false opposition between heaven and earth, which
are one, like the part and the whole. Don't you observe how you grow
instead of shrink when you outwit the wind and make it take you to the
right when it wants to go to the left? Don't you feel what great power
is within you, as you ride upon a wave, when it with a thousand pounds
of weight would press you down into its depth? He, who is supposed to
have created the wings of the birds, and who needed fifty thousand
years to make a flyer out of a creeper, was less quick than he who for
the first time put canvas on a pole and instantly invented navigation.

"Is it then so strange if man created God out of his own image,
conceiving from his ingenuity one still more ingenious?"

The girl having listened attentively to his effusion, regarded his
face uninterruptedly as if she had turned her own towards a fire to
warm it. The unusual words she heard seemed to have sunk into her
mind and acted as a leaven. Benumbed, lulled by the soft, persuading
intonation, she received without deliberation the new views he gave to
her previously lifeless and monotonous landscape, of the origin of life
and its meaning, and without seeing that her own religious conviction
was buried before dissolution, she took up the new and piled it upon
the old.

"I never before heard anyone speak as you do," she said dreamily;
"speak more!"

He kept silent and with a new motion he gave the boat another course.

They approached Svartbodan's sinister volcanic formation. The black
sparkling diorite with its death-white landmark, called "the white
mare," looked still more strikingly awful in the sun's rays, which in
vain tried to lighten the extreme tones of its black and white.

A cloud passed over the girl's face, her expression shrunk, the
eyebrows contracted in rolls as though they would drop down and shut
out the depressing picture. A visible movement on the tiller signified
that she would fall off from the skerry, but he gave the boat its
course forwards, and with the wind's compressed power sped it into
the ravine between the black cliffs where the sighing waves sucked it
forwards.

It became silent in the boat, and the commissioner would not try to
guess at the gloomy recollection that awoke in his companion, but
limited himself to pointing to the bleached white skeleton of a long
tailed duck, which was still left on the black ledge.

And the wind took the sails again, filled them and wafted the boat out
onto the open sea.

They passed the rock with its single mountain ash and its wagtail and
approached Sword Island where he for the first time had seen her.
There they landed and he guided her the same way that he had passed
that Sunday morning, and let her receive the same impressions that he
had felt, led her down into the blooming field and showed her where,
looking between the wild buckthorns, he had seen her for the first time.

She was now in a wanton mood because all these small observations, even
the details of the circumstances, had remained in his memory and must
signify that he was smitten. She laughed when he spoke of the first
time he had heard her cough, and in a playful humor she told him to go
down to the same place and speak and she would guess who it was that
spoke.

He obeyed, and jumping down from the rocky footstool placed himself
behind the white beam trees and imitated the bellowing of a bull.

"Nay, how beautiful he can sing," joked the girl. "It is surely a
Hottentot actor."

The commissioner, who found pleasure in her childishness and had
not played with children for many years, continued the role and
stepping out on the green field with his coat turned inside out
and the lorgnette hanging on one ear, he improvised a savage dance
accompanied by a song that he had heard Hottentots sing in the Jardin
d'Acclimatation.

The girl seemed both surprised and amused.

"Do you know," said she, "I much prefer you like that when I see that
you can be human for a moment and put aside that philosophical face?"

"Is a Hottentot then more of a human being in your eyes than a
philosopher?" let fall the commissioner, but at once regretting that
he had aroused her to consciousness, he broke a branch from the white
beam tree, and wove a wreath and gave it to the girl who had become
sober when she saw she had betrayed herself by committing such extreme
stupidity.

"Now you shall wreathe the victim, Miss Mary," said the commissioner as
a cover. "I wish instead of one I were a hundred and permitted to go as
a hecatomb to the slaughter for you."

Kneeling he received the wreath from the pacified beauty, whereupon he
started on a run towards the beach with the girl after him.

Down at the water's edge they stopped.

"Shall we throw skipping stones?" proposed she.

"If you please," answered he and selected a flat stone.

They threw stones out over the water a few moments until they became
warm.

"Shall we take a bath?" suddenly exclaimed the girl, as if she had for
a long time hatched the thought which must now come out.

The commissioner did not know where He was, whether it was a joke or a
project coming in earnest, with the mental reservation of keeping on
part of the clothing, or for one of the parties to withdraw.

"You take a bath and I will go on farther," he found this the only
thing to answer.

"Don't you bathe then?" asked the girl.

"No, I have no bathing suit with me," answered the commissioner; "and
besides, I do not bathe in cold water."

"Ha, ha, ha!" rang a cold, disagreeable, scornful laugh from the girl's
throat. "You, afraid of cold water," sneered she; "perhaps you cannot
swim?"

"Cold water is too coarse for my fine nerves. If you will take a cold
bath here I will go to the northern point and take a warm one."

The girl had already pushed off her shoes and throwing a look of
disdain and injured vanity at him, she said:

"I suppose you cannot see me from there?"

"Not unless you swim out too far," answered the commissioner and went
away.

When he had reached the northern slope of the islet, he searched for
a cleft in the rock, which was protected from the northern wind by a
rocky wall about fifty feet high. The black hornblende gneiss was as
polished as agate by the waves and curved in frail delicate rolls which
resembled the muscles of the human body and clung to the bare feet soft
as a bolster. No breath of wind reached here, and the sun had burned
six hours against the dark ledge so that the air was heated several
degrees above body temperature, and the stones almost burned beneath
his feet. He had been down to the boat and brought an ax with which he
now cut oft the driest heath and sand oats and made up a blazing fire
on the rock; in the meantime he undressed. When the fire had quickly
burned out he swept the ledge clean as a baker's oven, and with a
bailer poured the crystal sea water over the heated stones and let the
vapors lap his nude body. Then he placed himself in one of the arm
chairs which the sea had sculptured from the cliffs, wrapped a blanket
round him and with his knees crouched under his chin shut his eyes and
seemed to fall asleep. But he did not sleep; he used this method as
he called it to wind himself up and for a few moments let his brain
rest and resume its elasticity. For it was too much of an effort to
fit himself into companionship with the confused thoughts of others.
His mechanism of thought suffered by contact with others, so that it
wavered and became unreliable as the compass needle in the presence
of iron. Each time he would think clearly about something or form a
conclusion, he placed his soul in harmonious numbness by a warm bath,
extinguished consciousness in a half slumber for a brief moment by
not thinking, during which time all the received observation material
seemed to become melted, and afterwards when he extinguished the fire
and awoke himself to consciousness the alloy welled up.

When he had sat a moment and the sun had warmed him through, he
suddenly arose and stood as though awakened after having slept a whole
night. His thoughts labored again, and he looked happy, just as though
he had solved a problem.

"She is thirty-four years," he thought; "this I had forgotten under the
impression of her youthful beauty, therefore this chaos of past stages,
these parts of roles she has successively played in life, this mass of
shifting reflexes from men that she had tried to win and fit herself
to. Now lately she must have been wrecked in some love affair. _He_,
who had held together all these rag pieces of a soul, had turned aside,
the sack had rent and now the whole thing lay as a pile of ragpicker's
rubbish. She had shown sample pieces of the romantic parsonage of 1850
with a regurgitation from the beginning of the century for saving
humanity, zealous faith from 'The Dove's Voice,' and 'The Pietist's'
streams of conjuncture, cynicisms from George Sand and the androgynal
period. To search the bottom of this sieve through which so many soups
had passed, to solve the enigma which was not one, he was too prudent
to spend time on. Here only remained to pick out of the heap of bones
that which was suitable to form the skeleton, which he would afterwards
cover with living flesh and blow his breath into. But this she must not
observe for then she would not permit it. She must never see how she
was held by him for that would only raise hate and resistance. He would
grow underneath the ground as the rhizome, and graft her on himself
that she would shoot up, show herself to the world and bear the flower
which humanity should admire."

Now he heard the mew's cry and understood that she had swam out from
shore. Therefore he dressed quickly and after he had gathered up his
belongings he took from under the sheets of the boat material for a
small breakfast and laid it out on the moss under an arborescent pine
which resembled an Italian stone pine.

There was not a great variety, but everything was costly, choice
and served on the remnants of a collection of porcelain which he
at one time had begun to gather. The butter shone egg yellow in a
serpentine dish with screw cover that stood in a fragment of Henry
II faience filled with ice, the crackers lay on a lattice-braided
dish of Marieberg and the sardels were on a saucer of blue mottled
Nevers. Fear of the general banality breaking forth in arts, industry
and daily life, had urged the owner to the modern search after the
unusual, the dreadful triviality of the present age and its hate of
originality had forced him like so many others into superrefinement
to try to save his personality from being ground among the bowlders
in the big glacial flow. His finely developed senses did not search
after frugal beauty in shape and color, which so easily grows old; he
would see history and memories of exploits from the world in that which
surrounded him. This fragment of Henry II faience, with its cream white
pipe-clay incrusted with red, black and yellow, aroused memories of
the beautiful Loire landscape with its renaissance castles, while its
ornamental bookbinding style reminded of Madame Hélène de Genlis and
her librarian, who together with a potter pressed out a style, purely
personal, which still could not escape the coloring of the century of
chivalry, when beauty in life was venerated and even the trade was
subordinate to science and art, realizing the advantageousness of a
system of intellectual rank.

When he had spread breakfast and looked at his work it was to him as
though he had placed a piece of culture up here in this semi-arctic
wilderness, sardels from Brittany, chestnuts from Andalusia, caviare
from Volga, cheese from the Gruyère alps, wurst from Thuringia,
crackers from Britain and oranges from Asia Minor. There was a flask in
basket work of Chianti wine from Tuscany to be served in goblets with
Frederick I's monogram in gold. All were topsy-turvy without a savor of
collector or museum; there were slight touches of color thrown in here
and there, like flowers pressed as souvenirs between the leaves of a
guide book but not in a herbarium.

Now hearing the voice of the girl cry from her bathing place a halloo,
he answered, and immediately she stepped out of the shrubs, straight,
brisk and radiating with health and the joy of living. When she saw
the breakfast spread she raised her cap jokingly with a bow, impressed
against her will by the aristocratic in the arrangement.

"You are a wizard," said she; "permit me to bow!"

"Not for so little," answered the commissioner.

"Yes, you indicate that you can do more, but to rule nature as you
lately chattered about, that will be beyond you," opposed the girl in
a superior motherly tone.

"My lady! I did not express myself so categorically; I only reminded
you that we have partly learned how to subdue the powers of nature,
by which we are partly controlled--observe the little important word
partly--and that it is in our power to both change a landscape's
character and the whole soul life of its inhabitants."

"Good! Conjure up an Italian landscape, with marble cottages and stone
pines, out of this dreadful granite _paysage_!"

"I am certainly no juggler, but if you challenge me I promise you by
your birthday, in three weeks to transform this fresh piece of nature,
whose equal you may search after through all Europe, to a treeless,
scorched cabbage landscape to your taste."

"Well! Let us wager! And if after three weeks I lose, what then?"

"Then I win--but what?"

"We will see then!"

"We will see! But will you attend to my duty during that time?"

"Your duty! What is that? To lie on the sofa and smoke cigarettes?"

"Yes, if you can as I attend to my duty on the sofa,--with pleasure.
But you cannot do that and now you shall learn the reason and meaning
of my stay on this skerry! But first take a glass of wine with your
wurst!"

He poured a glass of the dark red Chianti wine and passed it to the
girl who emptied it at a draught.

"You know," began the commissioner, "that my official commission here
at this fishing port is to teach the population how to fish."

"It must be a nice one, you who brag that you have never had a tackle
in your hand."

"Don't interrupt me--I shall not teach them how to fish with tackle.
You see, things are thus, that these lingerers are conservative as all
rabble--"

"What language is this?" interrupted the girl again.

"Plain language! However! From indiscretion and conservatism these
aboriginals go on undermining their own interests as fish eating
mammals, and therefore the state must place them under guardians. The
stromling--God bless the fish!--that constitutes the most important
livelihood of these autochthones, threatens to come to an end.
Certainly I don't care at all, if a few hundred ichthyophageus more
or less increase or diminish a superfluous horde of people, it is
completely Immaterial. But now they shall live since the Academy of
Agriculture wishes it, and therefore I shall hinder them from fishing
their scanty supply. Is this acknowledged logic?"

"It is inhuman, but you are made of material for a hangman!"

"For this reason I have on my own accord, without asking for the
decoration of Vasa or any kind of thanks, found out a new means of
sustenance which shall replace the old, for even if the stromling
should shoal for half a man's age after the fishermen have emigrated,
still this means of sustenance is threatened by a competition, which
after a hundred years of rest has again arisen more formidable than
ever. Do you know that the herring will return to the coast of Bohus in
the fall?"

"No, I haven't had any letter from them for a long time!"

"They do so at any rate. Therefore we must stop the stromling fishing
and fish for salmon instead."

"Salmon? In the depth of the sea?"

"Yes! It shall be found there, although I haven't seen it. Yet you
shall find it out!"

"But if it isn't there?"

"I told you that it was there! You shall only catch the first one and
then salmon fishing is open."

"But how do you know salmon exists when you haven't seen it?" argued
the girl.

"By a mass of investigations too complicated to explain in
conversation, partly done at sea....

"Only once!"

"I work as quickly as twenty, thanks to my superior
intelligence--partly on my sofa but mostly in books. Anyway, will you
insist to destroy the people, first with salmon and afterwards with a
mission house which you have forgotten?"

"You are a demon, a devil!" exclaimed the girl between scorn and
earnestness.

The commissioner, who only from a caprice had turned into skepticism,
and now saw that just this made the most impression, found it best to
continue this role.

"Surely you do not believe in God?" asked the girl with an air, as
though she would eternally despise him if he answered in the negative.

"No, I do not."

"And you would be an Ansgarius and introduce Christianity on the
skerry?"

"And the salmon! Yes, I will be a demoniac Ansgarius! But will you
also let down the salmon trawl and be blessed by the revisors of the
Reichstag?"

"Yes, I shall work for these people whom I believe in, I shall devote
my feeble powers for the oppressed, and I shall show you that you are a
blasé, a roué and a scorner.... No, you are not, but you make yourself
out worse than you are for you are a good child anyway, I saw that last
Sunday...."

She said a good child, as if with a sure calculation that he would snap
at the bait, and place himself under her care as the child, no matter
whether a good or bad one. But now he had already formed a fancy for
the demon as being superior and more interesting, therefore he held to
the more grateful task. Surely he knew from experience that the easiest
way to insinuate oneself into a woman's favor was to let her play the
mother with all the freedom changed to intimacy, but it was a worn-out
play and could so easily lead to an inextirpable hectoring on her part.
Better then to give her the more grateful part of a redeemer, where
nothing that was absolutely superior entered, only the mother of God's
intervening purpose, where she was mediator between two equally strong
powers.

But the transition was not easily found, and in a moment of loathing
at the whole play, which was still necessary if he would win her, and
that he would, he pretended to go down and see if the boat was safely
moored, as a breeze was beginning to blow.

Upon reaching the beach he drew a long breath as though he had been
exerting himself beyond his strength. He unbuttoned his vest as though
he had been wearing a coat of iron, and cooling his head he threw a
longing glance out over the free water. Now he would have given much
to have been alone, to shake off the chaff which had fallen upon his
soul during his contact with a lower spirit. In this moment he hated
her, would be free from her, own himself again, but it was too late!
Cobwebs had fastened to his face, soft as silk, slimy, invisible and
impossible to remove. At the same time--when he turned back and saw her
as she sat peeling a chestnut with her long fingers and sharp teeth--he
was reminded of a mandrill he had seen in a menagerie, and was seized
with an infinite compassion, and a wave of sadness, such as the more
fortunate feels when he looks upon the lowly. He immediately thought
of her delight at seeing him as a Hottentot, and became vexed again,
but calming himself with the self-possession of a man of the world he
approached her, and to speak the first cloaked word he reminded her
that it was time to go, as the wind had risen. However she had observed
the tired and absent-minded look upon his face and with a sharpness,
which completely calmed his feeling for an instant, she responded:

"You are tired of my company! Let us go."

When he did not answer with a courtesy, she resumed with feeling, which
it was difficult to judge whether real or pretended.

"Excuse me, I am naughty! I have grown so, and I am ungrateful! Never
mind it!"

She wiped her eyes and began with a house-wife's trained care to put
the dishes together.

And now, when she bowed down, leaning over the remainder of the
unwashed dishes with the tablecloth tied round her waist for an apron
and started to carry the service to the beach to wash it, he hastened
to relieve her of the load, urged by an irresistible desire not to see
her in a servant's place, and feeling the sting of being served by one
whom he would raise far above himself at the same time she was to look
up to him as one that had granted her the power over him.

At this pretended combat that arose over which one should serve the
other, the girl dropped the dishes. She gave a cry, but when she looked
at the pieces, her face cleared up.

"Fortunately they were all old! My God, I was so frightened!"

He suppressed his paltry thoughts of the loss by at once placing
himself on the side of her who had had the misfortune, and glad to have
a noisy ending to the various feelings that rent him, he threw the
shivers of porcelain like skipping stones out over the bay and rounded
off the pointed situation with a jocose,

"Now we do not need to wash dishes, Miss Mary!"

Whereupon he reached her his hand and helped her into the boat, which
was already pulling at the painter under the increasing dash of the
waves.




CHAPTER SEVENTH


A bright, sunny summer morning the commissioner is sitting with his
pupil up in the wooden pavilion, which he has had set up on the highest
point of the skerry close to the newly laid foundation of the mission
house. Down in the harbor lies a schooner, from which the frame for
the new building is being unloaded and carried up to its place to be
joined together by the foreman and his laborers. Therefore it has been
unusually lively on the skerry for some time and small skirmishes have
already arisen between the fishermen and the city workmen, in which the
latter have treated the former with insolence, which has given rise
to a series of feasts of atonement followed by drunkenness and new
frays, attacks of immorality and appropriation of other's property.
Therefore the commissioner and the elderly lady have a momentary
regret at having undertaken the civilization of these people, when the
first steps already showed such a sad result; so much more so as the
nightly noises, singing, crying and complaining disturbed all work and
all rest for them, who had come out here solely for the purpose of
seeking quiet. The commissioner, who had lost all reputation by once
yielding a little of his authority, could not restore the peace, but
Miss Mary on the other hand succeeded better and understood how by a
prompt appearance, and a good word now and then, to suppress the storm.
This she would not impute to her beauty and agreeable manner; she had
credited herself with a higher degree of strength and understanding
than she possessed, and thus imbued herself in the belief of having an
unusual faculty of mind, so that even now, when she sat as a pupil with
her teacher, she received his instruction as though she were already
acquainted with them, and answered with remarks more pointed than
sagacious, seeming to correct and explain rather than to learn.

The mother, who was sitting beside her embroidering an altar cloth for
the new mission house, seemed occasionally amazed at her daughter's
penetrating insight and great knowledge, as she with a simple question
nonplussed her teacher.

"See here, Miss Mary," lectured the commissioner, always deceiving
himself with the hope of being able to educate her; "the untrained
eye has a propensity to see everything simple; the untrained ear to
hear everything simple. You see here around you only gray granite,
and the painter and the poet see the same. Therefore they paint and
depict everything so monotonously; therefore they find the skerries so
monotonous. And yet, look at this geological map of the surroundings
and then throw a glance out over the landscape. We are sitting on the
red gneiss region. Look at this stone you call granite, how rich is the
variety; it is the baking together of the black mica, the white quartz
and the pinkish feldspar."

He had taken a sample from the pile which the foundation layers
had blasted from the skerry and laid in a heap for the building's
foundation.

"And look, here is another. It is called eurite! See what fine shades
of color, from salmon red towards flint blue. And here is white marble
of primeval limestone."

"Is there marble here?" asked the girl, her imagination stirred at the
mention of this valuable stone.

"Yes, there exists marble here, although it looks gray on the surface
without being gray. For, if you observe it closer you will find what an
infinite variety of color there is in the lichens. What a scale of the
finest colors from the ramaline lichen India-ink black to the crottle's
ash-gray, the ground liverwort's leather-brown, the parmelia lichen
seal-green, the tree lungwort's spotted copper-green and the wall moss
egg-yellow. Look closer out over the skerries as they are now lit by
the sun, you will see that the rocks have different colors, and that
the people who are used to seeing them, even give them names after
the scale of colors, which they are acquainted with without knowing
it. Do you see that the Black Rock is darker than the others, because
it consists of the dark: hornblende; that the Red Rock is red, because
it is composed of red gneiss, and the white skerries of clean washed
eurite? Is it not more to know why, than to know that a thing is so;
and still less to see nothing but an even gray, as the painter, who
paints all the skerries with a mixing of black and white? Hear now the
roaring of the waves, as the poets summarily call this symphony of
sound. Close your eyes for a moment and you will hear better while I
analyze this harmony in simple notes. You at first hear a buzzing which
resembles the noise heard in a machine shop or a big city. It is the
masses of water dashing against each other; next you hear a hissing;
it is the lighter, smaller water particles which are lashed to foam.
And now a grating as of a knife against a grindstone; it is the wave
tearing against the sand. And now a rattling like the dumping of a
load of gravel; it is the sea heaving up small stones. Then a muffled
thud as when you clap the hollow of your hand to the ear, it is the
wave which presses the air before it into a cavern; and lastly this
murmuring as from distant thunder, it is big bowlders, rolling on the
stony bottom."

"Yes, but this is to spoil nature for us!" said the girl.

"It is to make nature intimate with us! It gives me composure to know
it, and thereby frees me from the poet's half-hidden fear of the
unknown, which is nothing else than memories from the time of savage
fiction, when explanations were sought but could not be found quickly;
and in the emergency the fable of the mermaids and the giants was
caught at. But now we pass on to the fishing, which shall be retrieved,
leaving the salmon for some other time, and try new methods for
stromling fishing. In two months the great fishing begins, and if I
have not calculated wrongly it is going to be a failure in the autumn."

"How can you foretell that from your sofa?" asked the girl more
cuttingly than inquisitive.

"I foretell it by the facts that I have seen--from my sofa--how the
drifting ice in the spring scraped the shoals clear of kelp and
other algæ, in which the stromling go to spawn. I foretell it by the
scientific fact that the small crustaceans--no matter what they are
called--on which the stromling feed, have stayed away from the banks
since the seaweed was scraped away. What shall we do then? We shall try
to fish in the deep water I If the fish don't come to me then I must
go to the fish. And therefore we shall try with nets drifting after a
floating boat. It is simple!"

"It is grand!" said Miss Mary.

"It is old," protested the commissioner, "and it isn't my discovery!
But now we shall as prudent beings think of a last resort, for even if
we get stromling and don't get a price for it on account of herring
being caught again on the west coast, we must have something else In
readiness."

"It is the salmon?"

"It is the salmon, which must be found here, but I haven't seen it."

"You have told me this much before, but now I should like to know how
you can know it."

"I shall reduce the fraction and in a few words tell the reason of my
stay here. The salmon wander as do the other migrating birds."

"The salmon a bird?"

"Certainly, a perfect migratory bird. It is to be found near the rivers
of Norrland, and has been caught twice in nets round the islands of
the north passage. It has been taken near Gotland and in the whole
southward passage; therefore it must pass by here. Now it is your task
to trace it out with floating trails. Have you the desire to do it, in
the capacity of my assistant, to obtain my salary?"

The last word came suddenly, but with calculation, and did not fail in
its intent.

"I shall make money, mamma," cried Miss Mary in a playful tone,
intended to hide the joy she really felt. "But," added she, "what will
you do then?"

"I shall lie on my sofa, and spoil nature for you."

"What are you going to do?" asked the mother, who believed she had not
heard aright.

"I shall make an Italian landscape for Miss Mary," answered the
commissioner, "and now I will leave you, my ladies, and make the
sketch."

Therewith he arose and making a polite bow walked down to the beach.

"He is an odd being," said the mother, when the commissioner was out of
hearing.

"An unusual being at the least," answered the girl; "but I don't
believe he is perfectly sane. He seems to have principles, and on the
whole is a kind man. What have you to say about him?"

"Hand me my yarn, child," said the mother.

"No, but say something ... tell me whether you like him or not,"
continued the girl.

The mother only answered with a half sad and half resigned glance,
which expressed indifference.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile the commissioner had gone down to the harbor and taken his
boat to row out among the skerries. The summer heat had lasted out here
a month, so that the air was hot; but drifting ice still coming from
the

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