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.