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.