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.