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.