It had rained for eight days after the first trial with the drifting
nets, which had passed without other results than a little scene
between the engaged pair. The commissioner, who very well knew that
there were no fish to get, as he had purposely led the young folks
astray, had gone down to the beach to receive the home-coming fishers
and had then been called idiot by his betrothed, who was entirely worn
out by being up all night. When the boatmen snickered at this secretly,
the commissioner, who feared a storm, had come between with a joke. At
the dinner table the sport at the new method of fishing had taken wider
range, and the commissioner had played deep humiliation so that Mr.
Blom had several times regarded it his duty to defend him in a manner
extremely wounding.
The rainy days following this had kept the company in doors, whereby an
extremely intimate intercourse had formed down in the ladies' cottage,
where the assistant had introduced the habit of reading aloud from the
Swedish poets. The commissioner had at the beginning listened to it,
but finally left with the explanation that Swedish poesy was written
for confirmation classes and ladies and that he would wait, until there
came a poet, who would write for men. He had then by common vote been
declared unpoetical, at which he was satisfied, as it relieved him from
the duty of being present at the seances.
The rainy weather had caused even the work on the chapel to stop, and
the laborers were sitting in the cottages and furnishing the gin to
what coffee they could get.
The colporteur, who could not gather the people out on the slope,
passed the first days in the kitchen and would have read out of the
Bible, but was received with indifference and fell into dispute
with the laborers, who were mostly free thinkers. Whereupon he had
withdrawn to his chamber, explaining that he was sick and he sent to
the commissioner for the china preparation, as his bottle was emptied.
Suddenly he had disappeared and it was said that he had gone with a
steamer to the city.
He had now returned, the evening before, to the skerry, accompanied by
a man, whom he called his brother and who brought a boat load of divers
articles, mostly beer, which was packed up in a boat house, in the
open door of which a plank on two barrels served as a counter, as the
commonwealth wealth had permitted the opening of a provision store.
During the past few days fishing folks had commenced to gather from the
islands near the mainland. And now the boat houses were opened where
whole families were harbored, the cottages were filled with relations
and acquaintances, and on the whole skerry there was a life, which
strangely contrasted with the usual solitude.
As the skerry and the fishing waters belonged to a private individual
in on the mainland, every boat paid a certain duty which was collected
by an overseer who was sent here. With this overseer the commissioner
had at once got on a bad footing, when he would speak about fishing
with drifting nets, which would be followed by the abandoning of the
shoals, and thereby the water tax would cease. But even this apparently
unfavorable circumstance he had known how to turn to his benefit; for
the overseer, when opposing the new method, was urged to propagate the
old system by means of gin and would thereby against his will form the
dark background, against which the effects of fishing with drifting
nets would stand out in bolder magnificence. And the commissioner
was perfectly sure of his victory, as night and day he had been
sampling the water, dredging, fishing, and with his water telescope
investigating the depths to find out where the shoals of fish were
moving.
All these details, however, had no other interest to him, than that
they served to exercise his energy for coming battles, to restore in
him that feeling of power, without which nobody can endure, who has
unusual abilities, which are easily lost, unless used.
And during the time, which had passed since the arrival of the
assistant, the daily hectoring from the side of the young folks had by
and by accustomed him to the role of an inferior, so that he was on the
way to live this role himself, especially as he himself did not wish
to break the engagement but found it necessary to cause the break to
be made by her. Between the two young people there existed a complete
sympathy on all subjects, and he had witnessed how the ripe woman was
at once on a level with the unripe man, all of whose immature thoughts,
all improvised notions she accepted as the height of wisdom. And each
of his attempts to refute a stupidity stranded against their inability
to keep together the threads of a discourse, because they were thinking
exclusively under the influence of the desire to own each other. To
take up some competition in acrobatic dexterity or praise of the lower
sex he would not, for it was his exact purpose to be erased and make a
capital end to the tie, which threatened his whole future existence.
And this biandri, in which he was living, when he, for an occasional
moment alone with his betrothed, only received reflexes from the other
man, felt, as it were, his spirit on her lips, heard his childishness
reëchoed from her mouth, all this had ended in giving him loathing for
a state, which reminded of a _ménage à trois_.
The young man's conceit had no limit, and he had fallen into the
ridiculous idea that he was superior to the commissioner, because he
was _al pari_ with Miss Mary, who also gave the illusion of being above
the commissioner; according to the perfectly correct formula: if A
is greater than B, and C is equal to A, then C is also greater than
B,--without, however, first examining whether A really was greater than
B.
He had never before expected to find youth's secret so openly exposed
as he got it here gratuitously presented on a waiter, and how well he
recognized himself from a past stage.
How had he not cried of hunger and rut? Experienced Weltschmerz of
envy for elders, who had already gained what he was struggling for and
who then made him feel dejected, whereby also his sympathy for all
oppressed and small had been aroused. This inability to judge one's
powers, based on anticipation of that, which it would be possible
to accomplish in this long life, if thought of as concentrated in
a single act! All this sentimentality, caused only by unsatisfied
desires. This over-estimating of woman, while memories from the nursery
and of the mother were still fresh. These lax half-thoughts of the
still soft brain under pressure from blood vessels and testicles.
He even recognized these faint signs of good sense, which under the
form of primitive, animal slyness and discrimination of means so often
believed themselves to be the highest prudence, but were only the fox's
simple attempt to be shrewd, and which therefore wonderfully resembled
the reputed women's artifice, priest shrewdness, and lawyers' trickery.
The young man had even tried mind reading on the commissioner, thereby
betraying that he suspected the latter of carrying some dangerous
secrets as he was unlike other beings. But in this he had acted so
clumsily, that the commissioner had found out all that was thought and
said about him by the ladies; instead of giving any information he
had by his answers so mystified the young man, that he began to doubt
whether his rival was a blockhead or of a demoniac nature. By demoniac
he meant a conscious person, who under pretext of the greatest naivete
acted with full calculation, always awake and leading the fates of
other beings according to his plans. And as the idea of calculation,
which was a virtue, always had a bad significance to the young, who
could not calculate the consequences of an act, so his envy assumed the
inferior's passionate desire to tear down and trample under the feet.
Thus matters stood, when the great day came that was to decide the
fishermen's whole existence for the coming winter.
* * * * *
The August evening was hanging bed warm over the skerry, all of whose
cliffs and stones were still warm after the sun had gone down, so warm,
that the dew could not fall on them. The sea outside spread itself
smooth and lavender gray where the full moon copper red slowly emerged
and was just now half hidden by a brig, which seemed to sail right on
the satellite's _mare serenitatis_. Nearer the strand were seen all
the floats of the laid out nets lying in rows like flocks of sea birds
floating on the swell.
And while the people were awaiting the break of day to look at the
nets, they had camped on the strands around campfires with coffeepots
and gin bottles; in the boat house, where the provision dealer was
selling beer, the preacher had taken place beside his brother to assist
him with the lively traffic, and with a blue apron round his hips he
was seen opening beer bottles like an old expert saloon keeper.
The commissioner, who had come out to observe the direction of the
currents, the temperature and barometric pressure, now wandered on the
sandy beach to rest from his thoughts. Here and there he surprised
a couple, who had sought solitude. Their unintelligible naivete in
behavior made him only turn his back on them with a sneer and loathing.
Coming further out on the point, he climbed out on the cliffs to find
his seat, where he used to meditate. It was one of the arm chairs which
had been perfectly polished by the waves, and was still warm as a stove
from the burning sun of the day.
He had been sitting a moment half asleep lulled by the sighing of the
surf, when he heard the sand creak below on the edge of the beach.
There was a rustle in the dry wrack, and he saw the assistant and his
betrothed coming slowly walking with their arms around each other's
waist. They halted between the invisible beholder and the moonlight's
street on the water, so that he could see their figures outlined
as sharply, as though he had had them between the objective of a
microscope and the reflecting mirror. And he saw now with antipathy's
sharpened glance her profile like that of a bird of prey leaning
towards the other's big ape's head with the enormous cheeks, useless
to all but buglers, and the narrow tapering skull without a forehead.
He observed now the superfluous mass of flesh in the man's figure,
whose ignoble outlines with too large hips reminded of a woman like the
Farnesian Hercules. A manly ideal of the period of the semi-brutes,
when the fist still ruled over the big brain, which was not completed.
Disgraced, as though he had been engaged to a centaur, he felt that his
soul through marriage with a retrogressive type, was standing before
the beginning of a crime, which, completed, would falsify his lineage
for all time to come, which should allure him to offer his only life
for another's child, on which he should squander his best feelings and,
after a time grown fast to it, drag his humiliation as a block about
his feet unable to free himself. Jealousy "this dirty vice," what else
is it than the healthy, strong fear of the tribal instinct lest it
should be hindered in its praiseworthy egotism to perpetuate the best
in the individual? And who lacks in this sound passion but the sterile
family sustainer, the wife panderer, the weak fool, the cicisbeo, the
gynecolater, who believes in platonic love?
He was jealous, but when the first anger over the affront had subsided,
there awoke an unrestrained desire to possess this woman without
wedlock. The gauntlet was thrown, the liberty in choice was proclaimed,
and he felt a desire to take up the battle, break the band and appear
as the lover in order that he with gained victory should be able to
go calmly onwards, conscious that he was not the one who had been
neglected by nature, who had been pushed aside in the battle of love.
Here was no longer a question of honest contest with loyal means, it
was an insidious battle between burglars. The challenger had selected
the simple weapon, skeleton keys, and the combat was about stealing!
With a woman as the prize all hesitation disappeared. The animal had
awakened, and the wild instincts, which hid themselves under the great
name of love, were as furious as the powers of nature let loose.
He arose from the rock unobserved and turned his steps homewards to
arrange his fate, as he called it.