The autumn had advanced, but on the skerry could not be seen that the
summer had gone, for there was not a deciduous tree to turn yellow,
and the lichens on the rocks had become more luxuriant, and swelled
by the moisture, the heath and the crowberry vines had taken on a new
verdure, the juniper and the dwarf pines, the eternally green trees of
the north, were freshened and freed from dust by rain.
The fishermen had flown, as their labor for the fall was ended; the
silence had again returned, and the provision store was closed. The
wooden frame of the chapel became more naked, as the boards had been
picked off for firewood and carpenter's lumber, so that there was only
the studdings to be seen, which resembled a complex of gibbets.
The preacher was seldom seen now, for since he had become an abstainer,
he had misused the china wine, which was a compound containing brandy,
and he already had buzzings in his ears, palpitation of the heart and
was sleeping most of the time.
The commissioner after a month of labor had succeeded in curing his
soul of the shot wound he had received at the game of love. With
potassium iodide and low diet he had subdued the desires, and when the
tristesse of the solitude took him, he generated a portion of laughing
gas from ammonium nitrate, for he had found a long time previous that
intoxication from alcohol was vile and succeeded by greater dejection
with mania for suicide. At first the wonderous nitrous oxide had
cheered him up and made him laugh, but the banal giggle had dissolved
all his great thoughts and struggles into a nothing, at which he
laughed, but when he had found himself down among the gigglers, who had
giggled at him, he felt the need of raising himself up again above his
former self, and he missed his sorrows and his griefs.
But when he had isolated himself completely, so that the chambermaid
was only permitted to clean the room and bring in food, while he
locked himself up in the attic room, all the memories from the summer
commenced to haunt him. He remembered now without wishing it, every
word that had been said. And now the appearance of the preacher in the
mist on the islet appeared as something that had been planned. The
words which he had uttered concerning his father and his circumstances
compared with those of Miss Mary, that she knew who he was, now took
root, grew and became big. There must exist some secret in his life,
which everybody knew except himself. And soon he saw in the appearance
of the preacher that of a planned spying, sustained by someone who
wished to persecute him. He did not believe this in calmer moments, for
he knew very well that the mania of persecution was the first symptom
of that infirmity, which accompanies isolation. Human beings formed
a great electrical battery of many elements, and when an element is
isolated, it loses its power. The induction coil of copper wire was
lame at the same moment the soft iron rod was taken out, and he was on
the way to be lame, since his iron rod had become tempered steel.
Yes, but that was not that sickly mania of persecution, which comes
from bodily infirmity, for he had in fact been persecuted, opposed
from the very moment, that he in the school bespoke that he would be
a power, a former of a species, that would be able to break from its
kindred and like the differentiating herb beget for itself a name of
its own, perhaps the name of a new genus. He had been persecuted,
instinctively from below by inferiors and above by the mediocre, which
latter sat as gauges and determined the standard, by which greatness
should be judged. He had been hated and picked at as the yellow
high-bred bird of the Canary islands, when it had flown out of its
cage and come among green-finches out in the forest, where its too
splendid attire provoked the wild birds.
But nature, in which he had sought company before, now became dead to
him, for the intermediary, the human being, was wanting. The sea, which
he had worshiped and which he sought as the only grandeur in his paltry
country with its petty, trivial summer cottage landscapes seemed to him
to become narrow, as his ego swelled. This blue, turpentine-green, gray
circle enclosed him as a prison yard, and the uniformity of the little
landscape brought the same pain, as prison cells might cause, by their
want of variety. To travel away from the whole he could not, for he sat
with his roots In the earth, in his little impressions, his diet, and
he could not be removed with the root. It was the Norseman's tragic,
which uttered itself in longing for the south.
It was then that he commenced to think out a plan for connecting the
country, the island country,--for that it had a connection by Lapland
did not change the case--with the mainland. First there should be a six
hours' lightning train to Helsingborg and communication with a steam
ferry boat across the sound making the capital of Denmark the center of
the North. Ice free harbors on Djuro and Nynas with ice breakers should
keep commerce and navigation alive the whole year round; the northern
winter sleep would thereby be retrenched, and the national character,
unsteadiness, which is said to be owing to that six months interruption
of all activity, should change nature. The Russian commerce to England
should go through Stockholm and Gothenborg, and the old scheme of
Charles XI and Charles XII, to get the Persia and India trade over
Russia and Sweden would be realized.
Sweden should become a country for tourists, and foreigners would be
allured to her. He would change Stockholm to a seaport by closing the
lake Mälar at the North Bridge and the Sluice, and give it another
outlet through a system of canals leading to the cove of Trosa. Thereby
the salt water would come up to Stockholm, which would change the
atmosphere conditions and consequently the inhabitants.
But he remembered the time when Sweden, still belonging to the great,
universal Christian church, stood in direct communication with Rome
and thereby was of some account to Europe. He would, if it was shown
that religion could not be abandoned by the multitude, again introduce
this our forefathers' faith, which we with fire and sword had been
urged to abjure, and whose martyrs, Hans Brask, Olaus and Johannes
Magnus, Nils Dacke, and Ture Jonsson have become so shamefully soiled
in history. And Catholicism, the Roman legacy, the first promulgator
of the idea of Europeism had conquered all Europe. Bismarck had fallen
in the combat of culture, gone to Canossa and selected the Pope for
an arbitrator, as he had commenced to believe in arbitrations without
steel cannons. Denmark had built Catholic cathedrals, and the young
Danes had already lent their pens to the cause. The germanization of
the North like that of North Germany was only a relapse into barbarism
after the Hun battles of 1870 the consequences of which have become
manifest in persecution against Latin, and in French hate, which is
uttered in wars of extermination against French literature, in North
Germany family politics and Lutheran inquisition with prisons for
heretics and a general lowering of the level of intelligence.
Lutherism, that was the foe! Teutonic culture; bourgeois religion
in black pants, sectaristic narrowness, particularism, sundering,
intrenchment and spiritual death!
No, Europe should be one again, and the peoples' way be over Rome, the
way of intelligence over Paris!
The Swedish peasant should again feel himself as cosmopolitan and
leave his position in the under class, again get that glimpse of the
culture of beauty which the church formerly offered in pictures and
tunes; his divine service should be a true hymn in the Roman language,
composed by poets, and not compounded by hymn book makers and of which
he should understand exactly as little, as would awaken his highest
ideas about that which he nevertheless would not comprehend. His high
mass should be performed by real ministers, who devoted their life to
religion and the care of souls, and not to agriculture, dairy business,
whist playing and office work; and then the peasant's wife would get
a guardian of her soul, to whom she at confession could intrust her
sorrows instead of running into the kitchen of the parsonage and
gossiping about it to the servants.
And with the re-installment of Latin every Upsala student's
dissertation could be read as of old by the learned of Europe and every
Swedish investigator feel himself a member of the great universal
corporation of the intelligence under the pontificate in Paris.
This and other thoughts he put down on paper and laid it in the table
drawer, for he had not a newspaper, that would print them, least of all
the patriots who "from envy had no desire to receive projects for the
elevation of the country."
He had now got the answers to his circulars and had the attic room
filled with materials for his European ethnography. But now the subject
had lost its interest, and his soul had become sick in earnest, so
that he did not even dare go out. The aspect of a human being awoke
such a loathing, that he turned back home, if he only saw one. At the
same time grew the contemporary need of hearing his own voice and to
unload his over-productive brain by contact with another being, to feel
himself exerting influence on the life of others and to have company.
He had thought for a moment to get a dog, but to lay down deposits from
his soul and his feelings in an animal body was to graft grapes onto
thistles and he had never been allured by the sympathy of dirty, food
courting animals.
There was only one man for whom he felt a certain attraction, and
that was the married man of the custom house, Vestman, whose wife was
living in bigamy, without her husband's knowing it. He had an honest
look and an awakened intellect, and with him the commissioner had bound
the companionship by presenting him with a salmon trawl with hooks.
He had at the beginning of the summer lent him books and taught him
how to write after a copy, but since the fishing had been in force and
navigation had become lively, their paths had separated.
But in order to get the man to really place out the trawl the
commissioner would not tell him that it was for salmon, for then the
conservative fisherman would never concern himself with what was
according to his idea an absurd exploit without reward; therefore he
was left in the belief that the question was about a new remunerative
cod fishing; where the biggest fishes should be caught.
When the commissioner now after a month of isolation rowed out on the
sea with Vestman and he heard his own voice again, he observed that
from lack of use it had changed its tone and become thinner, so that
he fancied he heard a stranger talk. And now he intoxicated himself
with talking. His brain, which had only labored and produced by hand
and pen, broke now through the sluices of the windpipe, and all his
thoughts flowed out as in a stream, giving new births on the way,
and when he had got the chance to speak to a human being's ear for a
sounding board without being interrupted, without being questioned,
it was to him as though he had a comprehending listener before him.
And after their first outing he felt sure that Vestman was the most
intelligent person he had met for a long time.
Now he kept on for eight days and narrated during their excursions
about all the secrets of nature, explained the influence of the moon on
the surface of the water, and warned him not to believe that all that
the eyes saw was as it looked to be. Narrated, for example, that the
moon was pear shaped, although it looked like a bowl, and that one,
therefore, had no surety that the earth was ball shaped....
Here Vestman made a face and dared to raise an objection for the first
time.
"Yes, but it says so in my almanac anyhow."
The commissioner found that he had gone out too far and must return,
but it was too late, because to give a demonstration of the latest
investigations regarding the shape of the earth as being a three axled
ellipsoid, required knowledge in the listener, and therefore he must
change to another subject. He spoke of the mirage and used the occasion
to ask if they had visited Sword Island and seen what he had done there.
"Surely we have seen that something has been going on there, but nobody
lands there more, and both the draughting of nets and the pasturing of
sheep are spoiled," answered Vestman perfectly in accordance with truth.
After this confession the commissioner drew back, ashamed at having
been the victim of the delusion that his listener had understood what
he said. Fie had spoken against a wall and taken his own echo for the
other's voice.
* * * * *
Eight days later there was a great stir on the skerry, for Vestman had
caught a salmon of twenty-six pounds. And as he believed he was the
discoverer of this method of fishing, there was soon a notice in the
newspaper about a new livelihood for fishermen, now that the stromling
had begun to decrease. The happy fisherman, Eric Vestman of the custom
house service, had thereby made himself deserving of the esteem and
gratitude of his fellow citizens....
Shortly afterwards there occurred in a periodical for the people a
defamatory article about fish commissioners, who understand nothing,
but believe they have everything to teach.
Hereafter a writing soon followed from the Academy of Agriculture
to the commissioner with the request for a complete report of the
management of the fishing, especially the salmon fishing, to which the
commissioner only answered by handing in his resignation.
Without further interest for the population and without that little
support, which his former official position had given him, he soon
learned how the savages, who thought that he had "been discharged,"
commenced a perfect war of extermination against him. First they began
to cast his boat loose, under the pretense that there was no place on
the bridge, and it drifted to land and was broken to pieces.
During the next rainy weather he observed, that the rain came into the
attic room. And after he had complained to Oman it began to rain into
the other rooms, without his discovering a failing rooftile.
Shortly after this, one night, a burglary occurred in the cellar, and
the offenders were said to be Esthonians.
That their purpose was to drive him away was perfectly clear, but now
it amused him to defy them, and this he did by not making any further
remarks, and bearing everything.
But now when he was surrounded by real enemies and had in earnest
stepped out of the community, the fear of the banished came over him
with double force.
He slept poorly nights, notwithstanding he sought to regulate his
dreams by giving himself strong suggestions before sleeping. But
when he awoke, he had dreamed that he was a whistling buoy that had
torn lose, and drifted and drifted seeking a strand upon which to be
thrown. And in his sleep he had unconsciously sought support against
the sideboard of the bed to feel contact with some object, even if a
dead one. Sometimes he dreamed, that he fluttered in the air and could
neither go up nor down; and when he finally awoke after a fainting
attack he had grasped his hands round the pillow on which he had lain
his head. Now the memory of his dead mother began to come up, and he
awoke often from dreaming that he had lain as a child on her breast.
His soul was plainly in retrogression, and the memory of the mother the
source, the link between unconscious and conscious life, the consoler,
the interceder, came forth. Childhood's thoughts of meeting again in
another world came up, and his first plan of suicide expressed itself
as an irresistible longing to find again his mother somewhere in
another world, which he did not believe in.
All science was useless to a spirit going downwards, and which had
lost all interest in life; the brain had battled, until tired, and the
fantasy labored without a regulator.
Still he kept up until it was near Christmas; but he ate little and
took only ether at night. The whole life disgusted him, and he smiled
now at his former ambitions. The rain had destroyed his books and
papers; the apparatus had corroded and rusted.
The care of his own person had lessened, so that his whiskers had
grown, his hair remained unkempt, and he shunned water. He had not sent
his linen to be laundried for a long time, and he had lost the ability
to see dirt.
His clothes lacked buttons, and his coat was always spotted in front
from things spilt, for the hand that managed knife and fork no longer
obeyed the will.
When he went out sometimes, the children stood and made faces at him
and called him nicknames.
One morning he had the whole swarm of children around him. They pulled
his coat, and when he turned back, a stone was thrown, which hit his
chin so that the blood ran. Then he began to weep and begged them not
to be cross with him.
"Yes, you shall go away, you devilish fool," cried a boy of twelve
years, "lest we shall get you to the almshouse."
And so they all threw stones. But then Oman's maid came out and took
the boy by the hair, and when she had chastised him, she went to the
assailed and wiped the blood from his face with her apron.
"Poor little man!" said she.
Then he leaned his head towards her full bosom and said:
"I will sleep with you."
"Oh, shame!" snubbed the maid and pushed him away from her.