One evening some days later Vestman's maid ran down and begged
the Doctor to come up and see Vestman's wife, who was dying. The
request seemed somewhat unexpected to the commissioner, but with the
clear-sightedness which during intervals of light accompanied his
sickness, he perceived that here a murder had been committed and
that they would use his name and title instead of a legal medical
examination. The case was immaterial to him, but it aroused him for a
moment. Something had happened, and the unusual had made a long needed
impression. He therefore went up to the custom house cottage and was
received by both brothers, who showed him into the sick room with a
politeness, which seemed to the commissioner extremely suspicious.
But he said nothing, asked nothing, for he would draw out the vague
confession by constraining the husband to speak first, sure that he
would betray himself at the first word.
By a tallow candle sat the child eating a cookie, which had not been
given her without an object, and she was dressed in her best clothes,
probably so that she should feel solemn and appear in a constrained
manner.
After the commissioner had looked around the room and observed that
Vestman's brother had sneaked out, he stepped up to the bed where the
woman lay.
He saw at once that she was dead, and by the contracted muscles of her
face he understood that some violence had been committed, and when he
also observed that her hair was carefully combed over the top of her
head, he understood at once that the old, good way with the nail had
been used.
But he would have the man speak first, and with half open lips and
questioning eyes, just as though he would ask something, he turned to
Vestman. This at once put him off his guard, and relying, that he need
no longer be sly with one who was insane, he said:
"Can't the Doctor testify that she is gone, so that we shall be
permitted to bury her at once, for you see, we poor cannot afford to
call a physician out here."
More was not needed to give half a surety. But instead of answering the
commissioner turned half whispering towards the man who was perfectly
calm after he had delivered his errand:
"Where is the hammer?"
At first the man flew backwards two steps, as if he would strangle his
opponent, who still disarmed him by casting a glance at the girl, after
which the husband stood still shivering.
"You do not know where the hammer is, but I know where the nail is
driven," the commissioner continued with an immovable calm. "Over
prudent asses, who cannot invent anything new, and like children always
hide on the same place, when they play goal. I am convinced that this
nailing the brain was invented by a nobleman or a priest during the
Middle Ages and has now sunk down to the under class, where it is dug
up as a sample of the peoples' craftiness. Everything comes from above,
salmon, arsenic, nails, accidental shootings, revolutions, personal
liberty, financial well being, ballads, folk-lore, farmers' almanacs,
anthropological museums, but they are first stolen, for you mob prefer
to steal rather than take a gift, for you are too paltry to be willing
to give thanks. And therefore you place your benefactors in an asylum,
and your noblemen on the scaffold. Place me now in an asylum, and you
will escape prison!"
Coming down to the cottage he remembered that the pleasure of speaking
what he thought had allured him to an imprudent act, and with knowledge
of the peoples' character he knew that self-defense against a dangerous
witness might determine the murderer to put him to silence. He slept,
therefore, during the night with a revolver in the bed and was awakened
by bad dreams.
The following day he remained locked in and saw how white sheets hung
at the windows in the custom house cottage. The third day the body was
brought out and taken away on a boat, and the fourth day the men came
back again. He did not sleep any more now, and insomnia completed the
work of destruction. The fear of becoming insane and being placed in an
asylum, mixed with the apprehension of being assassinated at any time,
confirmed his decision to step out of life voluntarily. Now, when death
approached and the end of life, of a family, stood forth in its gloom,
it was as though the propensity of generation sprang up, and found
utterance in the longing to own a child. But to go the whole trite
way to search for a woman, and bind himself by family to the earth
and community, was against him more than ever, and in his frail, torn
condition he speculated out a shorter way, which would give him family
pleasure, if only for a few hours.
In a roundabout way, at which his sense of delicacy would have revolted
a few months before, he procured after some waiting the seed of a human
being, and then he constructed a _couveuse,_ under the microscope which
could be kept at a temperature from thirty-six to forty-one degrees
Celsius. When fecundation had taken place, he saw how the males were
swarming round the immovable female, which he imagined he saw blushing.
And now they crowded, pushed, whipped each other in the battle to give
impetus to a generation to propagate his talents, inoculating his rich,
productive spirit on a buxom, rank, wild substratum. But it was not
the largest, those with big, stupid heads and thick tails, it was the
quickest, the agile, the most fiery, who first penetrated the membrane
to push into the nucleus.
With the screw of the alcohol lamp under his thumb and one eye on the
thermometer he looked at this unveiled mystery of love for a couple
of hours. Saw, how the cells commenced to cleave, how the division
of labor between the different segments had already taken place and
he waited with uneasiness for the anterior end of the medullary tube
to swell into a bulb, which would constitute the primary brain; he
dreamed that he could see this forge of thought arching beautifully,
and he felt for a moment a pride at his creation, which solved the
problem of Homunculus, when a movement on the screw of the lamp
caused the white of the egg to coagulate and the spark of life to be
extinguished.
He had lived so intensely this other being's life during these moments,
that now, when he saw the round, dull, white spot on the glass, it was
to him, as if he beheld the sunken eye of death, and magnified in his
sickly senses the grief grew to sorrow, the sorrow over his dead child:
the band between this and the future was severed, and he no longer had
power to do it over.
When he awoke and came to his senses, he felt a strong warm hand
grasping his right hand, and he remembered having dreamed, how he was a
stranded vessel, which was tossed on the waves--between sky and water,
until he finally felt the anchor chain pulling and perceived a calm, as
if again bound to firm earth.
Without looking up he pressed the firm hand to feel the attachment
with a living being, and he imagined that he observed, how powers were
transferred to him through the frailer nerve currents fastening onto
the stronger.
"How is it with you?" he heard the preacher's voice above his head.
"If thou wert a woman instead, I should live again, for woman is man's
root in the earth," answered the sick man, using thou for the first
time to his old comrade.
"Thank fortune, that you have lost the rotten root!"
"Without root we cannot grow and bloom."
"But with such a woman, Borg!"
"Such a one? Do you know who she was? I have never found out."
"Yes, then you only need to know, that she was such a one, that a man
never marries. But now she is engaged anyhow...."
"To him?"
"To him! It was in yesterday's paper."
After a moment's silence the preacher would arise and go, but the sick
man held him fast.
"Tell me a fairy tale," said he in a childish, touching voice.
"Hm! A fairy tale?"
"Yes, a fairy tale! About sprites, for example. Do this, I beg of you!"
The preacher sat down again, and when he saw that the sick man was in
earnest, he let him have his way and narrated.
The commissioner listened with the greatest attention, but when the
preacher, faithful to his habit, would give some moral erudition, he
was interrupted by the sick man, who begged him to keep to the text.
"It is so good to hear old tales," said he; "it is like rest and to
sink back into best memories of the time, when one was a little animal
and loved the useless, the nonsensical, the meaningless. Repeat the
Lord's Prayer for me now!"
"You don't believe in the Lord's Prayer?"
"No, not more than in the fairy tales: but it will do just as much good
anyhow and when death approaches and one is going back again, one loves
the old and becomes conservative. Repeat the Lord's Prayer. You shall
have what I leave and your note back, if you repeat it."
The preacher hesitated a moment. Then he began to read.
The sick man at first listened quietly, afterwards his lips followed
the sound in motion and finally spoke aloud and with a prayerful tone.
When they had finished, the colporteur said: "It is good to pray, I
believe!"
"It is like medicine. The words, the old words, awake memories and give
powers, the same powers as they formerly gave to the powerless, who
sought God outside himself. Do you know what God is? It is Archimedes
wishing for a fixed point outside, by the support of which he could
lift the earth. It is the imagined magnet in the earth, without which
the movement of the needle would be unexplainable. It is that ether,
which must be invented so that the vacant space can be filled. It is
the molecule, without which the laws of chemistry would be miracles.
Give me a little more hypotheses before anything else the fixed point
outside myself, for I am entirely loose."
"Do you wish me to speak of Jesus?" asked the preacher, who believed
that the sick man was irrational.
"No, not of Jesus! It is either a tale or a Hypothesis. It is a
device of revengeful slaves and evil women; it is the God of the
mollusks opposed to the vertebrates ... but wait, am I not myself a
mollusk. Speak of Jesus! Tell of how he accompanied custom house men
and dissolute women, as I have been obliged to do. Speak of how the
spiritually poor shall own heaven, because they had no power on earth;
and how he taught artisans to waste the time and, beggars, sluggards,
prodigal sons, who owned nothing, to share with the industrious, who
owned something."
"No. You blasphemer, I am not sitting here as a fool for you!"
interrupted the preacher and arose in earnest.
"Do not go, do not go!" cried the sick man. "Hold my hand and let me
hear your voice. Speak what you please! Read! Read in the almanac or
the Bible, it is immaterial to me. _Horror vacui_, fear of the empty
nothing must away!"
"See thou, that thou hast a fear of death?"
"Surely I have that just as every living thing, which without the fear
of death never would have lived, but the doom, you see, I do not fear,
for the work judges the master, and I have not created myself."
The colporteur had gone!
* * * * *
It was the day before Christmas eve, when he after a stormy night,
during which he believed he had heard cannon shots and cries of human
beings, went out to walk on the newly fallen snow. The heavens were
blue black as an iron sheet, and the waves were heaving against the
strand While the whistling buoy cried in a single uninterrupted howl,
as if it called for help.
And now he saw out on the sea to the south-east a big, black steamer,
with cinnabar red bottom shining as a torn and bloody breast. The
funnel with its white ring lay broken on one side, and in the masts and
yards dark figures were hanging, twisted as angleworms on hooks.
From a crack midships could be seen how the waves tore out chests,
parcels, bales, boxes and sunk the heaviest, but carried the lighter
ones to shore.
With an indifference for the fate of the shipwrecked, such as that one
must feel, who regards it lucky to die, he went forwards on the strand
and came out on the point, where the pile of stones and the cross
stood. There the waves foamed more furiously than elsewhere, and on the
green water he saw scattered objects of strange shape and color, over
which the mews circled with spiteful cries, as though they had been
deceived in their greedy waiting for prey.
After he had regarded the curious objects, which came nearer, he saw
that they resembled very small children, very finely dressed. Some had
blond bangs, others black, their cheeks were rose and white, and their
big, open blue eyes, glanced up to the black sky, immovable and without
winking. But when they came nearer the strand, he observed, that when
they swung on the wave, the eyes of some of them moved, as if they
signaled to him, that he should rescue them. And on the next wave five
were thrown upon the strand.
He had his desire so fixed to own a child and so rooted in his soft
brain, that he was not led to the thought, that they were dolls, which
the delayed and stranded vessel had brought for the Christmas season,
and he collected his arms full of the small orphan children, whom the
sea, the great mother, gave him. And with his wet protégées pressed
to his breast he hurried back to the cottage to dry them. But he had
nothing to make a fire with, for the people had said they had no wood
to sell. He himself did not feel the cold, but his little Christmas
company should have it warm, and therefore he broke a book shelf to
pieces, and made a flaming fire in the big fireplace, pulled out the
sofa and placed the five little ones in a row before the fire. After he
comprehended that they could not dry without being undressed, he began
to take off their clothes, but when he saw that they were all girls, he
left their small chemises on.
Now he washed their feet and hands with his sponge, and afterwards
combed their hair, dressed them and laid them to sleep.
It was as though he had company in the cottage, and he walked on tiptoe
not to wake them.
He had found something to live for, something to cherish, to give his
sympathy to, and when he regarded the small sleepers a moment and saw
that they lay with open eyes, he thought that the light pained them,
therefore he let the window shades down.
When it became dusk in the room, there came over him a heavy desire to
sleep, which was caused from hunger, although he could not now place
the cause of the sensation in the right place and thus did not know,
when he was hungry or thirsty. However, as the sofa was occupied by
the little ones, he laid down on the floor and slept.
When he awoke, it was dark in the room, but the door was open, and a
woman stood with a lighted lantern on the threshold.
"Heavenly father, he is lying on the floor," Oman's maid was heard to
break out. "But, dear sir, don't you know it is Christmas eve to-day?"
He had slept a day and a night and into the next day.
Unconsciously he arose, missing something, for the custom house men had
been down and confiscated the strand goods, but he could not remember
what he missed. He felt only a dreadful emptiness as though under a
great sorrow.
"Now he shall come up to Oman's and eat the Christmas rice pap, for one
is still a Christian being on Christmas eve. Oh, heavenly father, such
misery!"
And the girl began to cry.
"To see a human being so wrecked, is enough to make one shed tears of
blood! Come now! Come now!"
The half insane man made only a sign that he would come, if she would
go first.
When she had gone, he tarried a moment in the cottage, took the lantern
she had left and went to the looking glass. When he saw his face,
which resembled a savage's, his understanding seemed to light up, and
his will expand for a last effort.
Leaving the lantern, he went out.
The wind had turned west and slackened somewhat, the air was clear, and
the stars of heaven sparkled. Guided by the lights from the cottages he
went down to the harbor, sneaked into a boat house and took out sails
to a boat.
After he had hoisted the sail, he threw the painter loose, took the
tiller and kept for aft-wind straight out to sea.
He made a tack to look once more on the little fragment of the earth,
where he had last suffered, and when he saw a three branched candle in
the custom house window, where the murderer celebrated the birthday
of Jesus, the forgiver, the idol of all criminals and wretches, who
licensed everything wicked that the civil law punished, he turned back
and spat, pulled the sheet and made full sail. With his back towards
land he steered out under the great starry map and took bearings
from a star of the second magnitude between the Lyre and Corona in
the east. It seemed to him that it shone brighter than any other,
and when he searched in memory, there came a glimpse of something
about the Christmas star, the guiding star to Bethlehem, where three
dethroned kings pilgrimaged as fallen great ones to worship their
own insignificance in the smallest child of human being and which
afterwards became the declared god of all little ones. No, it could
not be that star, for as a punishment to the Christian wizards for
having spread darkness over the earth, not a single dot of light on the
arch of heaven bears the name of any one of them, and therefore they
celebrated the darkest time of the year--so sublimely ridiculous!--to
light wax tapers! Now as his memory cleared up--it was the star _Beta_
in Hercules. Hercules, Hella's moral ideal, the god of vigor and
prudence, who killed the Lernean hydra with its hundred heads, who
cleaned Augias' stable, captured Diomedes' bullocks which devoured
human beings, who tore the girdle from the Amazon queen, fetched
Cerebus up from Hades, to finally fall for a woman's stupidity, who
poisoned him from pure love, after he in lunacy had served the nymph
Omphale for three years....
Out towards the one that at least had been placed in heaven, who never
let anyone strike him or spit in his face without man-like to strike
and spit back, out towards the self-destroyer, who could only fall
by his own strong hand without begging for mercy from the chalice,
out towards Hercules, who freed Prometheus, the light giver, who was
himself the son of a god and a woman, and who was afterwards falsified
by savages to be the son of a virgin, whose birth was greeted by milk
drinking shepherds and braying asses.
Out to the new Christmas star led the way, out over the sea, the mother
of all, from the womb of whom life's first spark was kindled, the
inexhaustible spring of fecundity and love, life's origin and life's
foe.