I sat on the beach one forenoon in midsummer. A great number of people
were doing much the same. The rhapsodists and orators, the blameless
Ethiopians with their barbaric instruments of music, the itinerant
magicians with their wands, the statuesque groups posed before the
tripod of the photographer, the snow-white sea-chariots with crimson
wheels, the bare-legged riders on antique steeds, made me fancy I was
gazing at a scene of Southern Hellenic life. Why I know not--for it
was not in the least like.
Then I saw an enormous black hand stretch down over the fjord. I was
not alarmed, for I am becoming accustomed to apparitions of this kind.
It set weird signs and black marks upon the railings of the jetty, and
on the white sides of the bathing machines, and on the sails of
the fishing-boats, and when I turned about, the parade itself was
plastered with tablets.
And on all things had the New Lawgiver incised in letters of gold
and azure and purple upon shining tables the new commandments:
"Use Skäuerskjin's Soap!"; "Try Tommeliden Tonic!"; "Buy Boömpvig's
Pills!"; "Ask for Baldersen's Hairwash!"
And I heard the voice of the wild waves saying, as they lapped up over
the cheap sandshoes and saturated paper bags full of gingerbread nuts:
"This is the new moral law. That men should cherish the outside and
insides of their bodies, and keep them clean, like precious vessels of
brass and copper. Rather to let the picturesque perish than forget for
a moment which is the best soap for the complexion, and which will not
wash clothes. Never to see a ship spreading her canvas like a sea
bird without associations of a Purifying Saline Draught or a Relishing
Pickle. To ask and see that ye procure!"
Then I looked into the heavens above me, and behold, high above the
esplanade hung a hand, enormous as the one that had set its marks
on everything below, but white, white; and it held a brush and wrote
until the sky was full of signs, and they had form and colour, but not
of this world, and those who ran could read them.
And I bought a shell-box and a bath bun, and closed my eyes, and
lay musing in an agony of soul. Suddenly I felt the pain snap,
and something grow in me, and I saw in my soul's dawning the great
half-opened shell of a strange oyster.
And this oyster has its bed on my very heart, and it is _my_ salt
tears that nourish it, and it grows _inside_, invisible to all but me.
But I know that, when the oyster opens, I shall find within its shell,
like a gleaming dove-coloured pearl, the great Panacea of the To Be;
and, if you ask me to explain my meaning more fully, I reply that the
bearings of this blind allegory lie in the application thereof, and
that ye are a blow-fly brood of dull-witted hucksters.
* * * * *