When the son could not refute these bitter truths with rational arguments, declaring that his feelings, yes his most sacred feelings, rose against such a dry tenet, the father declared him to be a hornet which was still thinking with ganglia, and he warned him against dissolute fancies, or conclusions on insufficient ground and want of great material, not to be mistaken for scientific quick-reasoning, where from seemingly few premises—appearing few because the middle terms were omitted—new conclusions could be drawn, when, as if by a chemical union, two older ideas enter each other and form a new thought. Ontogenism had shown how the human fœtus was developed through all the earlier stages from the amœba through the frog and up to the anthropomorphic, how then could the youth question but that the spirit of a child must pass through the history of man through the animal and the savage upward, as long as the body was growing and that consequently man stood far ahead of youth! He warned him especially not to let the lowest of all our propensities, the sexual impulse cloud his judgment, for by its power it had so long dazzled sound reason, that erudite men still bore the superstition that woman was as high a type as man, yes even higher according to the opinion of some men, whereas she really is but an intermediate form between man and child, as is shown by the fœtal development, where the male at a certain stage is female but the female never male. To warn the young man of the danger of being over-powered by sexual impulses, was the same as to cast a shadow on woman, and the son soon commenced to make what the father called ganglionic conclusions, the bearing of which was that the Lieutenant-Colonel was a woman hater. And how could he do otherwise, when always hearing his father narrating how this or that man had thrown away his future on affairs with women, and how great geniuses had wasted their talents by procreation, and sacrificed happiness and position for a wife, who had been faithless and children who died before of mature age. Propagation was only for the lesser spirits, the greater ones should live in their works, and so forth.
Under such guidance the son grew up. He was born an unusually delicate child but with a harmoniously developed body; he had finely organized senses, quick and sure perception, keen understanding and a nobility of mind which manifested itself in forbearance and approachableness to mankind. He understood early how to regulate his life, to suppress the plant and animal propensities, and when he had accumulated a vast material of observations and knowledge, he began to work it up. His brain soon showed its prolific capacity—from a couple of known quantities to find the wanted unknown, from old thoughts to produce new ones, in a word the capacity of what is called originality. He was the coming regenerator and possessed ability to see the inter-relations in disorder, to discover the invisible force behind the phenomena, and even the concealed and extremely compound motives in the actions of men. Therefore his schoolmates looked upon him with suspicion, and the teachers discerned in him a silent critic of what they communicated as unalterable facts.
His arrival at the university occurred contemporarily with the great popular movements which concerned the parliamentary reform. Borg perceived well the defects of the representation by a four-class system, while the state consists of at least twenty classes with different interests and different abilities to judge in so complicated a problem as that of the government of a people, but on the other hand he could not consent to revert to the organization of the hord or tribe where everybody had equally much or equally little to say. He perceived at once that this simplifying of the method of governing, where the multitude should do it was not a reform suited to the needs of the time, moreover he had lately seen the right of universal suffrage in France produce an Emperor and a sham representation of lawyers, merchants and army officers, with the exclusion of laborers, farmers, savants and scientific men, thus only three classes, arbitrarily selected by the Emperor, were represented. He had calculated that the most correct would be a perfect class representation with proportional rights of representation, well balanced according to the interests of the respective classes and with due consideration given to the highest interests, or the higher right of the wise to own the preponderance, as they promote progress more than the ignorant. This, to be sure, the authors of the two chamber systems had already had in mind, when they perceived the necessity of referring questions to committees and disentangling certain questions by special committees, even by committees of experts. To complete the assembly, so that all interests would be guarded and all points taken and all information of the condition of the realm made accessible, each class of people, from the highest to the lowest, should elect representatives in proportion partly to their numbers and partly to their importance for the advancement of the country as a whole. Neglecting the Royal Court, which together with the monarch ought to be assorted under the foreign department, to which they properly belong, for the monarch is only permitted to represent the nation before foreign powers, this consultative, though not a legislative, class parliament would be constructed as follows, viz., First class: land owners and renters, tenants, overseers, foremen on farms and so forth. The second class: operators of mines and quarries, manufacturers and their laborers. Third class: merchants, mariners, pilots, hotel owners, porters, hackmen, and all employed in banks, custom houses, postal service, railroads and telegraphs. Fourth class: civil and military officers, clergymen, with servants, janitors and privates. Fifth class: savants, teachers, literateurs, and artists. Sixth class: physicians, apothecaries, superintendents of poorhouses. Seventh class: house owners, capitalists and rentiers.
In what proportion to elect from each class was the question, which could not be solved off hand, but it was necessary that skillful men with knowledge in the science of government should probe the new order of representation, which would therefore only and always be provisional. Over this consultative assembly should sit a council of specialists in the science of government, who had been professionally trained for that difficult calling, so that this most complicated of all arts would not be pursued by bunglers and enterprising amateurs, as had hitherto been done, and statesmen's accession to office would be preceded by a careful investigation of their past life, their private financial and social situation. This would spur youth to self-education and heedfulness of what they were doing, and would form a body of excellent men, while so called irreproachable conduct, or negative virtue, without talents would not as hitherto be the short cut to advancement. This would constitute the new nobility which would succeed the old military and court nobility, and the fact that this nobility established itself only through a natural selection of the fittest was a guarantee that the country would be ruled in the best manner. The Reichstag by only having to vote an opinion, not any decision, would thus furnish a vast material of investigation, not a legionary army that could be bribed and wheedled to commit voting outrages.
The young man, however, was too prudent to express his opinions, at a period, when noblemen were synonymous with the degenerated, left behind and blasé, and the masses were pushing so blindly forward that the mechanics were the ones that worked mostly into the hands of their coming class enemies, the peasants; a prudent man could only smile and wait. And he waited until he saw the four-chamber system succeeded by a one-class representation, when the realm was henceforth governed by the former peasantry alone. These historical events had, however, a very great influence in directing the young man's thoughts and development. He had there seen in what terrible confusion the thought mechanism of the majority was, and when he read the protocols of the Reichstag, and noticed the speeches of the most influential and brilliant speakers, he observed that what he called ganglionic reasoning, causing valvular contraction and congestion of the heart, exerted the greatest influence on the public opinion. It seemed to him sometimes as though it was not the question of the fatherland or progress, but only the motionary's triumph to gain his own will by fallacies, gross blunders in logic and hideous distortions of facts. In him was aroused, through observation, the great suspicion that everything was intended as a struggle for power, for the enjoyment of using the power of the brain for putting other brains into consonance, of sowing seeds of thought in the brain bark of others, where they would grow as parasites like the mistletoe, while the mother tree would proudly lift her shoulders at the thought that the parasites up in the crown still were nothing but parasites. This was the foundation of his ambition, to satisfy which required knowledge and experience through study, travel and conversation with learned and illustrious men. In the midst of this eternally movable chaos of contending forces and interests, he sought a place of anchorage for his being, the center of the sphere which reality threw around him—in himself. Instead of, like weak Christians assuming an external support in God, he took the real, palpable in his own self and sought to create his personality to a perfect type of man whose life and deeds would not violate anyone's rights, convinced that the fruit of a well-nursed tree could not fail to be of use and rejoicing to others. All the confusion and awkwardness that he saw in the struggles of those who say they are living for others while in reality they only live on others, on others' gratitude, others' opinion and others' acknowledgment, he avoided, holding his own straight course convinced that a single great and strong individual could not help doing more good than these masses of thoughtless people whose numbers stand in inverse ratio to their usefulness.
By this setting of hisegohe enforced a norm for his life, which led him to a high degree of morality, for, instead of relinquishing the final settlement to the uncertain hereafter, he regulated his deeds so that he had nothing left unsettled, he did not shift the blame from himself to an innocently suffering Christ, but in conscious self-responsibility he committed no acts that would awaken the need of a scapegoat.
Thereby he learned to rely only upon himself and never to take advice, always reflecting on the probable consequences of an act. This did not prevent him from suffering with nervousness like his generation, which was born and brought up during the period of steam and electricity when the vital activity was increased in speed. How could it be otherwise considering that he must destroy millions of old brain cells, storages for antiquated impressions, that every moment when he would form a judgment, he must carefully sift out superannuated axioms, which tried to come forward as premises. It was a work of total reconstruction which caused these disorders in the nervous system which are all laid to our ancestors' alcoholism and sexual excesses, but which pathological symptom was an uttering of increased vitality accompanied by extreme sensibility, like the crawfish when it shifts its shell, or the bird when molting. It was the regeneration of a genus or at least a variety of man which appeared to the old as diseased or unsound because it was in a process of development, something that they were disinclined to acknowledge as they themselves would be the norm and called themselves sound, although they were in a state of decomposition.
This nervous sensibility of the growing youth was enhanced by moderation in eating and drinking, and vigorous disciplining of the sexual desires. He found it debasing to place oneself into the ungovernable state of a lunatic or a savage through the use of fermented drinks, and his soul was far too aristocratic to play a moment's illicit love with a prostitute. With this, however, followed an increasing acuteness of the senses and a sensibility to disagreeable impressions which sometimes brought him disgust where others of a coarser nature would have found enjoyment.
Thus he felt abased for a few hours when his morning coffee was not strong enough, and a poorly painted billiard ball or a soiled cue constrained him to turn away in search of another place. A badly wiped glass raised his loathing and he felt the smell of human being on a newspaper which another had read, while he could on others' furniture see human grease deposited on the polish, and he always opened the window when the maid had arranged the room. However, if he was traveling and necessity constrained, then he could shut off, as it were, all conduits from his organs of perceptions and harden himself against all disagreeable sensations.
When he had completed his studies at the University, in natural science, that least dependent of all sciences, because opinion plays a lesser roll than a collection of material, he received a place as assistant in the Royal Academy of Science.
He had applied for a situation here for the purpose of obtaining a view of the kingdoms of nature, collected and classified in one place, and if possible to read therein and discover the great connection if there was any, or the universal confusion which probably was there. His intentions soon became manifest, especially when he could no longer avoid the danger of their enticing from him, his project to classify the birds after an entirely different method than the current one. The professors, who of course did not want to be lowered to collectors of material for a young man, and were not willing to become obsolete with their works, took an instinctive aversion to the scrutinizer. The first obstacle to the intruder was made by placing him to detail work of a subordinate character which was disgusting to his sense of beauty, during six months he had to change alcohol in the fish collection; at first he was retching from the nauseating odor, but after he had overcome this disagreeable perception he turned furiously to the study of the fishes, and as he worked rapidly he had inside of the half year thoroughly studied the great material. He had been standing the whole winter in a cold, dirty and semi-dark kitchen where he had been smelling bad alcohol, frozen his hands and contracted a severe chronic cystitis.
Afterwards he was set to writing labels for the algæ. As he had received no instructions in calligraphy at the University and by nature he had a wreak, unsteady hand, all the labels were discarded and he gained the name of being useless.—He could not even write.—But in two months, during which time he attended a writing school, and in the evenings sat at home over writing book and copy, he acquired a beautiful and legible hand and at the same time gained a more complete knowledge of the algæ than he had before, while into the bargain he learned the inestimable art of penmanship. The professors who had thought he would reject such subordinate work soon saw what kind of grit he had and that he understood how to use all adversities for his benefit, increasing his knowledge while turning aside softly from the leash and warding off the blows.
His improved penmanship was to be a new source of humiliations, for he was now placed at copying office records and letters, sinking finally, as they believed, to an ordinary copyist's rôle. Without complaining he took the occupation and, at the same time learning foreign languages, he had the opportunity of glancing into the secrets of all these great men, which they thought would be worthless to him. Thus he saw the scientific questions of the period, debated through correspondence and he discovered the ways to the secret meetings of learned societies, gained knowledge about the subterranean passages to distinction, and the opportunities to make his investigations fruitful. Thus he was unassailable, and just as they believed they had crushed him he arose again.
It was owing to this double quality of nobleman and independent thinker, that he became isolated. His name did not sound scientific and his fine and modern way of dressing was taken as a proof of unscientific sense by those who remembered Berzelius' ragged pants; his patient and apparent submission was taken as inferiority, and all his meditations over science, as poetical effusions. Regretting to have let him come behind the curtain, and in order to press him down again they now placed him at another work which had been rejected by every newcomer, and was called the proving stone. There was in the garret a remnant collection of stones and minerals, which had come together partly through gifts and legacies and partly through circumnavigations and explorations, and as most of it had been discarded as duplicates, at a time when geology was in its infancy, increasing knowledge demanded that they again be overhauled and assorted. They were placed in an attic room beneath the rooftiles and lay in a big heap decidedly covered with dust and cobwebs. Borg who must now stand bent beneath the heated rooftiles and inhale the dust, was about to give it up, but when on the second day he found a new mineral which he suspected to be unknown, he at once applied himself to the work and started classifying. During this he made observations which shook his already faint belief in the whole system of the science, and he commenced seeing that the stones were not classified by nature but it was the brain that classified the phenomena. Besides, everything might be classified if one could only decide upon a basis of division, and he soon saw that the basis employed here was not the most rational one, the very foundation being an unsettled hypothesis; for instance, that the primitive rocks had been formed through melting by fire, contrasting with the stratified rocks which were positively regarded as deposited in water; but some of the primitive rocks were also stratified like the younger sedimentary formations; then he found that all of it was twisted and guessed at and the whole system founded on guess work. In the meanwhile he had analyzed his mineral and found that it was hitherto unknown, whereupon he gave it to the professor who sent it to the Berlin Academy and got his name attached to the new mineral. Borg received no thanks, no mention, only a few taunting words from the professor. Irritated thereby he undertook himself to describe the next mineral which he found to be new and sent it to Lyell; his paper was read in the Geological Society, of which he was made a member. Comrades and superiors pretended to be ignorant of his success, which was in a measure disparaging to the professor who had overlooked the unknown mineral, and now repugnance grew into hate which developed to persecution. But he turned aside, made himself invisible and worked. This collection of minerals being gathered from all countries in Europe, and as Borg understood how to give to each discovery a touch of direct usefulness for the science of mining in the respective countries, he succeeded in two years to gain membership in most of the learned societies of Europe, and was decorated with badges of the Italian Crown Order, the French "Instruction publique," the Austrian Leopold order and the Russian St. Annae order, second class. But nothing availed among his surroundings, and the laughter increased at each mark of distinction which was nevertheless merited. When they could not deny the facts, they underrated their value or pretended to be ignorant of what had happened, which, however, did not prevent them from using his trodden path in their own hunt.
When at last after seven years of tormenting service he inherited a legacy from his father, who had died, and he retired from service to travel abroad as a private man, he heard alternately that he had failed in his calling and that it was a pity that he did not become anything, or that he had been discharged from office. It was with boundless disdain for human beings that he left his country to continue his studies abroad. In hotels and pensions all over Europe he met many, kinds of people with whom he formed acquaintances which were soon broken by circumstances. But everywhere he saw how people of the same period expressed the same mind about the same things, pronounced the opinion of the majority as their own, spoke phrases in place of thoughts, and he discovered thereby that it really was the thoughts of a few spirits that were ruminated by the masses. Thus he found that all geologists spoke Agassiz' and Lyell's ideas from 1830 and '40, all religious free thinkers exhaled Renan and Strauss, all brisk politicians were living on Mill or Buckle, and all who spoke up-to-date literature cast up Taine. It was then only a few main batteries which had an annunciator and which could through the conducting wires from their talents set all the small bells tinkling. Through this he soon came to the domain of psychology, visited spiritualists, hypnotizers and mind readers, saw behind these swindles some new discoveries which would surely change humanity in its mode of living thoughtlessly as cattle, perhaps contribute towards adjusting the thought mechanism, and show that this whole battle about opinions is only a strife for the power to set other people's brains in motion, to force the masses to think as I. He had been a witness to scientific encounters which had resulted in a conquest for the wrong opinion, only because the victor had sufficient authority and was supported by a majority. He had seen political and religious combats and in a legislation directly contrary to sound reason and justice, founded on approved errors, which were inherited by succeeding generations as self-evident truths.
Yes, surely it concerned only how to make one's own will valid, and the whole driving power behind the vindication of opinions were interest and passion. Interest, it was nothing else than need, a need of food and love, and to gain these required a certain amount of power. Whoever did not strive for power was a weak one, whose desire of life was attenuated, therefore the weak was always heard to demand rights, the rights of the weak, while there was only a mathematical justice given, an arithmetical truth, for the calculating of which was required a strong mind capable of emancipating itself from the delusions of interest and passions. When he searched his inner self and compared himself with a great many others, he found that through a strict self-education he had freed his judgment to a high degree, and that in him was a specially developed thrift to seek abstract justice, that truth which consists in the actual conditions, the pith of fact, why he called himself a friend of truth in the highest sense, although not prompted thereby to tell all his thoughts abroad nor prevented from replying to importunate questions, when need be, with a prevarication.
In order to trace more closely the organization of the man-brute he designed a special study of the mental faculties of all the lower animals and thus guided himself up to man. He then made a ledger over all the individuals that came in his way, from relatives, nurses, maids, to schoolmates, university comrades, society friends and superiors, in one word all who came within the circle of his observation. This he completed through a collection of personalia, baptismal certificates, and the testimonies of their acquaintances; he wrote down their equation and tried a solution of the problem of their life. It was an incredible amount of working material. When he had straightened out the confusion he saw that the human beings could be divided just as the animals and plants into large classes, orders and families according to the basis chosen. By taking several bases he came pretty near to the truth and threw the fullest illumination upon the object of his observation.
Among other things he made a diagram of the human beings, with three subdivisions, conscious, self-deceivers and unconscious. The conscious or initiated stood highest, had discerned the deceit and believed in nothing and nobody, and were usually called skeptics, feared and hated by the self-deceivers, but recognized each other at once and usually parted with the word rascal, and reciprocal accusations of bad motives. As self-deceivers he counted all religious believers, hypnotic mediums, prophets, party chiefs, politicians, charity spirits, and the whole swarm of weak ambitious ones who pretend to live for others. To the unconscious belonged children, most criminals, most women and some idiots, all of whom still live on the semi-mammalian plane without the ability to distinguish between subject and object.
Proceeding from another basis, or by ontogenesis from the fœtus up to the highest standard of man, he got as the result, children, youths, women and men.
He also used to search among his countrymen for ancestral race marks, distinguished the central Swedes from the southern Swedes, could see the Norwegian in the Vermlanders and Bohus-landers, pointed out the Finn in some of the Norrlanders, kept record of immigrated Germans, Wallons, Shemites and gypsies, which often gave him the key to various traits in otherwise inexplicable characters.
He also had another basis for a division of characters according to the dominant, as he called it, and he got the nutritive as the lowest group including epicures, drunkards and the avaricious, the sexualic or licentious, the affective or sensitive, and the intellectual or thinkers who stood highest.
This science he developed to a high degree, and after some time acquired the ability to judge human beings and give their equations. To verify the truth of his observations he used himself as a psychological preparation, cut himself up bodily, experimented with himself and grafted fistulas and fontanelles, subjecting himself to unnatural and often repulsive spiritual diet, but carefully guarded faults of observation, and avoided forming a norm for others by his own sayings and doings.
When he had finally become weary of traveling abroad, and his soul was longing for itsmilieu, he returned home to seek a sphere of activity. As it was immaterial to him what his occupation might be he applied for the position of fish commissioner. As they were not anxious to have him too near he was appointed as the first man of the inlet to Stockholm.
Here he awoke from the review of his evolution, from which he used to regenerate himself by hastily living his life over again, thereby tracing, as it were, his standpoint and, calculating his resources, he cleared his course onward to his probable destiny and his prospects of succeeding in his enterprises.
The pilot, who in the meantime had rowed the boat behind the rocks and in lee of the ice cakes, had already decided that the Doctor, who was sitting with introverted, expressionless eyes, was a little freaky, took the occasion to ask if they should turn toward the harbor, whereto the commissioner nodded consent.
Once more he glanced at the magnificent panorama yonder, where the ice floes were driven onward, rent asunder, packed themselves, crowded together, pushed over each other, turned on edge, changed their horizontal position to big upheavals and tilting of the strata, forming mountains, dales and hills. It seemed to him as though he beheld the earth's crust being born, when on the incandescent sea the first hard cake was broken to pieces, driven forward, pushed on edge, piled in heaps to form the primitive mountains, skerries, rocks, islets, which were but enormous packs of ice, icebergs, although formed from another mineral than water. Over this repetition of the history of creation vibrated the primitive, undivided white light of the ice beside the deep blue of air and water, the first breaking of the darkness, and here the God of the saga of creation who separated light from darkness, came forth as a sensible explanation to his investigating mind. Once again the first attempt at harmonious sounds of the reptiles, now transformed into birds, rang out over the watery circle, the limitation of himself, which must be the center wherever he went....
The boat floated into harbor, the smoke was rising from the chimneys, it was dinner time.
One Sunday forenoon the fish commissioner sat at his open window; the early summer had just come, there was a light blue color on the water and a faint verdure in the crevices of the rocks, on the insignificant remains of lichens and mosses. The flocks of birds had gone north and only segregated pairs of eider ducks were swimming, two by two, in the coves. The great solitude, as he called the Baltic Sea, impressed him this day as he saw one vessel after another steering southward under foreign flags with lively colors, perhaps coming accidentally, perhaps regularly, all of these flags more luminous than the poor blue and tawny yellow which is so easily soiled. He saw the exciting tricolor on a brig which was lumber laden from Norrland, where it had recently been with wine and oranges and was now passing down to more sunny and populous coasts. The enfeebled dannebrog on a butter schooner lay in the wake of a great German mail steamer carrying white bunting with mourning border and the Crown mark like the ace of spades, above something of red color. England's blood red standard, the Spanish awning cloth, America's King cotton ticking, each of these was a greeting from so many foreign nations to which he felt more affianced than to those strangers whom he was condemned to call countrymen, for he had a right to carry all of these colors on his gala coat but not his own country's. And to-day, it seemed, these reminders of his cosmopolitan citizenship came to him more invigorating than usual, as during the last few days of his exile in this place he had been surrounded by a full and open enmity. He had recently undertaken to enforce a law adopted several years ago, though never applied, about a certain measure of the meshes in nets and seines, and had thereby encountered an opposition and open defiance which finally forced him to send for the sheriff who confiscated the nets. He had, however, first shown thoroughly how the interference of the government was only prompted by concern for the welfare of the people, he had held before them how they, while not wishing to divide a farm, preferring to have one son prosperous and the family maintainer, still contrived, by indiscriminate fishing, to make their children dependent of the almshouse for their support. All to no avail. All these measures and steps were regarded as the evil contrivance of a pack of idle officers who were salaried with the people's money, for the special purpose of tormenting them. He retorted in vain, that it was the farmers in the Reichstag who had voted this law, whereupon the fishermen turned their hate towards the farmers and government alike.
He observed that these fishing people really represent a remnant of the aboriginal community, careless and inconsiderate, without the peasant's forethought for the morrow and next year. They were like the savage who hunts two days and sleeps eight, and like the savage they possessed certain negative faculties to do without, and endure, but lacked the positive ability to improve their situation through investigation, having a decided and instinctive dislike for innovation, thereby betraying their inability to adapt themselves to a higher stage of culture. All these fishermen were bottom sediments of the country's population; when the battle over fertile river valleys and lake margins was going on they could not maintain their own, and fled or were pressed out to the headlands where the soil ceased and only the uncertain water left its winnings. Like gamblers they were as unreliable as fortune, unscrupulous in their dealings, drawing small advances beforehand from the ever expected great fishing, which a lucky shipwreck might bring them. Therefore their hate immediately kindled towards the new comer, and in their blindness they could not see how he would if from ambition only improve their condition and free them from labor. For instance, one duty of the head pilot was to make meteorological reports; for him he had constructed a self-regulating wind measure from cleft sardine boxes, which, however, was not accepted but placed in the garret. He had offered to assist in cases of sickness but had been rejected. He had offered to teach the wives how to prevent the stoves from smoking, by the application of a stromling barrel as a flue at the top of the chimney, but they had made grimaces at him and continued to lament over the irremediable smoke. He would teach a fisherman, who had tried to raise potatoes unsuccessfully, how to fertilize the sandy strand with seaweed and the refuse from fish, as he had seen the people on the coast of England do with marked success; all was in vain. When he saw how the surplus of the big stromling fishing of the spring lay decaying for lack of salt, he would teach them the Faroe-islanders' method of salting with the ashes of seaweed in case of necessity and for domestic use, this same preservative being always used by said islanders in the manufacture of cheese.
The result of all his endeavors to teach them useful things, was that he received the nickname of Doctor Know-all, was regarded as a fool, and became the laughing stock of the coffee gatherings, and drinking bouts. Even the children made faces as he passed by.
The incongruity between what he was, and what he was taken to be, impressed him at the beginning as comical, but afterwards when the hostilities succeeded the coldness he marked an unfavorable influence on his mental state. It was as though a thundercloud of unequal electricities hung over him, irritating his nerve current, trying to annihilate it through neutralization. He felt as though the thoughts directed towards him from these many would have the power to gradually drag him down, cramp his opinion of his own value, so that the moment would come when he could no longer rely upon himself and his mental superiority, and finally their views that he was the idiot and they the sound would grasp his brain and force him to agree with them.
Meanwhile as his thoughts wandered here and there a new object came within the forty-five degrees of the horizon, which he commanded at a glance from his window. A gunboat came to lee of the rock at half speed, clewed up its sails and dropped anchor. Through the marine glass he saw the sailors move about apparently in a hurly-burly, but without crowding; each one hurried to his belaying pin, his line, and his halyard, when the executive officer's whistle sounded. The vessel's straight sides, the extended stem where the iron plates seemed to sprawl asunder but combined their concentrated force In a forward direction, radiating out as it were at the bowsprit, the exhaust pipe and the smokestack's energetic smoking, the masts striving with stay and shroud, the round circle of the cannon's mouth, everything indicated an array of forces, regulated, curbing each other, reacting and cooperating, the contemplation of which put him into a harmonic state of mind. It was to him as though power and order streamed forth from the wedge-shaped iron hull, where purpose, limitation and measure, united into a unit of beauty, and conveyed a deeper enjoyment by reflection than a handsome work of art commonly affords the superficial observer by the way of feeling.
Something else came to him through reflecting on this little floating community surrounded by water. He felt strengthened, as though he had a support in this symbol of power, that was authorized by the people's assembly and the royal government, with the appliance of all the means of culture and science, and which protected the higher developed against the pressure of barbarism from beneath; he saw with satisfaction how a couple of the most knowing, who had been qualified by due examinations, guided with a whistle this hundred of half savages, who did not dare to pretend to understand, that which they did not understand. He had never been beguiled to commit the modern fault of observation of believing that the lower classes suffered from their subordinate position and coarse food. He knew well that they were precisely on the plane they should be, and that they suffered just as little from their station as the fishes beneath would suffer from not having been developed into amphibians, and as far as their coarse food was concerned he knew from experience when he had invited a few fishermen to dinner how they rejected all but that which filled the belly; yes, he had seen them select the poor rye in the bread basket, instead of the fine wheat. He had never believed in the talk about lack of food excepting when misfortune came and then only accidentally, for there existed state laws for the poor which are so often misused by sluggards and the shrewd, who feign sickness and force the community to support them. He had never adored the small, never needed to kneel to the insignificant, notwithstanding that he himself was cast out from the upper camp which during the common period of decay tricked itself up with stolen reputations and lay pressing down that which should grow. He did not even now let this induce him to overestimate this approximate picture of the upper stratum, which in the shape of a man-of-war inspired his admiration from a certain point of view, but on the other hand was a reminder of a system of state, which executed outrages on the minds with compressed gas and Bessemer cylinders.
Downstairs his host's door banged, and the tongues began to wag at the entrance of Oman, whose net had been confiscated. The gin glasses rang and the clamor rose at the repetition of yesterday's drunken spree.
"Idiots and destroyers of the people, who believe they know more than sensible fishermen and who lie on the sofa and read books, and get two thousand a year, snots, who would teach their father how to fish, a pack of thieves and cigarette heroes who go about with sow's tails under their noses...."
And now a wave broke against Vestman's elucidation of facts that he had gleaned on board the "Jacob Bagge" about the commissioner's extraction, his father's irregular sexual relations, his mother's low descent, and he alluded to the commissioner's discharge from his first office and so forth.
The listener tried to make himself deaf, and indifferent as usual, but the words cut him, soiled him, hurt him against his will. Old doubts about his father's integrity began to awaken, doubts of his own value were aroused and fears as to the possibility of keeping himself dry in this rain of mud, and to avoid a fight where he perhaps would fail from nicety in choice of weapons.
Now struck the bell on the man-of-war, a drum whir rolled, and the summer wind carried the tunes of a hymn from a hundred throats out over the water, solemn, rhythmically arranged, submissive, all while the clamor and threats from downstairs rumbled as from the cages in a menagerie, and in the psalm's ferment rose to a howl, for a quarrel had arisen between the parties, at the question of taking back the net by force.
The commissioner, who regarded churches as archaeological collections or interesting pagoda buildings from past times was reminded involuntarily of the utterance which a young clergyman let fall one night when at a discussion of the Christian cult.
"I do not believe in Christ's divinity and all that, but believe me, the mob must be scared!" "The mob must be scared," repeated he to himself silently, but dropped the thread immediately when he heard the fray break out downstairs. Chairs were knocked over, heels were braced and kicked against the furniture and roaring as from cattle was mixed with hissing as from reptiles while during all this a woman's voice sputtered and produced several hundred words a minute.
At this instant the steamer whistled, weighed anchor and hoisted sail, the smokestack sent a soot cloud toward the blue summer sky. It was with a feeling of regret and anxiety that he saw the steamer and its beautiful cannon disappear southward; he felt as though he had lost a support and as if the hate closed round him like a sack, he would flee, out, anywhere.
Now a child cried, if from fear or pain he could not hear, for under the tumult he had stolen down the staircase and reached the harbor, cast off his painter and rowed out from the land as quickly as he could.
The rock he was in quest of was the eastern-most of a little archipelago, which he had never paid attention to before, but now for the first time when in need to be alone, he sought it. A hater of strong body movements, which he found partly superfluous while there existed locomotion by machinery, and partly detrimental to his nerve and thought life for the fine tool which the brain capsule enclosed could just as little stand jars as the house where the astronomer's instruments of precision are kept. He had never learned how to row but his sense of time and his well-weighed motion centers made him at once a clever oarsman, and his studies of physics taught him how to improve the old invention so that by raising the seat he economized arm power.
As he now saw the skerries receding from the stern of his boat he began to breathe easier, and when he shortly landed on the first rock he was seized by an irrepressible feeling of happiness. It was a sunny, long, low islet whose strand rocks of gray gneiss formed a little harbor into which the boat sped. The water near the beach was transparent as condensed limpid air, and the soft color of the kelp shone at the bottom as though molten into a mass of glass. The stones on the beach lay washed, dried and polished, offering a variation in colors that never tired, for there were no two alike, while between them the velvet grass and sedges had sought hold for their tufts. Slowly the ledge rose upward and in depressions in the moss lay the mews' eggs, three by three, coffee brown with black spots, while their owners cried and cawed above his head. He climbed higher up to where a pile of stones had been laid up by marine surveyors, and were whitewashed by the gulls, mews and terns. A few juniper bushes spread out as carpets and beneath them a profusion of the white, subtle star flower had improvised its bed, a connection of Middle Europe's highlands and the shade of northern forests.
The little turnstone daring and gay fluttered uneasily around the disturber of the peace to mislead him from her nest.
Not a shrub, not a tree pointed over the half naked ledges, and this absence of shadows from coverts, gave the visitor a lighter and gayer mood. Everything was open, overlooked at once, sunlit on this ledge of rock, and the water which separated him from his lately left home among the savages, seemed to surround him with an insurmountable limit of pure transparency. The half arctic, half alpine landscape with its primeval formation refreshed and rested him. When he had become rested, he took the boat and rowed on further. He passed three polished rocks, resembling three petrified waves, naked as a hand, without a trace of organic life and which only aroused a scientific, geological interest concerning their origin; he grazed a flat rock of reddish gneiss; on its lee side stood a hundred years' mountain ash, solitary, moss bedecked, gnarled, and in its ragged trunk a white wagtail hatched its brood for lack of rooftile or stone wall. The little charming bird dove down among the strand stones and would make the foe believe that in no wise there existed a nest or gray white eggs there.
The solitary mountain ash stood on a grassy carpet of a few square feet and looked so lonely, but so unusually strong in lack of competition, and could better defy storm, salt water and cold than with jealous equals wrangling over earth crumbs. He felt attracted to the lonely veteran and longed, during a transitory moment, to raise a hut at its feet, but he passed on and the feeling blew away.
A dark cliff came to view behind the last point, it was coal black from the volcanic mineral diorite, and, as he approached it, he became depressed. The black crystallized mass seemed to have been cast up from the sea bottom, and after hardening had come into a terrible fight with water or a thundercloud and had cracked into eight parts, which had afterwards been carried away by the sea and ice or dragged down into the depth. Steep, perpendicular stood the black glittering wall out along the little harbor, and when the boat landed below it he felt as though he was down in a coal mine or a sooty blacksmith's shop. It depressed and awed him, he climbed up on the cliff, there rose as a landmark a pole with a white painted keg at the top. This trace of human beings out here where no people were to be seen, was a mixed reminder of gibbet, shipwreck, coal, a crude contrast between the unmixed colorless colors, black and white, of barren violent nature devoid of organic life, there being no lichens or moss on the whole body of the rock; further, this carpentry work without vegetable transition between primeval nature and human hand work, was irritating, disquieting and brutal. In the great Sunday stillness he heard beneath his feet, where stones had rattled down and formed a roof over a crevice, how the long breakers sucked in half way under the point, and pressed the air forward with muffled sound, then drew back again with a hissing and hollow sighing.
He stood a moment enjoying the oppression, while his thoughts wandered back to old memories which always brought him loathing. He smelt coal gas, saw manufactories, sooty, discontented people, heard machinery, city rumbling and human voices, which spoke words that would eat their way through his ears into his brain and sow seeds that would spring up as weeds smothering his own sowing; transforming the field he had cultivated with so much pains to a wild meadow like those of the others.
He climbed into his boat and turned his back on the gloomy sight; again he enjoyed the infinite purity of the waters, the empty blue which like an unwritten slate lay soothingly before him, for it did not raise any memories, develop any inspirations, or call forth any strong sensations. And now when he approached a larger island, he greeted it as a new acquaintance who should tell him something else and efface the recent impressions. New points and rocks were passed, each offering its surprise, its special physiognomy, often with such small differences that it required a sharply trained eye to see them. These small cliffs, which seemed so naked, so tiresomely alike when viewed from a passing boat, offered at nearer view the most changeable scenery, just as variance of the same coins only to the numismatist betray their secrets.
He now landed on a somewhat larger islet whose irregular jagged appearance had allured him, especially when he saw protruding over the tops of the rocks the crowns of trees with dense foliage. When he had climbed up on the northern point, the black base of which was polished smooth by the waves, he saw that the island was a cluster of at least four others, that seemed to have been drifted together by different winds, and by the congestion of different geological formations, forming a whole conglomerate of landscape pictures, brought from every zone. The northern part was composed of a cone of hornblende schist which, down on the strand, was cleft in enormous blocks that had fallen from the rocky wall, and was as yet unpolished by the water, while between these cubes grew strangely, as though allured by secret sympathy, an immense number of black currant shrubs, dusky in color and harmonizing in tone with the black sparkling stones. It was so unexpected to find these cultured deserters from the garden out here in the wilderness that it appeared as a joke of nature, perhaps laid in the bill of a wounded black-cock that had flown out here to die, carrying the seeds of dawning culture. Farther up in the rock pile stood a grove of deciduous trees with light verdure, but with cut tops and white trunks, as though whitewashed with lime by fostering human hand. He tried from a distance to guess their species, but they were so different from all others he had seen in this latitude that his thoughts revolved between acacias, beeches and Japan varnish trees, so common in southern Europe, and when he finally heard the well known rustle of the common aspen he would not believe his ears. He quickly shunned a viper, which ran down between two stones like a stream of water, and coming nearer, he saw that he had heard aright. It was the slender and trim aspen of the groves and pastures, that the northern wind, stony ground, drifting ice and salt water had pruned and trained to this unrecognizable variety, and which in the battle against tempest and cold had turned gray and lost its top, and therefore only consisted of frozen sprouts that were continually shooting out indefatigably renewing themselves, while the goats had peeled off the protecting bark and let the sap run out. There was eternal youth in those soft light green shoots on the gray whiskered branchless trunk, old age without maturity, an abnormality which was refreshing because it was new and transcended the banal.
When he had climbed up between the sharp stones and reached the height it was as if he had ascended a field in ten minutes. The region of deciduous trees lay below him, and upon the plateau appeared already the alpine flora, with the field form of the juniper, and close by the veritable northern cloud berry in the white moss of the moist crevices, and here and there the little civilized cornel, perhaps the only Swedish shrub on the seaboard. He slowly descended the southern slope, through cowberry and bearberry vines, hair grass, sedges, cotton grass and springy mosses, until suddenly he stood on a ravine, where the islet had cracked and formed a channel between the black rocky walls.
With wild shrieks the saucy auks flew up as he stepped on a natural stone bridge across the shallow channel, climbed another cliff of lighter formations, and reached a new section of this wonderful islet.
The light elegant eurite, in which faint rose-colored feldspar was mingled with a delicate blue-green quartz while mica was only betrayed through a glistening like microscopical hoar frost, gave the little landscape a gay aspect, and being cleft infinitely, it offered sofas and real armchairs at every step. A compact vein of granular white limestone passed as a belt straight through the rocky mass, and the fertile gravel from this which had crumbled from rain and frost, was amassed below between the rocky walls. And here a ravine began to present such an enchanting view that he stopped amazed and sat down on one of the stone stools to enjoy the surprising fairy scenery.
Before him, between the perpendicular walls whose bases disappeared in the soil, there unfolded a grassy carpet interwoven with endless flowers, choicer and more thrifty than those on the mainland. The blood red geranium had stepped from the rock and sought moisture down here, the honey white grass of Parnassus from the wet sedgy mead had here met with the forest's blue yellow lily of the valley, and the southern orchids, perhaps wind driven from the vineland Gotland, had fled here, the hyacinth like orchis-sambucina, the pompous orchis militaris, the stately cephalanthera, a kind of embellished lily of the valley, had sought their nursery here in the forcing lime and moist sea air between protecting walls in the most luxurious grass.
And far in the distance the walls of the cliffs were hidden by birch and alder trees, which rose modestly in the air without daring to raise their tops to the wind; self-sown here and there stood the cranberry trees in the midst of the grassy carpet, with their white snowballs hanging to the grapelike leaf; the dark green buckthorn leaned like an espalier against the precipice and its glossy leaves faintly reminded of the orange so famed in song, but were more juicy, more varied in color, finer in design and more delicate structure.
It was a park with the characteristics of the mainland floating out here, and when through a rent or depression in the rocks he saw a blue horizontal streak of the sea, the contrast in the wonderful scenery struck him.
After he had sat a moment and listened to the chaffinch's spring time song, which was interrupted by the gulls' and guillemots' caws and shrieks, and he felt the solitude enwrap him like a slumber, and when the birds for a moment were hushed and only the faint sea breeze rustled in the birch tops without reaching farther down, he heard unexpectedly a cough. He started and looked around but saw no trace of man.
The painful hollow sound from the chest of a human being in the midst of this quiet nature awoke him suddenly and brought a disagreeable feeling of loathing. Was it a lonely one like himself who sought rest, or a nest plunderer? In either case he would free himself from uneasiness, and find out who this was that disturbed him. Therefore he climbed the rocky wall on natural steps in the limestone dyke and he beheld now the third section of this polyp-like islet. Over a low stone wall, apparently to protect the blooming field from grazing cattle, he passed to a pine tree region on gneiss, walked under the branches, trampled knee deep in ferns which formed an underbrush beneath the pine trees and resembled dwarf palms but of fresher green and more elegant foliage, while at their feet were seen the blushing strawberries.
When he came up out of the ravine he saw a cove with rushes where some abandoned pole hooks were driven in the mud. He stopped to listen, and soon he heard a voice which came from the other side of the knoll. It rang high and soft as a child's and sank again so that he thought it was some young yachtsman who had ventured out here. But the words fell so passively, attractively, winningly, and invitingly, and he was surprised to hear a boy expressing himself in so careful language. The vocabulary was small and the language was that of ordinary conservation in cultured society, but without force or diversity of expression, and the objects spoken of were called by incorrect terms. The speaker talked about the verdure of the trees without naming them, called the mews gulls, the chaffinch a bird, gneiss granite and the bulrush a reed.
It might be a youth that insisted upon being heard and spoke so long without allowing himself to be interrupted by the slow mumbling voice of an old man, who every now and then muttered an objection or information. Now the youthful voice laughed, a laughter without cause, to judge from the conversation, a laughter to let the beautiful voice be heard or show a set of white teeth, a laughter without merriment, a succession of ringing sounds without other meaning than to jealously divert the attention from something real, which would come between. A signal, a bird call! There was no doubt, it was a young woman's voice.
He stepped unresistingly up onto the last knoll after having felt of his necktie and hat, and he now saw beneath him a picture, whose details ever after remained in his memory. On a little upland meadow, under a group of old white beam trees around a white linen damask tablecloth, in the center of which was a butter dish of Kolmord marble, surrounded by the contents of a lunch basket, sat an old lady with beautiful gray hair and a well fitting gown, and close beside her stood a fisherman in his shirt sleeves with a sandwich in his hand, while before him stood a young lady holding in her hand a glass of beer, which she with a merry curtesy and the ripples of a dying laughter on her lips, reached to the embarrassed boatman.
He was captivated at once by the young woman's looks, and although his reflection at once whispered that she coquetted with the churl, he felt an irresistible attraction in the dark olive complexion, the black eyes, and the stately figure. It certainly was not the first woman which had attracted him at once, but she belonged to that class of women which never failed to attract him to them. The solitude and absence of others was not the reason of the quick selection, because he felt exactly the same as when he sought a color for a necktie and after walking dejectedly from store to store without experiencing the pleasant feeling that the article sought after would give, he finally stopped before a show window where the right one was, and in the same moment felt free from pressure as he quietly said to himself, this isthe one!
After having hesitated a moment whether to step forward and introduce himself, or turn back, he made a movement which betrayed him. The girl observed him first, her arms fell to her sides and she looked with the expression of a frightened child at the unexpected appearance, which at once gave the intruder courage to step forward and reassure the group with an explanation.
Raising his hat with a low bow he stepped up to them.
Half an hour later the commissioner sat in the little company's sailboat with his own dory in tow, he was already installed in the position of guide to the two ladies, who had for their health sought a resort for the summer on Fish Skerry and would consequently be his neighbors. The conversation ran agreeably between the three new acquaintances with a somewhat precipitate ardor to compete and show their readiness and best side which is called forth in all who meet for the first time. The one who made the least effort was the elderly lady, who had introduced herself as mother of the young beauty. She seemed to have reached a perfect harmony and resignation, worn off all corners and was living in her memories and semi-indifferently regarding what was going on around her, expecting nothing from others, prepared for everything that life could offer her of good or ill and charming with her even mild disposition.
An affinity had already arisen between the young man and the young woman, and she seemed to enjoy receiving, and he, who had so long waited to give, felt his powers growing now that the long-accumulated surplus had found an outlet. And he gave for half an hour with lavish hand from all he had stored of information that could be of interest to them who were unacquainted with the conditions which would surround them for awhile. He delineated all the resources of the skerry and its deficiencies, depicted the life very alluringly as it at this moment appeared to him to become, now when he was no longer alone. And the young woman, who had never seen the skerry, received her first actual impression of the same from his description. In imagination she saw the red cottage where she was going to live with her mother, so neat and cosy just as he wished that she would see it in order to feel at home and tarry there. While he spoke it seemed to him as though he received in return something good and strong, as though he heard new thoughts, new points of view spoken by her lips which stood half open, not as though to swallow what he reached her, but as though they spoke themselves, and when her two big, faithful eyes looked admiringly and surprisedly up to him he believed that all he said was true and felt with rising esteem for himself new powers awakened, and old ones growing in strength and tenacity. He felt so really thankful when the boat touched land, just as after having received benefices when in need, that he involuntarily thanked them heartily as he helped the ladies out of the boat and carried their heavy valises on shore.
The young girl returned the politeness with "not at all," but as though out of her treasures she had really given a trifle compared with what she had in reserve.
When the commissioner had escorted the ladies to their new home which turned out to be Oman's cottage, the young girl broke out into a flow of rapture, being still under the influence of Borg's enchanting description. The dilapidated house had something unusually picturesque in its exterior, for there was not a single straight line. Storms, salt water, frost and rain had destroyed every straight outline, and since the mortar had fallen from the chimney it looked like a big tufa. Still more agreeably surprising was the really homelike interior with its old-fashioned comfort. The two rooms were located one on each side of the hall, with a kitchen between them at the end; the best room was spacious, with dark brown paper, which from smoke and age had assumed a pleasing, quiet, even brown tone with which every color harmonized. The low ceiling, which left no vacant space to be peopled by fancies, showed the beams on which rested the attic floor. Two small windows, with panes about half a foot square discolored by age, allowed a view of the harbor and the sea, and the mass of light from outside was pleasantly subdued by the white lace curtains which protected against glances from outside without shutting out the daylight, and hung like light summer clouds down over balsam and geraniums in English faience mugs with Queen Victoria and Lord Nelson in yellow and green. The furniture comprising a big white folding table, a Gustavian bedstead on which were piled numerous eiderdown beds, a white painted wooden sofa, a clock of Mora make that struck the hours, a bureau of birch with its mirror frame veneered with the root of the alder, draped with a bridal veil and loaded with porcelain knickknacks. On the bureau stood a mounted parrot under a glass case, and on the wall hung colored lithographic pictures from the Old Testament, among which the two over the bed seemed to have been placed with questionable purpose, one representing Samson and Delilah in a very unveiled delineation, the other was Joseph and Potiphar's wife. In one corner was an open fireplace which occupied considerable space and would have been dreadful had not the black gap been covered by a white draw curtain.
It was homelike, idyllic and cleanly.
The other chamber was like the first, but had two beds and a commode; the floor was covered with a rag carpet which with its variegated colors formed an album of memories, from grandfather's jacket, grandmother's blouse, mother's cotton gown and father's pilot uniform. There were the red garters of the girls and the yellow gallows of the land-wehr boys, blue bathing suits of the summer guests, beaver and corduroy, cotton and baize, wool and crash, from all fashions and wardrobes, poor men's and rich men's.
In this room stood a big white cupboard with fancy paintings on the door panels, framed in ivy, wreaths painted with mosaic bronze, wonderful small landscapes with dark blue coves, banks of rushes and sailboats, trees of unknown species, from paradise or the carboniferous age, turbulent seas with waves straight as furrows in a potato field, a lighthouse like a column on a rocky ledge, everything as naïve as a child's simple comprehension of rich nature's infinite variety of shapes and colors, which only the highly trained eye can discern.
In all this old-fashioned simplicity lay the essential part of the cure for a tired brain, which would seek rest in the past. The worn movement of the watch would lay unwound awhile and let the spring be relieved of tension to regain its spent powers. The association with the lower classes which did not entice to battle for the morsel of power, but themselves involuntarily every day and hour reminded those of the upper class of their dearly earned position, would diminish the stimulus and quiet those desirous of power by the thought that there already existed passed by periods.
The commissioner had already prepared the minds of the visitors to see and know all this, and neither of the ladies tired of expressing their satisfaction with the new quarters and were so occupied by investigating the location that they did not observe that their guide had retreated to leave them undisturbed.
The commissioner sat at his window on this Sunday afternoon and watched the two ladies put things in order down in their cottage. When he followed with his eyes their soft, but irregular movements, it was to him as though he heard music. The same modulations that a series of harmonizing tones develop on the ear drum and communicate to the nerve system, the same mild vibrations were now produced through the eye, and rang through the white strings which stretched from the cranium shell out over the sounding board of the chest and transmitted the vibrations through the foundation of his soul. A feeling of general pleasure streamed through his being, when he saw these women's hands moving in waving lines, as they picked trifles from their trunks and laid them on the table and chairs, the rising and sinking of the hips and shoulders imperceptible to the untrained eye, but still so elastic. And when the young woman passed through the room, there arose no straight line, no corners or edges when she turned, no angles when she bent over.
He was perfectly captivated in regarding this, so that for a moment he did not notice the noise in the garret and the creaking of the stairs and the raising of latches.
He was deeply occupied regarding the young lady whose exterior seemed to him perfectly beautiful except in one point, which deficiency he would try and accustom his eyes not to see. Her chin was a few lines too big and indicated a lower jaw unnecessarily developed in one who had ceased to catch, hold and tear uncooked meat, and when he saw it in profile he could picture the coming witch physiognomy, when the time came that the old woman's teeth loosened, the lips sunk and formed an obtuse angle and the nose dropped down over the prominent chin. But he must overcome this reminder of a beast of prey, and he pursued her face with his glance and reshaped it in his fancy, forced his eyes when they were fixed upon her face to see it in its entirety.
Now he heard footsteps and shouts down on the hill, and in a wild rage Oman's wife appeared with a swarm of women, who were carrying in triumph the rescued net down to the beach.
He instantly felt his authority infringed on, and taking his hat went down to the surveyor to demand his help as he was in the Crown's service and in duty bound to assist him.
In the room sat the custom house man at the coffee table, and as usual, when Vestman was out fishing, he had his arm around the waist of his sister-in-law. At the entrance of the commissioner he dropped his hold and under influence of the fear of being discovered he showed a greater officiousness than he otherwise would have done. He put on his uniform cap and went out and in a hasty desire to be a just man he stormed against the women and caught hold of the net.
"Damned old women, don't you know it is penitentiary to break the Crown's lock and seal!"
The women answered in a chorus of imputations, which alluded to both the commissioner and surveyor, the principal ones being that they did not care and that the devil might take the Crown's lock and seal, and that both gentlemen were of such characters that they could be put in penitentiary at any time.
Whereupon the surveyor became enraged and cried to a subordinate to bring the sheriff.
At the word sheriff the people gathered, crawled out of every hole and corner like ants, when one scratches in an ant-hill.
The people seemed ready at once to take part with the women, threatening words were uttered. The commissioner found it time for him to interfere to avoid coming under a subordinate's protection. Therefore he went up to the crowd and asked what they wanted.
But he received no answer, and turning to the women he spoke to them in a polite but stern manner, saying:
"As I before informed you, the Reichstag or your own elected representatives decided for the sake of your children and descendants that the fishing must be protected through prohibiting the use of such implements as spoil it without bringing you any advantage, and when you have had three years to wear out your old nets, but are still making new ones against the law, I have in the name of the Crown been forced to confiscate the unlawful implements. Nevertheless and in spite of the statute law you have broken the Crown's lock and seal, which can be punished with penitentiary. Still I will use clemency instead of justice if you comply and obey, therefore I ask you for the last time, if you will willingly give back the nets."
To this the women answered with new shriek and a new shower of epithets.
"Well," finished the commissioner, "as I am not a policeman, and you are the multitude, I beg the custom house surveyor to send for the sheriff and his assistants and at the same time I will solicit an order from the provincial governor to arrest Oman's wife."
As he spoke the last word, he felt two soft, warm hands grasp his right hand, and two big childish eyes looked into his, while a falling voice like that of a mother who begged for the life of her child, said:
"In the name of Heaven have compassion on a poor unhappy woman and don't do her any ill;" it was the supplication of the young girl who had at the beginning of the scene come out of the cottage.
The commissioner would free himself and turned away from the big eyes, whose glance he could not endure, but he felt his hand clasped harder and finally pressed against a soft bosom, heard words in melting tones, and, completely vanquished, he whispered to the beauty, "Let me go and I will drop the whole affair."
The girl loosened her hold, and the commissioner who made his plan in half a minute caught the surveyor by his arm and led him up to the custom house cottage, just as though he would give him some orders. When they reached the door, the commissioner said shortly and decisively as though he had come to a new conclusion.
"I shall communicate with the provincial governor myself in writing. However, I thank you for your assistance."
Thereupon he went up to his room.
When he was alone and had collected his thoughts, he was obliged to acknowledge that his last act had been dictated by lower motives, as his sexual impulses had prevailed to such a high degree that he had been fooled into an act contrary to the law, for one could not speak of pity, for people who were comparatively well off, as they were owners of houses, fishing grounds, boats and implements valued at many hundreds of dollars, also owners of seal rookeries and bird islets, and, besides, paid taxes on capital and a few small places that they rented out. The false idea that a woman had vanquished him, however, did not hold a place in his thoughts, for he knew very well, conscious as he was in all points that he had fallen by his own propensity or interest to gain something from this woman. But before the throng of people his authority was ended, his reputation shaken and hereafter there would not be an old woman or a boy but felt themselves above him. This, to be sure, might be immaterial for it made no difference to him whether he had power or not over these poor wretches. What seemed worse to him was that this woman whom he now felt he must be bound to in order to be happy, should from the first moment inure herself in the belief that she had gained a conquest of him and thus the equilibrium in a future union would be disturbed.
He had had many fancies for and engagements with women before, but his distinct consciousness of man's superiority over the intermediate form between man and child, which is called woman, had made it impossible for him to conceal it long, and therefore his engagements had had but short duration. He would be loved by a woman, who should look up to him as the stronger, he would be the adored, not the adorer, he would be the main trunk on which the frail shoot should be grafted, but he was born at a period which was full of spiritual pestilence, when womankind was devastated by an epidemic mania for greatness, produced by degenerated, sickly men, and by political pygmies, who were in need of the masses to vote. Therefore he had been obliged to live alone. Well he knew that in love, man must give, must let himself be fooled and that the only way to approach a woman was on all fours. And he had crawled at intervals, and as long as he crawled everything had gone well, but when he had finally straightened up, that was the end of it, always with a multitude of reproaches that he had been false, that he had dissembled submission, that he had never loved, and so on.
Moreover, as a possessor of the highest intellectual enjoyments, and feeling himself an exceptional being, he had not harbored a lively desire after the lower affections, never desired to be the supporter of a parasite, never longed to feed competitors, and his stronger self had rebelled against being the instrument of propagation for a woman's lineage, the rôle he had seen most men of his age play.
But now he stood in just such a dilemma again, to assimilate a woman by allowing himself to be assimilated. To dissemble or let his exterior express what he did not feel, he could not, but he had a great ability for adapting himself to his associations, and comprehending other people's way of thinking and suffering, for he had never found in the lives of others anything but past stages that he himself had lived through, and consequently he had only to draw from memory or experience, letting go his hold, and diminishing the tension onward. He had always found pleasure in woman's company as a rest and diversion on exactly the same ground and from the same reason that keeping company with children makes one grow younger and is a strengthening amusement, when it is not continued too long or becomes an effort.
Now he had felt the desire growing in him to own this woman, but notwithstanding he was an investigator and knew that man was a mammal, it was perfectly clear to him that human love had developed as everything else, and has taken up the elements of a higher spiritual quality without leaving the sensual foundation. He knew precisely how much of unsound heavenliness sneaked in with the reaction of Christianity against the purely brutish, should be eliminated, and he did not believe in a primness which conceded matters that could not be shown, just as little as he admitted that the only purpose of the conjugal state was the bedfellowship. He wished for an intimate, complete union as to body and soul, where he as the stronger acid would neutralize the passive base, but not as in chemistry form a new neutral body, but, on the contrary, would leave a surplus of free acid, which would always give the union its character and lie in readiness to neutralize any attempt of the combination to liberate itself, for human love was not a chemical union, but a physical and organic, which resembled the former in certain respects without being identical with the same. He did not expect any augmentation of his own self, no addition to his strength, only an increase of his vitality, and instead of searching for a support he offered himself as a support to learn his strength and feel the enjoyment of measuring out his power, strewing with open hands his soul without being weakened thereby or made destitute.
During these thoughts he glanced out of the window and saw at once what he sought, for the young girl was standing on the door stoop receiving hand shakings from women and men, patting the children on their heads and seemed overcome by feelings, which so much public sympathy had aroused.
"What a peculiar sympathy for criminals," thought the commissioner; "what a love for the mentally poor! And how well they understood each other's propensities, which they boasted of as feelings and which they believed to be something more than clear, mature thoughts."
The whole scene was such a tangle of absurdities, that it could not be cleared, reflecting the chaotic in the first weak attempt at reasoning, by these brains and spinal cords.
There stood she who had fooled him into violating the law, and received worship like an angel. Even now if his violation of the law was from their point of view a fine noble action, then he who gave pardon instead of justice ought to have the thanks. The opinion of the horde was that he should not, for they well knew that the motive for his action was not kindness towards them, but perhaps tender feelings for a young girl, gallantry, or the hope of winning her. Yes, but the motive for her appearance might then be to gain the good will of the crowd, to become beloved and popular, and receive hand shakes; the horde here played the same role as the society of the ballroom, the promenaders on the street or in the square. And she had fooled him through personal contact, innocently, perhaps, possibly with calculations, probably half of each, to commit a weak action, for which she was worshiped.