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 acouveuse,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 starBetain 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.
CONTENTSPREFACECHAPTER FIRSTCHAPTER SECONDCHAPTER THIRDCHAPTER FOURTHCHAPTER FIFTHCHAPTER SIXTHCHAPTER SEVENTHCHAPTER EIGHTHCHAPTER NINTHCHAPTER TENTHCHAPTER ELEVENTHCHAPTER TWELFTHCHAPTER THIRTEENTHCHAPTER FOURTEENTH