Part 16

It was then that he commenced to think out a plan for connecting the country, the island country,--for that it had a connection by Lapland did not change the case--with the mainland. First there should be a six hours' lightning train to Helsingborg and communication with a steam ferry boat across the sound making the capital of Denmark the center of the North. Ice free harbors on Djuro and Nynas with ice breakers should keep commerce and navigation alive the whole year round; the northern winter sleep would thereby be retrenched, and the national character, unsteadiness, which is said to be owing to that six months interruption of all activity, should change nature. The Russian commerce to England should go through Stockholm and Gothenborg, and the old scheme of Charles XI and Charles XII, to get the Persia and India trade over Russia and Sweden would be realized.

Sweden should become a country for tourists, and foreigners would be allured to her. He would change Stockholm to a seaport by closing the lake Mälar at the North Bridge and the Sluice, and give it another outlet through a system of canals leading to the cove of Trosa. Thereby the salt water would come up to Stockholm, which would change the atmosphere conditions and consequently the inhabitants.

But he remembered the time when Sweden, still belonging to the great, universal Christian church, stood in direct communication with Rome and thereby was of some account to Europe. He would, if it was shown that religion could not be abandoned by the multitude, again introduce this our forefathers' faith, which we with fire and sword had been urged to abjure, and whose martyrs, Hans Brask, Olaus and Johannes Magnus, Nils Dacke, and Ture Jonsson have become so shamefully soiled in history. And Catholicism, the Roman legacy, the first promulgator of the idea of Europeism had conquered all Europe. Bismarck had fallen in the combat of culture, gone to Canossa and selected the Pope for an arbitrator, as he had commenced to believe in arbitrations without steel cannons. Denmark had built Catholic cathedrals, and the young Danes had already lent their pens to the cause. The germanization of the North like that of North Germany was only a relapse into barbarism after the Hun battles of 1870 the consequences of which have become manifest in persecution against Latin, and in French hate, which is uttered in wars of extermination against French literature, in North Germany family politics and Lutheran inquisition with prisons for heretics and a general lowering of the level of intelligence.

Lutherism, that was the foe! Teutonic culture; bourgeois religion in black pants, sectaristic narrowness, particularism, sundering, intrenchment and spiritual death!

No, Europe should be one again, and the peoples' way be over Rome, the way of intelligence over Paris!

The Swedish peasant should again feel himself as cosmopolitan and leave his position in the under class, again get that glimpse of the culture of beauty which the church formerly offered in pictures and tunes; his divine service should be a true hymn in the Roman language, composed by poets, and not compounded by hymn book makers and of which he should understand exactly as little, as would awaken his highest ideas about that which he nevertheless would not comprehend. His high mass should be performed by real ministers, who devoted their life to religion and the care of souls, and not to agriculture, dairy business, whist playing and office work; and then the peasant's wife would get a guardian of her soul, to whom she at confession could intrust her sorrows instead of running into the kitchen of the parsonage and gossiping about it to the servants.

And with the re-installment of Latin every Upsala student's dissertation could be read as of old by the learned of Europe and every Swedish investigator feel himself a member of the great universal corporation of the intelligence under the pontificate in Paris.

This and other thoughts he put down on paper and laid it in the table drawer, for he had not a newspaper, that would print them, least of all the patriots who "from envy had no desire to receive projects for the elevation of the country."

He had now got the answers to his circulars and had the attic room filled with materials for his European ethnography. But now the subject had lost its interest, and his soul had become sick in earnest, so that he did not even dare go out. The aspect of a human being awoke such a loathing, that he turned back home, if he only saw one. At the same time grew the contemporary need of hearing his own voice and to unload his over-productive brain by contact with another being, to feel himself exerting influence on the life of others and to have company. He had thought for a moment to get a dog, but to lay down deposits from his soul and his feelings in an animal body was to graft grapes onto thistles and he had never been allured by the sympathy of dirty, food courting animals.

There was only one man for whom he felt a certain attraction, and that was the married man of the custom house, Vestman, whose wife was living in bigamy, without her husband's knowing it. He had an honest look and an awakened intellect, and with him the commissioner had bound the companionship by presenting him with a salmon trawl with hooks. He had at the beginning of the summer lent him books and taught him how to write after a copy, but since the fishing had been in force and navigation had become lively, their paths had separated.

But in order to get the man to really place out the trawl the commissioner would not tell him that it was for salmon, for then the conservative fisherman would never concern himself with what was according to his idea an absurd exploit without reward; therefore he was left in the belief that the question was about a new remunerative cod fishing; where the biggest fishes should be caught.

When the commissioner now after a month of isolation rowed out on the sea with Vestman and he heard his own voice again, he observed that from lack of use it had changed its tone and become thinner, so that he fancied he heard a stranger talk. And now he intoxicated himself with talking. His brain, which had only labored and produced by hand and pen, broke now through the sluices of the windpipe, and all his thoughts flowed out as in a stream, giving new births on the way, and when he had got the chance to speak to a human being's ear for a sounding board without being interrupted, without being questioned, it was to him as though he had a comprehending listener before him. And after their first outing he felt sure that Vestman was the most intelligent person he had met for a long time.

Now he kept on for eight days and narrated during their excursions about all the secrets of nature, explained the influence of the moon on the surface of the water, and warned him not to believe that all that the eyes saw was as it looked to be. Narrated, for example, that the moon was pear shaped, although it looked like a bowl, and that one, therefore, had no surety that the earth was ball shaped....

Here Vestman made a face and dared to raise an objection for the first time.

"Yes, but it says so in my almanac anyhow."

The commissioner found that he had gone out too far and must return, but it was too late, because to give a demonstration of the latest investigations regarding the shape of the earth as being a three axled ellipsoid, required knowledge in the listener, and therefore he must change to another subject. He spoke of the mirage and used the occasion to ask if they had visited Sword Island and seen what he had done there.

"Surely we have seen that something has been going on there, but nobody lands there more, and both the draughting of nets and the pasturing of sheep are spoiled," answered Vestman perfectly in accordance with truth.

After this confession the commissioner drew back, ashamed at having been the victim of the delusion that his listener had understood what he said. Fie had spoken against a wall and taken his own echo for the other's voice.

* * * * *

Eight days later there was a great stir on the skerry, for Vestman had caught a salmon of twenty-six pounds. And as he believed he was the discoverer of this method of fishing, there was soon a notice in the newspaper about a new livelihood for fishermen, now that the stromling had begun to decrease. The happy fisherman, Eric Vestman of the custom house service, had thereby made himself deserving of the esteem and gratitude of his fellow citizens....

Shortly afterwards there occurred in a periodical for the people a defamatory article about fish commissioners, who understand nothing, but believe they have everything to teach.

Hereafter a writing soon followed from the Academy of Agriculture to the commissioner with the request for a complete report of the management of the fishing, especially the salmon fishing, to which the commissioner only answered by handing in his resignation.

Without further interest for the population and without that little support, which his former official position had given him, he soon learned how the savages, who thought that he had "been discharged," commenced a perfect war of extermination against him. First they began to cast his boat loose, under the pretense that there was no place on the bridge, and it drifted to land and was broken to pieces.

During the next rainy weather he observed, that the rain came into the attic room. And after he had complained to Oman it began to rain into the other rooms, without his discovering a failing rooftile.

Shortly after this, one night, a burglary occurred in the cellar, and the offenders were said to be Esthonians.

That their purpose was to drive him away was perfectly clear, but now it amused him to defy them, and this he did by not making any further remarks, and bearing everything.

But now when he was surrounded by real enemies and had in earnest stepped out of the community, the fear of the banished came over him with double force.

He slept poorly nights, notwithstanding he sought to regulate his dreams by giving himself strong suggestions before sleeping. But when he awoke, he had dreamed that he was a whistling buoy that had torn lose, and drifted and drifted seeking a strand upon which to be thrown. And in his sleep he had unconsciously sought support against the sideboard of the bed to feel contact with some object, even if a dead one. Sometimes he dreamed, that he fluttered in the air and could neither go up nor down; and when he finally awoke after a fainting attack he had grasped his hands round the pillow on which he had lain his head. Now the memory of his dead mother began to come up, and he awoke often from dreaming that he had lain as a child on her breast. His soul was plainly in retrogression, and the memory of the mother the source, the link between unconscious and conscious life, the consoler, the interceder, came forth. Childhood's thoughts of meeting again in another world came up, and his first plan of suicide expressed itself as an irresistible longing to find again his mother somewhere in another world, which he did not believe in.

All science was useless to a spirit going downwards, and which had lost all interest in life; the brain had battled, until tired, and the fantasy labored without a regulator.

Still he kept up until it was near Christmas; but he ate little and took only ether at night. The whole life disgusted him, and he smiled now at his former ambitions. The rain had destroyed his books and papers; the apparatus had corroded and rusted.

The care of his own person had lessened, so that his whiskers had grown, his hair remained unkempt, and he shunned water. He had not sent his linen to be laundried for a long time, and he had lost the ability to see dirt.

His clothes lacked buttons, and his coat was always spotted in front from things spilt, for the hand that managed knife and fork no longer obeyed the will.

When he went out sometimes, the children stood and made faces at him and called him nicknames.

One morning he had the whole swarm of children around him. They pulled his coat, and when he turned back, a stone was thrown, which hit his chin so that the blood ran. Then he began to weep and begged them not to be cross with him.

"Yes, you shall go away, you devilish fool," cried a boy of twelve years, "lest we shall get you to the almshouse."

And so they all threw stones. But then Oman's maid came out and took the boy by the hair, and when she had chastised him, she went to the assailed and wiped the blood from his face with her apron.

"Poor little man!" said she.

Then he leaned his head towards her full bosom and said:

"I will sleep with you."

"Oh, shame!" snubbed the maid and pushed him away from her.

He replied, "How coarse your thoughts are! Fie!"

One evening some days later Vestman's maid ran down and begged the Doctor to come up and see Vestman's wife, who was dying. The request seemed somewhat unexpected to the commissioner, but with the clear-sightedness which during intervals of light accompanied his sickness, he perceived that here a murder had been committed and that they would use his name and title instead of a legal medical examination. The case was immaterial to him, but it aroused him for a moment. Something had happened, and the unusual had made a long needed impression. He therefore went up to the custom house cottage and was received by both brothers, who showed him into the sick room with a politeness, which seemed to the commissioner extremely suspicious. But he said nothing, asked nothing, for he would draw out the vague confession by constraining the husband to speak first, sure that he would betray himself at the first word.

By a tallow candle sat the child eating a cookie, which had not been given her without an object, and she was dressed in her best clothes, probably so that she should feel solemn and appear in a constrained manner.

After the commissioner had looked around the room and observed that Vestman's brother had sneaked out, he stepped up to the bed where the woman lay.

He saw at once that she was dead, and by the contracted muscles of her face he understood that some violence had been committed, and when he also observed that her hair was carefully combed over the top of her head, he understood at once that the old, good way with the nail had been used.

But he would have the man speak first, and with half open lips and questioning eyes, just as though he would ask something, he turned to Vestman. This at once put him off his guard, and relying, that he need no longer be sly with one who was insane, he said:

"Can't the Doctor testify that she is gone, so that we shall be permitted to bury her at once, for you see, we poor cannot afford to call a physician out here."

More was not needed to give half a surety. But instead of answering the commissioner turned half whispering towards the man who was perfectly calm after he had delivered his errand:

"Where is the hammer?"

At first the man flew backwards two steps, as if he would strangle his opponent, who still disarmed him by casting a glance at the girl, after which the husband stood still shivering.

"You do not know where the hammer is, but I know where the nail is driven," the commissioner continued with an immovable calm. "Over prudent asses, who cannot invent anything new, and like children always hide on the same place, when they play goal. I am convinced that this nailing the brain was invented by a nobleman or a priest during the Middle Ages and has now sunk down to the under class, where it is dug up as a sample of the peoples' craftiness. Everything comes from above, salmon, arsenic, nails, accidental shootings, revolutions, personal liberty, financial well being, ballads, folk-lore, farmers' almanacs, anthropological museums, but they are first stolen, for you mob prefer to steal rather than take a gift, for you are too paltry to be willing to give thanks. And therefore you place your benefactors in an asylum, and your noblemen on the scaffold. Place me now in an asylum, and you will escape prison!"

Coming down to the cottage he remembered that the pleasure of speaking what he thought had allured him to an imprudent act, and with knowledge of the peoples' character he knew that self-defense against a dangerous witness might determine the murderer to put him to silence. He slept, therefore, during the night with a revolver in the bed and was awakened by bad dreams.

The following day he remained locked in and saw how white sheets hung at the windows in the custom house cottage. The third day the body was brought out and taken away on a boat, and the fourth day the men came back again. He did not sleep any more now, and insomnia completed the work of destruction. The fear of becoming insane and being placed in an asylum, mixed with the apprehension of being assassinated at any time, confirmed his decision to step out of life voluntarily. Now, when death approached and the end of life, of a family, stood forth in its gloom, it was as though the propensity of generation sprang up, and found utterance in the longing to own a child. But to go the whole trite way to search for a woman, and bind himself by family to the earth and community, was against him more than ever, and in his frail, torn condition he speculated out a shorter way, which would give him family pleasure, if only for a few hours.

In a roundabout way, at which his sense of delicacy would have revolted a few months before, he procured after some waiting the seed of a human being, and then he constructed a _couveuse,_ under the microscope which could be kept at a temperature from thirty-six to forty-one degrees Celsius. When fecundation had taken place, he saw how the males were swarming round the immovable female, which he imagined he saw blushing. And now they crowded, pushed, whipped each other in the battle to give impetus to a generation to propagate his talents, inoculating his rich, productive spirit on a buxom, rank, wild substratum. But it was not the largest, those with big, stupid heads and thick tails, it was the quickest, the agile, the most fiery, who first penetrated the membrane to push into the nucleus.

With the screw of the alcohol lamp under his thumb and one eye on the thermometer he looked at this unveiled mystery of love for a couple of hours. Saw, how the cells commenced to cleave, how the division of labor between the different segments had already taken place and he waited with uneasiness for the anterior end of the medullary tube to swell into a bulb, which would constitute the primary brain; he dreamed that he could see this forge of thought arching beautifully, and he felt for a moment a pride at his creation, which solved the problem of Homunculus, when a movement on the screw of the lamp caused the white of the egg to coagulate and the spark of life to be extinguished.

He had lived so intensely this other being's life during these moments, that now, when he saw the round, dull, white spot on the glass, it was to him, as if he beheld the sunken eye of death, and magnified in his sickly senses the grief grew to sorrow, the sorrow over his dead child: the band between this and the future was severed, and he no longer had power to do it over.

When he awoke and came to his senses, he felt a strong warm hand grasping his right hand, and he remembered having dreamed, how he was a stranded vessel, which was tossed on the waves--between sky and water, until he finally felt the anchor chain pulling and perceived a calm, as if again bound to firm earth.

Without looking up he pressed the firm hand to feel the attachment with a living being, and he imagined that he observed, how powers were transferred to him through the frailer nerve currents fastening onto the stronger.

"How is it with you?" he heard the preacher's voice above his head.

"If thou wert a woman instead, I should live again, for woman is man's root in the earth," answered the sick man, using thou for the first time to his old comrade.

"Thank fortune, that you have lost the rotten root!"

"Without root we cannot grow and bloom."

"But with such a woman, Borg!"

"Such a one? Do you know who she was? I have never found out."

"Yes, then you only need to know, that she was such a one, that a man never marries. But now she is engaged anyhow...."

"To him?"

"To him! It was in yesterday's paper."

After a moment's silence the preacher would arise and go, but the sick man held him fast.

"Tell me a fairy tale," said he in a childish, touching voice.

"Hm! A fairy tale?"

"Yes, a fairy tale! About sprites, for example. Do this, I beg of you!"

The preacher sat down again, and when he saw that the sick man was in earnest, he let him have his way and narrated.

The commissioner listened with the greatest attention, but when the preacher, faithful to his habit, would give some moral erudition, he was interrupted by the sick man, who begged him to keep to the text.

"It is so good to hear old tales," said he; "it is like rest and to sink back into best memories of the time, when one was a little animal and loved the useless, the nonsensical, the meaningless. Repeat the Lord's Prayer for me now!"

"You don't believe in the Lord's Prayer?"

"No, not more than in the fairy tales: but it will do just as much good anyhow and when death approaches and one is going back again, one loves the old and becomes conservative. Repeat the Lord's Prayer. You shall have what I leave and your note back, if you repeat it."

The preacher hesitated a moment. Then he began to read.

The sick man at first listened quietly, afterwards his lips followed the sound in motion and finally spoke aloud and with a prayerful tone.

When they had finished, the colporteur said: "It is good to pray, I believe!"

"It is like medicine. The words, the old words, awake memories and give powers, the same powers as they formerly gave to the powerless, who sought God outside himself. Do you know what God is? It is Archimedes wishing for a fixed point outside, by the support of which he could lift the earth. It is the imagined magnet in the earth, without which the movement of the needle would be unexplainable. It is that ether, which must be invented so that the vacant space can be filled. It is the molecule, without which the laws of chemistry would be miracles. Give me a little more hypotheses before anything else the fixed point outside myself, for I am entirely loose."

"Do you wish me to speak of Jesus?" asked the preacher, who believed that the sick man was irrational.

"No, not of Jesus! It is either a tale or a Hypothesis. It is a device of revengeful slaves and evil women; it is the God of the mollusks opposed to the vertebrates ... but wait, am I not myself a mollusk. Speak of Jesus! Tell of how he accompanied custom house men and dissolute women, as I have been obliged to do. Speak of how the spiritually poor shall own heaven, because they had no power on earth; and how he taught artisans to waste the time and, beggars, sluggards, prodigal sons, who owned nothing, to share with the industrious, who owned something."

"No. You blasphemer, I am not sitting here as a fool for you!" interrupted the preacher and arose in earnest.

"Do not go, do not go!" cried the sick man. "Hold my hand and let me hear your voice. Speak what you please! Read! Read in the almanac or the Bible, it is immaterial to me. _Horror vacui_, fear of the empty nothing must away!"

"See thou, that thou hast a fear of death?"

"Surely I have that just as every living thing, which without the fear of death never would have lived, but the doom, you see, I do not fear, for the work judges the master, and I have not created myself."

The colporteur had gone!

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