Part 17

It was the day before Christmas eve, when he after a stormy night, during which he believed he had heard cannon shots and cries of human beings, went out to walk on the newly fallen snow. The heavens were blue black as an iron sheet, and the waves were heaving against the strand While the whistling buoy cried in a single uninterrupted howl, as if it called for help.

And now he saw out on the sea to the south-east a big, black steamer, with cinnabar red bottom shining as a torn and bloody breast. The funnel with its white ring lay broken on one side, and in the masts and yards dark figures were hanging, twisted as angleworms on hooks.

From a crack midships could be seen how the waves tore out chests, parcels, bales, boxes and sunk the heaviest, but carried the lighter ones to shore.

With an indifference for the fate of the shipwrecked, such as that one must feel, who regards it lucky to die, he went forwards on the strand and came out on the point, where the pile of stones and the cross stood. There the waves foamed more furiously than elsewhere, and on the green water he saw scattered objects of strange shape and color, over which the mews circled with spiteful cries, as though they had been deceived in their greedy waiting for prey.

After he had regarded the curious objects, which came nearer, he saw that they resembled very small children, very finely dressed. Some had blond bangs, others black, their cheeks were rose and white, and their big, open blue eyes, glanced up to the black sky, immovable and without winking. But when they came nearer the strand, he observed, that when they swung on the wave, the eyes of some of them moved, as if they signaled to him, that he should rescue them. And on the next wave five were thrown upon the strand.

He had his desire so fixed to own a child and so rooted in his soft brain, that he was not led to the thought, that they were dolls, which the delayed and stranded vessel had brought for the Christmas season, and he collected his arms full of the small orphan children, whom the sea, the great mother, gave him. And with his wet protégées pressed to his breast he hurried back to the cottage to dry them. But he had nothing to make a fire with, for the people had said they had no wood to sell. He himself did not feel the cold, but his little Christmas company should have it warm, and therefore he broke a book shelf to pieces, and made a flaming fire in the big fireplace, pulled out the sofa and placed the five little ones in a row before the fire. After he comprehended that they could not dry without being undressed, he began to take off their clothes, but when he saw that they were all girls, he left their small chemises on.

Now he washed their feet and hands with his sponge, and afterwards combed their hair, dressed them and laid them to sleep.

It was as though he had company in the cottage, and he walked on tiptoe not to wake them.

He had found something to live for, something to cherish, to give his sympathy to, and when he regarded the small sleepers a moment and saw that they lay with open eyes, he thought that the light pained them, therefore he let the window shades down.

When it became dusk in the room, there came over him a heavy desire to sleep, which was caused from hunger, although he could not now place the cause of the sensation in the right place and thus did not know, when he was hungry or thirsty. However, as the sofa was occupied by the little ones, he laid down on the floor and slept.

When he awoke, it was dark in the room, but the door was open, and a woman stood with a lighted lantern on the threshold.

"Heavenly father, he is lying on the floor," Oman's maid was heard to break out. "But, dear sir, don't you know it is Christmas eve to-day?"

He had slept a day and a night and into the next day.

Unconsciously he arose, missing something, for the custom house men had been down and confiscated the strand goods, but he could not remember what he missed. He felt only a dreadful emptiness as though under a great sorrow.

"Now he shall come up to Oman's and eat the Christmas rice pap, for one is still a Christian being on Christmas eve. Oh, heavenly father, such misery!"

And the girl began to cry.

"To see a human being so wrecked, is enough to make one shed tears of blood! Come now! Come now!"

The half insane man made only a sign that he would come, if she would go first.

When she had gone, he tarried a moment in the cottage, took the lantern she had left and went to the looking glass. When he saw his face, which resembled a savage's, his understanding seemed to light up, and his will expand for a last effort.

Leaving the lantern, he went out.

The wind had turned west and slackened somewhat, the air was clear, and the stars of heaven sparkled. Guided by the lights from the cottages he went down to the harbor, sneaked into a boat house and took out sails to a boat.

After he had hoisted the sail, he threw the painter loose, took the tiller and kept for aft-wind straight out to sea.

He made a tack to look once more on the little fragment of the earth, where he had last suffered, and when he saw a three branched candle in the custom house window, where the murderer celebrated the birthday of Jesus, the forgiver, the idol of all criminals and wretches, who licensed everything wicked that the civil law punished, he turned back and spat, pulled the sheet and made full sail. With his back towards land he steered out under the great starry map and took bearings from a star of the second magnitude between the Lyre and Corona in the east. It seemed to him that it shone brighter than any other, and when he searched in memory, there came a glimpse of something about the Christmas star, the guiding star to Bethlehem, where three dethroned kings pilgrimaged as fallen great ones to worship their own insignificance in the smallest child of human being and which afterwards became the declared god of all little ones. No, it could not be that star, for as a punishment to the Christian wizards for having spread darkness over the earth, not a single dot of light on the arch of heaven bears the name of any one of them, and therefore they celebrated the darkest time of the year--so sublimely ridiculous!--to light wax tapers! Now as his memory cleared up--it was the star _Beta_ in Hercules. Hercules, Hella's moral ideal, the god of vigor and prudence, who killed the Lernean hydra with its hundred heads, who cleaned Augias' stable, captured Diomedes' bullocks which devoured human beings, who tore the girdle from the Amazon queen, fetched Cerebus up from Hades, to finally fall for a woman's stupidity, who poisoned him from pure love, after he in lunacy had served the nymph Omphale for three years....

Out towards the one that at least had been placed in heaven, who never let anyone strike him or spit in his face without man-like to strike and spit back, out towards the self-destroyer, who could only fall by his own strong hand without begging for mercy from the chalice, out towards Hercules, who freed Prometheus, the light giver, who was himself the son of a god and a woman, and who was afterwards falsified by savages to be the son of a virgin, whose birth was greeted by milk drinking shepherds and braying asses.

Out to the new Christmas star led the way, out over the sea, the mother of all, from the womb of whom life's first spark was kindled, the inexhaustible spring of fecundity and love, life's origin and life's foe.

THE END