Part 5

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 its _milieu_, 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.

CHAPTER FOURTH

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.