Part 6

"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 is _the 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.

CHAPTER FIFTH

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.