Part 8

Nevertheless it had been a pleasant evening. This imperceptible radiation of warmth from the mother which thawed the frigid thoughts, this atmosphere of cordiality and childishness in the young woman, which made him grow young again, this childish belief in that which in his youth was the naïve idea of the day to lift up that which was cast down, to protect what was dwarfed, sick and frail, all of which he now knew was directly against everything that could promote humanity's happiness and increase, and which he hated from instinct, when he saw how all strength, every burst of originality was persecuted by the unfortunate. And now he would form an alliance with them against himself, work to his own destruction, lower himself to their level, dissemble feeling for the enemy, bestow the war cash on the antagonists. The thought of the enjoyment these proofs of power would give intoxicated him, and he turned his footsteps towards the beach that in the solitude he might recall himself. And when he now in the still, mild summer night wandered on the sand, where he recognized his own footsteps from previous days, where he knew every stone and could tell where this or that herb grew, he noticed that everything looked differently, had assumed a new form and gave entirely different impressions than when he had walked there the day before. A change had occurred, something new had intervened. He could no longer evolve the great feeling of solitude, where he had felt as though alone before nature and humanity, for somebody stood at his side or behind him. The isolation was abolished, and he was soldered to the little banal life, threads had been spun round his soul, considerations began to bind his thoughts, and the cowardly fear of harboring other thoughts than those his friends harbored clutched him. To build happiness on a false foundation he dared not, for if he had it all hewn even to the ridge pole it might sometime tumble, and then the fall would be greater, the grief deeper, and still it must come to pass if he would own her, and that he would do with all the mighty power of a mature man. Lift her up to him? But how to do it? Not that he could make her from woman to man, or redeem her from the uncurable propensities her sex had given her. Not that he could give her his own education which had taken him thirty years to acquire, nor could he give her the same evolution he had passed through, the experiences and the knowledge he had battled for and won. Therefore he must sink down to her, but the thought of this sinking tormented him as the greatest possible evil, as sinking, going down, beginning over again, which besides was impossible. It only remained for him to make himself double, split himself in two, create a personality, intelligible and easy of access to her, play the duped lover, learn to admire her inferiority, get used to a role as she liked to have it, and so in silence live the other half of his life in secret and to himself, sleep with one eye and keep the other open.

He had mounted the skerry without observing it. And now he saw the lights down in the fishing village and heard wild shrieks, the cries of jubilee over the beaten foe, who would raise their children and their children's children from poverty, save them labor, give them new enjoyments. Once again there awoke in him the desire to see these savages tamed, to see these worshipers of Thor kneeling for the white Christ, the giants falling before the pale Asas. The barbarian must pass through Christianity as a purgatory, learn veneration for the power of the spirit in the frail bundles of muscles, the remainder of the wandering tribes must have their middle age before they can reach the renaissance of thinking and revolution of action.

Here should the chapel be raised on the highest ridge of the skerry and its little spire point upwards over the look-out and flag pole to greet the sailors at long distance as a reminder of.... Here he stopped and reflected. With a look of scorn on his pale face, he bent over and picked up four gneiss scales, which he laid in a rectangle from east to west, after having measured thirty steps in length and twenty in breadth.

"What an excellent landmark for the sailors!" he thought as he descended the hill and went home to bed.

CHAPTER SIXTH

The commissioner had confined himself to his room two days to work, and when on the morning of the third day he went out for a stroll on the beach, he met by chance the widow of the deceased officer of the exchequer. She had an anxious look, and when the commissioner inquired after her daughter's health, he learned that she was indisposed.

"It is lack of entertainment," said he at random.

"Yes, but what shall one do in this solitude?" responded the anxious mother.

"The lady must go out to sea, fishing and yachting and get exercise," prescribed he without thinking of what he said.

"Oh, yes," continued the mother; "but my poor Mary cannot go alone."

As there was only one reply, he answered:

"If it would please the ladies to have my company I shall be glad to be of service to you."

The mother found him very good and accepted the offer, saying that she would at once tell Mary to dress.

The commissioner went down to the harbor to outfit the boat, and on the way his steps began to falter, as though going down hill, where the weight pushed him faster than he would go. He felt reluctant at having been so suddenly put in motion by an outside power, before he had had time for deliberation, and now he would make resistance but could not. It was too late and he let himself drift, conscious that nevertheless he would always tend the rudder and determine the course.

He had hoisted the jib on his Bleking boat, shipped the rudder and loosened the bowline ready to be cast off, when Mademoiselle and her mother appeared on the beach. The girl was dressed in an ultra-marine blue gown with white trimmings and wore a blue scotch woolen cap which was very becoming and gave her something of a boyish, brisk expression, totally unlike the angelic one she had shown a few days before.

As the commissioner greeted her and asked after her health, he offered his hand to help them on board. The girl took the outstretched hand and with a light bound was in the boat, where she was placed in the stern at the tiller, but when afterwards the same hand was reached to the mother, she explained that she could not accompany them as she must prepare the dinner. The commissioner, who was suddenly surprised, felt again the desire to make resistance against this soft power which led him where he would not go, but was kept from doing so by the fear of seeming ill-bred; so after a short regret that he must spare the agreeable company of the mother, he threw off the bowline and commanding Miss Mary to throw over the tiller, he put the main sheet in her hand and hoisted the sail.

"But I cannot manage a boat," cried the girl; "I have never had my hand on a tiller!"

"It is no art! Do only as I tell you and you will at once be able to navigate a boat," replied the commissioner as he placed himself in front of the girl and helped her with the maneuvering.

A light soft breeze was blowing and the boat glided out of the harbor with the wind abeam.

The commissioner held the jib sheet and began by instructing the beautiful navigator, grasping every now and then her wrists and pressing the tiller to windward, until they were clear of land, had speedway and were lying on the tack they were to keep to until they reached the skerries.

The responsibility, the effort and the feeling of controlling the boat which held two lives, awoke the numb powers in the woman's frail form, and her eyes which attentively followed the position of the sails were glowing with courage and reliance, when she saw how the boat obeyed the slightest pressure of the hand. If she committed a fault, he corrected it with a kind word, gave her courage to continue by praising her watchfulness, removed difficulties through explaining the whole proceeding as something that clears itself.

She was radiant with happiness, and commenced to talk of the past, of her thirty-four years of life, how she had believed life and the desire of living was past, how she felt herself young again, how she had always dreamed of a life of activity, of manly activity above all else, and to devote her powers to humanity, to others. She knew that she as a woman was a pariah....

The commissioner listened to the whole as to well-known secrets, formulas of an absurd struggle to make that equal which nature had made purposely as unequal as possible, to spare humanity labor, but to answer this now he regarded as without reward and he stuck to his role as an appreciative listener, allowing her to give vent to her diseased imaginations which the fresh wind would blow away. Instead of taking out a knife and cutting off the tangled skeins which her confused thoughts offered to him, he would simply pretend not to notice them, but tuck them under and through gathering impressions which he purposely developed, wind on the old tangles and use them as bobbins, which should only serve as an underlayer for the new yarn, spun out from his rich distaff.

In haste he improvised a scheme, how using the material which the skerries afforded for object lessons, he would in living pictures, without her observing it, in a few hours let her pass through sensations which she should believe came from without, and in such a manner he would smuggle his soul's net over her, and tune her strings in harmony to his instrument. With a movement of the head he now signified that the boat should tack, he slacked the sheet a little, and the boat cleared land and dashed out on the open sea. The wide horizon, the infinite sea of light where no object intervened, threw a light over her beautiful face, the small lineaments were as magnified, half perceptible wrinkles were smoothed out, the whole expression assumed the character of freedom from daily cares, paltry thoughts, and the eye that in one moment could overlook such a big part of the earth's body seemed to see on a grand scale, so that the little self swelled and felt its relative power, and when now the long sea waves slowly raised and lowered the boat in powerful rhythm, he saw how transport was mixed with a grain of fear, which kept it in check.

The commissioner, who observed that the grand scenery did not fail in its impression, concluded now to place the text under the frail music of the swells of the senses, and guide her dawning thoughts out on the great highway, he would loosen the tegument on the swelling seed, so that the plantlet would push out.

"It has the effect of a planet!" improvised he. "The earth, the banal, the tiresome, the moldy, becomes a celestial body. Do we not feel as though we were already participants of heaven, when the opposition is dissolved, the false opposition between heaven and earth, which are one, like the part and the whole. Don't you observe how you grow instead of shrink when you outwit the wind and make it take you to the right when it wants to go to the left? Don't you feel what great power is within you, as you ride upon a wave, when it with a thousand pounds of weight would press you down into its depth? He, who is supposed to have created the wings of the birds, and who needed fifty thousand years to make a flyer out of a creeper, was less quick than he who for the first time put canvas on a pole and instantly invented navigation.

"Is it then so strange if man created God out of his own image, conceiving from his ingenuity one still more ingenious?"

The girl having listened attentively to his effusion, regarded his face uninterruptedly as if she had turned her own towards a fire to warm it. The unusual words she heard seemed to have sunk into her mind and acted as a leaven. Benumbed, lulled by the soft, persuading intonation, she received without deliberation the new views he gave to her previously lifeless and monotonous landscape, of the origin of life and its meaning, and without seeing that her own religious conviction was buried before dissolution, she took up the new and piled it upon the old.

"I never before heard anyone speak as you do," she said dreamily; "speak more!"

He kept silent and with a new motion he gave the boat another course.

They approached Svartbodan's sinister volcanic formation. The black sparkling diorite with its death-white landmark, called "the white mare," looked still more strikingly awful in the sun's rays, which in vain tried to lighten the extreme tones of its black and white.

A cloud passed over the girl's face, her expression shrunk, the eyebrows contracted in rolls as though they would drop down and shut out the depressing picture. A visible movement on the tiller signified that she would fall off from the skerry, but he gave the boat its course forwards, and with the wind's compressed power sped it into the ravine between the black cliffs where the sighing waves sucked it forwards.

It became silent in the boat, and the commissioner would not try to guess at the gloomy recollection that awoke in his companion, but limited himself to pointing to the bleached white skeleton of a long tailed duck, which was still left on the black ledge.

And the wind took the sails again, filled them and wafted the boat out onto the open sea.

They passed the rock with its single mountain ash and its wagtail and approached Sword Island where he for the first time had seen her. There they landed and he guided her the same way that he had passed that Sunday morning, and let her receive the same impressions that he had felt, led her down into the blooming field and showed her where, looking between the wild buckthorns, he had seen her for the first time.

She was now in a wanton mood because all these small observations, even the details of the circumstances, had remained in his memory and must signify that he was smitten. She laughed when he spoke of the first time he had heard her cough, and in a playful humor she told him to go down to the same place and speak and she would guess who it was that spoke.

He obeyed, and jumping down from the rocky footstool placed himself behind the white beam trees and imitated the bellowing of a bull.

"Nay, how beautiful he can sing," joked the girl. "It is surely a Hottentot actor."

The commissioner, who found pleasure in her childishness and had not played with children for many years, continued the role and stepping out on the green field with his coat turned inside out and the lorgnette hanging on one ear, he improvised a savage dance accompanied by a song that he had heard Hottentots sing in the Jardin d'Acclimatation.

The girl seemed both surprised and amused.

"Do you know," said she, "I much prefer you like that when I see that you can be human for a moment and put aside that philosophical face?"

"Is a Hottentot then more of a human being in your eyes than a philosopher?" let fall the commissioner, but at once regretting that he had aroused her to consciousness, he broke a branch from the white beam tree, and wove a wreath and gave it to the girl who had become sober when she saw she had betrayed herself by committing such extreme stupidity.

"Now you shall wreathe the victim, Miss Mary," said the commissioner as a cover. "I wish instead of one I were a hundred and permitted to go as a hecatomb to the slaughter for you."

Kneeling he received the wreath from the pacified beauty, whereupon he started on a run towards the beach with the girl after him.

Down at the water's edge they stopped.

"Shall we throw skipping stones?" proposed she.

"If you please," answered he and selected a flat stone.

They threw stones out over the water a few moments until they became warm.

"Shall we take a bath?" suddenly exclaimed the girl, as if she had for a long time hatched the thought which must now come out.

The commissioner did not know where He was, whether it was a joke or a project coming in earnest, with the mental reservation of keeping on part of the clothing, or for one of the parties to withdraw.

"You take a bath and I will go on farther," he found this the only thing to answer.

"Don't you bathe then?" asked the girl.

"No, I have no bathing suit with me," answered the commissioner; "and besides, I do not bathe in cold water."

"Ha, ha, ha!" rang a cold, disagreeable, scornful laugh from the girl's throat. "You, afraid of cold water," sneered she; "perhaps you cannot swim?"

"Cold water is too coarse for my fine nerves. If you will take a cold bath here I will go to the northern point and take a warm one."

The girl had already pushed off her shoes and throwing a look of disdain and injured vanity at him, she said:

"I suppose you cannot see me from there?"

"Not unless you swim out too far," answered the commissioner and went away.

When he had reached the northern slope of the islet, he searched for a cleft in the rock, which was protected from the northern wind by a rocky wall about fifty feet high. The black hornblende gneiss was as polished as agate by the waves and curved in frail delicate rolls which resembled the muscles of the human body and clung to the bare feet soft as a bolster. No breath of wind reached here, and the sun had burned six hours against the dark ledge so that the air was heated several degrees above body temperature, and the stones almost burned beneath his feet. He had been down to the boat and brought an ax with which he now cut oft the driest heath and sand oats and made up a blazing fire on the rock; in the meantime he undressed. When the fire had quickly burned out he swept the ledge clean as a baker's oven, and with a bailer poured the crystal sea water over the heated stones and let the vapors lap his nude body. Then he placed himself in one of the arm chairs which the sea had sculptured from the cliffs, wrapped a blanket round him and with his knees crouched under his chin shut his eyes and seemed to fall asleep. But he did not sleep; he used this method as he called it to wind himself up and for a few moments let his brain rest and resume its elasticity. For it was too much of an effort to fit himself into companionship with the confused thoughts of others. His mechanism of thought suffered by contact with others, so that it wavered and became unreliable as the compass needle in the presence of iron. Each time he would think clearly about something or form a conclusion, he placed his soul in harmonious numbness by a warm bath, extinguished consciousness in a half slumber for a brief moment by not thinking, during which time all the received observation material seemed to become melted, and afterwards when he extinguished the fire and awoke himself to consciousness the alloy welled up.

When he had sat a moment and the sun had warmed him through, he suddenly arose and stood as though awakened after having slept a whole night. His thoughts labored again, and he looked happy, just as though he had solved a problem.

"She is thirty-four years," he thought; "this I had forgotten under the impression of her youthful beauty, therefore this chaos of past stages, these parts of roles she has successively played in life, this mass of shifting reflexes from men that she had tried to win and fit herself to. Now lately she must have been wrecked in some love affair. _He_, who had held together all these rag pieces of a soul, had turned aside, the sack had rent and now the whole thing lay as a pile of ragpicker's rubbish. She had shown sample pieces of the romantic parsonage of 1850 with a regurgitation from the beginning of the century for saving humanity, zealous faith from 'The Dove's Voice,' and 'The Pietist's' streams of conjuncture, cynicisms from George Sand and the androgynal period. To search the bottom of this sieve through which so many soups had passed, to solve the enigma which was not one, he was too prudent to spend time on. Here only remained to pick out of the heap of bones that which was suitable to form the skeleton, which he would afterwards cover with living flesh and blow his breath into. But this she must not observe for then she would not permit it. She must never see how she was held by him for that would only raise hate and resistance. He would grow underneath the ground as the rhizome, and graft her on himself that she would shoot up, show herself to the world and bear the flower which humanity should admire."

Now he heard the mew's cry and understood that she had swam out from shore. Therefore he dressed quickly and after he had gathered up his belongings he took from under the sheets of the boat material for a small breakfast and laid it out on the moss under an arborescent pine which resembled an Italian stone pine.

There was not a great variety, but everything was costly, choice and served on the remnants of a collection of porcelain which he at one time had begun to gather. The butter shone egg yellow in a serpentine dish with screw cover that stood in a fragment of Henry II faience filled with ice, the crackers lay on a lattice-braided dish of Marieberg and the sardels were on a saucer of blue mottled Nevers. Fear of the general banality breaking forth in arts, industry and daily life, had urged the owner to the modern search after the unusual, the dreadful triviality of the present age and its hate of originality had forced him like so many others into superrefinement to try to save his personality from being ground among the bowlders in the big glacial flow. His finely developed senses did not search after frugal beauty in shape and color, which so easily grows old; he would see history and memories of exploits from the world in that which surrounded him. This fragment of Henry II faience, with its cream white pipe-clay incrusted with red, black and yellow, aroused memories of the beautiful Loire landscape with its renaissance castles, while its ornamental bookbinding style reminded of Madame Hélène de Genlis and her librarian, who together with a potter pressed out a style, purely personal, which still could not escape the coloring of the century of chivalry, when beauty in life was venerated and even the trade was subordinate to science and art, realizing the advantageousness of a system of intellectual rank.

When he had spread breakfast and looked at his work it was to him as though he had placed a piece of culture up here in this semi-arctic wilderness, sardels from Brittany, chestnuts from Andalusia, caviare from Volga, cheese from the Gruyère alps, wurst from Thuringia, crackers from Britain and oranges from Asia Minor. There was a flask in basket work of Chianti wine from Tuscany to be served in goblets with Frederick I's monogram in gold. All were topsy-turvy without a savor of collector or museum; there were slight touches of color thrown in here and there, like flowers pressed as souvenirs between the leaves of a guide book but not in a herbarium.

Now hearing the voice of the girl cry from her bathing place a halloo, he answered, and immediately she stepped out of the shrubs, straight, brisk and radiating with health and the joy of living. When she saw the breakfast spread she raised her cap jokingly with a bow, impressed against her will by the aristocratic in the arrangement.

"You are a wizard," said she; "permit me to bow!"

"Not for so little," answered the commissioner.

"Yes, you indicate that you can do more, but to rule nature as you lately chattered about, that will be beyond you," opposed the girl in a superior motherly tone.

"My lady! I did not express myself so categorically; I only reminded you that we have partly learned how to subdue the powers of nature, by which we are partly controlled--observe the little important word partly--and that it is in our power to both change a landscape's character and the whole soul life of its inhabitants."