Part 9

"Good! Conjure up an Italian landscape, with marble cottages and stone pines, out of this dreadful granite _paysage_!"

"I am certainly no juggler, but if you challenge me I promise you by your birthday, in three weeks to transform this fresh piece of nature, whose equal you may search after through all Europe, to a treeless, scorched cabbage landscape to your taste."

"Well! Let us wager! And if after three weeks I lose, what then?"

"Then I win--but what?"

"We will see then!"

"We will see! But will you attend to my duty during that time?"

"Your duty! What is that? To lie on the sofa and smoke cigarettes?"

"Yes, if you can as I attend to my duty on the sofa,--with pleasure. But you cannot do that and now you shall learn the reason and meaning of my stay on this skerry! But first take a glass of wine with your wurst!"

He poured a glass of the dark red Chianti wine and passed it to the girl who emptied it at a draught.

"You know," began the commissioner, "that my official commission here at this fishing port is to teach the population how to fish."

"It must be a nice one, you who brag that you have never had a tackle in your hand."

"Don't interrupt me--I shall not teach them how to fish with tackle. You see, things are thus, that these lingerers are conservative as all rabble--"

"What language is this?" interrupted the girl again.

"Plain language! However! From indiscretion and conservatism these aboriginals go on undermining their own interests as fish eating mammals, and therefore the state must place them under guardians. The stromling--God bless the fish!--that constitutes the most important livelihood of these autochthones, threatens to come to an end. Certainly I don't care at all, if a few hundred ichthyophageus more or less increase or diminish a superfluous horde of people, it is completely Immaterial. But now they shall live since the Academy of Agriculture wishes it, and therefore I shall hinder them from fishing their scanty supply. Is this acknowledged logic?"

"It is inhuman, but you are made of material for a hangman!"

"For this reason I have on my own accord, without asking for the decoration of Vasa or any kind of thanks, found out a new means of sustenance which shall replace the old, for even if the stromling should shoal for half a man's age after the fishermen have emigrated, still this means of sustenance is threatened by a competition, which after a hundred years of rest has again arisen more formidable than ever. Do you know that the herring will return to the coast of Bohus in the fall?"

"No, I haven't had any letter from them for a long time!"

"They do so at any rate. Therefore we must stop the stromling fishing and fish for salmon instead."

"Salmon? In the depth of the sea?"

"Yes! It shall be found there, although I haven't seen it. Yet you shall find it out!"

"But if it isn't there?"

"I told you that it was there! You shall only catch the first one and then salmon fishing is open."

"But how do you know salmon exists when you haven't seen it?" argued the girl.

"By a mass of investigations too complicated to explain in conversation, partly done at sea....

"Only once!"

"I work as quickly as twenty, thanks to my superior intelligence--partly on my sofa but mostly in books. Anyway, will you insist to destroy the people, first with salmon and afterwards with a mission house which you have forgotten?"

"You are a demon, a devil!" exclaimed the girl between scorn and earnestness.

The commissioner, who only from a caprice had turned into skepticism, and now saw that just this made the most impression, found it best to continue this role.

"Surely you do not believe in God?" asked the girl with an air, as though she would eternally despise him if he answered in the negative.

"No, I do not."

"And you would be an Ansgarius and introduce Christianity on the skerry?"

"And the salmon! Yes, I will be a demoniac Ansgarius! But will you also let down the salmon trawl and be blessed by the revisors of the Reichstag?"

"Yes, I shall work for these people whom I believe in, I shall devote my feeble powers for the oppressed, and I shall show you that you are a blasé, a roué and a scorner.... No, you are not, but you make yourself out worse than you are for you are a good child anyway, I saw that last Sunday...."

She said a good child, as if with a sure calculation that he would snap at the bait, and place himself under her care as the child, no matter whether a good or bad one. But now he had already formed a fancy for the demon as being superior and more interesting, therefore he held to the more grateful task. Surely he knew from experience that the easiest way to insinuate oneself into a woman's favor was to let her play the mother with all the freedom changed to intimacy, but it was a worn-out play and could so easily lead to an inextirpable hectoring on her part. Better then to give her the more grateful part of a redeemer, where nothing that was absolutely superior entered, only the mother of God's intervening purpose, where she was mediator between two equally strong powers.

But the transition was not easily found, and in a moment of loathing at the whole play, which was still necessary if he would win her, and that he would, he pretended to go down and see if the boat was safely moored, as a breeze was beginning to blow.

Upon reaching the beach he drew a long breath as though he had been exerting himself beyond his strength. He unbuttoned his vest as though he had been wearing a coat of iron, and cooling his head he threw a longing glance out over the free water. Now he would have given much to have been alone, to shake off the chaff which had fallen upon his soul during his contact with a lower spirit. In this moment he hated her, would be free from her, own himself again, but it was too late! Cobwebs had fastened to his face, soft as silk, slimy, invisible and impossible to remove. At the same time--when he turned back and saw her as she sat peeling a chestnut with her long fingers and sharp teeth--he was reminded of a mandrill he had seen in a menagerie, and was seized with an infinite compassion, and a wave of sadness, such as the more fortunate feels when he looks upon the lowly. He immediately thought of her delight at seeing him as a Hottentot, and became vexed again, but calming himself with the self-possession of a man of the world he approached her, and to speak the first cloaked word he reminded her that it was time to go, as the wind had risen. However she had observed the tired and absent-minded look upon his face and with a sharpness, which completely calmed his feeling for an instant, she responded:

"You are tired of my company! Let us go."

When he did not answer with a courtesy, she resumed with feeling, which it was difficult to judge whether real or pretended.

"Excuse me, I am naughty! I have grown so, and I am ungrateful! Never mind it!"

She wiped her eyes and began with a house-wife's trained care to put the dishes together.

And now, when she bowed down, leaning over the remainder of the unwashed dishes with the tablecloth tied round her waist for an apron and started to carry the service to the beach to wash it, he hastened to relieve her of the load, urged by an irresistible desire not to see her in a servant's place, and feeling the sting of being served by one whom he would raise far above himself at the same time she was to look up to him as one that had granted her the power over him.

At this pretended combat that arose over which one should serve the other, the girl dropped the dishes. She gave a cry, but when she looked at the pieces, her face cleared up.

"Fortunately they were all old! My God, I was so frightened!"

He suppressed his paltry thoughts of the loss by at once placing himself on the side of her who had had the misfortune, and glad to have a noisy ending to the various feelings that rent him, he threw the shivers of porcelain like skipping stones out over the bay and rounded off the pointed situation with a jocose,

"Now we do not need to wash dishes, Miss Mary!"

Whereupon he reached her his hand and helped her into the boat, which was already pulling at the painter under the increasing dash of the waves.

CHAPTER SEVENTH

A bright, sunny summer morning the commissioner is sitting with his pupil up in the wooden pavilion, which he has had set up on the highest point of the skerry close to the newly laid foundation of the mission house. Down in the harbor lies a schooner, from which the frame for the new building is being unloaded and carried up to its place to be joined together by the foreman and his laborers. Therefore it has been unusually lively on the skerry for some time and small skirmishes have already arisen between the fishermen and the city workmen, in which the latter have treated the former with insolence, which has given rise to a series of feasts of atonement followed by drunkenness and new frays, attacks of immorality and appropriation of other's property. Therefore the commissioner and the elderly lady have a momentary regret at having undertaken the civilization of these people, when the first steps already showed such a sad result; so much more so as the nightly noises, singing, crying and complaining disturbed all work and all rest for them, who had come out here solely for the purpose of seeking quiet. The commissioner, who had lost all reputation by once yielding a little of his authority, could not restore the peace, but Miss Mary on the other hand succeeded better and understood how by a prompt appearance, and a good word now and then, to suppress the storm. This she would not impute to her beauty and agreeable manner; she had credited herself with a higher degree of strength and understanding than she possessed, and thus imbued herself in the belief of having an unusual faculty of mind, so that even now, when she sat as a pupil with her teacher, she received his instruction as though she were already acquainted with them, and answered with remarks more pointed than sagacious, seeming to correct and explain rather than to learn.

The mother, who was sitting beside her embroidering an altar cloth for the new mission house, seemed occasionally amazed at her daughter's penetrating insight and great knowledge, as she with a simple question nonplussed her teacher.

"See here, Miss Mary," lectured the commissioner, always deceiving himself with the hope of being able to educate her; "the untrained eye has a propensity to see everything simple; the untrained ear to hear everything simple. You see here around you only gray granite, and the painter and the poet see the same. Therefore they paint and depict everything so monotonously; therefore they find the skerries so monotonous. And yet, look at this geological map of the surroundings and then throw a glance out over the landscape. We are sitting on the red gneiss region. Look at this stone you call granite, how rich is the variety; it is the baking together of the black mica, the white quartz and the pinkish feldspar."

He had taken a sample from the pile which the foundation layers had blasted from the skerry and laid in a heap for the building's foundation.

"And look, here is another. It is called eurite! See what fine shades of color, from salmon red towards flint blue. And here is white marble of primeval limestone."

"Is there marble here?" asked the girl, her imagination stirred at the mention of this valuable stone.

"Yes, there exists marble here, although it looks gray on the surface without being gray. For, if you observe it closer you will find what an infinite variety of color there is in the lichens. What a scale of the finest colors from the ramaline lichen India-ink black to the crottle's ash-gray, the ground liverwort's leather-brown, the parmelia lichen seal-green, the tree lungwort's spotted copper-green and the wall moss egg-yellow. Look closer out over the skerries as they are now lit by the sun, you will see that the rocks have different colors, and that the people who are used to seeing them, even give them names after the scale of colors, which they are acquainted with without knowing it. Do you see that the Black Rock is darker than the others, because it consists of the dark: hornblende; that the Red Rock is red, because it is composed of red gneiss, and the white skerries of clean washed eurite? Is it not more to know why, than to know that a thing is so; and still less to see nothing but an even gray, as the painter, who paints all the skerries with a mixing of black and white? Hear now the roaring of the waves, as the poets summarily call this symphony of sound. Close your eyes for a moment and you will hear better while I analyze this harmony in simple notes. You at first hear a buzzing which resembles the noise heard in a machine shop or a big city. It is the masses of water dashing against each other; next you hear a hissing; it is the lighter, smaller water particles which are lashed to foam. And now a grating as of a knife against a grindstone; it is the wave tearing against the sand. And now a rattling like the dumping of a load of gravel; it is the sea heaving up small stones. Then a muffled thud as when you clap the hollow of your hand to the ear, it is the wave which presses the air before it into a cavern; and lastly this murmuring as from distant thunder, it is big bowlders, rolling on the stony bottom."

"Yes, but this is to spoil nature for us!" said the girl.

"It is to make nature intimate with us! It gives me composure to know it, and thereby frees me from the poet's half-hidden fear of the unknown, which is nothing else than memories from the time of savage fiction, when explanations were sought but could not be found quickly; and in the emergency the fable of the mermaids and the giants was caught at. But now we pass on to the fishing, which shall be retrieved, leaving the salmon for some other time, and try new methods for stromling fishing. In two months the great fishing begins, and if I have not calculated wrongly it is going to be a failure in the autumn."

"How can you foretell that from your sofa?" asked the girl more cuttingly than inquisitive.

"I foretell it by the facts that I have seen--from my sofa--how the drifting ice in the spring scraped the shoals clear of kelp and other algæ, in which the stromling go to spawn. I foretell it by the scientific fact that the small crustaceans--no matter what they are called--on which the stromling feed, have stayed away from the banks since the seaweed was scraped away. What shall we do then? We shall try to fish in the deep water I If the fish don't come to me then I must go to the fish. And therefore we shall try with nets drifting after a floating boat. It is simple!"

"It is grand!" said Miss Mary.

"It is old," protested the commissioner, "and it isn't my discovery! But now we shall as prudent beings think of a last resort, for even if we get stromling and don't get a price for it on account of herring being caught again on the west coast, we must have something else In readiness."

"It is the salmon?"

"It is the salmon, which must be found here, but I haven't seen it."

"You have told me this much before, but now I should like to know how you can know it."

"I shall reduce the fraction and in a few words tell the reason of my stay here. The salmon wander as do the other migrating birds."

"The salmon a bird?"

"Certainly, a perfect migratory bird. It is to be found near the rivers of Norrland, and has been caught twice in nets round the islands of the north passage. It has been taken near Gotland and in the whole southward passage; therefore it must pass by here. Now it is your task to trace it out with floating trails. Have you the desire to do it, in the capacity of my assistant, to obtain my salary?"

The last word came suddenly, but with calculation, and did not fail in its intent.

"I shall make money, mamma," cried Miss Mary in a playful tone, intended to hide the joy she really felt. "But," added she, "what will you do then?"

"I shall lie on my sofa, and spoil nature for you."

"What are you going to do?" asked the mother, who believed she had not heard aright.

"I shall make an Italian landscape for Miss Mary," answered the commissioner, "and now I will leave you, my ladies, and make the sketch."

Therewith he arose and making a polite bow walked down to the beach.

"He is an odd being," said the mother, when the commissioner was out of hearing.

"An unusual being at the least," answered the girl; "but I don't believe he is perfectly sane. He seems to have principles, and on the whole is a kind man. What have you to say about him?"

"Hand me my yarn, child," said the mother.

"No, but say something ... tell me whether you like him or not," continued the girl.

The mother only answered with a half sad and half resigned glance, which expressed indifference.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the commissioner had gone down to the harbor and taken his boat to row out among the skerries. The summer heat had lasted out here a month, so that the air was hot; but drifting ice still coming from the north, where an unusually severe winter on the coast had caused bottom freezing, was now drifting southward, cooling the water, so that the lower air strata had greater density than the upper ones. The consequent refraction disfigured the aspect of the skerries and had caused the most magnificent mirages during the past few days. This scenery had given rise to long continued disputes between the commissioner and the ladies in which the fishing population had been summoned as judges, being the most competent because they had seen these phenomena of nature from childhood. And when on a morning the light red gneiss skerries through refraction stretched upwards and by the varying density in the strata of air seemed stratified as the cliffs of Normandy, Miss Mary argued that it really was those limestone cliffs, which were reflected as far up as the Baltic Sea, through a law of nature still unsolved by science. At the same time the white swell of the breakers in the strand stones was magnified and multiplied through refraction so that it really looked as though a flotilla of Normandy fishing boats were beating the wind under the cliffs. The commissioner, who had tried in vain to give the only correct explanation, in order to take away the supernatural, the more so as the people saw in the phenomena predictions, of course, of coming misfortunes; belief In ill luck, which acted as a damper on their enterprise, now found himself obliged to appear first as a wizard to win the ear of the populace, with the intention, however, to subsequently remove the mystery by telling them how he made his magic.

Therefore he asked the believers, whether they would also believe themselves to see a mirage of Italy, if they should see an Italian landscape, and when they answered, "Yes," he decided to combine the useful with the pleasant and by a few small changes fulfil his promise to form an exotic landscape for Miss Mary's birthday, so that by the next mirage it would loom up against the horizon on a grand scale when seen through the colossal magnifying glass, that the different density of the air strata afforded.

Sitting in his boat, he aimed towards the Sword-islet with his diopter, the lenses of which he had considerably increased in power. Now the first question was how to get the most characteristic features of the formation, viz., the stratified rocks, to come forth, and this nature had partly done. After this he needed a stone pine, a cypress, a marble palace and a terrace with oranges on espaliers.

After scanning and outlining the skerry, he had the scheme clear and soon landed with his boat in which was stowed a crow bar, a ship scraper, a roll of zinc wire and a bucket of yellow ocher with a big tar brush, besides an ax, a saw, nails and a stock of dynamite cartridges.

When he had landed and packed up his belongings, he felt himself a Robinson Crusoe, who had taken up a battle with nature, but much sharper and surer of victory as he had brought along the means of culture. After he had placed the plane table on a tripod and upon this the alidade, he started to work.

The mountain ridge, whose tilted folds happily imitated the southern sedimentary strata, needed only to be scraped so as to remove the lichens, where there were any, leaving some horizontal stripes darker than the folds. It was not heavy work; the ship scraper glided over the smooth surface as a retouching brush on the scene painter's big canvas.

Sometimes he felt with disgust that he was throwing time and power away on childish things, but the bodily exertion sent the blood to his head, so that he saw small things bigger than they were; felt something of a Titan, who stormed the universe, corrected our Maker's mistakes, and wriggled the earth's axis so that the south came a little northward.

After he had striped the rocky wall, for a few meters, which was all that was needed as it was to be multiplied by the air strata, he went to manufacture the stone pine. On the hillock's crest stood a group of low arborescent pines, which together only miraged as the border of a forest. The thing was to cut down half a dozen trees to isolate the best one which would be silhouetted against the sky.

To saw down the supernumerary trees was the work of half an hour. The one that was left was slender with all its vegetative energy gathered at the top, because the others standing so close had hindered the formation of branches on the trunk. But now he must thin the crown with an ax so that the characteristic umbrella frame with its ribs came out. It was easily done, but when he afterwards looked at his creation with the diopter he still saw that the style was not perfect and that the top branches must be stretched upwards with zinc wire and the side branches somewhat downwards and outwards. When the stone pine was completed, he took a glass of wine and selected the material for the cypresses. This soon presented itself in the form of a pair of pointed junipers, which he only needed to select so that they rose against the sky, and trim them with an ax and the knife. But as they were somewhat too light, he took a pail of water and stirred some ivory-black in it and sprinkled them with the wash until they had a perfect churchyard green.

When he contemplated his work, he became dejected, and recollected a dark story of the girl who stepped on the loaf of bread; and when the white mews gave forth dreadful cries above his head, he thought of the two black ravens which came from heaven to take her soul down to hell.

After he had sat a moment and the blood had returned to his brain, he smiled at his work and at his childish fear. If nature herself had not gone exactly so hastily to work with the origin of species it was not lack of good will, only lack of ability.

Now to make a marble palace; and as that had been his starting point and he had planned it all at home on his sofa, this work was not more difficult than the other.

The limestone ledge stood perfectly vertical, ready for a facade; true there were only a few square meters of it but no more was needed, and it was only to loosen the eurite slabs, which from weathering had cracked from the limestone. The crowbar proved sufficient at first, but at the base he found it necessary to use a dynamite cartridge in the crack.

At the report of the cartridge and the raining down of shivers he felt something of the poet's longing to dump all at once the ammunition of the standing armies into a volcano and relieve humanity of the pain of existence and the trouble of development.