On the Seaboard. August Strindberg
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here she has a little more to think of. Yes, anybody can get children if they help each other,—as a matter of course I am not in need of help, as they say."
The commissioner was surprised at the sudden turn the long sentence had taken, and asked himself if the man was cognizant of anything, or if he had only a feeling that there was something out of order. He himself had seen in ten minutes the way things stood.
How then was it possible that he who was interested in the question had seen nothing in a couple of years?
He was overcome with loathing at the whole thing, and turned to the wall to blind his eyes, and with mental pictures of a pleasant nature let the remaining half hour pass.
He could not make himself deaf, and heard against his will the talk, which a short time before had been lively, becoming broken as though the words were measured with a rule before spoken, and when there was a silence the husband filled it out as though from aversion, and fearing to hear something he would not hear, and could not be calm before his own stream of words intoxicated him.
When the hour was finally to an end and no order concerning the room had been given, the commissioner rising asked if it was ready.
O yes, it was ready in a way, but—
Here the commissioner asked in a tone of command to be shown to his room at once, reminding them in fitting words that he had not come to share a room with them, or for hospitality, he was traveling on the Crown's errands and only asked for his rights—and those he would have because of a memorial from the Civil Department through the Internal Revenue Office, which had been sent to the Royal Custom House in Dalaro.
This straightened affairs at once, and Vestman, with a candle in his fist, followed the severe gentleman upstairs to the gable chamber, where nothing in the arrangements could explain the requested hour's delay.
It was an ordinary, large room with walls as white as those downstairs, the big window opened on the longest wall as a black hole through which streamed the darkness unimpeded by any curtains.
A bed stood there ready for use, simple, only an elevation of the floor to prevent drafts, a table, two chairs and a washstand comprised the furniture. The commissioner threw a look of despair about him, when he, who was used to feast his eyes to satisfaction on luxuries, saw only these scattered articles placed about in space, where the candle battled with the darkness and where the big window seemed to consume every beam of light which was produced by the burning tallow.
He felt lost, as though after battling upwards for half his maturity to attain refinement, good position and luxuries, he had fallen to poverty, moved down to a lower class. It was as though his love of beauty and wisdom were imprisoned, deprived of their nourishment and subject to banishment. Those naked walls were a middle age cloister cell where asceticism in image, and emptiness in the middle hurried the famined fantasy to gnaw itself and bring forth lighter or darker fancies only to become extricated from nothing. The white, the shapeless, the colorless nothing in the whitewashed walls raised an activity of the imagination such as a savage's cave or a green bough hut never could have evoked, or the forest with its ever changing colors and moving outlines would have dispensed. An activity that not the field, nor the heath with the clouds' and sky's rich coloring, nor yet the never tiring sea, could call forth.
He felt at once a rising desire instantly to paint the walls full of sunny landscapes with palms and parrots, to stretch a Persian rug over the ceiling and throw hides of deer upon the plank floor covering the ruled-ledger appearance, to place sofas in the corners with small tables in front, to suspend a hanging lamp over a round table strewn with books and magazines, stand a piano against the short wall and dress the long wall with book shelves, and away in the corner of the sofa set a little woman's figure, no matter which one!—Just as the candle on the table fought against the darkness, so his fantasy rebelled against the room's arrangements, and thus it lost its hold, everything disappeared, and the dreadful surroundings frightened him to bed. Quenching the light he drew the blankets over his head.
The wind shook the whole gable, and the water caraff rattled against the drinking glasses. The draft passed through the room from window to door and sometimes touched his locks of hair, which were dried from the sea wind, so that he fancied someone stroked them with his hand, while between the gusts of wind, like the striking of the kettledrum in an orchestra, beat and boomed the big breakers against the caverned rocks out on the south point. And when he had finally become used to the monotonous sound of wind and wave, he heard, shortly before he fell asleep, a man's voice in the room below teaching a child its evening prayer.
CHAPTER SECOND
When the commissioner, after a dead sleep induced by the efforts of the preceding day and the strong sea air, awoke the next morning and looked out of the blankets, he observed first an incomprehensible silence, and found that his ear caught slight sounds that otherwise he would have paid no attention to. He could hear each little movement of the sheet as it rose and fell from his respiration, the friction of his locks of hair against the pillow-case, the pulsations in the neck arteries, the rickety bed repeating the heart beat on a small scale. He felt the silence because the wind had gone down, and only the swell beat against the compressed air in the hollows of the strand and returned once every half minute. From the bed which was placed opposite the window he saw, through the lower pane, something like a blue draw-curtain, bluer than the air, and it kept moving toward him slowly, as though it would come in through the window and overflow the room. He knew it was the sea, but it looked so small,—and it rose like a perpendicular wall instead of expanding as a horizontal surface, because the long breakers were fully lighted by the sun and cast no shadows from which the eye could form a perspective image.
He arose, and partly dressing himself opened the window. The raw, moist air in the chamber rushed out, and from the sea came a warm green-house air, warmed several hours by the radiant May sun. Below the window he saw only low, jagged rocks in the crevices of which lay small dusty drifts of snow, and near by bloomed small white rye-flowers, well protected in beds of moss, and the poor wild pansies, pale yellow as from famine, and blue as from chill, hoisting their poor country's poor colors to the first spring sun. Lower down crept the heath and the crowberry vine, looking down over the precipice, below which lay a windrow of white sand, pulverized by the sea, and in which were stuck scattered sand-oat stalks; then came the kelp belt as a dark sash or braid on the white sand, highest up it was almost ivory black from last year's kelp in which were sticking shells, leaves of fir, twigs, fish bones, and toward the sea it was olive-brown from the last fresh kelp, which with its curled and knotted fronds formed a garniture like a chenille cord. Inside on the sandy side walk lay the top of a barkless pine, sand scrubbed, washed by the water, polished by the wind, bleached by the sun, resembling the ribs of a mammoth skeleton, and around it a whole osteologist's museum of like skeletons or fragments of the same.
A beacon, which had shown ships the way for years, lay thrown up, and with its thick end looked like the thigh bone and condyle of a giraffe; in another place a juniper shrub, like the carcass of a drowned cat, with its white small roots stretching out for the tail.
Outside the strand lay reefs and rocks which one moment glanced wet in the sunshine, the next were submerged by the swell which passed over them with a splash, or if it had not sufficient power, rose, burst, and threw a water-fall of foam into the air.
Outside the island lay the shining sea, that great flat, as the fishermen called it, and now in the morning hour it stretched like a blue canvas without a wrinkle but undulating like a flag. The big round surface would have been tiresome had not a red buoy been anchored outside the reef, and brightened up the monotony of the surface with its minium spot like the seal on a letter.
This was the sea, certainly nothing new to Commissioner Borg who had seen several corners of the world. Still it was the desolate sea seen as it were in a tête-à-tête. It did not terrify like the forest with its gloomy hiding places, it was quieting like an open, big, faithful blue eye. Everything could be seen at once, no ambush, no lurking