Читать книгу On the Seaboard - August Strindberg - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The wind had shifted north-east during the night and the drifting ice had floated down from Aland, when the commissioner took his boat to make a preparatory investigation of the quality of the sea's bottom depth of water, sea flora and sea fauna.

A pilot who was with him as oarsman, soon became tired of giving explanations, when he saw that the commissioner by means of chart, sounding lead and other different instruments, found out facts that he had never thought of. Where the shoals lay was known to the pilot, and he also knew on which shoal the stromling nets should be set, but the commissioner was not satisfied with this and began to dredge at different depths, taking up small creatures and vegetable slime on which he believed the stromling fed. He lowered the lead to the bottom and drew up samples of clay, sand, mud, mold and gravel, which he assorted, numbered and placed in small glasses with labels.

Finally he took out a big spyglass which resembled a speaking trumpet, and looked down into the sea. The pilot had never dreamed that one could gaze into the water with an instrument and in his astonishment asked permission to place his eye to the glass and look down into the mysteries.

The commissioner on the one hand would not play wizard, and on the other did not desire hastily to solve the problem which time would clear up, or to inspire too high hopes about the results, he therefore granted the pilot's entreaty and gave some popular explanation of the living pictures which were unfolding down in the depths.

"Do you see that seaweed upon the shoal?" began the commissioner, "and do you see that it is first olive yellow, lower down liver colored and at the bottom red? That comes from the diminution of light!"

He took a few pulls at the oars, off the shallow, and kept constantly to lee of the rock so as to keep free from the drifting ice.

"What do you see now?" he asked the man who lay on his stomach.

"Oh Jesus! I think it is stromling, and they are standing close, as close as cards in a pack."

"Do you see now that the stromling go not on the shallows only, and do you understand now that one could catch them from the depths, and do you believe now when I tell you that one ought never to fish them on the shallows where they only go up to spawn where the eggs are reached by the sun's heat better than in deep water?"

The commissioner rowed on until he saw the water become greenish gray on account of the nature of the clay bottom.

"What do you see now?" he continued, meanwhile resting on the oars.

"I believe, on my soul, there are serpents on the sea bottom! there are real serpents' tails sticking out of the mud—and there are their heads."

"They are eels, my boy!" informed the commissioner.

The pilot looked incredulous for he had never heard of eels in the sea, but the commissioner would not give out his best card in advance or lavish long explanations over intricate things, therefore he left the oars and, taking his water telescope, leaned over the gunwale for observation.

He seemed to seek something with uncommon ardor, something that must be there, on this or that shoal but which he naturally had not seen there before, never having investigated that water.

They rowed around for two hours as the commissioner indicated, sometimes letting down his dredge, sometimes the lead line, and after each haul lying face downwards and looking through the glass into the water. His pale face contracted from the efforts and the eyes sunk into his head while the hand which held the tube trembled and the arms seemed stiff and numb as a stake. The cold, humid wind, which passed through the pilot's jacket did not seem to bite the frail figure which was only wrapped in a half-buttoned spring coat. His eyes watered from the sea wind and the endeavor to look sharply down into the half-impenetrable element which forms three-quarters of the earth's surface, about the life of which the other quarter generally knows so little and guesses so much.

Through the water telescope, which was not of his invention, but one he had made from what he had heard from bridge builders and laborers in marine blasting, he saw down into a lower world from which the great creation above the waters had been evolved. The forest of seaweed which had just advanced over the border from inorganic to organic life, swayed in the cold bottom current and resembled whites of eggs just coagulated, borrowing their shape from the surf and recalling frost flowers, when water freezes on the window pane. Down in the depths the kelp spread out like big parks with golden leaves, over which the inhabitants of the sea bottom dragged themselves on their bellies seeking cold and obscurity, concealing their shame of being behind in their long wandering toward the sun and air. Lowest down in the clay the flounder rests, partly dug into the ooze, lazy, immovable, without inventive faculty to develop a swim-bladder with which to raise himself, waiting a happy chance that leads the prey past his nose, without the impulse of turning the random to his advantage, and from pure laziness having twisted and stretched himself until his eyes for convenience' sake have stopped on the right side of the twisted head.

The blenny has already put one pair of oars out forward, but is loaded down by the stern and reminds one of the first trial at boat building, showing between the kelp's heraldic foliage his architectonic stone head with a Croat's mustache, lifting himself a moment from the mud to sink again immediately into it.

The lump sucker with its seven ridges goes with a keel to the air, the whole fish one enormous nose, smelling only for food and females, lighting for a moment the blue-green water with its rose-colored belly, spreading a faint aurora around him down in the gloom, and hugging again quickly a stone with his sucker to await the issue of the millions of years, which shall bring delivery to those left behind in the endless path of evolution.

The dreadful sea scorpion, that fury incarnate, with malice expressed in the spines of its face, whose swimming limbs are claws, but more for torturing than for attack or defense, lying on one side pining for enjoyment, and caressing his own body with his slimy tail.

Higher up in lighter and warmer water swims the handsome but profound thinking perch, perhaps the most characteristic fish of the Baltic Sea, well built and steady but still somewhat clumsy as a Koster boat, bearing the peculiar blue-green color of the Baltic and a Norseman's temper, part philosopher part pirate, a sociable hermit, a superficial creature who likes to seek the depths, and sometimes reaches them, idle and eccentric. He stands during long leisure moments and stares at the stones on the beach until awakening he darts off like an arrow, tyrant against his own but soon tamed, returns willingly to the same place, and harbors seven intestinal worms.

And then the eagle of the sea, the king of Baltic fishes, the light-built, cutter-rigged pike, who loves the sun and, as the strongest, needs not shun the light, who stands with his nose at the surface of the water, sleeping with the sun in his eyes, dreaming of the flowery fields and birch pastures yonder, where he can never go, and of the thin blue cupola which arches over his wet world, where he would smother, and yet where the birds are swimming lightly with their feathery pectoral-fins.

The boat had come between floating pieces of ice which cast moving shadows over the kelp parks on the bottom, like scattered clouds. The commissioner, who had searched several hours without finding what he sought, lifted the telescope out of the water, dried it and laid it aside.

Then he dropped upon the stern sheets and holding his hand before his eyes as though to rest them from impression, seemed buried in sleep for some minutes after which he gave the pilot a signal to row on.

The commissioner, who had given his attention the whole forenoon to the depth seemed now for the first time to observe the grand panorama which was unfolding on the sea surface. Ultra-marine blue the water segment extended some distance ahead of the boat, until the drifting ice showed a perfect arctic landscape. Islands, bays, coves, and sounds marked as on a map, and where the ice rode up on the reef, mountains had formed, through one block pressing down another and the following climbing up on the preceding. Over the rocks the ice had likewise piled up, made arches, formed caves and built towers, church-ruins, casemates, bastions. The enchantment in these formations lay in the fact that they seemed to have been shaped by an enormous human hand, for they had not the unconscious nature's chance forms, they reminded of human inventions in past historical periods. There had blocks piled into Cyclopean walls, arranged themselves in terraces as the Assyrian-greek temple, here had the waves through repeated impact dug out a Roman barrel vault, and fretted a round arch, which had sunken to an Arabian moresque, out of which the sunbeams and the spray from the waves had hacked out stalactites and bicelles, and here out of an already heaped wall, the whole wave front had eaten a line of arches of a Roman aqueduct, there stood the foundation to a mediæval castle, marking the remains of tumble down lancet arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles.

This fluctuation of thoughts between arctic landscapes and historicized architecture brought the contemplator into a peculiar frame of mind, out of which he was drawn by the noisy life which roving flocks of birds were making all around on floating islands of ice and on the clear blue waters.

In flocks of hundreds and hundreds floated the eider ducks, which were resting here, while waiting for open water to Norrland. The insignificant rust brown females were surrounded by the gorgeous males, who floated high with their snow white backs, sometimes rising for a short flight, exposing their soot black breasts. Loons in small flocks showing their miniver breasts, their reptile necks and drooping checkered wings. Legions of lively, long-tailed ducks in black and white, swimming, diving, skimming. The guillemots and sea parrots in small bands, mournful coal black scoters in marauding parties, contrasting with goosanders and red-breasted mergansers, a more brilliant retinue with panaches on their necks, and over the whole diving and fluttering host of birds that live an amphibious life hovered the mews and gulls, which had already selected the air for their element, only using the water for fishing and bathing.

Smuggled into this industrial world of labor, on the point half hidden sat a solitary crow, his low brow, his doubtful color, his thievish manner, his criminal type, great shyness for water, and dirty look made him an object of hatred to the strugglers who knew the nest plunderer, the egg sucker.

From the whole of this winged world, whose throats could set atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song. An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.

It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator, the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.

This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up in daylight.

Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared, swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant, the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets, the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this chain.

The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations, where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments, when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.

How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated. Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.

After these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.

He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure, but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities, who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them. As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.

The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom, which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new, changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no more be observed.

There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to be denuded by natural agencies, he felt something of the creator in himself. When he ordered tunnels bored, transferred sand ridges to lakes, and filled up marshes, he did not fail to perceive that he had taken in hand a remodeling of the earth ball, throwing the natural geological formations topsy-turvy, and therewith his personal feelings swelled incredibly.

Hereto was added his position as officer with numerous subordinates, whom he only communicated with as one in authority, and who consequently were considered as service muscles to his big determining brain.

With a military's physical courage and resolution, the profoundness of a savant, the full deliberation of a thinker, the calm of one financially independent, and the dignity and self-esteem of a man of honor, he exhibited a type of the highest rank, where beauty and prudence combined to produce a well-measured, harmonious personality.

In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations, and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ, which through its perfected form separates the human being from the beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses, and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form. Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue. This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit, which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad. Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured, just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time, does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away. All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe, which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just as the feelings which eventually would be laid aside, like the thyroid gland, which has come into disuse by human beings but still remains on its old place.