Of course it was not in order but it would be in about an hour if he would only lie still and wait.
The commissioner was lying there spending an intolerable hour with his eyes flitting over the tiresome arrangements of the chamber and its occupants. It was the government's cottage for the surveyor of that little department of the custom house on the East Skerries. Everything was scanty, merely a roof over the head. The white, bare walls were as narrow as the Crown's ideas, four white rectangles which enclosed a room covered by a white rectangle. Strange, hard as a hotel room, which is not to dwell in, only for lodging. To put on wall papers for his successor or for the Crown, neither the surveyor nor his predecessors had the heart. In the midst of this dead whiteness stood dark, poor, factory-made furniture, with half modern shapes. A round dining table of knotted pine stained with walnut and marked with white rings from dishes, chairs of the same material with high backs, and tilting on three legs, a bed-sofa, manufactured like ready-made men's clothing, from the cheapest and least possible material. Nothing seemed to fulfill its purpose of inviting rest and comfort, everything was useless, and therefore unsightly, notwithstanding its ornaments of papier maché.
The surveyor placed his broad buttock on a rattan chair and rested his mighty back against it, the maneuver was followed by annoying creaks and a morose exhortation from the sister-in-law, to be careful of other folk's things, whereupon the surveyor answered with an impudent patting followed by a look which left no doubt as to the relations existing between them.
The oppression which the whole room had caused in the commissioner was increased by the discovery of this discord. As naturalist he had not the current ideas about what was permissible and what was not permissible, but he had strongly impressed instinct of the designs in certain arrangements of nature's laws and suffered internally when he saw nature's commands violated. This was to him as though he should have found in his laboratory an acid which since the world's creation had only united with one base but was now, against its nature, forming a union with two.
His imagination was stirred in remonstrance over evolution from common sensuality to monogamy, and he felt himself back in the dark ages among wild herds of human beings, who lived a coral life and existed in masses, before selection and variation were attained to ordain individual personal being and consanguinity.
When he saw a two-years-old girl with too big a head and fish eyes walking around the chamber with timid footsteps, as though afraid to be seen, he comprehended at once that a doubtful birth had sown its seeds of discord which were working dissolution and disturbance, and he could easily understand that the moment must come when this living testimony would pay all the penalties of being an involuntary witness.
In the midst of these thoughts the door opened and the husband entered.
It was the surveyor's brother who had thus far remained a subordinate. He was physically even better endowed than the surveyor, but he was a blond with an open and friendly look.
After a cheerful "Good evening," he sat down at the table beside his brother and, taking the child on his lap, kissed it.
"We have a visitor," said the surveyor, pointing to the sofa where the commissioner lay. "It is the fish instructor, who will live upstairs."