And in the hope of binding him by a memory of the highest bliss she made the last concession after a stormy explanation of love on his side.
[CHAPTER THIRTEENTH]
Three days later the commissioner landed on East Skerries after having been to Dalaro. When he learned that the young lady had left never to return, he felt an inexpressible easiness, as though the air was rarefied and purer. Going up to his room, he rested before the open window to smoke, and in memory pass through the changeful sensations of the past days.
When he at midnight had torn himself from the girl's embrace, he had placed himself in the boat with a certain satisfaction; as though he had fulfilled a pressing duty. It was now as though the equilibrium had been replaced. His rights had been violated in such a case, where the law did not give redress, and therefore he must procure right for himself, and he had acted only upon the principles which the opponents themselves had promulgated.
Afterwards when he had gone aboard the corvette and met people, with whom he could converse in a cultured language, and had discussed with the surgeon learned subjects, it at first acted as an intoxicant. He did not need to suppress his brain for childish talk, nor make himself semi-stupid in order to be understood; and when he only expressed himself by inference or with hints, he was understood at once. Then he felt that he had been living three months in barbarism, which by and by had imperceptibly drawn him down into trifling battles, which had placed his thought life beneath the effective and vegetative; had elevated the act of reproduction to be the main thing, and allured him to enter as a competitor in a strife as between stallions, from which very likely he would have come out victorious. And so he understood why the guardians of the universal Christian church, who were sent to carry civilization out to the savages of all nations, were once forbidden to found a family, or to bind themselves to woman or children, and he understood that there could lay a rational significance in fasting and renunciation, for those who would live a higher spiritual life. It was not for self-gratification that the anchorite sought solitude, for just as when dropped at random on fallow ground, the solitary grain of wheat could raise sixty spears, while that in the wheat field only gave two, where the seed was crowded between millions on fertilized ground, so could that individual, who struggled for a richer development over others, only grow in the desert.
Three days' experience had corroborated this, for when he on board the corvette and at the bathing resort was dragged from circle to circle, he had observed every night when he went to bed, that during the course of the day he had ground off his edges, whereby he had, like a precious stone, gained in appearance but lost in carats. This subserviency, developed by common sympathy for the human being and by the tendency of adaption in society had deluded him to such a degree, that the opinions which he had improvised in society stuck to him and were subsequently recollected by him with the claim of being his inner-most thoughts. And he had finally become loath and felt himself at last a false being, who said one thing and thought another; he began to blush for himself and observed that with increasing esteem he gained in society for his affable manners, he lost all esteem for himself.
To avoid sinking he isolated himself again, and the regained solitude acted upon his spirit as a steam bath, or a swim in the sea, where liberty from all pressure, all contact with solid material had ceased; and he decided to stay on the skerry through the winter.
For this purpose he rented for his own use the cottage, where the ladies had dwelt, and began to install himself the same day. The one big room he took for a library and laboratory, the other for dining room and parlor; the attic he fixed up for a bedroom.
When he awoke the next morning in his new domicile, after a dreamless sleep, he found a new pleasure in having a house alone to himself, where he need not have forced upon him suggestions from others, nor receive other impressions than those he himself determined on.