On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

This and other thoughts he put down on paper and laid it in the table drawer, for he had not a newspaper, that would print them, least of all the patriots who "from envy had no desire to receive projects for the elevation of the country."

He had now got the answers to his circulars and had the attic room filled with materials for his European ethnography. But now the subject had lost its interest, and his soul had become sick in earnest, so that he did not even dare go out. The aspect of a human being awoke such a loathing, that he turned back home, if he only saw one. At the same time grew the contemporary need of hearing his own voice and to unload his over-productive brain by contact with another being, to feel himself exerting influence on the life of others and to have company. He had thought for a moment to get a dog, but to lay down deposits from his soul and his feelings in an animal body was to graft grapes onto thistles and he had never been allured by the sympathy of dirty, food courting animals.

There was only one man for whom he felt a certain attraction, and that was the married man of the custom house, Vestman, whose wife was living in bigamy, without her husband's knowing it. He had an honest look and an awakened intellect, and with him the commissioner had bound the companionship by presenting him with a salmon trawl with hooks. He had at the beginning of the summer lent him books and taught him how to write after a copy, but since the fishing had been in force and navigation had become lively, their paths had separated.

But in order to get the man to really place out the trawl the commissioner would not tell him that it was for salmon, for then the conservative fisherman would never concern himself with what was according to his idea an absurd exploit without reward; therefore he was left in the belief that the question was about a new remunerative cod fishing; where the biggest fishes should be caught.

When the commissioner now after a month of isolation rowed out on the sea with Vestman and he heard his own voice again, he observed that from lack of use it had changed its tone and become thinner, so that he fancied he heard a stranger talk. And now he intoxicated himself with talking. His brain, which had only labored and produced by hand and pen, broke now through the sluices of the windpipe, and all his thoughts flowed out as in a stream, giving new births on the way, and when he had got the chance to speak to a human being's ear for a sounding board without being interrupted, without being questioned, it was to him as though he had a comprehending listener before him. And after their first outing he felt sure that Vestman was the most intelligent person he had met for a long time.

Now he kept on for eight days and narrated during their excursions about all the secrets of nature, explained the influence of the moon on the surface of the water, and warned him not to believe that all that the eyes saw was as it looked to be. Narrated, for example, that the moon was pear shaped, although it looked like a bowl, and that one, therefore, had no surety that the earth was ball shaped....

Here Vestman made a face and dared to raise an objection for the first time.

"Yes, but it says so in my almanac anyhow."

The commissioner found that he had gone out too far and must return, but it was too late, because to give a demonstration of the latest investigations regarding the shape of the earth as being a three axled ellipsoid, required knowledge in the listener, and therefore he must change to another subject. He spoke of the mirage and used the occasion to ask if they had visited Sword Island and seen what he had done there.

"Surely we have seen that something has been going on there, but nobody lands there more, and both the draughting of nets and the pasturing of sheep are spoiled," answered Vestman perfectly in accordance with truth.