More was not needed to give half a surety. But instead of answering the commissioner turned half whispering towards the man who was perfectly calm after he had delivered his errand:
"Where is the hammer?"
At first the man flew backwards two steps, as if he would strangle his opponent, who still disarmed him by casting a glance at the girl, after which the husband stood still shivering.
"You do not know where the hammer is, but I know where the nail is driven," the commissioner continued with an immovable calm. "Over prudent asses, who cannot invent anything new, and like children always hide on the same place, when they play goal. I am convinced that this nailing the brain was invented by a nobleman or a priest during the Middle Ages and has now sunk down to the under class, where it is dug up as a sample of the peoples' craftiness. Everything comes from above, salmon, arsenic, nails, accidental shootings, revolutions, personal liberty, financial well being, ballads, folk-lore, farmers' almanacs, anthropological museums, but they are first stolen, for you mob prefer to steal rather than take a gift, for you are too paltry to be willing to give thanks. And therefore you place your benefactors in an asylum, and your noblemen on the scaffold. Place me now in an asylum, and you will escape prison!"
Coming down to the cottage he remembered that the pleasure of speaking what he thought had allured him to an imprudent act, and with knowledge of the peoples' character he knew that self-defense against a dangerous witness might determine the murderer to put him to silence. He slept, therefore, during the night with a revolver in the bed and was awakened by bad dreams.
The following day he remained locked in and saw how white sheets hung at the windows in the custom house cottage. The third day the body was brought out and taken away on a boat, and the fourth day the men came back again. He did not sleep any more now, and insomnia completed the work of destruction. The fear of becoming insane and being placed in an asylum, mixed with the apprehension of being assassinated at any time, confirmed his decision to step out of life voluntarily. Now, when death approached and the end of life, of a family, stood forth in its gloom, it was as though the propensity of generation sprang up, and found utterance in the longing to own a child. But to go the whole trite way to search for a woman, and bind himself by family to the earth and community, was against him more than ever, and in his frail, torn condition he speculated out a shorter way, which would give him family pleasure, if only for a few hours.
In a roundabout way, at which his sense of delicacy would have revolted a few months before, he procured after some waiting the seed of a human being, and then he constructed a couveuse, under the microscope which could be kept at a temperature from thirty-six to forty-one degrees Celsius. When fecundation had taken place, he saw how the males were swarming round the immovable female, which he imagined he saw blushing. And now they crowded, pushed, whipped each other in the battle to give impetus to a generation to propagate his talents, inoculating his rich, productive spirit on a buxom, rank, wild substratum. But it was not the largest, those with big, stupid heads and thick tails, it was the quickest, the agile, the most fiery, who first penetrated the membrane to push into the nucleus.
With the screw of the alcohol lamp under his thumb and one eye on the thermometer he looked at this unveiled mystery of love for a couple of hours. Saw, how the cells commenced to cleave, how the division of labor between the different segments had already taken place and he waited with uneasiness for the anterior end of the medullary tube to swell into a bulb, which would constitute the primary brain; he dreamed that he could see this forge of thought arching beautifully, and he felt for a moment a pride at his creation, which solved the problem of Homunculus, when a movement on the screw of the lamp caused the white of the egg to coagulate and the spark of life to be extinguished.
He had lived so intensely this other being's life during these moments, that now, when he saw the round, dull, white spot on the glass, it was to him, as if he beheld the sunken eye of death, and magnified in his sickly senses the grief grew to sorrow, the sorrow over his dead child: the band between this and the future was severed, and he no longer had power to do it over.
When he awoke and came to his senses, he felt a strong warm hand grasping his right hand, and he remembered having dreamed, how he was a stranded vessel, which was tossed on the waves—between sky and water, until he finally felt the anchor chain pulling and perceived a calm, as if again bound to firm earth.