This straightened affairs at once, and Vestman, with a candle in his fist, followed the severe gentleman upstairs to the gable chamber, where nothing in the arrangements could explain the requested hour's delay.
It was an ordinary, large room with walls as white as those downstairs, the big window opened on the longest wall as a black hole through which streamed the darkness unimpeded by any curtains.
A bed stood there ready for use, simple, only an elevation of the floor to prevent drafts, a table, two chairs and a washstand comprised the furniture. The commissioner threw a look of despair about him, when he, who was used to feast his eyes to satisfaction on luxuries, saw only these scattered articles placed about in space, where the candle battled with the darkness and where the big window seemed to consume every beam of light which was produced by the burning tallow.
He felt lost, as though after battling upwards for half his maturity to attain refinement, good position and luxuries, he had fallen to poverty, moved down to a lower class. It was as though his love of beauty and wisdom were imprisoned, deprived of their nourishment and subject to banishment. Those naked walls were a middle age cloister cell where asceticism in image, and emptiness in the middle hurried the famined fantasy to gnaw itself and bring forth lighter or darker fancies only to become extricated from nothing. The white, the shapeless, the colorless nothing in the whitewashed walls raised an activity of the imagination such as a savage's cave or a green bough hut never could have evoked, or the forest with its ever changing colors and moving outlines would have dispensed. An activity that not the field, nor the heath with the clouds' and sky's rich coloring, nor yet the never tiring sea, could call forth.
He felt at once a rising desire instantly to paint the walls full of sunny landscapes with palms and parrots, to stretch a Persian rug over the ceiling and throw hides of deer upon the plank floor covering the ruled-ledger appearance, to place sofas in the corners with small tables in front, to suspend a hanging lamp over a round table strewn with books and magazines, stand a piano against the short wall and dress the long wall with book shelves, and away in the corner of the sofa set a little woman's figure, no matter which one!—Just as the candle on the table fought against the darkness, so his fantasy rebelled against the room's arrangements, and thus it lost its hold, everything disappeared, and the dreadful surroundings frightened him to bed. Quenching the light he drew the blankets over his head.
The wind shook the whole gable, and the water caraff rattled against the drinking glasses. The draft passed through the room from window to door and sometimes touched his locks of hair, which were dried from the sea wind, so that he fancied someone stroked them with his hand, while between the gusts of wind, like the striking of the kettledrum in an orchestra, beat and boomed the big breakers against the caverned rocks out on the south point. And when he had finally become used to the monotonous sound of wind and wave, he heard, shortly before he fell asleep, a man's voice in the room below teaching a child its evening prayer.
[CHAPTER SECOND]
When the commissioner, after a dead sleep induced by the efforts of the preceding day and the strong sea air, awoke the next morning and looked out of the blankets, he observed first an incomprehensible silence, and found that his ear caught slight sounds that otherwise he would have paid no attention to. He could hear each little movement of the sheet as it rose and fell from his respiration, the friction of his locks of hair against the pillow-case, the pulsations in the neck arteries, the rickety bed repeating the heart beat on a small scale. He felt the silence because the wind had gone down, and only the swell beat against the compressed air in the hollows of the strand and returned once every half minute. From the bed which was placed opposite the window he saw, through the lower pane, something like a blue draw-curtain, bluer than the air, and it kept moving toward him slowly, as though it would come in through the window and overflow the room. He knew it was the sea, but it looked so small,—and it rose like a perpendicular wall instead of expanding as a horizontal surface, because the long breakers were fully lighted by the sun and cast no shadows from which the eye could form a perspective image.
He arose, and partly dressing himself opened the window. The raw, moist air in the chamber rushed out, and from the sea came a warm green-house air, warmed several hours by the radiant May sun. Below the window he saw only low, jagged rocks in the crevices of which lay small dusty drifts of snow, and near by bloomed small white rye-flowers, well protected in beds of moss, and the poor wild pansies, pale yellow as from famine, and blue as from chill, hoisting their poor country's poor colors to the first spring sun. Lower down crept the heath and the crowberry vine, looking down over the precipice, below which lay a windrow of white sand, pulverized by the sea, and in which were stuck scattered sand-oat stalks; then came the kelp belt as a dark sash or braid on the white sand, highest up it was almost ivory black from last year's kelp in which were sticking shells, leaves of fir, twigs, fish bones, and toward the sea it was olive-brown from the last fresh kelp, which with its curled and knotted fronds formed a garniture like a chenille cord. Inside on the sandy side walk lay the top of a barkless pine, sand scrubbed, washed by the water, polished by the wind, bleached by the sun, resembling the ribs of a mammoth skeleton, and around it a whole osteologist's museum of like skeletons or fragments of the same.