On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

Now struck the bell on the man-of-war, a drum whir rolled, and the summer wind carried the tunes of a hymn from a hundred throats out over the water, solemn, rhythmically arranged, submissive, all while the clamor and threats from downstairs rumbled as from the cages in a menagerie, and in the psalm's ferment rose to a howl, for a quarrel had arisen between the parties, at the question of taking back the net by force.

The commissioner, who regarded churches as archaeological collections or interesting pagoda buildings from past times was reminded involuntarily of the utterance which a young clergyman let fall one night when at a discussion of the Christian cult.

"I do not believe in Christ's divinity and all that, but believe me, the mob must be scared!" "The mob must be scared," repeated he to himself silently, but dropped the thread immediately when he heard the fray break out downstairs. Chairs were knocked over, heels were braced and kicked against the furniture and roaring as from cattle was mixed with hissing as from reptiles while during all this a woman's voice sputtered and produced several hundred words a minute.

At this instant the steamer whistled, weighed anchor and hoisted sail, the smokestack sent a soot cloud toward the blue summer sky. It was with a feeling of regret and anxiety that he saw the steamer and its beautiful cannon disappear southward; he felt as though he had lost a support and as if the hate closed round him like a sack, he would flee, out, anywhere.

Now a child cried, if from fear or pain he could not hear, for under the tumult he had stolen down the staircase and reached the harbor, cast off his painter and rowed out from the land as quickly as he could.

The rock he was in quest of was the eastern-most of a little archipelago, which he had never paid attention to before, but now for the first time when in need to be alone, he sought it. A hater of strong body movements, which he found partly superfluous while there existed locomotion by machinery, and partly detrimental to his nerve and thought life for the fine tool which the brain capsule enclosed could just as little stand jars as the house where the astronomer's instruments of precision are kept. He had never learned how to row but his sense of time and his well-weighed motion centers made him at once a clever oarsman, and his studies of physics taught him how to improve the old invention so that by raising the seat he economized arm power.

As he now saw the skerries receding from the stern of his boat he began to breathe easier, and when he shortly landed on the first rock he was seized by an irrepressible feeling of happiness. It was a sunny, long, low islet whose strand rocks of gray gneiss formed a little harbor into which the boat sped. The water near the beach was transparent as condensed limpid air, and the soft color of the kelp shone at the bottom as though molten into a mass of glass. The stones on the beach lay washed, dried and polished, offering a variation in colors that never tired, for there were no two alike, while between them the velvet grass and sedges had sought hold for their tufts. Slowly the ledge rose upward and in depressions in the moss lay the mews' eggs, three by three, coffee brown with black spots, while their owners cried and cawed above his head. He climbed higher up to where a pile of stones had been laid up by marine surveyors, and were whitewashed by the gulls, mews and terns. A few juniper bushes spread out as carpets and beneath them a profusion of the white, subtle star flower had improvised its bed, a connection of Middle Europe's highlands and the shade of northern forests.

The little turnstone daring and gay fluttered uneasily around the disturber of the peace to mislead him from her nest.

Not a shrub, not a tree pointed over the half naked ledges, and this absence of shadows from coverts, gave the visitor a lighter and gayer mood. Everything was open, overlooked at once, sunlit on this ledge of rock, and the water which separated him from his lately left home among the savages, seemed to surround him with an insurmountable limit of pure transparency. The half arctic, half alpine landscape with its primeval formation refreshed and rested him. When he had become rested, he took the boat and rowed on further. He passed three polished rocks, resembling three petrified waves, naked as a hand, without a trace of organic life and which only aroused a scientific, geological interest concerning their origin; he grazed a flat rock of reddish gneiss; on its lee side stood a hundred years' mountain ash, solitary, moss bedecked, gnarled, and in its ragged trunk a white wagtail hatched its brood for lack of rooftile or stone wall. The little charming bird dove down among the strand stones and would make the foe believe that in no wise there existed a nest or gray white eggs there.

The solitary mountain ash stood on a grassy carpet of a few square feet and looked so lonely, but so unusually strong in lack of competition, and could better defy storm, salt water and cold than with jealous equals wrangling over earth crumbs. He felt attracted to the lonely veteran and longed, during a transitory moment, to raise a hut at its feet, but he passed on and the feeling blew away.