After he had sat a moment and listened to the chaffinch's spring time song, which was interrupted by the gulls' and guillemots' caws and shrieks, and he felt the solitude enwrap him like a slumber, and when the birds for a moment were hushed and only the faint sea breeze rustled in the birch tops without reaching farther down, he heard unexpectedly a cough. He started and looked around but saw no trace of man.
The painful hollow sound from the chest of a human being in the midst of this quiet nature awoke him suddenly and brought a disagreeable feeling of loathing. Was it a lonely one like himself who sought rest, or a nest plunderer? In either case he would free himself from uneasiness, and find out who this was that disturbed him. Therefore he climbed the rocky wall on natural steps in the limestone dyke and he beheld now the third section of this polyp-like islet. Over a low stone wall, apparently to protect the blooming field from grazing cattle, he passed to a pine tree region on gneiss, walked under the branches, trampled knee deep in ferns which formed an underbrush beneath the pine trees and resembled dwarf palms but of fresher green and more elegant foliage, while at their feet were seen the blushing strawberries.
When he came up out of the ravine he saw a cove with rushes where some abandoned pole hooks were driven in the mud. He stopped to listen, and soon he heard a voice which came from the other side of the knoll. It rang high and soft as a child's and sank again so that he thought it was some young yachtsman who had ventured out here. But the words fell so passively, attractively, winningly, and invitingly, and he was surprised to hear a boy expressing himself in so careful language. The vocabulary was small and the language was that of ordinary conservation in cultured society, but without force or diversity of expression, and the objects spoken of were called by incorrect terms. The speaker talked about the verdure of the trees without naming them, called the mews gulls, the chaffinch a bird, gneiss granite and the bulrush a reed.
It might be a youth that insisted upon being heard and spoke so long without allowing himself to be interrupted by the slow mumbling voice of an old man, who every now and then muttered an objection or information. Now the youthful voice laughed, a laughter without cause, to judge from the conversation, a laughter to let the beautiful voice be heard or show a set of white teeth, a laughter without merriment, a succession of ringing sounds without other meaning than to jealously divert the attention from something real, which would come between. A signal, a bird call! There was no doubt, it was a young woman's voice.
He stepped unresistingly up onto the last knoll after having felt of his necktie and hat, and he now saw beneath him a picture, whose details ever after remained in his memory. On a little upland meadow, under a group of old white beam trees around a white linen damask tablecloth, in the center of which was a butter dish of Kolmord marble, surrounded by the contents of a lunch basket, sat an old lady with beautiful gray hair and a well fitting gown, and close beside her stood a fisherman in his shirt sleeves with a sandwich in his hand, while before him stood a young lady holding in her hand a glass of beer, which she with a merry curtesy and the ripples of a dying laughter on her lips, reached to the embarrassed boatman.
He was captivated at once by the young woman's looks, and although his reflection at once whispered that she coquetted with the churl, he felt an irresistible attraction in the dark olive complexion, the black eyes, and the stately figure. It certainly was not the first woman which had attracted him at once, but she belonged to that class of women which never failed to attract him to them. The solitude and absence of others was not the reason of the quick selection, because he felt exactly the same as when he sought a color for a necktie and after walking dejectedly from store to store without experiencing the pleasant feeling that the article sought after would give, he finally stopped before a show window where the right one was, and in the same moment felt free from pressure as he quietly said to himself, this is the one!
After having hesitated a moment whether to step forward and introduce himself, or turn back, he made a movement which betrayed him. The girl observed him first, her arms fell to her sides and she looked with the expression of a frightened child at the unexpected appearance, which at once gave the intruder courage to step forward and reassure the group with an explanation.
Raising his hat with a low bow he stepped up to them.