The commissioner held the jib sheet and began by instructing the beautiful navigator, grasping every now and then her wrists and pressing the tiller to windward, until they were clear of land, had speedway and were lying on the tack they were to keep to until they reached the skerries.
The responsibility, the effort and the feeling of controlling the boat which held two lives, awoke the numb powers in the woman's frail form, and her eyes which attentively followed the position of the sails were glowing with courage and reliance, when she saw how the boat obeyed the slightest pressure of the hand. If she committed a fault, he corrected it with a kind word, gave her courage to continue by praising her watchfulness, removed difficulties through explaining the whole proceeding as something that clears itself.
She was radiant with happiness, and commenced to talk of the past, of her thirty-four years of life, how she had believed life and the desire of living was past, how she felt herself young again, how she had always dreamed of a life of activity, of manly activity above all else, and to devote her powers to humanity, to others. She knew that she as a woman was a pariah....
The commissioner listened to the whole as to well-known secrets, formulas of an absurd struggle to make that equal which nature had made purposely as unequal as possible, to spare humanity labor, but to answer this now he regarded as without reward and he stuck to his role as an appreciative listener, allowing her to give vent to her diseased imaginations which the fresh wind would blow away. Instead of taking out a knife and cutting off the tangled skeins which her confused thoughts offered to him, he would simply pretend not to notice them, but tuck them under and through gathering impressions which he purposely developed, wind on the old tangles and use them as bobbins, which should only serve as an underlayer for the new yarn, spun out from his rich distaff.
In haste he improvised a scheme, how using the material which the skerries afforded for object lessons, he would in living pictures, without her observing it, in a few hours let her pass through sensations which she should believe came from without, and in such a manner he would smuggle his soul's net over her, and tune her strings in harmony to his instrument. With a movement of the head he now signified that the boat should tack, he slacked the sheet a little, and the boat cleared land and dashed out on the open sea. The wide horizon, the infinite sea of light where no object intervened, threw a light over her beautiful face, the small lineaments were as magnified, half perceptible wrinkles were smoothed out, the whole expression assumed the character of freedom from daily cares, paltry thoughts, and the eye that in one moment could overlook such a big part of the earth's body seemed to see on a grand scale, so that the little self swelled and felt its relative power, and when now the long sea waves slowly raised and lowered the boat in powerful rhythm, he saw how transport was mixed with a grain of fear, which kept it in check.
The commissioner, who observed that the grand scenery did not fail in its impression, concluded now to place the text under the frail music of the swells of the senses, and guide her dawning thoughts out on the great highway, he would loosen the tegument on the swelling seed, so that the plantlet would push out.
"It has the effect of a planet!" improvised he. "The earth, the banal, the tiresome, the moldy, becomes a celestial body. Do we not feel as though we were already participants of heaven, when the opposition is dissolved, the false opposition between heaven and earth, which are one, like the part and the whole. Don't you observe how you grow instead of shrink when you outwit the wind and make it take you to the right when it wants to go to the left? Don't you feel what great power is within you, as you ride upon a wave, when it with a thousand pounds of weight would press you down into its depth? He, who is supposed to have created the wings of the birds, and who needed fifty thousand years to make a flyer out of a creeper, was less quick than he who for the first time put canvas on a pole and instantly invented navigation.
"Is it then so strange if man created God out of his own image, conceiving from his ingenuity one still more ingenious?"
The girl having listened attentively to his effusion, regarded his face uninterruptedly as if she had turned her own towards a fire to warm it. The unusual words she heard seemed to have sunk into her mind and acted as a leaven. Benumbed, lulled by the soft, persuading intonation, she received without deliberation the new views he gave to her previously lifeless and monotonous landscape, of the origin of life and its meaning, and without seeing that her own religious conviction was buried before dissolution, she took up the new and piled it upon the old.
"I never before heard anyone speak as you do," she said dreamily; "speak more!"