On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

When he had sat a moment and the sun had warmed him through, he suddenly arose and stood as though awakened after having slept a whole night. His thoughts labored again, and he looked happy, just as though he had solved a problem.

"She is thirty-four years," he thought; "this I had forgotten under the impression of her youthful beauty, therefore this chaos of past stages, these parts of roles she has successively played in life, this mass of shifting reflexes from men that she had tried to win and fit herself to. Now lately she must have been wrecked in some love affair. He, who had held together all these rag pieces of a soul, had turned aside, the sack had rent and now the whole thing lay as a pile of ragpicker's rubbish. She had shown sample pieces of the romantic parsonage of 1850 with a regurgitation from the beginning of the century for saving humanity, zealous faith from 'The Dove's Voice,' and 'The Pietist's' streams of conjuncture, cynicisms from George Sand and the androgynal period. To search the bottom of this sieve through which so many soups had passed, to solve the enigma which was not one, he was too prudent to spend time on. Here only remained to pick out of the heap of bones that which was suitable to form the skeleton, which he would afterwards cover with living flesh and blow his breath into. But this she must not observe for then she would not permit it. She must never see how she was held by him for that would only raise hate and resistance. He would grow underneath the ground as the rhizome, and graft her on himself that she would shoot up, show herself to the world and bear the flower which humanity should admire."

Now he heard the mew's cry and understood that she had swam out from shore. Therefore he dressed quickly and after he had gathered up his belongings he took from under the sheets of the boat material for a small breakfast and laid it out on the moss under an arborescent pine which resembled an Italian stone pine.

There was not a great variety, but everything was costly, choice and served on the remnants of a collection of porcelain which he at one time had begun to gather. The butter shone egg yellow in a serpentine dish with screw cover that stood in a fragment of Henry II faience filled with ice, the crackers lay on a lattice-braided dish of Marieberg and the sardels were on a saucer of blue mottled Nevers. Fear of the general banality breaking forth in arts, industry and daily life, had urged the owner to the modern search after the unusual, the dreadful triviality of the present age and its hate of originality had forced him like so many others into superrefinement to try to save his personality from being ground among the bowlders in the big glacial flow. His finely developed senses did not search after frugal beauty in shape and color, which so easily grows old; he would see history and memories of exploits from the world in that which surrounded him. This fragment of Henry II faience, with its cream white pipe-clay incrusted with red, black and yellow, aroused memories of the beautiful Loire landscape with its renaissance castles, while its ornamental bookbinding style reminded of Madame Hélène de Genlis and her librarian, who together with a potter pressed out a style, purely personal, which still could not escape the coloring of the century of chivalry, when beauty in life was venerated and even the trade was subordinate to science and art, realizing the advantageousness of a system of intellectual rank.

When he had spread breakfast and looked at his work it was to him as though he had placed a piece of culture up here in this semi-arctic wilderness, sardels from Brittany, chestnuts from Andalusia, caviare from Volga, cheese from the Gruyère alps, wurst from Thuringia, crackers from Britain and oranges from Asia Minor. There was a flask in basket work of Chianti wine from Tuscany to be served in goblets with Frederick I's monogram in gold. All were topsy-turvy without a savor of collector or museum; there were slight touches of color thrown in here and there, like flowers pressed as souvenirs between the leaves of a guide book but not in a herbarium.

Now hearing the voice of the girl cry from her bathing place a halloo, he answered, and immediately she stepped out of the shrubs, straight, brisk and radiating with health and the joy of living. When she saw the breakfast spread she raised her cap jokingly with a bow, impressed against her will by the aristocratic in the arrangement.

"You are a wizard," said she; "permit me to bow!"

"Not for so little," answered the commissioner.

"Yes, you indicate that you can do more, but to rule nature as you lately chattered about, that will be beyond you," opposed the girl in a superior motherly tone.

"My lady! I did not express myself so categorically; I only reminded you that we have partly learned how to subdue the powers of nature, by which we are partly controlled—observe the little important word partly—and that it is in our power to both change a landscape's character and the whole soul life of its inhabitants."