On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

It had rained for eight days after the first trial with the drifting nets, which had passed without other results than a little scene between the engaged pair. The commissioner, who very well knew that there were no fish to get, as he had purposely led the young folks astray, had gone down to the beach to receive the home-coming fishers and had then been called idiot by his betrothed, who was entirely worn out by being up all night. When the boatmen snickered at this secretly, the commissioner, who feared a storm, had come between with a joke. At the dinner table the sport at the new method of fishing had taken wider range, and the commissioner had played deep humiliation so that Mr. Blom had several times regarded it his duty to defend him in a manner extremely wounding.

The rainy days following this had kept the company in doors, whereby an extremely intimate intercourse had formed down in the ladies' cottage, where the assistant had introduced the habit of reading aloud from the Swedish poets. The commissioner had at the beginning listened to it, but finally left with the explanation that Swedish poesy was written for confirmation classes and ladies and that he would wait, until there came a poet, who would write for men. He had then by common vote been declared unpoetical, at which he was satisfied, as it relieved him from the duty of being present at the seances.

The rainy weather had caused even the work on the chapel to stop, and the laborers were sitting in the cottages and furnishing the gin to what coffee they could get.

The colporteur, who could not gather the people out on the slope, passed the first days in the kitchen and would have read out of the Bible, but was received with indifference and fell into dispute with the laborers, who were mostly free thinkers. Whereupon he had withdrawn to his chamber, explaining that he was sick and he sent to the commissioner for the china preparation, as his bottle was emptied. Suddenly he had disappeared and it was said that he had gone with a steamer to the city.

He had now returned, the evening before, to the skerry, accompanied by a man, whom he called his brother and who brought a boat load of divers articles, mostly beer, which was packed up in a boat house, in the open door of which a plank on two barrels served as a counter, as the commonwealth wealth had permitted the opening of a provision store.

During the past few days fishing folks had commenced to gather from the islands near the mainland. And now the boat houses were opened where whole families were harbored, the cottages were filled with relations and acquaintances, and on the whole skerry there was a life, which strangely contrasted with the usual solitude.

As the skerry and the fishing waters belonged to a private individual in on the mainland, every boat paid a certain duty which was collected by an overseer who was sent here. With this overseer the commissioner had at once got on a bad footing, when he would speak about fishing with drifting nets, which would be followed by the abandoning of the shoals, and thereby the water tax would cease. But even this apparently unfavorable circumstance he had known how to turn to his benefit; for the overseer, when opposing the new method, was urged to propagate the old system by means of gin and would thereby against his will form the dark background, against which the effects of fishing with drifting nets would stand out in bolder magnificence. And the commissioner was perfectly sure of his victory, as night and day he had been sampling the water, dredging, fishing, and with his water telescope investigating the depths to find out where the shoals of fish were moving.

All these details, however, had no other interest to him, than that they served to exercise his energy for coming battles, to restore in him that feeling of power, without which nobody can endure, who has unusual abilities, which are easily lost, unless used.

And during the time, which had passed since the arrival of the assistant, the daily hectoring from the side of the young folks had by and by accustomed him to the role of an inferior, so that he was on the way to live this role himself, especially as he himself did not wish to break the engagement but found it necessary to cause the break to be made by her. Between the two young people there existed a complete sympathy on all subjects, and he had witnessed how the ripe woman was at once on a level with the unripe man, all of whose immature thoughts, all improvised notions she accepted as the height of wisdom. And each of his attempts to refute a stupidity stranded against their inability to keep together the threads of a discourse, because they were thinking exclusively under the influence of the desire to own each other. To take up some competition in acrobatic dexterity or praise of the lower sex he would not, for it was his exact purpose to be erased and make a capital end to the tie, which threatened his whole future existence. And this biandri, in which he was living, when he, for an occasional moment alone with his betrothed, only received reflexes from the other man, felt, as it were, his spirit on her lips, heard his childishness reëchoed from her mouth, all this had ended in giving him loathing for a state, which reminded of a ménage à trois.

The young man's conceit had no limit, and he had fallen into the ridiculous idea that he was superior to the commissioner, because he was al pari with Miss Mary, who also gave the illusion of being above the commissioner; according to the perfectly correct formula: if A is greater than B, and C is equal to A, then C is also greater than B,—without, however, first examining whether A really was greater than B.