He had never before expected to find youth's secret so openly exposed as he got it here gratuitously presented on a waiter, and how well he recognized himself from a past stage.
How had he not cried of hunger and rut? Experienced Weltschmerz of envy for elders, who had already gained what he was struggling for and who then made him feel dejected, whereby also his sympathy for all oppressed and small had been aroused. This inability to judge one's powers, based on anticipation of that, which it would be possible to accomplish in this long life, if thought of as concentrated in a single act! All this sentimentality, caused only by unsatisfied desires. This over-estimating of woman, while memories from the nursery and of the mother were still fresh. These lax half-thoughts of the still soft brain under pressure from blood vessels and testicles.
He even recognized these faint signs of good sense, which under the form of primitive, animal slyness and discrimination of means so often believed themselves to be the highest prudence, but were only the fox's simple attempt to be shrewd, and which therefore wonderfully resembled the reputed women's artifice, priest shrewdness, and lawyers' trickery.
The young man had even tried mind reading on the commissioner, thereby betraying that he suspected the latter of carrying some dangerous secrets as he was unlike other beings. But in this he had acted so clumsily, that the commissioner had found out all that was thought and said about him by the ladies; instead of giving any information he had by his answers so mystified the young man, that he began to doubt whether his rival was a blockhead or of a demoniac nature. By demoniac he meant a conscious person, who under pretext of the greatest naivete acted with full calculation, always awake and leading the fates of other beings according to his plans. And as the idea of calculation, which was a virtue, always had a bad significance to the young, who could not calculate the consequences of an act, so his envy assumed the inferior's passionate desire to tear down and trample under the feet.
Thus matters stood, when the great day came that was to decide the fishermen's whole existence for the coming winter.
The August evening was hanging bed warm over the skerry, all of whose cliffs and stones were still warm after the sun had gone down, so warm, that the dew could not fall on them. The sea outside spread itself smooth and lavender gray where the full moon copper red slowly emerged and was just now half hidden by a brig, which seemed to sail right on the satellite's mare serenitatis. Nearer the strand were seen all the floats of the laid out nets lying in rows like flocks of sea birds floating on the swell.
And while the people were awaiting the break of day to look at the nets, they had camped on the strands around campfires with coffeepots and gin bottles; in the boat house, where the provision dealer was selling beer, the preacher had taken place beside his brother to assist him with the lively traffic, and with a blue apron round his hips he was seen opening beer bottles like an old expert saloon keeper.
The commissioner, who had come out to observe the direction of the currents, the temperature and barometric pressure, now wandered on the sandy beach to rest from his thoughts. Here and there he surprised a couple, who had sought solitude. Their unintelligible naivete in behavior made him only turn his back on them with a sneer and loathing. Coming further out on the point, he climbed out on the cliffs to find his seat, where he used to meditate. It was one of the arm chairs which had been perfectly polished by the waves, and was still warm as a stove from the burning sun of the day.
He had been sitting a moment half asleep lulled by the sighing of the surf, when he heard the sand creak below on the edge of the beach. There was a rustle in the dry wrack, and he saw the assistant and his betrothed coming slowly walking with their arms around each other's waist. They halted between the invisible beholder and the moonlight's street on the water, so that he could see their figures outlined as sharply, as though he had had them between the objective of a microscope and the reflecting mirror. And he saw now with antipathy's sharpened glance her profile like that of a bird of prey leaning towards the other's big ape's head with the enormous cheeks, useless to all but buglers, and the narrow tapering skull without a forehead. He observed now the superfluous mass of flesh in the man's figure, whose ignoble outlines with too large hips reminded of a woman like the Farnesian Hercules. A manly ideal of the period of the semi-brutes, when the fist still ruled over the big brain, which was not completed.