Leonard then dragged himself up to the railing and stood there a long while under the branches of a large poplar, watching the Northstream tumble its waters between the piers.
There is a certain immobility in the midst of motion in rushing water. The same foaming, roaring wave stays there hour after hour, year after year, indicating a stone in the uneven bed of the torrent. Leonard sought to calm himself with philosophizing over this wave. So does life go on through its forms, he thought. Yonder fettered wave corresponds to the ripple of a flower petal, the curve of a chin. Then some spring day, maybe, the stone is undermined, an unknown obstruction in the furrow of the stream of life is cleared away, and the wave is transformed, the flower petal changes, the curve of the chin becomes different and softer.
Leonard was not the first man who had philosophized above the running stream. But he found no rest thereby. His thoughts merely played on the surface; they served only to sharpen his feeling of uncertainty. The fettered wave irritated him with its feeble trembling, its futile tossing. The continuous roar was like an indefinite warning, a dark threat. A warning of what? A threat of what? Ah, thou wonderful month of May!
Leonard clenched his empty fists and sank down on a bench in complete despair.
With that his eye fell on a little old man of the fisher trade. He was smoking in great repose a short pipe, muttering to himself, and picking at his clasp-knife, which he had taken apart and hung on the railing to dry. Leonard observed him a long time with secret envy. In winter it’s all very fine to be young, he thought, but in spring a man ought to be as old as possible—or at least to have rheumatism that lets up in fair weather. He got up laboriously and pushed his way to the fisherman.
“What have you to say to a day like this?” he grumbled.
“Eh, well, just that I think there are bream under the bridge piers today,” the old man said reflectively and puffed out a little blue cloud.
Leonard was struck by the answer. He began a long conversation with the fisherman, whose name was Lundstrom. The best fishing was spring and autumn, he learned. It was mostly smelt and bream. Perhaps a perch now and again. And before Christmas everybody got a burbot or two in eel-pots a little further up the Malar.
He doesn’t make any too much, thought Leonard. But he doesn’t talk about his fishing in the surly tone that poor men mostly use in growling about their scanty earnings. He is proud of his catches, he fondles his tackle, and his eyes rest confidently and patiently on the water. I gather from that that he is a true fisherman, which a man isn’t very likely to become unless he has left much behind him.
This quiet fisher person had a strange and enigmatical charm for Leonard. The old man had pulled together the large iron rings, and already the dip-net was swinging festively at its gallows on his low green-painted craft. There was only the grapnel to be pulled in. Thereupon Leonard reached over the railing and pled touchingly to be taken along for once.