On the Seaboard by August Strindberg

Author:August Strindberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620137857
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter Seventh

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A bright, sunny summer morning the commissioner is sitting with his pupil up in the wooden pavilion, which he has had set up on the highest point of the skerry close to the newly laid foundation of the mission house. Down in the harbor lies a schooner, from which the frame for the new building is being unloaded and carried up to its place to be joined together by the foreman and his laborers. Therefore it has been unusually lively on the skerry for some time and small skirmishes have already arisen between the fishermen and the city workmen, in which the latter have treated the former with insolence, which has given rise to a series of feasts of atonement followed by drunkenness and new frays, attacks of immorality and appropriation of other's property. Therefore the commissioner and the elderly lady have a momentary regret at having undertaken the civilization of these people, when the first steps already showed such a sad result; so much more so as the nightly noises, singing, crying and complaining disturbed all work and all rest for them, who had come out here solely for the purpose of seeking quiet. The commissioner, who had lost all reputation by once yielding a little of his authority, could not restore the peace, but Miss Mary on the other hand succeeded better and understood how by a prompt appearance, and a good word now and then, to suppress the storm. This she would not impute to her beauty and agreeable manner; she had credited herself with a higher degree of strength and understanding than she possessed, and thus imbued herself in the belief of having an unusual faculty of mind, so that even now, when she sat as a pupil with her teacher, she received his instruction as though she were already acquainted with them, and answered with remarks more pointed than sagacious, seeming to correct and explain rather than to learn.

The mother, who was sitting beside her embroidering an altar cloth for the new mission house, seemed occasionally amazed at her daughter's penetrating insight and great knowledge, as she with a simple question nonplussed her teacher.

"See here, Miss Mary," lectured the commissioner, always deceiving himself with the hope of being able to educate her; "the untrained eye has a propensity to see everything simple; the untrained ear to hear everything simple. You see here around you only gray granite, and the painter and the poet see the same. Therefore they paint and depict everything so monotonously; therefore they find the skerries so monotonous. And yet, look at this geological map of the surroundings and then throw a glance out over the landscape. We are sitting on the red gneiss region. Look at this stone you call granite, how rich is the variety; it is the baking together of the black mica, the white quartz and the pinkish feldspar."

He had taken a sample from the pile which the foundation layers had blasted from the skerry and laid in a heap for the building's foundation.

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