Memories that he had never recalled for years rushed up from the depths within him, like prisoners from a dungeon. A stream of rapid visions—furious hand-to-hand fighting, torchlight flickering over wild sword-play in a narrow gateway that sloped away into darkness—and then he was in a boat, rowing in the pale evening light outside the island walls of Stockholm, and facing him in the stern sat the Earl, short and broad as the door of a loft, invincibly strong and shaggy and warm as a he-bear, bright in his crimson velvet cloak, with his clear amber eyes laughing at war and adventure—oh, Lord Alf, Lord Alf, my liege!
The chain of dancers surged past him, and there was no end to the wild, ringing song. The men hung together, hooked arm in arm, leaning backward with their shoulders, and the chain swayed; the fiery faces of the singers could be seen through the clouds of dust each time they leaped high and stamped hard as they came down. Then a sudden jerk to the right all round the ring, and back they came charging toward the left.—His memories still sped through Olav’s mind: of men with whom he had been friends in a cool and pleasant fashion, each man for himself within the iron shell of his coat of mail, but covering one another with shield and sword. Oh, to hell with all women, they cling all too closely to a man! The glare of flames among the dark timber gables of a city street. And himself, a lad of twenty, fully armed, standing in a doorway—a young serving-maid, whose name he had forgotten, seeking to drag him in and hide him. He laughed, snatched a kiss and tore himself away, rushed up the street, sword in hand, to where he heard the trumpets of the Danish King’s men—and he was wild with an angry fear lest the Earl’s men should let themselves be driven down to their ships without attempting resistance.
Olav’s hands clenched upon the borders of his cloak—his spirit was in a violent uproar: to think that he could forget all this! And now it came back, his vision of the manor on the hill above the creek, but strangely paled and faded now; it was fraught with memories of ill health and contention with a dense, grey, overmastering force, and of a sick woman who crushed the youth and manhood out of him and who grew ever paler and more faded in spite of sucking his strength dry. And, with a sudden break, whatever feelings these memories had brought him hitherto—they now sickened and revolted him—Jesus! had he not been as one bewitched—or thrust into hell?
The song ended in a resounding roar and the thud of half a hundred feet that struck the ground at once. Olav drew a deep breath.
The ring of dancers broke up and the crowd of onlookers scattered. Olav moved about, uncertain what to do with himself. Then he ran against someone—looked at him and saw that it was the blind man from the church of the preaching friars.
For a moment they stood and stared at each other—so it seemed to Olav: the wan, sightless face, contracted with misfortune or bitterness, seemed all agaze. Olav’s only thought was that he had been clumsy. Then a change came over the stranger’s face, as though awakening from an evil dream. A smile broke out on it as he felt before him with his hands and spoke a few words.
“Cognovis me?” whispered Olav doubtfully.
The stranger—he was not much more than a lad, Olav now saw—replied at once in the same language, but he spoke it so quickly and fluently that Olav did not understand a word.
“Non capio bene latinum,” muttered Olav awkwardly.
The other smiled courteously and began again more slowly, in fewer words. Olav grasped so much: that he was parted from his company, and now he asked Olav to lead him somewhere—to the church. With hesitation Olav accepted the young man’s proffered hand and felt with aversion how clammy it was. Then he let the other take his arm and led him toward the path by which he had come.
The young man tried to enter into conversation—in Latin, English, and French, a little of each. Olav understood him to say that he knew him from the Dominicans’ church.
“Non es—” he sought the word for “blind.” He stole a look at the other’s ruined eyes. No, he must be stone-blind. A shock went through him—then someone had pointed him out to the man. “Non es cœcis?” The tension filled him with something like joy. Now he must be on guard.
It was dark in the forest; cautiously Olav led the blind man over roots and stones in the path—watching intently for any sign of men lurking in the undergrowth. And it had chanced unluckily that he had the stranger’s left arm locked in his right—or had the other managed it of set purpose? Olav was ashamed to change now. But he kept an eye on the man’s sword-hand.
He was waiting all the time for the flash of a dagger—or for someone to burst out of the thicket—and the way could not have been so long as he went to the sports green, nor the path so narrow—and dark it was here in the wood. But to the blind man’s questions he replied calmly that his name was Olav; he was a Norseman and a merchant. He would have told him too where he lay with his ship—it were well that the man should know he had no thought of hiding—but when he tried to explain it, he could not make himself clear in the foreign tongue.
And all at once they were out of the wood. Olav led the blind man up toward the church, which now gleamed faintly in the fading light. And a dull, oppressive fear came over Olav—it was not with dagger or armed men the stranger would attack him. But into the church with this man he would not go!
Then a serving-man came running down toward them and called out on seeing his master. The latter at once dropped Olav’s arm, took him by the hand, and thanked him for his help. Olav was dumb with surprise. The young knight turned to his man, laid a hand on his shoulder, and allowed himself to be led away, as he turned once more and greeted Olav with a parting “Vale!”
Olav stood still; it was now so incomprehensible that he felt almost disappointed. He followed the stranger with his eyes. Before the gate of the little priory by the church a company was getting into the saddle. And in a little while they came riding past him.
There were several men of rank in velvet, with gold chains on their breasts; they had excellent horses and costly gear. The blind man rode on a black stallion, which was led by a page. The serving-men who followed were armed and equipped for a journey, and in the rear came several horses laden with merchandise. Olav guessed they had come from far away.
And now it dawned on him that the blind man must have been away from home for some days. So she, the wife, had sent for him while she was alone.—He recalled the arbour in the secret corner of the garden, the young woman who came with perfumed hair, naked under her thin silken robe—neither pixy nor phantom as he had made himself believe—only an unfaithful wife.
In a surge of passion Olav felt as if he himself were the man betrayed. His rage was red and hot as lust—he could have seized and killed her with his bare hands. And he was dazed the while by a strange, unreal feeling—this had happened to him once before.
Then the rush of blood ebbed back, the red mist faded from his eyes. He felt the ground under his feet once more and saw everything about him with a strange distinctness. The beeches were bathed in a pale, subdued light, and the sky above was whitish, with a few bright shreds of cloud; the grey stones of the church flushed faintly in the afterglow. The place was now almost deserted, and a scent of dew and dust arose from the trampled grass. And Olav saw the cold, clear truth of it: that this game in which he had here been involved—he had taken part in it once before. But this time he was himself the thief.
He took the front of his cloak in both hands, as though he would tear off his bonds. But from the innermost chambers of his soul—now that at last he had been forced to open a crack of the door—the darkness spoke to him, a voice without words. This was the meaning of what had lately befallen him. Another man’s wife had been offered to him, so that he had but to reach out his hand to take her. And he himself had had no other thought—until that cry had warned him, from heaven or from purgatory. Had he not been snatched away, as a child is snatched from the fire by its mother, he himself would now have been a wedded woman’s paramour.
Olav began to walk swiftly, as though he would e
scape from these thoughts. He strode across the fair-field. Embers still glowed upon the ground in the increasing dusk; in one place a fire was burning brightly. Many people still lingered here, and all seemed drunken. Olav walked on rapidly; he entered another wood by a well-marked path that led downhill.
In a kind of desperate resentment he struggled to drown the voice—“in the devil’s name, I did not touch the woman. I have behaved like a fool, making eyes at an English bitch, because I thought she was like my wife.” And he might well be angry, at his age, for being caught in the woman’s snares—“but I had no such thought in my mind, and did I not make off at once, when I saw what she would with me?” And that the blind man had known him could hardly be a miracle; for he had often seen that blind men—beggars and aged folk—seemed to see with their whole body: they had the scent and hearing of dogs.
But all his striving to drown the voice within him was of no avail—he had violated no man’s honour indeed, but he had not regarded it in this way as he led the blind man through the wood; then he had been sure that the other sought his life, and justly. And again he knew that he had been guilty in accompanying the strange lady’s messenger—or an old, drowned guilt had floated up into the daylight.
As he hastened down the wooded path in the growing darkness, over stock and stone and bog-hole, sure of foot as a sleepwalker, it was borne in upon him that this darkness into which he hurried farther and farther was his own inner self, and presently he would have entered its deepest and darkest secret chamber. Soon he would be driven in, with his back against the last wall; but he knew withal that he would fight and defend himself to the utmost. And he understood—
First God had spoken to him face to face—that was in the night when he was to lose Ingunn. In that hour, when he was forsaken by his only friend, God had spoken to him from the forsakenness of the cross. In that night, when his grief was such that he could have sweated blood, God had appeared to him, bedewed with the blood of the death agony and the scourging and the nails and the thorns, and He had spoken to him as friend to friend: “O all ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!” And he had seen his own sin and sorrow as a bleeding gash upon those shoulders. Yet he had not been strong enough to come.
And God had spoken to him a second time. He had spoken to him in His holy Church, as soon as Olav was so far healed of grief’s fever that he could compose himself and listen to calm words. Yet he had voluntarily delayed on the road—nor was he any longer sure that he had obeyed the call. Unless—
But now this last thing had befallen him, so that he was forced to see what manner of man he was and what was his sin.
All at once he stood as it were outside and looked upon himself—as one stands behind a fence and looks at a man labouring in a barren, weed-grown field.
The man toils about a bramblebush, trying to clear it away, and tears his flesh and his clothes on it. But the weeds, the coarse and noxious growth of tares and thistles, he seems not to see. Yet it is not the bramble that has choked all the good seed in his cornfield: it may bulk large as it stands in full bloom, but it does not seed and scatter everywhere; one may clear it out once for all if one will take the trouble. And there it stands flowering, rank in its unprofitable beauty, and no one will despise it.
He had only been willing to acknowledge his great sins. For indeed they were blood-red transgressions against the laws that prevail in the kingdom of heaven. That he had always known, but at the same time he had known that among men it was accounted otherwise. And according to the law that held good among the men with whom his birth entitled him to rank himself, he had done no more than his duty—vindicated his right and his wife’s honour.
Even if it came out, this thing that he had done in secret, the murder, the dastard’s deed—it was not so sure that his memory would be tarnished with dishonour, even if his head had paid the penalty on the block. Not one man of all those he reckoned as his equals would judge him to be a dastard—if they knew all. Olav saw now that this knowledge had lain somewhere far back in his soul, always.
Young as he had been, he could not escape doing wrong, since his fate was tangled in the coil of other men’s wrongs and misfortunes. But all the evil that followed was due to the attempted betrayal of him and Ingunn by those who should have defended the two children’s rights. Up to the last and worst evil, his false confessions, the sacrilege that burned his mouth and heart—foot by foot he had been driven to all this, since he had had to take his own and his foster-sister’s cause into his own hands, and as a raw youth he had grasped it mistakenly.
He had never before thought it out clearly in this way, but within himself he had always known, in the midst of his distress, that God, the all-seeing, saw this much more clearly than he did—that his greatest sins were the sins of others no less than of himself. And inextricably bound up with the burden of his own misdeeds he bore the burden of others.
So he had bowed low and smitten his breast when the deacon said the Confiteor in the mass; he was willing to confess: “not one of these men standing about me is guilty of such black misdeeds as I.” In the mirror of God’s justice he saw himself sunken so much deeper than these others, as the reflection of the oak in a pond sinks deeper than that of the undergrowth around it. And even in a human view he must have seen himself standing like an oak above the brushwood.
But in this unearthly light which now shone into his darkness, what he had secretly wished to preserve from God’s hand appeared to him at last: the pride of the sinner, which is even harder to break than the self-righteousness of the righteous.—“Be it as it may, I am innocent of the sins of a mean man.”
Twice had Jesus Christ spoken to him out of the sweetness of His mercy—and he had shrunk away like a timid hound. Twice had the Voice spoken: “Behold, who I am, behold the depth of my love!” Now it said to him: “See then who thou art. See that thou art no greater a sinner than other men. See that thou art as small a sinner!”
The sword sank into the most hidden roots of his being and pierced him. Non veni pacem mittere, sed gladium. Qui invenit animam suam, perdet illam, et qui perdiderit animam suam propter me, inveniet eam. Olav saw that these words were truth, such as he had never dreamed of before, and when he understood their meaning, it was like sinking beneath the ice-cold waters of the very ocean.
He laughed with pain as he ran through the dark forest.
He had behaved as though he were afraid of losing his life-he who had long been so tired of life that if it had not been for Ingunn’s sake he could never have borne it for a day. He would not go back to it—he lost nothing if he now chose obedience, poverty, chastity, nay, the lot of a slave and a martyr’s death at last, for all that he must renounce he counted nothing worth, but what lay before him promised gains beyond measure—adventures and travels in distant lands, and at the last peace and God’s forgiveness, and admission to the ranks of His soldiers again.
But now he tardily understood that then he must choose, not between God and this or that upon earth, not even his worldly life, but between God and himself.
The path brought him to an open glade; it led high up along a slope, where the trees had been cut. Above him he now saw a wide stretch of the sky, dark and strewn with stars. Below him lay a little valley, he could see that he was looking down over the tops of trees; a sound of running water came from somewhere in the darkness.
Unconsciously he slackened his pace. The light, cooling breeze fanned his cheek; Olav wiped the sweat from his forehead. And, feeling that he was walking on high ground with open, airy space about him on every side, he had a sudden instinct that he was being led out into the wilderness; he walked here all alone in a foreign land and knew not whither he was going. Here was no familiar place or thing that might help him to escape seeing what he would not see; folks’ speech, which he did not understand, could not break in and drown the Voice that he would shun.
Olav halted abruptly. He seemed to absorb strength from th
e gloom around and from the raw, cold earth under his feet, so that he felt his ego swell and grow in black defiance: “Why dost Thou deal thus with me? Other men have done worse—and more contemptible—deeds. But Thou dost not drive them from home and peace and persecute them, as Thou drivest and persecutest me.”
The voice that replied seemed to dwell in the very stillness under the wide, star-strewn heaven and the forest that rustled faintly in the night breeze and the hushed murmur of the brook in the valley.
“Because thou dost yet love Me, I seek after thee. Because thou dost long for Me, I persecute thee. I drive thee out because thou dost call upon Me, even as thou fliest from Me.”
The path descended steeply, leading into the thick of the woods. Olav stopped again, threw himself down at the entrance of the dark gap that penetrated the foliage, and sat with his head buried in his arms.
Visions came swarming upon him without his being able to hinder them. Once he complained aloud. Was it to see this that he had been brought back to the very starting-point, his youth? In secret he had been proud of his youth: “After all, I was overborne by force, I was compelled to stand alone, none helped me—whatever I have done or left undone, was not the sin of an ignoble man.”
Was there none who helped him? Now he descried a little light low down, a lantern stood on the floor in a dark stable, and there were two young men. He recognized the face of Arnvid Finnsson, stricken and perplexed—it was he himself who had wounded his friend with a lie. Ay, that sin was his own and none other’s. Now he saw that this was surely the first sin he had committed deliberately and wilfully: when he cast his guilt upon the shoulders of his friend, who, he knew, never refused to take up another’s burden.
“No!” He whispered it breathlessly. This he would not have-let it be good for monk and priest, but he would not be imprisoned in this cell of self-knowledge they talked of; let it be their concern alone to watch the mirror that reflects God’s light and man’s darkness.
In the Wilderness Page 8
