The Black Cauldron

by William Heinesen

  Yes, he had his strengths, and moreover he could write. As a political correspondent, Mr. Skælling had acquired a good reputation in the Danish conservative press, and here in the Faroes, too, his writing was highly regarded, at least by the few connoisseurs whose opinion was of any significance.

  Nor should the memorial mound be forgotten – that aesthetically pleasing mound with the plaques commemorating those lost at sea, those men who never came home and were never laid to rest in consecrated ground. It had been Mr. Skælling’s idea. Perhaps that had been forgotten by now, but what did that matter? It still warmed his heart every time he visited the hallowed spot and saw how the memorial plaques grew in number.

  Well then … but back to the case of Ivar Berghammer. Irrespective of the personality of this young man, Mr. Skælling could not escape the fact that he had a deep-seated distrust of the very type Ivar represented. Ivar Berghammer was only one of the gradually, but disconcertingly, increasing number of more or less proletarian upstarts whom abnormal times had raised above their original station. This capricious age had released unpredictable forces which spelt danger because they knew neither roots nor culture. Yes, indeed, an age of louts and boors, an age at the mercy of the clenched fist, was already well on the way to establishing itself. It was sad to think back on those untroubled days of quiet prosperity when old Consul Tarnowius sat as a respected patriarch in his office and held all the threads in his steady hand, while the fish-drying grounds overflowed with silvery white dried cod tended by busy people blessed with happy dispositions and hands that were never unoccupied …

  But that was not the subject at this moment. Mr. Skælling reached for his telephone; he would ring to Opperman and get some information to use in his article on the tragedy at sea.

  Opperman was able – as he put it – to give the dead skipper his very best recommendation. There were not many as plucky and intrepid, reliable and loyal, as Ivar had been. Mr. Skælling could hear the emotion in Opperman’s voice. He made some comment, too, to the effect that Ivar had died a hero’s death – a rather superficial remark. Life at sea was a profitable occupation at the moment, and if all those many sailors who unfortunately lost their lives in this crazy war could be called heroes, the gallery of heroes thus created would be endless. The term had to be limited to those who sacrificed their lives in seeking to save others or in furthering some just cause. And sailing money home for Opperman was, of course, only an insignificant business which no one would have undertaken if not to gain some benefit in the form of a good commission.

  Otherwise Mr. Skælling had nothing serious against Opperman. He was an upstart and had his weaknesses and his ridiculous side, but he was a remarkably clever man, whose heart had often been seen to be in the right place, too.

  Of course, he could afford it all. But on the other hand, Opperman was in no way obliged to embark on charitable works; they were entirely voluntary, matters close to his heart. Nor was the benefaction to the orphan childen the only one to come from Opperman’s hand. He had contributed to the church organ fund. And the young people’s sports activities found a patron in him. In spite of all his peculiarities, it had to be admitted that Opperman was a valuable person to have in the community. And he was a good and loyal supporter of the newspaper, with a regular advertisement on the front page, in addition to which he occasionally took the entire back page.

  Mr. Skælling was sorry to think that Opperman had lost his ship. All these ships going down were a matter for general concern; their loss would sooner or later have serious repercussions as the sources of income dried up in a process which could have fateful consequences for every member of the community. Ultimately, of course, it was shipping which maintained the entire social fabric and raised the standard of living for all.

  That confounded war!

  And yet, on the other hand it could not be denied that it was that selfsame war that made seafaring profitable. Properly speaking, there was nothing for it but to take it philosophically. The sea giveth, and the sea taketh away.

  Mr. Skælling took his fountain pen: “The sea giveth and the sea taketh away. Once more Kingsport has suffered a painful loss. Our fleet has been reduced by yet another ship, the gallant cutter, the Manuela, belonging to one of our most distinguished citizens, the well-known merchant, Consul M. W. Opperman. And this war, the scourge of the entire civilised world, demanding new and painful sacrifices in virtually every country, has claimed as tribute the life of yet another of our young men.”

  As always when writing obituaries, Mr. Skælling was overcome by emotion and embarked on a flight of lyricism: “It happened at first dawn, just as a new day was breaking over the war-torn and unfortunate breed of men. For the last time this young man was to behold the sunrise before wandering forth into the night eternal to join the sombre, silent ranks of fallen mariners …”

  A tiny tear welled up in Mr. Skælling’s eye. His thoughts had turned to his own son, Kaj, who was the same age as Ivar, just turned twenty-five. At one time Kaj had insisted he wanted to go to sea, but thank goodness nothing had ever come of it, and luckily he had now settled down as Tarnowius’s book-keeper. But supposing he had become a sailor and so, of course, either a skipper or a first mate, or at the very least a home-trade master. Suppose it had been Kaj lying there in Ivar’s stead in the hospital mortuary with his chest ripped apart by a machine gun salvo!

  Yes, he could vividly enter into the deep sorrow of the bereaved. It was an inspired obituary. “It’s perhaps a little rhetorical,” he said to the typographer, Jens Ferdinand Hermansen, when he handed him the manuscript. “But in a situation such as this one has to show generosity of heart, and Ivar Berghammer is, when all is said and done, the first civilian victim of the war at sea to be laid to rest here.”

  “And God grant that he may be the last,” he added, withdrawing with a little sigh to his office adjoining the composing room.

  The typographer ran through the article. “What the hell does that banal snob mean by showing generosity?” he muttered to himself. “But the tune’s the same here as everywhere else in the world: first you squeeze the life out of the others, and then you skim off the cream for yourself; then you fall on your backside overcome by emotion because you’ve been so generous as to notice that they’ve kicked the bucket. It’s the tomb of the unknown soldier all over again. To Hell with the lot of them.”

  There was a knock on the door. Jens Ferdinand had a shock when he turned round and saw that it was Bergthor Ørnberg.

  “It’s about a song, or rather a hymn that I would like to have printed,” said Bergthor. “The Forward Youth Association’s going to sing it at Ivar’s funeral.”

  Bergthor was all seriousness and cordiality; he had put all grudges aside. He shook the typographer’s ink-black hand and with a matey smile said: “We had a rather unfortunate confrontation that night at Marselius’s place, Jens Ferdinand, but let it be forgotten now. In the shadow of death we all meet as friends and abandon all resentment.”

  He unfolded a carefully typed manuscript and laid it on the type case. “See, this is a poem I’ve written. It came to me this morning when I heard the news of Ivar’s death. We weren’t properly speaking friends, on the contrary, but as you know, I forgave Ivar for his behaviour towards me and let the matter drop. Naturally. Who wouldn’t? It all happened when he was drunk.”

  Bergthor raised his head, his eyes shadowed with mournful pride: “But now he is dead he is no longer Ivar Berghammer the private individual; he is more, Jens Ferdinand, he is far more! For us here in the Cauldron he has become the representative of all those brave and intrepid seamen who are now risking their lives for their native land … all those who together constitute the foundations upon which our community is built. They show our flag in alien ports; they bring wealth to the country; they are indispensable and dear to us, and if they fall on the field of honour, Jens Ferdinand, then we will do them all the honour that we in our weakness can muster. And so the youth of this plac
e shall sing at Ivar’s graveside, while the flag flies alongside them.”

  Bergthor Ørnberg spoke as though he were already standing at the graveside; his breathing betrayed his exaltation, his nostrils were quivering, his upper lip was red and slightly swollen; he really looked as though he had been crying. Jens Ferdinand ran suspiciously through his poem. Yes, of course, it was a load of stilted trash, a shameless and vacuous spate of words, daft patriotic nonsense, set to a stirring Danish melody from the Romantic age.

  “You’ve turned out a right load of trash there, all right,” he said irascibly. “That doesn’t do justice to Ivar’s memory.”

  Bergthor’s eyes suddenly narrowed to slits, and he failed in his attempt to smile. It was a moment or two before he could think of what to say after the shock.

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion,” he said in a low voice. “What you think is a matter of complete indifference to me. I want that poem printed. Do you understand?”

  “Cocky little typographer,” he added scornfully.

  “You’re no poet,” said Jens Ferdinand brutally. “We do have real poets in this country, but you are not one of them. You’re small fry.”

  Bergthor gritted his teeth and made as though to strike Jens Ferdinand, but he lowered his arm. He bent down towards the slightly built hunchback and hissed: “You chicken, you. I could crumple you up and throw you in the waste paper basket if I could be bothered.”

  He straightened himself up and his look became arrogant: “And in any case it’s foolish of me to stand here and waste time on a minion. Where’s the editor?”

  He grabbed the manuscript and went and knocked on the office door. He soon returned. In an authoritative voice, and without as much as looking at the typographer, he said: “Now get a move on so it can be ready in time.”

  3

  Engilbert fell into deep thought when he heard of the loss of the Manuela and the tragic fate of the lad from Angelica Cottage. He had a nagging suspicion that in some way he was partly responsible for what had happened, and he directed a silent and impotent protest at Madame Svava.

  That bizarre pair of drunkards, Thygesen and Myklebust, were making a din in the attic, taking it in turn to sing lighthearted songs. Myklebust was warbling in a falsetto voice and putting on quite a show:

  I rowed my boat to Seiegrund,

  One morning awful ear-ly …

  Engilbert banged on the wall and shouted: “Can’t you keep quiet in there, you two … Haven’t you heard about the tragedy?”

  Myklebust suddenly fell silent. Before long Thygesen opened the door to Engilbert’s room and looked in. His eyes showed signs of heavy drinking, but they were deadly serious. His chin was covered with week-old stubble.

  “I thought you said something about a tragedy?” he asked in a subdued voice. “What has happened, Mr. Thomsen?”

  Myklebust could be glimpsed in the passageway, listening attentively in the background. Engilbert explained briefly to Thygesen what had happened, adding: “So I feel we must stay quiet today and not make unnecessary noise.”

  “Good God,” said Thygesen, turning towards Myklebust. “He says another ship’s gone down, and that they’ve shot the skipper.”

  The two men tiptoed away and disappeared. Engilbert could hear them whispering and sighing in their attic. He could also hear the gurgle of their eternal bottle. Of course, it was not long before they ceased whispering, and now Thygesen sang out in his deep bass voice. But in a subdued, almost tearful, manner. And Engilbert could hear from the melody and the words that it was some kind of funeral hymn:

  Oh wondrous moon, companion of the night

  Shine out upon my face in death forlorn.

  Smile kindly on me in my mortal plight

  And light my way o’er death’s dark bourne.

  Engilbert sat down heavily on his bed and started thinking the situation through.

  If it really was Svava who had wrought this misfortune, then it was a terrible misunderstanding, done without his knowing, and completely at variance with what he wanted. But perhaps he had committed an unforgivably foolish act in confiding in this fellow countrywoman of his. The Icelandic spirit is totally different from that in other countries; it is dangerous and terrible, for Iceland is the land of glaciers and volcanoes, of hot springs and earthquakes, the land where people have been burned in their homes, the land of the Vøluspá prophecies. He had to think of Svava’s verse about the witches playing on high. He remembered, too, that Stefan Sveinsson had once said that his wife was descended from the Norwegian king Harald Squirrelcloak’s illegitimate son Erik Murt, who according to legend was supposed to have settled in Iceland; but when he was told this, Engilbert had not given a thought to the fact that in that case Svava had the blood of Erik Bloodaxe in her veins! Indeed, even worse: she was a descendant of Gunhild the Regicide! Perhaps it was from this evil and treacherous woman that she had inherited her magic powers.

  And that talisman of hers that he at first had been so genuinely pleased with … what had it brought him except pain and trouble? Powerful it certainly was, but seemingly powerful in the wrong way. It had diverted him from the path of spiritual ascent; it had made Thomea from Angelica Cottage submit to his will … the very evening after he had received it she had, as though by magic, surrendered to him with a frenzied reckless manner the likes of which he had never known before; since then he had been with her on several occasions, and she had remained just as compliant. Through her arts Svava had indeed forced the strange heavily-built girl from Angelica Cottage to her knees and made her into his obedient tool.

  Nor was that all. Engilbert had discovered that his power over women in general was many times greater than before. Everywhere he went, women looked at him with passion in their eyes. Even Mrs. Lundegaard, otherwise so straightlaced, had come to him one night, and now she was like wax in his hands. And it was not only earthly women who behaved in this way; the subterranean spirits didn’t hold back, either. Time after time he had been up among the boulders in the Angelica Bog and caught a glimpse of them in the dusk and heard their laughs and giggles, and time after time they had visited him in his dreams. Even Madame Svava herself had once come to him in his dreams … she had appeared sitting on a kind of throne covered with black moss; he had knelt at her foot, and she had stroked his hair and revealed herself to him.

  Of course, all this had been strange and fascinating enough. But for his soul it had been an evil draught, a treacherous potion that had dragged him ever further down, down to a level from which he had otherwise worked his way up; indeed, he could not but wonder whether in all his life he had ever sunk deeper in the cesspool of filth, in bestial and unworthy dependence on carnal pleasures and sensuous thoughts. It was in sadness and trembling he thought back on that blissful morning up in the Angelica Bog when he had seen the sign of Logos in the clouds.

  Alas, alas. Several times he had decided to turn around and begin a new ascent. But each time he failed. There was not a shadow of doubt that he had fallen prey to superior evil powers, and that Svava was in league with them. Her intentions with him were not good. She sat on her throne of black moss and sowed her seeds of evil and lust.

  He took out the little purse containing her lock of hair, and opened it.

  “Release yourself from this iniquity,” a voice whispered inside him. “Let the flames devour it.”

  But the sight of the living lock of black hair suddenly filled him with an uncontrollable desire; he twisted it round his finger and put it to his lips and once more felt electrified by its strange power. Everything went dark before his eyes; he kissed the lock madly and dissolved trembling into ecstasy, a mysterious sense of infinite well-being.

  The rain had ceased, but the air was thick and misty. Frederik had been to a captain’s protest together with the other four survivors from the Manuela, and he was now on his way up to Angelica Cottage. He felt tired and weak from lack of sleep and moved like a sleepwalker, devoid of all thought, scarcely aware
of touching the ground. As he passed the school, a voice called out to him. It was old Verlandsen. He came out of the school gate, open-mouthed and with a sheepish look on his face; his eyes were swollen and heavy behind his thick glasses.

  “Oh God, oh God, Frederik,” he said. “So that was how it was to end … and in a way it was all my fault.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, why on earth do you say that?” Frederik almost felt like smiling. It was just like the old man to come up with stupid remarks of this kind, however bright he was otherwise. He always maintained that he was to blame for whatever happened.

  “It was my fault that you were able to sail that evening,” said Verlandsen, looking Frederik in the eye. “I put in a good word for Ivar both with Joab Hansen and Bergthor Ørnberg. If I hadn’t done that, Frederik, and the matter had been allowed to take its course …”

  “Yes, but then it must surely have been God’s will that it happened as it did,” said Frederik, simply to say something.

  Verlandsen’s expression seemed to indicate he was receptive to new ideas. He shook Frederik’s hand in gratitude: “Yes, Frederik, let that be our consolation and hope. For otherwise the whole affair is incomprehensible. Yet even so, I can’t help thinking that I’ve behaved like a clumsy old fool. And it’s not the first time I’ve had this sort of thing happen. It’s often the case that you are guilty of hurting people without intending to. You think that what you’re doing will be good for them, and then the opposite turns out to be the case. I don’t understand it, Frederik. And now I am so old that there is not much hope I’ll ever understand it. There is something called a shift in value … but the Lord knows I’ve never really had the brain to understand it. However, I must get back to my work, Frederik … but let’s have another talk soon, my poor lad; come and have a chat, do me that kindness.”