The Snake Pit

by Sigrid Undset

  The priest invited Olav to accompany him home, and Olav accepted with thanks. Another thing at which Olav Ingolfsson turned up his nose was the smell in the priest’s yard, like that of the dyers’ booths in the town. But the house was clean and fair within; his living-room was far finer than that of Hestviken. Three well-favoured young maidens brought in butter, white bread, and ale, greeted the guest with comely grace and went straight out again. They were daughters of the priest’s nephew; the eldest undertook the duties of his household, and at this time she had her sisters on a visit.

  The ale was excellent, and the men sat a good while talking of this and that. Olav like Sira Benedikt better and better. Then their talk fell upon Olav Ingolfsson, and the priest praised the young man for having shown such loving-kindness toward one who had misgoverned his affairs so ill. Olav answered that it was his own outlawry that was chiefly to blame for the neglected state of Hestviken; the old man had doubtless done his best, seeing that he was a cripple and ailing. But indeed he held old Olav to be a remarkably wise and holy man.

  “That addle-pate?” said the priest.

  Olav said nothing.

  The priest went on: “Holiness, I trow, he had good cause to seek—to judge by the fellows he resorted to in his youth, his holiness cannot have been much to boast of. And were he wise, he would think and speak more of Christ and Mary Virgin, and less of witchcraft and spectres and mermen and water-wraiths—would pray, rather than practise these sorceries and incantations of his—I marvel whether much of what he deals with be not downright heresy. But he came out of school a half-taught priestling—and the half he had learned was learned wrong. It may be diverting to listen to his tales some evening or other—but you seem to be a man of sense, Olav Audunsson, you surely do not believe all his preaching—?”

  Ah, thought Olav, now he knew it. And in fact he thought he had already suspected how it was. Aloud he said with something like a smile:

  “There would seem to be no very warm friendship between you and my kinsman?”

  The priest replied: “I have never liked him—but that is not merely because he was foster-brother of him who wronged me and mine most grievously. And none of us bore hatred to the other men of Hestviken—they were brave and honourable, all but he. You may see that yourself, Olav—I have liked you since I saw you for the first time, and I was minded that you should see I wish you well, and I think myself that the old enmity between us of Eiken and you of Hestviken should now be buried and forgotten. Not that we ever counted Olav Ribbung and his other sons our enemies—but we kept out of each other’s way as much as we could, as you may well suppose.”

  Olav busied himself with wiping off some ale he had spilt on his jerkin; he did not look up as he asked:

  “I know not what you mean, Sira Benedikt. I am but newly come home and am strange to these parts—I have never heard aught of this enmity between your kindred and mine.”

  Sira Benedikt seemed greatly surprised, and a little embarrassed as well. “I thought surely Olav Half-priest had spoken to you of this?”

  Olav shook his head.

  “Then ’tis better I tell you myself.” The priest sat in thought awhile, jogging the little dipper that floated in the ale-bowl and making it sail round.

  “Did you look at those fair children of mine, the little maids that came in here, Olav?”

  “Indeed they were fair. And were it not that I have a young bride waiting for me in the Upplands, I had used my eyes better while your kinswomen were here, Sira!” said Olav with a little smile.

  “If I guess your meaning aright,” replied the priest, and he too smiled, but with a troubled look, “you cannot be aware that they are your own kinswomen, and near of kin too?”

  Olav turned his eyes upon the priest and waited.

  “You are second cousins. Torgils Foulbeard was the father of their father. He ruined my sister—”

  Involuntarily Olav’s face was convulsed with horror. Sira Benedikt saw it, guessed the young man’s thought, and said:

  “Nay, ’twas before God took his wits from Torgils, or the Evil One, whom he had followed so faithfully, while sin and lust tempted him. Ay, God knows I am not an impartial man when I speak of Olav Half-priest; he and Torgils were foster-brothers, and Olav backed the other through thick and thin. Olav Ribbung would compel Torgils to marry Astrid; he was an honourable, resolute, and loyal man—and when Torgils left her to her shame with his bastard son, while he himself kept to his leman in Oslo and would marry her, Olav Ribbung commanded his son to come hither. Ingolf, your grandfather, and Olav’s daughters, and Ivar Staal, his son-in-law, all said they would not sit at meat with Torgils nor speak to him while he held fast to his purpose. But Torgils was living with the priest, the father of Olav Ingolfsson—the more shame to them that they received him; one was a priest and the other was to be one.

  “Ay, and the end was that my father and brothers accepted fines and made atonement with the Hestvik men when we saw that neither Olav Ribbung nor Ingolf could do aught to shake Torgils or force him to make amends for Astrid’s misfortune. ’Twas the better and more Christian way—that is true. But had I been of an age to bear arms, I know full sure I would not have rested till I had laid Torgils low—I had done it even if I had been a priest, ordained to the service of God. I have hated that man so that—God sees my heart, and He knows it. But He knows too, I ween, that the hardest thing He can require of a man is that he shall not avenge his kinswoman’s honour with the sword.—I was ten years old when it happened. Astrid had been to me as a mother; she was the eldest of our family, and I was the youngest. I shared a bed with her that summer: she wept and wept; I know not how it was she did not weep herself to death. I tell you, Olav, the man who can forgive such a thing from his heart, him I would call a holy man.”

  The priest sat in silence. Olav, still as a rock, waited for him to say more. But at last he thought he must say something.

  “What became of her, your sister?” he asked in a low voice. “Did she die?”

  “’Tis eight winters since she died,” said the priest. “She lived to be an old woman. She was married some years after, to Kaare Jonsson of Roaldstad, north in Skeidis parish, and she had a good life with him. Father was too hard on her and could not bear the sight of her child; had it been another man’s—but that a daughter of his should swell the flock of Torgils’s concubines—But Kaare was good to them both; it was he too who brought about the good marriage for his stepson, with the daughter and heir of Hestbæk. And when disaster fell upon Olav of Hestviken and he began to feel the lack of kinsmen, he sent word to Astrid—if she would let him have the child, Arne, he would make the boy heir to his father’s name and goods. Kaare answered that the lad no longer needed the support of his father’s kindred, and both he and Astrid loved Arne Torgilsson far too dearly to send him out to Hestviken to inherit the fortunes of the Hestvik men. So Olav fetched home Aasa, who had served there at one time, and the son that she had had by Torgils; but he was not long in life—

  “But these are all old matters, and I deem that we should now forget our enmity and you young ones should claim kinship and meet in charity. I believe that Arne of Hestbæk and you would like each other. You must go thither with me one day, Olav, and greet the kinsfolk you have in this part of the land.”

  Olav said he would do so more than gladly. But then he asked:

  “That word you spoke of the Hestvik men’s fortunes—what meant you by that?”

  The priest looked as though the question troubled him.

  “You know that your great-grandfather was not blest in his kindred. That was the time when he sat there in Hestviken with the madman-his other children he had lost, all but Borgny, who was in a convent, and he had no true-born heir to follow him other than the little lad Audun, your father—and him Ingolf’s widow had taken with her, when she went home to the place she had come from, south in Elvesyssel. So it may well have seemed to Kaare and Astrid that the race would not prosper after him
.”

  Olav said pensively: “’Tis true for all that, Sira Benedikt, favoured of fortune they were not, from all that my kinsman has told me of them.”

  “They were brave men and loyal, Olav, and that is worth more than good fortune.”

  “Not Torgils,” said Olav. “I knew not this thing of him. I knew naught else but that he had been witless all his days—old Olav has never spoken his name.”

  “Bitterly as I have hated him,” said Sira Benedikt, “I will yet tell you the truth of him—he was a brave man—and with men he kept faith. And all say that no goodlier youth has been seen within the memory of man in the country about Folden. Ay, ’tis strange I should have liked you so well, when first I saw you, for you bear great resemblance to Torgils. But then Arne too is like his father, and his daughters—methought perchance you had seen it, when all three came in—they might well be your sisters. You all have the same abrupt little noses and the white skin—and the same fair hair, pale as thistledown; nay, so handsome as he was you are not—though I hated him, I must say with the rest, a fairer man have I never seen. So there may well be truth in what they report of him, that he had no need to run after women or to allure them with wooing arts and false words. They followed him of themselves-as though bewitched if he did but fix those strange blue-green eyes of his upon them. Ay, you have the same light eyes, you too, Olav—”

  Olav had to laugh at this—and he laughed on, trying to laugh off his sense of oppressive discomfort.

  “Nay, Sira Benedikt—I cannot be very like my kinsman Torgils —in the eyes at least. For I have never marked that I could charm women—”

  “You are like him, Olav, though you be not so handsome—and you have the same light eyes, both you and these little maids of mine. But the evil power of bewitching folk dwells not in the eyes of any of you, God be praised. And this prating of misfortune that is thought to pursue certain houses and kindreds—it may have been so in heathen times, I am ready to believe that. But you are surely wise enough now to lay your life and destiny in the hands of God Almighty and not to believe such things.—God be gracious to you, my Olav—I wish you happiness and blessing in your marriage, and that your race may be called fortune’s favourites from now on!”

  The priest drank to him. Olav drank, but could not bring himself to say anything. But now Sira Benedikt fetched in the three daughters of Arne—Signe, Una, and Torgunn—and Olav greeted his kinswomen with kisses. They were so fair and debonair that Olav warmed little by little and stayed a good while in cheerful converse with them. To his home-coming feast at Hestviken they thought they could not come, for it would be just at the time when they were to go to a great wedding near their own home. But late in the autumn they would return to the priest’s house and stay with him awhile, and then they promised to visit him and pay their respects to his wife.

  Olav was profoundly troubled in his mind as he rode homeward. That he should have been impelled to visit the church today—and that he should have met Sira Benedikt and learned this of his grandfather’s brother and the priest’s sister, this seemed so singular to Olav that he could scarce believe it to be pure chance.

  For though it was true that only the Bishop could give him absolution for the slaying of Teit, yet he could confess it to Sira Benedikt first. And with a sort of terror Olav felt how unspeakably he longed to do so.

  He knew that if he knelt at Sira Benedikt’s knee and laid it bare to him that he was a murderer, and how it had come about that he was one—then he would find himself in the presence of a servant of God who was not merely a spiritual father. Sira Benedikt would understand him as a father understands the son of his body.

  He had loved Bishop Torfinn because that monk from Tautra had suffered him to approach a world of riches and beauty and wisdom, which before he had only known as something distant and strange. The Christian faith had been to him a power like the King and the law of the land—he knew that it was to govern his life, and he bowed to it, without reluctance, with reverence and with the recognition that a man must be loyal to all these things if he was to be able to meet his equals and look them freely in the face without shame. In Bishop Torfinn he had seen the man who could take him by the hand and lead him on to all that gave happiness and self-knowledge to serve and to love. What manner of man he would have been had it been his lot to follow the lord Torfinn for a longer space, he could not tell. To Olav the Bishop remained an advocate from the eternal heights—and he himself was as a child, who had only understood a little of that to which the other opened his eyes, before his own conduct forced him to fly from his good instructor.

  Of Arnvid he was fond, but their tempers were so unlike that he had felt Arnvid’s piety as merely a part of what he did not understand in his friend. Arnvid was reserved, Olav felt, though he was far from being a taciturn man—but Arnvid’s loquacity seemed a part of his readiness to help. Time and again Olav remembered that it was always himself who had received and Arnvid who had given—but such a man was Arnvid Finnsson that Olav could not feel humiliated by it; he might have accepted even more of the other, and still they would have been close friends. Arnvid knew him through and through, thought Olav, and yet was fond of him—he did not know Arnvid, but yet was fond of him.

  It had diverted him greatly to listen to Olav Half-priest’s talk of spiritual things. But all that the old man talked of, angels and devils, pixies and sprites and fairies and holy men and women, seemed as it were to belong to another side of life than that in which he himself contended with his difficulties. The Lady Sancta Maria herself became almost as a king’s daughter in a fairy tale, the fairest rose of paradise—but it seemed very far from his part of the world, this paradise, when old Olav talked of it.

  Sira Benedikt was the first man he had met in whom he had recognized something of himself—a man who had fought the fight in which he himself was engaged. And Sira Benedikt had won, had become a God-fearing man, strong and steadfast in the faith. And Olav felt longing and hope pulsing in his veins. All he needed was to take heart. Pray for strength, as Brother Vegard had said, without the reservation: O God, grant not my prayer too quickly.

  He lay awake most of that night. It came over him that now he understood one thing: a conflict had been waged in the whole of creation since the dawn of the ages between God and His enemy, and all that had life, soul, or spirit took part in the fight in one host or the other, whether they knew it or not—angels and spirits, men here on earth and on the farther side of death. And it was most commonly by a man’s own cowardice that the Devil could entice him into his service—because the man was afraid God might demand too much of him—command him to utter a truth that was hard to force through his lips, or to abandon a cherished delight without which he believed himself not strong enough to live: gain or welfare, wantonness or the respect of others. Then came the old Father of lies and caught that man’s soul with his old master lie—that he demanded less of his servants and rewarded them better—so long as it lasted. But now Olav himself had to choose whether he would serve in one army or in the other.

  It was thick weather, mild and grey, when he came out next morning. The mist shed tiny drops of water over him, which fell gratefully on his face and refreshed his lips after the sleepless night.

  He went out on the high ground west of the manor, where the hill sloped in a rounded curve toward the open fiord, with stretches of bare rock and flowery crevices. It was already his habit to turn his steps thither every morning and to stand and watch the weather. He was beginning to be familiar with the voice of the fiord. Today the sea was calm. A light swell lapped the smooth sides of the Bull, breaking through the mist with little gleams of white, where the spray was thrown high into the air when the slightest breeze blew on the shore. There was a trickling of water among the rocks down on the beach, a lapping of the wreath of seaweed just beneath him, where the smooth rock slid down into the sea; a breath of good salt water came up to him.

  Olav stood motionless, gazing out and list
ening to the faint sound of the fiord. Now and again the fog thickened so that he could scarcely see it.

  He had seen long ago that he had committed a sinister folly in not proclaiming the slaying straightway at the first house he came to. Had he done that, ’twas not even certain that he would have been condemned to make amends—Teit’s life might have been found forfeit, if Ingunn’s kinsmen had been willing to witness that he, Olav, had an older right to the woman. He had now thought so long this way and that, that he scarce remembered what had been in his mind, when he chose to remain silent and wipe out all traces of the deed—but he must have fooled himself into the belief that so the shame might be kept hid. No man must learn that he had rid himself of Teit Hallsson, since thus he thought no man would learn that Ingunn had been disgraced by Teit. Now it seemed to him incomprehensible that he could have thought anything so totally fatuous.

  But now he was caught in his own snares. Never would the Bishop give him absolution for a manslaughter on other terms than that he should publicly acknowledge the deed, that justice might be done. But now it had become a secret murder and dastard’s work, and never could it be anything else.

  Behind him he had his manor, his lands along Kverndal, the forest on the ridges north and south of Hestviken—his property extended far inland into the mist. The sheds, the quay, his boats he could glimpse down in the creek; the smell came up to him of nets and tar and fish offal and salt water and wood soaked by the sea. And far away in the north Ingunn waited; God knew how she fared now. To take her out of her misfortune, bring her hither to a place of refuge, that was the first duty that lay upon him.