The Snake Pit

by Sigrid Undset

  At last, on the sixth day, the boy seemed to be much better. By supper-time he was sleeping soundly, and he did not feel so cold to the touch. Torhild put warm stones underneath his cradle clothes; then she went out, taking Eirik with her. She had watched nearly as much as the mother and had had all the housework in the daytime; now she could do no more.

  Ingunn was so tired that she neither heard nor saw—at last Olav led her away by force, took off her outer garments, and made her lie down in the bed. He promised that he himself would sit up with the maid and would wake her if the boy was restless.

  Olav fetched three tallow candles, set one on the candlestick, and lighted it. But, though he was usually such a bad sleeper, he felt heavy and drowsy tonight. If he stared at the flame of the candle, his eyes began to smart and run, and if he looked at the maid, who had taken her distaff and was spinning, he grew sleepy from seeing and hearing the spinning-wheel. From time to time he made up the fire, snuffed the candle, gave a look to the sleeping child and to his wife, drank cold water, or went outside for a moment, to look at the weather and refresh himself with a breath of the calm, cold spring night—bringing in a piece of wood, which he whittled as he sat. Thus he kept himself awake till he had set the third candle on the stick.

  He started up on hearing the cradle rockers bumping queerly against the clay floor; such a strange sound was coming from the child. It was almost dark in the room; the candle-end had fallen off the spike, almost burned out—the wick flickered and smoked in the molten tallow on the iron plate. On the hearth there was still a faint crackling amid the smoke of the wood ashes. Olav was beside the cradle in two noiseless steps; he lifted up the child, wrapping him in the clothes he lay in.

  The little body struggled, as though Audun would free himself from his swaddling-clothes—in the dim light Olav thought the boy gave him a strangely accusing look. Then he stretched himself, collapsed limply, and died there in his father’s arms.

  Olav was benumbed, body and soul, as he laid the corpse down again and covered it over. It was vain to think when Ingunn would wake.

  The maid had fallen asleep with her head in her arms over the table. Olav waked her, hastily hushing her as she was about to utter a cry. He bade her go out and tell the house-folk, begging them not to come near the house—Ingunn must be allowed to enjoy her sleep while she could.

  He opened the smoke-vent—it was daylight outside. But Ingunn slept and slept, and Olav stayed sitting with her and their dead son. But once when he got up to look at her, he chanced to jerk her belt onto the floor. It made a clanging noise, and the woman started up and looked into her husband’s face.

  She sprang up and pushed him aside when he tried to hold her back, threw herself upon the cradle so violently that it looked as if the dead child was upset into her arms.

  As she sat on her haunches, rocking the corpse in a close embrace and weeping with a strange, spluttering sound, she checked herself all of a sudden and looked up at her husband:

  “Were you two asleep when he died—were you both asleep when Audun drew his last breath?”

  “No, no, he died in my arms—”

  “You—and you did not wake me—Lord Christ, how had you the heart not to wake me—in my arms he should have died, ’twas me he knew, not you—you never cared for your child. Is it thus you keep your word!”

  “Ingunn—”

  But she leaped up, holding the child’s corpse high above her head with both hands and screaming. Then she tore open the dress over her bosom, pressed the little dead son to her bare body, and threw herself on the bed, lying over him.

  When Olav came up after a while and tried to talk to her, she put her hand against his face and thrust him away.

  “Nevermore will I be parted from my Audun—”

  Olav knew not what to do. He sat over on the bench with his head between his hands, waiting if perchance she should recover her senses—when Eirik burst open the door and ran to his mother, in a flood of tears. He had been told it when he awoke.

  Ingunn sat upright—the child’s corpse was left lying on the pillow. She drew her son to her in a close embrace, let him go and took his little tear-stained face in both hands, laid her own against it and wept, but much more quietly.

  The day Audun was borne to the grave was gloriously fine.

  During the afternoon Olav stole away from the funeral guests, down to the fence around the farthest cornfield. The sea gleamed and glistened so that the air seemed all a-quiver with it; the quiet surf at the foot of the Bull shone fresh and white. The smell that came up from the quay was so good and full-laden today, and it was met by the scent of warm rocks and mould and young growth. The little waves breaking on the beach trickled quietly back among the pebbles, rills were gushing everywhere, and from Kverndal came the murmur of the little stream. The alder wood up there was brown with bloom, and the hazel thickets dripped with yellow catkins. Summer was not far off.

  He heard it was Ingunn who came up behind him. Side by side they stood leaning over the fence, gazing at the reddish rocks on which the sun was blazing and at the gleam of blue water.

  All at once Olav felt strangely ill at ease, oppressed with longing. To be on board ship, at sea, with a clear horizon on every side. Or at home upcountry, where the scent of mould and grass and trees welled out of broad hills and ridges as far as one could see. Here all was cramped and small, this narrow fiord with its strips of land bordering the lonely creek.

  He said gently: “Do not grieve so much over Audun, Ingunn. It was best that God took home His poor innocent lamb, whose only heritage was to bear the burden of all our misdeeds.”

  Ingunn made no answer. She turned from him and went back toward the houses, quietly, with bowed head. Up by the houses Eirik came rushing to meet her—Olav saw that his mother hushed him as she took his hand and led him with her.

  9 February 5.

  11

  IN the summer the year after they had lost Audun, Olav and Ingunn were at a working meeting on a farm in the neighbourhood; they had Eirik with them. The boy was now seven winters old, and he was apt to be unmanageable when amusing himself.

  When work was over in the evening the people sat in a meadow near the house they had been roofing. Some of the younger ones then began to dance. Eirik and some other little boys ran about and made a noise; the ale had gone to their heads—they ran straight at the chain of dancers and tried to break it, shouting and laughing as they did so. They mixed among the older folk, jostling one after another, and interrupted the men’s talk. Olav had spoken to Eirik time after time, rather sharply at last—but it only kept the boy quiet for a little while.

  Ingunn had not noticed it—she was sitting a little way off by the wall in company with other women. All at once Olav appeared before her, dragging Eirik with him; he lifted him by the back of his shirt, so that the boy hung from Olav’s hand as one takes a puppy by the nape of the neck. Olav was red in the face, somewhat drunken—his ale was apt to tell on him more than usual when these fits of sleeplessness had been very frequent.

  “You must look after your boy and keep him in order, Ingunn,” he said angrily, giving Eirik a shake. “He will not obey me, unless I thrash him—take him, he belongs to you—” and he flung the boy so that Eirik pitched into his mother’s arms. With that he went away.

  In the course of the evening, when folk sat drinking in the shed after supper, some of them began to tell stories. And Sira Hallbjörn told the tale of Jökul:

  “A rich merchant fared forth and was away from home three winters. So every man may judge whether he was more surprised or joyful when he came home and found his wife abed and with her a little boy of one month old. But the traveller’s wife was a crafty and quick-witted woman; she said:

  “ ‘A great miracle has befallen me. Sorely have I longed for you, my husband, while you wandered so far abroad. But one day last winter I stood here at the door of the house and the icicles hung from the eaves; I broke one off and sucked, yearning for yo
u the while with keen and ardent desire—and then I conceived this child; judge for yourself whether you and none other are not his father, Jökul1 I have had him called!’

  “The traveller had to rest content with that; he spoke her fair, this loving wife of his, and seemed to have great joy of the son, Jökul. He would have the boy ever near him when he was at home. And when Jökul was twelve years old, his father took him out on one of his voyages. But one day, when they were in the midst of the sea and Jökul stood at the ship’s side, the merchant came behind him, while no man saw; he dropped the boy overboard.

  “On returning to his wife he told his tale with sorrowful mien and mourning voice:

  “ ‘A great misfortune has befallen us and a heavy loss have we suffered, my sweet one—Jökul is no more. Know that I lay becalmed in the midst of the sea, the day was hot and the sun poured straight down. Our Jökul stood upon the deck and he was bareheaded. We begged him hard that he would cover his head, but he would not—so he thawed in the heat of the sun, and there was nothing left of Jökul, our son, but a wet spot on the deck-planks!’

  “With that the wife had to rest content.”

  Folk laughed greatly at this tale. None took note that Olav Audunsson kept his eyes on the floor, while blushes overspread his face. If his life had depended on it, he did not believe he would have dared to turn his eyes to the dais, where his wife sat among the other ladies. Then there was a disturbance up there—Olav leaped over the table and forced his way through the crowding woman. He lifted up his wife, who had slipped from the bench in a swoon, and carried her out into the fresh air.

  The best thing Eirik knew was to be allowed to go out with his father—in a boat when Olav rowed out alone to fish with a hand-line, as he did now and then, mainly for pastime, or across the fields. Afterwards he always came to his mother and told her about it—with beaming eyes, so eagerly that he stumbled over the words—all that had happened to them and all that he had learned of his father: now he could both row and fish, make knots and splice ropes after the fashion of seafaring men; soon he would be able to go out and fish in earnest with his father and the men. He had become such a good hand at shooting and casting—his father said he had never seen his match.

  Ingunn listened to the boy’s chatter, perplexed and distressed. Her poor, simple-minded little boy loved Olav more than anyone else on earth. It was as though the man’s unfriendliness did not bite upon Eirik: he was given curt answers to all his questions, and at last he was told to hold his tongue. Olav coldly chid him when the boy was wild and wanton, and harshly bade Eirik speak the truth, when his mother guessed that only the child’s memory was at fault. But she dared not say that to her husband, dared not take Eirik’s part and remind Olav that he was so young—or tell the man Eirik called father how dearly the child loved him. She had to bow the neck and keep silence; only when she was alone with her son did she dare to show her love for him.

  Ingunn did not know that what Eirik said was true, and that it was for this that Olav’s bad humour neither frightened the boy for long at a time nor lessened his love for his father. They agreed much better when they were alone together. Eirik was then more obedient and not so restless, and even if he was too fond of asking odd questions, there was often some sense in them. He swallowed every word from his father’s lips with eyes and ears, and this made him forget to come out with his fables and rigmaroles. Without being himself aware of it, Olav was warmed by the affection the child showed him; he forgot his dislike of other days and let himself be warmed, just as he had felt warmed whenever anyone showed him the friendship he found it so hard to seek for himself. So he met Eirik halfway with calm goodwill; he instructed the boy in the use of weapons and implements, which were still more like playthings, smiled a little at Eirik’s eager questions, and chatted with him as a good father talks to his little son.

  They fished for wrasse under the cliff north of the Bull, and Olav showed the boy the cleft in the rock where an old she-otter had her lair. Every year Olav took the cubs—one year two litters—and the dog-otter. As soon as the dog was gone she got a new mate, said Olav, and he mimicked for the boy the otter’s cry. Yes. Eirik should come with him after the otter one night, when he was a little older—ah, when it would be, his father could not say.

  One day when they were up in his father’s game-covert to see to some traps, Olav chanced to speak of his own childhood at Frettastein, while he and Eirik’s mother were young. “Your grandfather,” said Olav, telling some story of Steinfinn at which he himself smiled and Eirik roared with laughter. “One day I had coaxed Hallvard, your uncle, with me—he was very small at that time, you must know, but all the same I had taken the boy with me up to the tarn, where we had a dugout we used to row in—” Till Eirik mentioned Tora of Berg; he remembered her. Olav broke off his story, answered absently when the boy went on asking questions—at last he bade him hold his tongue. It was as though the sky had suddenly clouded over.

  But whenever Olav was with his own house-carls, either on the quay or up at the manor, and Eirik ran about among them, he was at once more impatient with the boy. It was the way with Eirik that the more people he saw about him, the more noisy and foolish and disobedient he became. The men were amused at the boy, but they noticed that the master disliked their laughing at the things he said, and they thought Olav was very short-tempered and strict with his only son.

  But it was when the mother was there that Olav felt most provoked to an intolerable ill will toward the boy. Many a time he itched to give Eirik a thrashing, to break him roughly of all his bad habits.

  One thing was that Ingunn provoked him to a dull exasperation when she fussed with the child—he was to be quiet and behave in a seemly way, she said severely. Olav knew only too well that the moment his back was turned on the two, she would be on her knees trying to please Eirik. He saw how deeply she distrusted his feeling for the boy; she spied on him secretly when he was occupied with Eirik. He knew in himself that he had never done the child any harm—he might surely be trusted to punish the boy when he needed it. It was Ingunn who egged him on to anger, but it was his lifelong habit, when she was concerned, to hold himself in—and of late years it had come to this, that she was a poor, sick creature, and he had to be doubly careful not to make things worse for her. So when Ingunn tried Olav’s patience too far, it was usually Eirik who suffered.

  The boy had come between man and wife, and he was the first who had sundered their hearts in earnest. In their youth Olav had had to leave his playmate and fly the country—and in a way he had felt that Ingunn had gone astray simply because he had been forced to abandon her. Far too great a burden of evil fortune had been thrown upon her when she had to have recourse to her angry kinsfolk, who refused to count her as anything but a disobedient and dishonoured woman. Young she was, weak-shouldered and pampered—but her nature was not such that she could have been unfaithful to a husband with whom she shared bed and board, he knew that. He had had a feeling that Teit was but an unhappy accident—and in making an end of this confiding fool he had acted more from a belief that it would be so hopelessly difficult to remedy the disaster so long as he was alive and could blurt out the truth than because he had felt himself wronged by Teit. But even when the slaying had been accomplished, this had not done much to allay his pain of mind. His thirst to avenge the destruction of his happiness—this the poor corpse in the sæter had not been able greatly to assuage.

  Now Olav saw that Ingunn loved another, and he guessed how often she had wished him out of the way, so that she might freely shed her affection upon Eirik—as one smuggles food to an outlawed friend behind the back of the master of the house.

  And together with this bitterness and unrest something like a ghost of his youthful desire awoke in Olav’s heart and senses; he longed to possess Ingunn as he had possessed her in former days, when they were young and healthy and could find happiness in each other’s arms in spite of all their cares. Olav had never quite forgotten that time;
the memory of her sweet beauty had warmed his pity to a painful tenderness—this poor faded wreck to whom he was bound was the wreck of the lovely, useless Ingunn he had once loved, and his will to protect her became stubborn and intense, as had once been his will to defend his right to his wife.

  Now there blazed up in him a desire to feel that she too remembered the madness of their youth. Year in, year out a latent repugnance had smouldered within him when she clung to him with her morbid and insensate demand for caresses which, he knew, ought to be withheld from his sick wife. Now, when she avoided him, hiding herself away with what was her own, what she thought he could have no share in, it was Olav who felt he would fain have crushed her to pieces in his arms in the effort to make her answer such questions as these: Have you forgotten that I was once your dearest friend in all the world?—Why are you afraid of me?—Have I ever willingly brought sorrow upon you in all these years? For it cannot be my fault that we have had so little happiness in our married life?

  And then his fear awoke, when he touched upon the sick spot in his mind; the dull ache became a pain that shot through his whole being: whether it was so that he might all the time—have averted her misfortunes. If he had had the courage to hand himself over—to men’s justice and God’s compassion.

  Olav noticed that his unwonted impetuosity now frightened Ingunn and made her shrink; so he withdrew into himself, while his secret wound throbbed and stung. “Why is she afraid of me? Does she know—?”

  There were times when he almost believed it—believed that all knew it. For he had not a friend here in his native country. It could not be helped; but that was not all: Olav guessed that no one liked him. Coldness and distrust met him everywhere, and often he thought he could detect a hidden malicious satisfaction when things went ill with him. Yet in this part of the country he had always acted rightly and had never done any man an injustice. He could not even bring himself to be angry at this—he received his sentence without wincing. It must be that folk saw the secret mark upon his brow.