Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  10

  Concerning horse-copers

  Meanwhile, Steinar of Hlíðar had gone west and boarded ship and was now on the high seas bound for foreign lands. He had not set off until late in the hay-season, when most of the hay had already been secured, and he expected to be back late in October on the last autumn sailing. At the farm were only a woman and two children to clear up the autumn work. And the nights were growing dark.

  Petroleum was so expensive in those days, compared with farmers’ means, that one could hardly say there was much illumination in farmhouses during winter; even fish-oil, which had been the staple source of light in Iceland from the very beginning, was itself now becoming a luxury. The few pints of petroleum which served as the year’s supply of light at Hlíðar were reserved for the dark days of midwinter, and people tried to make the fullest use of what daylight there was. One banked up the fire and went to bed when there was no longer light enough to work by, and rose at the first streak of dawn, until at last the nights were equally long at both ends; only then did one begin to light the lamp. How long the children found the first few nights after their father had gone abroad!

  After a day of toil there was nothing to do except go to bed. But it sometimes happened that those twin travelling companions, Sleep and Dream, were late in calling at the house. In that case the best way to pass the time was to listen for the sound of distant hooves. The children could recognize the hoofbeats of horses from more than one district. It made a change during the quiet of the night to hear riders clattering through the yard and the dog baying up on the roof. And every morning they counted the days until their father was expected home.

  On the night which is now to be described, just at the time of the first autumn round-up, everyone in the house had been asleep for a long time. There had been no sound of hooves from any direction all evening. It was raining. At midnight the mother and daughter woke suddenly from deep slumber at a deafening tumult outside, as if the world were falling in. Then someone came to the window and said “God be with you!,” as was the custom in those days. The women threw on some clothes in haste and opened the door. Outside, the rain was lashing down. A burly man, dripping with rain and wearing a voluminous coat and enormous topboots, seized them in an embrace and kissed them. He smelled powerfully of horses, with a mixture of snuff and cognac as well. There was rainwater in his beard, and clammy moisture in the tufts of hair on his nose.

  “It’s only your old friend Björn of Leirur,” the visitor said when he had finished kissing them in the darkness. “We were just coming from east of the rivers, a few lads and myself with one or two horses. The wretched beasts are getting a bit tired. The boys haven’t slept for two days. We haven’t a dry stitch up to the armpits. What a God’s mercy it is to be able to kiss such warm and dry people! But tell me, by the way, is my good friend Steinar still at the king’s coat-tails?”

  The housewife said that Steinar was in Copenhagen and not expected home before the end of October: “But if this house is of any use to you, then you are welcome here. As you know, my dear Björn, there’s not much in the way of luxury here to offer to the gentry; but still, what’s good enough for my Steinar should be good enough for the king, that’s what I always say.”

  “As if drenched people can be gentry, my good woman!” said the visitor. “The main thing is to get a drop of warm soup, even though it’s only cow-soup. The other matter I have already discussed with my friend Steinar a long time ago—indeed, he offered me it unasked, as my two lads here remember from when they were helping him load up his horse with mahogany: ‘You will be obliging me, my dear chap,’ he said, bless him, ‘if you would rest up in my pastures next time you are driving horses. The grass does not care who eats it.’ As far as the boys are concerned, they can bed down in the lamb-shed, if they could just have a wisp of hay to lie on.”

  “Well, my dear Björn,” said the woman, “it so happens that we have nothing better for soup than some barley. We haven’t done any slaughtering at Hlíðar yet. Everything is waiting for Steinar. But there is some dried fish, although that’s not much of a feast for the nobility. And you are all welcome to share the three bunks in the living-room here, except that you yourself will have the bed in the spare-room, of course.”

  “Is that not just like you, my dear?” said old Björn. “And as for the soup, I could well believe that we have a shank or two of mutton tucked away in our saddle-bags, if you have the barley.”

  The woman told her daughter to fetch some brushwood and sheep-dung to revive the fire.

  It was quite an occasion. Half a score of dripping visitors filled the living-room and the family had their hands full pulling off their outer garments. A small lamp was lit, but one could still hardly see one’s nose for all the steam from the sodden clothing. Those who had no change of clothes borrowed some. There was some schnapps to keep the strength up while waiting for the soup; and that started the singing. The soup did not arrive until the night was nearly over, and some of them were already asleep by then. They shared the bunks out amongst themselves, but some had to go out and see to it that the ponies did not stray.

  At dawn the housewife thought it safer to send her daughter to the spare-room to help the champion off with his things, rather than let such an inexperienced young girl stay longer in the living-room waiting upon a crowd of high-spirited horse-copers who furthermore had been at the bottle.

  “Thanks for the offer, dear woman,” said Björn of Leirur, and kissed her goodnight. “It doesn’t come amiss to have such a lissom young creature to wait upon an old fellow who is numb and stiff from the glacier-rivers.”

  It was an old Scandinavian custom in all decent farms for a woman to be provided to help a visitor off with his clothes when he retired.

  “Well, well, my little lamb,” said Björn of Leirur.

  He was so big and bulky that he almost filled the little room. He patted the girl on the cheek and the head, the way one pats a dog; then he casually ran his hands over her breasts, stomach, and buttocks, squeezing them briskly the way one does with sheep to see if they are in good flesh. The girl gasped.

  “You’ve come on a bit since I saw you out there in the yard with your father that time, poor little thing,” he said. “I’ll soon have to be making an offer for you. My old woman is nothing but rheumatics and grumbles nowadays, I’ll be needing a house-keeper before long.”

  It was as if the girl withdrew even farther into her shell at these words. She hung her head a little and was rather at a loss for an answer.

  “We never say Yes, Björn,” she said, and looked him full in the face for a moment despite her fears. “My brother Víkingur sometimes says No, of course, but Daddy doesn’t like that because he says it means the same as Yes.”

  The man-mountain had now seated himself across the side of the bed; he leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs out to the floor. The girl knelt down in front of him and tried to pull off his vast topboots, which are popularly known as waders and are fastened to the waist with suspenders. Under them he was wearing stockinged trousers. He was neither so wet nor so cold as he made out; and perhaps not so old, either.

  He said, “You’ve now at least reached the age, little one, when sometime or other a young lad must have sneaked up and said something to you in secret which it was no use answering with nothing but hiccups.”

  “I won’t deny it,” said the girl. “It was the year before last. I was riding Krapi on the lamb-drive. And at sunrise, when we were up in the mountains, a boy said to me, just like that, ‘Would you give me a ride on the white horse?’ It’s the first time a stranger has ever asked me for anything like that. What could I say? I haven’t recovered from it yet.”

  “Since you could neither say Yes nor No, I can’t see that it would have cost you much to dismount without saying anything, my lamb,” said Björn. “He would just have got on the horse’s back, the young rascal, if he had any presence of mind.”

  “His father
and my father arrived just at that point,” said the girl. “Otherwise I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “One hopes he had the nerve to give you a casual hint of some sort, next time you met,” said Björn.

  “I didn’t go to the lamb-drive the next spring,” said the girl. “Nor this spring. When Daddy gave Krapi away, I knew I would never be going on a lamb-drive again.”

  “And you haven’t met since?” said Björn.

  “We’ve maybe just had a peep at one another in church,” said the girl. “He doesn’t seem to have forgotten that business over Krapi. Perhaps he never will.”

  “There’s not much stuff in these young lads yet, little one, pay no attention to them. You young girls are better off helping us old fellows off with our things, you know where you have us then.”

  “I don’t think you’re so very old, Björn,” said the girl. “And I don’t think Daddy is, either. When I was little I used to snuggle up under his beard to go to sleep. But since then it’s as if everything has somehow become so distant.”

  “Yes, childhood is soon faded into the distance, my little chicken,” said Björn, “and things get worse and worse for you until you’re bedridden with old age, and then things start getting a little better again, thank God. And come on now, dry my toes for me, my little mouse. What the devil’s the point of fording three glacier-rivers a day, anyway!”

  The girl said, “Daddy used to sing me a little song once; it went like this:

  Come and lay your cheek on mine,

  Though mine is cold and hairy,

  But yours is peach and petal-fine,

  My pretty little fairy.”

  “I’ll just have to take your daddy’s place for you, little lamb, while my old friend Steinar is with the king,” said Björn. “And now just pull these English trousers off me, and then there’s not much left except my birthday pants. You’re a real treasure—not the same at all as the old devil of a woman who was wrestling with me out east in Meðalland the other night. A thousand thanks.”

  “There are no thanks necessary for a little thing like that,” said the girl, getting to her feet and rubbing the numbness from her bare knees where she had been kneeling on the floor; she was scarlet in the face now. As she turned to go, she said he was not to hesitate to call out for anything he wanted; and she added, out of the goodness of her heart and the trusting innocence which is instinctive to young girls: “It is my life and joy to look after visitors who wake people up in the night.”

  “Now that you’ve bedded down all us horse-dealers in your own bunks, what are you going to do yourselves, you poor creatures?”

  “Mother is staying up to dry all their clothes in the kitchen,” said the girl. “Víkingur and I will lie down on the saddle-turves in the outhouse. It makes a nice change. It will only be for a short while, it’s nearly dawn.”

  “The very idea, child!” said Björn of Leirur. “Do you think for a moment that I’m going to allow a little girl with such long fair hair and rosy cheeks and a body like fresh-churned butter to go and lie on a scrap of turf out in a shed on my account? No, we may be quick to buy and sell horses, but we’re not so quick at sending our girls away. Here, let me put this pillow at the foot of the bed there, and you can creep into bed with me like the Beauty who freed the Beast from a spell once upon a time.”

  11

  Money on the window-sill

  When daylight came, it is not too much to say that the family at Hlíðar were startled, for Steinar’s hayfield and meadows were swarming with a greater horde of ponies than had ever been seen in those parts. It was a magnificent herd of beasts. Some accounts say that there were 300 ponies grazing at Hlíðar that morning; others say 400. There had been a lot of rain for the last few days, and the ground was soft. The chafing of the ponies churned it up and turned it into mud wherever they thronged together. Already during that first night the home-field had been trampled beyond repair. All these ponies had travelled miles from their home districts, and so were restless and unruly; the colts were alternately frisky and frightened, and kicked out at every wall in sight. Already during that first night large gaps had appeared in the dry-stone dykes that had been built by the master-craftsmen of Hlíðar, generation after generation.

  When the girl woke up that morning she found herself alone in the room. It was broad daylight. She was still wearing the ragged old petticoat she had hurriedly thrown on the night before. Her visitor was away in his long topboots. When she had a look through the window she saw that their home-field and meadows were all dense with ponies; and while she was standing staring at this in amazement, she happened to catch sight of a red coin on the window-sill. She took this strange object through to the kitchen and showed it to her mother, and told her how she had found it on the window-sill of the spare-room on her way out.

  “Well I never!” said the woman, taking the coin and studying it. “I suppose it was inevitable that this day would dawn, like all other days; but I always thought that the Saviour would spare me as long as possible from having to touch the metal your father Steinar least desires. This is gold, you see, the stuff that creates all the evil in the world, my child. No one in Hlíðar has ever touched this kind of metal before. How does it come about that you bring this evil object from the room our visitor used?”

  “I slept the night there,” said the girl. “And when I woke up there was nothing there except that.”

  The woman stared at her daughter dumbfounded. When she finally found her tongue she spoke in that suppressed tone of resignation which was current in Iceland for as long as people believed that everything bided its time: “May the Lord have mercy on all wretched creatures, and most particularly on those who have no wits. Did I not tell you to sleep on the saddle-turves out in the shed, child?”

  “Indeed you did,” said the girl. “I simply don’t understand myself. I had helped him off with his things and had got to my feet. I had said goodnight and was on my way out. I swear it, I was on the point of leaving the room. Then he said, ‘Where are you going, little one?’ And when I told him that I was going out to the shed to sleep, why, then he started insisting that it was out of the question for me to have to lie on a scrap of turf out in the shed on his account. Anyway, not to make a long story of it, before I knew what I was about I was in the bed beside him and fast asleep.”

  “You poor little fool,” said her mother. “And what then?”

  “Nothing,” said the girl. “The next thing I knew, it was morning, and that thing was lying on the window-sill.”

  “Am I really to believe, my child, that you have slept the night with Björn of Leirur himself, no less!” said the woman.

  “Mother dear,” said the girl, “I don’t believe for a minute that old Björn is as bad as he is said to be. He certainly did me no mischief, stupid though I am.”

  “I suppose you know you’re a fully grown girl now and can no longer go to bed beside a man,” said her mother.

  “What, me?” said the girl, on the verge of tears now at her mother’s words. “How can you say such a thing to me, Mummy, you who know better than anyone else, except perhaps the Saviour, that I’m still just a little girl and think about nothing all day long except my daddy and how it can be that he went away. And anyway I didn’t undress at all.”

  “How much are you wearing underneath?” said the woman. “There, isn’t that just what I thought! If you’ve never had any idea before this how things are with you, poor wretch, then it’s time you started thinking about yourself, after last night.”

  “What has happened to me, then, Mummy? Won’t you tell me?”

  “As if you had no knowledge of him, child!”

  “I only just felt there was a person there,” said the girl. “He’s so big and brawny as everyone knows. And I’m big and brawny now, too. And the bed scarcely has room for one, even.”

  “He must have pressed up against you just a little bit, child,” said the woman. “They used to in my day, at leas
t.”

  “I was dead tired and fell asleep at once,” said the girl. “And Björn had started snoring. If there was any pressing after I was asleep, how was I to know about it? I don’t think there was very much. At least I never woke up; I wouldn’t even call it a nightmare. And I didn’t wake up until this minute, in broad daylight.”

  “Why have you got that gold coin in your hand, then?” said the woman. “Leave it where you found it. You can’t have forgotten that Björn of Leirur and the sheriff and the king himself all offered gold in exchange for our Krapi; and what did your father reply?”