World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  “Be off with you, you pest!” she said.

  The cat was taken aback and looked at the girl, peering, and rubbed itself against a leg of the bed. The girl stamped on the floor. Startled, the cat leapt right up onto the bed beside her. By now Magnína was angry. She was rather short-tempered that day, bless her, and did not want to have any living creature near her; she picked up the cat by the scruff of the neck and put it down the stairway. Then she sat down again, and the boy saw the back of her head once more and those fat shoulders as she sat there.

  “It is hard to be alone.”

  He scarcely realized what he was saying before it was over and done with and the words were out. It was like jumping off the edge of a high cliff in a dream; one does not know where one is going to land. Where was he going to land now? There was a long silence and he felt that he was still hovering in the air. Finally she looked round and said, rather brusquely, “What’s that?” That was all.

  “I was saying that it’s hard to be alone,” he said, and heaved a deep sigh.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose that those who have nothing to do except lie in bed all day and let others slave for them have much to say on that subject,” said Magnína.

  “Oh, no one does that for fun, Magnína dear,” he replied. “Some people don’t need to envy others anything.”

  “ ‘Some people’ ”—she turned right round and looked straight at him; this was the language she understood.

  “Some people think that some people aren’t as ill as they pretend to be,” she said. “But obviously that doesn’t concern us so long as we get paid for your keep.”

  “It’s awful,” he said, nearly in tears, “to be the slave of mankind because of poverty, and even more awful to be ill in soul and body and never to know a happy day. Yes, Magnína. And yet it’s worst of all to be misunderstood by the nation.”

  “Misunderstood by the nation?” she said. “You? A child?”

  “I’m not so much of a child that I haven’t got a soul; Jesus the Savior knows that and it will be proved on the Day of Judgment,” he said.

  “How old are you now?” she asked.

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “That’s right, you’re over seventeen now,” she said, and had started actually talking to him. She went on with a sigh, “Yes, it’s awful to be young. But what’s that compared to soon becoming old!”

  “Nonsense, you’re not very old, Magnína,” he said consolingly. “There are lots of people as old as you. And older.”

  “No one knows how old I am except I myself,” she said. “I’m so terribly old now. And if everything were carefully examined, I’m undoubtedly just as much in bad health as you are, yes, even worse than you are, what’s more, although I never let on about it. No, the doctor doesn’t exist who understands me, or has ever understood me, or ever will understand me. No.”

  “Yes, but what does it matter if a person is in bad health when he is among his own! To have no one—that is really to be in bad health. Magnína, I have no one.”

  “Do I have someone then, perhaps?” she asked. “Whom do you think I have? No, I’ve never had anyone. I don’t call it having someone just because one perhaps has the right to board and lodging. You get board and lodging, too.”

  When it came to the point, she did not understand him; he could hear it from the way she suddenly sniffed.

  “You don’t understand me,” he said.

  “I simply don’t understand what people are thinking about when they start grumbling,” she said. “I don’t grumble.”

  She went downstairs, and he really did not know whether she was good or bad; the stairs creaked, but the smell of her remained behind in the loft. She came back to the loft again with the cat in her arms and a lump of brown sugar, and she gave him a generous piece and said as she handed it to him, “We mustn’t waste the sugar like this.”

  When all was said and done she had understood him—a little; and in her own way.

  14

  Next morning she was alone in the loft once again; but she was not at all dejected now, just in her usual mood. She was examining stockings. No one had more patience over stockings than Magnína, whether she was knitting them or darning them; but she had no time at all for garters, and her stockings were always slipping down her legs. Nothing was said. Every now and again she sniffed, and he measured the interval between each sniff by counting from one up to, at the highest tally, five hundred and seventy-three. Finally she laid the stockings aside and began to stare into the blue. Once or twice he had the impression that she was on the point of looking in his direction.

  “Were you talking about something yesterday, Ólafur?” she asked at last.

  “No,” he answered. “It was nothing, really.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You were certainly talking about something.”

  “No,” he said. “I was only talking about how ill I was. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “If I remember correctly, you were talking about how alone you were in the world, and that you had no one to care for you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “And why have you stopped asking me to read you The Felsenburg Stories as you used to?”

  “You didn’t want to,” he said, but his heart almost missed a beat when he heard the book mentioned again. There had been a time when he believed that in that book was enshrined the indefinable solace that everyone begins to yearn for at an early age. He had long since banished from his mind all hope about this book. But how quick the heart is to become attentive when it hears an old and forgotten hope whispered anew: was he, at last, to be allowed it?

  “You said I wasn’t allowed it,” he said.

  “I never said you weren’t allowed it,” she said. “You should tell the truth. We always tell the truth in this house. I only said you were too young, then. You lacked the fear of God and the worldly experience to understand such a book.”

  “Am I to be allowed it now?” he asked, and could scarcely hide his delight.

  “That’s not what I said,” she replied. “At least not today. And not tomorrow. And not the next day. And perhaps never. I don’t imagine it would do you much good, considering how ill you are. But I’ll think about it a bit when it’s nearer spring and the days get longer.”

  This boy had counted the floorboards and the joints and the planks in the clinker-built ceiling more than a thousand times, and imagined to himself that the boards were alternately black and white. He knew every single knot in the ceiling and the floor, and every single nail, and how the rust from the nails had stained the wood. He knew intimately every detail of all the counterpanes and bedclothes in the loft; in his sufferings he had counted every square and every stripe on them. Few prospects are as horrible as the immortality of the soul; as a concept it seems to be the height of cruelty. He had lain like that, day after day, month after month, a Christian person with nothing to look forward to, not even death, because according to Christian belief this, the final consolation, does not exist. Times without number he had listened with excited curiosity to the arrival of even the most humble visitors, in the hope of hearing just the slightest hint of what the soul yearned for—the truth, that long-desired consolation, the most important news of all. And now, suddenly, there was something else. This book that he had always yearned for was now in prospect. He kept an anxious watch on the daylight next morning, in the hope that the little Nordic sunbeam of the world would reach the sloping ceiling a little sooner that day. It was almost ten o’clock and not a sign of a sunbeam on the ceiling, and the hoarfrost was still blue on the window. He had a very severe headache and had begun to fear once more that life was unending. Then suddenly Magnína came up the stairs, brought out a worn book from under her apron, and sat down on the edge of his bed.

  “I had better let you hear the beginning,” she said.

  He longed to be able to hug the book and kiss it and shed sweet tears over it, but when she saw hi
m stretch out his arms she said it was her own book which she had got from her late father, and that she alone decided who could touch her book. “It might get torn, no one knows how to handle it in the right way except me, it’s that sort of book, and what’s more, you should be grateful that I want to read aloud to you from my own book.”

  “Yes, Magnína,” he said, moved. “Thanks be to God.”

  And so the solemn opening words of this classic Christian novel began:

  “ ‘I, Everhard Julius, first saw the light of this world in the year 1706, during the great eclipse. . . .’ ”

  At these words the boy was suddenly seized by a strange mixture of mysticism and sanctity, because for some reason they reminded him of the opening words of Holy Writ. It was just that there was something mysterious and religious, if not downright revelatory, about seeing the light of the world for the first time precisely on the particular day when the light of the world was completely invisible to both God and man; the Lord must have had something special in mind when he let this man be born. If only she would now carry on and not close her book after this solemn opening, as she had done once before!

  She carried on.

  But though the book was first and foremost a Christian book, and a devotional book, and in style and content just like something out of the Bible, it was not long before the boy realized that it also had certain characteristics which one never finds in devotional books, or only very seldom, even though they are what one most longs for. It was precisely this characteristic which emerged at once, quite unmistakeably, in the letter from Captain Wolfgang to Eberhard Julius asking this God-fearing child of the eclipse to meet him in Hamburg; it was apparent during Eberhard’s search for Wolfgang; but it really came into its own when the story turned to the well-mannered adventures, the exemplary, teetotal and Lutheran travels of this right-thinking captain in the distant, coffee-rich continents of the southern hemisphere. In short, Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík found himself for the first time in the enchanting atmosphere of romantic fiction; nor was it long before he was introduced in generous measure to the abundantly attractive demeanor of young ladies, which is nowhere so well known nor so conscientiously recorded as in that particular literary genre. When Captain Wolfgang was peeping through the leaves of an arbor at the Cape of Good Hope and looking at the girl who was dancing there, and no less when he had sat down beside her and engaged her in spiritual, candid and truth-seeking conversation, the orphan boy with the romantic imagination who cowered in his bed there under a sloping ceiling by the farthest northern seas could not help being touched by a funny feeling. It was a momentous inward experience.

  “ ‘You say you find me pleasing,’ said the lady, ‘and yet you do not even kiss me once, even though you are alone with me here and need have nothing to fear.’ ”

  At these words Captain Wolfgang made so bold as to kiss her, to which she responded with ten or twelve kisses of her own. This dancing lady was in reality a princess from Java; a sixty-year-old, aristocratic governor had brought her out here, and kept her in the charge of an old crone. But the old crone was as righteous and fair-minded as the governor seemed to be lacking in these virtues, and she could not refrain from telling Captain Wolfgang what a great sin it was to deprive this poor innocent child of the company of men.

  Ólafur Kárason listened, fascinated, to Magnína’s affected and reverent Bible-reading tones, and though the observation about the sinful lack of male company this poor child had to endure evoked notions in him that were too obscure to be called fully sympathetic understanding, he was nevertheless overwhelmed by indignation and sorrow over the treatment which this dancing girl had to suffer at the hands of the sixty-year-old governor, as well as by a sincere desire that she might have around her only gentle poetic men who never did a fine girl any harm but applied themselves instead to composing well-wrought verses about her or even whole spiritual poems.

  Ólafur Kárason’s respect for everything noble in woman’s nature, and for the magic of literary art in general, was not impaired when the dancing girl without more ado handed Captain Wolfgang a bulging purse of gold the next day as a reward for the kisses. There can be few things more delightful than to be given a generous measure of gold coins by a beautiful young maiden in payment for a few innocent kisses in an arbor, and nothing which could entrance a young poet’s fancy more. When Captain Wolfgang had pocketed the money, the dancing girl rejoiced over his modesty and bestowed on him the most tender caresses, and swore by the holy Christian faith and by her own god Thoume that she was consumed by burning love for this high-minded sea captain. But at this point in the story the captain seemed strangely irresolute, for as he himself recounted: “ ‘I was more than a little taken aback when I realized that I was in love with a heathen woman.’ ”

  How was Captain Wolfgang to conduct himself in this dilemma? Fortunately these anxieties vanished quickly like dew in the morning sun, “ ‘when I discovered after further inquiry that she desperately wanted to become a Christian.’ ”

  Next day Magnína came back with the book, sat down beside the invalid without a word, and began to read; and this blissful and enchanting story continued, in which a clean and true love for the Lutheran faith was constantly matched by an edifying and unaffected disgust for the abominable depravity which characterizes the wicked men of this world.

  The story now turned to Wolfgang’s noble-minded and extremely solemn adventure with the daughter of the governor of Hispaniola. This girl was named Donna Salome, and was seventeen or eighteen years old. Their romance was not quite so engagingly attractive, certainly, as the earlier one in the arbor at the Cape of Good Hope, but it was if anything even more Christian and even more edifying; that is to say, it was attended by an even more truly religious gravity, and this gravity manifested itself chiefly in the fact that Wolfgang married Donna openly and definitely, and their marriage was in every respect unblemished and incorruptible, even though it was perhaps impossible to deny that Donna Salome had originally inclined towards the Catholic faith. But alas, Donna Salome died in childbirth, sweetly and spiritually, nine months after the wedding; and although it was a bitter loss, Wolfgang was left with one consolation in his life, namely that Donna Salome, a few weeks before her death, had “had conversations with the pastor about religion, and the principles of the Lutheran faith had taken root in her heart.”

  15

  It had seldom or never happened before, but now it happened frequently: he would open his eyes in the morning in joyful anticipation of the coming day. He waited impatiently for the people to leave the house to attend to their various tasks. At last they would all be gone. Magnína appeared in the loft, brought out her book from under her apron, sat down beside him and started to read. She said nothing by way of preamble, and when she had finished reading she went away without a word. Sometimes she would stop reading suddenly if she thought she heard sounds of movement downstairs, and she would glance down in alarm, but her ears had deceived her. She never once looked in his direction while she read. She read everything with the same devotional intonation, whether it was about the depravity of Lemelie or the virtues of Concordia; it all had the same pious, mystical effect on her. He often had the feeling, however, that she was reading first and foremost for herself; it never occurred to her to ask whether he found the book enjoyable, indeed she always seemed to be a little bad-tempered, and often he wondered what wrong he could have done her; it was as if some unfriendly force were compelling her to read for him against her will. Previously she had sometimes addressed him of her own accord, but since she started reading to him she had never spoken to him. Sometimes, during the reading, she would forget how time was passing; there would be movement downstairs, the women would be back from the barn and she had forgotten to see to the meal. She would stop in midsentence, thrust the book under her apron, and disappear. Who would have believed that this girl could react so quickly?

  There was a man named van Leuven, a most excellent man. His
wife was the splendid Concordia whom the whole nation knows because she was not only beautiful but also endowed with all the virtues which can adorn a woman, and her name will never be forgotten as long as there is life on earth. On a sea voyage with this exemplary couple was the promising young man Albert Julius. They were shipwrecked on a desert island called Felsenburg. The fourth person who survived the shipwreck was the scoundrel Lemelie. This villian seized the first opportunity of doing away with the estimable van Leuven with a view to gaining Concordia’s love. A few days after the murder, however, this Lemelie luckily had the misfortune to impale himself on a bayonet held by the promising young man Albert Julius, and that was the end of Lemelie. Before he died, however, he had the consideration to confess his sins to the widow Concordia and Albert Julius, and to cut a long story short there were few sins in that catalogue which were milder than rape, incest, and infanticide. But when the story reached the point where Lemelie had burned his two illegitimate children “in a crucible,” Magnína stopped reading. She laid the book down in her lap and stared straight ahead in some perplexity. Ólafur Kárason was also somewhat perplexed. He was convinced that she was filled with horror at the depravity that exists in the world, and he felt he had to say something to comfort her so that she would not take it too much to heart.

  “Magnína dear,” he said gently, “don’t you think this could have been a little exaggerated?”

  But once again he had miscalculated completely, as he had done before.

  “Do you think I’m reading you some damned lie?” she said, and looked at him angrily.

  “No, I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I only meant that some people think that some things might be a little exaggerated even though they’re written in books.”

  “No, you certainly don’t deserve to have someone read to you out of one’s own book; indeed I should have known all along that those wretches who go in for composing obscene verses in their childhood, and carry on doing it from then on, wouldn’t benefit very much from having someone read to them from a remarkable and true Lutheran book which describes the wickedness of men as they really are!”