“Yes, that’s very possible,” said the woman drily, and glanced at the boy not unsympathetically, without pausing in her weeding. “But,” she added, “I’ve always heard that those who sleep with dogs wake up with fleas.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Who was talking about dogs? A great man, I said. Or have you perhaps never heard of great men like those you find in famous books?”
“No,” she said.
“Really,” he said. “That’s odd.”
This seemed to be one of those sad occasions in life when two people fail to understand one another.
“It’s quite true, my lad,” said the woman after a brief silence, “I’ve never done much reading in my time. But on the other hand I have had nine children in twelve parishes. Perhaps people have forgotten to write about it in books and famous stories, but if you haven’t heard about it already I can tell you that my children were all thrown on the dung-heap as soon as they came into the world. I’ve never heard tell of the type of great men you’re talking about; they might well be found in books, but they’re not known in this part of the country. The only great men I’ve ever known all had one thing in common— they set more store by the jackals who showed them abject obedience than by these so-called friendless youngsters who want to get on in the world. And there were parish officers in my day, and even pastors, too—and I can scarcely believe they’ve all died out—who thought it a calamity that the Great Verdict had been abolished in Iceland.”
“What Great Verdict?”
“Oh, there was never more than one kind of Great Verdict— drowning people in the river Öxará.”*
“It’s a great mercy it’s been stopped,” said the boy.
“Stopped?” said Hlaupa-Halla. “Only up to a point! What do the people matter in this country?”
“Whom is one to blame for being poor and homeless?” said the boy. “Isn’t it God who governs the world?”
“Oh, I suppose it’s easy enough to blame God for every misdeed and disgrace in the world,” said Hlaupa-Halla. “But it certainly wasn’t God who governed the world I lived in, while I lived.”
“And yet I have heard a distinguished woman say that while the Privy Councillor was here, he provided for everyone,” said the poet.
“Yes, but there was only one thing the Privy Councillor forgot,” said Hlaupa-Halla. “He forgot to slaughter us before he went away. When his cow stopped giving milk, he drove her out into the snow instead of killing her, while he betook himself to the king in Denmark with his Privy Councillor’s title and his million.”
6
Like most people who actually live by a landlocked sound, bereft of hope of happiness, he had a particular aversion to any doctrines which left people without hope of happiness and told them that they lived by a landlocked sound. He did not have Hlaupa-Halla’s obstinate, uncompromising, unbreakable temperament, which can endure lifelong despair without giving up.
It was now late, and the woman had gone. He stood in the road, alone under the care of Providence, soaked to the skin and already beginning to regret that he had not eaten more in the pastor’s kitchen. And now he had reached the point where he no longer appreciated to the full the unbelievable miracle that had happened to him a few days previously, when he was elevated into that strange perpendicular condition which is man’s answer to the law of gravity; instead he stared into the blue and asked the Creator of Miracles: If a person has been chopped into pieces and salted down in a barrel, is it a better deed to raise him from the dead or to let him remain in the brine?
Then Providence led him on his way, as it leads all people on their way. He began to wander round the estate in the night rain when everyone else had gone to bed. And it was not long before he was standing in the roadway between the two houses. He looked at them in turn, irresolute, his heart thumping almost in terror, and asked, “To be or not to be?”
For the third and last time he had to choose between those two houses. On the one side there awaited him a bed still unchanged from the dead patient who had last used it, where he would have lodgings in the shadow of death with Gísli the landowner and his companions until he himself was carried out feet first one morning. On the opposite side dwelt the beauty of the earth itself in all its rounded curves, in the image of a young woman, the hazard of life itself in one beguiling smile which promised you lifelong impassioned battle, probably lifelong unhappiness; but nevertheless, on that side of the roadway the concept of death had no place. And that is how it went; her young strong body, and the hot feminine look in her eyes that morning—the memory of these won, and he was suddenly determined to live. And he started hammering on the door.
When he had knocked for a long time, a man came to the window and asked angrily when these damned drunks were going to stop hammering on people’s houses in the middle of the night. It was the girl’s father.
“Is Vegmey at home?” asked the poet.
“Vegmey? At home? In the middle of the night? Where else would she be? Who are you? And what d’you want?”
He said he had been going to ask Vegmey if she would be kind enough to let him stay the night.
“You’re as drunk as a pig,” said the girl’s father.
“No,” said the poet. “But I’ve nowhere to stay.”
“This isn’t a guesthouse,” said the man. “Go to hell!”
At that moment the girl herself came to the window with sleep in her eyes, to find out what was going on. And there was her eccentric back again, the one to whom she had given coffee and biscuits that morning!
“Well, is that you back again!” she said. “And soaked to the skin and covered with mud! Come into the kitchen at once, poor thing!”
The door was not locked, as is the custom among ordinary people because they have nothing worth stealing, or rather because everything has already been stolen from them; and he walked into the kitchen.
She came towards him, yawning; she had put on a ragged dress. “Poor boy,” she said, “he hasn’t got a home! Daddy, he hasn’t got a home, hahaha, we’ll have to let him stay the night.”
“I’ve been hauling rocks all day and I’m not giving up my bed for anyone,” replied her father.
“He can sleep on the kitchen floor,” she said, but on closer inspection she saw that the visitor was too wet to lie on the floor, all the more because there was not much bedding available—he might catch pneumonia. She corrected herself and said, “I suppose I’ll have to let you have my own bed.”
She pushed him ahead of her into the living room, where the family was enjoying all the incomparable luxury of a clear conscience that characterizes sleep in these houses.
“There’s my bed,” she said. “Hurry up and get your clothes off and tuck yourself in well so that you don’t catch cold.”
Some people are rich, others are very poor; this was that true wealth which it is impossible to pluck from a girl at the wayside, even though unknown thieves had in other respects picked the house clean. He was allowed to wash, and bedded down in the warmth beside two warm children who lay at the foot, while Vegmey took a tattered bedspread and said Good-night and went into the kitchen and shut the door. He pulled the eiderdown up to his chin, and had never known a softer bed. There was a sound of breathing all around. The summer rain fell gently and sweetly on the roof; he soon got warm, all life’s cares were wiped away—no one can be as happy as a homeless man. Hovering between waking and dreaming he worshiped this lovely girl who got out of her bed in the middle of the night to let one stay; what would it be, this world we live in, if there were no rich and lordly people like her?
He woke up in sunshine and there were fat bluebottles buzzing cheerfully against the window. The children had been got up quietly and sent out, and inside, in the kitchen, the young girl was singing a pleasant song and making a clatter with the kitchen utensils. He coughed a few times to show that he was awake, and she came to the doorway and bade him good-morning and laughed; she had even combed her
ash-blonde hair, and the soft curls gleamed as she stood in the shaft of sunlight, her neck fair and strong. Her feet were bare in her shoes, her whole form was a revelation of that earthy line which is without doubt the most unfathomable vision of life, if not the measure of beauty itself; in a word, he had never known so rich a woman bid a poor man good-morning.
“Good-morning.”
Today there was neither coffee nor chicory; the day’s particular luck revealed itself in the fact that the household had come by some brown sugar, which she brought him along with some salted gill-lids and hot water.
“Eat as much as you can take of the brown sugar before the children come back,” she said, and took a handful of sugar for herself.
Never had the young poet been brought such a lot of sugar, and so he chose this girl to be the queen of all the world’s dainties; the sun-beams went on playing on her young hair, the buzzing of the flies at the window hummed like a voluptuous string, yes, the sun shone with true abundance into that house. He felt the house tremble with splendor and luxury. No wonder he forgot all other girls, all other loves at this moment; at her side he would walk fearlessly to the end of his days. She handed him his clothes all warm from the stove, and said she would go out while he was putting on his trousers. When he had put on his trousers she came in again because she said he was such a great poet that she wanted him to compose something about her every day, even if it were only just half a verse, hahaha, and they sat down together on the edge of the bed to talk, and the sun shone on them both as they sat there—and greater happiness it is impossible to imagine than two people and one sun.
Then she became serious and practical again and asked if he were going to carry on weeding for the pastor, and laid her elbow on his shoulder and looked thoughtfully into his radiant blue eyes.
“Unfortunately there is no more chickweed in the pastor’s garden,” he said.
“So what happens tonight?” she asked.
This was something he obviously could not solve, and he even felt it a little odd of her to be asking about it; this was a spring morning and the night was a long, long time away; the night did not exist, why should he have any worries yet about the night? He was seventeen years old and, what was more, a poet, who lives only one day at a time.
“Yes, but don’t you think you have to live beyond this passing day, even though you’re a poet?”
“I’ll do whatever you tell me,” he said.
“You must try Pétur ríhross,” she said.
“I daren’t,” he said. “People like him scare me. Besides, a distinguished woman I met yesterday told me that great men didn’t exist in this part of the country.”
“That’s a lie,” said the girl. “You’ll see, if you speak badly enough of the parish officer in front of Pétur ríhross, he’ll do anything for you. They’re both envious, you see, of what the other steals.”
He turned this over in his mind for a while, but finally answered despairingly, “No, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t know how to speak badly of people. And that’s because I think that wicked people don’t really exist. If someone behaves badly, I always think to myself: this man hasn’t heard the sonic revelation of the Almighty.”
“The what?” said the girl.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “you don’t need to understand it, because you are part of the sun.”
“What a great poet you are!” said the girl. “You’re such a great poet that you don’t see human life, not even your own life. But you will live nonetheless, even though it’s only me who says so!”
There was no point in trying to gainsay it; she had decided that he was to live, despite the fact that he was a great poet. Since he did not feel he could speak badly of the parish officer, she confided to him the only way that would work with Pétur ríhross when all else failed, and that was to go and burst into tears and pretend to be dying. “That’s what I do when his secretary has flatly refused us more credit and there’s nothing to eat; then he can’t stand any more and loads me with food from his own larder, because he’s really a Christian at heart, the swine, and that’s why he helps those who play up their misery enough and whine loud enough.”
The boy was so impressed by the recklessness of her ideas and the ruthlessness of her methods that he impulsively leaned over against her bosom and laid his face against her neck to find refuge. “I know that I’m safe forever because I have you,” he said.
“I’ve never seen a poet before,” she said. “But I’ve always known they were like you.”
“Now nothing can harm me any more,” he said. “Never.”
There was silence for a while, and then she whispered, “How nicely you breathe.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just so nice hearing you breathe.”
There was another pause. She bent down over his face and gazed into his eyes for a long time before they kissed. Then they kissed. He had actually never kissed a girl properly before, and for a long time afterwards he thought about how soft it had been. Then he whispered, “Vegmey, do you think you would like to be my wife?”
At that she stood up and stretched her arms towards the ceiling and yawned and said, “Are you crazy, man? Do you think you can start proposing to me at once?”
He, too, stood up, but was very serious because this was the most solemn moment of his life.
“Forgive me, Vegmey,” he said, “but I thought it right to mention it to you before I left.”
“Go now,” she said.
They went on kissing all the way to the door; and though she went on telling him to go, and pushing him ahead of her, it was not easy to tell which of the two found it harder to let go of the other.
7
Pétur ríhross lived in a ribbed merchant’s house with a high roof and low walls, a relic from the days of the Danish trading posts; the broad, dignified slope of the roof was broken only by an alien dormer window. The grass grew halfway up to the windows.
“Is it something important?” asked the maid at midday, when Ólafur Kárason had recovered sufficiently from the morning’s adventure to think of asking for Pétur Pálsson, the manager.
“Yes,” said the boy. Because he had been wandering round the village for hours on end in an ecstasy of love and was now hungry, and wanted the manager to help him at once.
After a moment the woman came back and said, “You can go in to the dining room and state your business briefly. He’s having his lunch, actually.”
She showed him through a kitchen which smelled of boiled meat, and left him at an open doorway through which he had a view of the manager and his family at their meal: red salt-meat, fat turnips, and thick soup, and a crowd of children and youngsters producing a cacophony of sound, and one lean woman who was silent, while Pétur himself sat at the head of the table in his morning coat and celluloid collar and surveyed the scene through magisterial eyeglasses.
“What d’you want?” shouted the manager when he saw the boy in the doorway; and at the sound of the harsh voice the visitor lost heart completely and truthfully no longer knew what he wanted and stood confused in the doorway. The young people at the table fell silent for a moment and waited for him to say something, but when nothing happened they broke into jeers and laughter that surged over the visitor like breakers.
“Be quiet for once, you idiots!” said the manager. “I can’t hear what the man’s saying.”
“He’s not saying anything,” said the children. “He’s weird and doesn’t even know how to open his mouth.”
At this taunt the poet plucked up courage, opened his mouth, and said, “I need work.”
The manager had never seen this young man before, and what is more he did not even seem to recognize the language he spoke. “You need work?” he echoed in amazement, as if this were a quotation from some unfamiliar and alien language. “What d’you mean?”
“So—so that I can get something to eat and somewhere to sleep,�
�� said the boy.
“To eat? And to sleep?” the manager repeated in astonishment; he was so astonished that he stopped in the act of putting into his mouth the spoonful he had raised to his lips and looked helplessly at his children, who went on guffawing with laughter whether the visitor spoke or was silent. At last the manager looked enquiringly at his wife in the faint hope that she could offer some explanation for it: “To eat and to sleep? What’s he getting at?”
“I don’t know,” said his wife.
“Who are you and where do you come from?” asked the manager.
The visitor said who he was, and the children roared with laughter at the incredibly funny idea that the man should have an actual name and come from an actual place. But the manager said, “That wasn’t what I was really asking. What I meant was, who’s playing you for a fool? Who’s responsible for you?”
“I’m on the parish,” said the boy.
“I might have known it was that damned parish officer!” said the manager. “Go back to him at once and tell him from me that he can go to the devil; and shut the door behind the man, Dísa dear, I don’t want a draft in the house.”
A clumsy, hoydenish girl of confirmation age, her face smothered in grease, stood up to close the door behind the boy as soon as he left; but the boy did not want to leave.
“The parish officer has thrown me out for good,” said the boy.
“Huh, has the parish officer thrown you out? Yes, that’s just like him! He’s an idiot and a rat.”
“He said I was to go and shift rocks,” said the boy.
“Shift rocks is that what he said? So he said that, did he! To the best of my knowledge it’s I who decides who shifts rocks in this village and who doesn’t.”
“Out you go!” said the hoyden, who was still waiting impatiently to close the door.
“What the hell are you doing, showing visitors the door, you brat?” said the manager. “Come in, my boy, since the parish officer has thrown you out, and tell me a little more about yourself.”
World Light Page 21
