The boy now stepped over the threshold and at once launched into his life story, but when he reached the point where he was sent to be fostered at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti, the children made such a fearful racket that it made no difference even when their father ordered them to shut up.
“Pay no attention to these idiots shrieking and laughing,” the manager shouted over the din. “It’s a family custom here; these wretches have nothing better to do than to jeer at people and laugh at them, but luckily no one pays any attention to it. Carry on.”
But the boy had lost the place in his life story and could not find it again; he saw nothing but a white fog and was drenched in sweat, and wrung his cap in agitation.
“Have you any aptitude for anything special?” asked the manager, when no more life story was forthcoming.
This question rescued the young poet; he was marvelously quick at recognizing sympathy in someone’s attitude and taking advantage of it, and now he made haste to answer in the affirmative: he said he had a quite exceptional aptitude for everything intellectual.
“Eh?” said the manager. He stopped chewing and looked up magisterially, and the children broke into more jeering. “Woman, get these children out of here; I won’t have these idiots in here when I’m talking to people.”
Luckily the idiots had eaten their fill, but still they did not leave the scene without thumbing their noses at the visitor and jeering at him as they went past.
“What do you mean, you have an aptitude for intellectual things, my boy?” asked the manager when everything was quiet.
“Poetry and learning,” said the boy.
At that the manager became a different person entirely and said, “Listen, sit down while I finish eating; we’ll talk a little more together. You see, the thing about me is that if I hadn’t become a manager I would have become a poet and a scientist. All my propensities lie in that direction. But such is the destiny of men, my boy; now I have to content myself with composing verses for the occasion now and again; that’s to say I provide the material for them, because usually I get a woman I know to knock them into shape for me. Have you perhaps tried to write poetry yourself?”
“Yes,” said Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. “I have composed eight hundred and sixty-five poems all told and have written them down in exercise books I got from my father. Over and above that I have composed many ditties and light verses I haven’t kept.”
“Listen, my boy,” said the manager. “May I, as an older man, make one observation: you don’t do any good by composing great masses of stuff; I never compose too much. One poem from time to time perhaps, for important occasions or sudden bereavements, that’s quite enough in my opinion. But poems by the hundred without a reason—that usually ends in sourness and grumbling over some imagined sorrow, mainly because someone thinks he isn’t living grandly enough. I never compose like that. I hope you’re not one of those who compose like that. Poets ought to be wholesome: wholesome in joy and wholesome in sorrow. I acknowledge no poets except wholesome poets. I don’t acknowledge these so-called modern realistic poets, like that damned fellow from Skjól,* who make a detour towards the dunghill solely because of their swinish natural desire to roll about in the muck. Poets should sing about ‘the land where peace abides and equality resides.’ D’you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the poet, in the full realization that the most successful kind of intellectual talent was the one that could conjure into his mouth one bite of the manager’s leftovers.
“Well, that’s all right then,” said the manager. “All young poets should get into the habit of writing poetry about what is beautiful and good. I’ll let you hear my latest poem when I’ve finished eating. And as for learning and science, we here also have a great interest in that, because all that sort of thing helps to lift the common people to a higher level and accustom them to think about other things than mouths and bellies. That’s why I’ve time and again thought of founding a small scientific research society here in the village, with my secretary, and the doctor, and the pastor, and perhaps the sheriff, even though he lives elsewhere. You see, I’ve been conducting some private experiments with a girl this winter, although to tell you the truth I haven’t got irrefutable proofs yet; but it’s getting better all the time. I’m hoping that she’ll eventually let me make some sufficiently thorough experiments on her. I’ve taken a vow that I shall find the proper evidence through her or else die in the attempt. So you can see that we, too, are pretty intellectual here in Sviðinsvík, my boy.”
“Yes,” said the poet. “But I’m not quite eighteen years old, and therefore I’m not educated to understand everything you say.”
“No, one can’t expect that,” said Pétur the manager, quite ready to forgive the boy’s lack of education. “No one expects a parish pauper from the remote valleys to understand modern science in every detail. But I hope you understand one thing—if you’ve an interest in intellectual matters at all—and that is that the objective of all modern science has to be only one thing, and can never be anything else, namely the question of the afterlife. I don’t acknowledge any other science or learning than that which makes the afterlife its aim and main object. Christian rationalism is my motto. I hope you understand that.”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“For what’s the point of this life here on earth if there isn’t another life hereafter?” asked the manager.
“That’s true,” said the boy. “If one is contented, one wants to live forever.”
“And why aren’t people contented? It’s because they don’t have the correct understanding of life; they lack Christian rationalism.” With these words the manager wiped his mouth with his sleeve and the back of his hand, for he had eaten his fill, and rubbed a soup stain carefully into the lapel of his morning coat, then removed his upper dentures, sprinkled a layer of snuff on the plate, and put them back into his mouth.
“What is the correct understanding of life, my boy?” asked the manager.
That he did not know.
“Then I shall tell you,” said the manager. “The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run. God is love. That’s why I say that damned parish officer should be ashamed of himself. In fact I have always been what foreigners call a socialist. We human beings should strive to behave like the invisible beings in space. We should see light. That’s what I call Christian rationalism.”
The boy was sure the manager’s voice almost broke at this solemn refrain of the miracles, and he had to remove his pince-nez to wipe the lenses. The boy, too, was rather moved, not least at hearing once again those winged words about the invisible beings in space, although he was on the other hand unable to fathom the mysterious connection between the manager and the great miracle girl of Kambar who had more or less raised him from the dead.
“I’m going to play a hymn for you,” said the manager. He stood up and patted Ólafur Kárason on the cheek with the back of his hand, like a little child. “A hymn at midday, it makes one so wonderfully good; it casts rays over one’s soul until well into the evening.”
He sat down at the harmonium, adjusted his pince-nez, and began to play the hymn “Praise the Lord, the King of Heaven” to his own singing. Ólafur Kárason was convinced that the manager was at heart the most affable of men even though he was a bit rough on the surface. As soon as you got to know him, you began to realize the sort of person he was; his singing was loud and powerful, the house quivered with the clamor of the harmonium; the visit had in fact turned into a church ceremony of the highest order. But however hard the boy tried to resist it, he could not take his eyes off the fat pieces of meat which had been left on the dish; that was how little of a poet he was, when all was said and done, so unspiritual that he was thinking about the irrelevancies of earthly life while Pé
tur Pálsson the manager was thinking about the cardinal point of existence—the afterlife.
Then the hymn was over and the manager got to his feet, his countenance transfigured, and patted the boy on the cheek again with the back of his hand.
“Would you like a pinch of snuff, my friend?” he said, and stuck the neck of his snuff mull into his nostrils one after the other, threw his head back, and inhaled hard.
“No, thanks,” said the poet.
“Can I offer you a cigar?” said the manager; he took a cigar box from a shelf and lit one for himself.
“No thanks,” said the poet.
“Well, that’s all right, my boy,” said the manager. “Tobacco’s filthy stuff; people shouldn’t use tobacco. That’s why we refuse to handle any tobacco in the Regeneration Company. I never used tobacco either when I was just one of the common people. Now we’ll go and visit Hólmfriður in her loft and see if she’s finished my latest poem yet. I’m sure that rhymesters of your age would benefit from hearing a poem by an educated man with experience of life.”
Then he bawled out, “Woman, where’s my hat?”
“It’s where you left it,” his wife replied from the kitchen.
“It doesn’t matter what you’re asked, you never know anything!” said the manager.
Nevertheless he found his black bowler hat, and now they were ready to set off to visit Hólmfriður in her loft and hear the poem.
8
Pétur said they would have to look in at the doctor’s on the way, and when he came out again one could make out the shape of a bottle in each pocket beneath his coattails.
“Now we’re ready to meet the poetess,” he said.
It was a long cow shed at the foot of the homefield right down by the sea. Half of the loft was used for human habitation, but the other half of the building from floor to rafters was a hay barn. Access was up some stairs with creaky steps. The door at the top of the stairs had been nailed together from odds and ends of wood; it closed of its own accord, worked by a weight on a string. The woman met them at the door and said that her husband was asleep.
“At the most productive time of the year?” said the manager.
“Is there anything more productive to do in Sviðinsvík than sleep?” said the woman.
She was a big, dark-haired woman with an intelligent, clear-eyed face, her voice oddly high-pitched and metallic, the more susceptible the tauter it was strung, and cracking at a certain pitch.
“I won’t listen to any pessimism today, my dear Fríða,” said the manager. “Today the weather is fine and we are all life’s children. I’ve brought a young poet from the fjord valleys, a nice polite boy, as you can see. Would you let him hear my latest poem, if you’ve finished it?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t had time to compose your new poem, the piebald cow didn’t take with the bull this morning,” said the woman with a tired, almost studied, lack of expression. In the lines around her mouth there lurked a kind of suffering the boy did not understand, something completely different from the common, coarse and stupid pain of poverty that is the easiest of all suffering and the least noteworthy; it was a delicate, rare and hard-earned suffering, a combination of hunger and sickness, and the boy felt he was kin to this woman despite the indifferent glance she gave him.
“Yes, you all pretend to be materialists,” said the manager, “and behave as if the mating of livestock is more important than the soul. But what a surprise they’ll get when they die, poor things, as the poet says! How often have I told you that spiritual matters should come before livestock?”
This started a bit of a wrangle between them: Pétur the manager as the sensitive and emotional upholder of human feelings, the poetess snappish in her replies, brusque and dispassionate. The boy stood halfway up the stairs and listened as hard as he could. Then a torrent of curses and oaths was heard from inside the house; the woman’s husband had woken up. He appeared in the doorway dishevelled, with feathers on his jersey, red-eyed and swollen, unshaven and toothless, jerking his shoulders and spitting. Ólafur Kárason stared in amazement at the man’s wife, this woman with her fair skin and hawk-like eyes, her strong vigorous hair and her red young-looking lips.
“Have you brought a drink, Pétur?” asked the woman’s husband, point-blank.
“I would expect to be invited in at least before I answer questions of conscience like that,” said the manager.
“Come inside!” said the woman’s husband.
They slammed the door on the poetess and the poet, and disappeared inside. The woman gave no reaction when the door was banged, but cleared her throat on a high, thin note, like the G string of a violin being plucked.
“They’ll never quench their thirst,” she said. “It’s their life.”
He did not know what to say.
“Are you in tow with him?” she asked, and took the boy into the kitchen.
“Oh, I don’t know, really,” he said, and added foolishly, “He played a hymn for me.”
He could not stop looking at the woman: this wordless blend of inquisitive, ever-vigilant feminine perception and petrified indignation as if she were indifferent to everything and despite everything, indifferent in some indefinable, inverted way at once fanatical and impersonal, a hundred thousand million times indifferent, her introspective, precise replies as stilted as some kind of poetry—how was it that he felt he knew this soul? Before he was aware of it, he was saying, “I feel I’ve seen you before.”
“Really?” she said. “It must have been in an earlier life. Where do you come from?”
He pondered her question in his mind for a moment, and then replied, “That’s never occurred to me before. Where I come from, it was always said that another life came after this one. But now I see that it could just as well have come before this one.”
“Do you believe everything you’re told?” she said.
“I feel that what you say is true,” he said. “I have known you in an earlier life.”
“Aren’t you hungry; don’t you want to eat?” she asked.
“No,” he said, and blushed because she was turning the conversation so abruptly to mundane and distasteful matters; and to tell the truth he was past hunger now.
“Didn’t you get a hymn for your midday meal?” she asked.
At that he could not help laughing.
“I’ll give you some fish now,” she said, “and perhaps some bread.”
“Well, perhaps just a very little, thanks,” he said.
He thought she would just toss a cod-wing at him without ceremony, but she did not; instead she went to the rack and fetched a rose-patterned plate and a knife and fork and laid a place for him at the kitchen table, as if for an important visitor. He got into a festive mood, and went on studying her carefully while she was serving. Very soon the fish and bread had arrived.
She was a combination of two people, one half of each. Above the middle she was like a big, gangling adolescent, slender down to the waist, with that thin voice and that intelligent countenance; but below the waist she was gross, her legs (not forgetting her heavy, clumsy hips) were clearly those of quite another person; the upper part was like a sensitive flower which had been planted in a coarse vessel; he was convinced that if she were married to a bad man, her soul was not to blame for that. She paused in her work and threw him a glance, and he felt she had sensed what he was thinking, and he was ashamed right down to his toes, and silently prayed God to help him.
“Go on eating,” she said. And when she saw how ashamed he was, she forgave him and said, “Let me hear some of your poetry.”
He let her hear some of his poetry.
“Where did you learn all these kennings?” she asked.
“From an old poet,” he said.
“Why do you write about love, at your age?” she said.
“It’s probably because I’ve been in love,” he said without looking up; then he added, as an excuse, and looked up, “But it didn’t last very long.”
>
“Love passes,” she said, and it was the first time she smiled with her lips; but he felt that the look in her eyes hardened at the same time.
“It wasn’t a very happy love, either,” he said.
“A happy love is no love at all,” she said.
“I would like to hear how you write about love,” he said.
“I write about death,” she said.
“Death? I don’t understand how that comes into it.”
“Oh, well,” she said.
“Then you must be terribly unhappy—in your love,” he said.
“My husband, he surpassed all others like an ash over thorn-bushes,” she replied. “He had eyes that saw miles out to sea. When I saw him for the first time, I saw a hero. It is life that is disgraceful.”
What was the woman getting at? Why this uncalled-for defense of her husband? Was she excusing herself?
“Unfortunately, he wasn’t wicked enough for this criminal society,” she added. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t a criminal.”
The boy forgot to eat and looked at the woman in surprise, but she did not even look up; she went on with her housework as if she had said something very ordinary.
“Take an oak tree and try to transplant it on to bare rock,” she said.
He did not know what to say. “That’s how I write about love,” she said, and then said no more, and gave him his coffee and sugar in silence. Afterwards, when he had eaten his fill, he sat for a long time at the window and looked out over the bay, while she went about her work indoors and outside quietly and conscientiously, while the men in the next room sang “In Bethlehem a Child Is Born.”
9
When the Bethlehem stage was over, “Oh, Thou Joy of the World” began. Finally came the Sprengisandur stage—“O’er the Icy, Sandy Wastes,” with incredibly long pauses between the lines. That night there was a white mist over land and sea. Ólafur Kárason helped to fetch the Regeneration Company’s cows and tether them, and stood in the barn and looked on while they were being milked. The poetess gave him milk to drink, warm from the cow, as much as he wanted and more. She had the task of separating the milk, churning the butter, preparing the whey, and making cheese for the manager, and the remainder of the milk she distributed at the barn door to the villagers who were on the books of the Regeneration Company. Towards midnight her evening work was done. Afterwards she sat in the kitchen and knitted very rapidly, but said nothing; the cat lay under the range and closed its eyes; the plates were rose-patterned, the curtains blue-checked; he sat at the kitchen window and looked out at the white mist, and the dew settled on the green grass in the summer dusk, and one could just glimpse the white sea like cream on the shingle a few yards away, and there was a shrieking of terns in the mist, and he felt that the night could continue like this forever. He tried time and again to start a conversation, but she would not talk; he wanted so much to hear one of her poems, but could not bring himself to say so.
World Light Page 22
