World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  It is good to have a house if one is wet enough. The intended was cooking; there was steam and the smell of fish boiling. She fussed around as usual because he was wet, she did not understand folk who got themselves wet unnecessarily, some people made no attempt to protect their clothes even though they had nothing to change into, and so on; he usually did not reply, because her talk was seldom of the kind that required an answer. But while he was taking off his wet things he looked at her obliquely as she stood in the corner behind her barricade, the stove, pale and thin and with that strong, impersonal hair which seemed to live a life of its own like the hair that grows on a corpse, and he asked himself: If I cast her out, who is then to thrust a nail between her teeth so that she doesn’t bite her tongue off when she has her fits? Why should I make her suffer because she no longer has young warm hands, a high bosom, a strong fair neck, lips that melt under your kisses? Why make her suffer because her voice no longer has a young, sensuous excitement, because her speech doesn’t have an attractive, cultured choice of words? Was it her fault? Had he, who had chosen her for his lot, the right to punish her—for shortcomings she couldn’t help? When he had been seeing an attractive young woman, he felt pity for this one more keenly than ever before, and the pity fettered him more than any love could. She was a representative of that humanity with which he himself was inextricably bound up, burdened with emotions, sensitive and sorrowful in its quest for a way out of the darkness and the severity of its origins. Was one to despise and betray this humanity, one’s own humanity, because its instinctive quest for something finer and more beautiful hadn’t succeeded? To abandon her and run after another was to abandon one’s own life for a will-o’-the-wisp. Once upon a time this one, too, had been young and glamorous like all other girls. And all other girls would one day no longer be young and glamorous, any more than she was today. He was as determined as ever to avoid all meetings which might contain the risk that he would betray her—and his peace. His compassion was so strong that no asceticism was too severe, no dungeon too dark or deep or fetid, as long as that companion was satisfied.

  On a pale, quiet autumn day without ravens, a young man and a girl came walking up the hill, with that slightly uncertain gait which bears witness to the fact that the betrothal is not of very long standing. It was Jórunn of Veghús and Jens the Faroese. Yes, times had changed since Faroese-Jens brought the Devil with him up the hill! And now, although the gait had this suggestion of waywardness and uncertain equilibrium, the poet was much too experienced in such matters here on the estate to think of interpreting such a walk in any other way than one—a formal engagement. By walking up the poet’s hillside, they were giving the poet special intimation of this event. Although the poet had affected ignorance the other day, he knew perfectly well that Faroese-Jens had been away on another fjord all summer; he must have only just come back, perhaps yesterday. That they should be together already like this suggested it was serious. He had probably earned quite good money. He was big and strong and discontented and militant, and wanted to overthrow society and manage to make money at the same time—in short, he was the right man for her. It was to be hoped that the poem the poet had written to him on her behalf, and which was still unpaid, had played its part in making this match—at least, the poet found some comfort in thinking so. He started to tidy the room, because he thought they were perhaps going to call on him. But when they came near The Heights the girl pointed in a different direction and they turned off the path. Then the girl gave her companion a sign that they should sit down, and they sat down on the scree a stone’s throw from the shack. They sat for a good while and talked, in full view of the poet’s window. Neither of them looked in his direction, as if he did not exist. After a while the girl stood up, then the young man stood up; she started walking and he, too, started walking. Then they were gone. When they were gone, the poet heaved a sigh as if a danger had passed. He had violent palpitations.

  What had he been afraid of? Had he feared that they would visit him in the shack to show him that tedious, innocent, nauseating faith in life which is the substance of every new betrothal and which irritates all those who want to be left in peace with their lot? Or was he secretly afraid of the opposite—that his wealth, his peace of mind, would grow still more, and grow too much, now that the girl was finally disposed of?

  All summer he had lived in the delightful danger that she might deprive him of his peace, and had run for cover if he saw her in the distance. When all was said and done, a lack of peace is a prerequisite for desiring peace. He was so ambivalent still that when the couple had disappeared from sight among the houses down below, he was seized with regret at having lost that secret hope of unrest which made peace so desirable. Her image, that strong long hand that could enclose the poet’s small hand, that bold, demanding life, belonged to someone else. In a sad vision in the fading light of an autumn day he saw how the hours could come and go without excitement, as they did long ago, with only a heavy swell of boredom like crossing a desert. In that instant he felt the cold breath of the many winter mornings ahead, with rime on the window, when he would wake up only to find his life flowing quickly past without joy and beauty, without any satisfaction for these secret yearnings of the soul, in the full knowledge that his loyal moral life, which was founded on pity for those who were closest to him, was in the first and last instance completely false.

  10

  The child was still ill; the poet’s house which during the spring had sailed away into the universe had returned long ago. And when the little girl leaned back against her pillow, pale and silent in the morning instead of throwing herself laughing into the day’s embrace, he suddenly remembered that he had not kept the promise he had made last winter to take her down to the beach and look for shells. In remorse over this omission he determined to be kinder to her than ever. He got three kinds of medicine from the doctor’s wife, in addition to the vitamin pills he had already got from Pétur Pálsson, and when it was obvious that the child only accepted these remedies with disgust and nausea he simply went to the shop and bought her sweets for twenty-five aurar. He sat with her for hours on end and played with her toys for her or told her stories. Sometimes the child was racked by suffering, and then it was he who nursed her in his arms and crooned foolish words of comfort to her and snatches of verses.

  The rainstorms of autumn were at their worst, with incessant downpours and the heavy growling of the sea between the squalls of wind. On many a stormy night the poet and his intended did not go to bed, so as to be ready for anything. One tempestuous evening when the shack was creaking under the lash of the wind and the child continued to whimper with half-closed eyes, the outer door was suddenly thrown open and a visitor appeared on the porch. It was at the time of day when sober people were no longer out and about, and the poet began to fear that in addition to the bad weather he would now have to spend the night in that hell he associated with drunks. But the visitor who greeted them in the shrill whining of the wind through the open door was not a drunk after all but a traveler from afar, weather-beaten from walking in the storm, wearing strong boots and a coat and carrying a knapsack. But it was no meek visitor who thrust his head through the doorway and surveyed the room with leonine eyes.

  “Örn Úlfar!” said the poet, and jumped to his feet. “Where have you come from; what brings you here?”

  His ship had not been scheduled to call at Sviðinsvík; so he had walked from the next fjord, across the mountain.

  “You are welcome to stay the night here, even though there isn’t much to offer,” said the poet.

  “Who is this man?” asked the intended, and fled behind the cooking stove. “How are we to put up a fine gentleman like this? This wretched hovel could be blown down over this sick child at any moment. Wouldn’t he be better to look for shelter with Pétur Pálsson the manager?”

  “Örn,” said the poet, “I ask you to look upon this little house and everything in it as your own. Jarþrúður, he is tir
ed after his journey and hungry; what can he have to eat?”

  “I was half expecting that someone might have been asking for me here tonight,” said Örn Úlfar. “Has anyone called?”

  “Who would that have been?”

  “Oh, just someone. A colleague. He has a rather large-boned face and a dark curly beard, and he chews tobacco.”

  No, no one like that had been in. Ólafur took his friend’s coat and invited him to sit on the bed and made him as comfortable as possible. “Jarþrúður, isn’t there a pinch of flour so that we can bake pancakes?” And he broke with long habit by stoking the fire himself, fidgety with eagerness, his eyes aflame.

  “What a carry-on!” said the intended.

  “He is my friend and my guest,” said the poet. “The house is his.”

  “There’s no flour,” said the intended. “But there are some potatoes. And there’s some salted skate soaking in the tub.”

  The visitor did not say Thank you in spite of the fact that he was being given the house many times over, and behaved as if he did not hear the exchanges between host and hostess; he leaned across to the poet’s writing desk which was lying at the foot of the bed, and began to leaf through the manuscripts, the corners of his mouth pulled down and his brow furrowed. Instead of giving a more detailed account of his own travels he asked bluntly, “Do you still write for the same reasons as before?”

  “I’ve forgotten the reasons why I wrote before,” said the poet when the fire was going. “I am writing some stories about Strange Men.”

  “What are strange men?” said Örn Úlfar.

  “Jóhann beri was a fugitive from his mistress for twenty years, wearing rags like a beggar. Thereafter, I’ll be writing the story of Jón almáttugi (the Almighty).”

  “Why do you write about these wretches?”

  “Probably because I’m sorry for them,” replied the poet.

  “Why are you sorry for them?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps because I see all humanity in them.”

  “Will you make any sacrifices because of this pity?” asked Örn Úlfar.

  “I don’t care if I have nothing to eat,” replied the poet. “I don’t care if my house is blown down in the next squall.”

  Then his intended, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, said: “I don’t call it being like pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson to care nothing about shame or honor and never to write anything one can recite to redeem one’s soul. But to sit up in bed at nights like a ghost with his knees up and to disarrange the bedclothes like a dog chewing a piece of fish skin instead of lying still; and then to get his head down in the morning and sleep all day; and to look on in cold blood while his own children waste away—that’s his way of life. Needless to say, those who try to keep this place going never get any thanks for their trouble except silence.”

  The visitor looked at the intended impassively and coldly for a moment, like a man who hears a sudden creak in a piece of furniture from which sound was unexpected. But the poet said, “A well-formed sentence and a true rhyme in a poem are generous reward for a day’s hunger and a sleepless night. In the future when I have long been dead and gone, it won’t be asked what the poet had for his meals or whether he slept well at nights, but—was his style Icelandic? Was his poetry pure?”

  “And the spirit?” asked Örn Úlfar.

  “I used to stand outside human life, particularly my own life. But now—human life has come closer to me than before, particularly my own life.”

  “Don’t you mean that your death has crept closer?” asked the visitor.

  “I was trying to answer you about the spirit,” said the poet. “What I was thinking of was that the world has certainly become more materialistic than it was when we last talked together and, it’s quite true, more transient. But nonetheless I still hear the good Voice; and however poor my life may appear from the outside, that makes it rich.”

  “Yes, you believe in Ýmir,” said the visitor, and smiled at his friend after all these years.* The poet looked admiringly at his neck-linen, at how neat it was even after crossing the mountain in rain and darkness. His complexion had recovered from the storm, his features were at once refined and strong like his whole physique; perhaps this man was unnaturally healthy rather than ill, and Ólafur Kárason counted himself lucky to have such a man as his friend—and his judge.

  “Well,” he said at last, “now I’ve told you everything about myself. Now you must tell me something about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You must have some reason for being in these parts,” said the poet.

  “I’m going to become a Member of Parliament,” said the visitor.

  “A Member of Parliament!” said the intended. “And crossing the mountain on foot!”

  “Örn Úlfar, M.P.—yes, I like that very much,” said the poet.

  “Then don’t let me down,” said the visitor. “There’s to be an election in the spring.”

  The poet then realized that his friend was perhaps in earnest after all, and he asked, “What does Pétur Pálsson the manager say to that?”

  “We’ll thrash the living daylights out of that bloodsucker,” said the visitor.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, perhaps,” said the poet, and glanced rather anxiously in the direction of his intended.

  “You must write,” said the visitor, “a challenge to the people of Sviðinsvík to defeat Júel and throw out his agent, Pétur ríhross, so that your children and all the others you are sorry for here on this estate can get a chance to live.”

  The intended from the other side of the cooking stove: “I’m leaving this house! People can cook their own skate!”

  “We must be careful what we say,” whispered the poet to his visitor, and out loud he begged his intended not to be offended by an innocent joke.

  “I can’t bear jokes about what I hold sacred,” said the intended. “And least of all do I want to have to listen to filthy talk about my benefactor.”

  “If he has given you vitamin tablets, my good woman,” said the visitor, “then I can tell you that you have to take thirty pints of water with every tablet if it is to have the same effect as one crowberry.”

  “Dear God and Jesus, to have to endure this kind of thing from strangers, yes, and under His very own roof!” said the intended, and the tears had begun to flow. She found a dark shawl and put it on and sniffed and sobbed. The poet had got to his feet to soothe her. Was she out of her mind to think of going out in this weather in the middle of the night, and how could she ever let herself get so furious over the harmless pleasantries of two old friends who had not seen one another for God knows how long?

  “Since he now owns this house and everything in it jointly with you, as you said before, I’m obviously not wanted here,” said the intended.

  “I’ll go,” said the visitor, and stood up.

  But now Ólafur Kárason was beside himself and said, “If you go, Örn, I’m going too.”

  In other words it looked as if the poet’s house would be left standing empty; everyone was prepared to leave it for good and abandon a dangerously ill child to her fate, along with the salted skate in the pot.

  But in the middle of these midnight emotions the porch door opened again, and the wind came raging into the house once more. A tall girl with a red silk scarf tied round her black curly hair, wearing an expensive coat and carrying a basket on her arm, said Good-evening.

  “God help me, Védís Pétursdóttir; what are you doing here in this terrible house? And in the middle of the night at that!”

  The manager’s daughter who had roamed around the estate here in bygone days, hoydenish and disagreeable, had long since become the best match in the Sviðinsvík district, quick and clever, educated in the south, with boyish movements in her long body, and shrewd eyes which never gave anything away, her coloring dazzlingly healthy.

  “Someone said your little girl was very ill,” said the hoyden. “All at once I felt so s
orry for you in the storm; I suddenly wanted to do something for you; what can I do?” And then she was suddenly taken aback at seeing the poet’s unexpected visitor: “Örn Úlfar, is that you, or am I seeing things?”

  “No formalities, Dísa,” said Örn Úlfar. “Anyway, you’re a god-send; the whole household was disintegrating because I said thirty pints of water were needed with your father’s vitamin pills. I rely on you now to unite this household again.”

  “Ach, you’re always the same villain about the old man, poor Pétur ríhross, but let me just tell you that his real vitamin is me, and no one needs to take thirty pints of water with me, my lad!—and with that let me give you my hand and bid you welcome.”

  “Thanks, Dísa,” said the visitor. “Let me have a look at you. Have you changed?” And he added by way of explanation to the others: “Dísa and I have met in the south.”

  “Védís, an educated girl!” said the intended, dumfounded. “Am I to believe my ears that you not only use a nickname for your father but mimic him as well? And in the presence of—these people?”

  The child whom the manager’s daughter had come to visit had been almost forgotten, and the poet showed her where she lay but said they had better not waken her; it was best for the sick to sleep. The girl bent over the child and murmured a few affectionate words, but perhaps without that quiet inner tenderness which characterizes true love. Everyone had given up the idea of abandoning the house. The intended had also forgiven the girl for talking disrespectfully of her father, and had begun to extol the high-mindedness of these wonderful people whom God wakes up in the middle of the night to comfort the poor.