No, there was nothing.
And then the boat casts off and slowly disappears into the mist to the accompaniment of waving hands and handkerchiefs.
***
That little grey, misty figure among all the other shadowy figures in the boat as it glided away – was it Merrit, the wonderful girl, the girl who could catch the sun and hold a rainbow in her hand, the girl who danced with outstretched arms across the Life Bridge, the girl who gave you the first kiss in your life?
No, it wasn’t her.
The real Merrit never went away; she remained for ever up in the green grasslands of summer; she is still there today and plays the melodic minor scale in the dusk beneath the lighted candles on the piano.
She is the Earth Girl, who takes you out on breathtaking trips, floating in the air to the End of the World.
She has become what everything finally becomes: Myth and Legend, Longing and Pain and – deepest down – profound, hidden, imperishable happiness.
The Steam Engine
The factory is going to be taken into use again and set going. There is a swarm of craftsmen and ordinary workmen out there; the rusty old machinery is being dismantled and new put in its place. Consideration is being given to whether the old steam-driven machinery should be taken out to sea and sunk or taken out of the country and sold as scrap iron, but for the moment it is being put on a kind of huge sledge drawn by black horses and taken down to the shore near the Ring so as to get it out of the way.
Here, it is stood up on end and looks very strange and alien in the middle of the everyday surroundings of the grey, lichen-covered rocks. There is a “manhole” down at the bottom in the big steam boiler, so that you can get into it. It isn’t quite dark in there, as a cold, iron light seeps in from above, creating a kind of nightmare half-light, threatening yet strangely compelling.
So the big drum is here and is no longer a boiler but something else, something without name or significance – like something in a dream. Something that might remind you of the Tower at the End of the World, which of course is far bigger and more impressive. Or was, for it is not there any more.
No, the Tower at the End of the World is irrevocably a thing of the past – indeed, it has never even really existed! A strange, shattering, vertiginous idea both filled with a sense of release and yet full of melancholy. And so there you stand now, abandoned and numbed, in the dark interior of the old, discarded boiler… and outside the mists swirl above the rushing abyss where the spirit of God still hovers over the waters (for after all, no one can stop Him from doing this). It is sinister and lonely out here, indeed you could scream with revulsion, but yet you wait a little longer before escaping into the day and reality… you wait until you simply can’t stand it any longer; you double up and stand there suffering until you almost die from fright. Then, with a howl of liberation, you climb out of the manhole and stand there in the light of day, thrilled with relief and delight, like a soul that has escaped from the powers of darkness and battled its way up from the tomb…
Just fancy that you are standing out there in the sunlight beneath a blue sky listening to the gulls screeching and seeing their wings flash in the air and casting fleeting shadows on the rocky surface. And on the drying grounds over on the other side of the Ring, the fisherfolk are busy lifting the heavy canvases and bast mats from the stacks, for now it is lovely dry weather so they must hurry to get the fish spread out in the sunshine. And Anton, the watchman stands with his telescope, looking out across the bay, where a heavily laden fishing sloop is on its way in.
But that game of terror in the tower is one you’ll have to play once more before you go back to town. Once more, you have to squeeze into the iron night in there and suffer until you can’t stand it any longer, and then laughing and gasping with delight, you dash back out into the sunshine and freedom.
***
When you think about it, it’s probably a silly game and perhaps you are what you least of all want to be: a feckless idiot.
It’s quite a different matter with Little Brother; no one would think of calling him feckless – he’s a “bright lad”; he already knows his tables up to the ten times off by heart, and Father’s starting to teach him up to twenty as well. As for you, you still find it difficult to remember them up to ten times – not to mention the Reigns of the Kings and Queens. And you can sense that your Father is afraid you might become a feckless idiot and good-for-nothing like Uncle Hans. For when he takes the time to sit down once more to tell you what the world is made of, you just sit there staring at his pipe and his big nose, and that feckless head of yours fails to make any sense of it at all.
For if the world is round and there are people living all the way round it, why do you never hear of anyone falling off?
“Because ‘up and down’ is something that only applies here and now. Out in Space there’s no ‘up and down’, only out from and in towards.”
And then we come to all these questions about the Moon and the Sun, the Tide and Currents. And Newton’s apple.
Why an apple and not a pear? And why was it an apple and not a pear that Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge and gave Adam to eat?
Mother nods over her ironing and says she knows what you are getting at.
And then your thoughts wander from Newton’s perfect apple to the egg that Columbus made to stand up by knocking the pointed end down on the table top. Surely that was a bit of a cheat?
Yes, Mother agrees. Like the story of Alexander the Great’s knot.
“What knot was that?”
Then Mother tells the story of the Gordian knot that Alexander undid by slicing it with his sword. That was cheating as well.
And all that about the Earth rolling and sailing freely in the air – that’s not far from cheating, either. ’Cos where is God’s Heaven then, and where is God Himself?
Here, it is Father who can’t really follow, but is content to sit with a frown on his face and at a loss for an answer.
Then he gets up with a brief laugh and stands with his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window.
***
But the fact is that there are both bright sparks and feckless idiots. Bright sparks use their heads and decide what is to happen and how to deal with everything. They have a lot to take care of and worry about.
Feckless idiots, on the other hand – they don’t bother about anything even though they get in the way both of themselves and of others and mess things up for themselves. They sing and hum and play the horn or sit rubbing their violins or feeding their ducks and sticking coloured paper on blown duck eggs.
Or they lie around dreaming and crying out in their sleep and then coming and telling hair-raising stories about what they have experienced in their dreams and wondering what this, that and the other can mean and “foreshadow”.
Selimsen, the artist, writes his dreams down in a “night book” and keeps a count of which dreams come true and which don’t.
That’s ridiculous and disgraceful. Father and Michelsen the bookkeeper are agreed on that. And so, too, are the Numerator and the Denominator, as they call the twin brothers who come and play cards with Father and Michelsen. They are both navigation instructors and among the brightest sparks in town; they sit there with shiny foreheads and raised eyebrows and smile in their beards at all the wickedness of the world.
But they don’t believe in God.
“And what will happen to the Numerator and Denominator on Judgement Day?”
Mother sighs and looks into space.
“Don’t ask me, my dear, for I simply don’t know. I only know that to God the Numerator and the Denominator are no more than two grains of sand on the seashore.”
Exile
Father has an awful lot to see to at this time. It happens ever more frequently that he “flies off the handle”, so that even Mother is frightened of him.
Now that the Factory is to be taken into use again there can no longer be a question of having conce
rts and balls out there.
The Feckless Idiots’ Plot – such is the name that Father also gives to Uncle Hans and his friends. It’s an unpleasant expression, this word “feckless”, dead and clammy and tacky like putty. Keil is especially feckless – “and I’ll make sure I put an end to his carrying on with our dear Nanna.”
“Yes, but what about her, then?”
Father doesn’t answer immediately, but he sits there thinking.
Mother (with a sigh): “It’s a pity for Nanna. She’s so much in love with Keil.”
Father: “Being in love never lasts long. It’s like a soap bubble. It’s nothing to stake your future on. Why not Debes the Lighthouse Keeper? – She’d have been all right with him. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Debes is a widower and still in the prime of life.”
Mother smiles quietly and shakes her head.
Silence.
Father (in a quiet voice and with his knuckles on the table): “I won’t have that windbag Keil running around here. She must be able to understand that Keil’s a man with no backbone. She’s a sensible girl. And surely she must have learnt something from that ridiculous affair with Harry. I’ll have a serious talk to her.”
Then Father had a serious talk to Aunt Nanna on her own, while Mother sat wringing her hands out in the kitchen.
Father (after the conversation): “Well, as I expected; your sister’s a sensible woman, so it’s possible to talk to her. She took it nicely.”
But the following day Aunt Nanna had again made herself invisible and shut herself up in her room and refused to react to Mother’s calling and knocking.
***
Selimsen the artist is a windbag and feckless idiot, too, and to a portrait he has painted of Uncle Hans sitting deep in thought on a boulder on the beach Father has given the title of “Toper by the Sea”.
Mother (flushed): “But it’s a good picture, Johan. It’s a work of art.”
“It might be a work of art. But Selimsen’s still a filthy beast.”
Father lights his pipe. His hands are trembling.
“Poor Platen, he was the most decent one of the whole crowd after all. At least he didn’t go carrying on with women and getting them into trouble.”
Mother (pleading): “But Hans isn’t like that.”
Father stares darkly in the air. Then he takes Mother’s hand and whispers something in her ear, and she sits for a moment shaking her head, her mouth open and her eyes closed.
***
In spite of everything, Mother wanted to buy Selimsen’s picture of Uncle Hans by the sea, and Father agreed to it. But the day Selimsen came with the painting, something happened in the office where the two men were alone. And when Father came in to dinner his face was very red and his look was very dark, and he was very silent.
The following day Selimsen and Keil left for Copenhagen on the Christina. They had been provided with money and a free passage, and their debts to the Rømer Concern had been written off.
Father (with a harsh little laugh): “Well, that was exile, Else. And so that’s over and done with. But then there’s Hans – our poor banshee.”
The Banshee
Well then there was Uncle Hans, whom Father wanted to “drag up from the morass” and to “make a proper man of him”.
“What’s a banshee?”
Mother sits there staring ahead, and it’s as though she can’t pull herself together to tell you what a banshee is.
“It’s something to do with a ship.”
“What on a ship? Something about the rigging?”
“No.”
“Something about the galley?”
“No.”
“What then?”
Mother shakes her head.
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s a kind of ship’s ghost, or whatever…”
Banshee. A new word, both to laugh at and be frightened of. You’d like to go on to ask why Uncle Hans is a banshee, but you don’t because you can sense it’s something it hurts your Mother to discuss.
Nor is it just that Uncle Hans is going around as a banshee and a feckless idiot with no “backbone”. He must have done something absolutely awful. But what?
Hannibal knows, but he won’t really say what.
“Cos I never gossip, you know.”
But neither does he keep quiet, so he produces a few enigmatic phrases and leaves you to work out for yourself what he means.
It’s something about Dolly Rose. And then it might be that Fina the Hut has been up to tricks with her magic spells, who knows?
***
Mother (one evening when you had worn yourself out over some sums that you were doing for homework and were leaning forward, tired out and with your forehead down on the table top):
“All this harshness is useless, Johan. You’ll only make him hate you more and more.”
You become wide awake on hearing this word hate. You think at first that it’s about you, but you soon understand that she’s referring to Uncle Hans; you remain motionless, listening.
Father: “You just keep out of it, Else.”
Silence. Father walks up and down the floor.
Mother: “You can see where it’s getting him, Johan.”
Father (stops): “What do you mean?”
Mother silent.
Father: “What do you really mean by that?”
Mother (in a broken voice): “I mean –– Amaldus! You’d better go to bed; you’re just sitting there going to sleep.”
So you went to bed, with a sense of unease and filled with foreboding.
***
Mother (in a letter to her sister Helene in Copenhagen):
“…This question of Hans is getting us all upset, and often making me quite unhappy, for you know how fond I am of him. Since Selimsen and Keil left he has gone around all on his own in some curious way and not had anyone to talk to except Mother. But of course he doesn’t confide in her, and she doesn’t encourage him to, nor has she really ever done, and so they probably only talk about music and ‘the old days’. And as for his sisters, I think he’s a bit embarrassed towards them because of that unfortunate affair with Rosa ( Dolly Rose), Fina the Hut’s daughter. I think you’ll remember her as a little girl – she used to stand at Fina’s garden gate, always beautifully dressed in red and white and with a finger in her mouth. She’s now said to be five months gone, and Johan insists vehemently that Hans must take the consequences of his actions and marry the girl, but Hans won’t.
He’s hardly on speaking terms with Johan any longer. All conversations simply turn into monologues on the part of Johan, and it is pitiful to see how embarrassed Hans is by all the scornful and bitter things he has to hear, however much truth there might be in them. I understand he hardly ever comes to the office any more but hangs around entirely on his own or goes off in his sailing boat – and I’m concerned about that, because he has never been careful enough with that boat, and now he is worse than ever.
And in brief… as for his appearance, he is hardly re-cognisable, and has left his beard untrimmed. You can imagine how uncomfortable I feel when I’m together with him, for I would so much like to be able to help him. But he doesn’t show any confidence in me either, and if I touch on this question of Rosa, he shuts up completely and refuses to say anything.
Then he tends to disappear and stay out all night – and where does he get to? Perhaps (it is to be hoped) he’s together with Rosa, but perhaps not, for one morning our warehouse keeper found him lying on the floor in what is known as ‘Rydberg’s Bedroom’ up in the loft in the green store; he was dead drunk and lay there frozen stiff, for it was during some cold weather. Father was like that occasionally, if you remember. Oh dear, I fear the worst…”
Catastrophe
October, equinox, south-westerly gale, dreadful weather.
The town lies there blinded and deafened in a fog of foam; jetties and fish-drying grounds are under water, and in many places the whitish green, foaming waters go right up in
to the streets and turn them into raging torrents. And even at midday it’s so dark that you can only vaguely make out the outlines of the dismantled fishing boats moored out in the roads, tugging at their anchor chains. If their mooring lines don’t hold they will be hopelessly lost in this onshore gale.
The ‘bedroom’ on the top floor in the end of the Green Storehouse is full of men dressed in greatcoats and fur caps standing at the window because that is the place with the best view, and Father is there with his long telescope. Everyone is shouting because of the din from the wind and the sea. The air rings with the names of all the ships threatened with destruction – Only Sister, Sumburgh Head, Realist, Goodwoman (all of them British ships bought in Scotland).
Inside, on the great sail loft there is such a howling and whistling of wind and clattering of shutters that Little Brother and I have to make signs to each other instead of shouting while, with the help of a rope hanging there, we try to get on to one of the crossbeams supporting the roof. All the woodwork in this great building is complaining and creaking and cracking and a mainsail lying stretched out on the floor is now and again overcome by dreadful convulsions.
I finally manage to get onto the beam. Up here under the roof I can lie on my stomach like some sort of god and look down on the vast landscape of the floor, where Little Brother is dancing up and down in fury at not being able to climb up here, the place he knows as the supreme dwelling place of earthly bliss and happiness.
But then something happens: men come rushing out of the bedroom door and disappear with a great rumbling down the stairs… and then you have to go down to see what is going on out in the world. And something dreadful is going on, for the sloop the Goodwoman has broken its moorings and is in danger of being driven ashore!
The Tower at the Edge of the World Page 12
