12
Shortly after New Year the brothers abandoned their battlefield at home and left for distant fishing stations. There was not much talk about their departure beforehand; their mother saw to their gear herself, and then they were gone, leaving behind the womenfolk and the poet. The older women and Kristjána shared the work in the barn and feeding the livestock; Magnína did the cooking for the household; and the poet lay under the sloping ceiling and waited for the sunbeam. But when Magnína was left alone in the house, she often sat upstairs in the loft on her mother’s soft bed and stared at the frostwork on the window and yawned and sniffed and counted how many pairs of stockings she had, and perhaps changed her stockings or put an extra pair on. She was usually chewing or munching something. Some days she would wash her face, and behind the ears as well. Then she would pull her feet up on to the bed and lie down on her side and fall asleep; perhaps she had left a pot on the stove, and she would wake up at the smell of burning which wafted up from the kitchen into the loft; the porridge would be scorched.
Often when she was preening herself in the loft at midday, the boy wondered whether he should dare speak to her to pass the time. He yearned so much for the company of a living soul. Most of all he longed to talk about the Light and the Spirit. He looked at her furtively, sidelong, and tried to size her up from the point of view of Light and Spirit. He asked himself, Could there be a secret chord lurking somewhere deep in that dark flesh?
After the brothers had gone she made a habit of coming up to the loft at bedtime and sitting at her mother’s bedside; they talked together in undertones, but the invalid was curious and sharp-eared like all those who are on the outside of the world. On Magnína’s side the conversation to begin with was all more or less harmless criticisms of some people, she was never entirely satisfied with some people, probably because she was not satisfied enough with herself.
But one night the tune changed. Something had happened; the boy caught a hint of some long-drawn-out tale of crime, with big, fat, heavy sighs and frequent invocations to Jesus above Who knew it was all true. The mother tried to make little of it for a long time, but in the end she fell silent, so cogent was the evidence. Then Magnína said, “Didn’t I tell you in the autumn that this would happen if you let that hussy stay?”
The mother said nothing.
“Didn’t I perhaps warn you about those whore’s eyes of hers?”
And when the mother still made no reply, the daughter grew impatient and said loudly, “You just say nothing!”
“I don’t see that it’s any use saying very much,” said the mother.
“I can believe that!” said Magnína. “There’s nothing much said to some people. Some people can do anything they like. It’s a different story for other people. Decent people are never allowed to call their lives their own all their born days. Decent people have to live and die like haltered beasts.”
“Which of the boys could it have been?” said Kamarilla thoughtfully.
“Which? As if it was only one or the other? No, if it had only been one of them I wouldn’t be saying anything. But since when have whores like that been content until they have reduced everything in trousers around them down to their own level? My God in heaven, what have I done to deserve this!”
“Oh, it’s just the way life goes, Magnína dear,” her mother said. “We just have to take that sort of thing with understanding.”
“All right, then,” said Magnína, “if that’s the way life goes, then it’s best to let this immorality remain here. But one thing’s certain, I’m going away from here.”
“I don’t like driving these two poor wretches away, mother and daughter, with the fishing season just started and no man on the farm, apart from the parish pauper over there in the corner.”
“Yes, I know, that’s you all over, you gather round you evil-minded harlots and useless parish paupers, but your own children whom you have taught to live a decent Christian life you drive from home, out into the snow in the middle of winter. But to get a decent man on the farm, a clean-living man who’s good with animals and does his work honestly and leaves other people in peace—that’s something you can’t understand. And I’m sure no one bothers to feel sorry for me, my brothers’ own sister, having to cook and serve food to this creature who has degraded them both, yes, and on top of that to have to listen to my own mother finding excuses for her, a harlot, pregnant by any male who comes along, in the middle of the highway so to speak, while other people are made to pine away like some sort of outlaws in their own family home.”
Magnína had now begun to sniff abnormally often; soon she had started to cry, and the boy heard her wailing over and over again between her sobs, “Yes, I’m just like any other poor, lonely wretch.” He did not dare on any account to sit up in bed and look, but he had a great desire to see how this big, bulky girl went about the business of weeping. At her weeping he felt his heart beat faster; he was strangely sensitive to weeping, and for some mysterious reason he felt affection for those who wept, especially those who wept because they were alone. He felt that all those who were alone were kin to himself, and now he had suddenly begun to feel fond of the daughter, Magnína. It is a remarkable experience when someone we do not love is suddenly revealed in a new light. He had actually never known this girl, and now he knew her. Never understood her, and now he understood her. All of a sudden he realized that they shared the same road, two lonely people; and at the same time he realized that it was not just hardship, loss of parents, poetry, the parish, and a cross to bear that made the individual lonely, but also thighs that were too fat, sugar, rolled tripe, pickled lamb fries, brisket, mother-love, hope of an inheritance, and happiness.
Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes. Magnína could also find consolation in the spirit, that good refuge for the wretched, the ones who were alone but lacked the courage to be so.
13
She sat in the loft next morning, unwashed and uncombed, and stared at the frostwork of winter, dejected, a little red-eyed, as if she had slept badly; yet she did not yawn, but moved her lips a little every now and again, as if she were speaking. The gray cat came over with arched back and tail on high and rubbed itself, purring, against her leg; she gave a start because she did not realize what it was—but it was only that damned cat.
“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 him 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.”