World Light (22 page)

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.”

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 Pétur 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.”