World Light (31 page)

18

Two days passed, and he was always thinking about this one thing, but could hardly believe it—had she not just been joking, perhaps? But why, then, had she started to weep, this unsentimental girl? No one weeps for a joke, and tears are very close to the truth.

He still had not been able to decide whether he should be glad or sorry. His feelings kept changing. It was naturally in many ways delightful to beget a young and promising son, a true scion of his line, but it was easier said than done suddenly to have to start playing the paterfamilias in these difficult times, not to mention for a man who had been planning to go to the secondary school in Aðalfjörður that autumn and even publish a book of poems. When he began to think of all the things he had to do in the near future—publish a book of poetry, educate himself, have a son, buy sheep, get a loan for a fishing boat, set up as a farmer, and many other things—he was sometimes assailed by pessimism as he worked in the meadow, and wanted only to throw away his scythe and lie down for good. He felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities of life. But suddenly her brisk laughter sounded in his ears and he saw her before him, just like the first time, standing in her doorway and kicking her legs in the air one after the other. Then he suddenly became optimistic again and felt that the world was only half a calfskin and the future an unbroken, sunshiny road—“How can I possibly think of despairing when she is by my side? Didn’t she have a solution for everything? Coffee, brown sugar, fish-gills—when didn’t she have enough of everything?” There was no darkness so black that she did not see a glimmer; the last time she left, she had torn the sackcloth from the window and said, “Daytime.” If she asked him for advice, it was just to test what he could do.

Probably she had already arranged to buy the cottage down by the sea without anyone knowing, yes, and the flowers on the roof, where they could live for the rest of their lives, just the two of them, in fact on the south side of the world and a little to one side of it, in shelter. In good weather he would row out into the fjord in the little boat and catch gleaming codlings for the pot. When the weather was bad he would sit in the living room and write famous books like Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík and earn distinction in distant parts of the country; perhaps even in France; luckily the weather was often bad. The golden-haired toddler played in the living room at the poet’s feet, but Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík unfortunately could not help being a little shy about that. It was certainly manly to have the title of father, but he could not conceal from himself the fact that he was rather afraid of small children and felt that he himself was really the only small child in the world who mattered at all. On the other hand, he had no doubt that Meya would supply both the cow and the coffee.

Why had she then started crying?

All day, just like that. He was extremely restless and preoccupied, did not know where he was, did not hear what was said, saw nothing with his eyes in bright daylight.

Ever since she had come to him for the first time, they had never missed three nights in a row. Tonight he sat at the window and waited for her impatiently. He had seldom felt more clearly than now that she was his life’s anchor, that without her he would go adrift and be shipwrecked in the next storm. Time passed, the late-summer night engulfed land and sea, but she did not arrive. First he was restless, then unhappy, finally apathetic; he leaned on the windowsill, buried his face on his elbow, and fell asleep. When he stirred again, sleep was stronger than unhappiness, and he threw himself down on the bed and slept on until his alarm clock rang in the morning. He gazed sadly out over the fjord, at the birds which had hovered over the smooth sea so many tranquil mornings after a happy night; all at once it was as if their wingbeats no longer concerned him. Why had she not come?

The following evening, when the day’s meaningless toil was over, he was determined to go to her house. Her face in the doorway, the sound of her voice, just one word—he felt that his very life was at stake. In the gathering dusk of late summer a secret unrest was stirring in all young hearts. Boys and girls were meeting one another again by complete accident on the road, and talking for a long time together about absolutely nothing at all, with bursts of laughter and rocking and slapping of thighs, and had never in all their born days ever heard anything like it and were going to die of laughing. Three young girls came walking towards him in the late-summer dusk. He saw at once that the girl walking in the middle was his girl. The others fell silent when they approached, but she went on talking. The other two looked at him, but she did not see him. They stared at him with the brazen curiosity with which girls look at a boy who they know has been with one of their friends far into the night, perhaps until morning. They seemed not so much to be wanting to taste him as to devour him completely. To his own girl, however, he was as totally invisible as he was a feast for the eyes of her companions. At first he had intended to greet her and call her by name and ask her to listen to even half a word. But in the face of this pretense he was at a loss what to do; he did not know if behind it there lay some purpose he was meant to understand. But he did not understand. Only one thing was perfectly clear, however: she did not want him to pay any heed to her, in word or greeting.

At the last moment, just as she was passing by, she suddenly stopped talking. She turned her face towards him and flashed him a look, just for a fraction of a second. Then she had gone past with her friends, and was carrying on with her story. He was left standing in the road with her look burning in his heart.

At first it occurred to him that he had made a mistake, perhaps it had been some other girl after all. He had never seen those eyes before. In the past, her eyes had contained all the sunshine of the days. It was as if behind her there echoed the green and fragrant forest; the expanse which lay open before her happy eyes had no night. And now? The defiant pride of youth was broken, life’s taut spring had slackened, the forest no longer echoed; and the expanse? One collided with things; and night had fallen. The eyes which looked at him tonight had been the eyes of a wounded animal. They were dominated by the dull and impersonal stupidity of pain; perhaps they do not even ask why, when their light is extinguished. His girl of the spring—that was how she walked past him in the autumn. Her companions looked back at him as he stood there in the road, but she did not look back.

It was Saturday night. He dreaded the thought of crawling into the darkness beside the rats and the feral cats. He wandered away and lay down somewhere on the moor. His sweetheart’s glance occupied his soul like a terrible disaster. There was autumn in the ground. He waited until sleep had laid its gentle hand on the seething unrest of the autumn and given the village peace.

When he felt sure that she would be in bed at home, he set off again. He walked up to her window. There was a white cloth before the window, above her bed, so that he could not see inside. He looked all around carefully before he dared knock on the window. When he felt sure that there were no prying eyes in the vicinity, he rapped on the window with his knuckles, first once, and then, after a wait, once again. Then he waited for a long time, but there was no reply. Eventually he rapped for a third time, harder than before. There was no sign of life. Finally he was seized by such panic that he battered on the window as hard as he could with his fists, as if there were a fire, and the blows were accompanied by that bittersweet anguish which accompanies some dreams.

Suddenly the quarryman, her father, rudely awoken, was standing in the doorway, pouring abuse over the poet. Finally, when the poet managed to stammer out his errand, the father said he had no intention of being made a fool of by dogs in heat, and threatened to go in and fetch his gun if he did not clear off this minute. Unfortunately it never occurred to the poet to stand his ground and wait to see if the man would come out with a real gun. It was not until many years later that it occurred to him that the man perhaps had not owned a gun at all. He took to his heels.

He was standing by the sea, out of breath from running, and was turning over in his mind whether she had been asleep in her bed while he had been at the window. If she had been at home, would she have humiliated herself and him by letting him wake her old father with his knocking? Would she rather not have lifted the curtain in good time and given him a sign to go away? But if she was not in her bed, where then was she in the middle of the night? Was she perhaps sitting with her companions somewhere down by the sea; were they perhaps talking about life as the summer waned, like other poets? But it could also be someone else. Why not someone else, just like him? She was a passionate girl and, besides, Ólafur Kárason had not been the first.

“Farther down the fjord here, if you walk for about an hour, there’s a little cottage. It stands right down by the high-water mark, all on its own. And there are flowers on the roof.” Is true love, then, not indivisible? Is it possible to love two people as she had loved? Or is love perhaps not true, but first and foremost twofold or threefold?

Why should this little cottage not stand right down by the high-water mark? Why should she not have arranged to buy the cottage without anyone knowing? Why should she not slip over there at night to weed the garden even though summer was almost over, or to put up curtains at the little window that faced the sea?

He wandered off, not up the fjord, but out by the sea, as she had said. The sky was cloudy, but it was not raining, and there was mist on the mountaintops, the murmur of the sea like the tranquil pulse of a supernaturally huge beast in its sleep, a swarm of terns on a sand-spit. There were bridle paths along the fjord, with the mountain on one side; sometimes the path had to climb a low mound, sometimes as it hugged the mountain it veered round a cliff. Sometimes at the water’s edge it had to round another cliff and was lost in the sands; he walked over the smoothed beach and the wet seaweed clung to his legs, and then he caught sight again of the path running up off the beach between rocks. He saw two cottages, but both of them stood right up by the mountain and he did not recognize them from the description; no, they were not her cottage. Her cottage stood down by the high-water mark, and there was a little landing place. He went on like this for a long, long time, long after it had begun to grow light. He saw many small landing places and bays, and he looked around carefully into every cranny, but there was no cottage. Then it was morning over the land with the sound of the sea heavier now, with a chilly breeze from the ocean, a cold, ponderous gull. He had been walking all night.

What if she were determined to forsake him? If she never wanted to see him again? Did not know him any longer? If he were to spend the rest of his life without her, alone?

It was she who had really given him life in the spring. She was the healing spirit who had nurtured him and revived him at her breast when he had no way out—the loving spirit that gives living creatures not only health and fertility but also hope and faith, and lifts our faces towards beauty itself at the same time as it clears the blindness from our eyes—she was not only his physical health, but also his spiritual life. Without her, no life.

It was a gray and dreary late-summer morning. He lay exhausted on the withered grass, and the swell washed over the stones in complete indifference, as if it were saying over and over again: It doesn’t concern me at all; it doesn’t concern me at all. Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.

You kissed my hand one twilit night
While autumn rains battered the ground,
Remorseless, deadening as a blight—
In autumn tears our love was drowned.

Your passion was a storm-tossed sea,
Fierce as the ocean’s raging tide
That crushes cli fs to sand and scree—
Till “Is it wrong?” you asked, and cried.

With morning came the daily round
Of pointless toil and dreary strife;
You left my bed without a sound
To start again your mundane life.

Yet you know well that he whose love was real
Was cut to the quick, and will not quickly heal.

He was not sure himself how he got home. But it was the soul’s good midwife, the Muse of poetry, who raised him to his feet and supported him and protected him. He woke up late in the day. It was Sunday. He was told that Vegmey Hansdóttir had been married at the pastor’s that day. Her husband was a fisherman-farmer from another village; that was their boat disappearing down the coast, under full sail.

19

Most of the board were agreed that there was now nothing else to do but to declare the Regeneration Company bankrupt and hand over its property to the bank to meet the claims for repayments and interest. By this decision, the Regeneration Company of Sviðinsvík was in effect wound up and turned into a Psychic Research Society.

A few wonderful late-summer weeks went by, with good drying weather for the hay, but unfortunately people did not know what they were drying; people brought in the hay, but did not know what they were bringing in. People had long ago mortgaged their homefield and the cow to the Regeneration Company, and now the Regeneration Company had become the property of the bank, along with the cow and the homefield. No one knew what the bank would do with the cow; as far as people knew, the bank was not a person and therefore not endowed with common sense. It was just as likely that it would slaughter the cow for the winter and sell the hay. What were people to think? Pétur Pálsson, the manager, was away traveling all over the place, on spiritualist expeditions and horse trading; the foreman went on drinking and did not care if the employees did not start work before midday; the whole estate hovered in limbo; only the hay showed any thrift and initiative, and dried of its own accord in the fine weather for the bank.

Some people were wishing and hoping that this much-discussed estate would be sold by auction before they were all dead. But then the same question was bound to arise that no one had been able to answer for years on end: who would buy it? Lopsided, ramshackle, rotting hovels on a gravel-bank and a slope, a palace for the winds of heaven, a fleet of ships at the bottom of the sea, millions owed to the bank, six hundred people and scarcely any potatoes—it was certainly no easy matter to find a good man who would care to buy such a useless place. From now on, every day was shorter than the last; soon it would be winter with snow hanging from the eaves, and what were they to use for firewood, not to mention footwear?

And then, all of a sudden, Pétur Pálsson the manager was seen strolling to and fro about the estate with a stranger: mysterious perambulations, frequent halts, speculations, much pointing with walking sticks, rocking and swaying from side to side. It was little wonder that hope now stirred again in some hearts. This was a distinguished gentleman wearing boots and a new coat and a broadbrimmed hat of a style unknown in Sviðinsvík; he did not have a dent in the crown like other people, but let the crown keep its full shape. The hope was that this man would now decide to buy the estate.

No, the manager had certainly not brought any small fry this time. This was nothing less than one of the big boys. This was Júel J. Júel, the son of the well-known Júel Júel: Grímur Loðinkinni* (Hairy-Cheek) Ltd.—two fishing stations up north and five trawlers. All the Grímur Loðinkinni trawlers had one virtue over the late lamented
Númi
—they could all catch fish. It was little wonder that the bank had greater confidence in Grímur Loðinkinni than in the people of Sviðinsvík whom that dreadful creature, the rat, had shipwrecked. Pétur Pálsson himself made it known that Júel J. Júel had half a mind to establish a station here at Sviðinsvík, but what kind of station no one seemed to be quite sure; some thought a whaling station, others said a herring station, and others a radio station. But everyone was agreed that any kind of station could save the estate.

As can be imagined, these base considerations had little effect on Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. He had more serious things to think about, having newly suffered a tremendous love sorrow. Few things are so enriching for the imagination, or altogether so maturing for the spiritual life as a whole, as suffering a love sorrow, especially for the first time.

So it was not because the grief-stricken poet was concerned about the present and future state of the village that destiny so arranged things that he should get to know the station owner himself, but for other reasons. He was summoned one day to act as groom for Pétur the manager and the distinguished visitor, who were going to ride over the mountain to pay a visit to the sheriff. The poet was provided with a pair of the manager’s cast-off riding boots and a tattered jacket of unknown origin to make him fit company for the gentry.

He was to look after the six riding horses which had been thought necessary for the journey, and to hold the stirrup when the gentry mounted. Júel J. Júel had his big hat on, and was in all other respects dressed with such distinction that Ólafur Kárason forgot his cares in amazement at this novel sight—that clothing should exist which did not seem primarily designed to show contempt for the human body, but the contrary. When he looked at this man, he felt in his heart like a wretched and clumsy farm implement beside some rare work of art, a chased and engraved ornament. He had not realized until now that there could be such a difference between two people on this earth. The station owner looked around with magnificent disdain, and smacked the house with his whip as he turned the corner. He lit a cigarette with a grimace of distaste on his handsome, polished face, pulled gloves over his manicured hands and stared at the same time with unqualified disdain and heartfelt boredom at Pétur
ríhross as he walked splay-footed and bent-kneed out of his house, wearing his morning coat, celluloid collar, pince-nez and bowler hat, with a half-chewed cigar between his gutta-percha dentures.

The journey began with Ólafur Kárason having to hold one of the manager’s fiery horses while Júel J. Júel mounted. But no sooner was the station owner in the saddle than he swung his whip with all his might at the horse’s groin, and the fiery beast was seized with panic, knocked Ólafur Kárason down as it reared, and disappeared in a flash up the road, right through the village, out onto the moor, over fences, bogs and earth slips, until it pulled up, trembling with terror, against another fence and looked round wild-eyed, whinnying. Júel J. Júel, on the other hand, had been left behind in the bog, and had lost his hat. He did not stand up when Pétur Pálsson came up to him, but pretended to be dead.

“A fall means fortune on the way,” said Pétur Pálsson, consolingly, and hauled the station owner out of the bog and laid him on a hummock and began to clean him up.

“Leave me alone, you damned fool!” said the station owner, when the manager began to scrape the mud off him with his pocketknife. “I’ve got a concussion.”

“You went off a little too fast,” said Pétur Pálsson.

“No, it was you who was trying to kill me with that damned hack,” said the station owner.

“He’s a very fine horse, my dear chap; he just doesn’t take to the whip too kindly,” said Pétur Pálsson.

“What the hell’s the use of having a horse if you can’t whip him?” said the station owner, and rose angrily to his feet. “I demand that you shoot the damned beast at once.”

“My dear friend and brother, no bad language,” said Pétur Pálsson. “We must remember to set off more slowly next time.”

“I’m not moving another step,” said the station owner. “I’ve got a concussion.”

“If a man’s got concussion, there’s nothing better than cognac,” said the manager.

“It’s my cognac,” said the station owner. “You don’t have to advise me to drink my own cognac. I decide what I do with my cognac.”

But Pétur Pálsson had no intention of losing his temper; he handled everything with great adroitness and psychological understanding, fetched the station owner’s hat from the bog, and began to examine it.

“This is a hell of a fine hat,” said Pétur Pálsson.

Júel J. Júel pulled out his handkerchief and dried his face sullenly.

“What did you pay for this hat?” asked Pétur Pálsson, and went on examining this treasure from every angle.

“Bring me the cognac,” said Júel J. Júel.

The manager opened a bag, brought out a bottle of cognac, and gave it to the station owner without a word, then continued his examination of the hat. The owner rummaged in his pocket for a corkscrew.

“Where can one get hats like this?” asked Pétur Pálsson, who had now turned out the sweatband to see how the lining was fastened inside it. “I simply must get myself a hat like this,” he said.

By the time the owner of the cognac had put the neck of the bottle to his mouth and was beginning to drink from it, Pétur Pálsson had become so enamored of the hat that he whipped off his own bowler in order to try on the station owner’s hat. But when the latter saw this he stopped drinking, tore his hat out of Pétur’s hands, and put it on.

“Let’s go!” he said.

He caught sight of Ólafur Kárason the poet at a distance, and asked why that good-for-nothing was standing there gaping, and shook his whip at him: “What are you gaping at? Be off with you at once and get the horses, or you’ll know all about it!”

The station owner was given another horse and they set off. He said he still had a concussion and refused to go at more than walking pace, and took care not to dangle his legs nor touch the pony’s groin, but sat hunched with the cigarette smoldering away in the corner of his mouth, with his hands in his pockets, and let the reins lie loose on the pony’s mane.

Pétur Pálsson suggested that they should dismount again soon and have a drop from the bottle. When they had ridden a few hundred yards, they halted again in a hollow not far above the village, where the road began to zigzag up into the pass. Júel J. Júel lay down flat on the ground with his hat over his face and began to utter all kinds of expressions of ill-temper and boredom. Pétur Pálsson did not spare the cognac meanwhile. Then Júel J. Júel half sat up and drank. When he had had a pull, and grumbled a little more, and had another pull, he said, “No, let’s be friends again, my dear Pétur,” and offered Pétur Pálsson his hand. Pétur Pálsson was seldom slow to accept a proffered hand when there was alcohol nearby, and indeed the handshake was long and firm and not unlike a betrothal ceremony. Then they drank again. Then Júel said, “Listen, Pétur, why didn’t you bring the damned girl along, too?”

“We are married men, my dear Júel,” said the manager piously, taking out his upper dentures, spraying snuff over them and thrusting them back into his mouth again. The station owner watched these proceedings with murder in his eyes, despite their newly pledged friendship and the handshakes.

“Eat shit!” he said.

“No bad language, dear friend,” said Pétur Pálsson the manager.

“I don’t call it much of an excursion when there are no women,” said the station owner. “I want that girl, do you hear me?”

“It’s not quite so easy to have her,” said the manager. “She’s not cheap, old friend.”

“Yes, perhaps with someone like you who hangs around her all day long and frightens her,” said the station owner.

“I know her from a spiritual standpoint,” said the manager. “I have been making scientific experiments with her for more than a year, first in private and now, recently, in public.”

“I would have had her a long time ago,” said the station owner, “if you hadn’t been nosing around in the corridor until all hours. What the devil were you nosing around in the corridor for?”

“Please don’t talk like that, my friend, we’re not only married men, but what’s more important, we are educated men,” said the manager.

“I’m turning back,” said Júel J. Júel.

“No, don’t do that, my dear Júel; I’m sure you wouldn’t treat the poor sheriff like that,” said the manager.

“To hell with the sheriff,” said the station owner.

“The roast’s waiting on the other side of the mountain,” said the manager.

“I want the girl,” said the station owner.

“The sheriff has a young wife,” said the manager.

The station owner wavered at that, and he said after a little thought, “Let’s be friends, my dear Pétur. You’re not so stupid as some people think. But that I should drink from the same bottle as you—never!”

They brought out another bottle and shook hands again for a long time and gazed into one another’s eyes like lovers, and the station owner said, “Grímur Loðinkinni never fails its friends.”

Eventually the manager leaned over to his friend and asked confidentially, “Has she told you how much she wants for it?”

“I don’t care a damn,” the other replied. “Money doesn’t matter if you need a woman—just don’t go wandering about in the corridor until all hours; it frightens her.”

“Are you prepared to pay her price?”

“Such as what?”

“Her price is a trip to England.”

“Yes, you’ve made her take leave of her senses. What the devil does she want to go to England for?”

“She wants to be world-famous. And I can well believe that she might become just that.”

“You must be out of your mind,” said Júel J. Júel.

“She has the most remarkable talents,” said the manager.

“It would be unthinkable in any civilized country to pay her more than five krónur,” said the station owner, and suddenly caught sight of the poet Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík.

“What’s that boy doing hanging around here, may I ask?”

“He’s a versifier and a harmless wretch I’ve taken under my wing,” said the manager. “Pay no attention to him.”

“He’s eavesdropping,” said the station owner. “If he doesn’t hop it to the horses at once, he’s going to catch it.” And he grabbed the whip, so that the poet jumped to his feet in alarm and hurried over to the horses.