But at this point Einar of Undirhlith intervened to say that he hoped they would forgive him if he felt that talk of this kind was rather unspiritual at such a solemn moment, when mysterious powers had just trespassed upon their lives in unique fashion. “Are we then completely incapable,” he went on to ask, “however much the Lord admonishes us, of forgetting, our lives of hunger, debt, and consumption even at such a serious moment?”
“I didn’t begin it, so you needn’t blame me,” retorted Olafur. “Anybody will tell you that I’m the sort of chap who is prepared at any time to dismiss all frivolity and concentrate on serious matters; but it isn’t so very easy to talk with authority, or even knowledge, when you’re so poor that you’re completely cut off from all cultural communication with the outside world, and when in addition you have to suffer the same home conditions as I have, the children consumptive as everybody knows, and the wife practically on her last legs, not that she has anything to do with the question. It’s just ten years since I was forced to resign from the Patriots’ Association, the only society that I ever managed to be connected with. And that so-called reading club that we used to have here at one time has long since gone completely to rack and ruin. Some folk say the rats have got into it. Whether that’s true I don’t know, but it’s an undisputed fact that no one has dared to open the cupboards for the past five years, so personally I don’t see how anyone in this part of the country can possibly have anything to say with very much sense in it, the way things are now.”
Einar of Undirhlith felt that we ought in that case to make good use of the present moment, for we were now in the company of educated men, the minister for instance, “and the minister, if I know him at all well, is the sort of gentleman who I am sure will readily excuse my lack of learning, despite the fact that the Reverend Gudmundur of blessed memory went to his grave without ever forgiving me for my ignorance. But the question I was wanting to ask was this: How does it come about that certain souls can never find peace, either on the heights, on the surface of the earth, or in the depths of the ocean?”
“Why, I expect it’s because there’s a devil in them,” replied Krusi of Gil briskly, long before the minister had managed to decide on a suitable answer. Several of the others countered with their opinions, though without shedding much light on the problem, and Olafur of Yztadale even referred to a book, several pages of which a friend of his had once obtained as wrapping-paper around some cups, in which it was flatly denied, according to evidence furnished by foreign scientists, that evil so much as existed.
“Now, really, Olafur, really,” said the Fell King, “that’s an assertion I would never dream of making, at least in the present circumstances. I for one have always believed that both good and evil exist, and, as the Mistress of Myri, a highly educated woman as everyone knows, has constantly emphasized in speeches both private and public, a belief in the existence of good and evil is said to be part of the Persian religion also. On the other hand, I consider that the world’s invisible powers are not nearly so good in their main points as they are usually reputed to be, and probably not nearly so evil either. Don’t you think they’re more likely to be somewhere more or less half-way between, Olafur?”
The minister, who had now had time to think things over, suggested that it was more in conformity with modern thought to suppose, as he had already pointed out during the procession, that they were here dealing with unhappy souls that were driven from one world to another like outlaws.
But now it was Einar of Undirhlith who had had more than he could stand.
“No, your reverence,” cried he, “this is where I am not afraid to tell you, on my own conscience and responsibility, that you have gone too far. It may be true that the late Reverend Gudmundur was never very friendly towards me and that he paid Uttle or no attention to the poor religious verses that I wrote, not for praise or fame, but for my own spiritual solace; but though he was very severe on uneducated men, no one needed to be in any doubt as to his creed: he wasn’t the man to lend an ear to any sort of balderdash simply because it was supposed to be modern, and he would certainly have been the last person on earth ever to soil his lips with the statement that Satan and his missionaries were nothing worse than unhappy souls. Though he had good rams and fat sheep, he never got muddled up between unrelated objects; he knew who it was he believed in, which is maybe more than can be said for some of you young clergymen who believe in anything as long as it’s new-fangled.”
The Reverend Teodor then had to try to convince Einar that the modern theologians also knew whom they believed in, though possibly they worded their ideas rather differently from the old theologians.
“May I ask the minister one question, then:” said Einar, gradually growing bolder. “Do you believe everything it says in the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike?”
The minister: “You may rest assured, Einar, that I believe everything in both Testaments. I believe in the New Testament. And I believe also in the Old Testament.”
Einar of Undirhlith: “Might I then ask you another question? Do you believe for instance that Jesus, God’s Son, raised Lazarus from the dead after he had begun to rot in the grave?”
The Reverend Teodor bethought himself for a moment, wiped the sweat from his brow, and finally said with great conviction:
“Yes, I believe that Jesus, God’s Son, raised Lazarus from the dead after he had lain at least three days in the grave. But naturally I am of the opinion that in that time he hadn’t really rotted very much.”
“Oh, what’s it matter whether the poor old devil had begun to jot or not,” cried Olafur in his piping gabble. “I should have thought the main thing was that he came back to life again. Anyway, since the minister is one of the company and we’re waiting for a drop of coffee and I don’t suppose I'll get to bed much before daylight in any case, I’d like to profit from the opportunity the same as Einar and ask the minister a little question. What exactly are your views about the soul, Reverend Teodor?”
The minister shook his head with a tortured smile, then said that on the whole he had no special views about the soul, only the good old views, the soul yes the soul, the soul naturally was in a way immortal, and if it wasn’t immortal, well, it wouldn’t be a soul.
“Oh, I know that already,” said Olafur, quite unimpressed by this answer. “That’s exactly what they told Jon Arason just before they chopped his head off. But now I’m going to tell you something that I have on the authority of a reliable southern newspaper which a friend of mine lent me last year; and that is that they reckon it’s nothing unusual nowadays for dead souls to enter into the furniture in the houses of highly placed men in Reykjavik.”
Good old Olafur, always the same, no end to the claptrap he would believe as long as he saw it in print. Some of the crofters shook their heads and laughed.
“Yes, laugh,” he cried, “laugh if you want to. But can you point to one single instance where I’ve made any assertion without having the best possible authority for it? Of course they enter into famous people’s furniture in Reykjavik, and that’s as true as I’m sitting here. The funny thing about you folk hereabouts is that you refuse to believe anything that happens more than a hundred yards from your own cow-shed door; you credit not a single solitary thing, physical or spiritual, except what you either see or don’t see in your own wretched cow-barns.”
The minister was inclined to back Olafur up. In apologetic tones he said that, much as it was to be regretted, eminent men in the south had undoubtedly noticed some rather strange things about their furniture lately, but whether it was correct to say that souls were the cause of it was another question altogether. Some authorities suggested that they might possibly be vagrant spirits who had not been allowed to see the light of heaven.
Olafur, passionately: “Now I’d like to ask the minister one thing. What is a soul? If you cut the head off an animal does its soul rush out of the top of its spine and wing its way up to heaven like a fly? Or is the soul like a
pancake which you can roll up and swallow again like Bjarni the Liar is supposed to have done? How many souls has any one man? Did Lazarus die a second time? And how does it come about that souls, or whatever they ought to be called, behave politely to important officials in Reykjavik while they do nothing but molest poor peasants in the valleys?”
But at this very moment, when the soul was beginning firmly to take root in the conversation, the master of the house stuck his head through the hatchway and looked around the crowded room. It was a scene from which he appeared to derive little pleasure. With one blow he cut the scientific knot that his old friend Olafur of Yztadale had just placed before the assembly:
“I am off to bed now,” he said, “and so are my family. We haven’t the patience to listen to any more of your rubbish about the soul this Christmas. And if in future you need to bawl any more hymns, then may I ask you to go and bawl them elsewhere. I have sent for the authorities. It is they who will find the guilty person and punish him. And when you have gone from here tonight, I hope you will look upon this visit as if it had never been made. Off with the kettle, Sola lass. I don’t know these people, nor did they come to see me.”
He did not acknowledge his best friends that night; he drove them to the door. And they did not recognize their old friend either, or rather the deadly, frozen hatred in the eyes of the man who had entered at the moment when they had lost sight of natural reasoning; and it was he, this man, who seemed suddenly to have understood everything and who now asked for nothing more except the authorities. Shamefaced and fumbling, like pantry-thieves caught red-handed, mumbling, forgetting even their farewells, old friends and new friends alike crept one after another down the stairs and, disbanding on the snowdrift outside, went their different ways. The moon had disappeared; there was no enchantment left, no coffee, no anything.
And, strange though it may seem, this night was rarely heard mentioned in the district afterwards. It fell straightway out of history in the same fashion as the bull reindeer that Gudbjartur Jonsson rode once upon a time over Glacier River on the moors. In the days that followed, when bearded, moss-covered men met by chance at home or out in the open, they cast one another a quick, embarrassed glance, like a boy and a girl who went too far last night but are resolved that it will never happen again. Even many years later this night still lay on the parish like an unhappy stain; it lived on at the bottom of their consciousness like a morbid fancy, heavy with shame and guilt—the livid, flickering shadows, the eyes of legend, the blasphemous singing of hymns, coffee that never came, the soul; and Bjartur of Summerhouses, who denied his friends when they had forgathered to attack his enemy, Kolumkilli.
JUSTICE
WITH this victory of Gudbjartur Jonsson’s there was an end, for the time being at least, of all spectral activity on the moors. As a man cuts down worm-diseased sheep in the spring, so did he cut down both religion and philosophy on the night when he drove the parish to the door and ordered his children to bed. Some folk say that he also hanged the cat. If the ghost thought that Bjartur would lose heart, sell out and seek a new home because of this second disaster to his sheep, then he was due for a disappointment. The devil had had all his trouble for nothing, Bjartur stood firm as a rock. And though he suffered a great loss in the engagement, the crofter learned never to yield an inch of ground. What followed now was merely the aftermath of events that had already taken place.
It was the shortest day. The sky grew overcast during the morning, with low clouds, snow-charged and threatening, hanging half-way up the mountain slopes. No wondrous gleam lit soul or landscape; there was only a little midday no sooner come than gone, yet how much darkness was needed to wrap it round! And the Sheriff was expected soon. The crofter gave no one his orders for today’s work; it was as if he wished to await the decision of the authorities as to who was master here, he or Kolumkilli; but all the same little Gvendur followed him out with the bitch when he went to feed his few remaining sheep. The eldest boy sat by the window, knocking his knees together and staring in silence at an old drawing scratched on the table. He did not speak even when spoken to, let alone think of doing a hand’s turn at the yarn on the spindle, and little Nonni, who sat knitting beside his grandmother, looked at him and, understanding him in the subtle, inexplicable way that reaches farther than words or images, went over to him consolingly.
“Helgi,” he said, “don’t fret about it. The Sheriff can’t do anything with a ghost.”
And when the eldest brother made no reply, little Nonni sat down again beside his grandmother. No story; no hymn; only a trivial mumble that no one understood.
Presently the Bailiff arrived from up-country to meet the Sheriff from down-country, for a judicial inquiry was to be held. But so far there was no Sheriff to be seen, rather had it begun to snow, and the Bailiff was sullen and abusive and had no time for this sort of nonsense, and it was very doubtful whether that blasted old Sheriff would risk his precious carcass on the moors in this weather, university men crawl back to bed as soon as they see a sprinkling of snow. The Bailiff lay down on the parents’ bed; he was in long snow-stockings and called to Asta Sollilja to pull them off for him. Neither was in a pleasant mood, visitor or crofter—you’re always in some damned mess, said the former to his host as he fished about for his tobacco-box; if it isn’t dying wives and starving sheep, it’s rampant fiends and raging devils; and the crofter replied that as far as death and devils are concerned, mate, I have never asked anyone to come along here and bawl their guts out with prayers and spiritual balderdash in the middle of the night, to the ridicule of God and men and the eternal disgrace of the whole parish. All I ask for is the justice that every free man is entitled to in a free country. Every year the authorities apply to me for taxes, but this is the first time that I apply to the authorities for anything, so I consider that I owe them nothing, and don’t have to put up with any of your lip.
“Look here,” said the Bailiff, adjusting the quid in his mouth with his tongue, “you ought to sell this lousy hole back to me and swindle me a second time.”
But after the emotional turbulence of the past few days Bjartur was determined to meet everything with equanimity. The Bailiff was not to be allowed to nettle him. “Yes, old boy,” he replied compassionately, “you always would have your little joke, wouldn’t you?”
The Bailiff: “I don’t see why you should bother keeping such a paltry venture going any longer now. Your two wives are dead, your sheep dead, your youngsters dead and worse than dead. What the hell’s the sense of it all? And there stands poor Solbjort or whatever you call her, almost a grown woman, heathen, illiterate, and no move made to have her confirmed yet.”
“It’s something fresh,” commented Bjartur, “this desire of yours to have people Christianized. Maybe you feel you’ve arrived at an age when you’d better be prepared for anything.”
“You needn’t worry yourself about that,” replied the Bailiff. I’ve always kept my Christianity before me, and I demand that others also should have the Christianity necessary to bring them within the rule of the law. I’ve always had a picture of Christ hanging in my room, a picture that was left me by my mother” (“Yes, and one of the Russian Czar, too,” interposed Bjartur)—“yes, one of the Russian Czar, and I'll have you know that the Russian Czar is a highly respected sovereign who has always ruled his subjects well, and that they at least aren’t a gang of stubborn heathen who call ghosts and monsters down upon their heads in the way you do.”
“Huh,” snorted Bjartur. “Grettir Asmundarson was never considered much of a religious hero in his day, and yet he was avenged all the way south in Miklagard, and acclaimed as the greatest man Iceland ever had for that very reason.”
But far from deigning to answer such irrelevant nonsense, the Bailiff took the quid out of his mouth and signified his intention of lying down for a while, I'll have more to say to you when I wake up, swung his legs on to the bed, turned his face to the wall.
“Mix up a few dun
g cakes for the authorities, Sola lass,” said Bjartur as he went out to see to his work; and the snow grew gradually heavier, and day went on passing somehow, anyhow, or nohow, with deepening snow and sleeping Bailiff and Sheriff expected soon.
The most unpleasant feature of mid-winter is not its darkness. More unpleasant still, perhaps, is that it should never grow dark enough for one to forget the endlessness of which it is a symbol; the endlessness that in reality is akin to nothing but justice itself; which fills the world, like justice, and, like justice, is inexorable. Mid-winter and justice are two sisters; one realizes best of all in the spring, when the sun shines, that they were both evil. Today is the shortest day. Perhaps those who manage to survive this day will be safe, let us hope so. Today is also the day of justice, and the little people in the little croft are awaiting the justice that fills the world and is void of understanding. It is the father who has sent for justice. He who makes hay for his sheep has justice on his side, the sheep are the sheep of justice; and though a mother be coffined and children be planted in the churchyard, yet justice is in the sheep and in the sheep alone. Whether it be he who loves dreams and the soul, or he whose hopes are centred on revolt, justice is inimical to both of them, because they had not the wit to conquer; and because justice is stupid in its nature; and evil; nothing so evil; one need only listen to the Bailiff sleeping to realize that, one need only smell the cakes that are being baked for justice and its officers. And the eldest son of Summerhouses closes the door after him.
The Bailiff was still asleep, snoring loudly; one would think this elderly man with the strong, chiselled face had not had a decent sleep for a whole lifetime. Sola girl, haven’t you a bit of brisket for the Bailiffs guts when he wakes up?—For there was no need to be sparing with the meat in Summerhouses this winter, every keg and every case was bursting with this delicacy, which no one would buy because it was dead meat. Dead meat be damned, of course it wasn’t dead meat, there was nothing the matter with the meat, except for the mark that stupidity and superstition had stamped upon it. Anyway, well stuff the authorities and let them decide. Where’s Helgi?
Independent People Page 38