When he went inside, he saw something sitting huddled up on a box in the entry. It did not move. It was a human being nevertheless. She had changed into her old dress with the holes in the elbows and was sitting with her hands in her lap, those mature, woman’s hands with their long bones and their peculiar thumb-knuckles. Her calves were too heavy, her hips too full for a girl of her age; it was easy to see that she was a grown woman. She was Madam of Myri’s grand-daughter. She did not look up when he crawled in through the door, did not move the hands in her lap. Was she sleeping in a heap there with her face in her bosom? Or was she afraid to look up and meet his eyes?
He struck her across the face. She cowered back and thrust one hand against the wall to prevent herself falling, shut her eyes and raised her hand to ward off a further blow, hid her face in the crook of her elbow. But he did not strike her again.
“Take that,” he said, “for the shame you have brought upon my land, the land that I have bought. But fortunately there is no drop of my blood in your veins, and therefore I will ask you to rear your bastards in the houses of those who are more nearly related to them than I am.”
“Yes, Father,” she said, gasping for breath; and standing up with her elbow in front of her face, she shrank away from him towards the door, “—I’m going.”
He went along the entry, climbed the ladder, stepped into the loft, and closed the trapdoor after him.
Yes, it was well that he had struck her and driven her away; his blow had been better than the thought of what was to come; now she knew what lay ahead of her, and what lay behind her. This blow of his had lifted a leaden weight from her heart, it had been a sort of confirmation. She stood on the paving surveying the spring night of life before her, like someone who is about to jump over a perilous ravine to save his life; with pounding heart, to be sure, but without weeping. No, it was not warm, it was very cold. There were showers on the heath, like dark walls that are built here and there and moved about. She looked to the east, but not to the west. Yes, he had beaten the uncertainty and the fear out of her body and her soul, and now she knew how she stood with him; now they both knew how they stood—and as if by revelation she realized, and felt that she would not have needed him to tell her, that in her veins there flowed no drop of his blood; the blow that he had given her at parting had been a moment of truth in both their lives. Until that moment the life of each of them had been, in its relation to the other’s, a false life, a life of lies. She had lived with him in troll’s hands, thinking that she was a troll herself. And now all at once she was standing outside his door and was discovering that she was not of the race of trolls. In one short moment she had been freed of this troll. She was only a human being, possibly a princess like Snow White and the other girls in fairy tales, and now she had nothing more to thank him for. Away.
When she had reached the marshes, she realized that she was wearing thin, worn shoes that were already soaking; and her old dress with the holes in the elbows; and nothing on her head; could such a bedraggled dale-girl really become a princess, as it says in the stories? No, it did not matter though she was wet. She did not look around at the croft. At least she was free, like the Princess, and had set out to find him whom she loved; this was the fairy tale of the dale-girl who had dreamed so much. She belonged to him alone. She would dwell with him all her days. She would never, never leave him. His bright house stood in a meadow by the sea, and she saw the ships coming and going. They, too, would go away on a ship one day. They would go to the lands that lie beyond the seas, for he owned lands there too, lands with sun-gilded palm-avenues. Yes, yes, yes. She would walk all night until early in the morning, and it would not matter if she walked her shoes off her feet; he would give her new shoes. She would not be long in finding his bright house in the meadow by the sea. She would knock on his door before he had risen from his rest, and he would hear that someone was knocking. “Who is there?” he asks. And she answers: “It is I.”
Her heart sang with joy as she crossed the marshes, she would never have believed that her steps could still have been so light; she flew, the heart in her breast flew. It flew to meet happiness, freedom, and love. She was the poor girl who would become a princess; no, she belonged to no one but him. Again and again she heard his whispering voice as he asked: “Who is there?” And again and again she answered: “It is I.” Light-footed she followed the path that wound its way up to the brow of the heath. She was no longer the dreaming child, newly bathed in the dew of a vague, unreal St. John’s Night; no, now she knew who she was; and where she was going. She was the woman in love who, having burned all bridges behind her, resorts now to her beloved. This was reality. This was love and the heath. Henceforth all that came to pass in her life would be true.
Love and the heath; there were still snowdrifts in the deep hollows, and the earth was muddy under the snow. A raw wind blew in her face. Soon her shoes were quite useless, and her feet grew very sore. She felt thirsty and drank from a pool beside a snowdrift, it had a nasty taste. Then she grew hungry. Then tired. Then sleepy. Suddenly she was in the middle of an ice-cold shower; it was sleet; she could not see a yard in front of her, and in a few seconds she was soaked through. She began to feel afraid. For the heath is also frightening. Perhaps it is life itself. Across her mind there flashed the thought of her brother Helgi, he who had been lost on the moors and never found. Many people perish on the heath. Her father could not perish on the heath—but suddenly she remembered that he was not her father, but a troll. That was why he could not be afraid either. It was she who was afraid, she who might perish. Terror banished hunger and all desire for sleep, and she began to wonder whether it might not have been wiser, when all was said and done, to throw her arms round his neck when he struck her and ask for mercy. She tried to forget her dread and to think of his bright house by the sea—what house? Was it not a dark hovel standing on a spit by the sea that he had mentioned, and many starving children? No, it was most assuredly a bright house in a meadow by the sea, it must be; his bright house on heaven and earth. Soon the sun would rise, and she would stand at his door in the rays of the morning sun, and there would be ships on the sea, and he would call out and ask: “Who is there?” But at that very moment she saw far in the distance the glint of the heath’s little tarn. The shower was passing over, and that must be the lake of unpleasant dreams; oh, why should one have to dream of such a dismal lake when one was miserable and unhappy, instead of dreaming of the ocean itself? So this was all the distance she had covered, this lonely, sore-footed wanderer of hope, and there were miles upon miles to cover yet, and she drank more water from a pool and stood up with difficulty, and then she hears the voice of her beloved as he calls to her from within his bright house and asks. He asks: “Who is there?” And she answers for the thousandth time and says: “It is I.”
Bjartur of Summerhouses did not take his clothes off that night, but went out at intervals of an hour to see to the two ewes that he had left in the home-field the evening before. At one o’clock old Kapa had lain down and was chewing the cud, but the other hoyden had made off up the mountainside and was now right under the crags. She had lain down, however, and her lamb was lying beside her. There was calm over everything; the first morning birds had begun their song, but most of them were still silent.
Yes, it was just as he had thought, old Kapa had been on the heavier side. Early in the morning she dropped three lambs, and these poor mites were now struggling to rise to their feet and get at her udders while she stood and licked them at the bottom of the home-field. It is pretty good work for an old ewe to have triplets; she had lived through many things with Bjartur, this old sheep, weathering worms and famine and ghosts, and now she had duly delivered her three lambs into the world as if nothing had ever happened. He thanked his lucky stars that he had allowed her to profit from her qualities as a leader and had not slaughtered her last autumn. Thus did she show her gratitude, poor creature. Triplets made a lot of difference when one’s stock was
so depleted. But there was very little in her udders, poor brute, she had grown so old. He warmed up the milk that he had kept from the previous evening and carried the lambs under his arm home to the paving. The ewe followed, bleating anxiously, for animals are mistrustful of man, even when he wishes them well. He sat down on the flags with the lambs between his knees and began to spit the milk into them through a quill. Heavens, how tiny their mouths were! Life was not much to boast about, especially when one examined it with a critical eye. The ewe stood on the grass some yards away, watching him suspiciously. She had always been rather a shy creature and had never been dependent on man; she was one of the Reverendgudmundur breed of course. But when she saw what the man was doing she drew nearer and nearer; she fastened upon him her large, intelligent eyes of black and yellow, full of motherly tension. Sympathy has perhaps no alphabet, but it is to be hoped that one day it will be triumphant throughout the whole world. It may be that this was by no means a remarkable heath and by no means a particularly remarkable croft on the heath, but nevertheless incredible things happened occasionally on this heath; the man and the animal understood each other. This was on Whit Sunday morning. The sheep came right up to him where he sat with her lambs in his arms, sniffed affectionately at his hard-featured face, and mewed a little into his beard with her warm breath, as if in gratitude.
PART II
Years of Prosperity
WHEN FERDINAND WAS SHOT
THIS so-called World War, perhaps the most bountiful blessing that God has sent our country since the Napoleonic Wars saved the nation from the consequences of the Great Eruption and raised our culture from the ruins with an increased demand for fish and whale-oil, yes, this beautiful war, and may the Almighty grant us another equally beautiful at the earliest possible liioment—this war began with the shooting of a scruffy little foreigner, a chap called Ferdinand or something, and the death of this Ferdinand was taken so much to heart by various ill-disposed citizens that they kept on hacking one another to pieces like suet in a trough, for four consecutive years and more. And in the little loft in Summerhouses, where on the occasion of the Shepherds Meet there had assembled once more all those indomitable warriors who themselves had waged a lifelong unremitting struggle much more serious than any World War, and one that was prosecuted for reasons far weightier than that any Ferdinand should ever have been assassinated, this war was now the theme of debate.
“But don’t you think they ought to have been glad to be rid of the bastard?” asked Bjartur.
“I shouldn’t care to say,” replied Einar of Undirhlith. “They reckon he was the king of some small country or other, whose name I can never remember, but I’m not saying he was any the better man for that. We Icelanders have never had any great respect for kings, except perhaps Fell Kings, for everyone is equal before God; and as long as a farmer can call himself an independent man and no one else’s slave, so long can he call himself his own king. But one thing at least is certain about this Ferdinand or whatever you call him: he was always a man, poor fellow. And I don’t think it becomes a Christian to use bad language about him. A man is always a man.”
“Well, apart from this one fellow and his name, whatever it may have been,” said Krusi of Gil, “what I could never understand about this business was why the others had to start squabbling simply because this bastard of a Ferdinand was shot.”
“Oh, let them squabble, damn them,” said Bjartur. “I only hope they keep it up as long as they can. They aren’t half so particular about what they eat now that they’re face to face with the realities of life. They’ll eat anything now. They’ll buy anything from you. Prices are soaring everywhere. Soon they’ll be buying the muck from your middens. I only hope they go on blasting one another’s brains out as long as other folk can get some good out of it. There ought to be plenty of people abroad. And no one misses them.”
“Oh, there are ideals in war too, though they may not be particularly noticeable,” said Einar apologetically, for to him Bjartur invariably seemed a thought too forceful in expression, whether in prose or verse. “Bjartur,” he added, “you who are an old ballad enthusiast ought to know that there is always an ideal lying behind every war, though that ideal may not loom very large in the eyes of men who have more serious things to think about.”
“Ideal?” asked Bjartur, and did not understand the word.
“Well, significance, then,” said Einar in explanation.
“Huh, you’re the first I’ve ever heard say that there was any significance behind these wars of theirs nowadays. They’re just madmen, pure and simple. It was another matter altogether in the olden days, when your heroes sailed off perhaps to distant quarters of the globe to fight for a peerless woman, or anything else that they considered some sort of flower in their lives. But such is not the case nowadays. Nowadays they fight just from sheer stupidity and obstinacy. But, as I’ve said before, stupidity is all right as long as other people can turn it to account.”
“There may be a good deal in what you say, Bjartur,” said the Fell King then, “but I think it behoves us also to examine this war from rather a different point of view. What we have to realize is that such a World War is accompanied not only by great blessings, such as the extra money we farmers now make on all our produce, but also by extensive damage and all sorts of hardship in the countries in which it is being waged, as for instance the other day there when they destroyed that cathedral in France, a magnificent edifice that had stood there for upwards of a hundred years.”
“What the hell does it matter to me if they destroy the cathedral in France?” cried Bjartur, spitting contemptuously. “They’re more than welcome for me. They could shell Rauthsmyri Church itself and I still wouldn’t give a damn.”
“Unfortunately it isn’t the cathedral alone,” said the Fell King. “They say they don’t even think twice about blowing whole cities to pieces. Just think, for instance, of the amount of gold and jewels alone that must be destroyed if a large city, London or Paris for instance, is razed to the ground. Think of all those marvellous palaces of theirs. And all the libraries.”
“Well, they don’t destroy the gold and the jewels for me. And they don’t blow up the palaces for me. And as for the libraries, they tell me that both mice and worms have been busy eating up the parish library here for the past ten years. It didn’t require a war.”
“Then what about all the valuable statues that must be destroyed when a city is shelled?”
“Statues, what the hell are statues? When the devil did you ever see a statue?”
The Fell King was slow to answer, for the truth was that he had never actually seen a real statue; none of them knew precisely what a statue was, save that Madam of Myri had once been heard talking about a statue and Thorir of Gilteig’s eldest daughter had bought a little china dog many years before. “Yes, that reminds me, china—”
“Oh, it’s all to the good if they start smashing rubbish like china, which is nothing but a rotten fraud and a swindle,” said Bjartur, who no longer regretted anything. “I don’t see why I should worry if a gang of foreigners have to start drinking out of ordinary bowls or enamelled mugs. I’ve done it all my life and thrived well on it.”
“Now, if I were to give you my opinion,” said Thorir of Gilteig, “I should say that this war was being waged principally to give a dissolute rabble the chance to invade other people’s countries and rape all the foreign women. I heard from a man who was abroad for some time that these swine of soldiers and generals are the most lecherous beasts that ever crawled on the face of the earth. And some of the stories I have heard about these military whoremongers are such that it would be pointless to repeat them; no one in Iceland here would believe them. I have three daughters myself, I’m saying no more about it, it isn’t my fault the way that things have gone, but I’ve often thanked my lucky stars lately that at least no Franco-German generals have ever forced their way into the country to practise their abominable manoeuvres on our innocent daught
ers.”
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