There were not many who could have boasted before now of knowing much about Pétur Pálsson’s ancestry—even genealogists reckoned that some of the most important branches of his family tree were uncertain. The only thing the public knew for sure about his family was that his grandmother, Madame Sophie Sørensen, had occasionally made herself heard at seances during the time when the Psychic Research Society of Sviðinsvík was flourishing. About the lady’s nationality there seemed to be some ambiguity. When Pétur Pálsson was drunk he asserted that she was Danish and that he was therefore no Icelander; but at the Psychic Research Society, learned people had thought that the old lady’s speech had inclined more toward some unidentified language such as Faroese or Norwegian, and on the only occasion on which Madame Sophie’s mother, the manager’s great-grandmother, had appeared at the Psychic Research Society, there had been various indications that the ancestry was French. The poet Ólafur Kárason had been present when the ladies had made themselves heard from the next world; it therefore came as a considerable surprise to him suddenly to hear Madame Sophie Sørensen now being talked about as if she were still alive, and so for a long time he could not believe his own ears. He got the impression that the woman was not nearly as deceased as she had pretended to be at the Psychic Research Society, but was somehow present in this part of the country, even here in the village, although she unfortunately did not seem to enjoy the best of health. He realized, certainly that there was no little secrecy about the elderly lady’s health, and indeed about her whole existence; but often when the postmaster became extremely drunk he would allow some of his closest cronies to see copies of the telegrams concerning Madame Sophie Sørensen’s health that Pétur Pálsson was now sending to his relatives in the south, sometimes daily, sometimes at intervals of only a few hours.
When the postmaster was questioned more closely about these telegrams he did not reply directly, but let it be understood that he knew more about the affairs of the ríhross kin than was good for anyone outside the family circle to know. In this way he had for years had knowledge of the grandmother’s health from one day to the next, and knew every detail of her multifarious setbacks and recoveries. People believed that a not unusual day in Madame Sophie Sørensen’s life went like this: at dawn she woke up with an epileptic fit, by midmorning she had dyspnea, at noon she had a slight stroke, by midafternoon she had broken both thighs, but by evening she had gone out for a stroll to Aðalfjörður and sent her greetings to her friends and acquaintances. . . .
“What’s all this damned nonsense!” said one man. “As if any person in their right mind would set off for a stroll just before nightfall over mountains and deserts to Aðalfjörður and with both thighs broken at that!”
The man who had got the story from a friend of the postmaster’s replied by asserting that there could be no mistake about it, for on the very next day a telegram had come for Pétur Pálsson from relatives in Aðalfjörður to the effect that grandmother had arrived there last night and was feeling well, but that she could easily take a turn for the worse in the morning. No sooner had Pétur ríhross received this telegram than he had wired to relatives in the south: “Grandmother in good health in Aðalfjörður, could perhaps get a touch of appendicitis tomorrow.”
One person laughed louder than anyone else over Madame Sophie Sørensen’s health. He laughed in ascending cascades, and in between he looked around with tears in his eyes, ready to laugh more; he made no other contribution to the discussion. This was Hjörtur of Veghús.
Beside him sat a fair-haired girl in a blue dress, with a large face and a complexion that had a suggestion of coarseness, slightly oblong dimples, and brilliant eyes under those strong, thick eyebrows. Her expression bore witness to a passionate temperament; her silence was full of vehemence, almost articulate. It was the unknown girl who had spoken to Ólafur Kárason at the fish yards. Across from her, three seats away, sat Jens the Faroese, gazing at her in wonder as if he scarcely believed that such a girl could be true. Then Ólafur Kárason realized that this must be the girl to whom he had composed the love poem, the Jórunn Hjartardóttir of Veghús who was a greater thief than all the foreign and inland trawlers put together. She had powerful shoulders and a sturdy bosom, curved breasts that sat high.
“Had I known she looked like that, I would have written a very different poem,” thought the poet.
Someone said it would surely be easy to get the postmaster drunk enough to pump him of everything he knew. But that was no longer possible. Someone else explained that Pétur Pálsson the manager had recently signed the pledge with the postmaster.
“What, has Pétur ríhross taken the pledge now?” asked one man, thunderstruck, as if a comet had been sighted and the Last Day were at hand.
“Yes, and even given up tobacco and coffee,” said someone else.
“Good God!” said many of them. “Has he gone completely mad?”
“He says it’s to keep the aura pure.”
“Aura? What the devil’s that?”
“It’s a halo, like the one round the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary; it vanishes if you take snuff.”
“Poor fellow,” said one man. “I know for a fact that since he gave up tobacco he goes around with a quid under his tongue and secretly swallows the juice.”
Then someone else said, “You’ll all have heard, of course, about this new stuff he’s got; it’s called vitamins and it’s meant to be better than anything else that’s ever been known before, including snuff, chewing tobacco, women and brennivín.”
Hjörtur of Veghús laughed so much you could see right down his throat, but his daughter frowned and clucked her tongue with displeasure. Someone had heard that this vitamins business was a new way of fooling the people.
“No, it’s not entirely a hoax,” said one, “because otherwise he wouldn’t be eating the stuff himself all day. He’s even got hold of some litmus ribbon from Germany which he has to moisten in a particular way which I would describe more fully if there weren’t any ladies present; if the moisture produces the right color in the ribbon, the body and the soul have had their fill of vitamins and have regained complete health.”
Now everyone who could laugh began laughing, but Hjörtur of Veghús sat with tears in his eyes and his mouth open and could not laugh any more, while his daughter snorted and bridled.
The parish officer now began to speak and said he had not intended people to come here to amuse themselves; he said that on the whole he himself did not feel like laughing, and indeed it was not right under any circumstances to be facetious in these very grave times for the whole nation. He said he had been building boats for people here so that they could make a living, not to have their living stolen from them. He said that if people had well-founded suspicions that a conspiracy was at work here with the object of helping poachers to evade the fishery patrol boats and starve out the nation, then he would do his best to bring the sheriff into the matter, but he said he did not care in the slightest how Pétur ríhross passed his water.
“Hear, hear!” people said, and became serious again.
One other matter was no less urgent than the violation of the fishing limits, and Pétur Pálsson was involved in that as in everything else. As everyone knew, the manager was the government’s agent as regards the estate, and the estate’s agent as regards the government. He had never been so firmly in the saddle as since Júel J. Júel had become his Member of Parliament and stood in his stirrups down south. Among other things he had a completely free hand with all government enterprises here on the estate. At long last they were about to start building a breakwater, and for that, cement and iron had to be bought with the government grant; that would lead to reduced employment; it would lead to a reduction in wages. The parish officer said that this was tantamount to forbidding people to reduce their debts to the parish, apart from the fact that it could be the beginning of total destitution in the village.
One after another, people vied with one another to repe
at the main points of the case: the outlook was terrible; not a fish out of the sea, the foreigners were catching not only the Sviðinsvík people’s fish but also their fishing gear; the nation was in danger; but what was all that compared to the fact that Pétur ríhross was now going to squander this destitute parish’s government grant on luxury wares and extravagances like cement and iron! And anyway, what was the point of starting to build a breakwater—what ships were going to sail into that harbor? The few tubs that existed would be better in the fire than on the sea. One man asserted that this harbor which had given people the opportunity of shifting rock for a decade would never come to anything; the site the government engineer had chosen for it was on dry land except at high tide; there was every likelihood that the harbor would be more suitable for growing potatoes than for docking ships. Hjörtur of Veghús had started laughing again.
The poet listened to the meeting in a trance, thankful that it was not turning out to be a plot against the government or something even worse, and was happy to be away from his home for a while. He envied Hjörtur of Veghús for being able to succeed on his own at anything he chose to do while at the same time finding all problems laughable. In the sensitive eyes of his new-found daughter, the father’s unquenchable vitality expressed itself in a fanatical expectation of great but undefined things.
Everyone felt that something had to be done, and several proposals were put forward: to send a telegram to the government, to write to Júel, to talk to Pétur ríhross. But all these had been tried umpteen times on similar occasions, without any visible results. Finally, some of the men had got the idea that the best solution would be to form a union; they had heard reports of successful unions in various other places. Others opposed the forming of a union, and cited the societies which had previously been established here on the estate, such as the late Regeneration Company which had brought everything to ruin, and the Psychic Research Society which followed in its wake and was to give people an afterlife here on the estate but had only achieved one thing before it passed away— the resurrection of two murderers. Someone asked, “How can we here in Sviðinsvík form a union against the government, the manager and foreign countries all at once?” Another maintained that unions and associations would be no earthly use until there was a radical change in the attitudes of each individual. The parish officer was in favor, up to a point, of the idea of forming a union to back their demands, but he said there was one drawback to laborers’ unions which called for the utmost care: he foresaw the danger that such unions might use their strength against society as a whole, which was surely in dire enough straits already.
“What damned society?” shouted Jens the Faroese.
“The thieves’ society!” said one cynical man by way of explanation.
The parish officer said there were examples in other places of unions being formed against society in general.
Someone said the time had come to overthrow the dogs who were always stealing from people. “What does Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík say? He’s a poet.”
“Yes, that’s right—Ólafur Kárason!” clamored the meeting, and people were now ready to listen to inspiration.
Ólafur Kárason said nothing, but got slight palpitations when he heard his name mentioned. He felt all eyes upon him. He was being challenged to contribute to the discussion. The daughter of Hjörtur of Veghús gazed at him with the expectation that commands something to come from somewhere and get something done.
“What am I to say?” said Ólafur Kárason.
“You’re a poet, man, stand up and make a speech!” they said.
He stood up, accustomed to doing as he was told, looked around in confusion for a while, felt giddy, ran his hand down his forehead and over his eyes and down over his face as if he were bothered by cobwebs, and heaved a deep sigh.
“How can I say anything, a man who is outside everything?”
But the meeting would not let him sit down again without speaking, now that he was on his feet: “You’re not above accepting support from our parish in order to live; so why should you be above sharing our interests?”
Then the poet began, little by little, to speak.
“I find it so difficult to speak,” he said. “Quite apart from the fact that I think that all of us who live on this estate are blind. If I’m to say anything, I think that this estate is ruled by an almost omnipotent enemy who ceaselessly demands our lives, but yet I feel we never see the battlefield we stand on nor the actual enemy who rules over us, and that is because we are blind. Sometimes I feel as if the enemy himself is part of our own soul. Perhaps there is no enemy other than our own blindness. Perhaps we would be free of our own accord if our blindness left us. I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Go on, carry on speaking,” they said. “Try to offer some conclusion, man.”
Then the poet said, “I find it difficult to speak. I said just now that I was blind. I said we were all blind. But I’m more than blind, and have an even harder furrow to plough than those who have lost their fishing gear and are in danger of having their wages reduced in the quarry or of losing their jobs altogether. I am a poet. I am the man who could never carry rocks, let alone have a share in a boat—that was what I meant when I said I was outside everything. I’m the village good-for-nothing whom everyone jeers at because I stay up at night and write books about men who were just as useless as I am myself. But for that very reason there is no thief so powerful that he can steal anything from me. Some say I’m allowed to work at the fish yards because I’m in tow with Pétur Pálsson the manager, but that’s not true; I have never done anything for the manager except to compose twelve elegies for him, which is the least one can do for anyone. But even though both king and bishop allowed me and no one else to work in their fish yards, and promised to pay me in gold and diamonds, I’d never dream of touching a single fin, except only because fish are the same color as the sunshine, and because the smell of fish matches the breeze off the sea.”
The meeting had already begun to interrupt him occasionally, but the poet Ólafur Kárason had now started and did not want to stop.
“Yes,” he said, “I can hear what you say. I have never thought of anything except being a poet and a scholar, and so I don’t care what others call me—fool, good-for-nothing, layabout, every bad name imaginable. But whatever I’m called, it doesn’t alter the fact that whoever is a poet and a scholar loves the world more than all others do, even though he has never owned a share in a boat, yes, and not even managed to be classed as a quarryman. The fact is that it is much more difficult to be a poet and write poetry about the world than it is to be a man and live out in the world. You hump rocks for next to no pay and have lost your livelihood to thieves, but the poet is the emotion of the world, and it is in the poet that all men suffer. ‘From the hoof of this damned world, O Lord, remove the small nails,’ says the old hymn. The poet is the quick in this hoof, and there is no stroke of luck, neither higher wages nor better catches, which can cure the poet of suffering—nothing but a better world. On the day the world becomes good, the poet will cease to suffer, and not before; but at the same time he will also cease to be a poet.”
He fell silent, looked around, and realized that the cobweb was gone from his face. And what he saw before him was wide, blue eyes, hot with the expectation of great, great things. Was it they which had called forth all this eloquence? He was not finished even yet.
“To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves’ society, where the children aren’t sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves goo
d, quite unlike here, where people’s aspirations are called wicked because it isn’t possible to fulfill them. In my land one can be content with looking at the clouds being mirrored in the sea, or lying on the grass listening to the brook purling through the dell. And when the great storms rage, people stoke their home fires generously, happy to own a sturdy house. And we hear a Voice which doesn’t express any pain, and makes no demands, but which never sounds sweeter than when the poet is silenced at last; and in my land, all men can hear it. But here on this shore . . .”
The men were getting restless and were searching their pockets for tobacco; it caused them almost physical pain to hear someone baring his soul like this. But Jórunn, the daughter of Hjörtur of Veghús, stood up in a trance, walked over to him, gave him her long, strong hand and said:
“It is the Dream of Happiness.”
The girl’s father bellowed with laughter.
Everyone had started mewing at one another again. The poet felt that no one had understood him except this girl, who had certainly been the cause of his speech, and yet he doubted whether she had understood him correctly; her unexpected handshake burned in the palm of his hand. Her hand was larger than his and undoubtedly stronger. But what worried him most was to have aroused Faroese-Jens’s jealousy, because suddenly the lovelorn skipper got to his feet and declared that everything Ólafur Kárason had said was useless poetic nonsense; he said he bought that sort of stuff when he had need of it and paid what he thought it was worth; he said he had not come here to listen to drivel but to make plans to put an end to injustice and tyranny, and to overthrow the thieves’ society. People urged him to carry on. “There’s nothing for it but to combine,” he said. “Form a union, get a reliable leader, start fighting!” At that the poet became uneasy. Soon afterwards he left.
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