World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  “I can tell from the smell that you’re boiling fish, Jarþrúður dear,” said the hoyden. “Take it off the stove for this once. It occurred to me it was perhaps a long time since your little girl had tasted meat. I’m just ashamed of myself for not having thought of it before.”

  She opened her basket and brought out a fine, brown, roasted leg of lamb for the child, golden sugar-fried potatoes and peas, a splendid pudding, exotic fruits, and a bottle of wine. The poet and his intended stood there speechless while the princess laid a cloth on the rickety table, put out plates and cutlery, brought out all the delicacies and began to serve them. Örn Úlfar frowned and was silent while the banquet was being prepared, and then said, “Have you taken leave of your senses, girl?”

  “Dinner is served,” said the hoyden.

  “This is an affront to the house,” said Örn Úlfar. “I’m not touching this food. Give me the skate.”

  The girl stopped serving and looked at him. Disappointment made her face suddenly childish: a little girl who had been hurt, almost brought to tears, in the middle of her unclouded happiness.

  “Örn,” she said. “When you come at long, long last, and everyone, everyone’s been waiting for you, and then . . .”

  Then she pulled herself together, bit her lip a little, and said, “It doesn’t really matter. If you don’t take any of it, there will be all the more for us, and besides it wasn’t meant for you but for the little sick girl. Jarþrúður dear, you just give him some rotten fish and preferably some cod-liver oil dregs for coffee.”

  In the end they all took their share of the roast except the one for whom the roast was intended, the little girl; she was allowed to sleep on. The daughter of the estate lavished all her care on the traveler instead, anticipating his every wish, never tiring of making him comfortable: “You know how ill he’s been,” she said by way of explanation. And the host and hostess gradually overcame their shyness and let themselves be entertained in their own house instead of abandoning it, and that leaky house with its mysteriously incompatible party guests ate and drank and was merry.

  Örn Úlfar suggested that they might hear the Stories of Strange Men by Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavik; the table was cleared, and the poet brought out his books and begged his guests to make themselves as comfortable as possible on the bed, while he seated himself on a stool at their feet and began to read. Jarþrúður the intended barricaded herself behind the cooking stove. The wind had suddenly dropped and the sea had died. The insecurities of heaven and earth were forgotten. The saga of Jóhann beri reigned in the house. One poet, and two royal listeners in the high seat, and this little house was a royal house. The girl leaned back against the visitor’s breast and laid her curly head under his cheek.

  It was late at night and the poet had come to a stop. Then the intended said, “It doesn’t look as if he’s going to come, the man with the beard the visitor was expecting here tonight.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Örn Úlfar. “But it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll meet him all the same.”

  “My dear fellow, don’t worry about that,” said the Ljósvíkingur. “You’re sleeping in this bed tonight. We can lie down anywhere ourselves.”

  Then Dísa got to her feet and said, “No, you can’t sleep here, Örn.” “Oh, really?” said Örn. “You’re not thinking of making me sleep with Pétur ríhross?”

  “Not directly,” she said.

  “But indirectly?” he asked.

  “Leave that to me,” she said. “I know of a place where you can sleep. The one you waited for will not let you down.”

  Soon afterwards they bade Good-night and were gone.

  11

  Örn Úlfar had undoubtedly looked deep enough into his old friend’s mind that first evening to realize that he was not the man to lead the attack in a battle, and that it would be advisable to try somewhere else first if there were to be a call to arms; in any event he never called on the poet for support in the party strife which now began on the estate, this time under his own leadership. But because he himself did not feel a scrap of admiration for conventional orthodox behavior, he knew better than anyone else how to talk to a poet, and so there was no more welcome visitor at The Heights, and the hours flew by when the two of them wandered together in Poetry’s meadow, that meadow where human destiny is given meaning.

  And the winter passed. The Laborers Union had been reconstituted long ago with Faroese-Jens as president, but with a more distinguished name; it was now called the Svíðinsvík Trades Union. To be sure it proved to be difficult to find anything for this union to do as things now stood, because there was less work available than ever and therefore there was no opportunity to fight over wages being too low. The difficulty was that the land part of the harbor was now completed, but the government had reserved the right to decide whether deeper water would affect the possibility of growing potatoes in that part of the harbor which was likely to be under water at high tide and while this decision was held up, no money was available for quarry work on the estate. The union could only insist that there was little prosperity in the village, and therefore it sent one resolution after another to the government, to Júel J. Júel and to Pétur Pálsson the manager, demanding money, ships, stations, fields, poultry, a just society. But the shop became emptier and emptier, and after New Year there was, apart from chicory and margarine, not much left on the shelves except hardtack biscuits in barrels and vitamins in packets, and people were allowed to have these remnants on credit as long as they lasted, against drafts drawn on the parish funds in the hope of a grant from the treasury.

  On the other hand, all those who owned a sack of saltfish and a barrel of potatoes wanted to be freeborn Icelanders and to do everything they could to protect their nationality against the unpatriotic. The shares in Irish slaves, Danes, and Russians were not very high at that time. The Society of True Icelanders in Sviðinsvík now began to collect funds for a new Icelandic church with pillars and painted windows in memory of Guðmundur góði here on the estate and, as it turned out, donations started pouring in from all quarters, some in kind, some in promises of work or in ready cash, because there has never been such lack of prosperity in Iceland that it has not been possible to raise unlimited money for building churches. People who would rather have been flayed alive than spend a halfpenny on themselves laid five krónur in pure silver on the table; yes, and two men from the Outer Nesses even brought a shiny rix-dollar.* If old Jón the snuffmaker on the French site would now contribute ten thousand krónur or so, it was practically certain that the church could be built that summer, and not just the church, but beside it also the cultural beacon in memory of órður of Hattardalur and Úlfur ópveginn, which had for a time been the fondest dream of Pétur Pálsson the manager. Likewise, the True Icelanders of Sviðinsvík had managed to secure the use of an airplane. The chairman assured the society that as early as next summer the members of the society would be given the opportunity of floating on the gentle breezes of heaven above this troublesome estate of Sviðinsvík-undir-Óþveginsenni.

  But none of these enterprises affected the poet’s world. What caused him more concern was the fact that it was now becoming impossible to get the child to take Pétur Pálsson’s vitamin pills or his cod-liver oil, and when they eventually began to try giving her warm fresh milk from the manager’s own barn, it was too late; the child continued to waste away. It was a wonder that she managed to draw breath at all.

  With every day that passed, the problem of what the child’s parents themselves were to have for their next meal became more and more difficult for a beginner and amateur to solve. It required neither more nor less than a scientific solution; it required the wisdom of the world. Money did not grow at this time of year, any more than green grass. If it so happened that someone was forced to commission an elegy in these difficult times, the poet was lucky to be paid with a sack of peats, or even a load of sheep droppings. But if there had been good fishing weather and people had c
aught anything, the Ljósvíkingur was sometimes to be seen wandering along the shore, and then people would perhaps throw him some fish with some such remark as: “We must give the poor fellow some fish heads for the pot; he’s a useless wretch and a poet; he’ll bring blessings or famine upon us with his poetry according to the way we treat him.” But unfortunately these occasional acts of charity made no provision for the future.

  More and more frequently he would return home empty-handed even though his intended had driven him out into the frost with the threat that she would not open the door to him until he came back with sugar, rye meal and groats. Her prayers to God, which she shouted on her knees, loudly, as if she were on a bad telephone line, together with incessant hymn-singing, required eardrums of leather. He himself could starve with equanimity, and had he been a free agent he would have gone to bed, pulled the covers over his head and waited fearlessly for the start of a new order in human affairs. But now the usual outcome was that the intended herself set out to see Pétur Pálsson the manager, and got him to give her some food from his own larder for the only currency with which the poor can trade with the rich when all else fails—a beggar’s tears.

  One day when there was one half-dried fish tail hanging outside the porch, the sum total of the house’s wealth, the poet found himself on the road in an icy snowstorm, having been forbidden to come home empty-handed. He pulled his old peaked cap down over his ears and wrapped his scarf twice round his neck. His nankeen jacket had long ago ceased to keep the wind out, and he felt the icy blast blowing through his bones like a whistle.

  It then occurred to him—it was something he had really never completely forgotten—that the girl from Veghús had omitted to pay him her debt from last spring. To go dunning a girl of her kind for such a trifling sum was certainly no pleasure outing, and something very different from what he had imagined at the time when his speech and her novel of The Dream of Happiness had found one another. Luckily he himself had fled up the mountain in time, but his poetry had, as so often before, been able to bring two hearts together in one truth. But in view of her love and happiness, how could she justify withholding from a poet the reward due to him for having given her a little key to the heart of so excellent a man as Faroese-Jens? She was bound to see for herself that it is not possible to bring two people together in love so artistically for nothing.

  His arguments for the justice of this claim became weightier and weightier the longer the icy wind played through his bones. No, it could not in any way be called degrading himself. It would be an untimely act of gallantry to give the poem away for nothing. What does this girl matter to me? Whether her eyes are hot or cold does not concern me at all. The main thing is that I sat up for a whole day and a whole night to execute an order for her; work is work, business is business. People must not imagine that poets are above ordinary human necessities.

  And so on, over and over again.

  The farmhouse of Veghús looked just as the poet had always imagined a house should look. It was in such a house that he had dreamed in his childhood that his mother lived, with the front door on the side that faced the road and friendly windows on each side of the door, a roof, a chimney. He trudged up the path to the house with the icy wind in his face and met the farmer in the yard, jovial, ruddy-faced and smiling, with a sou’wester on and bits of moss on his jersey. The farmer laughed in the driving snow and asked what brought the poet there.

  “Oh, I’m just having a stroll to pass the time,” said the poet.

  Then the farmer laughed even more; he had thought that poets had better ways of passing the time than that.

  “What do you think of the weather; what’s it going to do next?” asked the poet.

  “Oh, it’s just the sort of winter weather you’d expect, eh?” answered the farmer. “And what’s news with you?”

  “Nothing I can think of,” said the poet.

  “Everyone hale and hearty in the village?”

  “As far as I know,” said the poet.

  “And how far are you going on your stroll?”

  “Oh, this is probably far enough for today,” said the poet. “I just came up to the house because I saw you in the yard. You mustn’t think I had anything in mind. I just find it so remarkable that here, where there was only a gravel slope and a stretch of moor a few years ago, there should now be a farmhouse and a homefield; and people and sheep; yes, and the terns’ old fish yards down by the shore soon to be a meadow.”

  “Perhaps you might like to have a look at my hens, eh?” said the farmer.

  “Many thanks. A lot of people make fun of these birds because they can’t fly, but can other birds lay more eggs?” asked the poet, who had suddenly started to side with these birds.

  “Those who make most fun of these chickens wouldn’t say No to their eggs,” said the farmer.

  The animal sheds were behind the farmhouse, all under one roof including the hay barn; everything was as clean as if it were Christmas Eve—all the paving swept, the stalls and flooring brushed, not a speck of dung on the legs or tails of the two cows, any more than on the farmer’s conscience. At the other end of the barn were twenty plump hens in a wooden cage, cackling unemotionally in their hen language in the midday quiet, apart from the cockerel which bridled and crowed reprovingly at this intrusion and shook his comb and wattles. Ólafur Kárason thought the birds really were remarkable, particularly the cockerel, and looked at them for a long time. At the other end of the building twenty sheep were chewing the cud, in blissful peace like saints, innocent and lovely.

  “Feel one of them and tell me what you think,” said the farmer.

  But the poet excused himself and said he did not know how to feel a sheep. To tell the truth he was a little afraid of sheep. Then the farmer took hold of one of the ewes and showed the poet how to feel a sheep: the brisket and back to see how meaty it was, the belly to see if it were eating well, the udder to see if it were filling with milk. “I shall take the liberty of saying that if these ewes were a little farther down the Fjörður, they would all be True Icelanders and would form a society and erect a cultural beacon,” said the farmer, and laughed gustily, and everything pointed to the fact that the man and his livestock were one. Their well-being was one of the characteristics of his soul.

  “My heartfelt thanks for letting me see these delightful creatures,” said the poet. “I’m always becoming more and more convinced that animals are much more perfect creatures than human beings, and probably human beings will never get as far as they have. Everything that concerns animals is beautiful. And now I’d better be heading for home. Good-bye.”

  The farmer, for his part, was grateful that the visitor should have liked the animals and appreciated them properly, and he now asked if the poet would not step inside to have a look at the womenfolk as well. “Perhaps a poet knows how to fondle them a bit better, eh?”

  “There’s no need at all, thank you,” said the poet.

  “They often have coffee,” said the farmer.

  “Indeed,” said the poet. “Well, perhaps, thank you.”

  She was radiantly pure like a plant in blossom time, newly sprung, full of invisible rich coloring that appealed to hidden senses, and she pushed back a lock of hair behind her ear when she saw it was a man.

  “It’s out of the question to invite poets into the kitchen,” she said, and led him into the living room with her strong hand. She apologized for her appearance; she was wearing a big loose-knit jersey and a coarse woolly skirt which concealed her figure. She ordered a lanky youth to fetch coal and kindling, lit the fire in a twinkling, and told the poet to make himself comfortable. What could she offer him?

  She was no less energetic at home than outside, brought up in a large family, accustomed to running a household and receiving visitors; she shooed out the children, her brothers and sisters, who came to look at the man, and the stepmother withdrew; the farmer had gone to see to his tasks; in a short time there was an aroma of pancakes in the house
. The fire crackled and the room became warm, and the window started to steam up.

  Alone, the poet looked around the room, enchanted. There was a picture of a waterfall in a ravine, and another of the Great Geysir erupting; casual cushions on a corner bench nailed to the walls, with a table in front but no chair, woven rugs and braided mats of different patterns on the floor, embroidered hangings on the walls, a broad divan with a multicolored, woven covering and several embroidered cushions, a washstand with a bowl, toilet water, soap, powder box and a jar of cream which all gave the room a fragrance; there was also a Book of Dreams and an inkstand. On the wall above the washstand were pinned three postcards of male film stars, all looking rather sugary, and only one female film star beside them on a fourth postcard, slightly indecent and not very good-looking. Against the middle of the wall facing the window stood a loom with a half-finished blanket on it. The poet sat marveling on the divan among these magnificently patterned, embroidered cushions and had never imagined that such a room could exist. To the fragrance from the washstand was added the aroma from the kitchen next door. He could hear the batter being ladled onto the pan with a delectable seething noise which was associated with all of life’s greatest festivities, and on top of that came the smell of coffee. At last the girl came in, a little flushed after the baking, having changed out of her jersey into a close-fitting dress which showed her full, mature figure to best advantage; she laid a cloth on the table and brought in strong coffee with cream so thick you could hardly pour it, and pancakes baked over a fire so hot that the edges were crisp, smothered in butter and sugar.

  “I think I must be dead and in heaven,” said the visitor when he had put sugar in his coffee.

  “A poet was the last thing I expected,” said the girl.

  “I never thought that such a room existed,” he said.

  “When I arrived last year, this was the drawing room, but I threw out all the rubbish and put in my loom here instead. I made that corner bench myself; then I painted it and made these casual cushions for it. Don’t you think it looks nice?”