Independent People (52 page)

They were allowed a little touch at each of the books, but only with their fingertips tonight, literature cannot bear dirty hands; first well have to back each volume with paper, the covers must not get dirty, nor the spines slit, books are the nation’s most precious possession, books have preserved the nation’s life through monopoly, pestilence, and volcanic eruption, not to mention the tons of snow that have lain over the country’s widely scattered homesteads for the major part of every one of its thousand years. And that’s what your father knows full well, hard as his shell may be. And that’s why he’s sent you a special man with these books, and now well have to learn to handle them nicely; and the children thought of their father with a gratitude which almost made them swallow, he who had left them but had not forgotten. So theirs was such a father after all, and Asta Sollilja could not suppress herself and said to the boys there you are, now you see that nobody else has a father like ours, who sends us a special man to teach us about everything.

“Do the books tell you about the countries, then?” inquired little Nonni.

“Yes, my boy, of new countries and old; of new lands that rise from the ocean like young maidens and bathe their precious shells and thousand-coloured corals in the summer’s first light, and of old lands with fragrant forests and peacefully rustling leaves; of castles a thousand years old that tower up from the blue mountains in the Roman moonlight, and of sun-white cities that open their arms on green waveless oceans lapping in one perpetual dancing sunlight. Yes, as your sister says, it isn’t everyone who has the good fortune to learn of the great countries of the world from one who has actually been on the spot.”

For a while longer they continued to play with the books, but they mustn’t look at all the pictures at one go, only one from each book tonight—the picture of Rome for instance, which is nearly as big as the mountain above the croft here, and the giraffe,
which is so long in the neck that if it was standing down in the doorway there, its head would stick up through the chimney, for it’s to be hoped there’s at least a chimney on the place. And what do you think, the evening was over already; never in the mind of man had an evening passed with such speed. The books were carefully wrapped up in their papers again; no, no more tonight, when they had been thinking of asking him a hundred questions. He was tired and wanted to go to sleep, and they did not dare to be prodigal in the expenditure of his wisdom.

The boys stood reverently over him while he undressed, watching his manner of undressing, but Asta Sollilja turned her back and went along the loft to her grandmother. He laid his stick beside him in bed and covered it up with the clothes, maybe the stick had a soul. Finally he began to unlace the boot on his right foot. Every movement seemed to cost him considerable exertion. Sometimes he reminded one of the Bailiff; sometimes, much more rarely, of the bookseller; oh, what nonsense, he often coughed very loudly into his handkerchief, everything bore witness to the fact that he was a very special kind of person. And what ultimately emerged from this inanimate right boot? A foot. But it was no ordinary foot, no work of creation, like ours, with a white or at least a light-coloured skin and little hairs on it; rather was it a special foot, a dark-brown, highly polished product of the workshop, without flesh or blood, carpentry. And now it was little Nonni who could no longer suppress his feelings and cried: “Ooh, come and look at the man’s foot, Sola!” But Asta Sollilja, of course, did not wish to look at a man’s foot, such an idea offended her sense of modesty, as was only natural. “You ought to think shame of yourself, the way you behave,” she replied without turning round. But out in the huts next morning she could not help asking the brothers what sort of foot it had been, and whether there had been anything queer about the foot. They discussed this foot from every possible angle, over and over again, after they had finished feeding the sheep, and then they discussed the whole man: what a marvellous person he was, and what rapture it would be to have him teaching them, and what a lot they would know in the spring, when he had finished teaching them. He was an inexhaustible theme of debate for them when they were alone; everything about him was individual and veiled in mystery, everything from his whispering voice down to his carpentered foot, not excepting the stick which was allowed to sleep with him, as if it had a soul. The Summerhouses children
were lucky indeed to get such a man. And then they somehow had the idea that it was he who had taken the Tower House away from Bruni and handed it over to Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson so that poor people might be allowed an ounce of rye meal on their own account. And isn’t it strange that men of handsome, dignified appearance who come from large indeterminate places should all be wearing light-brown shirts?

Now he was lying here in their little room, he who had seen new countries and old bathing themselves in the morning’s first sunshine and in the moonlight of abroad; yes, and such a lot and such a lot. If only one could remember what he said and could repeat it afterwards; no one had such a golden tongue. Yes, and he was lying there with that look of wise seriousness in his eyes, and he had pulled the coverlet up to his neck and was resting beside them, under their roof, after a hazardous journey over the heath, all for their sake, he who had been reared in rustling groves; oh, if only we could repay him and could show how much we appreciate him! When the children went to bed that night, they felt they could easily live to be a hundred, without tobacco, like Grandmother, and without ever growing tired of undressing the same body night after night and dressing it again next morning. And to be able to look forward to the morrow in joyful expectation is good fortune indeed.

“Yes,” he whispered, “this is the kingdom of innocent hearts. Strange that I should still have had this in store for me, especially when one had seen the world’s gaudy show in great places, as I have.” Then he sighed and added: “Yes, yes, yes, my foot has travelled distant lands and clambered up steep slopes of dissension in a densely populated world of self-love where the fluttering wings of the human spirit find little rest; where the glacier cold of solitude hovers over the moss-grown tracts of the everyday life, without innocence or rest; without love. Asta Sollilja, darling, I wonder if you would be sweet as to leave a drop of coffee standing beside me here, in case my heart should affect me tonight. But I feel that tonight my heart will not affect me.”

And now the boys had gone to bed and the wall-lamp had been extinguished. The only light was the glimmer from the little candle burning on the grandmother’s shelf. Yes, and then the girl remembered that she had not washed herself since her father went away, so she gave herself a little wash and combed her hair a little, on the sly, before taking her clothes off. Then she
came down the room again to her bed, she was little Gvendur’s only bed-mate now, and her frock squeaked complainingly as she persuaded it over her head. It was really nothing but a rag now and far too tight for her. She did not dare take off her slip for fear the teacher saw; rather slipped stealthily in beside her brother in the bed opposite. At the same moment the grandmother put out the candle.

“Good night.” whispered the teacher in the dark, but Asta Sollilja did not know how to answer such courtesy, and her heart began to hammer, but after a little cogitation she whispered in reply: “Yes.”

Long after the guest had started snoring, the children lay awake, the fragrance of the books still in their nostrils, savouring the glory of this new era which they knew had dawned upon their lives. But gradually their perceptions dissolved into a blissful confusion and glided imperceptibly into an elastic world, which may well be the most authentic of all worlds, though nothing seems half so irrational; especially when the animals’ necks stick out of the chimney-top and the mountain has become a beautiful Christian church with dark, creaking stairs leading all the way up to the tower. Her name was Asta Sollilja and now she proposed to go all the way up to the tower. At first she was terribly cautious and very much afraid, but since she had started climbing she would have to go on and on, higher and higher. The stairs kept on creaking and creaking. It was because she knew that her father was somewhere behind her that she was so very much afraid. Faster and faster she hurried; she must get to the top first. Finally she was terribly out of breath and terribly frightened, but it was so nice running up dark stairs all alone and climbing all the way up to the tower, all, all, all the way, no, no one would ever get to know. Then the stairway began to narrow and she bumped into the walls and they creaked louder and louder still, and then her fear grew stronger than her joy; oh, why had she had to come into this Christian church in the first place, instead of staying quietly outside where no one need fear anything, and now Father would soon catch her and would slap her face if he caught her. At last she glimpsed a chink of light above her, a door left ajar, the clock-tower, and a face was standing there, watching her approach. What face? The face of joy? No, no, no, it was another face altogether, it was the ugly old evil bookseller who had all the ugly old evil bastards; and it was
he who was coming hobbling towards her on his stick in a brown shirt; where had this ugly old man got his brown shirt? So it was he who had been waiting for her with his book in his hand:

“Here I can show you a book that is practically new and quite the latest fashion nowadays. Just take a look, little miss, don’t you think we’d like to read it?”

She started up, bathed in sweat, her hands dripping, shaking in the grip of that uncontrollable shudder which is a characteristic feature of bad dreams and which, after spoiling a whole night’s sleep, can saturate every moment of the coming day with an apprehensive weariness of life. She heard the tail-end of her own terrified scream as she opened her eyes, jumped up in bed, gasped for breath. She heard her heart pounding like a sledgehammer falling on glowing iron. She passed a wet hand over her brow. No, no, no. There was no danger, only a bad dream. Not more than two yards away lay the guest who had come to bear them better times and to raise their lives to a higher plane; and she was going to make him pancakes in the morning so that he would feel better. Gradually her terror evaporated as she listened to him sleeping and wished him well. Yes, there’s a better time coming for all of us. And she lay down again.

A
ND
the light of learning began to shine.

The distinctive features of the world’s civilization are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also the elephant and the country of Denmark, besides many other things. Yes, every day brought its new animal and its new country, its new kings and its new gods, its quota of those tough little figures which seem to have no significance, but are nevertheless endowed with a life and a value of their own and may be added together or subtracted one from another at will. And finally poetry, which is greater than any country; poetry with its bright palaces. Over all flies the soul, viewing the heavenly light, like an eagle in the vestibule of the winds.

Out in the ewe-house in the mornings they often tried to find some answer to the riddle of why, after all the thoughtlessness that seemed to rule the world, there should come men who not only were acquainted with the content of books, but had actually
seen with their own eyes the world that is described in print, and had, moreover, travelled it with their own foot. Not only had he seen cities and zoological gardens, he had also wandered in the woods where one finds happiness, or at least peace, and he knew the words that fit the locked compartments of the soul, like keys, and open them.

While little Gvendur was content to meditate upon those animals which stand higher in the scale of honour than sheep, or to make an attempt to multiply the lambs by the ewes and subtract the boards in the roof from the planks in the floor, little Nonni thought endlessly of his countries, feeling that at last he had obtained valid proof of their actual existence and that he could therefore dismiss the theory that they were nothing but the idle chatter of kind-hearted people who wanted to comfort little children. And Asta Soliilja, it was she who swept on wings of poetry into those spheres which she had sensed as if in distant murmur one spring night last year when she was reading about the little girl who journeyed over the seven mountains; and the distant murmur had suddenly swelled to a song in her ears, and her soul found here for the first time its origin and its descent; happiness, fate, sorrow, she understood them all; and many other things. When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks: Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth? Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one’s pipe? No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Asta Soliilja.

She had early had some instruction in the understanding of the complex language of the ballad poets, and this preliminary training stood her now in good stead. But there was this difference: the ballads were suggestive of barren lands, poor in vegetation, but rich in stones, whereas the new poetry was full of the blissful flowers of the spirit and a melancholy fragrance. The teacher read poetry in a manner altogether different from her fathers; instead of laying the main stress on the rhyme, and especially the internal rhyme, this man whispered his poems with a honeyed, fascinating eloquence, for he understood the secrets of the poets themselves, so that every inanimate object in the room acquired a secret, and if you passed your hand along the
cold bed-boards, the wood would feel soft and warm, as if a living heart were beating within. He knew the words that she had tried to read in the clouds when she fell in love for the first time, but she had only been a little girl then, as she realized now, and it was only natural that she should not have understood the clouds, she who had looked there for something that did not even exist—He who had come to shoot on their land in those days, he knew no poems, he wouldn’t have understood poetry, the most precious thing in the life of man. The thought that even though Audur Jonsdottir had married him she would never hear a poem from his lips filled her with proud exultation. True, he had smiled, and smiled without smiling, but his eyes had lacked the twinkling brilliance of colour, his voice the confidential wiles of the man who knew poems and could whisper them in such a fashion that a tearful shiver would pass through her listening body; and dead objects would acquire souls.