Paradise Reclaimed (25 page)

“I shall truly do my best to get Pastor Runólfur to take off his clerical coat so that he can begin to earn a living and become at least a Ward chairman, if nothing else,” said Stone P. Stanford. “I can see from the way he looks after Bishop Þjóðrekur’s sheep that he could be an outstanding head of a family if he would covenant himself just one or two wives in marriage.”

“And what about yourself?” said the woman.

“By the way, don’t you think I should remove my jacket and take a look at the worst cracks in your walls? To tell you the truth, I freely acknowledge, even though I am sorely ashamed of it, that I broke my promise to you over a trivial thing I offered to do for you a long time ago. But the night’s not over yet, as the ghosts say, heeheehee,” said the bricklayer. “Excuse me, but are my eyes deceiving me, if I may ask? Or are the doors in the house gone?”

“We used them for the fire in the cold weather the winter before last, just after my daughter had her baby,” said the woman. “We didn’t need to shut the doors on one another any more, anyway. Our Lutheran was gone.”

The bricklayer now went on a brief tour of inspection of the house, outside and in, and was more and more appalled the more he saw of it. One could scarcely set foot in some of the rooms for ants and beetles, and the brambles and weeds around the house were swarming with wild animals of the lesser orders, most of them harmless, although at one spot there was a glint of the eyes of a viper.

“Well, I shall not detain you ladies any longer on this occasion, and thank you for showing me the house, which could certainly be improved, come to that, like most other human handiworks,” he said. “But it is not always so obvious where one should make a start when one is faced with a fallen wall.”

“It’s a great shame not to have any coffee left nowadays to offer a visitor,” said the woman.

“Oh, don’t give it a thought, dear lady, I am still living on the coffee I got from you in the past, not to mention the coffee you sent me once by your daughter,” said the bricklayer, and kissed her. “Think kindly of me, both of you. And if I should not run into your daughter out in the orchard, give her my warmest greetings; she is a very fine girl, even if she is not simpering all the time, no more than her mother, heeheehee; and that’s a grand little boy she has—to tell you the truth he reminds me most of my daughter’s son, with whom I was presented right out of the blue here the other day, as it were—or to be more accurate, with God’s help, I had never been given; indeed I dare not look in his direction in case I entice him away from a better father than I am. And now, where did I leave my hat, for I hope I did not come hatless into someone else’s house? And as far as I can remember I was taking it off to someone out in the road there not so long ago.”

The woman made no reply but looked at him from the remoteness of the soul in that huge, deep and tear-filled silence of human life that nothing could break except laughter.

He found his hat at last in the corner where he had put it.

It was not until he had stepped out of the room into the little hallway and had opened the outer door, with due creaking and grating, that he remembered a small matter he had nearly forgotten. He pushed the door to, turned back into the room, and said casually to the woman who had once more seated herself at the back-facing window with her darning: “It is not so easy as all that to get rid of this old fellow from Steinahlíðar once you have hooked him, and that is how it is now. But when I see of what poor adobe the house is built, and your windows all broken by these rascals, and your doors long since converted into kindling, and the sewing-machine that Pastor Runólfur proved to me over and over again was a token of the victory of the All-Wisdom here in Spanish Fork . . .”

“Would it be impertinent to ask what you are talking about?” said the woman.

“Hmmm,” he said. “I was just wondering whether I could invite you both to come over to my new house and live there? There is a remarkably attractive view from the attic window looking towards Sierra Benida, which I consider to be the ideal mountain. I will be getting old soon and am making ready to leave here. And then it is not such a bad thing to have around some reliable people, particularly women, who are loyal to one. And I offer you both in exchange the seal of marriage that women need to have in heaven.”

Next morning Stone P. Stanford made up his mind to make one more attempt to find suitable curtains for his upstairs window, from which one could see the truth in mountain form, the view which no fabric seemed to be worthy to curtain. Now we shall hear what happened when he set off on his search.

When he had gone a little way along the main road he saw that the householders on both sides of the road were driving sheep from their gardens in great wrath. Finally the ewes clustered together in the middle of the road, bleating irresolutely, and some of them started butting one another as if they could not agree what they should do now that they had no other refuge than the gravelled road where freedom grew, but not grass. The bricklayer counted them from ingrained habit; there were fifteen, all of them with fat tails which far surpassed the stumpy tails on Icelandic sheep.

“What sheep are these?” he asked.

Someone from the neighbourhood, exhausted from driving the sheep out of his garden, answered by asking him whether he did not see that these were Bishop Þjóðrekur’s soup-pot sheep: “Would you believe it? Pastor Runólfur just upped and let them free this morning.”

Another man joined them and said, “Ronki has quite obviously gone off his head. He was seen at dawn this morning staggering along with his trunk on his back, moving house. He seems to have moved into the dugout where the Lutheran lived.”

A third man came along and said, “Have you heard that the Josephite women threw him out with the porridge scrapings from the Bishop’s House last night?”

It was mentioned in this book previously that in Spanish Fork there stood the sorriest Lutheran church in the world; the young Josephite girl had said of it once that there was only room for about one mule to stand upright in it. On top of this box, which stood there up on a hillock, a tower had been stuck, which was little bigger than a good-sized coffee-grinder. And on top of the tower the Lutherans had put a cross, a symbol which the Latter-Day Saints call a heretical token derived from the Pope, an inheritance from the Great Apostasy. There had originally been four windows in this church. But when Pastor Runólfur lost his Lutheran faith and the congregation broke up and scattered to the four winds, the windows were all stoned and broken as is the custom of boys all over the world wherever they see a spiritually dilapidated house. For years now there had been boards nailed over the paneless windows, and there was nothing left of the cross except for a broken stump.

Stone P. Stanford was going past this deserted church which was like the famous church in the poem, the one on the barren mountain, “as deserted as on Judgement Day.” But now something new was afoot; someone had put a ladder up against the wall of the church and had managed to climb all the way up to the little tower. He was trying to mend the cross. He was in his shirt-sleeves. His clerical coat, the most distinguished garment in Spanish Fork before or since, had been folded lengthwise, with the lining outside, and laid over one rung of the ladder. Stone P. Stanford stopped on the road, took of his hat and shouted to him, “May God give you a good morning, my dear Pastor Runólfur.” But Pastor Runólfur made no reply and carried on mending the cross.

30

Ending

At this stage the management of the Mormon mission to Iceland had been transferred from Denmark to Scotland; that is where the headquarters were, as one puts it nowadays, but in the past it would have been called the archiepiscopal seat. At this seat there was a school at which Mormon priests were trained in the technique of preaching the Gospel in the new fashion to Gentiles of other lands. Stone P. Stanford was sent over there from Utah to study for a winter before he went to Iceland to succeed Bishop Þjóðrekur and other saints who had gone there. The bricklayer is reported to have said later that there he had learned theology with the part of the head that begins above the nose; whereas until then he had drunk it through the nose, like snuff from a wooden horn.

No further matters of theology or holy doctrine will be recounted here at present; the bricklayer himself, indeed, has said that nothing in the instruction at the archiepiscopal school there in Scotland surpassed the propositions that Pastor Runólfur had preached, and which have already been rendered in this little book. The story now moves on to a day when the birds were tuning up their songs in the trees there in the newly-green slope under Edinburgh Castle. Nearby lies Princes Street, which is broad and sunny and moistened with wholesome showers, more so than most city streets in the world, with the exception of the streets in the aforementioned God’s City of Zion, which were measured and laid out according to the principles of the All-Wisdom.

On this day the bricklayer from Utah was strolling along Princes Street to buy himself shoes with thick soles for his trip to Iceland, and perhaps even a good hat. Then all of a sudden someone came up to him and clapped him on the shoulder among the throng in Edinburgh’s main street where all the gentlemen of quality wear skirts. This man was wearing an expensive fur coat and a tall tile hat of the same kind of fur; his moustache had been waxed and the ends turned upwards so that they stood erect like knitting needles. This was clearly no Scottish street-sweeper or shoe-cleaner who had stopped him. But what surprised the bricklayer from Spanish Fork even more was that such a man should shake him by the hand and greet him in his native tongue with all sorts of homely oaths as friends are apt to do: Well, if it isn’t the old so-and-so himself; what the flaming hell are you doing here? And so on and so forth.

The bricklayer first blinked hard several times to get the dust out of his eyes and then swallowed carefully once or twice to loosen his tongue; and when he finally spoke it was not without a hint of a sob in his voice, but also with a touch of the laughter which always assailed him when he explained something he considered indisputable.

“My name,” he said, “is Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork in the Territory of Utah. Quite so.”

“Bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork, yes, what bloody lunatics you are! But to hell with that, and welcome to you anyway, and now open up and tell me how it is that I can’t get hold of as many women as Björn of Leirur and you.”

The bricklayer said, “Oh, there’s no more to say about an old fellow like this than there ever was, except that my ears tell me that the birds have started to sing rather more than is proper in Scotland on such a day; they are probably doing rather more than saying their prayers, heeheehee.”

“Don’t pay too much attention to what we are twittering,” said the man in the fur coat. “All the same, I’m taking you straight to my hotel over the road here and buying you a glass of beer.”

“I cannot exactly say that beer is my drink, my dear sheriff,” said the bricklayer. “But I usually accept coffee when it is sincerely offered. It revives the spirit, rather than deadens it, if there is such a thing; and I might then find the courage to ask how it comes about that I should run into the sheriff, bless him, in this great world-street.”

“There is nothing lower in Hell than being sheriff over lice-ridden people,” said the sheriff. “Never mind. To put it briefly, I have become tired of men who lie on their backs reading sagas while they wait for good fishing-weather. And finally, when it comes, a wave arrives which drowns them. In the hotel I sign myself Governor of Iceland, just for fun, and the doorman gets a penny for believing it every time I go in or out. To be Governor for a penny in the eyes of servants is at least better than being sheriff and judge in reality over people who cannot even achieve the minimum of human virtue because of their poverty. I have three missions in Great Britain: to form a British-Icelandic limited company to run trawlers; to raise capital to electrify life in Iceland; and finally to put the finishing touches to my book of poems.”

Not even in God’s City of Zion had the bricklayer set foot in such accommodation as the hotel to which his sheriff now brought him. There were carpets on the floor as green and soft as lush meadows. From the ceiling hung chandeliers so spectacular that if Egill Skallagrímsson had set eyes on them he would certainly have fallen into a berserk fit no less frenzied than when Einarr Skálaglamm* fastened the shield, inlaid with gold and jewels, over his bedhead. There were also pictures of queens wearing clerical ruffs, and other distinguished folk who were beheaded in Scotland. The chairs were high, with tall straight backs and carved woodwork, so that anyone who sat in them was bound to feel as if he were mounted on a good riding-horse. Governor of Iceland Benediktsson carried on talking.

It was quite evident that the sheriff had raised himself out of the peatbogs, where justice resides in Iceland, up into a no lesser splendour than the coal-biters of old who raised themselves from the ash-pit; but he had in fact always been well above the general run of sheriffs.

The bricklayer could find no break in the conversation where he could sneak in a few words about the truth which the Latter-Day Saints were given along with Paradise. When he had sat there silently for a long time, either smiling or nodding his head absently, or giggling slightly to himself whenever the sheriff swore, he began to look for an excuse to take his leave. The mailboat for Reykjavík was expected that evening, and he had still various matters to attend to, including buying himself shoes to go evangelising in.

“I know one who won’t take long to go over to Mormonism, and that’s Björn of Leirur,” said the sheriff. “I never tired of scolding him and saying to him, ‘You damned old devil, you get hold of all the wenches I should have had. I’ll settle your account some day,’ I said to him but the blame certainly wasn’t always his. For instance, I did everything I could to save your daughter, but it was hopeless. After God and men had joined forces to save her reputation and provide her with an acceptable father for the child, and old Björn had as near as dammit gone on oath, what was the end of it all? The girl made me a fool and a laughing-stock in the eyes of the Government. I even had it said to my face by the Governor that I was the sort of sheriff who pronounces virgin births. In the end I cleaned the old devil out of everything he had, in order to buy a trawler. But I never dared to mention electricity to him, because he doesn’t know what it is; he would have thought it was some remainders of damaged ship’s biscuits I was trying to palm off on him. But give him my regards all the same, and tell him that the British-Icelandic Company is under way.”

The poet-Governor accompanied his visitor out through the hotel foyer and kissed him in front of the entrance. The doorman bowed so low that his coat-tails stood on end, and looked on with lofty condescension at how graciously the Governor took leave of the lowest of his subjects. But when the bricklayer had reached the pavement, the Governor remembered a little something he had left unfinished in his business with him. He hurried out after him, bareheaded, and shouted in Icelandic: “Steinar of Hlíðar, am I not right in thinking you are on your way home? Wouldn’t you like me to give you a farm?”

“Oh, it is really quite unnecessary, bless your heart,” said the man who had suddenly become Steinar of Hlíðar, and turned round there in Edinburgh. “What farm would that be, if I may ask?”

“It is the farm at Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar, which I put up for auction under execution to pay off taxes and outstanding debts, and knocked down to myself to prevent it from landing in Björn of Leirur’s collection. If you come with me to the doorman’s desk I shall scribble you a note you can stick in your pocket; and the farm is yours again.”

The poet-Governor, Iceland’s new outpost in the British Empire, unfortunately did not turn out to be the only Icelander who showed no desire to hear about the Golden Book’s truth and the land beyond the wilderness which is thrown in with the truth for good measure. For three whole centuries, some say four, Icelanders had made it a rule to believe in dogmas that came from Denmark; indeed Bishop Þjóðrekur had declared that just as the Danes got all their wits from the Germans, so had Iceland’s brain—by mistake, it is to be hoped—landed inside the Danish king’s head: they too left the Mormons in peace when they heard that Kristian Wilhelmsson did likewise in his own country. But that brings us back to the question that Bishop Þjóðrekur failed to answer when he returned to Utah from his later, and greater, missionary journey: was it a step forward for the Icelanders or a step backwards for them to stop beating up Mormons? In former times, the moment a Mormon stepped ashore in Reykjavík the riffraff and drunkards, who in those days characterised the town, would come flocking round and pursue him with catcalls and obscenities, while the youngsters threw stones or snowballs of slush and mud. If nothing better occurred to them they would shout that the Mormon’s head was too big for him, or that he had one leg shorter than the other. Whenever a Mormon tried to hold a meeting in order to publicize such vital matters as immersion and the need to abstain from cursing and swearing, along with information about the breadth of the streets in the resplendent City of Zion, these rioters would immediately surge on to the platform where the speaker was preaching and start giving the saint a beating. Lutheran bishops and divinity teachers busied themselves writing pamphlets eulogising the excellence of Luther and other Germans against the Mormons, because they knew that the Danes believed in Germans; similarly, various Icelanders with a tendency towards mental disorder wrote malicious articles in
Þjóðólfur,
or plucked verses from the Bible against the Mormons in the hope that this would hustle these terrible people straight to hell.

But now times had changed. When Stanford the Mormon arrived in Reykjavík there was not a single guttersnipe or drunkard in the town who made any distinction between a Mormon and any old peasant from up-country. Most of the mentally disordered had forgotten about Mormons and had started thinking about electricity. In the newspapers of that period there is no mention at all of the arrival of this Mormon, with the exception of an advertisement that he himself inserted in
Þjóðólfur;
this stated that Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork in the Territory of Utah, was holding a meeting in the Good Templar Hall on such and such an evening at the end of the fishing-season to expound the revelations of Joseph Smith. This Stanford is the only Mormon who came to Iceland without once being beaten up, and about whom there was published no pamphlet, neither by Doctors nor lunatics, apart from this worthless little booklet compiled by the humble scholar who wields the pen at present.

Stanford the Mormon tried to engage people in conversation down by the harbour where they congregated sometimes in large numbers, especially late in the evening, and looked out over the bay with their wooden snuff-flasks rammed hard up their noses. He also accosted a water-carrier with four pairs of shoes and three battered hats, and a drunken old fishwife with a sack of salt on her back. He asked whether immersion would not do such people some good, and whether he could not lend them a pamphlet by John Pritt. People looked at him and never even shook their heads. Or would they rather, he asked, have that splendid masterpiece on the truth by Þjóðrekur Jónssón from Bóla in the Landeyjar? No one even told him to go and eat his own dirt.

And when the spring evening arrived on which Stone P. Stanford was to hold his lecture in the Good Templar Hall on the revelation, the terns flew past the door and started to hunt for minnows in the Tjörn.* Not a living soul in the town went out of the way to hear about the good country where peace reigned and truth lived. And yet. Two elderly women in ankle-length pleated skirts and everyday blouses, with jet-black woollen shawls wrapped around their heads so that only the tips of their noses showed, came sidling in through the door and seated themselves at the back; perhaps they wanted to hear about polygamy. At long last another person appeared. A dignified-looking and somewhat corpulent grey-beard, obviously practically blind, came fumbling down the centre aisle with his stick and did not stop until he was right below the platform. He laid his hat beside him on the bench; but the stick had become the most important of this man’s senses, and he did not let go of it even when he had sat down.

“Fine weather, then, eh?” he said when he was seated, looking straight ahead down the hall; he listened and waited for an answer for a while, and then added, “I presume that a large number of good people have gathered here this evening?”

But when there was no reply from the hall the lecturer himself rose from his seat in a shadowy corner where he had been waiting for a public, and made himself known to this seeker after truth who had conquered his blindness and infirmity in order to gain knowledge about the land of lands.

“Goodness gracious me, it can’t surely be Björn of Leirur? Hallo and welcome, my dear old friend,” said the man from Utah. “Am I right in thinking you don’t see so well? But you must not let yourself be downcast, the only sight that matters is . . .”

“You can quite safely skip that chapter, lad, for I am already saved,” interrupted the blind man, feeling with his stick until he found the Mormon, then pulled him towards him and kissed him. “Hallo yourself and welcome, my dearest Steinar of Hlíðar. Your little scamp of a daughter converted me to Mormonism with much more convincing arguments than a fellow like you is capable of.”