In the Wilderness (11 page)

The man toils about a bramblebush, trying to clear it away, and tears his flesh and his clothes on it. But the weeds, the coarse and noxious growth of tares and thistles, he seems not to see. Yet it is not the bramble that has choked all the good seed in his cornfield: it may bulk large as it stands in full bloom, but it does not seed and scatter everywhere; one may clear it out once for all if one will take the trouble. And there it stands flowering, rank in its unprofitable beauty, and no one will
despise
it.

He had only been willing to acknowledge his great sins. For indeed they were blood-red transgressions against the laws that prevail in the kingdom of heaven. That he had always known, but at the same time he had known that among men it was accounted otherwise. And according to the law that held good among the men with whom his birth entitled him to rank himself, he had done no more than his duty—vindicated his right and his wife’s honour.

Even if it came out, this thing that he had done in secret, the murder, the dastard’s deed—it was not so sure that his memory would be tarnished with dishonour, even if his head had paid the penalty on the block. Not
one
man of all those he reckoned as his equals would judge him to be a dastard—if they knew all. Olav saw now that this knowledge had lain somewhere far back in his soul, always.

Young as he had been, he could not escape doing wrong, since his fate was tangled in the coil of other men’s wrongs and misfortunes.
But all the evil that followed was due to the attempted betrayal of him and Ingunn by those who should have defended the two children’s rights. Up to the last and worst evil, his false confessions, the sacrilege that burned his mouth and heart—foot by foot he had been driven to all this, since he had had to take his own and his foster-sister’s cause into his own hands, and as a raw youth he had grasped it mistakenly.

He had never before thought it out clearly in this way, but within himself he had always known, in the midst of his distress, that God, the all-seeing, saw this much more clearly than he did—that his greatest sins were the sins of others no less than of himself. And inextricably bound up with the burden of his own misdeeds he bore the burden of others.

So he had bowed low and smitten his breast when the deacon said the Confiteor in the mass; he was willing to confess: “not one of these men standing about me is guilty of such black misdeeds as I.” In the mirror of God’s justice he saw himself sunken so much deeper than these others, as the reflection of the oak in a pond sinks deeper than that of the undergrowth around it. And even in a human view he must have seen himself standing like an oak above the brushwood.

But in this unearthly light which now shone into his darkness, what he had secretly wished to preserve from God’s hand appeared to him at last: the pride of the sinner, which is even harder to break than the self-righteousness of the righteous.—“Be it as it may, I am innocent of the sins of a mean man.”

Twice had Jesus Christ spoken to him out of the sweetness of His mercy—and he had shrunk away like a timid hound. Twice had the Voice spoken: “Behold, who I am, behold the depth of my love!” Now it said to him: “See then who
thou
art. See that thou art no greater a sinner than other men. See that thou art as small a sinner!”

The sword sank into the most hidden roots of his being and pierced him.
Non veni pacem mittere, sed gladium. Qui invenit animam suam, perdet illam, et qui perdiderit animam suam propter me, inveniet eam
. Olav saw that these words were truth, such as he had never dreamed of before, and when he understood their meaning, it was like sinking beneath the ice-cold waters of the very ocean.

He laughed with pain as he ran through the dark forest.

He had behaved as though he were afraid of losing his life-he who had long been so tired of life that if it had not been for Ingunn’s sake he could never have borne it for a day. He would
not
go back to it—he lost nothing if he now chose obedience, poverty, chastity, nay, the lot of a slave and a martyr’s death at last, for all that he must renounce he counted nothing worth, but what lay before him promised gains beyond measure—adventures and travels in distant lands, and at the last peace and God’s forgiveness, and admission to the ranks of His soldiers again.

But now he tardily understood that then he must choose, not between God and this or that upon earth, not even his worldly life, but between God and himself.

The path brought him to an open glade; it led high up along a slope, where the trees had been cut. Above him he now saw a wide stretch of the sky, dark and strewn with stars. Below him lay a little valley, he could see that he was looking down over the tops of trees; a sound of running water came from somewhere in the darkness.

Unconsciously he slackened his pace. The light, cooling breeze fanned his cheek; Olav wiped the sweat from his forehead. And, feeling that he was walking on high ground with open, airy space about him on every side, he had a sudden instinct that he was being led out into the wilderness; he walked here all alone in a foreign land and knew not whither he was going. Here was no familiar place or thing that might help him to escape seeing what he would not see; folks’ speech, which he did not understand, could not break in and drown the Voice that he would shun.

Olav halted abruptly. He seemed to absorb strength from the gloom around and from the raw, cold earth under his feet, so that he felt his ego swell and grow in black defiance: “Why dost Thou deal thus with me? Other men have done worse—and more contemptible—deeds. But Thou dost not drive them from home and peace and persecute them, as Thou drivest and persecutest me.”

The voice that replied seemed to dwell in the very stillness under the wide, star-strewn heaven and the forest that rustled faintly in the night breeze and the hushed murmur of the brook in the valley.

“Because thou dost yet love Me, I seek after thee. Because thou
dost long for Me, I persecute thee. I drive thee out because thou dost call upon Me, even as thou fliest from Me.”

The path descended steeply, leading into the thick of the woods. Olav stopped again, threw himself down at the entrance of the dark gap that penetrated the foliage, and sat with his head buried in his arms.

Visions came swarming upon him without his being able to hinder them. Once he complained aloud. Was it to see this that he had been brought back to the very starting-point, his youth? In secret he had been proud of his youth: “After all, I was overborne by force, I was compelled to stand alone, none helped me—whatever I have done or left undone, was not the sin of an ignoble man.”

Was there none who helped him? Now he descried a little light low down, a lantern stood on the floor in a dark stable, and there were two young men. He recognized the face of Arnvid Finnsson, stricken and perplexed—it was he himself who had wounded his friend with a lie. Ay,
that
sin was his own and none other’s. Now he saw that this was surely the first sin he had committed deliberately and wilfully: when he cast his guilt upon the shoulders of his friend, who, he knew, never refused to take up another’s burden.

“No!” He whispered it breathlessly. This he would not have-let it be good for monk and priest, but
he
would not be imprisoned in this cell of self-knowledge they talked of; let it be their concern alone to watch the mirror that reflects God’s light and man’s darkness.

But he could not protect himself—the light that shines in darkness continued to burn, and in it he saw the thousand things that he had wilfully forgotten.

Had none helped him? They had helped him, those of whom he had asked help, Arnvid and the good Bishop, Lord Torfinn. They were the men he had loved and looked up to as his superiors—of his inferiors he had never asked anything. But of the friendship of these two he had availed himself as fully and eagerly as any of his inferiors had availed themselves of him. The difference was merely that
he
had never thought of calling any man his friend and equal who came to him as a suppliant. Out of a pity that was both proud and lukewarm he had given his gifts.
But the men who took
him
under their protection when he came to them in his need had received him as a younger brother.— Humiliation overwhelmed Olav like a landslide—he was painfully crushed beneath the rocks.

“Nay, God, I will not have this. Ingunn, help me,” he prayed in his distress; “you must bear witness for me—Ingunn, I was never false to you?”

Again he felt with overpowering clearness how near she was now. Death only hid her form, like a darkness. But he heard her answer close beside him, out of a sorrow so deep that it made the living seem like children who lacked understanding:

“I witness for you, Olav, and every soul to whom you have shown pity witnesses for you of your good deeds. They are many, Olav—you were designed to render abundantly to God. But your deeds have become as withered stalks of corn, tainted in root and ear—they have so long been choked by the tares.”

He
saw
them before him, sick and wan, ears that bore no corn to ripeness. His inmost will had driven them on—that will which God had given him for ruling and protecting. But this will had been overpowered by whims and desires and perversity and unwise impulses, as vassal kings overpower their rightful sovereign lord. He had been sustained by the secret pride that his sins in any case were not those of cowardice and ignominy. And now he saw that these great sins were a load that he had allowed others to put upon him, because he had never been strong enough to admit it when he had taken a false step through weakness and cowardice and thoughtlessness.

By tricks and by honest dealing, by a little lying and a little truth combined, he had gained advantage for himself from the few men he had met in the world whom he had reckoned good enough to call his friends, to love and respect. He had never dared to tell them the truth about his own conduct, because he wished to have their respect—and because he needed their help. He stood in debt to his friends—he who had always looked down with pity on every debt-burdened wretch.

It was not true, that which he had said to Bishop Torfinn, and to all his friends, so often that he himself had almost forgotten what was the truth. It was a lie that he had asserted his right to his betrothed merely because miscreants sought to take away their
rights. Oh no, he had not been a strong-willed, resourceful grown man who took Ingunn and made her his, reckoning that, if there is dispute about a thing, he is best placed who has that thing in his possession. The truth was otherwise, humiliating—and at the same moment he was bathed in the sweetness of all these memories of his youthful love, now that at last they leaped up, naked, from beneath all the lies under which he had tried to hide them. He had been but a boy in those days at Frettastein, and he had had no thought of either right or wrong when he took to himself his young bride, dazed and wild with desire to possess her full sweetness and charm. He had thought no more than a child who grasps for everything it wants, without heeding, as it runs forward, whether it may fall.

Behind his closed eyelids he saw a cleft in a scree; under the rocks at the bottom of it ran a beck; red rosebay waved on the face of the precipice. Before him walked Ingunn: he saw her long, supple back in the red kirtle; she was plaiting her thick, dark-yellow hair, and he thought her so fair that he followed her as one bewitched. Before them the firs stood erect on the rocky cliff, and by the pale-blue radiance of the summer air he could see that the hillside dropped sheer beyond. He walked behind and looked at her, with mind and senses filled with secret memories of their meetings in her bower at night, with pride in being the master of her loveliness. And when they came to the end of the glen, where the lake lay far below under the dark, wooded heights—there was a little grassy slope between great shivering aspens—he ran up, embraced her from behind, and turned her face toward his own. Hers was pale, bedewed with warmth; as soon as he took her in his arms he felt that she grew weak and trembled in her everlasting animal docility.— This was before he knew that Steinfinn was to die, and before he had ever suspected that any man could hold their betrothal to be aught but a binding, irrevocable bargain.

In all these years he had never dared fully to recall to mind how it had been to feel nothing but the youth within him and all the world’s beauty in a young maid. His longing caught him by the throat and made his eyes burn in their sockets.

Olav rose from the ground and let his arms drop. He gazed out at the patch of starry sky, black velvet powdered with gold, that
lay above this unknown country in which he had lost himself. Unconsciously he caught a whiff of smoke from a fire somewhere in the night.

He divined that now he had wellnigh unravelled the whole skein of his life’s misfortunes to the end of the thread. “Cleanse thou me from secret faults, O Lord,” he had learned in his morning prayers—in all these years, when he recalled that psalm, he must have thought upon his own evil deeds. Now he saw that what he had tried to conceal, from both God and men, was that he might have gone astray from weakness, from childish thoughtlessness and blind desire—
that
he had sought to deny at any cost: even if he should take upon himself the guilt of far worse deeds, charge himself with a burden of sorrow so heavy that it broke him down, then rather that. If only it might look as if he had acted with premeditation and accepted his sorrows knowingly and of his own free will.

“—And preserve thy servant from the power of strangers: let them not have dominion over me; so shall I remain unspotted—” “Let me not submit to my enemies,” he had meant. And then it had been nothing but his own sheer nature that kept him from submitting to his enemies, he would not bend to men for whom he had no respect or who opposed him; to such he had always shown his stubborn obstinacy and his mute, cold defiance. It was toward his friends he was weak and submissive, even to falseness and dissembling; it was when he first became aware of his love for his child bride that his whole being was inflamed and bent aside from uprightness, melting and leaning over like a heated candle.—
That
should have been the object of his prayers: courage, so that he dared acknowledge his blushing; strength, so that he ventured to act rightly and speak the truth without heeding the judgment of those he loved.