In the Wilderness (5 page)

Olav had never before seen the heads of executed men close at hand. Often enough he had sailed past the Wheel Rock at Sigvalda, but had never landed on it. And the gallows hill outside Oslo lay in a quarter he had never had occasion to visit; nor had there ever been anything to take him thither, for it had never chanced that any was to be hanged when he was in the town.

But there was no horror in this sight, nothing that cried shame and dishonour over the dead. They looked like men of valour on guard over the gateway, waiting patiently for something, with faces turned toward the sun and the fresh morning breeze.

Olav was the first who remembered to make the sign of the cross; half-aloud he began to pray:

“Pater noster qui es in d
œ
lis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum, adveniat regnum Tuum—”

“Opera manuum Tuarum, Domine, ne despicias,”
the beggars took up the response, and said it together with his shipmates.

“Requiem
œ
ternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.”

Olav and Galfrid gave alms to the beggars, and then they hobbled off, this way and that. The thought struck Olav that these were the first words he had understood of folks’ speech in this country—the prayer for the souls of the beheaded men.

The portreeve’s officers had assigned the
Reindeer
to an anchorage west of the bridge—a little square-shaped dock at the riverside. None but small vessels lay there and most of them seemed to be English. The water was turbid and muddy; at low water the slimy bank was exposed. But the harbour itself was well compassed about on three sides with a quay and warehouses; the upper story was supported on pillars,
so
that the place resembled a cloister in a convent. These quays were astir all day long; more than a score of men were regularly employed in loading and unloading goods and in ferrying folk across the river. Torodd had found out that they had better not use the ship’s boat to take them to and from the shore; the ferrymen did not like it, and it was foolish to set them against one. So they made a bargain with one of them that he should row the
Reindeer’s
men ashore and back every day and have five English pence a week for it. It was dear—but it had not taken Olav long to perceive that he was unlikely to reap any great profit from this English voyage.

Oaken timber, furs, and hides they had here in abundance—there was no need to carry such things over the English Sea, and not much was to be got for fish at this time of the year. The otter and marten skins and Baard’s iron were the only wares he was able to sell with any profit. It vexed him somewhat that he had known so little of how things were in the outside world. But he did not regret the voyage.

Nor had he any need to feel ashamed in the presence of the Richardsons—they were no shrewder merchants than he. But their chief business in this voyage was not trade. It was their brother,
the Minorite friar, who had moved them to go. When he was in England some years ago he had found a kinsman, a rich priest in the west country, and this man had taken so kindly to his sister’s grandson that he promised to give the Minorites of Oslo a great quantity of costly books and mass vestments at his death. News had been brought last year that the priest was dead, and now the Richardsons were to see to taking up the heritage; the Franciscans’ house here in London would help them and send men with them into the west. At the same time their brother had obtained for them the charge of buying silk yarn, gold wire, flax, and velvet in England, both for the convent of nuns in Oslo and for the Queen’s household.

The Richardsons were to lodge with their kinsmen here in London, a man named Hamo, who was by craft an armourer. Olav was also bidden there as a guest. But in the narrow street where Hamo’s house lay there were smithies in every yard, and in the alleys about were taverns and stews—noise in the daytime and racket and shouting all night. Moreover he would have to give great gifts to everyone in the house at his departure. So Olav chose rather to stay on board with a young lad and an old man whom folk called Tomas Tabor, because in wintertime he went round in Oslo playing the tabor at banquets. The other two mariners stayed with the Richardsons up in the town.—Another thing was that Olav thought he slept so well under the open sky. It often rained at night, so that the water streamed in upon them where they lay under the poop, but in spite of that he preferred
it
to sharing a warm bed with a strange bedfellow.

Every morning early the waterman fetched him and one of his companions and set them ashore. By his second day in town Olav had already found out that the preaching friars had a great convent here, and thither he went to mass—St. Olav’s was so far out of the way, and he was not very eager to meet fellow countrymen either. They followed the river westward through a narrow street that ran behind the warehouses; here was a rank, raw smell in the cold depth between the lofty gabled houses. At last they came to a little green space among heaps of stones and rubble, beside which grew bushes and flowers; the town wall had here been pulled down and moved out farther to the westward to give the Dominicans room to build. The convent lay close up to the new wall, and the church was still in building—it’s outer walls stood naked and
unadorned. But it was exceedingly fair within, built with pointed arches and a very lofty roof with crossed ribs. The morning light poured in full and clear through the lofty, narrow windows, which were not yet filled with pictured glass.

Olav sought out a place so near to the altar that he could hear the words of the priest saying mass. The Latin had a somewhat different sound from that of Norwegians, but not so much so that he could not recognize the passages proper to the saint of the day:

Me exspectaverunt peccatores, ut perderent me: testimonia tua, Domine, intellexi: omnis consummationis vidi finem: latum man-datum tuum nimis. Beati immaculati in via: qui ambulant in lege Domini
—
²

This was the office for a virgin martyr; but they also sing
Beati immaculati
over little children when they are carried to the grave. With hands clasped over his breast brooch and his chin resting on them Olav stood gazing at the priest’s red chasuble. The gospel that followed had once been taught him by Asbjörn All-fat.

In illo tempore: Dixit Jesus discipulis suis parabolam hanc: Similie est regnum cœlorum thesauro abscondito in agro: quem qui invenit homo, abscondit, et prœ gaudio illius vadit, et vendit universa quœ habet, et emit agrum ilium—
³

He was always reminded of Arnvid Finnsson when he was in this church. The priest before the altar became as it were Arnvid—though when he turned toward the people he bore no resemblance to Arnvid, who had never attained to his heart’s desire, of being ordained priest.—
Et vendit universa quœ habet, et emit agrum ilium—
ay, that must be what Arnvid had meant by the counsel he gave him, when they met for the last time.

Another morning they celebrated the memory of a saint whose name Olav had never heard before—he must have been an Englishman. But this was a martyr too:

In illo tempore: Dixit Jesus discipulis suis: Nolite arbitrari, quia pacem venerim mittere in terram: Non veni pacem mittere, sed gladium
—
⁴

Gladium
—Olav had always thought that word sounded so finely. And he saw that it could not be otherwise: when God Himself descended into the world of men and appeared as a man among men, it had to be, not peace, but a sword. For God could
not intend to be as a sorcerer who puts man’s will to sleep; He must needs come with a war-cry: for or against Me! God’s peace—that must be like the peace that comes when the raging of the storm is past and the fight has been fought out—as indeed Saint John the Evangelist had seen in his visions; Bishop Torfinn had spoken of it.

In these early morning hours, when he knelt here during mass, the memories of his mornings in the church at Hamar were so near and living—though it had been winter then and dark outside, when he accompanied Asbjörn All-fat to the northern gallery. Asbjörn said his mass there at the altar of Saint Michael. It was so cold that he could see the priest’s breath as a white vapour against the red flames of the two candles on the altar. No others ever came up there—and sometimes they were so early that the scholars were still asleep; therefore Asbjörn had taught him to serve as acolyte at the mass. When Olav did not remember to answer at once, Asbjörn whispered the first words of the response; with scarcely perceptible nods and pointings he signed to the young man to move the books or bring the ampullæ and the holy water.

His heart had been filled to the brim with a deep, solemn joy when he was permitted thus to assist at the sacred act, the eternal sacrifice, which was here carried out on the border between night and day. Here, in the secret chamber at dawn, he had felt safely in harbour—after his long, rough voyage through the tempest of his own and other men’s uncurbed passions. He had pretended to be careless of the storm—but he had been so young; in secret he trembled with weariness. And he had not come through unsoiled: his heart was surely as turbid as the tarn north in the woods, when on the melting of the snows all the grey and rapid streams had emptied themselves into it. And no sooner had it cleared a little after the flood than the spruce forest round its banks came out and powdered the brown bog-water with yellow. But here at the foot of the altar he felt the Spirit of God as a cleansing wind—the mawkish pollen was blown away: once more his life would be bright and open as the tarn, reflecting the sheer blue and the sun and the clouds on their passage across the sky.

“Lord, Lord—’tis long ago! I am no more a young man. But even in autumn, when the ice has already begun to form around the rocks, and the tarn is choked with withered reeds and green scum—even then Thou canst send a wind that breaks up the half-formed
ice and sweeps the surface clean so that it lies still and bright and blue for a while—before winter comes and imprisons it in ice.”

These thoughts were scarcely formed, but the images haunted Olav as he knelt with bowed head and a corner of his cloak held up before his face. Everything was present to his memory, nothing would he attempt to deny. Nevertheless he was calm, full of confidence.

Now the little mass bell rang; the priest bowed low over the altar table, kneeling. Now he rose again, holding aloft in his hands the sacred body of our Lord, wrapt in the humble garment of the bread.

Olav looked up and worshipped: “My Lord and my God!”

Whether he would or would not, never could his heart cease to love God, he now knew. Whatever he might do and however he might try to drown the voice that made complaint in his inmost being: “Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee!”

Nor had he forgotten that here he was, a traitor and a fugitive from God’s host. For years he had done wrong, and never because he knew no better. But yet he did not now feel the gnawing pain of a sore conscience, which had tormented him so long, whenever he prayed or appeared to pray. Now every prayer he uttered was like kneeling down and quenching his thirst at a fountain.

Behind him in space and time he recalled all the years at Hestviken as a period of sickness—the memory of one long fever. The pain and ache had come from within, all the evil, all the nightmare visions had been bred within himself. Now it was as though the door were thrown open, light and refreshing coolness flowed in upon him from without.

He now felt whole again. The sea, the breezes, the nights on watch with senses directed outward, had washed away the close and fusty heat and cleansed him of his scalded sensitiveness.

It was not that he now thought less of his sin, but that he himself bulked far less in his own eyes. While he was brooding at home in Hestviken, silent and despairing over the loss of his soul, it had seemed to him there was so much he must throw overboard if he would find peace with God—
his
honour,
his
welfare,
his
life perhaps—these had been such great things. But now that he was in a place where he saw more of the glories and riches of this world than he had believed could be collected in one spot—now
all that he called his own suddenly appeared to him so little—a man ought to be able to fling this from him as lightly as he would hang up his harp on the wall, when the trumpet summoned him to arms.

By God, there would always be men enough left upon earth. But each man’s
soul—
that was a thing no man could take hold of, weigh and measure by the standards current among men. And in the end God collects all souls and weighs them with a weight that is His secret.

So he listened in calm meditation to the only voice that spoke to him in a tongue he understood—here in the foreign land, where all other voices shouted at him as though there were a wall between him and them. The voice of the Church was the same that he had listened to in his childhood and youth and manhood.
He
had changed—his aims and his thoughts and his speech, as he grew from one age into another—but the Church changed neither speech nor doctrine; she spoke to him in the holy mass as she had spoken to him when he was a little boy, not understanding many words, but nevertheless taking in much by looking on, as the child takes in its mother by following her looks and gestures, before it understands the spoken word. And he knew that if he journeyed to the uttermost limits of Christian men’s habitation—folks’ form and speech and customs might indeed be strange and incomprehensible to him, but everywhere, when he found a church and entered it, he would be welcomed by the same voice that had spoken to him when he was a child; with open hands the Church would offer him the same sacraments that she had nourished him with in his youth, and that he had rejected and misused.

And Olav felt like a man who has come home to his mother—from distant voyages that have brought him more of wounds and losses than of honour and profit. And now he sits alone with her, listening to her plain, reasonable speech and hearing her wise counsel: “If thou hast been the loser in every conflict thou hast essayed, be yet assured that not even the most hapless man has lost the fight that has not yet been fought.”