6 I meet the august ancestors
A child’s mental life is essentially egotistical. It revolves around its own emotions and sense impressions, untouched by the wider awareness which distinguishes the adult from the infant. A child is in the world, yet not of it, for his sense extensions are limited and weak. He swims about in the waters of his own emotions as unconscious of the outer world as a goldfish in its little glass bowl.
A series of sad jolts might, conceivably, increase the sensitivity of a goldfish—a cat clawing the water would no doubt inspire a spurt of exceptional energy. There was always something stirring the quiet of my private world. This something had, generally, a sting that whipped my small mental processes to the point where I found myself dimly aware that strange, alien powers existed beyond my little bowl.
There was the place where papa worked, for instance. It exercised a definite spell, which cast an uneasy shadow on the whole house. Before six in the morning papa set out with his lunch-box and bottle of coffee, and whenever he was well enough, he remained in this mysterious place until nine or ten o’clock at night. That his many illnesses were somehow connected with these strange visits I began to suspect, for he was always so tired when he came home. And sometimes there was a grey look in his face that made him seem a stranger. I was usually awake, for my cough tormented me, and often, too, I had bilious attacks that prevented sleep, and so nothing would do but I must sit on papa’s knee for a minute.
I remember those ghostly nights, when the kitchen lamp, turned low to save coal oil, struggled against the dark, and the stove made equally inadequate headway against the cold. Papa was often too tired to eat anything, though mamma always had a kettle of soup or porridge waiting for him. He ought to eat, she said; there was no nourishment in bread and coffee. And soup was the mainstay. Boiling beef or brisket with potatoes made a fine dish, the broth thickened with flour or a dash of oatmeal, and sometimes stepped up with an onion or a turnip when the budget permitted such luxuries.
Yes, he ought to eat. Papa knew that, but how could a man eat when his whole body ached and his lungs felt clogged with dust and his senses reeled with weariness? How could you sit for almost fourteen hours at a bench, stitching by hand the heaviest traces, fighting time for a few cents because it meant life for your family—stitching, stitching, stitching, with the devil at your heels, a sort of frozen despair in your heart, and come away with enough life even to feel hunger?
Yes, mamma knew that it was hard to keep one’s soul alive in this harsh country. She was sympathetic and cheerful, though at times a note of bitterness, not unmixed with accusation, coloured her sentiment. In a vague way, I understood that this feeling had its source in something far beyond my tiny goldfish bowl. It had to do with the incomprehensible world in which mamma lived before I was born, which was harder for me to visualize as tangible and real, for mamma referred to it seldom, than the glamorous reign of the Ancestors, on whose achievements she liked to dwell. They too were outside my small, immediate world, but represented a ghostly court of equity, to whom it was my duty to refer the record of my deeds and misdeeds.
The old-fashioned Icelander, like the ancient Chinese, does not cherish his ancestors idly. It is not with him a question of recounting with pride achievements once illustrious and long forgotten, for nothing better than pleasurable vanity. One walked warily before this ghostly assembly, and shuddered to be found wanting in commendable behaviour. Consciously and unconsciously, my mother’s judgements were invariably coloured by this final court of appeal.
Hardships she endured with exemplary courage, but no flight of sentimental eloquence ever swayed her the slightest from what she believed as right and becoming in the sight of that formidable company. Where my father would have cheerfully opened his house to any one with no better hospitality than a cup of coffee and some easy conversation, mother thought it beneath the dignity of respectable behaviour thus to inflict one’s poverty on others. She had no gift for light friendship, and preferred an old book to the companionship of indifferent people.
She was a woman descended from an ancient family, stiff-necked, righteous, and unbending in their unconscious pride. The sagas record their knightly deeds—bold, fearless, not always wise, yet never, I think, inconsistent with the cold pride that impelled them. Gunnar Hamundson, the hereditary chieftain, to whom the numerous branches of the family look back with justifiable veneration, was the last of the great Vikings. By which I mean last of the Norse nobles to acquit himself in the Viking manner, serving at court, sailing his own dragon ship on seaways of adventure, presiding at parliament, keeping open house in the regal style, paternal towards his dependents, keeping himself responsible for their justice at Thingvellir, and, as a matter of course, the champion of his less fortunate kinsman in all their quarrels. Immortalized in the sagas by reason of his own attainments, his family was already old and established long before they came to Iceland. Gunnar’s great-grandfather, Baugur Raudson, was one of the Landnamsmonnum—the first band of nobles who took possession of the country and established the old Norse Republic. His great-grandfather was Kjarvalur (Ceabhall), a colourful chieftain, who, in the good old Irish fashion, dubbed himself king of Ossory in Munster. He died there in 888.
True to the sentiments of his race, Gunnar preferred to die at the hands of his enemies rather than submit to a three-years’ banishment, although, for so renowned a knight, the sentence would have resolved itself into nothing more drastic than an extended visit at the court of the Norwegian king. But he loved his Icelandic dales; and the green slopes of the little hills, where lacy waterfalls came sweetly down from the crags above, were more precious in his sight than the pageantries of any court. Against the counsel of his wisest friends, he refused to fly. These heaths were his homeland. Why desert them because a feud of which he was spiritually guiltless might lead to death?
‘Death is not so great a matter,’ he contended. But the manner of one’s dying—ah, that was something else. A man’s departure from the vanities of existence ought to be consistent with the code he practices. ‘Aldrei ad guggna!’
They knew no compromise, those headstrong clansmen, and that unyielding quality has characterized their descendants, often with ill effects and unhappy consequences. But if they were often short on mercy, they seldom failed in justice, and rarely broke the bonds of loyalty.
After the fall of the Norse Republic and the rise of the medieval church, which, in Iceland as elsewhere in those god-bitten days, arrogated unto itself powers and principalities that formerly rested with the nobles, many an ancient house was brought to ruin, and only those individuals who, in the course of time, managed to slide into the pontifical service rose once more to public place. That, I suppose, rather than piety or special virtue, accounts for the priests and prelates that distinguished my mother’s family. However dire the economic fortunes of the country, some one of the line always managed to pop up in ministerial robes, and their daughters, as a matter of course, were predestined to the high service of husbands similarly placed. But the same quality which on the one hand upheld the old traditions without flinching might, on the other, pursue a tangent, and meet with grief.
My poor great-great-grandmother was a case in point. She was a pretty woman, the youngest of several sisters, all of whom, in due course, snared her minister, and, according to the tale, were a credit to the family. They were forceful, vigorous, wilful women, who knew, without a shadow of doubt what was right, not only for themselves, but for their youngest sister, whom dearly loved, but secretly suspected of a doubtful gentleness. They had seen her, on several occasions, listening with too wrapt attention to the silly verses of a handsome young nobody from a neighbouring farm. Being their sister, they could not of course accuse her of indiscretion, even in thought. The most they could do was set her at weaving whenever the young man came to discuss the law and the prophets with papa. And, to prevent her mind from wandering, one or another dear sister would read her something really inspiring from the Latin-threaded tomes of the bishops’ archives.
Yet, the unthinkable befell. One morning the sisters gathered in the badstoffa, their faces drawn and white, their glances veiled under shamed lashes. Their breakfast coffee drunk, the eldest, lifting her burning eyes, broke the dreadful silence, voicing what must be said.
‘Margot has gone,’ she said. ‘Gone—you understand? There are to be no inquiries. No explanations. When affliction strikes a house, it must be borne in silence. The Lord gives and the Lord taketh away … ‘
That was the end of the matter. So they thought. But they had reckoned without that other nagging virtue, loyalty. Margot was officially dead, but her memory burned in their hearts. They never spoke of her, yet each knew when, by some roundabout means, word reached one or another, and a sort of gloom would hang over the house for days. It did not surprise them that poor Margot’s happiness was short-lived, or that the shock of disillusionment and the break with her family was undermining her health. That was the natural consequence of an unnatural act. Margot had wilfully betrayed the laws of common sense. She had thought that romantic love could cancel the incompatibilities inherent in such a misalliance as hers. She had thought that her husband’s flare for poesy would stand between her and the harsh realities of a poverty-stricken life.
No, the sisters were not the least surprised that Margot went about her humble duties like a wistful ghost, seldom speaking, and never heard to laugh. But that was a year of bad harvests and fearful weather, and often, after the winter had closed in upon them, the sisters would stop in the midst of their labours, and their thoughts, though unspoken, were plain to all. How was Margot faring in that wretched place? Had she even the common necessities of life …
It was spring when the news reached them. Margot was dying of consumption. She had borne a child, and the doctor suspected she had had such a bad time of it because she was undernourished. The dreadful tidings were brought by Jon himself. To his personal misery the sisters were blind and deaf. That the poor young man was half dead with grief, and was come to beg their help humbly for Margot, apparently touched them not at all. Margot had no hand in his coming, he said—but she was dying.
The sisters held a council. Margot must come home—they must send for her at once—but she must come as she had left, unencumbered, alone. One look at their cold, hard faces, and whatever plea the poor husband may have had in mind for his helpless infant died unspoken. Perhaps he understood them better than they knew. They were just without mercy, utterly incapable of comprehending the graces of a truly charitable mind. They would be good to Margot. They would welcome her without recrimination, since that was the only procedure that could wipe from their minds the ghastly nightmare of her wilful behaviour.
So the prodigal came home to die in the bosom of a solicitous family, to whom, however, she dared say nothing of the little one left in the desolate crofter’s hut. But, when she was dead, the sisters had the child put to foster with a highly respectable family. They would have none of it themselves, for that would remind them of too many bitter memories. Still, the child had its rights—it must not grow up in ignorance, condemned to the stupid existence of an utterly commonplace person.
That disowned, not quite commonplace person, was my great-grandmother, and, from all accounts, her plebeian contribution had little effect on the sterner qualities peculiar to the family on which she was so haplessly grafted. But in that I may be wrong. Certainly, in the eyes of her people, mother repeated that wretched mistake when she married my father.
It was a wild, windy day that blew an arctic chill from the mountains when father first rode into the wide court-yard before the ancient deanery, seeking shelter. Mother was a little girl of ten, with a small delicate face and great ropes of bronze-coloured hair dangling down her back. She had been sent to the church, which stood at a little distance from the house, to fetch a hymnal for the dean, who was preparing the house-service for his people. It was she who first sighted the young men riding down from the hills, singing at the tops of their lungs, and making a gay spectacle in their riding-clothes and finely appointed accoutrements. The little horses stepped to the wind and sailed, heads high, tails streaming behind them, into the ancient court-yard.
Their coming must have created an uncomfortable stir, and, no doubt, a consequent pleasurable excitement. For the dean was famous for his zeal in the church, whereas, at least one of the young gallants, my future father, was infamous for his heretical intellectualism, and was a divorced man besides!
From all reports of father at that time, he was a dashing young man, too handsome for his own good, and possessed of a pleasant, persuasive voice. He was gay and witty, a radical in thought, and, like so many young men of his generation, given to pleasure and the glass that cheers. He was the son of a landed farmer, whose patch of precious earth, nestling under the dark shadow of mountains, was a source of deep affection. It was historic ground. Scarcely a foot of it but was consecrated by some event in ancient story. It was truly the land of their fathers, romantically loved and dearly treasured. How deeply loved can be judged by the fact that, a generation after it had passed from the family, my aunt in Winnipeg commissioned an artist to paint the homestead that so much of it at least might be preserved to its spiritual children.
They called it Ferry-Cot, and even in its painted semblance it looks a jolly place, as though something of its former rash hospitality lingered through the years. The beautiful White River winds lazily by, skirting the haylands, and the vagrant roads drop down from the mountain flanks—river and roads that brought so many ever-welcome visitors to the friendly old house. It is a sturdy house, as befits a dwelling where turbulent spirits worked out their turbulent destiny. It has the look of having weathered many storms, and settled at long last to sadly sweet dreams.
Those who are kindly inclined say that grandfather’s mismanagement of Ferry-Cot dated from the death of his first wife, Fru Anna, a woman of refinement and charm, and a singer of considerable merit. She had a way with her, say the old folk, a gentle persuasion that kept her impetuous husband from many a folly. She smiled upon his blustering, smoothing away irritation, and, without seeming so to do, really steered the domestic craft. When she died grandfather thought the world had come to an end. His grief was genuine and tragic—his choice of solace, no doubt, inexcusably weak and unwise. He was seldom sober, though never drunk, and took to riding about the country with his cronies, leaving the management of his land to servants. He could not bear the chill loneliness of that motherless house, and the sight of his bereaved children only increased his misery. He was sorry for them, but sorrier for himself. ‘I had the fairest woman to wife,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘and I had not the sense to appreciate her.’
It is difficult in this day and age, to give any adequate picture of what an old-fashioned Iceland farm was like, or to define the peculiar position of servants in such a patriarchal institution. But nothing is further from my mind than to create an impression of wealth in regard to grandfather’s humble, though comfortable, estate. That there were many working folk (vinnu folk) on the place was so from necessity, not because of affluence or vanity. In those days a farm was a miniature manufacturing plant, a self-contained institution. Almost everything needed and used in the home was made there. It was not merely a question of raising sheep and cattle and laying in the supplies of fodder necessary to their keep. Hides were tanned for shoes, the wool transformed into yarn for spinning and weaving, and this in tum meant that men and women proficient in such crafts must be employed, either by the season or permanently, as was more often the case on a large estate.
Horses were the only means of transportation, and there was always a large number trained, either for riding, which meant breaking them to pacing, since no Icelander would ride a horse that trotted, or for work as pack ponies. Every farm had, therefore, its smithy and in the smith a man who understood and loved horses. The cattle and sheep required herdsman and shepherd, and since sheep are milked in Iceland, a number of milkmaids, who had charge of the buttery and cheese-making. Meats were cured, fish dried and salted, huge kegs of skir prepared for the winter. An Icelandic bur was something to delight a woman’s heart, its shelves lined with cheeses, piles of flaky flatbread, firkins of butter, the rafters hung with sweet-smelling smoked mutton, and on the floor huge tubs and barrels of pickled meats, pressed sheep’s heads, spiced rolls of flank lamb, and bales of dried fish. The making of these edibles was entirely in the hands of women, as was the yearly supply of soap, and the thousands of candles required. through the long winter.
Tailoring of both men’s and women’s wear was carried on in the home, and, of course, in that pre-machine age it was done by hand. Yet I have never seen a more neatly turned lapel than one shown me by an old woman trained in those ancient days, and the work of her patient fingers.
All manner of handicrafts were expertly done on such farms; needlework of various sorts, the most beautiful of which was the baldering—gold and silver embroidery used on festal garments—an art perfected by Viking women; delicate crochet, weaving, knitting, the making of dyes, and, on the men’s part, carving in wood and bone, cabinet-making, bookbinding, leather work of many kinds, and, most respected of useful arts, the copying of ancient manuscripts. Indeed, many a rough-looking chap, who spent his days pitching hay and tending cattle, might of an evening, and by no better light than a tallow candle, turn out an illuminated page in script as fine as copper type, his capitals a work of sheer art, delicately shaded in blues and gold and scarlet.
It is perhaps not so difficult to imagine that so many people, living under one roof-tree, each contributing something toward the general welfare, should retain a self-respect and an independence not to be found among our servants of modern employers. There was never any stigma attached to labour in Iceland, and yet no people were ever more conscious of race. Individual integrity and attainments—which were expected of well-born people—these were the criteria, and no amount of money could supply the deficiency.
Grandfather may well have been as unwise in his selection of workers as he was in his choice of companions. At any rate he awoke, one day, to the disagreeable fact that his affairs were badly handled. When Fru Anna was at the helm everything had run smoothly enough. The solution, therefore, was another wife. He found her in a widow with a son about the same age as my father. From all reports, she was a sensible, amiable woman, who accepted the proposal in good grace. Amiable she proved, indeed, but anything but a manager. As the hasty wooer soon discovered, the new Frua was indolent and much too fond of physical comfort to inaugurate any vigorous improvements. She was a stout, cheery soul, who firmly believed in the road of least resistance. She was careless and untidy, and often drove grandfather into tantrums by leaving her personal ornaments strewn about the buttery.
‘Well, well, who is to steal them, my dear?’ she would laugh. ‘If they aren’t safe in the buttery, they won’t be safe in the bedroom.’
Some of these heirlooms, which once graced a butter tub, are now in the national museum. Quaint old pieces of silver filigree, fine as lace, and dating back no one knows how many generations.
But Frua had her loving attributes. She was a kind stepmother. She was as kind to my father as to her own son and the little daughter she bore to grandfather. Father’s eldest sisters seldom spoke of her. Perhaps they resented that a woman so different from their beloved mother had taken her place. Being women, they doubtless were more critical of niceties and more apt to be antagonistic. Father always thought of her with sincere affection, and loved to recount how mischievously he and her own son behaved toward the poor lady.
She grew heavy with the years, and consequently, more devoted to comfort. She was, too, I gathered, not above believing in the Hidden People. When she was busy in the bur the boys thought it rare sport to terrify the good soul with moans and groans and mysterious noises. Then the fun began: having drawn a shriek, the young imps pounced out, hooting their glee, and Frua, flying into a temper, would seize a ladle or a whisk, and chase her tormentors, crying: ‘Impish little worms! Wait till I lay hold of you!’ The chase generally extended round the house, till, breath and bulk exhausted, Frua gave up and laughingly told the little worms to behave themselves.
‘You should have a hiding, so you should, skratans ormarnir! But look, now—if you behave, you can have a cookie!’
A kind, generous-hearted woman, her indifferent management was not, as grandfather discovered, likely to save the household from disaster. Year followed year, and, instead of improvement, it now became apparent that something drastic must be done if the farm was not to pass from their hands. The solution grandfather hit upon this time may sound like a fantastic invention, but it must be remembered that over sixty years ago a father was something more than an apology for being.
At any rate, grandfather needed money, and suddenly he remembered that a friend of his, though blessed with means, was burdened with a plain daughter. A colourless, insignificant miss, who could never make a likely match, except at some sacrifice to her papa. Well then, let the wench pay off the debts on Ferry-Cot with her dowry! She must marry his son.
This heaven-sent inspiration in mind, grandfather straightway rode off to share the happy thought with his crony. The scheme had much to commend it, thought his friend, but what of the prospective bridal pair? Were they not too young to know their own minds, he wondered.
‘Ha! I could wish them younger still,’ said grandfather. ‘Something tells me they will be hard enough to manage as it is.’
Which certainly proved true. The girl wept and pleaded. My father argued and stormed. They did not want to be married. They had no interest in each other, nor anything in common. They fought a good fight to no purpose. Grandfather meant to save the farm, and the bride’s papa to see that no daughter of his passed up an opportunity to better herself. What either of them thought now, in their foolish immaturity, did not matter, said the fathers. They had their duty to face—their Christian, filial duty to perform.
In desperation the two young things met at a secret rendezvous. They were pale as death, outraged in their innermost feelings, and miserably conscious of their utter helplessness. The unhappy youth apologized for the bitter things he had said of his proposed bride. He had not been thinking of the tearful girl before him.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ the poor girl sobbed. ‘You can’t like people just because you are told to —I guess I’m kind of plain, and—and papa thinks nobody will have me, except—well, like this. But he’s wrong! I—I don’t know how to tell you, without seeming to be foolish—’
‘Don’t tell me!’ the young man cried. ‘It’s bad enough as it is. What a country! What a blind, belly-ridden country! If those old men thought of anything except their damned sheep and cattle—but they don’t. They think of everything in terms of chattel, even their flesh and blood, and that’s what we are until we come of age.’
‘Yes, that’s what we are,’ the girl echoed, brightening a little, because she sensed a touch of sympathy in the firebrand before her, although his eyes flashed and his coal-black hair, gleaming in the moonlight, gave him a cold, tragic air. ‘I thought of running away, but where could I go? Wherever I went, I’d be returned to my father’s house. I guess there is nothing we can do except—except try not to hate each other too much.’
‘Oh, but you are wrong,’ he told her, with bitter intensity. ‘That is exactly what we must do. Hate each other. Hate each other so effectively that this sort of thing will end. What if they brand us with that Christian ceremony, like they brand their sheep? Does that mean we have to live together? Look here, don’t worry about me. I’ll find a way to keep out of the way. And when I’m of age—’ He drew a deep breath, and the look on his face brought a lump to her throat.
Oh, poor boy, she thought, he is just as badly hurt as I.
‘When that time comes, and it is not so long,’ he concluded vehemently, ‘you shall see how well I’ll carry out the good work our dear fathers began. But I’ll go to the devil in my own sweet way!’
Father was not the kind of man who details, out of vanity, or for idle pleasure, his amatory history. This tragic episode, which undoubtedly coloured his whole existence and bore much bitter fruit, was told me by an older member of the family when I myself was a woman grown, and all the painful memories were gentled over by the years.
It is said that those two young people faced the churchly prelate, who pronounced upon them an eternal obligation, with frozen, ghostly calm, tears in their desperate eyes, and who can say what hate in their hearts? The subsequent fate of the little bride has no part in this story, but much that was reckless and paradoxical in my father’s conduct thereafter may be attributed to this unfortunate circumstance.
In accordance with the times, and the means of a small landowner, father acquired considerable learning at home. He was a scholar at heart, passionately devoted to the sagas, and well grounded in the antiquities. He was always a romanticist, demanding something more than dull, realistic details of obvious faults and incidents in poetry or prose. He loved Robert Burns because of his tenderness and pity, and understood that except for his weaknesses he could not have reacted so surely to the sufferings of men. He used to say that there was no uniform perfection in anything but mediocrity—’and from that may the good gods save us!’ He was devoted to letters and the language, and whatever he wrote was carefully and conscientiously composed. Not that he had any desire to pose as a stylist, but because he held that a thing worth saying at all was worth saying well. He was, moreover, an original, fearless thinker, not the least affected by conventional thunders or pious bigotry. Curiously enough, he was abetted in his heretical rationalism by a young cleric, the Reverend Oddur, who was his tutor for a season, and a lifelong friend thereafter. This young man had been educated in Copenhagen, and while there had hobnobbed with the rising intellectuals, who, in due course, were to cause such scandals in their respective countries, denouncing tyrants and disputing the Trinity. Perverse individualists, who refused to believe that man is a miserable worm, conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. Mad hatters, who even went so far as to contend that women might be trusted not to wreck the earth if, now and again, they were permitted to toy with a vision that transcended the cradle and the kitchen.
There is no doubt but that, had grandfather not followed his heavenly inspiration with regard to his son, my father would have settled down to the pleasant life of an Icelandic farmer, spending his time in debating the pros and cons of advancing thought and current poetry, and of the hated Danish suppression. The monotonous details of farming would have fallen to others, while he himself tinkered about as fancy dictated, devoting what time he pleased to his own chosen craft or chosen hobby. In my father’s case it was saddlery. He was an expert craftsman, and derived as much satisfaction from a meticulously executed pattern, the leather handsomely tooled and the cloth fittingly embroidered, as from a pointed discussion on the latest theological schism.
In old Iceland the hand and the head were never at enmity, nor was any man condemned to ignorance and the company of clods because he earned his bread by some humble employment. Some of our greatest poets were poverty-stricken farmers, and even a bishop might on occasion join in the haymaking in the short summer season. It is not surprising, therefore, that when my father decided to come to Canada he should think of his skill as something on which he might rely to provide a decent living for himself and his children. It would have been surprising had he even dreamed that a good craftsman, despite a very decent education, could so effectively be reduced to the status and the misery of a slave in the glorious country that ballyhooed its magnificent opportunities by way of press and prophet.
But that was yet to come. Father had no thought of America in his youth, and, from all reports, led a hectic, erratic career after that hapless marriage ceremony. It was dreadful, said the grundys, how he neglected his poor young wife and flashed about the country with his godless companions. It really seemed as though any pretty baggage with inviting eyes was more interesting to the wayward husband than his lawful spouse. Which was doubtless quite true. But all these excursions abroad were not quite so iniquitous as the good folk honestly believed. There were times when father went to some isolated mountain farmstead and behaved himself with decided decorum.
In fact, he spent happy months teaching the children the time-honoured reading, writing, arithmetic, and what he pleased of history and literature. How agreeably he lent himself to the task may be gathered from the fact that more than fifty years later father received a touching letter from an obscure old woman who had been his pupil. Style and handwriting were so ridiculously imitative of father’s that our first impulse was to laugh—but we did not laugh. She was a widow now, she wrote, and life had never been easy on the farm. But her children had all bettered themselves, had pursued ‘the happy path of knowledge.’ That was what she wanted papa to know, for it would please him. Herself, she had not been able to make much of his instruction, but she had not forgotten him, nor the hope he had set before her. And she signed the letter: ‘Your loving little Stina.’
There was a film of tears in father’s eyes as he gazed at that signature a moment, trying to recall what those devoted lines wished him to remember: a little girl with flying yellow hair and eager, inquisitive glances. Yet, when he spoke, the familiar satiric humour sang in his voice.
‘Oh, yes, my little Stina was a winsome lass, with no head for figures, God bless her—but what a gaunt old warhorse she had for a mother!’
These tutoring days were a pleasant interlude that left its homely memories, but the restlessness and inner revolt tormenting him seem to have rendered every place quickly distasteful, and all quiet occupation intolerable. He must turn to something else, go on and on, seeking he knew not what, but fully determined to repudiate the ties and obligations imposed upon him by paternal authority.
There are varying and contradictory tales of those aimless years, the common denominator of which seems to be that some overpowering impulse of curiosity drove him from one extreme to another. His most industrious moments were tormented by doubts of futility, his wildest excesses overcast by vague regrets. It might be that in his wandering, in his eager yearning, he had somewhere glimpsed those fateful fairy lights that the Norsemen called Vafurlogar. Strange, unpredictable hungers seized the spirit that looked upon this light; and none could tell to what quest it bound one, whether after riches, or beauty, or some dimly guessed knowledge beyond the stars. There was only one thing certain: once those silver torches had fired the fringe of consciousness, only death ended the searching wander lust of the soul.
It is true, at all events, that nothing so plagued my father as the smug monotony most people mistake for spiritual grace and happiness. In common with his godless companions, he subscribed to the tolerant doctrines of liberalism, and doubtless drained too many tankards to the glory of the newly liberated spirit of man. Also, like those other hotheads who punned against a graft-ridden government and thumbed noses at its pious beneficiaries, he is said to have serenaded too many susceptible damsels by the melting light of the midnight sun.
There were other deeds of which less was said—impulse, kindly deeds. There was the time a poor, filthy beggar died in his hut on the outskirts of a hamlet where father happened to be. The sheriff could find no one willing to prepare the wretched creature for decent burial. Alive, he had been a disgrace, scarcely tolerated in the cowsheds. Let him lie to the last judgement in the state he had chosen!
‘But he must once have thought like a man—dreamed like a man,’ cried my father. ‘Who can say where the blame rests? In him, or another, that he lost that dream.’
‘Fine words, fine words!’ muttered the sheriff, glowering at the fastidious romanticist. ‘You wouldn’t mind the dirty task yourself, I suppose—you’d fair jump at it, now wouldn’t you!’
‘I will do it very gladly,’ said my father.
