The Snake Pit (16 page)

“No. I saw him once. He was so afraid of me—clawed and kicked—he behaved like a young lynx when I tried to hold him.”

Olav felt old far beyond his years, weary and worn at heart. This was the fifth winter he and Ingunn had lived together—it might have been a hundred years. But the time must have seemed yet longer to her, poor woman, he reminded himself.

Meanwhile he tried to rouse himself—to hope. If this time it went well, that would indeed be the only thing that could make her happy again. And now she had been in good health longer than any time before—so maybe she was equal to going through with it.

As for himself, all desire of having children had been tortured out of him long ago. He thought indeed of his manor and his race—but now these affected him so little. And then there loomed before him a shadowy vision of something immensely far off in the future: when he had grown old, and his pain and anxiety and this strange morbid and uneasy love of his was no more—For she could not live to be old. And then his life might be like that of other men. Then he would be able to seek atonement and peace for his tortured conscience. And then there might yet be time to think of his manor and his race—

But when he had reached this point in his vague conjectures, a sharp pang went through his heart, as when a wound opens wide. Dimly he divined that, in spite of his having no peace, no joy, in spite of his soul being hurt to the death—he yet possessed happiness, his own happiness, even if it were unlike the happiness of other men. Sick and almost bled to death, his happiness yet lived within him, and his aim must be to find courage and means to save it, before it was too late.

Ingunn seemed to keep in good health, even into the new year. But by degrees it made Olav uneasy to see her so utterly unlike herself—in a continual state of futile bustling. That Torhild could
have patience with such a mistress was beyond his comprehension; but the girl followed her mistress with calm endurance and made work for herself out of all Ingunn’s restless confusion.

Matters stood thus when at the beginning of Lent word came to Hestviken that Jon Steinfinnsson, Ingunn’s younger brother, had died unmarried at Yuletide. There was indeed no necessity for Olav to journey northward at this winter season in order to take up his wife’s share of the inheritance. But to Olav Audunsson this thing came as a token.

For four nights he lay with lighted candles, scarcely closing his eyes in sleep. He was bargaining with his God and judge. Some means he
must
find now of saving himself and this unhappy wreck of whom he was so fond that he knew of no beginning or end between them. The whole of Hestviken as his patrimony and the name of his own son—that must surely be amends in full for the brat of the vagabond Icelander.

Olav had been twelve days at Berg when he spoke of this one evening as he sat in the hall drinking with Hallvard Steinfinnsson, while Tora was present: now there only remained his most important business, to fetch home his son.

Hallvard Steinfinnsson stared at him agape—speechless. Then he flared up:

“Your—! Do you tell me that you
yourself
were father to the brat Ingunn had to creep into the corner and give birth to like a bitch?” He smote the table, crimson with rage.

“You well know, Hallvard, how my fortunes stood at that time,” replied Olav with composure. “Had my enemies had this against me, that I was here in secret while still under sentence of banishment, they would scarce have been easy to deal with. And it might have cost their aunt and Lady Magnhild dearly if it had come out that they had housed me, an outlaw.”

But Hallvard swore till the sparks flew. “Think you not, Olav Audunsson, my aunt and Magnhild would rather have paid all they had in fines for your thrusting yourself upon them, an outlawed man, than that it should have been said that one of our women had disgraced herself so foully that she dared not name the father of her child?” He mimicked all the guesses folk had brought forward, each one uglier than the last.

Olav shrugged his shoulders. “I know not how you care to
speak of these rumours now. For now the truth will come to light—and had you let me know a little sooner that such things were said, I should not have waited so long. We deemed we ought to keep silence about it awhile for Magnhild’s sake—but you may be well assured I have never had any other thought than to acknowledge my son.”

“You had—God knows what you had!” the other mocked. All at once he sat straight up, with a stiff stare: “You had so! I wonder whether Ingunn believed it so surely—or that you would hold to your boast that ’twas a lawful marriage you made when you went to bed with her before you had hair on your chin? Why then did she throw herself into the lake?”

“Ask Tora,” said Olav curtly. “She thinks it was the milk that had gone to her head.”

“Nor do I believe,” said Hallvard slyly, “that Haftor would have sued Magnhild for this—for you and he were reconciled—”

“Believe what you will,” said Olav. “To be sure Haftor and I were reconciled—’twas on account of the Earl I was then an outlaw. A numskull you have been all your days, Hallvard, but you can scarce be so foolish as not to see that for you and your kinsfolk the more profitable way is to believe what I have now told you. Even if you should miss the inheritance you would have gotten had your sister died childless.”

Hallvard started up and made for the door.

But when Olav was left alone with Tora, he felt all at once that this thing he had taken upon himself was intolerably difficult. As she remained silent, he began with a kind of sneer:

“And you, Tora; do you believe me?”

Tora looked him straight in the face with eyes that betrayed nothing:

“I am bound to believe you, when you say it yourself.”

And Olav felt it as a physical pressure upon his neck. Weary as he was, he had now taken upon himself a new burden, in addition to the old. Nothing of it could be cast off, and nowhere could he turn for help. He must go through with it—alone.

On the evening of the next day Olav came down to Berg with the child. Tora did her best to receive her sister’s son kindly. But, for all that, the boy seemed to feel he was not very welcome in this house; he kept close to his new-found father, trotted at his
heels everywhere and stood by Olav’s knee when the man sat down. Then if it chanced that he was allowed to hold his father’s hand, or that Olav took him up and set him on his knees, Eirik’s pretty little face beamed with joy—all at once he had to turn and look up at his father in glad wonder.

After this Olav stayed no longer at Berg than he was obliged. Already on the morning of the third day he was ready for the journey.

Eirik sat well wrapped in the sledge, turning this way and that, looking about and laughing with joy. Now he was to drive in a sledge again—he had had one drive when his father fetched him from Siljuaas; the sledge had been waiting for them at the last farm in the parish. Anki laughed and chatted as he made fast the baggage—the kind man who had carried him down on his back when his father fetched him. His father looked shapelessly huge in his fur mantle—and the rime on the fur of his own cape showed as white as it did on the hairs around the men’s hoods.

Tora stood looking at the boy’s red and happy face—his brown eyes were bright and quick as those of a little bird. There sprang up in the woman’s heart a few drops of the tenderness she had felt for Eirik when he was a baby. She kissed him farewell on both cheeks and bade him bring greetings to his mother.

Olav came home to Hestviken early one day, as the pale sun shone red through the frost fog; he had driven from Oslo in the pitch-dark early morning. When they came into the valley he gave the reins to Anki, lifted the sleeping boy out of the sledge, and carried him up the slope to the house.

Ingunn sat by the fire combing her hair when Olav came in. He set down the child on the floor and pushed him forward:

“Go on, Eirik, and bid your mother good-morrow as you ought”—whereupon he turned back into the anteroom. From the door he saw with the corner of his eye that Ingunn crept toward the boy on her knees, stretching out her thin, bare arms; her hair swept the floor behind her.

He was out in the yard by the sledges when she called to him from the doorway. In the dark anteroom she threw her arms about his neck, weeping so that it shook her as she clung closely to him. He laid his hand upon her back—underneath the hair and the shift he felt her shoulder-blades standing out like boards. With
that wealth of unbound hair streaming over the weak, drooping shoulders she reminded her husband in a strange way of what she had been like when she was young. Heavy and awkward she was now in her movements—it was not easy to see traces of her freshness and beauty in the tear-swollen, wasted face. And yet it was not so many years since she had been the fairest of all.—For the first time he felt the full wretchedness of her useless fecundity. He put his arm around her again.

“I thought ’twould make you happy,” he said, for she wept and wept.

“Happy—” she trembled, and now he found that she was laughing through her sobs. “I am surely happier than the angels—though you know full well, Olav, I love you more than ten children—”

“Go in and dress yourself,” he begged her; “you will take cold here.”

When he came in she put on her clothes and her wimple and was carrying in food from the closet where they kept it in winter. Eirik still stood where Olav had put him down, but his mother had taken off his leathern jacket. When he saw his father coming, he turned to him quickly and tried to take his hand, smiling a little anxiously.

“Nay, go to your mother now, Eirik,” said Olav. “Do as I tell you,” he repeated, rather sharply, as the boy shyly drew nearer to him.

E
IRIK
was nearly five years old, and he was beginning to find out that it was counted a great blemish in him that he had no father. A year before, when they had been down to the village for Lady Day in the spring, he had heard certain folk saying that he was base-born; the same word had been used by the men who called at Siljuaas on their fowling—and it was surely said of him. But when he asked his foster-mother what it meant, she boxed his ears. Afterwards she had muttered angrily that they had better deserved the blows who said such things to the poor little creature—ay, and his mother too—’twas not the boy’s fault that he was a bastard and a straw-brat. But Eirik guessed it was better not to ask more questions about these queer words. They meant some
thing it was wrong to be, and that was why Torgal did not like him—he could not tell how he knew it, but it had come to him in some way that Torgal, the father of the house, was not
his
father.

Torgal, the crofter of Siljuaas, was a kindly, home-loving man. He trained up his sons: the eldest of them already went hunting with him in the forest, the younger ones had to work on the clearing at home, and their father showed them what to do and chastised them when they needed it. But Eirik he heeded not at all, whether for good or for evil. He showed his wife the honour of never meddling with her affairs, and he reckoned this adoption of the bastard of a great man’s daughter to be a venture of hers with which he had nothing to do—he left her a free hand both with the child and with the payment for his fostering.

Eirik knew well enough that Hallveig was not his mother, but he thought nothing of it, for Hallveig never made any difference between him and her own children. She was just as ready with blows and angry words whichever of them might get in her way while at work. And on the eve of holy-days she bathed them all in order of age in the big tub, and he was clad in a sheepskin coat the day before winter night,
⁸
and as soon as the cuckoo was heard he had to be content with a homespun shirt and nothing else, like the other children, whatever the weather. On those days in the year when the people of Siljuaas went down to the village to mass, and Hallveig had the use of the horse, Eirik was allowed to ride behind her just as far as each of the other children, and she kissed them all with equal affection when she had received
corpus Domini.

They never went short of food—cured fish or game; with it a piece of bread or a ladleful of porridge, small beer now and again, and water when milk ran short in winter. Eirik had been very well off and quite content with his lot in the lonely clearing far away in the forest.

Every hour of the day something happened, so many people and animals were there in the little homestead. And round about its fences the forest was thick on every side: within it, behind the wall of murmuring fir trees and glistening bushes, was a teeming, hidden life. Creatures lived and moved in there, keeping an eye on them from the edge of the wood, luring the boy and drawing him right down to the fence: at the slightest movement or sound
within the forest the whole flock of youngsters would spin round and take to their heels across the turf, back to the shelter of the houses. Not much had the children seen of the folk from beyond, but they heard the grown-ups tell tales of strange happenings, so they knew of the troll of Uvaas and the pixy who mostly haunted the mossy rocks by the Logging Stone, and of the bear-one year he had appeared at the byre and tried to break through the roof on a frosty night—but that was before Eirik could remember. Under a fixed rock in the meadow there dwelt little men and women in blue, but with them they were good friends—Hallveig carried out food to them now and then, and they did her many a good turn in gratitude. Eirik had often seen their footprints in the snow. Those who dwelt outside the fences were of course more evilly disposed. There was no great difference, to the boy, between the beasts of the forest and these others who haunted it.

The sound of something moving within the thicket on a summer’s day, the calls of beasts and other noises from the forest at nighttime, tracks in the snow on winter mornings. Beisk, the dog, who would start up and bark furiously on dark evenings, without Eirik ever finding out what made him do it—all such things made up the wonderful world outside the homestead which greeted the child. It was misty and dreamlike, but it was real enough, only he was so small that he had to stay inside the fence. But Master Torgal and the big boys went in and out of it and told of the strange things that happened there.