The Snake Pit (17 page)

Eirik never came into the forest except on those days in the year when Hallveig took him with her to church. Then they passed through it, a long, long way down. At last they came to a new world that was even farther away and more dreamlike. The bells that pealed and rang again across the great open fields with big houses on them; the church hill where stood horses and horses and yet more horses—little shaggy ones like their own on the lower side, but up by the churchyard fence there was a neighing of big, shiny colts with hog manes and red, green, and violet harness glittering with gold and silver. Within the church stood the priests with gilt cloaks on their backs, singing before the lighted candles on the altar, and some young ones in long white shirts swung the golden censers so that the church was filled with the sweetest fragrance. His foster-mother pushed her flock down on their knees
and hoisted them up, according to the movements of those in the brilliant light of the choir. At last came God, as Eirik knew, when the priest lifted up the little round loaf and the bell in the tower above began to ring, chiming with a sharp note of joy.

At the upper end of the church stood a whole crowd of men and women in bright-coloured clothes, shining belts, and big brooches, and Eirik knew that it was they who owned all the horses with the fine saddles and the gleaming arms that were left in the room under the tower. Eirik believed they were a kind of fairies—only that they lived and moved even farther away from his life than those others in the woods at home. One day Hallveig pointed to one of them, the bulkiest of all the women, clad in flaming red, with a triple silver belt about her big stomach and a brooch like an ale-bowl in the middle of her mighty bosom: that was his aunt, said Hallveig. Eirik was none the wiser, for he did not know what an aunt was. Fetches he had heard of and angels; nay, sometimes a woman came to Siljuaas whom the children called Aunt—her name was Ingrid and she had a great hump on her back—but this one did not look like anything of that sort.—

He had been properly scared when that lady in blue came. And it was for him she had come—she was his mother, they said. It made him extremely uncomfortable, for it seemed to be not only a great danger but a disgrace. She was certainly one of the women who stood in front at church—fairies of the farthest-off kind. And now he had got his eldest sister to tell him what a straw-brat was: when women lie with men out in the woods, they get a straw-brat. The blue woman had had him, just as Mother had had little Inga in the spring; all the other children in the house Mother had had, but not him. The child had a horrified suspicion that he had been born out of doors and carried in from the woods. But now he was mortally afraid he would be taken out there again, and he did not want that at all. For a long time he was haunted by a terrible dread lest the blue woman should come back and fetch him out to where she lay—with a man whom he imagined to be like a tree blown down by the storm, with tangled roots in the air. They passed a tree like this on the way to church; it lay on a flat piece of dry ground under a knoll, and Eirik had always been afraid of this dead, fallen fir tree, for it had something like an ugly man’s face amid the tangle of its roots. The boy imagined
that the blue woman lived in a little glade like this among the woods, and there he would be alone with her and her tree-man and the big sorrel horse with bright things on its bridle; never would anybody else come there, neither people nor animals. But he would not have that—he wanted to stay at home in the safe, open clearing and sleep indoors, and he would never be parted from Mother and Gudda, his foster-sister, and Kaare and the other children and Beisk and the horse and the cows and the goats and Torgal—and he would not be squeezed and kissed as he had been by the strange woman. For a long time he scarcely dared to go three steps from the house door, so frightened was he that she would come again, this mother of his. But if he had had a father, she could not have done anything to him—for sister had said that only those children who had no father could be straw-brats.

All the same, as time went on, Eirik thought less of that visit. But one day in the winter some men who were following a ski-track through the forest to Österdalen called at Siljuaas. Again he heard that they were talking about him, but this time they mentioned his mother by name: “Leman” they said she was called. Eirik had never heard that word before, but it sounded strange and unsafe—as if she were not human, but rather some kind of great bird. He imagined vaguely that Leman might come flapping her great blue cloak like a pair of broad wings and pounce down on him. It grew more and more clear to him how evil was his plight, since he had no father to own him, so that nobody would dare take him away.

Then one day there came a father to him. Eirik was not very surprised at this. When he was led up to the man, he took a good look at him. It must have been the fact that Olav’s complexion was so fair that made the boy feel confidence in him from the first. This father with the broad, straight shoulders and the upright bearing—Eirik felt at once that he knew this was another of those who stood in front at church—but he was not afraid of him. Gay clothes he wore—a leaf-green kirtle, a silver clasp in the breast of his jerkin, bright metal on his belt and on the long sheath of his dirk. And then Eirik took such a fancy to the queer big axe his father held between his knees as he sat; the hand that
rested on the head of the axe was covered with rings. The more he looked at him, the more pleased he was with his father. He stood calmly meeting the other’s searching glance—at the first sign of something like a smile on the man’s face Eirik beamed and went up close to Olav’s knee.

“He is small, this son of mine?” said the father to Hallveig, holding the boy’s chin a moment. Beyond that he said nothing to Eirik while he was at Siljuaas, but that was enough for the boy. Hallveig wept a little, Torgal lifted him up when he said farewell, the brothers and sisters stood staring at him who was to go away with the two strange men. Eirik felt a little clutch at the heart when he saw his mother cry; he put his arms about her neck, and his lips began to quiver—then his father called, and at once he turned and trudged to the door, clumsy in his new fur coat that came down to his feet.

Eirik and Olav became good friends on the journey. It was not much that his father said to him; he let Arnketil, his man, look after the boy. But all the strange new things he met with, the sledge and horses, a fresh house to sleep in every night, all the good food, and then the many people everywhere, who talked to him, many of them—Eirik knew that all this was his father’s doing. And his father wore a shirt and breeches of linen next his skin, and he did not take them off at night.

The new mother that he found when he came to the end of the journey made much less impression on Eirik. He did not know her again; when she asked if he remembered that she had been at Siljuaas, he answered yes, for he guessed that was what he ought to say. But he had no feeling that she was the same. This mother here had brown clothes, she was thick about the waist and trod heavily and slowly as she went ceaselessly in and out, busying herself between the houses. The tall, blue mother, Leman, with the quick, birdlike movements, he imagined standing in the little clearing in the forest, where she dwelt with her tree-man and the big sorrel horse. Only when the new brown mother crushed him to her and smothered him with kisses and wild words of endearment did he know in a way that she and Leman were one and the same—although they called this one Ingunn.—Eirik did not like being kissed and squeezed in this way—he had never in his life been
given other kisses than those which went with a mass Sunday and fresh meat and a drink from the ale-bowl when they came home—rare and festive occasions.

But here the way of it was that he got ale every day, and these folk ate cooked fresh food, fish and meat, day after day for many days, so maybe the women had the habit of kissing every day too.

When Eirik came up to Olav, laid his hands in his lap, and asked him all kinds of questions—whether the seal lived in the forest that he could see straight across the fiord, and why his two horses were white, and why he was not the father of Torhild’s children, and what they were to do with the train-oil they were boiling, and where the moon was going when it flew so swiftly across the sky—Ingunn watched the two with a strange tension. For one thing, she was afraid Olav might be impatient with the boy. She was so unspeakably humble in her gratitude for this thing her husband had done for her in bringing home the child for whom she had longed to the very death; and now she was only afraid the boy might worry Olav, or that he might be angry at the sight of her child if he saw too much of him. She could not discover that Olav entertained any dislike for Eirik. He took little notice of him, unless the boy sought him out, but then he was always friendly and replied as well as he could to Eirik’s endless questions. But it was not easy to make Eirik understand the nature of anything. The boy seemed to have no grasp at all—he made no difference between living and dead things, asked whether the big rock on the beach was fond of the gulls and why the snow wanted to lie on the ground. He could not make out that the sun that glimmered through the fog was the same as shone in the sky on a clear day, and once he had seen a moon that was quite unlike all other moons.—The priest came to see them one day, but Eirik never guessed that he was the same person he had seen up at the church—that his vestments could be taken off and that he could ride about like other men. Sometimes Eirik would take it upon himself to hold forth to them, but all his stories were strange and absurd—impossible to find any sense in them. Ingunn feared the boy was very stupid and backward for his age—and she was afraid Olav would dislike him still more for having so little sense. He was so pretty and so sweet that she thought she could never feast her eyes enough on him—but clever he was not.

The secret pang of disappointment and pain that she felt because the boy showed so openly that he liked his father better than her was another reason for her seeking to keep her husband and her son away from each other as much as she could.

At the outset Olav entertained no ill will toward Eirik. The violent mental tumult that had shaken him when he heard of Ingunn’s infidelity, and afterwards time after time when he recalled that another man had possessed her—this had become a thing of the distant past during these years of their joyless life together. His love of her was a fixed thing and a habit; it was intertwined with his whole being as the mould of a meadow is intertwined with a mass of roots. But now he did not feel this love otherwise than as an infinite compassion with this poor sick creature, whose life was his own life. What was now the living warmth in his feelings for Ingunn—what throbbed, flared up, and sank again—was tenderness and anxiety for her; desire only stirred sluggishly and lukewarm, as in a doze. But thus it was that his jealousy had also grown weak and numb—it was but rarely that he thought of what she had gone through in the past, and then it seemed very far away. And Olav could not realize any connection between the shame and agony of that time and this little boy whom they had brought into their home. Eirik was there, that was to be—God had made known to him that he was to take Eirik to himself, and that was an end of the matter. And Olav was more inclined than not to like the boy in himself—he was a pretty boy, and he wooed his father’s affection so openly. Olav, himself slow in taking to others, was always surprised and glad when any sought his friendship.

Olav often guessed the train of thought behind the boy’s strange jumble of talk much better than his mother did. And when she interrupted Eirik’s faltering explanations with inappreciative words and would not leave the boy alone so that he and Olav might reach an understanding, her husband more than once felt a kind of fretful impatience.
He
remembered—not in such a way that he could form clear images of it, much less put it into words, but in brief and fleeting visions he remembered a great deal of how the world had appeared to himself when he was a child.

T
HE ICE
broke up and the spring came. The dull-red rocks down by the fiord were baked in the sunshine, and the spray gleamed white under the Bull Crag, as though new-born. The soil turned green and breathed its sweet smell of grass and mould, and then came the time of bursting buds, filling the evening air with a cool and bitter scent of young leaves along the valley.

One morning in May, Olav came across a nest of vipers on a slope; he killed three of them. He brought them home in a closed wooden cup and during the midday rest he stole to the cookhouse with them. Snakes’ fat and snakes’ ashes are good for many things, but they have much more power if one goes secretly about the preparation of them.

He was about to slip into the cook-house when he heard voices. Ingunn was there, and the boy. The child’s voice said:

“—because father gave me the breast, you see.”

“He gave you the breast?” his mother wondered. “What nonsense are you talking now?”

“Oh yes, he did. And then Father said I might eat up the wings too, if I had not had enough, but there was nothing left of the cock but the wings—”

Olav laughed quietly to himself. Now he remembered: in the inn at Oslo the woman had set before him a roast cock, and the boy had liked the meat hugely.

Then he heard Ingunn say: “A whole cock I will roast for you, Eirik—will that make you think I am as kind as your father? You shall have it next time he goes away from home—”

Olav stole back across the yard and went east to the smithy. He felt a strange sense of shame on her behalf. What was the use of such talk? Surely she could roast one of her own cocks for the child, whether he were at home or not.

Whether it was that the unaccustomed food was too rich for Eirik’s stomach or from some other cause, as spring went on the child took to waking up and screaming nearly every night. Olav heard Eirik start up with a shriek, crawl around and grope this
way and that in the big north bed, where he slept alone—then he shrieked again, even louder, as though in utmost terror.