The Son Avenger (18 page)

This was the first cloud of weeping that passed across Eirik’s bright summer sky. He had been so small when he lost that finger that he had never felt the want of it, and it had never crossed his mind that it might debar him from the service of the altar. The novice-master remarked that the young man took it deeply to heart, so he spoke to him about it, bidding him bear in mind that it was a far greater aid toward perfection to suffer patiently the trials that were laid upon him than if he himself sought out never so many afflictions of his own devising. And there was just as
great need of his being a good clerk if he was to be a lay brother; their father, Saint Franciscus, had never wished to be other than a layman, and in the beginning he had intended to found his order as a company wholly of lay brothers.

Eirik listened meekly to the novice-master’s speech and never spoke of the matter again, but for long after he was in deep dejection. And then autumn came on.

There was no more to be done in the garden. The pease-straw lay tangled on the grey, frost-gripped beds, and the fallen leaves under the fruit trees were whitened with rime. The monks had long ago taken to their little lanterns when they went to matins in the church. Quitting the scrap of warmth that was to be found under the thin coverlets of his couch, he had to pass through the cold dormitory and down into the cloister, where the raw frost-fog stung his nose and crept icily up his naked calves. Thick as wool the wintry mist lay on the convent; as soon as one entered it, it seemed to force its way in and dim the little lantern. But inside the church it was colder than cold.

Eirik was so cold that he thought his brain froze to a lump inside his skull. He did not grasp a word of the prayers he said during the office, for he was too cold to be able to think of their meaning. The fog forced its way even into the church; the candles by the choir stalls shone in a mist, and the friars’ breath poured from their mouths like white smoke. But the nave was lost in outer darkness.

He now shuddered at the thought of the mornings when he had leave to stay behind after matins for private prayer. Stiff with cold he knelt with his eyes firmly fixed on the little lamp that shone before the tabernacle. Behind him he felt the body of the church, dark and empty, with the tombstones in the floor. Just outside the choir arch lay Sira Hallbjörn—and Eirik could not rid himself of the thought: what if the dead priest should appear to him one morning? If he were to turn round now and see Sira Hallbjörn standing behind him with the blood pouring down from his shattered skull over his pale, bony face, the chasuble in which he had been laid all besprinkled with blood—

Now and then he heard a low murmur from one or other of the brethren who had stayed behind as he had. But for the most part they knelt in perfect silence. They had led this life year after
year, winter and summer, and now neither the marvellous glory of the summer mornings nor the dismal horror of the winter nights seemed to move them any longer.

He tried to keep a hold on himself with all his thoughts centred on the tabernacle. But even that mystery now inspired him with terror rather than consolation—that God had suffered Himself to be imprisoned in that little painted tower of wood and
was
there. Wide awake, in bodily substance, spirit and soul, he filled the church, looked into his own sinful heart and saw his drooping courage, saw all that stirred in the hearts of all—and in the omnipotence of his Godhead watched over the whole of this wintry land, filling every space: the icy convent—and the town and the fiord and the homesteads along the frozen shores—and Hestviken, Rundmyr, Konungahella—all the places he could think of. In summer, when he knelt here and felt the full sweetness of being able to speak with God so near, it had been joy upon joy to know that from the bodily presence of God in the sacrament he went out in His invisible presence wherever he might be—in the sunshine that filled the cloisters outside, baked the soil of the garden so that the young shoots expanded from morn till eve, poured down through the foliage—while the town fiord and the islands outside and the woodlands round about lay wrapped in heat haze. But now that winter had the world in its clutch, there was nothing but desolation—as though he divined the mighty, soundless struggle between Christ and Satan, life and death at grips. All things of sight and sense became lifeless trifles rocking to and fro amid the furious encounter.

He would not ask to be released from these hours of watching to keep which he himself had begged leave. But as time went on, Brother Einar remarked that Eirik no longer had any profit of them, and so he bade the young man go back to bed after matins each morning for a while.

But Eirik found it hard to fall asleep again. He could not get any warmth on his narrow couch with only one sack of straw under him and two thin blankets. Another effect of the cold was that he was late in falling asleep at night, so that he was always tired and short of sleep; and often what kept him awake in the morning was simply his dread of having to get up again for prime. And if by chance he got a little warmth in bed, the chilblains on his fingers and toes began to burn and itch intolerably.

He himself was in despair over his lack of spirit and tried to summon up courage: had he not been through much that was far harder, and without caring a scrap! He tried to think of rides in storm and driving snow, when at times he had scarce been able to see his horse’s head. Or in a boat in wintertime—that night last year, just after he had come home, when they sailed to Tunsberg and a storm sprang up. Right ahead of them in the darkness was a loud booming amid the howl and roar of the stormy night—the white wall that seemed alive there must be the Hangman’s Reef, and they were drifting straight onto it; with every wave that lifted their boat high into the air he thought the breakers came nearer. Everything on them had been sheeted with ice when at last, late in the morning, they were able to slip into shelter somewhere a long way south—he had thought that Knut, one of Ragna’s sons, would not come through with his life. And had he now grown so soft that he whimpered at the itching of his chilblains, he who more than once had ripped the boots from his frozen feet, who had been used to feel the sea-salt bite into the raw flesh of his hands—

But such hardships were part of the day’s work, and one took them as they came. And afterwards—if life were not in danger—there was the sweet delight of coming under a roof, thawing out one’s frozen carcass, eating and drinking one’s fill, creeping in under the skin coverlets somewhere or other, two or three men in a bed to keep each other warm, and sleeping like a log. And there was always a raciness in it: one never knew how things would turn out or what the next day might bring.

But here it was a choice made for one’s whole life—after each summer’s warmth and joy of heart one was faced by the winter, and one had to shiver one’s way through it, watching, praying, fasting, from Holy Cross Day to Easter, so stiff with cold that neither the hours of rest on the hard bed nor the brief warmth of the refectory gave more than a breath of relief. One had just not to think of it, take the days as they came, for there would be no change until God sent warmth into the air again.

And Eirik discerned where the true sacrifice and severity of the monastic life lay: that a man had to will it himself and will it once for all, renounce playing with fortune and choose a life from which the unexpected was barred and where all was willed in advance. The submission of one’s will was itself an act of will.
But then he thought he must give up—
that
was more than he could do!

At last he had to tell Father Einar how it was with him. The monk answered that a man’s destiny must be thought to follow him even into the convent, or, to speak more justly, God might send him much that was unlooked-for, sickness or journeys abroad, for example. Eirik must pay for strength to overcome this temptation.

And Eirik prayed. But he knew himself that from deep within him, below the place in which he found the words of his prayer, a voice was pleading: “Show me not this grace for which I pray! Send me home!”

At times he thought, perhaps it was just in this that the Devil showed his profoundest cunning—in never tempting him with anything that pertained to the profligate life of his young days. He hated the thought of it and hated his old self. Even if he had to return to the world, at any rate he could never be like that again.

It was the memory of Hestviken that broke through and overwhelmed him, as he lay at night remembering, remembering with all his body and all his senses. No place in the world had just the same smell as their own beach; their corn when it stood in shooks and when there had been a frost at night was different from the corn of other fields—as he lay he thought he could catch the scent of their own haycocks and of the limes on the cliffs around the bay. Behind his closed eyelids floated visions of the land from which he had cut himself off: the sedgy paths up in Kverndal, the little dry mound where he found Lapp arrowheads, every crack in the rocks at home, the black wall of the Horse behind the houses, and the reddish, rounded side of the Bull rising from the sea, the surf at its foot, fresh and white on blue, sunny days, but on autumn evenings it sent out a lowing in the darkness, and through the night one could glimpse the dancing breakers and flying white foam.

Most of the calves that were born at Hestviken were brindled and usually had white markings—a heart on the forehead or patches of white on the sides or white feet. He remembered the look of them as they grazed on the salt pasture of the great level meadow by the shore at Saltviken and on the slopes where the wood had been cut down for burning charcoal. But the great junipers were left, dark and bushy. The salt-pans he remembered,
and the homestead a little way inland, with its houses falling into ruin; only one was kept in repair so that the salt-boilers and mowers might sleep in it. His father left the farm to hay and pasture, but Eirik himself had always thought that when his time came he would take it up again—it might be much better for corn than the head manor at Hestviken.

And this that called and allured his very body and blood, this was no sin—this too was an honourable and Christian life. Generation after generation of men had lived at Hestviken who showed God reverence and obeyed His commandments; their hand had been open to the poor and to strangers, they had had both the power and the will to defend widows and the rights of lesser men—had been the first to fly to arms when the peace of the countryside was threatened by enemies from within or without the realm. If it fell to Jörund Rypa to possess the manor after his father, then much would be changed from the old ways—he knew his brother-in-law well enough for that. And what of himself, who all his life had had but one thought, of when one day he should be master of Hestviken?

Nor did he seem to be able to make any progress with his reading and writing now. Besides, he was now not the only novice under Brother Hubert; early in the autumn the son of a poor cottar from Eiker had taken the habit. Much then had to be repeated which Eirik had already learned, and the new lessons dragged, for this Brother Torbjörn was very dull of apprehension.

Little by little the novice-master, Brother Einar, began to lose faith in Eirik Olavsson’s calling for the cloister. He had grown fond of the young man, doubting not that it was God Himself who had roused him and brought him from thoughtlessness to reflection. Eirik’s early fervour, his zeal to submit himself to the rule of the order—this had been far more than a whim.

But now in the first place there was the fact that he had been driven to the convent gate by grief over a woman—even though there were much else besides. But it was the experience of the novice-master that those who surrendered their love to God because they had been disappointed of their desires in this world seldom made the best monks. And what had been the actual relation
between Eirik and this foster-sister of his he could not tell;
now
the man said that nothing sinful had taken place, and he was afraid it was the Devil who had tempted him to think it worse than it was in order to frighten him into the convent without a true calling for it—in which case he would be a bad monk and a sure prey of the Evil One. Brother Einar had indeed corrected him severely for speaking thus: the Devil has no more power over a man than God permits and the man himself gives him, and he cannot rob God’s household of its servants unless they themselves open the door to him. But there was something in what Eirik said; the novice-master perceived that Eirik was never wittingly untruthful, but it was clear that the man himself did not remember the real circumstances of the case. And he had seen the same many times before. Eirik had difficulty in remembering anything in such a way that he could tell the story of it twice alike. But if this was a fault in men of any condition, it was a grave fault in a monk.

And Eirik was of a variable disposition and no doubt would always be so. Brother Einar had seen enough and more than enough of such natures, and it was ever a misfortune for a convent to admit a brother who always longed for change—always desired for himself another office or other work than that to which he had been assigned, or yearned to be removed to another house, until he had tried all the convents of his order in three or four realms. Had not Brother Edvin Richardson been a sore trial to the fraternity, pious and pure-hearted man as he was, with the spirit of unrest that dwelt within him? In his case, indeed, there was a sort of remedy for his roving disposition—he had such fame as a painter of images that he was sent for from all parts, where folk would have him come and work for them. But a restless spirit such as his was likely to infect a whole convent. Brother Einar himself had been a Black Friar among the Benedictines of Björgvin for ten years ere he received a call to join a stricter order, and he had now been a Minorite friar for more than thirty winters; but still he held that without weighty reason a monk ought not to abandon the convent where he first took the vow.

With the spring Eirik’s affection for his convent was revived—but at the same time his longing for Hestviken grew stronger, and now he was utterly unhappy, for no path seemed open to him, and however much he prayed and disciplined himself, he
was still torn in two directions by his longing. When therefore his trial year was at an end, it was so ordered that he was to delay his profession until the autumn, when the other two novices, Brother Arne and Brother Torbjörn, would take the vow. Then it was that he forgot himself and struck that peasant of Tveit to the ground. Had it been himself that this loon affronted, he believed he could have borne it now. But it was the house that he loved even more fervently, now that he had half decided to leave it, and the brethren of whom he was fond, and the habit of the order, which he had striven to wear honourably and well. He humbled himself before the man at the first word from Brother Stevne, he humbled himself at home in the chapter-house—but nevertheless it was this that finally turned the scale.