“The only conclusion not to be drawn from this fact is that one ought therefore to become a legal thief,” said the organist.
“Ah well. I’m on my way.”
I accompanied him out. We were going in the same direction. He was no good at starting a conversation, and I did not know what to say either. Our silence was like a fire glowing under a spit; until he said, “Do you recognize me?” and I replied, “Yes, but I don’t know who you are.”
“I know you,” he said.
“Have you seen me before?” I asked, and he said that he had. Then I said, “The difference is that I know you but haven’t seen you before.”
“Of course you’ve seen me,” he said. “I was one of the men who threw the corpse into your hall the other night.”
“Oh yes, now I remember,” I said, but yet it was not so much this that I remembered; rather I was meaning some indefinable secret relationship between us that lay much deeper, an acquaintanceship that it would not be proper to put into words. So I hurried away from that subject and started discussing the other: “Don’t you think it strange to have everything—youth, good looks, health, education, intelligence, and money—and yet go out like Arngrim Arland and be carried home in a paralysis of poison?”
“So-called daddy-boys,” he said, “the sons of men who have cheated the populace of vast wealth—they know by instinct that they are born receivers. What are such boys to do? They have no vocation to become criminals, and no necessity to become anything else, so they go out to eat and drink poison. That is their philosophy.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“From the north,” he said. “From Hunavatn County, where all the best thieves and murderers in the country come from.”
“Really?” I said. “Then we both own everything on the other side of Holtavard Heath; I am from the north too, you see.”
“But have you a vocation?” he asked.
“A vocation?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Have you not read in the papers that country people have to have a vocation?” he asked. “The papers are always saying so.”
“I was taught never to believe a single word that is written in the papers, and nothing except what is written in the Icelandic Sagas,” I replied.
“I unhitched the hack from the mower at noon one day in the middle of the hay-making,” he said. “And went south.”
“To do what?”
“It was the vocation,” he said. “And now I have stumbled into the misfortune of being taught to play the harmonium—by that man.”
“Misfortune?”
“Yes, he sees through the whole swindle,” he said. “What am I to do?”
“Aren’t you in the police?” I asked.
“That’s a minor detail,” he said.
“What’s the main thing?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out,” he said.
“We are just like any other country people in town,” I said. “But you who have a vocation…”
“Look at Two Hundred Thousand Pliers,” he said, “that superannuated alcoholic who could once only screech. Now he has become both pious and the manager of a Thieves’ Company for Snorredda in New York. He would have bought a genuine Rolls-Royce if the British had not refused to service such a vehicle for an Icelander; so he had to buy a Cadillac. Why should I be mowing hay which refuses to dry out? Or chasing up mountains after some wild old ewe? Why can I not have F.F.F. for Snorredda in New York, like him? We are at least from the same district. Why can I not build a church in the north to provoke these sheep farmers? Why can I not become the leader of a psychical research society? Why don’t the papers print what I have to say about God, and the soul, and the next world? Why can’t I have an atom poet for a message boy? And a brilliantined god for a storekeeper? I at least went to grammar school in Akureyri; and he didn’t; and in addition to that I’m a composer.”
“I’m sure our organist knows what we all ought to do,” I said.
“That is precisely the misfortune,” he said. “What frightens me most of all is the thought that the same thing will happen to me as has happened to the two gods: merely from learning scales from him and drinking coffee afterwards, they have in barely a year lost their vocations; and if from lifelong habit they happen to do a burglary somewhere, they bring the money home to his house and tear it all up, singing, and throw it on the floor.”
“Yes, he is the man I most want to understand,” I said. “I have only been with him a few half-hours, but each time he gives me a flower. Tell me about him.”
“I have barely got through his scales yet,” he replied, “and I have scarcely started on all the coffee. But already I am almost a ruined man, whatever worse there is to follow. He makes terrible demands.”
“Moral demands?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “You are at liberty to commit every crime in the world. He regards crime as a tasteless joke, although in fact he finds bourgeois ideals, everyday ordinary conduct, even more absurd; and heroism, whether for good or evil, he acknowledges no more than the Book of the Way. But…”
“What sort of demands then?” I asked.
“Briefly, the first demand is that you base poetry on objective psychology and biochemistry; secondly, that you have followed in detail every development in art since the days of cubism; and thirdly, that you acknowledge both quarter-tones and discords and moreover can find the point in a drum solo. In this man’s presence I feel like some disgusting insect. And yet he can say to an outcast like me, ‘Look on my house as if it were your own.’”
“You must be more than a little educated yourself,” I said, “to be able to understand him. I certainly wouldn’t understand him if he started to talk like that. What’s a quarter-tone? Or cubism? Or the Book of the Way?”
After a moment’s silence he replied, “You make me talk, and now I have talked too much. It’s a sign of weakness.”
“But you still haven’t told me what you yourself think,” I said.
“Of course not,” he said. “The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”
If this man had a million, I said to myself, and if he were about fifteen years older, then there would not be much difference between him and the Doctor, perhaps none at all—their souls were of the same color; except that I did not feel weak in the knees from talking to this one as I did with the other. Both of them had in generous measure that Icelandic talent, straight from the Sagas, of speaking mockingly of what was nearest to their hearts—this one about his vocation, the other about his children. The boy I lay with for a few nights once, he never said anything. And I never knew what my father was thinking. A man who says what he is thinking is absurd; at least in a woman’s eyes.
“May I see your patterned mittens?” I asked.
He let me see his patterned mittens in the light of a street-lamp in the night.
7. At a cell-meeting
Next day I met the girl and the young man in the baker’s. The girl gave me a friendly smile, and the boy solemnly raised his hat.
“I want to settle up,” I said, and handed over the money for the lottery tickets. “But you will pardon me if I doubt whether the Youth Center will be built.”
“Why not?” said the girl and looked at me a little grieved; and I felt that I had been beastly to her by owning to this doubt.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I did not want to grieve her further.
She looked at the young man and said, “You’ve lived in such a Center, haven’t you?”
“No,” he said, “but for three years I spent all my leisure in such a Center.”