“It shocks me to see these drunken young devils,” I said.
“Do not speak ill of the young in my hearing,” he said. unaccountably switching to the formal mode of address, and completely serious. After a little thought he went on: “I imagined there was enough crystal in the world for those who read crystal. I for my own part take greater pleasure in a film of ice over a clear brook on an autumn morning.”
“But what is one to do when those around one behave both wrongly and badly?” I asked.
“Behavioristically wrongly?” he asked. “Biochemically badly?”
“Morally wrongly and badly,” I said.
“Morals do not enter into it,” he said. “And there is no such thing as morality—only varyingly expedient conventions. What to one race is crime, is virtue to another; crime in one era is virtue in another; even a crime in one class of society is at the same time and in the same society virtue in another class. The Dobuans in Dobu have only one moral law, and that is to hate one another: hate one another in the same way that European nations used to do before the concept of nationalism became obsolete and East and West were substituted in its place. Amongst them, each individual is duty bound to hate the other as West is duty bound to hate East, amongst us. The only thing that saves the poor Dobuans is that they do not have such good weapons of destruction as Du Pont; nor Christianity, like the Pope.”
“Are drunk as well as sober criminals to be allowed free rein, then?” I asked.
“We live in a rather inexpedient social system,” he said. “The Dobuans are pretty close to us. But there is one consolation, and that is that man can never outgrow the necessity to live in an expedient social system. It makes no difference whether people are called good or bad; we are all here; now; there is only one world in existence, and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.”
“Can I then come barging in here blind drunk and shoot your flowers?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” he said, and laughed.
“Would that be right?” I asked.
“Alcohol produces certain chemical reactions in the living body and alters the functioning of the nervous system: you might fall downstairs. Jonas Hallgrimsson fell downstairs; some people think that thereby Iceland lost her finest poems—those which he had not yet composed.”
“Of course he drank too much,” I said.
“Do we think it makes much difference whether or not it was morally wrong of the man to take a drink so often? Perhaps he would not have fallen if he had only had ten drinks. Perhaps it was just the eleventh drink that felled him. Is it not just about as wrong morally to drink one drink too many as to remain out of doors for five minutes too long in the cold? For you might catch pneumonia. But both are inexpedient.”
I went on contemplating this man.
“On the other hand it would deeply offend my aesthetic sense to see a beautiful north-country girl drunk,” he added. “But aesthetics and morality have nothing in common: no one gets to Heaven by being beautiful. The authors of the New Testament had no appreciation of beauty. On the other hand Mohammed said: ‘If you have two farthings, buy yourself bread with the one and an anemone with the other.’ Anyone is at liberty to break my crystal. And though my own rule is no drink, it is not a moral rule. On the other hand, I buy anemones.”
After a moment’s thought I began again: “Do you contend that it is right for a fourteen-year-old girl to shut herself in with a married man and perhaps come out again pregnant?”
He always gave sort of a titter when he thought something funny. “Did you say fourteen, my good girl?” he said. “Twice times seven: it is a downright twice-sacred number. But now I shall tell you about another creature that also counts in this case, except that it counts up to sixteen; it is a species of cactus that is said to grow in Spain. There the blessed plant stands, in those scorching Castilian uplands, and counts and counts with precision and care, yes, I am probably safe in saying with actual moral fervor, until sixteen years are up; and then blooms. Not until sixteen years have passed does it dare to bear this feeble red blossom which is dead tomorrow.”
“Yes, but a child is a child,” I said stubbornly; and to tell the truth I was becoming a little annoyed at having so frivolous an organist.
“Just so,” he said. “A child is a child. And later the child stops being a child—without arithmetic. Nature asserts itself.”
“I am from the country, and year-old ewe-lambs are never put to the ram.”
“The lambs of year-old ewe-lambs are not usually much good for slaughtering,” he said. “If mankind were reared for the slaughter house, to be sold by the pound, your point of view would be valid. It is a common saying in Iceland that the children of children are fortune’s favorites.”
“Is one then to believe every damned stupid proverb there is?” I said, and was now a little angry.
“Look at me,” he said. “Here you see one of fortune’s favorites.”
It was the same as always: all conventional thinking turned into crude exaggeration, and universally-accepted notions into vulgarity, when one was talking to this man. My tongue tied itself in knots, for I felt that anything further I said in this direction was bound to cause him unpardonable offence—this man who had the clearest and most gentle eyes of any man.
“Was it wrong that I should come into being? That my mother should give birth to me the summer after she was confirmed?” he asked. “Was it bad? Was it wicked?”
Something flashed into my mind and I kept silent. He went on watching me. Did he expect me to reply? At last I said in a low voice, the only thing I could say: “You are so far ahead of me that you are almost out of sight; and I hear you as if on the long distance telephone from the other end of the country.”
“She was a clergyman’s daughter,” he said. “Christianity has robbed her of all peace of soul. For these few decades of a whole lifetime she has lain awake most nights to beg forgiveness of the enemy of human life, the God of the Christians; until Nature now in her mercy has deprived her of memory. You may now be thinking, perhaps, that those who believe in such a bad god must become bad themselves, but that is not so: man is more perfect than God. Although this woman’s doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her that all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure any man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the only words which she knows in her dotage, when she has forgotten all other words: Please do; and, God bless you. I think she has been the poorest woman in Iceland; but nevertheless for half a century she has kept open house for all Iceland; and most especially for criminals and harlots.”
I was silent for a long time, until I looked up at him and said, “Forgive me.” And he patted me on the cheek and kissed me on the forehead.
“I am sure you understand now,” he said with an apologetic smile, “why I am always stung if I hear views that reflect on my mother; and on me; on my existence as a living being.”
14. Oli Figure murdered
As a result of the Prime Minister’s last oaths there was no more discussion for a while about selling the country. There was now to be an interval of a year, followed by Parliamentary elections over the matter, and meanwhile attempts were to be made to get the representative of the Great Power to moderate the wording of the application: to ask not for a base for attack or defence in an atomic war, but rather for a shelter for any welfare missions which might be dispatched to alleviate the sufferings of European races. A temporary truce was declared between street and State. The Communists stopped saying that F.F.F. was going to sell the country, and F.F.F. stopped writing that people had to be true Icelanders and dig up bones. But in the middle of the calm that had fallen over country sales and exhumations, the main tidings of Christmas were that Oli Figure was found in a hut down by the sea with his head smashed in; the iron bar with which he had been assaulted lay nearby. As is the custom when murders are committed, little was written about it in the newspapers, so as not to offend the murderer and his family; until someone had the fine idea of blaming the murder on an unknown American negro, for it did not matter in the least if a colored Yankee and his family were offended.