“Run away?” I said. “Where to?”
“To Australia,” she said. “I’m engaged.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “The plane goes at five til midnight.”
“And have you nothing to get ready?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Except that I haven’t got a toothbrush; and no nightdress either, in fact. But that doesn’t matter.”
“It is perhaps forward of me to ask whom you are engaged to, Fruit-blood,” I said.
“It’s an Australian officer, and he’s leaving tonight,” she replied. “We’re going to get married in London tomorrow.”
“Hmm, Fruit-blood,” I said. “If you’ll tell me one single word of sense then I won’t tell anything. But if you behave like a lunatic I shall tell everyone everything, and first of all your father. It’s my duty. Where are you, child?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “Goodbye. And all the best. And thank you for last night. Though I live to be a hundred thousand years old I shall never forget you for that.”
And with these words she hung up.
Some time at the beginning of my stay here it had been impressed on me not to put down the receiver if there were mysterious anonymous phone calls, but to report the fact, so that the connection with the rogue’s number should be kept unbroken. I laid the receiver down on the table, beside the telephone, and called the master. I said that Fruit-blood was ill in town and would be glad if he could go to see her: her number was still connected.
In fact, the girl had left the phone when he came into the room, but the number was still connected, and he was careful not to disconnect it.
“Did you say Gudney was ill?” he repeated. “What is wrong with her?”
“She was not very well last night,” I replied. “And I think not fully recovered yet.”
“Drunk?” he asked bluntly—and without a smile.
“No,” I said.
Then he smiled again. “Yes, what does a person not ask these days?” he said. “When I was growing up there was in the whole town only one old fishwife who drank. We street-boys were always after her. Now it is considered quite the thing for a better-class citizen of Reykjavik to ask about his newly confirmed daughter: Was she drunk?”
Was he accusing someone? Or excusing? And if so, whom? I was silent. I kept silent, moreover, in the face of all his further questions, except to repeat that the girl was undoubtedly not feeling well and that in his place I would try to trace her.
He stopped smiling again, looked at me searchingly, lifted his eyebrows, took off his spectacles and held them between his fingers, breathed on the lenses and polished them; and there was more than a hint of unsteadiness in his fingers. Then he put his spectacles on again and said, “I thank you.”
He put on his coat and hat and went out, saying at the door, “Please let the phone stay connected.”
I heard him backing the car out.
That night I went to sleep early; and when I awoke again I thought it must be morning or even broad daylight and that I had slept in, for the master himself stood in the doorway. I sprang up in bed and said “Huh?”, panic-stricken.
“I know it is wicked to wake people in the middle of the night,” he said, with that tranquil night-vigil calm which has so uncanny an effect on a person awakening; and went on, “It was as you said, little Gudny was not feeling very well; she is still not feeling very well. I searched until I found her and took her to a friend of mine, a doctor. She will be feeling better soon. You are her confidante. She trusts you. Will you go in to her and sit with her?”
It was four o’clock.
Her father must have carried her from the car up to her room in his arms, for she was in no condition to walk. She lay on a sofa, pale as death and with her eyes shut, child’s face and tangled hair, the dark red wiped from her lips and the coloring from her cheeks. Her father had taken off her shoes but not her coat. She never moved nor fluttered an eyelash when she heard me enter. I went over to her and sat down beside her and took her hand and said, “Fruit-blood.” After a moment she opened her eyes and whispered, “It’s all over, Ugla. Daddy made me go to a doctor. It’s all over.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“He pushed irons up me. He killed me. There were bloody shreds of something in the bowl.”
“In the bowl? What bowl?”
“In an enamel bowl.”
I took off her clothes and put on a nightdress and laid her into her bed. She was drained of strength by the drugs, and half-delirious much of the time, moaning in a weak and fluttering voice; but when I thought she was asleep at last she suddenly said out of the blue, opening her eyes and smiling, “Now I too shall hear Mother of mine in the sheep-pen sung when I am big.”[14]
“Dearest little Fruit-blood,” I said. “I wish I could do something for you.”
“I should have gone to Australia,” she said.
Then she slipped back into a stupor, far away from me, and the thought fluttered through my mind that she might die; until she said, “Ugla, will you tell me a story about the country?”
“About the country?” I said. “What can you want to hear about the country?”
“Tell me about the lambs…”
I saw the girl’s eyes begin to twitch with weeping; and then the tears. And he who weeps does not die; weeping is a sign of life; weep, and your life is worth something again.
So I started to tell her about the lambs.
17. Girl at night
By the month of Thorri,[15] a month which does not in fact exist in towns, I had become quite convinced—and indeed much earlier than that. The symptoms all matched; all the things were going on inside me that you read about in books for women, and much more besides, I think. I dreamed about the man all night sometimes, often nightmares, and started up from sleep and had to switch on the light, and could not go to sleep again before I had promised myself to go to him and beg his forgiveness for having shut him out on New Year’s Eve; and invite him to provide for me in whatever way he thought best.
But in the mornings, when I awoke, I felt that I did not know this man at all, much less that he concerned me at all, and that the child was mine alone. Then I also felt that, in general, men never owned children at all, but rather that the woman alone owned them as in pictures of Mary with the Child; the Invisible is the father of all children, the man’s part in it being purely fortuitous, and I understood well those primitive races that do not associate sexual intercourse with babies. He shall never see my child nor be called its father, I said to myself. Was it not now time that a law was passed forbidding men to call themselves the fathers of children? But when I started thinking more closely about it I felt that the mother did not really own the child either; children owned themselves—and their mother too, in accordance with the law of Nature, but for no longer than they had need of her; owned her while they were growing in her womb, and while they were eating her, or rather drinking her, for their first year. Human society is the one that has duties towards children, in so far as it has duties towards anyone; in so far as anyone has duties towards anyone.
But when I was coming home from my music lessons in the evenings, before I knew it I had started walking along a particular street and gazing at a particular house, up at a particular window where sometimes there was a particular light and sometimes a particular darkness. I paused, but after a moment I was no longer safe from the imagined eyes that peered at me from countless windows, and I took to my heels and did not come to my senses until I heard my own heartbeats at the other end of the street. It is unbelievable how many souls a female creature can have, especially at night.
14
From the folk tale about a farm girl who killed her illegitimate baby in a sheep pen in order to be free to go to a dance. The baby appeared to her mother as a ghost and sang this song to her.