“Yes,” he said, and smiled amiably. “All For Virtue is our slogan, my good girl. Our wives want to have legitimate children, at least on paper; and preferably no competition. It is an an attack on the wives’ class to have day nurseries.”
“I do so want to put a question to you,” I said.
“I wish I knew the answers to everything you asked,” he said.
I asked: “Is it possible to be a Capitalist if one sees a baby child in a rainstorm behind a house?”
“That is a difficult question,” he said, and scratched himself behind the ear. “I do not think I am far enough advanced to be able to answer it; at least I would first need to go behind a house.”
“Why does Parliament and the Town Council not want my children to have a nursery like your children? Are my children not chemically and physiologically as good as your children? Why can we not have a society which is just as expedient for my children at it is for your children?”
He came right over to me and put his hand on the nape of my neck under the hair and said, “What has happened to our mountain-owl?”
“Nothing,” I said, and hung my head.
“Yes,” he said. “You have started thinking in a tight little circle from which you cannot break out. What is troubling you and getting worse every day?”
“I’m going,” I muttered into my bosom.
He asked where, and when.
“Away, at once,” I whispered.
“Tonight?” he said. “In this weather?”
“You have cast your vote against me and I have no home,” I said; and then I told him what had happened to me and turned away, and he stopped smiling and there was a silence. Finally he asked, “Are you fond of the man?”
And I replied, “No. Yes. I don’t know.”
He asked, “Is he fond of you?”
“I haven’t asked him,” I said.
“Do you want to marry each other?” he asked, but I could not answer such an absurdity except by shaking my head.
“Is he short of money?” he asked. “Can I do anything for you?”
I turned to face him again and looked at him and said, “I have now told you something that I have not even told him, and more I cannot do.”
“May I then not ask anything further?”
“I don’t even know what kind of a man he is,” I said, “so there is no point in asking. I am a girl, that is all there is to it. And you have cast your vote against me. If I did not have my old and penniless parents up north my child would be born a convicted outlaw, as it says in the Sagas, not to be fed nor forwarded nor helped nor harbored.”
He looked at me questioningly, almost timidly, as if he were seeing a danger he had long feared from afar suddenly loom close, and repeated in the form of a question, rather foolishly, the words I had just used—“Did I cast my vote against you?”
But when I was going to walk away he followed me and said, “Do not be anxious, you can get from me all the money you want, a house, a nursery, everything.”
“You cast your vote publicly against letting me and others like me be called people, but want to make me your beggar in secret…”
“Why in secret?” he interrupted. “Between you and me there is nothing done in secret.”
“No, now I am going, to have my baby with my own money,” I said. “Anything rather than accept money secretly from someone.”
I had no sooner got to my room than he had followed me, he even opened my door without knocking. Previously his face had momentarily tightened a little; for a while he had perhaps been on the verge of defending his point of view against me in earnest, but now his face had relaxed and he was once again gentle and unassuming, with that expression of candor that sometimes made him look more childlike even than his children.
“If I know our Red friends aright,” he said, “it will not be long before they bring this matter up again. Perhaps it will be dealt with differently next time. I shall talk to my brother-in-law and other strong men in our party. There shall be a day nursery, good heavens, never fear.”
“But if your brother-in-law says no?” I asked. “And the wives’ class?”
“You are making fun of me now,” he said. “Go ahead. The only consolation is—I do not consider myself much of a hero. But I promise you that in this matter I shall behave as if I were inspired by a woman…”
“A pregnant housemaid,” I corrected him.
“A woman whom I have admired from the very first moment,” he said.
“Yes, I once heard a tipsy man say that I was one of those women whom men want to go to bed with, without a word, the minute they see her for the first time.”
He came over to me and embraced me and looked at me.
“There are one or two women so made,” he said, “that a man forgets all his former life like a meaningless trifle the moment he first sets eyes on her, and is ready to sever all the obligations that tie him to his environment, turn around, and follow this woman to the end of the world.”
“No, I will not kiss you,” I said, “unless you promise me never to give me money, but let me work for myself like a free individual even though I am acquainted with you.”
He kissed me and said something.
“I know that I am terribly stupid,” I said afterwards. “But what am I to do? You are not like anyone else.”
19. Church-builders
Out of sight in a hollow to the east of the farm knoll rose the church; with a grassy slope behind the chancel. They had begun pouring the concrete the previous autumn, but had not had the money to buy a roof. The walls had stood in their molds until now, springtime, when the money started to arrive from the Treasury to buy a roof. I was sitting down in the gulley beside the stream, where the smell of the reeds is stronger in winter than in summer; it was here that we had played as children with sheep’s horns and jawbones, and filled a rusty tin can in the stream with the sort of water that could just as easily be cocoa, or mutton broth, or schnapps. And later there stood a tent here on the bank for three late-summer nights. And as I sat there I could hear above the murmur of the water the hammering of the church-builders alternating with the cries of the golden plover.
A long time ago there had been a church parish here of twelve farms, some say eighteen, but during the last century the church was abandoned. Now another church was rising here, even though there were only three farms left in the valley—and the third farmer, Jon of Bard, the head carpenter, only counted as half or scarcely that, having lost his wife and with his children away in the south and fire no longer kindled in the farm except for the fire that burned within the man himself; and his faith the sort of horseman’s faith that it would be more accurate to connect with the phallus than with Christ. Bard-Jon never called a church anything but “God’s window-horse,” nor the pastor anything but “the stallion of the soul-stud”; and neither I nor others were ever aware that he knew any other prayer than the old Skagafjord Lord’s Prayer which starts like this: “Our Father, oh, is that blasted piebald foal not tearing around all over the place again…” And that prayer he would mumble to himself all day long.
And Geiri of Midhouses laughed—that laugh that would suffice to build a cathedral, even on the summit of Mount Hekla. This many-childrened man, our neighbor, the other main farmer in the valley, was the incarnation of the most potent point of view in the world, the point of view that no argument can affect, neither religion nor philosophy nor economics, not even the arguments of the stomach, which are nevertheless always more sensible than the arguments of the brain, not least if it is the stomach of our children that is talking: this man said that he would never depart from this valley alive, accepted his pauper’s grant, and laughed. He said that he hoped to God that if he had to bury any more unbaptized children it should be done at the church where Iceland’s greatest man of renown had been baptized. He said that he himself was looking forward to lying for all eternity in one of those pleasant dry graves here in the uplands and rising from it when the time came in the company of the poets and heroes of old, rather than in a damp and tedious grave farther down in the district amongst the farm-louts of today and slaves who fished the seas.