In the Wilderness by Sigrid Undset
But he could not protect himself—the light that shines in darkness continued to burn, and in it he saw the thousand things that he had wilfully forgotten.
Had none helped him? They had helped him, those of whom he had asked help, Arnvid and the good Bishop, Lord Torfinn. They were the men he had loved and looked up to as his superiors—of his inferiors he had never asked anything. But of the friendship of these two he had availed himself as fully and eagerly as any of his inferiors had availed themselves of him. The difference was merely that he had never thought of calling any man his friend and equal who came to him as a suppliant. Out of a pity that was both proud and lukewarm he had given his gifts. But the men who took him under their protection when he came to them in his need had received him as a younger brother.— Humiliation overwhelmed Olav like a landslide—he was painfully crushed beneath the rocks.
“Nay, God, I will not have this. Ingunn, help me,” he prayed in his distress; “you must bear witness for me—Ingunn, I was never false to you?”
Again he felt with overpowering clearness how near she was now. Death only hid her form, like a darkness. But he heard her answer close beside him, out of a sorrow so deep that it made the living seem like children who lacked understanding:
“I witness for you, Olav, and every soul to whom you have shown pity witnesses for you of your good deeds. They are many, Olav—you were designed to render abundantly to God. But your deeds have become as withered stalks of corn, tainted in root and ear—they have so long been choked by the tares.”
He saw them before him, sick and wan, ears that bore no corn to ripeness. His inmost will had driven them on—that will which God had given him for ruling and protecting. But this will had been overpowered by whims and desires and perversity and unwise impulses, as vassal kings overpower their rightful sovereign lord. He had been sustained by the secret pride that his sins in any case were not those of cowardice and ignominy. And now he saw that these great sins were a load that he had allowed others to put upon him, because he had never been strong enough to admit it when he had taken a false step through weakness and cowardice and thoughtlessness.
By tricks and by honest dealing, by a little lying and a little truth combined, he had gained advantage for himself from the few men he had met in the world whom he had reckoned good enough to call his friends, to love and respect. He had never dared to tell them the truth about his own conduct, because he wished to have their respect—and because he needed their help. He stood in debt to his friends—he who had always looked down with pity on every debt-burdened wretch.
It was not true, that which he had said to Bishop Torfinn, and to all his friends, so often that he himself had almost forgotten what was the truth. It was a lie that he had asserted his right to his betrothed merely because miscreants sought to take away their rights. Oh no, he had not been a strong-willed, resourceful grown man who took Ingunn and made her his, reckoning that, if there is dispute about a thing, he is best placed who has that thing in his possession. The truth was otherwise, humiliating—and at the same moment he was bathed in the sweetness of all these memories of his youthful love, now that at last they leaped up, naked, from beneath all the lies under which he had tried to hide them. He had been but a boy in those days at Frettastein, and he had had no thought of either right or wrong when he took to himself his young bride, dazed and wild with desire to possess her full sweetness and charm. He had thought no more than a child who grasps for everything it wants, without heeding, as it runs forward, whether it may fall.
Behind his closed eyelids he saw a cleft in a scree; under the rocks at the bottom of it ran a beck; red rosebay waved on the face of the precipice. Before him walked Ingunn: he saw her long, supple back in the red kirtle; she was plaiting her thick, dark-yellow hair, and he thought her so fair that he followed her as one bewitched. Before them the firs stood erect on the rocky cliff, and by the pale-blue radiance of the summer air he could see that the hillside dropped sheer beyond. He walked behind and looked at her, with mind and senses filled with secret memories of their meetings in her bower at night, with pride in being the master of her loveliness. And when they came to the end of the glen, where the lake lay far below under the dark, wooded heights—there was a little grassy slope between great shivering aspens—he ran up, embraced her from behind, and turned her face toward his own. Hers was pale, bedewed with warmth; as soon as he took her in his arms he felt that she grew weak and trembled in her everlasting animal docility.— This was before he knew that Steinfinn was to die, and before he had ever suspected that any man could hold their betrothal to be aught but a binding, irrevocable bargain.
In all these years he had never dared fully to recall to mind how it had been to feel nothing but the youth within him and all the world’s beauty in a young maid. His longing caught him by the throat and made his eyes burn in their sockets.
Olav rose from the ground and let his arms drop. He gazed out at the patch of starry sky, black velvet powdered with gold, that lay above this unknown country in which he had lost himself. Unconsciously he caught a whiff of smoke from a fire somewhere in the night.
He divined that now he had wellnigh unravelled the whole skein of his life’s misfortunes to the end of the thread. “Cleanse thou me from secret faults, O Lord,” he had learned in his morning prayers—in all these years, when he recalled that psalm, he must have thought upon his own evil deeds. Now he saw that what he had tried to conceal, from both God and men, was that he might have gone astray from weakness, from childish thoughtlessness and blind desire—that he had sought to deny at any cost: even if he should take upon himself the guilt of far worse deeds, charge himself with a burden of sorrow so heavy that it broke him down, then rather that. If only it might look as if he had acted with premeditation and accepted his sorrows knowingly and of his own free will.
“—And preserve thy servant from the power of strangers: let them not have dominion over me; so shall I remain unspotted—” “Let me not submit to my enemies,” he had meant. And then it had been nothing but his own sheer nature that kept him from submitting to his enemies, he would not bend to men for whom he had no respect or who opposed him; to such he had always shown his stubborn obstinacy and his mute, cold defiance. It was toward his friends he was weak and submissive, even to falseness and dissembling; it was when he first became aware of his love for his child bride that his whole being was inflamed and bent aside from uprightness, melting and leaning over like a heated candle.— That should have been the object of his prayers: courage, so that he dared acknowledge his blushing; strength, so that he ventured to act rightly and speak the truth without heeding the judgment of those he loved.
But in all these years he had believed himself to be a hard and stubborn, steadfast man; he had himself chosen the bitter lot of Cain, and he had chosen it of necessity, since he was to be the master and protector of the frail, weak-minded wife to whom he had been bound as a child.—And yet he had had to do violence to himself many a time before he could act as a hard man—gag the voice of his own conscience: do we not know how ready a man is to do wrong blindly when friendship and love are at stake, when joy and pleasure call?—He had said to himself he was playing for a high stake—and he had not been playing, he had merely shuffled the draughtsmen like a witless child. He had not chosen the lot of Cain; he himself had never known when he made a choice.
Olav clenched his teeth; it was as though another had pronounced this judgment upon him, and he would still defend himself, deny it. But the memory of that evening in the garden came back to him: old as he was, it required no more than a false air of youth, and he let himself be carried away, ran to grasp at the first shadow that played before his eyes. True, he had not thought of sinning—he had thought of nothing. As for the blind lad at whose side he had heard mass day after day, he had not remembered his existence.
His mouth filled with water—as in his boyhood when he chanced to see anything that was alive with maggots.
In a fleeting vision he recalled the dream of his former night in the woods: a bed of leaves in the midst of the darkness, a naked white body lying in it, the slain child—as he had seen in pictures of a deathbed: the soul leaving the dying man’s mouth in the likeness of a little child, and angels and devils contending for it.
He trembled in extreme terror. Again the feeling came over him that he had had as a child on seeing maggots. And in the wild horror that seized him now that he saw what he had concealed from himself beneath his manifest sins, the temptation awoke—simply to throw more leaves over the murdered child, hide it completely, and fly.
And as though the words were spoken without him he heard: childish, soft, heedless—such a character he would scarcely be given by the neighbours at home. Weak—he? The memories roused by the fever of the dance returned, and now they seemed like a troop hastening to his succour. He could not judge his whole conduct as a grown man by the headlong follies he had committed on finding himself, a lad bereft of kinsfolk, charged with a cause that called for great resourcefulness if a full-grown man were to bring it to an honourable issue. Nor by the years he had spent at Hestviken, tied to a wife who was able neither to live nor to die. He had always been different in those periods of his life when he had been able to act with free hands. Surely he need not call himself white-livered and soft-hearted for disliking his uncle Barnim’s fatuous and useless cruelty. Nor weak because it went against the grain to slay Teit; it was, as that youth himself had said, far too like hunting flies with a falcon. Had he not been just as brave, just as eager for the sword-play, as the boldest among the Earl’s men—a trusty comrade, well liked by his fellows, a friend with most, not too good a friend with any, loyal to defend his neighbour, cautious whom he trusted—? “God, my lot might have been so cast that I could lead a man’s life, perform manly deeds like my forefathers, achieve my meed of honourable exploits—Thou didst set me where I had to fight with sickness and misfortunes black as hell, till I felt myself sink to the knees in mire. Does it make me a coward if I know myself that I was oft afraid, though no man saw me flinch?
“Did I run blindly after my own desires when I renounced pardon, manor, and wife at the moment when all were within my reach, for the sake of following my banished lord in his outlawry?”
But at the bare thought of the Earl his heart began to quiver with the old, ardent loyalty—oh, nay! If at any time he had blindly followed his own desires, it was when he rejoined the Earl. At that time he had forgotten Ingunn almost—he knew he was bound to her; never would he abandon his claim that their relation that autumn had been a lawful one, the consummation of an agreed marriage; but he had not remembered his love for his wife. Of his affection for Earl Alf he had never spoken to a soul—fate had given him a woman for his only trusty friend, and how should she be able to grasp anything of a squire’s affection for his lord?
Olav drew himself up in agitation. About him loomed the trees; black and immensely high, they hid from him the starry heaven. He had a feeling that he was in flight, carrying himself off as booty into the woods. Here the path dropped so steeply that every moment he was in danger of falling headlong—it was dark as a badger’s hole under the huge masses of foliage, and the track was full of big stones and twisted roots. Olav guessed that he must have left the broad, beaten path that he had followed at first. This gave him a strange feeling of relief—now he was forced to have a care of his feet, and he had to think of where he was, and whether perhaps he might reach some habitation where he could obtain a lodging for the night. In this country one could not enter the first house one came to along the road and ask for shelter, as at home.
Once, when he had to stop to empty his shoes of all the earth he had got in them, he came across the same smell of smoke as he had noticed before when he sat on the ridge. It must be the smoke of a watch-fire—’twas not likely that folk would keep the hearthfire burning in any house so late at night. So it seemed there were men abroad in the wood. Olav took his sword out of the slit in his kirtle and let it hang in readiness. With his wonted caution he tried if it were loose in the scabbard and then walked on, slowly and quietly, holding it in his left hand.
The path swung out round a sort of promontory where the slope of the valley was bare of trees. Right under him, farther down, he saw a fire burning among the brushwood.
The discovery filled him with unreflecting joy; none could tell what sort of men might frequent this place. But Olav rejoiced at the prospect of meeting no matter whom, if only he might escape from solitude.
Now he saw the flame through the trees, heard the crackling of the fire. It lighted up a little clearing under the wooded slope on the farther side of the river, casting a red reflection on the black, running water. Between him and the fire he made out the dark forms of two men and heard voices.
The path led down to a little plank bridge and across to the meadow. The men lying about the fire did not hear his approach as they had just thrown an armful of dry faggots into the blaze. They were three young fellows—dressed as men of the people, none of the worst sort, seemingly. So he called to them.
They started up. Olav held his cloak wrapped about him with his left hand. As he stepped into the light of the fire it struck him that it would have been just as wise if he had first taken off the two gold rings with gleaming stones that he wore on that hand, but now it was too late. He greeted the men and asked, as well as he could, if this was the way to London.
As far as he could make out from their answer, it was not—the men pointed in the direction of the stream and over the hill. It was evident that the road to town ran on the high ground toward the south-west, but the men thought he would not be able to find it in the dark and he had better stay with them till daylight. Olav nodded and thanked them. Then they threw him some armfuls of leafy boughs they had cut. Olav spread them out and lay down by the fire.
It did him good—now he felt that he was ready to drop with tiredness and hollow with hunger; he had eaten no more than once that day, and that was many hours ago. So he wished these strangers would offer him something, but they did not; it seemed they had eaten their supper. Now they tied up the mouths of their bags again and stretched themselves on their beds of leaves, two of them. The third was to sit and watch. So Olav did not care to ask for food.
They lay chatting for a while, as well as they could. The men were from the west—nor was their speech like that of the London folk, Olav heard. To their questions he replied that he had been to the pilgrims’ church, he had lost his companions, he was a Norseman. But the conversation flagged. Then one of them began to snore, and soon after, Olav also fell asleep.
It was still night when he awoke, but the darkness seemed to have thinned; dawn was not far off. He had slept heavily and dreamlessly, but cold and hunger waked him. The fire had almost gone out, and the watchman seemed to be asleep.
Olav got up noiselessly and went down toward the river. At any rate he would have a drink of water. He knelt down and filled his hand—then he was on his feet again with a bound: he felt that someone was behind him. No time to draw his sword—he flung himself upon the man and felt the knife slash his cheek; it was lucky he did not get it in his eye. But he had got a good hold of the other and gripped his head under his arm, so that the man’s cries were half-stifled. “The knife,” thought Olav, but could not let go; so he raised his knee and drove it into the fellow’s ribs, scarcely noticing that he got a stab in the thigh as he tried to wrest the knife away. But this gave the stranger a chance to close with Olav; and, locked together, they rocked and wrestled in the darkness, each trying to throw the other into the river. The man’s smell and the firm, hot hug of a flesh-and-blood opponent filled Olav with a deep sense of voluptuous joy. He put forth all his strength—it was like pressing back the iron-bound gates of a castle against the
Now he heard that the others were on their feet. At that moment he got a hold and succeeded in throwing his adversary; his body crashed into the bushes. Olav drew his sword and ran to meet the other two, with never a thought that he was running into danger and not away—there they were! In the dark he knocked aside a weapon—an axe, no doubt—struck and felt that he got home, and well; there was a cry and something fell in a heap. His second blow found nothing but the empty air, and he ran on. The plank bridge was too far, so he took a run and leaped out into the stream.
He splashed a stroke or two, then found bottom. When he stood up, the water came to his middle, but the bottom was muddy and he sank into it. Then he got hold of something—overhanging branches and then a root; the turf broke away under his knee; mould and gravel or whatever it was rolled down into the water. A moment later he was standing on the other bank. They were howling and roaring yonder.
Olav threw off his drenched cloak and wound it about his left arm, broke into the thicket, and forced his way through the undergrowth, with his bare sword in his right hand. Only now did he notice that he had cut it in wresting the knife from the first robber; the blood poured from it. Now and then he stopped a moment to listen—they must be on the plank bridge now. It seemed they had no great heart to pursue him; perhaps they guessed it was too uncertain in the dark and the thick underwood—a cursed wood it was, nothing but thorns and brambles.
Olav made his way on up the slope protecting his face as well as he could with the cloak about his left arm.
Arrived on the high ground, he presently came upon a broad road that seemed to lead down the valley. The sky was growing lighter now and the stars were fewer and paler, the woods swelled darkly against the first signs of dawn.