Hans of Iceland, Vol. 1 of 2

Did you see it? did you see it? did you see it? Oh! did you see it?--Who saw it? Who did see it? For mercy’s sake, who saw it?

STERNE: Tristram Shandy.

“That’s what comes of falling in love, Neighbor Niels. Poor Guth Stersen would not be stretched out yonder on that great black slab, like a starfish forgotten by the tide, if she had kept her mind on mending her father’s boat and patching his nets. Saint Usuph, the fisher, console our old friend in his affliction!”

“And her lover,” added a shrill, tremulous voice, “Gill Stadt, that fine young man beside her, would not be there now, if instead of making love to Guth and seeking his luck in those accursed Roeraas mines, he had stayed at home and rocked his little brother’s cradle, under the smoky cross-beams of his mother’s hut.”

Neighbor Niels, whom the first speaker addressed, interrupted: “Your memory is growing old along with yourself, Mother Olly. Gill never had a brother, and that makes poor Widow Stadt’s grief all the harder to bear, for her home is now left utterly desolate; if she looks up to heaven for consolation, she sees nought but her old roof, where still hangs the cradle of her son, grown to be a tall young man, and dead.”

“Poor mother!” replied old Olly, “it was the young man’s own fault. Why should he go to Roeraas to be a miner?”

“I do believe,” said Niels, “that those infernal mines rob us of a man for every escalin’s[3] worth of copper which we get out of them. What do you think, Father Braal?”

“Miners are fools,” replied the fisherman. “If he would live, the fish should not leave the water. Man should not enter the bowels of the earth.”

“But,” asked a young man in the crowd, “how if Gill Stadt had to work in the mines to win his sweetheart?”

“A man should never risk his life,” interrupted Olly, “for affections which are far from being worth a life, or filling it. A pretty wedding-bed Gill earned for his Guth!”

“So then that young woman,” inquired a curious bystander, “drowned herself in despair at the death of this young man?”

“Who says so?” loudly exclaimed a soldier, pushing his way through the crowd. “That young girl, whom I knew well, was indeed engaged to marry a young miner who was lately crushed by falling rocks in the underground tunnels of Storwaadsgrube, near Roeraas; but she was also the sweetheart of one of my mates, and as she was going to Munkholm secretly, day before yesterday, to celebrate with her lover the death of her betrothed, her boat capsized on a reef, and she was drowned.”

A confused sound of voices arose: “Impossible, master soldier,” cried the old women. The young ones were silent; and Neighbor Niels maliciously reminded fisher Braal of his serious statement: “That’s what comes of falling in love!”

The soldier was about to lose his temper with his opponents; he had already called them “old witches from the cave of Quiragoth,” and they were not disposed to bear so grave an insult patiently, when a sharp and imperious voice, crying “Silence, silence, you old fools!” put an end to the dispute. All was still, as when the sudden crow of a cock is heard amid the cackling of the hens.

Before relating the rest of the scene, it may be well to describe the spot where it occurred. It was--as the reader has doubtless guessed--one of those gloomy structures which public pity and social forethought devote to unknown corpses, the last asylum of the dead, whose lives were usually sad ones; where the careless spectator, the surly or kindly observer gather, and friends often meet tearful relatives, whom long and unendurable anxiety has robbed of all but one sad hope. At the period now remote, and in the uncivilized region to which I have carried my reader, there had as yet been no attempt, as in our cities of gold and mud, to make these resting-places into ingeniously forbidding or elegantly funereal edifices. Daylight did not fall through tomb-shaped openings, into artistically sculptured vaults, upon beds which seem as if the guardian of the place were anxious to leave the dead some of the conveniences of life, and the pillow seems arranged for sleep. If the keeper’s door were left ajar, the eye, wearied with gazing upon hideous, naked corpses, had not as now the pleasure of resting upon elegant furniture and happy children. Death was there in all its deformity, in all its horror; and there was no attempt to deck its fleshless skeleton with ribbons and gewgaws.

The room in which our actors stood was spacious and dark, which made it seem still larger; it was lighted only by a broad, low door opening upon the port of Throndhjem, and a rough hole in the ceiling, through which a dull, white light fell, mingled with rain, hail, or snow, according to the weather, upon the corpses lying directly under it. The room was divided by an iron railing, breast-high, running across it from side to side. The public entered the outer portion through the low door; in the inner part were six long black granite slabs, arranged abreast and parallel to each other. A small side door served to admit the keeper and his assistant to either section, their rooms occupying the rear of the building, close to the water. The miner and his betrothed occupied two granite beds; decomposition had already begun its work upon the young woman’s body, showing itself in large blue and purple spots running along her limbs on the line of the blood-vessels. Gill’s features were stern and set; but his body was so horribly mutilated that it was impossible to judge whether his beauty were really so great as old Olly declared.

It was before these disfigured remains, in the midst of the mute crowd, that the conversation which we have faithfully interpreted, began.

A tall, withered old man, sitting with folded arms and bent head upon a broken stool in the darkest corner of the room, had apparently paid no heed until the moment when he rose suddenly, exclaiming, “Silence, silence, you old fools!” and seized the soldier by the arm.

All were hushed; the soldier turned and broke into a burst of laughter at the sight of his strange interrupter, whose pale face, thin greasy locks, long fingers, and complete costume of reindeer leather amply justified this mirthful reception. But a clamor arose from the crowd of women, for a moment confounded: “It is the keeper of the Spladgest![4]--That infernal doorkeeper to the dead!--That diabolical Spiagudry!--That accursed sorcerer!”

“Silence, you old fools, silence! If this be the witches’ Sabbath, hasten away and find your broomsticks; if you don’t, they’ll fly off without you. Let this worthy descendant of the god Thor alone.”

Then Spiagudry, striving to assume a gracious expression, addressed the soldier: “You say, my good fellow, that this wretched woman--”

“Old rascal!” muttered Olly; “yes, we are all ‘wretched women,’ to him, because our bodies, if they fall into his claws, only bring him thirty escalins’ reward, while he gets forty for the paltry carcass of a man.”

“Silence, old women!” repeated Spiagudry. “In truth, these daughters of the Devil are like their kettles; when they wax warm, they must needs sing. Tell me, my valiant king of the sword, your comrade, this Guth’s lover, will doubtless kill himself in despair at her loss, won’t he?”

Here burst forth the long-repressed storm. “Do you hear the miscreant,--the old Pagan!” cried twenty shrill, discordant voices. “He would fain see one less man living, for the sake of the forty escalins that a dead body brings him.”