World Light by Halldór Laxness Read Free Book Online Page B

the invitation to coffee. He gazed after her as she walked away, tall and fair, bareheaded and rosy-cheeked, with a firm stride like a grown-up girl’s. She did not look back at him. They walked farther and farther up by the river. In his mind’s eye from then on she was always associated with running water, and he threw himself down on the riverbank and cried out to God. “God, God, God!” he said. For a long time he never thought about any other human being. In the parsonage or in church he was aware of no one else; other people were nothing but smoke. He felt it every time she moved, even though he had his back to her. He saw her skipping across a little stream in midafternoon: she—and the clear running water of spring at the start of the growing-season—and sunshine.
    On another occasion they were all playing on the riverbank, all the children, with the towering mountains on one side and the fjord on the other. It was evening. Guðrún was hot and flushed and just like a grown-up girl, and she had undone her top button, and the river flowed past, broad and calm. Her blonde braids had been tossed forward over her breast and one of them had become loosened, and her eyes sparkled. Then someone from one of the farms called out to the children that it was time to come in. He walked home alone and cried out to God. It was no doubt true; he was just the dregs of humanity and living under the yoke of slavery, a foster child who had no one and who misunderstood the Christian faith to an important extent. But all the same, let them beat him and scold him; God had revealed much to him. No one had ever perceived such immense visions as he had seen. Guðrún of Grænhóll! Then they were confirmed. Some of them did not see one another again for twenty or thirty years; some never met again. She never spoke to him except on that one occasion.

4
    One day in February a snowstorm blew up. It was low tide, and the sheep were out on the nesses and the skerries of the isthmus, and the boy was sent out to bring them in. It was not the first time he had got soaked running through the seaweed, nor was it the first time that the bitter winter cold had sliced through his threadbare woolen jacket. But on this occasion the storm was exceptionally severe, and it was freezing very hard. He had had a cold all winter and at times had been unable to speak for hoarseness. When he came in out of the snowstorm that evening, he was ill. At least, he said he was ill. He complained of pains in his back, and said he was sweating and shivering by turns.
    “It’s growing-pains,” said his foster mother, Kamarilla.
    “There’s no end to what our sweet little friend can dream up,” said the younger brother, Júst.
    That night the boy said he was drenched in sweat and had a stitch and could not get his breath, and he cried aloud to God.
    “It’s lovely to hear our sweet little friend singing in the middle of the night,” said Júst.
    Next morning when the brothers rose, the elder brother said that this was the latest method of avoiding going to the barn and touching cow dung. “Out of bed, you little devil!” he said. “You’re no more ill than I am!”
    But the foster mother, Kamarilla, put her hand on his forehead and found it very hot. She thought it best to let the poor wretch stay in bed that morning.
    So he lay there hovering between life and death, and time passed— or rather, time ceased to pass. Day and night, weekdays and Sundays, no longer succeeded one another in the order laid down by the calendar issued by the Icelandic National Society; there was no longer any distinction between one and two. The narrow became broad and the long became short of its own accord and without natural cause; there was no relationship between things. The fever pushed life and all consciousness on to another plane where all measures of time were wiped out, where one did not know what one was nor what one had been nor what one would become, nor what would