The Visionary: Pictures From Nordland

Chapter 1

My father was a country merchant, and owned the trading-place, ----ven

in West Lofoten. He was really from Trondhjem, whence he had come north,

as a destitute boy, in one of those small vessels which are sent from

that city to Lofoten, to trade during the fishing season. In his youth

he had gone through a great deal, and had even worked for a time in a

boat's crew, as a simple fisherman, until he at last got a place as

shop-boy with Erlandsen the merchant, whose son-in-law he became.

My father, in middle age, was a handsome man, black-haired and

dark-skinned, with sharp, energetic features, and in height rather short

than tall. He always wore a brown duffel, seaman's jacket, and glazed

hat. In manner he was stern, and not very accessible; it was said, too,

that he was rather a hard man--for which the severe school of life

through which he had passed was perhaps to blame. If this manner, on the

one hand, made him few friends, on the other, it gained for him a

greater confidence in business matters, in which he was prompt and

expeditious, always claiming to the utmost what he considered to be his

due. People feared him, and would not willingly be on bad terms with

him.

We have generally only flashing recollections of what has happened

before our eighth year, but these flashes last for a whole lifetime. I

have in my mind just such a picture of my poor unhappy mother. I know

her better from that than from all I have heard about her since; from

what I have been told she must have had fair hair and soft blue eyes,

have been pale and delicate, and in figure rather tall. She was also

very quiet and melancholy.

She was Erlandsen's only daughter, and was married to my father while he

was yet a subordinate in Erlandsen's service, and it was said that it

was the old man who brought about the union, thinking it the best way to

provide for her future.

I remember a warm summer day, and the mowers in their shirt-sleeves,

mowing with long scythes, out in the meadow: I was with my mother, as

she passed by them, knitting. Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky

hill, behind which my mother had a bench. Above this on a stony heap

grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees.

While I was scrambling about among the stones, picking raspberries,

father called my mother.

When she had gone away, there came over to me from the other side of the

hill a tall, pale lady, who seemed older than mother, dressed in black,

with a stand-up, white, frilled collar; she looked at me very kindly,

and stretched out to me a wild rose spray she had in her hand.

I did not feel at all afraid, and it did not seem as if she were a

stranger. Then she nodded sadly to me in farewell, and went back the

same way she had come.

When mother returned I told her that such a kind, strange lady had been

there, but she must have been in great sorrow, and now she was gone.

My mother--I remember it, as if it were yesterday--stood still for a

minute, as white as a sheet, looking at me with anguish in her eyes, as

if we were both going to die, then she threw her arms above her head,

and fell fainting to the ground.

I was too frightened to cry, but I remember that, while she lay

stretched insensible on the grass by the bench, I threw myself upon her,

crying, "Mother! mother!"

A little while after I had come running to father, who stood in his

shirt-sleeves over in the meadow, mowing with the others, and had said,

sobbing, that mother was dead.

From that hour my mother was out of her mind. For many years she had to

be constantly watched in her own room, and my father must have had many

a sad hour. Afterwards she was taken to a lunatic asylum in Trondhjem,

where two years later she died, without having come to her right mind

for one moment.

The person who had the charge of me during this time was old Anne Kv*,

a pock-marked, masculine-looking woman, with little brown eyes, rough,

iron-grey hair, strongly marked, almost witch-like features, and as a

rule a short, black clay pipe in her mouth. She had been my mother's

nurse, and was attached to her with her whole soul. When my mother went

out of her mind, she begged earnestly to become her guardian in the blue

room; but this had to be given up, as it was evident that it was just

her presence that most excited the patient's mind. My mother could not

bear to see father either, and me they never dared show her at all.

Old Anne Kv* had been my mother's only confidante. She was extremely

superstitious and strange. In her imagination, hobgoblins and gnomes

occupied the store-house and boat-house, as surely as my father resided

in the main building; and under the mountain to the east of the harbour,

the underground people carried on, invisibly, their fishing and trading

with Bergen, just as my father did his, visibly, in the world. Old Anne

had certainly filled my poor mother's head with her mystic

superstition, to no less an extent than she did mine. There were all

kinds of marks and signs to be made from morning till night, and she

always wore an uneasy look, as though she were keeping watch. When a

boat came in, you ought to turn towards the sea, and spit, and mutter a

few words against sea-sprites. She could see every man's double. [The

spirit which every one is supposed to have as a follower and companion

through life.] On its account the door must be shut to quickly after any

one had gone out; and she could always hear a warning beforehand when

father was coming home from a journey.

When Anne Kv* had no longer leave to go into the blue room to my

mother, she silently went through all kinds of performances outside the

door. I remember once standing on the stairs, and seeing her bowing and

curtseying, wetting her finger every now and then, drawing on the door

with it, and muttering, until I fled in terror.

In her incantation formul, the word "Jumala" often occurred, the name

of the Bjarmers' old god, whose memory, in the far north, is not so

completely eradicated as one would think, and who to this day has

perhaps some sacrificial stone or other on the wide mountain wastes of

Finland. Against Lap witchcraft--and a suspicion of it was fastened on

almost every Lap boat that landed at the quay--she also had her charms;

she apparently melted down Fin and Christian gods together in her

mystical incantations, for the confounding of Lap witchcraft.

In the midst of such mental impressions as these, I grew up.

The parsonage, with the white-towered church beside it, lay only a short

way from us, down by the sea, on the right-hand side of the bay, looking

out from our trading-place, which lay farther in.

There was a tutor in the place--we always called him "the student"--and

I went to lessons every day with the minister's two children, a bright

boy of the name of Carl, who was a year younger than I, namely twelve,

and his sister Susanna, of exactly the same age as myself, a blue-eyed

wild child, with a quantity of yellow hair, which was always requiring

to be pushed back from her forehead; when she could do so unnoticed by

the student, she made all kinds of faces and grimaces across at us, to

make us laugh.

The tutor was, in fact, exceedingly strict, and inspired the greatest

respect. The torture in which we sat when at school, not daring to look

up at one another for fear our laughter should break out, was really

anything but pleasant; for every time it exploded we fared very badly;

in the first place, we had our hair pulled and our ears boxed, and in

the next, long written harangues in our mark-books about our behaviour.

Susanna was often utterly merciless; it came to such a pass, that with

only a little wink in the corner of her eye, she could instantly put us

in a state of fever, so that we would sit with cheeks as red as apples,

and our eyes fastened on our books, until we could contain ourselves no

longer. She tried especially to work upon me, though she knew I must pay

dearly for misconduct at home; for father was a severe man, who had very

little comprehension of children.

In play hours, we romped with more animation than children generally

indulge in.

In contrast to the strict, gloomy life at home, with father always

either out on business, or up in the office; where, from the blue room,

often came noises and cries from my poor insane mother, and where Anne

Kv* was always going about, like a wandering spirit, playing with the

parsonage children was like a life in some other and happier, more

sunshiny part of the globe.