Authors: Sigrid Undset
In the course of the autumn a rumour came to Olav’s ears that Eirik Olavsson had forsaken his convent because he felt a call to a yet stricter life of penitence. It was said to be his intention to build himself a cell in the churchyard and become an anchorite. The like had never been known in the parish before, so there was great talk among the folk—some made a mock of it, but others thought it must be a great blessing to the countryside. At last Olav guessed that in one way or another Eirik himself must have originated these rumours, and so he took his son to task. Eirik was thrown into dire confusion—and it was the first time since his return from the convent that his father had seen him falter and blink his eyes. But his answer was that he had never said he himself would turn anchorite; he had only spoken of something that had been read aloud in the refectory last winter, a book that was called
Vitæ Patrum.
One day Eirik came to Olav and asked if he might bring the eldest of the Rundmyr children to Hestviken. The boy had become a cripple after an illness at the age of seven; when they laid him on the ground outside in summer he could just push himself about a little with his arms; he scarcely had the power of speech either. Before his sickness he had been a lively, handsome child—he bore no resemblance either to Liv or to Anki, but to a young and merry, red-haired and brown-eyed house-carl who had been at Hestviken the winter before those two were married. But that did not detract from Anki’s paternal pride, and even now, when the boy was in this state, both Anki and Liv said they would
rather lose all their other children than this one. But though they loved him so, and though they always received such abundant doles from Hestviken that they ought not to have suffered want, the sick child was covered with sores and lice and likely to rot away in his own uncleanliness. His parents did not neglect him, they stuffed him with the best morsels, but they could not cope with the filth.
Olav did not see how he could say no to Eirik’s request, for the child was his godson and was called Olav after him. So he merely said that Eirik was not to bring him into the house until he could rid him of his lice and keep his sores so clean that they did not stink too foully. Eirik then kept Olav Livsson in the barn until the cold set in, but then they had to let him lie in the living-room. By this time Eirik had got him tolerably clean, and the boy had learned to swing himself along a few steps with a pair of crutches. In the course of the winter he acquired sense enough to be able to perform a little light work, such as soaking withies and deer sinews, or planing rough wooden implements. He also learned to speak better, but he was still a stammerer and tongue-tied. However, there were many drawbacks to having him in the house. Not that the house-folk were ever unfriendly with him; and if once in a while Olav Audunsson took notice of his godson, it was always in the way of kindness—as far as that went, Olav was not displeased that the poor creature was now looked after like a Christian child—but when he was vexed at the trouble the sick boy caused them, Eirik was made to feel his father’s ill humour.
As yet Olav knew nothing of how the folk at Gunnarsby had taken the news that the son of Hestviken had returned. But he was a prey to misgivings whenever he thought of it, and it was never long absent from his mind.
In late autumn Olav found time to make a journey to Oslo, and while there he visited the Minorite convent. But he soon saw that he would be told nothing there of the reason for Eirik’s defection. It was clear that the friars reckoned this as one of the convent’s domestic affairs, and the silence of the cloister was as a wall. They had nothing but good to say of Eirik: they had grown devotedly attached to their young brother, but since it had been made clear both to himself and to them that God desired to lead this soul by other paths than that of the monastic life, then—
“Was it after the beating he gave that peasant at Tveit that you were clear about this?” asked Olav.
He had heard of this through Claus Wiephart. A pious widow at one of the farms of Tveit had sent word to the convent that she would give them some homespun cloth and victuals. Brother Stevne was to fetch the gifts and took Brother Eirik with him; he was to help carry them home. But when they were ready to leave, each with his load on his back, the widow’s only son came home, and he had less love for the beggar monks than his mother, so he covered the two friars with abuse—till Brother Eirik could command himself no longer, flung down his sack, sprang upon the peasant, and dealt him a blow on the jaw that felled him to the ground. True, Brother Stevne had remonstrated with him on the spot, and Eirik had humbled himself before the peasant; at home in the convent, too, he had doubtless had to do penance—the barefoot friars would be ill served by a revival of the memories of their former combativeness. But the incident was talked of far and wide.
So Olav had thought to hit the mark with this. But the guardian never winced. Nay, said he, they could not send away a novice on account of a false step of that kind, if he showed true repentance of his sin. Eirik had made no attempt to excuse his hot temper, but had submitted to his penance in such a way that he might be called a pattern of obedience.
Eirik’s father smiled incredulously.
Then at last the guardian told him—Eirik had come hither because he believed himself called to be a priest. But since there was a hindrance to this—
“Hindrance?” Olav turned suddenly red in the face. “Who has said, father, that there was any hindrance?”
“Such is the commandment of Holy Church, Olav. No man who has a blemish on body or limbs may serve before the altar. So with his maimed hand Eirik cannot—”
Olav said nothing. He had forgotten that Eirik lacked two joints of the little finger of his left hand. His first thought had been of Eirik’s birth.
The guardian resumed, and now he spoke rapidly and with full assurance: Eirik had sought admittance to their order because he believed that God had called him to be a priest. But since God never gives a man a call that he cannot follow, it was clear that
Eirik Olavsson had been mistaken in this. But that placed the matter at once on a different footing. During the remainder of his year of probation Eirik had striven to ascertain whether he were chosen to serve God in the cloister as a lay brother; but in the end they had all been certain that it was not so.
With that Olav had to be satisfied. The brethren said nothing of the gifts they had received when Eirik came to them, but on the other hand they were silent as to what had been promised them later. So these questions were never broached.
But Olav Audunsson parted from the Minorites in but indifferent kindness. And after that time he always spoke of these friars with ill will. And since in all else he was known to be a pious man and one so well disposed to cloister folk and priests that not even Sira Hallbjörn Erlingsson had been able to quarrel with him, folk deemed that he must have just cause to complain of the barefoot friars’ conduct in this matter.
It was true that the first thing to shake Eirik’s determination was the knowledge that he could not be ordained priest.
He had thrown himself into the new life with such burning zeal that the master of the novices, Brother Einar, had rather to restrain him. Many of the monks were wont to stay behind in church after matins in order to pray until prime. Eirik forthwith asked leave to do this every morning, and Brother Einar had to order him to go back to the dormitory and lie down again.
Eirik himself thought he needed no more sleep than a bird on the bough. Were he never so tired when called to matins, the first breath of the cool air of the summer night which met him as he came into the cloister garth was enough to make him wide awake. To enter the cold, dark church was almost as it had felt when, as a child, he plunged into the sea for a swim. During matins the lofty vaulted building grew lighter and lighter. At midsummer the first rays of the morning sun swept clear over the hills behind Aker as the brethren left the choir and crossed the green courtyard to return to their dormitory.
But two mornings in the week he was given leave to stay behind in church after matins. As he knelt in prayer the images in the choir windows became clearer, the colours began to shine-then the sun fired the glass, and the reds and yellows glowed and sparkled, till the whole choir was filled with unearthly light and
warmth from the many-coloured sunbeams that splashed the paintings on the walls and the altar cross and the candlesticks with flecks of blue and violet and gold. When the brethren returned to say prime, every corner of the church was filled with sunshine and reflected sunshine—and then came the sound of footsteps in the nave, echoing in the vault, as folk came in to hear mass.
Every time he was to join in the singing he felt the same surge of joy: he looked forward every day to singing during mass, he looked forward to Sundays and feast-days, for then they sang the hours as well; he looked forward to all masses for the dead, for then he joined in singing the vigil the evening before. He had always rejoiced in his own beautiful voice. Now he thought of how he was turning this precious gift to account, and in holy awe he set himself to learn to use it in singing God’s praises. He was then reminded of a verse, one of the first he had learned in this house:
“Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum: dico ego opera mea Regi.”
4
Eirik often chose the whole of the psalm that opens with these words as a theme for reflection when he was allowed to stay behind in the church; he did not yet know it word for word, but there were riches enough in what he had learned.
The first image that had presented itself to him when he gave himself over to prayer—when his Christianity appeared to him as an upper chamber full of locked chests that he had never thought of unlocking—remained with him. Every day new keys were placed in his hands, and he saw that a man’s life in this world is never long enough to permit him to lay his hands on more than a tiny fragment of the treasures that lie hidden in the secret stores of the faith.
One day a book on paradise had been read out in the refectory. Eirik recalled this chapter next morning as he knelt in the choir and thought upon Gethsemane. He saw paradise before his eyes: a garden like their own, where the hard fruit now clustered thickly on the trees, while pot-herbs teemed on the rich mould of the beds, and the flowers were beginning to bloom along the walls. Thus had God planted and sown it for a possession for the first human pair. One tree alone He had forbidden them to touch, but that made them ready to believe the serpent, when he tempted them and said this tree was the most excellent of all—and immediately they fell to plundering it. It was this garden that God gave
to the race of man as an earnest. But in Gethsemane the lean and dried-up branches of the olives straggled in the moonlight—in the convent they had some branches of olive trees that had been brought from the castle where their father, Saint Franciscus, was born; they were coarse and ugly, with hard and shrivelled leaves. Thus had men planted their garden, to receive God in it when He came down to visit them and redeem them from sin. Among these bitter, withered bushes He had lain upon His face, sweating blood, as He saw at the bottom of the chalice all the evil that the race of Adam and Eve had committed and shall commit from the dawn of the ages until the Day of Judgment. All the blood that had been spilt, all the robbery and murder and false swearing and deceit and lewdness and betrayal were in the chalice, and all this He was now to take upon Himself and atone for—and over by the gate lay His disciples asleep, but on the path from the castle Judas is already at hand, leading the servants of the high priest and the soldiers of Pilate with torches and with swords and staves to bind and smite and slay God.
There was no one else in the church that morning. Eirik crept forward on his knees to the tabernacle, loosed his clothes, and let them fall to his waist. Then he took the knotted rope he wore as a girdle and scourged himself with it till it was red with blood.
During the day he was sent out into the garden to weed. The sun was broiling hot. At first his back did not feel very sore, but by degrees, as he lay crawling among the beds and the coarse frock grew fast to the raw flesh, was torn away again and rubbed the wounds, and the sun beat straight down on him, it was like a burning fire across his shoulder-blades. But the pain filled him with a deep and humble bliss, for he thought it must feel almost like this to have a cross resting on one’s back—and then he felt his own unworthiness, and it made him so humble that he could have cast himself down with his face in the mould. For the first time he began rightly to understand the meaning of all penitential exercises and all self-discipline—that such things were not an end, but the means: the body required to be chastened and taught obedience as one trains a horse; and he had a glimpse of the paths that are opened to the soul as it makes itself master of the flesh.
But when he spoke to Father Einar of this in his next confession, his master said seriously that these were matters in which a new-comer might easily go astray, and he ordered the novice not to
impose discipline on himself another time except after consultation with him.
The whole forenoon until dinner-time they were at work in the cloisters, all those of the brethren who were at home. Only the church and the east wing—the chapter-house and the scriptorium—were yet built of stone, with a paved colonnade outside. To the west and south of the garth stood timber houses, with a cloister walk of timber. In the stone cloisters sat those brethren who read or wrote, but outside the south wing old Brother Arnstein Antonius had his loom, and there stood Brother Sigvard and Brother Johannes at their lathe and bench. In these forenoon hours Brother Eirik had his place beside Brother Hubert, an old German monk who had been an inmate of this house since its foundation. He was to teach the novice booklore and Latin, and for the sake of quiet they sat in the inmost corner of the cloister, close beside the church door.
There was only one other young brother in the convent that summer, Brother Arne, but he had been there since his seventh year, when his father, Brother Sveinke, had taken the habit; the mother with two daughters had entered the nunnery of Gimsöy, and the elder of these sisters had already died, at the age of eighteen, in odour of sanctity. Brother Arne was but seventeen years old, but already an accomplished clerk, so Eirik had to take his lessons alone, and he showed such aptitude that both his teacher and the master of the novices were astonished. And then there came a day when Eirik again had filled the tablet, and his writing was so fair and firm on the green wax that Brother Hubert had to show it to some of the others, before it was all smoothed out again: “Great pity is it that Brother Eirik should bear such blemish that he cannot be made a priest.”