Wanderers | Page 3

about now humming a little tune; go about rejoicing,
loving every straw and every stone, and feeling as if they cared for me
in return.
When I go by the overgrown path, in through the woods, my heart
quivers with an unearthly joy. I call to mind a spot on the eastern
shores of the Caspian, where I once stood. All just as it is here, with the
water still and heavy and iron-grey as now. I walked through the woods,
touched to the heart, and verging on tears for sheer happiness' sake, and
saying to myself all the time: God in heaven. To be here again....

As if I had been there before.
Ah well, I may have been there once before, perhaps, coming from
another time and another land, where the woods and the woodland
paths were the same. Perhaps I was a flower then, in the woods, or
perhaps a beetle, with its home in some acacia tree.
And now I have come to this place. Perhaps I was a bird and flew all
that long way. Or the kernel in some fruit sent by a Persian trader.
See, now I am well away from the rush and crowd of the city, from
people and newspapers; I have fled away from it all, because of the
calling that came to me once more from the quiet, lonely tracts where I
belong. "It will all come right this time," I tell myself, and am full of
hope. Alas, I have fled from the city like this before, and afterwards
returned. And fled away again.
But this time I am resolved. Peace I will have, at any cost. And for the
present I have taken a room in a cottage here, with Old Gunhild to look
after me.
Here and there among the pines are rowans, with ripe coral berries;
now the berries are falling, heavy clusters striking the earth. So they
reap themselves and sow themselves again, an inconceivable
abundance to be squandered every single year. Over three hundred
clusters I can count on a single tree. And here and there about are
flowers still in bloom, obstinate things that will not die, though their
time is really past.
But Old Gunhild's time is past as well--and think you she will die? She
goes about as if death were a thing did not concern her. When the
fishermen are down on the beach, painting their boats or darning nets,
comes Gunhild with her vacant eyes, but with a mind as keen as any to
a bargain.
"And what is the price of mackerel today?" she asks.
"The same as yesterday."

"Then you can keep it, for all I care."
And Gunhild goes back home.
But the fishermen know that Gunhild is not one of those that only
pretend to go away; she has gone off like that before now, up to her
cottage, without once looking back. So, "Hey" they call to her, and say
they'll make it seven to the half-dozen today, seeing she is an old
customer.
And Gunhild buys her fish.
Washing hangs on the lines to dry; red petticoats and blue shirts, and
under-things of preposterous thickness, all spun and woven on the
island by the old women still left alive. But there is washing, too, of
another sort: those fine chemises without sleeves, the very thing to
make a body blue with cold, and mauve woollen undervests that pull
out to no more than the thickness of a string. And how did these
abominations get there? Why, 'tis the daughters, to be sure, the young
girls of the present day, who've been in service in the towns, and earned
such finery that way. Wash them carefully, and not too often, and the
things will last for just a month. And then there is a lovely naked
feeling when the holes begin to spread.
But there is none of that sort of nonsense, now, about Gunhild's shoes,
for instance. At suitable intervals, she goes round to one of the
fishermen, her like in age and mind, and gets the uppers and the soles
done in thoroughly with a powerful mess of stuff that leaves the water
simply helpless. I've seen that dubbin boiling on the beach; there's
tallow in it, and tar and resin as well.
Wandering idly along the beach yesterday, looking at driftwood and
scales and stones, I came upon a tiny bit of plate glass. How it ever got
there, is more than I can make out; but the thing seems a mistake, a
very lie, to look at. Would any fisherman, now, have rowed out here
with it and laid it down and rowed away again? I left it where it lay; it
was thick and common and vulgar; perhaps a bit