The dark of summer, p.7
The Dark of Summer, page 7
‘You have told us once before.’
‘When you made me drunk.’
‘Tell us again,’ said Tórur, ‘and perhaps I will tell you about the grýla.’
In the train, on my way north from London to Edinburgh, when I had staggered through the crowded corridor into the lavatory, and been sick, I had considered for a little while tearing the ribbon of the Military Cross from my tunic and throwing it into the pan with my vomit. Nothing but inertia, I think, had stopped me doing that. I was half a fraud, and I knew it, but I had not the strength of mind to strip myself of fraudulence and stand before the world, thin, transparent, and without value. And now, remembering that failure and being suddenly filled with a weak and foolish anger—against myself, and against these men who had awakened an emotion so useless—I exclaimed (and I heard the shrillness of my voice), ‘Very well, if you want to hear an ugly story, here it is.
‘I was given a medal because I was a coward. I’d been told that I had “permission to retire”, and I was so Goddamned frightened that I couldn’t move. There were two German tanks looking down their guns at me as if I were a flounder in shallow water—a flounder on a sandy shore, under clear water—and they were going to spear me. I couldn’t move! Then one of them fell into a cutting, arse-over-tip, and the other panicked, and turned away. So I found my nerve again, and my half-company held on for another couple of hours. That was useful, that gave us valuable time, but I was wounded. Splinter in the chest, not serious. Then we got to Dunkirk, I can’t remember when. And I didn’t go aboard with my own people, because I was ashamed. I stayed on the beach to try and expiate my bloody cowardice. It was my only chance to regain a scrap of self-respect. And I couldn’t even do that, because I collapsed after three or four days and was dumped into a bloody little pleasure-boat as if I was a drunken tripper. And when my M.C. was gazetted I was still too much of a coward to tell the truth and refuse it. —And that’s the story of my medal.’
I was, I believe, a little more affected by whisky (and perhaps the heat of the room) than, at the time, I supposed. For now I remember my words with some embarrassment. At the time I thought them true, but I was in too emotional a state to be objective, and now I admit their dishonesty. I was secretly pleased with myself—pleased, that is, with the discipline that had let me recover from a moment of panic which might have earned me, as it earned Peter, a bullet in the back—though in the bitterness of youth I still deplored and abominated my innate tendency to fear; and that measure of self-contempt took control and wagged my disingenuous tongue.
But my tongue, however dishonestly, did its work. Sergeant Fergusson said approvingly, ‘A very interesting story!’ and Bömlo and Tórur, who had heard it before, listened with close attention, with a sentimental gravity, and drained their glasses.
‘You are a good man, Tony,’ said Bömlo.
‘He is a brave man,’ said Tórur. ‘To be frightened is natural, but to behave well after you have been fearful, that is brave. And I think he is our friend, Bömlo.’
I report their words, their emotions, only because of their effect on the situation. Tórur stood up and, fetching his breath with a sigh that deepened to a groan, said, ‘Let us show him, Bömlo.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Bömlo answered. ‘Now we do not know what to do, and perhaps he will tell us.’
‘Come,’ said Tórur, and led us into the porch, where we put on our boots and then went round to the back of the house. It was still light, but the light had the yellowish, autumn hue that foretold the dark.
Behind or beside the Faeroese farmhouse there usually stands a small building called a hjallur, the walls of which consist of narrow wooden planks with gaps between them, so that the wind may blow through. It is used as a curing-house for dried fish and mutton. It was to the hjallur that Tórur led us.
The door was locked with the old-fashioned Faeroese wooden lock, and Tórur fumbled with it, and was slow. Then he held the door wide open, and beckoned me to go in. I could not, at first, understand what I saw. For there, in the shadow of the roof but dimly lighted by the yellow glow of early evening, there seemed to be a man waiting to receive me. A man seated in a chair of a Victorian sort, such as I had seen in Tórur’s ben-room. But he did not move as I went in and, when I was near enough to see his face clearly, I was appalled by its frozen grimace. A face white as dough, but hard as bone and slightly glistening; and writhen with hate or agony.
Foolishly, and hearing my folly in the tremor of my voice, I said, ‘But he’s dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Tórur. ‘That is what we found this morning.’
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘The grýla,’ said Bömlo.
Sergeant Fergusson came in and in a business-like way examined the corpse and demanded, ‘Who tied him to the chair, and why? And who took his boots off?’
I saw then that his feet, on the cold ground, wore only grey woollen socks, and that his arms and body were bound to the back of the chair. He wore a high-necked, navy-blue jersey, and in his pale, short-cropped hair a little frost reflected the evening light. His eyes were open and appeared to be frozen. His mouth gaped, and the left side of his jaw was bruised and swollen. He was a man in his middle thirties, and had been, when alive, not ill-looking.
‘Is this the man who came ashore?’ I asked.
‘We will tell you all about him,’ said Bömlo. ‘And then, Tony, you must tell us what to do.’
Tórur locked the door of the hjallur again and we went back to the house. Sergeant Fergusson whispered to me, ‘Would you like me to fetch Lieutenant Silver, sir? Three heads are better than two, if we’re going to escape trouble.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell him to come at once—and come alone.’
I followed Tórur and Bömlo up the steps, and Fergusson, quick-stepping, went back to the jetty. Neither Tórur nor Bömlo seemed to notice he had gone—they had paid very little attention to him—and in the warm room Bömlo filled our glasses again as if it were a necessary rite of which he had grown weary.
I felt within me a chill of nausea that the whisky did little to dispel, and Bömlo, on the uncomfortable sofa, looked sad and sober. Both, indeed, now appeared to be quite sober, and Tórur seemed bereft and mournful.
Sadly and gently I asked, ‘Did you murder him?’
‘No, I do not think so,’ said Tórur. ‘But he was a bad man. He deceived us! We thought he was a good man at first, and then it turned out that he was bad. Oh, God, how bad! He tried to buy my soul.’
A good deal of the second bottle had been drunk before I disentangled the truth of what had happened; and I, upon oath, had only a single glass after seeing the body. —The dead man, the frozen man, was indeed the sixth man who had come ashore, and he had persuaded Tórur to hide and shelter him with a story that he was the personal emissary of Vidkun Quisling, charged with a mission of high importance. He had sworn that he was no enemy to Britain.
So Tórur said. So Bomlo, nodding heavily, agreed.
‘But Quisling,’ I said, ‘is Hitler’s deputy in Norway. How can one of his people say he is no enemy?’
‘Tony,’ said Tórur, ‘you live in the north of Scotland, in the Highlands. You are like one of us. It does not matter what this man said, or what Quisling says. You and I are brothers.’
‘What did he want you to do?’
‘First of all,’ said Bömlo, ‘you must hear what he said. About Quisling, about Hitler, about us.’
Put briefly, the man’s message was the substance of Tórur’s speech about the great destiny of the Atlantic islands and the sea-going races of Norse descent. Quisling, he maintained, had come to the conclusion that neither Hitler nor Germany would survive the war. Quisling was now out of favour with Hitler—it was true, at that time—and the reason was that he had been talking too freely. Germany and Russia would consume each other: so he had said. France was already defeated and could never recover, and Britain, shattered by air attack and rotted from within by moral decay—Tórur was apologetic about this—would presently collapse like the wicked civilizations of Mesopotamia. Then the peoples of the seaboard, descendants of the vikings, would come into their own again, and from their dominating shores rule all the western world.
It was the Nordic myth again, but translated from its Teutonic origin to people who, if they thought it worth their while, could more legitimately claim descent from viking stock. I, who call myself a Highland Scot but know how the last three hundred years have mixed my blood, have little faith in claims of racial purity, but considerable respect for small communities, such as those in Iceland and the Faeroes, where belief in it is apparently a source of confidence. I respect their emotions, that is, and I found no difficulty in believing Tórur’s assertion that he and Bömlo had been deeply stirred by the Norwegian’s eloquence.
He had called himself, very discreetly, Jón Jónsson, and sensibly had stiffened his rhetoric with hard, commercial facts. He reminded them that Norway, with its scanty population, had covered the oceans of the world with its ships: with 5,000,000 tons of merchant shipping. And Quisling, he said, was a very clever man. Cleverer than Hitler. And because he knew he would outlive Hitler he wanted now to establish his agents and his chain of command across the frontiers of the Atlantic.
Jón Jónsson had both inspired and entertained them. He had flattered their aspirations, admired the fertility of their islands: a population growing from six or seven thousand to thirty thousand in a hundred years was a fine example of Norse virility. He had fortified faith in their economic future with well-memorized figures of Norway’s natural wealth of forests and fisheries, of molybdenum—what he said about molybdenum had deeply impressed them—and sulphur pyrites. Molybdenum and racial destiny were a heady mixture, and the persuasive Jónsson had insisted, again and again, that collaboration would entail no hostility to Britain.
‘We made him drunk,’ said Bömlo pathetically, ‘and still he told us the same thing. Vidkun, he said, was no enemy of Britain, but Vidkun would like us to give him information, because the more he knew, the better he could play his cards against Hitler. Hitler, he said, was quite an ignorant man. He knew nothing about molybdenum, for one thing, till Vidkun told him what it was. And Hitler, he said, had never been to sea. That made us laugh! For how can anyone be a great man who has never been to sea?’
‘Jónsson wanted you to supply information: was that all?’ I asked.
‘But not information for Hitler. Only for Vidkun Quisling.’
‘What did he say about the boat? What happened to them, and why had they no food?’
‘The weather was too rough. The engine broke down, and they were driven too far north. They were fourteen days at sea, and the two young men died.’
‘There was a man who died of a fractured skull,’ I said. ‘Did he explain how that happened?’
‘It was the man who went mad who killed him. So Jónsson told us. There was a boat-hook, broken in two, and the madman with one piece of it hit him on the head.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I do not know,’ said Tórur glumly. ‘Now I do not know what to think.’
‘But why did you quarrel with Jónsson?’
‘God in high heaven!’ exclaimed Bömlo. ‘Who would not have quarrelled? Tell him, Tórur. Tell him quick.’
‘Night after night we listened to him,’ said Tórur. ‘It was very interesting, what he said, and Bömlo brought much brennivin. We liked him, for quite a lot of days, and we understood why we must not tell about him. Why we must be secret that he is here with us. But then he said, “Now I must go to Shetland. There is a man there I have to see. A man of much importance. Quisling said I must see him, he is an old friend of his. So how can you send me to Shetland without any people knowing?”
‘Well, we say, that is difficult. Very difficult. And he says it does not matter about money.’
‘But it did,’ said Bömlo.
‘Yes, by God! For when I say it is difficult, he gives me forty pounds in English money, and ask, “Is that enough?” Then I look surprised, and he say sixty. And I am thunder-struck, I look thunder-struck, and he say a hundred. “Send me to Shetland, with no one knowing, and here is a hundred pounds,” he say, “and now you are rich man.” So then I hit him on the jaw, the dirty bugger! He would bribe me, he would make me a spy! It is only spies who take money, and I am good Faeroe Nationalist. So I smash him on the jaw, and Bomlo is here, and we say, “Let us take him to the hjallur so he can cool his mind.” We tie him to a chair, and carry him to the hjallur, and leave him there.—That was last night.—Then we began to drink, and because Bömlo has brought much brennivin, and we are very angry, we drink too long, and become drunk. And so we forget all about Jón Jónsson. And when we go out in the morning, this morning, we find him dead in the hjallur, and frozen hard like a sheep who has died in the snow. Like a grýlal! And now you have seen him, Tony, and what are we to do?’
What I have written here in a few hundred words took, in telling of it, more than an hour; and the latter part of the tale was told to the wild tune of an increasing gale that spilled between the hillsides and howled above the house. I hate the sight of a corpse (I have a squeamish stomach) but I could not deplore Jónsson’s death, and I must admit that my heart beat like a drum, when the drums beat a salute, as Tórur told me how he, who had so warmly, if foolishly, responded to an evocation of pride, answered immediately the invitation of bribery with a right-handed punch to the mean man’s jaw.—For that was the essential difference, the proper cause of hostility: that one was mean, a buyer of men and their ideals, who thought truth and loyalty worth no more than a hundred pounds, and the other, though not very wise, was starkly honest and generous enough to pay for belief with his life.
I stood up and took Tórur by the shoulders—this I am not ashamed of—and said, ‘I have lost my own brother, and I need someone in his place. If you still call yourself my brother, I am very proud.’—And then the normal sobriety of my temper spoiled a momentary enthusiasm, and peevishly I added, ‘But it was damned silly of you to let the fellow freeze to death.’
‘Yes,’ said Bömlo, ‘and what are we going to do with him? We cannot go away and leave Jónsson in the hjallur, and the ground is so hard we cannot make a grave and put him out of sight.’
Then, through the noise of the wind, we heard loud knocking at the door, and I went across the kitchen and opened it to Silver and Sergeant Fergusson. They threw off their boots and duffle coats, and stocking-footed came into the daglistova, where I introduced Silver as my friend, and said he had come to help us in our difficulty. They welcomed him the more readily because he was a sailor, but they were now of a mood to welcome assistance wherever it came from.
I gave Silver a drink, and said, ‘I’ll tell you the story as briefly as I can.’—I knew that if I left it to Tórur it would last another hour.—So I told him there was a corpse in the hjallur, who had been the sixth man in the boat from Norway, and how, after posing as a friend of Faeroe Nationalism, he tried to bribe Tórur to send him secretly to Shetland, where, according to his tale, he had to make contact with someone of importance to his purpose.
Here Tórur interrupted: ‘Someone who is a good friend of Vidkun.’
‘Who is Vidkun?’ asked Silver.
‘Vidkun? Why, Vidkun Quisling. Who else?’
‘I didn’t know that was his name,’ said Silver. ‘I never heard his Christian name before.’—He turned to me and asked, ‘Did you know it?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I’ve never, until now, heard him referred to, in a familiar way, as Vidkun. But I’m sure—I’m almost sure—that I’ve seen his name in print.’
‘I haven’t,’ said Silver and, standing up, poured himself another glass of whisky.
‘Does it matter?’ I asked.
‘It does indeed. It means that I know the man your corpse wanted to see in Shetland.’
He had become preternaturally grave. He looked from one to another of us, with impatient inquiry, and then, dismissing a faint hope that we could tell him anything more, he seemed to forget us. Head bent and hands behind his back, he stood in silent thought, reluctant to admit his thought. Then with a little grimace, as of one who wakes with sourness in his mouth, he shrugged his shoulders and said, quietly and bitterly,‘ “The ghost of Roger Casement is beating at the door.”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I think the explanation will have to wait. I want to look at the corpse.’
It was dark now, but Silver had an electric torch, and in its sharp, dry light the body in the chair showed a sinister unreality. A strong unlikeness, I mean, to the humanity it had lately shared with Bömlo and Tórur. It was mere sculpture now—the word made frozen dough—but the eyeballs glittered—and shadows played on its immobile face as if the artist had not yet decided his meaning: decided the last expression he meant to leave.—The cold struck through my ribs, the big scarred wound on my right breast began to ache, and a wind from the hills raised a howl from the roof and a flurry of dry snow at our feet.
But Silver was calm and objective, precise and assured. ‘He’s perfectly preserved,’ he said, ‘and easily recognizable, if we can find anyone who knew him. Are there any marks on him?’
‘Marks?’ asked Bömlo, mystified.
‘Anything to identify him: old scars, or tattooing.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bömlo.
‘You haven’t looked? Well, what about his clothes? What else was he wearing?’
‘A coat, and boots, and oilskin.’
‘Anything in his pockets? Any documents?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I would know by now, if I were you. But perhaps it’s just as well that you haven’t interfered with him.—We’ll take him with us, Chisholm. The body, and all his possessions. We’ll take him straight to Lyness, and hand him over to the I.O. there. It’s quite possible they can find someone to identify him.’
‘But we can’t do that without permission from Force Headquarters, and your Naval people at Skansin—’
