Mute immeasurable disruption.
Tord rested on his oars. He felt it to the very bottom of his being, this disruption. The cramp suddenly relaxed within him. He felt a strange, shivering relief. Then he rowed homewards, but slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking everything with his oars. Afraid to meet anybody, silently as a thief he stole into his house, crept up to his bed and fell asleep voluptuously tired with the sky beneath his eyelids.
At dawn he awoke and at once sat down to write with this mute, wild disruption still within him.
His poetic rapture lasted for several weeks. It was a wonderful joy at last to be able to pour it forth, to reveal himself, to shout out all he felt, to take revenge on all the thousand impressions that had weighed him down to earth with their luxuriant wealth.
When Tord was not writing he wandered about with staring eyes and careful, groping steps, as if he were fragile and afraid to fall to pieces. If Dagmar spoke to him he told her to shut up, though in an anxious, almost gentle voice.
Tord had already filled a tremendous packet of notepaper when his imagination suddenly dried up one long, gloomy, wet day. He sat down to copy it out, but he had some difficulty in finding the way in the maze of his own inspiration. What did they really mean, all those strange figures resembling a barometric curve during a storm or the seismograph record registering an earthquake? Certain after-echoes of his inspiration and an infinite reverence for his own Selambian genius helped him, however, over the worst. Only here and there a brief humdrum phrase crept in to make it more intelligible and as a sacrifice to the philistines.
On an absolutely still, sultry day in July, with distant thunder in the air, Tord copied out with trembling hand the last line of his poem. Then he rushed out into the kitchen and tore Dagmar away from the stove, where she stood in her chemise and an underskirt with her pipe in the corner of her mouth, cooking sausage for supper. He trailed her with him into the bedroom, forced her into a chair, pulled down the blind, and began to read.
It was unrhymed verse, of course, in the shortest possible lines, abrupt sentences and inarticulate phrases. A collection of exclamations, questions, curses, shouts of jubilation, all expressive of Tord Selamb’s relation to woman, the clouds, the sea, the lightning and the eagles.
Tord read with a hoarse, trembling voice. He seemed to whisper the most extraordinary secrets of his life with a wild emotion. And still, had he not, in the presence of the uninitiated, been seized already at the very first line by a terrible doubt? Was this … was this really poetry? He looked at his wife above the sheets of papers with the eyes of a beggar, but of a mad beggar beseeching prostrate adoration.
Dagmar responded rather badly to his expectations. At first she looked a little embarrassed, almost like a child when its parents speak of something it should not understand. Then she looked at the door and mumbled:
“Pray excuse your slave, but I am afraid the sausages will be burnt. …”
“Let them burn then, idiot,” shouted Tord. After which he continued his reading in a more threatening voice.
Dagmar listened again. She sat quite still and good for a long while. Then her mouth began to twitch quite irresistibly, though she looked frightened.
Tord then hissed out the following lines:
“In a blue flash of lightning
With a blue hissing sound
Creaking
Manly
Zigzag
I saw it suddenly
The filth
The original filth
In the recesses of your body …
Damnation
Unclean one!”
“Splendid,” Dagmar snorted. “Thunder and filth!”
Whereupon she burst out laughing just as when Tord came home with his teeth knocked out, a thoughtless irrepressible feminine laugh, cruel without malice, pitiless though with no ill-will. But Tord hated her at this moment, hated her. She laughed! When she ought to have sunk at his feet, and adored his genius, saved him from doubt! Oh! the weakling’s dream of power is often far more intense than that of the strong man. It is not the bad poets who are the least devoted to their verses. Just the line that most challenges the ridicule of the world is often aglow with the most intense passion. Just the very wretchedness of the form often reflects a seriousness from which there has been no deliverance. Yes, the bad poets are the unborn children of emotion. Their sufferings are cruel. People seem to them empty, blind, perverse, malevolent. How can anyone laugh at red, flowing blood? How can anyone help trembling in the presence of a volcano in eruption?
Tord ran to the door and tore it open. His eyes shrank and his beard shook when he looked at his wife:
“Get out,” he shouted. “Out with you into the kitchen. That’s your place!”
And Dagmar went, without any such refinement as injured pride, but with her heart suddenly filled with compassion, a sort of slovenly, annoyed pity.
For several weeks Tord did not open his mouth. He strolled about alone along his shores or locked himself in to file away at his verse. His ambition soon discovered the usual solace for the wounds and doubts of the hermit. “I am too singular, too wildly original and deep,” he thought. “They can’t
