Read Online The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online Page A

home in the valley, reach into their pockets for their purses and open them with these worn hands which all at once I felt I could, weeping, have kissed, and then take out that famous widow’s mite, some of them even emptying their purses on the table and those without purses scrawling their names on a list—when I saw this I felt I was utterly and completely in sympathy with these people and would always be so, however dreary the matters they discussed, whether they wanted to reclaim some marsh-land in Mosfell District or hold on to their country against the tile-hats who wanted to betray it from under them and sell it from them. So I too scrawled my name on the list and pledged myself to subscribe ten kronur a month to the paper’s funds even though I had never seen it.
    The woman of the house wanted us to have some coffee before we went, but many, including myself, said they were in a hurry to get home; some said they had not even had a wash yet, and anyway it was getting late. The master of the house accompanied me to the door; he was the cell-leader. He said I was welcome to come again the next time, and that I must then stay on for coffee.
    And now I had attended a cell-meeting.
    ANOTHER MEETING
    The Cadillac was standing outside.
    I could not remember exactly the name of the smell that met me when I opened the back door, I scarcely even knew whether I liked the smell or not; a smell is good or bad according to its associations in one’s mind. This was at least no worse than that of tobacco-smoke. Was something on fire?
    When I went through the kitchen into the hall to find out what it was, I saw that the door of the master’s study was open. The Member of Parliament was sitting there in his room with his feet up on a chair, his back to the door, hunched over some task. He said Hallo, without looking, to the person he could hear walking outside in the hall, and continued to concentrate on his work.
    â€œIt’s only me,” said the maid.
    â€œWould you like a cigarette?” he said. “There are some on the table.”
    â€œI haven’t learned to smoke yet,” I said. “But I can smell something. Is this door meant to be open?”
    â€œI opened it to clear the stink of incense. Come in. I am going to show you something you cannot do.”
    He spoke as usual in that gay amiable tone, but a little absently; and so help me I did not know whether I ought to dare, even though he told me to. I was, as said before, the maid; and where was Madam? Still, I was no bondwoman, I was a person, I was a free woman.
    â€œCome in and try your hand with this boy,” he said.
    â€œBoy?” I said, and before I knew it I was in there and having a look. And was he not sitting there with a round toy mirror, the sort you get at Krok for ten aurar, with a little black boy on the back (for such articles must surely be manufactured for negroes)? There were a few small pellets loose between the picture and glass, two black, and five or six white, and the problem was to tilt the picture in such a way that the black pellets landed in the boy’s eye sockets and the white ones went into his jaws. And this was what my Member of Parliament was toiling over, with a cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth and his spectacles on the table.
    â€œI’m afraid I haven’t the knack for that,” I said. “I’m such a clumsy fool with puzzles.”
    â€œMe too,” he said, and looked at me with a smile; and handed me the toy; and before I knew it I had begun to have a shot, with him perched on the table to see how it was getting on. Then I heard some sort of mumbling going on in the next room, some solemn and yet half-stifled sermon, preached to an accompaniment of God-fearing moans like the last words of a dying man: “O ye, my yearning bones, O Love, O spiritual maturity, O light.” And there was a strange rattling sound in between, as if a sheep were