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‘Yes! Yes, exactly! You understand! You must read my work some time. Please read my work! Read my work!’ A note of desperation in his voice, a look of fear in his eyes, makes me say:
‘We’re both getting much too solemn for Christmas Day. I’m going to make you some coffee. And I have a plum cake.’
I move about, clattering cups, spooning coffee into my percolator. But I must have offended him, for, when I look round, I find he has left me. I am absurdly disappointed.
I finish making coffee, however, then turn to the bookshelf in the room. It is piled high with volumes, for which the landlady has apologized profusely: ‘Hope you don’t mind the books, Miss, but my husband won’t part with them, and there’s nowhere else to put them. We charge a bit less for the room for that reason.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Books are good friends.’
But these aren’t very friendly-looking books. I take one at random. Or does some strange fate guide my hand?
Sipping my coffee, inhaling my cigarette smoke, I begin to read the battered little book, published, I see, in Spring, 1852. It’s mainly poetry – immature stuff, but vivid. Then there’s a kind of diary. More realistic, less affected. Out of curiosity, to see if there are any amusing comparisons, I turn to the entry for Christmas Day, 1851. I read:
‘My first Christmas Day alone. I had rather an odd experience. When I went back to my lodgings after a walk, there was a middle-aged woman in my room. I thought, at first, I’d walked into the wrong room, but this was not so, and later, after a pleasant talk, she – disappeared. I suppose she was a ghost. But I wasn’t frightened. I liked her. But I do not feel well tonight. Not at all well. I have never felt ill at Christmas before.’
A publisher’s note followed the last entry: FRANCIS RANDEL DIED FROM A SUDDEN HEART ATTACK ON THE NIGHT OF CHRISTMAS DAY, 1851. THE WOMAN MENTIONED IN THIS FINAL ENTRY IN HIS DIARY WAS THE LAST PERSON TO SEE HIM ALIVE. IN SPITE OF REQUESTS FOR HER TO COME FORWARD, SHE NEVER DID SO. HER IDENTITY REMAINS A MYSTERY.
Elias and the Draug
by Jonas Lie
On Kvalholmen down in Helgeland there once lived a poor fisherman, by name Elias, and his wife, Karen, who before her marriage had worked in the parsonage at Alstadhaug.fn1 They lived in a little hut, which they had built, and Elias hired out by the day in the Lofoten fisheries.
Kvalholmen was a lonely island, and there were signs at times that it was haunted. Sometimes when her husband was away from home, the good wife heard all sorts of unearthly noises and cries, which surely boded no good.
Each year there came a child; when they had been married seven years there were six children in the home. But they were both steady and hard working people, and by the time the last arrived, Elias had managed to put aside something and felt that he could afford a sixern, and thereafter do his Lofoten fishing as master in his own boat.
One day, as he was walking with a halibut harpoon in one hand, thinking about this, he suddenly came upon a huge seal, sunning itself in the lee of a rock near the shore, and apparently quite as much taken by surprise as he was.
Elias meanwhile was not slow. From the rocky ledge, on
which he was standing, he plunged the long, heavy harpoon into its back just behind the neck. But then – oh, what a struggle! Instantly the seal reared itself up, stood erect on its tail, tall as the mast of a boat, and glowered at him with a pair of bloodshot eyes, at the same time showing its teeth in a grin so fiendish and venomous that Elias almost lost his wits from fright. Then suddenly it plunged into the sea and vanished in a spray of mingled blood and water.
That was the last Elias saw of it; but that very afternoon the harpoon, broken just below the iron barb, came drifting ashore near the boat landing not far from his house.
Elias had soon forgotten all about it. He bought his sixern that same autumn, and housed it in a little boat shed he had built during the summer.
One night, as he lay thinking about his new sixern, it occurred to him that perhaps, in order to safeguard it properly, he ought to put another shore on either side underneath it. He was so absurdly fond of the boat that he thought it only fun to get up and light his lantern and go down to look it over.
As he held up his lantern to see better, he suddenly glimpsed, on a tangle of nets in one corner, a face that resembled exactly the features of the seal. It grimaced for a moment angrily towards him and the light. Its mouth seemed to open wider and wider, and before he was aware of anything further, he saw a bulky man-form vanish out the door of the boat house, not so fast however but that he managed to make out, with the aid of his lantern, a long iron prong projecting from its back.
Elias now began to put two and two together. But even so he was more concerned for the safety of his boat than he was for his own life.
On the morning, early in January, when he set out for the fishing banks, with two men in the boat beside himself, he heard a voice call to him in the darkness from a skerry directly opposite the mouth of the cove. He thought that it laughed derisively.
‘Better beware, Elias, when you get your femböring!’fn2
It was a long time, however, before Elias saw his way clear to get a femböring – not until his eldest son was seventeen years old.
It was in the fall of the year that Elias embarked with his whole family and went to Ranen to trade in his sixern for a femböring. At home they left only a little Lapp girl, but newly confirmed, whom they had taken into their home some years before. There was one femböring in particular which he had his eye on, a little four man boat, which the best shipwright thereabout had finished and tarred that very fall. For this boat he traded in his own sixern, paying the difference in coin.
Elias thereupon began to think of sailing home. He first stopped at the village store and laid in a supply for Christmas for himself and his family, among other things a little keg of brandy. It may be that, pleased as they were with the day’s bargaining, both he and his wife had one drop too many before they left, and Bernt, their son, was given a taste too.
Whereupon they set sail for home in the new femböring. Other ballast than himself, his wife and children, and his Christmas supplies he had none. His son Bernt sat at the stem; his wife, with the assistance of the second son, managed the halyard; Elias himself sat at the tiller, while the two younger sons, twelve and fourteen respectively, were to alternate at the bailing.
They had fifty odd miles of sea before them, and they had no sooner reached the open than it was apparent that the femböring would be put to the test the very first time it was in use. A storm blew up before long, and soon white-crested waves began dashing themselves into spray. Then Elias saw what kind of a boat he had. It rode the waves like a sea gull, without so much as taking in one single drop, and he was ready to swear that he would not even have to single-reef, as any ordinary femböring would have been compelled to do in such weather.
As the day drew on, he noticed not far away another femböring, completely manned, speeding along, just as he was then, with four reefs in the sail. It seemed to follow the same course, and he thought it strange that he had not noticed it before. It seemed to want to race with him, and when Elias realized this, he could not resist letting out a reef again.
