第24章 FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD(1)

WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to lis-ten, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people, and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great schools at Reykjavik.

She is especially prized by them here in this new country where the Icelandmen are settled -- this America, so new in letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books.So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her pipe and begins her tale.

She is very old.Her daughters and sons are all dead, but her granddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a phy-sician, says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are others who say that she is older still.She watches all that the Iceland people do in the new land; she knows about the building of the five villages on the North Dakota plain, and of the founding of the churches and the schools, and the tilling of the wheat farms.She notes with sus-picion the actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store, instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in the fire faster than it can be turned from the churn.

She watches yet other things.All winter long the white snows reach across the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold.

In the morning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she notes golden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray --which is not often -- she notes that they grow as ashen as a face with the death shadow on it.

Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves.But at these things she looks only casually.It is when the blue shadows dance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove, and stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of her cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restored after four decades of decrepitude.

The young Icelandmen say:

"Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance of the shadows.""There are no clouds," she replies, and points to the jewel-like blue of the arching sky.

"It is the drifting air," explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has been in the North-ern seas."As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue against the white of the snow.

'Tis the air that makes the dancing shadows."But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.

"But Urda Bjarnason," says Ingeborg Chris-tianson, the pert young wife with the blue-eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only when we stand beside you and you help us to the sight?""Because," says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes, "having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh.They like to hear Ingeborg worsted.For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one from Mountain, and another from Winnipeg?

Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things.

"To-day," says Urda, standing by the little window and watching the dance of the shadows, "a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West, and then it died."The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so --that John Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but that he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died.

"Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton," says Urda; "all are laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger.He has with him a strange engine, but its purpose I do not know."Six hours later the drivers of three empty sledges stop at the house.

"We have been to Milton with wheat," they say, "and Christian Johnson here, carried a photographer from St.Paul."Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselves through the silent and white winters.And they prefer above all things to talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race for a thousand years.

Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, for she is the daughter and the grand-daughter and the great-granddaughter of story-tellers.It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John Thorlaksson to sing -- he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snow at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors to listen, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking music.

In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda's granddaughter, it some-times happens that twenty men will gather about the stove.They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put their fur gauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm, and then stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire.The room is fetid;the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips.Among the many, many tales she tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all the world --language so simple that even great scholars could find no simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand.