Jan Vedder's Wife. Barr Amelia E.
thee on the sea, father.”
“As for that, it will be as God pleases. A man’s duty is all my claim on thee. Margaret will be glad to see thee so happy.” He dropped his eyes as he spoke of Margaret. He would not seem to watch Jan, although he was conscious of doing so.
“A woman has many minds, father. Who knows if a thing will make her happy or angry?”
“That is a foolish saying, Jan. A wife must find her pleasure in the thing that pleases her husband. But now thou wilt have but little time; the boat is to be tried, and the hooks and lines are to go over, and the crew to hire. I have left all to thee.”
This pleased Jan most of all. Only a bird building its first nest could have been as happy as he was. When at night he opened the door of his house, and went in with a gay smile, it was like a resurrection. The pale rose-color on Margaret’s cheek grew vivid and deep when he took her in his arms, and kissed her in the old happy way. She smiled involuntarily, and Jan thought, “How beautiful she is!” He told her all Peter had said and done. He was full of gratitude and enthusiasm. He did not notice for a few moments that Margaret was silent, and chillingly unresponsive. He was amazed to find that the whole affair displeased her.
“So, then, I have married a common fisherman after all,” she said bitterly; “why, Suneva Torr’s husband has a bigger boat than thine.”
It was an unfortunate remark, and touched Jan on a very raw place. He could not refrain from answering, “He hath had better luck than I. Ragon Torr gave Glumm Suneva’s tocher, and he has bought his own boat with it.”
“Why not? Every one knows that Glumm is a prudent man. He never gets on his feet for nothing.”
Jan was inexpressibly pained and disappointed. For a moment a feeling of utter despair came over him. The boat lay upon his heart like a wreck. He drank his tea gloomily, and the delicately-browned fish, the young mutton, and the hot wheat cakes, all tasted like ashes in his mouth. Perhaps, then, Margaret’s heart smote her, for she began to talk, and to press upon Jan’s acceptance the viands which had somehow lost all their savor to him. Her conversation was in like case. She would not speak of the boat, since they could not agree about it; and no other subject interested Jan. But, like all perfectly selfish people, she imagined, as a matter of course, that whatever interested her was the supreme interest. In her calm, even voice, she spoke of the spring house-cleaning, and the growth of her pansies and tulip bulbs, and did not know that all the time Jan was thinking of his boat, heaving on the tide-top, or coming into harbor so heavy with fish that she would be – in Shetland phrase —lippering with the water.
But, after all, the week of preparation was a very happy week to Jan and Snorro; and on the sixteenth of May they were the foremost of the sixty boats that sailed out of Lerwick for the ling ground. There was a great crowd on the pier to see them off – mothers, and wives, and sweethearts; boys, sick and sad with longing and envy; and old men, with the glamor of their own past in their faces. Among them was Suneva, in a bright blue dress, with blue ribbons fluttering in her yellow hair. She stood at the pier-head and as they passed poured a cup of ale into the sea, to forespeak good luck for the fleet. Jan would have dearly liked to see his wife’s handsome face watching him, as he stood by the main-mast and lifted his cap to Peter. Margaret was not there.
She really felt very much humiliated in Jan’s position. She had always held herself a little apart from the Lerwick women. She had been to Edinburgh, she had been educated far above them, and she was quite aware that she would have a very large fortune. Her hope had been to see Jan take his place among the merchants and bailies of Lerwick. She had dreams of the fine mansion that they would build, and of the fine furniture which would come from Edinburgh for it. Margaret was one of those women to whom a house can become a kingdom, and its careful ordering an affair of more importance than the administration of a great nation. When she chose Jan, and raised him from his humble position, she had no idea that he would drift back again to the fishing nets.
For the first time she carried her complaint home. But Thora in this matter had not much sympathy with her. “The sea is his mother,” she said; “he loved her before he loved thee; when she calls him, he will always go back to her.”
“No man in Shetland hath a better business to his hand; and how can he like to live in a boat, he, that hath a home so quiet, and clean, and comfortable?”
Thora sighed. “Thou wilt not understand then, that what the cradle rocks the spade buries. The sea spoke to Jan before he lay on his mother’s breast. His father hath a grave in it. Neither gold nor the love of woman will ever keep them far apart; make up thy mind to that.”
All this might be true, but yet it humiliated Margaret. Besides, she imagined that every wife in Lerwick was saying, “Not much hold has Margaret Vedder on her husband. He is off to sea again, and that with the first boat that sails.” Yet if success could have reconciled her, Jan’s was wonderful. Not unfrequently “The Fair Margaret” took twenty score ling at a haul, and every one was talking of her good luck.
During these days Jan and Snorro drew very close to each other. When the baits were set most of the men went to sleep for three hours; but Snorro always watched, and very often Jan sat with him. And oh, the grand solemnity and serenity of these summer nights, when through belts of calm the boats drifted and the islands in a charmed circle filled the pale purple horizon before them. Most fair then was the treeless land, and very far off seemed the sin and sorrow of life. The men lay upon the deck, with a pile of nets or their folded arms for a pillow, and surely under such a sky, like Jacob of old, they dreamed of angels.
Snorro and Jan, sitting in the soft, mystical light, talked together, dropping their voices involuntarily, and speaking slowly, with thoughtful pauses between the sentences. When they were not talking, Snorro read, and the book was ever the same, the book of the Four Gospels. Jan often watched him when he thought Jan asleep. In that enchanted midnight glow, which was often a blending of four lights – moonlight and twilight, the aurora and the dawning – the gigantic figure and white face, bending over the little book, had a weird and almost supernatural interest. Then this man, poor, ugly, and despised, had an incomparable nobility, and he fascinated Jan.
One night he said to him, “Art thou never weary of reading that same book, Snorro?”
“Am I then ever weary of thee, my Jan? And these are the words of One who was the first who loved me. Accordingly, how well I know his voice.” Then, in a fervor of adoring affection, he talked to Jan of his dear Lord Christ, “who had stretched out his arms upon the cross that he might embrace the world.” And as he talked the men, one by one, raised themselves on their elbows and listened; and the theme transfigured Snorro, and he stood erect with uplifted face, and looked, in spite of his fisher’s suit, so royal that Jan felt humbled in his presence. And when he had told, in his own simple, grand way, the story of him who had often toiled at midnight with the fishers on the Galilean sea, as they toiled upon the Shetland waters, there was a great silence, until Jan said, in a voice that seemed almost strange to them: “Well, then, mates, now we will look to the lines.”
All summer, and until the middle of October, Jan continued at sea; and all summer, whether fishing for ling, cod, or herring, “The Fair Margaret” had exceptionally good fortune. There were many other fishers who woke, and watched, and toiled in their fishing, who did not have half her “takes.” “It is all Jan’s luck,” said Glumm, “for it is well known that he flings his nets and goes to sleep while they fill.”
“Well, then, ‘it is the net of the sleeping fisherman takes:’ that is the wise saying of old times” – and though Snorro did not think of it, the Shetland proverb was but the Norse form of the Hebrew faith: “He giveth his beloved in their sleep.”
Still, in spite of his success, Jan was not happy. A married man’s happiness is in the hands of his wife, and Margaret felt too injured to be generous. She was not happy, and she thought it only just that Jan should be made to feel it. He had disappointed all her hopes and aspirations; she was not magnanimous enough to rejoice in the success of his labors and aims. Besides, his situation as the hired skipper of a boat was contemptible in her eyes; her servant was engaged to a man in the same position. Another aggravating circumstance was that her old schoolmate, the minister’s