SEVEN BROTHERS
SEVEN
BROTHERS
BY
ALEXIS KIVI
TRANSLATED FROM THE FINNISH BY
ALEX MATSON
LONDON
FABER & FABER LIMITED
24 RUSSELL SQUARE
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIX
BY FABER AND FABER LIMITED
24 RUSSELL SQUARE LONDON W.C.I
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
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PREFACE
Alexis Kivi, or Stenvall, the greatest prose poet of Finland, was
born at Palojoki (Nurmjaervi) in Finland, on the 10th October, 1834,
in the poorest and humblest of circumstances.[1] His father was a
village tailor, his first home a low-roofed hut in a remote part of the
country, hemmed in by those virgin forests which Kivi has described so
unforgettably in his _Seven Brothers_.
His life was one long struggle against poverty and countless
difficulties. A great hunger for knowledge and education made him
leave his native village quite early, but there were so many forced
interruptions in his school days at Helsinki, the capital, that he
only entered the University at the age of 23. There, however, he
failed to complete his education, partly on account of want and
ill-health, partly also, perhaps, because of his inborn restlessness,
which induced him to take to the life of a literary freelance. Soon
he turned his back on Helsinki, which he was only to revisit at
intervals, and returned to the countryside for good and all. Here, in
peace and isolation, he began to write in earnest. Yet, in spite of an
apparently solitary life, he spent all these years in the best company
conceivable, in long intercourse with the rarest spirits that ever
communed with the minds of men. The Bible, Cervantes, Dante, Homer and
Shakespeare--these were his friends, his teachers, his models! A secret
kinship, a sure and unspoilt instinct, made this lonely ailing student
turn away from the literature of his own times and guided him to these
masters, the source of all poetry.
The influence of Shakespeare was especially powerful with him; as a
contemporary critic remarks: ‘Shakespeare loosened the tongue of his
Muse, though it would be too much to say that the English Titan taught
him speech’. There were many plays and poems of Shakespeare which he
learned by heart in Swedish translation (the Finnish version was not
published until later) and he never tired of reading and re-reading
them. Professor V. Tarkiainen, the well-known student of Kivi, observes
that from Shakespeare Kivi learned the art of constructing a play, of
grouping characters and situations, of contrasting light and shade.
Moreover, Shakespeare and Cervantes together helped him to develop and
express his great natural gifts of humour.
A kind-hearted, middle-aged motherly soul, by name Charlotta Lonngvist,
cook and sempstress in the same parish, gave Alexis Kivi the shelter
of her roof for many years, and such material help besides as her own
scanty means allowed. And there it was, in the Swedish-speaking parish
of Siuntio, that the greater number of Kivi’s masterpieces came into
being, _Seven Brothers_ among them.
Nevertheless, the narrow circumstances of his life continued to have a
depressing effect upon Kivi. When at leisure, he used to spend weeks
together in the forest, snaring birds. Occasionally too, when want of
money and companions and books became too oppressive, he escaped on
short visits to the capital, or found solace for the weariness and
restlessness of his soul in the glass.
No author living in Finland in those days could possibly hope to earn
a competence as a writer; the reading public was small, and authors’
fees there were little or none. Still less was this possible in the
case of Alexis Kivi, for he was a poet of such solitary and original
genius that few of his contemporaries were able to understand the
significance and range of his talents. He was like the bird that
migrates too early and settles among drifting ice--his genius was not
fated to light upon its hour, or awake response.
Outward circumstances combined with more intimate causes to hasten his
fate. Ill-health and nervousness had dogged him through life; insanity
at last declared itself. For a time the suffering poet was nursed in
Helsinki, but soon he was pronounced incurable and sent back to his
native village. There he was placed in the care of his brother, to
whom the village allotted as maintenance a yearly allowance of rye.
Kivi survived for one more year--passed, however, in almost complete
apathy--and on New Year’s Eve 1872, his life, which had been rich only
in the fairy gold of visions and dreams, was over. At his death he was
only thirty-seven years of age. His last words were ‘I live!’
These words, murmured on his sad deathbed, were prophetic. For Kivi
is still really alive, and more so perhaps than during his joyless
wanderings upon this earth. He is a living force in the mind of to-day,
in the literature and poetry of Finland.
Kivi’s writings embrace all the different branches of poetic
art--lyric, epic, dramatic. In each of these different spheres he has
experimented and attained to mastery; in epic and drama, he takes rank
as a pioneer.
He first attempted a gloomy tragedy in prose, choosing a subject from
the _Kalevala_, treating of Kullervo, one of the tragic heroes
of the national epic; condemned to slavery, he broods like Hamlet,
meditating vengeance upon his father’s brother. But this burning
tragedy of revenge was to remain a great fragment in the hands of the
author--an unfinished torso. In the choice of theme, however, and in
certain soaring lines, one already discerns the master-hand.
His one or two ventures upon lofty tragic themes in the Shakespearean
manner are scarcely likely to survive. But in his one-act play,
_Leah_, the achievement is complete and fully realized. This
lyrical play, with its biblical setting, has been described as a ‘sweet
flower, where the voluptuousness of the East is blended with Finnish
clarity.’
The action takes place during the life-time of Christ, in the house
of Zacchæus, the publican. Though Christ is not seen in person on the
stage, the radiance of His unseen presence seems to pervade the scene
and glimmer through the ecstasy of Leah, daughter to Zacchæus.
It is from the first performance of _Leah_ in 1869 that the
beginnings of the Finnish theatre are usually dated.
However, it was not until Kivi wrote that broad comedy of peasant
life called _The Heath Cobblers_ that his powers for creating
characters and situations became revealed in their full range and
richness and versatility. The subject is the unsuccessful courtship of
Esko, the heath cobbler’s son, who reaches the home of his would-be
bride just as she is celebrating her marriage with another suitor.
There is a world of varied and many-coloured types in this play; all of
them are depicted with the inexhaustible joy of creative energy, and
bathed in the golden light of genial humour.
Like some smaller piece cast in the same mould as _The Heath
Cobblers_, and of the same material, yet in miniature, is Kivi’s
one-act comedy, _The Betrothal_. Once again the subject is an
unsuccessful courtship, but this time the hero is a village tailor.
_The Betrothal_ appeared in an English version in the _Dublin
Review_, translated by Professor R. Pape Cowl, and was staged by the
Ashburton Players in 1922.
Professor Tarkiainen has made a happy comparison between Kivi’s poetry
and the wonder-bird of Finnish folklore--that bird ‘whose one wing
touches the water while the other sweeps the heavens’.
In his lyrical poems, so tender and delicate that they scarcely will
suffer any fetters of form, Kivi sometimes attains to a wonderful
unearthliness, as in the poem called _Dusk_, which begins:
‘What fainting light
What shadows of night
Surround my soul!’
Here already one feels the gathering menace of the oncoming clouds of
insanity.
In his prose, there is the same frail and dreamlike lyricism, combined
with a strong grasp of the realities--the soarings of the imagination
are linked with rich faculties of pithy observation, which spring
directly from the soil and often indeed bring us near to naked realism.
These two fundamental and apparently contradictory qualities are also
found together in Kivi’s masterpiece, _Seven Brothers_, now for
the first time given to the English public. _Seven Brothers_
was first published in 1870, only a short time before Kivi’s fateful
illness. Nine years went to the writing of this work, and more care and
pains were spent upon it than upon any other of his writings.
In this great epic novel, which has been compared with the greatest
literary creations of all times and countries, and where the influence
of Cervantes is unmistakable, Kivi has found the most original theme,
the largest scope for his creative fantasy. The story tells of the fate
of seven Finnish brothers who fly from civilization into the freedom of
primeval forests, and return at last of their own free-will to human
habitations and society.
There are passages where the story gleams with lyrical loveliness, as
in Aapo’s tale of the Pale Maiden, or in that scene set in Eero’s home
on a Sunday evening, when his young wife sings a lullaby to her child.
Again, the description creates for us powerful plastic pictures, full
of forest mystery, of the brothers’ hunting adventures, of their fight
on the top of a boulder with a frenzied herd of bulls. At times it
turns to the comic and burlesque, as in the spelling scene between the
brothers and the parish clerk; and now it is rich in bubbling dialogue,
and we listen to the living tones of each brother’s voice in turn, from
obstinate, bristle-haired Juhani, and prating, drunken Simeoni, down to
the youngest, sly and witty Eero.
In this spacious tale, unique among Kivi’s writings, and also in
Finnish literature, the virgin forest-lands of Finland live and have
their being, even as the wandering Kivi knew and loved them.
Kivi’s language, wonderful and original always, reaches full maturity
in _Seven Brothers_. At a time when Finnish was still undeveloped
as a literary language, he forges and creates an instrument entirely
his own which he can turn, now to sublime and tragic themes, now to
the comic and burlesque; he draws upon all sources and most of all
upon the Bible, the _Kalevala_ and the peasant talk of his fellow
parishioners, with its wealth of idioms and puns. The nearest parallel
which English readers could find would probably be the work of John M.
Synge, for he has drawn upon like sources, and the rhythm of his prose
most nearly recalls the language of Kivi.
The fate that befell _Seven Brothers_ was the fate common to all
masterpieces created in solitary grandeur, and independently of their
time. So far from gaining early recognition, Kivi’s epic found very
few readers able to divine its true significance. In various quarters
indeed, criticism was violently hostile: the language was held to be
coarse, the construction (here there was some justice for the comment)
not sufficiently compact, and the component parts--epic, dramatic and
lyric--wanting in harmony. The author’s unquestionable birthright of
genius remained an unguessed secret for most of his contemporaries.
It was only by slow degrees and with the passage of years that Kivi’s
genius came to be recognized. To-day, fresh editions of his works are
constantly appearing; Finland’s greatest artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela,
has illustrated _Seven Brothers_; towns vie with each other in
erecting monuments to the author’s memory. Special students, known as
Kivi-scholars, have risen into prominence and devote much time to the
study of Kivi’s life and work, the most representative among them being
the forementioned V. Tarkiainen, Professor of Finnish Literature at the
University of Helsinki, and Dr. J. W. Lehtonen, lecturer at the same
University.
_Seven Brothers_ has already been translated into many languages,
notably French, German, Swedish, Estonian, and now also into English.
The words of the Bible concerning the stone which the builders rejected
have indeed come true of Alexis Kivi; for Kivi (The Stone) has become
the cornerstone of Finnish literature.
AINO KALLAS.
SEVEN BROTHERS
CHAPTER I
Jukola Farm, in the south of the province of Häme, stands on the
northern slope of a hill, near the village of Toukola. Around it the
ground is bestrewn with boulders, but below this stony patch begin the
fields, where, before the farm fell into decay, heavy-eared crops used
to wave. Below the fields is a meadow, rimmed with clover and cleft
by a winding ditch; and richly it had yielded hay before becoming a
pasturage for straying village cattle. In addition to these, the farm
owns vast forests, bogs and backwoods, most of which the founder of the
farm, with admirable foresight, succeeded in adding to it at the first
great settlement of boundaries in former days. On that occasion the
master of Jukola, with an eye more to the benefit of his descendants
than his own best, had accepted as his share a forest ravaged by fire
and by this means received seven times the area given his neighbours.
But all signs of this fire had long ago disappeared from his holding
and dense forests had replaced them. Such is the home of the seven
brothers whose fortunes I am about to relate.
Their names, in order of age, are: Juhani, Tuomas, Aapo, Simeoni,
Timo, Lauri and Eero. Tuomas and Aapo are twins, and so are Timo and
Lauri. Juhani, the eldest, is twenty-five, while Eero, the youngest, is
barely eighteen. In build they are sturdy and broad of shoulder: all
of middling height except Eero, who is still very short. The tallest
of them is Aapo, though perhaps not the strongest. The honours in this
respect are with Tuomas, who is indeed famous for the breadth of his
shoulders. A peculiarity that marks them all is the brownness of their
skin and the stiff, hemplike quality of their hair, the coarseness of
which is especially striking in Juhani.
Their father, a passionate hunter, met a sudden death in the prime
of his life while fighting an enraged bear. Both were found dead,
the shaggy king of the woods and the man, lying side by side on the
bloodstained ground. The man was terribly mangled, but the bear, too,
displayed the marks of a knife in its throat and side, while the keen
ball of a rifle had pierced its breast. Thus perished a sturdy fellow
who had killed in his time over fifty bears. But for the sake of these
hunting trips he neglected the care of his farm and, bereft of a
master’s guidance, it had gradually fallen into ruin. Nor were the boys
better inclined towards sowing and ploughing; from their father they
had inherited his keen longing for the chase. They laid traps, set gins
and snares, and dug grouse-pits, to the undoing of wildfowl and hares.
In such pursuits they spent the days of their boyhood, until they could
handle fire-arms and dared approach the bear in its wilds.
Their mother tried, indeed, with scoldings and the rod, to turn their
thoughts to work and diligence, but the brothers’ obstinacy proved
equal to all her efforts. She was in all a deserving woman, known
for her straightforward and upright, though perhaps a trifle harsh,
nature. A fine character too, was her brother, the boys’ beloved
uncle, a fearless sailor who in his youth had sailed the distant seas,
seeing many peoples and lands; until losing his eyesight and becoming
stone-blind, he came to live the dark days of his old age on Jukola
Farm. Here, as he carved by touch such things as dippers, spoons,
axe-shafts, clappers and other useful articles, he would often tell his
nephews tales, and describe to them wonderful happenings in his own and
other countries, and, in between, miracles and events from the Bible.
To these talks of his the brothers listened attentively, impressing
them deeply on their memories. With less pleasure they heard the
commands and scoldings of their mother, whose often-repeated whippings
failed to cure them of an affected hardness of hearing. It would also
often happen that, scenting the approach of a hiding, the whole crowd
would take to flight, causing their mother and others much anxiety and
only making their own case worse.
I will relate here one episode of their childhood. As the boys were
well aware, there was a hen’s nest under their barn belonging to an old
woman called ‘Mother Pinewood’, her little cabin standing in a clump of
pines near Jukola. The thought of baked eggs coming into their minds
one day, they decided to rob this nest and to set off into the forest
to enjoy their plunder. Acting on this idea, they emptied the nest and
fled with one accord to the woods, six of them, for Eero still crawled
at that time at his mother’s feet. And when they reached a certain
bubbling brook in a dark spruce-wood, they made a fire on its bank,
wrapped the eggs in rags, and, after dipping them in water, set them
to bake in the hissing ashes. Then when the eggs were ready they ate a
tasty meal and set off home again, satisfied. But on reaching the home
hill they were met by a hurricane, for in the meantime their roguery
had been discovered. Mother Pinewood scolded and raged, and with angry
looks their own mother came forward to meet them, a whistling rod in
her hand. But the boys felt loth to face this tempest and turning, fled
again to the forest for shelter, heedless of their mother’s cries.
A day now passed and then another, but nothing was heard of the
truants; and at last their absence began to cause their mother great
anxiety; her anger soon changed to sorrow and tears of pity. She set
out to look for them, scouring the forests in all directions, but
without finding them. Whereupon the matter began to assume a more
dreadful aspect, and at last called for help from the authorities.
Word was sent to the Sheriff’s man, whose duty it was to organize
search parties, and without delay the whole of Toukola village and its
neighbourhood was called up. And now a party of old and young, men
and women mingled, set out in a long line to comb the forests, with
the Sheriff’s man at their head. On the first day they searched the
vicinity, but without the hoped-for result; the next day they moved
farther afield, and now as they breasted a hill, they saw far away
on the edge of a bog a blue pillar of smoke that wound upward to the
sky. Carefully marking the direction in which the smoke was seen, they
pushed on towards it. And then, having drawn nearer, they heard a voice
which sang:
‘We fared as well in olden days
Behind the river here.
The driftwood kept our fire ablaze,
The water was our beer.’
Whereat the mistress of Jukola, hearing this song, cheered up again,
for she recognized the voice as that of her son Juhani. And by certain
crashes which rang through the trees, the searchers knew they were
approaching the truants’ camp. The Sheriff’s man gave an order to
surround the boys and then to close in silently, keeping, however, some
distance away.
His orders were obeyed. And when the party, closing in on all sides,
had come within fifty paces of their quarry, they paused to look upon
this sight; at the foot of a rock a small shelter had been built
of pine branches, and against the door Juhani lay on a mossy bed,
looking up at the clouds and singing. Some distance from the shelter
a merry fire was blazing, and in its embers Simeoni was roasting a
grouse the brothers had caught in a snare. With sooty faces, Aapo and
Timo--blacked for some game--baked turnips in hot ashes. Lauri sat
in silence on the edge of a little claypit, modelling clay whistles,
bullocks and spirited foals; and a fine row he already had of them
drying on a moss-clad trunk. Tuomas wielded the fire-hammer: he spat
frothily on a stone embedded in the earth, then, placing a glowing
ember on the moisture, he brought down another stone on it with all his
might, whereupon a crash, often as loud as the report of a rifle, would
echo around, and a sooty smoke issue from between the stones.
JUHANI. ‘We fared as well in olden days Behind the river here
...’
But the Devil will get us yet out here. That’s as sure as anything, my
young beavers.
AAPO. I said that as soon as we took the hare’s road. What
fools we are! Robbers and gypsies can wallow like this under the naked
sky for me.
TIMO. God’s sky, anyhow.
AAPO. Living here with bears and wolves.
TUOMAS. And with God.
JUHANI. Right, Tuomas! With God and his angels. Ah! if we
could only see now with the eyes of a soul in heaven, we’d see plainly
enough a whole host of sheltering angels with wings camped around us,
and God himself looking like a grey old gaffer sitting in our midst
like the best of fathers.
SIMEONI. Ay, but what is poor mother thinking now?
TUOMAS. That she’d be glad to baste us to a turnip-stew as
soon as she lays her claws on us.
JUHANI. Ai, boy, that would be a basting!
TUOMAS. A tingling basting! Ay, we know that.
SIMEONI. There’s no doubt about that. Best go and take it now
and end this bullock’s holiday.
JUHANI. A bull doesn’t quite go of its own free will to the
slaughterer’s bench, little brother.
AAPO. What nonsense, boy! Winter’ll soon be here, and we
weren’t given a pelt to our backs at birth.
SIMEONI. So there’s nothing else to do but quick march home
and take our hiding. After all we’ve earned it.
JUHANI. Brothers, let our backs be spared a few more days. Who
knows what way out God may show us in the next two or three days. Ay,
let us still tumble about a bit out here: the days round yon tree-stump
fireplace of ours, the nights in our home of pine-branches, grunting in
a row like suckling-pigs in a stye.--What dost thou say, old Lauri, in
thy claypit? What? Shall we go nicely and be beaten?
LAURI. Let’s stay here still.
JUHANI. That’s what I think’s best too. Just so!--But that’s a
fine herd of cattle thou hast there.
TUOMAS. Cattle and poultry, that boy has.
JUHANI. A grand flock. There’s the making of a real
clay-whistle maker in thee.
TUOMAS. A real plasterer.
JUHANI. A first-class plasterer.--What Russian clay doll is
that just out of thy paws?
LAURI. This is only a kind of a little boy.
JUHANI. See the beggar!
TUOMAS. Makes boys like any man.
JUHANI. Boys as stout as tree-stumps; and looks after them
too like a man.--But brothers, hurry up with that dinner on the table;
my stomach’s starting to grumble. More ashes, red-hot ashes, on the
glowing side of that turnip. Whose turn is it to steal turnips?
SIMEONI. My turn to do the work of sin.
JUHANI. To keep the life in our bodies we are forced to pinch
a little from others. If this is a sin it is one of the tiniest done
in this worm-eaten world. And if I die with no other black marks in my
book than that, I’m sure those little crow’s marks won’t stop me from
coming to a somewhat better life. I’d soon be chased out of the real
bridal chamber, that I do know, but there’d always be some doorkeeper’s
job for a boy, and even that would be terrible fun.--Ay, let’s believe
that and cheerfully help ourselves to a belly-full at a time.
AAPO. I believe we’d do well to leave Kuokkala’s turnip-patch
in peace for a while and find ourselves another. A daily loss soon sets
a farmer watching his land night and day.
THE SHERIFF’S MAN. No need to worry over that, my boys, no
need at all. Well, well, why this flurry? Look: a host of guardian
angels has been camped around you right enough.
Thus spoke the Sheriff’s man to the brothers who, greatly scared,
sprang to their feet and rushed off in all directions, but to their
terror soon saw their way to freedom cut off everywhere. Then the
Sheriff’s man spoke again: ‘You are in the net now, rascals, safe in
a net from which there’ll be no escape until you have been scaled a
little as a reminder, a gentle reminder, of the footsoreness you have
caused us, you scoundrels. Now, mother, bring thy birch-rod here, and
give it them with a warm hand. And in case there’s any resistance,
there are plenty of help-women here.’ Followed a beating from mother’s
hand, man by man through the whole flock of brothers; and great was
the outcry in Kuokkala Wood. Hotly the woman plied her rod, yet the
Sheriff’s man held stoutly that their punishment had been too mild.
But when this final task was over, everybody returned home, amongst
them the mother with her sons. All the way she scolded and stormed at
the truants; nor did the tempest abate when they arrived at the house.
Even while setting out a meal for her sons on a stool the goodwife
still raged, threatening to give them a new beating. But seeing the
voracious hunger with which they dug their teeth into the bread and
salt fish, she turned her face away, secretly wiping a tear from her
brown, rugged cheek.
Thus ended the boys’ escapade. And this was the event from their
childhood for which I interrupted my tale.
Another favourite amusement of the brothers was a game called ‘hitting
the disc’, which even in the years of their manhood they still loved to
play. Divided into two parties, they fought fiercely to see which party
could drive the other backward, the point where the disc was laid low
deciding their positions. There was always a great running, shouting
and jostling, and the perspiration ran steaming from their faces. The
disc sped humming along the road, often rebounding from the bat on to a
man’s face, so that when they returned from their game, more than one
brow would be adorned with mighty horns, or a cheek would be swollen to
the likeness of a round loaf. So passed the days of their youth: the
summers in the forest or hitting the disc on the highway, the winters
on the top of the huge oven in perspiring heat.
But even the brothers could not fail to notice that the times
changed. Events occurred which compelled them in greater measure than
hitherto to think upon the morrow and to alter somewhat their former
ways.--Their mother had died and one of them had now to take over the
reins, to steer the farm clear of total ruin and to see to the payment
of the Government Tax, though considering the wide area of land and
forest belonging to Jukola, this was not large. But on a mismanaged
farm there are duties enough. And to crown all, it chanced that the new
Rector of the parish was a fearfully strict man in all that pertained
to his calling. He was, above all, merciless to backward readers, and
used every means in his power, not stopping short even of confinement
in the stocks, to stimulate their taste for learning. And soon his
sharp eye had fallen on the Jukola brothers. Already he had sent
them by a writ-server a sternly-worded command, bidding them hasten
with more than usual speed to the parish clerk to be taught how to
read.--With these events in their minds, sitting one evening in late
summer in the tupa, the large living-room in their home, the brothers
conversed amongst themselves in the following words:
AAPO. What I say is that this wild life isn’t right, and is
sure to end in ruin and destruction. Brothers! Other works and other
habits, if we wish for peace.
JUHANI. What thou sayest is true, it can’t be denied.
SIMEONI. God ha’ mercy! Wild and unbridled has our life been
unto this day.
TIMO. This life’s as good as another, and so’s this world.
It’s all right, even if it does tell on a man. Oho!
JUHANI. The wildness, or to use the right word, the
carelessness of our life cannot be denied. Let us remember though,
‘youth and folly, old age and wisdom’.
AAPO. It’s time now for us to grow wiser, time to put all
our lusts and passions under the yoke of our brains and do chiefly
that which brings profit, and not that which tastes best. Let us begin
without delay to work up our farm into respectable shape again.
JUHANI. Well spoken! We’ll start on the manure first like
dung-beetles, and to give us enough twigs to mix it with let the
chopping-block echo round Jukola’s walls from morning to eve; the
cattle, too, can do their best to raise the pile; and may the dunghills
in our yard rise high as the golden walls of a king’s castle. That’s
what we’ll do. Next Monday we begin, and down from the roots.
AAPO. Why not tomorrow?
JUHANI. Not before Monday. There’s no harm in letting the
matter ripen. That’s settled then: next Monday.
AAPO. There’s another point we ought to settle at once. It is
this: if we wish for order and a firm foundation to our work, one of us
must be leader and master. As we know, the right and duty of leadership
is Juhani’s both as his birthright and by our mother’s wish.
JUHANI. Ay, the right, the power and the might is mine.
AAPO. But see thou usest it fairly and for the common good.
JUHANI. I’m willing to try my best. If you would only obey me
without blows and the whip. Still, I’ll try my best.
AAPO. The whip?
JUHANI. Ay, if so be needed.
TUOMAS. Speak to thy dogs of the whip.
TIMO. Thou wilt never warm my withers, never; let the rod of
law and justice do that if ever my back itch for it.
JUHANI. Why will you seize on every loose word? There’s room
enough here for all of us to be happy in, as long as we can agree and
each draws in his horns.
EERO. Let’s make it plain, anyhow, how we stand to each other.
AAPO. And let us hear what each of us has to say.
JUHANI. What dost thou, Lauri, always a man of few words, say?
LAURI. I’d say something. Let us move into the forest and say
farewell to the racket of this world.
JUHANI. Ey?
AAPO. The man’s raving again.
JUHANI. Move into the forest? What foolishness!
AAPO. Never mind him. Listen, this is how I have thought out
the matter. Thou, Juhani, hast the first choice of being master, if it
is thy wish.
JUHANI. It is my wish.
AAPO. Then we others, as long as we stay in this dear home
of ours and are unmarried, will work here, eating the farm’s food and
getting our clothes from the farm. The first Monday in each month,
except at sowing and reaping times, is to be our holiday, though on
that day too the farm must feed us. Every year the farm is to give each
of us a half-barrel of oats for sowing, and every year we are to have
the right to cut a common clearing of at least three acres. Such is
my plan for as long as we stay here, and are single. But I know that
none of us would willingly leave the beloved soil of our dear Jukola,
and why should we? There’s plenty of room for seven brothers on these
lands. But should anyone in the course of time feel the wish to start
a home of his own and yet be unwilling to begin cutting up the farm as
he has the right to demand, with all the cost of surveyors, couldn’t
he agree to what I now say? Let him inherit a piece of land to build
his house and lay out fields on. Let him also be given a share of the
pasturage and the right to make a clearing in the forest big enough
for him to be able to keep a couple of horses and four or five head of
cattle. This land he can farm tax-free and enjoy its produce, both he
and his children, living peacefully on his own soil.--That’s how I have
thought out this matter. What do you say?
JUHANI. Fairly sensibly thought out. Let us take and weigh
over these paragraphs.
LAURI. Another and better plan is this. Let us move far into
the forest and sell wretched Jukola, or rent it to the tanner of
Rajaportti. He has told us of his wish for such a bargain; but he wants
the farm for his own for at least ten years. Let us do as I say and
move with horse, dogs and guns to the foot of Impivaara’s steep fell.
There we can build ourselves a merry cabin on a merry, sunny hillside,
and there, hunting game in the forests, live in peace far away from the
din of the world and its crabby people.--This is what I have dreamed of
night and day for many years.
JUHANI. Has the Devil turned thy brains, boy?
EERO. If not the Devil, a forest-nymph.
LAURI. That’s what I’m thinking of and that’s what I’ll
do some day. There we could live like gentlemen, hunting wildfowl,
squirrels, hares, foxes, wolves, badgers and bushy-coated bears.
JUHANI. Well! Go on with the whole Noah’s ark from mouse to
moose.
EERO. There’s an idea for you: say goodbye to salt and bread
and instead suck meat, gorge flesh like mosquitos or Lapland wizards.
Would we eat fox and wolf too, out there in Impivaara’s caves, like
hairy ogres?
LAURI. Foxes and wolves would give us skins, the skins money,
and with money we could buy salt and bread.
EERO. The skins will do for clothing, but let meat, bloody,
smoking meat, be our only food; salt and bread are no use to apes and
baboons in the forest.
LAURI. That is what I think of and what I shall yet do.
TIMO. Let us take and weigh over the matter from the roots
upwards. Why shouldn’t we be able to munch bread and salt in the
forest? Why? It’s Eero who is a mocker, always in our way, always
the cross stick in our pile. Who can prevent a man of the woods from
drawing near to a village now and again, once in a while, as his needs
drive him? Or wouldst thou hit me on the head with a stick if I did,
Eero?
EERO. No, brother, I would even ‘salt give to him who berries
doth bring’.--Move, boys, move, I won’t forbid you, but will even cart
you there, carry you off at a wolf’s trot.
JUHANI. They’d soon be driven back by the forest sprites, that
I’ll wager.
LAURI. For him who comes a second time the home threshold is
high. I know, so don’t think I’ll knock at thy door once I have left
it.--On May-day I move.
TIMO. Who knows I don’t come with thee.
LAURI. I’ll neither forbid nor invite thee; do as thy heart
says is best.--Next May-day I move to Impivaara clearing. At first,
until my own warm little cabin is ready, I’ll live in the moss-grown
hut grand-father used when burning charcoal. Then, when my day’s work
is over, I shall sleep in peace in my hut, hearing the bear whistle in
the forest and the grouse calling on Sompio Bog.
TIMO. I’ll come, Lauri; it’s said, Lauri.
TUOMAS. If the times don’t improve, I’ll come too.
JUHANI. Even Tuomas! Wouldst thou too move?
TUOMAS. If the times don’t improve.
LAURI. I’ll move next May-day, even if days of milk and honey
were to set in for Jukola.
TIMO. Thou and I, we two, we’ll move from here to Sompio Bog
like cranes in spring; and wind and weather whistle.
JUHANI. Well, well! But if I were to admit the truth, there’s
a secret spell in Lauri’s plan. The forest draws. Oh the devil! It’s as
though I could see the bonny plain of sky behind it.
AAPO. You madmen, what are you thinking of?--Move into the
forest! Why? Haven’t we a farm and a farmhouse; a precious roof over
our heads?
JUHANI. True, we have a farm to which we’ll stick tooth and
nails as long as it smells at all of bread. But look you, if hard luck
were to upset everything now, contrary to a man’s best plans, let
the forest be my other farm, to which I’ll be quick to scuttle when
the last grains rattle in the mill-funnel. Ay, but now we’ll pounce
with fearsome speed on the work of farming; and let us go back to the
paragraph which was the real question at point.--According to my dull
wits Aapo has thought out matters fairly wisely; and all will be well,
if each of us works on his own part for harmony and peace. But if it’s
trouble we’re looking for, we’ll always be finding something to set our
neck hairs bristling.
SIMEONI. Where can we not find it so long as the Old Adam
tickles and itches within us, here between our bones and skin.
TIMO. I have always thought of Old Adam as a solemn old gaffer
in a felt hat, long black coat, kneebreeches and a red waistcoat
reaching to the pit of his belly. As such a gaffer he strides in my
thoughts, driving a pair of oxen.
SIMEONI. By Old Adam we mean the root of sin, original sin.
TIMO. I know he is the mark and sign of original sin, the
horned devil of Hell, yet as such an old boy he marches before me,
driving a pair of oxen. I can’t help it.
JUHANI. This point of religion can wait, and we’ll stick to
the matter at hand.--Aapo, what are we to do with those two crofts of
ours, Vuchenkalma and Kekkuri?
AAPO. We have to remember that both their tenants once wrested
the land from raw, dismal forest, and therefore ought not to be evicted
from their holdings--which would indeed be wrong--so long as they have
the power to keep their fields in crop, and even then the law is that
they must be looked after in their old age. Such are the facts in that
matter.--But let us glance at another question, which I believe is a
ticklish one. For it is the most important step we are called upon to
take down here, a step that either makes our heads gray before their
time, or brings sunshine into our lives and rounds off our days with a
golden sunset. And it is thee, Juhani, the matter first touches. Note
therefore what I say: a wifeless mastership is lopsided and lame: a
house without a mistress on its storeroom path....
TIMO. Is like a wolf’s den without the wolf-bitch, or like a
top-boot without the other top-boot; truly, there is something lopsided
in it, as Aapo said.
AAPO. A home without a mistress on its storeroom path is like
a cloudy day, and dullness sits at its family table like a mournful
autumn eve. But a good mistress is the bright sun of a house, that
lights up and warms.--Lo! she is first to leave her bed in the morning,
mixes her dough, lays the breakfast for the men, puts up their food
for the day, and then hurries with milkpail in hand to the yard, to
milk her mottled cattle. Now she kneads bread, hustles and bustles;
now she stands at the table, now trips with a loaf on her palm to the
back bench, and now like a tempest she stirs the fire, which spews out
flame and smoke from its glowing bowels. Then, while the bread is
rising, she finds time at last, with a baby at her breast, to break her
own fast, a hunk of bread and a broiled sprat, with sour milk from the
bowl. Nor does she forget the dog, the farm’s faithful guardian on the
step, or the cat that peers sleepily down from the oven-top.--And now
again she hustles and bustles, trips and turns, mixes another dough
to rise in her trough, kneads it into loaves and bakes it, and the
sweat flows in streams from her brow. And see: when evening falls she
has hung the loaves under the ceiling, pole over pole, full-loaded,
from which new life breathes down. And when the men return from the
forest a steaming supper awaits them on the newly-scrubbed table.
But where is the mistress herself? There in the yard she milks her
crooked-horned cattle again, and the hissing, foaming crest of the milk
rises high in the pail.--So she hustles and bustles, trips and turns,
and only when the others already rumble in deepest sleep, does she
sink down in prayer beside her own bed. But even then her labours are
not over. Uncomplaining she rises from her couch during the night for
a moment, for an hour at a time, to hush the child which cried in its
cradle.--Such, brothers, is a good mistress.
JUHANI. Well spoken, Aapo, and I well understand thy meaning.
It is to turn my thoughts to marriage. Ay, I understand. A wife, thou
sayest, is a necessary piece in a household. True. But don’t worry. Thy
hope, I believe, will soon be fulfilled. Oh well: ay! I confess that my
mind has already pounced in earnest on a maiden, who I hope will be my
wife and a good wife, unless the old signs betray me.--Ay, brothers,
new times and new tricks draw near for us, and the mastership I must
take over is a great weight on my mind. A master has a heavy load to
bear down here, and has much to answer for on Judgment Day. I am now
responsible for the lot of you; remember that.
TUOMAS. Thou responsible? For what?
JUHANI. I am your master; from my finger-tips the blood will
once be drawn for your sakes.
TUOMAS. I answer for both my body and my soul.
TIMO. I answer for myself too. Ho!
AAPO. Brother Juhani, note that such remarks cause bad blood.
JUHANI. I meant bad blood no more than I meant bad flesh. But
like tar, like burrs on a hot summer day you seize wildly on an idle,
meaningless word, though you know my heart through and through. I’ll
lose my temper.
AAPO. Enough of this, and tell us, if thou wilt, who is the
maiden who has drawn thy heart to her.
JUHANI. That I will say without flinching. The wench whom I
love with a pitiless love is Mother Pinewood’s Venla.
AAPO. Hm.
JUHANI. What didst thou say?
AAPO. Hm, was all I said.
TUOMAS. A vexing matter.
SIMEONI. Venla. Well, well! But may everything be left to the
Heavenly Father.
AAPO. Hm, Venla indeed.
JUHANI. What are you muttering at? But ah! I suspect
something; and may the Son of the Lord protect us! What? Speak out!
AAPO. Listen: for years my thoughts have been busy around that
girl.
SIMEONI. If God has meant her for me, why should I sorrow?
EERO. Don’t then. She is meant for thee, while I take her.
TUOMAS. A vexing matter; the maiden pleases me greatly, that
I’ll admit.
JUHANI. Indeed, indeed. Good. And Timo?
TIMO. I make the same confession.
JUHANI. Son of the Lord! And Eero?
EERO. I make the same guileless confession, the same guileless
confession.
JUHANI. Good, very good! Ha-ha! Even Timo--Timo!
TIMO. The girl is greatly dear to me, I confess. True she beat
me once hard, leathered me like anything, poor little nipper that I
was, and I remember that hiding well, ho!
JUHANI. Shut up! The question is now: dost thou love her?
TIMO. Oh ay, that I do, and greatly, that is if she loves me
back.
JUHANI. Ah! Thou too steppest in my way then?
TIMO. Not at all, not at all, unless thou really canst not
keep thy temper in hand, thy temper and thy tongue. Still, I like the
wench a lot and will also do my best to win her.
JUHANI. Good, good! And what says Lauri?
LAURI. What have I to do with the girl?
JUHANI. Whose side art thou on?
LAURI. I won’t be mixed up in the matter on any side.
JUHANI. There’ll be a fine broth anyhow.
LAURI. I’ll keep my spoon out of it.
JUHANI. All of you then, except Lauri. Boys, boys, Jukola
brotherhood and kinsmen all! Now we’ll hit out, and earth and Heaven
shall shake. Now precious brothers, a knife, an axe or a billet, and
one against all and all against one like seven bulls! Right! A billet’s
my weapon; I seize this curly-wooded one, and may he blame himself
whose skull gets a splinter from it.--Grab your billets, boys, and step
forth, if you dare stand up against a man.
EERO. Here I stand armed, though a bit shorter than you others.
JUHANI. Thou, whipper-snapper! But look, I see that mocking,
that sly, that damnable grin on thy face again, and it seems thou
makest a joke of the whole thing. But I’ll teach thee.
EERO. Why worry, so long as my billet speaks truth?
JUHANI. I’ll soon teach thee. Take your clubs, boys, your
clubs, boys!
TIMO. Here I am and my billet, if so needed. I don’t want
anger and quarrelling, but if it’s needed.
JUHANI. Thy billet, Tuomas!
TUOMAS. Go to Hades with thy billet, owl!
JUHANI. Fire and lightning!
SIMEONI. Fearful, heathen and Turkish is all this din; but I
withdraw from the game and leave my marrying to God.
LAURI. I withdraw too.
JUHANI. Then stand aside, you, stand aside out of the
way!--Seize thy billet, Aapo, and let Jukola’s walls echo to the
cracking of skulls. Fire and horny devils!
AAPO. Oh wretched heart of man. I’m horrified, Juhani, when I
look upon thee now, seeing how thy eyes roll and thy hair stands on end
like a tuft of grass.
JUHANI. Let it stand, let it stand, it’s just the ordinary,
proper way of it.
EERO. I feel like dusting it a little.
JUHANI. Thou hop-o’-my-thumb! Best for thee to stop nicely in
a corner. Away! I feel sorry for thee.
EERO. Take that horrid jaw of thine into a corner in time. I
feel sorry for that. Even now it shakes and trembles like a crippled
beggar.
JUHANI. Look how this billet trembles, look!
AAPO. Juhani!
EERO. Strike! And it’ll rain back from here, I believe, real
hailstones perhaps, big as billets. Strike!
JUHANI. I will.
AAPO. Thou wilt not, Juhani.
JUHANI. Go to the dunghill thou, or take a billet and defend
thyself, if I’m not to soften thy head. Take a billet!
AAPO. Where are thy brains?
JUHANI. In this curly-wooden billet; look, now it’ll whisper a
word.
AAPO. Wait a bit, brother, wait, until I too have my
weapon.--Now then; here I stand with a round club in my hand. But
first a word or two, thou Christian brotherhood of Jukola, and then
we’ll fight like raging wolves.--Take note; a man in a rage is a
bloodthirsty beast of prey and no human being; he is stone-blind to
justice and fairness; least of all can he carry out works of love in a
rage. Notwithstanding, if we were now to try to look sensibly at this
matter that has brought brothers to the point of blows, I believe the
case would be this. The girl cannot love all of us, but only one, if
she is willing to take any of us as the one in whose company she feels
like wandering hand in hand over life’s thorny hill. I think it best,
therefore, that we all go together to her and gravely informing her of
our intentions, ask her with solemn heart and tongue if she will give
her heart to one of us. Then if the girl is willing, let the one on
whom the happy choice falls thank his lucky stars, and the others be
content with their fate. The one who is left forlorn must swallow his
anger, in the hope that he too will meet the one marked out for him.
If we do this we shall be acting like men and true brothers. And then
the glorified ghosts of our father and mother will step forth from the
glowing gate of Heaven and, standing on the edge of a shining cloud,
look down upon us, crying to us in a loud voice: ‘So, Juhani, so,
Tuomas and Aapo, so, Simeoni, Timo and Lauri, just so, my little Eero!
You are boys in whom we are well pleased!’
JUHANI. Man, thou speakest, Devil take me, like an angel from
Heaven, and were near to making me cry.
SIMEONI. We thank thee, Aapo.
JUHANI. Thank you. There goes my billet.
TIMO. There goes mine too. And this quarrel ends as I all
along wanted it to.
SIMEONI. Aapo holds up a mirror to us, and for that let us
thank him.
EERO. Let us thank him and sing a real ‘Simeon’s song of
thanksgiving’.
SIMEONI. Mockery, mockery, and scoffing again!
TIMO. Don’t mock, Eero, at the Word of God and Simeon’s song
of thanksgiving.
AAPO. Ah, so young and so hardened!
SIMEONI. So young and so hardened! Eero, Eero! Ay, I’ll say no
more now, only sigh on thy behalf.
JUHANI. I prophesy, Eero, that we shall have to lay on thee
once or twice with a father’s hand. For our mother brought thee up too
gently.
SIMEONI. We must punish him while his heart is still
youthfully pliant and yielding; but let us do it with loving hand and
not in rage. Punishment given in anger drives in devils and not out.
EERO. There’s for thee, and from a loving hand.
SIMEONI. The godless child, he hit me now!
EERO. Right on the mouth. Bile has overflowed for less.
JUHANI. Come here, my boy. Timo, fetch the stick from yon
corner.
SIMEONI. That’s it. Juhani, hold him across thy knee while I
let his trousers down.
EERO. Stop, in Hell.
JUHANI. Wriggling won’t help thee, weakling.
SIMEONI. Don’t let go of him.
JUHANI. See the wild-cat. But thou canst not escape, no.
EERO. Hit me, you accursed, and I’ll set the house on fire. I
swear I’ll raise fire and smoke for this!
JUHANI. What bile! Thou wouldst set the house on fire? Oh what
bile!
SIMEONI. The Lord preserve us, what bile!
JUHANI. Give the stick here, Timo!
TIMO. I can’t find it.
JUHANI. Blind, canst thou not see it in yon corner?
TIMO. What, this one? This birch one?
JUHANI. Just that; bring it here.
SIMEONI. Strike, but wisely and not with all thy strength.
JUHANI. I know how.
LAURI. Not a single swipe, say I!
TUOMAS. Leave the boy alone!
JUHANI. He needs a little something on his tail.
LAURI. Thou wilt not lay a finger on him.
TUOMAS. Let the boy go! This minute!
TIMO. May he be forgiven, Eero-boy, this once at least.
SIMEONI. Forgiven, forgiven, until the tares and thorns choke
the wheat.
LAURI. Don’t touch him.
AAPO. Let us forgive him: and in so doing we can try to heap
coals of fire on his head.
JUHANI. Go now and thank thy luck.
SIMEONI. And pray to God for a new heart, mind and tongue.
TIMO. I’m off to bed.
AAPO. Let us still weigh over one matter.
TIMO. I’m off to bed. Come along, Eero; let’s go to bed and
forget this miserable ant-heap of a world, a wretched heap that smokes
and steams in the rain. Come on, Eero!
JUHANI. What is the matter thou wouldst thresh out?
AAPO. God ha’ mercy! it is a fact that we don’t know our
‘a’ yet, the first letter of the alphabet, and that although the art
of reading is the first duty of every Christian citizen. But the law
can force us to learn, the law of the church. You all know what Crown
contraption awaits us, ready to seize us in its teeth if we don’t
dutifully teach ourselves to read. The stocks await us, brothers, the
black stocks, which, with all its holes agape, basks in the church
porch yonder like a black boar. With these same pincers of Hell the
Rector has already threatened us, and he can carry out this threat if
he doesn’t see us hard at work daily, that’s certain.
JUHANI. Impossible to learn to read!
AAPO. It’s a trick human beings have learned before.
TUOMAS. It would make any man sweat though.
JUHANI. And puff. I have such a hard head.
AAPO. A strong will carries its man even through grey granite.
Let’s get to work, send for a-b-c books from Hämeenlinna and go to the
parish clerk’s to school, as the Rector has commanded. Let us do this
before we are taken there by the Crown.
JUHANI. I’m afraid it’s what we shall have to do. I’m afraid
so. God have mercy upon us! But this matter can stand over till
tomorrow, and let us now get to bed.