Those monks," Myyriäinen thought, "are great artists, no question about it. They ought to be able to teach a man something about the real nature of art."

Musing, he gazed after the four carts which had disappeared in a cloud of dust, bound in the direction of the village he himself had left a couple of hours before. The monks most likely were going to call on some esteemed fellow-believers in the neighborhood. In the evening they would return to their cloister. It was not very far from here, he knew that much. But it was not a cloister which one visited for amusement's sake. Mindful of the secularization which had taken place in the region's large and more famous brother-house, the abbot here had declared that he wished no guests save those who came for edification and to invoke the aid of the miracle-working Madonna, the cloister's most precious icon. And Myyriäinen knew in his heart that, no matter how much he wanted to strip away his former self, he could not become a pilgrim in spirit and in truth. The holy rites would say nothing to him, and the wonderful hymns would only leave a fleeting impression of beauty.

It bothered him that the little man with the knowing voice who had spoken to him a while ago during the general uproar would not leave him in peace now. Bursting with   [p. 32]   meaning, he stood beneath a birch tree at the very roadside and waved eagerly; there was a handcart a short distance from him. Perhaps he wanted to sell him something. The man's appearance was amusing: he wore drooping trousers and had a cornflower stuck elegantly into the buttonhole of his coat. He had a benign grin all over his face and winked his eyes cunningly; he looked as if he had some trick or other up his sleeve.

Myyriäinen shook his head and decided not to pay the man any attention. He would simply continue his journey, and get rid of him that way. But it went against his grain to leave this place without any further ado: so many strange thoughts had come to him here. He looked ahead with a certain sadness. He could see the little turn-off a few hundred meters along the road; this was where the monks had come from, as far as he could tell. In all likelihood, the turn-off led only to the monks' jetty down at the water's edge. Perhaps some sort of settlement was there, too. But he had no reason to go that way. It led nowhere.

While he stood there in his indecision, trying to keep from looking at the little man and his irritating signals, his thoughts continued to spin their unending thread. Meanwhile, full of attention, the man came forward and introduced himself: "Iivana Lampinen," he said with an extremely well-mannered, almost courtly bow. Without taking the time to wait for an answer, he doused the stranger in a torrent of benign words. It was a fine day under God's heaven, and nice to meet this way on the highway of life, and couldn't he offer the stranger some piroshki and fresh butter, Palaga really had a way with piroshki, and who knows when we'll meet again in the marketplace of life? Myyriäinen gave what he thought might be an appropriate answer, and after repeated promptings and   [p. 33]   friendly shoves he let himself be dragged along to the resting-place beneath the birch tree, where a pile of greasy pastry and a tub of yellow butter could be seen shining from afar. He sat down in the grass and ate heartily and listened with half an ear to Lampinen's good-natured chatter. But his thoughts continued to spin their endless thread undisturbed. . . .

"All the same, it's strange that people have thought up the idea of God. And then they've built these shining temples and richly ornamented cloisters all over the world's surface, and created tones and colors and shapes of incomprehensible beauty in order to express His being. Has man sought a reflection of the divine beauty in his own works? But who can say that beauty is not an illusion? Instead, is it possible that man glorifies himself in this beauty? Why should God be beautiful? He can just as well be hideous, the way the idols of primitive peoples are. He is nothing of all these things which we can imagine. He is that strange, that completely different something which no living person has beheld. Perhaps we conceal it in beauty in order that we may protect ourselves from it. Perhaps those monks are charlatans after all. . . ."

Feeling confused, he opened his eyes. He noticed that he lay beneath a birch tree, listening to an old and monotonous recitation. He remembered that he had eaten here together with someone called Lampinen, and perhaps he had fallen asleep for a while after the meal. A passing thought told him that it must be Lampinen who was reciting something in this curious, half-singing fashion. But he did not take the trouble to raise himself up, he did not even lift his head. He simply lay there, listening, and as the monotonous rhythm carried the words to him, he felt that his body rose lightly and   [p. 34]   almost imperceptibly from the ground, and hovered unsupported in the air, in harmony with the soft and solemn movements of the earth and of the other heavenly bodies:

Lull the child, oh Lord in heaven,
lull it, heavenly Maria,
even I perhaps could slumber,
could I be but briefly idle.

Sleep, come to the baby's cradle,
dream, come softly to the bedstead,
where the little child is lying
sweet and still beneath the cover,
let the little baby slumber,
see how its frail strength is waning,
let it like the earth lie restful,
let it dream like tree and meadow,
let it have fair dreams, Maria,
give it of your holy quiet.

He could hear that Lampinen had finished his song, and in its stead talked quietly with someone who did not want to go to sleep. But he did not move. The song continued to sing within him. The tones darkened, the melody grew more and more lonely, and still the song remained the same. It was the song of Tuoni's land^[1*] and of the Maid of Death who lulls her child to rest at eventide. Perhaps the poet had found the song on the lips of the people and had turned it into a cradlesong for his own lonesome heart. His listening head was like a shell which echoed with the songs of the people. Myyriäinen thought that the head must be still more beautiful than it had appeared to his eyes. And suddenly he could   [p. 35]   not understand why he had ever doubted the absolute and indivisible beauty of God.

"There is a hidden music in everything which stands close to God," he thought. "One must have an ear to capture this music, and not be led astray. The simple folksong and great and lonely men possess the same music. Those who have shaken the dust of their suffering from their feet stand close to God."

Very gently, someone touched his shoulder, and to his surprise he saw that a thin little arm lay on his breast, and that a child bent over him and peered at him searchingly. His friend Lampinen held the girl in his arms, and, in order that the child could touch him, Lampinen had got down on his knees beside him.

"Sanni wanted so much to greet our guest," Lampinen said with a broad grin. "She's excited now, you see, and doesn't want to go to sleep, since we shall be at the house of God's Mother in a little while."

Looking at the little group, Myyriäinen felt ashamed. He had been so busy with his own thoughts that he had completely forgotten his fellow traveler. And what on earth had kept him from noticing the girl? She must have been the gray bundle he had thought he saw lying on the handcart.

"Why didn't you come over and say hello to me, I'm the oldest daughter of Iivana Lampinen," the girl said in a voice eager and a little shrill, which she had difficulty in controlling. She breathed in short gasps, and when Myyriäinen got a better look at her, he realized that she was very ill, perhaps even close to death. It was not just because she was emaciated and unnaturally pale, or because the hair that fell over her forehead was sticky with sweat; the whole of her little face with its sunken eyes was secretly marked by the brush of death, which paints shadows and draws lines of expression in its own strange and unfamiliar way.

  [p. 36]  

"I thought you were asleep," Myyriäinen answered in order to excuse himself.

"You shouldn't believe what Lampinen says, he's just telling stories," the girl said in her shrillest voice. She continued to talk with an unnatural exaltation, and even though Myyriäinen could tell very well how much of an effort it cost her, he did not have the heart to interrupt her or to make any movement which could have disturbed her. He knew instinctively that it was necessary for the girl to speak her mind; she had to hear her own exposition of things in order to find a connection with that life which, in some curious fashion, threatened to dissolve into mists, to disappear beyond her grasp.

She bent over him with a mysterious expression.

"I'm not supposed to sleep, you see, it's absolutely necessary for me not to sleep. Lampinen is so childish, he doesn't understand what's going on. It's dangerous to sleep when you're sick, for it's happened that some people don't wake up at all, and then they say you're dead and stuff you into the ground. Then you can't do anything, I'm sure you realize that. And who would take care of Lampinen's children then? There's nobody to clean up and sweep the floor and look after baby brother, Palaga Lampinen won't do that, she never will, and Mikko---he hasn't learned to walk yet---will do his business under him if I'm not there to carry him outside. Because Asser, you know, goes to school and all kinds of places and they won't get him to do womenfolk's work. He was supposed to carry in the water last winter, Lampinen ordered him to, but I had to bring up every last bucket myself, and Asser took the shoes I got from Mrs. Mitronen and I've never had them on a single time and Palaga Lampinen just laughed and said that a man's a man even in short trousers. Now you can see why it would be terribly unlucky if I happened to fall asleep and   [p. 37]   didn't know what was happening. Of course, the worst is that you can't depend on Lampinen. It's too bad that God's Mother has to live so far away that I'm not able to walk there all by myself. I'm glad you're coming along, because then you can keep an eye on Lampinen, you never know what he can think up, and then you'll see to it that I don't go to sleep, promise me that, please promise me."

The girl grabbed his lapel with a strength that astonished him and looked him straight in the eyes with an unnaturally dilated gaze; he felt a stab of pain to see how her glance first grew clouded and then was quickly extinguished, as if this last effort had broken her exhausted soul's power to resist. Her head drooped, and the struggling spark of life was plunged into dull sleep.

Lampinen got up carefully from his kneeling position, nodded encouragingly to Myyriäinen, and went off to put the girl to bed on the handcart. He walked as lightly and lithely as an Indian; his trousers hung in indescribable folds, and the heavy fur cap which he wore despite the summer's warmth gave the skinny little figure a certain melancholy dignity.

Myyriäinen had sat up; he followed Lampinen's movements with his eyes. Now he knew exactly what Sanni's case was: a child who had never been allowed to be a child, who at the age of ten already had a woman's burdensome life behind her. He was thoroughly familiar with such situations. It was the oldest girl's customary lot in the poor cottages of this region, where a child was born just about every year, and where the mother had to work outside. Undernourished, without enough clothes to go outside in the winter, grown crooked from constantly holding a baby too heavy for her strength, bound like a prisoner to the cradle and the musty-smelling hearth---that was little Sanni and her life. What shook him in her comments was her   [p. 38]   touching officiousness. She was so breathlessly eager and fussy that anyone could tell she was indispensable. All her duties and everything she had had to bear were put on display---not in order to complain but rather to show how indispensable she was, and how necessary it was for that dark power to fail in its plan of making her an outsider, as if she were someone who could be done without. The very fact of her life's absolute misery made her fate especially moving. He remembered how often people are heard to say that death would be a blessing for such wretched creatures as Sanni. It was true that her life had been hard and more burdensome than any human being's, let alone a child's, ought to be, but she herself knew that it had borne a profit just the same, something the value of which she alone could really understand. She did not wish to surrender this poor treasure.

Lampinen stored away the little gray bundle with great care. It was very amusing to watch him. His otherwise happy-go-lucky manner acquired a certain resolute and motherly quality when he fussed over the girl. He no doubt recalled the determined movements Palaga Lampinen used when she swaddled her infants, hard and tight, so that the little creature would have some stability in its existence and not get the chance to do itself harm. Thus he went to work with a will, taking pains to see that everything was made as taut as possible.

Myyriäinen sat thinking of Sanni's little hands. They lay all feeble and spent beneath their coverlets, while the transcendent heart sent up messages for help to unknown protectors. An oppressive sense of powerlessness came upon him. He knew---he had known it ever since he first saw the girl---that every hope was gone and that the officious little hands would never return to their world. They would disappear from it as if they had never been there; and   [p. 39]   everything would continue as it had before. Suddenly he realized what it was that threatened the girl and what she tried to defend herself against with her naive officiousness. It was not death at all, this dark melody which he had so often thought he heard in his dreams, like an undertone in everything which was and everything which would be. Why should death be so frightening? Why should he have felt this icy breath in his soul, merely because a poverty-stricken child he had met on the highway was going to die? He had seen many people die and kept his self-composure, and he lived in an age which, as though strangely drunk with death, prepared to offer its hecatombs on death's altar. And he had never been able to feel anything save a vague weight upon his soul and at the same time a dream-like enticement, a need to partake, himself, of these dark sacrificial rites, a need to achieve knowledge of their secret import. No, it was not death at all that frightened him. It was not the shadow of death he saw in little Sanni's wide-open eyes. It was the shadow of Nothingness---that everything had been without meaning and that little Sanni's "death" would be as senseless as her "life."

A chill ran through him, as though the sun had disappeared and the earth emanated an icy breath born of Nothingness itself. It seemed that he had chanced upon a land of vapors where every signpost vanishes and the solid ground beneath man's foot gives way in misty unreality. He had a fleeting notion that it was anguish over this which made men hurl themselves toward death in hope of being saved from simply succumbing to it.

In this hour he might perhaps have fallen prey to one of those mysterious and fateful spiritual catastrophes which for some reason may lay waste the lives of men, without their having the slightest idea of what caused the collapse, if he had been left to himself and had not had contact with   [p. 40]   some friendly-minded being. But Iivana Lampinen was not the man to let a chance for human fellowship escape him. He approached Myyriäinen and stood before him, looking at him with his head on one side and a cunning gleam in the corner of his eye.

"You'd better come along," he said. "Sanni would dearly love it. And then, of course, it will be a little more solemn that way."

Myyriäinen was almost frightened. Should he join the pilgrimage to the miracle-working madonna? He already knew that the girl would die. And what sense was there in it? He could not seriously believe in a miracle. If he went along, his conviction that Sanni must die would be written all over him, and that really wasn't fair play, somehow.

Lampinen was not embarrassed by his failure to get an answer. He stood with his hands in his pockets, peering up at the sky. This was his way of telling time, and besides, it was pleasant for a person with the gift of fantasy to lose himself in the contemplation of the heavens' blue arch. One could tell how much at home he was when he stood free as a bird on the wooded hillside, with the open highway before him. The nonchalance of his person, slovenly and a little tarnished, never appeared to better advantage than in such a moment. His shoulders were not loaded with any invisible burdens. The light and restless clouds of early summer floated above his shabby fur cap.

"It's getting on toward the time to start out now," he said thoughtfully. It was an announcement of the most general nature, intended to begin a conversation in a discreet sort of way. After such an observation, nothing can be more agreeable than embarking upon vague and generally valid reflections which have the advantage that in an ingenious and delightful manner they heighten the pleasure of postponing whatever it is one intends to do.

  [p. 41]  

But Myyriäinen had other things to think of. He did not take his eyes from the bundle on Lampinen's cart. There, life was gathering for the last great test of strength.

"Sanni doesn't have much time left," he said quickly, as if he wanted to get it said once and for all. But straightway he became conscious of the impropriety of his remark: it is not fitting for one person to reckon in advance with another's death.

To his surprise he heard Lampinen chuckle with delight.

"Of course! That's exactly what I told Palaga. It's a sickness unto death, mark my words, I said. But don't think she bothers to listen to what somebody else says. She just laughs and won't hear a word of anything that doesn't suit her. She's always been that way, you see. Lots of times it's really funny, I'll tell you. But Iivana Lampinen recognizes the signs. He knows exactly when somebody's about to die. And if the person's got a reprieve, you can tell that by looking at him, too, no matter how badly off he is."

Myyriäinen got up, tormented by what he had heard. He thought he could not breathe. He went over to the girl, stationing himself beside her cart in a vague feeling that he had to protect her.

"In my opinion, you shouldn't make a pilgrimage to the Mother of God," he said to Lampinen. "You don't have the proper faith."

Troubled, Lampinen rubbed his nose; he could not quite understand what Myyriäinen was talking about.

"That may be right," he said with his customary ready compliance. "A poor devil could certainly have other things to do. But remember---a father's heart. I've always had a soft spot for the children, you see. And when Sanni got the idea in her head . . . Mitronen's daughter Alvina visited us one evening and babbled on and on about the Most Holy image   [p. 42]   which is supposed to be in the cloister, and which is supposed to be so holy that all kinds of illnesses leave a person like an evil breath, if he can just get the chance to touch the image and pronounce his own name the way it's written in the church register. Why, Sanni was absolutely transformed when she heard about it. You couldn't recognize her. She begged and pleaded, and you didn't have the heart to watch it burning in her eyes night and day. After all, a person doesn't die more than once in his life, and so you can act a little extravagantly, if that's the way it has to be. Of course, Palaga wouldn't hear of it. To tell the truth, she has trouble doing without her husband. But I said what I believe---that the girl wouldn't find any rest in her grave if she died without getting to touch the Most Holy image. She'll come back as a ghost, I said, and then Palaga's face turned white as a sheet and she didn't know what to do. That evening she took care of that poor little creature of a Sanni as if a count's child had landed in our house, and she told the children to keep quiet. No matter how you look at it, there's something special about a person who's going to die. And you can just as well put yourself out a little."

Lampinen could go on croaking about death as much as he wanted to, it didn't concern Myyriäinen. He experienced one of those moments when life's innermost heart seems to open up before the eyes of men, and they sink into that all-reconciling bliss which flows out steadily and without end. A bolt of light had penetrated the labyrinth of conceptions of death in which he had been groping. In his mind he saw the little girl in utter reality, lying on the bench by the oven at home, quite alone, abandoned by the living, counted among the dead. A blush flamed up in her pale cheeks, a fire was kindled deep within her tired eyes, her glance grew large, and suddenly she saw that God's Mother would make her whole. It was no more remarkable than what took place   [p. 43]   in a creative imagination when the projected work emerged in its first and transcendent form. It was no more remarkable, and it was equally remarkable: inspiration, the eternal miracle. If the girl had not been chosen and called by this first miracle, she would never have embraced the thought of the pilgrimage to God's Mother in Her cloister with the mysterious, inexorable tenacity of purpose which at last overcame all opposition. She might have listened to what Mitronen's daughter Alvina said, just as he would have listened to it, without paying it more attention than any other story. But she knew as soon as she heard it that it was meant for her and no one else, that she was the one who would touch the image and utter her name in the presence of the Mother of God.

Myyriäinen heard a bird singing close to him. It sang with such an intoxicating zeal and shrillness that it seemed it would rather burst its throat than cease the expression of its feelings. The clear high tones stumbled over one another in their infinite eagerness, filling the air with a jubilation like that we would know if the flowers and the trees opened a thousand mute mouths, and yet it was just a single little bird which sang the praises of the day. He listened, strangely spellbound, as if it were the first time in his life he had perceived the miracle in a chaffinch's song.

He could hear Lampinen telling some interesting detail about that same Alvina, Mitronen's daughter, but it did not concern him. He bent down over the unconscious girl and looked at the closed little face which emerged from among the rags.

"A human face is a strange thing, all the same," he thought. "There's something in it you don't see at the first glance." He reflected for a while on what it could be in such a little face which was so hard to reach. He came to think of those old jugs which are dug up from the earth and which   [p. 44]   have shape and color of a sort that no living man has ever seen, and which no one can imitate.

"Actually it's all very simple, although you have trouble in understanding it. After all, there's only one Sanni among all the people who live and who have lived on the face of the earth. And there will never be someone else who is Sanni. In her way, Sanni realizes that. She knows it in her heart. Thus she certainly has the right---if anybody does---to a fate which isn't like other people's. If she agrees to die, then there has to be some meaning in it, maybe a sad meaning, but a meaning in any case. And little Sanni's death can't have any meaning at all, if there weren't some meaning in her life. Sanni knows all of this in her own way, and that's why she's making her life's great journey now."

He was ready to join the pilgrims without hesitation. He had a dim notion that something very important was about to happen in the silence surrounding the peoples of the earth, although it was hard to discern it among all the other, more conspicuous things. Men were aware that they possessed a countenance of their own, and now even those who had never mattered before were aware of it.

"Shall we get started?" he said to Lampinen, and took hold of the handcart himself.

Lampinen's sense of what was living and tender did not fail him. Going forward, he broke off the brightest and frailest sprig of the birch tree and tucked it in among the rags on the girl's breast, like a friendly banner of life.