[Subsection]

Who knows the magic of these regions, lost in their dreams? We who lived among this folk as outsiders have been bewildered to see its enigmatic treasures neglected and unsung, even ridiculed, while an alien spirit asserted itself and claimed victor's right to the weakly defended sanctuaries. In the distant quiet villages on the shore of the holy lake, where so much blood flowed and fire raged for Christ's sake, the people have concealed their treasures in the earth, and there someday a poet will perhaps find the five-stringed kantele between moss-grown graves and rotting sacred images.

The roads, bright with summer, gave a friendly welcome to the prodigal son. Myyriäinen entered with all his soul into this landscape which had bestowed upon its children so much of its own generosity and softness, its wealth of shades, its magical intensity, and which even in the depth of his own reserved and heavy nature guarded a fragment of its indestructible treasure, the dreamer's gift. He was at home here; at every turn in the road and at every flower-covered and stony hillside his childhood's landscape offered him inexhaustible sources of joy. From behind his pale blue eyes there looked out a secret nature avidly appeasing its hunger upon things, lights, moods which only a deeply kindred spirit can absorb. What does man live by? The wise and the   [p. 21]   mighty of this world do not know, but a Myyriäinen, drawing deep breaths in the middle of a sun-warmed road, knows in a fleeting second that he lives by joy and joy alone. If someone should ever get the idea of using joy as a measure of whatever is worth striving after in life, then perhaps the reflections of light on an old fence post where a crow is sitting, or the ominous rattle of leaves on an evening late in autumn, would have a high value, and perhaps even the philosophers would understand why the experiences of childhood possess a worth before which so much of what seems important in life grows pale.

Here Myyriäinen walked his childhood's golden ways. The gray, moss-covered fences along the roads, the poor gray settlements, as if from the Stone Age, on the hillocks, the potato patches and the sweet-smelling hops and the clear-eyed bells of the flowers and the flaxen-haired children playing gravely beside the sauna---all this filled him with a happiness which nothing else in the world could have given him, and the wild softness of the broad heather-grown moors caressed him with the tender hands of an old nurse.

Each time he adjusted his knapsack he felt the pressure of a hard object jutting against his shoulder blade. It was the poet's head which he had stuffed in at the last minute, when he had already finished packing. He had not thought of it before. His sole idea had been to get started as soon as he awoke the next morning. He quickly saw that his room had in reality already been abandoned. It stood lost, as it were, in its own repose, not waiting to be taken possession of by some busy spirit. Everything was in its proper place. Everything was in order. All that remained for him was to arise and go. Without the slightest hesitation he took out his green knapsack which had been his faithful companion during all the years he had carried around his funny old men to their prospective buyers. He filled the knapsack with his   [p. 22]   modest personal possessions; even when taking leave of most of one's possessions, there are still a few things one wants to take along. He moved quite lightly now, almost floating, with a soft sureness which otherwise was foreign to his clumsy form. On his forehead and cheeks there lay a pale flush which betrayed that his heart beat more rapidly than it was accustomed, a flush which gave his hollow grayish face an almost comically childish air. He began to whistle without knowing it, something he had not done since he was a boy and tended his flock in the forest; and perhaps he already felt the soft tussocks of the woods bending beneath his feet, and felt the tall trees stretching their branches out over him in a gesture of majestic protection.

He was about to tie his knapsack shut when he caught sight of the poet's head. Once again he was fascinated by its sorrowful expression. Standing beside his pack, he stared at the carving. Perhaps it happened because in his present condition he was so little receptive to concrete visual impressions; but he plainly saw another face emerge from the familiar features, the same worn-out face he had seen in the dream, and the divine eyes looked straight into his. He saw the road where the solitary figure had appeared, and now he suddenly recognized it. It was a piece of his childhood's road, between his home and the village, just at the bend beside the big Witch's Stone (he used to call it that because it looked as if it could swallow up little children in its rough and mossy maws, with their ugly teeth of white lichen) and the magically twisted old pine which he loved and felt sorry for, because it had grown fast-joined to the stone and yet kept up such a friendly soughing in its noble crown. As vividly as if he were indeed watching, he saw himself as a little bare-legged boy who ran panting along the road with his birch-bark satchel on his back.

He hastily stuffed the poet's head into his sack, and if   [p. 23]   there had not been enough room inside, then he would have taken out something else to make a place for it.

Just when everything was ready and he stood testing his pack with his hand, his mother appeared in the door. He stood with his back to her, but still he saw her as plainly as in a revelation, her right hand propped against the doorpost and her left pressed against her heart, while her tired gray glance rallied itself to meet the inevitable. Perhaps she had heard him whistling, perhaps she knew what was about to happen without this warning. When he looked at her, she merely nodded and returned to the kitchen.

She sank down heavily beside the table and let him pour the coffee. She did not say a word, and he said nothing either. They were not accustomed to dress their innermost thoughts in words. The old woman muttered to herself as she usually did when they were at the table, and he sat as he usually did, leaning forward, with his arms in his lap and his glance withdrawn. After a time he got up, made an awkward and rather shy bow in his mother's direction, as he was wont to do in order to thank her for the food, and then took hold of his knapsack. As he tossed it over his shoulder he said, without turning around toward her: "I'm going on a trip for a while now." His mother answered: "I can see that." Nothing more was said between them.

But when he had closed the door and begun his journey toward that land whither his longing led him, he talked long and profoundly with the old woman who had been left alone in the house. After all, she was the only person in the whole world who was near to him, and he had much to tell her concerning life and a little boy with a birch-bark satchel on his back.

He did not choose his course as a result of any deliberations. It unfolded all by itself. Naturally, he knew that he had to go toward the east, to those reaches where he had his   [p. 24]   home, and he needed to know no more. His home-parish up in the north did not lie in his thoughts, nor would he ever get that far on his journey. But wherever he went, his childhood followed him like an invisible companion. Memories from early years joined him and kept him company as he wandered along the broad and busy highway, hearing the hum of the cars and the rattle of the carts and the wagoners' shouts as a distant roaring in his ears.

One day, in the middle of the busiest hour, when he had been under way since the rising of the sun and was looking around, exhausted, for a shady place to rest, the awful memory of the suicide's autopsy suddenly rose up from the oblivion where it had lain hidden. He could no longer tell whether he had actually had the chance to see the suicide's face during that hideous process, which he had sneaked in to watch together with some other boys, or whether afterwards, in his excited condition, he had dreamed of it. But in this moment he plainly saw the swollen face which had a ghastly blue color, and he felt the shudder of disgust and pleasure which had assailed the boy when his ugly curiosity had been satisfied. He recalled that his imagination and the other children's had revolved for a long time around the "suicide," with an unnatural inquisitiveness which could only be compared to the excitement which seized them when they beheld certain other events they were not supposed to witness. "He can't be buried in consecrated earth," they whispered to one another in their excitement, and this phrase had an incomprehensible ability to awaken dismay and terror. It was as though the little savages, not guessing what really transpired, experienced the magical import of age-old conceptions of death with an intensity, bordering on ecstasy, to which adults no longer had access, although their mental world was essentially the same. "What can it be," Myyriäinen wondered, "which makes the popular imagination separate the suicide in such a hideous way from   [p. 25]   the man who dies a normal death? Isn't there some connection here with a deep comprehension of death's sanctity, of the holy import of dying?"

He was so lost in his thoughts that he neglected to look for a place to rest in the shade. Life's hasty movement marched past on the sun-baked highway, men toiled with sweaty faces and bent backs for their daily bread; he proceeded as in a dream. Abruptly, another memory from his childhood appeared, as much unlike its predecessor as the day is unlike the night, and yet secretly connected to it. It was a small, small flame which burned unchangingly and quietly in a human dwelling place. At first he only saw the little flame; then there emerged the weakly illuminated icon beneath which it burned, and the dark corner where the logs of the wall were blackened to ebony's dusky shine. Finally he saw the whole cottage. It was so small and low that it seemed made for dwarfs to dwell in; it had a window so tiny that a child's face, pressed against the pane, filled it entirely. He himself sat on the bench, his nose running, hungry, in despair; he had run away from home, bare-legged and wearing only a few ragged clothes, in the midst of the winter's worst cold. He sat quietly on the bench, his aching legs drawn up beneath him, and did nothing but gaze at the little flame with a shimmer of happiness upon his face. Roaring, the snowstorm passed over the roof, and the beasts of the forest hid themselves trembling in their lairs, but the little flame, unchanging and still, burned in its corner, as though it belonged to another world.

Myyriäinen stopped for a moment in the middle of the highway and closed his eyes in order to be better able to see; it was a miracle that he did not fall victim to an accident. Perhaps his kind little dwarf-woman protected him. She treated him like a prince and let the bounties of a fairy tale fall to his lot, beautiful rich-smelling piroshki and steaming coffee, and when he asked her what was burning so brightly   [p. 26]   over there in the corner, she answered that it was Our Savior's heart. "No one loves us poor people except Him," she said, and put a friendly hand on his head. Now he remembered everything with perfect clarity, and he could not understand how he had ever forgotten it. He knew of course that the little light had made a deep impression on him, because he had never seen anything like it before; the woman came from outside their parish, and was perhaps the only person in the whole region who professed the old faith. And perhaps he was also in special need of the supernatural's mild protection at that time. But wasn't there something else too? He remembered how often he had made his way to the hut later on, in the greatest secrecy, as though it were something he wanted to keep to himself; and if the old woman was not at home or if she was asleep, he pressed his nose flat against the pane in order at least to get a glimpse of the little flame. As small as he was, he imagined how pretty it would be with the little flame in the room, when the old woman lay there all alone and dead. He often thought of the old woman lying dead in her cottage; the flame seemed to talk, forever and unchangingly, about something which was connected with her death.

This series of images, arising one after the other from a sort of secret and forgotten storeroom, was so vivid that he got the impression that the little flame beneath the dwarf-woman's icon illuminated by its feeble light a whole world of unknown knowledge within him. "Longing dwells within it," he thought. And he came to reflect that, if he knew so little of what dwelt in his innermost being, how much the less he knew of what went on within this people from whom he had sprung, and from whom he had somehow become estranged. What did he know of its innermost and dream-veiled secrets?

All at once he realized that here he entered a culture which, in an essential and decisive way, was directed toward   [p. 27]   the East, which still stood in living contact with impulses from distant and duskily illuminated centuries, when crusaders from Novgorod and holy men from Athos had implanted the light of Christianity in the people's heart, long before the West came to these reaches with fire and sword. He thought that just as he had preserved the memory of the little flame through the decades, so this people had concealed the flame of the naive faith within their hearts, and in all secrecy; and whoever did not realize it was a stranger here, and ought never to enter this land.

Many thought they were familiar with this responsive, cheerful, quick-eyed folk, but if one could penetrate to its innermost being and listen to the deepest springs which were concealed from the stranger with craft and cunning, one might perhaps get to hear sounds which had not been heard since the kantele fell silent and the people's song grew dumb. Why had it become so still in these groves? Why had the song grown silent? He looked around, as if he expected to hear Marjatta's song or the Old One's music^[1*] coming from the nearby stand of birch trees. What a magic and familiar peace, the peace of the wilderness, lay upon this little glade in the forest! He stopped, spellbound: this was in truth the land of song. The earth itself was song, the hillocks' soft rhythm was song, the catkins of the weeping birch were song. The landscape had acquired another tone, more mysterious and more spiritual. It was no longer just his childhood's landscape, it was something else and something more, it was the virgin land where his people had found its soul and where his own yearning had its primal home.