The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1961, Page 51

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
49
“You?” I said. I did not understand
how she could venture to do this to a
man in his [position in society, a medical
man and a member of Althing.
“Yes. I had a good deal to do with
those fellows, and not the least with
him, when I was superintendent at the
hospital here. We often clashed, but
I never gave in. At one time I engaged
a nurse. She was not pretty, and that’s
a fact, but she was a good person and
she performed her duties well. That
was sufficient for me. When this self-
same doctor saw her he ordered me to
let her go."
‘“What is the reason?’” I asked, and
looked him straight in the eye.
“‘She is a proper scarecrow’, he said,
abruptly.
“‘As a matter of fact, I was engaging
a nurse, not some beauty model!”
“Thereupon he shrugged his should-
ers, turned his heel, and walked away”.
A few days passed after the doctor’s
visit and I became steadily worse. The
day came when I did not feel strong
enough to get up. My landlady had
not forgotten about the doctor and
late that afternoon she called him in.
The doctor listened closely with his
stethoscope. I learned then that he was
actually kindhearted and conscienti-
ous; it was with a strong feeling of
compunction that he told me the
truth.
“You must have caught this from
somebody”, he said, again and again.
When my roommate learned the ver-
dict, she fled the room, terrified, and
moved into the adjoining room, which
she shared with a maid. She did not
dare to look in on me. For a week I lay
there, running a temperature.
One day I got out of bed, to do my
washing and to prepare for my move
to the sanatorium. I hung the clothes
on the line in the yard. There was frost
and when I returned indoors, I was
thoroughly chilled.
My landlady called me to the kitchen
for a cup of coffee. As I sipped my
coffee, my thoughts dwelt on my stay
in this old house, where I was in my
second year in residence. When I first
came there, which was in the summer-
time, my landlady was for the time be-
ing alone in the house, which was be-
ing converted from a hospital building
to an apartment house. Her bedroom
was on the ground floor, while mine
was upstairs. The rent was seven
crowns. Partly because this was more
than I could readily afford to pay, I
later took in a fellow-roomer. Mean-
while my landlady and I were the only
occupants of this house, which had
been the final haven for many patients.
My landlady asserted that there were
many strange presences or spirit mani-
festations in the house. She thought
this nothing strange, and pointed to
the old mortuary in the yard, a few
paces from the main entrance. There
corpses had lain, there autopsies had
been performed and there, on occasion,
human bones had been processed in
the interests of medical research.
My landlady asked me more than
once if I was afraid to sleep alone up-
stairs. I replied that I feared neither
the dark nor the dead. Occasionally
she asked me to go on an errand to
the old mortuary building. On my re-
turn from one such errand she remark-
ed:
“You are not afraid of anything!
That’s good, that’s the right attitude.
No one needs to fear the dead. But
the living we must fear. If you meet
with evil men, the devil is on the
move.”
I did not understand these words
till long after, when she told me her
bitter life story. I realized then that