He counted the days now till he should be able to look with his own eyes on palaces he had known hitherto only from pictures in books—real palaces of kings! They would be no longer castles in the air to him, but real; grand piles of solid stone and mortar. He could walk through their halls, breathe the air of bygone centuries that hung there still; could touch with his hands the very walls that had stood there for hundreds of years.
He painted for himself a future like that of one of the old Icelandic bards. He would play to kings and nobles. There was a lust of travel in his blood, of wandering through life by the royal road of glory and fame. It was almost painful to remember that he had ever thought of living all his days at Borg, as his ancestors had done.
The great world called to him, and every fibre in him answered to the call. He knew that there, where he was going, were wonderful machines contrived to do the work of men. He had never been able to think of such machines as really inanimate things; he longed to see with his own eyes the arms, hands, and fingers they must surely possess. Yet, at the same time, the thought of it made his flesh creep.
Think—to fill a room with light by the mere turning of a switch! And to talk with people through a wire—which he imagined as hollow. And there were places where conjurers worked miracles, and acrobats performed impossible feats; clowns jested and played tricks.... And gardens filled with cages of strange beasts from countries even farther off....
All these and many other things which he had read of, and grown to consider as accessible only to a favoured few, were now to be part of his own surroundings in his daily life. He would live in a city with streets like deep chasms between unscalable cliffs—cave-hollowed cliffs peopled with human beings, instead of giants and goblins. He would go to theatres, where actors seemed to kill one another, and thunder, lightning, and snow could be brought into play within four walls. He would travel endless miles in machine-driven cars that raced along over rails of steel....
Ormarr lay in his dark room, his eyes wide open, letting his fancy paint all manner of visions in the richest colours. His mind was overwhelmed by a turmoil of new sensations.
He tried to recall, one after another, all the pictures he had seen of things in foreign lands; even to portraits of celebrities, of jockeys galloping over turf, and sordid lithographs with impossible figures in ridiculous postures, such as he had seen stuck up in the local stores.
A fever of anticipation burned in his veins. And when at last, towards morning, he dropped off into a broken sleep, he was still surrounded by a crowd of the impressions he had conjured up while awake. They vexed him now; he found himself being thrown from cars that raced away from him at full speed, losing his way in gloomy streets and labyrinthine passages, being snatched up by the steel arms of strange machines and crushed to pieces; standing with one end of a wire between his teeth and vainly trying to speak to a famous man at the other end; he switched on a light and set the house on fire, and was only saved from being burned to death by waking to find the sun shining full in his face.
CHAPTER IV
When a youth is thrown from the realm of fancy and solitude into a world of realities, one of two things takes place: either a process of reaction sets in, and he fortifies his soul in some faith or tradition; or he clutches greedily at life, becomes intoxicated by it, and loses his foothold. Whatever happens to him depends less upon strength of character than upon chance.