Independent People (11 page)

He called on the others to sing, and they sang:

“Hurrah for the pioneer in his moorland dale!” they cried. “Hurrah for this fearless son of Iceland! Hurrah for Bjartur of Summerhouses and his wife!” One patriotic song followed another, echoing from the mountain in the hush of the early autumn evening, till the loon ceased crying from the lake, greatly wondering. At last the lads had brought in all the horses; a hearty farewell was given Bjartur, and some of the girls went inside to say good-bye to Rosa, but she had disappeared. Ingolf ur Arnar-son bade the singers continue when everyone had got on horseback, and the last song, in praise of the country life, resounded from the marshes as a farewell to the people of Summerhouses.

For a little while longer the happy voices were still heard, then they mingled with the clopping of hoofs as the visitors quickened their pace over the firmer ground of the river bank, and finally faded from the ear; the twilight of early autumn had fallen over valley and heath. And the dalesman stood alone in his home-field. Presently he went inside to go to bed. Rosa had reappeared; she said not a word.

There’s a present for you lying by the brook,” said Bjartur.

“For me?”

“Yes, both fish and fowl.”

“From whom?” she inquired.

“Go down and see if you don’t know his mark on them.”

Sneaking out of the house while Bjartur was undressing, she went down to the brook, and, true enough, there lay the fish he had caught and the ducks he had shot. She felt that in the valley there still sounded the voices of those who had sung around him; the songs that had been sung still dwelled fresh in her mind, lingering in the air over the marshes.

A flock of golden-eyes flew low over the home-field with a whistling of wings, still in apprehension.

“You needn’t be afraid any longer,” whispered the young woman. “He is gone now.”

For a long time she stood by the brook in the dusk, listening to the songs that were silent in the valley, to the shots that long since had been fired, and thinking of the harmless birds he had killed. Soon it would be autumn.

THE DAY
before the round-up Bjartur decided to shave off his summer beard. That he despised this formality was evident, and while the operation lasted he swore most cruelly, but there was no escaping it, the festival of the sheep was at hand. There was another task, too, equally disagreeable, awaiting him that day. It was, apparently, one of the symptoms of his wife’s nerves that she was afraid to remain alone at home if Bjartur was away. There lay before him now three days’ search of the mountain pastures, then, following immediately upon the distribution in the pens, the drive to town in company with the other farmers. Rosa had declared that she would not even hear of being left alone in the croft during this absence of her husband’s. First she had asked him to leave her the dog behind, but when he had shown her that he would be as much use in a round-up without his right foot as without his dog, she refused to listen any longer to reason and said: “Very well, there’s nothing else for it but to go over to Utirauthsmyri, rather than stay in this ghost-ridden hole.” Now, nothing was more distasteful to Bjartur than the thought of having to ask any boon of the people of Utirauthsmyri, and the result was that he offered to try to search put a yearling ewe of his, one of a little flock that he had seen grazing in the neighbourhood a few days beforehand. So he set off with the dog when he had finished shaving, found the lamb, caught it with the dog’s help, and returning with it towards evening, tethered it on the outskirts of the home-field. The lamb was called Gullbra. The woman slept badly that night, for the animal bleated impatiently in the home-field, unable to understand the whims of mankind.

The shepherds cantered into the home-field with their dogs long before it was light. Bjartur, who was standing on the paving with his stockings pulled over his trouser bottoms, shook hands, his shoulders wriggling with pleasure, and paraded up and down in front of them, or in a circle about them while he asked them all in for coffee. Most of them wanted to inspect the building; some of the lads clumped up the ladder into the billowing smoke to see Rosa, and the dogs tried to follow, but the ladder was too steep for them and they fell back yelping.

“This is my palace, then,” said Bjartur, “not a penny behind so far.”

“Many a one has begun with less and finished up as a farmer of substance,” declared the Fell King approvingly. He himself had begun with little, but by now, with the offices of Fell King, parish clerk, and dog-doctor to his credit, he had attained a position of some note and was reputed to be not averse to a seat on the parish council, should the occasion ever arise.

“Jon from Husavik started off with a lump of peat from the devil,” burst out one young man who was used to better surroundings, imprudently.

“Now then, you kids, out with you,” said the Fell King, who wanted to get the lads off on their journey immediately, for they had been amusing themselves by riding on his heels over the ridge in an attempt to make his horse bolt with him, and later, when crossing the marshes, they had ridden just in front of him so that they could spatter him with mud. Nor was he of a mind to sit down to coffee in Summerhouses with just anyone; he preferred a few well-chosen men who would warm to a drop of brandy, especially some of the crofters, who, not having hired men, had to attend the round-up in person. One of these lone workers was Thorthur of Nithurkot, father-in-law to Bjartur of Summerhouses. This veteran had lost most of his children in rather unnoteworthy fashion and had met with disappointment in the only enterprise that he had ever hallowed with any serious thought, his corn-mill, but he had not grown jaundiced in outlook or abusive of fortune; no, he took everything as it came with a serenity of mind that approached the philosophic, a cheerful resignation that bordered on piety. Already on the stairway he was heard to express his admiration for the rare smell that his darling’s smoke had, and she helped him up through the hatchway and hid her face against his grimy cheek and the straggling hairs of his beard.

“Mother sent her love to her little darling, and she asked me to give you these few scraps,” he said, handing her a little parcel wrapped in a handkerchief. It contained sugar and coffee, half a pound of each.

She could not tear herself away from the old man. She clung to him and wiped her eyes on her apron, her manner suddenly so childlike in its intimacy and candour, so affectionate, that Bjartur felt that never in his life had he seen this woman before.
In a moment she seemed to have cast off all the stubborn gloom of the woman of the moors, to have changed into a little girl capable of showing her feelings. “Father, Father,” she wept, “how I’ve looked forward to seeing you!”

This she said. Without Bjartur ever having realized it, she had cherished this hope in her heart, had waited long for her father. And when he saw her clinging to him so childishly free in her embrace, he was gripped as on his wedding night by the unhealthy suspicion that his kingdom on the moors was not as undivided as he himself would most wish it.

The men sat down, produced their snuff-horns, and proceeded to discuss the weather with the deep gravity, the scientific restraint, and the ponderous firmness of style with which this topic was always hallowed. A general review of the weather during the past winter was succeeded by a more minute analysis of the varying conditions of spring, with a comprehensive survey of the lambing season and the condition of the sheep and the wool, followed in turn by an examination, week by week, of the summer. One corrected another, so that there was no lack of accuracy; they remembered every dry wind of consequence, produced complete records of the atmospheric conditions during every period of rain and storm, and recalled what this one had prophesied, and what the other, but how in the end everything had taken its own course in spite of prophecies. Each of them had waged alone his world war against the ruthless elements; each had managed somehow to get his crop of hay, spoiled or unspoiled, home on his own horse. Several of them still had hay lying out in the meadows; one had had his blown away by the wind; another’s crops had been flooded.

With the exception of the Fell King they were all lone workers and had not the means to hire capable help, but had often to manage with what little assistance they could get from their half-grown children, old people, imbeciles, or other encumbrances.

“For fifteen years I farmed without a hired man,” said the Fell King, who had now risen into the ranks of the middle-class farmers, “and when I look back on them now, it often seems to me that those were my best years. When you start paying wages you can say good-bye to prosperity. Wages are what keep a man down for good and all.”

“Your landed fanners can say what they like as far as I’m concerned,”
declared Einar of Undirhlith, “but it’s a dog’s life without some lusty lout or other to lend you a hand. And always will be. It’s starvation, physical and spiritual. And always will be.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have much to complain about, Einar, as long as your son Steini sticks at home,” observed Krusi of Gil.

“Oh, they all want their wages, sons and strangers alike,” retorted Einar. “And it’s a short-lived blessing in any case; the land can’t hope to compete with the sea these days, and I expect Steini will take the same road as the others before he’s much older. The mother’s milk is hardly dry on their lips before they’re off; the land is the land; the sea is the sea. Take Ragnar of Urtharsel, for instance, how did he fare? He had three sons, all as strong as horses; their beards had hardly begun sprouting before they were off to sea. One was drowned and the other two finished up in America. And did they drop their mother a line in spring, when their father died? No, not a word; not even a couple of dollars to keep her mind off her sorrow. And now the old woman and her daughter have made the croft over to the minister and are staying with him.” Einar prophesied that the same sort of thing would happen to him, since two of his sons had already left him and the third was out of hand.

But Krusi of Gil considered that children were no trouble at all compared with old folk. No one would credit their appetite; his father had died a year ago at the age of eighty-five. “And now, as you all know,” he added, “they knock me a dollar or two off the taxes and give me my mother-in-law to maintain. She’s eighty-two, and so far gone, poor old body, that we’ve had to keep a continual eye on the tools all summer, because she’s determined to hide them all.” (“Aye, and a rare worker, too, in her day,” mumbled Thorthur of Nithurkot.)

“Personally, I can’t see what you chaps have to worry about,” said Thorir of Gilteig, whose daughter Steinka, though unmarried, had made him a grandfather a few months before. “The sons can usually look after themselves, wherever they happen to land, and though the old folk hang on with one foot in the grave for a long, long time, the other usually follows in the end. But the girls, lads; the girls are a source of such worry and trouble to their parents that I envy no man who has a daughter in these hard times. Would you say, for instance, that woollen stockings, worked at home from the softest of yarn, were good enough for them nowadays? No, vanity and mischief is all they’re after, and all they want from one year’s end to another.”

The Fell King: “Oh, I don’t know. Many a man has had comfort of his daughters. It’s always nice to have something with a smile and a song running about the house, surely.”

“Running about, yes; and if you don’t give them a purseful of money to throw about in town, they worry the life out of you to go into service, preferably in Reykjavik. And if they can’t have either, they have their fling at home. They begin by demanding stockings made of pure cotton, which are nothing but a bloody swindle, and there they go flinging money away on that trash, which wouldn’t keep a flea warm, though there’s no lack of length in them, damn them, and they’re not considered to be worth the money unless they reach right up to the crotch; but, if a stitch goes, where are they then? In my time a woman was content if her stockings reached as far as her breeches, and she was considered a good wife for all that. There was less flightiness, too, among the women in those days, let me tell you, and maybe it wasn’t the custom to lift the skirts as high as nowadays.”

“Yes,”
agreed the Fell King, “that may well be so. And talking of skirts, I don’t think anyone will deny that they seem to be a lot shorter these days than they used to be.”

Thorir: “And where does it all end? I have it from a reliable source that cotton isn’t considered good enough now. I hear that one girl has bought herself neither more nor less than silk stockings.”

“Silk stockings???”

“Yes, silk stockings, neither more nor less than stockings of pure silk thread. I can even tell you her name: it’s the minister’s middle daughter, the one that was in the south last year.” (“Oh somebody must have made that story up,” muttered Thorthur of Nithurkot indulgently.)

“Our Steinka may have her faults, but she’s no bigger liar than most folk, and she’s ready to swear to it on oath that she’s seen her with them on. First of all, the women stop wearing petticoats, out of nothing but vanity and corruption; then come cotton stockings right up
to the
crotch—they and the rest of their finery aren’t long in equalling the price of a lamb—then they shorten their skirts, and when shamelessness reaches such a degree, it’s naturally a small step to silk stockings, and in the end, I suppose, to no skirts at all.” (Thorthur of Nithurkot: “I haven’t managed a new pair of trousers for seven years.”) “And what do they get out of all this? Consumption is nothing. But when decent principles and virtuous womanhood is lost to the nation, where does it stand then?
Many a poor old father’s back is breaking with the burden of all this immorality.”