Independent People (37 page)

Then was there no oasis in the desert of the days? Yes, the days had their oases: mealtimes, the salt fish, the porridge, and the sour black pudding. In these lay the only joy in life, for the cow had not calved yet. The day’s first ray of hope was the moment when their father called to Asta Sollilja and gave her the long-desired command to go home and boil the fish. At first it had always seemed that no matter how long they waited, this moment would never arrive, but eventually the boys discovered that the more often they looked at their father in reminder and expectation, the longer did he delay in calling to Asta Sollilja.

At last Asta Sollilja would set off home to boil the fish. Never were her steps so light, for she, too, had long been waiting for the moment when her father should think fit to indicate that she might lay aside her rake in the cruel thick of the daily strife and go home and busy herself with the fire. The fire; as soon as it began to burn up she would take off her wet things and dry them by the stove. Sometimes she might break off a little piece of sugar to sweeten her mouth, and when the fish had been put in the pan, she would sit down in front of the fire and warm herself.

Her grandmother, busy with her needles, would be mumbling away at her hymns without an upward look. But the girl knew not God nor His psychology, rather savoured to the full these moments under the roof of the hut, their security and the mellow calm that is characteristic of midsummer—fatigue, heavy grass, miry puddles, all was forgotten for the moment. Slowly the porridge
began to bubble and boil, the smell of salt fish to fill the room; in front of her burned the home fire. But the boys in the meadow were no longer mowing, they had long since lost all the power of their muscles; they were simply beating the wet grass with their scythes in some endless imbecility and raising only a spurt of water, a slice of sod, or at most a few broken straws; Asta Sollilja has fallen asleep of course and forgotten all about us. It was a joyful sight when at last they caught sight of her with the meal-tub on the outskirts of the home-field.

Dinner in the meadow was like all true joy, sweetest in anticipation. The salt codfish and the rye bread, the thin porridge and the sour blood pudding, the interminable rain that streamed down into these dishes while they were busy eating—a more rigid menu could not have been found anywhere. The fish gave off a vigorous odour in the rain, and the smell hung in the nostrils for hours afterwards, in the clothes, on the hands. Never did the children long so much for food as when they stood up from their meal under the hay-rick.

Whatever the weather, Bjartur always left the others when the meal was over. He would he down on a truss of hay with his hat over his face and fall asleep at once. As soon as he moved in his sleep he would roll off the truss, sometimes into a pool, and would be awake immediately, which pleased him greatly. He considered that it was proper for a man to sleep for four minutes during the daytime, and he was always in a bad temper if he slept longer. The womenfolk wormed in under the hay-rick when they had finished eating. Then the shivering would begin, for they were sitting on wet grass, and they would rise with hands benumbed and pins and needles in their legs and go to look for their rakes. And if Bjartur heard them complaining about the damp, he would reply that it was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. “It’s nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry,” he would say. “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a bit the worse for it.”

O
NE
evening when the meadow mowing was almost over, when dusk was already falling, for the days were rapidly drawing in, what should they see but a man with a pack-horse picking a trackless
way down from the top of the heath to the flats on the other side of the lake? Here was a peculiar sort of expedition—obviously a stranger to the district, maybe not quite right in the head. Or was it an outlaw? What did the fellow think he was doing, running around on other folk’s land? Perhaps it was an elf-man. At any rate it wasn’t any normal sort of person. Even Bjartur stopped work and leaned forward on the handle of his scythe to watch this person who scorned so much the beaten track. What was the fellow looking for? He explored the flats near the lake, surveyed the lake itself, likewise the air. Was it a foreign scientist? Or a land speculator from the south? Was he speculating? On other people’s land? Finally he took the baggage from his horse’s back and let it loose in the marshes on the other side of the lake, what the devil. Then he walked round the lake and made his way towards them. They stood watching him, work forgotten. Riddle. Mystery. Is there anything more enthralling than a stranger in the landscape? The children forgot even the cruel fatigue of the fifteenth hour.

He did not seem to bear much resemblance to other people. He was bareheaded and wearing a brown shirt and armless pullover; sunburnt, slim, newly shaved, slight stoop, fine features and judicious eyes like a foreigner, good evening.

“Good evening,” replied the others warily.

“Summerhouses people?” inquired the visitor as he came up.

“It all depends on how you look at it,” replied Bjartur rather testily, advancing a pace or two on the visitor with his scythe at the ready. I’ve always understood it was my land anyway, whoever you may be. And I can’t say that I see what the idea is of prospecting on other people’s land.”

The visitor did not offer his hand in the customary greeting, but halted a few paces away and looked about him in the dusk, then thoughtfully produced a pipe and tobacco. “A pretty valley,” he remarked. “As pretty as any I’ve ever seen.”

“Pretty,” said Bjartur; “hm, that depends on whether the hay goes to hogwash or not. You don’t happen to have been sent here by anyone, do you?”

Sent? No, the visitor hadn’t been sent by anyone, he had just felt that since the place was so nice, he might ask leave to pitch a tent there, on the other side of the lake.

“This land,” said Bjartur, “this land reaches south to the heath there and up to the mountain peaks in the north, west to the middle of the ridge, and east as far as Moldbrekkur. All the lowland belongs to me.”

The visitor made some rather incomprehensible observation about all this lowland making one park.

“Whether it would make one park or not,” replied Bjartur, “it’s still
my
property, and I can’t say that I care to see strangers nosing about on it. It’s thirteen years and more since I raised this farm from the ruins, and as for the Rauthsmyri crew, I owe them not a penny. I was told when I started that there was a ghost here, but I fear neither ghosts nor men. I own good sheep.”

The visitor understood and nodded his head: “Private enterprise.”

I don’t know,” said Bjartur, “and I’m not praising myself up either. I only know that I’m no worse off than most private individuals hereabouts, and, if anything, maybe a trifle better for never having made it a habit of mine to get into debt, which I’ve managed quite easily by always endeavouring to keep parasites away from my hay, until last winter, when I had cattle forced on me from a certain quarter. But naturally I never consider myself the equal of the big men, except that I feel I’m a big enough man for myself, and therefore I refuse to allow any meddling with my affairs and have no desire to be in partnership with anyone.”

But the visitor was quick to explain that by private enterprise, naturally, he hadn’t meant that they should all become landed farmers or rich men; and in any case he wasn’t too fond of dealing with the big farmers, he preferred to see his coppers passed on to the smallholders—

Bjartur, leaping at once to the conclusion that it must be somebody with some new business methods in his head, declared that he had determined to deal with no one but his own merchant; “the old fellow has kept body and soul together for more than a few in his time, and though Jon of Myri founds his co-operative societies and promises a bonus when times are good, I expect the bonus he talks about will be thickest where he bites it off, with his three hundred and fifty lambs every autumn, and thinner for us men with only thirty or forty for sale. And what about the bad years? If the whole thing crashes, it will be we who will have to pay the losses, I expect; and not only ours, but theirs as well, damn them. So, as far as business deals are concerned, my friend—”

The visitor hastened to assure Bjartur that he had never even dreamed of trying to undermine the good relations that existed between the crofter and his dealer; he was just a chap that liked to try a gun or a hook and line when he was out in the country
in the summertime, “and as I had heard that you didn’t bother much about your game, I wondered whether you wouldn’t allow me to try a line—for a consideration, of course.”

There’s nothing worth fishing for,” said Bjartur. “Sensible people haven’t the time to waste on the rubbish you’ll find in the lake, and in any case whatever was caught in the marshes here, fish or fowl, wouldn’t do my sheep much good. It may possibly do the big proprietors’ sheep some good, or the big proprietors’ sons even; there’s that son of the Bailiff at Utirauthsmyri, for instance, the one they call the secretary now, who’s bred on the Persian religion and has been made manager of that society he and his father started—he could never see anything draw the breath of life without wanting to blow the brains out of it, blast him.”

Old Fritha, imprudent and spiteful as ever, bawled out from the meadow: “Listen to them running down their betters, these flaming bog-trotters that grind everybody down, relations and strangers, dead and alive; and everything but the lice that crawl over their own mouldy hides.”

The visitor exhaled smoke in her direction without being quite clear what attitude he ought to take in this affair.

“Oh, don’t bother your head about what spews up out of that over there. It’s only one of those bloody old paupers, and it’s not the first time her tongue’s run away with her,” said Bjartur in order to prevent any misunderstanding, and in such a fashion that the stranger now considered himself free to renew his petition.

“Well,” replied the crofter at length, “if you aren’t speculating and you aren’t sent by any company either, I don’t see why you shouldn’t pitch a tent for a night or two, provided you don’t trample the grass down too much for me. But I won’t tolerate speculators on my land. And no members of any company or society either, because I consider societies the ruination of the individual. And my land isn’t for sale, anyway, and least of all for money. I and my folk live here for our sheep in peace and quiet, and we have enough of everything as long as our sheep have enough of everything. If only this damned rain would piss itself dry some time.”

The ground was cleared for negotiation when the stranger had at last managed to convince Bjartur that he was neither a speculator nor a member of any society. He was only an ordinary southerner, the sort of fellow you often see in the summer, a holiday-maker, in innocent exile. Someone had told him that there was good sport here, the name of his informant he had forgotten. He
would like to hang around for a few days, lacked nothing, was provided with everything. As proof of this he produced a notecase bulging with banknotes, real money in a bundle; they and the banks see eye to eye, these southerners; some folk say they use this stuff in the backhouse. In spite of Bjartur’s disdain for money, the sight of it did not now fan to produce a certain impression. He offered even to help the man with his tent, but the visitor declined with thanks, he could manage everything himself. He took leave of them with a farewell as perfunctory as his greeting, leaving behind him a cloud of blue smoke that dissolved over the meadow in the calm of the evening, and a fabulous fragrance. He had said so little, been so offhanded in his greeting, and displayed so much money that there was no end to what the imagination could spin around such a man, a great man, an elegant man, distance itself in one man, the prince of the fairy tale; and now he had become neighbour to the Summerhouses people. His proximity was like the flavour of Sunday in mid-week, like an interval in the downpour, colour in drabness, material for thought in apathy, stimulation in the midst of life’s cheerlessness. That night Asta Sollilja dreamed repeatedly that the apple started from her throat

Then on the following day the cow calved, and thus inside twenty-four hours there befell two great events on the moors.

She had been terribly heavy, poor thing, these last few weeks, and Finna, who knew what it was like, would trust no one but herself to bring her out in the morning or home at night. No one else was slow enough with her, no one had the patience to wait while she persuaded herself out of the narrow cow-shed door with her flanks grazing the doorpost on either side. To Finna it would never have occurred to beat this creature as she laboured up to the hocks through the mud in front of the croft. Bukolla would halt after every step, snorting and grumbling, but looking round occasionally at the woman, twitching her ears, and mooing. They parted company usually up in the hollow by the brook, and the woman would stroke her dewlap, and soon we’ll be having a little calf with a round forehead and feeble legs, long and clumsy, and I hope everything will go all right for us, and you’ll see me tonight; and well take things easy and think of each other. Then Finna would go off home and the cow would begin cropping noisily at the grass, her nostrils wrinkling with the pleasure of luxury, for the grass along the brooks was strong and juicy.

But that evening Finna did not find the cow in her usual pastures, and she thought it rather strange, for the cow had shown
little desire to wander of late now that she was expecting, and had long given up her attempts to run away. She wandered along from hillock to hillock, farther and farther along by the mountain’s side, calling: “Bukolla, Bukolla dear.” At last the cow answered her from a grassy little hollow by a ravine; she lowed once only in reply and was found. She had calved. The woman understood at once.

Finna found her unusually difficult to handle; she would not behave and had to be driven along, circling continually about the calf, sniffing at it and licking it and mooing softly at every step, not a thought to spare for anything else. But Finna understood. When one has had a calf, the calf comes between the mother and the object she had been fondest of before. The busy aggressiveness of happy motherhood had mastered her behaviour and wiped out its more civilized features. It was as if this creature’s dreams had all come true in one day, and as if she needed nothing more; the sympathy of others had become a superstition. It was a long, long time before the woman managed to coax her home to the croft.