Independent People (40 page)

But with the autumn a letter arrived from Bruni informing all and sundry that he had just returned from a trip abroad. On this trip he had been fortunate enough to secure goods at particularly advantageous prices and had concluded negotiations with the Continent that insured his customers quite exceptional terms in the future; price-list enclosed. He was undercutting Ingolfur Arnarson’s society on all shop goods, outbidding it on all forms of produce. Never had marketing been so profitable in Fjord as it was that autumn. If Ingolfur Arnarson clapped them on the back, Tulinius Jensen patted them on the cheek. When Ingolfur Arnarson addressed them as my dear friend, Tulinius Jensen called them my love. If it was Ingolfur Arnarson that fell on their necks, it was Tulinius Jensen that kissed them. The Christian frame of mind had, in business, overstepped all the bounds of propriety. No one ever mentioned the word “debt.” Costly luxuries were slung at you
as if they were so much rubbish. Everybody was to be a landed farmer in two years. Bjartur made use of the opportunity and bought some timber and some iron.

“Gladly, even if it was for a two-storey house of concrete,” cried Tulinius Jensen as he fell on his neck. “And if you want to borrow some money, help yourself.”

Building, said the Summerhouses children in an ecstasy of anticipation. They would sit there planning it out, debating whether it should have two floors like the mansion at Rauthsmyri or one floor like the Fell King’s, but with a drawing-room as well as a kitchen. The building material lent wings to their imagination, but if they made so bold as to ask Bjartur any question, the reply was always short-spoken: keep on doing something. Asta Sollilja pictured a great kitchen, a range with numerous compartments, and shelves and racks for the china just as at Rauthsmyri; for of course there had all at once appeared china in plenty. She looked forward to coming home and cooking in the summertime. The kitchen door opens suddenly, and into this lovely kitchen steps a visitor in a huge coat, with ten toes and a string each of birds and fish; he offers her his kindly hand, some people have such good hands, you remember them on your death-bed. “But,” she reflected, “if Father were to build a drawing-room, where would we get the pictures? And the sofa?”

They were busy taking the last loads of wet hay home from the marshes. She had been carrying the hay for him with great industry while he did the binding. She liked working near her father when no one else was about, nothing could compare with a word of his praise. Finally the last truss was bound. They sat down on a haycock, wet and muddy. He took out his snuff. She rested her big, work-weary hands in her wet lap, staring down at her feet, which were over the shoe-tops in water. She had a high forehead; no, they were not of his kin, those high foreheads; his forehead was low and broad. Her eyebrows, arched and dark, indicated a different stock, as did the fine slender lines of the lower face with its sculptured chin, strong of form and curved in artistic continuity of the cheek. And that full, ripe lower lip with the exotic grace of its curve. Then she looked at him and he saw her eyes. The right eye was strangely clear; it was young, almost happy, and quite free. But her left eye, which saw nothing straight, her left eye was a different soul, a different nation pursuing a different course; it held things undreamed of, fragile, delicate longings circumscribed by anguish itself, the longing of a man bound in the hands of his
enemies; it was the cross-eye of her mother, who had died without achieving speech, who had lived in dread and disappeared, whom he had married but never owned. She had been young as a flower. It was as if he saw down through the years to far-off days. And was suddenly tired; autumn swept over his face in a moment, or rather his face dissolved into the paths of autumn without colour or form; one stands and faces one’s life, a stranger—

“Father,” she said. “It will be lovely when you start building.”

And then she noticed his face, the face that he never showed in the light of day, which no one knew or had ever been allowed to see, which never realized expression even in his most expert verse, the face of the man within. His poetry was technically so complex that it could never attain any noteworthy content; and thus it was with his life itself. Once more she longed to throw her arms round his neck and bury her face in a certain spot. He stood up and stroked his daughter’s head with his muddy palm.

“Some day Father will build a big house for the flower of his life,” he said. “But it won’t be this year.”

Nor was it.

He contented himself that autumn with building a ewe-house with a corrugated iron roof to replace the old hut he had thrown up ten years ago on the bank of the brook. The cow-shed was made into a lamb-house and the ground floor of the croft adapted for the cow and the horse. The floor was paved and a door made in one of the sidewalls so that a muck-heap could be started behind the croft and the dung would not have to be shovelled out of the same door as the folk used.

In spite of all their disappointment this was still a sufficiently great event. New men on the croft, famous master builders who turfed the ewe-house walls in such a fashion that the courses took on a herring-bone pattern; a journeyman carpenter with foot-rule, pencil, and saw, mental arithmetic in his eye; the fresh scent of shavings blending with the smell of autumn’s mud and rain; boisterous conversation at meal-times, fragrant snuff, poetry, merchants and co-operative societies, sheep, sheep again, interesting information from irrelevant quarters, unknown phrases, brawls, sweet coffee.

“From time immemorial the dealers have been swine enough to oppress the peasantry by buying cheap, selling dear, and sticking the difference in their own pockets. Anyone can see that the dealer is one of the farmer’s arch-enemies.”

“They’ve saved the lives of a few in hard years all the same.”

“Maybe, but how far did this love of theirs ever reach? How high had the debt to be before they would refuse to add a pound of rye meal to your bill? A man may well hang his head in shame if he has to ask for a handful of rye meal to be put on somebody else’s account.”

“And now the co-op has introduced percentages. They pay you a percentage now on top of what you get for your produce, provided the market is good. When did it ever occur to the merchants to pay percentages, may I ask?”

“Oh, it’s just like the Rauthsmyri gang to invent percentages. I shouldn’t be surprised if these percentages of theirs are nothing but a lot of guff.”

“They’re thinking of starting a savings bank in Fjord, too, so that folk’s money can give off interest.”

“Interest?”

“Yes, it’s a sort of offspring that money spawns if it’s put in a savings bank. Some reliable man or other borrows it from the savings bank and pays it back at an even higher rate of interest.’

“Yes, the Rauthsmyri crew wouldn’t give a damn if they lost what they had had lent to them as long as there was money in it for themselves.”

Bjartur was true to his merchant in spite of all opposition, steadfast in his conviction that it would pay him better to deal with Tulinius Jensen than with the Bailiff, positive that all the Rauthsmyri societies and inventions had one aim only, to gain percentages and interest alike for themselves.

But higher than all dealers and societies stand the dreams of the heart, especially in the autumn when dusk is falling and the clouds of the world are full of marvellous pictures. Asta Sollilja sits by the window watching them. Her mother is downstairs talking to the cow, feeding it and stroking it and waiting for it to be thirsty, while her grandmother sits drooping on her bed in the dusk with her finger in her mouth and scarcely a single line of a hymn on her lips—incomprehensible being who in spite of everything has a sister in the south. And then from the heavens there gleam remote continents with varicoloured oceans and protean seaboards; faerie lands, cities. Up from the glass-green sea rise purple-red palaces which submerge once more with their towers, and the ocean dissolves and transforms itself into a fruitful orchard encircled by fantastic mountains with living peaks that curtsy low and fall into an embrace before they finally disappear. She had never sat by the window like that before. And now
into the fugitive apparitions of the air she interwove her thoughts of him. Him. Those strange countries with oceans and flitting sails, cities and orchards that lived and swirled in the skies in exotic brilliance, were all one wordless thought of him, one long recollection of occasions that had never been, one dream of the future without world, without days. Him; him; him. She heard the cow slunking up her water down below, and far, far away her mother telling the cow about the life of man, and the girl listened to the murmur of their remote irrelevant talk from the distance of the clouds above, where she had her home; where she had her kingdom with him as in the words of the folk-dance:

Oh, that it might never end; that it might live on to eternity in the restless splendour of its colour. And thus night after night she sat watching the silent music of the clouds.

T
HE FLOOR
space in the newly built ewe-house was inviting, and Bjartur, though well aware that he now had a cow to feed, boldly yielded to the temptation to retain a greater number of sheep than usual that autumn. He was thankful for every opportunity of sending them out to graze; the boys watched over them in the marshes. But though Bjartur was very fond of sheep, was continually thinking about sheep, and even had a reputation for handling sheep rather well, it was always touch-and-go whether these much discussed animals survived the winter, let alone the spring. They tell the same story everywhere, it takes next to nothing to finish a sheep off in the springtime, and such has been the case for a thousand years. From the time of the colonization this guileless creature has always had a quite remarkable propensity for death in the spring.

The family, on the other hand, were thriving famously this winter, and for the first time in many years Finna was not brought to her usual mid-winter bed; it was the beginning of March before she showed any signs of pregnancy. She had always some trouble with her chest, of course, as had her mother too, that dreadful range with its eternal smoke, they coughed from the time of kindling till well on in the day, then started another fit in the evenings. To make matters worse, there was the strong stench of cow-dung and horse’s urine in the croft, and this, coupled with the reek, caught Finna in the chest and gave her all sorts of sickly feelings. She kept on looking after the cow herself, but was no longer allowed to give her her hay, as she was far too prodigal with the small supply of home-field hay, which Bjartur preferred to reserve for the lambs and such of the ewes as were off their fodder. But she fed her and swept out for her, watered her and raked out the muck, striving always to keep her stall as clean as possible, for cows are grateful for such things. She would scratch her and stay with her in the stall talking to her as long as she could. She gave her many a fish-bone that she had managed to filch from the dog unnoticed by Bjartur, even lumps of dough when the bread was being made. The cow often fell into fits of depression nowadays, moaning querulously in long-drawn despair as if there would never be another spring. On these occasions the woman knew that her heart was beating in anguish, that she felt her life empty and pointless. At such a time Finna would go down to her in the middle of the day, this woman who had so little comfort herself, and stroking her dewlap and her head, would say that the forces of good would triumph finally in the life of man; and the cow would be quiet again and begin chewing the cud. Old Blesi, who despaired of ever escaping this inane and ruminating fellowship, snorted coldly over the crossbar. The children, however, had learned from their mother to love the cow and respect her because of the milk that augments the soul’s joy and induces more harmonious relationships in the household. But Bjartur would not touch the swill that deprives one of one’s appetite and makes one costive; he only gave the lambs that had diarrhea some chewing-tobacco boiled in milk.

Why, they even acquired a rosy colour in their cheeks and the sparkle of healthy youth in their eyes, these children who had hitherto been nothing but snivelling colds and slothfulness. All intentional laziness had disappeared; they no longer experienced
their old unhappy listíessness or the joyless emptiness that felt as if their stomachs were blown out with wind and water. Asta Sollilja improved in her understanding of the more obscure passages in her father’s ballads, learned to shape letters on a smoked glass, and made rapid progress in mental arithmetic. And so quickly did she sprout in this one winter that she could hardly get her old things on without splitting them, so they cut pieces out of the arm-holes and sewed gussets in the arms and sides; she was a lanky fourteen-year-old now, with a complexion, a bosom, peculiar feelings, and healthy occasional indispositions. They even had to add a broad strip to the bottom of her skirt because of her knees, which showed under the hem and had grown strong and plump since the preceding summer.

The minister came during the winter and asked her to read for him, and admired her skill in reading; she had taught her eldest brother to read as well; but how much religious knowledge had she learned? It turned out that she hadn’t learned any religious knowledge at all, only prayed to God once or twice without knowing Him. “We can’t have this,” said the minister. ‘It’s illegal. The girl is old enough to be confirmed.”

“I can’t say that I have much faith in this modern religion,” said Bjartur. “But we had a grand pastor here once; those were the days. Those who were fortunate enough to know old Reverend Gudmundur will remember him as a great man to their dying day. His breed will perpetuate his name in this district. For ever and ever.”