Independent People (67 page)

No one awake, or anything like awake, on the croft, and yet the lad had never known such a day. He sat down in the grass, with his back to the garden wall, and began thinking. He began thinking of America, the glorious land across the ocean, the America in which he could have been anything he chose. Had he lost it for good and all, then? Oh, well, it mattered little. Love is better; love is more glorious than America. Love is the one true America. Could it be true that she loved him? Yes, there was nothing half so true. There is nothing half so unlike itself as the world, the world is incredible. True, she had ridden away and left him, but then she had been on one of the famous Rauthsmyri thoroughbreds, and possibly it had wanted to get home. She had never looked around, never slackened speed, but in spite of this seeming indifference, he was convinced, on this incomparable morning, that at some future date, say when he had become the freeholder of Summerhouses, he would bring her back home as his wife. Since it had begun in such a fashion, how could it end otherwise? What he had found was happiness, though she had ridden away and left him behind—and again and again he excused her on the ground that she had not been able to manage her horse. He was determined to spend his American money on a good horse, a first-class thoroughbred, so that in future he would be able to ride side by side with his sweetheart. Thus he lay stretched out in the grass of his native croft, looking up into the sky, into the blue, comparing the love he had won with the America he had lost. Leifur the Lucky also had lost America. Yes, love was better—and thus over and over again. He saw her still in his mind’s eye as she swept over the undulating heath, flitting through the lucid night like an airy vision, her golden locks streaming in the wind, her coat flapping against the horse’s rump. And he saw himself following her still, from crest to crest—till she was lost in the blue. And he himself was lost in the blue.

He slept.

W
HEREIN
lay the secret of Ingolfur Amarson’s success? To what gifts, what accomplishments, did he owe the speed of the ascent that had carried him so rapidly from obscurity to fame, from nonentity to national eminence? Already, in spite of his youth,
he was one of the most important and most influential men in the country, a national figure whose photograph was the daily delight of the newspapers, whose name the euphonic pride of the fattest headlines. Did he perhaps owe his rise, like great men before him, to a constant rooting and grubbing for personal profit? Was he always on the hunt for anything that people in need might have for sale, so as to be able to sell it again to others who could not do without it and who were driven, possibly, by an even greater need? Had he, for example, appropriated a croft here, a croft there in years of depression and sold them again when prosperity returned and prices rose? Had he perhaps lent people hay in a hard spring and demanded the same weight in sheep as security? Or food and money to the starving, at a usurious rate of interest? Or had he achieved greatness by stinting himself of food and drink, like an ill-provisioned criminal in flight through the wilds, or a peasant who, in spite of slaving eighteen hours a day, has been told by his dealer that his debts are still increasing and that he has now reached the limit of his credit? Or by having one solitary chair in his room, and a broken one at that, and shambling about in a filthy assortment of mouldy old rags all day, like a wretched tramp or a farm labourer? Or was the method he employed that of accumulating thousand upon thousand at the bottom of his chest until he was rich enough to found a savings bank and start lending folk money at a legal rate of interest, and then of standing in front of destitute men and informing them that the depth of his poverty was such that soon he would have to sell the very soul from his body if he wished to escape imprisonment for debt? No, Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson was by no means such a person; all his greatness came from his mother’s side. Then was he the sort of person who owned a number of boats and made poverty-stricken men catch fish for him at the risk of their lives? Did he grab all the profit on the fish that others had caught and buy mahogany furniture, works of art, and electric lighting with it, while those who had caught all the fish received a pittance that barely allowed them to buy their wives a penny packet of hairpins by the way of a luxury? Or did he draw a fat income from Denmark and other distant countries for managing the sort of business that sold the necessities of existence to men who in strict reality could not afford to exist? Or did he run his own business and, while crawling in the dust before the richer farmers and allowing them to decide the value of their sheep themselves, because they could
always threaten to take their custom elsewhere, did he rule like a tyrant over the unfortunate peasants who owed him money, starving them every spring and robbing them of every opportunity of advancement? No, Ingolfur Arnarson’s road to honour and repute had been neither the miser’s nor the merchant’s bloody career, hitherto the sole paths to wealth and true dignity recognized as legal by the Icelandic community and its justice.

What made Ingolfur Arnarson a great man was first and foremost his ideals, his unquenchable love of mankind, his conviction that the people needed improved conditions of life and better facilities for cultural advancement, his determination to mitigate his fellow men’s sufferings by establishing a better form of government in the country. This government, instead of being a helpless puppet in the hands of the peasant’s ruthless oppressors, the merchants, would be the small producer’s, especially the peasant’s, most powerful ally in his struggle for existence. Middlemen and other parasites would no longer be allowed to batten on the farming classes. Ingolfur wanted to elevate the farmer’s life to a position of honour and dignity, not in word alone, but in deed. Because of these ideals the farmers had chosen him to represent them in the Althingi and other places where their welfare was at stake. Now, so far this constituency had been completely neglected by the government. It was not that old Dr. Finsen, Bruni’s mouthpiece, had been inactive in Parliament; merely that he had concentrated his endeavours upon one particular cause, that of persuading the Treasury to rebuild and extend quays and breakwaters which had been rebuilt and extended for the merchant the previous spring, but which high tides had washed away like so much spit as soon as completed. For upwards of twenty years he had pursued this recurring object with commendable zeal and undiminished vigour, producing his bill with such annual regularity that eventually it became known as a perpetual motion. But when Ingolfur took his seat in Parliament, he had the whole matter quietly shelved and the building of piers and breakwaters was never again mentioned in public. The time was not long, however, before he was having modern roads laid and fine bridges built to improve communications throughout his constituency. And this was only the beginning. He wanted now to have large-scale agriculture introduced and decent houses built for folk. The National Bank in Reykjavik, which hitherto had acted as a sort of horn of plenty for speculators in cod and herring, was to be
liquidated and placed under State control as an agricultural bank, since the State already lay under heavy obligations as surety for its debts. This agricultural bank would then lend money to the farmers, at a low rate of interest, for building-purposes and the better cultivation of the land. He proposed in addition to direct a certain amount of public money into a special fund that would help the farmers to purchase agricultural implements, everything from ploughs, harrows, tractors, mowers, and mechanical rakes down to sewing-machines and separators. Another subsidy would provide the farmers with sewers and manure cisterns, for he was the sworn enemy of muck-heaps and open cesspools. The provision of electric lighting in the country district was also very close to his heart, but this plan, unfortunately, was still rather nebulous in form. Waking and sleeping he worked upon the problems presented by the new era of rural colonization and development, and though he was still cooperative manager in name and still gave his permanent address as Fjord, one could hardly say that he ever went there except on a flying visit, for now that a deputy looked after the co-operative society for him, he spent the greater part of the year in Reykjavik, where he edited his party’s newspaper, worked on parliamentary committees, and engaged in various other activities as guardian of the farmer’s interests. For his personal interests and profit he had never a moment to spare. He was, in a word, the Ingolfur Arnarson of the new era, the Icelandic pioneer of the twentieth century, differing from his illustrious predecessor in this respect only, that he was a Jonsson.

Then, now that spring was here and the general elections approaching, surely one might have taken it for granted that Ingolfur would have been returned unopposed and that no one would have had the foolhardiness to offer himself as a rival candidate? On the contrary. One must not assume that plutocracy and merchant power had been altogether routed just because they had suffered a set-back here and there, in those few, scattered places where the peasants had succeeded in forming consumers’ societies in their own defence. Then again, the present boom had strengthened rather than enfeebled the creed of egoism that was so popular in the towns; and this constituency had two towns, Fjord and Vik, and egoism was especially rife among the boat owners, craftsmen, and small traders in Vik, though probably it received its strongest backing from the new merchant who had suddenly appeared upon the scene in that town. This
person had rapidly surrounded himself with all the most prosperous men from town and country and had even gone and married the Fell King’s daughter within a few months of his arrival, though some people maintained that originally he had been nothing more or less than a common swindler and speculator, even that he had spent a year or two in jail. Then, in the third place, the influence of a foreign doctrine named Socialism was rapidly growing more perceptible in Vik. The town was rarely free of paid agitators, specially sent from the south, who vied with one another in leading the poorer classes astray and inciting them to a hatred of both God and men, as if God and men were not sufficiently antagonistic towards such people already.

Ingolfur Arnarson: “Socialism is all lies. They puff destitute people up with endless promises that can never have any hope of fulfilment until man has reached the same stage of maturity as the gods; but their real aims are simply murder and rapine.”

Fortunately Ingolfur Arnarson was in no great danger from this menace as yet. The danger threatened from the other side. The capitalists, it now appeared, had dug up a rival candidate with a whole bank behind him, the selfsame bank that Ingolfur had wanted to raze to the ground and rebuild as an agricultural bank run for the benefit of the peasantry, and with his own men in command, if he had any say in the matter. That swindlers in Reykjavik should send out one of their own kidney, the manager of a half-insolvent bank, to spread their gospel throughout the land, was in itself of course no great marvel. But what came of it? If this brass-faced missionary of a gang of capitalist criminals did not have the nerve, in his utter lack of ideals, originality, and elementary decency to get up on his hind legs and offer the farmers not only everything that Ingolfur Arnarson had promised them, but a whole host of other things into the bargain! He offered to equip every croft in the constituency with electric lighting within the space of a year or two, and not only this constituency, but throughout the length and breadth of the land as well.

Ingolfur Arnarson: “Actually the difference between his and the Socialists’ promises can only be regarded as a difference in forms of insanity, with this exception, that the bank manager does not propose that folks should be robbed and murdered, probably because he remembers only too well that he is the emissary of that fractional part of the nation’s population which has robbed and murdered people without cease ever since Iceland
was Iceland, though by different means and without preaching any form of Socialism.”

Later, when the banker had promised the farming classes the whole of Ingolfur Arnarson’s program and more if he were elected, all in a much shorter period of time than Ingolfur had planned, he turned his attention to the towns, which had so far never been accorded any definite place in the platform of the farmers’ representative. Here again he was the very soul of generosity. To Vik he promised a bank and a big fishing company, to Fjord a bone-meal factory and a coal mine. The seaside electors lent ready ears to this sort of talk, as was only natural, and it was considered probable that these populous places would be solid in their support of the banker. Well, this was a fine kettle of fish. Things were looking pretty black for Ingolfur Arnarson. Where could he turn now? No, esteemed electors, Ingolfur was no turncoat on the field of political battle; he did not allow other men to take the promises out of his mouth. What did he do, then? He simply resurrected the famous parliamentary evergreen of his predecessor Finsen, the old breakwater. And, what was more, he promised Fjord not only a breakwater and a quay; he promised it a complete harbour costing no less than haft a million crowns as well. An engineering scheme so vast, he said, would afford unlimited employment not only to the inhabitants of Fjord, but also to the working people of the neighbouring town of Vik; nor should one forget all these countless business undertakings which the State would establish in Fjord as a natural sequel to the construction of such a harbour. Never before, no, not even in old Finsen’s time, had quays and breakwaters excited such burning and such opportune interest as they did now. Then, feeling, no doubt, that his generosity ought to be as impartial as it was large-hearted, he transferred the banker’s bone-meal factory from Fjord to Vik, and instead of his opponent’s big fishing company he promised the little fishing company in Vik a large subsidy from the State, together with numerous other privileges which would make it the most flourishing little fishing company in the whole country and would ensure for everyone in Vik, no matter what the depth of his present poverty, a prosperous and happy future as a member of the middle classes. There remained the coal mine. This he divided impartially between the two townships, though always on the proviso that the mine should be proved to contain real coal, and not lignite or just ordinary stones and earth. When this stage had
been reached, it was virtually impossible to determine whose were the better promises, and it began to appear likely that the issue would depend not so much on what was actually offered as on the oratorical skill of the candidates, especially their ability to play upon the electors’ heart-strings. It was reported that many working people had already discarded Socialism in favour of the chance of securing permanent employment, prosperous membership in the middle classes, and a share in a boat.