Independent People (9 page)

“I thought you were a free king,” she said derisively.

“Haven’t we plenty of decent fish, maybe? We are our own masters, we are finding our feet on our own land. We don’t have to eat the filthy refuse offered to the farmhands at Rauthsmyri, we eat excellent dried catfish, and up to a while ago had foreign potatoes to it. There’s plenty of rye bread, tons of sugar. And it isn’t my fault if you’ve let the biscuits grow mouldy. You should have eaten the biscuits if you felt like a change, instead of letting them grow mouldy. Rye biscuits are always confectionery. What’s more, lass, rye biscuits are Continental confectionery.”

I’m sure Father would lend us those three draught-horses of his to carry the sedge home.”

“I won’t take the begging road to anyone for anything, unless life depends on it and I can pay to the last penny,” said Bjartur. “And now enough of this. It’s vanity and nothing else for crofters on an isolated farm to talk about a cow; this is a sheep farm, we have to build up on sheep, I won’t listen to any more nonsense.”

“And what if I have a baby?”

“My child shall live on its mother’s milk. I had boiled fish and tallow and cod-liver oil in my sucking-bag long before I was a year old, and throve well on it.”

She stared at him with anguish-stricken eyes, and everything personal seemed suddenly to have been wiped out of her face. He was touched, and said in apologetic tones: “You can see it for yourself: the most pressing need must come first, and that is to get some of the land paid off. The majority of the lambs will
have to go to reduce accounts with the Bailiff, and it would be madness to dive head over heels into debt and then have to cut our sheep down, all for the sake of a cow. But in a year or so well try to get a bit of a vegetable garden going for you, lass.” He clapped her on the shoulder as he would have clapped a horse.

B
UT
in spite of the potent medicines that Bjartur had offered to procure her from Dr. Finsen’s, what happened was that his wife’s nerves, instead of improving, grew steadily worse and worse. At night she would give him his bread and cold fish, but would boil some thick oatmeal porridge for herself, standing bent over the range, stirring away with the ladle while the smoke from the half-dried brushwood filled the whole room. Bjartur would pick the bones out of the fish, then, after laying the two halves together so that each thick part covered each thin part in compensation, would bite into it as if it were a slice of bread, and all the while continue eying his wife from beneath his brows. Twelve months ago she had been a girl with a fresh complexion who used to change into her best frock in the evenings and wash herself, a girl who could laugh in her own way at whatever she considered amusing. Suddenly this girl had become a middle-aged woman, a slattern in an old sackcloth apron that she had worn for milking at Myri. She had grown grey and flabby in the face, the light had gone from her eyes, the colour from her cheeks, the grace from her carriage. Thus quickly was this flower of his fading in spite of plenty of fish, bread, and porridge, potatoes up to a week or two ago—and rye biscuits, which were actually Continental confectionery. “It looks to me as if she’s grieving for some damned sweetheart,” he said to himself—she could hear if she liked. One thing was certain: she shrank away from him so much that she took good care never to go to bed before he was asleep, and if her movements as she climbed in woke him up, she would be quick to turn her back upon him; and if he whispered in her ears, she would lie like a corpse, and all desire would leave him. He wasn’t so damned frisky himself, either—always that tired, done-up feeling, somehow. He cursed it silently; the best years of his life, eighteen of them, gone to the Bailiff and his crew, and now a fellow couldn’t get some enjoyment out of marriage when at last he had become his own master. When he fell asleep he would see cows cropping
his grass. The cows were bad-tempered and made a rush at him, frightening him in dreams as much now as in childhood. He would start up with a jump and, still dazed, mutter: “Sooner a coffin than a cow.” And in the mornings when he went outside and round the corner to relieve himself, he would cross himself to the east and mutter: In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: sooner a coffin than a cow. For ever and ever, amen.”

And there she was standing over her porridge, sticking more and more brushwood under the pan; it crackled and crackled, and steadily the smoke grew thicker and thicker.

“Careful with the firing, lass,” he said. But she did not hear and added still more.

“Oh well, it’s your own look-out, lass, as it’s your job to pull it usually.”

At last the porridge was ready and she took a basin and filled it, good God, right up to the brim; how much was the woman going to eat? Dipping her hand into the box she broke oflf a great lump of sugar-candy to eat with her porridge. He watched all this from under his brows, half scandalized that anyone should even think of such a thing, sugar-candy with porridge, the idea of it! Not that he grudged her it. Far from it; he was proud in his heart to know that his own wife was eating his own oatmeal, even if she did have sugar-candy with it—but when she returned to the pan and filled the basin a second time and broke off more sugar to eat with it, he began to feel a certain misgiving. Two basins full to the brim—one woman? More sugar? Yes, more sugar. He could make neither head nor tail of her nerves and their unfathomable vagaries. Yesterday it had been meat and milk, tonight two basinfuls of porridge and a hell of a lot of sugar, tomorrow it might just as likely be an elephant. He said not a word, but began to recite a few verses to himself, those with the complicated rhyme-scheme that he used whenever he was in a dilemma, murmuring them through with the main accent on the middle rhyme, spiritual soliloquy. After the porridge she took a few muddy stockings to wash in the brook and he went to bed alone.

When he woke up next morning she was not by his side. This had never happened before and he huddled into his clothes, downstairs and out.

“Rosa!” he bawled like an idiot from the paving. He went behind the croft also and shouted up at the mountain: “Rosa!”

But the melodious name raised not even an echo in the landscape.
The sun had risen with its long shadows that made of the croft a palace. But it was dark away in the west Summer was passing and the birds had sung all their sweetest songs; now their cry was short and hurried, as if they had discovered time.

“Titla,” he shouted. No dog jumped down from the wall as she had always done. She too had played him false. For the man this was disaster. But he did not give up; he shook his clenched fist at the mountain in the intervals of shouting for the woman and the dog. “Pull me to pieces limb by limb, but I'll never give in, Rosa, Titla, limb by limb, limb by limb,” he bawled.

At last he heard a yelping from the west, from the marshes. It was the dog. She came speeding along from the direction of the right, yelping without intermission, vee-vee-vee-vee. The man ran to meet her. “Where
is she?”
he asked. The dog was muddy and panting from the run, her tongue hanging out of her mouth, but she leaped up at him and thrust her open jaws into his face. Then she turned and raced off again, straight as an arrow, over pools and bogs, the man after her. Now and again she stopped and waited for him to catch up with her, but when he was a few yards away she would race off once more; wise brute. Clouds drifted over the sun, the air grew cool, rain almost certain. And on went this strange journey with a cur as leader and a man on the lead. Nor did it end before they reached the top of the ridge and the cairn of the long-buried woman, and the dog was right after all: Bjartur’s wife too had lain down here to sleep. She was lying in the grass that grew up round the cairn, in her old sackcloth pinafore, a cloth tied round her head, her stockings round her ankles, mud up to the knees, like a tramp lost on the ridge at night in an old story, her bundle under her head. He woke her and she looked about her with troubled eyes, her teeth chattering in her head. He spoke to her, but she did not answer. She tried repeatedly to rise to her feet, but failed each time. Had some ghost carried her here in her sleep?

“What are you doing here, woman? Where were you going?”

“Go away.”

“Were you walking in your sleep?” he asked.

“Leave me alone.”

“You weren’t drawn here, surely, were you?” he asked, for strange as it may seem of a person so sceptical, he was not altogether averse from ascribing some share at least in this occurrence to the work of spectres. He lifted her to her feet and pulled up her stockings. She was still shivering and still had difficulty
in speaking. He led her off down to the path; again and again her legs gave way beneath her.

Try and stand up, love,” he said.

Then she said:

“I had such a craving for milk.”

“Yes,” he replied, “it’s your illness.”

So she had been going to Rauthsmyri for milk and had taken the opportunity to pay her debt to Gunnvor. It was, after all, no spectre that had lured her here, except the one spectre that had wormed its way into her heart. But that the wife of the freeholder of Summerhouses should propose to beg from others was a humiliation too deep for Bjartur to hear even mentioned.

“I wasn’t going to beg for anything,” she protested.

“What have you got in the bundle?”

But she thrust it apprehensively under her arm, gripping it tightly, as if afraid he would take it from her.

“It’s my own property,” she said.

But when he pressed for further details, it came to light that the package contained wool, her own wool, part of Kolla’s fleece, and Kolla was her own property, her sole contribution to the farm, her sole possession after twenty-six years of a life of hard work with long hours and little sleep. She had intended offering the Mistress of Myri these tufts in exchange for a bottle of milk, but by the time she reached the top of the ridge she had been exhausted, her legs had always been very feeble; she had laid a stone on Gunnvor’s cairn and gone to sleep.

“We’ll separate six or seven ewes from their lambs and keep them back for milking next summer,” promised Bjartur.

The woman, cold and faint, now began to feel desperately sick. She retched violently, and Bjartur had to hold her up while she vomited on the path. Then it started raining; the big drops fell, first one, then two, and when she had been sick she was utterly spent and the rain had become a steady downpour. The man supported his wife down into the valley, then carried her over the bogs and pools home to Summerhouses while this summer continued with showers.

“Doesn’t it ever intend to clear up?” asked Bjartur.

The game was won if it cleared, but if it hung mainly fair with a sea wind and sudden showers, there would be the same uncertainty, the same war; sometimes it spoiled the labour of days. The vagaries of the sky were incalculable. It was their world
war, and in this world war of theirs Bjartur issued commands like a generalissimo, and the regiment obeyed, that little regiment, the smallest regiment in the records of any war, without meat or milk, without fresh food; and still they did not manage to gather the hay into ricks before it started in good earnest.

She was working near the lake on one of these wet days, raking together the new-mown hay between the marshy streams, and it was in one of these streams, which are full of weeds and slime and the grass that grows down below the edge, that she saw something moving, snaking its way upstream in many sinuous curves. She took the handle of her rake, thrust it beneath it, and swung it out of the stream. Over her head it flew, a big eel, three feet at least, and landed far behind her, sprawling among the hay like an earthworm of troll-like proportions and writhing there in eighteen coils. Her hunting instinct was aroused; it was a fish, and therefore restless on dry land. She had some misgivings certainly, for she knew that Bjartur would chide her if he learned of these doings, but she was determined to make good her catch and eat it, all of it, so she took out her knife and tried to grip the eel, and though it slipped repeatedly from her grasp, coiling even round her arm, she did at last manage to cut it in two. Then there were two fishes, and both these new fishes were just as elusive, endeavouring to make off in different directions, so that it took her all her time to herd them together. Taking off her kerchief, she wrapped them both inside, then placed them on top of a little mound, and there the kerchief kept on heaving until the evening, when she went home to make the supper, it had rolled down into a furrow.

“I’d look twice at my kindling before I’d use it for that filth, lass,” said Bjartur, gazing nonplussed at this woman with the nerves busy skinning an eel. The eel writhed in the pot in many coils till it was boiled and ready. Rosa lifted it out and said:

“Would you like some fish for your supper?”

“Good God, no. Not that sort anyway. Do you think I’d eat a worm? It’s a water-worm, that’s what it is.”

“All the more for me, then,” she replied, and started eating, while her husband watched her, disgusted that she could eat such a thing, and she ate the whole eel.

“Ten to one it’s an electric eel,” he said. “It’s as bad as eating a sea-monster.”

“Really,” said his wife, drinking up the gravy.

“I never thought a wife of mine would put filth like that to her mouth while there’s plenty in the pantry.”

“It’s a lot less filthy than that mouldy catfish you’ve been making me eat all summer,” retorted his wife, up in arms in defence of her eel.

But Bjartur did not care to begin any wrangling with a woman with the nerves at that time of night; he began instead to undo his clothes, clawing himself here and there the while and murmuring a verse or two from the Rhymes of Gongu-Hrolfur, of Grimur’s oceanic origin, then lay down and went to sleep.

J
UST
what it would do. The rain had cleared at last, but the drought was truly a mixed blessing. A raging land wind tore the dry-meadow hay from their hands and sent it flying anywhere and everywhere, some into the uncut grass, some—at least a third of the fruits of three weeks’ strife—out into the lake. Three days they spent on the banks gathering it together and heaping it into ricks. Then the gale subsided once more, and once more clawlike streaks of cloud stretched across the sky, threatening rain; the glory was at an end. The hay must be trussed and carried home immediately before the weather broke again; this was no time to think of messing about indoors, cooking food, and pampering one’s belly; this was no time to think of sleeping, even; now was the time to put their backs into it and outwit the elements, for this was Bjartur of Summerhouses’ war of independence. As soon as they had finished the ricking, Bjartur attacked the binding in good earnest. It was late in the evening, the light fading, summer well on the wane. At the darkest hour he ran off to look for the foal to carry the hay home, leaving his wife to snatch a little sleep behind a rick. He found the foal at length among a stud of Rauthsmyri horses, and before he had put on the pack-saddle and returned, it was growing light again. He woke his wife and they started trussing again where they had left off; ate cold fish and drank water from a bog. The streaks of cloud had stretched and widened over the whole sky, the downpour might start at any moment now, the hay would have to be got in immediately. Rosa was to lead the horse home and ride it back at top speed. She picked her way over the marshes leading the horse with its burden,
and then, riding astride the saddle-peg, hurried back to the meadow for the next load. The rain was still holding off. With the approach of night the clouds even thinned here and there and a new moon peeped through. It was refreshing to see such a polished moon, its light so romantic, so fabulous after the unremitting toil of day that one could almost see the elves come out of their crags to gaze on it; elves are much happier than men. But with the passing of the hours the moon lost its power of stimulation, its seductive incitement to indulge in day-dreams; the sense of charmed peace retreated before hunger and fatigue. To and fro over the marshes she stumbled with the horse. There was no longer any feeling in her legs, she fell and fell again. When she rode the horse back on the return journey her head would drop forward on her breast and she would wake up to find the horse grazing.