Independent People (23 page)

But at that moment the beloved coffee arrived, to put an end to this instructive discussion of the stranger phenomena of nature. It was good coffee; no one need have been ashamed of such coffee, however high he stood in the social scale. Such coffee made you sweat like a horse. Drink up, lads, drink. And there were also lovely cakes with the coffee, thick slices of Christmas cake with big raisins, fat doughnuts, and pancakes loaded with sugar. Eat up, lads, eat up. Happily they fell upon these luxuries; to the devil with personal opinions and interests. Cupful after cupful they swilled, without making a sound other than guzzling and crunching and the snuffling of nostrils charged with tobacco.

‘It may be a while before I invite you to another feast,” said Bjartur of Summerhouses.

Finally each had had his fill and had wiped his mouth on his sleeve and the back of his hand. Then there was silence. It was the silence of the occasion, the silence that sooner or later must impose itself on all funerals, broken occasionally by a churchlike clearing of the throat and accompanied by a vacant staring of the eyes.

“Had you thought of any ceremony here in the house?”

“No,” was Bjartur’s reply. “I couldn’t persuade that mule of a parson of ours to drag himself up into the valley here, all because of his blasted whimsies. Not that it makes any difference.”

“Her mother would maybe like it better if we sang something nice while she is being taken out,” said the old man apologetically, “—so I brought the
Passion Hymns
with me.”

“Why man, what difference do you think that will make?” asked Bjartur.

“She was our own Christian child,” said the old man dejectedly.

When Bjartur saw how determined he was, he allowed him to have his own way.

Blesi was standing ready-saddled, tethered to the doorpost, a heavy horse, long in the head, twitching his nether lip a little now and again as if he were talking to himself, moving his ears in turn, the events of the house mirrored in his receptive, introspective eye. The dog whined, shivering behind the stairway with its tail between its legs and fawning on no one.

Most of the sheep had returned from the brook home to the croft. A few wiggled their way past the horse into the house and after sniffing at the mangers gave a disappointed bleat because
they had not been replenished. More and more trickled into the house to meet with the same disappointment. Others thronged about the doorway or faced defiantly up to the visitors’ dogs. They helped to give the funeral the appearance of a good following, much sympathy, and the increased warmth that is so much appreciated on such a day in the midst of the marsh’s frozen snow, the high moor’s glacier-covered reaches. The folk had all arranged themselves round the coffin. Old Thorthur of Nithurkot unfolded the handkerchief from his wife’s volume of Hallgrimur Pjetursson’s
Fassion Hymns
and started looking for the place he had marked with a dog’s-ear.

“Wouldn’t somebody with a good voice like to begin?” The book was passed round from one to another, but it seemed that no one knew the tune: it was so seldom that anyone went to church, and they had forgotten all the hymn tunes long ago. So the old man took the book himself and began trying to reach the note. A ewe looked at him and gave vent to a full-throated bleat. Then the old man began to sing over his darling. He sang of when the Redeemer is led out, hymn twenty-five: “So many wounds that I may rest in peace.” He knew it all by heart, without looking at the book, but his voice was toneless and husky and could not keep to any definite tune. Even the men around him felt that he did not sing well.

And so the angels of the Lord will say: Look upon this man.

The horse pricked its ears and snorted. Again and again the dog gave a pitiful howl, as if someone were torturing it, and the ewes bleated on, like a long funeral procession, both outside and in, because they had not been given their fodder. He sang the last verse in a tuneless screech: “Truly art thou Son of God,” and the tears streamed unending from the inflamed lids down into the scraggy beard. His pronunciation too was difficult and lisping, because of his missing teeth; sometimes his song was nothing more than a feeble tremor of the throat and jaws. He was like any speechless child that has long wept. Then there was silence.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to say the Lord’s Prayer?”

The Fell King took the old man by the arm so that he should not fall, and whispered: “Gudny here wants to know whether it wouldn’t be better to say the Lord’s Prayer.”

So the old man wept the Lord’s Prayer, without ceasing to tremble, without lifting his head, without taking the handkerchief
from his eyes. More than half the words were drowned in the heaving of his sobs; it was not so easy to make out what he said: “Our Father, which art in Heaven, yes, so infinitely far away that no one knows where You are, almost nowhere, give us this day just a few crumbs to eat in the name of Thy Glory, and forgive us if we can’t pay the dealer and our creditors and let us not, above all, be tempted to be happy, for Thine is the Kingdom”—perhaps it was difficult to imagine a place equally well chosen for this engaging prayer; it was as if the Redeemer had written it for the occasion. They stood with bowed heads, all except Bjartur, who would never dream of bowing his head for an unrhymed prayer. They they lifted the coffin out. They lifted it on to the horse and tied it across the saddle, then laid a hand on each end to steady it.

“Has the horse been spoken to?” asked the old man; and as it had not yet been done, he took an ear in each hand and whispered to it, according to ancient custom, for horses understand these things:

“You carry a coffin today. You carry a coffin today.”

Then the funeral procession moved off.

The Fell King walked in the van, keeping as far as possible to the patches that were bare of snow, so that there would be less danger of mishap. Einar of Undirhlith led the horse, Olafur and Bjartur walked at each end of the coffin, and the old man limped along in the rear with his stick and the huge mittens with the flapping thumbs.

The women stood at the door with tear-swollen faces, watching the procession disappear in the whirling snow.

T
HE GOING
was slow over the ridge, for it was often impossible to find a clear path however far they deviated from their route. They sank repeatedly into deep snowdrifts on the hillsides and had to be on the watch all the time lest the coffin roll off the saddle. The body did not arrive at Rauthsmyri till late in the afternoon. Dusk was beginning to fall. The minister had arrived some time beforehand; though his face was completely inscrutable, he was obviously pressed for time. A few other visitors were also waiting for this funeral and the coffee that would follow it. The coffin was carried straight into the church in compliance with the minister’s request and the bells were rung. Feeble was the sound
they made, feeble their intrusion on frozen nature’s winter omnipotence, their peal reminiscent of nothing so much as the jingle of a child’s toy. And the folk came trailing out of the drifting snow and into the church, timid in the face of death, which never seems so irrevocable as when bells of such a kind tinkle so helplessly in the cold, white spaces of declining day. The Bailiff’s wife had not come to the funeral, not even as a mere spectator. On such a winter day not even she felt very well; she had caught a chill apparently and was sitting at home in her room snuffing hot water and salt up her nose, guaranteed to kill any cold. The Bailiff himself, however, had turned up, and if he was wearing his old trousers that were giving way round the patches, he had at least thrown on another jacket in recognition of the occasion, and took his seat in the chancel as usual and was careful not to open his mouth throughout the service. Blesi had been tied to the gate, and as the dog was not allowed inside because of the rites, it waited outside on the threshold, shivering.

The minister entered, wearing his crumpled parish-of-ease cassock and a pair of white bands round his neck because the occasion was not important enough for a ruff. Some of the crofters began singing: “I live and know,” each to a tune of his own. The old man was sitting at the back, no longer weeping, as if his emotions had dried up. During the music the minister pulled his watch out twice in front of the coffin, as if he had no time for this sort of thing. When the music was over, he put on his spectacles and read the prayer from his tattered old book. It was an old prayer, as was only to be expected in such weather, and besides, the man was hoarse. Then, instead of the long one he had threatened, he delivered a short sermon, in which, after declaring that evil spirits lay in ambush for mankind, he proceeded to discuss unbelief in terms that were none too complimentary. He said that many people had neglected their Creator while they were chasing stupid sheep over the mountains. “What are sheep?” he asked. He said that sheep had been a greater curse to the Icelandic nation than foxes and tapeworms put together. “Sheep’s clothing disguises a ferocious wolf that has sometimes been referred to in this district as the Albogastathir Fiend, whom others name Kolumkilli. People run after sheep all their lives long and never find them. Such is the lesson we may learn from the parting that oppresses us today.”

The sermon over, he spared a few words for the dead woman’s career; no career, really, but a proof of how insignificant the individual is as he appears in the parish register. What was the
individual considered as a separate unit? “Nothing—a name, at most a date. Me today, you tomorrow. Let us unite in prayer to the God who stands above the individual, while our names rot in the registers.” No weeping or wailing or gnashing of teeth, no emotion, no flirting with the heart-strings—a sleepy Lord’s Prayer and a clipped amen. In his contradictions he was as much an enigma as the country itself: a religious devotee out of spite at the soullessness of men who thought of nothing but dogs and sheep, a scientific breeder of sheep because of his contempt for sheep, the Icelandic pastor of a thousand years’ folk-stories, his presence alone was a comfortable reassurance that all was as it should be.

The coffin was now borne out.

It was lowered into the grave by means of two ropes, and the mourners hung about near the edge for a while longer. Three crofters with bared heads sang “As the one blossom” in the drifting snow; it was a sort of commemoration day for Hallgrimur Pjetursson, a cold day. The dog stood whining near Bjartur, its tail between its legs as if it had been whipped, and still shivering. The minister threw a few handfuls of earth on the coffin in silence, then with noisy gusto sniffed up a couple of good pinches of snuff from the box offered him by the Fell King, his parish clerk. The bearers eagerly grabbed their spades and set to work with a will. One by one others trailed off.

B
JARTUR
did not make the journey back to Summerhouses till die following day. The dog padded along beside him in blissful anticipation. It is lovely to be going home. And whenever she was a few yards ahead of her master, she would halt and look back at him with eyes full of an unwavering faith, then return to him on a big curve. Her reverence for her master was so great that she did not presume even to walk ahead of him. A dog finds in a man the things it looks for. He leaned into the gusts of driven snow, leading Blesi by the reins and casting an occasional glance at his dog—poor little thing, lousy and wormy, but where is fidelity to be found if not in those brown eyes—where the loyalty that nothing can subvert? Misfortune, dishonour, the pricks of conscience, nothing can quench this fire—poor little bitch, in her eyes Bjartur of Summerhouses must always be highest, greatest, best; the incomparable. Man finds in the eyes of a dog the things he looks for.
Hell, but Blesi is heavy on the lead today. And yet there is a living creature on his back. A living creature? Who? It is the old woman from Urtharsel, riding sideways on the saddle and muffled up to the eyes in sacks and shawls. Her belongings and those of her daughter dangle from the saddle. Finna follows in their tracks, her face weatherbeaten, her gait clumsy, her skirts kilted above her knees.

Nothing was said. And on crawled the little procession in the direction of Summerhouses, men and animals, men-animals, five souls. The pale red sun grazed the surface of the moorland bluffs on this northern winter’s morning which was really only an evening. And yet it was midday. The light gilded the clouds of snow flying over the moors so that they seemed one unbroken ocean of fire, one radiant fire of gold with streaming flames and glimmering smoke from east to west over the whole frozen expanse. Through this golden fire of frost, comparable in its magic to nothing but the most powerful and elaborate witchcraft of the Ballads, lay their homeward way,

The women from Myri greeted the new arrivals with dumb courtesy, but were none the less importunate in their demands for the milk which Bjartur had promised to bring back with him; they had had to give the baby thin gruel in its sucking bag. When they had made coffee for the newcomers their task was over, so they gathered their belongings together and made ready to go. Bjartur offered to accompany them over the ridge, but they declined with thanks and took leave of both him and the newcomers with the same kind of politeness as that with which they had welcomed them. Finna was left with the baby in her lap, to give it its bottle for the first time. And the old crone began fussing about in the house.

Though it was still early in the evening, Bjartur went to bed as soon as he had seen to the livestock. He felt really that he had had no rest since the last night he had spent at home with Rosa. He was glad that he had at least said good-bye before he left. It had been an adventurous round-up, and it was only this evening that he felt he had really returned. Every time that he had gone to bed since his return from the deserts he had felt, just as he was dozing off, a sudden storm of snow beating in his face and a voluptuous torpor stealing up his legs, up his thighs, all the way up to his stomach. And he had jumped up in a panic, certain that if he let himself fall asleep he would die in the blizzard. It was for this reason that he always slept so badly afterwards. In the middle
of the night he would start up with a bawdy verse on his lips, or some scurrilous old lampoon ridiculing bailiffs or merchants, and would be on the point of jumping out of bed to thump himself warm before he recollected himself.