Independent People (30 page)

But when the messengers were on the point of taking their leave, Bjartur bade them hang on a moment, and after rooting about in the bed for a while, produced finally an old glove that was kept in his wife’s mattress.

“You will inform the Bailiff,” he told them, “that hitherto I have owed him nothing beyond what was agreed upon. If he expects to distrain upon my lambs next autumn, then he had better think again. And I call you to witness that if he considers this amount insufficient, he must remove the animal not later than tomorrow; otherwise I reserve full powers to decide whether or not I kill it tomorrow night.”

Well, this was proud behaviour, if you like; here was a man who, in ready money if necessary, could flaunt his freedom and independence in the face of the Bailiff or anybody else up-country. But the messengers shrank from accepting the money, they had no authority to accept it, didn’t even know whether it was Bjartur whom the Bailiff expected to pay for this so-called animal, maybe it’s paid for. Paid for? Yes, from elsewhere. From elsewhere?

Were they mad, was there some conspiracy behind it all, then? Was he, then, dependent on somebody or other elsewhere? Perhaps they thought up-country that it was poverty that had prevented him from buying a cow? No, mates, he was short of neither dung nor doughnuts here, and what was more, he had plenty of money. It was, of course, against his principles to keep cows at the expense of his sheep, but he could, if necessary, buy as many cows as anybody, and pay for them on the spot. Ever since he began he had had a distant goal in view in his running of the farm. He knew quite well what he was going to do with his money. What was he going to do with it? What? If your orders were to inquire about that, you can say that I’m maybe going to build myself a palace with it. And dig an orchard all the way round it. Good-bye.

But it was not long before this same sea-cow had became the bosom-friend of everybody in Summerhouses except Bjartur, the dog, and old Blesi. When the grandmother came scrambling up the stairs that evening with a little milk in the bottom of her pail and proceeded to give each of the children a cupful of the heart-warming luxury and Finna a good measure in a can, a new era might be said to have dawned over this moorland valley. From the beginning of March life seemed to quicken in everything; there was spring in these narrow souls that lived here encompassed by the frozen deserts. The brothers stopped their eternal bickering and dropped all unseemly nicknames and threats of retaliation. Asta Sollilja finished her vest and began without untimely drowsiness on a new pair of knickers with all the industry, forethought, and optimism that such garments demand. From Grandma’s memory there even thawed better hymns, easier to understand, less sprinkled with Latin. The ghosts in her stories suddenly became less baneful than before; all at once she even recollected a famous ghost in the south who would do as he was told if he was given his daily cupful the same as other people. Her descriptions of the fate of travellers lost in the snow were no longer so harrowing;
there were occasions even when men who had fallen over precipices would be rescued after two days, incredible as it sounds, and would live to a ripe and honourable old age though both thighs had been broken. But a greater marvel still was that not a full week had elapsed before the mistress of the house was rising from her bed and trying out her shaky limbs around the room with assistance from the others. She found her voice again and began inquiring about the firewood three weeks earlier than she had risen from her winter sick-bed the year before. She even asked about the clothes, and everything was in holes, so she found her darning-needle and sat up in bed to mend them. One morning she was neither more nor less than out of bed before anyone else, kindling the fire with those skilful hands of hers. There was much less smoke in the room that morning, the brushwood started crackling earlier, the coffee warmed up more quickly. And another morning, when Bjartur went downstairs he found his wife beside the cow; she had been giving her her fodder and making her comfortable and was now standing beside her in the stall, scratching her and talking to her.

“I never knew that that blasted cow had to be served before the others,” he grumbled, and began feeding his sheep.

But from that day forward it became a regular habit with Finna to rise every morning and feed the cow. She brought water for her too, and saw to it that the floor of her stall was always dry and comfortable; cows are grateful for such attentions. She milked her with supple fingers, they had long conversations together. Finna had intuition that set at naught the nation’s thousand years’ experience, and therefore she occasionally left the door ajar for a few minutes and took the turf plug out of the vent in the roof if the day was a fine one. Old Blesi was very dissatisfied about being so close to this tiresome sea-cow; his temper had grown uncertain and he did not relish such company in his declining years; it was bad enough having the Reverend Gudmundur and his brother in the pen on the other side of the drain, fighting and cursing the whole night through. He would stand sometimes for hours on end with his ears laid back in token of contempt and would watch his chance to stretch over the partition and snatch a mouthful of the fine Rauthsmyri hay from the cow’s manger. If he could not sleep at night, he would bite her whenever he got the opportunity. So Finna herself nailed up an extra crossbar be tween them.

“She has deserved well of all of us,” she said, full of love and reverence.

“Then I only hope you’re prepared to pay a hired man wages to mow hay for her in the autumn,” retorted Bjartur, “because I’m certainly not killing off any of my sheep for the sake of that gutsy old parasite.”

“I know that God will provide for our dear Bukolla,” said his wife with tears in her eyes. She began stroking the cow even more tenderly than before, for this woman knew God in her own way and found Him in a cow, as they do in the East, where the Almighty reveals Himself in cows and the people worship the holy creatures.

They were having quite a decent spring this year; the ground would soon be clear of snow. Bjartur started driving his sheep out into the marshes, where they sought out the spring grass, the famous first-shoots, which cure everything if only the sheep can stand them. The ewes of course were never very lively even in the mildest spring, and though this year they were in rather better condition than usual, it was a lazy, scraggy-necked, feeble-voiced flock that trailed wearily about the marshes. In their dirty fleeces they looked the very picture of melancholy. Bjartur wandered about ready to pull them out if they got stuck, but this year comparatively few of them showed any desire to remain inactive in the bogs, even if they had sunk as far as the hocks. Soon the snow in the hollows had melted.

The sun shone on the pale, withered grass of winter, on the swollen brook, on the thawing marshes redolent of growth and decay. Somewhere in the warm breeze the golden plover was piping its shy vernal notes, for the first friends of the heath had flown home from the south. The garrulous redshank would follow the shepherd home almost to the door, feeling that it simply must tell him this amusing story, of which it never grew tired: he, he, he, he, he, he, he. Little Nonni took the leg-bones, the jaw-bones, and the horns outside on to the slope; the brook was nearly as big as the sea, so big that one could imagine that the world was on the other side. After a day or two the brook had grown little again and all the snow had melted from the mountain. Had the brook lost its charm, then? No, far from it. Clear and joyful it flowed over the shining sand and pebbles, between its banks white with withered grass, its joy eternally new every spring for a thousand years; and it told little stories, in its own little tongue, its own little inflections, while the boy sat on the bank and listened
for a thousand years. The boy and eternity, two friends, the sky cloudless and unending. Yes.

T
HE BAILIFF
came riding into the enclosure on his way home from the coast. He was travelling, as on his last visit, with an escort, but on this occasion his attendants were much more in keeping with his dignity: his son and daughter, both of whom had just returned from the south—Ingolfur Arnarson, the co-operative secretary, and the beautiful, twenty-year-old, newly educated Audur. The folk had been spreading manure on the home-field, but now they stopped spreading manure and, leaning forward on their rakes, stared with marvelling eyes at this portent. Bjartur came home to the croft, leaving his sheep and the helpless lambs they were giving birth to. The daughter refused to step down into the mud and remained sitting on horseback, but the Bailiff dismounted, though obviously bored by whatever was afoot, and the big-booted secretary also dismounted. The Bailiff gave his usual greeting, offering at most two fingers. But for Ingolfur Arnarson a handshake was a very different matter. A representative of the world, of the life of power, privilege, and infinite possibility that those who live in close contact with the government may enjoy, Ingolfur Arnarson was not the man to be shy with the lower orders. He made no bones about wringing Bjartur of Summerhouses’ paw; he even went as far as to clap him on the shoulder; for a moment, in fact, it looked as if he was about to fall on his neck, kiss him, and who knows what else. It was his mother coming out in him of course. Nor was he by any means the old irresponsible student whose idea of a good time was to murder the helpless and inoffensive birds that flew over a fellow’s marshes on the Sabbath; no, with the passing of the years he had acquired a sober, public-spirited deportment, and he had also developed the corpulence that is so necessary to anyone who wishes his words to carry conviction in an assembly. He had learned to imbue his gestures with authority, to puff out his chest, to hold his head high. But Bjartur of Summerhouses was the man he was in Asta Sollilja’s eyes: he had scant regard for his superiors, however public-spirited they might be, and in his shadow they seemed all at once to suffer some incongruous loss of dignity, some deformity even, as if they had suddenly acquired six fingers or even three eyes.

“May I help the young lady down in case she goes bow-legged sticking in the saddle there?” inquired Bjartur politely; but no sooner had he spoken than she hopped down without assistance and made her way on to the paving by herself. She was in breeches and glittering knee-boots, healthy and strong as a plant that grows on sheltered slopes facing the south. Elegant, southern-travelled and blooming she stood before the low door, on the paving that it had taken Gudbjartur Jonsson and his children, both living and dead, twelve years to buy—and eighteen years before that; she who had her home on the smooth pathway leading up to one immortal house half-hidden in flowers.

“Thanks, thanks very much,” she said, “Then we won’t bother coming in. I want to get home as soon as I can.”

But the Bailiff would like just to pop upstairs with the master of the house for a few minutes, he and Ingolfur wanted a word with him; worse luck, there’s always something. But when they had got safely upstairs after negotiating the mud and the filth in the entrance, she tried all the devices she could think of to prevent their taking a seat on the beds, because of the lice, but the Bailiff would not hear of any fastidiousness, he had been reared on lice. He sat carefully but solidly down on the bed he was accustomed to using whenever he paid a visit to Summerhouses. Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson found a seat on the clothes-chest, then looked around the room with cocked head and face radiant as the sun, but with his mother’s cold smile. The young lady perched herself on the table. The Bailiff, who was sunk in deliberation so profound that he made no answer to Bjartur’s inquiries about the condition of the sheep and the state of the weather, sat fumbling in his pockets with limp and tremulous fingers. Over his face there stole a look of solemn devotion, an expression almost fanatical in its pious gravity, and his hand, never very steady, especially when it held money, trembled visibly as he produced his purse. He opened it and looked down into it, yet in such a fashion that by a slight backward tilt of his head and an upward protrusion of his lower lip he contrived to retain all his chew as he spoke.

“This is the first chance I’ve had of repaying the money you sent for the cow last winter. It’s been paid from elsewhere.”

“Really? Who is this person who thinks he can boast of having made me, Bjartur of Summerhouses, a gift of something? Paid from elsewhere? I’ve never asked anyone to pay my debts, either here or elsewhere. To hell with anyone who thinks he has the right to pay my debts.”

“Quite so; but it’s paid all the same,” said the Bailiff.

“I take alms from no one, either in heaven or on earth. Were it the Redeemer Himself he would not be privileged to pay my debts and I would forbid Him to do so.”

“Well, it isn’t the Redeemer actually; it’s the Women’s Institute,” said the Bailiff.

“I might have known,” said Bjartur, and proceed to heap this Institute with all the vituperation he could lay his tongue to. They were, he said, nothing but a gang of insolent slanderers whose one aim was to force their lousy patronage on honourable men and make them their debtors and lickspittles so that they could brag about it later both on earth and in heaven. “But you can lay your life on it,” he continued, “that I'll slaughter that bloody old cow and chop her into mincemeat just as soon as I think fit, for she does nothing but take the youngsters’ appetites away so that they go slouching about without even the strength to quarrel with one another—apart from the fact that she makes the womenfolk fractious and fosters their stubbornness.”

“Yes, but everybody up-country says that your family is looking much better since the cow arrived.”

But this observation had no very soothing effect on the moor-crofter’s temper. Never were his suspicions so easily aroused as when the dalesmen up-country showed any regard for his welfare, and is there any reason why you or the Women’s Institute should concern yourselves with me and my wife, may I ask? Or my children? As long as I owe neither you nor the Women’s Institute I shall demand in return that neither you nor the Women’s Institute meddle with my wife or my children. My wife and my children are mine in life and death. And it is my business, mine alone, and neither yours nor that pack of blasted old scandalmongers’ whether my children look well or not. Sooner shall all the hummocks on Summerhouses land hop up to heaven and all the bogs sink down to bottomless bloody hell than I shall renounce
my
independence and my rights as a man.