Independent People (36 page)

To this croft, the inmates of which seemed to have so little to say to each other, especially in public, old Fritha came like a new element. It was Bjartur’s habit to address his wife from the paving outside, calling in to her through the door or speaking out into the blue as if he were addressing the universe, and it was always a matter of uncertainty whether she heard him at all up in the loft. For the most part they were observations regarding the weather or reflections about the work of the farm and indirect commands regarding the same. Their subject-matter was perfectly impersonal and it made no difference if she answered or not. The elder brothers punched one another on the sly, but if their father saw them he would hit them, sometimes with the implement he was lucky enough to be holding. “Helgi you brat, leave the boy alone,” for it was always Helgi that was to blame, Gvendur was the boy. Grandmother sat rocking backward and forward, mumbling away to herself. And Asta Sollilja’s mature, questioning eyes gazed through the wall; or through the heavens. She who lived with a wish must think in private, like Bjartur, who composed verses without anyone knowing and surprised everyone when he recited them to visitors.

Suddenly the pauper’s irresistible flood of talk engulfed the great independent household where everybody stood on his own feet Talking she came across the marshes with her bundle on her back, and she talked ceaselessly all that day long till naked she climbed talking into bed beside the grandmother and little Nonni. Her talk dripped through the days like a leak that nothing can stop. She talked to herself as she raked the hay together in the meadow, and the boys closed slyly in upon her and listened: she discussed parish affairs, agriculture, and private matters, inquired into paternities and adulteries, flayed even the landed farmers for starving their sheep, branded respectable parishioners
as thieves, and attacked the Bailiff, the minister, and even the Sheriff, reviling the authorities where others could see nothing but the wet marshes, and always getting the better of the issue because her opponents were many miles away. She poured out a continual stream of curses, complaining most of all over what she called the scandalous tyranny of mankind. This tyranny of mankind was such a thorn in her flesh that, regardless of whether she was talking to herself, to the others, to the bitch, to the sheep that chanced to cross the mowing, or to the ignorant song-birds of the air, all her discourse, waking and sleeping, revolved about this one hub. She lived in continual and altogether hopeless revolt against this loathsome oppression, and for that reason there was something rash, insolent, and vindictive in her eyes, something reminiscent of the eyes of an evil but indeterminate animal that one had seen in dreams; formless, but terrifying in its proximity. The grandmother turned her bowed back to the incessant storm and withdrew even deeper into the age-old heath-silence of her secret self. The mother found suitable places to interject a meaningless monosyllable in a sympathetic voice. Helgi would narrow his eyes in a malicious grin, and sometimes he hid her petticoat at night or slipped a pebble into her porridge. Bjartur, himself the recipient of many a gabbled gibe, would never lower himself to answer a bloody old calder like her, so his face was all contempt whenever he passed her, and Gvendur followed his father’s example in this as in other things. But little Nonni listened large-eyed to everything that she said, trying to find some coherence in it all. He often stood right in front of her, the better to examine the working of her organs of speech, and not without admiration for her volubility and the wealth of her vocabulary. When talking to him she drew no distinction between him and any adult, modifying neither language nor subject-matter to suit him; her conversation ranked him as a man.

And once upon a time in a great snowstorm in mid-winter a certain Queen was sitting by the window in her palace and was busy sewing—it was one night just before the hay-harvest, and Asta was sitting on the paving watching over the home-field and reading her book. She read it all through out of doors and, having finished it a little after midnight, turned straightway back to the beginning. When she had read it a second time, the sun was rising. For a long time she sat staring southward over the moors, running over the story once more in her mind. Again and again she trod in Snow White’s footsteps over the seven mountains and found
refuge in the dwarfs’ house after being spared by a cook. Finally, after she had been exposed to all the wickedness of the world, the handsome Prince came and took her home to his realm in a glass coffin. So deep was her sympathy with little Snow White in joy and sorrow, in happiness and tribulation, that her breast heaved and her eyes were filled with tears; but it was not the bitter, crushed feeling of one who suffers because of the evil men have done him, rather the emotion of one who would willingly live and die for the good that there is in life. So lifelike was the fairy tale that she saw the Prince through her tears in living flesh and blood. She saw herself lying in the glass coffin, and the King’s men carrying her off, and the stumble, and the apple starting from her throat; and she rose up and they looked at each other, and greeted each other, and it was as if they had known each other from all eternity, and he made her his Queen—after all that she had suffered since the day of her birth. This was the first time that her soul was charmed by the power of poetry, which shows us the lot of man so truthfully and so sympathetically and with so much love for that which is good that we ourselves become better persons and understand life more fully than before, and hope and trust that good may always prevail in the life of man.

Bjartur did not abandon the methods of the lone worker, but still rose just before daybreak, as he had done in his first summer. Close on his heels came his adult workers, Finna and Fritha, who worked till well on in the morning on empty stomachs. The old woman did what she could with the fire, then woke the children, who were allowed to sleep until the coffee had been warmed up. The grandmother found the task of rousing them as difficult in summer as in winter; she had never known the like of them. When they made no answer to her preludes, she would try to drag them out by main force, but it was like pulling at a length of elastic; when she released her feeble grip they were farther off than ever, their eyelids heavy as sorrow. Even after they had managed to crawl out and were busy pulling on their stockings, their eyelids would droop afresh and then they would lose their balance and fall back across the bed. Often the old woman had to slap their faces with a wet dishcloth before they could open those curious eyelids. Every morning she decided afresh that nothing would ever come of them.

And when at last they were on their feet, they often felt so sick that they could swallow neither the coffee nor the slice of bread: delicacies had no charm for them before they had been
working an hour or so. They would trail away down the marshes with some coffee in a bottle for the grown-ups, as unsteady on their legs as the much-discussed giddy sheep, their feet still asleep, a tickle in their knee-joints, something in the nature of pins and needles, their bodies thirsting voluptuously for more rest. It was lovely falling between the hummocks. No one could forbid them to fall, and it did not matter if they got left or had immediately to gather their strength for the effort to rise, the fall was so lovely, a moment in the blissful embrace of rest. So sick did they feel that cold beads of sweat would start from their brows, and sometimes they stood doubled up in the marshes and retched, while the sweat grew colder and colder, icy water on their brows and temples in midsummer. The coffee that came up was no longer sweet, but bitter, and finally some unknown fluid would fill their mouths. Often they had toothache in the morning and until well on in the day, sometimes all day long, and it was incredible the number of different kinds of disagreeable tastes they could feel in their mouths.

The elder boys had each been provided with a scythe, but little Nonni had to help with the raking so that the women could keep up with the mowers. It was a sixteen-hour working day for the children, interrupted twice for a meal and once for a drink of coffee, with a few minutes’ sleep beneath the open sky at midday. When the sky was unclouded, the mind, flitting off to distant goals, would find relief in the hope that somehow the years to come would grant a freer life and better surroundings, sun-fostered dreams that have always been the thrall’s title of nobility; but this summer, unfortunately, the Occasions were few indeed when day-dreamers by rake and scythe could visit the lands of desire, for this happened to be a wet summer, and no one who is working soaked to the skin in marshy ground is apt to forget immediate realities. These children had as little to wear for rain as they had for Sundays, owning at most a ragged jersey of scrim and thin nankeen; it doesn’t pay in these hard times to weave your wool or knit it unless it’s for the most necessary underclothes. Bjartur had a jerkin that he used on the more ceremonial occasions such as the shepherds’ meet and the autumn drive; it was the only rainproof garment on the croft that was worthy of such an honourable name, and though he never donned it for his work, as it was only a symbol of his independence, there were occasions when he would hand it to Asta Solülja if it looked like raining all day. And Asta
Sollilja would take it and look at him without lifting her head, and nothing more. Old Fritha, strangely enough, owned an old cloak of thick homespun in spite of being on the parish, and she was also the possessor of an immense sail-cloth skirt. And the ceaseless rain of this inclement summer poured down upon the three little unprotected workmen of the moors and on the woman who every winter spent sixteen weeks in bed, soaking every thread in their rags, turning their headgear into a shapeless, sodden mass and running down their necks and faces in rivulets stained with the colour from their hats. It oozed down their backs, and down their chests. Thus they stood in bogs and in pools, in water and in mud, the close-packed clouds above them interminable, the wet grass whistling drearily under the scythe. The scythe grew heavier and heavier, the hours refused to pass, the moments seemed to stick to them as soggily as their sodden garments; midsummer; the birds silent but for the redshank gliding busily about, reciting a fragment of his marvellous, unending story, he, he, he, he; these lucky birds are so made that the water does not stick to their soft, thick plumage. The sound of old Fritha’s talk was lost in such heavy rain, and for hours on end the children heard no sign of life other than the rumbling in their own stomachs, for not only were they soaking wet and infinitely tired, they were also famished, and with no comforting hopes of the possibility of communion with the elves.

Great is the tyranny of mankind.

It doesn’t matter so much if he kills me, the devil, for as God and anyone can tell you, I’m doomed in advance—slaved to death a hundred times and on the parish. But never was I so badly off that I didn’t have something to keep out the wet in spite of fraud, tyranny, and murder. And you mark my words, my lad, and see if he hasn’t racked the life out of your poor mother before God gives her another summer, the bloody slave-driver.”

That was her text. Nor was it to be denied that even in the height of summer their mother was often away from work because of illness, and as for the children, the green issue of their nostrils mingled with the rivulets that coursed down their faces.

“But I’ve only myself to blame for agreeing to let that flaming Bailiff throw me summer after summer to these lousy peasants. A stingier crowd you never met in all your born days; devil a bit of colour do you ever see in all your coffee, and day in, day out, living or dead, it’s rotten salt fish down your gullet, when it isn’t
that mouldy old sausage of theirs that burns like flaming fire and tastes as sour as hell. As for a bite of meat on a Sunday, Jesuspete, it’s like mentioning murder itself.”

The tyranny of mankind; it was like the obstinate drip of water falling on a stone and hollowing it little by little; and this drip continued, falling obstinately, falling without pause on the souls of the children.

“As if I didn’t know these accursed smallholding scum after being their slave and their doormat for a couple of generations! It isn’t the first time by a long way that I’ve watched them sacrifice what little wits they have to their worm-eaten sheep. You can always tell the Devil by his cloven hoof. And they all want to be rich men, too; there’s no lack of ambition among them. They aren’t on the parish, not they, it’s free men they are. Independence, and plenty of it. But where is their independence, may I ask? Isn’t most of it in their sheep’s guts when they’re starving
to
death in the spring of the year? Is their freedom worth as much as the worms that feed from eternity to eternity on the bags of skin and bones they call their sheep? And let me see their kingdom, my lad, in the colourless coffee and stinking fish of this world or the next. No wonder Kolumkilli sucks the marrow out of the pitiful little devils they are supposed to provide for.”

The children had long listened to this endless gabble as to some funny rigmarole that with time and constant repetition can become an unbearable nuisance; and as their father said: empty vessels and paupers make the most sound. It was like a new case of nerves on the croft, a new kind of psalm, though without any claim on their respect; one could pull a face at her on Sundays. The children had been conditioned from birth to the absolute authority of the father. He was at one and the same time supreme authority over the croft and source of everything that happened in it. In this little world he was immutable fate, a source of adversity that they could neither control nor accuse of responsibility, for his dictatorship outlawed all criticism and made organized resistance to his measures inconceivable. Nevertheless the boys had long nourished vague emotions, a wordless antipathy against the father, not least because of their mother’s long winter illnesses and the still-born children that, subconsciously and without any spark of revolt, they had always associated with him. But when the last week in August had seen no end to the rain, there came a time when Fritha’s gabble could no longer be regarded as the detestable blather of a nerve-ridden old pauper, for, after all,
there was something in it that sided with them against the cold showers, against the ceaseless beating of the rain that glued the coarse old rags to the young skin and drowned every glad feeling of the soul; against the desperate, destroying labour of a sixteen-hour day. It was something new for them to hear their misery and their thraldom traced to a perceptible source. In this wretched old woman’s irresponsible babble there lurked argument against life’s crushing yoke; it was the voice of emancipation itself, which in this strange guise had joined forces with their own subconscious minds, and finally a stage was reached when Helgi no longer saw the fun of teasing her or pulling a face at her on Sundays, but showed less haste than ever in obeying his father’s commands and started grimacing into his face as often as he had previously grimaced behind his back. Little Nonni declared in the meadow that Mamma was lying ill in bed today because our father won’t give her a coat.