Independent People (45 page)

Yes, there was a cat on the croft. Sometimes he sat on the edge of the hatchway in the daytime, listening with taut attention to the vehement barking of the bitch from below, for the bitch was very angry that there should be a cat on the croft. The hair on her back would stand on end if she knew that he was anywhere near, and she would start barking immediately. If she came upstairs, pussy would spring into the window recess above the end of the grandmother’s bed, where he just managed to squeeze on to the sill; then he would watch the bitch attentively for a while, then the pupils would contract and the eyes close in philosophy. When the bitch had gone, the cat would spring down on the old woman’s bed and, after washing himself with meticulous care, would he down to sleep with his head across his hind legs. The old woman never called him anything but that scum of a cat or that brute of a torn, and yet he liked to be with her best, for he valued not vocabulary but disposition. She had never been known to hurt any animal. It is strange what a great liking cats have for old people. They appreciate that lack of inventiveness, rich in security, which is the chief virtue of old age; or was it that they understood the grey in each other, that which lies behind Christianity and behind the soul?

W
ELL,
what luck had this scum of a cat in forestalling further misfortune on the lonely croft in the valley?

Just before bedtime Bjartur took him under his arm and set off with him out to the ewe-house. His confidence in the cat, however, was not of the fullest, and instead of going straight to bed he sat up longer than usual, pottering with some small job long after the old woman and the boys were all asleep. Last to bed was Asta Sollilja. She messed about, over beside the range, till a very late hour, first rinsing out a few of her things and mending them, then giving herself a wash and sprucing herself up a little; she had reached the hair-combing age. Sometimes she would heat herself water and wash her feet and her legs up to just above her knees, and her neck, and a little way down her back; and her chest; and he couldn’t very well forbid it; this water-fury manifests itself in the female sex at a certain age and lasts for a few years. It is youth, it is the flower—does not the grass suck the dew to itself while it is growing? Then after a few years they stop washing themselves;
when the babies begin to come. He put out the light at his end of the loft and lay down on the bed, yawning, with his head pillowed in his hands, but without thought of sleep. She was still washing and combing away in the glimmer of the candle, standing in her slip with an old piece of mirror propped up in front of her. She pushed the straps over her shoulders and washed herself there and in the armpits, poor kid, she’s getting a big girl now, she can’t help it. Asta, however, was very much aware that he was looking art: her, and she would have washed herself much better if he had not been looking at her—if she washed herself better and he saw, it was naughty. It was strange how passionately she longed to convince him that she never even thought of anything naughty, anything not right; and why? It was because she had nestled up to him out in the world when she was little and because she could never forget it. Before her stepmother’s death she had often blushed red when she thought of it, but since then some fear had struck through her almost every time that the memory had recurred to her—strange how the bygone errors of childhood’s unwitting days continued to prey on the mind, though actually nothing at all had happened; she had only been afraid out in the world because she was so little—and he had pushed her aside and gone away. And here the fear would flame up in her body, around her heart, the fear of something she did not understand. This dread of the incomprehensible lay ever smouldering in her body, and when she began to think of this thing, it would flare up, though never so much as when she had determined not to think about it at all. Sometimes it followed her into her dreams, taking on the form of monstrous beasts and ghosts or evil men; or a precipice where she could no longer find any way either up or down; or, worst of all, quite incomprehensible piles of filth which she had to carry away, but which grew bigger and bigger the faster she carried. Why had it been naughty, why had it not been right? She had not meant anything wrong, it was simply that she hadn’t been able to help herself because she had felt so unhappy—thus over and over again, and then: no, never would she take off this slip when anyone was there, and least of all her father.

And he gazed at her cheek in the glimmer of the candle and had certainly no inkling of the emotions that tormented her soul; but he saw that it was her left cheek, her left soul, that old, unhappy, afflicted soul which was a thousand years older than the girl herself, a soul from another century with oblique malicious vision, fragile desires, and features that reminded one of sworn
oaths and deadly hatred. The full lower lip, whose curve was so delightful when seen from the right, seemed from this side distorted in a grimace. It was impossible that she could be a fifteen-year-old child; it was as if her profile, when viewed from this side, gave evidence of some complete loss, blindness even, blindness which lived nevertheless in some hateful harmony with its own world, without demanding another and a better, and which was endowed with that contempt for death which senses all misfortune and endures it.

“Listen, wench,” he said, and thought: “surely I’m not going wrong in the head or something?” The girl jumped with fright at the sound of his voice and hastily pulled the straps on to her shoulder again. She gazed at him terror-stricken, with palpitation in her eyes, gulping for breath, what had she done? But it seemed that he only wanted her to turn round on her chair, he preferred the right side of people, he had said something the same to her mother when he was running after her, the right side, girlie, you’re so like a changeling somehow on the left cheek and it’s always getting more and more pronounced, just like that, yes. And see you don’t catch cold with all that washing. It’s unhealthy to dabble much in water unless it’s absolutely necessary, girlie; I’ve never dabbled much in water. And heap up the fire for your grandmother in the morning, she has such a devil of a job with it these days, she’s such a decrepit old woman grown.

A little later he rose and went out

He inspected the stalls to see that everything was as it should be. Everything as it should be. The green eyes of the cat gleamed now at the far end of the manger, now up in the beams; on the whole they despised each other, for Bjartur was a dog man. When he came in again Asta had gone to bed; oh well, poor girl, as long as she keeps herself warm. In spite of the cat he felt the sheep vulnerable enough to get up twice every night, sometimes thrice. He would go out to the ewe-house and spit in all directions; the sky bright with stars, the bitch barking up into the air. Otherwise it seemed that people slept the same as usual and dreamed the same as usual, sometimes of a silver dollar, sometimes only of a dime; sometimes of the ocean itself, sometimes only of a distant glimpse of the little lake.

T
HE WEATHER
changed after mid-Advent, thick snow falling quietly, gently, but persistently, day after day; otherwise nothing, not a footprint to be seen. Calm-weather snow is the most incommunicative of all things that fall from the skies; one looked blindly out at the drift of it, it was as if one was cut off from everything, as if one no longer existed. Good, as long as nothing happens, said Bjartur. Some people grumble about monotony,—such complaints are the marks of immaturity, sensible people don’t like things happening. Of animals, of course, few have the same capacity for monotony as a torn has. While the snow accumulated in the window, veiling the pane like bluish wool-combings, the cat only closed his eyes in facetious dignity and suave malice. Finally it stopped snowing. The skies brightened, but the frost grew harder; and cold, gusty winds blew the snow into deep drifts. This winter, however, there was no lack of hay; one need fear no natural causes this winter. But what of the supernatural? Was that in evidence? Not at the moment. The sense of insecurity that had sent the farmer up-country in search of a cat seemed to be on the wane again. He stroked the beast from head to tip of tail, though once only and in great haste, and said: “See that the dog and the cat don’t flare up at each other.” Yet when he came to think the matter over in cold reason, he could not understand how it could ever have occurred to him that a cat should have any power over the supernatural. All the same, he was no longer rising in the night to keep watch on the ewe-house.

But the intangible forces of existence were not yet worsted, in spite of tom-cats. They had only been waiting for a frost, of course, because they dislike leaving their footprints in the snow. It was early one morning and Bjartur was making his usual trip out to the ewe-house. He opened the door, and after lighting the candle, looked about him, to be faced by one of the most horrible scenes that he had ever had the misfortune to set eyes on: ten of his ewes lay dead or in their death-struggles, some on the floor, some in the mangers. They had been butchered in the most monstrous fashion; some of them had had their throats cut half-way across, others had had rusty nails driven into their skulls, and others still
their heads battered in as if with a club. It was a scene of slaughter that baffled description, which was possibly one of the reasons why Gudbjartur Jonsson never had much to say about it whenever, in later days, the subject cropped up in discussion. He had never had such a shock in his life. He tore his hat off and scratched his head with both hands as hard as he could, then he laid hold of carcass after carcass, examined their injuries, and made an end of those that were still breathing. But he could contain himself no longer. Turning on his heel, he struck his clenched fists together and swore and spat in every direction. He challenged the devil Kolumkilli and his trollop Guthvor to come forth and fight. In language pagan and Christian alike he called upon them to take the field against him, both together, and chose the slope in front of the croft as his ground—what could the man do, what could he say? He demanded that the secret powers of existence show some sign of manhood and come out into the open. Surely they could no longer hide behind the skirts of existence if they wished to preserve a last shred of repute. “It’s easy enough to murder and destroy when everybody’s asleep,” he cried, shaking his fists into the frozen face of nature and up at the sky. Finally he could find no words strong enough and squealed; the bitch squealed too. It was pure blasphemy; and availed nothing, the faint, blue gleam in the east dull and sluggish. Then he began to wonder whether by swearing at monsters he was not pursuing the wrong course of action, for there had occurred to him an old story of goblins that throve on the like—but what was the man to say? Hymns, thought he. Ought he perhaps to ask old Hallbera to drag herself out here and sing a hymn? Or fetch the minister and have him call upon Jesus in Hebrew? Not, of course, that he, Bjartur of Summerhouses, had any faith in religion; independent people have no need of religion, he was a match for any spectre. On the other hand, he had heard old stories which said that ghosts believed in theology and yielded to the power of Jesus’ names pronounced in famous old tongues, though of course there was little hope that the Reverend Teodor, that baldheaded youngster, would be able to do much in the way of disciplining fiends whom the stalwart old priests of yore, with all their hard-mouthed exorcisms, had repeatedly consigned to hell without result.

The children stood out on the pile of snow that had drifted up against the ewe-house, gazing at him in silence as he laid the heads of the butchered sheep on the wall. It was little Nonni who at last found something to say.

“Father,” he said, “our Helgi often sees something around the house.”

Bjartur straightened his back and with the bloody knife in his hand asked: “What?”

“Nothing,” replied Helgi. “He’s telling lies.”

“Oh, am I? Don’t you remember what you told me one night awhile ago, when father was down-country and we were sitting on the flags there talking about the waterfall?”

Bjartur strode over to his eldest son with the knife in his hand and in no uncertain terms demanded more explicit details of what he had seen. But the boy maintained that he had never seen anything. Then Bjartur took him by the shoulder and shook him and said it would be the worse for him, whereupon the boy grew frightened and confessed that he had occasionally seen some lad or other, or an oldish sort of chap, though sometimes he had grey pigtails like an old woman.

“Where do you see him about?”

“I’ve seen him running from the ewe-house towards the croft sometimes. I’ve often tried to catch him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about him before?”

“I knew that no one would believe me.”

“Where did he go for

“He was running.”

Bjartur grew more insistent and demanded a detailed description of this mysterious athlete, but the boy’s answers grew wilder and wilder; sometimes the man had a beard, sometimes pigtails, finally he had got into a skirt—

“A skirt?” inquired Bjartur, “What sort of a skirt?”

“It was a red one. And he had something round his neck.”

“Round his neck? What had he got round his neck?”

“I don’t really know what
it’s
like. I think it’s like a clergyman’s ruff.”

“A clergyman’s ruff, you bloody little fool!” cried Bjartur, losing his temper and giving his son a smack on the jaw that almost knocked him over. “There’s the penny for your story.”

Supernatural phenomena are most unpleasant for this reason: that having reduced to chaos all that ordered knowledge of the world about him which is the foundation a man stands on, they leave the soul floating in mid-air, where it does not rightly belong. One dare no longer draw any conclusion, even from the soundest of common sense, for all boundaries, even those between antitheses, are in a state of perpetual flux. Death is no longer death,
nor life life, as Einar of Undirhlith maintains—he who sorts everything out into its appropriate group, as one does when one sorts out the cards in one’s hand—for the hidden powers of existence have burst without warning upon this human sense-world and set everything afloat, as if it were September hay in the autumn rains. Some people are of the opinion that supernatural phenomena result from the Lord’s desire to remind mere mortals that He is much wiser than they. What was Bjartur of Summerhouses’ opinion? Was he to allow the uncanny to drive him into a corner? Or was he to go to others and ask advice? Or curse in private and wait till the misbegotten spawn of another world had butchered all his stock, and laid waste the croft as in 1750?