Independent People (70 page)

“Oh, I'll begin when I think fit,” said Bjartur.

‘Well, if you’re thinking of starting this summer, it would be just as well if we got it all settled now, because I’m going south to Reykjavik in the middle of the week, and I doubt if I shall be returning until after the elections.”

“How do you know I can’t get better terms elsewhere, Ingi lad?” asked Bjartur.

“You misunderstand me completely if you think I’m offering you terms,” replied the co-operative manager. ‘The society is no haggling establishment, and we don’t set out to attract custom with fine-sounding offers of bargain prices. The co-operative is your own store, man, where it is you that decide your own terms. There are no middlemen there to add their quota to the cost of the timber and the cement. Nor is there anyone to press you for payment except yourself. All I ask is, what are your orders? I am your servant. When do you want our stuff? And do you want me to work out for you the amount you’ll require from the savings bank, or would you rather do it yourself ?”

“The terms at the savings bank are hopeless. The ordinary banks are better.”

“Yes, Bjartur, so much better that I shouldn’t be surprised if your old friend the Fell King hadn’t lost all he owns by Christmas and was living in an old shack down on the beach, where he rightly belongs, or was working his guts out as a stableman for his son-in-law, whom I can have put in prison whenever I care. I am the man who will rule the destiny of the National Bank before this summer is over, mark my words. And the whole of that infernal gang of swindlers shall be bankrupted or my name isn’t Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson. And in that day there will be little comfort for those who trusted the swindlers and laid their fate in their hands. Our savings bank, on the other hand, is a solid, trustworthy establishment, Bjartur; and though it may not grant a loan for a very long period, you’re all the better off for that, because a farm saddled with a long mortgage isn’t one’s own property, except on paper.”

This was high finance with a vengeance, and Bjartur was in two minds, hardly knowing what to believe. He was merely a simple up-country peasant who had fought nature and the country’s monsters with his bare hands, and his higher culture was derived all from ballads and old sagas where men fought one another without any beating about the bush, hewed one another to pieces, and heaped the corpses of the slain one above another; this was the only higher politics he understood.

“Our building materials are as much as a third cheaper than the stuff you’ll get in Vik,” continued the co-operative manager. “We got a whole cargo of cement direct from abroad last summer. And, in addition, there’s every prospect that well be giving as high as fifty crowns a head for the lambs this autumn.”

It’s a pity one can never tell when you’re lying and when you’re not lying,” said Bjartur. “Personally, I’m nearest to believing that you lie all the time.”

At this the Althingi member clapped him on the shoulder and laughed.

Then he prepared to take his leave.

“So it will be in order for me to send you the first load of cement tomorrow,” said he. “The rest will come of itself. My agent will show you all the architect’s plans you need. And we’ve plenty of masons and joiners around the store. As far as the loan from the savings bank is concerned, we have a rough idea of what you’ll be needing. Give us a look in tomorrow or the day after and we’ll discuss the matter at great length.”

The car was standing on the road opposite Summerhouses, and the racehorse was very frightened; it pricked its ears restively, refusing to advance in spite of its rider’s efforts to urge it on. Finally he had to dismount and lead it by the reins. The strange, highly polished machine glittered in the rays of the evening sun, alien in the landscape, preternatural, but nevertheless he led his horse right up to it. From the open front window there rose, coiling in the tranquil air, a thin plume of blue smoke. The daughter was sitting alone there in the front seat; he saw her shoulder, her white neck, her golden curls, her cheek. She did not look at him, though he was only a few yards away, and the smoke went on rising from the window in graceful coils and loops. He went closer still and wished her good-evening. She gave a little start and made as if to hide the cigarette, then raised it once more to her lips.

“Why did you startle me like that?” she asked, in her singing, rather nasal voice.

“I thought I’d like to show you my horse,” he said with a countrified smile.

“Horse?” she said vacantly, as if she had never heard of such a beast.

“Yes,” he said, and pointed to the horse and told her the price, and it was one of the costliest horses in the district.

“Dear me,” she said, without deigning to look at it. “Has it anything to do with me?”

“Don’t you remember me, then?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” she answered tonelessly, gazing straight along the road through the windshield of her father’s car, with the cigarette daintily held between her fingers. He went on staring
at her. Finally she turned her head and, giving him a supercilious look, asked, as if he had done her some personal injury: “Why aren’t you in America?”

“I missed the ship that night,” he replied.

“Why didn’t you go on the next one?”

“I wanted a h-horse instead.”

“A horse?”

Then, plucking up courage, he said: “I felt I would be able to make good at home here after I’d g-got to know you.”

“Wretch!” she said. “Spineless wretch!”

This stung him to a hint of temper: he flushed hotly, and the smile gave way to a quivering upper lip. “I’m no wretch,” he cried. “I’ll show you that. You’ll see one day.”

The sort of people who set out to do something and give up before it’s done are all wretches and weeds. I call them frightful wretches and weeds. I call them wretches and weeds and cowards. Yes, cowards. I’m ashamed of myself, ashamed of myself, for having set eyes on them, let alone spoken to them.”

He hopped back a pace and there was a momentary glint in his eyes as he cried, matching provocation for provocation: “Maybe we shall build as big a mansion as you people at Rauthsmyri. Or bigger.”

She laughed contemptuously down her nose, and nothing more.

“You blasted Rauthsmyri gang,” he cried, “you’ve always thought you could trample on us, yes, that’s what you’ve always thought,” and advancing a step nearer, he shook his clenched fist in her face. “But I'll show you!”

“I’m not talking to you,” said she. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“In a few years I shall be the owner of Summerhouses, and I'll be as big a farmer as your grandfather, maybe bigger. You’ll
see.”

She puffed the smoke out of her mouth in a great cloud as she narrowed her eyes and measured him.

“My father will soon be master of the whole country,” she told him. Then she opened her eyes and, leaning towards him, sharpened them on him as if in menace. “Of the whole of Iceland. All of it.”

This took the shine out of him again, and he looked down at the ground. Then he asked:

“Why are you so cruel to me now? You who know that it was
only because of you that I didn’t go to America. I thought you were fond of me.”

“Fathead,” she said. “Yes, maybe if you’d gone, just a little.” She thought of a good joke and couldn’t bear to suppress it: “And more especially if you’d never come back—then, perhaps. But there’s Father coming now,” and straightway she threw her cigarette into the ditch.

“So you’ve found someone to talk to, love,” said Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson. ‘That was fine.” He got into the car and lit himself a cigar.

“It’s only a country lad,” she said. “He was going to America once.”

“Oh, is it he?” asked the Althingi member as he trod on the self-starter and let the brakes off.

“You did right, mate, in giving up this idea of going to America. We must stay at home, contend with our own difficulties and overcome them. It pays to believe in one’s own motherland. Everything for Iceland. By the way, how old are you?”

But the lad was only seventeen and too young to vote yet.

So the Althingi member put the car in gear without troubling more about him, and, as the car moved off, absent-mindedly raised a finger to his hat, as if in farewell, perhaps it was only to straighten it.

In a few moments they were away in the distance. There remained only a puff or two of dust swirling about in the air. Presently it had settled and there was no more dust in the air.

M
ANY
a man may have his doubts for the moment, but when all comes to all and a long view is taken, one discovers usually that things have been making some sort of forward progress, some headway or other. And a man’s dreams have a habit of coming true, more especially if he has made no particular effort to fulfil them—and there on the paving, before the crofter has quite waked up to the fact, lie the first loads of cement for building. It is popularly supposed that when a man has made himself worthy of living in a real house, he will be given a real house to live in; it sprouts out of the earth for him of its own accord, they say; life bestows on the individual all that he is worthy of, and the same is said to be true of the nation as a whole. The war raised many
people, and one or two countries, to positions of great worth, it is, in fact, extremely doubtful whether any number of politicians, however brilliant, however high-minded, can do more for Iceland than one war accompanied by plenty of lively slaughter in foreign parts. After Bjartur had become a person of great worth, even he was prone to admit on occasion that life had sometimes been pretty hard in Summerhouses in the old days, but one has to take a few knocks if one wants to get on, surely, and anyway we never ate other folk’s bread. Other folk’s bread is the most virulent form of poison that a free and independent man can take; other folk’s bread is the only thing that can rob him of independence and the one true freedom. Time was when certain persons had tried to force upon him the gift of a cow, but he was most certainly not the man to accept presents from his enemies; and when, in the following year, he had slaughtered this same cow, it was because he had had a distant goal in prospect in his husbandry, or, as he had told the workmen in those far-off days, because he knew quite well what he was going to do with his money, maybe he was going to build himself a palace with it. And it was in very much the same strain that he spoke down in the co-operative store now. “A big house or nothing at all,” he said, “two storeys and a third under gables at the least.” They managed, however, to persuade him that it would be better to have a nice, well-built cellar and one storey less, which would make three storeys just the same, basement, ground floor, upper floor. He raised a loan in the savings bank. The croft, with its lack of good buildings, was of course not considered sufficient security for a long loan, so it was only granted for a period of one year at a time. It was considered suitable to lend thirty per cent on the strength of the first mortgage on the land, though only provided that the co-operative society went surety. The co-operative society accepted the responsibility immediately in exchange for a second mortgage on the land. The savings bank then declared itself not unwilling to advance another loan in the autumn, when the house was finished building, subject to a further mortgage on the house and property together. From this new loan the co-operative society was to be repaid the loan they had advanced for building materials. Such are the workings of higher finance, and in return for all this the crofter voted for Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson, that he might sit as his representative in the Althingi and solve the nation’s problems, and shortly afterwards the co-operative manager was declared elected, and merchant power had thereby suffered a second defeat on this particular
front. All those who had voted for the co-operative manager had reason now to rejoice, whereas those who had voted for the banker gnawed their knuckles and cursed themselves black in the face, partly because the bank was in a pretty shaky condition and might, indeed, be declared insolvent at any moment, partly because these same people had shown themselves in open enmity of the Rauthsmyrians; and to whom could they look now in the midst of their self-wrought destruction? Then, to make the outlook blacker still, those idiotic foreigners didn’t seem to have had the sense to keep their precious war going for another twelve-month or so, and it looked as if the bottom might fall out of the farmer’s market any day now.

The foundations were dug in the slope of the ground just south of the old croft, and then masons and joiners came and made the cellar, and it was a marvellous cellar; then they knocked off for a week’s breathing-space, and, at the end of it, set to work on the ground floor, where there were to be four rooms and a scullery. Yes, if only there had been one or two little children, young and avid of novelty, to rejoice over the building, as there had been years ago when the ewe-house was being built, for there was great excitement and much afoot on the croft these days, the smell of wood and cement, the tapping of hammers and the churning rattle of the mixer, workmen by the score, carts and horses, sand and gravel. At this date double walls and ferro-concrete were unheard of; single walls were made to suffice, but they were built thick. Half-way through the meadow haymaking the upper storey and the roof were still lacking, and as the money had all been spent by this time, Bjartur went down to town to get a further advance from the savings bank. But Ingolfur Arnarson happened to be in Reykjavik and money was tight in the savings bank, though they gave him to understand that there might be a chance in the autumn. Nor was this his only difficulty, for the store was out of corrugated iron for roofs and was also very short of window-glass, there were so many folk building just now, but they expected a fresh consignment of glass later in the summer and of corrugated iron in the autumn. “We’ll see what sort of price the lambs fetch” they said. So Bjartur’s house stood in the moulds all that summer, a most depressing object to meet the eye; travellers passing that way missed the friendly old grass-grown turf cottage, for it lay out of sight behind this formless, gaping monstrosity, which reminded one of nothing so much as the havoc and devastation left in the trail of a hurricane. But if anyone imagined that Bjartur’s house
would be allowed to stay as it was indefinitely, he was sadly in error. For in the autumn it came to light that the heaven-sent blessings of war were still in operation as far as prices were concerned, though the fighting itself had been over and done with for almost a year now. Never had such prices been heard of before in Iceland; so much so that Madam of Myri spoke these winged words at the National Congress of Women’s Institutes in Reykjavik that very autumn: “Iceland is a heavenly country.” The lambs were bringing in as much as fifty crowns apiece, and naturally no words in the language were idyllic enough to praise the virtues of rural culture, past and present, in the southern newspapers. The merits of the peasantry were exalted above all other merits. Bjartur was able to obtain more money from the savings bank, and then both timber and window-panes and corrugated iron and workmen, so that the time was not long before the house was finished and complete with roof. But when they were busy moulding the upper floor, it was discovered that the cellar had begun to crack. When the foreman joiner and the foreman mason were summoned, they announced that these cracks must have been caused by the earthquakes that had occurred that summer. Bjartur said that no one had noticed any earthquakes that particular summer, not on the upper surface of the earth at least.