Independent People (13 page)

“Oh, it’s very free, of course,” she replied, and sniffed.

“Yes,” said the Fell King, who had now become like a landed farmer in outlook after his drop of brandy. “If the spirit that animates this young couple were to permeate the whole of the younger generation, men and women alike, the country would need to have no fear of the future either.”

“Well,” said old Thorthur of Nithurkot, “I think the best thing for me would be to crawl along the way a bit on that poor old nag of mine.”

He stood there by the trapdoor so worn and decrepit after his long life and few ideas that it was difficult not to say something to him too. So the Fell King clapped a hand consolingly on his shoulder and said:

“Yes, my dear Thorthur, life for all of us is a sort of lottery.”

“Eh?” said the old man vacantly, failing to understand the comparison, as he had only taken part in one lottery, and that was a few years ago when Madam of Myri had given a filly to be raffled for the Cemetery Fund. And the result of that lottery was that the Bailiff drew the filly himself.

“Father,” said Rosa, when she had taken him out to his horse, “do try to cover yourself well in the hut tonight.”

“Why I should be chasing over the mountains after wild sheep at my age,” he said, laying the reins over his horse, “is more than I can understand; a man nearly eighty and hardly able to lift my old bones out of bed in the morning—”

The men parted their dogs, which were rolling about, fighting, on the slope in front of the house, and the ewe, still tethered on the outskirts of the enclosure, stood and bleated as it watched them. The old man embraced his daughter, then began painfully to mount his horse, while she steadied the stirrup for him; he had a black sheepskin over his saddle for comfort and protection. She stroked his horse’s nose; old Glaesir, dear creature that she could remember as a little foal, and how glorious everything had been at home in those days, eighteen years ago, when all the brothers and sisters had been at home in Nithurkot, the brothers and sisters who were now scattered far and wide! And all at once there was Samur, his tongue hanging out of his mouth after the fray; but he knew her, forgot immediately the recent dispute, and jumped up at her, barking with such joy at the reunion that she
could not help running inside to find a scrap of fish to give her father’s dog.

“I would ask you to lend me Samur for company tonight, Father, if I didn’t know that the sheep have to come first. I seem to have so little trust in that ewe he is going to leave with me.”

At this moment Bjartur appeared on the scene, leading Blesi by the reins. He kissed his wife hastily and told her what had to be done in his absence, then swung himself into the saddle and called Titla. And the round-up men rode out of the home-field. She watched them crossing the marshes, her father behind the others, drooping in the saddle and swinging his legs to thump the horse’s flanks; old Glaesir was so heavy in the mud.

SHORTLY
afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance. And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.

She had taken up her mending, but too listless to begin, sat motionless by the window, hypnotized by the pattering hiss of the rain. She gazed in a mindless lethargy at the grey darkness outside, or stared with childish eyes at the pools that formed on the window-sill as the water seeped through. But as the day wore on a gale began to spring up, and the wind chased the rain in
howling white squalls, beating them on as if they were so many flocks of sheep. These rain-flocks rushed spuming over the marshes, and taking on the form of waves about to break, they rose still farther, then either subsided or broke.

The ewe had stopped bleating in the home-field and was now standing as far from the peg as the tether allowed, with its head drooping and its horns in the weather. At first the woman pitied it in its misfortune, the only sheep on all the fells to be dragged off and held in captivity, so she decided to bring it into shelter. The sheep tried to run away when it saw her approaching, but the tether limited its flight. She took the rope in her hands, and following it up until she could catch hold of its horns, she gripped the animal between her legs, struggled home with it into the croft, let it loose in the dark stalls below, and closed the door. The sheep soon showed its dislike of the house; when it had shaken most of the rain out of its fleece, it began to range up and down the stalls and, finding that there was no way out, started bleating so loudly that the croft rang to the echo. The woman tried to show it some hospitality and took it down some water, but the sheep refused it; then she offered it hay, but it would not touch that either, and scurried away from her, panic-stricken, and stood at bay in a corner looking at her with suspicious eyes, green in the dark. It beat the floor with its forefoot as if in menace. Finally she offered it bread and fish, but when this too was refused, she gave up, and the animal continued its sharp, apprehensive bleat.

Dusk came and still it went on bleating. The woman heated up some porridge and ate it, and by this time it was dark, but she could not bring herself
to
let the fire die out, the air was so raw and there was water dripping from two of the rafters, and besides, there were no matches in the croft, and man’s security lives in the light of a fire, and after that in the ember that must be kept aglow. She sat by the range for a good while with the door half-open so that she could see into the fire. Thinking to comfort herself with indulgence, she made some coffee from her mother’s present. With it she ate sugar, also the gift of her mother, five lumps instead of one because it was her own sugar. Slowly she drank the coffee, cup after cup, staring steadfastly into the embers to keep off the fear of night that waited its chance to creep over her flesh and shiver down her spine. She set herself deliberately to think of pleasant things, and by calling up old memories managed at odd moments to feel almost comfortable. The sheep was silent at last, it had lain down. But the wind had grown wilder
still; gradually the beat of the rain took on the rising note of a gale that pounded the window-panes and shook the croft in its eddies. It was so late now that the woman scarcely dared move from the range, so charged with evil did she feel the darkness round her. She sat with her feet drawn up under her and her arms folded tightly across her breast, with the eerie feeling that someone might reach for them if she stretched them out. For comfort she tried to keep her mind engrossed on her memories. She had been sitting like this for some time, and had even succeeded in forgetting her fears, when the sheep, tired of lying down, rose to its feet and with rested vigour gave vent to a louder bleat, shrill and cutting, from the darkness below. It was as if it had taken sudden fright; as if someone had suddenly kicked it to its feet; for a while, as if pursued, it dashed in fright from corner to corner; twice it stopped and beat the floor with its foot, blew into someone’s face. Whose? Maybe no one’s.

At last she stole forward to the trapdoor and called down:

“Little lamb, don’t be afraid.”

But her heart jumped when she heard her voice in the emptiness of the dark croft. She did not know her own voice; she knew no voice that was so fantastic. And there she stood motionless by the trapdoor, and in an instant all her forebodings of the dark and inevitable calamity that waited in the night had become a frightful certainty. Down the length of her spine there struck a paralysing shudder, like a furious, excruciating pain: there was someone downstairs, someone who was attacking the sheep, seizing it evilly by the throat, someone who throttled its bleat and threw it against the wall—someone, something—till it gave vent to another bleat, more terror-stricken, more despairing than ever before.

No, she did not faint; she fumbled instinctively for more brushwood to add to the fire. The brushwood was her one hope, its blue crackling flame, its glowing embers; the fire in the range must not die out. “No, perhaps it was nothing.’ she said, sticking the twigs in with numb fingers.

Someone, something; perhaps nothing. She was determined to calm herself by gazing into the little glow, the fire of her own home, the fire that burns for the idea of independence, the idea of freedom. No one walked after death, Kolumkilli least of all; there was only the good God of freedom on the moors, the God who exalts man above the dog (perhaps). Who knew but that she herself might be Bailiff’s wife, like the Mistress of Myri in twenty-three years’ time? Life is a sort of lottery, as the Fell King had said
to her father—poor old man, what if he should catch pneumonia in this lottery, lying out in a mountain hut tonight, and seventy years old. No, she would not think about it, she must not think of anything evil, only of the good and the beautiful.

“Meh-eh-eh.”

Into the bleating of the ewe there had crept a note as of madness, a hoarse, almost expiring rattle. Rosa even began to wonder whether it could really be the sheep. It was a bleat no longer, it was an agonized wail. Was the evil presence throttling the life out of it? The plunging and scrambling continued with occasional pauses, something collided with the ladder and bumped into the door, the croft trembled in every timber, then there was a respite and silence except for the squalls beating on the window and the pounding of her heart—she was hoping that the turmoil was over, that the sheep would be quiet, but no sooner had the heaving of her breast subsided than a sudden blow buffeted the door, reechoing throughout the house, and the attack had started again with a rushing and a trampling, a rumbling and a clatter as if everything was falling down. At first the woman thought the drumming and the rumbling came from the mountain, or that the front of the house had caved in; then there rang out a screaming bellow and she knew that the sheep was being strangled. Shaking with terror, she clung to the bedpost and called upon God and Jesus, repeating the names unwillingly like someone praying on his deathbed. At long last, and with infinite caution, she started to undo her outer garments, slipping them off and standing in her underclothes, but these she did not dare to remove, for with every movement she risked calling up the furtive powers of the darkness. Inch by inch she slipped under the bedclothes and, drawing them above her head, felt some relief only when she had gathered them so closely to her that no air could get inside. She lay like this for a long time, still quivering and still with a pain in her heart; no memories could comfort her any longer, terror is stronger than the total sum of anyone’s happiness. She tried to think with hope of the far-off dawn, for human beings always seek some source of consolation; it is this search for consolation, even when every retreat is obviously cut off, that proves that one is still alive.

Long, long she lay trembling in terror before she sank into a dazed confusion, a tense stupor that was neither sleep nor waking rest, but a difficult, reluctant journey through a world landless and without time, where she lived over again the most incredible
events of the past and met people she had once known, in visions most unnatural in their clarity, most horrible in the minuteness of their detail. She heard anew the drawl in a long-forgotten voice, a voice that had never mattered, saw again the long-forgotten wrinkle in a face that had never concerned her. Every face that materialized before her distraught fancy sought like a canker to eat its way into her brain. She saw, for example, the faces of her visitors of the morning before with a detail that was almost nauseating. These visions, which terrified her in proportion to their clarity and their detail, sought stubbornly to burn themselves into her brain, so that they could never be effaced; they sat there in the sleepy greyness of the dawn with their rigid faces, like dead men we know in dreams—they come to us and pretend to be alive, and yet we know in the dream that they are dead because once upon a time we went to their funerals. Their melancholy grin was the grin of dead men. Their conversation, fantastically dreary, was the conversation of dead men; the faces they showed each other were masks, films half-frozen over the horror of the ruin that had engulfed them—no one in his right mind believed that they would ever be landed farmers. Bjartur had once reckoned up that he would be bailiff in twenty-three years’ time, “but where will I be then?” wondered Rosa. Her father had dreamed of being a landed farmer too, perhaps bailiff. He had built a corn-mill over the brook, but where was he lying tonight? Tonight he lay in the desert, seventy years old, rheumatic and weak-chested, and the mill stood moss-grown in the brook. Where were the shank-bones and the jaw-bones, the playthings of the children of Nithurkot? In childhood her hopes had been imaginary flocks, dewlapped cows with heavy udders, frisky mares at stud with graceful stallions, all on her own mountain pastures; and she had dreamed, too, of being as clever and as poetical as the Bailiff’s wife and of living in a famous mansion. Where was she living now? Where were her flocks, where her genius? She owned one sheep and could hardly write. As a child by her father’s mill-cot she had been rich; in those days her hopes had been cows, her dreams the horses of poetry. The brook at home had had its own song. The mill-cot that had never been a mill had had its own soul, a soul such that nothing in life had compared with it since. She saw still the jawbones and the leg-bones lying on the bank beside the cot, saw the mussel-shell her father had found by the sea. She had been so fond of her mussel-shell, it had been a treasure beyond earthly
price, not one of her brothers or sisters had been allowed to play with her mussel-shell—“what can have happened to my mussel-shell?”