Independent People (15 page)

“Yes,” said Rosa, “it is good to be independent. Freedom comes before everything.”

Such sentiments the poetess was pleased, very pleased, to hear expressed; that was the right way of thinking; neither the pomp of town life nor its show could compare with such a way of thinking. Here was a woman whose soul’s gaze was calmly directed on the lofty peaks of idealism, whom the uncanny could not daunt, for well she knew that the stories of spectral visitations on the moors here were only uncouth folk-tales invented by uneducated, craven-hearted wretches who lived hundreds of years ago. She said that the daleswoman’s coffee was really marvellous, but if there was anything she envied her more it was this little room where all her housework lay under her eye; what a difference it must be to trailing about these big houses, no one knew the sleepless nights that accompanied a big house. She had neither more nor less than twenty-three rooms in her own house, as Rosa could testify from the days when she was in service in the same, and she had over twenty people to look after, people of every age and temper, as is the way of the world, and every minute, said the poetess, had to be spent in running after other people, seeing to
untrustworthy servants, maintaining peaceful and harmonious relations, and trying to diffuse light and fragrance over the life of her little community. “The true country idyll,” she said, “is not inherent in owning a large house, but in owning a little house, small acres, a little home. And why? That, dear, is what I propose to tell you. It is as the famous poet has it: ‘Marriage bliss a haven doth create, Protection meet from all the storms of fate, Then the darling children begin to come, not to lessen, but to add to the joy. When might you be expecting yours, dear, if I might inquire?”

The unexpected question threw the woman of the moors into sudden confusion. Her fugitive eyes looked everywhere but at the poetess, and found no answer; and when the Bailiff’s wife made as if to touch her, she jumped to her feet as if she thought that such a touch would be something akin to obscenity, and withdrew from reach to glare at her with wild, extravagant eyes, full of a savagery entirely unwarranted by the sweetness of the late conversation. It was difficult to say what lay behind this enigma; was it fear, or hate, or only passionless perplexity, or all this at once? One thing, however, was unmistakable in her stare, and it was this: “Do not touch me.” And there was also in those strange eyes a look that spoke of pride rising in exultation against the Bailiff’s wife, a look that might have been interpreted thus: “Have no fear, I shall never seek help from you.”

Whatever the interpretation laid upon it by Ingolfur Arnarson’s mother, it certainly had a disturbing effect upon her. She let the matter drop and was in difficulties about what to turn to next. She was careful not to look the young woman in the eyes again. Instead, she looked out of the window, but unfortunately there was a haze over the Blue Mountains, so she could not point out how the mountains lifted their summits towards heaven. She was disconcerted to the point even of forgetting for the moment to offer the crofter’s wife her support in the present and the future. The result was that she felt herself constrained to declare that in life everything depended upon one’s finding oneself. One apothegm and she was once more on an even keel. For her there was no doubt that husband and wife had found themselves on the moors—“I have noticed that poor people are always happier than these so-called rich people, of whom, actually, there are none in existence. For what are rich people? They are people who have much business, and own, if everything were reckoned up, nothing but anxiety; who go to the grave as destitute as anyone else, except that they have had more worry about their means of livelihood
and less real happiness. I say for my part that every cent we manage to scrape together goes in wages to the work-people. For three years now and more I’ve been dreaming of a new costume, but I see not the slightest possibility of it yet.”

“Dear, dear,” said Rosa indifferently.

“There are many whom one would like to help,” said Madam, “but one needs must stay the hand more often than one would wish in these critical times.”

“We have plenty of everything here,” said Rosa.

This reply the Bailiff’s wife found pleasing, very pleasing; on such a spirit rested the independence of the country. “I am not sure, dear,” she said confidentially, “whether you are aware that there was for many years considerable opposition in the parish council to my husband’s selling your Bjartur this land. As you may know, he had been angling after it year after year. But they maintained on the parish council that Bjartur would never be able to support a wife and family, and that probably they would soon have a flock of children from a deserted croft on their hands, for they’ve become so used in these days to whole families coming for maintenance on to the parish. And the tax-paying ability of the few who have anything is less than nothing; the taxes on us, the so-called prosperous people, grow year after year more intolerable. Then towards the end of last winter they began to whisper about you and Bjartur at home in Myri, and not long afterwards a meeting of the council was held there, and it was then that I took the bull by the horns and said: ‘Have no fear of Bjartur. If the daughter of dear old Thorthur of Nithurkot isn’t woman enough to find herself on the moors, and help Bjartur to find himself too, then there’s only one thing that I know for certain, which is that it’s time for me in person to seek parish relief, and that immediately and on the spot. For if there’s a trustworthy and industrious man in the whole of the parish, it’s our good Thorthur of Nithurkot, that worthy old soul who’s always running to be first to pay his taxes—I seem to see him before me now, as he has been all these years when he comes looking for my husband, with his money in his pocket. He lays his hat under the chair and unfastens the safety-pins on his breast pocket and draws out his purse, wrapped in two handkerchiefs, one red and the other white—such people do not seek help of others. And Bjartur—I know him as I know myself; he may not be a money-grubber, greedy of gain, and no lickspittle, but he is most certainly a thoroughly
upright, trustworthy person, one who could never bear the thought of being in anyone’s debt. Such people are not found on the parish. It is such people that are the core of national life.’”

Rosa made no reply. All this had happened some little time after the poetess had found this former servant-girl of hers in a part of the house where she had least expected to see her, and that at an hour that must occasion most comment; but all the same it was obvious to Rosa that the Bailiff’s wife was somewhat disappointed at the indifference she showed towards the news of the part, the so important part, that she had played in persuading the council to allow Bjartur to buy the holding. Shortly afterwards the visitor stood up and, after kissing her darling for the coffee, drew the veil beneath her chin and got on Sou’s back.

A
FTER
the second round-up Bjartur killed an old ewe for the house and salted it in a keg. This meat, he decided, should be reserved as a change of diet for the celebration of Sundays and other red-letter days during the winter; but there were occasional Sundays when he was served with a surprisingly tender portion, and then he would be heard to remark how unusually tasty it was for a spent old ewe. Now when the year-old ewe Gullbra did not appear in the second round-up he began to feel rather worried about her, hazarding various conjectures, based on various hypotheses, as to her fate. He thought it most probable that she had taken fright because of her captivity and strayed off south towards the Blue Mountains, beyond the limits of any search. He often asked his wife what was the last she had seen of the ewe, but the only reply was that she had wandered away over the marshes out of sight.

Then came the third round-up, and Bjartur of Summerhouses had recovered all his sheep with the exception of this one ewe. He began to feel that there was something strange behind it all, and it weighed heavily on his mind. It was the old story of the lost sheep.

“That most excellent of creatures,” he said, “that pearl among animals. Think of that dignified, spiral-horned, broad-backed stock, that firm-fleshed, wary, Reverendgudmundur breed, and the hard, suspicious gaze completely independent of man. Such sheep are like the daughters of kings on the mountains, so distinguished
is their appearance. Yet theirs is not the pride or the wariness that leads them into stray paths, but the pride that makes them search for the best and find it.”

And when he was undressing at night he would say: “Oh, I wish I could dream of my little Gullbra tonight.”

“But you don’t believe in dreams, Bjartur,” remarked his wife.

“I believe in what I like,” he retorted sharply, bridling up. I believe in anything that has a sensible sort of a meaning in it; but I don’t believe in dreams that betray you into nerves and hysterical nonsense”—he turned his back peevishly on his wife.

One morning when he woke, his wish had been fulfilled.

“I have the feeling that she still lives, and in the best of health,” he said. “I thought I saw her in a nice little gully where the grass is still green. Damn it, if only I could recall where it was, for I felt sure in my dream that I knew it and that I’d been there before. But however hard I tried, somehow I couldn’t get up the hill above to take my bearings, though I’m pretty certain it was somewhere near the hot springs south of the Blue Mountains. But I did know the sheep. It was my Gullbra and no other.”

“Dear me,” said his wife; and dished him up with his bread a rib, left over from Sunday’s dinner, of the sheep he had been dreaming about.

Autumn was well advanced and sleet had taken the place of the early autumn rains. The hills were almost mantled with snow, the moors speckled, the home mountain white down to the middle of the landslides. The weather, however, was still fairly good. There was pasture near by and the lambs were still out; Bjartur’s flock and the Rauthsmyri sheep fed together a mile or two away to the west. Some days the sun would shine and melt the snow on the home mountain, but the rime remained on the northern slopes of the gullies.

“It’s clearing up nicely for my little Gullbra today,” the crofter would observe.

Then it began to freeze in earnest. One morning the level stretches of the marshes were white with a thin film of ice; rime lay on the fallen grass. On the home brook, too, there had appeared little slivers of ice, and under them little bubbles restlessly played. Oh, how clear it was, their little home brook, as it bubbled on between the crystal wafers! She stood on the bank gazing at her cold little brook and listening to its flow; her child would grow up by this brook, as she by the brook at home.

“Now then, lass,” said Bjartur, “wrap me up a bite to eat, enough for three days. I’m thinking of taking a little walk to myself over the moors to the south there.”

It was a fortnight after Winter Day.

“Don’t be such a fool,” said Rosa. I’m sure the sheep has fallen in somewhere or other.”

“Fallen in?” repeated Bjartur, greatly offended. “My little Gullbra? The Reverendgudmundur breed? As if she were an underfed yearling! You must be out of your head, woman.”

“Maybe she’s taken the pest, then,” said Rosa.

“No, she hasn’t taken the pest. No more of your nonsense.”

“But look what month it is, man. You never know what weather to expect now.”

“Oh, it won’t be the first time I’ve taken a stroll over the moors at this time of the year, or even later, and that for other people’s sheep. No one felt sorry for me then, nor was there any reason why they should.”

“You don’t consider me, of course,” complained his wife.

“Oh, the weather’s always fine enough in bed.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying things like that.”

“Now, it’s no good you talking,” he said uncompromisingly. “There is, as it says in the Bible, less joy in heaven over a hundred sheep that improve their lot than over one lost sheep that is found.”

“But what if she’s dead of the pest?”

“My conscience will be none the clearer for that,” he replied, “unless I’ve done all I can to find out whether she’s dead or alive first. But perhaps you’d like to see the conscience in me die of the pest?”

“But what if I’m taken ill while you’re away?”

“Oh, you can hardly be taken so very ill. Not just yet, anyway.”

“What if you’re lost in a snowstorm?”

“Now that’s enough,” he said. “I’m sick of listening to this hysterical babble of yours. Whatever happens, you can always comfort yourself with the thought that the sheep are in the home pastures. Now then, stuff the dog with as much as she can hold. And wrap me a rag around a few black puddings and a pluck sausage. Some cold coffee in a bottle wouldn’t be a bad idea either, and it can be as strong as it likes.”

The woman sat thinking for a while, and though she had it in her power with one word to settle the issue, she was too proud to use this power of hers and instead employed threats, which were unlikely to make him stay at home.

“If you leave me here by myself, Bjartur, I'll go and stay with somebody else.”

“Somebody else? Surely you would never lower yourself to that, an independent woman?”

“I’ll go all the same.”

“I don’t doubt it, once you take one of your mulish turns. A sheep’s stubbornness is as nothing compared with a woman’s.”

“You know the condition I’m in and that I’m expecting a child.”

“I know only one thing: that my child isn’t due till after the New Year. Other people’s children are no concern of mine.”

“I’ve felt it kicking for a long time, all the same.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t concern me.”

However much she argued, nothing could make Bjartur budge an inch. He put on two pairs of socks and both his woollen jerseys, and when his wife showed no signs of packing his food, he did it himself, while she sat by the range with her back turned on him. Yet it never occurred to her to confess that she had eaten the ewe. He hung about for a while, fiddling with this and that, as if waiting for her to come to her senses, and mumbled a line or two of poetry, but she did not come to her senses and sat without moving.