Independent People (18 page)

On the following night, long after the people of Brun, the nearest farm of Glacierdale, had retired to bed—the storm had raged relentlessly now for a full twenty-four hours—it came to pass that the housewife was wakened from her sleep by a hubbub at the window, a groaning, even a hammering. She woke her husband, and they came to the conclusion that some creature gifted with the power of reasoning must surely be afoot and about the house, though on this lonely croft visitors were the last thing to be expected in such a storm—was it man or devil? They huddled on their most necessary garments and went to the door with a light. And when they had opened the door, there toppled in through the drift outside a creature resembling only in some ways a human being; he rolled in through the doorway armoured from head to foot in ice, nose and mouth encrusted, and came to rest in a squatting position with his back against the wall and his head sunk on his chest, as if the monstrous spectre, despairing of maltreating him further, had finally slung him through the door and up against the wall; the light of the house shone on this visitor. He panted heavily, his chest heaving and groaning, and made an effort to clear his throat and spit, and when the crofter asked him who he was and where he came from, he tried to get
to
his feet, like an animal trying to stand up on its hind legs, and gave his name—“Bjartur of Summerhouses.”

The crofter’s son had now risen also, and together he and his
father made an attempt to help their visitor into the room, but he refused any such assistance. “I’ll walk by myself,” he said, “I’ll follow the woman with the lamp.” He laid himself across the son’s bed and for a while made no answer to their questions, but mumbled like a drunkard, rumbled like a bull about to bellow. At last he said:

“I am thirsty.”

The woman brought him a three-pint basin of milk, and he set it to his mouth and drank it off, and said as he passed her the basin: “Thanks for the drink, mother.” With her warm hands she helped to thaw the clots of ice in his beard and eyebrows, then drew off his frozen clothes and felt with experienced fingers for frost-bite. Fingers and toes were without feeling, his skin smarting with frost, but otherwise he appeared to have taken no hurt. When the crust of ice had been thawed off, he stretched himself out naked in the son’s warm bed and had seldom felt so comfortable in all his life. After the housewife had gone to prepare him some food, father and son sat down beside him, their eyes bewildered, as if they did not really believe this phenomenon and did not know quite what to say. In the end it was he who spoke, as he asked in a hoarse voice from under the coverlet:

“Were your lambs in?”

They replied that they were, and asked in turn how it had come about that he had landed here, on the eastern bank of Glacier River, in murderous weather that would kill any man.

“Any man?” he repeated querulously. “What do the men matter? I always thought it was the animals that came first.”

They continued to question him.

“Oh, as a matter of fact I was just taking a little walk by myself,” he vouchsafed. “I missed a ewe, you see, and took a stroll along the heights there just to soothe my mind.”

For a while he was silent, then he added:

“It’s been a trifle rough today.”

“It wasn’t any pleasanter last night either,” they said, “a regular hurricane.”

“Yes,” agreed Bjartur,
“it
was just a trifle rough last night, too.”

They wanted to know where he had put in the night, and he replied: “In the snow.” They were particularly curious about how he had managed to cross Glacier River, but he would give no details. “It’s a nice thing to have one’s lambs out in this,” he said mournfully.

They said that in his shoes they wouldn’t trouble themselves
about lambs tonight, but think themselves lucky to be where they were.

“It’s easy to see,” he replied, “that you people have found your feet. But I am fighting for my independence. I have worked eighteen years for the little livestock I have, and if they’re under snow, it would be better for me to be under snow too.”

But when the woman had brought him a meal in bed and he had eaten his fill, he lay down without further discourse and was asleep and snoring loudly.

O
N
the afternoon of the fifth day Bjartur ploughed his way home across the marshes, knee-deep in snow. He was feeling anything but pleased with himself, ashamed of what he felt had been a most ignominious journey, and alternating between hope and fear as to the fate of his sheep in the home pastures; and now, to cap it all, there wasn’t even a flicker of light in the window to welcome him home when at last he did return, for the croft was buried in snow and no attempt had been made to clear the door or the window; nowhere was there a passage cut through the drift, not a wisp of smoke rose from the chimney. He crawled up on to the roof, scraped the snow from the window and shouted: “Rosa, see if you can’t get me a shovel out through the door.”

The dog gave a pitiful howl inside in the living-room, the only answer; and when the crofter started shouting to his wife again, the dog leaped up at the window from inside and scratched at it with her paws. He began then to wonder whether his wife might not have been taken ill, and feeling rather apprehensive about it, he started on the drift like one in a frenzy. He had to scrape the snow aside with his hands, slow work, but eventually he managed to clear sufficient space about the door to worm his way inside.

When he got to the top of the stairway the dog jumped up at him madly, howling bitterly, as if someone were steadily tramping on her tail. The winter darkness had fallen early, and it was as black as pitch inside, the windows snowed up; he had to feel his way about. But he had not taken a full step across the floor before he struck his foot against some unwonted obstacle. He swore, as was his habit whenever he lost his footing—what the devil had he fallen over?

It took him a long time to find the matches, and when he had
found them the lamp proved to be empty, the wick burned down, the glass black with smoke. But when he had filled the lamp and the wick had begun drawing again, it was possible even in this feeble light to make out some indication of what had happened in Summerhouses in his absence. It was his wife. She was lying dead there in her congealed blood. It looked as if she had got out of bed for something, and, too weak to climb in again, had collapsed by the bedside; in her hand a wet towel, blood-stained. The condition of the body showed plainly what had happened. And when he looked into the bed, whither the dog had suddenly leaped, he saw peeping from under the dog’s belly a small, yellow-brown face, wrinkled, with closed eyes, like a new-born old man, and over this face slight quivers were playing, feeble and spasmodic, and from this unfortunate there came, if he heard aright, an occasional very faint whimper.

The dog strove to spread herself as closely as possible over the little body that she had taken to foster and given the only thing she possessed: the warmth of her lousy body, hungry and emaciated; when Bjartur came nearer to look more closely, she showed her teeth, as if wishing him to understand that it was not he who owned this child. The mother had wrapped the poor creature in a woollen rag as soon as she had cut the cord, and had probably risen from her bed to heat some water to bathe it with, for on the range stood a pan full of water, long since cold above the dead fire. But the infant was still hanging on to life in the warmth from the animal’s body.

Bjartur lifted the body of his wife from the floor, and after laying it in the empty bedstead opposite their own bed, wiped off as much of the blood as he could. It cost him a good deal of effort to straighten the corpse out, for the limbs had stiffened in the position in which the body had lain; the arms obstinately refused to lie in a cross over her breast, the dull eyes would not close, the right eye especially, the one with a cast—her stubbornness again. But Bjartur trusted himself even less for what was now of greater importance, and that was to quicken the spark of life still left in the new-born infant. This put him in no mean quandary, the independent man, for experienced hands were needed, probably female hands; he himself dared not have anything to do with it Must he then ask help of other people? The last thing that he had impressed upon his wife was not to ask help of other people—an independent man who resorts to other
people for help gives himself over into the power of the archfiend; and now this same humiliation was to be pronounced on him; on Bjartur of Summerhouses; but he was determined to pay whatever was asked of him.

”W
ELL,
at least you’re getting about a bit these days, my lad,” said Bjartur to himself as on the evening of the same day he knocked at the kitchen door at Rauthsmyri.

“So it’s you at last, is it?” said the workman who came to the door. He was in his stocking feet and had in his hand some steaming cloth that he was fulling—the domestic crafts were in full swing. ‘We thought you were dead.’

“Far from it,” replied Bjartur. ‘I’ve been over the mountains for sheep.”

“Are you sure you’re right in the head?” asked the other.

“I lost a ewe.”

“It’s like you to leave all your other sheep in danger to go chasing over the mountains after one ewe.”

“Well, I may be wrong, mate, but as far as I know it says in the Bible that one sheep on the mountains is worth more than a hundred at home,” said Bjartur, who had his own fondness for those passages in the Scriptures which mention sheep. “And besides, one doesn’t live next door to the local potentate for nothing if the weather happens to break.”

Such, indeed, proved to have been the case: the Rauthsmyri herds had taken Bjartur’s sheep in with their own the evening that the storm broke, but had not been ordered by the Bailiff to drive them back home tomorrow morning and to find out at the same time whether their owner was dead or not. “Did you find the ewe?”

“No, there wasn’t a damned thing to be seen, except a hot-spring bird in the springs south of the Blue Mountains,” replied Bjartur. “But by the way, have the lambs taken to hay yet?”

Oh yes, they’d had a sniff or two at the hay, said the workman, and gave Bjartur to understand that these valiant lambs of his would soon learn the art of eating. But while they were discussing the matter, the housekeeper, Gudny, came to the door, for she had recognized Bjartur’s voice; she bade him now come into the kitchen, and would he like a bowl of porridge and a rib of horse?
He scraped the snow from his clothes with his knife and dusted his hat against the doorpost.

It was a big kitchen, used partly as a living-room; the workmen were fulling or busy with horsehair, the servant-girls with their wool, and the dogs were lying full-length on the floor, all old friends of Bjartur’s, dogs included. Bjartur was very hungry. They were all discussing the unexpected blizzard and its effect on the livestock; “we can look for a dirty January,” said the womenfolk, “when it’s started already and Advent not here yet. How is Rosa keeping?”

“Urn,” said Bjartur with his mouth full, “it was a trifle rough on the other side of Glacier River, but I’ve seen it worse many atime.”

“On the other side of Glacier River?” asked the workmen in surprise. “You aren’t trying to make us believe that you crossed Glacier River, are you?”

“Why not? Many a brook can be waded, even if it is up on the moors,” replied the crofter, “and maybe we aren’t all such hearth-hounds as the lot of you.”

“Do you mean to tell us that you’ve been fooling about up on the moors, and poor Rosa in the condition they say she is?” cried the housekeeper compassionately.

“I please myself what I do, Gunsa lass,” retorted Bjartur with a scornful grin. “I’m my own boss these days, you know, and need give account to no one, you least of all.” And throwing the horse-meat he had been given to one of the dogs as he spoke, he added: “But by the way, do you think our good Madam has gone off to bed yet?”

The Bailiff’s wife came sailing in, high of head and full of bosom, looked inquiringly at Bjartur through spectacles that ploughed creases in the fat, red cheeks, and switched on the cold, cultured, aristocratic smile that in spite of ideals and poetic talent built such a high, wide wall between her and those whose well-being was less dependent on romanticism. Bjartur thanked her heartily for the horse-meat and the porridge.

“Surely you haven’t sent for me to thank me for a ladle of porridge,” she said, without referring to the horse-meat.

“No, oh no, not exactly,” replied Bjartur. “It was something else I was wanting actually.” He was ashamed to ask of course, but he was wondering whether she wouldn’t be able to give him a little help with something, if he could have a few words with her in private—“and besides, I have to thank you and your husband
for my sheep, which your lads got in all ready for me while I was away on the round-up.”

The poetess intimated that Bjartur ought to be sufficiently well acquainted with the household here to know that she never concerned herself with the livestock, but left it to more suitable people.

‘Well I know it,” said Bjartur, “and actually I’m fully determined to fetch them tomorrow—I only hope they don’t eat the poor Bailiff out of house and home tonight. But if he’s short in spring, bless him, he can always come along to me for a pack-load of lamb’s hay later on.”

“I’d rather you told me how dear Rosa is getting on,” said the poetess.

“Yes,
I was coming to that,” said Bjartur. “In fact I only asked to see you because I had something to tell you. Nothing important, of course.”

The Bailiff’s wife looked at him as if half expecting that he was about to ask her for something, whereupon the soul within her receded like a star, far out into the frozen wastes of infinity, and only the cold smile remained on earth.

“I hope for your sake it’s nothing my husband may not hear,” said she with much determination.

“Oh, no,” replied Bjartur, “it takes more than a trifle to upset the Bailiff, bless him.”

Madam showed Bjartur into Bailiff Jon of Myri’s sanctum, one of the smallest rooms in this great house. The pair had long since given up the habit of sleeping together; Madam slept in a separate room with her little daughter Audur. This little room of the Bailiff’s would have resembled nothing so much as the miserable garret where a pauper allotted by the parish is left with little honour to his own devices, had it not been for one of the walls, which was completely hidden by bookshelves carrying volumes of parliamentary transactions bound in black, with the year on a white label. The bed, nailed to the wall, was fashioned like a peasant’s of unplaned boards and covered with a ragged self-coloured blanket. On the floor stood a blue-glazed spittoon shaped like an hour-glass; above the bed a crudely made shelf on which stood a flowered porridge-basin, a heavy china cup, and a bottle of liniment for rheumatism; by one wall a rude table bearing writing materials of indifferent quality, and beneath the window a huge chest; in front of the table a wretched old armchair without a cover, tied up with string where the joints had sprung. On the wall there hung a bright-coloured picture of the Redeemer on the
Cross, another, equally bright, of the Czar Nicholas, and a calendar bearing the name of the merchant in Vik.