Independent People (21 page)

“How was that?” inquired the minister suspiciously. “I can’t help it if she’s dead, surely.”

“No, heavens above, I know that. And it wasn’t meant that way either,” said Bjartur, absolving the minister of all guilt in the matter. “She just died, in a natural way, probably through loss of blood, and I know well enough how it happened. But what’s happened to Gullbra, a fine year-old ewe of your breed that I had tethered at the bottom of the home-field this autumn, during the first round-up? I left her behind with my late wife, you see, to keep her company, well, that’s something I really can’t fathom at all.”

“I know nothing about it,” said the minister coldly. “I’m no sheep-stealer. I deny any participation in these affairs.”

“What I mean,” said Bjartur reasonably, “is that some arrangements will have to be made, at least as far as the wife is concerned.”

“I can furnish you with another woman while you wait, a fine woman, docile as a nun, and very obedient. But an old woman accompanies her, a decrepit old vixen, so you know what you’re in for—she knows the whole of the Videy Psalms off by heart.”

“Quite; but I’d thought of asking you to bury this one first,” said Bjartur politely.

“Oh, Lord, I simply loathe the thought of burying folk.”

“Yes, but what you don’t realize is that I can’t keep anybody on the croft as long as she’s lying there. You’ve no idea how foolish people are nowadays. And superstitious.”

“You’d better dump her in a temporary grave till the spring, then,” said the minister. “I’m certainly not going wading over mountains at my age, an old man worn out years ago, chesty by nature, and probably with a cancer on the liver. Then again, nothing is known about how this woman of yours came to die. You wretched mountaineers can always get out of it by saying you were away in the deserts looking for strays when your wives pass out. But women, as far as I know, need looking after the same as cattle. And it wouldn’t be so very difficult for me to prove a thing or two about the death of many people, men and women alike, in this district, since I wandered here in my misery and doubt thirty
years ago—and certainly would prove too, did I not love my parishioners and were I not grown too old and feeble to importune a corrupt administration that neither pillage, arson, nor murder can stir to action.”

“Oh, I expect you’ve sprinkled a few that died a stranger death than my Rosa.”

“Yes,” sighed the minister mournfully, “I’m just a helpless old wretch, I suppose, and sick unto death.”

“All I ask is that you take a trip out to Rauthsmyri on Saturday first if the weather’s decent.”

“The spade in the church there is broken, God help me,” said the minister, raising all the difficulties possible. “I can vouch for nothing with regard to the death, judgment, and future life of anyone whose last obsequies are performed with the help of such a ghastly old implement. Then again, you’re sure to demand a sermon of me, but I intend telling you once and for all that I don’t see the point of making a speech over a corpse in this sort of weather. One gets nothing out of it in any case.”

“It needn’t be a long speech, you know,” said Bjartur.

“Can’t the old wife at Rauthsmyri make a speech over her? She made a speech over her last spring. Why can’t she make a speech over her this autumn?”

“Now, honestly, I don’t mind telling anybody,” said Bjartur, “that I have very little faith in any speech that the Rauthsmyri crew may make. And I could easily be persuaded that things might have turned out better had it been you instead of her that did the sermonizing at the wedding, though, to be perfectly frank, I have in general no great faith in any speech, whether for one purpose or another, and least of all long speeches.”

“If I make a speech at all,” snapped the minister, “it’s going to be a long speech. Because once you get started, there’s no end at all to what has to be said, the way that people conduct themselves nowadays towards one another and to the parish.”

“It all depends on how you look at it actually,” said Bjartur. “Some think the least said soonest mended. But one thing we needn’t argue about is the contents of the speech; it’s all the same to me as long as there’s nothing objectionable in it. The main thing is to have a speech for the right person made in the right place by the right authority, otherwise they hold it against you and hint that perhaps you can’t afford a speech, but that is a slur that I’ll never have cast in my teeth as long as I can call myself an independent man. My wife was an independent woman.”

“And how much do you think you can give for a speech?”

“Well, that was really one of the things I wanted to arrange. Actually I consider that you owe me a speech from last spring and I think I might as well have it now. It won’t improve with keeping.”

“No,” said the minister decisively. “I will hold no sermon over a woman who lives in marriage for one summer only, then dies. You can think yourself lucky that I don’t have the matter inquired into. There might be ways and means of letting you have your next marriage sermon for nothing, but to trade a funeral sermon for a wedding sermon is a type of jobbery that I'll have nothing to do with.”

“I imagine, your reverence,” said the crofter, “that fuller investigation might prove that I had a legal right to the sermon. Even if she never saw thirty, she was my wife, a good wife, a Christian wife.”

“So she was a Christian, was she?” said the minister angrily, for he could never bear to hear anyone praised.

“Well,” replied Bjartur, preparing to concede a point or two in the interests of harmony, “perhaps I ought to say that she was a Christian in her own way. But everything in moderation, you know.”

“It’s news to me, let me tell you, if the people in these parts have suddenly become Christians,” cried the minister furiously. “In Rangarvellir you did have Christian people, I agree. There you had a holy person and a prophet on every other farm, but I’ve lived in exile here for thirty years and never yet come across living Christianity or true repentance before God in any shape or form, only monstrous crimes, monstrous crimes, fourteen murders and exposures of children, besides all the abortions.”

“Those are things I know nothing about,” said Bjartur, “but I do know that my wife was a good woman who must in her heart have believed in God and mankind even though she didn’t proclaim it from the housetops. And if you say anything, I would like you to speak well rather than ill of her, for I had a great admiration for the woman.”

The minister’s tact forbade him to dispute this eulogy of a simple, undistinguished woman who had hved for one summer only and then had died; but he pointed to the portrait of the Princess Augusta with an air of admonition that was all the more expressive, and said: “If you would see the likeness of a woman who was an example to others as a princess, a wife, and a human being, then
there it hangs. It would do you no harm to remember it, you scurvy little runts who have always thought yourselves too proud to bow your lousy heads before the grace of the Holy Ghost, even though you stand lower in the community than the very sheep you kill with famine and tapeworm every spring that God grants us. But King Christian’s children were wakened up there every morning at six, to be one with their Saviour in every kind of weather, and there they went on praying till the court chaplain himself spewed with hunger. What do you think of that?”

Bjartur could no longer restrain his laughter. “Hahaha, hahaha,” he guffawed, “it was very like that business with the dog at Rauthsmyri, then, the one that couldn’t keep away from the horse-meat, a year or two ago.”

“Eh?” said the Reverend Gudmundur very seriously, pulling up in mid-floor, his mouth gaping in perplexity and his eyebrows raised in astonishment.

“Why, it was like this,” said Bjartur. “There was a lad at Myri who came from the town, a daft fellow and rather a vicious customer, and he took it into his head to make friends with all the dogs and lure them from their rightful masters, my dog among them. I’ve always been great on dogs, she was a grand little bitch, trusty and clever. Hahaha, hahaha.”

“I don’t understand,” snapped the minister, still not moving.

“I didn’t think you would,” said Bjartur laughing. “I didn’t understand it either until she began to vomit up gobbets of horse-meat as big as your fist, man. If the young devil hadn’t been up to the same trick all winter; stealing horse-meat from the kitchen to entice the dogs.”

“Here, I can’t stick any more of this,” said the minister. “For heaven’s sake get on your way.”

“Yes, your reverence,” said Bjartur soberly. “No one can control his own thoughts. I hope it harms nobody. And thank you kindly for the coffee. It’s some of the very best coffee I’ve tasted for many a day. And we can rely on each other about the young ram in the autumn and the other business.”

“It is to be hoped that I am dead before the spring,” said the minister piously, “dead, dead to this monstrous rabble. Good-bye.”

But Bjartur was by no means disposed to leave at this stage. He continued hanging about the minister, fiddling with this and that, till finally he plucked up courage and said:

“By the way, Reverend Gudmundur, did I hear you say something about a woman, or rather two women, just now?”

“Now then, what are you after?” demanded tibe minister testily, “Do you want them? You needn’t think I’m keen on getting rid of them.”

“Who are they, anyway?”

“God in His mercy alone provides for them. I brought them from Sandgilsheath on my own pack-horse, they belong to my own parish-of-ease. The father of the house died of internal trouble, and all they had were seventeen miserable-looking sheep, a few broken implements, and a couple of twenty-five-year-old mares, which they gave me as contribution to their keep when they came here in the autumn, so help me God. They are, of course, quite prostrate with grief. The old man farmed for forty years and never saved a penny, it was such a ghastly holding.”

“Oh?” said Bjartur. “So they do own a bit of land.”

“Certainly they own land,” said the minister; then rushing to the door, opened it and bawled: “Fetch me Finna and old Hallbera immediately. There’s a man here wants to take them away.”

A few minutes elapsed, then in through the opening there edged a couple of women, the mother knitting, a brown skull-cap on her head and hairs sprouting from a wart on her chin, sour-faced as anyone that has been shut up within herself for three score years and more, not looking up, but peering with blinking eyes down her nose at her knitting, her head on the slant; the daughter a woman in the late thirties, clumsily built, especially below, but making up in mildly smiling anticipation for what the mother lacked in tenderness. They halted shoulder to shoulder not more than a span from the threshold, making it impossible for anyone to close the door behind them. The old woman kept on knitting, the daughter looked at the men with big eyes that hoped for everything. She had the purple mark of an old chilblain on her cheek, and obvious palpitation.

“Here stands a gentleman who is going to lighten us all of a heavy burden,” said the minister. “He intends to take us home with him. His wife lies on her bier, God help me, and he is absolutely prostrate with grief.”

“Yes, I know, poor man,” mumbled the old woman into her needles without looking up. Her daughter gazed with eyes full of heartfelt sympathy at the unhappy gentleman.

“Well, if it isn’t the womenfolk of Urtharsel, Ragnar’s widow and his daughter,” exclaimed Bjartur, offering them his hand in greeting and thanking them from the bottom of his heart for their old hospitality; he had stayed a night with them one autumn four
or five years ago when he was out tracking down some stray or other for the Bailiff, and not the first time either. Yes, he remembered Ragnar all right, a genius: nobody could handle an infected sheep like him—he would sooner see his family short of sugar and coffee than his lambs without their chaw. “Hadn’t he the right ear tipped and the left pierced and double-snicked? Yes? Bull’s-eye for Bjartur. Hadn’t he a sandy-haired dog as well, a marvellous animal that could see better in the dark than most other dogs in daylight? Damn me if it wasn’t second-sighted; not everybody’s fortunate enough to fall in with an animal like that, I can tell you.”

All this proved to be correct. Finna beamed with gratitude at the genial condescension implicit in her erstwhile guest’s tenacity of memory. She herself remembered as if it were yesterday the occasion when he had spent the night at Urtharsel, neither more nor less than the shepherd of Utirauthsmyri in person; it wasn’t so often that people came to stay the night, and very seldom anyone from the bigger farms. Mother and daughter, indeed, whispering together, had concluded that it wasn’t so easy to entertain a man that came from the Big House itself, a man who was accustomed surely to nothing but the best, what was to be done? Hallbera had suggested baking ember scones, but her daughter had said: “No, he’d never even dream of allowing stuff that’s baked on the bare peat to pass his lips, a man from Utirauthsmyri—you haven’t forgotten that surely, have you, Mother?”

But the old woman said that she had long since forgotten everything; she no longer remembered anything from the past or the present except her young days and a few sacred verses, she had grown such a terrible old wreck, and if it hadn’t been for the good minister, who had taken pity on them when the hand of the Almighty had seen fit to take poor Ragnar—

“Aren’t I telling you that the man wants to take you away?” interrupted the minister impatiently. “You’ll be all right with him. He started a farm on that wonderful estate of his last spring, and he’s a sort of new-fangled progressive with decided views about this desert shall blossom like a rose movement that they are always voting through Parliament and writing about in the papers in Reykjavik.”

“Oh, I don’t bother my head too much about what they write in the papers in Reykjavik,” said Bjartur. “But I maintain all the same that there’s a great future in Summerhouses for those that value their freedom at all and want to be men of independence.”

Then the old woman said in her strained, quavering voice: