Independent People (27 page)

“Don’t be so silly,” answered his grandmother. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big boy like you with such foolish fancies in the middle of the day; and can’t knit yet.”

The boy broke off all discussion with the gentry of Fjord and said:

“There, what did I tell you, she’s blowing up for a gale,” and scattering hurried farewells, he set off homeward at full speed, urging on along the winding paths that lay up and down the floor. But half-way there his grandmother overtook him like a storm springing up without warning on the moors, so he died in the snow and was placed on his grandmother’s bed and given his needles.

Looping the yarn languidly round his finger, he started knitting. It was the same stocking foot that he had been struggling with for a full week now, and yet it was still far from half finished. It was as if nothing wanted to make any progress these days, as if everything was determined to drag itself along as slowly as possible. One saw no end to anything, no end to the foot, no end to day, no end to life at home. The consideration of this endless protraction made him very sleepy. Then suddenly he remembered that he had perished in a storm on the heath.

“Grandma, I’m a ghost,” he said, yawning.

“Poor little wretch, you haven’t heard anything good today yet, have you?”

No, quite true now that he came to think of it: he hadn’t heard anything good yet, and worse things could happen than hearing something good. Often his grandmother grew so absorbed in the something good she was busy reciting that she forgot to scold him for his knitting, especially if it was something really good:

On and on, on and on it went. Never do hymns seem so long as in the days of childhood, never is their world and their language so alien to the soul. In old age the opposite is true, the hours are then too short for the hymns. In these pious old verses, age-hallowed and Latin-sprinkled, which the old woman had learned from her grandmother, in these lay hidden her other world; their rhythm in time with the regular pressure of the treadle was her music, to which she surrendered herself till the walls of the narrow room had floated out to the horizons of eternity and she was sitting with her hands fallen in her lap, the thread snapped, the wheel silent. With the echo of the verse in her soul and on her lips she began looking for the thread on the spindle, and when at last she had found it, she would suck the end through the pipe and wake the boy up.

“Heavens, what a lamentable sight!” she said. “Today it’s like a salmon net, yesterday you couldn’t have driven a nail through it. Double-loop the wool round your finger, you silly, or I’ll undo it all for you.”

Now to find some method of escaping this invariable daily criticism, though without openly calling its purpose in question. It could be managed in various ways. Sometimes the old woman could be cajoled into another hymn, sometimes a story, but it was safest when her attention could be directed to some scandal even more flagrant than a couple of loose stitches. Today he was lucky. Asta Sollilja was lying back against the slope of the roof, her head lolling forward, the needles motionless in her lap, fast asleep.

“Grandma,” exclaimed the boy, highly offended, “our Asta’s sleeping, look.”

Thus had the boy succeeded in diverting his grandmother’s attention from himself to Asta Sollilja, that sleepy being who had a queer shape and who was, if the truth be told, only half a human being. Merciful heavens, what a lamentable sight! But when Asta Sollilja had been waked up with all the appropriate ritual, everything
simply began all over again; day seemed not to have moved onward one inch, his mother was groaning as painfully as ever, o pura optimi, drag on postea.

Drag on postea.

The wheel had begun to revolve again before the boy remembered that he had been a ghost for some time now.

“Ghosts,” he remarked, “—don’t they get everything they want?”

“Oh, rubbish.”

“They can do anything they like, can’t they?”

“Get on with your knitting, you little silly.”

“Grandma, will you tell me a story about a ghost?”

“How have I any time for stories?”

“Just one ghost.”

“What stories would I know about ghosts, a bedridden old woman who can’t remember a thing?”

After a few moments, however, she could be heard muttering away to herself; it was like the first sighing of a gale that would soon be raging in full blast. Her stories were cast all in the same mould. In the famine after the Eruption folk ate scraps of leather, they were so thin that the lice ate their way into them, her grandmother could remember the time. There was once a French cutter, this happened when I was in the south, they were wrecked on the sands in a terrible gale, the crew all perished on a sandbank, a rich farmer stole everything that drifted ashore, including a cask full of money and a barrel of claret. The captain walked again and the cook as well, they followed the thief to the ninth generation, they aren’t free of them yet, many stories about it. Two brothers went to market, one set off home again in the morning, the other wanted to stay a day longer. It was a long way, over the mountains. A terrible storm came on, but the brother managed to reach a hut. The hut was haunted a lot. During the night the ghost started pounding on the walls and the door, but the brother pulled some stones up from the floor and piled them up against the door. Outside, the ghost was screaming horribly. The brother piled more stones against the door and bade him never thrive. In the morning there was a keen frost, but the snow had stopped. The brother clears the stones away and opens the door. But as he opens it, in tumbles his brother, frozen to death. He waked again and haunted his brother. Endless space with bottomless drifts of snow, precipices over which men stepped blindly to their death, frozen rivers where people fell into holes and were carried under the ice and
out to sea, walked again, knocked at windows, and chanted poetry. Sea-monsters attacking people at tibe foot of cliffs, destroying the houses of women who were alone at home. The fiend Kolumkilli, they say, is immortal and the witch Gunnvor lived on this croft and made a pact with him and murdered folk, there are many stories about it, endless stories, at last she was broken at the lichgate at Myri Church on Trinity Sunday and her limbs cut off, guest of Gunnvor was no man with God or good grace, she has broken my rib-bone, my leg-bone, my hip-bone; and if Kolumkilli call me should, this is what he’d say, bones and red blood, bones and red blood and dododo—

All at once Bjartur stuck his head up through the hatchway and cried:

“Stick the kettle on, Hallbera, there are visitors coming”

Pushing her spinning-wheel aside in the middle of a story, the old woman grudgingly answered: “Oh, there’s no need to tell me. They’re never off the roads, some of them. And there was quite a crowd of bogles here this morning to announce them, too.”

“Sola will give you a hand to mix some pancakes, and you can make the coffee as strong as you like in honour of a man who never came here yet but he was after something or other. And no dawdling.”

A few moments later the sharply chiselled features of the Bailiff in their frame of strong, grey-streaked hair rose above the hatchway. He was wearing a thick riding-jacket and muffler, sealskin boots, and long snow-stockings pulled over his trousers and up to his thighs. His whip was adorned with three resplendent silver bands. He was on his way to town, and had one of his farm labourers with him for company; he stretched out two or three fingers in greeting and mumbled something into his beard. Asta Sollilja cleared a seat for him on the children’s bed, while Bjartur sat down beside his wife. The smell of the first pancake reached them.

“Well, well, old lad,” said Bjartur as though he rather pitied the Bailiff, “so you’re seeing what your horses think of the roads in this weather, are you?”

“Oh, the roads are right enough,” replied the Bailiff sleepily, caressing his chin and yawning as his
eyes
wandered about the room.

“Oh? That’s funny. I seem to remember a time when you would have said the moors were too dangerous for horses in this depth of snow,” said Bjartur, who was always in the right in his dealings
with the Bailiff, “—particularly if it was me that wanted to use the horses. But naturally a man knows best himself how far to tax his own horses.”

“Oh, it isn’t so very often that I fool around the moors for no reason,” said the Bailiff significantly. “And they’re my horses.”

Bjartur countered this insinuation by remarking that both rich and poor alike always had some purpose in mind, whether at home or in the deserts, and the Bailiff could say what he liked, but there had been no shortage of snow up on the moors here lately, whatever it was like across at Myri.

The Bailiff replied that it was no worse than was to be expected in the middle of winter. Producing his silver tobacco-box, he measured off a nice length of chew with his finger, then bit the piece off and, after carefully replacing the remainder in the box, closed it with great caution. Then he lay back on the bed, unafraid of lice.

“Well, well, old cock,” said Bjartur affably, “just so, yes. And what’s fresh up your way these days?”

The Bailiff said that everything was as usual with him. How other people were faring he didn’t know.

“No sign of worms or diarrhea?”

“With me?” asked the Bailiff.

“Oh, you usually speak for yourself first, if I know you at all well.”

“It’s all one whether they have worms or not, the price that folk get for them nowadays,” said the Bailiff. “The wretched animals are simply a burden on folks these days.”

Bjartur doubted whether the gentry really meant it when they spoke disparagingly of their sheep.

“You can doubt what you like for me,” retorted the Bailiff.

“Are you clearing the snow from the home-field?”

“No. I haven’t been short of hay yet,” replied the Bailiff.

“Nor me either,” said Bjartur.

The Bailiff, now lying at his ease well up on the bed, was sucking away with all his might, and had already accumulated so much saliva that he had begun to avoid long sentences. The half-closed eyes flitted from one thing to another until finally they settled on Asta Sollilja, busy with her cooking.

“There have been occasions,” observed the Bailiff, “when you’ve had to ask other people for what you needed most.”

“Well, it’s your own wife’s fault if she refused to take anything
for the few drops of milk I fetched to put in the lads’ gruel when they were little; and I don’t owe you a penny on the land, as everybody knows, my lad, though it did take twelve years.”

“It strikes me you’re still using other folk’s land the same as ever.”

“Eh?”

“Wasn’t there something on your back when you came to see me yesterday? This is the fourth time, if I’m not mistaken. What I can’t fathom at all is why you bought land from me up in the valley here if you intend taking over my churchyard as well.”

“Maybe you folk at Rauthsmyri have managed to get the better of death,” said the crofter, but to this sarcasm the Bailiff made no reply.

“What am I to say if I meet the Sheriff in town?” he asked.

“That the black-face I pulled out of a bog for him last Midsummer Day was rotten with disease,” retorted Bjartur.

The Bailiffs only reply was to mouth his chew a moment or two longer, then squirt it all in one stream at Bjartur’s feet. “How old is that girl of yours now?” he asked without taking his eyes off Asta Sollilja.

“She’s getting on for fourteen, poor kid. I shouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t born about the same time as I made the first payment on the land.”

“It just shows you what you’re made of: farming for fourteen years and not a cow on the place yet.”

“If it hadn’t been for this scrap of land on my conscience all those twelve years, I would certainly have bought a cow and have had hired help as well. But it so happens that all my life I’ve held the opinion that freedom and independence are worth more than all the cattle that any crofter ever got himself into debt for.”

The Bailiff gave a faint snort.

“What did you say she was called, again?” he asked.

“Oh, Asta Sollilja is her name.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean, my friend, that she’ll never need to be dependent on others, either in body or soul, for as long as I live in this hut. And now well talk no more about it, mate.”

But the Bailiff’s contempt of Bjartur’s independence knew no bounds, and he said:

“You can send her along to me with the turn of the year; my wife is rather fond of teaching kids to read and so on. We’ll give her her food for a month or so.”

“There’s plenty of food in Summerhouses,” said Bjartur. “And the soulful drivel you people of Myri call learning is probably healthiest for the children you acknowledge as your own.”

The Bailiff, leaning forward, landed an immense stream at Bjartur’s foot, then sleepily passed a hand over his brow and cheek and suppressed a yawn.

I’m for my folk, you’re for your folk,” added Bjartur without looking at the spit

“Your wife’s much the same as ever, I see,” observed the Bailiff. “How much have you paid for medicine for her this year?”

“That’s another matter altogether. It would never occur to me to deny that I’d had the misfortune to marry women both of whom were troubled with their hearts, which, being nothing but God’s will and malignant fortune, concerns no one, you least of all.”

The Bailiff, who never took offence over a snappish answer, but liked this sort of tone best, clawed himself here and there, for they had started crawling, and said to no one in particular:

“Oh, it’s all right, it doesn’t worry me. But the wife thinks the girl should have some teaching, and a law has been passed about compulsory examinations. Not that anybody need be in any doubt about my opinion: I consider that all this education business will be the ruination of the lower classes.”