Independent People (28 page)

“In that case I think it’s best that those who belong to the lower classes should educate their lower classes, and that those who belong to the upper classes should educate their upper classes; and give Madam my best wishes.”

“I don’t gain anything by people being educated,” said the Bailiff. “But it’s what the government wants. And, by the way, the womenfolk up there are all raving and saying you should get yourself a cow.”

“I am a free man.”

“Um. What shall I tell the Sheriff if he decides to inquire into it?”

“Tell him that we people on the moors stand on our own feet”

“Yes; and up to the neck in your own graves,” snorted the Bailiff.

Before Bjartur had had time to think of a suitable rejoinder, a voice, long-drawn and wavering, broke in from the region of the range:

“It is just as his honour says: this is no sort of life for a human being. I lived at Urtharsel for forty years and we always had a cow of one kind or another. I never needed to ask God for anything special in all those forty years.”

“Listen,” said the Bailiff, as if something has just occurred to him. “I can sell you one that’s due to calve in the summer, a fine beast, doesn’t give too much milk, but keeps going a long time.”

Is he at it again? thought Bjartur, who knew his Bailiff from of old; this wasn’t the first of their discussions, it was like beating one’s head against a stone wall. He had the habit of beginning again where he had left off before, the old mule. To try to turn his mind from anything was hopeless. It was difficult to say whether this trait in his character irritated Bjartur more than it excited his admiration. Then something happened to delay Bjartur’s answer for the moment: all at once Finna made an attempt to lift herself up and, looking at the two of them with fevered eyes, whispered blithely:

“I only wish the good God would grant it” And she lay down again.

Only when this sigh had passed away did Bjartur find an opportunity of answering the Bailiff: “You wouldn’t have been so keen on offering me a cow last year or the year before, mate, when it was still uncertain whether I would make the last payment on the land.”

“I could provide you with hay for her, too,” offered the Bailiff.

“God’s blessing on the man,” sighed the woman again from her sick-bed.

“Oh, you get your medicine from Finsen, lass,” said Bjartur. “You’ve never been short of medicine.”

The Bailiff, who had some local repute as a homoeopath, asked if he might see some of the medicine that Bjartur obtained for his wife from the District Medical Officer and Member of Parliament, Dr. Finsen. Finna drew aside the curtain from the corner cupboard by her bed, revealing a large and imposing collection of medicine bottles of all sizes and colours, three shelves full. Most of them were empty. The Bailiff took one or two of them, removed the corks, and sniffed. They had all the same inscription, written in the doctor’s scholarly black-letter: “Gudfinna Ragnarsdottir. To be taken thrice daily at equal intervals. For internal use.” When the Bailiff had taken a disdainful sniff at the contents of a few of the bottles, he replaced them with the remark that he’d brewed his poison too long, the blasted old rogue.

But coffee had now been served and Bjartur generously exhorted the Bailiff and his attendant to fall tooth and nail upon those pancake things or whatever you call them. The old woman, still mumbling to herself, kept on fussing about around the range,
but Asta Sollilja, who had followed everything that had been said, about cows and schooling alike, stood sucking her finger and gazing full of respect at the way in which the Bailiff was disposing of the pancakes she herself had cooked. The boys’ eyes widened and widened as the sugar-sprinkled mound grew smaller on the the dish, their faces longer and longer as its roses, its romance, and its damsel reappeared. Weren’t they going to leave a single one?

“By the way,” said the Bailiff, “my son Ingolfur may be up this way on some business or other in the spring.”

“Really,” said the crofter. “I won’t forbid him the road. I hear he’s become quite a big bug down in the south nowadays.”

“Co-operative Secretary,” corrected the Bailiff.

“Oh, so there is a difference, then?”

“I don’t know whether you’re aware that the wool last year reached three times the price that Bruni was giving for it. And the profits he made on the mutton this autumn don’t seem to have been any smaller.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Bjartur, “as long as I can pay you and the dealer what I legally owe you, well, it’s much the same to me what you gentry think fit to accuse one another of embezzlement or burglary, it’s all the same to me.”

“Yes, you’re all cravens, the lot of you,” observed the Bailiff. “You live and die in complete trust of the one that fleeces you most.”

“I don’t know, but according to what I’ve heard, you don’t give so very much more for what you buy alive, mate. The dealer was telling me only this autumn that you make a profit of five to eight crowns on every lamb you sell in Vik. And that wasn’t the biggest estimate.”

Now, the Bailiff’s nature was such that had he been accused of theft or even of murder he would have preserved an unruffled exterior and have seemed, indeed, to be quite gratified. But with one crime he would not have his name connected: if anyone insinuated that he was making money, the ice was broken and his tongue was loosened; such a slander was more than he could stand. Leaning forward, he opened his mouth on a flood of words, the muscles of his face twitching passionately, fire in his eyes, his reasoning full of extravagant assertions and discordant similes. In a moment all his sleepiness had disappeared:

“Fortunately enough, I happen to be better acquainted with my affairs than the dealer in Fjord is. And I can provide documentary proof at any time that my dealings in sheep have done
more harm to me than all the foxes have to all the farmers in this district and for miles farther afield for the last two or three generations. You let the merchant down there delude you into believing that I buy sheep in the autumn for the fun of the thing. But the truth of the matter is that when I’ve bought sheep from people in these parts, it’s always been out of charity. And what is charity? A fellow goes and gets himself mixed up in the mess that ought first and last to be the individual’s private concern, a fellow lets himself be fooled into saving irredeemable folk from starvation, or debt, or imminent bankruptcy, all for the sake of the taxes, instead of letting them go on to the parish, and the parish on to the county, and the county on to the country. And the whole damned lot to hell. Have I perhaps asked them up for the pleasure of their company? No, I ask no one up, but they come all the same, and there I am. One comes asking for grain, another for sugar, a third for hay, a fourth for money, a fifth for snuff, when I maybe haven’t a chew for myself even. The sixth comes asking for all this at once, the seventh even demands mixed snuff, as if it was my job to start mixing snuff for people, and does Bruni imagine that I’m some sort of gift dispensary, where everybody can come and ask for what he wants and never think of payment? Then why doesn’t Bruni turn his business into an everlasting gift establishment, may I ask? No, mate, you can tell Bruni from me that all the year round there’s a constant stream of penniless men coming to me, men he has fleeced to the skin, then forbidden like murder to charge even as much as a single mouthful for their starving and emaciated tribes of youngsters. And what do you get out of these people in the autumn? A few pitiful rattle-bones that you could lift with your little finger, hardly worth poisoning for fox-bait.”

After this outburst the Bailiff fumbled through his pockets in a furious search for his tobacco-box, but he rarely resumed his chewing before he had either won over his opponent or given him up as hopeless.

“The time has come,” he said, instead of biting off a plug, “and come long ago, when the farmers with any guts in them at all must lay their heads together here the same as in other places and find out where their bread would be best buttered, so that feeble individuals like myself, with small incomes and heavy responsibilities, should not have to look after people that the merchant is bent on starving to death—and then be called a thief for their pains.”

“At one time folk would have said there was something the matter with you if you had considered other people’s interests before your own,” remarked Bjartur.

“Anyway, one thing you can be certain of is that I could mix a better bottle for your Finna than those blasted camphor-slops you get from old Finsen. He and Tulinius Jensen are a couple of birds out of the same nest. To the best of my knowledge he’s never done anything in die Althingi but have quays built for the merchant. They’ve already stung the Treasury for subsidies for two piers that were reduced to sand by the breakers as fast as they were built, of course, so now they’ve decided to milk them for another hundred thousand crowns to build a breakwater stretching out to somewhere near the horizon as a bulwark for the ruined piers. And who pays for all this building and construction that’s thrown to the waves as if it were refuse? We farmers, of course; plucked to the bone in direct and indirect taxes to the Treasury. No; if the Icelandic farming community is not to become the miserable doormat of merchant power, then we farmers must unite in defence of our interests the same as they started doing in Thingey over thirty years ago.”

He stood up, stretched, and began winding his muffler round his neck.

‘Well, well, little girl,” he said, halting in front of Asta Sollilja; and his eyes were so warm and his hewn features so strong that the child blushed all over and her heart began hammering against her ribs, “I think I'll give you a couple of crowns; young ladies sometimes like to have some money for hankies.” He took a real silver coin out of his purse and gave it to her. She had long been afraid of the Bailifif, but never so much as now. The boys he did not even look at. Then he buttoned up his jacket.

“A hundred and fifty for the cow and never a cent more,” he said. “And hay according to agreement.”

S
OON
the dusk falls. The boy no longer feels sure of himself after the day’s song and story, no longer dare leave his legs dangling over the edge of the bed, but huddling up because of the world’s hidden powers, knits without venturing on the slightest movement. His grandmother and his sister stand with their backs to him, piously attentive to the ritual of their cooking. The brushwood is
spitting sullenly, filling the room with a dense smoke that makes his throat smart; it is in this smoke that there dwells the poetry of day, with all its furious gales, its ravines and its spectres per nostra krimina. Though the quarrelsome voices of the elder brothers may occasionally be heard from the outskirts, they afford him no relief, and in these oppressive surroundings the stitches become more and more netlike; his left index finger has long been dead from sticking straight up in the air. In the dusk the room’s dimensions seem to increase still further; no earthly power can bridge them now. Remotest of all is his mother. Even her heart seems to have disappeared irrevocably in the plumbless depths of this fog which is instinct with the poetry of life, the poetry of death.

Supper was tense with exertion and a frozen silence. One or two of them stole a glance at Bjartur, then at each other. Asta Sollilja scarcely touched her food. Presently they had all had their fill of salt coalfish, the potatoes were finished, no one wanted any more of this morning’s porridge. Asta Sollilja began to clear the table; she had an amazing squint. The elder brothers said something nasty in a whisper, and the mother said: “Parlings,” also in a whisper. The old woman took her needles down from the shelf, and from the middle of her story spoke these words aloud: “Moo now, moo now, my Bukolla, if you are alive at all.”

“Eh?” demanded Bjartur crossly from his bed.

“Pluck a hair from my tail and lay it on the ground,” mumbled the old woman into her knitting without explanation. In the silence it was like the crackle of frost. The boys had started knocking one another about near the hatchway. Halting suddenly in front of her father with a plate in her hand, Asta Sollilja looked at him with the straight eye and said:

“Father, I want to learn.”

The ice had been broken.

“I didn’t do any learning before the winter that I went to the minister’s and read Orvar-Odds Saga while I was being taught my catechism,” replied Bjartur.

“Father, I want to learn,” insisted the girl, lowering her head and drooping her eyelids, her throat and mouth twitching slightly, and the fragile plate in her hand.

“All right, lass, I'll spell through the Bernotus Rhymes with you.”

The girl bit her lip a little and said:

“I don’t want to learn the Bernotus Rhymes,”

“That’s strange,” said Bjartur. “What do you want to learn, then?”

“I want to learn Christianity.”

“You can learn that from old Hallbera.”

“No,” said the girl, “I want to go over to Rauthsmyri, like the Bailiff said.”

“And what for, do you think?”

“To learn to know God.”

“None of your nonsense,” said Bjartur of Summerhouses.

“I want to go to Rauthsmyri all the same.”

“Oh, indeed, my lass,” he said. “But it so happens that I’d sooner bring Rauthsmyri children up myself than allow the Rauthsmyri folk to bring up mine.”

“I want to go to Rauthsmyri.”

“Yes, when I’m dead.”

“To Rauthsmyri.”

“Your mother wanted to go to Rauthsmyri, too. But she would rather die than give in to herself, and she died; there was a woman for you. Rauthsmyri is Rauthsmyri. I went there when I was eighteen, thirty years ago, and I’ve never straightened my back since; and they haven’t finished with me yet. Now they’re threatening to force a cow on me. But your mother died in this room here, without letting anybody offer her anything. She was an independent woman.”

Bjartur was very proud of this wife of his, thirteen years after her death. He was in love with her memory and had forgotten her faults. But when he saw by her daughter’s quivering shoulders that she was weeping over her washing-up, he remembered once more that women are more to be pitied than ordinary mortals and need daylong consolation. Then again, if he had a tender spot at all in him, it was for this crosseyed slip of a girl with the lovely name, whom sometimes he gazed at on Sundays and sometimes protected from the rain in summer, both without remark. So he promised to teach her to read tomorrow, so that they wouldn’t have anything to complain about at Rauthsmyri. “And we might be able to buy ourselves Orvar-Odds Saga this spring. And even a hanky.”