Independent People (4 page)

Ridges and high moorland enclose the valley on all sides. To the west lies a narrow ridge, and the first farm beyond it is called Utirauthsmyri, Rauthsmyri, or simply Myri, the seat of the local Bailiff; this moorland valley has until now been part of his possessions. Broad lands, widely farmed, open beyond Myri. The high heath in the east, over which lies the road down to the market town on the fjord, is considered a five hours’ crossing with pack-horses. In the south, low undulating moors gradually rise in height until the Blue Mountains close the horizon, melting into the sky, it seems, in pious meditation, and rarely free of snow before St. John the Baptist’s Day. And what lies beyond the Blue Mountains? Only the deserts of the land.

And the spring breezes blow up the valley.

And when the spring breezes blow up the valley; when the spring sun shines on last year’s withered grass on the river banks; and on the lake; and on the lake’s two white swans; and coaxes the new grass out of the spongy soil in the marshes—who could believe on such a day that this peaceful, grassy valley brooded over the story of our past; and over its spectres? People ride along the river, along the banks where side by side lie many paths, cut one by one, century after century, by the horses of the past—and the fresh spring breeze blows through the valley in the sunshine. On such a day the sun is stronger than the past.

A new generation forgets the spectres that may have tormented the old.

How often has the bigging Albogastathir on the Moor been destroyed by spectres? And rebuilt, in spite of spectres? Century after century the lone worker leaves the settlements to tempt fortune on this knoll between the lake and the cleft in the mountain,
determined to challenge the evil powers that hold his land in thrall and thirst for his blood and the marrow in his bones. Generation after generation the crofter raises his chant, contemptuous of the powers that lay claim to his limbs and seek to rule his fate to his dying day. The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with a spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.

“No,” he said defiantly.

It was the man who was making for Albogastathir on the Moor a century and a half after the croft had last been destroyed. And as he passed Gunnvor’s cairn on the ridge, he spat, and ground out vindictively: “Damn the stone you’ll ever get from me, you old bitch,” and refused to give her a stone.

His movement was a response to the breeze, his gait in perfect harmony with the uneven land beneath his feet. A yellow dog was following him, a farm labourer’s dog with a slim muzzle, and full of lice, for she often threw herself down and bit herself passionately, rolling over and over between the tussocks with the strange, restless yelp peculiar to lousy dogs. She was starved of vitamins, for she stopped every now and again to eat grass. It was equally obvious that she was wormy. And the man turned his face into the fresh wind of spring. The sun shone on the flaunting manes of ancient horses and in the wind was the clopping of long gone hoofs; they were the horses of the past in the bridle-paths along the river, century after century, generation after generation, and still the road was travelled—and now he, the newest landowner, Icelandic pioneer in the thirtieth generation, was treading it, dauntless as ever, with his dog. Halting on the path of the centuries, he ran his eyes over his valley in the sunshine of spring.

As soon as he halted the dog came fawning upon him. She stuck her slim muzzle between his hard paws, resting it there and wagging her tail and all her body, and the man gazed at the animal philosophically for a while, savouring, in the submissiveness of his dog, the consciousness of his own power, the rapture of command, and sharing, for a second, in human nature’s loftiest dream, like a general who looks over his troops and knows that with a word he can send them into the charge. A few moments passed
thus, and now the dog was squatting on the withered grass on the bank before him, watching him with questioning eyes, and he replied: “Yes, whatever a man seeks he will find—in his dog.”

He went on discussing this subject after he had left the path and was making his way over the marshes towards the home-field, repeating it in various forms: “The things a dog seeks he finds in a man; seek and ye shall find.” Bending down, he felt at the spring grass of the marshes with his thick fingers and measured its length; then he uprooted a few blades from a boggy patch, and after wiping the mud from them on to his trousers, put them into his mouth, like a sheep, and thinking as he chewed, began thinking like a sheep. The taste was bitter, but he did not spit; he smacked his lips and savoured the rooty taste of it. “This stuff has saved many a life after a long winter and little hay,” he said to himself; “there is a sort of honey in it though it tastes strong. It is this young swamp grass that gives the sheep new life in the spring, you see; and the sheep gives man new life in the autumn.” And he went on talking about the swamp grass and mixing it up with philosophy and playing variations on the theme till he had reached the home-field.

Standing on the highest point of the knoll, like a Viking pioneer who has found his high-seat posts, he looked about him, then made water, first to the north in the direction of the mountain, then to the east, towards the marshy tracts and the lake and the river flowing smoothly from the lake through the marshes; then towards the moors in the south, where the Blue Mountains, still coated with snow, closed the horizon in meditation. And the sun shone from a cloudless sky.

Not far from him two Rauthsmyri sheep were cropping the green of the home-field, and although they were his master’s sheep, he chased them off, cleared his own home-field for the first time. “This land is mine now,” he said.

And then it seemed as if some misgiving gripped him; perhaps the land was not all paid for. Instead of allowing the dog to pursue the sheep, he called her to heel. And went on viewing the world from his own enclosure, the world he had just bought. Summer was just rising over this world.

It was for that reason that he said to the dog: “Winterhouses is no name for a farm like this, no name at all. And as for Albogastathir on the Moor—that’s no name either; it’s just another of these relics of old popery. Damn me if I’ll have names that are bound up with spectres of the past on my farm. I was christened
Bjartur, which ought to mean ‘bright, So the farm shall be called Summerhouses.”

And Bjartur of Summerhouses walked round his own home-field, inspecting the grass-grown ruins, scrutinizing the stonework in the walls of the lambs’ fold, and pulling down and building up again, in imagination, the same sort of croft-house as he had been born and bred in across the eastern heaths.

“Size isn’t everything by any means,” he said aloud to the dog, as if suspecting her of entertaining high ideas. ‘Take my word for it, freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years’ slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through the winter and can pay what has been stipulated from year to year—then I pay what has been stipulated; and I have kept my sheep alive. No, it is freedom that we are all after, Titla. He who pays his way is a king. He who keeps his sheep alive through the winter lives in a palace.”

And when the bitch heard this, she too was happy. Now there were no more clouds. She raced in circles around him, barking frivolously, then slunk towards him with her muzzle on the ground, as if to pounce on him, and the next second had leaped away again and traced another circle.

“Now then,” he said soberly, “no fooling here. Do I run in circles and bark? Do I lie down with my nose on the ground and tomfoolery in my eyes and go for folk? No, my independence has cost me dearer than that: eighteen years for the Bailiff at Rauthsrnyri and the poetess and Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson, who they say has been sent to Denmark now. Was it maybe just for a picnic that I used to go and comb the mountains in the south there for their strays, with winter well on the way? No; and I’ve buried myself in snow. And it wasn’t their fault, bless them, if I crawled out alive next morning.”

At this reminder the dog’s joy subsided considerably, and she sat down and took to biting herself.

“And no one will ever be able to say that I counted my footsteps in their service; and what’s more, I paid the first instalment on the farm on Easter morning as had been arranged. And I have twenty-five ewes fleeced and lambed; there’s many a one begun with less, and still more who have been other people’s slaves all their lives and never owned a stick. Take my father for instance. He lived to be eighty and never managed to pay off the miserable sick-loan the parish advanced him when he was only a youngster.”

The bitch contemplated him sceptically for a while, as if she didn’t really believe what he was saying. She thought of barking, but decided not to, and opened her jaws in a long yawn only, like a question.

“No, I didn’t think you would understand,” said Bjartur. “You dogs are pretty poor objects really, though on the whole I think we humans have even less to boast about. Still, things will go worse with us than I think, if my Rosa serves her folk with the bones of an old horse on Christmas Eve after twenty-three years of housekeeping here, as the poetess of Rauthsmyri thought fit to do, and that no longer ago than last year.”

The bitch had again begun biting herself passionately.

“Aye, no wonder their herd’s dog is lousy and eats the grass, when even their housekeeper hasn’t set eyes on the pantry-key for twenty years. And wouldn’t the horses he leaves out in winter tell a fine story, if only their tongues were loosened, poor brutes; and his sheep, too. It has been one eternal martyrdom for them all these years, and probably it’s just as well for some people that sheep don’t have a place on the judgment seat in heaven, poor brutes.”

The farm brook ran down from the mountain in a straight line for the fold, then swerved to the west to go its way down into the marshes. There were two knee-high falls in it and two pools, knee-deep. At the bottom there was shingle, pebbles and sand. It ran in many curves. Each curve had its own tone, but not one of them was dull; the brook was merry and music-loving, like youth, but yet with various strings, and it played its music without thought of any audience and did not care though no one heard for a hundred years, like the true poet. The man examined it all closely. He halted by the upper fall and said: “Here she can wash out socks and so on;” by the lower fall and said: “Here salt fish could be put to soak.” The dog stretched her head down to the water and lapped at it. The man lay flat on the bank, too, and drank, and some of the water went up his nose. “It’s first-rate water,” said Bjartur of Summerhouses, looking at the dog as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I could almost believe that it had been consecrated.”

Probably it occurred to him that with this observation he was exposing a chink in his armour to the unknown powers of evil that were popularly supposed to infest the valley, for all at once he turned about in the spring breeze, turned in a complete circle, and said in every direction:

“Not that it matters; the water could be unconsecrated for
all I care. Of you I am unafraid, Gunnvor. Hard shall it go with you to oppose my good fortune, old hag, for spectres never daunted me yet.” He clenched his fists and with kindling eyes looked up at the mountain cleft, then at the ridge in the west, and then at the lake, still grinding out words of challenge between his teeth in saga style: “—And never shall!”

The bitch leaped up and, rushing madly at the sheep at the bottom of the knoll, started snapping viciously at their hocks, for she thought the man was angry, whereas he was only filled with the modern spirit and determination to be a free man on his own land, with the same independence as the other generations that had settled there before him.

“Kolumkilli! he cried, laughing scornfully, after he had called the dog to heel. “What a tale; what nonsense these old wives let their heads be stuffed with!”

B
Y
the time that Term Day comes round, Iceland’s splendidly patriotic grass has begun sprouting for the inhabitants with a welcome rapidity; one could almost take a scythe to the growth in the manured fields. The sheep have begun to lift their heavy heads again and hide their ribs in flesh, and the eyeless face of the carcase down in the marsh is buried in grass. Yes, life is sweet at such a time, and now, surely, is the time to marry, for all the nests of the mice in the old ruins have been pulled out and a new croft has been built. It is Bjartur of Summerhouses’ croft. Stones have been carried, turf cut, walls built up, framework nailed, rafters hoisted, boards nailed for a clincher roof, range built in, chimney set in place—and there stands the croft-house as if part of nature itself.

Up-country, in pretty much the same sort of dwelling, the marriage was solemnized at Nithurkot, the home of the bride’s parents, and it was from the same sort of farmhouses that most of the guests came: crofts standing at the foot of the mountains or sheltering on the southern slope of a ridge, each with a little brook running through the home-field, marshy land beyond, and a river flowing smoothly through the marsh. When one journeys from one homestead to the next, nothing seems more likely than that they all bear the same name and that the same man and the same woman work them all; yet that is not so. Old Thorthur of Nithurkot, for
instance, had cherished throughout the years the dream of building himself a mill across his farm brook. There was some strength in its flow, and if he could build a mill and grind Scotch barley for folk he would make quite a decent little profit out of the enterprise. But no sooner had he got the building finished than they stopped importing unground corn; and in any case folk preferred their corn ready-milled. His children played about the mill-cot in the spring days of childhood with no evening; the sky was blue in those days; they never forgot it as long as they lived.