Independent People (57 page)

Then he seemed to feel that he had said too much, and he did not finish the sentence.

S
OON
the lowlands were free of snow, and the ewes were beginning to feed to some purpose on the grass in the marshes. At meal-times, when Father and the boys came in from work, there was their food laid all ready for them on the table. But where was Asta Sollilja? She was down at the brook washing stockings and suchlike, or seeing to the clothes hanging out on the line, or kneading bread down in the entrance; she was very seldom seen in the loft when anyone else was in the loft, and at night she went to bed after all the others had gone to bed; if she washed herself at all these days, no one ever saw her doing it. Once she was in bed, she would draw the coverlet over her head and lie as still as a mouse. She had developed suddenly a habit of hanging her head, as if she wished to hide her face. Long lashes drooped over eyes that looked at no one in particular. If her father addressed her she would answer with a monosyllable, then slip away as soon as possible. He had grown used to seeing her look at him questioningly, with wide, guileless eyes, and he had replied with silence; now it was he that looked at her questioningly, she who replied with silence.

It was possibly no great novelty though no one on the croft knew quite what anyone else was thinking, and it is possible that such a mode is all for the best. One might be inclined to believe that on a croft everyone’s soul would be cast in the same mould, but this is far from the truth, for nowhere are there souls more varied in nature than on a little croft. The two brothers, for example—when had they ever understood one another?—Gvendur, who longed for the fulfilment of reality in a definite place, Nonni, who longed for the solution of dreams in some remote indeterminate distance. Sunshine and thawing snow, the ice in the gully melting, the waterfall in flood—the little boy gazed enchanted out into the spring, and a breeze came away from the south and blew the waterfall back over the mountain, get on with your work and stop glowering into space, said the elder brother. They were busy in the enclosure spreading manure. This waterfall in the gully and its wind from the south, a whole human soul could find its symbol in one small peculiarity of nature and could mould itself
upon it; he had discussed it with his mother and she had understood and told him a dream. Now there was no one to understand, but he lived on this dream; and on her wishes. He walked alone whenever he could. In his breast there dwelt a lyrical sadness, a strange sorrowful longing; when he was tending the sheep he sang part-songs that he had never heard. Yes, there was such a wonderful instrument in his breast; and though he could not yet play upon it himself, he toyed with its strings and listened to this note or that note early in the spring, sometimes trembling, often with tears in his eyes, and his eyes were deep and sorrowful and pure as a rill, and like silver deep, deep at the bottom of a rill, silver in a rill.

In spite of the mild weather there was little show of green on the hills yet, and as the possibility of sudden storms could not be excluded, the crofter had little desire to allow his sheep to wander away up to the high moors. He searched the moorland watercourses in tibe south and the east at regular intervals, chasing all the sheep he could find down to the lowlands. The more oppressive the silence at home, the more did he appreciate the freshness of spring with its bewitching intensity, its odour of thawing snow and snow that had thawed, of sunlit space and the promise of eternity; for the moors stand in indissoluble communion with eternity. Little by little the snow retreated before the sun, and soon there was in the air the scent of heather and withered grass and the first fresh shoots as they emerged from the drifts on the slopes. The ewes loitered among the hollows and the gullies, cropping at whatever they could find above the snow. But when least expected they would take to their heels and, rushing to the top of the gully or the hollow, would race off into the wind at full speed, into unlimited space, into eternity; for sheep also love eternity and have faith in it.

For some days a raven had been seen flapping about over the gully. He took a walk along the bottom to see whether it was some prey the bird was so intent upon. The river was in spate, but not so high as it had been previously. All at once the dog came to a halt and stood barking over something that the river had washed on to the gravel. The raven hovered croaking over the gully. Now, the last thing that Bjartur had expected was to find anything dead here, for he had lost no sheep that spring, and anyway, as good luck would have it, it wasn’t a carcass, it was a corpse. It was a boy’s slender body. It had tumbled over the rocks at some time during the winter and, after lying in a drift until the snow had
thawed, had been floated off by the river when in flood, then left stranded on the gravel here when the level of the waters sank. No, it bore no likeness to any human being. The bone of the nose was bare and the mouth laughed without lips at the sky, the eyes torn out, the rags that stuck to the body so rotten that the decay had eaten its way into the bones; and then of course beasts of prey had been busy on it, so that all together it was rather a gruesome sight. The man touched it once or twice with his stick, told the dog to shut up, and mumbled: “As one sows, so does one reap.” He took a good pinch of snuff. The bitch went on barking.

“Yes, you can cut out the cackle for all the good it will do,” he said. “You don’t understand these things. Some folks want to lay the blame on Kolumkilli, but it’s more likely that each of us bears his destination in his own heart.”

Nevertheless he found it difficult to absolve Kolumkilli of all intervention in human fate, for it often happens that though one is quite certain that the story of Kolumkilli is not true, or even that it is a downright lie, there are times when this same story seems to hold more truth than any truth. There is some devil or other on the moors who eats people. Ah well, he would have to do something for the body, seeing that he had found it, and that as quickly as possible, for the ewes had taken to their heels and were out of the gully by now. He was wearing a pair of thick, heavy gloves that were practically new, and he took the glove from his right hand and threw it to the corpse, for it is considered discourteous to leave a corpse that one has found without first doing it some small service. A few seconds later he was standing on the brink of the gully: it was as he had thought, the ewes were in full flight. The leaders showed against the sky as they raced across the top of a distant roll in the moors; they were heading for the Blue-fells. He ran off in pursuit, happy to own such ewes as these, which yearned like ascetics for the solitude of the endless wilderness early in the spring.

“Hallbera,” he said that evening, throwing her a glove, “knit me a glove to match that odd one.”

“Hullo, where’s the other?” asked the old woman, for she had never known the crofter to lose a glove.

“Oh, we won’t bother our heads about that, old girl.”

“No?” she said, tilting her dithering head up and away from him, as was her custom when she looked at anyone; and had no need to ask any further questions, had no need to ask.

T
HEN
there came great rainstorms that seemed to fill the whole world, and a hundred seasonal rills, rushing down the sides of the mountain, washed winter’s snow away to the sea. When next the sun was seen, there was no snow in the valley, the hills green, buttercups in the home-field, blissful breezes. The brook in the home-field had swelled to full spate and dwindled again without the crofter’s youngest son having noticed it. Only one year had passed, and he was standing no longer by the home brook. He was standing in the enclosure with his rake, spreading manure in perfect aimlessness, like an idiot, he to whom the elves had promised better lands in a dream. The lands that his winter’s books had brought so near to him had drifted away with the spring and vanished over horizons even more remote than before. He had only to look at Asta Sollilja to realize how inaccessible were the countries that once had mirrored themselves in the skies because of the white landlessness of winter. Yet the soul refuses to give up the struggle. Spring, its birds from beyond the blue mountains, its breezes, its sky—spring called and called. Each time that he came out of the low door and halted on the paving it called to him. And went on calling. He listened. The melancholy longing, the sad sympathy with life, awoke in his breast. He had listened to her silence all through the spring, ever since the teacher left at Easter-time. But he had not known that she wept, until one day. It was a Sunday. From where he was standing in the home-field he saw her lying in a green hollow. He went to her. She did not move, for she did not hear his approach. But when he came up to her he saw that her shoulders were shaking. She was weeping, her face buried in the grass. He was well aware that though she was their big
sister
she was really a more insignificant being than he and his brother, and he was struck with immediate pity. He himself wept more and more seldom now, he had hardly wept at all since last summer, he would soon be a big boy. Finally he spoke her name. She gave a start and, sitting up, wiped her tears away with the hem of her dress. But the only result was that the tears flowed faster and faster.

“What are you crying for?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she replied with a sniff.

“Have you lost anything?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You mustn’t cry,” he said.

“I’m not crying,” she replied, and went on crying.

“Has Father been nasty to you?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Yes, once. A long time ago. But it’s such a long time ago. It didn’t matter. I’ve forgotten all about it. No, he didn’t hit me at all.”

“Is it something you want badly?” he asked.

And she replied almost greedily, gasping for breath: “Yes”—and burst into a storm of weeping.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she wept in despair.

“You needn’t be afraid of telling me, Sola dear. Maybe I can get it for you when I grow up.”

“You wouldn’t understand. You’re so little. No one understands. I don’t even understand it myself—day and night.”

“Is it because of the way you’re made?” he asked, full of sympathy and conscious that the discussion was verging now upon the most intimate secrets of the human body, which it is otherwise customary never to mention—possibly it was wrong of him, but the words had slipped his tongue before he realized.

“Yes,” she sighed after a little reflection, disconsolately.

“It doesn’t matter, Sola dear,” he whispered then, and patted her cheek, determined to console her. “There’s no one need find out. I won’t tell anyone. I shall ask Gvendur not to tell anyone.”

“So you know, then?” she asked, taking the cloth away from her eyes and looking him straight in the eyes “—you know?”

“No, Sola dear, I know nothing. I’ve never had a look; it doesn’t matter. And anyway nobody can help it. And when I’m a big man, maybe I'll build a house in another country and then you can come and live with me and eat potatoes—”

“Potatoes? What do I want with potatoes?”

“Like it says in the Bible stories,” he explained.

“There aren’t any potatoes in the Bible stories.”

“I mean what the woman ate in the Bible stories,” he said.

“I don’t want anything in the Bible stories,” she said, gazing tato space with tear-swollen eyes. “God is an enemy of the soul.”

Then suddenly he asked: “What did you wish for in the winter, Sola, when the teacher gave us all a wish?”

First she looked at him searchingly, and the squint in her eyes seemed more pronounced than ever, because of her weeping; then her lids fell and she began uprooting grass from the sward. “You mustn’t tell anyone,” she said.

“No, I shall never tell anyone. What was it, then?”

“It was love,” she said, and then once more her weeping burst its bonds, and again and again she repeated from the midst of her sobbing: “Love, love, love.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

She threw herself in a heap on the ground again, her shoulders shaking with sobs as they had done when he came up to her a few moments ago, and she wailed:

“I wish I could die. Die. Die.”

He did not know what to say in the face of such sorrow. He sat in silence by his sister’s side in the spring verdure, which was too young; and the hidden strings in his breast began to quiver, and to sound.

This was the first time that he had ever looked into the labyrinth of the human soul. He was very far from understanding what he saw. But what was of more value, he felt and suffered with her. In years that were yet to come he relived this memory in song, in the most beautiful song the world has known. For the understanding of the soul’s defencelessness, of the conflict between the two poles, is not the source of the greatest song. The source of the greatest song is sympathy. Sympathy with Asta Sollilja on earth.

T
HE MOST
remarkable thing about man’s dreams is that they all come true; this has always been the case, though no one would care to admit it And a peculiarity of man’s behaviour is that he is not in the least surprised when his dreams do come true; it is as if he had always expected nothing else. The goal to be reached and the determination to reach it are brother and sister, and slumber both in the same heart.

It happened on the day before Ascension Day. At this part of the year a good number of people wend their way through the valley, though very few ever leave the main road and pay a visit to the croft. But on this day a man left the main road and paid a visit to the croft. In no respect was he a noteworthy person. There was nothing at all individual about his appearance, and probably nothing very indispensable about the function he performed in life; at least there was nothing that one could point to definitely and say: “This is his function;” unless it was to deliver this one letter. In later years, when Jon Gudbjartsson tried to call him back to memory, he always refused to show himself. He was, in other words, just like a hundred other natural objects that one does not notice because they are so natural. He simply handed Bjartur of Summerhouses this one small letter, said goodbye, and left.