Independent People (65 page)

I’m off to America,” he said.

“Poor boy,” she said, but without pity, without feeling of any kind.

“I’m certain I can do better for myself over there, even though the prospects are good in Iceland.”

She smiled coldly.

“Who sent you to me?” she asked.

“No one,” he replied. “I just felt that I had to come along and say good-bye.”

“I should have thought you would have been the last of the family to entertain any longings,” she said. “I thought you would have been a free man, like Bjartur of Summerhouses.”

She said Bjartur of Summerhouses with a cold smile, without hesitation. What she had gained in s’trength she had lost in sensitiveness.

He stood deep in thought, eyes fixed on the ground for greater
concentration. “There’s always someone in the valley there who rules over you and holds you in his hand,” he said at length. “I don’t know who it is. And though Father may be hard, he isn’t free. There’s someone even harder than he, someone who stands over him and holds him in his power.”

She looked at him searchingly for a while, as if seeking to read in his mind how far he was capable of understanding. “You mean Kolumkilli?” she asked in a tone of cold jocularity. Perhaps she was just as puzzled by him as he by her.

“No,” was his reply. “There is something that never allows you any peace, something that makes you keep on doing something.”

“I should never have known you again for the old Gvendur,” she said.

“That’s because I’ve got money now,” he replied. “You look at things differently then.”

“You’ll never be free of him,” she said.

“Free of whom?”

“Bjartur of Summerhouses. You can hate him. But he is in you. You simply hate yourself. He who reviles him reviles himself.”

This the boy did not understand. “If a fellow goes abroad,” he said, “and starts a new life in distant countries, surely he ought to have a good chance of freeing himself?”

She laughed out loud, a mirthless laugh. “I thought that too,” she said. “It was one night, I left him, he kicked me out, I tramped all the way over the high heath there, and was barefoot by morning. I too went abroad, to a distant country.”

“You—?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I went to my America. Off you go to yours. And a pleasant journey to you.”

“Then do you think, like Father, that I'll never make good out there?”

“I’m saying nothing about that, Gvendur boy. All I know is that Bjartur of Summerhouses is in you; as he is in me, even though we may not be related at all.”

“Oh well, it may be quite an advantage, you know,” said the lad then. “Father is the sort of man who never gives in. Only the other day I heard someone offer him fifteen thousand for the croft, and he turned it down. Anyone with his hardness in him could make a great man of himself out in the world—for instance in America, where a farmer’s stock is reckoned in cattle.”

“Didn’t you say there was somebody harder still than Father, someone who ruled over him and held him in his hand?”

“Well, I did say so in a way, but it wasn’t because I believe in Kolumkilli.”

“No, and it isn’t Kolumkilli either,” she said. “It is the power that rules the world, and you can call it what you like, Gvendur boy.”

“Is it God?”

“Yes—if it is God that benefits from people slaving like brute beasts all their lives long and never having a chance at all that life has to offer—then it is God all right. And now I am afraid I shall have to leave you, Gvendur, the washing is waiting for me.”

“No, listen,” he said, without having fathomed this deeper wisdom, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you before I say goodbye, Sola: I was thinking of making you a present of my ewes.”

She checked herself in the middle of her first step and looked at him; there was perhaps a trace of unfeigned pity in her eyes, as when people regard an incredibly stupid person who has given himself away in conversation. Then she smiled again.

Thank you, Gvendur,” she said, “but I don’t accept gifts, even from Bjartur of Summerhouses’ son. You mustn’t take it in bad part, it isn’t the first time I’ve refused a gift. Last year when I was starving with my little girl in an unheated cellar along the fjord there, the most influential man in the district came to see me one night in secret and said I was his daughter and offered me a a lot of money; yes, he offered to provide for Bjort and me as long as we lived. “I would rather see my child die, said I.” Once more she gave her cold laugh, then added: “My little girl and I are independent people also, you see; we also are a sovereign state. Bjort and I love freedom just as much as our namesake does. We would rather be free to die than have to accept anyone’s gifts.”

It was she who had come down from the high heath early one morning in spring. She had walked all night, a young soul, charged with dreams, with holy dreams, the holiest of dreams; she had been barefoot by morning. She too had had her hopes of America. To leave childhood behind and attain maturity and discretion is to have found America. She crowed over her brother who had not yet reached this world-famous land of helpless dreams; yes, it was one morning, one Whit Sunday morning. New lands rise from the ocean, she thought, and bathe their precious shells and thousand-coloured corals in the summer’s first light; and old lands with fragrant orchards and peacefully murmuring leaves. And on
the meadow by the seashore stands his bright house. It was a black shed, clad in tarred paper that had blown loose in places. In a little window, which looked out to sea, stood two rusty tin mugs full of soil. Sticking out of the roof a broken stove-pipe that was out of the perpendicular. Leading up to the door two broken steps. And the woods? Withered seaweed that the breakers had washed up on the beach all around. A little brook, scarcely a yard in width, ran out into the sand, and kneeling on the bank were two half-grown boys playing at stirring up the mud at the bottom. She stepped over it. A half-grown girl of about her own age, only thinner, was busy near the door with two screaming children, they had a rash, they were blue in the face. And on the threshold stood the mother, pregnant like the girl herself, with a baby in her arms and swearing. It is for Asta Sollilja and her beloved that cheap poets and misanthropists and liars write books full of sunshine and dreams and beautiful sun-gilt palm-avenues to fool them and ridicule them and insult them. All that her loved one possessed were these dreams. And the ability to drink himself stupid.

Then suddenly Gvendur remembered that he had not finished his errand yet, and again he asked her to wait but a moment longer—“Father asked me to tell you that things are still very much the same at home, except that he’s going to start building his house soon.”

She spun round on her heel and cried in astonishment: “Father asked you? To tell me!”

As soon as he heard her question the boy realized that he had said too much, and he hastened to correct himself by saying: “No, he didn’t ask me to tell you. But he said it nevertheless. And he asked me to recite you these verses”—and he recited the two verses.

She laughed.

“Tell him,” she said forgetting that he was bound for America, “tell him from me that I know the cow-barns he builds. And tell him that I also know the empty, drivelling doggerel that he cudgels into shape with hands and feet. But I, I am engaged to a young man who loves me. He has been to school, and he is a modern poet, and he and his mother own a sweet little house on Sandeyri. It’s two years since he first asked me to marry him, and he will never drive me away from him, because he loves me. Tell Bjartur of Summerhouses that.”

This was her last word. Such had she become, the little Midsummer Night girl of bygone days. It was the left cheek in her
life that had gained the ascendancy; or, much more probably, that had saved the helpless right cheek that she had turned to Bjartur of Summerhouses many years ago, one Christmas Eve.

“IS
it you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “it is I.”

Thus did their acquaintanceship begin.

In a lush green meadow towards evening stood a lofty and distinguished house, with a rectangular tower, bathed in sunshine. The meadow gleamed almost with a tinge of fleeting red in the evening sun, so bright and charming was it.

“You’re frightfully lucky going to America,” she said. “Aren’t you really awfully excited about it?”

She was wearing high boots and breeches that were close-fitting at the knees but full above, and she was leading two spirited young thoroughbreds whose coats glistened with good feeding, glossy as silk. The sunshine and the breeze played in her golden hair, in its waves and its curls; her young bosom rose cupped above her slender waist, her arms were naked to the shoulder, her eyebrows curved in a high care-free bow. Her keen eyes reminded him both of the sky and of its hawks; her skin, radiant with the fresh bloom of youth, colour incomparable, made him think of wholesome new milk in May. She was altogether free. She was beauty itself. He had never seen anyone or anything in any way like her. She had a slight trace of a nasal pronunciation, her voice slipped into low, singing notes at the end of every sentence, and she laughed in fun and earnest. He was completely lost.

“You can go in on the lawn if you would like to,” she said.

He opened the gate for her.

“You may hold my horses for me while I go inside,” she said, and was gone. He stood there with the horses on the rein while they champed their bits and rubbed themselves against him impatiently. For a long, long time he waited and still she did not return, and just when he was beginning to think she would never return she returned.

“Like some chocolate?” she asked, and gave him some chocolate.

“More?” she asked, and gave him some more.

“I wish I were going with you,” she said. “Lord, how I’d love to go to America! I say, how would you like me to come along with you?”

He blushed furiously at the thought of running away with such a girl. The idea seemed somehow a little improper. Nevertheless he gave her permission to accompany him to America. “The ship will be arriving tonight and leaving early in the morning.” he told her. She burst out into hearty laughter; it amused her enormously that he should intend taking her with him to America. “You’re very kind, I’m sure,” she said, laughing in fun and earnest, “I think I shall have to treat you to a trip on the roan instead, though there’s only a rope halter on him at the moment. I was thinking, actually, of popping over to Myri to see my grandfather and my grandmother, and if you’ve no objections to riding barebacked for a mile or two, you can see me as far as the top of the heath.”

No, no, he had no objections to riding bareback, even if it were fifty miles, and was astride the horse immediately. No sooner had they mounted than the eager animals were off at breakneck speed, the grey leading at a gallop with the girl, the roan in furious pursuit, shaking his head and tugging viciously at the reins, utterly heedless of his rider’s efforts to guide him. She turned the grey on to the road leading up to the heath at full speed, while the roan chased along behind at an erratic gallop, snorting and swerving and bucking as if he had never experienced a bridle before; once or twice she looked around at him and laughed, her hair streaming in the breeze, golden in the sunshine. In spite of his mount Gudmundur Gudbjartsson had never known anything so glorious, so romantic. They dashed up the scarp as if it had been levelled into a race-track, the horses taking the bends in the zigzag road at such speed that he had to hang on to the mane to prevent himself being shot sideways.

Only a few moments had passed and already they were within sight of the summit. At one point near the head of the pass the road skirts the bottom of a grassy hollow, and just as they were passing this hollow the grey gave a sudden swerve, made for the side of the road, jumped clean over the ditch, landed in the hollow, and bump, there on the bank lay the girl with her legs waving in the air. The roan, following hard in the other’s tracks, threw his hind legs up with such vigour that his rider catapulted forward, landed on his head, and turned a somersault before he could stop. The horses, tossing their heads and snorting, trotted
away farther up the hollow and began grazing. The girl lay giggling in the grass.

“You haven’t hurt yourself, I hope?” he asked as he picked himself up.

But all she could do was giggle. “Lord, what a joke!” she cried, writhing with laughter. He went after the horses and pulled the reins over their heads to hamper their movements; they were eating greedily, snorting into the grass and jingling their bits. When he returned she was sitting up tidying her hair. The town lay beneath them in bird’s-eye view, with coffee-brown garden plots and newly painted house-roofs as testimony to the bountiful blessings of a prosperous war; and they could see far, far out over the ocean, and the ocean lay spread before them like eternity, smooth and mirror-bright as far as the horizon, so that one felt that surely the world must end there and a new and better world take its place, maybe it’s true.

“You’re frightfully lucky having the chance to sail over all that sea.”

“I was afraid you had hurt yourself,” he said chivalrously. “Great horses, those of yours.”

“Pooh, they’re just a couple of ordinary nags. I would swap them immediately for the chance to sail to America.”

“What do they call you?” he asked.

But she only looked at him and showed her even, milk-white teeth in a lilting laugh. “Why should you trouble to ask, you who are going to America?”

“I only wanted to know.”

“All right, I'll tell you; but not before you come back from America. Listen, what are you going to do when you get to America?”

“Oh, I don’t really know yet,” said he, himself retiring, though not without reluctance, behind the same shroud of coy mysteriousness as she.

“You don’t want to tell me, that’s what’s the matter.”

“A man can be anything he likes in America,” he said, “Take my brother, for instance. He is in America, but no one knows what he is. All we know is that he has an awful lot of money. Money printed on blue paper. He has just sent me a whole bundle of them. There are countries in America with big forests and wild animals in them.”