Independent People (14 page)

“Ma-a-a-a.”

The shrill cry startled her immediately from her coma. In her dozing ears it took on an incredible note: the sheep had been lolled, but had risen now after three hours by the aid of the Devil. That hoarse, subterranean cry could not come from any animal born; it was the scream of the tortured souls spoken of in the Scriptures; all the devils and ghouls of the moor had congregated to bellow in this one sheep: the spectres of those who cannot rest in their graves, of children left under a rock in the boulder-wastes to die, peasants with throats cut for the marrow in their bones, popish people who hate God and Jesus, whose one desire is to drag everyone else down into their own eternal hell. In such a fashion did this night drag on.

At long last she summoned sufficient courage to peep from under the blankets, and lo, a faint gleam was lighting the room. To her inexpressible relief she discovered that night was almost over; however long, however grievous the night, dawn always comes in the end. The wind had dropped, but the rain continued, encompassing everything near and far in its heavy interminable beat. And the ewe was still bleating. Slowly the light in the room strengthened and slowly the woman’s temper changed; the disordered exhaustion of night was gradually overcome by the courage of rising day. At last it was so light that she no longer felt any fear of the animal. She hated it. It was an enemy. Every fresh bleat was like oil that is poured on flames. Whatever it cost, she would stop its evil mouth—she waited only for more light, more courage, then nothing would stop her from attacking the animal and destroying it somehow, anyhow. At length she could resist no longer and sprang out of bed. She did not even bother to put on her clothes, but ranged the room with bare arms and half-naked breasts, her face pale and sleepless, eyes glittering, wild. She fumbled about under the roof-tree in the grey light of dawn and drew out Bjartur’s scythe-blade, unwound its covering of sacking, looked at the edge and tested it on her hair. Then she went down the stairs. The sheep began racing from wall to wall in terror, and she gave chase, stumbling over hay-rakes and tangled ropes that had fallen in the turmoil of the night. But she was no longer afraid, no fanciful fears could prevent her carrying out her intention, and after some pursuit she succeeded in capturing the sheep. Then
she uncoiled a rope’s end and dragged the sheep out over the doorstep. The sheep resisted stubbornly, blowing through distended nostrils. She dragged it down the home-field to where the brook ran out into the marsh. There she threw it on its back with its head towards the stream. She wound the rope round its feet It was now light enough to see what one was doing.

Very deliberately she set about the task. Like an experienced slaughterer she parted the wool about the sheep’s throat, but now the creature had sensed its death and quivered convulsively under the woman’s hand, gaping with open mouth and gaping nostrils, and writhing frantically in its bonds. But any sentimental qualm of compassion was far from the woman at this moment. Sitting down astride of the sheep, she gripped the leaping body between her legs until she had steadied it sufficiently to apply the blade to its throat. The scythe-blade was not much good as a slaughterer’s knife, for although it was reasonably sharp, it was so unwieldy that great care was needed not to cut oneself. She had to take both hands to it and lose all control over the sheep’s head in its death-throes. But she did not allow this difficulty to impede her and hacked and sawed away at the throat while hot jets of blood played on her hands and spurted into her face. Gradually, as the loss of blood affected it, the creature’s struggles grew feebler, and finally it even ceased lifting its head and lay still with gurgling mouth. At last she found the vertebrae of the neck. Deeper and deeper she thrust the blade; a voluptuous spasm shook the animal where it lay gripped between her legs, and nothing moved now but the tail. The vertebrae gaped, showing the whiteness of the spinal cord. She cut straight across it, there was one slight tremor, and the sheep was dead. She severed the head and left the carcass to bleed into the stream; there was a little blood on the grass. The woman sat down by the stream, and after washing her hands and face, carefully wiped the scythe-blade with moss. A shiver struck through her and she was exhausted, almost comatose, and thought no more of what she had done, but reeled home to the croft and put on her clothes. She sat down on the bed. Her passion was spent, her impulse satisfied, and with the fulfilment a comfortable drowsiness flowed through her limbs in the drab light of the dawn. Letting herself sink back, she pulled the coverlet over her bare shoulders and was asleep.

It was bright day when she woke again. What had she been dreaming of? She passed a hand over her eyes and forehead to break the threads between sleeping and waking, to separate dream
from reality. She had been dreaming of the Mistress of Myri, it seemed she had done something that would affect the whole parish, she had cut the Mistress of Myri’s throat. But when she looked out of the window she remembered that it was only a sheep that she had killed, a sheep guilty of nothing more than having been at least as frightened as she herself in the loneliness of the night. Yet she felt no prick of conscience for what she had done. All she felt was surprise. She could not understand the woman who had risen that morning from her bed, sleepless, armed like Death with a scythe. She put on her clothes, pinned a shawl round her head and shoulders, and was the same woman as yesterday; but the sheep had stopped bleating. She realized immediately that everything depended on hiding from Bjartur the traces of this deed. She went down to the brook, to where the sheep lay headless on the bank, and kicked it with her toe, a butchered sheep. A butchered sheep? Every fibre in her body woke thrilling to the fact in anticipation, in greedy exultation—it was not only a sheep’s carcass, it was meat. Fresh meat. Now at last she understood what she had done: she had killed a sheep for fresh meat. The summer-long dream, summer’s loftiest and most hallowed dream, was at last to be fulfilled.

Her mouth filled with water, her body with blissful hunger, her soul with the rapturous prescience of satiety. All that she had to do was to prepare the sheep and put the pot on the fire. She found her clasp-knife and sharpened it on two whetstones, then she began to cut the sheep up. Though she had never taken an active part in the autumn slaughter, she had often watched and therefore knew the process in outline, so she took out the entrails to the best of her ability, scraped off the suet, taking care not to pierce the gall, then washed the stomach in the brook. When she had finished most of the work, she wasted no time in running home and putting the pan on. She stuffed the gullet with suet, made the pouch into sausage-skins, and put them all into the pan along with the heart and the kidneys. Soon the croft was filled with the fragrance of boiling offals. And while they were simmering she finished cutting up the sheep and hid the signs of slaughter so that not even the ravens would find anything. She tied the larger bowel to the door and scraped it, then chopped up the carcass with an old axe and salted it in a case.

Presently the meal was ready.

Perhaps there was never served on the high table of any manor house a meal as appetizing as that to which the woman of the
moors now sat down in her own croft. It is at least certain that never since the days of Gudmundur the Rich and the old chieftains has any delicacy called forth such ineffably wholehearted joy in the body and soul of the eater as that which was produced in this woman by the fat-salty tang of sueted gullet, the luscious meaty heart of the young animal, the tender, delicately fibred flesh of the kidneys with their peculiar flavour, and the thick slices of liver sausage dripping with fat from the pot. She drank the gravy along with it, thick and wholesome. She ate and ate as if she would never be sated. This was the first happy day of her married life. Afterwards she made some coffee from her mother’s gift and ate much sugar. After the meal she lapsed again into a comfortable drowsiness. She sat at first by the range with her hands in her lap, her head nodding forward, but finding at length that she could no longer hold herself up, she lay down and went to sleep. And slept for hours.

B
JARTUR
brought his sheep home late on the fourth day and was off again next morning in the company of a number of crofters from up-country on the drive to town. The results of the round-up had been satisfactory, and he was able to take with him a flock of twenty lambs. Of these, twelve went in part payment of his debt to the Bailiff for the land, while for the remainder the dealer allowed him a sack of rye flour, some salted codfish, a few pounds each of wheat, coffee, sugar, and oatmeal, and also a little snuff. Besides these provisions he brought home the lambs’ offals, and after this had to make three more journeys to town for the horse’s fodder. He slept little, travelling night and day, preferring to make three journeys to the prosperous farmer’s one rather than incur any debt for transport. When he came home, worn out with travel by night, soaked to the skin in the downpour of autumn, muddy up to the knees from the slippery paths, he could hardly help admiring his wife’s appearance, so fresh and healthy did she look; she was like the turnip, which thrives best in autumn, and she must have forgotten all about her ghosts, for she had freed the ewe he had left her for company.

But Bjartur was aware that “the nerves” is a stubborn disease that can flare up in a variety of forms, and he was also aware that a stitch in time saves nine, so he did not forget her at the doctor’s.
He took from his pocket a little phial of pills that he had obtained from Dr. Finsen and handed it to his wife.

‘There’s supposed to be some real strength in these,” he said. They haven’t spared their science on these, I reckon, like they have on the medicine for the dogs. These pills are supposed to keep everything inside you in such good condition that you needn’t be afraid of any disease. There’s a sort of liquid in them that destroys all humours, they prevent griping pains in your insides, and they give your blood tremendous power.

His wife took his gift and weighed it in her hand.

“And what do you think I gave for them?” he asked.

That his wife did not know. “What do you think old Finsen said when I was going to pay him? We won’t bother about a trifle like this, my dear Bjartur; one isn’t particular to a penny or two with the members of one’s own party, says the old fellow. Why, said I, ‘never have I been set so high before as to be counted among the members of the same party as the doctor, me a crofter in his first year, says I. By the way, my dear Bjartur, says he then, ‘where did we stand at the last election?’ Where did we stand?’ I asked. ‘Oughtn’t the Althingi member to know best himself where he stood? And as for me, I stood then where I stand now, in that I consider it the height of vanity for farm labourers and smallholders to bother themselves about the government, when anyone with half an eye can see that the government is and always will be on the side of the great and not on the side of the small, and that the small will not make themselves a whit bigger by meddling with the affairs of the great.”

“Now, you haven’t got that quite right, my friend, says he, talking to me just like man to man. The government, he says, ‘is first and foremost for the people; and if the people don’t use their votes, and use them with judgment, it ends up with irresponsible folk being elected to the government; and that is something we must all bear in mind, all of us, those who haven’t a great deal to come and go on included.’ ‘Yes’, I said, for I couldn’t be bothered to argue with the old fellow, ‘it must be grand to be as learned as you are, doctor, and that’s why I’ve always maintained that we in this part of the country are so lucky, with a scientist like you to represent us in Parliament,—Give him his due, he’s learned right enough, the old cock, what with those fine doctor’s hands of his, and all that gold on his spectacles. ‘But it happens to be a custom of mine, I said, ‘to pay for everything
I buy, it being my opinion that freedom and independence is a question of not being in anyone’s debt, and of being one’s own master. And that’s why I ask you, doctor, not to hesitate to name your price for the damned old pills of yours, because I know that they’re good and wholesome pills if they come from you.”

“But it was all the same what I said to him, he wouldn’t hear money mentioned. We’ll just bear each other in mind in the autumn and appear at the right time and place to vote,’ he says, ‘because these are difficult times,’ says he, ‘these are terribly difficult times, and Parliament faces many serious problems, and men of judgment are needed to find a way out of all this, and to protect working people from intolerable burdens and fight for the independence of the country.’ Then he stands up, a grand old man if ever there was one, and worthy of anyone’s respect, and he claps me on the shoulder and says: ‘Give your wife my kindest regards and tell her I’m sending her these pills to try. Tell her that they’re some of the best pills made as far as humours are concerned, and that they’re particularly good for strengthening the nerves.”

F
REQUENT
visits were paid to Summerhouses that autumn, for the road to town from up-country lay through the valley. Daily, long processions of pack-horses plodded along the river banks, heading for the uplands on their way to Fjord, while the landed farmers who owned them rode there and back at their ease, leaving their farmhands in charge of the train. Sometimes these farmers, returning from town in a drunken condition, would wake up Bjartur and his wife in the middle of the night and, noisy and garrulous, would talk of poetry and wenching. They chanted lampoons in full-throated tones, sang patriotic songs, bawdy rhymes, and comic hymns, keeping up the merriment all night long till they spewed on the floor and went to sleep in the couple’s own bed. Some of the farmers’ wives would also leave the main road to pay a visit, threading their way carefully over the marshes on their gentle-paced amblers just to kiss their darling little Rosa of Summerhouses. One of these ladies was Madam Myri herself. She also was on her way to town, riding her horse Soti, and clad in a habit with a skirt that seemed wide enough to accommodate half the parish. She had an embroidered covering under her saddle,
and a riding hat, and a veil; she lifted her veil half-way up her nose and kissed her little darling. Madam did Rosa the honor of drinking four cups of her coffee, and on being allowed to examine her provisions declared that the salt codfish would last till Christmas, and the rye meal till the New Year if economically used. She said that the settling of new land, a movement now popular in the country, was a charming movement. It was the spirit of the colonists. She said that on this movement depended the prosperity of the country in the future no less than it had done in the past This movement was called private enterprise and it alone could overcome various unwholesome political tendencies, now unfortunately growing more popular in the coastal towns, which aimed at dragging man down to the level of the dogs, both physically and spiritually. She said she considered those who forsook the land for the towns as lost souls; nothing but corruption awaited them. “How can anyone of healthy mind think of forsaking the dear flowers or the blue mountains that lift the heart of man to heaven?” she asked. “They, on the other hand, that take themselves a holding are true ministers of God; they foster and further life itself, the good and the beautiful. On the farmer in his valley rests the increase and the advancement of the Icelandic nation in the past, the present, and the future.”