Independent People (5 page)

There were seven of them. When they grew up they left home and went away to distant places. Two sons were drowned in a distant ocean, and one son and a daughter had disappeared to a land even more remote, America, which is farther than death. But perhaps no distance is greater than that which separates a poor family in the same country; two daughters had married in fishing villages, and one of them was now a widow with a horde of children, while the other, who had married a consumptive, was on the parish—what is life?

The youngest daughter, Rosa, had spent most of her time at home, until she went into service with the Bailiff at Utirauthsmyri. There was then no one left on the croft but the old couple, an aged crone who stayed with them, and an eighty-year-old pauper assigned them by the parish. And today Rosa was to be married; that’s what she had got out of it. Tomorrow she was going for good and all. And the mill stood by the brook. Such is life.

Though Bjartur had from youth upwards spent his life on a large estate, most of his acquaintances were peasants from up-country, sheep-men like himself who toiled like slaves over their flocks, day in, day out, the whole year round, till they died without ever having transacted a business deal involving more than a few dollars at a time. Some of them succeeded in attaining a degree of culture that was expressed in a timber living-room shaped like a box and roofed with corrugated iron, but such houses are damp and draughty; draughts are the source of rheumatism, consumption breeds in the damp. Most of them, however, thought themselves lucky if they could renew a wall or two of their earthen crofts once every five years, and that in spite of dreams of higher things. In every croft, somehow, there lives and persists the dream of something better; for a thousand years they have imagined that they will rise above penury in some mysterious manner and acquire a large estate and the title of landed farmers, the eternal dream. Some consider that it will only be fulfilled in heaven.

They lived for their sheep, and, with the exception of the Bailiff, they all dealt in Fjord with Tulinius Jensen, manager of Bruni’s, a firm of Danish merchants. The Bailiff dealt in Vik, and as he himself decided what price he should have for his sheep, it was rumoured that he must have more than a finger in the business there.

People were considered fortunate to get on to Bruni’s books, for he usually allowed them a certain amount of credit. They never saw a penny from that day forward, of course, but they would feel reasonably sure of surviving the winter, and of getting enough rye meal, refuse fish, and coffee to rear the kids on, those at least that didn’t die (the others were forgotten), always provided that they restricted themselves to the customary one meal a day in the spring. If he approved of them, as the saying went, Bruni might even help them to buy some land, and then they would own the land, in name at least, and would be styled freeholders on the tax bills and church accounts; and when they were dead there they were in the parochial register for the consideration of genealogists.

These men were not servile in temper, nor did they consider themselves part of the common herd. They stood on their own feet; independence was their great capital. They believed in private enterprise and if they had had a drink of brandy would even quote from the sagas and the rhymes. They were men toughened by the grim, unremitting battle for existence, men whom no physical strain, not even that of starving with their families towards the end of winter, could daunt. Yet they were by no means spiritual paupers, gross materialists who looked upon their bellies as their god; they knew a lot of verse, some of it written in the ingenious traditional form that has middle and end rhymes as well as alliteration, and one or two of them could improvise a quatrain about his neighbour, about his poverty, about danger, or nature, or those hopes of tolerable days that are only fulfilled in heaven; or yes, even about love (dirty verse). Of these poets Bjartur was one. They had also an extensive fund of stories dealing with peculiar old men and women, usually idiots, and in addition tales of eccentric clergymen. Their own divine, though neither a fool nor a rogue, had a certain queerness about him for which they had recorded their gratitude in many pleasing tales of the worthy Reverend Gudmundur. This sense of obligation was greatly deepened by the fact that he had brought with him into the parish an admirable breed of sheep, which they had christened the Reverendgudmundur breed. And though the minister never wearied
of denouncing sheep and slandering that animal species, for it was his opinion that they seduced the hearts of men from God, yet with his rams he had been a source of greater help to the peasants than any one man before or since; for these animals were well-fleshed and firm, if perhaps a trifle undersized. The crofters therefore held their minister in great respect and were inclined to forgive him more than they did others.

In the opinion of the minister, however, it was not only the sheep that troubled the right thinking of his flock, luring their hearts from God and the Redemption that is to be found through Him alone. Under the same imputation lay the famous poetess, the Bailiff of Myri’s wife, whom many felt it more appropriate to call Madam. The story now turns to her.

This lady, the daughter of a boat-owner in Vik, had been educated in the National College of Domestic Science. She had married Bailiff Jon, she said, purely and simply because he was a farmer and she loved the joys of the country life. Her acquaintance with these joys had begun at home with the reading of foreign literature, especially Bjomstjerne Bjornson, and had been continued in the college. When she was to be confined for the first time, Ingolfur Arnarson, Iceland’s first colonist, had appeared to her in a dream and, after singing the praises of husbandry, had asked her to give the child his name.

She had added a hundred hundreds of land to the estate as her dowry and had stocked this land afterwards on obtaining her inheritance. She loved the peasants more than anything else in life, and never missed any opportunity of convincing them of the value of the country idyll or of the delight implicit in living and dying on a farm. A spiritual sunshine emanated from her throughout the district; she was founder and president of the Women’s Institute; she published articles and poems in the southern newspapers extolling the country idyll and the spiritual and physical health to be gained from the possession of a farm. Domestic crafts, she considered, were the only form of industry legitimate to Iceland, so she spent much time and much art on cross-weaving. Therefore she was sent as delegate to the conference of the Federation of Women’s Institutes in the capital, to discuss domestic crafts and those moral qualities which are nurtured by rusticity and which alone have the power to save our country from the calamity that threatens her in these hard times. Such a woman knew how to appreciate the beauty of the changing face of the seasons and of the blue mountains, as she sat by her window at
Myri. Oh, yes; she knew also how to talk about this beauty at a meeting; she talked about it with as much feeling as a tourist on a summer picnic. Work out of doors in nature’s bosom was, she maintained, a form of healthy physical exercise taken in the midst of the country’s indescribable beauty. She envied the crofters too because they had so little to worry about. And their expenses were so very small. Whereas her husband had loaded himself with debt because of extensive new buildings, agricultural implements, and improvements to the land, to say nothing of the cost of the workpeople’s keep in these hard times, all the dalesman had to do to be perfectly happy was to rise an hour earlier in the morning and work an hour later at night. Rich people are never happy, she said, but poor people are happy practically without exception.

Whenever a poor man married and set up as a crofter in the dales, she, too, would marry in the spirit and kiss his footsteps. She therefore lent a large tent for Bjartur’s wedding, so that coffee could be drunk in shelter and a speech made.

The crofters were standing about on the paving in front of the door or leaning against the wall, making faces as they took snuff, or talking to the bridegroom. The conversation was the conversation of spring, the themes fixed and immutable, with the emphasis heavily laid on the various ailments of the sheep. For years and years the tapeworm had been a national curse, but with increasing progress in canine hygiene some ascendancy had at last been gained over this ill-omened guest. Of late years, however, a new worm with, if anything, even less patriotism than the old one had begun to make its presence felt in the sheep. This was the lung-worm, and though the tapeworm never lost its absorbing seasonal interest, the lung-worm showed with each fresh spring that it was rapidly ousting the former from pride of place as a subject of conversation.

“Well,” said Thorir of Gilteig, “if you were to ask me my opinion I should say that there’s nothing to fear as long as you manage to keep them clear of diarrhea in the wintertime. Even if the maggots are coming out of their nostrils I don’t see why you should worry as long as their bellies are clean. And as long as their bellies are clean, surely anyone would expect them to stand the early spring grass. However, I may be wrong in this as in so many other things.”

“No,” said the bridegroom, “you’re quite right. Ragnar of Urtharsel, who they say is lying on his death-bed, was of the same opinion, and he was a genius with diarrhea, I can tell you.

But where it was lambs that were affected he was a great believer in chewing-tobacco. I remember he told me when I stayed with him a year or two ago that there were some winters when he gave his lambs as much as four ounces of the best; and he said he would sooner stint his family of their coffee, not to mention sugar, than see his lambs go short of their chaw.”

“Well, no one ever praised me for my husbandry,” observed Einar of Undirhlith, the psalmist and commemorative poet of the district, “and I can’t say I mind at all, because I’ve noticed that those who worry most about making both ends meet prosper least in this world; fortune somehow seems to make them her special sport. But if I was to give you my opinion, according to my own understanding, I should say that if the fodder does little to keep the lambs free of maggots, chaw will do even less. Chaw might well be of some help when things are desperate, but when all is said and done, chaw is chaw and fodder fodder.”

“True enough, every word of it,” cried Olafur of Yztadale, swift of speech and rather shrill of voice. “Fodder is always fodder. But there’s fodder and fodder, as I thought anybody could see for himself, considering the number of times the zoologists have said so in the papers. And one thing is quite certain: it’s in some of the fodder that the damned bacteria that produce the maggots are hidden. Bacteria are always bacteria surely, and no maggot was ever produced without bacteria. I thought everybody could see that for himself. And where are the bacteria originally, may I ask, if they aren’t in the fodder?”

“I don’t know, I don’t argue about anything these days,” replied Thorir of Gilteig. “We try to see that the animals have decent fodder; and we try to see that the children have a good Christian upbringing. It’s impossible to say where the worm begins—either in the animal kingdom or in human society.”

Meanwhile the womenfolks, sitting inside, were holding a whispered discussion about Steinka of Gilteig, who was supposed to look after her father, Thorir. She had had a baby the week before, you see, and several of the women had been running to volunteer their services in the croft for the occasion, for all are eager to help when somebody has an illegitimate baby, or at least during the first week, while nobody knows who the father is. She had had a pretty bad time of it, poor girl, and the child wasn’t any too well, it was still doubtful whether it would pull through. But little by little the women’s conversation veered round to their own confinements and maladies, as well as to the ailments of the children:
the country never seems to have its health nowadays, and yet there are no signs of any great epidemic like the smallpox and black death of the old days, only
those
everlasting complaints like toothache, rash, swollen joints, bruises, bad coughs, often with phlegm, continual shooting pains in the chest and soreness of the throat, not to mention that peculiar rumbling of the insides which comes from wind in the stomach; though perhaps no illness is more deadly to mind and body than the nerves.

The Bailiff’s wife fled out of the house and swept along the paving to the men. But when she heard what the subject of conversation was, she bade them cease such chatter; in words that carried weight, for hers was a forceful presence, her broad face, spectacles, and imposing mien not unlike photographs of the Pope. She asked them to choose some topic more in harmony with the beauty of the spring day, and indicated the dear blue moors and the bright cloudless sky above them and the meadows, which soon would be fresh and green. “Here we have at least two poets of local repute,” she said, “first the bridegroom himself, and then Einar of Undirhlith. And there is our Olaf ur of Yztadale, who loves scientific doctrines and is a member of the Patriots’ Association. Surely some lovely lines have occurred to you out in nature’s sweet bosom this spring?”

But these poets were never so reluctant to recite their compositions as in the presence of the Bailiff’s wife, for in spite of the warmth of her protestations of regard for them, and the frankness with which she admitted her envy of their circumstances, the smile was so cold that they felt that nothing could bridge the ocean between them. They were both far removed from the Mistress of Myri in their way of thinking. This lady was an enthusiastic admirer of the world’s great poets and could not praise sufficiently the beauty of our life on earth. She had great faith in the God who directs it, believing that He existed in all things and that man’s role was to stand at His side and help Him through fair and foul; with any other life she was not concerned. Such a way of thinking was condemned by the minister as the most downright paganism. Einar of Undirhlith, on the other hand, despised the world and usually wrote about people only when they were dead. He sought comfort in the Christian religion, which he thought would be of advantage to the peasants more in the next life than in this. The minister, however, forbade the singing of his elegies at funerals, holding it unseemly that a simple crofter, unversed in theology, should compete with the nation’s time-honoured psalmists. As for
Bjartur, he was a devotee of the old heroic spirit of the nation as it is revealed in the rhymes and other classics, and he admired only those people who trusted in their own might and main, people such as Bernotus Borneyarkappi, the Jomsvikings, and other ancient geniuses. From the classics, too, he took his verse-technique, refusing to admit that anything less complicated than ring-handed quatrains could possibly be good poetry.