Independent People (50 page)

But it seemed that she didn’t care at all for living in a house; yes, maybe once, years and years ago, but not now, this croft was quite good enough for her, if only you’ll stay with your Sola, if only you won’t leave your little Asta Sollilja. If I am to be alone, Father, everything that threatens here, everything that might happen—

But he assured her that nothing would happen and that there was nothing threatening; yes, he was quite sure of it. He knew what she meant, she meant a ghost, but it was as he had often told the dog: a man finds what he looks for, and he who believes in a ghost will surely find a ghost. He had decided to go away and work for money to buy more sheep in the autumn. This would be the first time in his life that he worked at all for money; he would get some sort of a job with Bruni provided Tulinius Jensen hadn’t gone bankrupt. Now then; there was just a chance that the children needn’t be left on their own, for there was a fellow down in Fjord he might think about—but here he stopped, in case he was tempted to promise too much, there there lass, cheer up a bit, your mother was a hundred times more alone when she died in the loft here in the old days, and I don’t see why anyone should regret having run his nose up against life, lassie, for at least he’s had a cheap opportunity of trying himself out, and there’s plenty of time for grumbling in the grave, so dry your face now, chicken, and see about getting to bed.

Here the discussion ended. He was first in getting to bed. With drooping head she wandered back to the fire. Her throat was constricted with weeping, but it made no difference; though she had been a famous orator with a tongue of gold, all further prattle would have been in vain; he had lain down and pulled the clothes over him, the snow on the window blue. But there were no frost roses, it was warm in the room, the water boiling in the pan, steam, huge shadows, little light, Christmas. The power did not exist, either of strength or of endearment, that could shake his decisions. It was no child’s-play having such a father, and yet she would never, never wish for any father other than him. She was in that limp, soulless condition which grips the body after heartfelt weeping,
as when water evaporates after much boiling and remains in the air. She sniffed and sniffed; slowly the tears dried in her eyes. Even her agony of soul had evaporated. She took off her stockings, then her slip, laying garment after garment vacantly on the bench before her and looking neither to the right nor to the left; everything that she did henceforth was justified. She stood over the steaming water long and drooping like a plant, her high, cupped breasts in soft silhouette against the faint gleam of the candle on Christmas Night, against the steam’s fluttering shadows; her lips swollen with weeping, her lashes heavy with salt.

I
N
its own way misery no less than revelry is varied in form and worthy of note wherever there lurks a spark of life in the world, and these children who for some mysterious reason were still alive on the moors had experienced many of its noteworthy phenomena, not only during festivals, but between festivals as well. It is always very instructive to lose one’s mother in the first sunshine of the haymaking; and when one’s father goes away after one’s eldest brother’s disappearance, then that too is a special kind of experience, a new type of misery, quite the same as in revelry, where people are said to draw an enormous distinction between song and dance. A little loss borrows its power from the greater loss, and so, after their father’s departure, their motherless-ness comes like a creditor clamouring its demand upon memory; few like father, none like mother; and in the depths of winter the children see once more in imagination that summer day when their mother was laid on a bier out in the lamb-house, among the toadstools at noon, and still the sun went on shining. Yes and the blowfly had gone on buzzing in its sunbeam, in the shelter of the window-frame, unmoved by the fact that the loving agony of life was no more on the croft and that it was the silence of death that reigned upstairs, unrelated to the silence of the heart—that song-loving insect which restricts itself to one single note. Today this song returns, this other world, which is one immutable note, loveless and remote—today it sings once more in their minds, when the window is deep in snow. They consider it separately, without looking at one another, sky and glacier-mountains in flames on the horizon at midday, the Bluefell peaks white-glowing in the burning frost. And their life, which was already without sheltering
walls, is now all at once without a ridge-beam, like a roof that
is
broken down. The sheep standing in sanctity by the hole in the brook stares bleating over its frozen hills, unable to impart to the children of men the virtues of its mentality. So when they have given the stock their last feed of the day, the two boys sit down on the snowdrift, without understanding one another, and gaze with little energy over the same hills. It is hard never to be allowed a moment’s rest, but harder still to be alive when there is no longer anybody to tell one what to do—for how in such a case is one to be able to keep on doing something? Then the younger brother suddenly remembers his grandmother, she who knows everything if one can only fathom what she says, and he tells his elder brother that whenever anything happens she knows it all beforehand and keeps on knitting.

“Yes,” said Gvendur, “it’s easy enough if you’re nearly a hundred years old and needn’t do anything but knit. But what about us? How are we going to manage things?”

Little Nonni thought and thought, and at last he replied:

“It’s tobacco we want.”

Tobacco?” asked Gudmundur, far from following this line of reasoning.

“Yes, tobacco. He who knows not his Maker needs tobacco. I heard Grandmother say so when she was talking to the Bailiff.”

“Maker?” asked Gvendur. “What maker? Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?”

“What I mean,” explained little Nonni, “is that if you chew tobacco you needn’t worry if your Maker doesn’t arrange everything as pleases Him best.”

Gvendur: “You’ve started talking like our Helgi used to talk. You ought instead to be thinking of how we’ll grow up some day, and how we’ll help Father to treble the stock and start farming on a big scale like the Rauthsmyri people, and how we’ll keep cows, and build houses. And lots of other things.”

“Yes, I’ve often thought about all that,” replied little Nonni, “but it’s such a long time to wait. And sometimes I’ve thought of going away, for instance if nothing happens for a hundred years. Because it must be possible to get away, even though Helgi said it wasn’t. But if nothing happens, and it isn’t possible to get away for years and years and years, for surely something is possible some time or other, then it’s possible not to let it worry you if you don’t grow up immediately, or if the stock doesn’t get any bigger
at all, or if you don’t start keeping cows. You just chew some tobacco.”

Unwilling to listen any longer to such rubbish, Gudmundur Gudbjartsson walked away in silence, and another day dragged its length over the mighty snow and the small apprehensive hearts of the nation, till the boys stood once more on the same snowdrift the day after, viewing a landscape in which there was not a speck of bare ground to be seen. Then it was that Gudmundur Gudbjartsson said, without preamble:

“Listen, Nonni, have you stolen the lambs’ tobacco that was left over from last year? It ought to be in the lumber-box in the entrance.”

Nonni: “You said you didn’t want tobacco yesterday. What makes you want it today?”

Gvendur: “Hand it over immediately or I'll give you a good hiding.”

There followed some slight scuffing on the snowdrift, till the elder brother drew from the younger’s trousers a twist of mouldy chewing-tobacco. “Do you think I’m going to let you eat all that yourself, you little glutton?”

Peace was finally restored, and after smelling at the tobacco, licking it, and tasting it on their tongues, they agreed to share it in brotherly fashion and eat not more than one plug per day as long as it lasted. But later in the day they began to feel terribly ill. They crawled upstairs with pains in the stomach, dizziness, and vomiting, and Asta Sollilja had to undress them and put them to bed; but however much she pestered them with questions, they could not be persuaded to reveal anything of the sedative that should be taken if one fears that the Lord is not arranging everything as pleases Him best.

And Asta Sollilja, who sat teasing her wool, how was she to forget all those tomorrow evenings which make tonight so long? She tried to think of how the stairs had creaked yesterday morning when Father went down for the last time, how the bits had jingled in old Blesi’s mouth when he threw the reins over, put his foot in the stirrup, and sat down astride his luggage, how the frozen snow had squeaked beneath the horse’s hoofs as they moved off. She forced her mind to dwell on this departure for as long as possible, as if on the first part of a story, so as to be able to cheer herself the more with the thought of his return at Easter; and possibly there would be a green Easter since there had been
a white Christmas; and then, after an incalculable number of evenings, she hears the jingle of harness outside, for now he is taking the bridle off, and once more the stairs creak, and she
sees
his face and his strong shoulders rising above the hatchway, and it is he, he has come at last. She hopped towards this vision of the future over innumerable endless evenings. But when it came to the point, she found she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t lift herself high enough into the air. She stood alone facing the many evenings that had yet to come like crowds of dead men trooping through one living soul; the soul of man needs every day a little consolation if it is to live, but there was nowhere any consolation to be found.

“When this festival is over, Grandmother, what comes after that?”

“Eh?” asked the grandmother. “What do you expect to come? I shouldn’t think there would be very much coming; nothing very much, I should say indeed. And a good job, too.”

“But surely something is bound to come next, Grandmother, after the New Year is over, I mean some festival or other”—something nearing Easter, she added to herself, but did not dare say aloud.

“Oh, I don’t know that there’s anything in the way of a big festival, except that after the New Year you have Twelfth Night, but that’s no very great festival. No, I don’t think there’s anything much in the way of big festivals.”

Yes, it was Twelfth Night and no other that Asta Sollilja had been fishing after, for anticipation prefers to forget the interminable weekday evenings and to use festivals only as its stepping-stones into the future. “Yes, Twelfth Night, and what then?”

“Then it will be getting on towards Thorri.”

Thorn, thought the girl drearily, for it reminded her only of great snowstorms and sudden thaws, which came in turns and were therefore without a purpose, a thaw that turned into a frost, a frost that turned into a thaw, eternity after eternity. “No, Grandmother, not Thorri, not it; I meant festivals. Festivals—”

“In my time we took note of the weather both on St. Paul’s Day and at Candlemas, but in those days of course there were more of the old customs left.”

But Asta Sollilja had been hoping for Ash Wednesday, as she seemed to remember that Ash Wednesday was a summit from which Easter might be descried, but now it appeared that there was all the month of Thorri and all the month of Goa to fill in
first, and then would come—the Fast of the Nine Weeks. Fast of the Nine Weeks? Nine weeks? Who would ever manage to survive that? Nevertheless she took fresh heart and expressed the hope that when the Fast of the Nine Weeks was at last ended, surely Ash Wednesday couldn’t be so very far away.

“Oh, I always understood that Shrove Tuesday came first.”

“But surely Ash Wednesday is bound to come some time, Grandmother, and then it can’t be long till Easter.”

“It will be something fresh, then,” replied the old woman, leaning her head back and looking askant down at her needles. “In my time Ash Wednesday was always followed by the Fast.”

“What fast?”

“Why, the Long Fast, woman—Lent. Did you ever hear of such ignorance! Nearly sixteen years old and thinks Easter comes straight after Ash Wednesday! In my time you would have been counted a simpleton indeed not to know Lent and all the most important festival in it, the Ember Days, for instance, and Lady Day.”

“I know Good Friday, though,” said the girl with sudden inspiration. “That will be coming some time, won’t it?”

“Oh, I should think St. Magnus will come first,” replied the grandmother. “And Maundy Thursday.”

This finished the young girl’s attempt to bring Easter into focus; she gave up. She had gone completely astray in the deserts of the calendar, had lost all sense of direction, the wool suddenly clammy between her fingers, every tuft a tangled mass that she would never be able to comb. Why couldn’t these young folk comfort themselves with the thought that everything passes somehow or other, just as pleases the Maker best?

“Oh, your fortune isn’t made with big festivals only, my girl,” said the grandmother in a sudden access of compassion. “I remember one Whit Sunday, for instance, years ago, when my poor father led the cow out so that she could take a bite at a few blades of withered grass that were sticking up through the ice. And it was by no means uncommon in my time for a blizzard to start on Midsummer Day itself.”

H
ABNESS
jingling? Hoofs clattering on the ice? Isn’t that old Blesi snorting in the darkness out on the drift? Yes, of course it is. They
were not long in streaming down the stairs, out through the snow corridor, up on to the surface—is there anyone there?

“God be praised” was heard whispered in the darkness just beside them. “So the blessed creature has found its way home after all. I am here. Come nearer.”

And when the children went nearer, they found a man standing on the snowdrift. They took his cold hand in greeting. Each party was equally delighted to know of the other’s presence.