Independent People (63 page)

But Bjartur was not making fun of anyone, he had never been particularly fond of fun, he was in sober earnest, and actually it was quite a while since he had conceived the idea of giving poor old Gunnvor a stone. She had lain in his land for centuries, in a dishonoured grave, and she had been the butt of slander and calumny which coupled her name with that of a devil; but now the time had come to make amends and to cleanse her name of all these popish superstitions. He did not, of course, deny the fact that she had been a most luckless woman, but he doubted whether she had been dogged by any worse misfortune than the nation as a whole. He himself had known hard times, but what were they in comparison with the hard times the country had had to suffer in the past, during the Great Famine, for instance, or in the time of the Monopoly, when the devil Kolumkilli had seemed to have a stranglehold on the whole nation? It was quite possible also that the woman had made mistakes, and who hasn’t made mistakes? Some people said that she had killed folk, and who
hasn’t killed folk, if it comes to that? What are folk? Folk are less than the dirt beneath your feet when times are bad. He said he looked upon her as his neighbour on the heath here, and though he had hitherto never espoused her cause, there was a boom in both farming and fishing now, and surely the time had come to make some little amends to a long-misunderstood woman. He had therefore decided to give her a stone and to let bygones be bygones. And what was more, he was willing to lend her his name to bear her company through the centuries, in place of the popish monstrosity that had stuck to her so far; and instructed them to inscribe the stone thus: To Gunnvor from Bjartur.

And now little Gvendur had grown up.

He was a promising young fellow, not unlike his father in build and carriage, but of a milder disposition, and yet, strangely enough, devoid of any great feeling for poetry or skill in its composition. That, however, was not considered a serious drawback, for by this time poetry had been written about most subjects worthy of a poem, some of it reasonably well, and then again the years of his adolescence had been less noted for poetry than for general prosperity on land and sea and all the manifold blessings of a heaven-sent World War. He was thickset, even a trifle clumsy, had fair hair seldom dipped or combed, and he was ruddy in the face, with eyes that, though good-natured and not over-sharp, were by no means void of resolution; but what is resolution? He was very strong. He was known as the freeholder of Summerhouses’ only son, and such a title carried no small dignity in these days, when the price of lambs had risen as high as thirty or forty crowns, or even higher; when there was a cow being kept on the farm, and then another, and their presence was provoking no displays of temper, no sharpening of knives, but was apparently being accepted almost as a natural phenomenon; when, too, the former lone worker had become an employer of labour, of strangers who arrived spring and autumn from near and far and who, though demanding high wages and working only fourteen hours a day, were nevertheless placed much lower in the social scale than the crofter’s son. One fine day he would inherit this little kingdom in the valley. From childhood upwards his interests, waking and sleeping, had been centred on the welfare of the farm;
he loved the soil, as people say, though mostly without being conscious of it, and he was ready and willing to fight hardship and adversity, without wanting to overcome them by ideals. He had never asked for any other joy than the joy of knowing that the sheep were breeding with good result in their regular season, and of seeing them weather the winter strong enough to struggle out of the bogs in spring. Possibly that is the true joy. Though the loft might be growing a little distorted in shape, and the floor sagging deeply beneath the foot, he never considered it any special problem. Bjartur thought nothing more natural than that he should have such a son; what did puzzle him was why he shouldn’t have had half a dozen of the same type, but why complain? The boy was now seventeen years old and the owner of six sheep, a pair of patent-leather shoes, a blue Sunday suit, and a watch and chain. Very few Icelanders are as rich as that when they are only seventeen. In his case it was the result of keeping on doing something, instead of sitting gabbing a lot of pointless rubbish on the flags outside, or of surrendering oneself to the power of nonsensical dreams, or even ghosts, as his brothers had done. And now of course they were both dead, each in his own fashion, whereas he was alive and the owner of
six
sheep.

Now, at this time there was a great movement, or dissolution, as some people preferred to call it, making itself felt among the community, and there were not many who could withstand such a movement without being moved, such a dissolution without being dissolved; no, only a few. The principal movement and the main dissolution was taking place in money matters, for human life hangs together with the aid of money, and some people consider that money is the only thing that governs it, either by being none at all or enough, or by being somewhere in between. Men suddenly came to realize that the amount of money that could be owned by any one person at any one time was much greater than had previously been imagined. Those who hitherto had seldom mentioned a higher sum than two crowns in sober earnest were now beginning to talk about crowns by the score, ten-to-twenty-crown men were refusing to discuss anything unless it topped the thousand, and even tearful old invalids who hadn’t earned a penny for years were now doing business involving sums reminiscent of nothing so much as the figures in the astronomical poem
Njola.
Thorir of Gilteig managed to buy his croft, and some people said that he paid for it, but all records went by the board when a consumptive philosopher like Olafur of Yztadale could enter upon
a contract to purchase his holding, for a sum reported to be in the tens of thousands. Others paid their profits into the savings bank in Fjord. This savings bank was usually linked with the Bailiff of Myri’s name, because he had a hundred thousand in it, though this was probably a lie, as no one groaned half so bitterly under the everlasting burden of debt as he did; and in this savings bank the money gave off interest at a phenomenal rate, some people saying that once their deposits were entered in the books, they bred like rats. Among those who had money in this establishment was Bjartur of Summerhouses. His name was a good name in the savings bank and he was allowed interest. In spite of all that had passed, the Rauthsmyrians were now giving him interest. It was as if the whole world had turned upside down.

And now who should be standing on the paving but the Bailiff himself, with a team of three horses as if he thought he had been endowed with a triple backside, and a pair of boots that must surely have been given him in liquidation of a debt; war showers great blessings on high and low alike. He was making some complaint or other about one of his horses having worked a shoe loose. “And by the way,” he grumbled, “they’ve made a hell of a mess of the grazing-marshes with that blasted road of theirs.”

“Oh, they’re my marshes, you know,” replied Bjartur.

The Bailiff: “Your mother-in-law is still living, they tell me.”

Bjartur: “Yes, at my cost, not yours. She has never yet eaten other people’s bread, though there was a time when you wanted to have her taken away from here and kept at the parish’s expense.”

“What’s happened to her croft?”

“What croft?”

“Her croft. Her own croft. What’s happened to it?”

“Oh, I expect it’s still sitting on Sandgilsheath the same as ever.”

“You’re always been a cross-grained swine,” said the Bailiff. “The worst I’ve ever known. Damned if anyone can get a decent word out of you on a lovely day early in the spring.”

“One remembers best the things one learned as a child. And I got my education not a hundred miles from someone I know.”

“I hear you’re thinking of selling this place and flitting away there,” said the Bailiff.

“Away where? It’s a lie.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of building yourself a decent house here, then?”

“I’ll do as I think fit, in building as in other things.”

‘I just thought I’d ask you, in case it happened to be true. And even if it didn’t, I might possibly have considered making you an offer for these old winter sheep-cotes of mine.’

“This place happens to have been called Summerhouses for the last eighteen years, mate,” said Bjartur. “But it’s not surprising you should have forgotten, it’s so long since we had anything to do with each other. And now let me tell you this: it’s far more likely that Rauthsmyri will one day be tacked on to Summerhouses’ land than that Summerhouses will ever be added to Rauthsmyri.”

“Rauthsmyri
is
yours for the asking,” said the Bailiff. “Seventy thousand crowns and you can take it with you.”

I’ll buy it when I think fit.”

“Then you might just as well sell me back my sheep-cotes while you’re thinking the matter over. Ten thousand on the nail.”

Bjartur: “Yes, and probably all counterfeit money.”

“Fifteen thousand,” said the Bailiff.

To this offer Bjartur made no reply other than that of parading slowly round and round the Bailiff while he summed up his ancestry and reputation in a few forceful words, the same as he had done at least a hundred times before. But by this time the horseshoe had been nailed on again and the Bailiff was preparing to mount.

“I said fifteen thousand.” said the Bailiff when he had got on horseback. “It isn’t certain that I shall repeat such an offer. But if you would rather build, you can please yourself entirely. And if you should need a loan from the savings bank for building-purposes, I certainly shan’t stand in your way.”

Fifteen thousand crowns—this patch-breeched skinflint who could never part with a penny without turning it three or four times over in his hand, had he said fifteen thousand crowns? Was the man mad? Everyone knew that fifteen thousand in a lump must be counterfeit money, unless one had worked for it oneself, and no one would ever do that—it would serve him right if I rode after him and killed him, like Egill Skallagrimsson, when Skalaglamm left his shield behind at Borg, and sagas were written about him, and the spaces between the writing were all lined with gold and set with precious stones. Why did he have to offer him money, if not for the croft, then on the security of the croft? How was it that the Rauthsmyrians could never leave this dale-farmer in peace? Why were they always making him these bargain offers? No, he was determined to keep his land to the very end, the land that he had
lived on with his sheep, lived for with his sheep, where he had lived for his sheep. And one fine day, when he was dead, the same as sheep, his only son would take up the dale-farmer’s banner and would bear the rural culture on his shoulders, and so on and on into the future for a thousand years to come. And if he built new buildings, and he was determined to build, all in his own good time, it would be not at the instigation of the Rauthsmyrians, but for reasons that concerned himself alone. “Never let them snare you with money, Gvendur boy, if you live, as I know you will live, to be the owner of this land. The land—it is on the land that sheep live; and good sheep, healthy sheep, sheep heavy-fleeced and in fine condition after the winter, are the foundations of a man’s freedom and repute.”

Yes, it was a good man indeed who could stand immovable as a rock in these times, when everything around him, including money and views of life, was afloat and swirling in perpetual change; when the strongest boundary walls between men and things in time and place were being washed away; when the impossible was becoming possible and even the wishes of those who had never dared to make a wish were being fulfilled. Why, the sheep were being served with bread, just like the Sheriff and other high officials, and pailfuls of first-class herring were being stuck in front of uneducated cows—they crunched away at these delicacies with the most amiable of expressions, laying their ears back and closing their eyes in dreamy ecstasy. Icelanders were sailing their ships to America, a thing they had not done for more than nine hundred years, when Leif ur the Lucky found that land and went and lost it again; yes, verily all this was mighty in power and far-reaching in scope, and then, right in the midst of this flood of good fortune that had burst its every sluice and overflowed its every channel, at a period when men had got past the ability to marvel at great events or to be disturbed by sudden calamities, there arrived for Mr. Gudmundur Gudbjartsson a letter, which he had to seek and sign for with his own hand at Rauthsmyri, and he did not dare to open it before he had reached the top of the ridge again, because the last thing he wanted in all the world was to let the Rauthsmyrians nose out any secret of his, and he sat down in a hollow, and the new grass had barely begun to push its way through the withered grass of winter, for it was early in May; and he opened the letter. And out of it there fell two slips of blue paper, with foreign letters on them and a learned signature with all sorts of ornamental flourishes. On a third slip
were written a few words in a legible hand, signature Nonni, contents thus: “Two hundred dollars, which Uncle is sending you so that you can come to America immediately, the war is over, times are good, you can be anything you like.”

Even the most earth-bound man that ever existed was never so earth-bound that he would not go to America. It is said that for the past hundred years the most earth-bound men in the world have gone to America, in large steamships, over a vast ocean. The one thing that hinders the most earth-bound men from forsaking their land is not the land itself, and not man’s ties with the land, but the lack of money with which to reach America. Just as Iceland’s dalesmen, the core, the flower, the life-blood, and the backbone of the nation, the healthy rural culture in person, had emigrated to America over a period of forty years, inane of expression as the Israelites in the desert, with platters under their arms and coverlets fragrant with puffin down, as if there were neither platters nor bedclothes in America—so, we are told, did the flower of Poland flit to America over a period of from fifty to a hundred years, and still do flit if they get the chance, not with their bedclothes only, but with the wheels from their beloved muck-carts as well, for fear that wheels should still be unknown there. Take for example this lad who was sitting here in the white winter grass of Iceland, Gudmundur Gudbjartsson, seventeen, six sheep, patent-leather shoes, and what not. It would be difficult indeed to imagine anyone whose heart had been so deeply rooted in one little patch of land on the moors, a valley with a home mountain and a lake, a patrimony of limitless descent through the generations, of boundless possibilities in the eyes of his children dreaming in the spring. No one had ever dwelt more happily in the bosom of the Mountain Queen, as they say in poetry. Two slips of blue paper decorated with illegible flourishes, and it was all over and done with. He was quite certain that never again would he hear the singing of Iceland’s birds, and already in his mind he had begun to bid farewell to the valley that had created him, the valley that was in reality himself, fully determined to be something else, to be what he wanted in the land where a farmer’s stock is measured in cattle, and no one deigns to mention a form of animal life so low as a sheep.