Independent People (71 page)

“There were earthquakes in Korea,” said the foreman joiner.

Fortunately the cracks were comparatively small and it was easy to fill them up again and possible to see many an entrancing vision of the future in connection with the house in spite of them. Bjartur gazed at the building long and often, mumbling a variety of things to himself.

After the autumn round-up both father and son went down to Fjord with two carts, for there was still a good deal of smaller stuff needed for the house. Bjartur said not a word till they had crossed the heath and were descending its eastern declivity. Then he broke the silence:

“You told me in the spring there that Asta Sollilja thought my poetry was nothing but empty doggerel, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Gvendur, “those were her words more or less.”

“And that her friends down in Fjord were all in favour of this modern poetry?”

“Yes,” said Gvendur, “she’s engaged to a man who is a modern poet.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to write like these modern fellows,” said Bjartur. “It’s just like diarrhea. End-rhymes and nothing more.”

But Gvendur had not the poet’s tongue and was therefore chary of words when such matters were the subject of discussion. After a short silence his father went on:

“If you should run across Asta Sollilja today, I’d like you to recite her these three modern verses of mine, so that no one shall say of me that I couldn’t write in these simple modern measures, if need be.”

“Very well, as long as I can learn them.”

“For heaven’s sake, lad, never let anyone hear you say you’re such a blockhead as not to be able to learn three easy little verses first go.”

He walked on for a while, mumbling under his breath, then said aloud: “They are three verses about the war.

“Wouldn’t you rather go and see her yourself?” asked Gvendur.

“I?” asked the father, gaping. “No, I have nothing in common with such folk.”

“What folk?”

“Folk who have betrayed my trust It isn’t I who must go and ask forgiveness of anyone. Let those who have betrayed my trust come to me and ask forgiveness. I ask forgiveness of no one. Besides,” he added, “I’m no relation of hers anyway.”

“You ought to go and see her all the same,” said the lad. “I’m sure she must often have a pretty hard time of it. And it was you who kicked her out when she was pregnant.”

“It’s no business of yours whom I kick out. You can think yourself lucky that I don’t kick you out; and I won’t be long about it, either, let me tell you, if I have any more of your blasted lip.”

I’m sure Sola would love you to go and see her.”

Bjartur gave his horse a mighty swipe and replied: Tío, while there’s a breath of life left in me, nothing will make me go to her.” Then after a moment or two he added, looking over his shoulder at his son: “But if I die, you can tell her from me that she may gladly lay me out”

Asta Sollilja had just moved into her betrothed’s house at Sandeyri, farther down the fjord. It was a little house. Actually it wasn’t a house at all in the ordinary sense of the word, it was a turf hut roofed with rusty corrugated iron, reflecting much the same degree of civilization as those inhabited by the Negroes of Darkest Africa. There were two rusty tin bowls in the window, full of earth, and from one of them stuck the stem of some plant or other that was struggling to live. Two beds; one for Asta Sollilja and her fiance, the other for his mother, who owned the hut. The fiance was out of work. Asta Sollilja greeted her brother in not unfriendly fashion, though her left eye was very much more in evidence than the right. She was pale and strange and her decayed tooth had been extracted, leaving a gap. For the rest, she was not very talkative with her brother and did not even mention his old plan of emigrating to America. Obviously she did not consider it in any way remarkable that he should have abandoned the idea; she had not believed in America in the spring and did not believe in it now. He saw immediately that she was pregnant, and gazed at her long-fingered hands, in which there dwelt a wealth of human reality, and at her arms, which were too thin. She had a dry cough.

“You seem to have a bad cold,” he remarked.

No, she hadn’t a cold, but she was always coughing just the same; sometimes she spat a little blood in the mornings. He asked her then whether she was thinking of getting married, but it appeared that she was not looking forward to marriage now with quite the same pride as she had shown in the spring, when she had informed Bjartur of Summerhouses’ son that she was engaged and that her fiance was a modern poet “What concern is it of anyone in Summerhouses what I do?” she asked.

“Father gave me a poem to learn this morning,” said Gvendur. “It’s about the war. A modern poem. Shall I recite it for your.”

“No,” she said, ‘I can’t be bothered to listen to it.”

“I think I'll recite it all the same,” he said, and recited the three verses.

She listened and her eyes grew strangely warm at the sound of it, and the lines in her face dissolved, as if she were about to burst
out weeping, or about to fly into a rage, but she said not a word, or, rather, left all that she had intended saying unsaid, and turned away from him.

The new house is almost ready now,” he said. “We shall be moving into it shortly.”

“Really,” she said, “what’s that to me?”

“Judging from the poem, I should say that Father has certain ideas of
his
own with regard to the house. I’m sure he’d give you the big room all to yourself if you came back to us.”

“I,” she replied with a proud toss of her head, “I am engaged to a young man, a gifted young man who loves me.”

“You ought to come back all the same,” said Gvendur.

“Do you think that I, I, would ever leave a man who loves me?”

But this was too much for the old woman, who, unable to contain herself any longer, burst out from the region of the stove: “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you were to show him a little more kindness, then. Poor lad, he never has a moment’s peace with you when he’s indoors here.”

“It’s a lie,” cried Asta Sollilja passionately, turning to face the old woman. “I love him, yes, love him more than anything in the whole world, and you’ve no right to go telling strangers that I’m not good to him, when I’m at least twice as good to him as he deserves—it’s his child I’m carrying, isn’t it? And though Bjartur of Summerhouses were to come to me in person, and were to crawl across this floor here on hands and knees to beg forgiveness for all that he’s done to me since I was born, I still wouldn’t hear a word about his house, much less ever dream of moving a step in his direction. So you can tell him this from me: that while there’s a breath of life left in me, nothing will ever make me go back to Bjartur of Summerhouses, but that when I’m dead he may gladly bury my carrion for all that I care.”

O
NE
has grown weary of one’s house before it has finished building; strange that mankind should need to live in a house, instead of remaining content with the house of wishes. What news now of that much discussed concrete building in which Bjartur of Summerhouses proposed to take up his residence? As related above, there had been earthquakes in Korea, but what of that?—there were windows in the house now, and panes in the windows,
and the house had a roof, with a chimney sticking out of it, and in the kitchen there was a range with three grates, bought at a bargain price. And to improve matters still further, they even went and built a concrete stairway up to the front door so that people could get into the house, five steps high. Then came the entrance hall, for naturally there was an entrance hall. The intention was to flit into the house at some time during the autumn. The largest room on the ground floor had been panelled inside; one person suggested that the panelling should be painted, another that picture pages cut from foreign newspapers should be pasted on it, to smarten it up as they did in the towns, but Bjartur didn’t want anything smartened up, he didn’t want any trash in his house. So far so good. But early in the autumn heavy gales sprang up, with day after day of storm-driven rain and sleet, and then it came to light that it was just as windy inside the house as out. Why was this? It was because they had forgotten to put doors on the house. No one had had the forethought to order them in time, and it was too late now, for it takes a good while to make a door, and the joiners in Fjord were all far too busy with jobs that people needed doing before the winter set in.

“Oh, just knock a few old boards together,” said Bjartur.

But this the joiner refused to do, saying that it would be useless hanging ramshackle doors in a stone house, as the wind always seemed twice as searching in a house build of stone. He was willing, however, to equip the house with first-class thresholds before he left, but I’m telling you now that to match such thresholds you’ll need doors of the finest quality only, doors of special wood, doors hung on proper hinges.

“Oh, the blacksmith won’t be long in hammering out a few hinges for me,” said Bjartur.

“No,” said the joiner. “That’s where you’re wrong. Ordinary hinges, such as the blacksmith will make you, may be quite all right on a box or chest, but they’re no good for a decently made door. What you want are proper door-hinges of the finest workmanship and quality. In a boom year all doors must be hung on proper hinges.”

“Oh, to hell with it all,” cried Bjartur angrily, for he was exasperated beyond measure at the thought of how much this gaping cement monster had already cost him in ready money.

But there were worse things than the mere absence of doors. The house was no doubt finished as far as the builders were concerned, but nevertheless there was a total lack of all those things
which are indispensable in a house if it is properly to be worthy of the name. There were no beds, for instance. The bedsteads in the old croft had been built into the framework of the living-room, and it was impossible to transfer them. The same thing applied to tables. The table in the croft had in its time been knocked together out of a few roughly planed boards, which had then been nailed to the window-sill, and though it was true that time had long since planed them smooth, it was equally true that time had done much more: it had broken them in various places and rotted them through and through. There were no cupboards that could be moved either; the old shelves had been nailed to the wall and had rotted away along with it. Nor were there any chairs; there had never been any chairs in Summerhouses, had never been benches either, much less any of the superior luxuries
in
the way of decorative furniture such as curtains,
God Bless Our Home, Hallgrimur Pjetursson, The Czar of Russia,
china dogs. In short, throughout all these years there had never existed in Summerhouses one single object that could have served either for use or for ornament in a real house. Such are the many problems that arise and confront a man when, having reached the highest peaks of culture, he begins living in a house. It isn’t doors alone that are needed. Bjartur therefore decided to spend yet another winter in the old turf croft, especially as the hard weather looked as if it would set in early. He had the doors boarded up. And thus, for the time being, the house remained, towering up from the slope in front of the croft like any other advertisement of those boom years that the man had experienced in his husbandry, a peculiar facade.

Now we turn to housekeepers. It is difficult to keep housekeepers. Housekeepers differ from married women in this respect: that they insist on doing as they please, whereas married women are required to do as they are told. Housekeepers are continually demanding things, whereas married women may think themselves lucky for getting nothing at all. Housekeepers always need everything for everything, whereas married women need nothing for anything, and think it quite natural. Most things are considered by housekeepers as being beneath their dignity, but who bothers listening to a married woman if she starts grumbling? No one is any the worse for it but her. One needn’t mention their fits of sulks or the fact that they’ll argue the head off a man if everything isn’t exactly to their liking; and it’s hard, surely, to have to marry a woman just to be able to tell her to keep her trap shut. “I’d rather be married to three women at once than have one housekeeper,”
Bjartur was wont to say, but he was inconsistent enough in deed to keep on engaging the importunate termagants and to suffer a life of continual squabbling from one year’s end to another. During the first three years he had three housekeepers, each of whom stayed with him a twelve-month, one young, one middle-aged, one elderly. The young one was terrible, the middle-aged one worse, the old one worse still. Finally he engaged one without any age, and she proved to be the least objectionable of the lot; she was named Brynhildur, usually shortened to Brynja. She had stuck it out for two years now in spite of everything. One good quality that served to mark her out from the others was that she was interested in the farm and wished it well. But that was not the only point in her favour. She was not addicted, like the young one, to reserving the best of everything for the hired man, and to keeping him up at night with billing and cooing so that he was useless in the morning; she did not work herself up into a frenzy of rage against God and men, then roll about the floor in a fit of hysterics, like the middle one; and she did not seek to humiliate Bjartur by comparing the leaks in Summerhouses and her present life of misery with the superior roofing arrangements and the freedom from rheumatism of a youth spent happily in the service of clergymen, as the old one did. No, she went about her work quietly and efficiently and was truthful in all her dealings with her master. But she was by no means free from the minor failings of the sex for all that She felt that she was never appreciated at her true worth, that her labours went unrecognized, her virtues unacknowledged. Everyone misunderstood her, she thought, even suspected her of various crimes, for they seemed always to be accusing her of something or other, though usually of thieving. For charges so manifestly unjust she maintained a perpetual watch, ready to meet them and ward them off with a steadfast and vigorous defence. “You seem to forget that the calf got the dregs,” she would say if Bjartur ever suggested that what had been left of the morning’s coffee might be heated up to quench his thirst. “You
seem
to think I go about the house stealing.” she would grumble if Bjartur asked politely for the bite or two of fish he had left uneaten at dinner-time. “Perhaps you think I’ve been lying in bed coddling myself like a bailiff’s daughter,” would be her retort if Bjartur ever hinted that she was making a somewhat belated appearance out in the meadow after the morning milking. She had never married. She was supposed to have been friendly with a man in her youth, but apparently she had found out that he had
a wife already, and she had never been able to get over it since. As she had worked for a wage all her life long and had saved it up and banked it all, she was generally considered to be pretty well off. She had also a horse of her own, an old roan mare which had never been broken in, but of which she was extremely fond. Most remarkable of all, however, was the fact that she was the possessor of a treasure that exalted her high above the majority of the working people in the country. What was this treasure? It was a bed, a bed that was independent of the framework of the house, a bed that could be taken to pieces and put together again at will, so that it could be moved from one place to another, a bed, in short, that was nothing less than a piece of furniture. She had her own mattress, which she always put out to air on the first day of summer, and she had an over-mattress and a coverlet of the finest-quality down, two sets of linen sheets, and a lovely pillow with “Good Night” embroidered on it. Actually she was a fine, dependable woman, uncommonly well built and a match for any man. Though she was clean as a cat and always in the right, she was no squeamish shirker who would shrink from the thought of carrying muck night or day, with her hands as big as hams and not altogether free from the marks of old chilblains, and dressed in a tight-fitting jacket and no corsets, so that she seemed as big in the girth as a good strong pack-horse. There was a pleasant, youthful rosiness in her weather-beaten cheeks, and perhaps just a tinge of blue about them when she was cold. She had the eyes of a realist, and a mouth that was set in coarse, hard-working lines, free from any suggestion of the modern spirit of captiousness in thought or feeling. She spoke usually in a strained voice and cold tones not unlike an unjustly accused person in front of a judge, always a little aggrieved, a little wounded in her inmost heart.