Independent People (77 page)

“What?” he said, staring at the child, for it had seemed to him that she said something as she looked up at him.

I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“What are you doing out of bed at this hour, little
girl?”
he asked. “It’s barely six o’clock.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I have whooping cough. My mother said I would be best outside.”

“Oh, dear,” he said, “so you’ve a bad cough, have you? No wonder you’ve a bad cough when that thing you’re wearing is so terribly thin.”

She made no reply, but sat down to see her cakes again. He scratched his head.

“Well, well, Sola girl,” he said, “poor lass.”

“They don’t call me Sola,” she said.

“What do they call you, then?”

“They call me Bjort,” she replied proudly.

“Well, well, Bjort my girl,” he said, “I don’t suppose it makes much difference.”

He sat down at the side of the road and went on looking at her.

She ladled the mud into an old enamel mug, then placed the mug on a stone for baking.

“It’s a Christmas cake,” she said, giving him a little smile to keep the conversation going.

He said nothing, but still went on gazing at her.

Finally she stood up again and asked:

“What are you sitting there for? What are you looking at me for?”

“Your mother ought to be making the breakfast coffee by now, oughtn’t she?” he asked.

‘There isn’t any coffee,” she said, “only water.”

“Oh, lots of people have had to content themselves with water before today.”

She was seized with a fit of coughing. It turned her face blue. She lay down on the ground until the fit was over.

“What are you doing there?” she asked when she began to recover from the coughing. “Why don’t you go away?”

“I was thinking of coming in with you for a cup of breakfast water,” he answered in matter-of-fact tones.

After looking at him searchingly for a moment or two, she said: “All right, come on, then.”

He had eaten other people’s bread last night, bread, moreover, that had been stolen by thieves, so what did it matter if he had his breakfast water with this little girl. He straddled the barbed-wire fence and followed the child home to the hut. Never had his moral fortitude ebbed so low as the night that was passing and the morning of sunshine that was succeeding it; yes, it was doubtful
whether he could really call himself an independent man any longer.

There was a window made for four panes in the gable, with sacks stuffed into two of the openings, the third nailed over with pieces of wood, and only in the fourth a whole pane of glass. Bjort led the way. At one time the hut had been papered inside, in town fashion, but the paper was now black with damp and hanging from the clincher roof in tatters. There were two beds; in one of them lay the owner of the house, the old woman, and in the other Asta Sollilja with her younger child. There was an oil-stove on a table by the window, a box, and a broken chair.

“Are you back already?” said Asta Sollilja when she saw her daughter in the doorway. She sat up in bed, her breasts pendulous under her open vest, her hair in disorder; she was very thin, very pale. But when she saw Bjartur following the child inside, her eyes began to stare. She shook her head as if to break some optical illusion, but it was no illusion, he was standing there on the floor, it was he.

“Father,” she cried, gasping for breath.

Open-mouthed she stared at him, her eyes growing bigger and bigger, the pupils more and more dilated. Her features drooped, as if she had lost control of her facial muscles, but seemed at the same time to fill out and grow younger, all in the twinkling of an eye, and then again she shouted, completely beside herself: “Father!”

Grabbing her petticoat, she pulled it hastily over her head and smoothed it down over her hips as she sprang barefooted out of bed, ran to the door, and flung herself into his embrace. With her arms round his neck she pressed her mouth to his throat, under the beard.

Yes, it was he. Her mouth was resting once more in its old place, it was he, he had come. At last she lifted her head, looked into his face again, and sighed:

“I thought you would never come.”

“Listen, lass,” he said, “hurry up and heat some water and dress the kids. I’m taking you back with me today.”

“Father,” was all she could say, with her eyes still glued on liis face. She stood as if rooted to the spot “No, I can’t believe it’s you.”

He went over to her bed and she pivoted round on the floor and continued to stare at him, overwhelmed. He stood contemplating
the infant that lay sleeping on the bed before him, and was, as always when he saw a living babe, filled with compassion.

“Heavens, what a helpless-looking object!” he said. “Yes, mankind is rather a pitiful sight when you come to look at it as it is in actual fact.”

“I don’t believe it yet,” said Asta Sollilja, as she pressed herself against him once more.

“Run along and put your things on, lass,” he said. “We’ve a long way before us.”

At that she began dressing herself. She had a cough.

“You ought to have come home again before your chest grew so bad,” he said. “I built you a house, as I told you I would, but there’s no pleasure in it left, it’s all gone. Old Hallbera has leased me Urtharsel.”

“Father,” she said, and nothing else.

“My opinion has always been this,” he said, “that you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breathe your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan. Yes, lass, last night I ate stolen bread and left my son among men who are going to use pick-handles on the authorities, so I thought I might just as well look you up this morning.”

“H
EAVEN’S,
what a time you’ve been away, girl!” said the grandmother when Asta was left alone with her on their last day in Summerhouses, Bjartur having gone off to Urtharsel with the provisions. “I thought you were dead.”

“Yes, I was dead, Grandmother,” said the girl.

The Grandmother: “Isn’t it funny how everyone manages to die except me?”

“Yes, but now I’ve risen up from the dead, Grandmother,” said Asta Sollilja.

“Eh?” said the grandmother.

“I’ve risen from the dead.”

“Oh no, wench,” replied the grandmother, “no one rises from the dead. And a good thing too.”

Then she turned away and, once more fixing her peering gaze
on the knitting she was busy with, began mumbling to herself an old hymn about the Resurrection.

In the evening Asta took her children down to the brook and stood staring in wonder at this ugly house with the sharp corners, the impressions left on the concrete by the boards in the moulds, the dabs of cement on some of the windows, the broken panes of others, and the holes that had been dug in the earth all around. New though it was, it reminded one of the ruins of a building shelled in the war. Such was the palace he had built in the dream that she would return. She, too, had once upon a time dreamed of a bright house in a green meadow by the sea. Now she missed only the little cottage of Summerhouses with its rounded lines and agreeable proportions, where she had experienced her holiest sufferings, her dearest longings. Still, it was a great comfort to see the old hills at home, to find that, though so many centuries seemed to have passed, they were still in their places; as was also the lake, and the marsh, and the smoothly flowing river in the marsh. Once there had been a Midsummer Eve, and she had been going out to view the world for the first time; once there had been the glance of a stranger’s eyes, and she had longed to rest her soul there to all eternity; her life had been laid waste before it had begun, like Bjartur Jonsson’s house and his independence, and now she was a mother with two children, perhaps three, though no one need know of that. She showed these two her old croft brook and said, “Look, there’s my old brook,” and kissed them. She was like defenceless nature, that withers in the blast because it has shelter neither of God nor of men; human beings do not give one another shelter; and God? We shall see, when in the end we are dead of consumption. Perhaps the Almighty had made a note of all that she had had to suffer. All the same, she felt that evening that she was not too old once more to view the future in a dream; in a new dream. To be able to look forward is to live.

On the day following, Bjartur took the last load of his belongings up to Urtharsel. He had fitted old Blesi out with two peat-boxes, and in one box he seated the old woman, who was over ninety now, while in the other he put the two children. Then he set off, leading the horse on its way. Asta Sollilja walked by his side over the ridge. The bitch loitered along in the rear, carelessly nosing this and that, as dogs are wont to do on fragrant days of spring. There was nothing said. They were like people on a long journey leaving a poor night-lodging on the moors. They were the moors of life. The road lies towards moors even more
remote. No lamentations—never harbour your grief, never mourn what you have lost. He did not even turn around and give his old valley a parting glance when they reached the top of the ridge. But when they were passing Gunnvor’s cairn he halted and left the road. Seizing hold of the headstone that he had placed there to her memory a few years back, he rolled it over the brink of the ravine. He knew now for certain that it was impossible to cleanse her of Kolumkilli; she had always lain there with him, in hard times and in good alike; she was lying there with him still. Once again had they laid waste the lone worker’s farm; they are always the same from century to century, for the simple reason that the lone worker remains the same from century to century. A war on the Continent may bring some relief, for a year or so, but it is only a seeming help, an illusion. The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man’s protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, ie life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him. From one night-lodging into another even worse. A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country for a thousand years—for whom? Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs. They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws—in whose land? Not in their own at least. In foreign books there is a holy story that tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy’s field one night. Bjartur of Summerhouses’ story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy’s field all his life, day and night. Such is the story of the most independent man in the country. Moors; more moors. From the ravine there came an eerie echoing rumble as the headstone crashed its way down, and the bitch sprang to the brink and stood there barking wildly.

A little farther along the ridge, at a point from which it was possible to see down to Utirauthsmyri, the man left the highroad and began heading north, over old, untrodden footpaths from the past, in the direction of Sandgilsheath. The peat-boxes kept up a continual creaking; the children were asleep in the one on the other side of the horse, but the old woman sat in hers holding on to the pack-saddle peg with her withered blue hands. She was on her way home, home from her night’s lodging.

The going grew heavier and heavier the farther they progressed northwards over the moors; landslides, gullies, bogs,
boulders, all kinds of obstacles; finally moorland watercourses rising higher and always higher. A mile or so of this and Asta Sollilja had come to the end of her strength. She threw herself down on a grassy slope, coughing violently; some blood appeared. When at length the fit was over she sank back with a groan and lay there in a state of collapse. Bjartur took the boxes down and allowed the horse to graze. He helped the children and the old creature out of the boxes. Little Bjort stood some yards away with her finger in her mouth, gazing at her mother, but the old woman sat down at her head, with the infant sleeping in her lap, as it says in the old poem:

All that it says in the poem had come true, there was blood in the grass. They waited a while for Asta Sollilja to recover her strength. Bjartur stood at a loss some distance away; the little girl asked her mother whether it hurt a lot, but it didn’t hurt her much, she was just exhausted and she didn’t think she could walk yet. She lay there in the grass, feebly groaning, her eyes shut, blood in the corner of her mouth. The old woman bent over her and peered at her closely for a moment or two, her head on the slant.

“Yes,” she mumbled, “and I’m not surprised. One more corpse shall I live to kiss.”

Eventually Bjartur gave up all hope of the girl as being able to walk any farther. Seating the children and the old woman in the boxes again, he lifted them on to the peg. Then he took Asta Sollilja up into his arms, told her to keep a good hold of his neck, and led the horse off once more. When they had got well up the hillside, she whispered:

“At last I’m with you again.”

And he replied:

“Keep a good hold round my neck, my flower.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Always—as long as I live. Your one flower. The flower of your life. And I shan’t die yet awhile; no, not for a long while yet.”

Then they went on their way.