Independent People (8 page)

“No,” she said, “it’s a lie.”

She turned her face defiantly to the wall, miserable, disappointed.

“Who was it?” he demanded.

“It’s a he,” she cried again.

“If I were you I should tell.”

“You don’t tell me about yours.”

“No?” he said. “I’ve no need to conceal anything.”

“I don’t want to hear about them!”

“You’re all modest enough and shy enough on your wedding day, but for all your blushes no one knows where you may have bedded. You pass on to us men the lifeless corpse of love when the vultures have picked the eyes out of
it.”

“You’re an angel, I suppose,” she said.

“Was it that fellow at Tindstathir?”

“Ask him.”

“Or that half-wit from the coast who did the ploughing?”

“Maybe.”

“Surely you weren’t mad enough to go with that whoremonger of a teacher who gave Steinka of Gilteighers?”

“Why don’t you count up all the whoremongers in the country?”

“And find you’d had them all? The cat that creeps is craftier than the one that leaps.”

Then she rose in her wrath and cried passionately:

“God knows, and Jesus Christ, that if there’s anything I regret it’s not having had them all instead of marrying a man that worships dogs and sets more store on sheep than he does on the human
soul I only wish I had had sense enough to turn back today and go home to Father and Mother.”

“Oh, I knew all right it wasn’t the old ghoul you were afraid of,” he said. “I can see a bit farther than the end of my nose, you know. And there’s no need to question you; it doesn’t take much to see through a woman. This is how you work it usually: you love those who are fine enough gentlemen to kick you out when they’re sick of you, then you go off and marry someone you despise.”

“You’re a liar,” cried the woman.

“So this was the reason you were always so sleepy in the daytime when he came back from the Agricultural College last spring. So this was your love of independence. This was your love of freedom. You thought of course that his pedigree was finer than mine because his father was too miserly to eat a decent meal when he was at the fishing, but eked out his dripping with tar and swindled his mates with watered brandy, and bought broken-down horses with his summer’s wages when he was in the south, and then came home and put mustard under their tails so that they jumped about as if they had never been broken in. You can be a big man and hop into bed with the skivvies at night and sleep all day after it if you’re lucky enough to have a father who’s both a thief and a swindler.”

“You’re lying, lying,” raged the woman.

“And it is for this swine that I have slaved for eighteen years—eighteen years of my life gone to pay for his blood-horses, his travels, and his schooling; and for this swine that you stood the Bailiff’s sarcasms when he thought you didn’t water the home-field proudly enough with the pots from under their beds. And now they even ask me to rear his bastards in my own house.”

Here Bjartur of Summerhouses had worked himself up to such a pitch of fury that he leaped out of bed and dragged the clothes off his half-naked wife as if his intention was to flay her. Scrambling to her knees in terror, she flung her arms round his neck and swore by all that was holy that no man had ever known her, and least of all and least of all and least of all—“God Almighty help me if I lie,” she cried, “I know there’s a curse on this fold; the croft has been destroyed seven times by ghosts and devils, and what good will it be though you call it Summerhouses if you go and kill your wife on her bridal night and give Kolumkilli my bones.” And thus she continued to plead for mercy in incoherent prayers watered with tears, until at last he took pity on her. For he knew that women
are even more to be pitied than ordinary mortals. He took a pinch of snuff, lay down again, and went to sleep. Their wedding night, one summer night.

Of such a kind was their married life.

B
UT
in the mornings, when he rose before the first birds, he never had the heart to wake her, she slept so naturally. He would look round at her as he was dressing and say to himself: “She is young, like a flower;” and he would forgive her for many things. Yet he always wondered that she, who lay there sleeping so innocently, should have loved other men, and should have been unwilling to confess, she who had always been so reserved and so unlikely to respond to any advances. He had often said: There is a girl who keeps herself to herself, and the men at a distance; I will marry that girl and buy myself a farm.” And now that he had married her and bought his farm, it turned out that she had loved other men, and no one had known anything about it. When she was asleep she was happy, but when she woke up he saw the disenchantment in her eyes, and therefore he let her sleep on. They spoke little and hardly dared look at each other; it was as if they had been married for twenty-five years, they did not know each other. He would go round the corner of the croft and cross himself to the east through force of habit, unthinkingly. And Tida would come leaping down from the wall, where she slept on the turf sill of the western window. Every morning she fawned upon him with protestations of friendship as fervid as if they were meeting after a fortnight’s parting. She would trace great circles in the grass around him and, barking all the time, would race off to the outskirts of the home-field and sneeze and rub her muzzle in the grass. Then she would follow him out to the mowing.

Dawn was very near, the breeze fresh with morning, the lake clear as a mirror. There, on an islet, a pair of swans were nesting, and crested duck and golden-eyes swam there in little companies, but the mallards and the harlequins preferred the deeper pools of the river and built on its banks; sometimes the crofter could not help stopping for a moment to appraise the royal plumage of the drakes. A few redshanks would fly over from the east when they sighted him, bearing him their elaborate morning greeting. There were also some terns nesting by the lake; in their eyes life
is a worm. Here and there on the grassy stretches round the lake bean-geese could be seen moving two and two, their long necks showing against the sky. Birds are happier than men, it is their wings that make all the difference; “grey-goose mother, lend me thy wings.” The only plaintive cry was the loon’s, a dismal songbird. Bjartur of Summerhouses gripped the handle of the scythe and started mowing.

For the first few whettings he felt rather stiff, not so lively of a morning now as he had been ten or twelve years ago, when he had enjoyed adding night to day. In those days he had not needed sleep, he had not needed rest, but used to eat his morning curds standing in the meadow, leaning against the handle of his scythe. It was only five years since he had discovered what it meant to be tired, and now sometimes the day would begin with a fluttering of stinging pains throughout his limbs. But for all that he was a property-owner now, and registered as such with the State. In twelve years’ time he would have paid the last penny off the holding, total thirty years. He was a king in his own kingdom, the birds his guests with their rich plumage and their various song. His wife was asleep in the croft and was his legally wedded spouse even though someone might have had her before and might have the first option on her still. As he worked he wove these thoughts into verse, but it was verse that he recited to no one. The dog would be racing about chasing birds over the marshes. Sometimes she might catch a rail or a snipe. She would eat it, then sit down in the field, biting herself and licking herself. Afterwards she might take a thoughtful turn, staring up the valley in an unwinking trance, then last of all she would trace herself a couch on a tussock and curl up. The sun rose in the heavens and the shadows shortened, but about breakfast-time the sun was often obscured by clouds and a cold wind would blow down the valley; the most beautiful part of day was over. The mornings were never commonplace, each morning was a new morning, but as day advanced, the birds would sing less and the Blue Mountains would gradually lose the beauty of their colours. The days were like grown-up people, the mornings always young.

He thought his wife might welcome him gladly now when he returned for his morning drink of coffee, and might perhaps like to hear anew poem about nature; but it seemed that she wasn’t feeling well, or at least not well enough to enjoy & poem. In any case she didn’t see much point in poetry. He had bought her a rose-figured dress, the very thing for wearing when the weather
was dry, but she seemed always to prefer the old canvas apron she had worn for milking at Rauthsmyri, or a threadbare woollen skirt and an old patched coat. And she never felt well somehow; sometimes she was faint and had to sit down, very often she had to retire behind a hillock. In the mornings they had rye bread and coffee without milk. At one time she had been a good hand with the hay and a brisk worker, but now she often hung listlessly over her rake. “You’re so grey and lifeless-looking somehow,” he remarked. No answer. “That rake could do with a bit more life behind it,” he complained. She made no reply, bit her lip. She would go drooping off home just before nine to boil the fish, but very often she could not get the fire to draw. She brought him his fish, rye bread, and coffee out to the meadow. “There’s no need to be stingy with that muck,” he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things. Afterwards he would go and sprawl on the river bank, resting, but never, for longer than four minutes. Meanwhile his wife would be sitting in the meadow, rooting up moss with her fingers, preoccupied.

On Sundays he climbed the mountain slopes gathering ling, or walked up to the high moors and amused himself by spying out sheep and seeing if he could tell where they came from, for he knew the various breeds of many parishes. He also had a strange liking for rolling big stones over the edge of a precipice. His wife would be washing out their things in the brook, beside the lower waterfall. One Sunday he was away for a longer time than usual, and when he came home he was very pleased with himself and asked her could she guess what he had seen. It proved to be Mjoinhyrna; he had seen her south in Lindir with a marvellous lamb. ‘I dare bet anyone she won’t be a pound under thirty in the autumn, that lamb of Mjoinhyrna’s.” But his wife showed no signs of gratification.

“That’s a tough breed of the Reverend Gudmundur’s,” he remarked. “They aren’t a rambling breed, there’s no straying off into the blue with them. They know what they’re looking for, then go no farther; they’re intelligent sheep. If there’s one thing I’ve made up my mind on, it’s to rear a ram of the Reverend Gudmundur’s brqed.”

“Dear me,” said Rosa. “Fancy that, now.”

She took no part in any happiness of his, and was indifferent to his ambitions. Whatever her thoughts, she kept them to herself.

“Bjartur,” she said after a short silence, “I’d love some meat.”

“Meat?” he asked, astonished. “Meat in the height of summer?”

“My mouth waters every time I look at a sheep.”

“Waters?” he repeated, “Why, it must be water-brash.”

“That salt catfish of yours isn’t fit to offer to a dog.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling quite well, lass?”

“At Rauthsmyri we had meat regularly twice a week,” she said.

“Horse-flesh. Never mention that damned muck of theirs again.”

“Never a Sunday passed but we had mutton, even in summer,” she said. “And anyway horse-flesh is excellent eating.”

“They never killed anything for their folk but spent ewes and skinny old nags. Their meat was only fit for slaves.”

“Where is your meat, then?”

“A free man can live on fish. Independence is better than meat,” he replied.

“I dream of sausages every night. I think I’m cutting up tripe by the handful; they come reeking out of the pot with the suet dripping from them. Sometimes it’s liver sausage, sometimes blood sausage. God in heaven help me.”

“That means rain and storm,” he interpreted. “Suet—that” for cloud with some sunshine. It looks as if we’re going to have the same weather all through the dog-days.”

“I dream of milk, too,” she went on.

“Milk? Snow? In the height of summer?”

This seemed a most peculiar dream to Bjartur.

“Last night I dreamed I was back at Rauthsmyri. I thought I was separating in the dairy and from one pipe ran skimmed milk and from the other ran cream, just like when you work a separator And I dreamed I put my mouth to the cream pipe.”

“Why you should bother your head about such damned nonsense is more than I can grasp, it’s meaningless to me,” said Bjartur, and in despair gave her dreams up altogether.

“In the daytime too I’m always thinking about milk. When I’m busy in the meadows raking, I think about milk. And meat.”

Bjartur sat frowning over the matter seriously for a while, then said at length:

“Listen, Rosa dear, I hope there’s nothing wrong with your nerves.”

“Can we possibly buy a cow, Bjartur?”

“A cow?” he repeated in gaping astonishment. “A cow?”

“Yes,” persisted his wife stubbornly, “a cow.”

“There goes the last shred of doubt, woman. It’s your nerves. That’s how my poor old mother’s nerves began. It started with
her always being full of some weird notion, then she began hearing voices. First of all we saw a herb woman about it, but when that was no good we had to see the doctor. If this continues you had better let me know so that I can go across to old Finsen’s and get something with a bit of a kick in it for you.”

“I don’t want medicine. I want a cow.”

“Where’s your field, then? I thought you could see for yourself how little grass there is on this blasted hillock that the croft’s built on. And the far meadows are even worse, as you ought to know from your own experience. Where are you going to get the hay for your cow?”

“There’s sedge along by the river.”

“Who is there to mow it? And who is there to lift it on to the bank? And what are we to ride it home on? Do you think we can afford to indulge in luxuries, crofters in our first year? You aren’t in your right senses.”