The path had begun to slope downhill along the brink of the ravine which the river cuts through the ridge, and a few drops of rain were beginning to fall from the cloud over the valley before the woman broke the silence by calling to her husband. “Bjartur,” she said.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, turning on his heel.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Let me down here, will you? I’m going home.”
He stared at his wife in open-mouthed amazement.
“Have you taken leave of your senses, Rosa?” he asked finally.
“I want to go home.”
“Home where?”
“Home.”
“I’ve never known you behave like this before, Rosa,” said the man, and turning once more he led her off on his way. The tears started from her eyes; there are few things so comforting as to be able to weep. In this fashion they continued their journey down into the valley. The dog padded along quietly in the rear. And when they arrived at a point opposite the croft, Bjartur led the horse out of the path and homeward across the marshes. There were bogs and deep pools to be avoided. In one place the horse sank right up to the groin; as it floundered out on to firmer ground, the woman was thrown and lay there in water and mud. Bjartur lifted her to her feet, then wiped off the worst of the mud with his handkerchief. “You women are more to be pitied than ordinary mortals, I suppose,” he said. This remark made her stop weeping, and she walked by his side the rest of the way. She sat down by the brook to wring out her skirts, while the crofter unsaddled Blesi and hobbled him. The shadows had fled from the valley, there was sunshine over the little home-field.
It was a house and a stable in one. All that was visible of the inner, wooden shell was the door and its frame, the door so small, the threshold so high that one had to stoop on entering. Down in the stable it was cold and dark, the air sour with the smell of earth, the toadstools flabby, but when the trapdoor was lifted a faint gleam shone down from the loft. There were mangers along the sides, and in the farther wall a gap just wide enough to allow access to a hay barn that Bjartur proposed building behind the house. A ladder with seven rungs led up to the living-room above; Bjartur climbed it first to show his wife that it was safe. She followed him up and looked round the room. She thought the window was small.
“Anyone would think you had been born in a palace,” snorted Bjartur. “If it’s sunshine you’re after, there’s plenty outside.”
I’m afraid it will be a change after the big windows in Rauthsmyri, all the same.”
“I wonder if you’ll miss anything or anybody else in Rauthsmyri,” he said bitterly.
“What do you mean?” she demanded. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying things like that.”
It was a medium-sized room, and so low that Bjartur could just stand upright under the roof-tree. Two bedsteads, made from the same sort of wood as the roof and the floor, were fixed to the wall, while the table was nailed to the window-sill. There was a little range on the left of the trapdoor, and above it, set in the slope of the roof, another window with a pane not much bigger than the palm of a hand; a few stalks of grass growing outside the window were swaying in the wind. But the thickness of the turf walls outside was too great to admit much light, no sunbeam could enter unless the sun shone directly on the window.
The bed nearer the table was already provided with a mattress of dry turf, the marriage bed. At the foot of this bed were boxes of provisions, for Bjartur had got his supplies in—ryemeal and sugar, best quality from Bruni, and maybe a handful of wheaten flour for pancakes, if we feel that way, and who knows if there isn’t a bag or two of raisins hiding about somewhere or other? Downstairs there was a fine sackful of refuse fish. Then Krusi of Gil had made them a wedding present of a load of dry sheep’s dung for fuel, because of a young foal that Bjartur had rescued from drowning in a pit the year before last, but that would have to be used sparingly and mixed with ling and moss at first, and besides, there’s plenty of peat, you know, lying only four spade depths down in the marshes east of the house here.
Rosa, her eyes red and elbows muddy, was sitting on the turf mattress on the bed, gazing at the large, irresolute hands in her lap.
“Well, doesn’t it suit you?” asked Bjartur of Summerhouses.
“You don’t think I expected anything better, do you?”
“Well, there’s always one good thing about it: no one that lives here need slave all day long at housework,” he said, “and I always thought you had sense enough to appreciate your independence. Independence is the most important thing of all in life. I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent. People who aren’t independent aren’t people. A man who isn’t his own master is as bad as a man without a dog.”
“A dog?” she asked indifferently, and sniffed.
He gazed out of the window for a while, without accounting for the trend of his thought, staring in silence towards the mountain.
“This land will not betray its flocks,” he said at length.
His wife wiped a drop from the end of her nose with the back of her hand.
“Where the sheep lives, there lives man,” continued the bridegroom. “It’s just as my father used to say: in a way sheep and men are one.”
I’ve had such bad dreams,” said his wife.
Turning his head to throw her a scornful glance, he said:
“Why pay any heed to suchlike things? Dreams are caused by the blood streaming upwards; you have them when you are lying in a cramped position, or if there’s a lump beneath you, that’s all. This spring, for instance, when I was busy pulling the stones out of the ruins here, I dreamed that a woman came out of the mountain, a damned fine-looking woman, too, let me tell you.”
“Yes,” said his wife, “it would be a woman, wouldn’t it?”
“Without actually believing in dreams,” continued Bjartur, “I bet that means I’m to have some fine lambs for sale in my very first autumn.”
“Everybody says that Gunnvor is fit to take the place here. It’s only two years since a horse bolted here at midday.”
“I don’t want to hear anything more about any damned Gunnvor.”
“She’s driven many a one out of the moors here all the same.”
“Some duffer or other who didn’t know a rake from a spade,” snorted Bjartur. “They can always find something to blame if they have to sell up.”
“You seem to think that nothing evil exists.”
“No, I don’t say that,” he replied. “There is danger on land and danger on the sea, but what of it? If you get into danger, either you perish or you escape. But to say that devils and fiends and all that sort of stuff exists is to say that your blood is out of order, that’s all.”
“Dogs see a lot, all the same,” said his wife.
“A dog is a dog.”
“Fancy that! I always thought you believed that dogs were all-knowing.”
“No,” he countered, “that’s a thing I’ve never said. All I say is that a dog is the only animal that understands a man. But a dog is a dog and a man is a man for all that, as Einar of Undirhlith would say.”
“Everybody with second sight says this place is haunted.”
“I don’t care a damn for people with second sight,” he snorted. “Give me a man who has some control over his own senses. There they go seeing things and hearing the devil only knows what, like that half-wit of a tramp that everybody made so much fuss about in Fjord a year or two ago. There he was, supposed to be falling into trances, and gabbling off all sorts of drivel from the hereafter about Jesus Christ, Egill Skallagrimsson, and King Christian IX. Then he ended up in prison for forging the Sheriff’s signature.”
“I’m sure you don’t believe in God even, Bjartur.”
“I’m saying nothing about that,” he replied, “but there’s one thing I’ll never deny: that the Reverend Gudmundur’s is a grand breed of sheep, the best that’s ever been known hereabouts.”
“You don’t m
ean to tell me you don’t even say your prayers at night, Bjartur?”
“Oh, I don’t know. If they rhyme I sometimes run through a prayer or two while I’m falling off to sleep, just to fill the time in,” he said, “or used to when I had less to think about. But never the Lord’s Prayer, because I don’t call that poetry. And anyway, since I don’t believe in the Devil, I see no point in praying, so we’ll say nothing more about it. What do you say to a drop of coffee to freshen us up?”
“What awful talk, Gudbjarturl” said Rosa. “I’m sure it must frighten away the angels of God, the way you talk. You deny everything except what you want to believe; that’s the sort of man you are.”
“I have my five senses,” he replied, “and don’t see what need there is for more.”
“I know of people who stand much higher in society than you do, and who nevertheless believe in both good and evil.”
“Maybe,” said Bjartur, “and I think I can guess what they’re like. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of them wasn’t the chap who was hanging around you women at Myri this spring, that fellow who used to frighten you into his arms with ghost stories ”
“Us who?” she demanded, looking up, and for the first time a gleam showed in the eye with a cast. “What do you think you mean?”
But he was busy humming an old verse and looking for the kettle to fetch water, for he was determined to have his coffee. On the ladder he turned and left behind him this observation:
“Oh, maybe somebody got as near to somebody as he wanted to. I shouldn’t be at all surprised, shouldn’t be surprised a bit.”
SECRETS
THIS parting observation seemed on superficial consideration neither particularly definite nor particularly significant, and yet few things exercised so profound an influence on the early domestic life of Summerhouses as the imputation it bore, or rather that fact which immediately the first evening proved to be the foundation for it.
“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.
DREAMS
BUT 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 s
tretches 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.
Independent People Page 6
