The Fell King maintained, however, that lots of people had had reason to bless the day that Bruni took them on his books. Bruni never allowed a man of his to starve. Had anyone ever heard of Bruni refusing anyone credit, once he had accepted their assurances? “True, he doesn’t care about paying out in hard cash in these critical times, and there’s been many a year when not a cent has been seen up in the country districts, and as everybody well knows he’s tight with the luxuries; but it’s very seldom that he has allowed any of his men to suffer real want, unless, of course, it’s unavoidable, as, for instance, in the springtime. In any case,” continued the Fell King, “it’s very far from the truth to think that everything depends on money. There’s many a man got on in life and never handled the metal that matters. And by the way,” he added as proof of this, “the Sheriff was asking me at the Thing in spring whether I couldn’t suggest some dependable fellow to help with the doctoring of the dogs.”
“Quite right,” said Bjartur. “It never pays to neglect a dog, and as you’ve maybe heard, I swore on my wedding day in spring that I’d attend to my dog myself if that pissy concoction of yours doesn’t clean them out.”
“Surely no one would care to suggest that there is anything false or inaccurate about preparations I receive straight from the hands of the District Medical Officer himself,” said the Fell King, assuming a look of injured officialdom. “I admit, of course, that no one with all that swarm of dogs to attend to would be prepared to swear on his hopes of salvation that the medicine had been perfectly administered in every single case, which is the reason why the Sheriff is of the opinion that another reliable person should be appointed as my assistant.”
The crofters were all agreed that the situation called for desperate measures, since even in Utirauthsmyri there had been signs of the staggers during the previous spring.
“Yes, I shall have to give the matter serious thought,” continued the Fell King in the tones of one fully alive to his responsibilities. “It is important work, though of course no more pleasant than any other medical work. And it takes an able man for the job. I should think that with a little persuasion I could get the Sheriff to agree to a pretty fair wage for this proposed assistant of mine. But at the moment I have no authority to promise anything.”
“I say, what about the Bailiff?” said Bjartur, who found it difficult to root this Bailiff out of his mind. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t make quite a suitable assistant dog-doctor.”
This suggestion, made partly in jest, partly in earnest, evoked no real response in either mood from Bjartur’s guests; they merely sniffed or wrinkled their noses slightly in melancholy derision.
At this juncture Rosa brought the coffee, but as there were very few cups, they had to drink in two sittings.
“Drink up, lads,” exhorted Bjartur. “You needn’t be afraid of getting stomach-ache from the cream in Summerhouses’ coffee, but we aren’t niggardly with the beans.”
“What about a shot of Danish cream?” said the Fell King, drawing a small flask from his breast pocket. As he took out the stopper, the formless, rigid faces of the lone workers about him broke into the most beatific of smiles.
“I always like to be able to do something for my friends when we’re out on the mountains,” went on the Fell King. “Who knows, my friends may be able to do something for me when we’re all at home again?”—adding, as he poured a little into each cup: “Heavy taxes have kept the smallholder down these last few years, as you all know, but it may well happen that those who have little to come and go on will have someone to speak for them on the council before long. And there we’ll let the matter rest.”
“Wade into the doughnuts, lads,” cried Bjartur, “and don’t spare that lousy sugar. Pour the Fell King another cup, Rosa.”
“Well, lads,” said the Fell King when the brandy had gone the round, “surely someone has strung together a few Unes over the hay this summer, unsettled though it was.”
“Yes, now’s the time for a nice crafty one,” said the others.
“Well, you needn’t expect it from me,” said Einar. “My views on poetry, as you all know, are such that I don’t bother with this crafty verse, as it’s called. In the few things I set together when occasion allows, I try to pay more attention to the truth of the sense than to the elaboration of the metre.”
It was no secret that Bjartur had a poor opinion of Einar’s poetry, for Bjartur had been brought up on the old measures of the eighteenth-century ballads and had always despised the writing of hymns and new-fangled lyrics as much as he despised any other form of empty-headed fantasy. “My father,” said he, “was a great man for poetry and was gifted with the tongue; and I owe it to him that I learned the rules of metre when I was still a youngster and have kept them since in spite of all the newfangled theories of the great poets, Madam of Myri, for instance. I inherited my copies of the rhymes from my father, seven of them belonging to the days when there were men of genius in Iceland, men who knew too well what they were about to trip over their feet; men who only needed four lines to the verse, and yet you could read it in forty-eight ways and always it made sense. Not for them this lyric style that’s full of grief and nerves and soggy soulfulness; and no hymns either, they left those to the priests. They were men who didn’t believe in tearing their hair and beating their breasts. Take Ulfar’s Rhymes, for instance, with their mighty battles each more valiantly contested than the last; those were heroes who didn’t crawl round licking a woman’s feet, like these love-poets do nowadays. But mind you, if they heard tell of a famous woman they didn’t stop to count the cost even if she lived in another hemisphere; no, they were off after her with the light of battle in their eyes, to conquer kings and kingdoms and heap the slain higher than the hills.”
They wrangled on without coming to any agreement, the one swearing by the classical form and the heroic spirit of the old ballads, the other unshaken in his faith in the human and the divine. As a result of this difference in orientation neither could be persuaded to recite any of his verse as long as the other was present. “People who like to display complicated technique in their verse are more given to pride themselves on their work than are those who write for their own solace,” said Einar. Bjartur retorted that he had never thought himself much of a poet, but to have to listen to anything less capable than internally rhymed quatrains was more than he could stomach, “and were I a poet,” he said, “I should see that nothing of mine was ever made public unless it was a crafty verse reading the same backwards or forwards.”
Olafur of Yztadale, who was of a scientific turn of mind and interested especially in the obscurities of science, was always out of his element when the discussion was confined to poetry. So far he had been unable to get a word in, but now he could no longer restrain himself from propounding some question, however small, that would ensure for him his share of the limelight in this daybreak assembly, he whose inquiring mind was constantly busy wrestling with perplexing problems.
“Yes, the world’s a funny place, right enough,” he said, stealing into the conversation like a thief in the night. “They say that Easter falls on a Saturday next year.”
The company sat for a while stricken to silence at this startling news.
“Saturday?” repeated the Fell King at length, thoughtfully. “That can’t be right, Olafur, Easter always falls on a Sunday.”
“Aye, that’s what I’d always thought,” cried Olafur triumphantly. “But I’ve read it twice in the Patriots’ Almanac. And it says there that Easter falls on a Saturday.”
“It must be a misprint,” suggested the Fell King.
“A misprint in the Almanac? No, out of the question; they wouldn’t dare. But I think I have the right explanation. I believe it was in an old book of the Reverend Gudmundur’s that I read it, when I stayed the night there some years ago. It said that the sun occasionally slowed up for a certain period. If that’s correct, then it’s naturally impossible for time to do anything but go back
wards in the meantime. At least a little bit.”
“My dear Olafur,” said Bjartur indulgently, “for goodness” sake don’t let anyone think that you take all that sort of thing seriously. You should beware of believing things you see in books. I never regard books as the truth, and least of all the Bible, because there’s no check on what they can write in them. They can spin lies as big as they like, and you never know, if you haven’t been on the spot. If it was right, for instance, that time went backwards, even a little bit at a time, then it would end up with Easter falling on Christmas Day.”
“Well,” said the Fell King, “all I have to say is that the story tells you that Jesus rose again on the Sunday morning, and I’m sticking to that. Therefore Easter must always fall on the Sunday, whether time goes backward or not.”
“The story can say what it likes for me,” said Bjartur sceptically, “but what I’d like to know is this: Who saw Jesus rise on a Sunday? A bunch of women, I expect, and how much can you rely on women and their nerves? There was a woman from the south in service at Utirauthsmyri a year or two ago, for instance, who came in yelling that she had stumbled over an exposed baby on the landslides there, one late summer evening it was, and she swore it let out a wail. But what do you think it was? Nothing but a blessed wild cat in heat, of course.”
“By the way,” said the Fell King, who preferred not to encourage the intricacies of a discussion so irrelevant, “I was wondering, seeing that Bjartur mentioned wild cats there, what plans you had for our friend the fox this autumn.”
“Plans are one thing,” they replied, “and deeds another. What about seeing the Bailiff about it?”
“Oh, the Bailiffs hardly likely to be in any difficulties with the dodger,” asserted Bjartur. “Last year he had twenty skins to sell in the south. And got a damned good price for them, too.”
The others were of the opinion that the smallholders’ sheep would suffer just the same, and cursed Reynard roundly for some time in a variety of tones—he had killed last autumn, he was sure to kill this autumn. The Fell King declared magisterially that foxes were undoubtedly among the nation’s worst enemies. And the old man from Nithurkot ended this part of the conversation with the assertion: “He killed last year. He killed in spring. And he will kill again this autumn.”
When all had finished their coffee, the Fell King replaced the stopper and pushed the flask back into his pocket; it was light enough to proceed.
“Well, men,” he said as he stood up, “I’ve travelled over the moors here often enough, but never like this. What a difference! A difference that many a one on a rough winter’s day will be glad of. We’ve been entertained like royalty. If you don’t feel fit enough to foot it round your sheep now, you never will.”
But Bjartur wanted it to appear that his hospitality was a very minor issue. “The chief point,” he said, “and the point towards which I have always directed my course, is independence. And a man is always independent if the hut he lives in is his own. Whether he lives or dies is his concern, and his only. Otherwise, I maintain, one cannot be independent. This desire for freedom runs in a man’s blood, as anybody who has been servant to another understands.”
“Yes,” agreed the Fell King, “I for one understand. The love of freedom and independence has always been a characteristic of the Icelandic people. Iceland was originally colonized by free-born chieftains who would rather live and die in isolation than serve a foreign king. They were the same sort of men as Bjartur. Bjartur and men like him are the free-born Icelanders on whom Icelandic independence and Icelandic nationality have always rested, rest now, and always will rest. And Rosa thrives well, too, here in the valley; I’ve never seen her looking so plump before. How do you like the life on the moors, Rosa?”
“Oh, it’s very free, of course,” she replied, and sniffed.
“Yes,” said the Fell King, who had now become like a landed farmer in outlook after his drop of brandy. “If the spirit that animates this young couple were to permeate the whole of the younger generation, men and women alike, the country would need to have no fear of the future either.”
“Well,” said old Thorthur of Nithurkot, “I think the best thing for me would be to crawl along the way a bit on that poor old nag of mine.”
He stood there by the trapdoor so worn and decrepit after his long life and few ideas that it was difficult not to say something to him too. So the Fell King clapped a hand consolingly on his shoulder and said:
“Yes, my dear Thorthur, life for all of us is a sort of lottery.”
“Eh?” said the old man vacantly, failing to understand the comparison, as he had only taken part in one lottery, and that was a few years ago when Madam of Myri had given a filly to be raffled for the Cemetery Fund. And the result of that lottery was that the Bailiff drew the filly himself.
“Father,” said Rosa, when she had taken him out to his horse, “do try to cover yourself well in the hut tonight.”
“Why I should be chasing over the mountains after wild sheep at my age,” he said, laying the reins over his horse, “is more than I can understand; a man nearly eighty and hardly able to lift my old bones out of bed in the morning—”
The men parted their dogs, which were rolling about, fighting, on the slope in front of the house, and the ewe, still tethered on the outskirts of the enclosure, stood and bleated as it watched them. The old man embraced his daughter, then began painfully to mount his horse, while she steadied the stirrup for him; he had a black sheepskin over his saddle for comfort and protection. She stroked his horse’s nose; old Glaesir, dear creature that she could remember as a little foal, and how glorious everything had been at home in those days, eighteen years ago, when all the brothers and sisters had been at home in Nithurkot, the brothers and sisters who were now scattered far and wide! And all at once there was Samur, his tongue hanging out of his mouth after the fray; but he knew her, forgot immediately the recent dispute, and jumped up at her, barking with such joy at the reunion that she could not help running inside to find a scrap of fish to give her father’s dog.
“I would ask you to lend me Samur for company tonight, Father, if I didn’t know that the sheep have to come first. I seem to have so little trust in that ewe he is going to leave with me.”
At this moment Bjartur appeared on the scene, leading Blesi by the reins. He kissed his wife hastily and told her what had to be done in his absence, then swung himself into the saddle and called Titla. And the round-up men rode out of the home-field. She watched them crossing the marshes, her father behind the others, drooping in the saddle and swinging his legs to thump the horse’s flanks; old Glaesir was so heavy in the mud.
SEPTEMBER NIGHT
SHORTLY afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance. And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.
She had taken up her mending, but too listless to begin, sat motionless by the window, hypnotized by the pattering hiss of the rain. She gazed in a mindless lethargy at the
grey darkness outside, or stared with childish eyes at the pools that formed on the window-sill as the water seeped through. But as the day wore on a gale began to spring up, and the wind chased the rain in howling white squalls, beating them on as if they were so many flocks of sheep. These rain-flocks rushed spuming over the marshes, and taking on the form of waves about to break, they rose still farther, then either subsided or broke.
The ewe had stopped bleating in the home-field and was now standing as far from the peg as the tether allowed, with its head drooping and its horns in the weather. At first the woman pitied it in its misfortune, the only sheep on all the fells to be dragged off and held in captivity, so she decided to bring it into shelter. The sheep tried to run away when it saw her approaching, but the tether limited its flight. She took the rope in her hands, and following it up until she could catch hold of its horns, she gripped the animal between her legs, struggled home with it into the croft, let it loose in the dark stalls below, and closed the door. The sheep soon showed its dislike of the house; when it had shaken most of the rain out of its fleece, it began to range up and down the stalls and, finding that there was no way out, started bleating so loudly that the croft rang to the echo. The woman tried to show it some hospitality and took it down some water, but the sheep refused it; then she offered it hay, but it would not touch that either, and scurried away from her, panic-stricken, and stood at bay in a corner looking at her with suspicious eyes, green in the dark. It beat the floor with its forefoot as if in menace. Finally she offered it bread and fish, but when this too was refused, she gave up, and the animal continued its sharp, apprehensive bleat.
Dusk came and still it went on bleating. The woman heated up some porridge and ate it, and by this time it was dark, but she could not bring herself to let the fire die out, the air was so raw and there was water dripping from two of the rafters, and besides, there were no matches in the croft, and man’s security lives in the light of a fire, and after that in the ember that must be kept aglow. She sat by the range for a good while with the door half-open so that she could see into the fire. Thinking to comfort herself with indulgence, she made some coffee from her mother’s present. With it she ate sugar, also the gift of her mother, five lumps instead of one because it was her own sugar. Slowly she drank the coffee, cup after cup, staring steadfastly into the embers to keep off the fear of night that waited its chance to creep over her flesh and shiver down her spine. She set herself deliberately to think of pleasant things, and by calling up old memories managed at odd moments to feel almost comfortable. The sheep was silent at last, it had lain down. But the wind had grown wilder still; gradually the beat of the rain took on the rising note of a gale that pounded the window-panes and shook the croft in its eddies. It was so late now that the woman scarcely dared move from the range, so charged with evil did she feel the darkness round her. She sat with her feet drawn up under her and her arms folded tightly across her breast, with the eerie feeling that someone might reach for them if she stretched them out. For comfort she tried to keep her mind engrossed on her memories. She had been sitting like this for some time, and had even succeeded in forgetting her fears, when the sheep, tired of lying down, rose to its feet and with rested vigour gave vent to a louder bleat, shrill and cutting, from the darkness below. It was as if it had taken sudden fright; as if someone had suddenly kicked it to its feet; for a while, as if pursued, it dashed in fright from corner to corner; twice it stopped and beat the floor with its foot, blew into someone’s face. Whose? Maybe no one’s.
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