Independent People

by Halldor Laxness

  “And there was once a little boy. He was a foster-child with some people who lived in a valley up on the moors, and he was not allowed to go to church, though all the others went to church. He had no brother and no little sister either, because they had been taken away from him. It was one Sunday in the summertime. They had all set off for church in their Sunday clothes, each of them on his horse, and he was standing on the paving watching them draw farther away, and how the puffs of dust rose from the horses’ hoofs on the paths along by the riverl Don’t you think he must have taken it to heart?

  “He wandered, weeping, away from the farm and up to the rocks at the foot of the mountain, quite overpowered by the evil that seems so often to prevail in life and even to rule it. But what do you think he heard from the rocks at the foot of the mountain? Why, he heard the most delightful singing! Who could it be that was singing so beautifully? It wasn’t a solo or a duet, and it wasn’t a trio either; it was a whole congregation singing. A service was being held; never had the boy heard such a lovely hymn before. And where was all the singing coming from? Then the boy saw that the fairy rock was no longer a rock, but a church, and the church was standing open in the sunshine, and the elves were all sitting in the church, and the priest was standing in front of the altar in vestments of green. And the boy went into the elves’ church. He had never seen such people before, so noble and happy. Such is life when it is lived in peace and in song. When the hymn was over, the priest mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon. Never had the boy heard a sermon so beautiful or so touching. And never afterwards did he hear a sermon like it. All his life through he remembered it, meditating upon it in secret and trying always to live up to it; but the theme of the sermon he told to no one. Some people think that it must have been about how in the end good will be triumphant in the life of man. Then the priest went to the altar and intoned in a warm, gentle voice; quite differently from our priests here on earth. It was as if a good hand was laid over his heart Then when the last hymn had been sung, all the people stood up and went out. And the boy stood up too and went out But when he looked around, the people had all disappeared and the church had gone too. There was nothing to be seen but Fairy Rock, as bare and steep as it had always been, and all he could hear was the twitter of some birds flying in and out of the clefts, probably they were white-tails. He never saw Fairy Rock open again. But he kept the memory of this Sunday ever afterwards in his mind and it consoled him when he had to do without the happiness that others enjoy in life; and he grew up into a man pleased with what he had and contented with his lot.”

  From the white heaven of mist where the sun was hidden like a delightful promise there dropped into her hair a thousand precious glittering pearls as she told her stories. She pursed her lips at the end of each with solemnity, almost with adoration, as if they were sacred chronicles. Gently she smoothed the loops on her needles; the landscape was shrouded and holy, breathe quietly. Her best friend had been an elf-woman and she had known an elf-man, too, the elf-woman’s brother; but all that had been long, long ago, when she was at home in Urtharsel. “Have I dropped a stitch?” she asked, and sighed. “Ah well, it doesn’t matter. What is gone is gone. And will never return.”

  But the boy felt that it mattered. He proposed that they should go to her friends and become elves with them, when Father and Asta Sollilja were down in Fjord. “And we’ll take our Bukolla along with us,” he said.

  “No,” said his mother pensively. “It’s too late now. Who would there be to look after Grandmother?”

  That was more than the boy could answer; he simply kept on gazing into his mother’s face, which was the noblest and most exalted of all things that lived in the world, unequalled in its goodness, its beauty, and its sorrow. And when later in life he thought of those days and of the face that reigned over them, then he felt that he too, no less than the blue mountains, had been fortunate enough to experience the holiness of religious contemplation. His being had rested full of adoration for the glory which unifies all distances in such beauty and sorrow that one no longer wishes for anything—in unconquerable adversity, in unquenchable longing, he felt that life had nevertheless been worth while living.

  When the fiddle’s song is still,

  And the bird in shelter shivers,

  When the snow hides every hill,

  Blinds the eye to dales and rivers,

  Often in the halls of dreams,

  Or afar, by distant woodland,

  I behold the one who seems

  First of all men in our Iceland.

  Like a note upon the string

  Once he dwelt with me in gladness.

  Ever shall my wishes bring

  Peace to calm his distant sadness.

  Still the string whispers his song;

  That may break, a love-gift only;

  But my wish shall make him strong,

  Never shall he travel lonely.

  His mother taught him to sing. And when he had grown up and had listened to the world’s song, he felt that there could be no greater happiness than to return to her song. In her song dwelt the most precious and the most incomprehensible dreams of mankind. The heath grew into the heavens in those days. The songbirds of the air listened in wonder to this song, the most beautiful song of life.

  OF THE WORLD

  ST. JOHN’S EVE; those who bathe in the dew may wish a wish.

  Young and slender she walked down by the brook, down to the marshes, and waded barefoot in the lukewarm mud of the bogs. Tomorrow she was to go to town and see the world for herself.

  For weeks the prospect had filled her day-dreams with pleasurable anticipation; every night since the Bailiff came she had gone to sleep in the middle of a dozing reverie crowded with fancies of the promised journey. In daylight or in dreams she had seen herself set off a hundred times, and lately she had been so reluctant to waste time in sleeping that she had lain awake till early morning, savouring the delight to come. The hours today had passed like a distant breeze, her fingertips had been numb, her cheeks hot, she had heard nothing that was said. She had knitted herself underclothes of soft blue-grey yarn and had laid them aside for this excursion, looking at them only on Sundays. And she had knitted herself a brown petticoat with two stripes round it, one blue, the other red. And a few hours ago her father had opened the clothes-chest, which was the only receptacle in the house that had a lock to it, and had taken out a flowered frock wrapped in his Sunday jacket. “Though you’re maybe a shade too thin to fill it,” he said, “it’s time you began wearing your mother’s best frock. My daughter shall lack nothing outside or in, the day she goes out into the world.”

  She had blushed with pleasure, her eyes sparkling. It was a solemn moment. The dress was crumpled of course, the material crisp and thin with old age, but neither moths nor damp had ever touched it. It was printed with the fertile vegetation of foreign countries and had numerous flounces on the bosom. But though Asta Sollilja had grown at an incredible rate these last few months, her figure beginning to round to life’s youthful curves, she was still a leggy stripling and far too slight to fill such a garment. It hung loosely from her thin shoulders and billowed widely about her waist. “She’s like a scarecrow in the meadow at Utirauthsmyri,” said Helgi, and his father pushed him away downstairs. Apart from its size the dress suited her admirably.

  She threw her arms round her father’s neck in gratitude and found the place on his throat and hid her face there. Her lips had grown thicker. When one looked at her profile against the window, one saw that she had a heavy lower lip, rather like a charming curl; her mouth was beginning to look so mature, poor girl—and his beard tickled her eyelids.

  The lukewarm mud spurted up between her bare toes and sucked noisily when she lifted her heel. Tonight she was going to bathe in the dew, as if she had never had a body before. On every pool of the river there was a phalarope to make her a bow; no bird in all the marshes is so courdy in its demeanour on Midsummer Eve. It was after midnigh
t, wearing slowly on for one o’clock. The spring night reigned over the valley like a young girl. Should she come or should she not come? She hesitated, stole forward on her toes—and it was day. The feathery mists over the marshes rose twining up the slopes and lay, like a veil, in innocent modesty about the mountain’s waist. Against the white sheen of the lake loomed the shape of some animal, like a kelpie in the pellucid night.

  A grassy hollow on the margin of the river, and leading up to it through the dew the wandering trail left by two inexperienced feet. The birds were silent for a while. She sat on the bank and listened. Then she stripped herself of her torn everyday rags under a sky that could wipe even the sunless winters of a whole lifetime from the memory, the sky of this Midsummer Eve. Young goddess of the sunlit night, perfect in her half-mature nakedness. Nothing in life is so beautiful as the night before what is yet to be, the night and its dew. She wished her wish, slender and half-grown in the half-grown grass and its dew. Body and soul were one, and the unity was perfectly pure in the wish. Then she washed her hair in the river and combed it out carefully, sitting with her feet in the water and her toes buried in the sand at the bottom. Those strange waterfowl still swam round her in strange curves, turning about courteously when least expected and making her a bow for no reason at all. Nor was there anyone else in the whole of the world who could make so fine a bow.

  She began to feel cold, and she ran to and fro on the river bank, her trail criss-crossing like the streets in the cities of the world. She was light and impersonal, new-risen from the dew like the mist itself, wonderful in the moist green landscape of the sunlit night. She grew warm again after running about for a little while, and the birds woke up and the sky was radiant with the flickering of gorgeous colours; in an hour’s time the sun would glint in the dew of the lady’s-mantle, and the dew would disappear in the sun, St. John’s holy dew.

  With the first morning rays, long before the snores of night had risen as far as the throat, Bjartur sprang out of bed, took a hasty pinch of snuff, and started dressing. Did Asta Sollilja oversleep this morning, the morning of the great day on which she was to see the world? No, let no one say it; she rose up too, and rubbed the sleeplessness from her eyes as she watched him putting his clothes on. Then he went out for the horse. And when he had gone she took out her new underclothes and drew them over the clean body that she had bathed for the first time last night, the body that she had just discovered for the first time, the body she had actually just been given. She put on her petticoat, her new woollen stockings, and her new sheepskin shoes, and last of all she donned the lovely dress, memory of her mother. She tripped up and down the floor, her heart beating high with eagerness and the joy of departure, while her stepmother warmed up the coffee. The grandmother too was awake, sitting up in bed with her index finger between her gums.

  “Don’t forget your coat, maiden. You’re badly dressed for a shower of rain.”

  That was just like Grandmother. As if Asta Sollilja would even dream of showing herself down-country in such a filthy old rag.

  “Oh, it can come on at any moment,” replied her grandmother.

  “But there’s not a sign of cloud in the sky,” said Asta Sollilja.

  “Fine weather fools fine wits,” said the grandmother. “And heedlessness has its own reward.”

  But nothing fills the soul with such perfect confidence as a cloudless morning of this kind; the sun was beaming over the green valley and the Bluefell’s lay resting on the blue of the sky in dreamy security, like the children in a rich house, their faces exalted and happy, as if nothing, nothing would ever cast another shadow on the tranquil sunshine under this deep eternal sky. To drag out a torn old coat was like an evil thought on such a morning, and Asta Sollilja said good-bye to her grumbling old grandmother.

  Then she set off into the world with her father. The cart old Blesi was pulling was heaped with sacks of wool, and when they had reached the road, her father said she might ride on top while he walked in front leading the horse. It was a lovely morning. Never had Asta Sollilja felt the day to be so spacious, never had she been so free. After a short time new vistas were unfolded and she began to feel that she had left the meagreness of all her past existence behind her. The winds that blew over the moors had never smelled so fresh in her nostrils, never had the song of moorland birds sped off to such outer distance. The echos had changed, the voices were altogether different. They no longer heard the old familiar valley-birds, they heard new birds, birds that sang to other landscapes, the birds of the world. The hummocks alongside the road took on a different shape and different vegetation, the mountains changed their positions and new forms peeped out, while old ridges and promontories retreated upon themselves or resolved themselves into independent hills. The streams ran in a different direction, the stones had a different appearance; from the dingles the scent of unknown flowers was wafted towards the inexperienced traveller. So bad was the road that she was shaken and jolted unmercifully in the cart, but her senses were alive to the smallest detail of day and route, the world new as on the first morning of the Lord’s creation.

  The road wound backward and forward among the watercourses, ascending gradually to the moors above, and the travellers were met on the crest of every rise by fresh families of moorland birds, which followed them with passionate song to the next escarpment and the next escort. The morning was half spent before they reached the plateau. Here the vegetation was thinner, the breeze colder. The heath spread itself out before the young traveller’s eyes, lonely and grey, with fewer and fewer birds, no brooks. Far, far away sparkled the white surface of a lake. One undulation succeeded another with its windswept, naked crest, its desolate gravel plains, and its tracts of thin soil, stripped of vegetation. Here and there were flats sparsely covered with moss, where mountain ewes and their lambs lay ruminating in the morning sunshine and took to their heels when they approached. The girl jumped down from the cart and walked along by her father’s side in the wide flowered dress, in an effort to warm herself up. The chill isolation of the moorland plateau reigned over these two wayfarers and they were silent. The dreary monotony of the landscape dulled their senses; she began to feel hungry and no longer looked for or delighted in the things that were strange to her.

  Again and again the girl waited for the next hilltop to refresh the eye with some variation, some new prospect, but always it was the same endless repetition except that the gleaming waters of the lake had long since been left in the rear. She had lost all her anticipation and had long grown tired of expecting anything in particular when the road, turning suddenly, dipped downward along the side of a deep ravine with a river at the bottom. And when she looked eastward along the gap, expecting to see another hill in front of her, lo and behold, there was nothing to see; it was as if the world came to a sudden stop before her eyes and the depth of the skies took its place, though with a different shade of blue. Or was it that the sky was supported out on the horizon there by a gleaming wall of blue-green glass? This strange blue colour seemed to embrace all the mysteries of distance, and she stood for a moment overwhelmed by the prospect of such infinity. It was as if she had come to the edge of the world.

  “Father,” she said in a perplexed and hesitating voice, “where are we?”

  “We’ve crossed the heath,” he replied. “That’s the ocean.”

  “The ocean,” she repeated in an awe-stricken whisper. She went on staring out to the east, and a cold shiver of joy passed through her at the thought of being fortunate enough to stand on the eastern margin of the moors and see where the land ends and the ocean begins, the sea of the world.

  “Isn’t there anything on the other side, then?” she asked finally.

  “The foreign countries are on the other side,” replied her father, proud of being able to explain such a vista. “The countries that they talk about in books,” he went on, “the kingdoms.”

  “Yes,” she breathed in an enchanted whisper.

  It was not
for some time that she realized how foolish had been her question, and that she might well have known that this was the very ocean over which young heroes sailed to win fame in the Rhymes; far, far across this mighty sea lay the lands of adventure. To her had been given the good fortune of looking upon the sea that swirls about the lands of romance; the road to the incredible. And when they halted at the top of the first slope on their way downhill, she had forgotten her hunger and was still staring out to sea in speechless wonder. Even in her wildest fancies the ocean had never been so huge.

  The eastern sides of the heath were steeper even than at home. Soon they were looking down upon the roofs of the market town and the coffee-brown vegetable gardens with their arrow-straight paths between the beds. Asta Sollilja had conjured up remarkable pictures of Fjord, but she would never have dreamed that so many houses, every one of them as impressive as the mansion at Utirauthsmyri, could have stood in a row along such a short stretch of road. And the smoke that was wafted up the hillsides from these houses smelled almost sweet in her nostrils, far different from the troublesome reek that poured out of the poor turf at home in Summerhouses. Soon they were passing the first houses on the hillside and beginning to meet all sorts of wayfarers, some walking, some riding, and some driving carts. They even met some finely dressed young men, wearing collars and ties on a week-day and with cigarettes between their lips, and these young men were so pleased with life that they looked at her and burst out laughing and had forgotten her with the next step they took.

  “Who were those young men?” she asked.

  But her father, it seemed, was not so deeply impressed by these elegant youths as she had been. “A crowd of cigarette-sucking louts,” he replied. And now they were walking on a paved road and there were houses on either side, and curtains and flowers in the windows; isn’t it wonderful the things that grow out in the world? And there, walking towards them arm in arm, came two girls, both wearing laced shoes and coats, one with a red hat, the other with a blue one, and they were both so smart that at a distance she thought that one of them at least must be Audur of Myri, but when they came nearer she thought the other must be Audur too, and could make neither head nor tail of it, but it turned out that they were only two town girls, and they shrieked with helpless laughter as they passed her. The people of Fjord seemed to be extraordinarily generous with their laughter and their happiness.