Independent People

by Halldor Laxness

  Presently she began to prepare herself for the rest of her trip. She sat in the grass and tidied her hair and canted her head to one side; the boy watched her and canted his head to one side also, just a little, unconsciously, and presently they had finished canting their heads to one side. “Now we’ll have to get hold of the horses,” she said. They got hold of the horses. The horses went on snorting and trying to rub the bits out of their mouths. They hung to a rein each, she gazing once more in admiration over the ocean he was about to cross, he no longer able to take his eyes off her.

  “I suppose we’ll have to say good-bye now,” she said very sorrowfully.

  She offered him her hand, so warm, so young, stretching her arm so smooth and bright over the horse’s neck. He took it in silence and she saw that he wanted to accompany her farther, and thought she was in some ways very, very pleased, in others she was half inclined to be sorry.

  “When you come back again, you can come and see me, then,” she said, to comfort both herself and him.

  He made no reply. She lingered for a while and went on gazing at him; rested her elbows on the grey’s withers and went on gazing at him over the horse’s neck.

  ‘They’re a fine pair of horses,” he said, stroking the grey. She laughed then, for men are always the same, always seeking some excuse to spin out the occasion.

  “Would you like to sell me them?” he asked.

  “Sell you them? When you’re leaving for America? What would you want with horses?”

  “Oh, I just want them,” he replied. “I have so much money, you see.”

  “No, I won’t sell them to you, I’ll make you a present of them,” she said, “until you come back.”

  “What do they call you?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you when you return.”

  “I want to know your name while I’m away,” he said.

  “Why, were you going to write to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ride a little farther with me, then,” she said, “and we’ll talk it over.”

  They sprang on horseback and set off at the same furious speed as before, the grey leading, the roan following, westward over the moors. The ground was dry and the dust rose behind them in billowing clouds; the wind blew in their laughing faces as they sped straight into the eye of the westering sun, like supernatural beings riding the clouds into a burning fire. It was the loveliest journey in all the world. On and on they sped, without slackening speed, without talking it over. Far over the heath they glimpsed the sheen of a little white lake, otherwise the moss was grey and the withered grass white, the rocks black, the turfless patches of earth red. The mountains far away to the south were bathed in violet, the glaciers beyond them snowy white, the ocean lost behind them long ago, night day. Along the side of the road panic-stricken heath-birds scuttled squawking over the grass before they rose into the air. Mother ewes and their lambs took to their heels and were lost to sight.

  When at length they reached the lake, she turned her horse without warning off the road, and the roan followed, first over a tract of moss-grown stones, then over a marshy patch, and finally on to the banks, which were covered with dry meadow grass, green as if it had been cultivated. There were two swans on the lake. She jumped down from her horse, and he also jumped down. They were on the higher part of the moors now; the shadows very long, the sun touching the western brink of the heath, the air growing rapidly cooler. Strapped to the back of her saddle she carried a thick coat, and when she had unbuckled it and cast it over her shoulders, she produced sweets from all pockets and offered him some. Then she sat down on the bank.

  “Sit down,” she said, and he sat down.

  “Look at the swans,” she said, and he looked at the swans.

  “Aren’t you cold?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  “I can see from your face that you’re cold. Come a little closer and I'll give you a corner of my coat round you.”

  “It isn’t at all necessary,” he said, moving closer so that she could throw a corner of her coat round him.

  “Your clothes smell of smoke,” she said with a laugh. “And feathers too.”

  “Eh?” said he. “Smoke? Feathers?”

  “Yes, but your hair is ever so lovely,” she said, stroking his hair with her bright hands, “and you’re so broad across here. And here. And you have such manly eyes.”

  The swans swam nearer the land, peering at the girl and the boy curiously, with an occasional low gobble. “Look how nobly he swims, how gracefully she follows in his wake.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at the swans and seeing all that she saw. At first they had seemed just ordinary birds, but now he realized that they were a couple, a he and a she, not just any two birds, but two birds with a significance.

  “They’re in love, you see,” she said, her eyes still fixed upon them.

  He gripped her hand in silent answer, quite involuntarily; what other answer could he make? He sensed the warmth of her young bosom; it was life itself; and he sat holding her hand and she offered no objections and went on gazing at the swans as they swam to and fro in wary patrol, a yard or two from land, peering at them inquisitively. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, and she shivered and moved nearer still; her hair tickled his face. He pressed his burning lips to her cheek.

  “How do you think you’re going to get back to Fjord again now?” she asked, with a roguish sidewise glance of her eyes.

  “There’s no hurry,” he said. “I have the night before me.” And added, in a whisper: “I’m ever so fond of you. Won’t you promise to wait for me?”

  “Sh, don’t talk like that,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth, first once with a laugh, then twice with a little sob, then repeatedly and passionately, as if she owned him; and closed her eyes.

  When at long length he threw aside the coat, under which they had been lying, and rose to his feet, the sun was far below the mountains, the air chilly, and the swans—the swans had disappeared. Perhaps there had never been any, all sheer illusion, it was only an ordinary night, a spring night over the heath. She told him to go look for the horses, then turned her back on him and hiding herself under the coat, proceeded to arrange her clothes and tidy her hair beneath its protection. He was completely devoid of thought, a man who had lost every aim in time and place, both point and line. The horses had wandered round to the other side of the lake, far away. The roan had rubbed his bit out, the rope halter was lost. He was very refractory without a bridle, and the lad had great trouble in catching him; he had to wade knee-deep in mud through the bogs. There was very little glory left in his patent-leather shoes by the time he was finished. He enticed him eventually alongside the grey and, catching hold of him, hastily tied the cord he had bought under his lower lip. When he returned at last with the horses, the girl had grown very impatient and asked him why he had been away so long. She threw the reins over the grey’s neck without loss of time, mounted, slapped her horse on the groin, and was off at full speed, over all that lay before her.

  The roan proved, if anything, even more intractable now that he had only an improvised bit and a single rein. He ran for a while in erratic curves and circles, then followed this up with a variety of other antics, so that soon Gvendur came to realize that he was sitting an unbroken foal whose tricks and whimsies made him an impossible mount. When at last he had got him on to the road again, the girl was far away on the crest of a hill and still maintaining her initial speed over the undulating heath. The roan caught sight of her and, giving vent to a loud neigh, set off in wild pursuit. But gradually it was borne in on Gvendur that his mount was less of a stayer than a sprinter; already he was in a bath of sweat, and when descending a hill, he lost his footing and tumbled, with the result that Gvendur grazed his cheek-bones and his knuckles. He took out his watch to see whether the throw had broken it, but it was unbroken; and two o’clock. The girl continued to increase her lead. Two o’clock—he had come much too far, he would b
e lucky indeed if he got back to Fjord by rising-time—and what was he to do with the horse? He would have to return the girl her horse, surely, before setting out on his return walk to Fjord. “Hey,” he yelled, “hey!” But they were so far apart by now that there was no hope of her hearing him, and besides, she was out of sight beyond a roll in the moors. There’s no two ways about it, I’ll have to catch up with her and give her the horse,” he thought He tried to make the cord into a double rein, to see if the roan would answer any better, then mounted and endeavoured to urge it forward. “Hey,” he yelled, “hey! Your horse, your horse!” But when he had reached the western brow of the plateau, whence one could see right down to Summerhouses, it was past three o’clock, dawn at his back, and far, far away down the valley puffs of dust from her horse’s hoofs told him that her speed had not lessened. There was no longer the remotest likelihood of his catching up with her, especially now that the roan was showing unmistakable signs of fatigue. He dismounted, and curlews, wide awake, bubbled at him from every rock, every mound on the ridges; what the devil was he to do now? If he left her horse here and walked back to Fjord, there was little chance of catching the ship the way that matters stood now, unless of course its departure had been considerably delayed. It was three o’clock. He was tired already, spent with the long bareback ride and the falls he had sustained; and not only tired, but hungry as well; he remembered all at once that he had eaten nothing, except the sweets she had given him, since leaving the lodging-house some time early yesterday morning. Suppose he were to borrow the horse without, but in anticipation of, the owner’s consent, as was said to be justifiable in cases of extreme necessity; suppose he were to ride it straight back to Fjord, would it avail at all, would he be in time for the ship? After cudgelling his brains for a while, he decided that he ought at least to make the attempt; this was obviously a case of extreme necessity and no occasion for an over-scrupulous sense of honesty—and having decided to ride back to Fjord, he mounted once again. But the foal now refused to budge, and though the lad thumped it repeatedly with heel and fist, no amount of blows could produce any effect beyond a half-hearted effort to unseat him. It knew that its grey stall-brother was making off to the west, and no human power could persuade it to take the opposite direction. In the end the rider gave up in despair and allowed the horse to take its own road. Off it ambled down the hillside, picking its way cautiously down the road into the valley, with an occasional yawn, because of the cord, and an occasional shake of the head, an occasional snort or a neigh. When they reached the marshes opposite Summerhouses they caught a last distant glimpse of the girl and the grey on the skyline before they disappeared over the top of the ridge in the west. He managed to force his steed up the path leading to the croft. After unfastening the string, he let it loose in the home-field; the corners of its mouth were sore. It rolled about in the grass in front of the croft, stood up and shook itself, shivering a little at groin and shoulder, lathered in sweat. The sun was shining, the shadows cast by the croft long as those of some mighty palace. No part of night or day wears such beauty as the time of the sun’s rising, for then there is quiet, loveliness, and splendour over everything. And now over everything there was quiet, loveliness, and splendour. The song of the birds was sweet and happy. The mirror-like lake and the smoothly flowing river gleamed and sparkled with a silvery, entrancing radiance. The Blue Fells lay gazing in rapture up at their heaven, as if they had nothing in common with this world. They had nothing in common with this world. And in the unsubstantiality of its serene beauty and its peaceful dignity the valley, too, seemed to have nothing in common with this world. There are times when the world seems to have nothing in common with the world, times when one can no more understand oneself than if one had been immortal.

  No one awake, or anything like awake, on the croft, and yet the lad had never known such a day. He sat down in the grass, with his back to the garden wall, and began thinking. He began thinking of America, the glorious land across the ocean, the America in which he could have been anything he chose. Had he lost it for good and all, then? Oh, well, it mattered little. Love is better; love is more glorious than America. Love is the one true America. Could it be true that she loved him? Yes, there was nothing half so true. There is nothing half so unlike itself as the world, the world is incredible. True, she had ridden away and left him, but then she had been on one of the famous Rauthsmyri thoroughbreds, and possibly it had wanted to get home. She had never looked around, never slackened speed, but in spite of this seeming indifference, he was convinced, on this incomparable morning, that at some future date, say when he had become the freeholder of Summerhouses, he would bring her back home as his wife. Since it had begun in such a fashion, how could it end otherwise? What he had found was happiness, though she had ridden away and left him behind—and again and again he excused her on the ground that she had not been able to manage her horse. He was determined to spend his American money on a good horse, a first-class thoroughbred, so that in future he would be able to ride side by side with his sweetheart. Thus he lay stretched out in the grass of his native croft, looking up into the sky, into the blue, comparing the love he had won with the America he had lost. Leifur the Lucky also had lost America. Yes, love was better—and thus over and over again. He saw her still in his mind’s eye as she swept over the undulating heath, flitting through the lucid night like an airy vision, her golden locks streaming in the wind, her coat flapping against the horse’s rump. And he saw himself following her still, from crest to crest—till she was lost in the blue. And he himself was lost in the blue.

  He slept.

  POLITICS

  WHEREIN lay the secret of Ingolfur Amarson’s success? To what gifts, what accomplishments, did he owe the speed of the ascent that had carried him so rapidly from obscurity to fame, from nonentity to national eminence? Already, in spite of his youth, he was one of the most important and most influential men in the country, a national figure whose photograph was the daily delight of the newspapers, whose name the euphonic pride of the fattest headlines. Did he perhaps owe his rise, like great men before him, to a constant rooting and grubbing for personal profit? Was he always on the hunt for anything that people in need might have for sale, so as to be able to sell it again to others who could not do without it and who were driven, possibly, by an even greater need? Had he, for example, appropriated a croft here, a croft there in years of depression and sold them again when prosperity returned and prices rose? Had he perhaps lent people hay in a hard spring and demanded the same weight in sheep as security? Or food and money to the starving, at a usurious rate of interest? Or had he achieved greatness by stinting himself of food and drink, like an ill-provisioned criminal in flight through the wilds, or a peasant who, in spite of slaving eighteen hours a day, has been told by his dealer that his debts are still increasing and that he has now reached the limit of his credit? Or by having one solitary chair in his room, and a broken one at that, and shambling about in a filthy assortment of mouldy old rags all day, like a wretched tramp or a farm labourer? Or was the method he employed that of accumulating thousand upon thousand at the bottom of his chest until he was rich enough to found a savings bank and start lending folk money at a legal rate of interest, and then of standing in front of destitute men and informing them that the depth of his poverty was such that soon he would have to sell the very soul from his body if he wished to escape imprisonment for debt? No, Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson was by no means such a person; all his greatness came from his mother’s side. Then was he the sort of person who owned a number of boats and made poverty-stricken men catch fish for him at the risk of their lives? Did he grab all the profit on the fish that others had caught and buy mahogany furniture, works of art, and electric lighting with it, while those who had caught all the fish received a pittance that barely allowed them to buy their wives a penny packet of hairpins by the way of a luxury? Or did he draw a fat income from Denmark and other distant countries for managing the sort of
business that sold the necessities of existence to men who in strict reality could not afford to exist? Or did he run his own business and, while crawling in the dust before the richer farmers and allowing them to decide the value of their sheep themselves, because they could always threaten to take their custom elsewhere, did he rule like a tyrant over the unfortunate peasants who owed him money, starving them every spring and robbing them of every opportunity of advancement? No, Ingolfur Arnarson’s road to honour and repute had been neither the miser’s nor the merchant’s bloody career, hitherto the sole paths to wealth and true dignity recognized as legal by the Icelandic community and its justice.

  What made Ingolfur Arnarson a great man was first and foremost his ideals, his unquenchable love of mankind, his conviction that the people needed improved conditions of life and better facilities for cultural advancement, his determination to mitigate his fellow men’s sufferings by establishing a better form oí government in the country. This government, instead of being a helpless puppet in the hands of the peasant’s ruthless oppressors, the merchants, would be the small producer’s, especially the peasant’s, most powerful ally in his struggle for existence. Middlemen and other parasites would no longer be allowed to batten on the farming classes. Ingolfur wanted to elevate the farmer’s life to a position of honour and dignity, not in word alone, but in deed. Because of these ideals the farmers had chosen him to represent them in the Althingi and other places where their welfare was at stake. Now, so far this constituency had been completely neglected by the government. It was not that old Dr. Finsen, Bruni’s mouthpiece, had been inactive in Parliament; merely that he had concentrated his endeavours upon one particular cause, that of persuading the Treasury to rebuild and extend quays and breakwaters which had been rebuilt and extended for the merchant the previous spring, but which high tides had washed away like so much spit as soon as completed. For upwards of twenty years he had pursued this recurring object with commendable zeal and undiminished vigour, producing his bill with such annual regularity that eventually it became known as a perpetual motion. But when Ingolfur took his seat in Parliament, he had the whole matter quietly shelved and the building of piers and breakwaters was never again mentioned in public. The time was not long, however, before he was having modern roads laid and fine bridges built to improve communications throughout his constituency. And this was only the beginning. He wanted now to have large-scale agriculture introduced and decent houses built for folk. The National Bank in Reykjavik, which hitherto had acted as a sort of horn of plenty for speculators in cod and herring, was to be liquidated and placed under State control as an agricultural bank, since the State already lay under heavy obligations as surety for its debts. This agricultural bank would then lend money to the farmers, at a low rate of interest, for building-purposes and the better cultivation of the land. He proposed in addition to direct a certain amount of public money into a special fund that would help the farmers to purchase agricultural implements, everything from ploughs, harrows, tractors, mowers, and mechanical rakes down to sewing-machines and separators. Another subsidy would provide the farmers with sewers and manure cisterns, for he was the sworn enemy of muck-heaps and open cesspools. The provision of electric lighting in the country district was also very close to his heart, but this plan, unfortunately, was still rather nebulous in form. Waking and sleeping he worked upon the problems presented by the new era of rural colonization and development, and though he was still cooperative manager in name and still gave his permanent address as Fjord, one could hardly say that he ever went there except on a flying visit, for now that a deputy looked after the co-operative society for him, he spent the greater part of the year in Reykjavik, where he edited his party’s newspaper, worked on parliamentary committees, and engaged in various other activities as guardian of the farmer’s interests. For his personal interests and profit he had never a moment to spare. He was, in a word, the Ingolfur Arnarson of the new era, the Icelandic pioneer of the twentieth century, differing from his illustrious predecessor in this respect only, that he was a Jonsson.