Read "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
ON the Saturday before Whitsun Asta Sollilja returned from Rauthsmyri; let us hope she had learned her Christianity, for she was to be confirmed on the morrow. But why had she come home today? Had not Bjartur arranged for a woman up-country to make her a dress and had he not paid for it in advance? Surely it had been decided that the girl was to return only when the confirmation ceremony was over, on Whit Sunday evening? What of it: she came home on the Saturday before Whitsun, late in the afternoon. It happened in this way:
Through the marshes, in a skirt that could have held half the parish, there came a woman riding a smart roan that picked its way daintily between the patches of bog. No, it was no lumbering old draught-horse, it was Rauthsmyri-Sorli with his spirited hoofs and his arched neck. Jumping from tussock to tussock behind them came Asta Sollilja, with downcast head and eyes looking neither to right nor to left, only one step at a time. She was crying.