Independent People by Halldor Laxness

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.