Independent People by Halldor Laxness

MANY a man may have his doubts for the moment, but when all comes to all and a long view is taken, one discovers usually that things have been making some sort of forward progress, some headway or other. And a man's dreams have a habit of coming true, more especially if he has made no particular effort to fulfil them-and there on the paving, before the crofter has quite waked up to the fact, lie the first loads of cement for building. It is popularly supposed that when a man has made himself worthy of living in a real house, he will be given a real house to live in; it sprouts out of the earth for him of its own accord, they say; life bestows on the individual all that he is worthy of, and the same is said to be true of the nation as a whole. The war raised many people, and one or two countries, to positions of great worth, it is, in fact, extremely doubtful whether any number of politicians, however brilliant, however high-minded, can do more for Iceland than one war accompanied by plenty of lively slaughter in foreign parts. After Bjartur had become a person of great worth, even he was prone to admit on occasion that life had sometimes been pretty hard in Summerhouses in the old days, but one has to take a few knocks if one wants to get on, surely, and anyway we never ate other folk's bread. Other folk's bread is the most virulent form of poison that a free and independent man can take; other folk's bread is the only thing that can rob him of independence and the one true freedom. Time was when certain persons had tried to force upon him the gift of a cow, but he was most certainly not the man to accept presents from his enemies; and when, in the following year, he had slaughtered this same cow, it was because he had had a distant goal in prospect in his husbandry, or, as he had told the workmen in those far-off days, because he knew quite well what he was going to do with his money, maybe he was going to build himself a palace with it. And it was in very much the same strain that he spoke down in the co-operative store now. "A big house or nothing at all," he said, "two storeys and a third under gables at the least. " They managed, however, to persuade him that it would be better to have a nice, well-built cellar and one storey less, which would make three storeys just the same, basement, ground floor, upper floor. He raised a loan in the savings bank. The croft, with its lack of good buildings, was of course not considered sufficient security for a long loan, so it was only granted for a period of one year at a time. It was considered suitable to lend thirty per cent on the strength of the first mortgage on the land, though only provided that the co-operative society went surety. The co-operative society accepted the responsibility immediately in exchange for a second mortgage on the land. The savings bank then declared itself not unwilling to advance another loan in the autumn, when the house was finished building, subject to a further mortgage on the house and property together. From this new loan the co-operative society was to be repaid the loan they had advanced for building materials. Such are the workings of higher finance, and in return for all this the crofter voted for Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson, that he might sit as his representative in the Althingi and solve the nation's problems, and shortly afterwards the co-operative manager was declared elected, and merchant power had thereby suffered a second defeat on this particular front. All those who had voted for the co-operative manager had reason now to rejoice, whereas those who had voted for the banker gnawed their knuckles and cursed themselves black in the face, partly because the bank was in a pretty shaky condition and might, indeed, be declared insolvent at any moment, partly because these same people had shown themselves in open enmity of the Rauthsmyrians; and to whom could they look now in the midst of their self-wrought destruction? Then, to make the outlook blacker still, those idiotic foreigners didn't seem to have had the sense to keep their precious war going for another twelve-month or so, and it looked as if the bottom might fall out of the farmer's market any day now.