Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Author:Halldór Laxness
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Iceland, Nobel Prize for Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307486264
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1946-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

BUILDING

THIS Bailiff Jon of Utirauthsmyri was a person who had long been renowned for his ability to sell sheep wherever he pleased and at whatever price suited him best, while lesser farmers had to content themselves with revolving on Bruni’s tether of debt. He was the one man in the district who could afford to hate Tulinius Jensen in public. He bought people’s sheep and drove them north over the high heath and sold them for huge sums of money in Vik, because he had a share in the business there. But as time went on this co-operative society epidemic began spreading farther and farther afield till eventually a society was established in Vik, and this society grew so rapidly that the Vik business died of a wasting disease, and that in spite of the Bailiff’s support, which goes to show how dangerous societies can be for the individual in these hard times, however strong that individual may happen to be. One would naturally have imagined that Jon of Myri would now turn tooth and nail upon such unions of the crofters as the one that had just destroyed his business in Vik. But what happened? He sent away to the south country for his son, the secretary. He started a society in Fjord along with Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson. And into this society he not only raked all the solvent farmers from the surrounding districts, including everyone down to the most abject peasant, but started lending people money on whatever terms they liked so that they could throw off Bruni’s yoke and join his cooperative society. ‘We must stand together, we farmers,” he said. He who so far had always stood alone was now of a sudden standing together. Such people know the tricks of flattering and fawning all right. “If the Icelandic farming community is ever to become anything but the miserable doormat of merchant power, we must take concerted action and rally round the standard of our own financial interests. The co-operative societies give full value for the farmers’ produce and sell them their necessities at practically cost-price; they are actually not business enterprises, but charitable institutions owned and used by the farmers themselves for their own benefit. A man who sells us thirty lambs receives something like sixty crowns in dividend if world markets are favourable. A man paying in three to four hundred lambs would receive a dividend of say a thousand crowns. Anyone can see how essential these societies are to rich and poor alike. No one steals from anyone.”

But with the autumn a letter arrived from Bruni informing all and sundry that he had just returned from a trip abroad. On this trip he had been fortunate enough to secure goods at particularly advantageous prices and had concluded negotiations with the Continent that insured his customers quite exceptional terms in the future; price-list enclosed. He was undercutting Ingolfur Arnarson’s society on all shop goods, outbidding it on all forms of produce. Never had marketing been so profitable in Fjord as it was that autumn.

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