Settlers of the Marsh (20 page)

He scanned her face: he reproached himself for doing so: but there was an irresistible fascination about it. The mask was repaired; but it was an imperfect piece of work, betraying hurry. Since he knew it was there, he could detect the true face under the mask.

She felt his scrutiny and asked peevishly, “What are you looking at me that way for?”

Niels came near saying a harsh word and betraying himself. But he laughed and said, with an almost grim jest, “I suppose I can look at my wife if I want to, can't I?”

S
HORTLY BEFORE
the threshers were expected, she began to sit often in absent-minded musing.

One night she said, with a sigh, “I'm suffering from the tooth-ache.”

“I'm sorry,” said Niels, though he did not know what a tooth-ache was. “I've heard they've got a good dentist at Balfour. How if I took you over as soon as threshing is done? I want to buy a democrat anyway. Might just as well get it there. I could take a few steers. Bobby might come along on horseback.”

“Oh no,” she replied. “Never mind.”

But three, four days later she introduced the subject again. “I'll tell you, Niels,” she said. “I'd like to go to the city for a week. I need a few things in the line of wardrobe; and I could get my teeth attended to at the same time.”

“Wardrobe?” he asked, much surprised. “Surely you've got much more as it is than you can ever use here in the country.”

“You don't understand,” she replied, after a pause which had the effect of a reproach. “Most of my things are out of style. I want them made over.”

“But your teeth … They say the dentist at Balfour is equal to any man in the city.”

“He wouldn't be at Balfour,” she said distantly. “It always pays to get the best.”

“It'll cost a mint of money,” Niels said musingly. He had never been in the city himself except when he had passed through as an
immigrant
.

“I've got my own money,” she said. “Rowdle is supposed to pay up after threshing.”

“That so?” he said absent-mindedly. Then, rousing himself, “Well, I expect to pay my wife's way.” And, after another few minutes of silence, “I've half a mind to come along. I've never seen the city … The crop is good …”

She did not answer right away. At last, “I'm afraid you'd find it very tedious.”

He looked up. A question hovered on his lips: How about you, then? But he did not utter it.

A day or so later she reverted once more to the topic. “I ought to look after my money, too. It's in the bank drawing three percent. I could do better than that by investing it.”

“Sure,” Niels replied with a sigh. “By all means do.”

N
IELS THRESHED
. Mrs. Lund—whose store in Odensee had been closed by the creditors—came to do the cooking, with Mrs. Schultze to help her. Mrs. Lund was going to take a position at Judge Cameron's in Poplar Grove, as house-keeper at good wages.

Mrs. Lindstedt sat in a corner of the kitchen, in a silk dressing gown, relieved of all responsibility, gossiping, smiling, ironical. Niels had no time to notice her. She was outside of things, an onlooker pure and simple.

Wheat yielded forty bushels to the acre. The granary proved much too small to hold the wealth. The last of it had to be bagged and carried up into the loft of the new stable. Niels took it there, carrying two bags at a time, to the huge admiration of Bobby and others. The threshers made a jest of it, shouting and blowing the whistle for him to hurry up. Even Niels could not help laughing, a thing he rarely did these days.

On the third day the threshers departed, wending their way across the corner of the Marsh. The White Range Line House sank back into quiet and night.

A
WEEK OR SO
later Niels took his wife to Minor, drew a few hundred dollars from the bank, and saw her off.

Plowing started.

No matter what his worries, his thoughts, his suspicions might be, the farm demanded his work, and he gave it.

While the work was done, thoughts came and went …

He thought of concrete things, of his Sunday evenings, for instance.

He and his wife were sitting in that dining room on the lower floor … Perhaps in the gathering dusk, accentuated by the shadows of the trees in the big, rustling bluff that overtowered the house; perhaps by the light of the tall floor-lamp with its huge, silken shade. Each of them was dreaming, musing: each along his own, peculiar lines: smiling perhaps; or perhaps a prey to some hidden anguish. Sometimes she was reading; and when he, too, got up to fetch book or magazine, she would raise her head and follow him with her eyes through the room and smile at what he reached for. He would have liked to fathom that smile, to probe its significance; but somehow he never did. Still, once or twice he had tried her kind of reading: some of her books, perhaps most of them, were translations from the French: one of them she had given him to read:
Madame Bovary
. She had given it to him with a peculiar look in her eyes … After the first hundred pages or so he sat aghast. He had not read on. The
story of this little doctor's wife
amazed and terrified him. What might it be written for? … He tried an American novel. He laid it aside because it seemed silly. In vain he searched for something that might enlighten him as to his mentality, that dealt with problems which were his …

On week-day evenings it was different. He tried to sit up with her, lounging in one of the chairs: her life seemed to begin at night. She often became gay, sometimes reckless when the day was gone. “I wish there were a show around the corner,” she said once; another time, “If only there were a street nearby, with electric lights and a crowd of people rolling along; with faces to watch and clothes to criticise …”

Then he would be overcome by the sleepiness of him who all day long has given of his strength without stinting: he spared neither himself nor others. He would stretch and yawn. She would drop her book and look up, with a curious smile. He would try to hold out; but in vain. Perhaps he would say, after a while, “Well, how about hitting the hay?” And she would nod, perhaps. Then he would bolt both doors—before he was married, he had never troubled about that—turn the light out, and go up, she following. Five minutes later he would be asleep. But should he wake up, at midnight or later, he would still see the light from her room which cast a yellow gleam on the partition between the landing where he slept and that mysterious second room about which she had never evinced curiosity.

Or he would not say anything at all. He would simply sit and stare and yawn till drowsiness overcame him: then his head would fall back, and he would go to sleep, snoring. As soon, however, as he heard himself snore, an uncomfortable feeling would come over him: for he seemed to feel her eye, critical, condemning. He would rouse himself; but if he succeeded, it was not for long.

And finally, when he was sinking away into the very depths of sleep, he would suddenly feel her touch on his shoulder: a summons to go to bed …

In the mornings he had been getting up very early, at half past three or four o'clock: she had risen half an hour later to prepare breakfast and to go to bed again. He had milked the two cows and put the milk in pans in the cellar for the cream to rise; the cream from the previous milking he had dipped off and taken to the kitchen in a pitcher; and the skimmed milk he had fed to the pigs. The rest of the cows were not milked: the calves were left with them. Then he had lighted the kitchen fire, put the kettle on, and gone to the stable to feed and harness the horses. There, Bobby would join him; and the plans for the day would be outlined briefly. The morning had rolled off like clockwork. Nearly always he had heard his wife's alarm bell ringing when he crossed the yard on his way to the stable.

Yes, the daily routine looked peaceful enough as he reviewed it, ruminatingly, while riding the plow.

But! Was there anything in it that bound man and wife together? … Nothing.

They lived side by side: without common memories in the past, without common interests in the present, without common aims in the future. Why were they married?

The worst of it was that there were decades upon decades of exactly the same thing ahead …

He saw himself sitting on his yard, an old man, a man of eighty: and by his side sat an old woman, eighty-six years old: and both followed separate lines of thought: each followed his own memories back over half a century: not a pulse-beat in common …

Each was facing eternity alone! …

They were strangers; strangers they would remain …

What had led them together? Niels thought of the thrills which this woman had had power to send through him in years gone by. He thought of the night of their union: their pulses had beaten together: they had beaten together in lust. For how long? Still, there had been hope. That hope was gone.

He wanted children. Did she?

Something that had been puzzling him very much arose again before his mind.

In certain moments there was a peculiar look in her eyes. He had seen that look before: alluring, seductive, appealing to something in him of which he was ashamed.

And as he rode the plow, in those days of the Indian summer: those days that before all others are reminiscent and chaste: when the light of the sun seems to be floating in the air like millions of bronzed little powdery particles—one day that memory crystallised.

He had been going with Hahn through the street in Minor; they had met three ladies, painted and powdered and dressed conspicuously, so as to make their appearance, in the light of Hahn's revelation, an advertisement of their trade: and from under their heavy eye-lids the same look had shot forth …

What was it that had led them together?

Lust was the defiling of an instinct of nature: it was sin.

When he shuddered at this realisation, the memory of the feeling came back to him which had assailed him on that evening of Olga's wedding in Lund's house: the feeling of disaster, of a shameful bondage that was inescapable. His doom had overtaken him, irrevocably, irremediably: he was bond-slave to a moment in his life, to a moment in the past, for all future times …

And as he reached this conclusion, in those halcyon October days, he at last faced once more his ancient dreams. Quite impersonally, with a melancholy kind of regret, with almost that kind of homesickness which overcomes us when we look back at the destinies, fixed and unchangeable, as unrolled in a very beloved book. He thought of that vision which had once guided him, goaded him on when he had first started out to conquer the wilderness: the vision of a wife and children.

The Wages of Sin is Death! I shall visit the Sins of the Father …

What?

Children?

His eye went dim; his head turned with him as he realised it. No … Children would be a perpetuation of the sin of a moment …

He did not want children out of this woman!

M
RS. LINDSTEDT
did not return after a week. Instead, a letter came, asking for more money. Friends had taken much of her time. The various matters of business of which he knew were only half attended to … She would need another week … So, with her love …

Niels left Bobby alone for a day, went to town, sent the money …

During her absence a marsh-fire broke out, threatening the whole settlement which had been growing, growing.…

All the settlers turned out during the night, to draw a fire-break across the Marsh, four, five miles south of Niels' place.

In the lurid light of the approaching flames, half choked with smoke, Niels and Bobby strode along behind their plows …

A tall, slim figure passed them, plowing along on the other side of the strip of breaking.

Niels peered across; he could not make out who it was. The head was turned as if on purpose.

“Who was that?” he asked of the boy behind him.

“Ellen Amundsen, I believe,” the answer came.

For a moment Niels' heart stood still. Of her he had not thought. It had come to this that they passed each other silently in the night …

W
HEN THE TIME CAME
, Niels went to town to get his wife. Snow had fallen prematurely.

Mrs. Lindstedt seemed pleased to be back. She had had everything she had gone for attended to. She made an attempt to be friendly, conciliating: as if she wished to make up for her absence. And yet, there was something subtly new about her: something almost as if she were disappointed; something also which was disappointing to Niels.

Niels went to town once more. He thought his wife might wish to be taken out, to see the country, perhaps to visit … He bought, at a sale, democrat, drivers, and cutter …

Then it came home to him. Yes, in the White Range Line House an indefinable change was taking place between husband and wife.

From the beginning there had been about their moments of union something artificial, perhaps because their importance was so hugely exaggerated, they being the only bond between them …

It would be wrong to say that Niels did not see or at least try to see her side of the matter. Sometimes he thought of her not without sympathy; but only since, in those fall musings, he had accepted his own life as irretrievably ruined—at least as far as a life is the gradual approach, through an infinite number of compromises, to a preconceived goal, to an ideal, a dream or a vision which may never be completely realised.

What was her side of it?

She, a city woman, with the tastes and inclinations of such an one, was banished to the farm. It was her fault, granted. Yet her life was a life in exile. She had lived it before; she knew what it meant; if she had blindly gone into it, she had no excuse; all that was true. The fact remained that it was so.

He realised the dreariness, the utter emptiness of her life. She got up in the morning to prepare breakfast and went to bed again. She rose to prepare dinner and to get some semblance of order into the house and went to bed again. She rose to get supper …