Settlers of the Marsh (23 page)

Niels forestalled her, barring the way.

She turned to the front door.

“That door is locked,” he said grimly.

Her arms sank helpless.

“Do you mean to say,” she gasped; and for a moment her woman's nature overwhelmed her so that she sank into a chair. Then she rose again. “Do you mean to say I am a prisoner here?”

“Just about.”

A silence of several minutes ensued, she standing by the table, he in the kitchen door.

She became calm, extraordinarily, dangerously calm.

“Why?” she asked in a voice cool, measured, almost impersonally enquiring, as if she were solving an intricate problem in mathematics.

That voice carried a sting. It roused red anger. “What have you been doing in the city?” he snarled.

She faced him, looked at him, laughed contemptuously. She measured him with her eyes, from head to foot and back again. When she spoke, her voice was ice-cold.

“Look at the fellow!” she said. Then, inner fires breaking through for a moment, bursting into flame, smoke, and ashes. “Look at the contemptible scoundrel! How he stands there and sneers, secure in his brute strength, abusing a woman! If only I had a revolver, a knife …”

She stopped, realising that she was becoming theatrical, raging, hardly able to prevent herself from breaking into a sob of impotence … Again she rallied, searching for the sharpest sting in her quiver.

“Why do you ask?” she said. “Is it jealousy? I know it is not. I'll tell you what it is: it is that ridiculous man-nature in you. You married me. You don't want me any longer. But I am not to belong to any one else. I am to be your property, your slave-property … Since you have no further use for me, you want to fling me on this … this manure-pile here.” With a comprehensive sweep of her arm. “But let any one come and want to pick me up because I may still be of use to him, and at once the dog-in-the-manger instinct that lurks in every man pops up, and you put me under lock and key! … What did you marry me for, anyway?”

“That you know as well as I.”

“No,” she said, curiously. “I don't. I know why you married me, for what reasons; I don't know what for. The reason is clear enough. You married me because you were such an innocence, such a milk-sop that you could not bear the thought of having gone to bed with a woman who was not your wife. You had not the force to resist when I wanted you—yes, I wanted you, for a night or an hour … and you had to legalise the thing behind-hand. That's why you married me. You wouldn't have needed to bother. I had had what I wanted. I did not ask you for anything beyond. I'm honest. I'm not a sneak who asks for one thing to get another. I did not know all this at the time, that goes without saying. I know it now. Had I known it then, you would never have snared me. At the time I thought you were really in love with me, you really wanted me, you really wanted me! Not only a woman, any woman. Do you know what you did when you married me? You prostituted me if you know what that means. That's what you did. After having made a convenience of me. When you married me, you committed a crime!”

She paused. Once more her pose was theatrical.

Niels' thoughts were in a turmoil. That woman was right! That was why he had married her! Not she, he stood indicated. For a moment he was helpless. Then he felt that she was evading the question. Anger over-mastered him once more. “What have you been doing in the city?”

She remained perfectly self-possessed. “You want to know? I'll tell you. I amused myself. I had a good time. In the company of men who appreciate me. Men who are not dumb brutes. Men who seek me for the sake of what I am … That they incidentally desired my body also …”

Niels had been listening almost with curiosity. But now a tormenting agony invaded him; his joints were loosening, as if he must pitch forward. “Which you gave?”

She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “That's it, is it? All the rest does not count; but that one thing … That's where the sting lies, is it? … Now I'll tell you something that will really sting when you come to think of it; provided that I've ever been anything to you at all; and provided that you have brains enough to understand it … Yes; which I gave the last time I went.”

“What do you mean?” he stammered.

Her attitude changed. She spoke very quietly, as to a child. “I'll tell you … But let's sit down. I'm getting tired. There isn't any use in yelling at each other, either. I can tell you this in perfect ease. It's all past history for me.”

She sat down; the man in the door remained standing.

“There was a time,” she went on, “when I was in love with you. Even such as I do fall in love, you know. I admired your strength of body, your build, your steely eyes, your straight mouth. I admired the energy and determination with which you learned English and went to work. I thought you were a man. The class of people I had associated with—artists, writers, newspaper men—are mostly weaklings. Business men are dull. I had been married to one for altogether too long. I wanted you for years before I had you. Love is a fleeting thing with me. Desire is not. Love has to be conquered again and again. A sense of duty does not exist for me. But so long as I had not had you, I wanted you. I might have gone on wanting you, tempting you, if you had not been weak. I felt sure that you would marry that Amundsen girl. If you had married her—as, by the way, you should have done—I should have been unhappy for the rest of my days: if I had not had you. Once I'd had you, I should not have cared. Well, I had you … You proposed marriage to me. You will remember that I hesitated; that I did not at once consent. All kinds of thoughts went through my head. I came to the conclusion that, like the floorwalker, you really loved me. That you would reconquer me from day to day as he had done. I was tired of being a bird of passage. There were horrible things in my memory of the past. Money had often been scarce. What the floorwalker had left was too much to starve on; not enough to live on. As I said, I thought you were a man. You would steady and hold me. I thought I could waive my need for stimulants. I could spin myself into a cocoon with reading. I thought I could force myself to do the work which is indispensable in a house. I told you I never could be a farming woman. You insisted. It never occurred to me that you might be weak enough to want marriage on moral grounds. I gave in …

“Then I came out here. I did what could not be left undone. It was slavery; it was a horror. To wash dishes, to sweep a house … to do anything on time, regularly, as a routine, day after day: all that is a horror to me. But I did it. I was in love with you, continued in love with what I thought you were. I bore the rest. I still admired your simplicity, your energy, your power and steadiness in work …

“But then, during the latter part of the first summer, I became conscious of the fact—I was for ever brooding—that it was always I who came to you … never you who came to me. A suspicion took hold of me. I began to doubt you. I began to doubt your love. More and more life became a drudgery. I thought of a test. That was why I went to the city. I needed a recreation, it is true, a change. I sought my old company. It seemed hard to return to this place in the wilderness. Yet, I longed for you. But I made up my mind, when I did return, to withdraw, to wait for you, not to go to you again. You did not come. You let me drift, no matter where. Half from resentment, half from a desire to test you further, I stopped the work I had been doing. I waited; oh, so anxiously I waited for you to scold, to get angry, to beat me if need be … Just to show that you did care, that I was not simply a nothing, a figure-head, an encumbrance to you …

“You did nothing of the kind. It left you indifferent …

“I was not needed. Why was I here? Why was I sacrificing everything I had valued: the colour, the gayness, the zest of life for a man to whom I was nothing? Who perhaps hated me, had hated me ever since I had been his wife? And I became aware of the possibility that perhaps one day I might come to hate you.

“When the Nelsons came, my resentment grew too strong for me. As yet, even then, it was half done on purpose when I insulted you. The insult glanced off.

“I made another test. Again I went to the city. I wanted you to say no, then; that I could not go. I wanted you to be surprised that I asked for Bobby to drive me to town. You agreed to everything; as if it were the most natural thing for me to travel alone all over the country. I stayed away much longer than could possibly be necessary to have any number of teeth attended to. I wanted you to question me; or to get angry. You met me with a grin. My heart froze against you. When I got back, I shut myself up in my room.

“Yes I made still a third test. I went to the city at Easter. I used no pretext. I simply announced I was going. For half a year I had been living like an unmarried woman that has never known a man. What did you think I was made of? Did you think mine was the nature of a fish? You stirred neither hand nor foot. You did not say a word. You did not even object to my going.

“I went; and I threw myself away in the city. So far the men had been courting me; now I courted them. Some of them were poor. I had plenty of money from the first two trips left. I had never been inside a dentist's office. My stay had not cost me a cent. I had lived with friends. I entertained men this time, with your money … I threw myself away, body and all. It was nothing to me. I thought it would mean much to you. I revelled in my revenge …

“And yet, Niels, even then I could not get rid of the thought of you. I still saw you when I was in the arms of another.…

“I might have stayed away, then I came back. I still hoped … Nothing. Nothing.

“And now, Niels, will you let me go? My feeling for you is dead; you are nothing to me any longer, not that much … You are only a husband whom I married by mistake, somewhat ridiculous, and very hateful … Yes, I hate you, I hate you … Will you let me go?”

The man at the door had listened aghast. He did not understand. He felt as if he had been walking along an abyss, blindfolded. He shivered. Fever burned in him. Sweat broke out on his brow. He stared …

“Niels,” she went on once more, “will you let me go? This time I shall not come back. I want to live, not to stagnate. I want to feel that I can go from this house as I used to go from my cottage in the bush. I want you to be a memory only. I want you to be the past …

“I do not ask you for money. I have money of my own. If you want a divorce, I am willing. You can throw the guilt on me. But then I demand to be paid for it. You have no proofs. I am willing to furnish them, for a consideration.

“If you don't want a divorce, I have a hold on you. I may ask for money at a later time. You are well-to-do. You are getting richer every day because you have no wants … I have known too well what it is to be without money not to appreciate it …

“All this I intended to write to you. Don't think that I do not want you to see the whole of the situation.

“And now, once more, will you let me go?”

All this went past Niels. He did not catch a word of it at the time: much later only did some of the things she had said come back to him as out of an evil dream. One fact stood out: she had given her body …

As in a spasm he answered, “I will not.”

She looked at him, questioningly, almost curiously. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

He saw her dimly. In this conflict of two human natures such trifles as her appearance, the exaggeration of her make-up—too absurd to be taken notice of—angered him. He would have liked to strip all that costly tinsel off her, with one rough touch to wipe paint and powder down, so she would stand there, the bare, ugly, life-worn specimen of humanity she appeared to him to be under her mask. He might have pitied her then.

Her face hardened. “Niels,” she said, “I warn you. It will go hard with you and me. I cannot stay here, a prisoner, condemned to a life-sentence. I won't.”

“You are not going to leave this place if I can help it,” he said doggedly.

“Listen,” she flared up, “I have tried to make you understand. I have failed. I wanted to show you a last mercy by leaving. You prove to me that you are mean, brutal, revengeful. You think you have power over me. I'll show you that you have not. For the last time, will you let me go?”

“No.”

“Then listen.” She stood up. “From now on I shall live to get even with you. I don't want to leave any longer. I shall stay. I can hit you harder here. You don't need to lock doors.

You have made me live through hell. I shall give you a taste of the same thing now. You don't know yet why people have not called. You will know one day. I, too, have powers. I have borne what I could. I can bear no more. People here are coarse and vulgar. They are not to my taste. I'll overlook that for the sake of revenge. You have made your bed. You must lie in it. This house, the White Range Line House as they call it, is going to be a famous house on the Marsh; its name is going to be a by-word ringing through the countryside; and you are going to be the laughing-stock of the settlement. Mark my words, you will rue this day!”

With that she ran out into the hall and up the stairs, leaving him alone.

Again there were drives, drives, drives; for Niels started work in the bush right after plowing … As always when he was driving, there was time to think, to brood …

At the very first, when his wife's revelations had hit him like so many hammer-blows, he had been stunned. Then, in life's first reaction against injury and death, he had been subject to sudden fits of rage, sudden wellings-up in him of primeval impulses, of the desire to kill, to crush …

At such moments he had indulged in horrible imaginings. He had felt as if he could have looked on while the woman perished under frightful tortures; as if he could have laughed at her contortions; as if he could have revelled in her agony.