Settlers of the Marsh (15 page)

S
IGURDSEN LAY
in his clothes, not on the bed, but on the floor, his head reversed, his legs curved back, sprawling; his body bent hollow so it did not touch the floor; his thick, swollen tongue lolling out of his mouth. A rattling noise came from his throat.

Niels and Bobby undressed him and lifted him up on his bed.

Bobby was frightened. “Is he going to die?”

“I think so. Better go to bed. I shall watch.”

Niels pulled the one chair to the side of the bed and sat down for the long night.

Why did it have to be to-day? When life was hard to bear as it was …

What was life anyway? A dumb shifting of forces. Grass grew and was trodden down; and it knew not why. He himself—this very afternoon there had been in him the joy of grass growing, twigs budding, blossoms opening to the air of spring. The grass had been stepped on; the twig had been broken; the blossoms nipped by frost …

He, Niels, a workman in God's garden? Who was God anyway? …

Here lay a lump of flesh, being transformed in its agony from flesh in which dwelt thought, feeling, a soul, into flesh that would rot and feed worms till it became clay …

Once a woman had been, his mother. She had been young, pretty, pulsating, vibrating in every fibre with life: at best she was a heap of brittle bones …

Did she live on? In him, Niels? …

Yes, that was it! The highest we can aspire to in this life is that we feel we leave a gap behind in the lives of others when we go. To inflict pain on others in undergoing the supreme pain ourselves: that is the sum and substance of our achievement … If that is denied, we shiver in an utter void … Thus would he shiver …

Niels laughed in the presence of death …

This man had loved him. Yes, after all it was good that he could die … Could die without seeing the horrors that were sure to come …

Niels sat and watched. The body relaxed. The heart was still beating … And then it stopped …

Quietly he got up and drew a blanket over it that had been he.

A
N HOUR OR SO
later he went to the house, wakened Bobby, and sent him to town to see the doctor and get the death certificate …

He held the gate open when Bobby drove out.

Then he turned his face north, to the farm where Ellen lived. He had, in a flash, made up his mind to plead once more the cause of life …

H
E FOUND HER
at the house, preparing breakfast.

“Come in,” she said when she saw him at the door.

“Sigurdsen is dead,” Niels said slowly.

She looked at him with wide, haggard eyes.

He straightened. “He's dead. Let that go. I am alive. I want to speak about myself.”

“Niels,” Ellen pleaded, “I sent you away last night. I am not going to put you off again if you insist. But had we not better wait?”

“No. I have got to know. I have to get this clear. I am quiet. There is no use in waiting.”

“Very well,” she acquiesced. “Sit down. I shall listen.”

“Ellen,” he broke out, “there's a house on my place, the best-built, roomiest house for many miles around. In it there are things that I've bought through these years and which I've never used. There's a sewing machine; there's a washing machine; there are curtains, packed away; there are parcels with towels, bed-linen, table-cloths, and what not. Do you know for whom that house was built, for whom those things were bought?”

“I know,” she said, smiling sadly. “I have feared it ever … ever since I saw the house.”

“Feared it?” he repeated … “Ellen, when I filed on that homestead, I did so because it was near to you. When I fenced it, I drove your name into the ground as the future owner with every post. When I cleared my field, I did it for you. When I dug the cellar of the house, I laid it out so it would save you work. When I planned the kitchen and the dining room, I thought of nothing but saving you steps. When I bought the lumber, I felt I was taking home presents for you. Whenever I came driving over the Marsh, I saw you standing at the gate to welcome me. When I laid out the kitchen garden, I thought of you bringing in the greens. Ellen, no matter what I have done during these years, it was done with you in mind.”

An infinitely soft expression had come into the face of the girl; slowly she reached out with her hand and laid it on his where it was resting on the table that stood between them.

“Yes,” she said. “All that I know, Niels. At least I often thought so. I could not help it. What was I to do? I always feared that one day I was going to give you pain. Yet I hoped you would understand …”

“Understand?” he repeated. “Understand what?”

“That between me and any man there can be but friendship.”

“Friendship?” he echoed dully.

“Yes. You know I was lonesome. You know how lonesome I was. There were plenty who were willing to make me feel less lonesome. They wanted marriage. Long ago there were plenty of them. Your very friend Nelson had been among them. I turned all of them away, harshly, so that a few weeks after my father's death I was the most lonesome woman in the district. You came. I did not turn you away. I liked you. I had liked you from the day when I first met you. I was fond of you. I am fond of you. As of a brother. I would not do anything that might hurt you if I could help myself. You must feel that. Don't you, Niels?”—Her voice was as full of passionate pleading as his had been.

“Yes, but …” And in helpless non-comprehension he shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, it is so hard to explain,” Ellen exclaimed. “Niels, I do not want to lose you. I am fighting for you with all my strength. I know a farmer needs a woman on the place. Take me as a sister. Marry another woman. But let us remain what we are!”

“Another woman …”

“Yes, Niels, you are thirty. You cannot but have seen other women. Surely you have sometimes thought of others but myself! Surely there are plenty of girls in the world; there are some in this settlement that will gladly be your handmaiden, that will jump at the chance of becoming the wife of a man like you.”

Niels sat and brooded. He tried to follow her thought. He even tried to visualise a fulfilment of what she suggested. His vision was a blank. He shook his head.

“Ellen,” he said, “before your father died, before I had filed on my claim, when I was living with Nelson, up in the bush, in winter, in the little shack he had; when I was fresh from the squalour and poverty of the old country—then I used to dream of a place of my own, with a comfortable house, with a living room and a roaring fire in the stove, and a good, bright lamp burning overhead, of an evening. I was sitting with a woman, my wife, in the light of that lamp, when the nightly chores were done; and we were listening to the children's feet on the floor above as they went to bed; and we were looking and smiling at each other. Ellen, always then, in that dream, the woman was you … At other times, when I was thinking of my mother … How, even when my father was still living, she had to slave away, all day, getting wood, getting water, and taking in washing to pay for the children's clothes—for my father was just a labourer, hiring out from sun to sun; his wages were low, not more than ten, twelve dollars a month the year around; and there were six children to feed … And when my father died, she had to go herself, for little wages; and some of her employers were mean to her; but others gave her a pot of beans, or the bones of a roast in addition to her wages—a Krone, a quarter, a day—to take home … I still fumed and raged at it in retrospection … And I vowed to myself that no wife of mine should ever have to work as she had done. That was why I had come to this country. And when I thought of how I would rather slave and work my fingers to the bone than let my wife, the mother of my children, do one single thing beyond what it would be a pleasure for her to do—then, for six years now, I have always thought of you as that wife. Why was that? What do you think?”

“Oh Niels …”

“I will tell you. It was because I loved you, loved you from the very first day that I had seen you. Do you remember? … There I sat, at the breakfast table; and you were busy over the stove. I kept watching you; and your father did not like it. I did not know, of course, then; but I knew later on that already I had seen in you the mate of my life …”

Ellen smiled a reminiscent smile and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And then … Will you listen, Niels? It's a long story; and I don't know whether I can tell it. I don't know whether you will understand. I have to strip myself before you. I have to show you leprous scars in my memory. I will try …

“What I must tell you is the story of my mother. Much of it I did not understand at the time. I was a child when these things happened. But I must speak to you as a woman …

“You speak of your mother … How she used to work and to slave. Probably you know only the least of what she had to go through. You know the outside. You were a boy. Only a girl or a woman can understand another woman. I was a very observant child, old and experienced before my time. I saw and understood many things which even my mother did not know, did not suspect I could understand. She often said, you will understand that one day, when I understood it right then. But some things I did not understand at the time. I saw them, and they lived in my memory; and I came to understand them later …

“Niels, if I am to make this thing clear to you, I shall have to speak to you, not as to a man, especially not a man who had hoped to be more to me than a brother. I shall have to forget that I am a young woman. There are things which even between older people are skipped in silence. If you are to understand, I must strip my soul of its secrets … I could not bear to have you look at me, Niels, while I tell them. But I know—I think I know what this means to you. I will do it if you wish …”

Niels rose and walked up and down through the room. Then he took his chair, turned it, and sat down, facing the window that looked out on the yard.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I
WAS NINE YEARS OLD
when we came from Sweden. My father's people had been day labourers in the
rye
-districts of
Soedermanland
. They were prosperous in their small way. They had a little house of two rooms and a piece of land, half an acre maybe. They fattened a pig every year and kept a cow and a few hens. On the land they grew garden truck for the city.

“My father was also a farm hand as you say in this country; but he had to pay rent for the house in which we lived. There were three children, all girls; and my mother was weakly. Her illness had involved him in debt.

“Slowly, through years of discussion, against my mother's wish, the plan to emigrate took shape. My grandfather proposed to keep mother and children while father went out to explore the land. My father declined.

“But one day he proposed to leave the children and to take only mother. At that my mother revolted. But in another year he wore her resistence down till she consented to leave the two younger girls and to take only me. I was her first-born; she would not listen to leaving me behind. She always spoke of letting the others follow as soon as possible.

“But my grandparents were very fond of children. They were not old yet. They had never had but the one child of their own. And when they agreed to take my two sisters, they made their bargain, made it with my father: they were to be in the place of father and mother to them; and my parents were not to have any rights whatever over them any more. He did not tell my mother, thinking that she would give in later when she had got used to having one child only. She never did, of course. The separation remained to her a lifelong sorrow. But as you will see, that was the least she had to bear …

“We came away. My father had no difficulty in finding work in this country. He was strong and healthy. I don't know by what chance he came to Odensee. He had been working on a German estate in Sweden. He understood German well and spoke it a little; probably that was the reason. At Odensee he rented a one-roomed shack with three acres of land where he grew potatoes and raised pigs. He worked on the big farms in summer; and in winter he went to town, till he took up his homestead three years later.

“The place he rented in Odensee was part of a quarter section of almost wild land, south of the village. It belonged to an old man who had moved to town. The rest of the land was rented to a man by name of Campbell who had married a Swedish girl. He is now living north of here, on a place of his own; you may know him.

“As if it were yesterday I remember the first meeting between my mother and Mrs. Campbell. We had moved into the place a day or so before. The Campbells' house stood a quarter of a mile east of ours, a large, unpainted frame building half gone to ruin. The man was in the cattle business; but he was not yet making money. There were three acres of land broken near the house; and he had planted them to potatoes. There were four children. The woman had to look after the little crop, for the man used his business as a pretext to be hardly ever at home. So, from the first, I got used to seeing the woman work in the potato-patch.

“Since my mother knew neither English nor German, she was lost in the settlement. She had heard that Mrs. Campbell was Swedish. And, being in a strange country the ways of which she did not know, she was anxious to become acquainted with somebody she could talk to.

“It was in the afternoon of a summer day when we crawled through the fence of our yard and crossed over through the brush to the potato-patch.

“As I said, there were four children on the place. The oldest one was a girl of seven or eight: and she was watching the smaller ones—two were twins—while she picked weeds from the rows of the plants.

“The mother, a big, bony woman, was hoeing between the rows. She did not show any pleasure at meeting my mother.

“You have four children! my mother said.