Settlers of the Marsh (22 page)

“You're welcome enough as far as I'm concerned,” Niels said quietly.

“That's enough,” Nelson took him up very quickly. “As far as you're concerned … We can take a hint.”

Niels faced him. “Nelson, what is the reason?”

“The reason for what?”

“That nobody comes near us.”

“You don't mean to say you don't know?”

“I don't know.” Niels' voice carried conviction.

“Then I won't tell you,” Nelson said. “Never mind about dinner. We're going.”

“Nelson,” Niels tried to plead. Then, shrugged his shoulders, “All right.”

Olga was already in the hall, putting the wraps on her children. Nelson helped her into her coat. He took his own; and they went out.

In silence Niels led the horses from the stable, watered them, and helped to hitch them up.

Nelson lifted the children into the cutter, Niels standing by, facing the house.

And as he stood there, he saw the curtains of the window in the woman's bed-room move. She peered down at the scene in the front of the stable, furtive, smiling …

Nelson and his wife climbed in.

“Mr. Lindstedt,” Olga said, tears in her eyes as she held out her hand, “I'm terribly sorry. I hope you'll believe me.”

“By-by,” Nelson nodded, laughing lightly. “Buck up, old hoss …”

Niels stood and looked after them, conscious that he was being watched from above …

T
OWARDS EVENING
Mrs. Lindstedt came down, dressed more daintily, made up more carefully than ever, and surrounded by an enervating aura of scents.

Silently, but with smiles flitting over her face, her eyes dancing as of old, she went to the task of preparing supper for herself in the most leisurely way.

Niels sat in the dining room over a book. He had sent for a volume on National Economy which he had seen advertised; he was struggling with its abstruse phraseology. He had forgotten about his wife. Now he followed her with his eyes wherever she went.

She took no notice of him. But when, half an hour later, he got up to leave the house, she confronted him with an open, seductive smile. “Well,” she said; and her voice was quiet, sympathetic, compassionate, “did your guests have a nice call?”

Involuntarily Niels had stopped to listen. Now he shrugged his shoulders and left the room without a word.

O
N NEW YEAR'S EVE
, Mrs. Lindstedt, coming down after supper, remarked casually that her teeth still seemed to give trouble; she would return to the city for a short stay.

Niels looked at her, silent, and nodded.

“I suppose Bobby can take me to town to-morrow morning?” she added, speaking sharply, with the unmistakable intention of avoiding the impression as she were making advances.

“Sure,” Niels said.

He took his cheque-book from the cupboard in the hall where he kept his papers, sat down, wrote a cheque for two hundred and fifty dollars, and tossed it across the table.

She ignored the slip of paper and got up.

But when Niels came down during the night to feed the fire in the big stove, he took note of the fact that the cheque was gone.

M
ORE EVEN THAN BEFORE
, Niels brooded over his relation to his wife. He thought, during the drives which he made, from bush to town, from farm to bush, of all the married couples he knew …

He could not puzzle it out.

On the other hand, whether Nelson and Olga approved, whether the world approved, mattered very little. If only …

He, Niels Lindstedt, a skunk? … Mean? … If any one had reason to complain of unfair dealing, it seemed to him it was he.

Her life was a horror. True.

As soon as she was absent, he was able to see her side of it. If only she would utter wishes! He realised with a shudder that she had become physically repulsive to him. But even …

What did it matter?

He became aware that this phrase—what did it matter?—occurred more and more frequently in his thought. Did nothing really matter?

Why had she gone to the city again? The matter of dentistry was the merest pretext … Yet, she had felt it incumbent upon her to use a pretext. But … let her go! Let her go! If that made life bearable for her … Let her go as often as she cared to. He would offer the next trip to her, at Easter …

W
INTER WENT
. Mrs. Lindstedt returned; no change; or if any, a slight change for the worse; all things a little more pronounced, with a little more of an edge to them …

Niels had not sent Bobby to get her. He had gone himself. He had thought it might please her. She had all but ignored him at the station: handing her baggage, not to him but to the obsequious operator who stared at her. “Perhaps you are hungry,” he had stammered. He had been hungry himself.

“I had my dinner on the train,” the answer had come, icily, distancing. He had not even known you can have dinner on the train …

Two and a half months followed, after that two-hour drive during which she had carefully avoided touching him …

Niels did all the housework now, cooked three meals a day for himself and Bobby, washed the dishes, shook up his bed, swept the floor … Sometimes he did not see his wife for days at a stretch, leaving as he did for the bush before sun-up, and returning after dark, often to find the house cold and still: only a cup or a plate would betray that she had been downstairs at all, snatching a perhaps hurried meal while he was away from house and yard.

Easter came. She did not give him a chance to offer that trip. She merely announced that she was going, giving no reason whatever this time. Niels did not give, she did not ask for, any money. Three weeks later she returned with a livery team which she had hired in town.

D
URING THIS ABSENCE
Niels did no longer form any good resolutions. He was immersed in gloom.

Vague, disquieting suspicions invaded him: what was she doing in the city? What was she doing?

A dull, menacing feeling grew up in him, was on the point of flaring into hatred. She hated him, of that he was sure. He hated her. Why had she come back?

He felt as if he must purge himself of an infection, of things unimaginable, horrors unspeakable—the more horrible as they were vague, vague …

T
HE THAW-UP CAME
. New settlers moved in: two young Canadians, brothers, the Dunsmore boys people called them; a German who squatted down along the creek, northeast from Niels' place, Dahlbeck by name.

The spring work began and was finished. The farm was a law unto itself …

S
UMMER
.

Often now, during Sunday afternoons, Niels was sitting in the back seat of his democrat, under the forward-slanting roof of the implement shed, with his book, the Elements of Political Economy. He entered his house only when it could not be helped … But he stared across at it, with unseeing eyes, at that big house which he had built for himself four, five years ago … For himself? No, of that he must not think… That way lay insanity.

Sometimes, during week-days, he took his meals in Bobby's shack instead of going to the house …

Bobby never said a word about all these troubles. But Niels knew that he knew all about them. Once or twice Niels thought things might be easier if he could talk them over … Yet, could he? Bobby was like a son to him … But, after all, he was not his son …

The crops grew well; they promised a bountiful harvest in June; but in July the drought came: the first drought Niels had ever experienced. What did it matter?

Sometimes clouds sailed up, obscuring the sky; and with a big bluster of wind they blew over, not a drop coming down from their bursting udders. The grass parched in the meadows; the cattle bellowed on the Marsh; the grain ripened, so light that there was hardly any difference between straw and ear …

And then the hail-storm came, like a sudden catastrophe …

When the hail had melted away—it lay three, four inches thick in places—Niels and Bobby went out to look at the damage. Water stood in the furrows; the ridges in between looked like black sugar, melting … The crops had disappeared.

Bobby exclaimed again and again, “Gee whiz!”

Niels shrugged his shoulders with something like a chuckle. “And to think,” he said, “that on the advice of that fellow Regan in Minor I insured against hail! Why, that hail-storm means money in my pocket! Eight dollars an acre … I could never have threshed eight dollars out of that dry straw …”

“I hadn't even thought of that,” Bobby laughed. “Gee, Niels, you're a wizard. You make money even out of hail …”

But Niels' eyes had gone steely again.

What had she gone to the city for? What had she been doing there? … It was an obsession …

N
IELS THOUGHT AND THOUGHT
as he sat in his implement shed and watched his house. It was a Sunday afternoon, the last in August.

Hahn's revelations came back to him. “They're from the city.” Eyes peered at Niels, alluring, provoking, from under fashionable, expensive hats … hats like his wife's … set in faces powdered and painted … “One of them will be your wife … for an hour …”

Niels whipped himself up and walked back and forth, back and forth, behind that array of his implements: wagons, plows, binder, seeder … He walked there because he could not be seen from the house. And every now and then he bent down and peered from under the low, jutting roof across his yard at the windows of that house.

In this hour of torture there was born in him a great determination: no matter what happened, his wife was not going to go to the city again. Three times she had gone. What had she been doing there? Never mind what she had been doing. She was not going to do it again! …

T
HE WEEK WENT BY
. Niels was aware of unusual activity in the house: in that room which he never entered any longer; and one day, when the door, now usually closed, was ajar, it opened under the tremour of his heavy tread on the landing. He saw enough to know that his wife was packing up …

She was making preparations to go on a fourth trip. She was not going to go …

Not a word did she say to him. But she spoke to Bobby, asking him to be ready to take her to town on a certain day.

She had waited till Niels was away to speak to the boy. But Bobby told him as soon as he returned.

Niels, in sudden blind rage, went to the house at once. It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a time when he hardly ever entered the place.

She was in the dining room, engaged in collecting some trifles which she intended to take along …

H
E HAD ENTERED
through the front door, thereby cutting off her retreat; of a set purpose he turned the key behind his back and drew it out, in a single motion.

He crossed the hall and stood in the door of the dining room, almost filling it with his huge frame.

“What are you doing?” he asked, quietly, but with a vibrant note which would have warned the most unobservant.

She turned; slowly, as if recalling her absent thoughts to some unimportant business which thrust itself in her path. On her lips, which were brilliantly, exaggeratedly rouged, lay a smile. In her eyes—couched behind lids, lashes and brows which also bore the marks of the make-up for artificial light—lay the remnant of a happy dream. Her dressing gown, of filmy, white, Japanese silk, showed every detail of her undergarments: lacy things of pink crepe-de-chine. Her chestnut-red hair surrounded her face like a flaming cloud. Her bare arms and soft white hands, issuing as they did from wide, flaring sleeves, were the very picture of allurement and temptation. The room was heady with heavy scents …

Niels looked with distaste at the scene; he felt a loathing for the woman. Had he obeyed his impulse, he would have given her all the money he had and sent her away. But it was a peculiarity of his nature that, having thought out and laid down a plan, he must go on along the demarcated line and carry out that plan even though circumstances might have arisen which made it absurd.

T
HUS HE HAD BROKE
his land, thus built his house, thus made himself the servant of the soil … It was his peasant nature going on by inertia …

She felt the approach of a catastrophic development. The smile faded from her lips; the dream died in her eyes. She focused them on the man in the door who thrust himself into her visions, standing there, huge, implacable, like doom. As this change took place, her whole appearance became, in a moment, from a picture of all that might in a physical sense be alluring, something pathetically artificial: as if a small animal at bay, a mouse perhaps, were looking out from some large shell, beautiful in its iridescent colours; or as if some old, old dignitary, a pope maybe, clad in gorgeous regalia that not he wore but that bore him up, had suddenly forgotten the part he played as the personification of some time-honoured institution and had become a frail, mortal man, shaking in fear … From behind the mask, the woman peered out, helpless, at bay, mortally frightened.

If at that moment Niels had struck; if he had gone straight to her and torn her finery off her body, sternly, ruthlessly, and ordered her to do menial service on the farm, he would have conquered … But he merely frowned …

Then, as if she awoke from a nightmare, she rallied and shrugged her almost bare shoulders: it was as if she shivered. Slowly a smile returned into her face. Two human natures had measured each other; and the woman had realised her power. The smile was new: it held a note of contempt.

“I?” she said slowly, languidly. “I am getting ready to leave.”

“For the city?”

“Yes,” she replied in a tone of great indifference.

“You have been to the city for the last time—You won't go again. If ever, you won't go alone.”

For a moment she stared. Then she laughed. “I might go into the bush instead …” And with a swift motion she swept towards the kitchen door.