Settlers of the Marsh by Frederick Philip Grove.
Title: Settlers of the Marsh.
Author: Frederick Philip Grove.
Genre: Literature, fiction, pioneer fiction, romance.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1925.
Summary: Niels Lindstedt, a virginal Swedish immigrant and homesteader on the Canadian prairies, works hard on his farm while he dreams of domestic happiness and marrying his neighbour's daughter, Ellen Amundsen. But when Ellen refuses his marriage proposal, due to heart-breaking and misguided reasons, a shattered Niels is seduced by a local widow, Clara Vogel, with a scandalous reputation unknown only to him. The consequences are devastating for all three. The novel presents with chilling accuracy the hopes, passions, and anxieties of young pioneers.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ They plodded on. That they were not on the trail there could be no doubt any longer; they felt the low brush impeding their steps.
Sometimes they stumbled; Niels laughed apologetically; Nelson swore under his breath. But they kept their sides to the wind and went on.
Both would have liked to talk, to tell and to listen to stories of danger, of being lost, of hair-breadth escapes: the influence of the prairie snowstorm made itself felt. But whenever one of them spoke, the wind snatched his word from his lips and threw it aloft.
♥ Before he spoke, he thought; and, having thought, he spoke with decision. He seemed to realise with great force and made others realise that thought could be changed and modified, but that a spoken word was binding. Every motion of his showed that he watched jealously over his dignity. But his voice was harsh and loud as if he were trying to give a special emphasis and significance to every word.
♥ He worked in his slow, deliberate way, without a lost motion, and giving to the veriest trifle an importance and a sort of dignity which seemed laughable or sublime.
♥ "Too bad about your wife," Nelson said after a while. "Have you had the doctor in?"
"She is in the hand of God," Amundsen replied sententiously. "What is to be will be. I am a sinner and a stricken man." It sounded as if he boasted of the fact.
"Too bad," Nelson repeated.
Once more Niels looked at the man. There was something repulsive about his self-sufficiency. His wife was lying at the point of death; but he had not even called in what help human skill and knowledge might give. He relied on God to do for him what could be done... And his daughter worked like a man...
♥ He felt as if freedom had been bestowed upon him in the wild. Somehow he felt less a stranger in the bush. Though everything was different, yet it was nature as in Sweden. None of the heath country of his native Blekinge here; none of the pretty juniper trees; none of the sea with its rocky islands. These poplar trees seemed wilder, less spared by an ancient civilisation that has learned to appreciate them. They invited the axe, the explorer...
The trees stood still, strangely still in the slanting afternoon sun which threw a ruddy glow over the white snow in sloughs and glades...
♥ A single one struck him; that of a woman who formed a rather striking contrast to all other women present. It was "Mrs. Vogel."
She was dressed in a remarkably pretty and becoming way, with ruffles around her limp, smooth-skinned, though rather pallid face. In spite of the season she wore a light, washable dress which fitted her slender and yet plump body without a fold. Her waist showed a v-shaped opening at the throat which gave her - by contrast to the other women - something peculiarly feminine; beside her, the others looked neuter.
But more than anything else her round, laughing, coal-black eyes attracted attention. They were in everlasting motion and seemed to be dancing with merriment. Mrs. Lund was like a great lady, accustomed, no matter what she wore and how she looked, to lord it over every one in her surroundings; but even she seemed to live under a strain, as if she kept her spirits up in an eternal fight against adverse circumstances. Her predominance was a physical one, gained by sheer weight and dimensions and held by sonorous contralto and booming ring of the voice. All the other women were subdued, self-effacing, almost apologetic; as if daunted by work and struggling not to be swamped by it. Mrs. Vogel was different. Difficulties and poverty did not seem to reach her. She shrank from them; she smiled till they vanished. She did not step out and fight; she stepped back, into the protection of her sex; and they passed her by.
All this did not become clear to Niels in articulate thought. It gathered into a general impression of attraction. Her sight roused his protective instincts, the impulses of the man in him.
♥ "One day," Mrs. Lund went on, addressing Niels, "we are going to have everything as it should be. A large, good house; a hot-bed for the garden; real, up-to-date stables; and... everything. And the children are going to learn something. We want Bobby to go to college..."
Niels looked at her. Since she had spoken in Swedish, he had understood.
But suddenly he understood far more than the mere words. He understood that this woman knew she was at the end of her life and that life had not kept faith with her. Her voice was only half that with which we tell of a marvellous dream; half it was a passionate protest against the squalor surrounding her: it reared a triumphant vision above the ruins of reality. It was the cry of despair which says, It shall not be so!
Niels was unable to answer. He felt as if he should step over to her and lay his hand on her shoulder to show that he understood. But he knew, if he did so, she would break down and cry.
His eye wandered from her to Nelson and Olga sitting close together and conversing in whispers.
Not knowing what to do, in the intensity of the feeling that had swept over him, he went to the window and looked out into the rising dark.
..When Niels looked aback into the room, the last glimmer of that light played over Nelson's and Olga's heads. The face of the girl was actually beautiful now as she sat there with dreaming eyes, her cheeks suffused with that ecstatic smile of hers.
She, too, had a dream; but her dream was of the future: it was capable of fulfilment, not fraught with pathos as her mother's...
The whole room was softened into some appearance of harmony by the dark: fit setting for the dreams of the young and the retrospection of those whose dreams have come true: a horror to those in despair...
♥ To Niels his doings seemed inconsequential and irrelevant; such was the influence of the boundless landscape which stretched away in the dim light of the moon...
Life had him in its grip and played with him; the vastness of the spaces looked calmly on.
♥ "Why don't you buy?" Niels asked his friend.
Nelson laughed. "Has she put that bug into your head, too?...I want to be my own boss. I don't mind working out for a while each year till I get on my feet. But when I go home, I stand on my own soil; and no debts worry me. What I raise is mine. Five, six years from now I shall be independent."
"Yes," Niels said. "But the work it costs would pay for a prairie farm."
"Maybe," Nelson laughed. And after a silence he added, very seriously, "I'll tell you, I like the work. I'd pay to be allowed to do it. Land I've cleared is more my own than land I've bought."
Niels understood. That was his own thought exactly, his own unexpressed, inexpressible thought...
They walked on in silence, swinging along in great, vigorous strides. The last few words had filled them with the exhilaration of a confession of faith. High above, far ahead stood an ideal; towards that ideal they walked.
♥ In this country, life and success did not, as they had always seemed to do in Sweden, demand some mysterious powers inherent in the individual. It was merely a question of persevering and hewing straight to the line. Life was simplified.
Yet, material success was not enough. What did it matter whether a person had a little more or less wealth? A strong, healthy body was his; with that he could make a living anywhere; he had made a living in Sweden.
But the accessories of life were really the essentials; they were what made that living worth while: the building up of a whole little world that revolved about him. About him? Not at all....
That vision was so familiar to him began to dominate him more and more. Already he felt, in the mental realisation of it, a note of impatience.
He himself might be forever a stranger in this country; so far he saw it against the background of Sweden. But if he had children, they would be rooted here.... He might become rooted himself, though them....
♥ Niels lived in a continual glow of excitement. He worked passionately; he dreamed passionately; and when he lay down at night, he even slept with something like a passionate intensity....
♥ Everything he did he did for her. Sometimes he felt an overpowering impulse to go right over and to ask her to follow him.
..He knew that he wanted her; that he desired only one thing: to melt that ice which seemed to surround her; to beat down those barriers which defended her against him; yes, finally, with a realisation that made his very body tremble and shake, that sent his blood red-hot to his brain, he became conscious of the ultimate, supreme, physical desire: he wanted to feel her head sinking on his shoulder, her body yielding to his embrace...
When he came home after such a paroxysm of passion and despair, he threw himself down on his hard willow-bed on the ground; and he told himself that this would not do; that no girl, no woman was ever wooed from a distance.
How was he to get near her? Her father? No father was ever an obstacle between man and girl...
It was she, she alone who kept him away: who kept the world away, and with the world him: for he was merely a part of that world: not a hero who came, acclaimed by the multitudes, borne high on the shoulders of his followers...
♥ Niels no longer blamed her for the state of her house. The mere fact that she felt the need of referring to better days in the certain past and the possible future showed that she was only too conscious of the fearful shortcomings of the present. Who, from morning to night, walks with bare, bleeding feet over meadow and stubble forgets about niceties, about scrubbing and polishing things...
♥ It would have been rude not to obey the summons. Yet, as he went over and sat down by her side, he felt as if he were being entrapped: he felt what was almost a foreboding of disaster. Never in his life had he felt like that; and the memory of this feeling was to come back to him, many years later, when his terrible destiny had overtaken him. Had he obeyed a hardly articular impulse, he would at once have got up again and gone out.
♥ The sun was sinking to the west; the bright, red glow which fell through the open door stood like a screen between them and the rest. They were in the shadow of the wall. Theirs was a side-play, acted in a niche and off the stage...
♥ He was still angry at himself, for an inexplicable feeling of guilt that possessed him. She looked very lovely, he thought; but she looked like sin. She was incomprehensible to him...
♥ Beyond, tall, ghostly, white stems of aspens loomed up, shutting out the world...
Already, though he had thought he could never root in this country, the pretty junipers of Sweden had been replaced in his affections by the more virile and fertile growth of the Canadian north. The short, ardent summer and the long, violent winter had captivated him: there was something heady in the quick pulse of the seasons...
He had been an onlooker so far. But to-night something had happened which he did not understand: he was a leaf borne along in the wind, a prey to things beyond his control, a fragment swept away by torrents.
That made him cling to the landscape as something abiding, something to steady him.
He cut across the corner of the slough; and when he had passed out of eye and earshot of the noisy, celebrating crowd, he stopped, raised his arms above his head, and stretched... A lassitude came over him: a desire to evade life's issues...
He longed to be with his mother, to feel her gnarled, calloused fingers rumpling his hair, and to hear her crooning voice droning some old tune...
And then he seemed to see her before him: a wrinkled, shrunk little face looking anxiously into his own.
He groaned.
That face with the watery, sky-blue eyes did not look for that which tormented him: what tormented him, he suddenly knew, had tormented her also; she had fought it down. Her eyes looked into himself, knowingly, reproachfully. There was pity in the look of the ancient mother: pity with him who was going astray: pithy with him, not because of what assailed him from without; but pity with what he was in his heart...
It was very clear now that the torrent which swept him away, the wind that bore him whither it listed came from his innermost self. If, for what had happened to him, anybody was to blame at all, it was he...
♥ He had gone across the sandy corner of the Marsh, to the bridge; and there he was torn between two desires: the desire to see Ellen and to have her quietly, critically gaze at him out of her eyes as if she were searching for something in him; and the desire to see, and to listen to, the other woman whose look and voice sent a thrill through his body and kindled his imagination.
Invariably he had at last returned to his homestead and his tent without seeing either...
One of these women had seemed to demand; the other, to give. Yet one was competent; the other, helpless. One was a mate; the other, a toy...
♥ Niels thought of himself. If he had married in Sweden, he would, like the rest, have laughed at this household. He would have accepted what is as immutable and pre-arranged.
How chance played into life!
He had emigrated; and the mere fact that he was uprooted and transplanted had given him a second sight, had awakened powers of vision and sympathy in him which were far beyond his education and upbringing. If one single thing had been different, everything might have run a different course...
If Lund had held on to one of the places which he was said to have owned in his life, instead of giving in to adverse circumstances; or if his boy had not been drowned, success might have been his instead of failure...
What, then, was in store for him, Niels?
He could not defend himself just now against a feeling of fear: the fear of life...
♥ Henceforth Niels thought of his former dreams with nothing but silent scorn. And yet there was only one excuse for his life in the present; and that excuse lay in the possible future. He had, in the past, planned a homestead with that future in view; and the plan persisted.
♥ Did she even suspect what he thoughts had been with regard to her? Had been?...
The blood sang in his veins as he stepped briskly along the familiar Marsh trail.
The darkness was peopled with blushing faces and strange, soft voices...
There, in front of him, behind that dimly looming bluff, he suddenly saw his house erected: a palace in the wilderness; and behind it stretched the farm, a secluded kingdom... The farm and the house... His farm and his house! The work of his hands, dreams of, planned, and built to harbour her!
..The song of the softly rustling leaves, just sprouted on the pillars overhead, held a new and perturbing note. The stars in the heavens were eyes and smiled at him. The sound of his horses, champing in the stable, munching their hay, had a strange home-like, sheltered, protected ring. A whip-poor-will whistled his clarion call in the bluff...
..At last he returned to the granary, his provisional house. It was not lonely now; it was peopled with dreams. He lay awake till dawn; and then he looked out into the eastern gates of heaven, aflame with glory...
♥ "A large house? A regular mansion, Sigurdsen says."
Niels coloured. "Four rooms; besides the kitchen which is a lean-to."
"Four rooms?" Ellen exclaimed, dropping her hands to her knees. "What do you want four rooms for?"
"And there is space for two small attic rooms besides," Niels went on with sudden recklessness.
Ellen stared at him. Then both laughed; and Niels, too, felt at ease.
"Well," he said, "people here think more of their machinery than of their houses; more of their farms than of their lives. The house is merely a piece of the farm, a place to sleep in while you are not at work. I want a house of which the farm is a part, the place where what is needed in the house is grown. These people here, when they get anywhere, are rich at best. Their life has slipped by; they have never lived. Especially the women."
.."Help is hard to get," Ellen objected.
"Perhaps... Then why not do a little less?"
"Well," Ellen pondered, "I'll tell you. During the first few years it is really the woman that makes the living on a pioneer farm. She keeps chickens, cows, and pigs. The man makes the land."
"But when it is made?"
"That's where the trouble comes in. Then there are children; and the house takes a fearful amount of time. Nobody thinks of relieving her of any work. She has always done it. Why can she not do it now?"
♥ Before them stood the bluff that sheltered his yard: a softly glistening dome. From the east beyond, dark shadows rose; overhead, the sky was still shot with polished beams.
"Look at that," he called to the girl as he strode along beside her load and waved his arm aloft.
She nodded in silence.
Satisfaction with what he had, longing for what he had not were strangely mixed in him as he stepped out, his head erect, by the side of her wearily plodding horses.
Again the blood sang in his veins. He felt like an adventurer coming home with booty; he longed to shout to his house which lay hidden behind the trees. This girl that was reclining on her load should be there, should be waiting for him and look out as he rounded the bluff...
♥ "The house is lovely," she said, her cheeks aglow. "But so large..."
"Did you go upstairs?"
"Yes, and even into the cellar."
He longed to cry out, "I built it for you!" But his tongue was tied...
♥ The old man was getting to be stranger and stranger. Sometimes he would talk to himself for a long while, taking no notice of Niels' presence.
..Niels would nod. He understood that the old man was talking to the phantoms of his youth. Strange, disquieting things he would sometimes say, trailing off into Icelandic which Niels understood only half: things that seemed to withdraw a veil from wild visions, incomprehensible in one so old...
..And this decay of the human faculties, the reappearance of the animal in a man whom he loved, aroused in Niels strange enthusiasms: as if he could have got up and howled and whistled, vying with the wind...
♥ There was much discussion about this between Niels and Ellen. They would not sell. They were on their land because they loved it: to them it was home.
Yes, since Niels had proved up, there was no obstacle any longer... Why did he wait?...
There had re-entered into their relationship something of the distancing effect of the first few years... Niels began almost to dread he coming of the decisive moment...
There was some unsounded depth in him or the girl...
Something dreadful was coming, coming...
♥ To Niels it always seemed that for town-people the most important problem was what to do with their time.
♥ Then he left town, following the road to the east, along the Muddy River, walking.
A feeling of general dissatisfaction possessed him. This was the first time he had spent more than a few hours in town. He had often had the same feeling before.
On his land he was master; he knew just how to act. Here in town, people did with him as they pleased. Storekeepers tried to sell him what he did not want; at the hotel they fed him with things he did not like, The banker with whom he had sought no interview dismissed him at his own imperious pleasure...
And the attitude of superiority everybody assumed... They were quicker at repartee - silly, stupid repartee: and they were quick at it because they did not do much else but practise it...
♥ Ellen was waiting for him. She stood at the gate, looking down the winding trail to the south.
Was there something in his face which betrayed him?
Somehow she was different. In her face, too, there was a new expression: something of expectancy, emotion, inner struggle which had disturbed her usual balance.
He was aware of it as soon as he looked into her eye. He knew more clearly, more convincingly that the moment was at hand. Whether he brought it or not, it was there. In the smile with which she greeted him there was something hunted... For the first time in their intercourse this girl awakened in him the protective instincts. More than ever before she was the only woman in the world for him...
In silence they went to the accustomed place, that natural bower in the fringe of the bush...
As they crossed the yard, imponderable things, incomprehensible waves of feeling passed to and fro between them: things too delicate for words; things somehow full of pain and anxious, disquieting anticipation: like silent discharges between summer clouds that distantly wink at each other in lightning.
The air, too, wads charged; its sultriness foreboded a storm. Yet, there was not a cloud in the upper reaches of the atmosphere; only at the horizon there lay, in the far north-west, a white bank which, above the dark cliff of forest, showed a rounded, convoluted outline, its edge blushing with a golden iridescence.
The slightest breeze ambled into the clearing from the east, scarcely perceptible, yet refreshing where it could be felt.
Between the two, as the silence lengthened - between man and woman, boy and girl - the consciousness arose that the other knew of the decision which was at hand: it was almost oppressive. Some step was to be taken, had to be taken at last: it was a tragic necessity no longer to be evaded...
Yet neither spoke; each waited for the other. They stood by the chairs which the girl had provided.
Furtive glances stole across, to be averted forthwith. Colour came and went in two faces, imperceptible almost, yet divined.
Then the girl spoke. He words came hurriedly, precipitately, as if to forestall the arrival of the moment; as if to postpone what was unavoidably coming; as if to plead for a term of grace.
.."Sometimes," the girl went on, still hurriedly, "the bush frightens me. I cannot find the horizon. I want to see wide, open, level spaces. Let's go to the slough."
Again Niels nodded. He did not trust himself to speak. There was no barrier between them: they looked at each other, as it were, stripped of all conventions, all disguises...
The moment was coming. It had prepared itself. It was rushing along the lane of time where neither he nor she could escape it. Yes, it was already here. It stood in front of them; and its face was not smiling; it was grimly tragical...
"Wait," said the girl. "I'll get my hat." And she slipped past him, in the house.
Half conscious only of his movements he idled back to the yard and stood there, eyes fixed on vacancy.
Dark, green, gloomy, the bush reared all about. Aspen-leaves shivered, revealing their silvery undersides.
"I believe a storm is coming," said the girl, somewhat steadied as she rejoined him, her hat slung by its ribbons over her arm. "I wish it would come while we are out. I like to watch a storm."
They turned and passed into the bush road, side by side.
The tension between them grew less. The moment was coming. It did not depend upon them. Why tremble?
On and on they went; between them peace arose. Both seemed to feel that it was for the very last time: drain what you can to the dregs...
The storm, too, was coming. But all the clearer, all the more brilliant was the sky overhead.
First they followed the bush road; then they left it, threading a cattle path which branched off to the left. Birds fluttered up as they touched the bushes: shy birds and bold birds: waxwings, catbirds, tow-hees - these merely flitted away; blackbirds, kingbirds, and jays - these scolded at them, resenting their intrusion into the home of their young. Bush rabbits sprang up and scampered away in a panic: and both of them laughed: laughter released the tension completely.
The cattle path forked: the girl followed one, the boy another; they flitted and ran; whoever was first to arrive at the rejunction of the trails stood and waited for the other, smiling or laughing...
..True enough, the moment was coming. But between them had arisen something like a silent compact not to hasten it along; to delay it, rather. That moment was fraught with pain!
♥ The girl puts her hat on, a wide-rimmed hat, the rim bent down at the sides and fastened with ribbons under her chin: her face looks out as from a cavern.
The air is breathless: even the slight, wafting flow from the east has ceased. Nature lies prostrate in expectation of the scourge that is coming, coming. The wall of cloud has differentiated: there are two, three waves of almost black; in front, a circling festoon of loose, white, flocculent manes, seething whirling... A winking of light runs through the first wave of black. A distant rumbling heralds the storm...
The two have squatted down in the hay, forgetting themselves. They sit and look. Then a noise as of distant breakers in the surf; the roar of the sea, approaching nearer, nearer.
The bush in front through which they have come stands motionless, breathless, blackening, as the sun is obscured. Birds flit to and fro, seeking shelter, silent...
Then a huge suction soughs through the stems. But already the lash of the wind comes down: like the sea in a storm tree tops rise and fall, the stems bending over and down and whipping back again, tossed by enormous pressures. They dance and roll, tumble and rear, and mutely cry out as in pain. And the very next moment the wind hits the stack, snatching the breath from the lips of the two who sit there crouching, A misty veil rushes over the landscape, illumined by a bluish flash which is followed by nearer and nearer growlings and barkings.
Up rises the girl in the storm, holding on to her bonnet with both her hands, leaning back into the wind, her skit crackling and snapping and pulling at her strong limbs. Once more she laughs, laughs into the storm and sweeps her arm over the landscape, pointing.
♥ On sweeps the storm; less and less rain falls; the drops begin to sparkle and glitter; the sun bursts forth. Over the bush huge clouds are lifting their wings; and a playful breeze strikes into the cave where Niels and Ellen still crouch silent...
Ellen is looking out, straight ahead, her eyes fixed on she knows not what.
Niels is looking at her, from close by, his face almost touching her shoulder. The longing actually to touch her, to take her in both his arms, grows so strong that his joints ache with it... A moment ago he still could have yielded to this longing...
But already something has stepped in between them: as if a distance had stepped between them, a great, infinite remoteness not to be bridged... As he sits there and looks, it is as if her face were receding and fading from view. And suddenly he is aware that in her eyes there are tears which are quivering on her lashes, white, sun-bleached lashes, before they fall.
The realisation of a bottomless abyss shakes him.
"Ellen," he calls with an almost breaking voice.
The girl slowly rises. "I know," she says. "Don't speak. The moment has come. I know what you want to say. Oh Niels, I am going to hurt you deeply. Let it be as it is, Niels. Why can't you?" She sobs and turns, touching his cheek with her hand. Then almost impatiently, almost angrily, "Oh God, I can't understand it! Why has it got to be like this? I've seen it coming, Niels. Ever since I first saw you, years ago. I knew it would have to come to this! I knew it! I knew it! I did what I could to keep it away; but it did not help. Oh God!" she cries out once more, "I've had only one single friend in my life! And now I must lose him!" And her tears run freely at last; and she makes no longer any attempt to check her sobs.
..At Ellen's gate they stopped.
"Niels," Ellen said, "will you believe me when I tell you that I know? What you wish can never be. When I can, I shall tell you. If it's any comfort to you, you may know I shall never marry. You've been my only friend. I've suffered, Niels, when sometimes you did not come. I know why you have stayed away when you did. Because you, too, felt that at last something like this would be coming. I've dreaded it; I've dreaded it more than I can tell. Let things remain as they are. Don't leave me alone. You will come again? Promise me, Niels, promise that you will come again!"
♥ He did not understand what had happened to him. He did not enquire into it. It was final...
♥ 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? I 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 wad good that he could die... Could die without seeing the horrors that were sure to come...
Niels sat ans 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.
♥ 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...
♥ "I knew and understood more, in a childish way, than the grown-ups thought. When you change your country, at that age, it somehow gives you an insight into things and as curiosity beyond your years."
♥ Niels turned and went to the door. For a moment he held the knob; then he shrugged his shoulders convulsively and went out.
Ellen sprang up and ran to the door. "Niels!"
He stopped without looking back.
"Niels," she repeated, "promise that you will come back. Not now. Not within a day or a week. I know you can't. But I shall be so lonesome. You must fight this down. Don't leave me alone for the rest of my days. Promise that you will come back..."
"I shall try," he stammered and left the yard.
He did not see that over that farmyard there followed him a girl, her hand pressed to her bosom, tears in her eyes; not that, at the gate, she sank to the ground and sobbed...
♥ "Don't you know? Two and a half miles west of my corner... Plenty of customers, nothing to worry about. Amundsen used to go there. Baker. Smith. The boys from the English settlement. That's where Bobby spends most of his Sundays... ..What I don't understand," Hahn went on, "is that you should have lived here for years and never seen anything of it. There's one like that Hefter woman in every district. If there weren't, the boys wouldn't leave the girls alone. There's one in yours..."
♥ Niels had come to think without bitterness of Ellen; but he felt he could never see her again...
When he glimpsed at his old dream, a lump rose in his throat. His muscles tightened when he turned his thoughts away...
This gradual negation of his old dream had a curious effect on others: it gave him such an air of superiority over his environment that the few words which he still had to speak were listened to almost with deference. They seemed to come out of vast hidden caverns of meaning. This face, scored and lined so that it sometimes seemed outright ugly, held all in awe, some in terror. Once he heard a man say to Bobby, "I shouldn't care to work for that fellow. I'd be scared of him."
The truth was, lightning flashes of pain sometimes went through his look, giving him the appearance of one insane; or of one who communed with different worlds...
A new dream rose: a longing to leave and to go to the very margin of civilisation, there to clear a new place; and when it was cleared and people began to settle about it, to move on once more, again to the very edge of pioneerdom, and to start it all over anew... That way his enormous strength would still have a meaning. Woman would have no place in his life.
He looked upon himself as belonging to a special race - a race not comprised in any limited nation, but one that crossed-sectioned all nations: a race doomed to everlasting extinction and yet recruited out of the wastage of all other nations...
But, of course, it was only the dream of the slave who dreams of freedom...
♥ He wanted to know; but he did not press for confidences. Oddly, while he wished for them, he feared them. He felt that there were things which, revealed, would break what there was left of his life: things which would lead to disasters unthinkable. And he forbore.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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?
..What was 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 one 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 conquest 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!
♥ 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.
♥ 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?
♥ He felt as if he must purge himself of an infection, of things unimaginable, horrors unspeakable - the more horrible as they were vague, vague...
♥ But he stared across 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.
♥ 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. Thus 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...
♥ "..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 behindhand. 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!"
♥ 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-worm specimen of humanity she appeared to him to be under her mask. He might have pitied her then.
♥ 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...
..But those had been no more than impulses, comparable to brief eruptions of a volcano which yet show what is hidden underneath.
..It never occurred to him yet not to blame his wife for doing what it was her nature to do; not to judge her and to find her guilty...
But, as soon as the driving started, he went to work, unconsciously, at finding a new path through the tangled labyrinth of his life.
What was the problem?
He came to see that the real problem was very complicated. Judging her guilty, he demanded repentance and atonement. But he could not demand anything of her because she did not acknowledge his right to demand: he had no authority over her.
She was planned revenge. Revenge for what? No doubt for a wrong she thought had been done here.
Had he, Niels wronged the woman, intentionally or not? That was the great question.
She was right in reproaching him with weakness: he had fallen. But since he had fallen, could he have acted otherwise than he had done? Could he had simulated feelings which he did not have?
The whole marriage, the whole antecedents of this marriage was immoral...
So it all came back to this that he should not have fallen...
But suppose a man had fallen, what was he to do?
♥ He had been willing, instead, to give her money to go to the city with, provided she remained faithful to him...
He had been fool enough not to see as he saw it now that no man can afford to let his wife go anywhere alone unless he can trust her; and, of course, he can trust her only if he knows that she can trust him, in everything, absolutely: he can trust her only if not only she loves him but if he loves her, and if she knows it, of positive knowledge...
To make the best of a bad bargain! What folly! He saw clearly now that nobody, in this relationship of marriage, can ever make the best of a bad bargain. It is all or nothing. Give all and take all. If you cannot do that, stand back and refrain.
♥ What must happen would happen. He had sinned. He saw no atonement. None, nowhere.
And what about his life? What was its justification? No justification existed... Except perhaps, perhaps in helping others?...
♥ The man's stern face, narrow, hatchet-shaped, alone underwent a change, discernible in shadings only. In that change there was betrayed a feeling of restraint, almost of shame. It looked as if he would have liked to interfere, to call the woman to order; as if he felt embarrassed at his own failure to do so. His nod, in answer to Niels', was almost forbidding.
Niels liked the man for that nod. He read his mind in it.
This man was a slave of passion. He would have preferred freedom; but he was a slave. The woman dominated, swayed, attracted, repelled him as she pleased. The woman was his evil genius...
All that Niels read in a glance and a nod...
♥ Sometimes he waited till a later hour before attending to his chores in the house. It did not make any difference. Once he waited till midnight.
That time, when he entered through the kitchen door - the milk was frozen solid - the whole house was dark. But when he returned from the cellar, the dining room was lighted by the big floor-lamp; and there, by the stove, stood his wife.
He could not doubt any longer: there was a purpose behind her conduct.
What was that purpose?
He could not see his way through her psychology. He had no means of reading the mind of a woman driven to extremities.
It never occurred to him that this was a last attempt on her part to bring about a reconciliation...
She displayed herself to him; but to save her pride, she made it hard for him to find her attractive...
Had he made a single motion towards her, had he said a single word, even though it had been a word of forgiveness instead of desire, perhaps the worst might still have been averted; fate might have been stayed...
In him, however, all sexual instincts were dead.
♥ Horses know as well as dogs whether their masters feel friendly toward them or not. Unlike dogs, they do not cling to or fawn upon him who does not deserve their love. They cannot but do the work demanded of them; but they are henceforth mere slaves.
♥ Back in the open, on the yard, he felt crushed by the weight of the consciousness that he was losing his hold on himself..
..There, in the dark, he sat down on the seat of the binder; without any thought at first; but with a feeling of such unhappiness as he had never felt before. How could he, how could he let things get the better of him that way? He, Niels!
Are there in us unsounded depths of which we do not know ourselves? Can things outside of us sway us in such a way as to change our very nature? Are we we? Or are we mere products of circumstance?
♥ True, it was no longer possible to realise old dreams. His marriage had killed them. His dreams were dead. What if they were?
What would life be without her? Not happiness. Not what he had once dreamed of as his life. But there would be peace: he could drown himself in work. And the fruits of work? Well, at the worst he could give them away...
♥ A strange hesitancy took possession of him. Again he was going to carry out a preconceived plan. He had done so before; and what he had done then was the exact reverse of what he should have done... Perhaps it might be best to wait, to think matters over more fully...
He stood and brooded. No; think and then act on the decision arrived at; that was the law of his nature. He could not help himself. It had to be done.
For the first and last time in his life he was conscious of deliberately composing his features for the occasion...
♥ Apart from that, the decay in Niels consisted more in a gradual disintegration of will and purpose.
He became indifferent to everything, even to his comfort. That he went on with the work, under Bobby's direction, was merely because it was the easiest thing to do; it required no thought, no decision, no break with the past.
Winter went by; life went its way.
♥ Two, three hours went by that way.
Several times he sank to his knees, bending his body low, crouching in an agony of misery.
Had anybody met him and asked him, sternly, "What is that thought which is lurking beyond the edge of your world, ready to rise above the horizon?" he would have searched in his mind, sincerely, honestly; yet he would have found nothing but a painful, raw void to face, to probe into which without encountering anything was baffling, infinitely tormenting. He would have groaned as the man groans on whom a painful operation is being performed while he is under the influence of an anaesthetic. Although the onlooker is, perhaps, from past experience, fully aware of the fact that he who lives in that body feels nothing, the groan sounds all the more pitiful, all the more enervating...
♥ Bobby had no education. If you had asked him what a tragedy is, he could not have answered. But he felt that a tragedy had been enacted in the house...
Niels had been young, strong, enormously strong, handsome, clean, competent... yes, and good! Bobby had seen his decaying, slowly, steadily, irrevocably. Now that he came to think about it and looked back at what he had been during the last few months, he felt profoundly shaken; he felt shattered in his belief in the firm foundations of life... His own life would have to be lived under the shadow of what had happened to Niels, of what would happen to him... He could never be the same carefree boy again...
He had often, of late, heard Niels mutter certain words. On this summer day they took a meaning for Bobby. "And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow..."
He had been happy, constitutionally happy. He would never be quite so happy again; but he would be more thoughtful...
♥ After the fourth year Niels attended evening classes conducted by the schoolmaster of the village: high school classes. He learned something of French and Latin, of Algebra, Geometry, Science... He acquired a vocabulary which would enable him to read real books. He was often puzzled by the abstruseness of it all. Finally he was amused. He learned to laugh at man's folly in puzzling out such curiosities of the mind... What had it all to do with the real problem of life?
But he kept at it.
♥ The third, a piece of cardboard lying on it, inscribed with a blue pencil, "Welcome Home."
He sank down on a chair, overcome with a strange feeling it was almost happiness...
♥ Niels had been looking from one to the other. The young woman... yes, she was a mate... She had no doubt been pretty, with the prettiness of youth... Now she looked helpful rather... But was not that what was needed?...
♥ And now, for the first time, he faced the day alone...
It was not an easy task. To drown one's thought in labour is very difficult on the farm: everything is conducive to contemplation. No high ambitions lead you away from the present; and yet those ambitions which are indispensable, the lowly ones, are really the highest on earth: the desire for peace and harmony in yourself, your surroundings...
But there were no surroundings - there was no little world, no microcosm revolving within the macrocosm. There was the duty to the farm, the country, the world: cold, abstract things devoid of the living blood...
There was still another difficulty. Since life could be borne only if the immediate past, the last ten years, were covered with a half artificial oblivion, the past to be faced in memory was the past of his dreams... It was almost as painful to face as the later one...
So long as Niels had to avert his eye from old desires, visions, dreams, there was no foundation for his life.
♥ Ellen!
..Ten years or longer ago he had left her alone...
His life, her life: two vessels which he had shattered at a single blow...
As for his life... there was only one thing left which he could do: gather the shattered fragments and fit them as best he might be able to do.
The nightmare of ten years he had atoned for, perhaps. But there, in that remoter past which, in high thoughts, now became more vivid, more real than the years immediately preceding the present he had done a great wrong: he had left alone a human being that had been in need of him: had left her alone because he had thought he could never be as little to her as a brother. And that human being had been she, the woman of his dreams, his vision, his love...
When the huge steel-gate of the prison on the brow of the hill had swung shut behind him, not many days ago, he had felt inwardly balanced; he had felt at peace. Scar-tissue had grown over his soul. It had been the peace of resignation, but it had been peace...
He felt himself plunged back into unrest, chaos...
Once more he was a stranger on his place; he was eating the bitter bread of exile...
There would never be any rest for him unless the girl in the bush forgave him... He must try to be to her now what she had wanted him to be to her then: a brother...
Was he able to do so? Were all those things that had once disturbed him and her, were they dead in him? Could he face her quietly, without desire?... Even though she might not hold it against him that he had left her for ten years or more...
He tried to visualise a meeting. It never occurred to him to take into account the fact that they were both more than ten years older than they had been. Himself - like all people to whom vanity is constitutionally foreign - he did not see: he was he; the one who saw; not the one who was being seen...
Ellen...
..His throat tightened; his heart pounded as of old...
To think he had lost her: not as a mate - what did that matter? Had lost her as a guiding influence in his life, had lost her as a sister, a friend...
He, he had gone astray; had left her alone...
Would she want him to come back? Would she accept him now? Would she forgive him?
Yet... she had been here; had been thinking of him in his absence.
For a week he pondered the question, musing, probing himself, probing her...
♥ All about reared the bush...
Even that small change spoke of years that had run down the river of time...
For a long while Niels stood and waited, trying to calm the turmoil in his heart...
He came like the prodigal son...
♥ And once more Niels sat silent, in the corner of the room this time, behind the table, in the shadow of the wall. That shadow, too, was the shadow of the past.
Happiness almost ancient and a sense of infinite sorrow which was new were mixed in the mute abandonment to his feelings in which he sat there. The sorrow was at the lapse of time; the old, never ending sorrow that what was is no more; the happiness, at the bridging of the gulf of years, accomplished without words, without explanations...
♥ The smaller trees in the bliss blossomed forth: clouds of white blossoms: the leaves were hanging from the poplar twigs, weak, as if tired; young, helpless; before them the whole of summer lay, the summer of life.
♥ It was a mere adumbration of the thought of a possible outcome, a mere foreshadowing of a state of things that might, might come about like a miracle hardly to be visualised. It was at once suppressed with a beating of the heart, a scarlet flooding of the brain... To face it seemed equivalent to precluding it: it was such a tender, delicate thing of a hope...
♥ The days went by; the marvel of passing time.
♥ Another Sunday, with white clouds sailing: a Sunday in June.
Ellen stands at the gate, looking along the road which is still no more than a bush trail.
They look atr each other as they meet; and they blush.
Ellen swings the little gate open and turns; he follows.
Both know; and each knows that the other knows...
A new, strange thing has happened between them. Expectancy is in their eyes, emotion. They see that coming which makes their hearts beat - that which is like a memory of old times, long past. But it is not with fear that their pulse is quickened... It is with an anticipation which neither of them is unwilling to prolong; for behind that anticipation there stands a certainty...
Again, as they cross the yard in silence, going to the accustomed place - that natural bower in the fringe of the bush - imponderable things, incomprehensible waves of feeling pass to and fro between them: things too delicate for words: things somehow full of joy and disquieting though not unpleasurable expectation.
Spring breezes amble through the bush; a meadow lark sings on the nearby clearing; robins chase each other in the grass.
And as the silence lengthens between them, between man and woman, the consciousness arises in each that the other knows his inmost thought: that both have secretly, almost reluctantly, faced the same hope...
Colour comes and goes in their faces, imperceptible almost - not seen by either, for they avoid each other's eyes - yet divided.
And as they stand there, by the chairs which the woman has provided, a memory rises, flushing her face with a scarlet flood...
She speaks as if she would ward it off; she speaks hurriedly, like a girl, precipitately; and her words are the same as they were then, twelve years ago. "Shall we sit here?" she says. "Let us have a walk rather, shall we?"
Niels nods. Her words are expression of his thought or his desire unformed; he does not think in articulate terms...
"The bush hides," she says. "It shelters, protects. It has served me well... But sometimes I wish I had a vista through it, out on the plains, to the horizon. I want to see wide, open, level spaces. Let us go to the slough..."
Again Niels nods. He does not trust himself to speak. His voice would seem so strange: it would break a spell. There is no barrier between them which would need to be bridged by words. They are not looking at each other: they are one.
"Wait," says the girl. "I will get my hat."
And she slips past him, into the house.
He idles back to the yard. The blood sings in his veins; he stands, strangely aglow.
Light-green, virgin, the bush rears all about. Aspen leaves shiver, reflecting little points of light from their still flossy surface.
"I love spring," says the girl as she rejoins him, her hat sluing by its ribbons over her arm. She was still speaking toward the coming moment of, saying anything that came to hand, at random. "I wish it were always spring..."
They pass through the gate and on to the bush road, turning north, side by side.
Again, between them, the tension grows less. What has happened between them is a beginning; it is not the end... What must come will come; there is much to follow. Why tremble? Why hasten it? To be merely alive is joy enough...
First they follow the bush road; then they leave it, threading a cattle path that branches off to the left where the road bends eastward.
Birds flutter up as they touch the bushes. They flit away, looking curiously at the intruding pair...
The cattle-path forks: the girl follows one branch, the man another. They do not flit and run: they go quietly, sedately. Still they avoid each other's eye; but each knows that the other is flushed, and his face smiles, with a strange, almost otherworldly smile. Whoever arrives first at the rejunction of the trails waits for the other: the other is coming...
Thus they reach the little school and look about. The yard is cleared; no brambles cover it any longer. Around the building the ground is bare, vegetation being worn down by many feet. They stand and look, their feelings half joy half sorrow...
They go to the windows of the school house and peer in. They do not laugh; but they smile at sight of benches and blackboards.
Then they go on, quietly, reminiscently. No need for words. Between them there stands the past; not as a barrier now; as a bond.
These two have been parted; and parting has opened their eyes. They have suffered; suffering has made them sweet, not made them bitter. Life has involved them in guilt; regret and repentance have led them together; they know that never again must they part. It is not passion that will unite them; what will unite them is love...
They are older. Both feel it. Older than they were when they threaded these thickets before. They are quieter, less apt to rush at conclusions, to close in struggle with life...
They come out to the slough and see the horizon, far in the north. They stand and look. Both think of a hay-stack that stood in the meadow, a few hundred yards in front. There is no hay-stack there now: it is spring, not autumn.
"Shall we sit?" says the girl.
They find a place in the grass, with a fallen tree for a back-rest.
They sit and look out, as if in resurrection of what was dead.
The man has turned. He was conscious of something in the girl by his side... of something disturbing or perhaps disturbed. He looks at her face which is held straight ahead, almost rigid. Something works on her features; and between the lashes of her light-blue eyes - white, sun-bleached lashes - there quivers a tear.
"Ellen," he says, his voice a-tremble.
"Niels," she replies, "it is time we make up for what we have done in the past... I have something to say to you, Niels. I should have thought of it twelve years ago; but I did not know it then. Yet I knew it the moment you had left my yard. Only I did not trust my own knowledge. Niels, I, too, am a woman. I, too, need more than mere brotherhood. The years go by; we both are passing through life. There is nothing that will remain when we are gone..."
"Ellen," he says again and presses her small, shapely, calloused hand in his own large one...
"I know," she says. "Don't speak. I have more to say. I have been to blame... I should not have said at the time, what you wish can never be. I should have said, what you wish cannot be so long as I live under the shadow of my mother's life. But if you can wait... For, Niels, I know then as I know now that it is my destiny and my greatest need to have children, children... And I knew then as I know now that there is no man living on earth from whom I could accept them if not you... I thought I could live my life as a protest against the life my mother had lived. I had loved her and she was dead... I should have known... Had she been living, the mistake would never have been made..."
Again the man by her side pressed her hand. Their shoulders touch. Not with the fleeting touch as in the bush. They are leaning against each other, quietly, trustingly, in peace with the world.
The man speaks, slowly, softly, his head bent low. "Do you think we can live down what lies in between?"
"Niels," she says, "I've had more than six years time to think that over. I believe we can. And whether we can or not, we must try..."
An hour or so later they rise and walk home through the dusk. They do not kiss. Their lips have not touched. But their arms rest in each other; their fingers are intertwined...
As they go, a vision arises between them, shared by both.