He was greeted by a vast stir of feet and a multiple nicker. Groping for the switch, he flashed a light on. He shook himself to expel the icy air; and slowly, deliberately, he fed his horses.
He went from place to place, looking after cows, pigs, and fowl. It was the same thing everywhere; the shelter was perfect. At last he milkedâby hand as he had always done.
It was six when he re-entered the sleeping house. He sat down in the rarely-used living-room. On any other day he would have fallen asleep; but the furious blizzard of the prairie forces the hearer to listen. This wind, with its onsets and lulls and its sudden cannonading attacks, infuses into the blood a rhythm which defies sleep. Will anything withstand it? Or is it going to level the work of man, turning a slow and gradual destruction into a cataclysm momentary and catastrophic?
Repeatedly Abe went out again. Slowly a grey light crept into things, and the short, crepuscular day began. Abe lighted the fire in the kitchen. It was all settled: tonight, at supper, he would make the announcement; the date would be set. Provided the groom arrived!
At half-past eight Abe went to the stairway and called: a great shout which woke every one in the house; then he shouldered into his sheepskin to issue forth into the yard for the dozenth time.
There was light to see by. Above, the hollow of the yard was covered as with a lid: a moving, scurrying lid consisting of infinitely small particles, some of which, dropping into the calm of the space enclosed by wind-break and buildings, were arrested in their wild flight, caught in the stagnant, swaying air where they filtered to the ground, to be swept up again and whirled aloft in fluttering sheets which rocked according to the whim of eddying countercurrents within the shelter belts. Again Abe went all over his yardâ¦.
Let the girl have her wish!
Lights flashed on in the house. Abe waited; but at last,
expecting breakfast to be ready, he entered through the shed at the rear.
In the kitchen all but Jim were busy, their faces flushed, tongues babbling, for they found the presents which, the night before, had been scattered over the dining table. Abe was greeted with a shout of “Merry Christmas!” and answered like the beloved head of a family, giver of all good gifts to them. His eye sought a face and found it.
In entering he had admitted a whiff of icy air; and for a moment he stood in an evanescent cloud arising from the condensation of the moisture in the room. Huge and tall he towered in the door, dusted over from head to foot with a fine, glittering snow. What a contrast to the girl in her beige-coloured dress of georgette silk over which she had donned a large starched overall apron of pale-blue cambric!
She had shed that air of suffering and languor which she had worn for months except on Sundays; never before had she shed it so completely. Yet a slight change came over her at sight of her father.
They had breakfast. And after breakfast Abe went out again, restless and disturbed. It was partly the effect of the weather.
Even though the poplars stood bare and leafless, the wind bent and twisted them, straining at every twig and bough, whipping their swaying tops. Everything that could move moved under the impact of that aerial turmoil; everything that could rattle rattled; and since trees and timbers were frozen to the core, the sum total of the sounds produced was that of a dry, feverish chatter which set the nerves on edge as though things had a sort of insane voice of their own. The twigs which broke in the girdle of trees snapped with the splintering crackle of rifle fire. When, in a down-sweep of the captured air, the
hard, fine granules of the snow, which had no trace of their crystalline structure left, hit the ground or the roofs of the lower buildings, they did so with a swishing sound. And to all that was added the music of the air itself which, like a floating shroud, kept swinging and swaying.
Abe's powerful physique enjoyed the flooding turbulence as others may enjoy a dip through rolling breakers of brine.
Again he went to the house. “It's doubtful,” he said in the kitchen.
Ruth and the girls looked at him; and so did Jim who was helping.
On Marion's face lay a peculiar smile. “Would you go yourself?”
“I don't believe a horse would face that wind.”
Marion shrugged her shoulders. “I don't know about uncle and auntie; but John will come!” This was said with unalterable conviction.
The noon hour came. The girl knew no doubt. Abe went upstairs to change into his Sunday clothes.
In the old coonskin coat which had belonged to his father before him, he went to the gate of his yard. He knew it was impossible to see far on the prairie; he had always liked the feeling of isolation produced by a blizzard, as if the farm were shut off from all the entanglements of contact with a turbulent world: that world which demanded a surrender of individual freedom and independence and with which he need have nothing more to do. Knowing that in house and granaries provisions were stored which would secure the continuance of life for weeks, he felt the very fierceness and aggressiveness of this winter orgy as enhancing rather than diminishing the sense of safety: no matter what might happen in the outer world, this farm was a world in itself
which would endure while he lasted, defying the forces of nature.
The great farm gate, open as always in winter, creaked on its hinges. Outside, the flying snow swooped to the ground like a sloping roof, hiding even the ditch. Everything was sketched in white and grey. No, they could not come. They could never hold their direction.
The drift-laden wind leapt the shelter of the yard as a hunting animal might leap stone or shrub in its way; the very ground seemed to be slipping forward. Since the trees formed a trap for whatever snow fell below the carrying blast, the fence was half buried.
Without thought of what he was doing, Abe turned west, close to the fence. Twenty rods from the gate the wind-break bent to the north. Beyond, the field of vision was closed by flying, whirling, streaky walls of drift. Abe went on to that corner, stopping in the sharp-rested wave of closely packed snow which traversed the road like a boldly flung promontory, losing itself in the ditch which was completely filled. The world seemed to end beyond the wind-break. The snow came in waves and flaws; but these spectral waves did not advance in straight lines; and so there were no vistas between them such as occur between vertical veils of mist. Sometimes those sheet-like waves were thrown down by a canting of the wind; then they looked like enormous, airy beings which stretched aloft before they blotted themselves on their faces in a unison of supplication. At other times, a sheet resolved itself, under the impact of an adventitious blow, into a rounded thing bounding along like a galloping animal multiplied a thousand-fold in size: and before it had crossed the road, it, too, was flung down by a chute of the gale or blown aloft, disintegrated into its elements.
Glowing with inner warmth, Abe turned. He was at peace with himself; the question which had disturbed him was settled. This inner peace was enhanced into positive happiness by the reaction to the turmoil about.
He reached the gate and went on, from a mere aversion to enter yard or house. He came to the eastern corner of the wind-break. No, that prairie, ordinarily so open, did not exist to the eye. Nothing was left but the farm behind his back, nothing of all the world.
Convinced, and sorry in the conviction, that no callers could come, he was on the point of turning once more when he was caught up in a whirl of a different kind.
From out of the swaying drifts to the east two horses emerged whose jingling bells became audible with startling suddenness as they entered the shelter belt; their nostrils raised and wide, with icicles hanging from nose and lips, they plunged through the snow. Abe had just time to leap aside. But they, no less startled than he, reared and upset the cutter, throwing its inmates into the snow. They were on the point of bolting in a panic when Abe leapt forward and caught their bridles.
From behind came the sound of muffled laughter. Three figures, hardly recognizable in their wraps, struggled to their feet. Two of them, one tall and strong, the other short and spare, showed no trace of their faces which were hidden by woollen scarfs; the last, of medium height, had its eyes bare in a slit between fur cap and wrappings.
Abe felt almost disappointed at their arrival; but he remembered his duty as host. “I didn't think you would venture out,” he said.
“We'd never have started,” said Mary, laughing and shaking the snow from her coat, her voice sounding as though she were singing against the wind. “But Mr. Harrison came
at nine; and he swore he would be responsible for our safe arrival.”
“I got you here, did I not?” young Harrison laughed.
“You might have been lost!”
“We
were
lost half a dozen times. But Charlie and I never stirred from our seats. We left it to Mr. Harrison to find his way back to the road.”
Abe was leading the horses by their bridles; the guests followed.
“Better go to the house,” he said as he stopped at the barn.
“You go,” young Harrison said to the Vanbruiks, untying the scarf from around his head. “I'll help Mr. Spalding.”
Abe took the sleigh into the driveway of the barn and watered the horses at the inside trough. “You'll have to stay overnight.”
“We'll see,” said John.
At the house, all lights had been turned on, for even at midday it remained murky. In the kitchen the last preparations for dinner were going forward. Like Ruth, the girls, and Mary Vanbruik, Jim had donned an overall apron. Somehow, this seemed to impart even to the aprons of the women the character of a disguise.
When Abe and John entered, the latter joined those in the kitchen; and the gaiety reached a climax when, in addition to donning an apron, he twisted a towel into a turban and, reaching for a ladle, walked about like a chef supervising the work. His disguise was all the more comically effective as the apron served to set off his blue shirt with the excessively wide trousers which he affected.
Abe and the doctor sat down in the living-room.
During the next half-hourâwhenever the swing-door from the kitchen admitted someone to the dining-roomâ
a burst of voices and laughter ran through the house. Once Mary came to the door and spoke to her brother. “I should have been sorry to miss this. It is lovely out here in this weather.”
Abe followed her with his eyes as she returned to the kitchen. In spite of her age she looked like a girl.
Shortly after, the ladies passed through the room to run out into the hall and upstairs. Even Ruth seemed rejuvenated. They removed their aprons, touched up their hair, and “powdered their noses,” as the doctor expressed it. When they returned, they stood for a moment in the living-room, laughing and jesting. John, still in his cook's disguise, appeared in the door and announced solemnly, bowing and swinging his ladle, that “madame was served.”
This brought a new burst of laughter; and Dr. Vanbruik, “rising to the occasion”âhe always used set phrases when he was jestingâoffered his arm to Ruth. Abe did the same with his sister; and, the girls following, they took their seats. John contrived to divest himself with magic speed of apron and turban.
Ruth had taken out her best dinner set and the sterling flatware which Abe had given her on completion of the house. The tablecloth was of cut-work embroidery; and the whole arrangement of the room betrayed the endeavour, not unsuccessful, to produce an impression of festive splendour. Abe, expecting his guests to stay for the night, the first time such a thing had happened, was conscious of a feeling of satisfaction. Ruth deserved credit.
The doctor exerted his conversational powers, though even to-day he could not entirely remove the impression that he was descending into a lower arena when mingling with his fellow beings; but he succeeded in making himself agreeable
to his nieces and Ruth; which meant that he indulged in an old-fashioned, cumbersome sort of banter.
“Uncle!” Marion exclaimed on such in an occasion, with a flash of her even teeth. “You are trying to fluster me.”
“To judge from your blush, I succeeded,” he said, looking at her through his gold-rimmed glasses.
“I may have blushedâ”
“You are still blushing. Never mind. Even a plain girl grows pretty when the colour mounts to her hair. And youâ”
“Now you are going to say what you don't mean.”
“You contradict to give emphasis to my words. Admit it.”
“Not at all!”
“Of course,” he went on, “that is as it should be. Who does not like to be praised? And you, I was going to say, are far from plain. I appeal to Mr. Harrison's judgment.”
John looked at her, laughing. Her blushes deepened.
“Perhaps,” the doctor still pursued the subject, with a bow to the young man, “that appeal is hardly fair.”
“John,” Marion cried, “I forbid you to answer.”
Which brought a laugh around the board. Ruth felt perhaps even more flattered than the girl herself.
Dinner over, Jim went to the hall and climbed into a suit of overalls to feed the strange horses.
“I'll go along,” said John Harrison.
“All right, Bud.”
“And I!” Frances joined in.
But Ruth objected. “You and I, my dear, are going to do the dishes.”
“Let her go,” Mary said. “I'll help you.”
So the girls, too, put on coats and wraps. Jim ran to the kitchen to fetch his sheepskin from the narrow closet. Rapid whispers sprang up in the hall; the girls intended to race him
to the stable. But Jim divined their intention, and in spite of their hurry he reached the corner of the house at the very moment when they descended the steps of the stoop. They were nearer the gate in the fence of the house-yard; but, presuming on this advantage, they failed to put forth their best effort; and Jim defeated them by vaulting the fence. Yet none of them gave up. On such a day it seemed the only fit way of locomotion to run as fast as one could; it sent a glow of health into the cheeks and gave all eyes the polish of jewels. Marion's looked like veined agate, harmonizing with her complexion of ivory and red, in striking contrast to her sister's which was pure white and apple-blossom pink.