Settlers of the Marsh (10 page)

“Hm …” the old man mused. “Got your seed in?”

“Yes,” the girl answered. “I have it all done.”

The two men rose. In vain Niels searched for something to say.

Sigurdsen held out his hand. Then he suddenly bethought himself and drew his pocketbook.

“Never mind,” Ellen said. “Pay when you get the permit.”

“All right.”

And a moment later they were outside in the dark.

As they crossed the yard, the girl, too, came out, carrying a lighted lantern and two pails which she deposited at the door of the house. Then she turned back and, just as Sigurdsen was untying his horses, she followed the men to the gate. The darkness made her move more freely, more gracefully still …

She came and stepped to the side of the wagon.

“I baked to-day,” she said to the old man. “I brought you a loaf of fresh bread.”

“Tya …” Sigurdsen said. “You mighty good to me …”

She laughed as she slipped back through the gate. “Good-night.”

The two men remained silent while they drove the four miles through the bush. Even at parting neither spoke a word.

The last mile Niels walked.

W
HY HAD THE OLD MAN
insisted on his coming along? Apparently he was on the most friendly terms with the girl …

Why had she blushed when she saw him, Niels? Did she know what his thoughts had been with regard to her? For the first time she had smiled and even laughed. She had stepped down from a pedestal and walked among humans …

Did she even suspect what his 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, dreamt of, planned, and built to harbour her!

W
HEN HE REACHED
his yard, he could not think of going in to sleep …

The song of the softly rustling leaves, just sprouted on the poplars 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 strangely home-like, sheltered, protected ring. A
whip-poor-will
whistled his
clarion call
in the bluff …

Niels lighted a lantern and walked about on the yard: his yard, as for months it had no longer seemed to be. He went to the stable, patted the horses on the rump, and gave the newly bought cow an extra feed of hay.

He went over to the site of his house where the logs lay ready, squared and notched to be fitted together; and the lumber for floors, partitions, ceilings, rafters, roof, and stairs, neatly piled; doors and windows were stored in the granary. Stones were gathered in a huge pile for the foundation; the cellar was dug …

He went to the clearing where his first breaking lay, seeded to barley. Soon he would add to it … Already he had started to cut the brush …

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 …

T
HAT VERY DAY
he went north to bespeak help in building the house …

Soon it grew up,
a mansion
, holding four rooms, with a lean-to kitchen …

But then, here he was sitting on the Marsh; five miles north, she was sitting in the bush. How were they to get together?

He went to Lund's: She was not there. Instead, there was the usual crowd.

Kelm, the German, and his cronies were playing at cards …

Lund, as ever, was reclining in his wicker chair … Bobby greeted Niels, blushing with pleasure, for Niels and Nelson were still his idols: he was a big boy of fifteen now, with the angular movements of adolescence.

Niels drifted about, anxious to make his escape.

But so as not to be lacking in common civility, he turned to Mr. Lund and sat down.

“Got any hay this year?” he asked.

“No,” the man replied, groping about with uncertain hands and smiling his overdone smile. “Oh, it's Mr. Lindstedt, is it? … No. The south-west quarter of twenty-one is still open … But we don't know …”

Mrs. Lund, having heard a word or so of the conversation, came over and spoke in a lowered voice. “The truth of the matter is, Mr. Lindstedt, we have to wait till the seventeenth. Then the post-office-cheque will come in. But you know, that cheque cannot pay for everything …”

“Oh, mamma,” her husband broke in, “how you talk!”

“Well,” she flashed back. “It's true, ain't it?”

“We'll get a loan …”

“There you go again. Who is going to give you a loan? You haven't even got your patent.”

“I can prove up any time,” Lund said, darkening with displeasure. “I have forty acres broken …”

“Yes,” she snapped, “and the Jew takes it all … Mr. Lindstedt,” she added in desperation, tears almost in her eyes, “there isn't enough flour in the house to make breakfast with tomorrow morning. Whatever we get the Jew puts his hand on. We've three acres of potatoes in; and the crop is sold already for twenty cents a bushel. Other people get fifty cents and sixty cents; but we get twenty because we've got to sell in advance … That's the way it goes with this man …”

Niels felt immensely embarrassed. “Mrs. Lund,” he said, “will you let me help you out? I've got ten dollars in my pocket which I don't need just now. Take it and pay me back when your cheque comes in.”

“Well,” she said, “thanks, Mr. Lindstedt. I'll take it. But be sure to come over on Sunday the eighteenth …”

As he drove home, Niels thought, Where is Nelson? Where Olga?

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE
of July before haying began. Rains had delayed it.

Three days after, it was Sunday, the eighteenth.

Niels returned to Lund's. Mrs. Lund had his money ready.

Niels was untying his horses from the fence in order to leave again when he saw Mr. Lund coming blindly across the yard. The old man was in a hurry; he stumbled forward, feeling his way, nearly running into the wall of the smithy, but swerving back the very last moment.

Niels waited for him.

“Mr. Lindstedt,” Lund called. “Ah, there you are … Say, Mr. Lindstedt, will you give me a ride down to Sigurdsen's?”

“Certainly,” Niels replied, not a little astonished at the man's air of mystery and abject apology.

He helped him on to the seat and drove out on the dam in a brisk trot.

The two sat in silence. Niels was thinking, thinking …

Suddenly the man by his side began to speak.

“Mr. Lindstedt,” he said after clearing his throat repeatedly, his voice grating with artificial cordiality, “You have helped me out before … Can you loan me thirty-five dollars?”

Niels betrayed his surprise by his silence.

At once Lund tried to forestall the implied refusal.

“You see,” he said, “I have a brother living in Minnesota who is very well off. I want to go and see him. I am sure he would help me. If I can get a loan of two or three thousand dollars, I can prove up and straighten things out …”

“Well,” Niels said without harshness—the man was a visionary after all—“I haven't the cash …”

“You could give me a cheque … I'd pay you good interest … I'd pay … I'd pay you ten percent a month.”

That decided Niels. This man could not be trusted with money. “As far as the interest goes,” he said, “I don't care about that. But I can't.”

“You think it over,” Lund pleaded. “Think it over, Mr. Lindstedt. I shall see you again …”

W
HEN SIGURDSEN SAW
whom Niels had with him, he glared with suspicion. Apparently he wanted to speak to Niels alone. “Go to the house, Lund,” he said.

And when Lund had gone, he turned to Niels. “The girl … She come this morning see me. She want help in haying.”

“Well,” Niels pondered. “How would it be if we did our work in the morning and then went and helped her together?”

“Fine, tya. You go tell her.”

“Now?”

“Yea. She be waiting for me. You go.”

“All right,” Niels consented though he felt a sudden panic running through his body; and he turned his horses and drove back the way he had come.

H
E TIED HIS HORSES
at Ellen's gate, hardly knowing what to do next. But the difficulty solved itself: the girl stepped out of the house and came to meet him.

“Hello,” Niels said, his head aglow.

“Hello,” she replied, her voice strangely steady.

“Sigurdsen was speaking to me …”

“Well,” she asked, “may he come?” It sounded as if she were faintly amused.

“We'll both come to-morrow. Right after noon. Where is your hay?”

The girl nodded backwards. “Beyond the field. Have your dinner here. We'll use my teams.”

Niels assented.

“Won't you come in?” she invited casually, opening the little gate.

Niels followed mechanically as she led the way.

She did not go to the house but to a spot in the bush, north of it, where a little table and a folding chair stood in a sort of bower formed by
hazelbrush
and plum trees. A tin box with smouldering grass inside spread a smoky haze to keep the mosquitoes away.

“I'll get a chair,” she said.

“Never mind. I'll sit on the grass …”

They sat down, Ellen resuming a crochet-hook and some wool with which she had beguiled the time.

“You've been building?” she asked after a while. She was quite at ease.

“Yes,” he said. “I've built a house.”

“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.”

The girl looked at him. Her eyes had lost their critical, distancing look; they were frankly questioning.

Niels looked back at her, without speaking. He noticed that her abundant, straw-yellow hair was no longer so severely brushed down. It had little waves and ripples in it; a looser way of doing it up had given it freedom to follow its natural bend. He remembered how, as a girl, she had seemed to him singularly mature; now that in age she was a woman, she seemed almost girlish …

“I've looked about a good deal,” he said at last. “I've seen Lund's place; Hahn's; and a few others. Of course, I believe the men do work hard …”

“Lund doesn't,” Ellen interrupted.

“No,” Niels agreed quite seriously. “Not Lund. But Hahn. He's strong. If he does work hard, he can stand it. His wife works just as hard …”

“Harder,” Ellen interrupted again.

“Yes,” Niels went on. “She has the house and the children; the cows to milk; the sheep to feed. In summer she stacks the grain and the hay; and when
threshing time
comes …”

“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?”

“I passed Kelm's place last year,” Niels said. “He was breaking with his
new tractor
.
He sat on his engine. But she walked behind the plows, bare-footed, and picked out the stones and dragged the roots into piles. Kelm passes as a well-to-do man.”

Ellen laughed. A low, self-possessed laugh. “I've done it myself,” she said. “I am still doing it, though on a smaller scale.”

“You shouldn't,” he answered boldly.

“I'm independent,” she objected and resumed her work. But after a silence of a few minutes she dropped it again. “Isn't it strange that we should have been neighbours for over a year and have never spoken?”

“I did not dare,” Niels said.

“Dare?”

“You looked so forbidding. As if you would resent it if I spoke.”

She mused for a while. “Do you remember,” she said at last, “how you first came here to dig the well and spoke only Swedish?”

Niels blushed. “I do.”

“Do you know what I thought? One morning you did speak. ‘A penny for your thoughts, miss,' you called.”

Niels felt uncomfortable under the remembrance.

“And I probably frowned. Another one of those silly youngsters, I thought. When they see a girl, they think they must act up in order to please her. I knew the kind …”

“I was silly enough,” Niels admitted ruefully.

“I suppose. But you kept silent after that.”