Settlers of the Marsh (19 page)

The only other room which received any of this furniture was the dining room. There, a round extension table of fumed oak occupied the centre, surrounded by six chairs. Along the wall stood a large buffet; in the corner, a china cabinet filled with dishes too delicate for Niels' calloused and clumsy hands …

In both these rooms there had, at first, appeared many framed pictures; a few of them landscapes; most of them human figures, photographs, so she had explained, of famous paintings … naked figures …

Famous or not, Niels had—timidly, with a reference to Bobby—objected to them; so they had gone upstairs, into the bed-room.

The former furniture of the dining room stood in the front room now which was being used as a hall.

Niels himself slept in his iron bedstead where he used grey blankets and coarse linen: only when he had seen her things, had he realised their coarseness; he would have been uncomfortable with anything else.

In Bobby's presence Niels felt ashamed even of the elegance of the dining room. For himself and the boy he insisted—timidly—on using the coarse, heavy dishes of his bachelor times.

Mrs. Lindstedt received letters and parcels through the post—the post office was again on Lund's former place where a Ruthenian settler had squatted down. The parcels contained mostly books inscribed with the names of the givers: invariably names of men. Niels never asked for the contents or after the writers of these letters. He knew she burned them …

What she had told him of her former life, was this.

Before she was married for the first time, she had been a sales-girl in the city, first in the book, then in the “art” department of a large store. There, Mr. Vogel, floorwalker, had fallen in love with her; and they had married. Mr. Vogel had been sickly, but possessed of some money, the savings of a lifetime. His trouble being “nerves,” the doctor had advised him to live in the country. So, as a speculation, he had bought the place where Rowdle now lived and had built the cottage, renting the land to Rowdle from the start. There, they had lived for two years, till Mr. Vogel had died from heart failure. He had left some money behind but not enough for the widow to live on. So, before Rowdle bought the place, for two thousand dollars, on crop payments, she had been forced to live on it for long periods at a time, in order to save, though she had been exceedingly lonesome …

Niels easily surmised that this was not all. There was a vast background of things not ordinarily touched upon. Yet, in hours of effusion, she sometimes cried, Niels sitting helplessly by; and then she would hint at dark, incomprehensible things.

“Oh, Niels,” she would say, “if you knew what terrible things I have had to put up with: brutal things!”

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.

This feeling was strengthened—sometimes into an almost uncanny dread—by the attitude of others: nobody spoke to him about his marriage. Occasionally, when he had business with others—and he had more and more such business: the farm grew, the country became settled—he would enter a house where two or three were assembled. At sight of him all would go silent. And yet he was the oldest settler in the Marsh, the one from whom help was expected, encouragement, employment even.

Not a congratulation, not an invitation for neighbourly intercourse: nothing …

Niels could not but be aware of enveloping reticences; he felt as if he were surrounded by a huge vacuum in which the air was too thin for human relationships to flourish …

Bobby even! … Niels could not help reverting again and again, in thought, to that first evening of his wife's arrival on the place: Bobby had blushed and hung his head, speechless at her announcement that she was Mrs. Lindstedt now.

Already, during two short months, a conviction had grown in him that there were things which all about him knew: he alone was ignorant of them …

He shrugged his shoulders: they were broad: they could carry much …

Of the work on the farm she no longer took any notice, not since the first novelty had worn off.

Once, timidly, Niels had mentioned the garden, the cows. She had smiled.

“Niels,” she had said, conciliatingly, but almost condescendingly, “I hope you didn't marry me in order to make me work. I will try to keep house for you. But that is all I can undertake. I am not the kind of woman that works.”

Niels had felt it coming that the next moment she would mention the “other woman”; and so he had quickly said, “No, no; of course; that's all right.”

He had gone on milking the cows; and whenever, at night, it was not too dark, he hoed in the garden. That he always took water and wood into the house went without saying. In the morning, work in the field or at haying started with daylight.

T
HUS MATTERS DRIFTED
along to the end of July.

Then, one day, a little tussle arose. Niels carried his point; but he did so by a compromise. Unlike her, he had not prepared for the occasion.

“Niels,” she said one evening when he came in after the chores were done and while he was washing in the kitchen. “Just how did Bobby and you divide the housework when you were alone?”

Niels looked up, stopping in the vigorous rubbing and splashing of face, neck, and head in which he indulged. He divined what was coming. “We worked together, as in everything else. You know we did nothing but what was absolutely necessary.”

“Well,” she continued, “I have been thinking, since he gets the shack and lives there by himself, why should he not look after his meals as well. You might give him a small raise …”

Niels answered somewhat hotly, “I gave him a raise when I sent him to live there. He's a mere boy. He can't be expected to look out for himself. He misses the company he had before you came.”

“Yes,” she said, “probably he does. But I'm sure he'd do anything for money …”

“He would not … But let me finish washing.”

So he gained a little time to think.

“I don't see why you should wish this,” he said at last, entering the dining room. “You can't complain about too much work?”

She began to cry. “Oh,” she said, “you're hard! …”

Somehow this word struck him with such force that, for a moment, a lump rose in his throat. Somewhere, some time, he had heard it before. He could not at once trust himself to speak.

“Look here, Clara,” he said at last—it was very rare that he used her first name; and as he pronounced it, she smiled up at him, brilliantly, gratefully, as if expanding under a caress; and that smile disarmed him once more. There was in it something which abashed, which confused, but which also antagonised him. It was meant to sweep his sensual being off its balance … Then he rallied. “Surely,” he said, “there is very little difference whether you fry eggs for two or for three.”

“It isn't that,” she said, her voice tearful.

“Well, what is it?”

“Oh, I can't express it. You wouldn't understand.” Then, with a helpless gesture, “You can't know how terribly hard life is for me; oh, everything … I sometimes don't know what to do. I am so unhappy …”

Niels looked at her. Then he shook his head.

“No. I don't understand. I thought you wanted this.”

“I did, Niels,” she protested. “I did. I thought things would be different with you. You are a man. You are more of a man than any one I have ever known. I only wish you didn't have to work!”

“Not have to work!”—in amazement.

“Yes,” she said. “So you wouldn't have to leave me, not for an hour, not for a minute!”

Niels laughed good-naturedly. “You are taking things too hard … You exaggerate them …”

Hopefully she reached for his neck to draw him down and kiss him. “Niels,” she whispered, “help me, help me.”

He was embarrassed. He wished to help her. “If I only knew what it is …”

“Oh,” she said with a vain effort to explain, “I am so tired all the time. And then I lie down. And such thoughts come. This cannot last. Niels, one day something terrible is going to happen to me …”

Niels remained silent for a minute or so. Then, hesitatingly, “I even believe you should do more than you do. Take your thoughts off yourself …”

“I can't,” she exclaimed. “If only I could! But even dressing is too much. I don't stay for breakfast any longer. I shouldn't mind Bobby if only I didn't need to come down for dinner and supper.”

“Well,” Niels gave in on the minor detail, “if that's the case, suit yourself. As for the boy, I cannot send him away from the house altogether. I am responsible for him. If I leave him to himself, he'll either quit or go wrong …”

Thus things rested, not to the enhancement of Niels' prestige in his own eyes.

The farm was a law unto itself. It demanded his work. Nellie and her oldest filly were both in foal. Two big hay-stacks in the yard, one, monstrously large, in a slough east of the place. While the field-work rested, a new stable was erected, a huge structure with drain channels, built inside of three-inch lumber. Cutting started. The wheat was heavy, sixty acres of it. Before threshing the granary would have to be doubled in capacity … Work galore …

A
T THIS TIME
something happened which was irritating in the extreme.

Niels had just stabled the horses; Bobby was washing in the basin at the pump which was run by an engine now.

Niels was in a hurry. Rain threatened. It had been misty for a day or so in the early morning.

When he entered the house, he saw, in passing through the dining room, that the breakfast dishes were still on the table: the stove in the kitchen was dead and cold. On the table lay a ham which he had brought in from the granary—there was no smoke-house yet; and the ham was uncut.

He had hardly entered the kitchen and was pouring water into the basin—well water; the house was still without eave-troughing: work, work everywhere—when he heard his wife's voice from the staircase.

“Oh,” she called, “I'm so sorry. Surely it isn't twelve yet!” But she held her watch in her hand and was staring at it in dismay.

“Quarter past,” Niels sang back, his eye on the clock, “We're in a hurry, too. It's going to rain.”

“But Niels,” she cried, “I can't come. I have my hair all bundled up.”

Niels went into the front room and looked up the stairs—they had no
balustrade
yet: work waiting everywhere—and there she stood, in white kimono, her head bandaged in a turban of
Turkish towels
.

“What's wrong?”

“
Henna
,” she said.

“What's that?”

“Henna leaves,” she repeated. “I'm dying my hair.”

Niels stood speechless.

“We're in a hurry,” he said once more, impatiently. “It's going to rain. There are just three acres of wheat left. He spoke grimly and hurried back into the kitchen.

“Oh Niels, wait!” she called. “I simply can't come. I never thought it was so late. I'm sorry, Niels. It isn't going to happen again.”

That moment Bobby knocked. She fled upstairs.

“Come in,” Niels called from the door of the kitchen. “Quick, Bobby, get a move on you. We've got to get dinner ourselves. Get a fire started. Put the kettle on. And the frying pan …”

They ate in the kitchen. But it was past one before they were back in the field.

In the evening Mrs. Lindstedt had a great cry over it as soon as they were left alone …

Dying her hair! Yes, the lower edge had looked different of late, brown, with a little grey mixed in …

T
HE INCIDENT
was not repeated during the fall. Niels allowed it to pass in silence. What else could he do? …

Other things gave food for thought: not always, these days, was thought as charitable as it should have been.

One day—observation was sharpened by the knowledge that her hair was dyed—a new suspicion ripened into certainty. Not only the colour of her hair was artificial, but the colour of the face as well. Niels knew, of course, that she used
powder
: even that he did not understand nor approve of. Always, in the morning, her lips had looked pallid; now he noticed a greyish, yellowish complexion in her face.

One morning early—he intended to see Kelm about his threshing before he went at the work of stacking his sheaves—he entered her room to waken her so she would prepare breakfast while he attended to his chores.

There, as he looked at her in the pale light of a wind-torn dawn, he stood arrested.

From behind the mask which still half concealed her face, another face looked out at him, like death's-head: the coarse, aged face of a coarse, aged woman, aged before her time: very like that of Mrs. Philiptyuk, the Ruthenian woman at the post office, strangely, strikingly, terrifyingly like it: but aged, not from work but from … what?

For a moment Niels stared. Something like aversion and disgust came over him. Then, carefully, almost fastidiously, he lifted a corner of the satin coverlet, baring the shoulder and part of the breast which were still half hidden under the filmy veil of a lacy nightgown. There the flesh was still smooth and firm: but the face was the face of decay …

For another minute he looked; then, without waking her, he turned and left the room on tiptoe.

But he had wakened her. “Niels,” she called a moment later. “I'm coming. I must have slept in. I read late last night. I did not hear the alarm …”

Ten minutes after—Niels had just started the fire as he always did and was washing—she came down, in dressing gown and slippers, to mix the dough; for his bachelor life had made him partial to hot biscuits for breakfast.