Settlers of the Marsh

by Frederick Philip Grove

  In the afternoon, Niels strolled all over his farm; his wife had lain down for a nap.

  When Bobby returned, late at night, after supper, Niels gave him his directions for the morning. He did so in a softer, almost indulgent voice; with few words, but words which sounded as if he wished to conciliate an ally in a struggle to come …

  MONDAY MORNING Bobby walked behind the drag-harrow; Niels rode the seeder.

  They had worked for some hours when along the edge of the field a female figure appeared, dressed in a light, washable frock, with a “tango” coat over her shoulders, her chestnut-red hair flaming in the morning sun. Her eyes smiled at Bobby; and when Niels came by, she picked her way over the soft, brown seed-bed.

  He stopped and looked at her.

  “Well,” she asked, her whole face dimpling up, “how does it feel?” And she went around the machine, to his side, resting her elbows on the seedbox, leaning against him.

  For a moment silence. Then, as with an effort, “How does what feel?”

  “Everything … Being married …”

  He looked ahead and did not reply.

  She cast a quick glance at Bobby; and, since his back was still turned, she reached up with her hand, rumpled Niels’ hair, raised herself on her toes, kissed his ear, and whispered, “Oh, I love you; you’re so big and strong! How I love you! I love you so much it hurts!”

  An embarrassed look flitted over his face. “Don’t … the boy …”

  “Oh,” she cried, “go, you big bear!” She pushed his shoulder and laughingly picked her way to the edge of the field and sat down on a boulder.

  Never once did Niels look at her; but she followed him with her eyes. When Bobby passed her, she smiled.

  Niels was a prey to a whirl of thoughts and feelings … Already his marriage seemed to him almost an indecency …

  He looked back at the thing that had happened, as if it had happened to another man.

  Many points he did not understand … The astonished look of the woman, for instance, when, the morning after the night, he had asked her about the arrangements for their marriage. At first she had laughed. “Marry?” she had asked with widening eyes. As if there could be any question about the marriage! And, after some time, as if a readjustment of a preconceived idea had taken place, she, too, had treated that point as settled, as a matter of course. Then she had suddenly fallen about his neck, half laughing, half crying. “Oh,” she had whispered, “how I have wanted this! I have wanted it for years; for seven years, I believe. Ever since I first met you. But Niels, listen! Promise me that you will never leave me. Never, never! Not for a single day! It would be terrible if you did, Niels. Terrible for you and me. Promise, Niels.”

  He had not understood then; he did not understand now.

  She loved him; had loved him for seven years: so what was there to fear? Everything was plain and simple. He, it is true, could no longer respond with any great passion. But he, too, had wanted her once, would want her again. He would do his duty …

  The other woman had sent him away … The other woman? … The world went black before his eyes …

  He put the thought aside with an effort. His look assumed a steely expression; his mouth was set in rigid lines. He looked old.

  “Come on, there, Nellie,” he shouted and swung his whip, the first time he had ever done so, over the Percherons. Jock jumped as he heard its swish …

  FROM THE NEIGHBOURS where Bobby had carried the news, it had flown abroad. The settlement was astir with it: Lindstedt, the powerful Swede, had married the Vogel woman!

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered!” Mrs. Lund had exclaimed at Odensee.

  “Yooh-hooh!” Kelm had yodled across the creek.

  The timid young settlers south-east of Niels’ had looked at each other, almost frightened …

  Not a person called at the White Range Line House … Nor did the pair call on any one …

  Just now, of course, everybody was busy seeding; but even after seeding was over …

  Niels broadcasted a mixture of grasses in his slough. Perhaps, if he seeded grass, he could get along without additional hay… The other woman held the permits …

  BUT THE MEETING had to come, of course.

  One evening, still in the early summer, he went to see Kelm on business; and as he drove over the bridge, into the road-chasm, where the bush still stood in its primeval thickness, he saw her team coming, water-barrels in the wagon-box …

  His heart stood still. There was no way of turning. He had to go to the side to give her the road. His horses stopped, and he sat, his head bowed low.

  Slowly her team approached, came up, and stood … For a moment silence.

  Then her voice, a mere whisper, full of anguish, “Niels, how could you! …”

  Without answering he drove past …

  SUMMER WENT ON its way.

  More and more Niels realised that the woman who had become his wife was a stranger to him …

  It had not taken above three days before he knew that, if ever there had been in him the true fire that welds two lives together, it had died down. He had made an effort to conquer something like aversion … It was his duty to make the best of a bad bargain …

  Distasteful though they were, he satisfied her strange, ardent, erratic desires. Often she awakened him in the middle of the night, in the early morning hours, just before daylight; often she robbed him of his sleep in the evening, keeping him up till midnight and later. She herself slept much in daytime. He bore up under the additional fatigue …

  Whenever she came, she overwhelmed him with caresses and protestations of love which were strangely in contrast to her usual, almost ironical coolness.

  She read much, restricting her work in the house to the least that would do. Yet, during the early part of the summer, meals were always prepared, the house in order when he came home at the regular hours.

  Once a week Mrs. Shultze came over, the frail little wife of the German neighbour, to do the heavy washing, the scrubbing, the baking, the churning … as Niels’ mother had done … Her own wearing apparel Mrs. Lindstedt washed by hand, upstairs, in her basin …

  Twice, when Niels had entered the house at an unusual hour, once at eleven, once at four o’clock, he had found it exactly as he had left it, with the breakfast and dinner dishes still on the table, the beds unmade: she did her work the last minute … Niels tried not to see it.

  The interior of the house was much changed.

  Mrs. Lindstedt had had a flat in the city and owned furniture of her own. She had had it shipped out to Minor; and Niels had made two trips with the hay-rack to haul it from there.

  It had converted her bed-room into something which he did not understand: upholstered chairs, rugs, heavy curtains, and a monstrously wide, luxurious bed with box mattress and satin covers; a mahogany dressing table covered with brushes, combs, flasks, jars, and provided with three large mirrors two of which were hinged to the central one; a chiffonier filled with a multitudinous arrangement of incomprehensible, silky and fluffy garments, so light and thin that you could crush them in the hollow of your hand; a set of sectional bookcases filled with many volumes; a couch upholstered in large-flowered damask; cushions without number; and above all mirrors, mirrors. The whole room was pervaded with sweetish scents.

  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.

  THUS 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 …

  AT 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.