“Sure,” Niels said.
He took his cheque-book from the cupboard in the hall where he kept his papers, sat down, wrote a cheque for two hundred and fifty dollars, and tossed it across the table.
She ignored the slip of paper and got up.
But when Niels came down during the night to feed the fire in the big stove, he took note of the fact that the cheque was gone.
MORE EVEN THAN BEFORE, Niels brooded over his relation to his wife. He thought, during the drives which he made, from bush to town, from farm to bush, of all the married couples he knew …
He could not puzzle it out.
On the other hand, whether Nelson and Olga approved, whether the world approved, mattered very little. If only …
He, Niels Lindstedt, a skunk? … Mean? … If any one had reason to complain of unfair dealing, it seemed to him it was he.
Her life was a horror. True.
As soon as she was absent, he was able to see her side of it. If only she would utter wishes! He realised with a shudder that she had become physically repulsive to him. 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?
Why had she gone to the city again? The matter of dentistry was the merest pretext … Yet, she had felt it incumbent upon her to use a pretext. But … let her go! Let her go! If that made life bearable for her … Let her go as often as she cared to. He would offer the next trip to her, at Easter …
WINTER WENT. Mrs. Lindstedt returned; no change; or if any, a slight change for the worse; all things a little more pronounced, with a little more of an edge to them …
Niels had not sent Bobby to get her. He had gone himself. He had thought it might please her. She had all but ignored him at the station: handing her baggage, not to him but to the obsequious operator who stared at her. “Perhaps you are hungry,” he had stammered. He had been hungry himself.
“I had my dinner on the train,” the answer had come, icily, distancing. He had not even known you can have dinner on the train …
Two and a half months followed, after that two-hour drive during which she had carefully avoided touching him …
Niels did all the housework now, cooked three meals a day for himself and Bobby, washed the dishes, shook up his bed, swept the floor … Sometimes he did not see his wife for days at a stretch, leaving as he did for the bush before sun-up, and returning after dark, often to find the house cold and still: only a cup or a plate would betray that she had been downstairs at all, snatching a perhaps hurried meal while he was away from house and yard.
Easter came. She did not give him a chance to offer that trip. She merely announced that she was going, giving no reason whatever this time. Niels did not give, she did not ask for, any money. Three weeks later she returned with a livery team which she had hired in town.
DURING THIS ABSENCE Niels did no longer form any good resolutions. He was immersed in gloom.
Vague, disquieting suspicions invaded him: what was she doing in the city? What was she doing?
A dull, menacing feeling grew up in him, was on the point of flaring into hatred. She hated him, of that he was sure. He hated her. Why had she come back?
He felt as if he must purge himself of an infection, of things unimaginable, horrors unspeakable—the more horrible as they were vague, vague …
THE THAW-UP CAME. New settlers moved in: two young Canadians, brothers, the Dunsmore boys people called them; a German who squatted down along the creek, northeast from Niels’ place, Dahlbeck by name.
The spring work began and was finished. The farm was a law unto itself …
SUMMER.
Often now, during Sunday afternoons, Niels was sitting in the back seat of his democrat, under the forward-slanting roof of the implement shed, with his book, the Elements of Political Economy. He entered his house only when it could not be helped … But he stared across at 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.
Sometimes, during week-days, he took his meals in Bobby’s shack instead of going to the house …
Bobby never said a word about all these troubles. But Niels knew that he knew all about them. Once or twice Niels thought things might be easier if he could talk them over … Yet, could he? Bobby was like a son to him … But, after all, he was not his son …
The crops grew well; they promised a bountiful harvest in June; but in July the drought came: the first drought Niels had ever experienced. What did it matter?
Sometimes clouds sailed up, obscuring the sky; and with a big bluster of wind they blew over, not a drop coming down from their bursting udders. The grass parched in the meadows; the cattle bellowed on the Marsh; the grain ripened, so light that there was hardly any difference between straw and ear …
And then the hail-storm came, like a sudden catastrophe …
When the hail had melted away—it lay three, four inches thick in places—Niels and Bobby went out to look at the damage. Water stood in the furrows; the ridges in between looked like black sugar, melting … The crops had disappeared.
Bobby exclaimed again and again, “Gee whiz!”
Niels shrugged his shoulders with something like a chuckle. “And to think,” he said, “that on the advice of that fellow Regan in Minor I insured against hail! Why, that hail-storm means money in my pocket! Eight dollars an acre … I could never have threshed eight dollars out of that dry straw …”
“I hadn’t even thought of that,” Bobby laughed. “Gee, Niels, you’re a wizard. You make money even out of hail …”
But Niels’ eyes had gone steely again.
What had she gone to the city for? What had she been doing there? … It was an obsession …
NIELS THOUGHT AND THOUGHT as he sat in his implement shed and watched his house. It was a Sunday afternoon, the last in August.
Hahn’s revelations came back to him. “They’re from the city.” Eyes peered at Niels, alluring, provoking, from under fashionable, expensive hats … hats like his wife’s … set in faces powdered and painted … “One of them will be your wife … for an hour …”
Niels whipped himself up and walked back and forth, back and forth, behind that array of his implements: wagons, plows, binder, seeder … He walked there because he could not be seen from the house. And every now and then he bent down and peered from under the low, jutting roof across his yard at the windows of that house.
In this hour of torture there was born in him a great determination: no matter what happened, his wife was not going to go to the city again. Three times she had gone. What had she been doing there? Never mind what she had been doing. She was not going to do it again! …
THE WEEK WENT BY. Niels was aware of unusual activity in the house: in that room which he never entered any longer; and one day, when the door, now usually closed, was ajar, it opened under the tremour of his heavy tread on the landing. He saw enough to know that his wife was packing up …
She was making preparations to go on a fourth trip. She was not going to go …
Not a word did she say to him. But she spoke to Bobby, asking him to be ready to take her to town on a certain day.
She had waited till Niels was away to speak to the boy. But Bobby told him as soon as he returned.
Niels, in sudden blind rage, went to the house at once. It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a time when he hardly ever entered the place.
She was in the dining room, engaged in collecting some trifles which she intended to take along …
HE HAD ENTERED through the front door, thereby cutting off her retreat; of a set purpose he turned the key behind his back and drew it out, in a single motion.
He crossed the hall and stood in the door of the dining room, almost filling it with his huge frame.
“What are you doing?” he asked, qui
etly, but with a vibrant note which would have warned the most unobservant.
She turned; slowly, as if recalling her absent thoughts to some unimportant business which thrust itself in her path. On her lips, which were brilliantly, exaggeratedly rouged, lay a smile. In her eyes—couched behind lids, lashes and brows which also bore the marks of the make-up for artificial light—lay the remnant of a happy dream. Her dressing gown, of filmy, white, Japanese silk, showed every detail of her undergarments: lacy things of pink crepe-de-chine. Her chestnut-red hair surrounded her face like a flaming cloud. Her bare arms and soft white hands, issuing as they did from wide, flaring sleeves, were the very picture of allurement and temptation. The room was heady with heavy scents …
Niels looked with distaste at the scene; he felt a loathing for the woman. Had he obeyed his impulse, he would have given her all the money he had and sent her away. 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 …
She felt the approach of a catastrophic development. The smile faded from her lips; the dream died in her eyes. She focused them on the man in the door who thrust himself into her visions, standing there, huge, implacable, like doom. As this change took place, her whole appearance became, in a moment, from a picture of all that might in a physical sense be alluring, something pathetically artificial: as if a small animal at bay, a mouse perhaps, were looking out from some large shell, beautiful in its iridescent colours; or as if some old, old dignitary, a pope maybe, clad in gorgeous regalia that not he wore but that bore him up, had suddenly forgotten the part he played as the personification of some time-honoured institution and had become a frail, mortal man, shaking in fear … From behind the mask, the woman peered out, helpless, at bay, mortally frightened.
If at that moment Niels had struck; if he had gone straight to her and torn her finery off her body, sternly, ruthlessly, and ordered her to do menial service on the farm, he would have conquered … But he merely frowned …
Then, as if she awoke from a nightmare, she rallied and shrugged her almost bare shoulders: it was as if she shivered. Slowly a smile returned into her face. Two human natures had measured each other; and the woman had realised her power. The smile was new: it held a note of contempt.
“I?” she said slowly, languidly. “I am getting ready to leave.”
“For the city?”
“Yes,” she replied in a tone of great indifference.
“You have been to the city for the last time—You won’t go again. If ever, you won’t go alone.”
For a moment she stared. Then she laughed. “I might go into the bush instead …” And with a swift motion she swept towards the kitchen door.
Niels forestalled her, barring the way.
She turned to the front door.
“That door is locked,” he said grimly.
Her arms sank helpless.
“Do you mean to say,” she gasped; and for a moment her woman’s nature overwhelmed her so that she sank into a chair. Then she rose again. “Do you mean to say I am a prisoner here?”
“Just about.”
A silence of several minutes ensued, she standing by the table, he in the kitchen door.
She became calm, extraordinarily, dangerously calm.
“Why?” she asked in a voice cool, measured, almost impersonally enquiring, as if she were solving an intricate problem in mathematics.
That voice carried a sting. It roused red anger. “What have you been doing in the city?” he snarled.
She faced him, looked at him, laughed contemptuously. She measured him with her eyes, from head to foot and back again. When she spoke, her voice was ice-cold.
“Look at the fellow!” she said. Then, inner fires breaking through for a moment, bursting into flame, smoke, and ashes. “Look at the contemptible scoundrel! How he stands there and sneers, secure in his brute strength, abusing a woman! If only I had a revolver, a knife …”
She stopped, realising that she was becoming theatrical, raging, hardly able to prevent herself from breaking into a sob of impotence … Again she rallied, searching for the sharpest sting in her quiver.
“Why do you ask?” she said. “Is it jealousy? I know it is not. I’ll tell you what it is: it is that ridiculous man-nature in you. You married me. You don’t want me any longer. But I am not to belong to any one else. I am to be your property, your slave-property … Since you have no further use for me, you want to fling me on this … this manure-pile here.” With a comprehensive sweep of her arm. “But let any one come and want to pick me up because I may still be of use to him, and at once the dog-in-the-manger instinct that lurks in every man pops up, and you put me under lock and key! … 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 behind-hand. 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!”
She paused. Once more her pose was theatrical.
Niels’ thoughts were in a turmoil. That woman was right! That was why he had married her! Not she, he stood indicated. For a moment he was helpless. Then he felt that she was evading the question. Anger over-mastered him once more. “What have you been doing in the city?”
She remained perfectly self-possessed. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. I amused myself. I had a good time. In the company of men who appreciate me. Men who are not dumb brutes. Men who seek me for the sake of what I am … That they incidentally desired my body also …”
Niels had been listening almost with curiosity. But now a tormenting agony invaded him; his joints were loosening, as if he must pitch forward. “Which you gave?”
She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “That’s it, is it? All the rest does not count; but that one thing … That’s where the sting lies, is it? … Now I’ll tell you something that will really sting when you come to think of it; provided that I’ve ever been anything to you at all; and provided that you have brains enough to understand it … Yes; which I gave the last time I went.”
“What do you mean?” he stammered.
Her attitude changed. She spoke very quietly, as to a child. “I’ll tell you … But let’s sit down. I’m getting tired. There isn’t any use in yelling at each other, either. I can tell you this in perfect ease. It’s all past history for me.”
She sat down; the man in the door remained standing.
“There was a time,” she went on, “when I was in love with you. Even such as I do fall in love, you know. I admired your strength of body, your build, your steely eyes, your straight mouth. I admired the energy and determination with which you learned English and went to work. I thought you were a man. The class of people I had associated with—artists, writers, newspaper men—are mostly weaklings. Business men are dull. I had been married to one for altogether too long. I wanted you for years before I had you
. Love is a fleeting thing with me. Desire is not. Love has to be conquered again and again. A sense of duty does not exist for me. But so long as I had not had you, I wanted you. I might have gone on wanting you, tempting you, if you had not been weak. I felt sure that you would marry that Amundsen girl. If you had married her—as, by the way, you should have done—I should have been unhappy for the rest of my days: if I had not had you. Once I’d had you, I should not have cared. Well, I had you … You proposed marriage to me. You will remember that I hesitated; that I did not at once consent. All kinds of thoughts went through my head. I came to the conclusion that, like the floorwalker, you really loved me. That you would reconquer me from day to day as he had done. I was tired of being a bird of passage. There were horrible things in my memory of the past. Money had often been scarce. What the floorwalker had left was too much to starve on; not enough to live on. As I said, I thought you were a man. You would steady and hold me. I thought I could waive my need for stimulants. I could spin myself into a cocoon with reading. I thought I could force myself to do the work which is indispensable in a house. I told you I never could be a farming woman. You insisted. It never occurred to me that you might be weak enough to want marriage on moral grounds. I gave in …
“Then I came out here. I did what could not be left undone. It was slavery; it was a horror. To wash dishes, to sweep a house … to do anything on time, regularly, as a routine, day after day: all that is a horror to me. But I did it. I was in love with you, continued in love with what I thought you were. I bore the rest. I still admired your simplicity, your energy, your power and steadiness in work …
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