Settlers of the Marsh

by Frederick Philip Grove

  But it was the last flicker of a dying flame. Hopelessness and indifference began to show more and more even in his physique. His shoulders stooped; his features began to sag. He never shaved any longer, his hair hung low. He felt old, tremendously old, centuries old. He felt as if he carried the experience of a world, carried it as an actual load on his shoulders.

  In daytime he drowned thought in work; at night he read.

  But even his reading was restricted to one book, the Bible; and in the Bible to one chapter of the Old Testament: Solomon’s wisdom. He intoxicated himself in the rhythm of its sentences. He read the same thing over and over again till he knew it by heart. In the field he muttered detached phrases, repeating them a hundred times. “This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” “And he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place where the rivers go, thither they go again.”

  When he came to the sentence, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight,” it seemed a comfort. The phrase, “There is no profit under the sun,” seemed to echo his own conclusions. “And there is no new thing under the sun.” No; others had arrived at the same truths as he, Kings and High Priests …

  YET RIGHT BY HIS SIDE Life was lived: the life of children who do not look beyond the hour. The child was Bobby.

  Bobby was getting restless. When he tried to talk and saw that Niels was not listening, he went out and sat on a stone or a block of wood, frowning, dissatisfied. He was a man now, twenty-one years old. Niels had been more than an employer to him: he had been an idol. Still, he had his own life to make. He could not for ever be looking after Niels …

  But time went and revealed its secrets. Things that were hidden came to light.

  Bates, a neighbour of Niels’, on the south-east quarter of the same section, “burned out.” He wanted to leave, to give up: he was a city man, drifting back to the city … Niels bought his quarter, bought it for Bobby, to be farmed by him for himself, beginning with the next year …

  NIELS HAD ARRIVED at something like composure again. It was a dark, pessimistic composure, it is true; but it seemed is if it might last forever …

  Then that composure also broke down.

  One afternoon, in cutting time, Niels forsook his binder. Something, he knew not what, prompted him to do so. It was no suspicion; it was hardly an uneasiness. Bobby was stooking.

  “I’m two rounds ahead,” Niels said as he let himself down from his seat. “I’ll be back before you catch up.”

  He crossed the stubble and disappeared in the grove which bordered his farm in the west.

  He came to the fence and climbed over it.

  On the road, he looked about. As if it were the first time he saw it, the size of the settlement struck him which had grown up on the Marsh. For a moment the sight of all the farms recalled him to reality. He passed his hand over his sweaty brow, sighed, and was on the point of turning back. But the moment he faced his field again, an invincible disinclination to ride that binder took hold of him.

  He went north, along his fence.

  When he came to the gate, he did not open it, but stepped over the stile which he had built by its side. On the yard he stopped and looked about.

  All was still, so still that he heard the fluttering of the wings of a bird flitting by. He stared at the house. The door stood wide open.

  Suddenly his heart began to beat like a sledgehammer; he could hear its thud.

  Under an irresistible compulsion he slunk over to the door and stood there, listening.

  Not a sound.

  He went to the corner of the house.

  This time he heard something: whispers and laughter, half suppressed.

  He went to the corner of the house.

  This time he heard something.

  He went all the way back to the entrance of the yard. There he turned south into the bush, almost running over the sun-dappled soil between the trees. He went on till he was beyond the stables, and then turned east, circling the whole clearing of his yard. At last he turned north again, along pig-pens and milk-house, till he reached the garden. He vaulted over its pole-fence and crossed the potato-patch. North of the garden a thicket of plum trees had developed into a dense screen since the lot had been cleared.

  Niels crouched. Slowly, carefully he invaded the bush.

  Suddenly he stood as if frozen in his attitude.

  There, right in front of him, not more than twenty, thirty feet away, unhidden by intervening shrubs or trees, sat his wife, just as he had found her two months ago. But by her side sat a man, the younger Dunsmore, his right arm about her shoulder, holding one of her hands in his left. They were whispering and laughing. The man bent over and kissed her on the mouth, long, fervently, with the kiss of a sensual lover.

  Niels moved; a dry twig snapped under his foot. Then he stood arrested again.

  The woman’s right hand came up and grasped the head of the man from behind, holding it; and beyond and above the head her eyes appeared, staring straight at Niels.

  She had heard the crackling of the twig. She knew he was there: and she perpetuated the attitude in which she had been caught, enjoying his dismay, perpetuated it for his leisurely inspection …

  Her eyes held him, looking at him, derisively, looking at his shrinking figure and drooping head …

  Thus the two, man and woman, stared at each other for half a minute …

  That woman in front of him, in the arms of her lover, was insane …

  Then the head of the man was lifted and obstructed the woman’s look.

  During that fraction of a second Niels withdrew into the denser thicket behind.

  He heard a laugh: the light, silvery laugh, not at all artificial, which had rung in his ears for days, years ago. It sounded so sane, contented, so natural that, for a moment, he doubted the very testimony of his eyes: what he had seen could not be reality!

  Then he returned the way he had come. But he did not run this time; he went as if lost in thought. In truth he was not lost in thought: there was no thought in him; he was merely stunned.

  He went past his farm, on to wild land, and sat down. He remained for hours. He was barely conscious …

  It was late, after nine, when Niels appeared at the shack. He declined supper. But he attended himself to all those of the chores which necessitated entering the house. All else he left to Bobby.

  ONCE MORE Niels was a changed man.

  True, he rode the binder again: he drove the sheaves to the yard: he plowed the land.

  But it was Bobby who did the farming. It was Bobby who planned and suggested, directed, instructed.

  It was Bobby, too, who, when winter came began the work in the bush.

  Only one single part of what had to be done on the place Niels attended to without being reminded of it: the part that had to be done in the house.

  There, nothing betrayed that anybody was living in it: nothing except that the wood-box became empty, that the water in the pails sank lower, and that eggs, potatoes, meat were slowly, slowly getting less.

  Niels watched this with fascination: he counted the things which thus disappeared.

  Apart from that, the decay in Niels consisted more in a gradual disintegration of will and purpose.

  He became indifferent to everything, even to his comfort. That he went on with the work, under Bobby’s direction, was merely because it was the easiest thing to do; it required no thought, no decision, no break with the past.

  WINTER WENT BY; life went its way.

  Bobby seeded his own farm, the quarter section that was to be his. He picked a four-horse team from among Niels’ colts, bargained for them with his employer, an paid in cash: he had the accumulated earnings of years. As for the farm, he would pay in half crops.

  Bobby was loyal. Seeing that Niels was doing this for him, he would not leave him while he was what he was. But Bobby wanted to get married, to establish himself …

  We
ll, even for that there would be a way pretty soon.

  HAYING TIME.

  It was Bobby who rented a meadow where the two had never cut before. He was not working for wages in haying; he was working on shares with Niels.

  The quarter next to the one he rented had been taken by Dahlbeck, the German settler on the bank of the creek.

  Thus it came about that, whenever Bobby and Niels went out to the slough, in the early dawn, both sitting on their hay-racks, taking six horses, in front of them or behind them a third hay-rack would be moving along. On it sat Dahlbeck, pale, slim, and wiry; and by his side, the Dahlbeck woman, flashy, handsome in her coarse peasant way, and using her eyes to establish a bond between herself and Bobby or Niels …

  Now it happened that Bobby—in an impulse of impatience at Niels’ lethargy—one evening when he was shaving turned about on him where he was sitting in front of his shack, in the dusk, and said jestingly, “Come on, Niels, let me give you a trimming, too.”

  Niels looked at him, silently, with an almost forbidding disapproval of his jocularity.

  But Bobby had already taken a pair of clippers. “Come on,” he repeated, “let me, eh?”

  And Niels let him do as he pleased.

  “The beard, too?” Bobby asked when he had finished the hair. And he laughed. “Come on, now. Be a sport. You look like Methuselah!”

  Niels raised his chin. What did it matter? It was not worth while to resist. Besides, there was a feeling of physical comfort in the proceeding.

  “Gee whiz!” Bobby exclaimed when he looked at his handiwork. “You’re a young man yet, Niels. I’d almost forgotten. I thought you were old enough to be my granddad by this time.”

  Absent-mindedly Niels guided his finger-tips over his chin and nodded. He got up with a sigh and went about his chores.

  There was one person who noticed the change at once next morning: the Dahlbeck woman as everybody called her. She glanced at Bobby and laughed; and Bobby smiled back.

  It struck the boy that there was a resemblance between Dahlbeck and Niels: not in appearance or anything concrete; but in their outlook on life …

  Niels and Bobby stacked in the slough; but Dahlbeck took all his dry hay home. The woman raked whenever he was gone; they had no horse-rake yet.

  In the afternoon it so chanced that Bobby wished to draw a load home to be put in the loft of the stable. He and Dahlbeck started at the same time …

  NIELS WAS ON the far side of the stack and never noticed the coincidence. He turned to the mower. That mower, Bobby had said, needed oiling; he knelt down to his task. The horses were standing north of him, their noses to the hay.

  Suddenly the shadow of a figure fell across the grass in front of him. He winced; and as he looked up, there stood the Dahlbeck woman, laughing at his startled glance.

  She said nothing. She merely looked at him and let herself down to a squatting posture.

  Over them stood an almost cloudless sky. The summer had been that typical prairie season in which settled weather is broken only by swift, violent storms in which the equilibrium of the atmospheric forces is speedily re-established.

  The slough about them was fragrant with the hot exhalations of the hay.

  Niels had stopped in his work and was staring at her, the oil-can in his hand. At last he spoke, “What do you want?”

  The woman laughed. She threw herself back in the loose hay that littered the ground. As she did so, her hat fell from her head, baring tightly rolled tresses of abundant, dark brown hair. Her skirt slipped up; the full, strong calves of her legs protruded.

  “You!” she said in a whisper from which the heat of passion breathed.

  Niels still knelt motionless. Pictures of the past flitted through his mind: the first that had come to him through many months. The frown on his brow deepened into a scowl.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said with distaste.

  Once more she laughed; and she rolled over in the hay, closer to him, so that she nearly touched him. “Joseph!” she whispered mockingly.

  That note of mockery called up the almost forgotten memory of her who was his wife as she had been one time and as she had had power over him in years gone by. A feeling of shame swept through him, unnerving his strength. His head sank down on his chest. He had no right to upbraid the woman …

  He got up, threw the oil-can into the tool-box, and went over to where the horses stood. He picked their lines up and guided them to the mower. Nellie stepped over the pole. He hooked the traces into place.

  The woman whose laughter had died away followed every one of his movements with her eye. It was she who was scowling now. And when he clicked his tongue to pull away from her, she sprang up and ran after him, catching hold of his shoulder. She was beside herself with rage.

  “You hypocrite,” she hissed, “are you better than other people? I know you, you devil! You can’t play the innocent with me! No man can! You least of all! You married the district whore …”

  And for several minutes she went on, pouring abuse from pent-up stores as foam boils from a brimming vessel.

  But Niels did not hear. He had stopped. His knees shook under him. Lightning had struck him; and the flash had illumined the past as a flash of real lightning illumines a forest trail for him who travels in the dark, making every detail spring out of the night at once.

  What, in the fraction of a second, he saw like a panorama, with hundreds of details, all simultaneously, was this: the hesitation of the woman when he had first mentioned marriage to her; Bobby’s silence when he had opened the gate for her and him; the atmosphere of a hollow void which had surrounded them when they had come to the Marsh to live; Nelson’s words, “You don’t mean to say that you don’t know?” and again, “Then I won’t tell you;” Hahn’s remark, “There’s one in every district. There’s one in yours;” and, much later, the woman’s words, “I gave myself, body and all … It was nothing to me!” Ellen’s “How could you? …”

  All that and much more Niels saw and heard in that illuminating flash.

  For a moment he felt that he must pitch forward and faint. Instinctively his trembling hand reached for the machine to steady his swaying body …

  The woman saw it and stopped in her rush of words. Her eyes became wide. She realised what she had done: she had swung an axe into a great, towering tree; and the tree had crashed down at a single blow …

  She let go of the man; and he dropped the lines and stumbled away …

  WHEN BOBBY RETURNED to the slough, sitting on his hay-rack, he found Dahlbeck and the woman at work.

  The sun was setting.

  He drove to the stack. Jock and Nellie were hitched to the mower; the lines were trailing behind; they were grazing, their heads bent low. The Clydes still stood at the stack, half asleep, one leg drawn up.

  Niels was nowhere to be seen. The landscape presented the picture of evening peace.

  Slowly Bobby went to the other side of the stack and called over to where Dahlbeck was working, “Seen anything of Lindstedt?”

  Dahlbeck stopped his team. “No, not a thing.”

  Bobby stood undecided. It struck him that the woman who was pitching the last of the day’s cutting into cocks did not even turn to look at him.

  There was nothing to do but to load his rack as best he could alone.

  He whistled away for a while as he went about the work. Then he became silent.

  Soon after, the Dahlbecks left the slough on top of their load.

  Bobby was by nature companionable. The great, hollow night that rose about him made him feel lonesome.

  What was wrong that Niels should be gone?

  It had never happened before … Yet, come to think of it, it had happened before: when they were cutting and stooking the grain in the harvest field … Niels had walked off; then, too, Bobby had been puzzled and worried. Niels was going to pieces, there could be no doubt. He was getting to be very queer …

  A slow, numbing dread took
hold of Bobby …

  There was a memory in the boy’s mind, of his own foster-father, Lund, who had disappeared in the bush …

  He began to hurry. He had only half filled his rack when he stopped. He pitched his fork up into the load and went to get the other horses. He tied them behind, all four, took his lines, climbed up, and drove through the slough to the road.

  He had six miles to go; but the horses stepped briskly along.

  What could be wrong?

  The bush stood silent, motionless. Not a breath stirred. The creaking and rattling of the wheels echoed back to the driver who sat hushed on the load.

  Now and then the horses snorted; they were wide awake; horses are watchful, scary at night.

  At last they came to the east-west road leading to the corner of the bluff. There was the Dunsmore shack ahead, to the left; Dahlbeck’s place to the right. On the yard man and wife were pitching off their load.

  Even here no sound except the desultory, almost hesitating bumps and screeches of the rack …

  Then, ahead, against the paler sky of the west, the bluff loomed up, like a huge bowl inverted over … what?

  To dispel the feeling of oppression Bobby began to whistle once more. He stopped at once: the sound jarred on the silence.