by Willa Cather
“Oh, worse! Much worse,” moaned Mrs. Bergson. “Drouth, chince-bugs, hail, everything! My garden all cut to pieces like sauerkraut. No grapes on the creek, no nothing. The people all lived just like coyotes.”
Oscar got up and tramped out of the kitchen. Lou followed him. They felt that Alexandra had taken an unfair advantage in turning their mother loose on them. The next morning they were silent and reserved. They did not offer to take the women to church, but went down to the barn immediately after breakfast and stayed there all day. When Carl Linstrum came over in the afternoon, Alexandra winked to him and pointed toward the barn. He understood her and went down to play cards with the boys. They believed that a very wicked thing to do on Sunday, and it relieved their feelings.
Alexandra stayed in the house. On Sunday afternoon Mrs. Bergson always took a nap, and Alexandra read. During the week she read only the newspaper, but on Sunday, and in the long evenings of winter, she read a good deal; read a few things over a great many times. She knew long portions of the “Frithjof Saga” by heart, and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow’s verse,—the ballads and the “Golden Legend” and “The Spanish Student.” To-day she sat in the wooden rocking-chair with the Swedish Bible open on her knees, but she was not reading. She was looking thoughtfully away at the point where the upland road disappeared over the rim of the prairie. Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly. Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.
All afternoon the sitting-room was full of quiet and sunlight. Emil was making rabbit traps in the kitchen shed. The hens were clucking and scratching brown holes in the flower beds, and the wind was teasing the prince’s feather by the door.
That evening Carl came in with the boys to supper.
“Emil,” said Alexandra, when they were all seated at the table, “how would you like to go traveling? Because I am going to take a trip, and you can go with me if you want to.”
The boys looked up in amazement; they were always afraid of Alexandra’s schemes. Carl was interested.
“I’ve been thinking, boys,” she went on, “that maybe I am too set against making a change. I’m going to take Brigham and the buckboard to-morrow and drive down to the river country and spend a few days looking over what they’ve got down there. If I find anything good, you boys can go down and make a trade.”
“Nobody down there will trade for anything up here,” said Oscar gloomily.
“That’s just what I want to find out. Maybe they are just as discontented down there as we are up here. Things away from home often look better than they are. You know what your Hans Andersen book says, Carl, about the Swedes liking to buy Danish bread and the Danes liking to buy Swedish bread, because people always think the bread of another country is better than their own. Anyway, I’ve heard so much about the river farms, I won’t be satisfied till I’ve seen for myself.”
Lou fidgeted. “Look out! Don’t agree to anything. Don’t let them fool you.”
Lou was apt to be fooled himself. He had not yet learned to keep away from the shell-game wagons that followed the circus.
After supper Lou put on a necktie and went across the fields to court Annie Lee, and Carl and Oscar sat down to a game of checkers, while Alexandra read “The Swiss Family Robinson” aloud to her mother and Emil. It was not long before the two boys at the table neglected their game to listen. They were all big children together, and they found the adventures of the family in the tree house so absorbing that they gave them their undivided attention.
V
Alexandra and Emil spent five days down among the river farms, driving up and down the valley. Alexandra talked to the men about their crops and to the women about their poultry. She spent a whole day with one young farmer who had been away at school, and who was experimenting with a new kind of clover hay. She learned a great deal. As they drove along, she and Emil talked and planned. At last, on the sixth day, Alexandra turned Brigham’s head northward and left the river behind.
“There’s nothing in it for us down there, Emil. There are a few fine farms, but they are owned by the rich men in town, and couldn’t be bought. Most of the land is rough and hilly. They can always scrape along down there, but they can never do anything big. Down there they have a little certainty, but up with us there is a big chance. We must have faith in the high land, Emil. I want to hold on harder than ever, and when you’re a man you’ll thank me.” She urged Brigham forward.
When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Alexandra reached home in the afternoon. That evening she held a family council and told her brothers all that she had seen and heard.
“I want you boys to go down yourselves and look it over. Nothing will convince you like seeing with your own eyes. The river land was settled before this, and so they are a few years ahead of us, and have learned more about farming. The land sells for three times as much as this, but in five years we will double it. The rich men down there own all the best land, and they are buying all they can get. The thing to do is to sell our cattle and what little old corn we have, and buy the Linstrum place. Then the next thing to do is to take out two loans on our half-sections, and buy Peter Crow’s place; raise every dollar we can, and buy every acre we can.”
“Mortgage the homestead again?” Lou cried. He sprang up and began to wind the clock furiously. “I won’t slave to pay off another mortgage. I’ll never do it. You’d just as soon kill us all, Alexandra, to carry out some scheme!”
Oscar rubbed his high, pale forehead. “How do you propose to pay off your mortgages?”
Alexandra looked from one to the other and bit her lip. They had never seen her so nervous. “See here,” she brought out at last. “We borrow the money for six years. Well, with the money we buy a half-section from Linstrum and a half from Crow, and a quarter from Struble, maybe. That will give us upwards of fourteen hundred acres, won’t it? You won’t have to pay off your mortgages for six years. By that time, any of this land will be worth thirty dollars an acre—it will be worth fifty, but we’ll say thirty; then you can sell a garden patch anywhere, and pay off a debt of sixteen hundred dollars. It’s not the principal I’m worried about, it’s the interest and taxes. We’ll have to strain to meet the payments. But as sure as we are sitting here to-night, we can sit down here ten years from now independent landowners, not struggling farmers any longer. The chance that father was always looking for has come.”
Lou was pacing the floor. “But how do you know that land is going to go up enough to pay the mortgages and—”
“And make us rich besides?” Alexandra put in firmly. “I can’t explain that, Lou. You’ll have to take my word for it. I know, that’s all. When you drive about over the country you can feel it coming.”
Oscar had been sitting with his head lowered, his hands hanging between his knees. “But we can’t work so much land,” he said dully, as if he were talking to himself. “We can’t even try. It would just lie there and we’d work ourselves to death.” He sighed, and laid his calloused fist on the table.
Alexandra’s eyes filled with tears. She put her hand on his shoulder. “You poor boy, you won’t have to work it. The men in town who are buying up other people’s land don’t try to farm it. They are the men to watch, in a new country. Let’s try to do like the shrewd ones, and not like th
ese stupid fellows. I don’t want you boys always to have to work like this. I want you to be independent, and Emil to go to school.”
Lou held his head as if it were splitting. “Everybody will say we are crazy. It must be crazy, or everybody would be doing it.”
“If they were, we wouldn’t have much chance. No, Lou, I was talking about that with the smart young man who is raising the new kind of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because father had more brains. Our people were better people than these in the old country. We ought to do more than they do, and see further ahead. Yes, mother, I’m going to clear the table now.”
Alexandra rose. The boys went to the stable to see to the stock, and they were gone a long while. When they came back Lou played on his dragharmonika and Oscar sat figuring at his father’s secretary all evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra’s project, but she felt sure now that they would consent to it. Just before bedtime Oscar went out for a pail of water. When he did not come back, Alexandra threw a shawl over her head and ran down the path to the windmill. She found him sitting there with his head in his hands, and she sat down beside him.
“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, Oscar,” she whispered. She waited a moment, but he did not stir. “I won’t say any more about it, if you’d rather not. What makes you so discouraged?”
“I dread signing my name to them pieces of paper,” he said slowly. “All the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us.”
“Then don’t sign one. I don’t want you to, if you feel that way.”
Oscar shook his head. “No, I can see there’s a chance that way. I’ve thought a good while there might be. We’re in so deep now, we might as well go deeper. But it’s hard work pulling out of debt. Like pulling a threshing-machine out of the mud; breaks your back. Me and Lou’s worked hard, and I can’t see it’s got us ahead much.”
“Nobody knows about that as well as I do, Oscar. That’s why I want to try an easier way. I don’t want you to have to grub for every dollar.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Maybe it’ll come out right. But signing papers is signing papers. There ain’t no maybe about that.” He took his pail and trudged up the path to the house.
Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.
PART II
Neighboring Fields
I
It is sixteen years since John Bergson died. His wife now lies beside him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams across the wheat-fields. Could he rise from beneath it, he would not know the country under which he has been asleep. The shaggy coat of the prairie, which they lifted to make him a bed, has vanished forever. From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a vast checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles. From the graveyard gate one can count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses; the gilded weather-vanes on the big red barns wink at each other across the green and brown and yellow fields. The light steel windmills tremble throughout their frames and tug at their moorings, as they vibrate in the wind that often blows from one week’s end to another across that high, active, resolute stretch of country.
The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. The wheat-cutting sometimes goes on all night as well as all day, and in good seasons there are scarcely men and horses enough to do the harvesting. The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet.
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.
One June morning a young man stood at the gate of the Norwegian graveyard, sharpening his scythe in strokes unconsciously timed to the tune he was whistling. He wore a flannel cap and duck trousers, and the sleeves of his white flannel shirt were rolled back to the elbow. When he was satisfied with the edge of his blade, he slipped the whetstone into his hip pocket and began to swing his scythe, still whistling, but softly, out of respect to the quiet folk about him. Unconscious respect, probably, for he seemed intent upon his own thoughts, and, like the Gladiator’s, they were far away. He was a splendid figure of a boy, tall and straight as a young pine tree, with a handsome head, and stormy gray eyes, deeply set under a serious brow. The space between his two front teeth, which were unusually far apart, gave him the proficiency in whistling for which he was distinguished at college. (He also played the cornet in the University band.)
When the grass required his close attention, or when he had to stoop to cut about a head-stone, he paused in his lively air,—the “Jewel” song,—taking it up where he had left it when his scythe swung free again. He was not thinking about the tired pioneers over whom his blade glittered. The old wild country, the struggle in which his sister was destined to succeed while so many men broke their hearts and died, he can scarcely remember. That is all among the dim things of childhood and has been forgotten in the brighter pattern life weaves to-day, in the bright facts of being captain of the track team, and holding the interstate record for the high jump, in the all-suffusing brightness of being twenty-one. Yet sometimes, in the pauses of his work, the young man frowned and looked at the ground with an intentness which suggested that even twenty-one might have its problems.
When he had been mowing the better part of an hour, he heard the rattle of a light cart on the road behind him. Supposing that it was his sister coming back from one of her farms, he kept on with his work. The cart stopped at the gate and a merry contralto voice called, “Almost through, Emil?” He dropped his scythe and went toward the fence, wiping his face and neck with his handkerchief. In the cart sat a young woman who wore driving gauntlets and a wide shade hat, trimmed with red poppies. Her face, too, was rather like a poppy, round and brown, with rich color in her cheeks and lips, and her dancing yellow-brown eyes bubbled with gayety. The wind was flapping her big hat and teasing a curl of her chestnut-colored hair. She shook her head at the tall youth.
“What time did you get over here? That’s not much of a job for an athlete. Here I’ve been to town and back. Alexandra lets you sleep late. Oh, I know! Lou’s wife was telling me about the way she spoils you. I was going to give you a lift, if you were done.” She gathered up her reins.
“But I will be, in a minute. Please wait for me,
Marie,” Emil coaxed. “Alexandra sent me to mow our lot, but I’ve done half a dozen others, you see. Just wait till I finish off the Kourdnas’. By the way, they were Bohemians. Why aren’t they up in the Catholic graveyard?”
“Free-thinkers,” replied the young woman laconically.
“Lots of the Bohemian boys at the University are,” said Emil, taking up his scythe again. “What did you ever burn John Huss for, anyway? It’s made an awful row. They still jaw about it in history classes.”
“We’d do it right over again, most of us,” said the young woman hotly. “Don’t they ever teach you in your history classes that you’d all be heathen Turks if it hadn’t been for the Bohemians?”
Emil had fallen to mowing. “Oh, there’s no denying you’re a spunky little bunch, you Czechs,” he called back over his shoulder.
Marie Shabata settled herself in her seat and watched the rhythmical movement of the young man’s long arms, swinging her foot as if in time to some air that was going through her mind. The minutes passed. Emil mowed vigorously and Marie sat sunning herself and watching the long grass fall. She sat with the ease that belongs to persons of an essentially happy nature, who can find a comfortable spot almost anywhere; who are supple, and quick in adapting themselves to circumstances. After a final swish, Emil snapped the gate and sprang into the cart, holding his scythe well out over the wheel. “There,” he sighed. “I gave old man Lee a cut or so, too. Lou’s wife needn’t talk. I never see Lou’s scythe over here.”
Marie clucked to her horse. “Oh, you know Annie!” She looked at the young man’s bare arms. “How brown you’ve got since you came home. I wish I had an athlete to mow my orchard. I get wet to my knees when I go down to pick cherries.”
“You can have one, any time you want him. Better wait until after it rains.” Emil squinted off at the horizon as if he were looking for clouds.