Settlers of the Marsh (24 page)

But those had been no more than impulses, comparable to brief eruptions of a volcano which yet show what is hidden underneath.

He had kept away from his house when his wife was about, entering it only in the early morning and at night. He and Bobby were “baching it” in the shack, living as once they had lived together in the house. Meanwhile they worked at what had to be done: they dug potatoes, replaced rotting fence-posts, squared logs for a smokehouse and a larger granary; they went together into the bush.

Niels was watching his house …

It never occurred to him yet not to blame his wife for doing what it was her nature to do; not to judge her and to find her guilty …

But, as soon as the driving started, he went to work, unconsciously, at finding a new path through the tangled labyrinth of his life.

What was the problem?

He came to see that the real problem was very complicated. Judging her guilty, he demanded repentance and atonement. But he could not demand anything of her because she did not acknowledge his right to demand: he had no authority over her.

She was planning revenge. Revenge for what? No doubt for a wrong she thought had been done her.

Had he, Niels wronged the woman, intentionally or not? That was the great question.

She was right in reproaching him with weakness: he had fallen. But, once he had fallen, could he have acted otherwise than he had done? Could he have simulated feelings which he did not have?

The whole marriage, the whole antecedents of this marriage were immoral …

So it all came back to this that he should not have fallen …

But suppose a man had fallen, what was he to do?

Suppose he had simulated feelings which he did not have … Suppose—unlikely as such an outcome must be—he had succeeded in deceiving the woman into the belief that he really loved her …

He would have had to bear the burden of that deceit to his grave!

Could he have stood up under such a strain? He could not. His marriage would have been worse than concubinage: it would have been prostitution on his part!

What had his resolutions amounted to, his good intentions of a year ago? To this that he had intended to buy her off.

He had strongly, forcibly realised that he was not the only sufferer. But he had not been willing—because he had been unable—to give her what she wanted, what she was looking for in him. He had been willing, instead, to give her money to go to the city with, provided she remained faithful to him …

He had been fool enough not to see as he saw it now that no man can afford to let his wife go anywhere alone unless he can trust her; and, of course, he can trust her only if he knows that she can trust him, in everything, absolutely: he can trust her only if not only she loves him but if he loves her, and if she knows it, of positive knowledge …

To make the best of a bad bargain! What folly! He saw clearly now that nobody, in this relationship of marriage, can ever make the best of a bad bargain. It is all or nothing. Give all and take all. If you cannot do that, stand back and refrain.

But then, he had not refrained. He had taken her …

No matter where he turned in his agony, he saw no help for it; he saw no way out.

Once more, when this utter hopelessness of the situation became clear to him, he hardened his heart. He could not help himself; he was he; he could not act or speak except according to laws inherent in him.

What must happen would happen. He had sinned. He saw no atonement. None, nowhere.

And what about his life? What was its justification? No justification existed … Except perhaps, perhaps in helping others? …

O
N ONE OF HIS FIRST DRIVES
to town he met the ox-team of the new German settler, Dahlbeck by name.

On the wagon-truck drawn by the slow, plodding beasts rested a sand-box without a seat. The man sat on the edge of the box, his feet dangling between the wheels.

In front, on a little pile of straw, reposed a woman. The back of the low box was piled with bundles holding her belongings.

It was the big, strapping girl of the first farm to town; the one that had once looked at him when she had stood at the pump …

She was lying down as the two teams approached each other; but she sat up as Niels drew near.

Somehow, at his sight, a change took place in her expression. She recognised him. Her nonchalance dropped; and though she remained sitting, she seemed to rock herself on her hips. A provoking, challenging quality crept into the open smile with which she stared at him …

The man's stern face, narrow, hatchet-shaped, also underwent a change, discernible in shadings only. In that change there was betrayed a feeling of restraint, almost of shame. It looked as if he would have liked to interfere, to call the woman to order; as if he felt embarrassed at his own failure to do so. His nod, in answer to Niels', was almost forbidding.

Niels liked the man for that nod. He read his mind in it.

This man was a slave of passion. He would have preferred freedom; but he was a slave. The woman dominated, swayed, attracted, repelled him as she pleased. The woman was his evil genius …

All that Niels read in a glance and a nod …

S
LOWLY, SLOWLY
, a new development traced itself out in the White Range Line House.

It was not often that Niels even saw his wife in the early part of the winter. Still more than before Mrs. Lindstedt led an indoor life. It seemed she never left the house any more …

Niels provided for everything she might possibly need to carry on a purely animal existence. He saw to it that there was bread—Mrs. Schultze baked it; he gathered the eggs and skimmed the milk; he watched the flourbag, the potatoes, the smoked meat. He carried wood and water in.

All this he did either before day-break or after nightfall.

He knew that upstairs, in that room on the east side of the house, there lay or sat a woman, his wife, spinning off her hours, her days, her weeks … For a long time he did not even hear her.

The only signs of her life consisted in the slow, slow dwindling of the supply of flour; in the disappearance of an egg or two a day from the colander on the kitchen shelf; in the fact that at night there was a little less water in the pail on the bench by the door … Only once or twice—very rarely—there was a light burning in the room upstairs, in the morning or at night …

It would almost seem as if she watched for his appearance on the yard to extinguish even her lamp.

The only intercourse between the two, and that an indirect intercourse, consisted in this that once a week he took her mail which continued to arrive with great regularity and deposited it on the deal table in the hall whenever Bobby brought it from the office. When he looked for it the next time—as he never failed to do—it was gone. Whether she answered any of the letters or not; and if so, how, Niels did not learn …

T
HEN, SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS
, a chance meeting came about in the kitchen.

Niels entered, rather later in the evening than usual, carrying a pail of milk to take it down into the cellar. It was quite dark inside and outside. Yet Niels knew that he had left the lamp burning on the table. Perhaps, when he went out, the draft had extinguished it. He set his pail down by the door and felt for matches. As he did so, his hand touched the hot glass of the lamp. A gasp escaped him; and the same moment there was the swish of clothes, quite nearby, as of somebody running. Then the crash of a falling chair and a half-suppressed cry.

He found the matches, removed, still in the dark, the chimney from the burner, struck his match, and lighted the lamp.

As he turned, he saw his wife in the corner behind the door. Apparently she had come down, thinking that he had finished the evening chores and had left the light burning by mistake. When she had heard him approaching over the crunching snow, she had blown the lamp and tried to escape without being seen. In the dark she had missed the door …

He looked at her; and she, with a defiant toss of her head, gathered her wraps which had half fallen about her and fled. He heard her passing through the dining room, into the hall, and up the stairs.

It was a meeting of no more than a quarter minute. But in those few seconds Niels had seen a number of things.

She had been in her nightgown, with a dressing gown thrown over her shoulders. The dressing gown was of light blue silk; the nightgown, of pink organdie or some other light, filmy material, profusely adorned with lace.

But the face!

For the fraction of a second he had thought it was the face of a perfect stranger. It had been that of an aging woman, yellow, lined with sharp wrinkles and black hollows under the eyes, the lips pale like the face … She had been without her make-up …

A
FTER CHRISTMAS
, one day, while he was attending to his chores, a second meeting took place.

This time the mere fact of the meeting was hard to explain. The first time it had been accidental; this time there could be no doubt that it was intentional. Since their first encounter Niels had made it a point to give ample warning of his presence whenever he entered the house.

On this particular night he had gone down into the cellar, carrying the kitchen lamp and rattling the tin pails which he had previously scalded in the kitchen.

He was dipping the cream off the morning's milk when she, too, came down, carrying her own lamp in one hand and a little dish in the other. She took no notice of him but passed him by as if he did not exist.

Again she was in undress for the night, with a gown thrown over her shoulders. Again her face, that of an aging woman, aged by God knew what, stood in strange contrast, an incomprehensible, almost uncanny contrast, to her appearance; it was so yellow, lined …

Neither said a word. When she returned upstairs, Niels finished his work in the cellar, feeling guilty, down-cast, despondent. He took the skimmed milk to the kitchen to leave it there, ready for the morning when it would be fed to the pigs. Then he went out to bring in a few armfuls of wood for the heater in the dining room. He noticed, before he went out, that there was a light in that room; yet he never thought anything but that she, knowing he would come back, had simply left the lamp burning when she went upstairs.

As soon, however, as, in returning, he opened the door, he saw her standing by the stove, her dressing gown thrown back, warming herself in the heat that radiated through the mica-panes of the feed-door. For a moment he hesitated, looking at her. Then she spoke.

“Just put the wood down,” she said, perfectly cool. “I'll see to the fire.”

Her voice was that of a person speaking to a servant whose presence is in no way considered as embarrassing or as imposing restraint.

Yet she stood there as no woman could show herself to any man but her husband …

H
ENCEFORTH THE SAME THING
happened often: soon it became the regular thing …

Whenever Niels entered the house, at least at night—for it could not be but that she watched for the time when he would come; never before had she been downstairs with such regularity, not even in the first few months of their marriage—she went about as if either everything were perfectly harmonious between them, and they perfectly secure from the intrusion of any stranger, or as if he did not exist, as if he were a being of air, a spirit ministering and bound to minister to her wants.

Niels did not know how to take it, what to think or to do.

Sometimes he waited till a later hour before attending to his chores in the house. It did not make any difference. Once he waited till midnight.

That time, when he entered through the kitchen door—the milk was frozen solid—the whole house was dark. But when he returned from the cellar, the dining room was lighted by the big floor-lamp; and there, by the stove, stood his wife.

He could not doubt any longer: there was a purpose behind her conduct.

What was that purpose?

He could not see his way through her psychology. He had no means of reading the mind of a woman driven to extremities.

It never occurred to him that this was a last attempt on her part to bring about a reconciliation …

She displayed herself to him; but to save her pride, she made it hard for him to find her attractive …

Had he made a single motion towards her, had he said a single word, even though it had been a word of forgiveness instead of desire, perhaps the worst might still have been averted; fate might have been stayed …

In him, however, all sexual instincts were dead.

T
HE WORK IN THE BUSH
went on … Day after day there was time to ponder, to brood. Matters were getting on Niels' nerves.

He employed quite a crew in the bush now. He was being watched. He was the boss …

Harder and harder did he drive himself. His “hands” took it that he was setting an example for them. Naturally, he wanted to make money … When he told them to “take their time,” all but Bobby saw in that mere hypocrisy …

Niels drove, as he had always done, the “old Percheron team,” Jock and Nellie—there was another such team on the farm now, bred and raised there.

Once he had been considerate in the highest degree wherever these two horses were concerned.

That was no longer the case.

Once, not so long ago, he had never neglected to pat them when he fed them in the stable. Now he roughly shouldered them aside when he entered their stalls.

When Jock, as of old, in the beginning of the winter, had once or twice turned his head to scrape his master's hand with his teeth, Niels had, with an impatient movement, declined his familiarity …

Horses know as well as dogs whether their masters feel friendly towards them or not. Unlike dogs, they do not cling to or fawn upon him who does not deserve their love. They cannot but do the work demanded of them; but they are henceforth mere slaves.

Towards the end of winter Niels' relation to his horses became completely demoralised.