Settlers of the Marsh (27 page)
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 â¦
She let go of the man; and he dropped the lines and stumbled away â¦
W
HEN 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 â¦
A slow, numbing dread took hold of Bobby â¦
There was a memory in the boy's mind, of his own foster-father, Lund, who had disappeared in the bush â¦
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 â¦
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.
He turned the corner and came to the gate. He slipped from the load and stood, listening. Not a sound. Low in the west, the waxing sickle of the moon was hanging, a mere wisp, a little curve of light, about to set. There was no wind: but the leaves of the aspens in the bluff were rustling softly: they were never still â¦
On the yard, white buildings stood outlined against the sombre bush, some looming high: house, barn; some squatting low: pig-pens, cow-shed. Nowhere a light â¦
Bobby shivered.
He turned to the horses. They, too, listened to the silence. Their ears moved back and forth, jerkily.
To defend himself against the feeling of dread, the boy began for the third time to whistle. Again he stopped. The sound seemed like a profanation of something â¦
Quickly he opened the gate; the horses pulled at once, as if afraid of being left behind, alone â¦
A few minutes later Bobby had lighted a lantern; he unhitched and untied the horses. He opened the door of the stable. They knew their stalls and for the moment needed no further attention.
He picked the lantern up and ran to the shack. It was empty. The dishes and the stove had not been touched since dinner time. The alarm clock showed a quarter past nine â¦
“Well,” he muttered with a phrase of his mother's, “I'll be jiggered!”
He returned to the yard.
Once more he looked about and listened â¦
Incomprehensibly, uncannily, he was aware of a new accession of dread. A single, horizontal line of light showed in the upper east window of the house. During the past two years the house had often seemed spectral to him: never before as now.
Where was Niels?
Bobby shuddered. A feeling took hold of him as if from somewhere in the dark eyes were looking out at him.
A cow lowed on the open marsh â¦
Bobby awoke to life. The herd was coming home.
He went about his chores, pumped water, fed pigs â¦
The pigs knew the routine: when he entered the milk-house to stir shorts and barley into the milk, they ran along their fence, squealing â¦
In the cow-lot, after he had
lighted a smudge
, the swishing sound of the milk in the pails sounded like company, like a re-affirmation of the common workaday sanity of country life, shutting out the horrors that lurked somewhere â¦
Yet, where was Niels?
The moon had set; even the pallour in the north-west of the sky had darkened. It was night ⦠Where was Niels?
There was the possibility that he might have gone to the shack meanwhile. No. The shack was empty as before. It was eleven o'clock.
Was he to look for him? Was he to give the alarm to the neighbours? ⦠His foster-father had been helpless, half blind, half lame. He had been out of his senses â¦
Should he enter the house? ⦠No. He could not face the woman â¦
He was hungry. He went to the shack again and lighted the stove. As he sat there, with the door open, the light of the lamp on the table falling slantways out on the little clearing and, beyond, among the white glistening
boles
of the young aspens, he, too, began to review what he knew of the woman in the great house, of her who had been the curse of the place â¦
He thought of the shock it had been to him when she had smiled down at him from the seat of the wagon, saying what she had said ⦠He had never known much about her; but he had heard whispers, seen looks exchanged between grown-ups â¦
For a moment then, Niels had fallen in his esteem; till he had spoken to him in front of the stable ⦠The tone of his voice as he had spoken to him! â¦
If only Niels would come home ⦠Now ⦠Quick â¦
He, Bobby, had sometimes felt harshly towards him of late, when he had become so queer ⦠He would never do so again if only â¦
He rose and busied himself with pots and pans.
Niels had been a father to him. He thought of a Sunday, years ago, when Niels had refused him a horse. “Not if you want to go to bad places ⦔
Once more Bobby went out on the yard, looking, listening ⦠To the gate, peering along the road, north, south ⦠Nothing â¦
It was after midnight when he returned to the shack. He was so worried he did not even enter; he merely glanced at the clock.
Then he squatted down on the ground, by the door â¦
Sleep must have overcome him at last. He was suddenly conscious of starting up. For several minutes he sat stock-still. He thought he had heard something. The first grey of dawn was hovering over the world. His clothes were damp with dew; he shivered ⦠The stillness of death, except for the chirping of some bird â¦
He rose and went into the shack to lie down â¦
Then, just as a few minutes before, in his sleep, the sharp report of a shot â¦
With a jerk Bobby straightened, every muscle taut; drowsiness had fallen from him like a cloak.
He hurried back to the yard. He saw the stable door open, ran, and looked in.
There, in the cold, grey morning light stood Niels, the smoking gun still in his hand. And Jock, his horse, was convulsively kicking his last at his feet â¦
W
HEN NIELS HAD LEFT
the slough, he had lost himself in the bush. He went blindly, with unseeing eyes, unthinking brain.
Like the bell of doom the woman's words seemed to reverberate within a hollow vault of brass â¦
There had been thoughts, suspicions, almost certainties half faced. There never had been unescapable conviction ⦠From all about him there was only one voice of the woman, “You have married the ⦔
He went blindly, stumbling over roots and stumps. He was bleeding from nose and forehead. He had lost his cap ⦠He picked himself up again, fell again, tearing his clothes, bruising his limbs. He went on as an animal goes, wounded to death, seeking his lair, to hide himself â¦
He was in a trance. Three, four times he came out on the road. Instinctively he stopped, trying to focus eye and mind on it, swaying from side to side like one drunk. Then he turned back into the thickets behind.
Two, three hours went by that way.
Several times he sank to his knees, bending his body low, crouching in an agony of misery.
Had anybody met him and asked him, sternly, “What is that thought which is lurking beyond the edge of your world, ready to rise above the horizon?” he would have searched in his mind, sincerely, honestly; yet he would have found nothing but a painful, raw void to face, to probe into which without encountering anything was baffling, infinitely tormenting. He would have groaned as the man groans on whom a painful operation is being performed while he is under the influence of an anaesthetic. Although the onlooker is, perhaps, from past experience, fully aware of the fact that he who lives in that body feels nothing, the groan sounds all the more pitiful, all the more enervating â¦
After hours of such
somnambulism
Niels found himself stopped by his own fence. Again he stood, one of his hands resting on the wire, as, with an infinite exertion, he tried to comprehend, to concentrate his mind on the thing that had stopped him.
And as soon as it entered his consciousness that these sloughs, these rising ridges, that bluff half a mile away were his, he turned back.
Behind him were other sloughs, swampy hollows, their soil churned up, trodden and trampled by wandering cattle into little hillocks tufted with grass, hardened by drying, with muddy holes in between where the feet of the heavy beasts had sunk deep.
Over these foot-traps he tottered, stumbled, fell headlong, picked himself up again â¦
Once more he was stopped by a fence. Again that slow, painful process of concentration began; again the fact filtered through the defences of his mind that the fence was his â¦
His lip curled in a physical sense of distaste; he turned back again. Dusk was rising â¦
When, an hour or so later, the fence stopped him for the third time, he did not turn back. For a while he stood like a man broken by a lifetime of work too heavy for him, bent over, one hand on the post, one on the wire ⦠Then he tried to straddle the fence, stumbled back, and finally went down on his knees, thus crawling on to his own land where he lay, exhausted â¦
But some impulse was at work in him. Slowly he drew his legs up and raised himself on hands and knees; and at last he got up on his feet.
Within half an hour he found himself in a bluff of
poplars
. He felt his way from tree to tree, supporting himself by his hands, feeling up and down the ridged trunks as if searching for something.
In another half hour he was south of his yard; and then, behind the granary. Around its corners he groped his way â¦
When he reached the front, he attacked the door: it took several minutes to open it: his hands seemed to have lost the knack of lifting the latch.
It was a high step to take; and in attempting it he fell headlong. There was a pile of bags hung over the partition between bins. Niels pawed at it till they came down. Then he turned on his back, pushed the bags into a heap, and leaned against them â¦
There he sat, his knees drawn up, his forehead resting on them, his hands lying on the floor â¦
Occasionally he lifted his head, like an enormous burden which swayed on his neck, with that re-awaking and astonishment with which he who, having gone to sleep in his own bed, finds himself in a strange place would look about for something to recognise â¦
At first there was nothing but darkness.
At last a tiny speck of light stood out, just by the door, halfway up the jamb. It was reflected by a highly polished object hanging there: that must be the butt of the big-game rifle which he had bought for Bobby â¦
After many attempts to rise he crawled forward.
He had heard a noise: the creaking of a hay-rack, the slow step of horses, a snorting, the dull thud of the gate swinging against its stop.
The door had swung almost shut; he pushed it half open and lifted his legs over the edge of the threshold till he sat there, in the crack of the door.
Far out on the yardâthe granary stood in a recess of the bushâthe light of a lantern moved to and fro, about the stables, to the east. The lantern burned dimly: its glass was smoky â¦
A curious interest awoke in Niels. Unseen, he saw.
The lantern, bobbing up and down, crossed the whole length of the yard, moving quickly. Its dim light illuminated the running legs of the boy till the door, half shut, closed out the view.
From Niels' throat came a sound as if he were chuckling.
The light returned. The boy was standing, looking, listening â¦
Niels' eyes were fastened on him, out of the dark that screened him. The little dome of visibility ensphering the lantern did not reach to the granary.
Niels fought with himself to suppress his laughter. He was playing a prank. He saw, he was not seen â¦
The cows lowed. Bobby returned â¦
Niels began to dangle his feet, like a child, or like one who has been sick and has unlearned the art of walking: he delighted in the sense of the motion.
