Settlers of the Marsh (6 page)

He crossed the bridge over Grassy Creek. On the bare Marsh, the snow was lashed into waves and crests like a boiling sea. There was no road left. He angled across the open land. It took him two hours to make the mile to a huge poplar bluff which rose like an island or a promontory jutting out from the east into the waste of snow. He intended to unhitch and to feed in its shelter.

When he rounded this bluff which, to the south, trailed off into smaller second-growth of poplar, skirting the Marsh, a great piece of good luck befell him; for around a roaring fire a crowd of men were assembled; and many teams and loads of wood were standing in the shelter of the bluff, bound no doubt for the same destination as he. Niels counted the loads; there were twenty-two. The men were a motley crowd, mostly Germans; and they greeted him with shouts and laughter as he drove into sight. They were getting ready to go but offered to wait for him. As best he could he made clear to them that he wanted to feed and to rest his team … The caravan set out without him.

Niels looked about as he kept the fire going. And before long it somehow was clear to him that this was his future home. One day, if the place was still open for entry, he would file on it.…

The next night, on his return trip, he spent at Lund's, having arrived there after midnight.

In the morning, while waiting for his horses to finish their feeding, he saw to his surprise Ellen Amundsen driving up on the yard.

In the box of her sleigh there were two tanks.

He had just looked in at the stable and was returning to the house. So he stopped in his tracks and greeted her.

Ellen, as usual, turned her eyes upon him and nodded casually. She stopped at the well and sprang to the ground. There was no pump yet; so she reached for pail and rope.

In a second Niels was by her side.

“Oh, never mind,” she said. But he paid no attention to her protest and opened the well-trap. For a moment she stood undecided and then stepped back.

He lifted pail after pail and emptied them into her tanks. Not a word did the two exchange; and yet they were quite alone.

The meeting at the well seemed to call for speech; and both of them felt it. But Ellen expected some jesting remark and was on her guard not to provoke it; and Niels knew that, whenever he met her, he was on probation. Neither of them was a conversationalist.

When the barrels were filled, Niels covered them with the rags which Ellen had brought; and he even turned the horses for her.

“All right,” he said almost harshly when he jumped to the ground.

Ellen got in and took the lines. For a moment it looked as if she might unbend. But she clicked her tongue, nodded, said, “Thanks,” and was gone.

“That's nothing,” Niels mumbled, touched his cap, and turned to the house.

The brief meeting filled him with confusion. In his heart there was a great tenderness, such as he had felt for his mother when she had been slaving away to keep her little home free of debt. But there was also a trace of resentment against the unyielding aloofness of the girl.…

To add to his confusion, he came at the house upon a scene which was profoundly distasteful to him at the present moment.

Mrs. Lund had picked a geranium flower from one of the potted plants which she nursed and hoarded all through the bitter winter. She stood bent over her husband where he reclined in his frayed wicker chair, and fastened the blossom in the lapel of his ragged coat.

“Don't make me too pretty, mamma,” he cooed; “the girls might get gay with me.”

“I wish they would, daddy,” she replied and rumpled his scant grey hair with a caressing hand.

Niels stopped at the door, with the impulse to turn back. But Mrs. Lund had heard him and looked up.

“Now there's a girl, Mr. Lindstedt,” she said, “that'll make a wife for some lucky fellow one day.”

Niels coloured. “I don't think she ever dreams of such things.”

“Still waters are deep,” Mrs. Lund replied.

T
HESE LONG, LONESOME DRIVES
were conducive to a great deal of thinking, especially on the way home when the horses could be left to themselves.

But more so still were the lonesome days in the bush. There he did a great deal of dreaming and planning; the more the wider his knowledge became of this mixed settlement. And gradually, as he worked at felling and cutting the trees; but especially in the long evenings, when he sat in that little shanty “up north,” mechanically keeping his fire going; and most of all when he lay in bed, made wakeful by the mere consciousness of his utter isolation, did he build up a program and a plan for himself and his future life.

Of his material success he had no doubt. Was he not slowly and surely making headway right now? While he was hibernating as it were?

In this country, life and success did not, as they had always seemed to do in Sweden, demand some mysterious powers inherent in the individual. It was merely a question of persevering and hewing straight to the line. Life was simplified.

Yet, material success was not enough. What did it matter whether a person had a little more or less wealth? A strong, healthy body was his; with that he could make a living anywhere; he had made a living in Sweden.

But the accessories of life were really the essentials; they were what made that living worth while: the building up of a whole little world that revolved about him. About him? Not at all.…

That vision which was so familiar to him began to dominate him more and more. Already he felt, in the mental realisation of it, a note of impatience.

He himself might be forever a stranger in this country; so far he saw it against the background of Sweden. But if he had children, they would be rooted here.… He might become rooted himself, through them.…

The picture which he saw, of himself and a woman in a cosy room, with the homely light of a lamp shed over their shoulders, while the winter winds stalked and howled outside and while from above the pitter-patter of children's feet sounded down, took more and more definite form.…

There could be no doubt any longer: the woman in the picture was Ellen, the girl. He longed for her sight: he longed to speak to her: to show, to reveal his innermost being to her: not in words, but in deeds, in the little insignificant things of the day.

But even in his dream he felt shy in her presence, bashful, unable to speak when she looked at him, with the cool, appraising expression in her eyes. He felt awkward, dumb, torn by dark passions unworthy of her serene, poised equilibrium. A good many times he saw her as he had seen her at the well, standing by as if she merely submitted to his interference: as if it were merely not quite worth the trouble it would cost to prevent it.

Sometimes he caught himself in a sudden sullen anger because she would not see how he longed for her. And then again he would laugh at himself for his folly. How could she do so? What did she know of him? His whole intercourse with her had not comprised more than a few casual meetings: the sum of his conversations with her, no more than a few dozen words.…

How much more intimate, he sometimes thought, was his still slenderer acquaintance with Mrs. Vogel! Two or three times only had he met her; yet there was almost a secret understanding between them.…

But whenever he had been dreaming of her and his thought then reverted to Ellen, he felt guilty; he felt defiled as if he had given in to sin. Her appeal was to something in him which was lower, which was not worthy of the man who had seen Ellen.…

Though he could not have told what that something in him which was lower really meant.…

And when he felt very self-critical, as when he had been altogether absorbed in his immediate tasks, he seemed to become conscious that in his thought of Mrs. Vogel there was nothing either of the dumb, passionate longing, nothing of the anger and resentment, nothing of the visionary glory which surrounded his thought of the other woman. He could imagine pleasant hours spent in her company; but his future life he could imagine without her. He could no longer imagine a future life without Ellen.…

W
INTER WENT BY
; the thaw-up came. Breaking and seeding, on a share of the crop.…

Then “working out,” in the south. A year since he had come to this country … A winter in town, to learn English … Another summer. A second winter with Nelson …

Many things happened. Mrs. Amundsen died.

W
HEN NELSON CAME
and joined him to put in his last season of “working out,” Niels heard that the attendance at the funeral had been enormous. It was meant as a protest against Amundsen's treatment of his wife; but Amundsen, crying profusely, had taken it as a tribute to himself.…

Nelson had enlarged stable and house; he had built a granary; he had broken enough land to prove up; he had bought a second team.… He and Olga Lund were going to be married next spring.…

With Lunds matters were going from bad to worse …

Niels had over twelve hundred dollars in cash in the bank at Minor.

He filed on the north-east quarter of section seven, in the edge of the Marsh, on the
Range Line
, which held the big bluff.

Sigurdsen, the old Icelandic settler who had turned them back into the storm on Niels' first trip north, would be his nearest neighbour now. He had become his friend; for during the winters with Nelson he had had repeated opportunities to oblige the old man, bringing tobacco and other trifles from town.…

When Niels at last moved out to his claim, he took a little tent along to live in till, after
threshing
, late in the fall, he could get a building up. He would buy horses then; he needed hay.…

Amundsen acted as agent for the absentee landlords who held the hay-land. Niels had to see him.

As he had expected, he found the man on the field, a quarter of a mile north-west of the yard, embedded in the bush. Ellen was driving the team of colts while her father was picking stones off a newly brushed strip of land.

“Yes,” Amundsen said in reply to Niels' enquiry. “I have two quarters left. Good quarters, too; the southern half of twenty-one, just west of Lund's. Lund has spoken for one of them; but he has no money … The permit is fifteen dollars a quarter …”

“Well,” Niels said, “I'll look it over. I shall let you know by to-morrow night. Too bad, though, to let the Lunds go without hay …”

Amundsen shrugged his broad shoulders, looking at the ground and smiling a deprecatory smile. “That is as it is. I cannot give the hay away. Do you want it for yourself?”

“I am in partnership with old man Sigurdsen,” Niels replied. “I myself have filed on the north-west quarter of seven, five miles south.” He took care to speak so the girl would hear it.

“That's so? Well, it's good land. If you are steady …” Ellen's horses pulled. “Whoa!” he called. “I suppose we better move on.” And he clicked his tongue.

For a moment Niels looked after him. He chafed at the man's complacency, at his imperturbable self-assurance, his very neatness and accuracy.…

His eyes fell on the girl; he saw her again as he had seen her two and a half years ago. That perfect poise, that forbidding scrutiny seemed to hold him at a distance even now. His mere thoughts of her, the fact that she had figured in his visions of the future, seemed like an intrusion, like the violation of an inviolable privacy.…

With a sinking heart he turned and strode off across the clearing.…

All around, the bush stood trembling in green. On the berries and
drupes
of
saskatoon
and plum lay the first blush of purple.…

Niels camped on his claim, cutting willows for fence-posts and staking off his land.…

He worked all the time. When he was too tired, from one kind of work, so that his muscles ached, he simply changed over to another and
grubbed
stones out of the ground on what he had already fixed upon as his future yard.…

Even on Sundays he would walk about in that big, rustling bluff of aspens, picking out the straightest trees to be cut for his buildings.

The southern part of his claim was covered with comparatively small growth; for one of the marshfires that broke out every now and then had encroached upon it, some fifteen years ago, consuming everything that would burn. For no apparent reason—perhaps in consequence of a change of wind—the fire had stopped short of that tall, majestic bluff which now stood dominant, lording it over this whole corner of the Marsh.

To the east, there was much willow; though even there, on a rising piece of ground, ten acres or so of
primeval forest
remained like an island.

West and north of his claim there was sand. Nothing but low, scrubby brush intervened between the claim and the cliff of the forest along the creek.

Niels lived in a continual glow of excitement. He worked passionately; he dreamed passionately; and when he lay down at night, he even slept with something like a passionate intensity.…

Life had been flowing placidly for a year or two. His dreams had receded as their realisation approached. But now, in the first flush of reality; now, when all that was needed seemed to be a retracing in fact of what had already been traced in vision: now that vision became an obsession.

Morning and evening he walked over to Sigurdsen's place for water, milk, or eggs—a distance of a mile and a half. These walks became something of a ritual. Always, in going, his look was fixed on that gap in the green-gold forest—gilded by rising or setting sun—where the trail led north, across the old bridge put up by the one-time fuel-hunters who had become settlers: the bush in which Ellen lived.

Everything he did he did for her. Sometimes he felt an overpowering impulse to go right over and to ask her to follow him. Once or twice, on moonlit nights, he went to the bridge and lost himself in the shadows of the road-chasm beyond. But, the nearer he came to that farmstead in the bush, the less did the girl seem approachable to him; the less distinctly did he see her as she had walked along the edge of the field, with her firm, long strides, or as she had stood by his side at the well; and the more forbiddingly did she, instead, look at him as she had done on her father's yard when he had recklessly spoken to her. Out of clear, critical, light-blue eyes she looked.…