“If it please God,” Amundsen said at last decisively, “we shall find water … Well, shall we go in?” And he led the way to the house.
“Mrs. Amundsen still poorly?” Nelson asked.
“It has pleased God to confine her to her bed,” Amundsen replied with corresponding choice of words in Swedish. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands in a deprecatory gesture. “It is a visitation. One must be resigned.”
When they entered the house, Amundsen ceremoniously letting the two others precede, a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years was busy at the range. The bed on the floor had been removed; the table was spread.
Niels looked at the girl and expected some kind of introduction; but none was vouchsafed. Neither did she seem to take any notice of the guests.
She was somewhat above medium height, taller than her father, with wide hips and a mature bust. Her hair was straw-yellow and neatly but plainly brushed back and gathered into a knot above the nape of her neck. Her dress was of dark-blue print, made with no view to prettiness or style, but spotlessly clean.
Her whole attitude, even to her father, spoke of self-centred repose and somewhat defiant aloofness.
It was not till the three men were seated at the table that Niels had a glimpse of her face. Her eyes were light-blue, her features round, and her complexion a pure, Scandinavian white. But it was the expression that held him: hers was the face of a woman; not of a girl. There was a great, ripe maturity in it, and a look as if she saw through pretences and shams and knew more of life than her age would warrant. No smile lighted her features; her eyes were stern and nearly condemnatory. But somehow, when Niels looked at her, a great desire came over him to make her smile.
Amundsen noticed his scrutiny and disapproved of it; for with his loud and matter-of-fact voice he cut it short.
“Well,” he said, “pray.” And, standing up, he spoke with a firm and insistent voice a prayer which sounded as if he were rather laying down the law to his creator than invoking his blessing.
Then, without looking up, he sat down. “Ellen, coffee.”
“Yes, father,” replied the girl with an unexpected note of obsequience oddly at variance with her preoccupied air.
Breakfast was eaten in silence. The girl did not sit down with the men but ate while standing at the range.
Nelson was the first to rise. “Well,” he said, “I guess we better get started.”
They went out.
Amundsen remained on the yard, busying himself with the sleighs to which apparently he intended to transfer the box from the wagon.
Soon after, when the two men had gathered their tools, picks and shovels, Niels saw to his surprise the girl, clad like a man in sheepskin and big overshoes, crossing the yard to the stable where she began to harness a team of horses. They were big, powerful brutes, young and unruly. But she handled them with calm assurance and unflinching courage as she led them out on the yard.
“They’re famous run-aways,” Nelson said.
“And he lets the girl handle them!”
“Yea …” Nelson replied. “But they don’t run away with her. It’s him they smash up every once in a while.”
“Does she work on the farm?”
“Like a man,” Nelson said.
She tied the horses to a rail of the fence and went to join her father. Between them, the two lifted the wagon-box from the wheel-truck, in order to transfer it to the bob-sleighs.
Niels ran over and took hold of the girl’s end; but she did not yield without reluctance. A frown settled between her brows. Without a word she went to get the horses.
Nelson had gone on with his work; and Niels rejoined him while Amundsen and his daughter placed two barrels into the wagon-box.
The girl drove away; Amundsen returned to the stable.
“Better not take too much notice of the girl,” Nelson said when the man had disappeared. “Amundsen might show you off the place.”
When Amundsen, after a while, emerged from the stable, he was leading a team of older, steadier horses which he hitched to a hay-rack still on wheels. He worked in his slow, deliberate way, without a lost motion, and giving to the veriest trifle an importance and a sort of dignity which seemed laughable or sublime.
Niels watched him covertly till he drove away.
Meanwhile he and Nelson worked silently, with the steady team-work peculiar to Swedes.
Then the girl returned from the creek. As she drove in on the yard, she happened to look at Niels. It was a level, quiet look, unswerving and irresponsive. It did not establish a bond; it held no message, neither of acceptance nor of disapproval; it was not meant to have any meaning for him; it was an undisguised, cool, disinterested scrutiny.
Niels coloured under the look. He lowered his eye and went on with his work, a little too eagerly perhaps: he was self-conscious. In order to shake off his embarrassment, and in an impulse of defiant self-assertion, he dropped his pick, straightened his back, wiped his forehead, and sang out, in Swedish, “A penny for your thoughts, miss.”
But he repented instantly; for the look of the girl assumed a critical, disapproving expression; the frown settled back between her brows. Thus she turned her attention to her horses and ignored the men at their work.
Nelson, too, had straightened and looked at Niels, grinning. “You’ve got your nerve,” he said admiringly.
Nelson felt still more embarrassed; but he laughed and fell to work again.
Some time during the afternoon Niels had an occasion to go into the house. When he entered the kitchen, the door to the second room stood open; and he had a glimpse of the bed in which the sick woman lay. Ellen was sitting on the edge of the bed and holding her mother’s hand.
The woman’s face seemed to be all eye: large, dark eyes in large, cavernous sockets. Ear, nose, and cheek had a waxy transparency.
Ellen was in sheep-skin and tam, as she had come in from the yard. When she heard a footfall, she looked back over her shoulder, rose, and closed the door.
Niels felt ashamed of his behaviour in the morning.
At night, after the day’s work had reluctantly been brought to a close, the three men sat in the kitchen. Nelson smoked a pipe; Amundsen partook of a dram; Niels declined both tobacco and “schnapps.”
“Done any breaking yet?” Amundsen asked.
“Yes,” said Nelson. “Three acres last summer. Too late for a crop, though. I’ll clear enough to break four or five more in spring.”
“That’s good,” said Amundsen in his slow, deliberate way. “You’ve bought horses. Where are they?”
“At Hahn’s.”
“I know him,” Amundsen said with a peculiar smile. “He’s German. He used to be a good, steady fellow till last year. Then he went crazy and joined the Baptists. As if the word of the Lord were not perfectly clear …” And he reached for a Bible on the windowshelf.
But Nelson forestalled him. “Do you intend to break next summer?”
“If I live and am well.” Amundsen’s smile was deprecating. “I’ve brushed and cleared three acres in summer. So, if it please God …”
“You’ve surely done well in this country.”
“Yes,” Amundsen admitted. “It might have been better, of course. But I can’t complain. God has blessed my labour.”
“You came only seven or eight years ago, didn’t you?”
“Nine. But when I came I was in debt. I owe no man now.”
“Too bad about your wife,” Nelson said after a while. “Have you had the doctor in?”
“She is in the hand of God,” Amundsen replied sententiously. “What is to be will be. I am a sinner and a stricken man.” It sounded as if he boasted of the fact.
“Too bad,” Nelson repeated.
Once more Niels looked at the man. There was something repulsive about his self-sufficiency. His wife was lying at the point of death; but he had not even called in what help human skill and knowledge might give. He relied on God to do for him what coul
d be done … And his daughter worked like a man …
NEXT DAY the sky was bright and clear. Not a wisp of cloud was visible anywhere. But it had been very cold overnight …
Work felt grateful: this country seemed to have been created to rouse man’s energies to fullest exertion …
Again the girl was about the yard. She fetched water for the stock and fed cows, horses, and pigs; and when the chores were done, she went with her father to get hay from a stack in the meadow …
Without his being conscious of it she intrigued Niels. She was so utterly impersonal. The only softer feature she betrayed consisted in an absent-minded patting of the old dog that limped through the snow across the yard, wagging his tail whenever she came, to return to his lair in the straw-stack as soon as she left.
The place was so utterly lonesome that it reminded Niels of the wood-cutters’ houses in fairy tales. Wherever you looked, the bush reared about the buildings: great, towering aspens, now bare and leafless but glittering with the crystals of dry, powdery snow in the cracks of the bark.
Whenever Nelson and Niels were alone, the latter asked questions. Once he enquired after Amundsen’s wife. Somehow she reminded him of his own mother; and like his mother she aroused in him a feeling of resentment against something that seemed to be wrong with the world.
“They say he’s worked her to death,” Nelson said. “I don’t know. People talk a lot. Around here the women and children all have to work. I saw her on the hay-stack last year. I’ve seen lots of others. Soon after, there was a child, born dead. She’s never been up again.”
“But why not send for a doctor?”
“Nobody here sends for the doctor. He’d charge twenty-five or thirty dollars to come …”
THE WEEK WENT BY. On Sunday Niels and Nelson were idle.
In the afternoon many people called at the farm in the bush, the women to look in on Mrs. Amundsen; the men, to gossip in the kitchen … Where did they all come from in this wilderness?
Some of the callers were Germans, some Swedes and Icelanders, two or three English or Canadian.
The men wore sheep-skins, big boots, and flannelette shirts; most of the women, dark, long skirts, shawls over their shoulders, and white or light-coloured head-kerchiefs. Many of them had babies along which they nursed without restraint.
Nelson knew them all; but it struck Niels that both he and his friend were outside of things. Many spoke German which Amundsen seemed to understand though he spoke it only in a broken way. Apart from the Canadians, one single couple—elderly Swedes—used English exclusively. To Niels it seemed that they were handling it with remarkable fluency. Their name was Lund.
Mr. Lund was between fifty-five and sixty years old: a man who once must have been of powerful build; but he seemed to be nearly blind; and as he walked about, he groped his way as if all his members were disjointed. When he sat down, he either reclined or bent forward, resting his elbows on table or knees. The hair on the huge dome of his head was scanty, grey, straggling; a short, grey beard covered his chin.
His wife was by ten years his junior: a big, fleshy woman of florid features who must have been attractive in the past. She was lively, in a coarse, good-humoured way, not without wit; and she treated her husband with a sort of contemptuous indulgence.
Both man and wife were shabby; though Mrs. Lund wore a glaring waist which would have drawn attention in a city and seemed entirely out of place where she was. Her black hair might have been a beauty if it had been kept tidy.
These were the people for whom Niels and Nelson were to dig the second well.
To Niels it was a foreign crowd. He had no contact with them. He felt lonesome, forlorn …
Then Mrs. Lund ran across him.
“So you have only just come into the country, Mr. Lindstedt?” she asked with the air of a lady of the world, speaking Swedish. “And what do you mean to do?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Make some money and take up a homestead, I suppose …”
“Mr. Lindstedt,” she said, leaning over from her seat on a big, old-country trunk, “why don’t you buy?”
“Buy?” His tone was vacant surprise.
“Sure. This isn’t the old country, you know. Lots of people in this country buy without a cent of money. Crop-payments, you know.”
“Well,” Niels hesitated, “so long as I can get a homestead for nothing …”
“Listen,” she interrupted him. “Believe an old homesteader like me. By the time you’re ready to prove up, in the bush, you’ve paid for the place in work three times over. And what with the stumps and stones, everybody is willing to sell out as soon as he gets his patent. Yes, if you could get a homestead out in the open prairie … But there the land’s all settled. And when a man has proved up and owns his quarter of bush, what can he get for it? Two thousand dollars. And that’s for six, seven years of back-breaking work; and sometimes for longer. Take a prairie farm, now, which sells for six thousand dollars, let me say. You work it for six years, and you’ve paid for it in half crops. And you own all your machinery besides. You are worth ten thousand dollars. And meanwhile you haven’t been working so’s to make a cripple out of yourself. Think it over, Mr. Lindstedt. That’s all I say. Think it over. But you want to get married, of course.”
Niels coloured. He was ill at ease … There must be a flaw in these arguments.
Mrs. Lund rose. “Carl,” she called. “Come on. Time we get home.”
“Yes, Anna,” her husband replied; and when he had slowly raised himself, he adjusted with trembling hands smoked glasses before his eyes. His wife helped him into a series of three or four coats, each being singly too light for the season. She herself donned a man’s coat and, over it, a sheep-skin.
Nelson approached. “Came in the bob-sleighs?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Lund replied.
“Going straight home?”
“Immedately.”
“We might come along,” Nelson suggested, “and tramp it back.”
“Why, certainly, Mr. Nelson,” Lund said with insincere cordiality. “Certainly, Mr. Nelson. Look the place over.”
“Lots of room in the box,” Mrs. Lund joined in.
“Come on,” Nelson said to Niels.
And both got their sheep-skins and caps.
On the yard there was a great deal of bustle. Four or five different parties prepared to leave. Horses pawed, nickered, plunged. Nelson found Lund’s team and backed them out of the row. One of the horses was a tall, ancient white; the other a bony sorrel with elephantine feet.
Assisted by his wife, Lund lifted himself into the box and sat down on its floor, drawing the straw close about him. Mrs. Lund sat on the spring-seat in front; Nelson climbed in beside her, taking the lines; and Niels stood behind them.
“Well,” Mrs. Lund sang, “good-by everybody.”
IT WAS THE FIRST TIME since their arrival at Amundsen’s farm that either of the two friends left the yard. Niels was glad to escape from the crowded house. He felt as if freedom had been bestowed upon him in the wild. Somehow he felt less a stranger in the bush. Though everything was different, yet it was nature as in Sweden. None of the heath country of his native Blekinge here; none of the pretty juniper trees; none of the sea with its rocky islands. These poplar trees seemed wilder, less spared by an ancient civilisation that has learned to appreciate them. They invited the axe, the explorer …
The trees stood still, strangely still in the slanting afternoon sun which threw a ruddy glow over the white snow in sloughs and glades …
A mile or two from Amundsen’s place they passed a lonely school house in the bush. It stood on a little clearing, the trees encroaching on it from every side. Except for Nelson’s occasional shout to the horses they drove in silence.
After four miles or so they emerged from the bush on to a vast, low slough which, from the character of the tops of weeds and sedges rising above the snow, must be a swamp in summer. It was a mile or so wide; in the north it seemed to stretc
h to the very horizon. To the east, in the rising margin of the enveloping bush, Niels espied a single, solitary giant spruce tree, outtopping the poplar forest and heralding the straggling cluster of low buildings which go to make up a pioneer farmstead.
That was Lund’s place.
Slowly they approached it across the frozen slough. Taller and taller the spruce tree loomed, dwarfing the poplars about the place …
They drove up on a dam; and the view to the yard opened up.
There were a number of low buildings, stable, smokehouse, smithy—none of them more than eight feet high in the front, and all sloping down in the rear. The dwelling at the southern end of the yard was a huge, shack-like affair, built of lumber, twelve feet high in front and also sloping down behind.
Settlers of the Marsh Page 2
