Settlers of the Marsh

by Frederick Philip Grove

  The yard was encumbered with all kinds of machinery. Several horses and cows were mixed into the general disorder; and over it all a sprinkling as it were of children was spread out. These struck Niels so forcibly that, for the first time, he took the lead in asking a question.

  “All those children yours?” he asked.

  Mrs. Lund laughed a broad, hearty laugh.

  “We have only two, Mr. Lindstedt. A girl and a boy; and the boy is adopted. Our own boy was drowned in the Muddy River, five years ago. So we adopted Bobby from the children’s home.”

  When they turned in over a rickety culvert of poles bridging the ditch, a number of grown-ups came out from the door of the dwelling.

  “You’ve callers,” Nelson said.

  “Well,” Mrs. Lund laughed, “you know us, Mr. Nelson. We’ve always callers.” Turning to Niels and changing back into Swedish, she added, “This is the general meeting-place for fifteen miles around, post office, boarding house, and news store combined.”

  Behind the giant spruce tree and the surrounding bluff of poplars a number of teams were tied to the fence-posts.

  “Hello,” a girl said, coming to meet them in front of the long-extended stable with its low doors which gaped like the entrances into caves, for straw was thrown over roof and back of the building.

  The girl was perhaps sixteen years old, fat, overgrown, physically mature; but her face showed a certain baby-like prettiness; and she was gaudily dressed in cheap and flimsy finery. With amazement Niels noticed that her skirt was of black silk …

  Niels was the first to jump to the ground; and while the others alighted, he looked about. Every one of the five or six horses that stood on the yard had something the matter with it. One was lame; the other humpbacked; and a third was hardly able to move with old age.

  Nelson, still holding the lines, shook hands with the girl. Her face bore an almost engaging smile.

  “Hello, Mr. Nelson,” she said. “And how are you? Didn’t it snow up early this year? And how cold it is!”

  Mrs. Lund stepped down with the air of a great lady, her numerous wraps gathered loosely over her arm. “This is Mr. Lindstedt, Olga, a friend of Mr. Nelson’s. Now listen, Olga. You and Bobby put the horses in. And give them a good feed of oats.”

  The emphasis on the word “good” attracted Niels’ attention.

  Nelson tried to interpose. “I’ll put them in,” he said and bent to unhook the traces.

  “Not at all, Mr. Nelson,” Mrs. Lund objected. “You know Olga. She’ll look after that. Don’t you bother.”

  Olga shot a glance at him, half shy, half coquettish.

  “Hello,” a pleasant-faced boy of eleven or twelve sang out, joining the group just when they started for the house.

  “You look after the horses, Bobby,” Mrs. Lund repeated. “Give them a good feed of oats.”

  Mr. Lund, as if forgotten by everybody, had groped his way out of the box and was standing helpless, feeling about with his hands for something to support himself by. Niels saw it and stepped up to guide him. But again Mrs. Lund protested.

  “Never mind daddy, Mr. Lindstedt,” she called. “He is on his yard. He can find his way.”

  The next moment she had mingled in the group at the door of the dwelling. With an elaborate courtesy which would have been becoming in a duchess she started the formalities of introduction. A dozen times Niels had to shake hands. The names went past his ear in bewilderment.

  A single one struck him: that of a woman who formed a rather striking contrast to all other women present. It was “Mrs. Vogel.”

  She was dressed in a remarkably pretty and becoming way, with ruffles around her plump, smooth-skinned, though rather pallid face. In spite of the season she wore a light, washable dress which fitted her slender and yet plump body without a fold. Her waist showed a v-shaped opening at the throat which gave her—by contrast to the other women—something peculiarly feminine; beside her, the others looked neuter.

  But more than anything else her round, laughing, coal-black eyes attracted attention. They were in everlasting motion and seemed to be dancing with merriment. Mrs. Lund was like a great lady, accustomed, no matter what she wore and how she looked, to lord it over every one in her surroundings; but even she seemed to live under a strain, as if she kept her spirits up in an eternal fight against adverse circumstances. Her predominance was a physical one, gained by sheer weight and dimensions and held by sonorous contralto and booming ring of the voice. All the other women were subdued, self-effacing, almost apologetic; as if daunted by work and struggling not to be swamped by it. Mrs. Vogel was different. Difficulties and poverty did not seem to reach her. She shrank from them; she smiled till they vanished. She did not step out and fight; she stepped back, into the protection of her sex; and they passed her by.

  “All this did not become clear to Niels in articulate thought. It gathered into a general impression of attraction. Her sight roused his protective instincts, the impulses of the man in him.

  “Mrs. Vogel,” Mrs. Lund had said in introducing her, “the gay widow of the settlement.”

  Mrs. Vogel’s face had lighted up. She had shuddered in mock seriousness. “Widow sounds so funereal,” she had said and stepped back. But the look from her dancing eyes had sent a thrill through Niels.

  The next moment he found himself involved in a conversation with a short, slight man of thirty-five or so who spoke a fluent English. It went, so far, quite beyond Niels’ understanding.

  Nelson joined the group.

  “Where have you been?” Mrs. Lund veered about.

  “Put the horses in,” he replied.

  “Well,” she exclaimed, “what do you know about that?”

  And at once Nelson was surrounded by a laughing, hand-shaking crowd of men.

  On its outskirts lingered Olga Lund, a transfixed smile on her face and a red mark, as from a lover’s kiss, on her throat.

  Bobby had run off to join the children.

  “Well,” Mrs. Lund invited. “Come in, folks.”

  And she led the way into the house.

  “Yooh-hooh,” a yodling shout rang out as soon as she opened the door.

  And Niels who happened to be next behind her saw three men sitting at an oil-cloth-covered table to the left of the large, low room. One of them was the yodler, a tall, slim man with a merry face and a black moustache, unmistakably German. The three were playing at cards.

  “Hello, Nelson,” the same voice shouted. “Back again?”

  And Nelson, pushing through the crowd, shook hands, long and violently, both men laughing the while. There was ostentation and exaggeration about their meeting.

  The card-player raised a bottle. “Here, have a schnapps, boy, on your happy return.”

  For a moment there was a bedlam of noise, shouts, and laughter. Then, when the confusion subsided, Mrs. Lund who had dropped her wraps pushed through, with a view to the proprieties, and introduced Niels.

  But a few minutes later he found himself once more on the outskirts of the crowd, partly on account of his inability to speak either English or German, partly because it was his nature to be alone, even in a crowd.

  He looked about, appraisingly.

  The house, built of lumber, was unfinished inside: the raw joists showed in the walls. The floor was unpainted, splintered up to an alarming degree, its cracks filled with earth and dirt.

  The furnishings consisted of oddly assembled pieces: upholstered easy-chairs, worn down as it were to the bones; and threadbare and ragged hangings. In the south-west corner of the large room stood a plank-table, home-made, and strewn with papers: the post-office.

  Niels could not help contrasting the shabby, second-hand, defunct gentility of it all, and the squalour in which it was left, with the trim and spotless but bare austerity of Amundsen’s house. It struck him how little there was of comfort in that other home: Ellen’s home! And yet, how sincere it was in its severe utility as compared with this! Amundsen’s house represen
ted a future; this one, the past: Amundsen’s growth; this one, decay. Every piece of the furniture here, with the exception of the post-office table and the oil-cloth, came from the home of some rich man; but before it had reached this room, it had slowly and roughly descended the social ladder till at last, at the tenth or twelfth hand, it had reluctantly and incongruously landed here as on a junk pile.

  And suddenly the problem of the woman’s and the girl’s clothes was solved as well: they were second-hand.

  In his mind’s eye Niels placed Ellen and Olga side by side: easy-going sloth and what was almost asceticism.

  He felt immensely depressed; for a moment he felt he must leave the house never to return.

  A commotion in the crowd roused him at last from his contemplation. The callers were getting ready to leave. Across the enormous slough the sun was nearing the horizon.

  Hand-shaking. Leave-taking …

  He looked on. He was not concerned. This, too, was a foreign crowd: he had nothing in common with them.

  Slowly all went away, till nobody was left but Nelson and he. They, too, made preparation to leave; but Mrs. Lund protested.

  “You’ll stay for supper. You’ll have moonlight for the way back.”

  And she began to bustle about, clearing the table and shaking down the fire in the stove which was an ancient range, battered and footless, propped up on bricks.

  Nelson had sunk back in his chair, an old cradle-rocker, covered with damask which had once been pink; steel-springs and horse-hair protruded through its rents.

  For another quarter of an hour there was coming and going outside.

  Mrs. Lund turned to Niels where he stood behind the stove, in the shadows. “That’s the way,” she said in the tone of polite explanation, “it’s with us every Sunday.”

  “And many a week-day, too,” Olga added smiling.

  “Not that way,” Mrs. Lund protested, pushing her sleeves up above her elbows and baring powerful fore arms. “You see,

  Mr. Lindstedt, most of these people come for their mail on Sundays. On week-days nobody has the time.” She stepped to the door and, opening it called in a strident falsetto which could have been heard from half a mile away, “Bob-beee!”

  “Yes,” the boy answered with startling nearness from just around the corner.

  “Attend to your chores, boy,” she said. “Get wood in and snow. And do the feeding.”

  Olga rose. “I’ll do the feeding.”

  “No,” Mrs. Lund forbade briefly, “not to-night.”

  The girl acquiesced with a smile.

  “You get the bacon,” her mother went on …

  Thus, in the rising dusk, the preparations went forward.

  “Where’s daddy?” Mrs. Lund asked suddenly, straightening from the stove.

  “Here, mamma,” the voice of the man replied from the darkest corner where he lay reclining in a large wicker chair which was unravelling in a dozen places.

  “Go and help Bobby,” she said.

  “All right, mamma,” he agreed, raising himself painfully. Then he groped his way along the wall.

  “One day,” Mrs. Lund went on, addressing Niels, “we are going to have everything as it should be. A large, good house; a hot-bed for the garden; real, up-to-date stables; and … everything. And the children are going to learn something. We want Bobby to go to college …”

  Niels looked at her. Since she had spoken in Swedish, he had understood.

  But suddenly he understood far more than the mere words. He understood that this woman knew she was at the end of her life and that life had not kept faith with her. Her voice was only half that with which we tell of a marvellous dream; half it was a passionate protest against the squalour surrounding her: it reared a triumphant vision above the ruins of reality. It was the cry of despair which says, It shall not be so!

  Niels was unable to answer. He felt as if he should step over to her and lay his hand on her shoulder to show that he understood. But he knew, if he did so, she would break down and cry.

  His eye wandered from her to Nelson and Olga sitting close together and conversing in whispers.

  Not knowing what to do, in the intensity of the feeling that had swept over him, he went to the window and looked out into the rising dark.

  To his surprise he saw Mr. Lund walking about on the yard without groping his way. His step was uncertain; his back was bent; but on it he carried an enormous bundle of coarse, dried rushes, for litter or feed: and he had no trouble in finding his way.

  This sight sobered Niels. Somehow he felt it incumbent upon him to say something.

  “It is a beautiful country,” he ventured.

  “In summer,” Mrs. Lund said. “You should see it in summer, Mr. Lindstedt. The flowers and the shrubs! One day,” and again that quality rose in her voice, “we shall plant lindens and maples all about the yard and cut all those old poplars down.”

  Niels looked up. “But the poplars … And that wonderful spruce tree …”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Lund agreed, “the spruce tree … But if somebody pulled every poplar right out of the ground he’d do us a great big help.”

  Niels did not reply.

  The ruddy glow that was still reflected from the high clouds flaming in the west of the sunken sun spread its dull warmth over the yard: dusk had wiped out the picture of disorder and litter; and like a giant finger pointing upward, to God, the spruce tree stood on guard at the corner …

  When Niels looked back into the room, the last glimmer of that light played over Nelson’s and Olga’s heads. The face of the girl was actually beautiful now as she sat there with dreaming eyes, her cheeks suffused with that ecstatic smile of hers.

  She, too, had a dream; but her dream was of the future: it was capable of fulfilment, not fraught with pathos as her mother’s.…

  The whole room was softened into some appearance of harmony by the dark: fit setting for the dreams of the young and the retrospection of those whose dreams have come true: a horror to those in despair …

  As if she felt it, the woman lighted a lamp.

  Again Niels looked out.

  There, on the yard, Mr. Lund was slowly walking about with closed eyes, a forked willow-branch in his hands. Thus, while Niels watched, he went from place to place, all over the yard, into the corners, across the open, along the stable, towards the gate at the culvert. Suddenly he stopped, standing in the light of the high half moon; and in evident excitement he called to the boy who soon after brought him four poles which he placed on the snow-covered ground.

  To Niels his doings seemed inconsequential and irrelevant; such was the influence of the boundless landscape which stretched away in the dim light of the moon …

  Life had him in its grip and played with him; the vastness of the spaces looked calmly on.

  When Lund came in—his grey and hairy face bore a smile of transcendent rapture.

  “Well,” he said very quietly, as if he were blessing everything. “I have located the well.”

  “That right?” Nelson asked without interest.

  “Yes,” Lund replied. “The rod turned very distinctly. We shall get water.”

  “We need it,” Mrs. Lund said skeptically. And, turning to Niels, she added, “We have been using the water from the ditch … it gives the horses swamp fever.…”

  “We’ll get it, mamma,” Lund repeated. “I know. Don’t worry.”

  The table was set. Mrs. Lund called for supper.

  Niels sat between her and Bobby; Nelson, between Olga and Mr. Lund. No grace was said.

  For a while the meal proceeded in silence.

  Then Nelson spoke. “Going to school, Bobby?”

  “Yes,” the boy replied with a grin on his frank and humorous face. “Not very regular.”

  “We send him whenever we can,” Mrs. Lund explained. “It’s nearly four miles to go; in summer the swamp can’t be crossed; then it’s more; and in winter the snow is often up to his hips. It isn’t work that’s keeping him,
Mr. Nelson; don’t you believe it. We want our children to get an education.”

  “Yes,” Lund agreed, still with the smile on his face. “If we can only send him to the Agricultural College. Have you ever seen it, Mr. Nelson?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Why, it’s grand! That is farming, I often say to mother. I have been to the college myself, for three years. Did you know it?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, daddy,” his wife interposed good-naturedly. “What shall the people think of you?” And, turning to Nelson, she added. “He was at the college all right, but feeding pigs.”

  Lund sighed. A sullen expression settled on his face. Everybody except his wife felt embarrassed.

  “We’ve seen better days, that’s true,” Mrs. Lund went on. “When I was a young girl, I was a trained nurse. I’ve spent five years in a spital.”

  “Yes, scrubbing floors,” Lund mumbled spitefully.

  Nelson could not forbear a smile; but Mrs. Lund fastened such a forbidding look on her husband that he squirmed in his seat. Olga coloured dark red; and Bobby made things worse by his desperate efforts to suppress a giggle.

  Supper went by under a constraint; and when it was over, the friends were glad to escape from the charged atmosphere of the house.

  They got their wraps and took leave.