Olga looked after them from the door when they crossed the yard.
THE AIR WAS CRISP; the snow creaked under their steps; the moon stood high; the two young men stepped briskly along.
“Strange people,” Niels said at last.
“Yes,” Nelson agreed. “I pity the girl.”
“Is he really blind?”
“I don’t believe it. He is a great actor; and the laziest fellow I’ve ever met. The woman and the girl do all the heavy work; and the boy, too, does twice his share. The man does nothing except spend the money.”
“Where does he get it?” Niels exclaimed.
“Sponges and bums and runs into debt. The homestead is his; but he hasn’t proved up.”
“How long has he been on the place?”
“Ten years or so. It’s the third place he’s had. The first was mortgaged to the hilt; and the company foreclosed on him. On the second the buildings burned down; they say he set fire to them. And here he is in debt again to the tune of some two thousand dollars. The woman and the girl run the post office and the farm. They don’t want him to prove up. As soon as he gets his title, they’ll lose the place; and they know it.”
Success and failure! It seemed to depend on who you were, an Amundsen or a Lund …
“Why don’t you buy?” Niels asked his friend.
Nelson laughed. “Has she put that bug into your head, too? … I want to be my own boss. I don’t mind working out for a while each year till I get on my feet. But when I go home, I stand on my own soil; and no debts worry me. What I raise is mine. Five, six years from now I shall be independent.”
“Yes,” Niels said. “But the work it costs would pay for a prairie farm.”
“Maybe,” Nelson laughed. And after a silence he added, very seriously, “I’ll tell you, I like the work. I’d pay to be allowed to do it. Land I’ve cleared is more my own than land I’ve bought.”
Niels understood. That was his own thought exactly, his own unexpressed, inexpressible thought …
They walked on in silence, swinging along in great, vigorous strides. The last few words had filled them with the exhilaration of a confession of faith. High above, far ahead stood an ideal; towards that ideal they walked.
Suddenly, as they were entering the bush, where the moonlight filtered down through the meshes of leafless boughs overhead, a vision took hold of Niels: of himself and a woman, sitting of a mid-winter night by the light of a lamp and in front of a fire, with the pitter-patter of children’s feet sounding down from above: the eternal vision that has moved the world and that was to direct his fate. He tried to see the face of the woman; but it entirely evaded him.…
ONCE MORE during the following week Niels and Nelson, while at work on Amundsen’s yard, spoke of Lunds. “Was it true that Mrs. Lund had been a nurse?”
“I don’t know,” Nelson replied. “She’s had more of an education than he. She works in the city after Christmas; at what nobody knows. She says she has a position as companion to a crippled lady. Most people think she hires out as domestic help. She lies, you know.”
“Lies?”
“Sure,” Nelson laughed. “You heard her repeat twice, the other day, that Olga and Bobby were to give the horses a good feed of oats? Well, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that there isn’t a grain of oats on the place.”
“Is that so?” Niels exclaimed. “But why say it?”
“Pride,” Nelson said. “She doesn’t like to let on how poor they are. There isn’t a person in the whole district, Swedish, German, or English, who doesn’t take favours from that woman which she can ill afford to do. Whatever she has and anybody needs or wants she gives away and goes without herself. But it isn’t merely good nature; it’s part thriftlessness and part ostentation.”
AMUNDSEN, after all, did give up. The two men went deeper and deeper and found no water. Then news came that there was a well-drilling outfit in the district, working some eight, ten miles north-east. Amundsen made up his mind to try that machine, chiefly because the cribbing of a really deep well would be very expensive.
The decision came on Saturday.
Since they were not to move till the morrow, Nelson borrowed a gun and a handful of shells from Amundsen; and during the last hours of daylight the two friends went into the bush to look for game. They saw nothing but a rabbit which Nelson brought down and, on their return, contributed to the family larder.
Amundsen carefully figured out their account, prepared a receipt for them to sign, and pushed over to them the sum of forty-one dollars and twenty cents.
“I take five cents out for the cartridge,” he explained.
Nelson grinned. “Well,” he said, “not that it matters; but I turned the rabbit in.”
“I understood,” Amundsen argued without the least embarrassment, “you shot the rabbit on my place. You will remember I asked about that.”
“I did,” Nelson said.
“Then the rabbit was mine anyway,” Amundsen decided with finality.
“All right.” Nelson laughed. And even Niels could not suppress a smile.
THUS IT CAME to pass that the two friends returned to Lund’s sooner than they had expected. When they left Amundsen’s place, Ellen nodded to them and said, “Good-by” as to casual strangers.
AT LUND’S, too, Niels saw Olga harnessing a team of big, weary brutes. She and Bobby were going into the bush after firewood.
Niels watched her as he had watched Ellen. The morning was cold; and the girl was warmly dressed. But there was a difference. None of the silks to-day; but no sheep-skin, either. She wore a multitude of ragged things, each, like those of her father, too thin for the season, but together calculated to keep the cold out, at least. And, whereas Ellen, when she donned her working clothes, had changed from a virgin, cool and distant, into a being that was almost sexless, Olga preserved her whole feminity. The nonchalance of her bearing also stood in strange contrast to the intense determination with which Ellen went after her work. About Olga’s movements there was hesitation, an almost lazy deliberation very different from the competent lack of hurry in Ellen. Besides, Ellen ignored the men at their work; Olga stopped, looking on, and chatted with Nelson about his plans.
This more homely atmosphere turned Niels’ thoughts back to Sweden, to his poor home where his father and mother had died … They, too, had worked very hard.
His mother, for instance, had to the very last, to the day when she was overtaken by her final illness, daily gone into the park owned by Baron Halson to gather dry brush for the stove. That had been allowed by way of charity. To earn her bread she had gone out scrubbing floors even when she was no longer able to do satisfactory work. The people whom she served had kept her on because they were good-hearted, after all; but they had treated her as a being from a lower social, yes, human plane.
He remembered how once, when he was about ten years old, he had stood outside of one of the mansions where she worked, for two, three hours after school, waiting for her because she had forgotten to put the key to the hut in the usual place. There he had stood in the street of the little town, looking at the brass-trimmed door with its polished brass name-plate, longing for his mother to come; for it was cold and he was scantily dressed. Yet he had not dared to touch the shining brass knocker on the well-to-do door which it was not for one like him to lift.
He also remembered how that vision of himself as a child, as a poor child, had haunted him when he grew up till fierce and impotent hatreds devastated his heart, so that at last it had become his dream to emigrate to a country where such things could not be. By some trick in his ancestry there was implanted in him the longing for the land that would be his: with a house of his own and a wife that would go through it like an inspiration: he had come to Canada, the land of the million farmsteads to be had for the asking.
Here, there were big trees which any one could fell for firewood. Nobody looked down upon him because he was poor. Money came easily: he had saved over a hundred and fifty
dollars in a few months. No doubt it went easily, too. But he would hold on to it till he owned his land.…
Lunds? The trouble with them was that they were children one and all.…
In this country there was a way out for him who was young and strong. In Sweden it had seemed to him as if his and everybody’s fate had been fixed from all eternity. He could not win out because he had to overcome, not only his own poverty, but that of all his ancestors to boot.…
SOME TIME, during that forenoon, Mrs. Vogel came driving on to Lund’s yard. She fetched her mail from the house; and then she stopped her pony for a moment at the well-site to look on. Nelson dropped his pick and straightened his back.
“No, no, Mr. Nelson,” she said. “Go on; I love to watch strong men work.”
Niels, too, looked up.
On her lips lay a smile; her black, beady eyes seemed to dance when they rested on his friend, and to glow with a strange warmth when they lighted on his own.
She wore a plush cap, a real fur coat, and, on the hand which held the lines, a knitted mitt of white wool.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t want to keep you. Get up, Prince. Bye-bye. I wanted to see you work, not loaf.”
And she drove on, not without throwing over her shoulder a glance which sent a tingling sensation along Niels’ spine.
Woman had never figured as a concrete thing in Niels’ thought of his future in this new country. True, he had seen in his visions a wife and children; but the wife had been a symbol merely. Now that he was in the country of his dreams and gaining a foothold, it seemed as if individual women were bent on replacing the vague, schematic figures he had had in his mind. He found this intrusion strangely disquieting.
“She seems to have taken a fancy to you,” Nelson startled him by saying.
Niels scowled when he bent to his work. His friend’s remark was like the violation of a confidence, like an intrusion into the arcana of holy ground; for as yet Niels was chaste to the very core of his being.
There was a distant look in his eyes when at last he brought himself to reply, “Maybe to you.”
Nelson laughed. “Don’t think so. She’s seen me often enough. She’s never stopped to flirt with me before.”
This word seemed indelicate. It opened a gap between Niels and his friend; it would take time to bridge it over.…
A FEW DAYS LATER, on Wednesday, Nelson had, as usual, started the digging while Niels drew up the pails and removed the earth from the pit, when a sudden shout made Niels jump back to the edge.
There, in the still shallow hole, he saw Nelson standing to over his hips in water which was still rising, though more slowly now.
“Quick, get me out of here!” Nelson shouted.
But before Niels could reach for the rope and throw it, the water had risen to Nelson’s chest.
“Well,” Nelson sang out as he burst through the door of the house, dripping, “you’ve got it!”
“You don’t say so!” And Mrs. Lund who was washing the breakfast dishes, barefooted as she was, ran out over the snow.
Even Lund awoke from his contemplative lethargy and was on his feet in an incredibly short time.
“Didn’t I tell you?” he triumphed. “Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Linstedt?”
“Struck a pocket or a vein,” Nelson called after him. “Stuck the pick in; and she bubbled up.…”
“Well, I declare!” Mrs. Lund said when she returned to the house. “That’s the first piece of luck we’ve had since we moved out here. There’s water enough for anybody. Thank the Lord, now the hauling and snow-melting is over at last! What’ll Olga say when she gets home!”
But Olga did not say very much. Her eyes shone and rested happily on Nelson.
“Isn’t it grand!” were her only words.
Bobby had all the more to say.
“And you were right in it when the water came? Was it cold?”
“You bet,” Nelson replied. He was warming up by the stove, clad in Niels’ summer suit which was much too small for him.
“Gee,” Bobby exclaimed. “I wish I’d been there to see. She just bubbled up?”
“Like a spring,” Nelson said.
The boy ran off to have another look at this world-wonder, the well.
“She’s still rising,” he said when he returned. “She’s within three feet of the ground now.”
“That makes seven feet of water,” Lund admired. “Amundsen should have let me locate his well. I told him I would charge him only a bag of barley.…”
It was agreed that the work should be paid for out of Mrs. Lund’s next “post-office-cheque” which was due in January. Niels and Nelson prepared to leave for the latter’s own place, seven miles north and one mile west.…
Next morning, the whole family stood on the yard when they left.…
ON THE WAY, Nelson picked up his horses, from the place of the German settler who lived a mile south of his own place, on a homestead in the bush.
Beyond, now driving, they struck out over unbroken snow. There were drifts here, especially where a last feeler of the big slough in the south crossed their road.… The snow was dry and loose like powder; it sparkled and glittered as it was dusted aloft by the horses.… A noonday sun glared down on the landscape.
They followed a bush trail, winding from side to side over the timbered road-allowance.
A last crossing: a narrow road-gap east and west: a few hundred yards to the right, and they saw Nelson’s tiny yard.
A little log-shanty, twelve by fifteen feet, singularly forlorn and snow-bound; behind it, a still smaller stable, also of logs, its roof consisting of poles covered with straw which in turn supported a dome-like hood of snow. It looked like a fairy dwelling, untouched, virgin, and immeasurably lonesome … Bush all around …
“There we are,” Nelson said not without a touch of pride.
“So this is it?” They had often spoken of the place. Niels was hushed with a sense of longing for his own old home, for his dead mother.…
They backed the wagon up to the shack and unhitched the horses. The stable was cold; but the horses stepped in: they knew it. Nelson fetched hay from a little stack which was leaning against the south side of the building.
Then they went to the house and opened the door. A small pile of wood was provided against a homecoming. In a few minutes a fire was roaring in the little tin heater which occupied the centre of the single room. Along the west wall stood a white-enamelled bed, four feet wide; against the east wall, a deal table with two chairs. A small cooking stove, back to back against the heater, and a battered trunk completed the furniture. The walls were plastered with clay but showed the raw poplar logs, peeled of their bark and glistening with tiny ice-crystals which made them look singularly cold and moist. The floor was of axe-squared poplar planks which felt soft to the booted foot.
“What did that cost you?” Niels asked.
“In money? The work I did myself, you know. Nails, door, window, furniture … forty dollars.”
“I could put up a place for myself!” Niels thought.…
When they had unloaded the wagon—it held some oats and groceries brought from Hahn’s, the German’s, place—they pushed it out of the way and closed the door. The radiating heat from the little stove took effect; and from that moment on this little building became something like a home to Niels.…
THUS STARTED Niels’ first winter in the northern forest.
Henceforth his life consisted alternately of work in the bush and driving, driving.…
One of the two men was always on the road. Sometimes it took three, sometimes four days to make the round trip to Minor where they sold the seasoned wood of last winter’s cutting. Occasionally it took a week. Niels learned to know the district.…
Often he dropped in on Lunds. Sometimes he saw Ellen.
Once, after a roaring blizzard, he reached Amundsen’s place in the afternoon. He had seen Olga that day; and now he saw Ellen who was leaving the yard with the team of
colts to go for water.
His face lighted up; he would have liked to speak to her. But she returned his greeting by a mere curt nod. It struck him that she went north-east. He looked after her as she drove swiftly along, holding her prancing and rearing horses with a firm and competent hand. She did not turn back, however. He was no more than a stranger to her, a stranger who happened to have worked on her father’s place.
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.
Settlers of the Marsh Page 4
