For a minute or so Mrs. Vogel did not speak but looked at him with a sidelong glance, intensely feminine, nearly coquettish, and full of smiling scrutiny. Niels had never before been looked at in that way. He had never met a woman like her.
“Is it possible,” she said at last, “that you are the boy whom I saw here three years ago?” Her voice, too, was smiling, caressing, almost, triumphantly disarming.
Niels felt confused. He reddened. He wished to flee; but the strength had gone out of his limbs. His lips said, mechanically, “Have I changed?”
She laughed: a light, silvery, falsetto laugh: the laugh of a woman perfectly sure of herself and very superior to her interlocutor. “Changed?” she repeated. “I should say so. You were a boy then; now you are a man.”
Niels’ head was glowing. “I am older.”
“Partly,” she conceded. “You have learned to speak, too. When I first met you, you were dumb.”
“I did not know any English.”
“Where did you learn?”
“I took lessons. At night-school in Minor.”
“From a lady?”
“No, a man.”
“Well, your English is so good that I felt sure it had been a lady… You are changed altogether. You are a man with a future. Your shoulders have broadened. Your lips have become straight and firm. You have grown a moustache. I felt sure only a woman could have worked the change …”
Flee, Niels’ genius seemed to whisper. Flee from temptation! His ears tingled; his scalp felt hot. Her laughter sounded to him as if it came from a distance. There was mockery in it.
“I wonder,” she said suddenly, “whether you could smile, Mr. Lindstedt?”
This shocked him. He felt as if somebody were piling a crushing weight on him; or as if he were being stripped of his disguises. His chastity felt attacked. He wanted to get away and looked helplessly at the crowd.
But she had chosen her place well.
The sun was sinking to the west; the bright, red glow which fell through the open door stood like a screen between them and the rest. They were in the shadow of the wall. Theirs was a side-play, acted in a niche and off the stage …
Niels frowned … And the woman laughed. As if to favour her and to separate them still more from the others, somebody started the old, screeching grammophone going.
Mrs. Vogel’s face became serious. She lowered her eyes as if she herself were embarrassed. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “I hear we are going to be neighbours?”
Niels felt relieved. This was neutral ground. “Is that so?” he asked rather readily.
Mrs. Vogel looked at him. Her demure air had dropped. The mockery in her eyes was undisguised, “Why don’t you ask at least where I live. Or do you know?”
“No,” he said brusquely.
“Ask then!” Look and laugh challenged him.
Niels frowned in rebellion; but he asked, though ungraciously.
“Two miles south of here,” she replied, whispering, as if imparting a secret. “Of course, I don’t always live there. Mostly I live in the city. But I have the place … Go north from your corner, across the bridge; then, instead of continuing north, along the trail which would lead you to Amundsen’s, turn to the east, along the first logging trail. Three miles from the bridge you will find me. Apart from Sigurdsen who does not count I am your nearest neighbour now …”
There was a pause—an awkward pause, awkward for Niels. Mrs. Vogel seemed to enjoy it; she looked at him sideways with a quiet smile …
Chance came to his aid. Mrs. Lund had asked some of the men to arrange the tables for supper. Niels got up. “I suppose I had better lend a hand …”
But he found that his help was not needed. So, in order to save himself, he slipped out of the door and crossed the yard to where the children were playing about the hay-stack.
BOBBY, NOW A FINE LAD of fourteen, was teasing a little girl of four or five. He stood in front of the hay-stack and shouted, “Now, May, watch out. I’m going to blow the haystack over. Watch.” And he blew his cheeks up to perfect rotundity.
“Don’t, Bobby, don’t!” the little girl cried, with the tears very near the surface.
“Then I’ll blow you over,” he threatened, veering about.
But the little girl ran away, screaming.
And Bobby followed her, protesting that he was merely “fooling.”
Niels felt as if he were waking up from a terrible dream. He passed his hand over his forehead and went to the stable.
There he met Nelson who was coming back from the gate where the teams were tied.
“Getting rather thick with the widow?” Nelson asked, grinning.
Niels coloured; and the consciousness angered him. “Nonsense,” he said.
“I watched you. Better be careful. She’s set her cap for you … What do you intend to do next?”
“Fence,” Niels replied.
“Going to buy horses in the fall?”
“I think so.”
“Well, you’ve got the hay; good hay, too; and lots of it. I’m glad you fixed the Lunds up. Better hold on to what you’ll have to spare. Hay’s going to be scarce. There’s none in the west.”
“I have no intention of selling,” Niels said. “Maybe in spring … Going to work out this fall?”
“Hardly. I’ve got my hands full on my own place. Thirty-five acres to plow … And then … when a man’s married … What am I to do with your share of the barley from the new breaking?”
“Can you hold it for me?”
“Sure. If you buy horses, better keep it. Well, I’ll have to go in. So long.” And he went to the house.
SOMEHOW NIELS FELT that a barrier had arisen between him and his friend. So far they had had their interests in common. Nelson had stepped aside; he was going to live in a world from which Niels was excluded. Niels was left alone. He felt in need of the company of one whom he could trust, on whom he could rely, who would understand the turmoil in his heart without an explanation in so many words.
While he stood there, under the giant spruce tree, and looked across the slough at the amber glow of the sky, his thought went back, with affection, to old man Sigurdsen. His world, his workaday world of toil and worry, seemed suddenly so sane as compared with his own world of passion, desire, and longing …
At supper, he sat next to Hahn, the German, and his wife; but he did not take part in the general conversation …
Mrs. Vogel sat at the other end of the table. Niels looked at her once or twice; but she seemed to avoid his eye; and it suited him so. He was still angry at himself, for an inexplicable feeling of guilt that possessed him. She looked very lovely, he thought; but she looked like sin. She was incomprehensible to him …
When the grown-ups had finished their supper, they made room for the children.
While the groups thus re-arranged themselves, a sudden commotion arose. Somebody called for Nelson, somebody else, for the bride. They were not to be found.
Then a small, unobtrusive man who had gone out came running to the door.
“Come on,” he shouted; “they’re going.”
And everybody rushed to the door.
In the confusion which followed Niels reached for his cap and caught Bobby by the shoulder.
“I’m going too,” he said to the boy. “Tell your mother I’ll be back in the morning to finish the hay.”
“All right,” said Bobby and squirmed away in the crush.
Nelson was standing in his wagon-box and backed his horses out of the row at the fence. The bride sat on the spring-seat and looked over her shoulder at the crowd which came running.
Everybody had grabbed something, a broken plate, a dish, an old shoe, a handful of rice. Niels was caught in the general onrush and ran with the rest.
A shower of things was thrown after the couple both of whom were laughing and replying to the bantering jokes flung at them from the rear.
Niels felt that part of his life was driving away
with them as they swung out on the dam and away into darkness …
For a moment the crowd of guests lingered at the gate where Mrs. Lund stood crying unrestrainedly.
Suddenly Niels felt a hand on his arm. Mrs. Vogel stood by him.
“You are going?” She smiled up at him. “Don’t forget. North across the bridge. Then east along the first logging trail. Three miles from the bridge. A white cottage. Sooner or later you’ll come. Come soon. Before I return to the city. I am a lonely woman, you know …” And, nodding at him, she lost herself in the crowd.
WHAT DID IT all mean?
Without waiting for anybody Niels dodged behind the log-shack which served as a smithy and into the thick bluff beyond.
A plank was lying across the ditch. It was almost dark. The air was strangely quiet for a summer day in the north. The atmosphere was saturated with the smell of hay from the edge of the slough …
Beyond, tall, ghostly, white stems of aspens loomed up, shutting out the world …
Already, though he had thought he could never root in this country, the pretty junipers of Sweden had been replaced in his affections by the more virile and fertile growth of the Canadian north. The short, ardent summer and the long, violent winter had captivated him: there was something heady in the quick pulse of the seasons …
He had been an onlooker so far. But to-night something had happened which he did not understand: he was a leaf borne along in the wind, a prey to things beyond his control, a fragment swept away by torrents.
That made him cling to the landscape as something abiding, something to steady him.
He cut across the corner of the slough; and when he had passed out of eye and earshot of the noisy, celebrating crowd, he stopped, raised his arms above his head, and stretched … A lassitude came over him: a desire to evade life’s issues …
He longed to be with his mother, to feel her gnarled, calloused fingers rumpling his hair, and to hear her crooning voice droning some old tune …
And then he seemed to see her before him: a wrinkled, shrunk little face looking anxiously into his own.
He groaned.
That face with the watery, sky-blue eyes did not look for that which tormented him: what tormented him, he suddenly knew, had tormented her also; she had fought it down. Her eyes looked into himself, knowingly, reproachfully. There was pity in the look of the ancient mother: pity with him who was going astray: pity with him, not because of what assailed him from without; but pity with what he was in his heart …
It was very clear now that the torrent which swept him away, the wind that bore him whither it listed came from his innermost self. If, for what had happened to him, anybody was to blame at all, it was he …
As if to confirm it, there arose in him the vision again of that room where he sat with a woman, his wife. But no pitter-patter of little children’s feet sounded down from above; nor were they sitting on opposite sides of a table in front of a fire-place. He was crouching on a low stool in front of the woman’s seat; and he was leaning his head on her. And when he looked up into her face, that face bore the features and the smile of the woman who had spoken to him that very night …
CHAPTER TWO
NIELS
Fall came. Niels “worked out.”
In many ways he was changed. Every Sunday, during the summer, he had fought a savage fight with himself. He had gone across the sandy corner of the Marsh, to the bridge; and there he was torn between two desires: the desire to see Ellen and to have her quietly, critically gaze at him out of her eyes as if she were searching for something in him; and the desire to see, and to listen to, the other woman whose look and voice sent a thrill through his body and kindled his imagination.
Invariably he had at last returned to his homestead and his tent without seeing either …
One of these women had seemed to demand; the other, to give. Yet one was competent; the other, helpless. One was a mate; the other, a toy …
When, on Monday mornings, he went to work again, fencing his claim, he shook all visions off and felt a grim sort of satisfaction at having resisted both temptations. But the fight drew sharp lines into his face and made him seem older than he was. He had become reticent again as he had perforce been during his first year in the new country. He never spoke a word beyond what was exactly needed to convey his meaning …
He had grown tremendously strong. Among the harvest crews he enjoyed, though he never fought, the reputation of being a fighter. The men who chaffed everybody else left him alone …
His outlooked also had changed. Life seemed irrelevant; success seemed idle. All he did he did mechanically.
HE RETURNED to his homestead bringing a team. He began to cut the trees for his buildings, clearing a little field …
And he put the buildings up, a stable and a granary which, so far, was to serve as a house …
Then he thought of going for the grain which was his as his share of Nelson’s crop …
It was a cold, frosty winter morning when he set out driving his horses.
At the bridge he saw Amundsen working on the ice of the creek.
Belated rains which, in the bush, had fallen on frozen ground had caused an abundant run-off; enough to fill the creek which usually, at the time of freeze-up, consisted merely of a string of pools at the bottom of the wide trough. The water, however, had at once frozen over; and, since the bed of the creek proceeded in a succession of terraces downward, it had run out from under the frozen bridges of ice, thus creating large hollow vaults at the bottom of which the trickle of the stream still fell or ran from pool to pool.
Amundsen was working with the axe, breaking this ice-bridge so as to reach the water underneath.
Niels stopped and looked down. Amundsen nodded to him; and he returned the greeting.
“You never got the drill after all,” Niels shouted at last.
Amundsen came somewhat closer before he replied.
“No,” he said. “The beggars were at Kurtz’s. Eight miles from my place. But Kelm wanted them; and Hahn: and several others. So they asked half a dollar more to come down here, the cut-throats!”
Niels felt the same odd repulsion for the man which he had always felt.
“We get a little water from the well you dug with Nelson,” Amundsen went on. “I’ve put the cribbing in. But it isn’t enough for the stock. For a while we hauled from Lund’s. But they got mad about the hay last year. There’s no snow yet to speak of. So we’ve got to get at the creek. Going north?”
“Yes,” Niels said. “I’d better be moving.”
That was the last Niels ever saw of the man.
IN THE WINDING CHASM of the bush road he met Ellen who was coming with her barrels in the sleigh. She was driving the run-away team.
Niels guided his horses right into the underbrush, giving her the whole of the road.
But the girl also edged over on her side, disdaining to take advantage of him.
All the while her clear, inscrutable eyes were fixed on his face as they passed each other.
In a sudden resentment he repeated a phrase which had often tingled in his ears and which the other woman had used. “I wonder,” he muttered as he nodded his greeting, “whether you could smile, Miss Amundsen?”
She had not changed. She looked and acted exactly as she had done three years ago.
THEN, AS HE DROVE over the virgin snow, he began, as usual, to argue with himself.
Why should he be angry with her? He had seen her, she him, a dozen times. All the words spoken between them counted up to a score or so … Why should she smile at him, a perfect stranger?
IN DUE TIME he came out on the slough, it was near the dinner hour. Nelsons might be at Lund’s. He would call there to see. But when he drove up on the dam, close to the yard, he found himself the unwilling witness of a scene which made him go on.
Lund was standing in front of the stable, pitching manure on to a sleigh-box.
Mrs. Lund, a pail in her hand, was coming f
rom the house. Neither saw Niels.
Mrs. Lund, however, caught sight of a little calf gambolling about and sprinting off into the snow-covered clearing behind the yard.
“Who’s let the calf out?” she shouted angrily and ran over to the stable. The door was open.
Lund stopped in his work, leaned on his fork, and fumbled with a shaking hand at the dark glasses protecting his eyes.
“What did you let that calf out for?” she repeated.
“I didn’t, mamma,” he replied.
The sleigh was gliding noiselessly over the soft, loose snow; every word sounded clearly across to Niels.
“You old thunderbuss!” she screamed. “Don’t lie!”
“What?” The old man rose in arms, grasping his fork.
Mrs. Lund stopped and laughed. “Don’t act silly! You can’t bully me!”
But he advanced, raising the fork.
Mrs. Lund’s laughter died away; and from defiance her attitude changed into one of hunted fright. “Well, I declare!” she said and dropped her pail.
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