Settlers of the Marsh

by Frederick Philip Grove

  As soon, however, as, in returning, he opened the door, he saw her standing by the stove, her dressing gown thrown back, warming herself in the heat that radiated through the mica-panes of the feed-door. For a moment he hesitated, looking at her. Then she spoke.

  “Just put the wood down,” she said, perfectly cool. “I’ll see to the fire.”

  Her voice was that of a person speaking to a servant whose presence is in no way considered as embarrassing or as imposing restraint.

  Yet she stood there as no woman could show herself to any man but her husband …

  HENCEFORTH THE SAME THING happened often: soon it became the regular thing …

  Whenever Niels entered the house, at least at night—for it could not be but that she watched for the time when he would come; never before had she been downstairs with such regularity, not even in the first few months of their marriage—she went about as if either everything were perfectly harmonious between them, and they perfectly secure from the intrusion of any stranger, or as if he did not exist, as if he were a being of air, a spirit ministering and bound to minister to her wants.

  Niels did not know how to take it, what to think or to do.

  Sometimes he waited till a later hour before attending to his chores in the house. It did not make any difference. Once he waited till midnight.

  That time, when he entered through the kitchen door—the milk was frozen solid—the whole house was dark. But when he returned from the cellar, the dining room was lighted by the big floor-lamp; and there, by the stove, stood his wife.

  He could not doubt any longer: there was a purpose behind her conduct.

  What was that purpose?

  He could not see his way through her psychology. He had no means of reading the mind of a woman driven to extremities.

  It never occurred to him that this was a last attempt on her part to bring about a reconciliation …

  She displayed herself to him; but to save her pride, she made it hard for him to find her attractive …

  Had he made a single motion towards her, had he said a single word, even though it had been a word of forgiveness instead of desire, perhaps the worst might still have been averted; fate might have been stayed …

  In him, however, all sexual instincts were dead.

  THE WORK IN THE BUSH went on … Day after day there was time to ponder, to brood. Matters were getting on Niels’ nerves.

  He employed quite a crew in the bush now. He was being watched. He was the boss …

  Harder and harder did he drive himself. His “hands” took it that he was setting an example for them. Naturally, he wanted to make money … When he told them to “take their time,” all but Bobby saw in that mere hypocrisy …

  Niels drove, as he had always done, the “old Percheron team,” Jock and Nellie—there was another such team on the farm now, bred and raised there.

  Once he had been considerate in the highest degree wherever these two horses were concerned.

  That was no longer the case.

  Once, not so long ago, he had never neglected to pat them when he fed them in the stable. Now he roughly shouldered them aside when he entered their stalls.

  When Jock, as of old, in the beginning of the winter, had once or twice turned his head to scrape his master’s hand with his teeth, Niels had, with an impatient movement, declined his familiarity …

  Horses know as well as dogs whether their masters feel friendly towards them or not. Unlike dogs, they do not cling to or fawn upon him who does not deserve their love. They cannot but do the work demanded of them; but they are henceforth mere slaves.

  Towards the end of winter Niels’ relation to his horses became completely demoralised.

  One day, when he entered Nellie’s stall, carrying hay, while she was eating her oats, he roughly hit her with the handle of the fork because she did not sidle over fast enough.

  She turned her head and bit at him.

  He flew into a towering rage, got a short stick of wood, returned into her stall, took her head by the halter, and brought the stick down on her flanks so that she reared and nearly crushed her colt which had whisked over to her other side.

  Ever after she was nervous, almost vicious when he approached her.

  As it happened, Bobby had come in just when Niels was punishing her. Instantly Niels felt ashamed of himself. But he muttered, “I’ll show you,” as he went out.

  BACK IN THE OPEN, on the yard, he felt crushed by the weight of the consciousness that he was losing his hold on himself; so much so that he could not bear to face Bobby at once. He went into the implement shed, ostensibly to look for something or other; in reality, to hide from the boy.

  There, in the dark, he sat down on the seat of the binder; without any thought at first; but with a feeling of such unhappiness as he had never felt before. How could he, how could he let things get the better of him that way? He, Niels!

  Are there in us unsounded depths of which we do not know ourselves? Can things outside of us sway us in such a way as to change our very nature? Are we we? Or are we mere products of circumstance?

  He felt like a rider on horseback who tries to control his mount when it is under the influence of an uncontrollable panic …

  Was he, Niels, going insane?

  If so, what could he do about it?

  What was that woman doing to him? Was she taking the revenge she had threatened?

  What did that revenge consist in?

  SPRING CAME. A hundred acres were seeded.

  And in the house the woman awoke.

  The dreaded next move was being made.

  So far it consisted in nothing more but that she began to take walks in the bluff where the soil was dry and clean, consisting of the matted roots of grass, low-growing plants, and trees.

  For these walks she dressed in the most elaborate way, combing her hair in the latest fashion, and “making up” with all her art.

  Niels could not help spying upon her sometimes. He found work that would take him into the cow-lot; or perhaps he had something to do in the garden, east of the house.

  She would walk about in the bluff, sometimes dreamily, sometimes almost gaily, a smile on her face, lost in thought.

  Or she would take a chair out, or a rug which she spread on the ground, and sit down and read: to a stranger it would have appeared a very idyl …

  Only, had that stranger by chance seen the change in her look when she caught sight of her husband, he would have shuddered at the sudden expression of hatred that came over her face … It was not a mere dislike, not a fleeting aversion: it was the chilling insanity of revenge …

  Niels never saw her like that; but somehow he, too, shuddered at her mere sight.

  He would go to some corner of his farm, perhaps to the grove at the south-west corner, where he was cutting poles to replace rotting fence-posts. And he would sit down and brood. He would then almost wish that something decisive, something catastrophic would happen.

  The fact was that he began to live under a fear: the inactivity of the woman began to unnerve him.

  WHAT WAS HE TO DO? Bobby would leave one day. He was growing up. He was twenty years old. But Niels needed Bobby: Bobby was the last link that connected him with the world of living men: the last barrier between him and insanity …

  The Sundays were the worst. Then Bobby went out …

  Niels, too, began to go out on Sundays, using his drivers: then he could be seen, driving furiously and aimlessly over the Marsh, his hair growing longer and longer on his shoulders, his beard flowing over his breast. People shook their heads …

  Think, think …

  A ray of light. Perhaps if he threshed the whole thing out once more, from beginning to end, being all alone, he would find some solution …

  He heard of a certain hay-meadow. A store-keeper in Poplar Grove looked after it for the owner. He could always think best when driving. He would go there to-morrow and see …

  He started out very early in the m
orning, at sun-up. Whenever he approached farm or homestead in the bush, he galloped his horses.

  He would not have needed to fear. If he avoided people in this settlement, the people also avoided him. Nobody knows how rumours spring up in the wilderness; spring up they do. The story went that Lindstedt was insane; that he was a hermit; that he kept his wife a prisoner on his place … Nobody would have come to the road to exchange a greeting with Lindstedt …

  Gradually a definite line of thought evolved.

  It was almost a year now since the final break with his wife. But he could have reconstructed the whole course of the argument. He had a knack of viewing things most clearly in retrospection.

  His wife had intended to leave him. He had refused to let her go. Why? Why had he not simply agreed? Would it not have been best for both of them? Of course, it would.

  Had she asked him now to let her go, he would have been glad; he would have welcomed it as a great deliverance.

  True, it was no longer possible to realise old dreams. His marriage had killed them. His dreams were dead. What if they were?

  What would life be without her? Not happiness. Not what he had once dreamed of as his life. But there would be peace: he could drown himself in work. And the fruits of work? Well, at the worst he could give them away …

  Why had he refused to let her go? Slowly that summer arose before his memory. Last summer. Last summer only?

  And the whole year before it!

  Three times she had been in the city.

  Slowly, out of his brooding over those absences, a question had arisen. This question: What had she been doing in the city? It had disturbed him, gnawed at him, and finally whipped him into the determination not to let her go back to the city. “No matter what she had been doing, she was not going to do it again!”

  He understood. During that interview in the dining room he had been blind, he had been inaccessible to any reason. He had unthinkingly held on to that decision.

  He understood. He was glad he could interpret his action so clearly, so accurately. And suddenly the solution of the whole problem flashed up before him: he saw a way out of his labyrinth. Why, it was all clear. There could be no doubt.

  What he was going to do, what he must do was this: he must offer to send her away; he must offer money; he must bribe her to leave him alone …

  He did not go on. He turned his horses and drove home, furiously. He reached the farm shortly after noon.

  IT WAS STILL EARLY when he saw his wife leave the house for her now accustomed walk in the bluff. He had been waiting about at the stables.

  For a moment she stood in the door of the house, looking out to the right and the left. She was dressed in a light summer frock of striped zephyr; and she held a parasol of pearl-grey silk over her head. Her face showed a perfect make-up: lips of glowing red, dark brows over dancing eyes, cheeks of pallid smoothness …

  If she was aware of Niels’ presence on the other side of the yard, she did not betray it.

  His heart sank.

  She looked the picture of contented happiness—so much so that he began to doubt of the success of his scheme. He wondered what might be going on in that head.

  He turned and went into the stable. He stopped at the little square window which, curtained with cobwebs in which dust and chaff were caught, looked out to the north. From there he watched.

  After a minute or so the woman, adjusting, with an almost convulsive shrug of her shoulders, a light shawl about her neck, turned to the east and passed through the lane that separated the kitchen garden, now become a potato-patch, from the wall of the lean-to. She disappeared from Niels’ field of vision.

  For a while he busied himself about the stable, irresolutely. Bobby was far away in the south-east corner of the farm, disking. Niels had sent him there on purpose. Now was the time to do what he intended to do.

  A strange hesitancy took possession of him. Again he was going to carry out a preconceived plan. He had done so before; and what he had done then was the exact reverse of what he should have done … Perhaps it might be best to wait, to think matters over more fully …

  He stood and brooded. No; think and then act on the decision arrived at; that was the law of his nature. He could not help himself. It had to be done.

  For the first and last time in his life he was conscious of deliberately composing his features for the occasion …

  HE FOUND HIS WIFE sitting on a rug which, at the northern edge of the bluff, was spread on the ground, in a little natural glade shaded by a thicket of plum trees.

  As he approached, she looked up at him, with the old expression of half mocking friendliness and interest. It disarmed him for a moment. Then he became aware of an uncanny element in that expression.

  A question arose: whom did she see? Surely, it was not he whom she looked at that way?

  As if to confirm his thought her features underwent a change as if she were, by an effort, recalling her eyes from a distance. She focused them on him: a steely hardness entered them. Her features became hollow under her mask. Haggard she looked out from behind a screen.

  Niels’ mind worked feverishly. He recalled various things: how he had first seen her without her mask, one morning when he had entered her bed-room before the usual hour: how another face had looked out at him, like a death’s-head almost: the coarse, aged face of a coarse, aged woman, aged before her time … Other sights rose, full of revelations. But above all that of how she had stood in that dining room of hers, on that fateful September afternoon last year. Then, too, the smile had faded from her lips; the dream had died in her eyes …

  Niels stood and hesitated. He felt chilled to his very bones. Whatever he might wish, she would for that very reason decline …

  Just then, after a minute of allowing this air of hostility to do its work, she moved and spoke.

  Her movement consisted in a raising of her head while, with the point of her folded parasol, she tapped the toe of her shoe; her eye looked straight at him, or rather through him.

  Her speech was a single word, freezing in its coldness. “Well? …”

  Niels cleared his throat. Then, haltingly, awkwardly, as he had always spoken to this woman, “I have thought this matter over … Something has to be done … I am going to pieces … So are you … If you want to go … I am willing …”

  And there his speech gave out as a runnel of water gives out in a sand-hole.

  Her eye had flashed up. A smile had returned to her lips. It was an evil smile.

  He looked at her aghast.

  Then she burst into an artificial laugh. “No,” she said, still laughing.

  And suddenly she was on her feet, whipped up, as if a steel-spring had sent her up with enormous power.

  The laughter had died. She was fury personified.

  Niels had already turned and was leaving her. With his shoulders bent as he might bend them in a beating, lashing rain, he walked off with long, almost furtive strides.

  She followed him. “No,” she yelled after him, “that favour I won’t do you! No longer! You’re going to pieces, are you? … Well, let me tell you … I’m not through with you yet. I’ll go when I’m ready to go. You’re only going to pieces … I won’t go till you’ve gone to pieces …”

  Niels went faster and faster; but she ran after him, stumbling, gathering herself up again, falling, rising, losing her parasol, and finally breaking down and lying there, on the yard, just at the corner of the kitchen, where the lane between house and garden came to an end.

  Niels did not look back. He went straight across the open and into the stable whence he had watched her a while ago.

  Bobby was there. Some accident had brought him back from the field. He was looking for some piece of harness to replace another which had probably broken. He had heard all or part at least … What did it matter? … Niels paid no attention to him. For a moment the boy, having found what he was looking for, hesitated at the side door which led to the horse-lot. Niels wav
ed his hand at him to be gone …

  Then he stepped back to the little window.

  There, at the end of the lane, the woman that was his wife was picking herself up from the ground. In stumbling, she had stepped on the hem of her frock and torn it so that it was hanging about her feet; and she stumbled again. She raised her head and looked dazedly about. Her face was bleeding. Earth and chaff, such as gathers on farmyards, were sticking to the make-up of her cheeks. She reached for the corner of the building to steady herself and groped her way along to the door, stumbling once more, bending down, and picking up the torn edge of her gown. At last she disappeared inside.

  Niels’ first impulse had been to go to her aid. But he thought better of it. It would not do. He waited ten minutes, went to fetch rug and parasol, and dropped them into the entrance of the house.

  Still he hesitated.

  No; to go upstairs was useless. His mere sight would irritate the woman … It was best to leave her alone …

  Spring passed by; summer came.

  The hay had to be stacked in the slough, then hauled to the yard and restacked there. Showery weather during July doubled and trebled the work … Niels was aging, decaying … Yet, the energy and circumspection with which he furthered the work and repaired the damage done to the hay—as far as it could be repaired—were still those of his best years: his care for the farm was almost passionate.