He turned the corner and came to the gate. He slipped from the load and stood, listening. Not a sound. Low in the west, the waxing sickle of the moon was hanging, a mere wisp, a little curve of light, about to set. There was no wind: but the leaves of the aspens in the bluff were rustling softly: they were never still …
On the yard, white buildings stood outlined against the sombre bush, some looming high: house, barn; some squatting low: pig-pens, cow-shed. Nowhere a light …
Bobby shivered.
He turned to the horses. They, too, listened to the silence. Their ears moved back and forth, jerkily.
To defend himself against the feeling of dread, the boy began for the third time to whistle. Again he stopped. The sound seemed like a profanation of something …
Quickly he opened the gate; the horses pulled at once, as if afraid of being left behind, alone …
A few minutes later Bobby had lighted a lantern; he unhitched and untied the horses. He opened the door of the stable. They knew their stalls and for the moment needed no further attention.
He picked the lantern up and ran to the shack. It was empty. The dishes and the stove had not been touched since dinner time. The alarm clock showed a quarter past nine …
“Well,” he muttered with a phrase of his mother’s, “I’ll be jiggered!”
He returned to the yard.
Once more he looked about and listened …
Incomprehensibly, uncannily, he was aware of a new accession of dread. A single, horizontal line of light showed in the upper east window of the house. During the past two years the house had often seemed spectral to him: never before as now.
Where was Niels?
Bobby shuddered. A feeling took hold of him as if from somewhere in the dark eyes were looking out at him.
A cow lowed on the open marsh …
Bobby awoke to life. The herd was coming home.
He went about his chores, pumped water, fed pigs …
The pigs knew the routine: when he entered the milk-house to stir shorts and barley into the milk, they ran along their fence, squealing …
In the cow-lot, after he had lighted a smudge, the swishing sound of the milk in the pails sounded like company, like a re-affirmation of the common workaday sanity of country life, shutting out the horrors that lurked somewhere …
Yet, where was Niels?
The moon had set; even the pallour in the north-west of the sky had darkened. It was night … Where was Niels?
There was the possibility that he might have gone to the shack meanwhile. No. The shack was empty as before. It was eleven o’clock.
Was he to look for him? Was he to give the alarm to the neighbours? … His foster-father had been helpless, half blind, half lame. He had been out of his senses …
Should he enter the house? … No. He could not face the woman …
He was hungry. He went to the shack again and lighted the stove. As he sat there, with the door open, the light of the lamp on the table falling slantways out on the little clearing and, beyond, among the white glistening boles of the young aspens, he, too, began to review what he knew of the woman in the great house, of her who had been the curse of the place …
He thought of the shock it had been to him when she had smiled down at him from the seat of the wagon, saying what she had said … He had never known much about her; but he had heard whispers, seen looks exchanged between grown-ups …
For a moment then, Niels had fallen in his esteem; till he had spoken to him in front of the stable … The tone of his voice as he had spoken to him! …
If only Niels would come home … Now … Quick …
He, Bobby, had sometimes felt harshly towards him of late, when he had become so queer … He would never do so again if only …
He rose and busied himself with pots and pans.
Niels had been a father to him. He thought of a Sunday, years ago, when Niels had refused him a horse. “Not if you want to go to bad places …”
Once more Bobby went out on the yard, looking, listening … To the gate, peering along the road, north, south … Nothing …
It was after midnight when he returned to the shack. He was so worried he did not even enter; he merely glanced at the clock.
Then he squatted down on the ground, by the door …
Sleep must have overcome him at last. He was suddenly conscious of starting up. For several minutes he sat stock-still. He thought he had heard something. The first grey of dawn was hovering over the world. His clothes were damp with dew; he shivered … The stillness of death, except for the chirping of some bird …
He rose and went into the shack to lie down …
Then, just as a few minutes before, in his sleep, the sharp report of a shot …
With a jerk Bobby straightened, every muscle taut; drowsiness had fallen from him like a cloak.
He hurried back to the yard. He saw the stable door open, ran, and looked in.
There, in the cold, grey morning light stood Niels, the smoking gun still in his hand. And Jock, his horse, was convulsively kicking his last at his feet …
WHEN NIELS HAD LEFT the slough, he had lost himself in the bush. He went blindly, with unseeing eyes, unthinking brain.
Like the bell of doom the woman’s words seemed to reverberate within a hollow vault of brass …
There had been thoughts, suspicions, almost certainties half faced. There never had been unescapable conviction … From all about him there was only one voice of the woman, “You have married the …”
He went blindly, stumbling over roots and stumps. He was bleeding from nose and forehead. He had lost his cap … He picked himself up again, fell again, tearing his clothes, bruising his limbs. He went on as an animal goes, wounded to death, seeking his lair, to hide himself …
He was in a trance. Three, four times he came out on the road. Instinctively he stopped, trying to focus eye and mind on it, swaying from side to side like one drunk. Then he turned back into the thickets behind.
Two, three hours went by that way.
Several times he sank to his knees, bending his body low, crouching in an agony of misery.
Had anybody met him and asked him, sternly, “What is that thought which is lurking beyond the edge of your world, ready to rise above the horizon?” he would have searched in his mind, sincerely, honestly; yet he would have found nothing but a painful, raw void to face, to probe into which without encountering anything was baffling, infinitely tormenting. He would have groaned as the man groans on whom a painful operation is being performed while he is under the influence of an anaesthetic. Although the onlooker is, perhaps, from past experience, fully aware of the fact that he who lives in that body feels nothing, the groan sounds all the more pitiful, all the more enervating …
After hours of such somnambulism Niels found himself stopped by his own fence. Again he stood, one of his hands resting on the wire, as, with an infinite exertion, he tried to comprehend, to concentrate his mind on the thing that had stopped him.
And as soon as it entered his consciousness that these sloughs, these rising ridges, that bluff half a mile away were his, he turned back.
Behind him were other sloughs, swampy hollows, their soil churned up, trodden and trampled by wandering cattle into little hillocks tufted with grass, hardened by drying, with muddy holes in between where the feet of the heavy beasts had sunk deep.
Over these foot-traps he tottered, stumbled, fell headlong, picked himself up again …
Once more he was stopped by a fence. Again that slow, painful process of concentration began; again the fact filtered through the defences of his mind that the fence was his …
His lip curled in a physical sense of distaste; he turned back again. Dusk was rising …
When, an hour or so later, the fence stopped him for the third time, he did not turn back. For a while he stood like a man broken by a lifetime of work too heavy for him, bent over, one hand on the post, one on the wire … Then he tried to str
addle the fence, stumbled back, and finally went down on his knees, thus crawling on to his own land where he lay, exhausted …
But some impulse was at work in him. Slowly he drew his legs up and raised himself on hands and knees; and at last he got up on his feet.
Within half an hour he found himself in a bluff of poplars. He felt his way from tree to tree, supporting himself by his hands, feeling up and down the ridged trunks as if searching for something.
In another half hour he was south of his yard; and then, behind the granary. Around its corners he groped his way …
When he reached the front, he attacked the door: it took several minutes to open it: his hands seemed to have lost the knack of lifting the latch.
It was a high step to take; and in attempting it he fell headlong. There was a pile of bags hung over the partition between bins. Niels pawed at it till they came down. Then he turned on his back, pushed the bags into a heap, and leaned against them …
There he sat, his knees drawn up, his forehead resting on them, his hands lying on the floor …
Occasionally he lifted his head, like an enormous burden which swayed on his neck, with that re-awaking and astonishment with which he who, having gone to sleep in his own bed, finds himself in a strange place would look about for something to recognise …
At first there was nothing but darkness.
At last a tiny speck of light stood out, just by the door, halfway up the jamb. It was reflected by a highly polished object hanging there: that must be the butt of the big-game rifle which he had bought for Bobby …
After many attempts to rise he crawled forward.
He had heard a noise: the creaking of a hay-rack, the slow step of horses, a snorting, the dull thud of the gate swinging against its stop.
The door had swung almost shut; he pushed it half open and lifted his legs over the edge of the threshold till he sat there, in the crack of the door.
Far out on the yard—the granary stood in a recess of the bush—the light of a lantern moved to and fro, about the stables, to the east. The lantern burned dimly: its glass was smoky …
A curious interest awoke in Niels. Unseen, he saw.
The lantern, bobbing up and down, crossed the whole length of the yard, moving quickly. Its dim light illuminated the running legs of the boy till the door, half shut, closed out the view.
From Niels’ throat came a sound as if he were chuckling.
The light returned. The boy was standing, looking, listening …
Niels’ eyes were fastened on him, out of the dark that screened him. The little dome of visibility ensphering the lantern did not reach to the granary.
Niels fought with himself to suppress his laughter. He was playing a prank. He saw, he was not seen …
The cows lowed. Bobby returned …
Niels began to dangle his feet, like a child, or like one who has been sick and has unlearned the art of walking: he delighted in the sense of the motion.
But when his heel struck the stones of the foundation below, he started and covered his mouth with his hand: a movement of childish mock fright …
Then, after many more comings and goings, Bobby left the yard not to return …
Long, long Niels sat and stared into the dark. There was just starlight enough to show the outlines.
It was all there, the whole picture of the yard, dim and quiet: without its details. His eyes were gradually, automatically adjusting themselves, so that, when they were called upon, they saw.
The call that came consisted in a change of the picture. It was long past midnight.
The line of light disappeared from the crack between blind and frame in the upper east window of the house.
Instantly Niels saw. He did not move. The change did not at once release any conscious reaction, any thought.
The next moment the light reappeared at the lower window, in front of the staircase, throwing a dim glow over the sward of grass on the yard. For a moment a figure appeared in the frame of the window; a woman in flimsy, gaudy undress. An arm, almost bare, reached up to draw the blind so that it intercepted the light.
Utter darkness fell, darker than before. But after a minute or so, very dim, almost divined, the light fell into the lane between kitchen and garden.
Niels sat very still, frowning.
A whole, forgotten world came back to him: a distasteful world, not in keeping with his animal comfort.
He wanted to put the thought away as it tried to emerge. He was tempted to brush it from his brow with his hand. But he did not move. His hands rested alongside his thighs, on the threshold of the door. His body was bent forward. His muscles were tightening, slackening, in reflex action …
He stared and did not move.
In his mind, in the background of his memory, proceeding from the faintest adumbration of some great fact dominating his life, a question crystalised …
What had all this to do with him?
With that problem he wrestled for an hour.
Again a change in the picture of the yard. Once more the light went on its progress downward in the house.
And this time, what he saw connected itself with the past, suddenly, without any slow development or unfolding. The whole antecedents of the present moment stood before his mind as if he were living them within fractions of a second: it was like a dream which, retrospectively, motivates a sound or other perception received in sleep.
His muscles tightened and remained tight. It was as if a powerful spring inside of him had been tightly wound and then arrested by some catch, either to snap under the strain or to unroll itself in the natural way by setting some complicated wheel-work into irresistible motion, grinding up what might come in its way or attempt to stop it.
Wave after wave of hot blood went through his body, lapping up into his brain, breaking there, flooding his consciousness with an opaque, scarlet flood …
He raised himself on his feet, without swaying, and stood. Then it was as if a cruel wrench had been given that spring inside of him, tightening it to the breaking point. And as that point was reached, he moved.
He moved with tremendous speed.
The next moment he stood at the door of the house and threw it open.
Voices from the back room; laughing voices.
“Sh-sh!”
“Nonsense! Who’d come at this time of night?”
A third voice, whispering.
A roar of laughter …
That released the tightly wound spring. Irresistibly a clockwork began to move. There was not a spark of consciousness in Niels. He acted entirely under the compulsion of the spring.
He remembered later, much later …
He was back at the granary and reached into the door for the gun. He made sure it was loaded.
Again he crossed the yard and entered the house, noisily, without taking precautions.
He went through the front room and threw the door to the dining room open.
There, consternation had done its work.
A man’s figure, half clad, was vaulting through the open window to the right; a second one was fleeing through the door into the kitchen.
At the left, the woman was sitting, her face made up, her body wrapped in silks …
On the table dishes, plates, cups, a biscuit-bowl, a tea-pot …
The woman rose, a half frightened, half triumphant smile on her face. She sought his eyes; but she looked into the barrel of the gun.
The shot rang out.
She screamed and ran for the kitchen door, upsetting a chair on her way. But before she reached it, she fell, flinging her arms and kicking her feet so that a silken slipper fell in the centre of the table.
Then she went quiet and lay in a heap.
Niels had already turned, slamming both doors as he went. Again he crossed the yard. He entered the stable. He could never remember why he had done so. He went through the driveway and east, towards the horse-lot.
There, in this short aisle, in neighbour
ing stalls, stood Jock and Nellie, just visible in the dim light of dawn.
Niels, swaying again, came very near to the rump of the gelding.
Jock, as the door was opened, had turned his head. When his master swayed near him, he, expecting a blow, kicked out.
Niels raised his gun and shot the gelding through the head …
ALL THAT DAY Niels slept: a deep, sunken sleep.
Bobby had pulled the dead horse out of the stable, putting the chain around his rigid hind legs and hitching the Clydes to the chain. It would have seemed a sacrilege to use the young Percherons for such a purpose.
Niels slept.
Bobby did the chores. He milked the cows, watered the cattle, and let them out on the Marsh. He brushed the horses, untied them, and opened the door to the lot.
Niels slept.
Bobby manoeuvred the hay-rack against the door of the stable and pitched the hay into the loft.
Niels slept.
Bobby was now convinced that he had heard two shots. He looked Jock over. He found only one bullet-hole.
He went to the shack and fetched the rifle. Its capacity was five shots; it had been fully loaded. There were three shells left.
Bobby looked at the house that stood in the morning sun as it had stood there on every day since he had known it. There was something uncanny about it.
Settlers of the Marsh Page 22
