Mrs. Lindstedt

One night, late in the fall, Nelson came with Hahn, his German neighbor. Both were on horseback, driving a big bunch of steers which Nelson had sold and which he had to deliver at Minor.

“Hello, Lindstedt,” he sang out while he was circling his drove, spurring his horse in wild-west style. “For God’s sake, open your gate. Let us drive these creatures in on your yard. They’re wild as can be. We’ve got to rest our horses. We haven’t had dinner yet. They take to the bush every chance they get. We can’t stop while they’re out in the open . . .”

Niels did as requested.

And as the two riders put their heels into the flanks of their frenzied mounts and once more circled the drove, the steers tore into the enclosure of the yard, racing around it, along the fence, their heads lowered, bellowing with excitement. There were over thirty of them: round, fat animals that had all their spirit left after seventeen miles of road.

As soon as Bobby caught sight of the men, he busied himself preparing a second supper: he was frying eggs and cutting bread of which by chance there was a supply in the house. Every few minutes he came to the door to look admiringly out into the turmoil on the yard.

“Thank the Lord!” Nelson’s voice boomed when the gate swung shut. “That was a piece of work, I can tell you, Lindstedt. Thank the Lord, there’s no more bush for a while. All day long we’ve sighed for this corner. Out on the Marsh you can see the beggars. Hi! What’s that? Your own cattle coming?”

From the south-west, Niels’ little herd came slowly home, a cow stopping and lowing for water through the dusk that rose over the Marsh.

“Where’s your cow-lot?” Nelson asked.

“In the bluff.”

“You don’t mean to say they’ve got to go over the yard?”

“I don’t see what else we can do . . .”

“Man alive, they’ll tear them to pieces.”

“Take the fence down outside,” Hahn advised.

So the three men ran to pull each a fence-post out of the ground. The herd was driven through the gap, and the posts replaced as best it could be done.

“Well, you scamp,” Nelson called at sight of Bobby when they went to the house. “So this is where you keep yourself instead of helping your brother-in-law?”

Bobby grinned. “I get real wages here.”

“Sure, sure,” Nelson agreed noisily. “Lindstedt’s a rich man. What’s that I hear?”—Turning to Niels.—“You’ve got full-blooded Percherons they say?”

“Yes, four.”

“Let’s see.” And he, Hahn, and Niels went out again.

The steers were quieting down. But the horses were all the more excited by the unusual noise. With flashing eyes the gelding looked at the intruders; the fillies were racing about, their heads raised, and nickering in their babyish voices.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” Nelson said as he looked at Jock by the light of a lantern.

“Yea,” Hahn drawled. “That’s the kind to have.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Nelson asked as they sat at the supper table. “Why don’t you ask how Olga is and what we’re doing in our backwoods country?”

“Well,” said Niels, “what are you doing?”

“Increasing the population.” Nelson laughed boisterously. “Doing our dooty by the country. Hahn here’s got twins. I’ve got a boy. You know about the girl that was born before old man Lund disappeared. That’s doing better than you are doing.”

“Any new breaking?” Niels asked wearily.

“You bet,” Nelson replied. “A little every year. But cattle, that’s my real business. To-morrow I’ll have twelve hundred dollars in my pocket. Then I’ll pay off the loan. And there’ll still be sixty head of them left in the bush. Any crop’s profit.”

“Yea,” Hahn drawled, “there’s money in cattle if you can put them in the bush. But it’s too much work in winter. When summer’s over, I want to rest . . .”

“Say,” Nelson asked after a while, “how about the gay widow? Ever seen her again?”

“Once,” Niels replied monosyllabically.

“Well, I’m astonished she hasn’t netted you yet. . .”

They stayed till ten o’clock. At night the road would be free of traffic.

The gate was opened; the two men waited on horseback, outside; and the bellowing herd charged away into the moon-lit Marsh . . .

Settlers were moving into the district, Canadians, Americans, chiefly Germans . . .

Kelm was going to clear an enormous tract north of the creek; to provide work for himself and Bobby during the winter, Niels contracted for a piece of it: he was to get no wages, but the wood instead: he longed to be driving, driving . . .

Heirs had turned up and claimed old man Sigurdsen’s property. Niels had harvested the crop on shares . . .

Life was useless; there was no meaning in it . . . no justification . . .

Niels became more and more prosperous. But the farm owned him; not he the farm . . . It grew according to laws of its own . . .

Niels hauled his wheat . . .

On the second trip out he had a revelation . . .

The very first farm to which he came in the Minor belt was owned by a German of fifteen years’ standing.

It was a mild, spring-like day in November, with snow on the ground . . .

As he neared that farm, a strong, full-bosomed girl came from the house and walked across the yard to the pump which stood close to the road, in the corner between barn and fence. With an absent-minded look he noticed that she was peering out for him as he approached.

She was rocking herself on quivering hips as she went. With a few quick strokes of the handle she filled the wooden bucket and then stood, looking at Niels.

In a perverse impulse he stopped his horses right in front of the gate to rest them.

The girl wore shoes; but her legs were bare.

As he stopped, she turned, picked her bucket up, and laughed at him. With her free hand she reached around and raised her skirt, so that her bare legs showed behind to above her knees; and then she walked off, rocking herself on her hips and throwing provocative glances over her shoulder at him where he stood by the side of his load.

A trifle. What troubled him in retrospection was that his first impulse had been to call to her or to run after her. Worse: whenever he pictured that scene to himself—and in spite of all endeavours he did so, often—a wave of hot blood ran through him: he wished for a recurrence of the incident . . .

Then he took himself in hand, started his horses, and muttered, “I am going to the dogs . . .”

Once he fell in with Hahn. Hahn, too, was hauling wheat to Minor, in spite of the fact that he had an elevator closer by. “I’ve got a friend in Minor,” he said in explanation.

He came up with Niels when the latter was resting his horses. He tied his own team behind and climbed on to Niels’ load . . .

Niels sat in silence; Hahn talked.

“There’s one thing about you, Lindstedt,” he said after a while, “which I can’t understand. You’re getting to be pretty prosperous. Nelson and you are the two most successful fellows among the new settlers. Nelson’s married. You haven’t even got a woman on the place . . .”

Niels’ laugh was bitter; but he said nothing.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Hahn asked.

Niels looked his non-comprehension. “What?”

Hahn laughed, embarrassed. “Well . . . a man needs a woman, doesn’t he?”

“Perhaps he does.”

“Look here,” Hahn exclaimed, “I’m butting into things that are none of my business. But I’d like to know. Do you go to the town or the city?”

“I’ve never been to the city,” Niels said. “I go to town when I’ve got business there . . .”

“You mean to say you never see a woman . . .?”

“I see them . . .”

“But you don’t . . . you don’t . . .”

Niels frowned. “I don’t see what you mean . . .”

Hahn laughed and slapped his thigh. “Say,” he exclaimed, “you’re a corker! I like you for that . . . Do you mean to say you’ve never touched a woman? . . .”

“You know,” Niels said after a while, “I’m unmarried.”

Hahn laughed as if in expostulation to the sky . . .

In town, Hahn stayed with Niels. It was evening. Dusk was rising fast.

A short distance beyond the hotel they met three ladies who were still more conspicuously powdered and painted than the ordinary young ladies of western towns. They were dressed in aggressively fashionable style; and they smiled at the two men as they passed them.

“By gosh,” Hahn whispered. “Let’s hook in, Lindstedt.”

“What do you mean?” Niels asked, reddening.

“Let’s turn and go after them.”

“What for?”

“By jingo,” Hahn laughed. “You’re as innocent as a new-born babe. They’re from the city; they’re . . . I don’t know enough English to find a word that’s decent enough for your tender ears . . . One of them’ll be your wife . . . for an hour or so . . .”

“Do you mean,” Niels hesitated, “they’re whores?”

“Yes,” Hahn said, greatly relieved, “that’s it.”

“I don’t intend to marry a whore.”

“Man alive!” Hahn fairly shouted. “Ock! What’s the use!” And he turned on his heels and left him.

On the way home, during the night, Niels brought the topic up. “Hahn,” he said, “is the friend you have in town a woman?”

Hahn laughed. “Of course,” he said.

“But you’re married . . .”

“Well,” Hahn explained, “I’m young and strong. I need something younger and fresher . . . So long as the wife doesn’t know, it doesn’t hurt her. That’s why I go to town and not to the Hefter woman . . .”

“Who’s that?” Niels asked brusquely.

“Don’t you know? Two and a half miles west of my corner . . . Plenty of customers, nothing to worry about. Amundsen used to go there. Baker. Smith. The boys from the English settlement. That’s where Bobby spends most of his Sundays . . .”

Niels sat up as if stung by a needle. “Bobby?”

“What I don’t understand,” Hahn went on, “is that you should have lived here for years and never seen anything of it. There’s one like that Hefter woman in every district. If there weren’t, the boys wouldn’t leave the girls alone. There’s one in yours . . .”

Bobby! Niels felt responsible for the boy.

The next time Bobby asked for the loan of a horse Niels refused it. “Not if you want to go to bad places,” he said. “Whenever you want to see your mother, you can have it.”

Bobby was as red as blood. “I’ll stay at home,” he said, slinking off.

From that day on Niels owned the boy body and soul.

Again blizzards blew; snow enveloped the world; blinding winter suns threw an ineffectual glare, over Marsh and bush; a new year ticked off its hours, days, and weeks.

Bobby and Niels worked in the bush, clearing land for Kelm.

Driving, driving . . .

Niels had come to think without bitterness of Ellen; but he felt he could never see her again . . .

When he glimpsed at his old dream, a lump rose in his throat. His muscles tightened when he turned his thoughts away . . .

This gradual negation of his old dream had a curious effect on others: it gave him such an air of superiority over his environment that the few words which he still had to speak were listened to almost with deference. They seemed to come out of vast hidden caverns of meaning. His face, scored and lined so that it sometimes seemed outright ugly, held all in awe, some in terror. Once he heard a man say to Bobby, “I shouldn’t care to work for that fellow. I’d be scared of him.”

The truth was, lightning flashes of pain sometimes went through his look, giving him the appearance of one insane; or of one who communed with different worlds . . .

A new dream rose: a longing to leave and to go to the very margin of civilisation, there to clear a new place; and when it was cleared and people began to settle about it, to move on once more, again to the very edge of pioneerdom, and to start it all over anew . . . That way his enormous strength would still have a meaning. Woman would have no place in his life.

He looked upon himself as belonging to a special race—a race not comprised in any limited nation, but one that cross-sectioned all nations: a race doomed to everlasting extinction and yet recruited out of the wastage of all other nations . . .

But, of course, it was only the dream of the slave who dreams of freedom . . .

Once more the thaw-up came. The roads were a morass, the fields a mire . . .

Niels had to go to town for repairs to some of his implements. A blind chance happening, a breakage on his wagon, forced him to stay in town overnight.

He walked the streets. It was warm, almost summer-like: a night that made you feel tired; a night to relax in; a night to stretch, to saunter and linger about . . .

From the hotel he went east, in the direction of the little park in the bend of the river . . .

One store-window still showed light: that of the drugstore. Aimlessly Niels stopped in front of it, looking at the display of soaps, face-powders, and similar toilet goods . . .

Something within him stirred, something hidden, shameful . . . He turned.

That very moment the door opened, and out stepped a lady. She was on the point of passing him by with a casual glance; but she stood arrested.

Out of a dream, a dismal dream, almost forgotten, sunk in the past, a voice accosted him as he touched his cap.

“Well,” the voice said, “if it isn’t Niels, of all people! Why, this is nice. I came in from the city to-day, on business regarding my place. I am waiting for the midnight train. Were you out for a walk?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . .” There was nothing of his ancient hostility against the woman in his voice.

“Well,” she smiled up at him, “let’s have that walk anyway. Or are you going out again to-night?”

“No . . . I am staying at the boarding house . . .”

“Good,” she exclaimed; and without hesitation she put her hand in his arm and led him along. “How are things?”

“Pretty much as ever . . .”

She laughed: that old, light, silvery laugh of hers; she had not changed.

At the touch of her hand a warm, exciting and yet benumbing current seemed to flow from his arm through his body: a current which slowly wore down resistance . . .

They came to the end of the street. “How about the park?” she asked. “Is it dry enough to go in?”

“It’s dry enough, I think . . .”

So she led him on, crossed the road and entered a foot-path.

There, in the darkness, it seemed that the touch of the hand became the touch of a body. Her head brushed his shoulder . . .

The path wound about, hardly visible in the moonless night. To the left the trees opened up where the river flowed, starlight dimly reflected from its surface; slight, gurgling sounds came up from the margin where there was still a ledge of snow-covered ice . . .

The hold on his arm relaxed; the woman stood in front of him, her head bent back, her face raised to his.

Intensely whispered came the word, “Kiss me!”

Not knowing what he did, he bent down and kissed her; and then, in a paroxysm of passion, he crushed her against his body, released her, and ran off into the night . . .

Two, three hours later, when he had walked the road for many miles, till his joints began to ache, he returned to the boarding house. He had no intention of going to bed. He wanted to sit down for a while and then to leave town, letting his business go . . .

He had done what he had never done before: he had touched a woman: the touch had set his blood aflame. He almost hated the woman for what she had done to him. He wanted oblivion: he wanted death-in-life; and she had kindled in him that which he had hardly known to exist: she had given a meaning and a direction to stirrings within him, to strange, incomprehensible impulses. His instinct urged him to flight: it was impossible that he should see her again. All this was dimly felt, not distinctly told off in thought.

In the lobby of the hotel there were still some loungers. One or two he knew: the doctor, a merchant. They would speak to him . . .

He stood undecided. Should he go to the stable instead? No; he had paid for his room; there he would be alone . . .

The loungers got up from their chairs. It was a minute or so till midnight . . . At midnight the lights would be turned off; he would not be able to see the number of the door to his room . . .

He ran up the stairs; into the uncarpeted corridor where his steps resounded loudly.

He was too late; that very moment the lights went out. He was just aware, before he stood in utter darkness, that somewhere along the corridor a door had opened.

The very next moment he felt two warm, bare arms about his neck; and a warm, soft, fragrant body seemed to envelop his. A hand closed his mouth; he was drawn forward; he yielded . . .

It was late on the evening of the third day, on Saturday night, that Niels returned to his farm. Bobby had already milked the cows and fed the horses. When he heard Niels calling at the gate, he ran to meet him.

“Hello,” he sang out, “I . . .” And he went silent, for he saw the woman on the seat, by the side of his employer.

He swung the gate open and greeted her, smiling in his embarrassed way. “Hello, Mrs. Vogel.”

She laughed; and then she corrected him. “I am afraid you’ll have to say Mrs. Lindstedt after this.”

Bobby’s eyes widened till they stared.

Niels sat stiffly and looked straight ahead, without smiling. He was not a tall man; but his breadth of shoulder made him look almost colossal in the darkness, by the side of her.

“Well,” said the woman, laughing again, as the horses pulled, “why don’t you say something? . . . Congratulate me and . . . him?”

But Bobby said nothing. He was very red as, at the stable, he bent over the traces to unhook them.

Niels sprang to the ground, went heavily to the other side of the wagon, and helped his wife to alight. Then he reached for the two suitcases and led the way to the house. The woman followed.

“So this is the famous White Range Line House?” she said as they entered.

And for the first time Niels spoke. “You will have to put up with things,” he said. “This is a bachelor’s establishment. We shall get order into it shortly.” His speech was brief but not unkind.

In the north room a lamp was burning; its glass was smoky. The four chairs were plain, straight-backed kitchen chairs; it held two beds and a deal table. Overalls and other workingman’s apparel were strewn on floor and furniture.

The woman looked about. “That is the kitchen?”

Niels went in, struck a match, and lighted a lamp.

The kitchen held a stove, two chairs, another deal table, and a small array of enamelled pots and dishes, most of them unwashed. A colander contained some eggs, a bag some potatoes, a large baking tin some soggy biscuits, a box by the stove some wood, and a pail on the bench by the door fresh water in which a dipper floated about . . .

She smiled at it all and nodded.

“How about Bobby?” she asked.

“I’ll see,” Niels said and left her alone.

He went out and stood a moment in the darkness, musing. Then he crossed the yard to the stable.

Bobby had watered the horses and was stripping the harness off their backs, by the light of a lantern. Jock, the Percheron gelding, nickered at sight of his master. Niels stepped in by his side and patted his breast. He seemed lost in thought . . .

Bobby poured oats for the Clydes. Niels took a fork to go for hay.

“How about the sloughs?” he asked of Bobby when they had finished. “Dry enough to plow?”

“I think so.”

“All right. By the way, you will have to move to the shack.”

“To-night?”

“Just as well. And you’ll have to help me in the house for an hour or so. You’ll get your meals there, of course . . . I’ll raise you five dollars . . .”

“Well,” Bobby said . . . “Thanks.”

In the house, they carried one of the beds upstairs; another bed which was stored there they put together. The things that littered rooms and landing they removed into the west room which Niels locked.

When they had finished, the east room bore some resemblance to a civilised bed-room though it still looked bare. His own bed Niels had placed on the landing, in front of the door which was locked.

They were looking at their work and finding it good when the woman’s voice rang out, “Will you men be ready for supper in about fifteen minutes?”

“I think so,” Niels replied.

“I’ve had my supper,” Bobby called.

“Well, have another,” the voice said, laughing.

They went down and loaded up with Bobby’s things. “You’ll have to use a lantern,” Niels said, “till there’s time to send to town for a lamp. I forgot.”

“That’s all right.” And Bobby shouldered his mattress.

At supper, which had been set on the oil-cloth-covered table in the large, bare north room, Bobby kept casting furtive glances at the woman presiding.

She had changed into a silky sort of dressing gown the like of which he had never seen in his life. When she reached for anything on the table, she gathered the wide, flowing sleeve with the other hand to prevent its brushing over the dishes. The lapping panel of the gown that covered her breast fell back as she did so and revealed a white, round shoulder with a pink silk ribbon over it and the lace-trimmed edge of some undergarment below her throat. When she saw Bobby’s stare, she smiled and folded the panel back into place.

Bobby looked at Niels who sat there sternly, looking straight ahead and chewing absent-mindedly a freshly baked biscuit. When Bobby pushed his chair back and rose, his eye fell on a suitcase standing open by the wall—the contents of which, the appurtenances of modern feminity, made him blush to the roots of his hair.

Awkwardly he stumbled out and mumbled, “Goodnight.”

On Sunday many things were done in the house, Bobby being banished to stable and shack.

Niels looked forbidding; Mrs. Lindstedt went about the rooms, busy with curtains and things.

Bobby felt lost and went at last to call on the new neighbours to the south . . .

In the afternoon, Niels strolled all over his farm; his wife had lain down for a nap.

When Bobby returned, late at night, after supper, Niels gave him his directions for the morning. He did so in a softer, almost indulgent voice; with few words, but words which sounded as if he wished to conciliate an ally in a struggle to come . . .

Monday morning Bobby walked behind the drag-harrow; Niels rode the seeder.

They had worked for some hours when along the edge of the field a female figure appeared, dressed in a light, washable frock, with a “tango” coat over her shoulders, her chestnut-red hair flaming in the morning sun. Her eyes smiled at Bobby; and when Niels came by, she picked her way over the soft, brown seed-bed.

He stopped and looked at her.

“Well,” she asked, her whole face dimpling up, “how does it feel?” And she went around the machine, to his side, resting her elbows on the seedbox, leaning against him.

For a moment silence. Then, as with an effort, “How does what feel?”

“Everything . . . Being married . . .”

He looked ahead and did not reply.

She cast a quick glance at Bobby; and, since his back was still turned, she reached up with her hand, rumpled Niels’ hair, raised herself on her toes, kissed his ear, and whispered, “Oh, I love you; you’re so big and strong! How I love you! I love you so much it hurts!”

An embarrassed look flitted over his face. “Don’t . . . the boy . . .”

“Oh,” she cried, “go, you big bear!” She pushed his shoulder and laughingly picked her way to the edge of the field and sat down on a boulder.

Never once did Niels look at her; but she followed him with her eyes. When Bobby passed her, she smiled.

Niels was a prey to a whirl of thoughts and feelings . . . Already this marriage seemed to him almost an indecency . . .

He looked back at the thing that had happened, as if it had happened to another man.

Many points he did not understand . . . The astonished look of the woman, for instance, when, the morning after the night, he had asked her about the arrangements for their marriage. At first she had laughed. “Marry?” she had asked with widening eyes. As if there could be any question about the marriage! And, after some time, as if a re-adjustment of a preconceived idea had taken place, she, too, had treated that point as settled, as a matter of course. Then she had suddenly fallen about his neck, half laughing, half crying. “Oh,” she had whispered, “how I have wanted this! I have wanted it for years; for seven years, I believe. Ever since I first met you. But Niels, listen! Promise me that you will never leave me. Never, never! Not for a single day! It would be terrible if you did, Niels. Terrible for you and me. Promise, Niels.”

He had not understood then; he did not understand now . . .

She loved him; had loved him for seven years: so what was there to fear? Everything was plain and simple. He, it is true, could no longer respond with any great passion. But he, too, had wanted her once, would want her again. He would do his duty . . .

The other woman had sent him away . . . The other woman? . . . The world went black before his eyes . . .

He put the thought aside with an effort. His look assumed a steely expression; his mouth was set in rigid lines. He looked old.

“Come on, there, Nellie,” he shouted and swung his whip, the first time he had ever done so, over the Percherons. Jock jumped as he heard its swish . . .

From the neighbours where Bobby had carried the news, it had flown abroad. The settlement was astir with it: Lindstedt, the powerful Swede, had married the Vogel woman!

“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” Mrs. Lund had exclaimed at Odensee.

“Yooh-hooh!” Kelm had yodled across the creek.

The timid young settlers south-east of Niels’ had looked at each other, almost frightened . . .

Not a person called at the White Range Line House . . . Nor did the pair call on any one . . .

Just now, of course, everybody was busy seeding; but even after seeding was over . . .

Niels broadcasted a mixture of grasses in his slough. Perhaps, if he seeded grass, he could get along without additional hay . . . The other woman held the permits . . .

But the meeting had to come, of course.

One evening, still in the early summer, he went to see Kelm on business; and as he drove over the bridge, into the road-chasm, where the bush still stood in its primeval thickness, he saw her team coming, water-barrels in the wagon-box . . .

His heart stood still. There was no way of turning. He had to go to the side to give her the road. His horses stopped, and he sat, his head bowed low.

Slowly her team approached, came up, and stood . . . For a moment silence.

Then her voice, a mere whisper, full of anguish, “Niels, how could you! . . .”

Without answering he drove past . . .

Summer went on its way.

More and more Niels realised that the woman who had become his wife was a stranger to him . . .

It had not taken above three days before he knew that, if ever there had been in him the true fire that welds two lives together, it had died down. He had made an effort to conquer something like aversion . . . It was his duty to make the best of a bad bargain . . .

Distasteful though they were, he satisfied her strange, ardent, erratic desires. Often she awakened him in the middle of the night, in the early morning hours, just before daylight; often she robbed him of his sleep in the evening, keeping him up till midnight and later. She herself slept much in daytime. He bore up under the additional fatigue . . .

Whenever she came, she overwhelmed him with caresses and protestations of love which were strangely in contrast to her usual, almost ironical coolness.

She read much, restricting her work in the house to the least that would do. Yet, during the early part of the summer, meals were always prepared, the house in order when he came home at the regular hours.

Once a week Mrs. Schultze came over, the frail little wife of the German neighbour, to do the heavy washing, the scrubbing, the baking, the churning . . . as Niels’ mother had done . . . Her own wearing apparel Mrs. Lindstedt washed by hand, upstairs, in her basin . . .

Twice, when Niels had entered the house at an unusual hour, once at eleven, once at four o’clock, he had found it exactly as he had left it, with the breakfast and dinner dishes still on the table, the beds unmade: she did her work the last minute . . . Niels tried not to see it.

The interior of the house was much changed.

Mrs. Lindstedt had had a flat in the city and owned furniture of her own. She had had it shipped out to Minor; and Niels had made two trips with the hay-rack to haul it from there.

It had converted her bed-room into something which he did not understand: upholstered chairs, rugs, heavy curtains, and a monstrously wide, luxurious bed with box mattress and satin covers; a mahogany dressing table covered with brushes, combs, flasks, jars, and provided with three large mirrors two of which were hinged to the central one; a chiffonier filled with a multitudinous arrangement of incomprehensible, silky and fluffy garments, so light and thin that you could crush them into the hollow of your hand; a set of sectional bookcases filled with many volumes; a couch upholstered in large-flowered damask; cushions without number; and above all mirrors, mirrors. The whole room was pervaded with sweetish scents.

The only other room which received any of this furniture was the dining room. There, a round extension table of fumed oak occupied the centre, surrounded by six chairs. Along the wall stood a large buffet; in the corner, a china cabinet filled with dishes too delicate for Niels’ calloused and clumsy hands . . .

In both these rooms there had, at first, appeared many framed pictures; a few of them landscapes; most of them human figures, photographs, so she had explained, of famous paintings . . . naked figures . . .

Famous or not, Niels had—timidly, with a reference to Bobby—objected to them; so they had gone upstairs, into the bed-room.

The former furniture of the dining room stood in the front room now which was being used as a hall.

Niels himself slept in his iron bedstead where he used grey blankets and coarse linen: only when he had seen her things, had he realised their coarseness; he would have been uncomfortable with anything else.

In Bobby’s presence Niels felt ashamed even of the elegance of the dining room. For himself and the boy he insisted—timidly—on using the coarse, heavy dishes of his bachelor times.

Mrs. Lindstedt received letters and parcels through the post—the post office was again on Lund’s former place where a Ruthenian settler had squatted down. The parcels contained mostly books inscribed with the names of the givers: invariably names of men. Niels never asked for the contents or after the writers of these letters. He knew she burned them . . .

What she had told him of her former life, was this.

Before she was married for the first time, she had been a sales-girl in the city, first in the book, then in the “art” department of a large store. There, Mr. Vogel, floorwalker, had fallen in love with her; and they had married. Mr. Vogel had been sickly, but possessed of some money, the savings of a lifetime. His trouble being “nerves,” the doctor had advised him to live in the country. So, as a speculation, he had bought the place where Rowdle now lived and had built the cottage, renting the land to Rowdle from the start. There, they had lived for two years, till Mr. Vogel had died from heart failure. He had left some money behind but not enough for the widow to live on. So, before Rowdle bought the place, for two thousand dollars, on crop payments, she had been forced to live on it for long periods at a time, in order to save, though she had been exceedingly lonesome . . .

Niels easily surmised that this was not all. There was a vast background of things not ordinarily touched upon. Yet, in hours of effusion, she sometimes cried, Niels sitting helplessly by; and then she would hint at dark, incomprehensible things.

“Oh, Niels,” she would say, “if you knew what terrible things I have had to put up with: brutal things!”

He wanted to know; but he did not press for confidences. Oddly, while he wished for them, he feared them. He felt that there were things which, revealed, would break what there was left of his life: things which would lead to disasters unthinkable. And he forbore.

This feeling was strengthened—sometimes into an almost uncanny dread—by the attitude of others: nobody spoke to him about his marriage. Occasionally, when he had business with others—and he had more and more such business: the farm grew, the country became settled—he would enter a house where two or three were assembled. At sight of him all would go silent. And yet he was the oldest settler in the Marsh, the one from whom help was expected, encouragement, employment even.

Not a congratulation, not an invitation for neighbourly intercourse: nothing . . .

Niels could not but be aware of enveloping reticences; he felt as if he were surrounded by a huge vacuum in which the air was too thin for human relationships to flourish . . .

Bobby even! . . . Niels could not help reverting again and again, in thought, to that first evening of his wife’s arrival on the place: Bobby had blushed and hung his head, speechless at her announcement that she was Mrs. Lindstedt now.

Already, during two short months, a conviction had grown in him that there were things which all about him knew: he alone was ignorant of them . . .

He shrugged his shoulders: they were broad: they could carry much . . .

Of the work on the farm she no longer took any notice, not since the first novelty had worn off.

Once, timidly, Niels had mentioned the garden, the cows. She had smiled.

“Niels,” she had said, conciliatingly, but almost condescendingly, “I do hope you didn’t marry me in order to make me work. I will try to keep house for you. But that is all I can undertake. I am not the kind of woman that works.”

Niels had felt it coming that the next moment she would mention the “other woman”; and so he had quickly said, “No, no; of course; that’s all right.”

He had gone on milking the cows; and whenever, at night, it was not too dark, he hoed in the garden. That he always took water and wood into the house went without saying. In the morning, work in the field or at haying started with daylight.

Thus matters drifted along to the end of July.

Then, one day, a little tussle arose. Niels carried his point; but he did so by a compromise. Unlike her, he had not prepared for the occasion.

“Niels,” she said one evening when he came in after the chores were done and while he was washing in the kitchen. “Just how did Bobby and you divide the housework when you were alone?”

Niels looked up, stopping in the vigorous rubbing and splashing of face, neck, and head in which he indulged. He divined what was coming. “We worked together, as in everything else. You know we did nothing but what was absolutely necessary.”

“Well,” she continued, “I have been thinking, since he gets the shack and lives there by himself, why should he not look after his meals as well. You might give him a small raise . . .”

Niels answered somewhat hotly, “I gave him a raise when I sent him to live there. He’s a mere boy. He can’t be expected to look out for himself. He misses the company he had before you came.”

“Yes,” she said, “probably he does. But I’m sure he’d do anything for money . . .”

“He would not . . . But let me finish washing.”

So he gained a little time to think.

“I don’t see why you should wish this,” he said at last, entering the dining room. “You can’t complain about too much work?”

She began to cry. “Oh,” she said, “you’re hard! . . .”

Somehow this word struck him with such force that, for a moment, a lump rose in his throat. Somewhere, some time, he had heard it before. He could not at once trust himself to speak.

“Look here, Clara,” he said at last—it was very rare that he used her first name; and as he pronounced it, she smiled up at him, brilliantly, gratefully, as if expanding under a caress; and that smile disarmed him once more. There was in it something which abashed, which confused, but which also antagonised him. It was meant to sweep his sensual being off its balance . . . Then he rallied. “Surely,” he said, “there is very little difference whether you fry eggs for two or for three.”

“It isn’t that,” she said, her voice tearful.

“Well, what is it?”

“Oh, I can’t express it. You wouldn’t understand.” Then, with a helpless gesture, “You can’t know how terribly hard life is for me; oh, everything . . . I sometimes don’t know what to do. I am so unhappy . . .”

Niels looked at her. Then he shook his head.

“No. I don’t understand. I thought you wanted this.”

“I did, Niels,” she protested. “I did. I thought things would be different with you. You are a man. You are more of a man than any one I have ever known. I only wish you didn’t have to work!”

“Not have to work!”—in amazement.

“Yes,” she said. “So you wouldn’t have to leave me, not for an hour, not for a minute!”

Niels laughed good-naturedly. “You are taking things too hard . . . You exaggerate them . . .”

Hopefully she reached for his neck to draw him down and kiss him. “Niels,” she whispered, “help me, help me.”

He was embarrassed. He wished to help her. “If I only knew what it is . . .”

“Oh,” she said with a vain effort to explain, “I am so tired all the time. And then I lie down. And such thoughts come. This cannot last. Niels, one day something terrible is going to happen to me . . .”

Niels remained silent for a minute or so. Then, hesitatingly, “I even believe you should do more than you do. Take your thoughts off yourself . . .”

“I can’t,” she exclaimed. “If only I could! But even dressing is too much. I don’t stay for breakfast any longer. I shouldn’t mind Bobby if only I didn’t need to come down for dinner and supper.”

“Well,” Niels gave in on the minor detail, “if that’s the case, suit yourself. As for the boy, I cannot send him away from the house altogether. I am responsible for him. If I leave him to himself, he’ll either quit or go wrong . . .”

Thus things rested, not to the enhancement of Niels’ prestige in his own eyes.

The farm was a law unto itself. It demanded his work. Nellie and her oldest filly were both in foal. Two big hay-stacks in the yard, one, monstrously large, in a slough east of the place. While the field-work rested, a new stable was erected, a huge structure with drain channels, built inside of three-inch lumber. Cutting started. The wheat was heavy, sixty acres of it. Before threshing the granary would have to be doubled in capacity . . . Work galore . . .

At this time something happened which was irritating in the extreme.

Niels had just stabled the horses; Bobby was washing in the basin at the pump which was run by an engine now.

Niels was in a hurry. Rain threatened. It had been misty for a day or so in the early morning.

When he entered the house, he saw, in passing through the dining room, that the breakfast dishes were still on the table: the stove in the kitchen was dead and cold. On the table lay a ham which he had brought in from the granary—there was no smoke-house yet; and the ham was uncut.

He had hardly entered the kitchen and was pouring water into the basin—well water; the house was still without eave-troughing: work, work everywhere—when he heard his wife’s voice from the staircase.

“Oh,” she called, “I’m so sorry. Surely it isn’t twelve yet!” But she held her watch in her hand and was staring at it in dismay.

“Quarter past,” Niels sang back, his eye on the clock, “We’re in a hurry, too. It’s going to rain.”

“But Niels,” she cried, “I can’t come. I have my hair all bundled up.”

Niels went into the front room and looked up the stairs—they had no balustrade yet: work waiting everywhere—and there she stood, in white kimono, her head bandaged in a turban of Turkish towels.

“What’s wrong?”

“Henna,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Henna leaves,” she repeated. “I’m dying my hair.”

Niels stood speechless.

“We’re in a hurry,” he said once more, impatiently. “It’s going to rain. There are just three acres of wheat left. He spoke grimly and hurried back into the kitchen.

“Oh Niels, wait!” she called. “I simply can’t come. I never thought it was so late. I’m sorry, Niels. It isn’t going to happen again.”

That moment Bobby knocked. She fled upstairs.

“Come in,” Niels called from the door of the kitchen. “Quick, Bobby, get a move on you. We’ve got to get dinner ourselves. Get a fire started. Put the kettle on. And the frying pan . . .”

They ate in the kitchen. But it was past one before they were back in the field.

In the evening Mrs. Lindstedt had a great cry over it as soon as they were left alone . . .

Dying her hair! Yes, the lower edge had looked different of late, brown, with a little grey mixed in . . .

The incident was not repeated during the fall. Niels allowed it to pass in silence. What else could he do? . . .

Other things gave food for thought: not always, these days, was thought as charitable as it should have been.

One day—observation was sharpened by the knowledge that her hair was dyed—a new suspicion ripened into certainty. Not only the colour of her hair was artificial, but the colour of the face as well. Niels knew, of course, that she used powder: even that he did not understand nor approve of. Always, in the morning, her lips had looked pallid; now he noticed a greyish, yellowish complexion in her face.

One morning early—he intended to see Kelm about his threshing before he went at the work of stacking his sheaves—he entered her room to waken her so she would prepare breakfast while he attended to his chores.

There, as he looked at her in the pale light of a wind-torn dawn, he stood arrested.

From behind the mask which still half concealed her face, another face looked out at him, like a death’s-head: the coarse, aged face of a coarse, aged woman, aged before her time: very like that of Mrs. Philiptyuk, the Ruthenian woman at the post office: strangely, strikingly, terrifyingly like it: but aged, not from work but from . . . what?

For a moment Niels stared. Something like aversion and disgust came over him. Then, carefully, almost fastidiously, he lifted a corner of the satin coverlet, baring the shoulder and part of the breast which were still half hidden under the filmy veil of a lacy nightgown. There, the flesh was still smooth and firm: but the face was the face of decay . . .

For another minute he looked; then, without waking her, he turned and left the room on tiptoe.

But he had wakened her. “Niels,” she called a moment later. “I’m coming. I must have slept in. I read late last night. I did not hear the alarm . . .”

Ten minutes after—Niels had just started the fire as he always did and was washing—she came down, in dressing gown and slippers, to mix the dough; for his bachelor life had made him partial to hot biscuits for breakfast.

He scanned her face: he reproached himself for doing so: but there was an irresistible fascination about it. The mask was repaired; but it was an imperfect piece of work, betraying hurry. Since he knew it was there, he could detect the true face under the mask.

She felt his scrutiny and asked peevishly, “What are you looking at me that way for?”

Niels came near saying a harsh word and betraying himself. But he laughed and said, with an almost grim jest, “I suppose I can look at my wife if I want to, can’t I?”

Shortly before the threshers were expected, she began to sit often in absent-minded musing.

One night she said, with a sigh, “I’m suffering from the tooth-ache.”

“I’m sorry,” said Niels, though he did not know what a tooth-ache was. “I’ve heard they’ve got a good dentist at Balfour. How if I took you over as soon as threshing is done? I want to buy a democrat anyway. Might just as well get it there. I could take a few steers. Bobby might come along on horseback.”

“Oh no,” she replied. “Never mind.”

But three, four days later she introduced the subject again. “I’ll tell you, Niels,” she said. “I’d like to go to the city for a week. I need a few things in the line of wardrobe; and I could get my teeth attended to at the same time.”

“Wardrobe?” he asked, much surprised. “Surely you’ve got much more as it is than you can ever use here in the country.”

“You don’t understand,” she replied, after a pause which had the effect of a reproach. “Most of my things are out of style. I want them made over.”

“But your teeth . . . They say the dentist at Balfour is equal to any man in the city.”

“He wouldn’t be at Balfour,” she said distantly. “It always pays to get the best.”

“It’ll cost a mint of money,” Niels said musingly. He had never been in the city himself except when he had passed through as an immigrant.

“I’ve got my own money,” she said. “Rowdle is supposed to pay up after threshing.”

“That so?” he said absent-mindedly. Then, rousing himself, “Well, I expect to pay my wife’s way.” And, after another few minutes of silence, “I’ve half a mind to come along. I’ve never seen the city . . . The crop is good . . .”

She did not answer right away. At last, “I’m afraid you’d find it very tedious.”

He looked up. A question hovered on his lips: How about you, then? But he did not utter it.

A day or so later she reverted once more to the topic. “I ought to look after my money, too. It’s in the bank, drawing three percent. I could do better than that by investing it.”

“Sure,” Niels replied with a sigh. “By all means do.”

Niels threshed. Mrs. Lund—whose store in Odensee had been closed by the creditors—came to do the cooking, with Mrs. Schultze to help her. Mrs. Lund was going to take a position at Judge Cameron’s in Poplar Grove, as house-keeper at good wages.

Mrs. Lindstedt sat in a corner of the kitchen, in a silk dressing gown, relieved of all responsibility, gossiping, smiling, ironical. Niels had no time to notice her. She was outside of things, an onlooker pure and simple.

Wheat yielded forty bushels to the acre. The granary proved much too small to hold the wealth. The last of it had to be bagged and carried up into the loft of the new stable. Niels took it there, carrying two bags at a time, to the huge admiration of Bobby and others. The threshers made a jest of it, shouting and blowing the whistle for him to hurry up. Even Niels could not help laughing, a thing he rarely did these days.

On the third day the threshers departed, wending their way across the corner of the Marsh. The White Range Line House sank back into quiet and night.

A week or so later Niels took his wife to Minor, drew a few hundred dollars from the bank, and saw her off.

Plowing started.

No matter what his worries, his thoughts, his suspicions might be, the farm demanded his work, and he gave it.

While the work was done, thoughts came and went . . .

He thought of concrete things, of his Sunday evenings, for instance.

He and his wife were sitting in that dining room on the lower floor . . . Perhaps in the gathering dusk, accentuated by the shadows of the trees in the big, rustling bluff that overtowered the house; perhaps by the light of the tall floor-lamp with its huge, silken shade. Each of them was dreaming, musing: each along his own, peculiar lines: smiling perhaps; or perhaps a prey to some hidden anguish. Sometimes she was reading; and when he, too, got up to fetch book or magazine, she would raise her head and follow him with her eyes through the room and smile at what he reached for. He would have liked to fathom that smile, to probe its significance; but somehow he never did. Still, once or twice he had tried her kind of reading: some of her books, perhaps most of them, were translations from the French: one of them she had given him to read: Madame Bovary. She had given it to him with a peculiar look in her eyes . . . After the first hundred pages or so he sat aghast. He had not read on. The story of this little doctor’s wife amazed and terrified him. What might it be written for? . . . He tried an American novel. He laid it aside because it seemed silly. In vain he searched for something that might enlighten him as to his mentality, that dealt with problems which were his . . .

On week-day evenings it was different. He tried to sit up with her, lounging in one of the chairs: her life seemed to begin at night. She often became gay, sometimes reckless when the day was gone. “I wish there were a show around the corner,” she said once; another time, “If only there were a street nearby, with electric lights and a crowd of people rolling along; with faces to watch and clothes to criticise . . .”

Then he would be overcome by the sleepiness of him who all day long has given of his strength without stinting: he spared neither himself nor others. He would stretch and yawn. She would drop her book and look up, with a curious smile. He would try to hold out; but in vain. Perhaps he would say, after a while, “Well, how about hitting the hay?” And she would nod, perhaps. Then he would bolt both doors—before he was married, he had never troubled about that—turn the light out, and go up, she following. Five minutes later he would be asleep. But should he wake up, at midnight or later, he would still see the light from her room which cast a yellow gleam on the partition between the landing where he slept and that mysterious second room about which she had never evinced curiosity.

Or he would not say anything at all. He would simply sit and stare and yawn till drowsiness overcame him: then his head would fall back, and he would go to sleep, snoring. As soon, however, as he heard himself snore, an uncomfortable feeling would come over him: for he seemed to feel her eye, critical, condemning. He would rouse himself; but if he succeeded, it was not for long.

And finally, when he was sinking away into the very depths of sleep, he would suddenly feel her touch on his shoulder: a summons to go to bed . . .

In the mornings he had been getting up very early, at half past three or four o’clock: she had risen half an hour later to prepare breakfast and to go to bed again. He had milked the two cows and put the milk in pans in the cellar for the cream to rise; the cream from the previous milking he had dipped off and taken to the kitchen in a pitcher; and the skimmed milk he had fed to the pigs. The rest of the cows were not milked: the calves were left with them. Then he had lighted the kitchen fire, put the kettle on, and gone to the stable to feed and harness the horses. There, Bobby would join him; and the plans for the day would be outlined briefly. The morning had rolled off like clockwork. Nearly always he had heard his wife’s alarm bell ringing when he crossed the yard on his way to the stable.

Yes, the daily routine looked peaceful enough as he reviewed it, ruminatingly, while riding the plow.

But! Was there anything in it that bound man and wife together? . . . Nothing.

They lived side by side: without common memories in the past, without common interests in the present, without common aims in the future. Why were they married?

The worst of it was that there were decades upon decades of exactly the same thing ahead . . .

He saw himself sitting on his yard, an old man, a man of eighty: and by his side sat an old woman, eighty-six years old: and both followed separate lines of thought: each followed his own memories back over half a century: not a pulse-beat in common . . .

Each was facing eternity alone! . . .

They were strangers; strangers they would remain . . .

What had led them together? Niels thought of the thrills which this woman had had power to send through him in years gone by. He thought of the night of their union: their pulses had beaten together: they had beaten together in lust. For how long? Still, there had been hope. That hope was gone.

He wanted children. Did she?

Something that had been puzzling him very much arose again before his mind.

In certain moments there was a peculiar look in her eyes. He had seen that look before: alluring, seductive, appealing to something in him of which he was ashamed.

And as he rode the plow, in those days of the Indian summer: those days that before all others are reminiscent and chaste: when the light of the sun seems to be floating in the air like millions of bronzed little powdery particles—one day that memory crystallised.

He had been going with Hahn through the street in Minor; they had met three ladies, painted and powdered and dressed conspicuously, so as to make their appearance, in the light of Hahn’s revelation, an advertisement of their trade: and from under their heavy eye-lids the same look had shot forth . . .

What was it that had led them together?

Lust was the defiling of an instinct of nature: it was sin.

When he shuddered at this realisation, the memory of the feeling came back to him which had assailed him on that evening of Olga’s wedding in Lund’s house: the feeling of disaster, of a shameful bondage that was inescapable. His doom had overtaken him, irrevocably, irremediably: he was bond-slave to a moment in his life, to a moment in the past, for all future times . . .

And as he reached this conclusion, in those halcyon October days, he at last faced once more his ancient dreams. Quite impersonally, with a melancholy kind of regret, with almost that kind of homesickness which overcomes us when we look back at the destinies, fixed and unchangeable, as unrolled in a very beloved book. He thought of that vision which had once guided him, goaded him on when he had first started out to conquer the wilderness: the vision of a wife and children.

The Wages of Sin is Death! I shall visit the Sins of the Father . . .

What?

Children?

His eye went dim; his head turned with him as he realised it. No . . . Children would be a perpetuation of the sin of a moment . . .

He did not want children out of this woman!

Mrs. Lindstedt did not return after a week. Instead, a letter came, asking for more money. Friends had taken much of her time. The various matters of business of which he knew were only half attended to . . . She would need another week . . . So, with her love . . .

Niels left Bobby alone for a day, went to town, sent the money . . .

During her absence a marsh-fire broke out, threatening the whole settlement which had been growing, growing . . . .

All the settlers turned out during the night, to draw a fire-break across the Marsh, four, five miles south of Niels’ place.

In the lurid light of the approaching flames, half choked with smoke, Niels and Bobby strode along behind their plows . . .

A tall, slim figure passed them, plowing along on the other side of the strip of breaking.

Niels peered across; he could not make out who it was. The head was turned as if on purpose.

“Who was that?” he asked of the boy behind him.

“Ellen Amundsen, I believe,” the answer came.

For a moment Niels’ heart stood still. Of her he had not thought. It had come to this that they passed each other silently in the night . . .

When the time came, Niels went to town to get his wife. Snow had fallen prematurely.

Mrs. Lindstedt seemed pleased to be back. She had had everything she had gone for attended to. She made an attempt to be friendly, conciliating: as if she wished to make up for her absence. And yet, there was something subtly new about her: something almost as if she were disappointed; something also which was disappointing to Niels.

Niels went to town once more. He thought his wife might wish to be taken out, to see the country, perhaps to visit. . . He bought, at a sale, democrat, drivers, and cutter . . .

Then it came home to him. Yes, in the White Range Line House an indefinable change was taking place between husband and wife.

From the beginning there had been about their moments of union something artificial, perhaps because their importance was so hugely exaggerated, they being the only bond between them . . .

It would be wrong to say that Niels did not see or at least try to see her side of the matter. Sometimes he thought of her not without sympathy; but only since, in those fall musings, he had accepted his own life as irretrievably ruined—at least as far as a life is the gradual approach, through an infinite number of compromises, to a preconceived goal, to an ideal, a dream or a vision which may never be completely realised.

What was her side of it?

She, a city woman, with the tastes and inclinations of such an one, was banished to the farm. It was her fault, granted. Yet her life was a life in exile. She had lived it before; she knew what it meant; if she had blindly gone into it, she had no excuse; all that was true. The fact remained that it was so.

He realised the dreariness, the utter emptiness of her life. She got up in the morning to prepare breakfast and went to bed again. She rose to prepare dinner and to get some semblance of order into the house and went to bed again. She rose to get supper . . .

The work she did was hateful to her; yet she did it. Was not that an attempt to do what was expected of her? With almost any other woman it would have been a matter of course. Was it with her? He had, so far, blamed her in his heart because his meals were as monotonous now as they had been in his bachelor days. He was suddenly inclined to give her credit for the fact that they were not more so than formerly.

What her city life had consisted in, of that he had no very clear idea. No matter; it had been different. To please him, she made an attempt to adapt herself. He would show a little more sympathy, a little more appreciation.

But somehow, right from the beginning, he felt himself thwarted . . .

He had, for instance, expected that she would open her suitcases and show him where his money had gone. It might have been spent on cold creams, perfumes, silks, gewgaws: things he did not approve of. No matter what it had been spent on, he had expected to see it; he was prepared to express approval of what he condemned, simply for the sake of even a fictitious companionship.

She gave him no chance to do so; she showed him nothing . . .

He came to the conclusion that perhaps it was expected of him to betray curiosity. He would ask her; he would seize the very next opportunity . . . The trouble was that no opportunity offered. His wife seemed to wear an armour since her return. . . .

He had also expected that, after an absence of almost three weeks, there would be, on her part, a re-awaking of physical desires. Even he, having tasted of the forbidden fruit, was conscious of them.

His expectation was disappointed.

This puzzled him greatly.

But there was still something else . . .

Of an evening, of a Sunday afternoon, when he felt her scrutiny, he became aware of a new quality in her look: she was no longer merely amused at his ways, at his choice of reading matter.

With an uncomfortable realisation of possible shortcomings, unsuspected by himself, he became convinced that he was being weighed, compared . . . with whom?

Her eyes showed a new expression: there was a dreamy quality in them . . .

Once or twice, when crossing his yard, he caught himself dreading that look in her face: he turned back and went to the granary, instead of the house. He sat down in its door, looking across at that big dwelling of his which contained a mystery . . .

But he must make the best of a bad bargain! . . .

He offered to take her out for drives.

“Oh no,” she said curtly. “I don’t care for it.”

Yet she, too, was restless. When they had been sitting, she would suddenly get up and begin to pace the room. Sometimes she hummed a tune, smiling to herself; her step became almost a dance. Then, with a sigh, the look in her eyes seemed to come back from an infinite distance and to refocus reality: it became serious, then, almost hostile, as if she wished to erase reality.

Early in December more snow fell. Hauling began. Niels hired a second man; and they went with three teams, starting out in the morning at three, getting home again next morning about the same time.

In the most natural way, thus, another change came about.

Niels got up about two o’clock at night and prepared breakfast for himself and Bobby. When they returned, at uncertain hours, he made breakfast again.

Thus the first few trips were made.

Then, one morning, when they came home, after a particularly hard trip, against a sharp north-east wind and drifting snow, exhausted, cold, almost desperate, Niels found in the kitchen the dishes his wife had used the day before, and even his own breakfast dishes unwashed. They were simply piled together.

In an impulse of anger he went to the staircase and called. But, receiving no answer, he did not call again. He went to the kitchen, heated water, and washed the dishes himself.

This happened once; then, after a week, it became the regular routine. Niels did not comment on it at all.

In this manner, what with his absences and reticences, an almost complete separation of husband and wife came about before he realised it. It was a demoralisation of all human relationships . . .

And yet, as if to perpetuate this state of affairs, he took out a timber lease on government land, so as to provide work in the bush for the rest of the winter . . .

What was the woman in the White Range Line House doing meanwhile?

He hardly knew.

He did know that she spent hours and hours in front of her dressing table, combing her hair in ever new ways. To her, too, life seemed to be a burden.

When she was aware of being watched, she moved about with extreme slowness.

She made the impression of being always absent-minded. She would take up a brush and lay it down again; a comb, and drop it back into place; and finally she would reach for a shell hair-pin and put it slowly, tentatively, into a dozen places in her hair before she left it where it was . . .

To his occasional shame, Niels got into the habit of spying on her . . .

Sometimes, when he was at home, there would pass between them no more than half a dozen words.

But Saturdays, mail-days, she would invariably ask, “Can you send Bobby to the post office?”

And Bobby would go on horseback and bring back a bundle of letters, circulars, papers, sometimes a parcel . . . The letters were all for her; the parcels, too. Niels had never asked from whom they came; she had never volunteered any information. Without glancing at them, she thrust them into her waist or the pocket of her dressing gown.

For a long time Niels was not aware of the fact that he himself looked at the addresses on the envelopes; but one day he realised that he knew every single handwriting on them and noticed when this or that one was missing.

Christmas came.

On the eve Niels had seen one of his neighbours, a settler on the sand-flats, returning from the bush with two little Christmas-trees.

Children!

Early on Christmas Day Bobby went on horseback to call on his foster mother at Poplar Grove . . .

The White Range Line House lay dead and cold . . .

Restlessly Niels went here and there, back and forth on the yard, clad in his sheep-skin, a fur cap on his head, big, roomy boots on his feet, leggings rolled about his legs: he was a burden to himself.

On a silken bed upstairs in the house, there lay a woman, it is true . . .

Horses, cows, and pigs were a semblance of company. Niels went ever back to the stables.

He was there when, shortly before noon, the merry jingle of sleigh bells caught his ear. The sound came from the north, from the bridge trail over the corner of the Marsh. Niels stepped to the door of the stable to listen . . . Nearer and nearer came the sound. It reached the bluff and rounded the corner . . .

Callers for some one; not for him . . .

And yet, there they stopped in front of his gate! Niels went past the cow-shed and crossed his yard.

Strangers belike who wished to enquire about the road: it was a big cutter filled with furs: three children on the front seat, two grown-ups behind.

And then a voice, loud, boisterous, laughing.

“Hello! Step lively there, you hulking muskrat!”

Nelson’s voice!

A titter sounded an echo to it; behind Nelson’s shoulder a woman’s face peered out: Olga’s!

Niels opened the gate. “Hello,” he said, forcing a smile of welcome.

“Haven’t seen you for ages,” Nelson said, shaking hands. “Thought we’d do the right thing and call, seeing that you’re married at last. Well, she nibbed you, didn’t she, old hoss? The gay widow? Well, well!”

Olga laughed. But she reproved her husband. “Here, Lars, behave.”

Nelson drove in; and they alighted. Niels helped to unhitch the drivers: great, strong-limbed beasts.

“So you’ve built a stable?” Nelson said.

“And such a big one!” Olga admired.

She looked the same as years ago when Niels had first met her as Mrs. Nelson. The crisp winter air had driven a flush into her face.

“Made it in a little over two hours,” Nelson boasted. “How’s that for drivers?”

“Bought them this year?” Niels asked.

“After threshing. Had to have something to offset your Percherons.”

They entered the stable.

“Gosh,” Nelson exclaimed. “Look at that, Olga. If this dormouse hasn’t got ten head of horses! He beats me on that. Six’s all I have. But I’ve got cattle. No end of cattle. Herefords. Say, Lindstedt, I’ve got a little bull, a two-year-old that’s a beauty. Just the thing for a small herd like yours. Sell him to you for two hundred, for old sake’s sake. Make you a present of him for two hundred . . . Well, how does it feel to be married?”

Niels was white. “Come to the house,” he said.

They went.

“What a beautiful yard!” Olga exclaimed. “So sheltered!”

“How much have you broken?” Nelson asked.

“A hundred acres.”

“Whoo-pee!” Nelson shouted in his booming bass. “You sure beat me on that! I’m sticking around fifty. But grain’s a side issue with me. I’m the cattle man. I prefer a crop that’ll walk to town on its own feet.”

Niels held the door. Olga pushed two of her children ahead; the youngest one Nelson picked up as he entered.

Niels led them through to the dining room.

“Make yourselves at home,” he said, taking their wraps.

Olga and Nelson wore black-dog coats. Nelson, as he peeled himself out of his, stood in black “store-clothes,” with stiff white collar and blue satin tie, patent-leather shoes on his enormous feet. Olga was dressed in shiny black silk, very pretty, and plainly with child. The two boys were encased in brand-new suits, with knickers and Norfolk jackets; the little girl, the oldest, in fluffy white muslin.

“Excuse me a moment,” Niels said as he ponderously stepped back into the almost bare front room.

There he hesitated; then, with an expression of set determination on his deeply lined face, he went slowly upstairs.

As he entered his wife’s room, for the first time in months, the woman, in a sky-blue dressing gown, reclining on her bed, looked up at him, dropping the hand which held her book. There was a curious expression on her face, half a smile, full of irony, challenge, hostile provocation . . .

For just a second Niels was tempted to yell at her, Get up and dress and come down!

The strange thing was that he felt instinctively that that would have been the right thing to do; yes, that it would have pleased her. He did not know why. He did not fathom this woman’s psychology. Later, much later, he understood that such a course might have righted much that was wrong between him and his wife . . .

Clear and sharp, perfectly self-possessed, as if she were not concerned, her voice rang out, calmly enough, but to him like the bell of doom. “Well?”

Niels took himself in hand. As he mastered his almost unconquerable impulse of violence, he felt humiliated, almost humble, and said very quietly, “The Nelsons are here. They came to call.”

“Well?” the voice repeated.

Niels began to stammer he hardly knew what. Her aggressive composure disconcerted him. Then, with a great effort, he used her name. “Clara . . . won’t you dress and come down?”

Her light, silvery laugh answered him. It sounded perfectly easy; but a strange quality in it betrayed even to Niels that in this woman, too, the nerves were in tension. Then, after a pause, “Why should I?”

“But . . . You don’t understand . . . They are the first callers we’ve had . . .”

“They call on you, not on me,” she said, the laughter dying out from her voice, the smile from her face. And, with a distinctly hostile note, “Leave me alone.”

He was thunderstruck. Once more he began to stammer “Clara . . . Do me the favour . . .”

“Do you a favour?” the voice answered, low but strident. Then a brief laughter. And again the voice, vibrant with pent-up excitement, “You . . . you . . . you skunk!”

Niels turned.

“Do me the favour,” the voice was now loud and ringing so that Niels thought it could be heard throughout the house, “and close my door . . .”

Neils had to stop on the stairs to steady himself. His knees shook . . .

Then he went down. In the hall he hesitated again before he entered the dining room.

“What perfectly lovely furniture!” Olga greeted him as he entered.

He looked at her and nodded. “You’ll stay for dinner, of course,” he managed to say after a while.

“That’s what we were figuring on,” Nelson said. “Indeed we were, if you’ve got a bite in the house?”

There was an air of immense embarrassment in the room.

Niels went to the dumb-waiter in the corner and picked up a table cloth. Then he inserted a leaf in the table. And at last he went to the kitchen door.

“You’ll have to excuse me once more,” he mumbled.

The children were crowding about their mother: they were afraid of him.

In the kitchen he started the fire, sliced ham and bread, and broke eggs into a frying pan.

His guests had been conversing in whispers. When he appeared, they went silent; and again that air of embarrassment settled over the room.

Then Nelson said, clearly with the intention of breaking the silence, “Bobby away?”

“Bobby’s gone to call on his mother.”

“I’m so glad,” Olga threw in, “mamma’s got that splendid place at the judge’s. She says it’s just grand. The judge is such a lovely old man.”

Niels returned to the kitchen. Nelson followed.

“Look here, old man,” Nelson said, “anything wrong?”

“No,” Niels replied without looking up.

“I mean with the wife . . .”

“She isn’t feeling well . . .”

“Child coming?” Nelson whispered slyly, nudging Niels with his elbow.

“No.”

Suddenly Nelson became serious. “Look here. We came to do you a good turn, old man. We know that we’re the first to call. You know the reason, of course, why nobody has ever come. We thought we’d break the ice. But, if we’re not welcome . . .”

“You’re welcome enough as far as I’m concerned,” Niels said quietly.

“That’s enough,” Nelson took him up very quickly. “As far as you’re concerned . . . We can take a hint.”

Niels faced him. “Nelson, what is the reason?”

“The reason for what?”

“That nobody comes near us.”

“You don’t mean to say you don’t know?”

“I don’t know.” Niels’ voice carried conviction.

“Then I won’t tell you,” Nelson said. “Never mind about dinner. We’re going.”

“Nelson,” Niels tried to plead. Then, shrugged his shoulders, “All right.”

Olga was already in the hall, putting the wraps on her children. Nelson helped her into her coat. He took his own; and they went out.

In silence Niels led the horses from the stable, watered them, and helped to hitch them up.

Nelson lifted the children into the cutter, Niels standing by, facing the house.

And as he stood there, he saw the curtains of the window in the woman’s bed-room move. She peered down at the scene in front of the stable, furtive, smiling . . .

Nelson and his wife climbed in.

“Mr. Lindstedt,” Olga said, tears in her eyes as she held out her hand, “I’m terribly sorry. I hope you’ll believe me.”

“By-by,” Nelson nodded, laughing lightly. “Buck up, old hoss . . .”

Niels stood and looked after them, conscious that he was being watched from above . . .

Towards evening Mrs. Lindstedt came down, dressed more daintily, made up more carefully than ever, and surrounded by an enervating aura of scents.

Silently, but with smiles flitting over her face, her eyes dancing as of old, she went at the task of preparing supper for herself in the most leisurely way.

Niels sat in the dining room over a book. He had sent for a volume on National Economy which he had seen advertised; he was struggling with its abstruse phraseology. He had forgotten about his wife. Now he followed her with his eyes wherever she went.

She took no notice of him. But when, half an hour later, he got up to leave the house, she confronted him with an open, seductive smile. “Well,” she said; and her voice was quiet, sympathetic, compassionate, “did your guests have a nice call?”

Involuntarily Niels had stopped to listen. Now he shrugged his shoulders and left the room without a word.

On New Year’s Eve, Mrs. Lindstedt, coming down after supper, remarked casually that her teeth still seemed to give trouble; she would return to the city for a short stay.

Niels looked at her, silent, and nodded.

“I suppose Bobby can take me to town to-morrow morning?” she added, speaking sharply, with the unmistakable intention of avoiding the impression as if she were making advances.

“Sure,” Niels said.

He took his cheque-book from the cupboard in the hall where he kept his papers, sat down, wrote a cheque for two hundred and fifty dollars, and tossed it across the table.

She ignored the slip of paper and got up.

But when Niels came down during the night to feed the fire in the big stove, he took note of the fact that the cheque was gone.

More even than before, Niels brooded over his relations to his wife. He thought, during the drives which he made, from bush to town, from farm to bush, of all the married couples he knew . . .

He could not puzzle it out.

On the other hand, whether Nelson and Olga approved, whether the world approved, mattered very little. If only . . .

He, Niels Lindstedt, a skunk? . . . Mean? . . . If any one had reason to complain of unfair dealing, it seemed to him it was he.

Her life was a horror. True.

As soon as she was absent, he was able to see her side of it. If only she would utter wishes! He realised with a shudder that she had become physically repulsive to him. But even . . .

What did it matter?

He became aware that this phrase—what did it matter?—occurred more and more frequently in his thought. Did nothing really matter?

Why had she gone to the city again? The matter of dentistry was the merest pretext . . . Yet, she had felt it incumbent upon her to use a pretext. But. . . let her go! Let her go! If that made life bearable for her . . . Let her go as often as she cared to. He would offer the next trip to her, at Easter . . .

Winter went. Mrs. Lindstedt returned; no change; or if any, a slight change for the worse; all things a little more pronounced, with a little more of an edge to them . . .

Niels had not sent Bobby to get her. He had gone himself. He had thought it might please her. She had all but ignored him at the station: handing her baggage, not to him but to the obsequious operator who stared at her. “Perhaps you are hungry,” he had stammered. He had been hungry himself.

“I had my dinner on the train,” the answer had come, icily, distancing. He had not even known you can have dinner on the train . . .

Two and a half months followed, after that two-hour drive during which she had carefully avoided touching him . . .

Niels did all the housework now, cooked three meals a day for himself and Bobby, washed the dishes, shook up his bed, swept the floor . . . Sometimes he did not see his wife for days at a stretch, leaving as he did for the bush before sun-up, and returning after dark, often to find the house cold and still: only a cup or a plate would betray that she had been downstairs at all, snatching a perhaps hurried meal while he was away from house and yard.

Easter came. She did not give him a chance to offer that trip. She merely announced that she was going, giving no reason whatever this time. Niels did not give, she did not ask for, any money. Three weeks later she returned with a livery team which she had hired in town.

During this absence Niels did no longer form any good resolutions. He was immersed in gloom.

Vague, disquieting suspicions invaded him: what was she doing in the city? What was she doing?

A dull, menacing feeling grew up in him, was on the point of flaring into hatred. She hated him, of that he was sure. He hated her. Why had she come back?

He felt as if he must purge himself of an infection, of things unimaginable, horrors unspeakable—the more horrible as they were vague, vague . . .

The thaw-up came. New settlers moved in: two young Canadians, brothers, the Dunsmore boys people called them; a German who squatted down along the creek, north-east from Niels’ place, Dahlbeck by name.

The spring work began and was finished. The farm was a law unto itself . . .

Summer.

Often now, during Sunday afternoons, Niels was sitting in the back seat of his democrat, under the forward-slanting roof of the implement shed, with his book, the Elements of Political Economy. He entered his house only when it could not be helped . . . But he stared across at it, with unseeing eyes, at that big house which he had built for himself four, five years ago . . . For himself? No, of that he must not think . . . That way lay insanity.

Sometimes, during week-days, he took his meals in Bobby’s shack instead of going to the house . . .

Bobby never said a word about all these troubles. But Niels knew that he knew all about them. Once or twice Niels thought things might be easier if he could talk them over . . . Yet, could he? Bobby was like a son to him . . . But, after all, he was not his son . . .

The crops grew well; they promised a bountiful harvest in June; but in July the drought came: the first drought Niels had ever experienced. What did it matter?

Sometimes clouds sailed up, obscuring the sky; and with a big bluster of wind they blew over, not a drop coming down from their bursting udders. The grass parched in the meadows; the cattle bellowed on the Marsh; the grain ripened, so light that there was hardly any difference between straw and ear . . .

And then the hail-storm came, like a sudden catastrophe . . .

When the hail had melted away—it lay three, four inches thick in places—Niels and Bobby went out to look at the damage. Water stood in the furrows; the ridges in between looked like black sugar, melting . . . The crops had disappeared.

Bobby exclaimed again and again, “Gee whiz!”

Niels shrugged his shoulders with something like a chuckle. “And to think,” he said, “that on the advice of that fellow Regan in Minor I insured against hail! Why, that hail-storm means money in my pocket! Eight dollars an acre . . . I could never have threshed eight dollars out of that dry straw . . .”

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” Bobby laughed. “Gee, Niels, you’re a wizard. You make money even out of hail . . .”

But Niels’ eyes had gone steely again.

What had she gone to the city for? What had she been doing there? . . . It was an obsession . . .

Niels thought and thought as he sat in his implement shed and watched his house. It was a Sunday afternoon, the last in August.

Hahn’s revelations came back to him. “They’re from the city.” Eyes peered at Niels, alluring, provoking, from under fashionable, expensive hats . . . hats like his wife’s . . . set in faces powdered and painted . . . “One of them will be your wife . . . for an hour . . .”

Niels whipped himself up and walked back and forth, back and forth, behind that array of his implements: wagons, plows, binder, seeder . . . He walked there because he could not be seen from the house. And every now and then he bent down and peered from under the low, jutting roof across his yard at the windows of that house.

In this hour of torture there was born in him a great determination: no matter what happened, his wife was not going to go to the city again. Three times she had gone. What had she been doing there? Never mind what she had been doing. She was not going to do it again! . . .

The week went by. Niels was aware of unusual activity in the house: in that room which he never entered any longer; and one day, when the door, now usually closed, was ajar, it opened under the tremour of his heavy tread on the landing. He saw enough to know that his wife was packing up . . .

She was making preparations to go on a fourth trip. She was not going to go . . .

Not a word did she say to him. But she spoke to Bobby, asking him to be ready to take her to town on a certain day.

She had waited till Niels was away to speak to the boy. But Bobby told him as soon as he returned.

Niels, in sudden blind rage, went to the house at once. It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a time when he hardly ever entered the place.

She was in the dining room, engaged in collecting some trifles which she intended to take along . . .

He had entered through the front door, thereby cutting off her retreat; of a set purpose he turned the key behind his back and drew it out, in a single motion.

He crossed the hall and stood in the door of the dining room, almost filling it with his huge frame.

“What are you doing?” he asked, quietly, but with a vibrant note which would have warned the most unobservant.

She turned; slowly, as if recalling her absent thoughts to some unimportant business which thrust itself in her path. On her lips, which were brilliantly, exaggeratedly rouged, lay a smile. In her eyes—couched behind lids, lashes and brows which also bore the marks of the make-up for artificial light—lay the remnant of a happy dream. Her dressing gown, of filmy, white, Japanese silk, showed every detail of her undergarments: lacy things of pink crepe-de-chine. Her chestnut-red hair surrounded her face like a flaming cloud. Her bare arms and soft white hands, issuing as they did from wide, flaring sleeves, were the very picture of allurement and temptation. The room was heady with heavy scents . . .

Niels looked with distaste at the scene; he felt a loathing for the woman. Had he obeyed his impulse, he would have given her all the money he had and sent her away. But it was a peculiarity of his nature that, having thought out and laid down a plan, he must go on along the demarcated line and carry out that plan even though circumstances might have arisen which made it absurd. Thus he had broken his land, thus built his house, thus made himself the servant of the soil . . . It was his peasant nature going on by inertia . . .

She felt the approach of a catastrophic development. The smile faded from her lips; the dream died in her eyes. She focused them on the man in the door who thrust himself into her visions, standing there, huge, implacable, like doom. As this change took place, her whole appearance became, in a moment, from a picture of all that might in a physical sense be alluring, something pathetically artificial: as if a small animal at bay, a mouse perhaps, were looking out from some large shell, beautiful in its iridescent colours; or as if some old, old dignitary, a pope maybe, clad in gorgeous regalia that not he wore but that bore him up, had suddenly forgotten the part he played as the personification of some time-honoured institution and had become a frail, mortal man, shaking with fear . . . From behind the mask, the woman peered out, helpless, at bay, mortally frightened.

If at that moment Niels had struck; if he had gone straight to her and torn her finery off her body, sternly, ruthlessly, and ordered her to do menial service on the farm, he would have conquered . . . But he merely frowned . . .

Then, as if she awoke from a nightmare, she rallied and shrugged her almost bare shoulders: it was as if she shivered. Slowly a smile returned into her face. Two human natures had measured each other; and the woman had realised her power. The smile was new: it held a note of contempt.

“I?” she said slowly, languidly. “I am getting ready to leave.”

“For the city?”

“Yes,” she replied in a tone of great indifference.

“You have been to the city for the last time. You won’t go again. If ever, you won’t go alone.”

For a moment she stared. Then she laughed. “I might go into the bush instead . . .” And with a swift motion she swept towards the kitchen door.

Niels forestalled her, barring the way.

She turned to the front door.

“That door is locked,” he said grimly.

Her arms sank helpless.

“Do you mean to say,” she gasped; and for a moment her woman’s nature overwhelmed her so that she sank into a chair. Then she rose again. “Do you mean to say I am a prisoner here?”

“Just about.”

A silence of several minutes ensued, she standing by the table, he in the kitchen door.

She became calm, extraordinarily, dangerously calm.

“Why?” she asked in a voice cool, measured, almost impersonally enquiring, as if she were solving an intricate problem in mathematics.

That voice carried a sting. It roused red anger. “What have you been doing in the city?” he snarled.

She faced him, looked at him, laughed contemptuously. She measured him with her eyes, from head to foot and back again. When she spoke, her voice was ice-cold.

“Look at the fellow!” she said. Then, inner fires breaking through for a moment, bursting into flame, smoke, and ashes. “Look at the contemptible scoundrel! How he stands there and sneers, secure in his brute strength, abusing a woman! If only I had a revolver, a knife . . .”

She stopped, realising that she was becoming theatrical, raging, hardly able to prevent herself from breaking into a sob of impotence . . . Again she rallied, searching for the sharpest sting in her quiver.

“Why do you ask?” she said. “Is it jealousy? I know it is not. I’ll tell you what it is: it is that ridiculous man-nature in you. You married me. You don’t want me any longer. But I am not to belong to any one else. I am to be your property, your slave-property . . . Since you have no further use for me, you want to fling me on this . . . this manure-pile here.” With a comprehensive sweep of her arm. “But let any one come and want to pick me up because I may still be of use to him, and at once the dog-in-the-manger instinct that lurks in every man pops up, and you put me under lock and key! . . . What did you marry me for, anyway?”

“That you know as well as I.”

“No,” she said, curiously. “I don’t. I know why you married me, for what reasons; I don’t know what for. The reason is clear enough. You married me because you were such an innocence, such a milk-sop that you could not bear the thought of having gone to bed with a woman who was not your wife. You had not the force to resist when I wanted you—yes, I wanted you, for a night or an hour . . . and you had to legalise the thing behindhand. That’s why you married me. You wouldn’t have needed to bother. I had had what I wanted. I did not ask you for anything beyond. I’m honest. I’m not a sneak who asks for one thing to get another. I did not know all this at the time, that goes without saying. I know it now. Had I known it then, you would never have snared me. At the time I thought you were really in love with me, you really wanted me, you really wanted me! Not only a woman, any woman. Do you know what you did when you married me? You prostituted me if you know what that means. That’s what you did. After having made a convenience of me. When you married me, you committed a crime!”

She paused. Once more her pose was theatrical.

Niels’ thoughts were in a turmoil. That woman was right! That was why he had married her! Not she, he stood indicted. For a moment he was helpless. Then he felt that she was evading the question. Anger overmastered him once more. “What have you been doing in the city?”

She remained perfectly self-possessed. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. I amused myself. I had a good time. In the company of men who appreciate me. Men who are not dumb brutes. Men who seek me for the sake of what I am . . . That they incidentally desired my body also . . .”

Niels had been listening almost with curiosity. But now a tormenting agony invaded him; his joints were loosening, as if he must pitch forward. “Which you gave?”

She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “That’s it, is it? All the rest does not count; but that one thing . . . That’s where the sting lies, is it? . . . Now I’ll tell you something that will really sting when you come to think of it; provided that I’ve ever been anything to you at all; and provided that you have brains enough to understand it . . . Yes; which I gave the last time I went.”

“What do you mean?” he stammered.

Her attitude changed. She spoke very quietly, as to a child. “I’ll tell you . . . But let’s sit down. I’m getting tired. There isn’t any use in yelling at each other, either. I can tell you this in perfect ease. It’s all past history for me.”

She sat down; the man in the door remained standing.

“There was a time,” she went on, “when I was in love with you. Even such as I do fall in love, you know. I admired your strength of body, your build, your steely eyes, your straight mouth. I admired the energy and determination with which you learned English and went to work. I thought you were a man. The class of people I had associated with—artists, writers, newspaper men—are mostly weaklings. Business men are dull. I had been married to one for altogether too long. I wanted you for years before I had you. Love is a fleeting thing with me. Desire is not. Love has to be conquered again and again. A sense of duty does not exist for me. But so long as I had not had you, I wanted you. I might have gone on wanting you, tempting you, if you had not been weak. I felt sure that you would marry that Amundsen girl. If you had married her—as, by the way, you should have done—I should have been unhappy for the rest of my days: if I had not had you. Once I’d had you, I should not have cared. Well, I had you . . . You proposed marriage to me. You will remember that I hesitated; that I did not at once consent. All kinds of thoughts went through my head. I came to the conclusion that, like the floorwalker, you really loved me. That you would reconquer me from day to day as he had done. I was tired of being a bird of passage. There were horrible things in my memory of the past. Money had often been scarce. What the floorwalker had left was too much to starve on; not enough to live on. As I said, I thought you were a man. You would steady and hold me. I thought I could waive my need for stimulants. I could spin myself into a cocoon with reading. I thought I could force myself to do the work which is indispensable in a house. I told you I never could be a farming woman. You insisted. It never occurred to me that you might be weak enough to want marriage on moral grounds. I gave in . . .

“Then I came out here. I did what could not be left undone. It was slavery; it was a horror. To wash dishes, to sweep a house . . . to do anything on time, regularly, as a routine, day after day: all that is a horror to me. But I did it. I was in love with you, continued in love with what I thought you were. I bore the rest. I still admired your simplicity, your energy, your power and steadiness in work . . .

“But then, during the latter part of the first summer, I became conscious of the fact—I was for ever brooding—that it was always I who came to you . . . never you who came to me. A suspicion took hold of me. I began to doubt you. I began to doubt your love. More and more life became a drudgery. I thought of a test. That was why I went to the city. I needed a recreation, it is true, a change. I sought my old company. It seemed hard to return to this place in the wilderness. Yet, I longed for you. But I made up my mind, when I did return, to withdraw, to wait for you, not to go to you again. You did not come. You let me drift, no matter where. Half from resentment, half from a desire to test you further, I stopped the work I had been doing. I waited; oh, so anxiously I waited for you to scold, to get angry, to beat me if need be . . . Just to show that you did care, that I was not simply a nothing, a figure-head, an encumbrance to you . . .

“You did nothing of the kind. It left you indifferent . . .

“I was not needed. Why was I here? Why was I sacrificing everything I had valued: the colour, the gayness, the zest of life for a man to whom I was nothing? Who perhaps hated me, had hated me ever since I had been his wife? And I became aware of the possibility that perhaps one day I might come to hate you.

“When the Nelsons came, my resentment grew too strong for me. As yet, even then, it was half done on purpose when I insulted you. The insult glanced off.

“I made another test. Again I went to the city. I wanted you to say no, then; that I could not go. I wanted you to be surprised that I asked for Bobby to drive me to town. You agreed to everything; as if it were the most natural thing for me to travel alone all over the country. I stayed away much longer than could possibly be necessary to have any number of teeth attended to. I wanted you to question me; or to get angry. You met me with a grin. My heart froze against you. When I got back, I shut myself up in my room.

“Yet I made still a third test. I went to the city at Easter. I used no pretext. I simply announced I was going. For half a year I had been living like an unmarried woman that has never known a man. What did you think I was made of? Did you think mine was the nature of a fish? You stirred neither hand nor foot. You did not say a word. You did not even object to my going.

“I went; and I threw myself away in the city. So far the men had been courting me; now I courted them. Some of them were poor. I had plenty of money from the first two trips left. I had never been inside a dentist’s office. My stay had not cost me a cent. I had lived with friends. I entertained men this time, with your money . . . I threw myself away, body and all. It was nothing to me. I thought it would mean much to you. I revelled in my revenge . . .

“And yet, Niels, even then I could not get rid of the thought of you. I still saw you when I was in the arms of another. . . .

“I might have stayed away, then. I came back. I still hoped . . . Nothing. Nothing.

“And now, Niels, will you let me go? My feeling for you is dead; you are nothing to me any longer, not that much . . . You are only a husband whom I married by mistake, somewhat ridiculous, and very hateful . . . Yes, I hate you, I hate you . . . Will you let me go?”

The man at the door had listened aghast. He did not understand. He felt as if he had been walking along an abyss, blindfolded. He shivered. Fever burned in him. Sweat broke out on his brow. He stared . . .

“Niels,” she went on once more, “will you let me go? This time I shall not come back. I want to live, not to stagnate. I want to feel that I can go from this house as I used to go from my cottage in the bush. I want you to be a memory only. I want you to be the past . . .

“I do not ask you for money. I have money of my own. If you want a divorce, I am willing. You can throw the guilt on me. But then I demand to be paid for it. You have no proofs. I am willing to furnish them, for a consideration.

“If you don’t want a divorce, I have a hold on you. I may ask for money at a later time. You are well-to-do. You are getting richer every day because you have no wants . . . I have known too well what it is to be without money not to appreciate it . . .

“All this I intended to write to you. Don’t think that I do not want you to see the whole of the situation.

“And now, once more, will you let me go?”

All this went past Niels. He did not catch a word of it at the time: much later only did some of the things she had said come back to him as out of an evil dream. One fact stood out: she had given her body . . .

As in a spasm he answered, “I will not.”

She looked at him, questioningly, almost curiously. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

He saw her dimly. In this conflict of two human natures such trifles as her appearance, the exaggeration of her make-up—too absurd to be taken notice of—angered him. He would have liked to strip all that costly tinsel off her, with one rough touch to wipe paint and powder down, so she would stand there, the bare, ugly, life-worn specimen of humanity she appeared to him to be under her mask. He might have pitied her then.

Her face hardened. “Niels,” she said, “I warn you. It will go hard with you and me. I cannot stay here, a prisoner, condemned to a life-sentence. I won’t.”

“You are not going to leave this place if I can help it,” he said doggedly.

“Listen,” she flared up, “I have tried to make you understand. I have failed. I wanted to show you a last mercy by leaving. You prove to me that you are mean, brutal, revengeful. You think you have power over me. I’ll show you that you have not. For the last time, will you let me go?”

“No.”

“Then listen.” She stood up. “From now on I shall live to get even with you. I don’t want to leave any longer. I shall stay. I can hit you harder here. You don’t need to lock doors. You have made me live through hell. I shall give you a taste of the same thing now. You don’t know yet why people have not called. You will know one day. I, too, have powers. I have borne what I could. I can bear no more. People here are coarse and vulgar. They are not to my taste. I’ll overlook that for the sake of revenge. You have made your bed. You must lie in it. This house, the White Range Line House as they call it, is going to be a famous house on the Marsh; its name is going to be a by-word ringing through the countryside; and you are going to be the laughing-stock of the settlement. Mark my words, you will rue this day!”

With that she ran out into the hall and up the stairs, leaving him alone.