Bobby

Again there were drives, drives, drives; for Niels started work in the bush right after plowing . . . As always when he was driving, there was time to think, to brood . . .

At the very first, when his wife’s revelations had hit him like so many hammer-blows, he had been stunned. Then, in life’s first reaction against injury and death, he had been subject to sudden fits of rage, sudden wellings-up in him of primeval impulses, of the desire to kill, to crush . . .

At such moments he had indulged in horrible imaginings. He had felt as if he could have looked on while the woman perished under frightful tortures; as if he could have laughed at her contortions; as if he could have revelled in her agony.

But those had been no more than impulses, comparable to brief eruptions of a volcano which yet show what is hidden underneath.

He had kept away from his house when his wife was about, entering it only in the early morning and at night. He and Bobby were “baching it” in the shack, living as once they had lived together in the house. Meanwhile they worked at what had to be done: they dug potatoes, replaced rotting fence-posts, squared logs for a smokehouse and a larger granary; they went together into the bush.

Niels was watching his house . . .

It never occurred to him yet not to blame his wife for doing what it was her nature to do; not to judge her and to find her guilty . . .

But, as soon as the driving started, he went to work, unconsciously, at finding a new path through the tangled labyrinth of his life.

What was the problem?

He came to see that the real problem was very complicated. Judging her guilty, he demanded repentance and atonement. But he could not demand anything of her because she did not acknowledge his right to demand: he had no authority over her.

She was planning revenge. Revenge for what? No doubt for a wrong she thought had been done her.

Had he, Niels wronged the woman, intentionally or not? That was the great question.

She was right in reproaching him with weakness: he had fallen. But, once he had fallen, could he have acted otherwise than he had done? Could he have simulated feelings which he did not have?

The whole marriage, the whole antecedents of this marriage were immoral . . .

So it all came back to this that he should not have fallen . . .

But suppose a man had fallen, what was he to do?

Suppose he had simulated feelings which he did not have . . . Suppose—unlikely as such an outcome must be—he had succeeded in deceiving the woman into the belief that he really loved her . . .

He would have had to bear the burden of that deceit to his grave!

Could he have stood up under such a strain? He could not. His marriage would have been worse than concubinage: it would have been prostitution on his part!

What had his resolutions amounted to, his good intentions of a year ago? To this that he had intended to buy her off.

He had strongly, forcibly realised that he was not the only sufferer. But he had not been willing—because he had been unable—to give her what she wanted, what she was looking for in him. He had been willing, instead, to give her money to go to the city with, provided she remained faithful to him . . .

He had been fool enough not to see as he saw it now that no man can afford to let his wife go anywhere alone unless he can trust her; and, of course, he can trust her only if he knows that she can trust him, in everything, absolutely: he can trust her only if not only she loves him but if he loves her, and if she knows it, of positive knowledge . . .

To make the best of a bad bargain! What folly! He saw clearly now that nobody, in this relationship of marriage, can ever make the best of a bad bargain. It is all or nothing. Give all and take all. If you cannot do that, stand back and refrain.

But then, he had not refrained. He had taken her . . .

No matter where he turned in his agony, he saw no help for it; he saw no way out.

Once more, when this utter hopelessness of the situation became clear to him, he hardened his heart. He could not help himself; he was he; he could not act or speak except according to laws inherent in him.

What must happen would happen. He had sinned. He saw no atonement. None, nowhere.

And what about his life? What was its justification? No justification existed . . . Except perhaps, perhaps in helping others? . . .

On one of his first drives to town he met the ox-team of the new German settler, Dahlbeck by name.

On the wagon-truck drawn by the slow, plodding beasts rested a sand-box without a seat. The man sat on the edge of the box, his feet dangling between the wheels.

In front, on a little pile of straw, reposed a woman. The back of the low box was piled with bundles holding her belongings.

It was the big, strapping girl of the first farm to town; the one that had once looked at him when she had stood at the pump . . .

She was lying down as the two teams approached each other; but she sat up as Niels drew near.

Somehow, at his sight, a change took place in her expression. She recognised him. Her nonchalance dropped; and though she remained sitting, she seemed to rock herself on her hips. A provoking, challenging quality crept into the open smile with which she stared at him . . .

The man’s stern face, narrow, hatchet-shaped, also underwent a change, discernible in shadings only. In that change there was betrayed a feeling of restraint, almost of shame. It looked as if he would have liked to interfere, to call the woman to order; as if he felt embarrassed at his own failure to do so. His nod, in answer to Niels’, was almost forbidding.

Niels liked the man for that nod. He read his mind in it.

This man was a slave of passion. He would have preferred freedom; but he was a slave. The woman dominated, swayed, attracted, repelled him as she pleased. The woman was his evil genius . . .

All that Niels read in a glance and a nod . . .

Slowly, slowly, a new development traced itself out in the White Range Line House.

It was not often that Niels even saw his wife in the early part of the winter. Still more than before Mrs. Lindstedt led an indoor life. It seemed she never left the house any more . . .

Niels provided for everything she might possibly need to carry on a purely animal existence. He saw to it that there was bread—Mrs. Schultze baked it; he gathered the eggs and skimmed the milk; he watched the flour-bag, the potatoes, the smoked meat. He carried wood and water in.

All this he did either before day-break or after nightfall.

He knew that upstairs, in that room on the east side of the house, there lay or sat a woman, his wife, spinning off her hours, her days, her weeks . . . For a long time he did not even hear her.

The only signs of her life consisted in the slow, slow dwindling of the supply of flour; in the disappearance of an egg or two a day from the colander on the kitchen shelf; in the fact that at night there was a little less water in the pail on the bench by the door . . . Only once or twice—very rarely—there was a light burning in the room upstairs, in the morning or at night . . .

It would almost seem as if she watched for his appearance on the yard to extinguish even her lamp.

The only intercourse between the two, and that an indirect intercourse, consisted in this that once a week he took her mail which continued to arrive with great regularity and deposited it on the deal table in the hall whenever Bobby brought it from the office. When he looked for it the next time—as he never failed to do—it was gone. Whether she answered any of the letters or not; and if so, how, Niels did not learn . . .

Then, shortly before Christmas, a chance meeting came about in the kitchen.

Niels entered, rather later in the evening than usual, carrying a pail of milk to take it down into the cellar. It was quite dark inside and outside. Yet Niels knew that he had left the lamp burning on the table. Perhaps, when he went out, the draft had extinguished it. He set his pail down by the door and felt for matches. As he did so, his hand touched the hot glass of the lamp. A gasp escaped him; and the same moment there was the swish of clothes, quite nearby, as of somebody running. Then the crash of a falling chair and a half-suppressed cry.

He found the matches, removed, still in the dark, the chimney from the burner, struck his match, and lighted the lamp.

As he turned, he saw his wife in the corner behind the door. Apparently she had come down, thinking that he had finished the evening chores and had left the light burning by mistake. When she had heard him approaching over the crunching snow, she had blown the lamp and tried to escape without being seen. In the dark she had missed the door . . .

He looked at her; and she, with a defiant toss of her head, gathered her wraps which had half fallen about her and fled. He heard her passing through the dining room, into the hall, and up the stairs.

It was a meeting of no more than a quarter minute. But in those few seconds Niels had seen a number of things.

She had been in her nightgown, with a dressing gown thrown over her shoulders. The dressing gown was of light blue silk; the nightgown, of pink organdie or some other light, filmy material, profusely adorned with lace.

But the face!

For the fraction of a second he had thought it was the face of a perfect stranger. It had been that of an aging woman, yellow, lined with sharp wrinkles and black hollows under the eyes, the lips pale like the face . . . She had been without her make-up . . .

After Christmas, one day, while he was attending to his chores, a second meeting took place.

This time the mere fact of the meeting was hard to explain. The first time it had been accidental; this time there could be no doubt but that it was intentional. Since their first encounter Niels had made it a point to give ample warning of his presence whenever he entered the house.

On this particular night he had gone down into the cellar, carrying the kitchen lamp and rattling the tin pails which he had previously scalded in the kitchen.

He was dipping the cream off the morning’s milk when she, too, came down, carrying her own lamp in one hand and a little dish in the other. She took no notice of him but passed him by as if he did not exist.

Again she was in undress for the night, with a gown thrown over her shoulders. Again her face, that of an aging woman, aged by God knew what, stood in strange contrast, an incomprehensible, almost uncanny contrast, to her appearance; it was so yellow, lined . . .

Neither said a word. When she returned upstairs, Niels finished his work in the cellar, feeling guilty, down-cast, despondent. He took the skimmed milk to the kitchen to leave it there, ready for the morning when it would be fed to the pigs. Then he went out to bring in a few armfuls of wood for the heater in the dining room. He noticed, before he went out, that there was a light in that room; yet he never thought anything but that she, knowing he would come back, had simply left the lamp burning when she went upstairs.

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

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

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

Yet she stood there as no woman could show herself to any man but her husband . . . Henceforth the same thing happened often: soon it became the regular thing . . .

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

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

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

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

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

What was that purpose?

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

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

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

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

In him, however, all sexual instincts were dead.

The work in the bush went on . . . Day after day there was time to ponder, to brood. Matters were getting on Niels’ nerves.

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

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

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

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

That was no longer the case.

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

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

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

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

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

She turned her head and bit at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was he, Niels, going insane?

If so, what could he do about it?

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

Spring came. A hundred acres were seeded.

And in the house the woman awoke.

The dreaded next move was being made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was he to do? Bobby would leave one day. He was growing up. He was twenty years old. But Niels needed Bobby: Bobby was the last link that connected him with the world of living men: the last barrier between him and insanity . . .

The Sundays were the worst. Then Bobby went out . . .

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

Think, think . . .

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

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

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

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

Gradually a definite line of thought evolved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the whole year before it!

Three times she had been in the city.

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

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

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

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

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

It was still early when he saw his wife leave the house for her now accustomed walk in the bluff. He had been waiting about at the stables.

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

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

His heart sank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He found his wife sitting on a rug which, at the northern edge of the bluff, was spread on the ground, in a little natural glade shaded by a thicket of plum trees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her aghast.

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

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

The laughter had died. She was fury personified.

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

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

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

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

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

Then he stepped back to the little window.

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

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

Still he hesitated.

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

Spring passed by; summer came.

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

But it was the last flicker of a dying flame. Hopelessness and indifference began to show more and more even in his physique. His shoulders stooped; his features began to sag. He never shaved any longer, his hair hung low. He felt old, tremendously old, centuries old. He felt as if he carried the experience of a world, carried it as an actual load on his shoulders.

In daytime he drowned thought in work; at night he read.

But even his reading was restricted to one book, the Bible; and in the Bible to one chapter of the Old Testament: Solomon’s wisdom. He intoxicated himself in the rhythm of its sentences. He read the same thing over and over again till he knew it by heart. In the field he muttered detached phrases, repeating them a hundred times. “This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” “And he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place where the rivers go, thither they go again.”

When he came to the sentence, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight,” it seemed a comfort. The phrase, “There is no profit under the sun,” seemed to echo his own conclusions. “And there is no new thing under the sun.” No; others had arrived at the same truths as he, Kings and High Priests . . .

Yet right by his side Life was lived: the life of children who do not look beyond the hour. The child was Bobby.

Bobby was getting restless. When he tried to talk and saw that Niels was not listening, he went out and sat on a stone or a block of wood, frowning, dissatisfied. He was a man now, twenty-one years old. Niels had been more than an employer to him: he had been an idol. Still, he had his own life to make. He could not for ever be looking after Niels . . .

But time went and revealed its secrets. Things that were hidden came to light.

Bates, a neighbour of Niels’, on the south-east quarter of the same section, “burned out.” He wanted to leave, to give up: he was a city man, drifting back to the city . . . Niels bought his quarter, bought it for Bobby, to be farmed by him for himself, beginning with the next year . . .

Niels had arrived at something like composure again. It was a dark, pessimistic composure, it is true; but it seemed as if it might last forever . . .

Then that composure also broke down.

One afternoon, in cutting time, Niels forsook his binder. Something, he knew not what, prompted him to do so. It was no suspicion; it was hardly an uneasiness. Bobby was stooking.

“I’m two rounds ahead,” Niels said as he let himself down from his seat. “I’ll be back before you catch up.”

He crossed the stubble and disappeared in the grove which bordered his farm in the west.

He came to the fence and climbed over it.

On the road, he looked about. As if it were the first time he saw it, the size of the settlement struck him which had grown up on the Marsh. For a moment the sight of all the farms recalled him to reality. He passed his hand over his sweaty brow, sighed, and was on the point of turning back. But the moment he faced his field again, an invincible disinclination to ride that binder took hold of him.

He went north, along his fence.

When he came to the gate, he did not open it, but stepped over the stile which he had built by its side. On the yard he stopped and looked about.

All was still, so still that he heard the fluttering of the wings of a bird flitting by. He stared at the house. The door stood wide open.

Suddenly his heart began to beat like a sledgehammer; he could hear its thud.

Under an irresistible compulsion he slunk over to the door and stood there, listening.

Not a sound.

He went to the corner of the house where his [. . .] and this time he heard something: whispers and laughter, half suppressed.

He went all the way back to the entrance of the yard. There he turned south into the bush, almost running over the sun-dappled soil between the trees. He went on till he was beyond the stables, and then turned east, circling the whole clearing of his yard. At last he turned north again, along pig-pens and milk-house, till he reached the garden. He vaulted over its pole-fence and crossed the potato-patch. North of the garden a thicket of plum trees had developed into a dense screen since the lot had been cleared.

Niels crouched. Slowly, carefully he invaded the bush.

Suddenly he stood as if frozen in his attitude.

There, right in front of him, not more than twenty, thirty feet away, unhidden by intervening shrubs or trees, sat his wife, just as he had found her two months ago. But by her side sat a man, the younger Dunsmore, his right arm about her shoulder, holding one of her hands in his left. They were whispering and laughing. The man bent over and kissed her on the mouth, long, fervently, with the kiss of a sensual lover.

Niels moved; a dry twig snapped under his foot. Then he stood arrested again.

The woman’s right hand came up and grasped the head of the man from behind, holding it; and beyond and above the head her eyes appeared, staring straight at Niels.

She had heard the crackling of the twig. She knew he was there; and she perpetuated the attitude in which she had been caught, enjoying his dismay, perpetuated it for his leisurely inspection . . .

Her eyes held him, looking at him, derisively, looking at his shrinking figure and drooping head . . .

Thus the two, man and woman, stared at each other for half a minute . . .

That woman in front of him, in the arms of her lover, was insane . . .

Then the head of the man was lifted and obstructed the woman’s look.

During that fraction of a second Niels withdrew into the denser thicket behind.

He heard a laugh: the light, silvery laugh, not at all artificial, which had rung in his ears for days, years ago. It sounded so sane, contented, so natural that, for a moment, he doubted the very testimony of his eyes: what he had seen could not be reality!

Then he returned the way he had come. But he did not run this time; he went as if lost in thought. In truth he was not lost in thought: there was no thought in him; he was merely stunned.

He went past his farm, on to wild land, and sat down. He remained for hours. He was barely conscious . . .

It was late, after nine, when Niels appeared at the shack. He declined supper. But he attended himself to all those of the chores which necessitated entering the house. All else he left to Bobby.

Once more Niels was a changed man.

True, he rode the binder again: he drove the sheaves to the yard: he plowed the land.

But it was Bobby who did the farming. It was Bobby who planned and suggested, directed, instructed.

It was Bobby, too, who, when winter came began the work in the bush.

Only one single part of what had to be done on the place Niels attended to without being reminded of it: the part that had to be done in the house.

There, nothing betrayed that anybody was living in it: nothing except that the wood-box became empty, that the water in the pails sank lower, and that eggs, potatoes, meat were slowly, slowly getting less.

Niels watched this with fascination: he counted the things which thus disappeared.

Apart from that, the decay in Niels consisted more in a gradual disintegration of will and purpose.

He became indifferent to everything, even to his comfort. That he went on with the work, under Bobby’s direction, was merely because it was the easiest thing to do; it required no thought, no decision, no break with the past.

Winter went by; life went its way.

Bobby seeded his own farm, the quarter section that was to be his. He picked a four-horse team from among Niels’ colts, bargained for them with his employer, and paid in cash: he had the accumulated earnings of years. As for the farm, he would pay in half crops.

Bobby was loyal. Seeing that Niels was doing this for him, he would not leave him while he was what he was. But Bobby wanted to get married, to establish himself . . .

Well, even for that there would be a way pretty soon.

Haying time.

It was Bobby who rented a meadow where the two had never cut before. He was not working for wages in haying; he was working on shares with Niels.

The quarter next to the one he rented had been taken by Dahlbeck, the German settler on the bank of the creek.

Thus it came about that, whenever Bobby and Niels went out to the slough, in the early dawn, both sitting on their hay-racks, taking six horses, in front of them or behind them a third hay-rack would be moving along. On it sat Dahlbeck, pale, slim, and wiry; and by his side, the Dahlbeck woman, flashy, handsome in her coarse peasant way, and using her eyes to establish a bond between herself and Bobby or Niels . . .

Now it happened that Bobby—in an impulse of impatience at Niels’ lethargy—one evening when he was shaving turned about on him where he was sitting in front of his shack, in the dusk, and said jestingly, “Come on, Niels, let me give you a trimming, too.”

Niels looked at him, silently, with an almost forbidding disapproval of his jocularity.

But Bobby had already taken a pair of clippers. “Come on,” he repeated, “let me, eh?”

And Niels let him do as he pleased.

“The beard, too?” Bobby asked when he had finished the hair. And he laughed. “Come on, now. Be a sport. You look like Methuselah!”

Niels raised his chin. What did it matter? It was not worth while to resist. Besides, there was a feeling of physical comfort in the proceeding.

“Gee whiz!” Bobby exclaimed when he looked at his handiwork. “You’re a young man yet, Niels. I’d almost forgotten. I thought you were old enough to be my granddad by this time.”

Absent-mindedly Niels guided his finger-tips over his chin and nodded. He got up with a sigh and went about his chores.

There was one person who noticed the change at once next morning: the Dahlbeck woman as everybody called her. She glanced at Bobby and laughed; and Bobby smiled back.

It struck the boy that there was a resemblance between Dahlbeck and Niels: not in appearance or anything concrete; but in their outlook on life . . .

Niels and Bobby stacked in the slough; but Dahlbeck took all his dry hay home. The woman raked whenever he was gone; they had no horse-rake yet.

In the afternoon it so chanced that Bobby wished to draw a load home to be put in the loft of the stable. He and Dahlbeck started at the same time . . .

Niels was on the far side of the stack and never noticed the coincidence. He turned to the mower. That mower, Bobby had said, needed oiling; he knelt down to his task. The horses were standing north of him, their noses to the hay.

Suddenly the shadow of a figure fell across the grass in front of him. He winced; and as he looked up, there stood the Dahlbeck woman, laughing at his startled glance.

She said nothing. She merely looked at him and let herself down to a squatting posture.

Over them stood an almost cloudless sky. The summer had been that typical prairie season in which settled weather is broken only by swift, violent storms in which the equilibrium of the atmospheric forces is speedily re-established.

The slough about them was fragrant with the hot exhalations of the hay.

Niels had stopped in his work and was staring at her, the oil-can in his hand. At last he spoke, “What do you want?”

The woman laughed. She threw herself back in the loose hay that littered the ground. As she did so, her hat fell from her head, baring tightly rolled tresses of abundant, dark brown hair. Her skirt slipped up; the full, strong calves of her legs protruded.

“You!” she said in a whisper from which the heat of passion breathed.

Niels still knelt motionless. Pictures of the past flitted through his mind: the first that had come to him through many months. The frown on his brow deepened into a scowl.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said with distaste.

Once more she laughed; and she rolled over in the hay, closer to him, so that she nearly touched him. “Joseph!” she whispered mockingly.

That note of mockery called up the almost forgotten memory of her who was his wife as she had been one time and as she had had power over him in years gone by. A feeling of shame swept through him, unnerving his strength. His head sank down on his chest. He had no right to upbraid the woman . . .

He got up, threw the oil-can into the tool-box, and went over to where the horses stood. He picked their lines up and guided them to the mower. Nellie stepped over the pole. He hooked the traces into place.

The woman whose laughter had died away followed every one of his movements with her eye. It was she who was scowling now. And when he clicked his tongue to pull away from her, she sprang up and ran after him, catching hold of his shoulder. She was beside herself with rage.

“You hypocrite,” she hissed, “are you better than other people? I know you, you devil! You can’t play the innocent with me! No man can! You least of all! You married the district whore . . .”

And for several minutes she went on, pouring abuse from pent-up stores as foam boils from a brimming vessel.

But Niels did not hear. He had stopped. His knees shook under him. Lightning had struck him; and the flash had illumined the past as a flash of real lightning illumines a forest trail for him who travels in the dark, making every detail spring out of the night at once.

What, in the fraction of a second, he saw like a panorama, with hundreds of details, all simultaneously, was this: the hesitation of the woman when he had first mentioned marriage to her; Bobby’s silence when he had opened the gate for her and him; the atmosphere of a hollow void which had surrounded them when they had come to the Marsh to live; Nelson’s words, “You don’t mean to say that you don’t know?” and again, “Then I won’t tell you;” Hahn’s remark, “There’s one in every district. There’s one in yours;” and, much later, the woman’s words, “I gave myself, body and all . . . It was nothing to me!” Ellen’s “How could you? . . .”

All that and much more Niels saw and heard in that illuminating flash.

For a moment he felt that he must pitch forward and faint. Instinctively his trembling hand reached for the machine to steady his swaying body . . .

The woman saw it and stopped in her rush of words. Her eyes became wide. She realised what she had done: she had swung an axe into a great, towering tree; and the tree had crashed down at a single blow . . .

She let go of the man; and he dropped the lines and stumbled away . . .

When Bobby returned to the slough, sitting on his hay-rack, he found Dahlbeck and the woman at work.

The sun was setting.

He drove to the stack. Jock and Nellie were hitched to the mower; the lines were trailing behind; they were grazing, their heads bent low. The Clydes still stood at the stack, half asleep, one leg drawn up.

Niels was nowhere to be seen. The landscape presented the picture of evening peace.

Slowly Bobby went to the other side of the stack and called over to where Dahlbeck was working, “Seen anything of Lindstedt?”

Dahlbeck stopped his team. “No, not a thing.”

Bobby stood undecided. It struck him that the woman who was pitching the last of the day’s cutting into cocks did not even turn to look at him.

There was nothing to do but to load his rack as best he could alone.

He whistled away for a while as he went about the work. Then he became silent.

Soon after, the Dahlbecks left the slough on top of their load.

Bobby was by nature companionable. The great, hollow night that rose about him made him feel lonesome.

What was wrong that Niels should be gone?

It had never happened before . . . Yet, come to think of it, it had happened before: when they were cutting and stooking the grain in the harvest field . . . Niels had walked off; then, too, Bobby had been puzzled and worried. Niels was going to pieces, there could be no doubt. He was getting to be very queer . . .

A slow, numbing dread took hold of Bobby . . .

There was a memory in the boy’s mind, of his own foster-father, Lund, who had disappeared in the bush . . .

He began to hurry. He had only half filled his rack when he stopped. He pitched his fork up into the load and went to get the other horses. He tied them behind, all four, took his lines, climbed up, and drove through the slough to the road.

He had six miles to go; but the horses stepped briskly along.

What could be wrong?

The bush stood silent, motionless. Not a breath stirred. The creaking and rattling of the wheels echoed back to the driver who sat hushed on the load.

Now and then the horses snorted; they were wide awake; horses are watchful, scary at night.

At last they came to the east-west road leading to the corner of the bluff. There was the Dunsmore shack ahead, to the left; Dahlbeck’s place to the right. On the yard man and wife were pitching off their load.

Even here no sound except the desultory, almost hesitating bumps and screeches of the rack . . .

Then, ahead, against the paler sky of the west, the bluff loomed up, like a huge bowl inverted over . . . what?

To dispel the feeling of oppression Bobby began to whistle once more. He stopped at once: the sound jarred on the silence.

He turned the corner and came to the gate. He slipped from the load and stood, listening. Not a sound. Low in the west, the waxing sickle of the moon was hanging, a mere wisp, a little curve of light, about to set. There was no wind: but the leaves of the aspens in the bluff were rustling softly: they were never still . . .

On the yard, white buildings stood outlined against the sombre bush, some looming high: house, barn; some squatting low: pig-pens, cow-shed. Nowhere a light . . .

Bobby shivered.

He turned to the horses. They, too, listened to the silence. Their ears moved back and forth, jerkily.

To defend himself against the feeling of dread, the boy began for the third time to whistle. Again he stopped. The sound seemed like a profanation of something . . .

Quickly he opened the gate; the horses pulled at once, as if afraid of being left behind, alone . . .

A few minutes later Bobby had lighted a lantern; he unhitched and untied the horses. He opened the door of the stable. They knew their stalls and for the moment needed no further attention.

He picked the lantern up and ran to the shack. It was empty. The dishes and the stove had not been touched since dinner time. The alarm clock showed a quarter past nine . . .

“Well,” he muttered with a phrase of his mother’s, “I’ll be jiggered!”

He returned to the yard.

Once more he looked about and listened . . .

Incomprehensibly, uncannily, he was aware of a new accession of dread. A single, horizontal line of light showed in the upper east window of the house. During the past two years the house had often seemed spectral to him: never before as now.

Where was Niels?

Bobby shuddered. A feeling took hold of him as if from somewhere in the dark eyes were looking out at him.

A cow lowed on the open marsh . . .

Bobby awoke to life. The herd was coming home.

He went about his chores, pumped water, fed pigs . . .

The pigs knew the routine: when he entered the milk-house to stir shorts and barley into the milk, they ran along their fence, squealing . . .

In the cow-lot, after he had lighted a smudge, the swishing sound of the milk in the pails sounded like company, like a re-affirmation of the common workaday sanity of country life, shutting out the horrors that lurked somewhere . . .

Yet, where was Niels?

The moon had set; even the pallour in the north-west of the sky had darkened. It was night . . . Where was Niels?

There was the possibility that he might have gone to the shack meanwhile. No. The shack was empty as before. It was eleven o’clock.

Was he to look for him? Was he to give the alarm to the neighbours? . . . His foster-father had been helpless, half blind, half lame. He had been out of his senses . . .

Should he enter the house? . . . No. He could not face the woman . . .

He was hungry. He went to the shack again and lighted the stove. As he sat there, with the door open, the light of the lamp on the table falling slantways out on the little clearing and, beyond, among the white glistening boles of the young aspens, he, too, began to review what he knew of the woman in the great house, of her who had been the curse of the place . . .

He thought of the shock it had been to him when she had smiled down at him from the seat of the wagon, saying what she had said . . . He had never known much about her; but he had heard whispers, seen looks exchanged between grown-ups . . .

For a moment then, Niels had fallen in his esteem; till he had spoken to him in front of the stable . . . The tone of his voice as he had spoken to him! . . .

If only Niels would come home . . . Now . . . Quick . . .

He, Bobby, had sometimes felt harshly towards him, of late, when he had become so queer . . . He would never do so again if only . . .

He rose and busied himself with pots and pans.

Niels had been a father to him. He thought of a Sunday, years ago, when Niels had refused him a horse. “Not if you want to go to bad places . . .”

Once more Bobby went out on the yard, looking, listening . . . To the gate, peering along the road, north, south . . . Nothing . . .

It was after midnight when he returned to the shack. He was so worried he did not even enter; he merely glanced at the clock.

Then he squatted down on the ground, by the door . . .

Sleep must have overcome him at last. He was suddenly conscious of starting up. For several minutes he sat stock-still. He thought he had heard something. The first grey of dawn was hovering over the world. His clothes were damp with dew; he shivered . . . The stillness of death, except for the chirping of some bird . . .

He rose and went into the shack to lie down . . .

Then, just as a few minutes before, in his sleep, the sharp report of a shot . . .

With a jerk Bobby straightened, every muscle taut; drowsiness had fallen from him like a cloak.

He hurried back to the yard. He saw the stable door open, ran, and looked in.

There, in the cold, grey morning light stood Niels, the smoking gun still in his hand. And Jock, his horse, was convulsively kicking his last at his feet . . .

When Niels had left the slough, he had lost himself in the bush. He went blindly, with unseeing eyes, unthinking brain.

Like the bell of doom the woman’s words seemed to reverberate within a hollow vault of brass . . .

There had been thoughts, suspicions, almost certainties half faced. There never had been unescapable conviction . . . From all about him there was only one voice of the woman, “You have married the . . .”

He went blindly, stumbling over roots and stumps. He was bleeding from nose and forehead. He had lost his cap . . . He picked himself up again, fell again, tearing his clothes, bruising his limbs. He went on as an animal goes, wounded to death, seeking his lair, to hide himself . . .

He was in a trance. Three, four times he came out on the road. Instinctively he stopped, trying to focus eye and mind on it, swaying from side to side like one drunk. Then he turned back into the thickets behind.

Two, three hours went by that way.

Several times he sank to his knees, bending his body low, crouching in an agony of misery.

Had anybody met him and asked him, sternly, “What is that thought which is lurking beyond the edge of your world, ready to rise above the horizon?” he would have searched in his mind, sincerely, honestly; yet he would have found nothing but a painful, raw void to face, to probe into which without encountering anything was baffling, infinitely tormenting. He would have groaned as the man groans on whom a painful operation is being performed while he is under the influence of an anesthetic. Although the onlooker is, perhaps, from past experience, fully aware of the fact that he who lives in that body feels nothing, the groan sounds all the more pitiful, all the more enervating . . .

After hours of such somnambulism Niels found himself stopped by his own fence. Again he stood, one of his hands resting on the wire, as, with an infinite exertion, he tried to comprehend, to concentrate his mind on the thing that had stopped him.

And as soon as it entered his consciousness that these sloughs, these rising ridges, that bluff half a mile away were his, he turned back.

Behind him were other sloughs, swampy hollows, their soil churned up, trodden and trampled by wandering cattle into little hillocks tufted with grass, hardened by drying, with muddy holes in between where the feet of the heavy beasts had sunk deep.

Over these foot-traps he tottered, stumbled, fell headlong, picked himself up again . . .

Once more he was stopped by a fence. Again that slow, painful process of concentration began; again the fact filtered through the defences of his mind that the fence was his . . .

His lip curled in a physical sense of distaste; he turned back again. Dusk was rising . . .

When, an hour or so later, the fence stopped him for the third time, he did not turn back. For a while he stood like a man broken by a lifetime of work too heavy for him, bent over, one hand on the post, one on the wire . . . Then he tried to straddle the fence, stumbled back, and finally went down on his knees, thus crawling on to his own land where he lay, exhausted . . .

But some impulse was at work in him. Slowly he drew his legs up and raised himself on hands and knees; and at last he got up on his feet.

Within half an hour he found himself in a bluff of poplars. He felt his way from tree to tree, supporting himself by his hands, feeling up and down the ridged trunks as if searching for something.

In another half hour he was south of his yard; and then, behind the granary. Around its corners he groped his way . . .

When he reached the front, he attacked the door: it took several minutes to open it: his hands seemed to have lost the knack of lifting the latch.

It was a high step to take; and in attempting it he fell headlong. There was a pile of bags hung over the partition between bins. Niels pawed at it till they came down. Then he turned on his back, pushed the bags into a heap, and leaned against them . . .

There he sat, his knees drawn up, his forehead resting on them, his hands lying on the floor . . .

Occasionally he lifted his head, like an enormous burden which swayed on his neck, with that re-awaking and astonishment with which he who, having gone to sleep in his own bed, finds himself in a strange place would look about for something to recognise . . .

At first there was nothing but darkness.

At last a tiny speck of light stood out, just by the door, halfway up the jamb. It was reflected by a highly polished object hanging there: that must be the butt of the big-game rifle which he had bought for Bobby . . .

After many attempts to rise he crawled forward.

He had heard a noise: the creaking of a hay-rack, the slow step of horses, a snorting, the dull thud of the gate swinging against its stop.

The door had swung almost shut; he pushed it half open and lifted his legs over the edge of the threshold till he sat there, in the crack of the door.

Far out on the yard—the granary stood in a recess of the bush—the light of a lantern moved to and fro, about the stables, to the east. The lantern burned dimly: its glass was smoky . . .

A curious interest awoke in Niels. Unseen, he saw.

The lantern, bobbing up and down, crossed the whole length of the yard, moving quickly. Its dim light illuminated the running legs of the boy till the door, half shut, closed out the view.

From Niels’ throat came a sound as if he were chuckling.

The light returned. The boy was standing, looking, listening . . .

Niels’ eyes were fastened on him, out of the dark that screened him. The little dome of visibility ensphering the lantern did not reach to the granary.

Niels fought with himself to suppress his laughter. He was playing a prank. He saw, he was not seen . . .

The cows lowed. Bobby returned . . .

Niels began to dangle his feet, like a child, or like one who has been sick and has unlearned the art of walking: he delighted in the sense of the motion.

But when his heel struck the stones of the foundation below, he started and covered his mouth with his hand: a movement of childish mock fright . . .

Then, after many more comings and goings, Bobby left the yard not to return . . .

Long, long Niels sat and stared into the dark. There was just starlight enough to show the outlines.

It was all there, the whole picture of the yard, dim and quiet: without its details. His eyes were gradually, automatically adjusting themselves, so that, when they were called upon, they saw.

The call that came consisted in a change of the picture. It was long past midnight.

The line of light disappeared from the crack between blind and frame in the upper east window of the house . . .

Instantly Niels saw. He did not move. The change did not at once release any conscious reaction, any thought.

The next moment the light reappeared at the lower window, in front of the staircase, throwing a dim glow over the sward of grass on the yard. For a moment a figure appeared in the frame of the window; a woman in flimsy, gaudy undress. An arm, almost bare, reached up to draw the blind so that it intercepted the light.

Utter darkness fell, darker than before. But after a minute or so, very dim, almost divined, the light fell into the lane between kitchen and garden.

Niels sat very still, frowning.

A whole, forgotten world came back to him: a distasteful world, not in keeping with his animal comfort.

He wanted to put the thought away as it tried to emerge. He was tempted to brush it from his brow with his hand. But he did not move. His hands rested alongside his thighs, on the threshold of the door. His body was bent forward. His muscles were tightening, slackening, in reflex action . . .

He stared and did not move.

In his mind, in the background of his memory, proceeding from the faintest adumbration of some great fact dominating his life, a question crystalised . . .

What had all this to do with him?

With that problem he wrestled for an hour.

Again a change in the picture of the yard. Once more the light went on its progress downward in the house.

And this time, what he saw connected itself with the past, suddenly, without any slow development or unfolding. The whole antecedents of the present moment stood before his mind as if he were living them within fractions of a second: it was like a dream which, retrospectively, motivates a sound or other perception received in sleep.

His muscles tightened and remained tight. It was as if a powerful spring inside of him had been tightly wound and then arrested by some catch, either to snap under the strain or to unroll itself in the natural way by setting some complicated wheel-work into irresistible motion, grinding up what might come in its way or attempt to stop it.

Wave after wave of hot blood went through his body, lapping up into his brain, breaking there, flooding his consciousness with an opaque, scarlet flood . . .

He raised himself on his feet, without swaying, and stood. Then it was as if a cruel wrench had been given that spring inside of him, tightening it to the breaking point. And as that point was reached, he moved.

He moved with tremendous speed.

The next moment he stood at the door of the house and threw it open.

Voices from the back room; laughing voices.

“Sh-sh!”

“Nonsense! Who’d come at this time of night?”

A third voice, whispering.

A roar of laughter . . .

That released the tightly wound spring. Irresistibly a clockwork began to move. There was not a spark of consciousness in Niels. He acted entirely under the compulsion of the spring.

He remembered later, much later . . .

He was back at the granary and reached into the door for the gun. He made sure it was loaded.

Again he crossed the yard and entered the house, noisily, without taking precautions.

He went through the front room and threw the door to the dining room open.

There, consternation had done its work.

A man’s figure, half clad, was vaulting through the open window to the right; a second one was fleeing through the door into the kitchen.

At the left, the woman was sitting, her face made up, her body wrapped in silks . . .

On the table dishes, plates, cups, a biscuit-bowl, a tea-pot . . .

The woman rose, a half frightened, half triumphant smile on her face. She sought his eyes; but she looked into the barrel of the gun.

The shot rang out.

She screamed and ran for the kitchen door, upsetting a chair on her way. But before she reached it, she fell, flinging her arms and kicking her feet so that a silken slipper fell in the centre of the table.

Then she went quiet and lay in a heap.

Niels had already turned, slamming both doors as he went. Again he crossed the yard. He entered the stable. He could never remember why he had done so. He went through the driveway and east, towards the horse-lot.

There, in this short aisle, in neighbouring stalls, stood Jock and Nellie, just visible in the dim light of dawn.

Niels, swaying again, came very near to the rump of the gelding.

Jock, as the door was opened, had turned his head. When his master swayed near him, he, expecting a blow, kicked out.

Niels raised his gun and shot the gelding through the head . . .

All that day Niels slept: a deep, sunken sleep.

Bobby had pulled the dead horse out of the stable, putting the chain around his rigid hind legs and hitching the Clydes to the chain. It would have seemed a sacrilege to use the young Percherons for such a purpose.

Niels slept.

Bobby did the chores. He milked the cows, watered the cattle, and let them out on the Marsh. He brushed the horses, untied them, and opened the door to the lot.

Niels slept.

Bobby manoeuvred the hay-rack against the door of the stable and pitched the hay into the loft.

Niels slept.

Bobby was now convinced that he had heard two shots. He looked Jock over. He found only one bullet-hole.

He went to the shack and fetched the rifle. Its capacity was five shots; it had been fully loaded. There were three shells left.

Bobby looked at the house that stood in the morning sun as it had stood there on every day since he had known it. There was something uncanny about it.

He shuddered. What was he to do?

He could not go to the hay-slough alone this morning.

Niels had not said a word. He had thrown the rifle over his shoulder and gone to the shack, slowly, steadily, soberly. There, he had flung himself on the bed, in his clothes, vouchsafing no information, inviting no question, answering no enquiring look . . .

“Don’t you want breakfast?” Bobby had asked.

Niels had already been asleep.

Bobby went all around the house. The east window of the dining room, on the north side, was open.

Should he look in? He could fetch the saw-buck or a truss from the milk-house to stand on.

He did not go. He was afraid to look in.

He returned to the yard, picked the rifle up where he had left it leaning against the stable, broke the barrel, and emptied the remaining shells into his hand.

Something frightful had happened. What?

He felt disconsolate.

Niels had never owned shotgun or rifle.

But one day, in winter, a year or two ago, Bobby and Niels had been coming from the shack; and there, in the first, frosty light of the morning, they had seen a moose standing at the far corner of the garden-lot, head thrown high, mobile nostrils aquiver to catch a scent . . . Both men had stopped in their tracks. Then Bobby, bending down, had picked up a stick and sprung forward, levelling it like a gun at his shoulder, shouting, “Bang . . . Bang!” Whereupon the noble animal, all nerves and trembling muscle, had reared up and disappeared in long, graceful bounds. “What a pity,” Bobby had exclaimed, “that we haven’t a gun!” Niels had shrugged his shoulders. But the next time he had gone to town he had brought back this rifle for Bobby. It had never been used except for practice and in fun . . .

If it had not been for him, Bobby, there would have been no fire-arms on the place . . .

Many times, during the forenoon, Bobby went to the shack. Niels never stirred.

Bobby became hungry. But Niels needed the rest. He merely fetched some bread and a cup, went to the pump, drew fresh water, and sat down to munch his crusts . . .

Bobby had no education. If you had asked him what a tragedy is, he could not have answered. But he felt that a tragedy had been enacted in the house . . .

Niels had been young, strong, enormously strong, handsome, clean, competent . . . yes, and good! Bobby had seen him decaying, slowly, steadily, irrevocably. Now that he came to think about it and looked back at what he had been during the last few months, he felt profoundly shaken; he felt shattered in his belief in the firm foundations of life . . . His own life would have to be lived under the shadow of what had happened to Niels, of what would happen to him . . . He could never be the same carefree boy again . . .

He had often, of late, heard Niels mutter certain words. On this summer day they took a meaning for Bobby. “And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow . . .”

He had been happy, constitutionally happy. He would never be quite so happy again; but he would be more thoughtful . . .

More thoughtful? Had he not been thoughtful enough in the past?

On the contrary, had he been thoughtful in his relation to Niels? Had he not often, of late, been impatient with him? Had he not shrunk from the careless, untidy habits into which he had fallen?

Bobby, young as he was, came to know the bitterness of regret and repentence . . .

Several times he rose, walked about, fought down his sobs . . .

Niels lay like a log.

All life on the Marsh would be changed . . .

Slowly the sun rode on and finally sank to the west.

At last, late in the evening, when his rays came almost parallel with the ground, Niels awoke.

He raised himself till he was sitting on his bed, his feet on the floor, his shoulders curved forward, his hands lying by his sides. As Bobby darkened the door, he looked up. His eye was clear; but his look came from another world.

“It’s evening, is it?” he asked. His voice, too, sounded as from an infinite distance.

Bobby nodded, a lump in his throat.

“Get something to eat,” Niels said without stirring.

Bobby began to work as if a great deal depended on his speed. His hands shook. He dropped this, spilt that. He started a fire, fried eggs, made tea.

Niels got up, slowly, heavily, stretched himself, and went out to where the wash-basin stood on a homemade bench.

There he washed, slowly, painstakingly, splashing and brushing for fully five minutes.

With the same painstaking care he dried face, neck, arms.

When he re-entered the shack, he sat down at the table, heavily, as if his weight had increased tenfold.

Bobby, too, sat down. But he could not eat for the dull, numbing excitement that was in him.

Every now and then, while Niels satisfied his appetite, eating slowly, but in great, enormous bites, his eye rested for a moment on the boy.

He finished and made an attempt to rise: the attempt failed or was given up. At last he pointed over the table, with a sweep of his arm.

“Clear that off.”

When Bobby, working feverishly, had done so, Niels added, “Bring pen and ink. And the bundle of papers from the cupboard.”

Niels lifted his arms on to the table as if they were weighted with lead.

He tore the string that held the bundle of papers and picked out his cheque-book and a large, folded parchment. He tried to remove the stopper from the ink bottle. Failing, he said, “Open that.”

He dipped the pen and began to write, in large, stiff, unwieldy scrawls. When he had finished, he wheeled about on his chair, nearly falling.

“Bobby,” he said as if speaking, too, were very difficult, “there’s the patent for my land. It’s yours. With all that’s on it. Here’s a cheque. There’s something owing on the other quarter. It’s the full amount. I won’t be back.”

“Niels,” Bobby cried, almost choking with sobs, “what have you done?”

“I?” Niels said with a sudden flicker in his eye. “I have killed my wife.”

“O God!” Bobby groaned. “I was afraid that was it.”

“Afraid?” Niels said slowly and sternly. “What have you to be afraid of? You’ve been a son to me. I leave you my property.”

“Niels,” Bobby cried. He would have liked to throw himself on this man, to hold him, to shield him with his body.

Niels waved him back.

“Niels,” Bobby cried again, “what are you going to do? You must hide . . .”

“Hide? No. I am going to town.”

And slowly, heavily he rose and went to the door, Bobby was beside himself.

Niels turned back, swallowing two, three times.

“Bobby,” he said at last, “you’ve been a son to me. I want . . . I want to thank you . . .”

“Don’t!” Bobby cried, flinging his arms up. “I can’t stand it . . .”

“Stand it?” Niels repeated. “I am going to town to hand myself over.” He took a step or two till he stood in the middle of the little clearing. “Don’t try to hold me. Don’t follow me.”

Bobby did not move. He stared at the man.

Niels stood for another few minutes, his lips muttering words.

Then, mastering his refractory body, he pulled himself up; and for a moment his voice became articulate and distinct, though not loud.

“. . . Hanged by the neck until dead . . .”

Everything seemed to turn about Bobby.

Then, when he looked again, the man on the clearing was gone.