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Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
Release Date: May, 2002 [Etext #3237]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
[The actual date this file first posted = 02/05/01]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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The Wild Land I
One January day,
thirty years ago,
the little town of Hanover,
anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland,
was trying not
to be blown away.
A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie,
under a gray sky.
The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod;
some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight,
and others as if they were straying off by themselves,
headed straight
for the open plain.
None of them had any appearance of permanence,
and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.
The main street was a deeply rutted road,
now frozen hard,
which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain
"elevator"
at the north end of the town
to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end.
On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings;
the general merchandise stores,
the two banks,
the drug store,
the feed store,
the saloon,
the post-office.
The board sidewalks were gray
with trampled snow,
but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers,
having come back from dinner,
were keeping well behind their frosty windows.
The children were all in school,
and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats,
with their long caps pulled down
to their noses.
Some of them had brought their wives
to town,
and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another.
At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses,
harnessed
to farm wagons,
shivered under their blankets.
About the station everything was quiet,
for there would not be another train in until night.
On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy,
crying bitterly.
He was about five years old.
His black cloth coat was much too big
for him and made him look like a little old man.
His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt and the tops of his clumsy,
copper-toed shoes.
His cap was pulled down over his ears;
his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red
with cold.
He cried quietly,
and the few people who hurried by did not notice him.
He was afraid
to stop any one,
afraid
to go into the store and ask
for help,
so he sat wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him,
whimpering,
"My kitten,
oh,
my kitten! Her will fweeze!"
At the top of the pole crouched a shivering gray kitten,
mewing faintly and clinging desperately
to the wood
with her claws.
The boy had been left at the store while his sister went
to the doctor's office,
and in her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole.
The little creature had never been so high before,
and she was too frightened
to move.
Her master was sunk in despair.
He was a little country boy,
and this village was
to him a very strange and perplexing place,
where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts.
He always felt shy and awkward here,
and wanted
to hide behind things
for fear some one might laugh at him.
Just now,
he was too unhappy
to care who laughed.
At last he seemed
to see a ray of hope:
his sister was coming,
and he got up and ran toward her in his heavy shoes.
His sister was a tall,
strong girl,
and she walked rapidly and resolutely,
as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going
to do next.
She wore a man's long ulster
(not as if it were an affliction,
but as if it were very comfortable and belonged
to her;
carried it like a young soldier),
and a round plush cap,
tied down
with a thick veil.
She had a serious,
thoughtful face,
and her clear,
deep blue eyes were fixed intently on the distance,
without seeming
to see anything,
as if she were in trouble.
She did not notice the little boy until he pulled her by the coat.
Then she stopped short and stooped down
to wipe his wet face.
"Why,
Emil! I told you
to stay in the store and not
to come out.
What is the matter
with you?"
"My kitten,
sister,
my kitten! A man put her out,
and a dog chased her up there."
His forefinger,
projecting from the sleeve of his coat,
pointed up
to the wretched little creature on the pole.
"Oh,
Emil! Didn't I tell you she'd get us into trouble of some kind,
if you brought her?
What made you tease me so?
But there,
I ought
to have known better myself."
She went
to the foot of the pole and held out her arms,
crying,
"Kitty,
kitty,
kitty,"
but the kitten only mewed and faintly waved its tail.
Alexandra turned away decidedly.
"No,
she won't come down.
Somebody will have
to go up after her.
I saw the Linstrums'
wagon in town.
I'll go and see if I can find Carl.
Maybe he can do something.
Only you must stop crying,
or I won't go a step.
Where's your comforter?
Did you leave it in the store?
Never mind.
Hold still,
till I put this on you."
She unwound the brown veil from her head and tied it about his throat.
A shabby little traveling man,
who was just then coming out of the store on his way
to the saloon,
stopped and gazed stupidly at the shining mass of hair she bared when she took off her veil;
two thick braids,
pinned about her head in the German way,
with a fringe of reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap.
He took his cigar out of his mouth and held the wet end between the fingers of his woolen glove.
"My God,
girl,
what a head of hair!"
he exclaimed,
quite innocently and foolishly.
She stabbed him
with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip--most unnecessary severity.
It gave the little clothing drummer such a start that he actually let his cigar fall
to the sidewalk and went off weakly in the teeth of the wind
to the saloon.
His hand was still unsteady when he took his glass from the bartender.
His feeble flirtatious instincts had been crushed before,
but never so mercilessly.
He felt cheap and ill-used,
as if some one had taken advantage of him.
When a drummer had been knocking about in little drab towns and crawling across the wintry country in dirty smokingcars,
was he
to be blamed if,
when he chanced upon a fine human creature,
he suddenly wished himself more of a man?
While the little drummer was drinking
to recover his nerve,
Alexandra hurried
to the drug store as the most likely place
to find Carl Linstrum.
There he was,
turning over a portfolio of chromo
"studies"
which the druggist sold
to the Hanover women who did chinapainting.
Alexandra explained her predicament,
and the boy followed her
to the corner,
where Emil still sat by the pole.
"I'll have
to go up after her,
Alexandra.
I think at the depot they have some spikes I can strap on my feet.
Wait a minute."
Carl thrust his hands into his pockets,
lowered his head,
and darted up the street against the north wind.
He was a tall boy of fifteen,
slight and narrow-chested.
When he came back
with the spikes,
Alexandra asked him what he had done
with his overcoat.
"I left it in the drug store.
I couldn't climb in it,
anyhow.
Catch me if I fall,
Emil,"
he called back as he began his ascent.
Alexandra watched him anxiously;
the cold was bitter enough on the ground.
The kitten would not budge an inch.
Carl had
to go
to the very top of the pole,
and then had some difficulty in tearing her from her hold.
When he reached the ground,
he handed the cat
to her tearful little master.
"Now go into the store
with her,
Emil,
and get warm."
He opened the door
for the child.
"Wait a minute,
Alexandra.
Why can't I drive
for you as far as our place?
It's getting colder every minute.
Have you seen the doctor?"
"Yes.
He is coming over to-morrow.
But he says father can't get better;
can't get well."
The girl's lip trembled.
She looked fixedly up the bleak street as if she were gathering her strength
to face something,
as if she were trying
with all her might
to grasp a situation which,
no matter how painful,
must be met and dealt
with somehow.
The wind flapped the skirts of her heavy coat about her.
Carl did not say anything,
but she felt his sympathy.
He,
too,
was lonely.
He was a thin,
frail boy,
with brooding dark eyes,
very quiet in all his movements.
There was a delicate pallor in his thin face,
and his mouth was too sensitive
for a boy's.
The lips had already a little curl of bitterness and skepticism.
The two friends stood
for a few moments on the windy street corner,
not speaking a word,
as two travelers,
who have lost their way,
sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence.
When Carl turned away he said,
"I'll see
to your team."
Alexandra went into the store
to have her purchases packed in the egg-boxes,
and
to get warm before she set out on her long cold drive.
When she looked
for Emil,
she found him sitting on a step of the staircase that led up
to the clothing and carpet department.
He was playing
with a little Bohemian girl,
Marie Tovesky,
who was tying her handkerchief over the kitten's head
for a bonnet.
Marie was a stranger in the country,
having come from Omaha
with her mother
to visit her uncle,
Joe Tovesky.
She was a dark child,
with brown curly hair,
like a brunette doll's,
a coaxing little red mouth,
and round,
yellow-brown eyes.
Every one noticed her eyes;
the brown iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone,
or,
in softer lights,
like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.
The country children thereabouts wore their dresses
to their shoe-tops,
but this city child was dressed in what was then called the
"Kate Greenaway"
manner,
and her red cashmere frock,
gathered full from the yoke,
came almost
to the floor.
This,
with her poke bonnet,
gave her the look of a quaint little woman.
She had a white fur tippet about her neck and made no fussy objections when Emil fingered it admiringly.
Alexandra had not the heart
to take him away from so pretty a playfellow,
and she let them tease the kitten together until Joe Tovesky came in noisily and picked up his little niece,
setting her on his shoulder
for every one
to see.
His children were all boys,
and he adored this little creature.
His cronies formed a circle about him,
admiring and teasing the little girl,
who took their jokes
with great good nature.
They were all delighted
with her,
for they seldom saw so pretty and carefully nurtured a child.
They told her that she must choose one of them
for a sweetheart,
and each began pressing his suit and offering her bribes;
candy,
and little pigs,
and spotted calves.
She looked archly into the big,
brown,
mustached faces,
smelling of spirits and tobacco,
then she ran her tiny forefinger delicately over Joe's bristly chin and said,
"Here is my sweetheart."
The Bohemians roared
with laughter,
and Marie's uncle hugged her until she cried,
"Please don't,
Uncle Joe! You hurt me."
Each of Joe's friends gave her a bag of candy,
and she kissed them all around,
though she did not like country candy very well.
Perhaps that was why she bethought herself of Emil.
"Let me down,
Uncle Joe,"
she said,
"I want
to give some of my candy
to that nice little boy I found."
She walked graciously over
to Emil,
followed by her lusty admirers,
who formed a new circle and teased the little boy until he hid his face in his sister's skirts,
and she had
to scold him
for being such a baby.
The farm people were making preparations
to start
for home.
The women were checking over their groceries and pinning their big red shawls about their heads.
The men were buying tobacco and candy
with what money they had left,
were showing each other new boots and gloves and blue flannel shirts.
Three big Bohemians were drinking raw alcohol,
tinctured
with oil of cinnamon.
This was said
to fortify one effectually against the cold,
and they smacked their lips after each pull at the flask.
Their volubility drowned every other noise in the place,
and the overheated store sounded of their spirited language as it reeked of pipe smoke,
damp woolens,
and kerosene.
Carl came in,
wearing his overcoat and carrying a wooden box
with a brass handle.
"Come,"
he said,
"I've fed and watered your team,
and the wagon is ready."
He carried Emil out and tucked him down in the straw in the wagonbox.
The heat had made the little boy sleepy,
but he still clung
to his kitten.
"You were awful good
to climb so high and get my kitten,
Carl.
When I get big I'll climb and get little boys'
kittens
for them,"
he murmured drowsily.
Before the horses were over the first hill,
Emil and his cat were both fast asleep.
Although it was only four o'clock,
the winter day was fading.
The road led southwest,
toward the streak of pale,
watery light that glimmered in the leaden sky.
The light fell upon the two sad young faces that were turned mutely toward it:
upon the eyes of the girl,
who seemed
to be looking
with such anguished perplexity into the future;
upon the sombre eyes of the boy,
who seemed already
to be looking into the past.
The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been,
had fallen behind the swell of the prairie,
and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom.
The homesteads were few and far apart;
here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky,
a sod house crouching in a hollow.
But the great fact was the land itself,
which seemed
to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter;
because he felt that men were too weak
to make any mark here,
that the land wanted
to be let alone,
to preserve its own fierce strength,
its peculiar,
savage kind of beauty,
its uninterrupted mournfulness.
The wagon jolted along over the frozen road.
The two friends had less
to say
to each other than usual,
as if the cold had somehow penetrated
to their hearts.
"Did Lou and Oscar go
to the Blue
to cut wood to-day?"
Carl asked.
"Yes.
I'm almost sorry I let them go,
it's turned so cold.
But mother frets if the wood gets low."
She stopped and put her hand
to her forehead,
brushing back her hair.
"I don't know what is
to become of us,
Carl,
if father has
to die.
I don't dare
to think about it.
I wish we could all go
with him and let the grass grow back over everything."
Carl made no reply.
Just ahead of them was the Norwegian graveyard,
where the grass had,
indeed,
grown back over everything,
shaggy and red,
hiding even the wire fence.
Carl realized that he was not a very helpful companion,
but there was nothing he could say.
"Of course,"
Alexandra went on,
steadying her voice a little,
"the boys are strong and work hard,
but we've always depended so on father that I don't see how we can go ahead.
I almost feel as if there were nothing
to go ahead for."
"Does your father know?"
"Yes,
I think he does.
He lies and counts on his fingers all day.
I think he is trying
to count up what he is leaving
for us.
It's a comfort
to him that my chickens are laying right on through the cold weather and bringing in a little money.
I wish we could keep his mind off such things,
but I don't have much time
to be
with him now."
"I wonder if he'd like
to have me bring my magic lantern over some evening?"
Alexandra turned her face toward him.
"Oh,
Carl! Have you got it?"
"Yes.
It's back there in the straw.
Didn't you notice the box I was carrying?
I tried it all morning in the drug-store cellar,
and it worked ever so well,
makes fine big pictures."
"What are they about?"
"Oh,
hunting pictures in Germany,
and Robinson Crusoe and funny pictures about cannibals.
I'm going
to paint some slides
for it on glass,
out of the Hans Andersen book."
Alexandra seemed actually cheered.
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had
to grow up too soon.
"Do bring it over,
Carl.
I can hardly wait
to see it,
and I'm sure it will please father.
Are the pictures colored?
Then I know he'll like them.
He likes the calendars I get him in town.
I wish I could get more.
You must leave me here,
mustn't you?
It's been nice
to have company."
Carl stopped the horses and looked dubiously up at the black sky.
"It's pretty dark.
Of course the horses will take you home,
but I think I'd better light your lantern,
in case you should need it."
He gave her the reins and climbed back into the wagon-box,
where he crouched down and made a tent of his overcoat.
After a dozen trials he succeeded in lighting the lantern,
which he placed in front of Alexandra,
half covering it
with a blanket so that the light would not shine in her eyes.
"Now,
wait until I find my box.
Yes,
here it is.
Good-night,
Alexandra.
Try not
to worry."
Carl sprang
to the ground and ran off across the fields toward the Linstrum homestead.
"Hoo,
hoo-o-o-o!"
he called back as he disappeared over a ridge and dropped into a sand gully.
The wind answered him like an echo,
"Hoo,
hoo-o-o-o-o-o!"
Alexandra drove off alone.
The rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind,
but her lantern,
held firmly between her feet,
made a moving point of light along the highway,
going deeper and deeper into the dark country.
II On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house in which John Bergson was dying.
The Bergson homestead was easier
to find than many another,
because it overlooked Norway Creek,
a shallow,
muddy stream that sometimes flowed,
and sometimes stood still,
at the bottom of a winding ravine
with steep,
shelving sides overgrown
with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash.
This creek gave a sort of identity
to the farms that bordered upon it.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country,
the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
The houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away in low places;
you did not see them until you came directly upon them.
Most of them were built of the sod itself,
and were only the unescapable ground in another form.
The roads were but faint tracks in the grass,
and the fields were scarcely noticeable.
The record of the plow was insignificant,
like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races,
so indeterminate that they may,
after all,
be only the markings of glaciers,
and not a record of human strivings.
In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come
to tame.
It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods;
and no one knew when they were likely
to come,
or why.
Mischance hung over it.
Its Genius was unfriendly
to man.
The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of the window,
after the doctor had left him,
on the day following Alexandra's trip
to town.
There it lay outside his door,
the same land,
the same lead-colored miles.
He knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon.
To the south,
his plowed fields;
to the east,
the sod stables,
the cattle corral,
the pond,
--and then the grass.
Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back.
One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard.
The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had
to be shot.
Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera,
and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite.
Time and again his crops had failed.
He had lost two children,
boys,
that came between Lou and Emil,
and there had been the cost of sickness and death.
Now,
when he had at last struggled out of debt,
he was going
to die himself.
He was only forty-six,
and had,
of course,
counted upon more time.
Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt,
and the last six getting out.
He had paid off his mortgages and had ended pretty much where he began,
with the land.
He owned exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his door;
his own original homestead and timber claim,
making three hundred and twenty acres,
and the halfsection adjoining,
the homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight,
gone back
to Chicago
to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself in a Swedish athletic club.
So far John had not attempted
to cultivate the second half-section,
but used it
for pasture land,
and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.
John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land,
in itself,
is desirable.
But this land was an enigma.
It was like a horse that no one knows how
to break
to harness,
that runs wild and kicks things
to pieces.
He had an idea that no one understood how
to farm it properly,
and this he often discussed
with Alexandra.
Their neighbors,
certainly,
knew even less about farming than he did.
Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their homesteads.
They had been HANDWERKERS at home;
tailors,
locksmiths,
joiners,
cigarmakers,
etc.
Bergson himself had worked in a shipyard.
For weeks,
John Bergson had been thinking about these things.
His bed stood in the sittingroom,
next
to the kitchen.
Through the day,
while the baking and washing and ironing were going on,
the father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had hewn,
or out at the cattle in the corral.
He counted the cattle over and over.
It diverted him
to speculate as
to how much weight each of the steers would probably put on by spring.
He often called his daughter in
to talk
to her about this.
Before Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun
to be a help
to him,
and as she grew older he had come
to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness and good judgment.
His boys were willing enough
to work,
but when he talked
with them they usually irritated him.
It was Alexandra who read the papers and followed the markets,
and who learned by the mistakes of their neighbors.
It was Alexandra who could always tell about what it had cost
to fatten each steer,
and who could guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than John Bergson himself.
Lou and Oscar were industrious,
but he could never teach them
to use their heads about their work.
Alexandra,
her father often said
to himself,
was like her grandfather;
which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.
John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder,
a man of considerable force and of some fortune.
Late in life he married a second time,
a Stockholm woman of questionable character,
much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extravagance.
On the shipbuilder's part,
this marriage was an infatuation,
the despairing folly of a powerful man who cannot bear
to grow old.
In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime.
He speculated,
lost his own fortune and funds entrusted
to him by poor seafaring men,
and died disgraced,
leaving his children nothing.
But when all was said,
he had come up from the sea himself,
had built up a proud little business
with no capital but his own skill and foresight,
and had proved himself a man.
In his daughter,
John Bergson recognized the strength of will,
and the simple direct way of thinking things out,
that had characterized his father in his better days.
He would much rather,
of course,
have seen this likeness in one of his sons,
but it was not a question of choice.
As he lay there day after day he had
to accept the situation as it was,
and
to be thankful that there was one among his children
to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land.
The winter twilight was fading.
The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen,
and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door.
It seemed like a light shining far away.
He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands,
with all the work gone out of them.
He was ready
to give up,
he felt.
He did not know how it had come about,
but he was quite willing
to go deep under his fields and rest,
where the plow could not find him.
He was tired of making mistakes.
He was content
to leave the tangle
to other hands;
he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.
"DOTTER,"
he called feebly,
"DOTTER!"
He heard her quick step and saw her tall figure appear in the doorway,
with the light of the lamp behind her.
He felt her youth and strength,
how easily she moved and stooped and lifted.
But he would not have had it again if he could,
not he! He knew the end too well
to wish
to begin again.
He knew where it all went to,
what it all became.
His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows.
She called him by an old Swedish name that she used
to call him when she was little and took his dinner
to him in the shipyard.
"Tell the boys
to come here,
daughter.
I want
to speak
to them."
"They are feeding the horses,
father.
They have just come back from the Blue.
Shall I call them?"
He sighed.
"No,
no.
Wait until they come in.
Alexandra,
you will have
to do the best you can
for your brothers.
Everything will come on you."
"I will do all I can,
father."
"Don't let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto.
I want them
to keep the land."
"We will,
father.
We will never lose the land."
There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen.
Alexandra went
to the door and beckoned
to her brothers,
two strapping boys of seventeen and nineteen.
They came in and stood at the foot of the bed.
Their father looked at them searchingly,
though it was too dark
to see their faces;
they were just the same boys,
he told himself,
he had not been mistaken in them.
The square head and heavy shoulders belonged
to Oscar,
the elder.
The younger boy was quicker,
but vacillating.
"Boys,"
said the father wearily,
"I want you
to keep the land together and
to be guided by your sister.
I have talked
to her since I have been sick,
and she knows all my wishes.
I want no quarrels among my children,
and so long as there is one house there must be one head.
Alexandra is the oldest,
and she knows my wishes.
She will do the best she can.
If she makes mistakes,
she will not make so many as I have made.
When you marry,
and want a house of your own,
the land will be divided fairly,
according
to the courts.
But
for the next few years you will have it hard,
and you must all keep together.
Alexandra will manage the best she can."
Oscar,
who was usually the last
to speak,
replied because he was the older,
"Yes,
father.
It would be so anyway,
without your speaking.
We will all work the place together."
"And you will be guided by your sister,
boys,
and be good brothers
to her,
and good sons
to your mother?
That is good.
And Alexandra must not work in the fields any more.
There is no necessity now.
Hire a man when you need help.
She can make much more
with her eggs and butter than the wages of a man.
It was one of my mistakes that I did not find that out sooner.
Try
to break a little more land every year;
sod corn is good
for fodder.
Keep turning the land,
and always put up more hay than you need.
Don't grudge your mother a little time
for plowing her garden and setting out fruit trees,
even if it comes in a busy season.
She has been a good mother
to you,
and she has always When they went back
to the kitchen the boys sat down silently at the table.
Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates and did not lift their red eyes.
They did not eat much,
although they had been working in the cold all day,
and there was a rabbit stewed in gravy
for supper,
and prune pies.
John Bergson had married beneath him,
but he had married a good housewife.
Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned,
corpulent woman,
heavy and placid like her son,
Oscar,
but there was something comfortable about her;
perhaps it was her own love of comfort.
For eleven years she had worthily striven
to maintain some semblance of household order amid conditions that made order very difficult.
Habit was very strong
with Mrs. Bergson,
and her unremitting efforts
to repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done a great deal
to keep the family from disintegrating morally and getting careless in their ways.
The Bergsons had a log house,
for instance,
only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.
She missed the fish diet of her own country,
and twice every summer she sent the boys
to the river,
twenty miles
to the southward,
to fish
for channel cat.
When the children were little she used
to load them all into the wagon,
the baby in its crib,
and go fishing herself.
Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island,
she would thank God
for her deliverance,
make a garden,
and find something
to preserve.
Preserving was almost a mania
with Mrs. Bergson.
Stout as she was,
she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking
for fox grapes and goose plums,
like a wild creature in search of prey.
She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie,
flavoring it
with lemon peel;
and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes.
She had experimented even
with the rank buffalo-pea,
and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and murmuring,
"What a pity!"
When there was nothing more
to preserve,
she began
to pickle.
The amount of sugar she used in these processes was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources.
She was a good mother,
but she was glad when her children were old enough not
to be in her way in the kitchen.
She had never quite forgiven John Bergson
for bringing her
to the end of the earth;
but,
now that she was there,
she wanted
to be let alone
to reconstruct her old life in so far as that was possible.
She could still take some comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave,
glass jars on the shelves,
and sheets in the press.
She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping,
and the women thought her very proud.
Once when Mrs. Bergson,
on her way
to Norway Creek,
stopped
to see old Mrs. Lee,
the old woman hid in the haymow
"for fear Mis'
Bergson would catch her barefoot."
III One Sunday afternoon in July,
six months after John Bergson's death,
Carl was sitting in the doorway of the Linstrum kitchen,
dreaming over an illustrated paper,
when he heard the rattle of a wagon along the hill road.
Looking up he recognized the Bergsons'
team,
with two seats in the wagon,
which meant they were off
for a pleasure excursion.
Oscar and Lou,
on the front seat,
wore their cloth hats and coats,
never worn except on Sundays,
and Emil,
on the second seat
with Alexandra,
sat proudly in his new trousers,
made from a pair of his father's,
and a pink-striped shirt,
with a wide ruffled collar.
Oscar stopped the horses and waved
to Carl,
who caught up his hat and ran through the melon patch
to join them.
"Want
to go
with us?"
Lou called.
"We're going
to Crazy Ivar's
to buy a hammock."
"Sure."
Carl ran up panting,
and clambering over the wheel sat down beside Emil.
"I've always wanted
to see Ivar's pond.
They say it's the biggest in all the country.
Aren't you afraid
to go
to Ivar's in that new shirt,
Emil?
He might want it and take it right off your back."
Emil grinned.
"I'd be awful scared
to go,"
he admitted,
"if you big boys weren't along
to take care of me.
Did you ever hear him howl,
Carl?
People say sometimes he runs about the country howling at night because he is afraid the Lord will destroy him.
Mother thinks he must have done something awful wicked."
Lou looked back and winked at Carl.
"What would you do,
Emil,
if you was out on the prairie by yourself and seen him coming?"
Emil stared.
"Maybe I could hide in a badger-hole,"
he suggested doubtfully.
"But suppose there wasn't any badger-hole,"
Lou persisted.
"Would you run?"
"No,
I'd be too scared
to run,"
Emil admitted mournfully,
twisting his fingers.
"I guess I'd sit right down on the ground and say my prayers."
The big boys laughed,
and Oscar brandished his whip over the broad backs of the horses.
"He wouldn't hurt you,
Emil,"
said Carl persuasively.
"He came
to doctor our mare when she ate green corn and swelled up most as big as the water-tank.
He petted her just like you do your cats.
I couldn't understand much he said,
for he don't talk any English,
but he kept patting her and groaning as if he had the pain himself,
and saying,
'There now,
sister,
that's easier,
that's better!'
"
Lou and Oscar laughed,
and Emil giggled delightedly and looked up at his sister.
"I don't think he knows anything at all about doctoring,"
said Oscar scornfully.
"They say when horses have distemper he takes the medicine himself,
and then prays over the horses."
Alexandra spoke up.
"That's what the Crows said,
but he cured their horses,
all the same.
Some days his mind is cloudy,
like.
But if you can get him on a clear day,
you can learn a great deal from him.
He understands animals.
Didn't I see him take the horn off the Berquist's cow when she had torn it loose and went crazy?
She was tearing all over the place,
knocking herself against things.
And at last she ran out on the roof of the old dugout and her legs went through and there she stuck,
bellowing.
Ivar came running
with his white bag,
and the moment he got
to her she was quiet and let him saw her horn off and daub the place
with tar."
Emil had been watching his sister,
his face reflecting the sufferings of the cow.
"And then didn't it hurt her any more?"
he asked.
Alexandra patted him.
"No,
not any more.
And in two days they could use her milk again."
The road
to Ivar's homestead was a very poor one.
He had settled in the rough country across the county line,
where no one lived but some Russians,--half a dozen families who dwelt together in one long house,
divided off like barracks.
Ivar had explained his choice by saying that the fewer neighbors he had,
the fewer temptations.
Nevertheless,
when one considered that his chief business was horsedoctoring,
it seemed rather short-sighted of him
to live in the most inaccessible place he could find.
The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and grass banks,
followed the bottom of winding draws,
or skirted the margin of wide lagoons,
where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks rose
with a whirr of wings.
Lou looked after them helplessly.
"I wish I'd brought my gun,
anyway,
Alexandra,"
he said fretfully.
"I could have hidden it under the straw in the bottom of the wagon."
"Then we'd have had
to lie
to Ivar.
Besides,
they say he can smell dead birds.
And if he knew,
we wouldn't get anything out of him,
not even a hammock.
I want
to talk
to him,
and he won't talk sense if he's angry.
It makes him foolish."
Lou sniffed.
"Whoever heard of him talking sense,
anyhow! I'd rather have ducks
for supper than Crazy Ivar's tongue."
Emil was alarmed.
"Oh,
but,
Lou,
you don't want
to make him mad! He might howl!"
They all laughed again,
and Oscar urged the horses up the crumbling side of a clay bank.
They had left the lagoons and the red grass behind them.
In Crazy Ivar's country the grass was short and gray,
the draws deeper than they were in the Bergsons'
neighborhood,
and the land was all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges.
The wild flowers disappeared,
and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest:
shoestring,
and ironweed,
and snow-on-themountain.
"Look,
look,
Emil,
there's Ivar's big pond!"
Alexandra pointed
to a shining sheet of water that lay at the bottom of a shallow draw.
At one end of the pond was an earthen dam,
planted
with green willow bushes,
and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside.
You would not have seen them at all but
for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass.
And that was all you saw.
Not a shed,
not a corral,
not a well,
not even a path broken in the curly grass.
But
for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod,
you could have walked over the roof of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation.
Ivar had lived
for three years in the clay bank,
without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.
When the Bergsons drove over the hill,
Ivar was sitting in the doorway of his house,
reading the Norwegian Bible.
He was a queerly shaped old man,
with a thick,
powerful body set on short bow-legs.
His shaggy white hair,
falling in a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks,
made him look older than he was.
He was barefoot,
but he wore a clean shirt of unbleached cotton,
open at the neck.
He always put on a clean shirt when Sunday morning came round,
though he never went
to church.
He had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on
with any of the denominations.
Often he did not see anybody from one week's end
to another.
He kept a calendar,
and every morning he checked off a day,
so that he was never in any doubt as
to which day of the week it was.
Ivar hired himself out in threshing and corn-husking time,
and he doctored sick animals when he was sent for.
When he was at home,
he made hammocks out of twine and committed chapters of the Bible
to memory.
Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out
for himself.
He disliked the litter of human dwellings:
the broken food,
the bits of broken china,
the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch.
He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod.
He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people,
and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger.
He best expressed his preference
for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer
to him there.
If one stood in the doorway of his cave,
and looked off at the rough land,
the smiling sky,
the curly grass white in the hot sunlight;
if one listened
to the rapturous song of the lark,
the drumming of the quail,
the burr of the locust against that vast silence,
one understood what Ivar meant.
On this Sunday afternoon his face shone
with happiness.
He closed the book on his knee,
keeping the place
with his horny finger,
and He sendeth the springs into the valleys,
which run among the hills;
They give drink
to every beast of the field;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
The trees of the Lord are full of sap;
the cedars of Lebanon which he hath planted;
Where the birds make their nests:
as
for the stork,
the fir trees are her house.
The high hills are a refuge
for the wild goats;
and the rocks
for the conies.
repeated softly:-Before he opened his Bible again,
Ivar heard the Bergsons'
wagon approaching,
and he sprang up and ran toward it.
"No guns,
no guns!"
he shouted,
waving his arms distractedly.
"No,
Ivar,
no guns,"
Alexandra called reassuringly.
He dropped his arms and went up
to the wagon,
smiling amiably and looking at them out of his pale blue eyes.
"We want
to buy a hammock,
if you have one,"
Alexandra explained,
"and my little brother,
here,
wants
to see your big pond,
where so many birds come."
Ivar smiled foolishly,
and began rubbing the horses'
noses and feeling about their mouths behind the bits.
"Not many birds just now.
A few ducks this morning;
and some snipe come
to drink.
But there was a crane last week.
She spent one night and came back the next evening.
I don't know why.
It is not her season,
of course.
Many of them go over in the fall.
Then the pond is full of strange voices every night."
Alexandra translated
for Carl,
who looked thoughtful.
"Ask him,
Alexandra,
if it is true that a sea gull came here once.
I have heard so."
She had some difficulty in making the old man understand.
He looked puzzled at first,
then smote his hands together as he remembered.
"Oh,
yes,
yes! A big white bird
with long wings and pink feet.
My! what a voice she had! She came in the afternoon and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark.
She was in trouble of some sort,
but I could not understand her.
She was going over
to the other ocean,
maybe,
and did not know how far it was.
She was afraid of never getting there.
She was more mournful than our birds here;
she cried in the night.
She saw the light from my window and darted up
to it.
Maybe she thought my house was a boat,
she was such a wild thing.
Next morning,
when the sun rose,
I went out
to take her food,
but she flew up into the sky and went on her way."
Ivar ran his fingers through his thick hair.
"I have many strange birds stop
with me here.
They come from very far away and are great company.
I hope you boys never shoot wild birds?"
Lou and Oscar grinned,
and Ivar shook his bushy head.
"Yes,
I know boys are thoughtless.
But these wild things are God's birds.
He watches over them and counts them,
as we do our cattle;
Christ says so in the New Testament."
"Now,
Ivar,"
Lou asked,
"may we water our horses at your pond and give them some feed?
It's a bad road
to your place."
"Yes,
yes,
it is."
The old man scrambled about and began
to loose the tugs.
"A bad road,
eh,
girls?
And the bay
with a colt at home!"
Oscar brushed the old man aside.
"We'll take care of the horses,
Ivar.
You'll be finding some disease on them.
Alexandra wants
to see your hammocks."
Ivar led Alexandra and Emil
to his little cave house.
He had but one room,
neatly plastered and whitewashed,
and there was a wooden floor.
There was a kitchen stove,
a table covered
with oilcloth,
two chairs,
a clock,
a calendar,
a few books on the window-shelf;
nothing more.
But the place was as clean as a cupboard.
"But where do you sleep,
Ivar?"
Emil asked,
looking about.
Ivar unslung a hammock from a hook on the wall;
in it was rolled a buffalo robe.
"There,
my son.
A hammock is a good bed,
and in winter I wrap up in this skin.
Where I go
to work,
the beds are not half so easy as this."
By this time Emil had lost all his timidity.
He thought a cave a very superior kind of house.
There was something pleasantly unusual about it and about Ivar.
"Do the birds know you will be kind
to them,
Ivar?
Is that why so many come?"
he asked.
Ivar sat down on the floor and tucked his feet under him.
"See,
little brother,
they have come from a long way,
and they are very tired.
From up there where they are flying,
our country looks dark and flat.
They must have water
to drink and
to bathe in before they can go on
with their journey.
They look this way and that,
and far below them they see something shining,
like a piece of glass set in the dark earth.
That is my pond.
They come
to it and are not disturbed.
Maybe I sprinkle a little corn.
They tell the other birds,
and next year more come this way.
They have their roads up there,
as we have down here."
Emil rubbed his knees thoughtfully.
"And is that true,
Ivar,
about the head ducks falling back when they are tired,
and the hind ones taking their place?"
"Yes.
The point of the wedge gets the worst of it;
they cut the wind.
They can only stand it there a little while--half an hour,
maybe.
Then they fall back and the wedge splits a little,
while the rear ones come up the middle
to the front.
Then it closes up and they fly on,
with a new edge.
They are always changing like that,
up in the air.
Never any confusion;
just like soldiers who have been drilled."
Alexandra had selected her hammock by the time the boys came up from the pond.
They would not come in,
but sat in the shade of the bank outside while Alexandra and Ivar talked about the birds and about his housekeeping,
and why he never ate meat,
fresh or salt.
Alexandra was sitting on one of the wooden chairs,
her arms resting on the table.
Ivar was sitting on the floor at her feet.
"Ivar,"
she said suddenly,
beginning
to trace the pattern on the oilcloth
with her forefinger,
"I came to-day more because I wanted
to talk
to you than because I wanted
to buy a hammock."
"Yes?"
The old man scraped his bare feet on the plank floor.
"We have a big bunch of hogs,
Ivar.
I wouldn't sell in the spring,
when everybody advised me to,
and now so many people are losing their hogs that I am frightened.
What can be done?"
Ivar's little eyes began
to shine.
They lost their vagueness.
"You feed them swill and such stuff?
Of course! And sour milk?
Oh,
yes! And keep them in a stinking pen?
I tell you,
sister,
the hogs of this country are put upon! They become unclean,
like the hogs in the Bible.
If you kept your chickens like that,
what would happen?
You have a little sorghum patch,
maybe?
Put a fence around it,
and turn the hogs in.
Build a shed
to give them shade,
a thatch on poles.
Let the boys haul water
to them in barrels,
clean water,
and plenty.
Get them off the old stinking ground,
and do not let them go back there until winter.
Give them only grain and clean feed,
such as you would give horses or cattle.
Hogs do not like
to be filthy."
The boys outside the door had been listening.
Lou nudged his brother.
"Come,
the horses are done eating.
Let's hitch up and get out of here.
He'll fill her full of notions.
She'll be
for having the pigs sleep
with us,
next."
Oscar grunted and got up.
Carl,
who could not understand what Ivar said,
saw that the two boys were displeased.
They did not mind hard work,
but they hated experiments and could never see the use of taking pains.
Even Lou,
who was more elastic than his older brother,
disliked
to do anything different from their neighbors.
He felt that it made them conspicuous and gave people a chance
to talk about them.
Once they were on the homeward road,
the boys forgot their ill-humor and joked about Ivar and his birds.
Alexandra did not propose any reforms in the care of the pigs,
and they hoped she had forgotten Ivar's talk.
They agreed that he was crazier than ever,
and would never be able
to prove up on his land because he worked it so little.
Alexandra privately resolved that she would have a talk
with Ivar about this and stir him up.
The boys persuaded Carl
to stay
for supper and go swimming in the pasture pond after dark.
That evening,
after she had washed the supper dishes,
Alexandra sat down on the kitchen doorstep,
while her mother was mixing the bread.
It was a still,
deep-breathing summer night,
full of the smell of the hay fields.
Sounds of laughter and splashing came up from the pasture,
and when the moon rose rapidly above the bare rim of the prairie,
the pond glittered like polished metal,
and she could see the flash of white bodies as the boys ran about the edge,
or jumped into the water.
Alexandra watched the shimmering pool dreamily,
but eventually her eyes went back
to the sorghum patch south of the barn,
where she was planning
to make her new pig corral.
IV
for the first three years after John Bergson's death,
the affairs of his family prospered.
Then came the hard times that brought every one on the Divide
to the brink of despair;
three years of drouth and failure,
the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare.
The first of these fruitless summers the Bergson boys bore courageously.
The failure of the corn crop made labor cheap.
Lou and Oscar hired two men and put in bigger crops than ever before.
They lost everything they spent.
The whole country was discouraged.
Farmers who were already in debt had
to give up their land.
A few foreclosures demoralized the county.
The settlers sat about on the wooden sidewalks in the little town and told each other that the country was never meant
for men
to live in;
the thing
to do was
to get back
to Iowa,
to Illinois,
to any place that had been proved habitable.
The Bergson boys,
certainly,
would have been happier
with their uncle Otto,
in the bakery shop in Chicago.
Like most of their neighbors,
they were meant
to follow in paths already marked out
for them,
not
to break trails in a new country.
A steady job,
a few holidays,
nothing
to think about,
and they would have been very happy.
It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys.
A pioneer should have imagination,
should be able
to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
The second of these barren summers was passing.
One September afternoon Alexandra had gone over
to the garden across the draw
to dig sweet potatoes--they had been thriving upon the weather that was fatal
to everything else.
But when Carl Linstrum came up the garden rows
to find her,
she was not working.
She was standing lost in thought,
leaning upon her pitchfork,
her sunbonnet lying beside her on the ground.
The dry garden patch smelled of drying vines and was strewn
with yellow seed-cucumbers and pumpkins and citrons.
At one end,
next the rhubarb,
grew feathery asparagus,
with red berries.
Down the middle of the garden was a row of gooseberry and currant bushes.
A few tough zenias and marigolds and a row of scarlet sage bore witness
to the buckets of water that Mrs. Bergson had carried there after sundown,
against the prohibition of her sons.
Carl came quietly and slowly up the garden path,
looking intently at Alexandra.
She did not hear him.
She was standing perfectly still,
with that serious ease so characteristic of her.
Her thick,
reddish braids,
twisted about her head,
fairly burned in the sunlight.
The air was cool enough
to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders,
and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up,
into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
Even Carl,
never a very cheerful boy,
and considerably darkened by these last two bitter years,
loved the country on days like this,
felt something strong and young and wild come out of it,
that laughed at care.
"Alexandra,"
he said as he approached her,
"I want
to talk
to you.
Let's sit down by the gooseberry bushes."
He picked up her sack of potatoes and they crossed the garden.
"Boys gone
to town?"
he asked as he sank down on the warm,
sun-baked earth.
"Well,
we have made up our minds at last,
Alexandra.
We are really going away."
She looked at him as if she were a little frightened.
"Really,
Carl?
Is it settled?"
"Yes,
father has heard from St. Louis,
and they will give him back his old job in the cigar factory.
He must be there by the first of November.
They are taking on new men then.
We will sell the place
for whatever we can get,
and auction the stock.
We haven't enough
to ship.
I am going
to learn engraving
with a German engraver there,
and then try
to get work in Chicago."
Alexandra's hands dropped in her lap.
Her eyes became dreamy and filled
with tears.
Carl's sensitive lower lip trembled.
He scratched in the soft earth beside him
with a stick.
"That's all I hate about it,
Alexandra,"
he said slowly.
"You've stood by us through so much and helped father out so many times,
and now it seems as if we were running off and leaving you
to face the worst of it.
But it isn't as if we could really ever be of any help
to you.
We are only one more drag,
one more thing you look out
for and feel responsible for.
Father was never meant
for a farmer,
you know that.
And I hate it.
We'd only get in deeper and deeper."
"Yes,
yes,
Carl,
I know.
You are wasting your life here.
You are able
to do much better things.
You are nearly nineteen now,
and I wouldn't have you stay.
I've always hoped you would get away.
But I can't help feeling scared when I think how I will miss you-more than you will ever know."
She brushed the tears from her cheeks,
not trying
to hide them.
"But,
Alexandra,"
he said sadly and wistfully,
"I've never been any real help
to you,
beyond sometimes trying
to keep the boys in a good humor."
Alexandra smiled and shook her head.
"Oh,
it's not that.
Nothing like that.
It's by understanding me,
and the boys,
and mother,
that you've helped me.
I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.
I think you are about the only one that ever helped me.
Somehow it will take more courage
to bear your going than everything that has happened before."
Carl looked at the ground.
"You see,
we've all depended so on you,"
he said,
"even father.
He makes me laugh.
When anything comes up he always says,
'I wonder what the Bergsons are going
to do about that?
I guess I'll go and ask her.'
I'll never forget that time,
when we first came here,
and our horse had the colic,
and I ran over
to your place--your father was away,
and you came home
with me and showed father how
to let the wind out of the horse.
You were only a little girl then,
but you knew ever so much more about farm work than poor father.
You remember how homesick I used
to get,
and what long talks we used
to have coming from school?
We've someway always felt alike about things."
"Yes,
that's it;
we've liked the same things and we've liked them together,
without anybody else knowing.
And we've had good times,
hunting
for Christmas trees and going
for ducks and making our plum wine together every year.
We've never either of us had any other close friend.
And now--"
Alexandra wiped her eyes
with the corner of her apron,
"and now I must remember that you are going where you will have many friends,
and will find the work you were meant
to do.
But you'll write
to me,
Carl?
That will mean a great deal
to me here."
"I'll write as long as I live,"
cried the boy impetuously.
"And I'll be working
for you as much as
for myself,
Alexandra.
I want
to do something you'll like and be proud of.
I'm a fool here,
but I know I can do something!"
He sat up and frowned at the red grass.
Alexandra sighed.
"How discouraged the boys will be when they hear.
They always come home from town discouraged,
anyway.
So many people are trying
to leave the country,
and they talk
to our boys and make them lowspirited.
I'm afraid they are beginning
to feel hard toward me because I won't listen
to any talk about going.
Sometimes I feel like I'm getting tired of standing up
for this country."
"I won't tell the boys yet,
if you'd rather not."
"Oh,
I'll tell them myself,
to-night,
when they come home.
They'll be talking wild,
anyway,
and no good comes of keeping bad news.
It's all harder on them than it is on me.
Lou wants
to get married,
poor boy,
and he can't until times are better.
See,
there goes the sun,
Carl.
I must be getting back.
Mother will want her potatoes.
It's chilly already,
the moment the light goes."
Alexandra rose and looked about.
A golden afterglow throbbed in the west,
but the country already looked empty and mournful.
A dark moving mass came over the western hill,
the Lee boy was bringing in the herd from the other half-section.
Emil ran from the windmill
to open the corral gate.
From the log house,
on the little rise across the draw,
the smoke was curling.
The cattle lowed and bellowed.
In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
Alexandra and Carl walked together down the potato rows.
"I have
to keep telling myself what is going
to happen,"
she said softly.
"Since you have been here,
ten years now,
I have never really been lonely.
But I can remember what it was like before.
Now I shall have nobody but Emil.
But he is my boy,
and he is tender-hearted."
That night,
when the boys were called
to supper,
they sat down moodily.
They had worn their coats
to town,
but they ate in their striped shirts and suspenders.
They were grown men now,
and,
as Alexandra said,
for the last few years they had been growing more and more like themselves.
Lou was still the slighter of the two,
the quicker and more intelligent,
but apt
to go off at half-cock.
He had a lively blue eye,
a thin,
fair skin
(always burned red
to the neckband of his shirt in summer),
stiff,
yellow hair that would not lie down on his head,
and a bristly little yellow mustache,
of which he was very proud.
Oscar could not grow a mustache;
his pale face was as bare as an egg,
and his white eyebrows gave it an empty look.
He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance;
the sort of man you could attach
to a corn-sheller as you would an engine.
He would turn it all day,
without hurrying,
without slowing down.
But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body.
His love of routine amounted
to a vice.
He worked like an insect,
always doing the same thing over in the same way,
regardless of whether it was best or no.
He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil,
and he rather liked
to do things in the hardest way.
If a field had once been in corn,
he couldn't bear
to put it into wheat.
He liked
to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year,
whether the season were backward or forward.
He seemed
to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather.
When the wheat crop failed,
he threshed the straw at a dead loss
to demonstrate how little grain there was,
and thus prove his case against Providence.
Lou,
on the other hand,
was fussy and flighty;
always planned
to get through two days'
work in one,
and often got only the least important things done.
He liked
to keep the place up,
but he never got round
to doing odd jobs until he had
to neglect more pressing work
to attend
to them.
In the middle of the wheat harvest,
when the grain was over-ripe and every hand was needed,
he would stop
to mend fences or
to patch the harness;
then dash down
to the field and overwork and be laid up in bed
for a week.
The two boys balanced each other,
and they pulled well together.
They had been good friends since they were children.
One seldom went anywhere,
even
to town,
without the other.
To-night,
after they sat down
to supper,
Oscar kept looking at Lou as if he expected him
to say something,
and Lou blinked his eyes and frowned at his plate.
It was Alexandra herself who at last opened the discussion.
"The Linstrums,"
she said calmly,
as she put another plate of hot biscuit on the table,
"are going back
to St. Louis.
The old man is going
to work in the cigar factory again."
At this Lou plunged in.
"You see,
Alexandra,
everybody who can crawl out is going away.
There's no use of us trying
to stick it out,
just
to be stubborn.
There's something in knowing when
to quit."
"Where do you want
to go,
Lou?"
"Any place where things will grow."
said Oscar grimly.
Lou reached
for a potato.
"Chris Arnson has traded his half-section
for a place down on the river."
"Who did he trade with?"
"Charley Fuller,
in town."
"Fuller the real estate man?
You see,
Lou,
that Fuller has a head on him.
He's buying and trading
for every bit of land he can get up here.
It'll make him a rich man,
some day."
"He's rich now,
that's why he can take a chance."
"Why can't we?
We'll live longer than he will.
Some day the land itself will be worth more than all we can ever raise on it."
Lou laughed.
"It could be worth that,
and still not be worth much.
Why,
Alexandra,
you don't know what you're talking about.
Our place wouldn't bring now what it would six years ago.
The fellows that settled up here just made a mistake.
Now they're beginning
to see this high land wasn't never meant
to grow nothing on,
and everybody who ain't fixed
to graze cattle is trying
to crawl out.
It's too high
to farm up here.
All the Americans are skinning out.
That man Percy Adams,
north of town,
told me that he was going
to let Fuller take his land and stuff
for four hundred dollars and a ticket
to Chicago."
"There's Fuller again!"
Alexandra exclaimed.
"I wish that man would take me
for a partner.
He's feathering his nest! If only poor people could learn a little from rich people! But all these fellows who are running off are bad farmers,
like poor Mr. Linstrum.
They couldn't get ahead even in good years,
and they all got into debt while father was getting out.
I think we ought
to hold on as long as we can on father's account.
He was so set on keeping this land.
He must have seen harder times than this,
here.
How was it in the early days,
mother?"
Mrs. Bergson was weeping quietly.
These family discussions always depressed her,
and made her remember all that she had been torn away from.
"I don't see why the boys are always taking on about going away,"
she said,
wiping her eyes.
"I don't want
to move again;
out
to some raw place,
maybe,
where we'd be worse off than we are here,
and all
to do over again.
I won't move! If the rest of you go,
I will ask some of the neighbors
to take me in,
and stay and be buried by father.
I'm not going
to leave him by himself on the prairie,
for cattle
to run over."
She began
to cry more bitterly.
The boys looked angry.
Alexandra put a soothing hand on her mother's shoulder.
"There's no question of that,
mother.
You don't have
to go if you don't want to.
A third of the place belongs
to you by American law,
and we can't sell without your consent.
We only want you
to advise us.
How did it use
to be when you and father first came?
Was it really as bad as this,
or not?"
"Oh,
worse! Much worse,"
moaned Mrs. Bergson.
"Drouth,
chince-bugs,
hail,
everything! My garden all cut
to pieces like sauerkraut.
No grapes on the creek,
no nothing.
The people all lived just like coyotes."
Oscar got up and tramped out of the kitchen.
Lou followed him.
They felt that Alexandra had taken an unfair advantage in turning their mother loose on them.
The next morning they were silent and reserved.
They did not offer
to take the women
to church,
but went down
to the barn immediately after breakfast and stayed there all day.
When Carl Linstrum came over in the afternoon,
Alexandra winked
to him and pointed toward the barn.
He understood her and went down
to play cards
with the boys.
They believed that a very wicked thing
to do on Sunday,
and it relieved their feelings.
Alexandra stayed in the house.
On Sunday afternoon Mrs. Bergson always took a nap,
and Alexandra read.
During the week she read only the newspaper,
but on Sunday,
and in the long evenings of winter,
she read a good deal;
read a few things over a great many times.
She knew long portions of the
"Frithjof Saga"
by heart,
and,
like most Swedes who read at all,
she was fond of Longfellow's verse,--the ballads and the
"Golden Legend"
and
"The Spanish Student."
To-day she sat in the wooden rockingchair
with the Swedish Bible open on her knees,
but she was not reading.
She was looking thoughtfully away at the point where the upland road disappeared over the rim of the prairie.
Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose,
such as it was apt
to take when she was thinking earnestly.
Her mind was slow,
truthful,
steadfast.
She had not the least spark of cleverness.
All afternoon the sitting-room was full of quiet and sunlight.
Emil was making rabbit traps in the kitchen shed.
The hens were clucking and scratching brown holes in the flower beds,
and the wind was teasing the prince's feather by the door.
That evening Carl came in
with the boys
to supper.
"Emil,"
said Alexandra,
when they were all seated at the table,
"how would you like
to go traveling?
Because I am going
to take a trip,
and you can go
with me if you want to."
The boys looked up in amazement;
they were always afraid of Alexandra's schemes.
Carl was interested.
"I've been thinking,
boys,"
she went on,
"that maybe I am too set against making a change.
I'm going
to take Brigham and the buckboard to-morrow and drive down
to the river country and spend a few days looking over what they've got down there.
If I find anything good,
you boys can go down and make a trade."
"Nobody down there will trade
for anything up here,"
said Oscar gloomily.
"That's just what I want
to find out.
Maybe they are just as discontented down there as we are up here.
Things away from home often look better than they are.
You know what your Hans Andersen book says,
Carl,
about the Swedes liking
to buy Danish bread and the Danes liking
to buy Swedish bread,
because people always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
Anyway,
I've heard so much about the river farms,
I won't be satisfied till I've seen
for myself."
Lou fidgeted.
"Look out! Don't agree
to anything.
Don't let them fool you."
Lou was apt
to be fooled himself.
He had not yet learned
to keep away from the shell-game wagons that followed the circus.
After supper Lou put on a necktie and went across the fields
to court Annie Lee,
and Carl and Oscar sat down
to a game of checkers,
while Alexandra read
"The Swiss Family Robinson"
aloud
to her mother and Emil.
It was not long before the two boys at the table neglected their game
to listen.
They were all big children together,
and they found the adventures of the family in the tree house so absorbing that they gave them their undivided attention.
V Alexandra and Emil spent five days down among the river farms,
driving up and down the valley.
Alexandra talked
to the men about their crops and
to the women about their poultry.
She spent a whole day
with one young farmer who had been away at school,
and who was experimenting
with a new kind of clover hay.
She learned a great deal.
As they drove along,
she and Emil talked and planned.
At last,
on the sixth day,
Alexandra turned Brigham's head northward and left the river behind.
"There's nothing in it
for us down there,
Emil.
There are a few fine farms,
but they are owned by the rich men in town,
and couldn't be bought.
Most of the land is rough and hilly.
They can always scrape along down there,
but they can never do anything big.
Down there they have a little certainty,
but up
with us there is a big chance.
We must have faith in the high land,
Emil.
I want
to hold on harder than ever,
and when you're a man you'll thank me."
She urged Brigham forward.
When the road began
to climb the first long swells of the Divide,
Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn,
and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy.
Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her.
For the first time,
perhaps,
since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages,
a human face was set toward it
with love and yearning.
It seemed beautiful
to her,
rich and strong and glorious.
Her eyes drank in the breadth of it,
until her tears blinded her.
Then the Genius of the Divide,
the great,
free spirit which breathes across it,
must have bent lower than it ever bent
to a human will before.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Alexandra reached home in the afternoon.
That evening she held a family council and told her brothers all that she had seen and heard.
"I want you boys
to go down yourselves and look it over.
Nothing will convince you like seeing
with your own eyes.
The river land was settled before this,
and so they are a few years ahead of us,
and have learned more about farming.
The land sells
for three times as much as this,
but in five years we will double it.
The rich men down there own all the best land,
and they are buying all they can get.
The thing
to do is
to sell our cattle and what little old corn we have,
and buy the Linstrum place.
Then the next thing
to do is
to take out two loans on our half-sections,
and buy Peter Crow's place;
raise every dollar we can,
and buy every acre we can."
"Mortgage the homestead again?"
Lou cried.
He sprang up and began
to wind the clock furiously.
"I won't slave
to pay off another mortgage.
I'll never do it.
You'd just as soon kill us all,
Alexandra,
to carry out some scheme!"
Oscar rubbed his high,
pale forehead.
"How do you propose
to pay off your mortgages?"
Alexandra looked from one
to the other and bit her lip.
They had never seen her so nervous.
"See here,"
she brought out at last.
"We borrow the money
for six years.
Well,
with the money we buy a half-section from Linstrum and a half from Crow,
and a quarter from Struble,
maybe.
That will give us upwards of fourteen hundred acres,
won't it?
You won't have
to pay off your mortgages
for six years.
By that time,
any of this land will be worth thirty dollars an acre--it will be worth fifty,
but we'll say thirty;
then you can sell a garden patch anywhere,
and pay off a debt of sixteen hundred dollars.
It's not the principal I'm worried about,
it's the interest and taxes.
We'll have
to strain
to meet the payments.
But as sure as we are sitting here to-night,
we can sit down here ten years from now independent landowners,
not struggling farmers any longer.
The chance that father was always looking
for has come."
Lou was pacing the floor.
"But how do you KNOW that land is going
to go up enough
to pay the mortgages and--"
"And make us rich besides?"
Alexandra put in firmly.
"I can't explain that,
Lou.
You'll have
to take my word
for it.
I KNOW,
that's all.
When you drive about over the country you can feel it coming."
Oscar had been sitting
with his head lowered,
his hands hanging between his knees.
"But we can't work so much land,"
he said dully,
as if he were talking
to himself.
"We can't even try.
It would just lie there and we'd work ourselves
to death."
He sighed,
and laid his calloused fist on the table.
Alexandra's eyes filled
with tears.
She put her hand on his shoulder.
"You poor boy,
you won't have
to work it.
The men in town who are buying up other people's land don't try
to farm it.
They are the men
to watch,
in a new country.
Let's try
to do like the shrewd ones,
and not like these stupid fellows.
I don't want you boys always
to have
to work like this.
I want you
to be independent,
and Emil
to go
to school."
Lou held his head as if it were splitting.
"Everybody will say we are crazy.
It must be crazy,
or everybody would be doing it."
"If they were,
we wouldn't have much chance.
No,
Lou,
I was talking about that
with the smart young man who is raising the new kind of clover.
He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don't do.
Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors?
Because father had more brains.
Our people were better people than these in the old country.
We OUGHT
to do more than they do,
and see further ahead.
Yes,
mother,
I'm going
to clear the table now."
Alexandra rose.
The boys went
to the stable
to see
to the stock,
and they were gone a long while.
When they came back Lou played on his DRAGHARMONIKA and Oscar sat figuring at his father's secretary all evening.
They said nothing more about Alexandra's project,
but she felt sure now that they would consent
to it.
Just before bedtime Oscar went out
for a pail of water.
When he did not come back,
Alexandra threw a shawl over her head and ran down the path
to the windmill.
She found him sitting there
with his head in his hands,
and she sat down beside him.
"Don't do anything you don't want
to do,
Oscar,"
she whispered.
She waited a moment,
but he did not stir.
"I won't say any more about it,
if you'd rather not.
What makes you so discouraged?"
"I dread signing my name
to them pieces of paper,"
he said slowly.
"All the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us."
"Then don't sign one.
I don't want you to,
if you feel that way."
Oscar shook his head.
"No,
I can see there's a chance that way.
I've thought a good while there might be.
We're in so deep now,
we might as well go deeper.
But it's hard work pulling out of debt.
Like pulling a threshingmachine out of the mud;
breaks your back.
Me and Lou's worked hard,
and I can't see it's got us ahead much."
"Nobody knows about that as well as I do,
Oscar.
That's why I want
to try an easier way.
I don't want you
to have
to grub
for every dollar."
"Yes,
I know what you mean.
Maybe it'll come out right.
But signing papers is signing papers.
There ain't no maybe about that."
He took his pail and trudged up the path
to the house.
Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill,
looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air.
She always loved
to watch them,
to think of their vastness and distance,
and of their ordered march.
It fortified her
to reflect upon the great operations of nature,
and when she thought of the law that lay behind them,
she felt a sense of personal security.
That night she had a new consciousness of the country,
felt almost a new relation
to it.
Even her talk
with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back
to the Divide that afternoon.
She had never known before how much the country meant
to her.
The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music.
She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there,
somewhere,
with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun.
Under the long shaggy ridges,
she felt the future stirring.
PART II Neighboring Fields I IT is sixteen years since John Bergson died.
His wife now lies beside him,
and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams across the wheat-fields.
Could he rise from beneath it,
he would not know the country under which he has been asleep.
The shaggy coat of the prairie,
which they lifted
to make him a bed,
has vanished forever.
From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a vast checker-board,
marked off in squares of wheat and corn;
light and dark,
dark and light.
Telephone wires hum along the white roads,
which always run at right angles.
From the graveyard gate one can count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses;
the gilded weather-vanes on the big red barns wink at each other across the green and brown and yellow fields.
The light steel windmills tremble throughout their frames and tug at their moorings,
as they vibrate in the wind that often blows from one week's end
to another across that high,
active,
resolute stretch of country.
The Divide is now thickly populated.
The rich soil yields heavy harvests;
the dry,
bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy
for men and beasts.
There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country,
where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length,
and the brown earth,
with such a strong,
clean smell,
and such a power of growth and fertility in it,
yields itself eagerly
to the plow;
rolls away from the shear,
not even dimming the brightness of the metal,
with a soft,
deep sigh of happiness.
The wheatcutting sometimes goes on all night as well as all day,
and in good seasons there are scarcely men and horses enough
to do the harvesting.
The grain is so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet.
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country.
It gives itself ungrudgingly
to the moods of the season,
holding nothing back.
Like the plains of Lombardy,
it seems
to rise a little
to meet the sun.
The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled,
as if the one were the breath of the other.
You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic,
puissant quality that is in the tilth,
the same strength and resoluteness.
One June morning a young man stood at the gate of the Norwegian graveyard,
sharpening his scythe in strokes unconsciously timed
to the tune he was whistling.
He wore a flannel cap and duck trousers,
and the sleeves of his white flannel shirt were rolled back
to the elbow.
When he was satisfied
with the edge of his blade,
he slipped the whetstone into his hip pocket and began
to swing his scythe,
still whistling,
but softly,
out of respect
to the quiet folk about him.
Unconscious respect,
probably,
for he seemed intent upon his own thoughts,
and,
like the Gladiator's,
they were far away.
He was a splendid figure of a boy,
tall and straight as a young pine tree,
with a handsome head,
and stormy gray eyes,
deeply set under a serious brow.
The space between his two front teeth,
which were unusually far apart,
gave him the proficiency in whistling
for which he was distinguished at college.
(He also played the cornet in the University band.)
When the grass required his close attention,
or when he had
to stoop
to cut about a headstone,
he paused in his lively air,--the
"Jewel"
song,--taking it up where he had left it when his scythe swung free again.
He was not thinking about the tired pioneers over whom his blade glittered.
The old wild country,
the struggle in which his sister was destined
to succeed while so many men broke their hearts and died,
he can scarcely remember.
That is all among the dim things of childhood and has been forgotten in the brighter pattern life weaves to-day,
in the bright facts of being captain of the track team,
and holding the interstate record
for the high jump,
in the all-suffusing brightness of being twenty-one.
Yet sometimes,
in the pauses of his work,
the young man frowned and looked at the ground
with an intentness which suggested that even twentyone might have its probleMs. When he had been mowing the better part of an hour,
he heard the rattle of a light cart on the road behind him.
Supposing that it was his sister coming back from one of her farms,
he kept on
with his work.
The cart stopped at the gate and a merry contralto voice called,
"Almost through,
Emil?"
He dropped his scythe and went toward the fence,
wiping his face and neck
with his handkerchief.
In the cart sat a young woman who wore driving gauntlets and a wide shade hat,
trimmed
with red poppies.
Her face,
too,
was rather like a poppy,
round and brown,
with rich color in her cheeks and lips,
and her dancing yellow-brown eyes bubbled
with gayety.
The wind was flapping her big hat and teasing a curl of her chestnut-colored hair.
She shook her head at the tall youth.
"What time did you get over here?
That's not much of a job
for an athlete.
Here I've been
to town and back.
Alexandra lets you sleep late.
Oh,
I know! Lou's wife was telling me about the way she spoils you.
I was going
to give you a lift,
if you were done."
She gathered up her reins.
"But I will be,
in a minute.
Please wait
for me,
Marie,"
Emil coaxed.
"Alexandra sent me
to mow our lot,
but I've done half a dozen others,
you see.
Just wait till I finish off the Kourdnas'.
By the way,
they were Bohemians.
Why aren't they up in the Catholic graveyard?"
"Free-thinkers,"
replied the young woman laconically.
"Lots of the Bohemian boys at the University are,"
said Emil,
taking up his scythe again.
"What did you ever burn John Huss for,
anyway?
It's made an awful row.
They still jaw about it in history classes."
"We'd do it right over again,
most of us,"
said the young woman hotly.
"Don't they ever teach you in your history classes that you'd all be heathen Turks if it hadn't been
for the Bohemians?"
Emil had fallen
to mowing.
"Oh,
there's no denying you're a spunky little bunch,
you Czechs,"
he called back over his shoulder.
Marie Shabata settled herself in her seat and watched the rhythmical movement of the young man's long arms,
swinging her foot as if in time
to some air that was going through her mind.
The minutes passed.
Emil mowed vigorously and Marie sat sunning herself and watching the long grass fall.
She sat
with the ease that belongs
to persons of an essentially happy nature,
who can find a comfortable spot almost anywhere;
who are supple,
and quick in adapting themselves
to circumstances.
After a final swish,
Emil snapped the gate and sprang into the cart,
holding his scythe well out over the wheel.
"There,"
he sighed.
"I gave old man Lee a cut or so,
too.
Lou's wife needn't talk.
I never see Lou's scythe over here."
Marie clucked
to her horse.
"Oh,
you know Annie!"
She looked at the young man's bare arMs. "How brown you've got since you came home.
I wish I had an athlete
to mow my orchard.
I get wet
to my knees when I go down
to pick cherries."
"You can have one,
any time you want him.
Better wait until after it rains."
Emil squinted off at the horizon as if he were looking
for clouds.
"Will you?
Oh,
there's a good boy!"
She turned her head
to him
with a quick,
bright smile.
He felt it rather than saw it.
Indeed,
he had looked away
with the purpose of not seeing it.
"I've been up looking at Angelique's wedding clothes,"
Marie went on,
"and I'm so excited I can hardly wait until Sunday.
Amedee will be a handsome bridegroom.
Is anybody but you going
to stand up
with him?
Well,
then it will be a handsome wedding party."
She made a droll face at Emil,
who flushed.
"Frank,"
Marie continued,
flicking her horse,
"is cranky at me because I loaned his saddle
to Jan Smirka,
and I'm terribly afraid he won't take me
to the dance in the evening.
Maybe the supper will tempt him.
All Angelique's folks are baking
for it,
and all Amedee's twenty cousins.
There will be barrels of beer.
If once I get Frank
to the supper,
I'll see that I stay
for the dance.
And by the way,
Emil,
you mustn't dance
with me but once or twice.
You must dance
with all the French girls.
It hurts their feelings if you don't.
They think you're proud because you've been away
to school or something."
Emil sniffed.
"How do you know they think that?"
"Well,
you didn't dance
with them much at Raoul Marcel's party,
and I could tell how they took it by the way they looked at you--and at me."
"All right,"
said Emil shortly,
studying the glittering blade of his scythe.
They drove westward toward Norway Creek,
and toward a big white house that stood on a hill,
several miles across the fields.
There were so many sheds and outbuildings grouped about it that the place looked not unlike a tiny village.
A stranger,
approaching it,
could not help noticing the beauty and fruitfulness of the outlying fields.
There was something individual about the great farm,
a most unusual trimness and care
for detail.
On either side of the road,
for a mile before you reached the foot of the hill,
stood tall osage orange hedges,
their glossy green marking off the yellow fields.
South of the hill,
in a low,
sheltered swale,
surrounded by a mulberry hedge,
was the orchard,
its fruit trees knee-deep in timothy grass.
Any one thereabouts would have told you that this was one of the richest farms on the Divide,
and that the farmer was a woman,
Alexandra Bergson.
If you go up the hill and enter Alexandra's big house,
you will find that it is curiously unfinished and uneven in comfort.
One room is papered,
carpeted,
over-furnished;
the next is almost bare.
The pleasantest rooms in the house are the kitchen--where Alexandra's three young Swedish girls chatter and cook and pickle and preserve all summer long--and the sitting-room,
in which Alexandra has brought together the old homely furniture that the Bergsons used in their first log house,
the family portraits,
and the few things her mother brought from Sweden.
When you go out of the house into the flower garden,
there you feel again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm;
in the fencing and hedging,
in the windbreaks and sheds,
in the symmetrical pasture ponds,
planted
with scrub willows
to give shade
to the cattle in fly-time.
There is even a white row of beehives in the orchard,
under the walnut trees.
You feel that,
properly,
Alexandra's house is the big out-of-doors,
and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best.
II Emil reached home a little past noon,
and when he went into the kitchen Alexandra was already seated at the head of the long table,
having dinner
with her men,
as she always did unless there were visitors.
He slipped into his empty place at his sister's right.
The three pretty young Swedish girls who did Alexandra's housework were cutting pies,
refilling coffeecups,
placing platters of bread and meat and potatoes upon the red tablecloth,
and continually getting in each other's way between the table and the stove.
To be sure they always wasted a good deal of time getting in each other's way and giggling at each other's mistakes.
But,
as Alexandra had pointedly told her sisters-inlaw,
it was
to hear them giggle that she kept three young things in her kitchen;
the work she could do herself,
if it were necessary.
These girls,
with their long letters from home,
their finery,
and their love-affairs,
afforded her a great deal of entertainment,
and they were company
for her when Emil was away at school.
Of the youngest girl,
Signa,
who has a pretty figure,
mottled pink cheeks,
and yellow hair,
Alexandra is very fond,
though she keeps a sharp eye upon her.
Signa is apt
to be skittish at mealtime,
when the men are about,
and
to spill the coffee or upset the cream.
It is supposed that Nelse Jensen,
one of the six men at the dinner-table,
is courting Signa,
though he has been so careful not
to commit himself that no one in the house,
least of all Signa,
can tell just how far the matter has progressed.
Nelse watches her glumly as she waits upon the table,
and in the evening he sits on a bench behind the stove
with his DRAGHARMONIKA,
playing mournful airs and watching her as she goes about her work.
When Alexandra asked Signa whether she thought Nelse was in earnest,
the poor child hid her hands under her apron and murmured,
"I don't know,
ma'm.
But he scolds me about everything,
like as if he wanted
to have me!"
At Alexandra's left sat a very old man,
barefoot and wearing a long blue blouse,
open at the neck.
His shaggy head is scarcely whiter than it was sixteen years ago,
but his little blue eyes have become pale and watery,
and his ruddy face is withered,
like an apple that has clung all winter
to the tree.
When Ivar lost his land through mismanagement a dozen years ago,
Alexandra took him in,
and he has been a member of her household ever since.
He is too old
to work in the fields,
but he hitches and unhitches the work-teams and looks after the health of the stock.
Sometimes of a winter evening Alexandra calls him into the sitting-room
to read the Bible aloud
to her,
for he still reads very well.
He dislikes human habitations,
so Alexandra has fitted him up a room in the barn,
where he is very comfortable,
being near the horses and,
as he says,
further from temptations.
No one has ever found out what his temptations are.
In cold weather he sits by the kitchen fire and makes hammocks or mends harness until it is time
to go
to bed.
Then he says his prayers at great length behind the stove,
puts on his buffalo-skin coat and goes out
to his room in the barn.
Alexandra herself has changed very little.
Her figure is fuller,
and she has more color.
She seems sunnier and more vigorous than she did as a young girl.
But she still has the same calmness and deliberation of manner,
the same clear eyes,
and she still wears her hair in two braids wound round her head.
It is so curly that fiery ends escape from the braids and make her head look like one of the big double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden.
Her face is always tanned in summer,
for her sunbonnet is oftener on her arm than on her head.
But where her collar falls away from her neck,
or where her sleeves are pushed back from her wrist,
the skin is of such smoothness and whiteness as none but Swedish women ever possess;
skin
with the freshness of the snow itself.
Alexandra did not talk much at the table,
but she encouraged her men
to talk,
and she always listened attentively,
even when they seemed
to be talking foolishly.
To-day Barney Flinn,
the big red-headed Irishman who had been
with Alexandra
for five years and who was actually her foreman,
though he had no such title,
was grumbling about the new silo she had put up that spring.
It happened
to be the first silo on the Divide,
and Alexandra's neighbors and her men were skeptical about it.
"To be sure,
if the thing don't work,
we'll have plenty of feed without it,
indeed,"
Barney conceded.
Nelse Jensen,
Signa's gloomy suitor,
had his word.
"Lou,
he says he wouldn't have no silo on his place if you'd give it
to him.
He says the feed outen it gives the stock the bloat.
He heard of somebody lost four head of horses,
feedin'
'em that stuff."
Alexandra looked down the table from one
to another.
"Well,
the only way we can find out is
to try.
Lou and I have different notions about feeding stock,
and that's a good thing.
It's bad if all the members of a family think alike.
They never get anywhere.
Lou can learn by my mistakes and I can learn by his.
Isn't that fair,
Barney?"
The Irishman laughed.
He had no love
for Lou,
who was always uppish
with him and who said that Alexandra paid her hands too much.
"I've no thought but
to give the thing an honest try,
mum.
'T would be only right,
after puttin'
so much expense into it.
Maybe Emil will come out an'
have a look at it wid me."
He pushed back his chair,
took his hat from the nail,
and marched out
with Emil,
who,
with his university ideas,
was supposed
to have instigated the silo.
The other hands followed them,
all except old Ivar.
He had been depressed throughout the meal and had paid no heed
to the talk of the men,
even when they mentioned cornstalk bloat,
upon which he was sure
to have opinions.
"Did you want
to speak
to me,
Ivar?"
Alexandra asked as she rose from the table.
"Come into the sitting-room."
The old man followed Alexandra,
but when she motioned him
to a chair he shook his head.
She took up her workbasket and waited
for him
to speak.
He stood looking at the carpet,
his bushy head bowed,
his hands clasped in front of him.
Ivar's bandy legs seemed
to have grown shorter
with years,
and they were completely misfitted
to his broad,
thick body and heavy shoulders.
"Well,
Ivar,
what is it?"
Alexandra asked after she had waited longer than usual.
Ivar had never learned
to speak English and his Norwegian was quaint and grave,
like the speech of the more old-fashioned people.
He always addressed Alexandra in terms of the deepest respect,
hoping
to set a good example
to the kitchen girls,
whom he thought too familiar in their manners.
"Mistress,"
he began faintly,
without raising his eyes,
"the folk have been looking coldly at me of late.
You know there has been talk."
"Talk about what,
Ivar?"
"About sending me away;
to the asylum."
Alexandra put down her sewing-basket.
"Nobody has come
to me
with such talk,"
she said decidedly.
"Why need you listen?
You know I would never consent
to such a thing."
Ivar lifted his shaggy head and looked at her out of his little eyes.
"They say that you cannot prevent it if the folk complain of me,
if your brothers complain
to the authorities.
They say that your brothers are afraid--God forbid!-that I may do you some injury when my spells are on me.
Mistress,
how can any one think that?--that I could bite the hand that fed me!"
The tears trickled down on the old man's beard.
Alexandra frowned.
"Ivar,
I wonder at you,
that you should come bothering me
with such nonsense.
I am still running my own house,
and other people have nothing
to do
with either you or me.
So long as I am suited
with you,
there is nothing
to be said."
Ivar pulled a red handkerchief out of the breast of his blouse and wiped his eyes and beard.
"But I should not wish you
to keep me if,
as they say,
it is against your interests,
and if it is hard
for you
to get hands because I am here."
Alexandra made an impatient gesture,
but the old man put out his hand and went on earnestly:--
"Listen,
mistress,
it is right that you should take these things into account.
You know that my spells come from God,
and that I would not harm any living creature.
You believe that every one should worship God in the way revealed
to him.
But that is not the way of this country.
The way here is
for all
to do alike.
I am despised because I do not wear shoes,
because I do not cut my hair,
and because I have visions.
At home,
in the old country,
there were many like me,
who had been touched by God,
or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward.
We thought nothing of it,
and let them alone.
But here,
if a man is different in his feet or in his head,
they put him in the asylum.
Look at Peter Kralik;
when he was a boy,
drinking out of a creek,
he swallowed a snake,
and always after that he could eat only such food as the creature liked,
for when he ate anything else,
it became enraged and gnawed him.
When he felt it whipping about in him,
he drank alcohol
to stupefy it and get some ease
for himself.
He could work as good as any man,
and his head was clear,
but they locked him up
for being different in his stomach.
That is the way;
they have built the asylum
for people who are different,
and they will not even let us live in the holes
with the badgers.
Only your great prosperity has protected me so far.
If you had had ill-fortune,
they would have taken me
to Hastings long ago."
As Ivar talked,
his gloom lifted.
Alexandra had found that she could often break his fasts and long penances by talking
to him and letting him pour out the thoughts that troubled him.
Sympathy always cleared his mind,
and ridicule was poison
to him.
"There is a great deal in what you say,
Ivar.
Like as not they will be wanting
to take me
to Hastings because I have built a silo;
and then I may take you
with me.
But at present I need you here.
Only don't come
to me again telling me what people say.
Let people go on talking as they like,
and we will go on living as we think best.
You have been
with me now
for twelve years,
and I have gone
to you
for advice oftener than I have ever gone
to any one.
That ought
to satisfy you."
Ivar bowed humbly.
"Yes,
mistress,
I shall not trouble you
with their talk again.
And as
for my feet,
I have observed your wishes all these years,
though you have never questioned me;
washing them every night,
even in winter."
Alexandra laughed.
"Oh,
never mind about your feet,
Ivar.
We can remember when half our neighbors went barefoot in summer.
I expect old Mrs. Lee would love
to slip her shoes off now sometimes,
if she dared.
I'm glad I'm not Lou's mother-in-law."
Ivar looked about mysteriously and lowered his voice almost
to a whisper.
"You know what they have over at Lou's house?
A great white tub,
like the stone water-troughs in the old country,
to wash themselves in.
When you sent me over
with the strawberries,
they were all in town but the old woman Lee and the baby.
She took me in and showed me the thing,
and she told me it was impossible
to wash yourself clean in it,
because,
in so much water,
you could not make a strong suds.
So when they fill it up and send her in there,
she pretends,
and makes a splashing noise.
Then,
when they are all asleep,
she washes herself in a little wooden tub she keeps under her bed."
Alexandra shook
with laughter.
"Poor old Mrs. Lee! They won't let her wear nightcaps,
either.
Never mind;
when she comes
to visit me,
she can do all the old things in the old way,
and have as much beer as she wants.
We'll start an asylum
for old-time people,
Ivar."
Ivar folded his big handkerchief carefully and thrust it back into his blouse.
"This is always the way,
mistress.
I come
to you sorrowing,
and you send me away
with a light heart.
And will you be so good as
to tell the Irishman that he is not
to work the brown gelding until the sore on its shoulder is healed?"
"That I will.
Now go and put Emil's mare
to the cart.
I am going
to drive up
to the north quarter
to meet the man from town who is
to buy my alfalfa hay."
III Alexandra was
to hear more of Ivar's case,
however.
On Sunday her married brothers came
to dinner.
She had asked them
for that day because Emil,
who hated family parties,
would be absent,
dancing at Amedee Chevalier's wedding,
up in the French country.
The table was set
for company in the dining-room,
where highly varnished wood and colored glass and useless pieces of china were conspicuous enough
to satisfy the standards of the new prosperity.
Alexandra had put herself into the hands of the Hanover furniture dealer,
and he had conscientiously done his best
to make her dining-room look like his display window.
She said frankly that she knew nothing about such things,
and she was willing
to be governed by the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were,
the greater their virtue as ornament.
That seemed reasonable enough.
Since she liked plain things herself,
it was all the more necessary
to have jars and punchbowls and candlesticks in the company rooms
for people who did appreciate them.
Her guests liked
to see about them these reassuring emblems of prosperity.
The family party was complete except
for Emil,
and Oscar's wife who,
in the country phrase,
"was not going anywhere just now."
Oscar sat at the foot of the table and his four tow-headed little boys,
aged from twelve
to five,
were ranged at one side.
Neither Oscar nor Lou has changed much;
they have simply,
as Alexandra said of them long ago,
grown
to be more and more like themselves.
Lou now looks the older of the two;
his face is thin and shrewd and wrinkled about the eyes,
while Oscar's is thick and dull.
For all his dullness,
however,
Oscar makes more money than his brother,