Ewriting Format by Carl Peterson © 2002
Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!
Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.
Please do not remove this.
This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words
are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
need about what they can legally do with the texts.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below. We need your donations.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
As of 12/12/00 contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana,
Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota,
Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
International donations are accepted,
but we don't know ANYTHING about how
to make them tax-deductible, or
even if they CAN be made deductible,
and don't have the staff to handle it
even if there are ways.
As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising
will begin in the additional states. Please feel
free to ask to check the status of your state.
International donations are accepted,
but we don't know ANYTHING about how
to make them tax-deductible, or
even if they CAN be made deductible,
and don't have the staff to handle it
even if there are ways.
These donations should be made to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109
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
Project Gutenberg Etext of The Garotters, by William D. Howells
*****This file should be named gartt10.txt or gartt10.zip*****
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gartt11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gartt10a.txt
This etext was produced from the 1897 David Douglas edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included. Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
the official publication date.
Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.
Most people start at our sites at:
http://gutenberg.net
http://promo.net/pg
Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext02
or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02
Or /etext01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.
Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
manage to get some real funding.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
We need your donations more than ever!
Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada,
Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising
will begin in the additional states.
These donations should be made to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541,
has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal
Revenue Service (IRS). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent
permitted by law. As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the
additional states.
All donations should be made to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Mail to:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Avenue
Oxford, MS 38655-4109 [USA]
We need your donations more than ever!
You can get up to date donation information at:
http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
***
If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:
Michael S. Hart
hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
We would prefer to send you information by email.
***
Example command-line FTP session:
ftp ftp.ibiblio.org
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc.
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
**The Legal Small Print**
(Three Pages)
***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.
To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.
THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this
requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however,
if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
including any form resulting from conversion by word
processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
*EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those
intended by the author of the work, although tilde
(~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
be used to convey punctuation intended by the
author, and additional characters may be used to
indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
form by the program that displays the etext (as is
the case, for instance, with most word processors);
OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you
don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are
payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to
let us know your plans and to work out the details.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.
The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END*
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,
which adds
to Lou's sharpness and uneasiness and tempts him
to make a show.
The trouble
with Lou is that he is tricky,
and his neighbors have found out that,
as Ivar says,
he has not a fox's face
for nothing.
Politics being the natural field
for such talents,
he neglects his farm
to attend conventions and
to run
for county offices.
Lou's wife,
formerly Annie Lee,
has grown
to look curiously like her husband.
Her face has become longer,
sharper,
more aggressive.
She wears her yellow hair in a high pompadour,
and is bedecked
with rings and chains and
"beauty pins."
Her tight,
high-heeled shoes give her an awkward walk,
and she is always more or less preoccupied
with her clothes.
As she sat at the table,
she kept telling her youngest daughter to
"be careful now,
and not drop anything on mother."
The conversation at the table was all in English.
Oscar's wife,
from the malaria district of Missouri,
was ashamed of marrying a foreigner,
and his boys do not understand a word of Swedish.
Annie and Lou sometimes speak Swedish at home,
but Annie is almost as much afraid of being
"caught"
at it as ever her mother was of being caught barefoot.
Oscar still has a thick accent,
but Lou speaks like anybody from Iowa.
"When I was in Hastings
to attend the convention,"
he was saying,
"I saw the superintendent of the asylum,
and I was telling him about Ivar's symptoMs. He says Ivar's case is one of the most dangerous kind,
and it's a wonder he hasn't done something violent before this."
Alexandra laughed good-humoredly.
"Oh,
nonsense,
Lou! The doctors would have us all crazy if they could.
Ivar's queer,
certainly,
but he has more sense than half the hands I hire."
Lou flew at his fried chicken.
"Oh,
I guess the doctor knows his business,
Alexandra.
He was very much surprised when I told him how you'd put up
with Ivar.
He says he's likely
to set fire
to the barn any night,
or
to take after you and the girls
with an axe."
Little Signa,
who was waiting on the table,
giggled and fled
to the kitchen.
Alexandra's eyes twinkled.
"That was too much
for Signa,
Lou.
We all know that Ivar's perfectly harmless.
The girls would as soon expect me
to chase them
with an axe."
Lou flushed and signaled
to his wife.
"All the same,
the neighbors will be having a say about it before long.
He may burn anybody's barn.
It's only necessary
for one propertyowner in the township
to make complaint,
and he'll be taken up by force.
You'd better send him yourself and not have any hard feelings."
Alexandra helped one of her little nephews
to gravy.
"Well,
Lou,
if any of the neighbors try that,
I'll have myself appointed Ivar's guardian and take the case
to court,
that's all.
I am perfectly satisfied
with him."
"Pass the preserves,
Lou,"
said Annie in a warning tone.
She had reasons
for not wishing her husband
to cross Alexandra too openly.
"But don't you sort of hate
to have people see him around here,
Alexandra?"
she went on
with persuasive smoothness.
"He IS a disgraceful object,
and you're fixed up so nice now.
It sort of makes people distant
with you,
when they never know when they'll hear him scratching about.
My girls are afraid as death of him,
aren't you,
Milly,
dear?"
Milly was fifteen,
fat and jolly and pompadoured,
with a creamy complexion,
square white teeth,
and a short upper lip.
She looked like her grandmother Bergson,
and had her comfortable and comfort-loving nature.
She grinned at her aunt,
with whom she was a great deal more at ease than she was
with her mother.
Alexandra winked a reply.
"Milly needn't be afraid of Ivar.
She's an especial favorite of his.
In my opinion Ivar has just as much right
to his own way of dressing and thinking as we have.
But I'll see that he doesn't bother other people.
I'll keep him at home,
so don't trouble any more about him,
Lou.
I've been wanting
to ask you about your new bathtub.
How does it work?"
Annie came
to the fore
to give Lou time
to recover himself.
"Oh,
it works something grand! I can't keep him out of it.
He washes himself all over three times a week now,
and uses all the hot water.
I think it's weakening
to stay in as long as he does.
You ought
to have one,
Alexandra."
"I'm thinking of it.
I might have one put in the barn
for Ivar,
if it will ease people's minds.
But before I get a bathtub,
I'm going
to get a piano
for Milly."
Oscar,
at the end of the table,
looked up from his plate.
"What does Milly want of a pianny?
What's the matter
with her organ?
She can make some use of that,
and play in church."
Annie looked flustered.
She had begged Alexandra not
to say anything about this plan before Oscar,
who was apt
to be jealous of what his sister did
for Lou's children.
Alexandra did not get on
with Oscar's wife at all.
"Milly can play in church just the same,
and she'll still play on the organ.
But practising on it so much spoils her touch.
Her teacher says so,"
Annie brought out
with spirit.
Oscar rolled his eyes.
"Well,
Milly must have got on pretty good if she's got past the organ.
I know plenty of grown folks that ain't,"
he said bluntly.
Annie threw up her chin.
"She has got on good,
and she's going
to play
for her commencement when she graduates in town next year."
"Yes,"
said Alexandra firmly,
"I think Milly deserves a piano.
All the girls around here have been taking lessons
for years,
but Milly is the only one of them who can ever play anything when you ask her.
I'll tell you when I first thought I would like
to give you a piano,
Milly,
and that was when you learned that book of old Swedish songs that your grandfather used
to sing.
He had a sweet tenor voice,
and when he was a young man he loved
to sing.
I can remember hearing him singing
with the sailors down in the shipyard,
when I was no bigger than Stella here,"
pointing
to Annie's younger daughter.
Milly and Stella both looked through the door into the sitting-room,
where a crayon portrait of John Bergson hung on the wall.
Alexandra had had it made from a little photograph,
taken
for his friends just before he left Sweden;
a slender man of thirty-five,
with soft hair curling about his high forehead,
a drooping mustache,
and wondering,
sad eyes that looked forward into the distance,
as if they already beheld the New World.
After dinner Lou and Oscar went
to the orchard
to pick cherries--they had neither of them had the patience
to grow an orchard of their own--and Annie went down
to gossip
with Alexandra's kitchen girls while they washed the dishes.
She could always find out more about Alexandra's domestic economy from the prattling maids than from Alexandra herself,
and what she discovered she used
to her own advantage
with Lou.
On the Divide,
farmers'
daughters no longer went out into service,
so Alexandra got her girls from Sweden,
by paying their fare over.
They stayed
with her until they married,
and were replaced by sisters or cousins from the old country.
Alexandra took her three nieces into the flower garden.
She was fond of the little girls,
especially of Milly,
who came
to spend a week
with her aunt now and then,
and read aloud
to her from the old books about the house,
or listened
to stories about the early days on the Divide.
While they were walking among the flower beds,
a buggy drove up the hill and stopped in front of the gate.
A man got out and stood talking
to the driver.
The little girls were delighted at the advent of a stranger,
some one from very far away,
they knew by his clothes,
his gloves,
and the sharp,
pointed cut of his dark beard.
The girls fell behind their aunt and peeped out at him from among the castor beans.
The stranger came up
to the gate and stood holding his hat in his hand,
smiling,
while Alexandra advanced slowly
to meet him.
As she approached he spoke in a low,
pleasant voice.
"Don't you know me,
Alexandra?
I would have known you,
anywhere."
Alexandra shaded her eyes
with her hand.
Suddenly she took a quick step forward.
"Can it be!"
she exclaimed
with feeling;
"can it be that it is Carl Linstrum?
Why,
Carl,
it is!"
She threw out both her hands and caught his across the gate.
"Sadie,
Milly,
run tell your father and Uncle Oscar that our old friend Carl Linstrum is here.
Be quick! Why,
Carl,
how did it happen?
I can't believe this!"
Alexandra shook the tears from her eyes and laughed.
The stranger nodded
to his driver,
dropped his suitcase inside the fence,
and opened the gate.
"Then you are glad
to see me,
and you can put me up overnight?
I couldn't go through this country without stopping off
to have a look at you.
How little you have changed! Do you know,
I was sure it would be like that.
You simply couldn't be different.
How fine you are!"
He stepped back and looked at her admiringly.
Alexandra blushed and laughed again.
"But you yourself,
Carl--with that beard--how could I have known you?
You went away a little boy."
She reached
for his suitcase and when he intercepted her she threw up her hands.
"You see,
I give myself away.
I have only women come
to visit me,
and I do not know how
to behave.
Where is your trunk?"
"It's in Hanover.
I can stay only a few days.
I am on my way
to the coast."
They started up the path.
"A few days?
After all these years!"
Alexandra shook her finger at him.
"See this,
you have walked into a trap.
You do not get away so easy."
She put her hand affectionately on his shoulder.
"You owe me a visit
for the sake of old times.
Why must you go
to the coast at all?"
"Oh,
I must! I am a fortune hunter.
From Seattle I go on
to Alaska."
"Alaska?"
She looked at him in astonishment.
"Are you going
to paint the Indians?"
"Paint?"
the young man frowned.
"Oh! I'm not a painter,
Alexandra.
I'm an engraver.
I have nothing
to do
with painting."
"But on my parlor wall I have the paintings--"
He interrupted nervously.
"Oh,
water-color sketches--done
for amusement.
I sent them
to remind you of me,
not because they were good.
What a wonderful place you have made of this,
Alexandra."
He turned and looked back at the wide,
map-like prospect of field and hedge and pasture.
"I would never have believed it could be done.
I'm disappointed in my own eye,
in my imagination."
At this moment Lou and Oscar came up the hill from the orchard.
They did not quicken their pace when they saw Carl;
indeed,
they did not openly look in his direction.
They advanced distrustfully,
and as if they wished the distance were longer.
Alexandra beckoned
to them.
"They think I am trying
to fool them.
Come,
boys,
it's Carl Linstrum,
our old Carl!"
Lou gave the visitor a quick,
sidelong glance and thrust out his hand.
"Glad
to see you."
Oscar followed with
"How d'
do."
Carl could not tell whether their offishness came from unfriendliness or from embarrassment.
He and Alexandra led the way
to the porch.
"Carl,"
Alexandra explained,
"is on his way
to Seattle.
He is going
to Alaska."
Oscar studied the visitor's yellow shoes.
"Got business there?"
he asked.
Carl laughed.
"Yes,
very pressing business.
I'm going there
to get rich.
Engraving's a very interesting profession,
but a man never makes any money at it.
So I'm going
to try the goldfields."
Alexandra felt that this was a tactful speech,
and Lou looked up
with some interest.
"Ever done anything in that line before?"
"No,
but I'm going
to join a friend of mine who went out from New York and has done well.
He has offered
to break me in."
"Turrible cold winters,
there,
I hear,"
remarked Oscar.
"I thought people went up there in the spring."
"They do.
But my friend is going
to spend the winter in Seattle and I am
to stay
with him there and learn something about prospecting before we start north next year."
Lou looked skeptical.
"Let's see,
how long have you been away from here?"
"Sixteen years.
You ought
to remember that,
Lou,
for you were married just after we went away."
"Going
to stay
with us some time?"
Oscar asked.
"A few days,
if Alexandra can keep me."
"I expect you'll be wanting
to see your old place,"
Lou observed more cordially.
"You won't hardly know it.
But there's a few chunks of your old sod house left.
Alexandra wouldn't never let Frank Shabata plough over it."
Annie Lee,
who,
ever since the visitor was announced,
had been touching up her hair and settling her lace and wishing she had worn another dress,
now emerged
with her three daughters and introduced them.
She was greatly impressed by Carl's urban appearance,
and in her excitement talked very loud and threw her head about.
"And you ain't married yet?
At your age,
now! Think of that! You'll have
to wait
for Milly.
Yes,
we've got a boy,
too.
The youngest.
He's at home
with his grandma.
You must come over
to see mother and hear Milly play.
She's the musician of the family.
She does pyrography,
too.
That's burnt wood,
you know.
You wouldn't believe what she can do
with her poker.
Yes,
she goes
to school in town,
and she is the youngest in her class by two years."
Milly looked uncomfortable and Carl took her hand again.
He liked her creamy skin and happy,
innocent eyes,
and he could see that her mother's way of talking distressed her.
"I'm sure she's a clever little girl,"
he murmured,
looking at her thoughtfully.
"Let me see-Ah,
it's your mother that she looks like,
Alexandra.
Mrs. Bergson must have looked just like this when she was a little girl.
Does Milly run about over the country as you and Alexandra used to,
Annie?"
Milly's mother protested.
"Oh,
my,
no! Things has changed since we was girls.
Milly has it very different.
We are going
to rent the place and move into town as soon as the girls are old enough
to go out into company.
A good many are doing that here now.
Lou is going into business."
Lou grinned.
"That's what she says.
You better go get your things on.
Ivar's hitching up,"
he added,
turning
to Annie.
Young farmers seldom address their wives by name.
It is always
"you,"
or
"she."
Having got his wife out of the way,
Lou sat down on the step and began
to whittle.
"Well,
what do folks in New York think of William Jennings Bryan?"
Lou began
to bluster,
as he always did when he talked politics.
"We gave Wall Street a scare in ninety-six,
all right,
and we're fixing another
to hand them.
Silver wasn't the only issue,"
he nodded mysteriously.
"There's a good many things got
to be changed.
The West is going
to make itself heard."
Carl laughed.
"But,
surely,
it did do that,
if nothing else."
Lou's thin face reddened up
to the roots of his bristly hair.
"Oh,
we've only begun.
We're waking up
to a sense of our responsibilities,
out here,
and we ain't afraid,
neither.
You fellows back there must be a tame lot.
If you had any nerve you'd get together and march down
to Wall Street and blow it up.
Dynamite it,
I mean,"
with a threatening nod.
He was so much in earnest that Carl scarcely knew how
to answer him.
"That would be a waste of powder.
The same business would go on in another street.
The street doesn't matter.
But what have you fellows out here got
to kick about?
You have the only safe place there is.
Morgan himself couldn't touch you.
One only has
to drive through this country
to see that you're all as rich as barons."
"We have a good deal more
to say than we had when we were poor,"
said Lou threateningly.
"We're getting on
to a whole lot of things."
As Ivar drove a double carriage up
to the gate,
Annie came out in a hat that looked like the model of a battleship.
Carl rose and took her down
to the carriage,
while Lou lingered
for a word
with his sister.
"What do you suppose he's come for?"
he asked,
jerking his head toward the gate.
"Why,
to pay us a visit.
I've been begging him
to
for years."
Oscar looked at Alexandra.
"He didn't let you know he was coming?"
"No.
Why should he?
I told him
to come at any time."
Lou shrugged his shoulders.
"He doesn't seem
to have done much
for himself.
Wandering around this way!"
Oscar spoke solemnly,
as from the depths of a cavern.
"He never was much account."
Alexandra left them and hurried down
to the gate where Annie was rattling on
to Carl about her new dining-room furniture.
"You must bring Mr. Linstrum over real soon,
only be sure
to telephone me first,"
she called back,
as Carl helped her into the carriage.
Old Ivar,
his white head bare,
stood holding the horses.
Lou came down the path and climbed into the front seat,
took up the reins,
and drove off without saying anything further
to any one.
Oscar picked up his youngest boy and trudged off down the road,
the other three trotting after him.
Carl,
holding the gate open
for Alexandra,
began
to laugh.
"Up and coming on the Divide,
eh,
Alexandra?"
he cried gayly.
IV Carl had changed,
Alexandra felt,
much less than one might have expected.
He had not become a trim,
self-satisfied city man.
There was still something homely and wayward and definitely personal about him.
Even his clothes,
his Norfolk coat and his very high collars,
were a little unconventional.
He seemed
to shrink into himself as he used
to do;
to hold himself away from things,
as if he were afraid of being hurt.
In short,
he was more self-conscious than a man of thirty-five is expected
to be.
He looked older than his years and not very strong.
His black hair,
which still hung in a triangle over his pale forehead,
was thin at the crown,
and there were fine,
relentless lines about his eyes.
His back,
with its high,
sharp shoulders,
looked like the back of an overworked German professor off on his holiday.
His face was intelligent,
sensitive,
unhappy.
That evening after supper,
Carl and Alexandra were sitting by the clump of castor beans in the middle of the flower garden.
The gravel paths glittered in the moonlight,
and below them the fields lay white and still.
"Do you know,
Alexandra,"
he was saying,
"I've been thinking how strangely things work out.
I've been away engraving other men's pictures,
and you've stayed at home and made your own."
He pointed
with his cigar toward the sleeping landscape.
"How in the world have you done it?
How have your neighbors done it?"
"We hadn't any of us much
to do
with it,
Carl.
The land did it.
It had its little joke.
It pretended
to be poor because nobody knew how
to work it right;
and then,
all at once,
it worked itself.
It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself,
and it was so big,
so rich,
that we suddenly found we were rich,
just from sitting still.
As
for me,
you remember when I began
to buy land.
For years after that I was always squeezing and borrowing until I was ashamed
to show my face in the banks.
And then,
all at once,
men began
to come
to me offering
to lend me money--and I didn't need it! Then I went ahead and built this house.
I really built it
for Emil.
I want you
to see Emil,
Carl.
He is so different from the rest of us!"
"How different?"
"Oh,
you'll see! I'm sure it was
to have sons like Emil,
and
to give them a chance,
that father left the old country.
It's curious,
too;
on the outside Emil is just like an American boy,--he graduated from the State University in June,
you know,--but underneath he is more Swedish than any of us.
Sometimes he is so like father that he frightens me;
he is so violent in his feelings like that."
"Is he going
to farm here
with you?"
"He shall do whatever he wants to,"
Alexandra declared warmly.
"He is going
to have a chance,
a whole chance;
that's what I've worked for.
Sometimes he talks about studying law,
and sometimes,
just lately,
he's been talking about going out into the sand hills and taking up more land.
He has his sad times,
like father.
But I hope he won't do that.
We have land enough,
at last!"
Alexandra laughed.
"How about Lou and Oscar?
They've done well,
haven't they?"
"Yes,
very well;
but they are different,
and now that they have farms of their own I do not see so much of them.
We divided the land equally when Lou married.
They have their own way of doing things,
and they do not altogether like my way,
I am afraid.
Perhaps they think me too independent.
But I have had
to think
for myself a good many years and am not likely
to change.
On the whole,
though,
we take as much comfort in each other as most brothers and sisters do.
And I am very fond of Lou's oldest daughter."
"I think I liked the old Lou and Oscar better,
and they probably feel the same about me.
I even,
if you can keep a secret,"--Carl leaned forward and touched her arm,
smiling,--"I even think I liked the old country better.
This is all very splendid in its way,
but there was something about this country when it was a wild old beast that has haunted me all these years.
Now,
when I come back
to all this milk and honey,
I feel like the old German song,
'Wo bist du,
wo bist du,
mein geliebtest Land?'
-Do you ever feel like that,
I wonder?"
"Yes,
sometimes,
when I think about father and mother and those who are gone;
so many of our old neighbors."
Alexandra paused and looked up thoughtfully at the stars.
"We can remember the graveyard when it was wild prairie,
Carl,
and now--"
"And now the old story has begun
to write itself over there,"
said Carl softly.
"Isn't it queer:
there are only two or three human stories,
and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before;
like the larks in this country,
that have been singing the same five notes over
for thousands of years."
"Oh,
yes! The young people,
they live so hard.
And yet I sometimes envy them.
There is my little neighbor,
now;
the people who bought your old place.
I wouldn't have sold it
to any one else,
but I was always fond of that girl.
You must remember her,
little Marie Tovesky,
from Omaha,
who used
to visit here?
When she was eighteen she ran away from the convent school and got married,
crazy child! She came out here a bride,
with her father and husband.
He had nothing,
and the old man was willing
to buy them a place and set them up.
Your farm took her fancy,
and I was glad
to have her so near me.
I've never been sorry,
either.
I even try
to get along
with Frank on her account."
"Is Frank her husband?"
"Yes.
He's one of these wild fellows.
Most Bohemians are good-natured,
but Frank thinks we don't appreciate him here,
I guess.
He's jealous about everything,
his farm and his horses and his pretty wife.
Everybody likes her,
just the same as when she was little.
Sometimes I go up
to the Catholic church
with Emil,
and it's funny
to see Marie standing there laughing and shaking hands
with people,
looking so excited and gay,
with Frank sulking behind her as if he could eat everybody alive.
Frank's not a bad neighbor,
but
to get on
with him you've got
to make a fuss over him and act as if you thought he was a very important person all the time,
and different from other people.
I find it hard
to keep that up from one year's end
to another."
"I shouldn't think you'd be very successful at that kind of thing,
Alexandra."
Carl seemed
to find the idea amusing.
"Well,"
said Alexandra firmly,
"I do the best I can,
on Marie's account.
She has it hard enough,
anyway.
She's too young and pretty
for this sort of life.
We're all ever so much older and slower.
But she's the kind that won't be downed easily.
She'll work all day and go
to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night,
and drive the hay wagon
for a cross man next morning.
I could stay by a job,
but I never had the go in me that she has,
when I was going my best.
I'll have
to take you over
to see her to-morrow."
Carl dropped the end of his cigar softly among the castor beans and sighed.
"Yes,
I suppose I must see the old place.
I'm cowardly about things that remind me of myself.
It took courage
to come at all,
Alexandra.
I wouldn't have,
if I hadn't wanted
to see you very,
very much."
Alexandra looked at him
with her calm,
deliberate eyes.
"Why do you dread things like that,
Carl?"
she asked earnestly.
"Why are you dissatisfied
with yourself?"
Her visitor winced.
"How direct you are,
Alexandra! Just like you used
to be.
Do I give myself away so quickly?
Well,
you see,
for one thing,
there's nothing
to look forward
to in my profession.
Wood-engraving is the only thing I care about,
and that had gone out before I began.
Everything's cheap metal work nowadays,
touching up miserable photographs,
forcing up poor drawings,
and spoiling good ones.
I'm absolutely sick of it all."
Carl frowned.
"Alexandra,
all the way out from New York I've been planning how I could deceive you and make you think me a very enviable fellow,
and here I am telling you the truth the first night.
I waste a lot of time pretending
to people,
and the joke of it is,
I don't think I ever deceive any one.
There are too many of my kind;
people know us on sight."
Carl paused.
Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow
with a puzzled,
thoughtful gesture.
"You see,"
he went on calmly,
"measured by your standards here,
I'm a failure.
I couldn't buy even one of your cornfields.
I've enjoyed a great many things,
but I've got nothing
to show
for it all."
"But you show
for it yourself,
Carl.
I'd rather have had your freedom than my land."
Carl shook his head mournfully.
"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
Here you are an individual,
you have a background of your own,
you would be missed.
But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me.
We are all alike;
we have no ties,
we know nobody,
we own nothing.
When one of us dies,
they scarcely know where
to bury him.
Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners,
and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle,
or an easel,
or a typewriter,
or whatever tool we got our living by.
All we have ever managed
to do is
to pay our rent,
the exorbitant rent that one has
to pay
for a few square feet of space near the heart of things.
We have no house,
no place,
no people of our own.
We live in the streets,
in the parks,
in the theatres.
We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
Alexandra was silent.
She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture.
He knew that she understood what he meant.
At last she said slowly,
"And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers.
We pay a high rent,
too,
though we pay differently.
We grow hard and heavy here.
We don't move lightly and easily as you do,
and our minds get stiff.
If the world were no wider than my cornfields,
if there were not something beside this,
I wouldn't feel that it was much worth while
to work.
No,
I would rather have Emil like you than like them.
I felt that as soon as you came."
"I wonder why you feel like that?"
Carl mused.
"I don't know.
Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen,
the sister of one of my hired men.
She had never been out of the cornfields,
and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over,
and she didn't see the use of it.
After she had tried
to kill herself once or twice,
her folks got worried and sent her over
to Iowa
to visit some relations.
Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful,
and she says she's contented
to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting.
She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her.
And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me."
V Alexandra did not find time
to go
to her neighbor's the next day,
nor the next.
It was a busy season on the farm,
with the corn-plowing going on,
and even Emil was in the field
with a team and cultivator.
Carl went about over the farms
with Alexandra in the morning,
and in the afternoon and evening they found a great deal
to talk about.
Emil,
for all his track practice,
did not stand up under farmwork very well,
and by night he was too tired
to talk or even
to practise on his cornet.
On Wednesday morning Carl got up before it was light,
and stole downstairs and out of the kitchen door just as old Ivar was making his morning ablutions at the pump.
Carl nodded
to him and hurried up the draw,
past the garden,
and into the pasture where the milking cows used
to be kept.
The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that was burning under the edge of the world.
The color was reflected in the globules of dew that sheathed the short gray pasture grass.
Carl walked rapidly until he came
to the crest of the second hill,
where the Bergson pasture joined the one that had belonged
to his father.
There he sat down and waited
for the sun
to rise.
It was just there that he and Alexandra used
to do their milking together,
he on his side of the fence,
she on hers.
He could remember exactly how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass,
her skirts pinned up,
her head bare,
a bright tin pail in either hand,
and the milky light of the early morning all about her.
Even as a boy he used
to feel,
when he saw her coming
with her free step,
her upright head and calm shoulders,
that she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself.
Since then,
when he had happened
to see the sun come up in the country or on the water,
he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.
Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie,
and in the grass about him all the small creatures of day began
to tune their tiny instruments.
Birds and insects without number began
to chirp,
to twitter,
to snap and whistle,
to make all manner of fresh shrill noises.
The pasture was flooded
with light;
every clump of ironweed and snow-on-themountain threw a long shadow,
and the golden light seemed
to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in.
He crossed the fence into the pasture that was now the Shabatas'
and continued his walk toward the pond.
He had not gone far,
however,
when he discovered that he was not the only person abroad.
In the draw below,
his gun in his hands,
was Emil,
advancing cautiously,
with a young woman beside him.
They were moving softly,
keeping close together,
and Carl knew that they expected
to find ducks on the pond.
At the moment when they came in sight of the bright spot of water,
he heard a whirr of wings and the ducks shot up into the air.
There was a sharp crack from the gun,
and five of the birds fell
to the ground.
Emil and his companion laughed delightedly,
and Emil ran
to pick them up.
When he came back,
dangling the ducks by their feet,
Marie held her apron and he dropped them into it.
As she stood looking down at them,
her face changed.
She took up one of the birds,
a rumpled ball of feathers
with the blood dripping slowly from its mouth,
and looked at the live color that still burned on its plumage.
As she let it fall,
she cried in distress,
"Oh,
Emil,
why did you?"
"I like that!"
the boy exclaimed indignantly.
"Why,
Marie,
you asked me
to come yourself."
":Yes,
yes,
I know,"
she said tearfully,
"but I didn't think.
I hate
to see them when they are first shot.
They were having such a good time,
and we've spoiled it all
for them."
Emil gave a rather sore laugh.
"I should say we had! I'm not going hunting
with you any more.
You're as bad as Ivar.
Here,
let me take them."
He snatched the ducks out of her apron.
"Don't be cross,
Emil.
Only--Ivar's right about wild things.
They're too happy
to kill.
You can tell just how they felt when they flew up.
They were scared,
but they didn't really think anything could hurt them.
No,
we won't do that any more."
"All right,"
Emil assented.
"I'm sorry I made you feel bad."
As he looked down into her tearful eyes,
there was a curious,
sharp young bitterness in his own.
Carl watched them as they moved slowly down the draw.
They had not seen him at all.
He had not overheard much of their dialogue,
but he felt the import of it.
It made him,
somehow,
unreasonably mournful
to find two young things abroad in the pasture in the early morning.
He decided that he needed his breakfast.
VI At dinner that day Alexandra said she thought they must really manage
to go over
to the Shabatas'
that afternoon.
"It's not often I let three days go by without seeing Marie.
She will think I have forsaken her,
now that my old friend has come back."
After the men had gone back
to work,
Alexandra put on a white dress and her sun-hat,
and she and Carl set forth across the fields.
"You see we have kept up the old path,
Carl.
It has been so nice
for me
to feel that there was a friend at the other end of it again."
Carl smiled a little ruefully.
"All the same,
I hope it hasn't been QUITE the same."
Alexandra looked at him
with surprise.
"Why,
no,
of course not.
Not the same.
She could not very well take your place,
if that's what you mean.
I'm friendly
with all my neighbors,
I hope.
But Marie is really a companion,
some one I can talk
to quite frankly.
You wouldn't want me
to be more lonely than I have been,
would you?"
Carl laughed and pushed back the triangular lock of hair
with the edge of his hat.
"Of course I don't.
I ought
to be thankful that this path hasn't been worn by--well,
by friends
with more pressing errands than your little Bohemian is likely
to have."
He paused
to give Alexandra his hand as she stepped over the stile.
"Are you the least bit disappointed in our coming together again?"
he asked abruptly.
"Is it the way you hoped it would be?"
Alexandra smiled at this.
"Only better.
When I've thought about your coming,
I've sometimes been a little afraid of it.
You have lived where things move so fast,
and everything is slow here;
the people slowest of all.
Our lives are like the years,
all made up of weather and crops and cows.
How you hated cows!"
She shook her head and laughed
to herself.
"I didn't when we milked together.
I walked up
to the pasture corners this morning.
I wonder whether I shall ever be able
to tell you all that I was thinking about up there.
It's a strange thing,
Alexandra;
I find it easy
to be frank
with you about everything under the sun except--yourself!"
"You are afraid of hurting my feelings,
perhaps."
Alexandra looked at him thoughtfully.
"No,
I'm afraid of giving you a shock.
You've seen yourself
for so long in the dull minds of the people about you,
that if I were
to tell you how you seem
to me,
it would startle you.
But you must see that you astonish me.
You must feel when people admire you."
Alexandra blushed and laughed
with some confusion.
"I felt that you were pleased
with me,
if you mean that."
"And you've felt when other people were pleased
with you?"
he insisted.
"Well,
sometimes.
The men in town,
at the banks and the county offices,
seem glad
to see me.
I think,
myself,
it is more pleasant
to do business
with people who are clean and healthy-looking,"
she admitted blandly.
Carl gave a little chuckle as he opened the Shabatas'
gate
for her.
"Oh,
do you?"
he asked dryly.
There was no sign of life about the Shabatas'
house except a big yellow cat,
sunning itself on the kitchen doorstep.
Alexandra took the path that led
to the orchard.
"She often sits there and sews.
I didn't telephone her we were coming,
because I didn't her
to go
to work and bake cake and freeze ice-cream.
She'll always make a party if you give her the least excuse.
Do you recognize the apple trees,
Carl?"
Linstrum looked about him.
"I wish I had a dollar
for every bucket of water I've carried
for those trees.
Poor father,
he was an easy man,
but he was perfectly merciless when it came
to watering the orchard."
"That's one thing I like about Germans;
they make an orchard grow if they can't make anything else.
I'm so glad these trees belong
to some one who takes comfort in them.
When I rented this place,
the tenants never kept the orchard up,
and Emil and I used
to come over and take care of it ourselves.
It needs mowing now.
There she is,
down in the corner.
Maria-a-a!"
she called.
A recumbent figure started up from the grass and came running toward them through the flickering screen of light and shade.
"Look at her! Isn't she like a little brown rabbit?"
Alexandra laughed.
Maria ran up panting and threw her arms about Alexandra.
"Oh,
I had begun
to think you were not coming at all,
maybe.
I knew you were so busy.
Yes,
Emil told me about Mr. Linstrum being here.
Won't you come up
to the house?"
"Why not sit down there in your corner?
Carl wants
to see the orchard.
He kept all these trees alive
for years,
watering them
with his own back."
Marie turned
to Carl.
"Then I'm thankful
to you,
Mr. Linstrum.
We'd never have bought the place if it hadn't been
for this orchard,
and then I wouldn't have had Alexandra,
either."
She gave Alexandra's arm a little squeeze as she walked beside her.
"How nice your dress smells,
Alexandra;
you put rosemary leaves in your chest,
like I told you."
She led them
to the northwest corner of the orchard,
sheltered on one side by a thick mulberry hedge and bordered on the other by a wheatfield,
just beginning
to yellow.
In this corner the ground dipped a little,
and the bluegrass,
which the weeds had driven out in the upper part of the orchard,
grew thick and luxuriant.
Wild roses were flaming in the tufts of bunchgrass along the fence.
Under a white mulberry tree there was an old wagon-seat.
Beside it lay a book and a workbasket.
"You must have the seat,
Alexandra.
The grass would stain your dress,"
the hostess insisted.
She dropped down on the ground at Alexandra's side and tucked her feet under her.
Carl sat at a little distance from the two women,
his back
to the wheatfield,
and watched them.
Alexandra took off her shade-hat and threw it on the ground.
Marie picked it up and played
with the white ribbons,
twisting them about her brown fingers as she talked.
They made a pretty picture in the strong sunlight,
the leafy pattern surrounding them like a net;
the Swedish woman so white and gold,
kindly and amused,
but armored in calm,
and the alert brown one,
her full lips parted,
points of yellow light dancing in her eyes as she laughed and chattered.
Carl had never forgotten little Marie Tovesky's eyes,
and he was glad
to have an opportunity
to study them.
The brown iris,
he found,
was curiously slashed
with yellow,
the color of sunflower honey,
or of old amber.
In each eye one of these streaks must have been larger than the others,
for the effect was that of two dancing points of light,
two little yellow bubbles,
such as rise in a glass of champagne.
Sometimes they seemed like the sparks from a forge.
She seemed so easily excited,
to kindle
with a fierce little flame if one but breathed upon her.
"What a waste,"
Carl reflected.
"She ought
to be doing all that
for a sweetheart.
How awkwardly things come about!"
It was not very long before Marie sprang up out of the grass again.
"Wait a moment.
I want
to show you something."
She ran away and disappeared behind the low-growing apple trees.
"What a charming creature,"
Carl murmured.
"I don't wonder that her husband is jealous.
But can't she walk?
does she always run?"
Alexandra nodded.
"Always.
I don't see many people,
but I don't believe there are many like her,
anywhere."
Marie came back
with a branch she had broken from an apricot tree,
laden
with paleyellow,
pink-cheeked fruit.
She dropped it beside Carl.
"Did you plant those,
too?
They are such beautiful little trees."
Carl fingered the blue-green leaves,
porous like blotting-paper and shaped like birch leaves,
hung on waxen red steMs. "Yes,
I think I did.
Are these the circus trees,
Alexandra?"
"Shall I tell her about them?"
Alexandra asked.
"Sit down like a good girl,
Marie,
and don't ruin my poor hat,
and I'll tell you a story.
A long time ago,
when Carl and I were,
say,
sixteen and twelve,
a circus came
to Hanover and we went
to town in our wagon,
with Lou and Oscar,
to see the parade.
We hadn't money enough
to go
to the circus.
We followed the parade out
to the circus grounds and hung around until the show began and the crowd went inside the tent.
Then Lou was afraid we looked foolish standing outside in the pasture,
so we went back
to Hanover feeling very sad.
There was a man in the streets selling apricots,
and we had never seen any before.
He had driven down from somewhere up in the French country,
and he was selling them twenty-five cents a peck.
We had a little money our fathers had given us
for candy,
and I bought two pecks and Carl bought one.
They cheered us a good deal,
and we saved all the seeds and planted them.
Up
to the time Carl went away,
they hadn't borne at all."
"And now he's come back
to eat them,"
cried Marie,
nodding at Carl.
"That IS a good story.
I can remember you a little,
Mr. Linstrum.
I used
to see you in Hanover sometimes,
when Uncle Joe took me
to town.
I remember you because you were always buying pencils and tubes of paint at the drug store.
Once,
when my uncle left me at the store,
you drew a lot of little birds and flowers
for me on a piece of wrapping-paper.
I kept them
for a long while.
I thought you were very romantic because you could draw and had such black eyes."
Carl smiled.
"Yes,
I remember that time.
Your uncle bought you some kind of a mechanical toy,
a Turkish lady sitting on an ottoman and smoking a hookah,
wasn't it?
And she turned her head backwards and forwards."
"Oh,
yes! Wasn't she splendid! I knew well enough I ought not
to tell Uncle Joe I wanted it,
for he had just come back from the saloon and was feeling good.
You remember how he laughed?
She tickled him,
too.
But when we got home,
my aunt scolded him
for buying toys when she needed so many things.
We wound our lady up every night,
and when she began
to move her head my aunt used
to laugh as hard as any of us.
It was a music-box,
you know,
and the Turkish lady played a tune while she smoked.
That was how she made you feel so jolly.
As I remember her,
she was lovely,
and had a gold crescent on her turban."
Half an hour later,
as they were leaving the house,
Carl and Alexandra were met in the path by a strapping fellow in overalls and a blue shirt.
He was breathing hard,
as if he had been running,
and was muttering
to himself.
Marie ran forward,
and,
taking him by the arm,
gave him a little push toward her guests.
"Frank,
this is Mr. Linstrum."
Frank took off his broad straw hat and nodded
to Alexandra.
When he spoke
to Carl,
he showed a fine set of white teeth.
He was burned a dull red down
to his neckband,
and there was a heavy three-days'
stubble on his face.
Even in his agitation he was handsome,
but he looked a rash and violent man.
Barely saluting the callers,
he turned at once
to his wife and began,
in an outraged tone,
"I have
to leave my team
to drive the old woman Hiller's hogs out-a my wheat.
I go
to take dat old woman
to de court if she ain't careful,
I tell you!"
His wife spoke soothingly.
"But,
Frank,
she has only her lame boy
to help her.
She does the best she can."
Alexandra looked at the excited man and offered a suggestion.
"Why don't you go over there some afternoon and hog-tight her fences?
You'd save time
for yourself in the end."
Frank's neck stiffened.
"Not-a-much,
I won't.
I keep my hogs home.
Other peoples can do like me.
See?
If that Louis can mend shoes,
he can mend fence."
"Maybe,"
said Alexandra placidly;
"but I've found it sometimes pays
to mend other people's fences.
Good-bye,
Marie.
Come
to see me soon."
Alexandra walked firmly down the path and Carl followed her.
Frank went into the house and threw himself on the sofa,
his face
to the wall,
his clenched fist on his hip.
Marie,
having seen her guests off,
came in and put her hand coaxingly on his shoulder.
"Poor Frank! You've run until you've made your head ache,
now haven't you?
Let me make you some coffee."
"What else am I
to do?"
he cried hotly in Bohemian.
"Am I
to let any old woman's hogs root up my wheat?
Is that what I work myself
to death for?"
"Don't worry about it,
Frank.
I'll speak
to Mrs. Hiller again.
But,
really,
she almost cried last time they got out,
she was so sorry."
Frank bounced over on his other side.
"That's it;
you always side
with them against me.
They all know it.
Anybody here feels free
to borrow the mower and break it,
or turn their hogs in on me.
They know you won't care!"
Marie hurried away
to make his coffee.
When she came back,
he was fast asleep.
She sat down and looked at him
for a long while,
very thoughtfully.
When the kitchen clock struck six she went out
to get supper,
closing the door gently behind her.
She was always sorry
for Frank when he worked himself into one of these rages,
and she was sorry
to have him rough and quarrelsome
with his neighbors.
She was perfectly aware that the neighbors had a good deal
to put up with,
and that they bore
with Frank
for her sake.
VII Marie's father,
Albert Tovesky,
was one of the more intelligent Bohemians who came West in the early seventies.
He settled in Omaha and became a leader and adviser among his people there.
Marie was his youngest child,
by a second wife,
and was the apple of his eye.
She was barely sixteen,
and was in the graduating class of the Omaha High School,
when Frank Shabata arrived from the old country and set all the Bohemian girls in a flutter.
He was easily the buck of the beer-gardens,
and on Sunday he was a sight
to see,
with his silk hat and tucked shirt and blue frock-coat,
wearing gloves and carrying a little wisp of a yellow cane.
He was tall and fair,
with splendid teeth and close-cropped yellow curls,
and he wore a slightly disdainful expression,
proper
for a young man
with high connections,
whose mother had a big farm in the Elbe valley.
There was often an interesting discontent in his blue eyes,
and every Bohemian girl he met imagined herself the cause of that unsatisfied expression.
He had a way of drawing out his cambric handkerchief slowly,
by one corner,
from his breastpocket,
that was melancholy and romantic in the extreme.
He took a little flight
with each of the more eligible Bohemian girls,
but it was when he was
with little Marie Tovesky that he drew his handkerchief out most slowly,
and,
after he had lit a fresh cigar,
dropped the match most despairingly.
Any one could see,
with half an eye,
that his proud heart was bleeding
for somebody.
One Sunday,
late in the summer after Marie's graduation,
she met Frank at a Bohemian picnic down the river and went rowing
with him all the afternoon.
When she got home that evening she went straight
to her father's room and told him that she was engaged
to Shabata.
Old Tovesky was having a comfortable pipe before he went
to bed.
When he heard his daughter's announcement,
he first prudently corked his beer bottle and then leaped
to his feet and had a turn of temper.
He characterized Frank Shabata by a Bohemian expression which is the equivalent of stuffed shirt.
"Why don't he go
to work like the rest of us did?
His farm in the Elbe valley,
indeed! Ain't he got plenty brothers and sisters?
It's his mother's farm,
and why don't he stay at home and help her?
Haven't I seen his mother out in the morning at five o'clock
with her ladle and her big bucket on wheels,
putting liquid manure on the cabbages?
Don't I know the look of old Eva Shabata's hands?
Like an old horse's hoofs they are--and this fellow wearing gloves and rings! Engaged,
indeed! You aren't fit
to be out of school,
and that's what's the matter
with you.
I will send you off
to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis,
and they will teach you some sense,
~I~ guess!"
Accordingly,
the very next week,
Albert Tovesky took his daughter,
pale and tearful,
down the river
to the convent.
But the way
to make Frank want anything was
to tell him he couldn't have it.
He managed
to have an interview
with Marie before she went away,
and whereas he had been only half in love
with her before,
he now persuaded himself that he would not stop at anything.
Marie took
with her
to the convent,
under the canvas lining of her trunk,
the results of a laborious and satisfying morning on Frank's part;
no less than a dozen photographs of himself,
taken in a dozen different love-lorn attitudes.
There was a little round photograph
for her watch-case,
photographs
for her wall and dresser,
and even long narrow ones
to be used as bookmarks.
More than once the handsome gentleman was torn
to pieces before the French class by an indignant nun.
Marie pined in the convent
for a year,
until her eighteenth birthday was passed.
Then she met Frank Shabata in the Union Station in St. Louis and ran away
with him.
Old Tovesky forgave his daughter because there was nothing else
to do,
and bought her a farm in the country that she had loved so well as a child.
Since then her story had been a part of the history of the Divide.
She and Frank had been living there
for five years when Carl Linstrum came back
to pay his long deferred visit
to Alexandra.
Frank had,
on the whole,
done better than one might have expected.
He had flung himself at the soil
with savage energy.
Once a year he went
to Hastings or
to Omaha,
on a spree.
He stayed away
for a week or two,
and then came home and worked like a demon.
He did work;
if he felt sorry
for himself,
that was his own affair.
VIII On the evening of the day of Alexandra's call at the Shabatas',
a heavy rain set in.
Frank sat up until a late hour reading the Sunday newspapers.
One of the Goulds was getting a divorce,
and Frank took it as a personal affront.
In printing the story of the young man's marital troubles,
the knowing editor gave a sufficiently colored account of his career,
stating the amount of his income and the manner in which he was supposed
to spend it.
Frank read English slowly,
and the more he read about this divorce case,
the angrier he grew.
At last he threw down the page
with a snort.
He turned
to his farm-hand who was reading the other half of the paper.
"By God! if I have that young feller in de hayfield once,
I show him someting.
Listen here what he do wit his money."
And Frank began the catalogue of the young man's reputed extravagances.
Marie sighed.
She thought it hard that the Goulds,
for whom she had nothing but good will,
should make her so much trouble.
She hated
to see the Sunday newspapers come into the house.
Frank was always reading about the doings of rich people and feeling outraged.
He had an inexhaustible stock of stories about their crimes and follies,
how they bribed the courts and shot down their butlers
with impunity whenever they chose.
Frank and Lou Bergson had very similar ideas,
and they were two of the political agitators of the county.
The next morning broke clear and brilliant,
but Frank said the ground was too wet
to plough,
so he took the cart and drove over
to Sainte-Agnes
to spend the day at Moses Marcel's saloon.
After he was gone,
Marie went out
to the back porch
to begin her butter-making.
A brisk wind had come up and was driving puffy white clouds across the sky.
The orchard was sparkling and rippling in the sun.
Marie stood looking toward it wistfully,
her hand on the lid of the churn,
when she heard a sharp ring in the air,
the merry sound of the whetstone on the scythe.
That invitation decided her.
She ran into the house,
put on a short skirt and a pair of her husband's boots,
caught up a tin pail and started
for the orchard.
Emil had already begun work and was mowing vigorously.
When he saw her coming,
he stopped and wiped his brow.
His yellow canvas leggings and khaki trousers were splashed
to the knees.
"Don't let me disturb you,
Emil.
I'm going
to pick cherries.
Isn't everything beautiful after the rain?
Oh,
but I'm glad
to get this place mowed! When I heard it raining in the night,
I thought maybe you would come and do it
for me to-day.
The wind wakened me.
Didn't it blow dreadfully?
Just smell the wild roses! They are always so spicy after a rain.
We never had so many of them in here before.
I suppose it's the wet season.
Will you have
to cut them,
too?"
"If I cut the grass,
I will,"
Emil said teasingly.
"What's the matter
with you?
What makes you so flighty?"
"Am I flighty?
I suppose that's the wet season,
too,
then.
It's exciting
to see everything growing so fast,--and
to get the grass cut! Please leave the roses till last,
if you must cut them.
Oh,
I don't mean all of them,
I mean that low place down by my tree,
where there are so many.
Aren't you splashed! Look at the spider-webs all over the grass.
Good-bye.
I'll call you if I see a snake."
She tripped away and Emil stood looking after her.
In a few moments he heard the cherries dropping smartly into the pail,
and he began
to swing his scythe
with that long,
even stroke that few American boys ever learn.
Marie picked cherries and sang softly
to herself,
stripping one glittering branch after another,
shivering when she caught a shower of raindrops on her neck and hair.
And Emil mowed his way slowly down toward the cherry trees.
That summer the rains had been so many and opportune that it was almost more than Shabata and his man could do
to keep up
with the corn;
the orchard was a neglected wilderness.
All sorts of weeds and herbs and flowers had grown up there;
splotches of wild larkspur,
pale green-and-white spikes of hoarhound,
plantations of wild cotton,
tangles of foxtail and wild wheat.
South of the apricot trees,
cornering on the wheatfield,
was Frank's alfalfa,
where myriads of white and yellow butterflies were always fluttering above the purple blossoMs. When Emil reached the lower corner by the hedge,
Marie was sitting under her white mulberry tree,
the pailful of cherries beside her,
looking off at the gentle,
tireless swelling of the wheat.
"Emil,"
she said suddenly--he was mowing quietly about under the tree so as not
to disturb her--"what religion did the Swedes have away back,
before they were Christians?"
Emil paused and straightened his back.
"I don't know.
About like the Germans',
wasn't it?"
Marie went on as if she had not heard him.
"The Bohemians,
you know,
were tree worshipers before the missionaries came.
Father says the people in the mountains still do queer things,
sometimes,--they believe that trees bring good or bad luck."
Emil looked superior.
"Do they?
Well,
which are the lucky trees?
I'd like
to know."
"I don't know all of them,
but I know lindens are.
The old people in the mountains plant lindens
to purify the forest,
and
to do away
with the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted from heathen times.
I'm a good Catholic,
but I think I could get along
with caring
for trees,
if I hadn't anything else."
"That's a poor saying,"
said Emil,
stooping over
to wipe his hands in the wet grass.
"Why is it?
If I feel that way,
I feel that way.
I like trees because they seem more resigned
to the way they have
to live than other things do.
I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here.
When I come back
to it,
I never have
to remind it of anything;
I begin just where I left off."
Emil had nothing
to say
to this.
He reached up among the branches and began
to pick the sweet,
insipid fruit,--long ivory-colored berries,
tipped
with faint pink,
like white coral,
that fall
to the ground unheeded all summer through.
He dropped a handful into her lap.
"Do you like Mr. Linstrum?"
Marie asked suddenly.
"Yes.
Don't you?"
"Oh,
ever so much;
only he seems kind of staid and school-teachery.
But,
of course,
he is older than Frank,
even.
I'm sure I don't want
to live
to be more than thirty,
do you?
Do you think Alexandra likes him very much?"
"I suppose so.
They were old friends."
"Oh,
Emil,
you know what I mean!"
Marie tossed her head impatiently.
"Does she really care about him?
When she used
to tell me about him,
I always wondered whether she wasn't a little in love
with him."
"Who,
Alexandra?"
Emil laughed and thrust his hands into his trousers pockets.
"Alexandra's never been in love,
you crazy!"
He laughed again.
"She wouldn't know how
to go about it.
The idea!"
Marie shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh,
you don't know Alexandra as well as you think you do! If you had any eyes,
you would see that she is very fond of him.
It would serve you all right if she walked off
with Carl.
I like him because he appreciates her more than you do."
Emil frowned.
"What are you talking about,
Marie?
Alexandra's all right.
She and I have always been good friends.
What more do you want?
I like
to talk
to Carl about New York and what a fellow can do there."
"Oh,
Emil! Surely you are not thinking of going off there?"
"Why not?
I must go somewhere,
mustn't I?"
The young man took up his scythe and leaned on it.
"Would you rather I went off in the sand hills and lived like Ivar?"
Marie's face fell under his brooding gaze.
She looked down at his wet leggings.
"I'm sure Alexandra hopes you will stay on here,"
she murmured.
"Then Alexandra will be disappointed,"
the young man said roughly.
"What do I want
to hang around here for?
Alexandra can run the farm all right,
without me.
I don't want
to stand around and look on.
I want
to be doing something on my own account."
"That's so,"
Marie sighed.
"There are so many,
many things you can do.
Almost anything you choose."
"And there are so many,
many things I can't do."
Emil echoed her tone sarcastically.
"Sometimes I don't want
to do anything at all,
and sometimes I want
to pull the four corners of the Divide together,"--he threw out his arm and brought it back
with a jerk,--"so,
like a table-cloth.
I get tired of seeing men and horses going up and down,
up and down."
Marie looked up at his defiant figure and her face clouded.
"I wish you weren't so restless,
and didn't get so worked up over things,"
she said sadly.
"Thank you,"
he returned shortly.
She sighed despondently.
"Everything I say makes you cross,
don't it?
And you never used
to be cross
to me."
Emil took a step nearer and stood frowning down at her bent head.
He stood in an attitude of self-defense,
his feet well apart,
his hands clenched and drawn up at his sides,
so that the cords stood out on his bare arMs. "I can't play
with you like a little boy any more,"
he said slowly.
"That's what you miss,
Marie.
You'll have
to get some other little boy
to play with."
He stopped and took a deep breath.
Then he went on in a low tone,
so intense that it was almost threatening:
"Sometimes you seem
to understand perfectly,
and then sometimes you pretend you don't.
You don't help things any by pretending.
It's then that I want
to pull the corners of the Divide together.
If you WON'T understand,
you know,
I could make you!"
Marie clasped her hands and started up from her seat.
She had grown very pale and her eyes were shining
with excitement and distress.
"But,
Emil,
if I understand,
then all our good times are over,
we can never do nice things together any more.
We shall have
to behave like Mr. Linstrum.
And,
anyhow,
there's nothing
to understand!"
She struck the ground
with her little foot fiercely.
"That won't last.
It will go away,
and things will be just as they used to.
I wish you were a Catholic.
The Church helps people,
indeed it does.
I pray
for you,
but that's not the same as if you prayed yourself."
She spoke rapidly and pleadingly,
looked entreatingly into his face.
Emil stood defiant,
gazing down at her.
"I can't pray
to have the things I want,"
he said slowly,
"and I won't pray not
to have them,
not if I'm damned
for it."
Marie turned away,
wringing her hands.
"Oh,
Emil,
you won't try! Then all our good times are over."
"Yes;
over.
I never expect
to have any more."
Emil gripped the hand-holds of his scythe and began
to mow.
Marie took up her cherries and went slowly toward the house,
crying bitterly.
IX On Sunday afternoon,
a month after Carl Linstrum's arrival,
he rode
with Emil up into the French country
to attend a Catholic fair.
He sat
for most of the afternoon in the basement of the church,
where the fair was held,
talking
to Marie Shabata,
or strolled about the gravel terrace,
thrown up on the hillside in front of the basement doors,
where the French boys were jumping and wrestling and throwing the discus.
Some of the boys were in their white baseball suits;
they had just come up from a Sunday practice game down in the ballgrounds.
Amedee,
the newly married,
Emil's best friend,
was their pitcher,
renowned among the country towns
for his dash and skill.
Amedee was a little fellow,
a year younger than Emil and much more boyish in appearance;
very lithe and active and neatly made,
with a clear brown and white skin,
and flashing white teeth.
The Sainte-Agnes boys were
to play the Hastings nine in a fortnight,
and Amedee's lightning balls were the hope of his team.
The little Frenchman seemed
to get every ounce there was in him behind the ball as it left his hand.
"You'd have made the battery at the University
for sure,
'Medee,"
Emil said as they were walking from the ball-grounds back
to the church on the hill.
"You're pitching better than you did in the spring."
Amedee grinned.
"Sure! A married man don't lose his head no more."
He slapped Emil on the back as he caught step
with him.
"Oh,
Emil,
you wanna get married right off quick! It's the greatest thing ever!"
Emil laughed.
"How am I going
to get married without any girl?"
Amedee took his arm.
"Pooh! There are plenty girls will have you.
You wanna get some nice French girl,
now.
She treat you well;
always be jolly.
See,"--he began checking off on his fingers,--"there is Severine,
and Alphosen,
and Josephine,
and Hectorine,
and Louise,
and Malvina--why,
I could love any of them girls! Why don't you get after them?
Are you stuck up,
Emil,
or is anything the matter
with you?
I never did know a boy twenty-two years old before that didn't have no girl.
You wanna be a priest,
maybe?
Not-a
for me!"
Amedee swaggered.
"I bring many good Catholics into this world,
I hope,
and that's a way I help the Church."
Emil looked down and patted him on the shoulder.
"Now you're windy,
'Medee.
You Frenchies like
to brag."
But Amedee had the zeal of the newly married,
and he was not
to be lightly shaken off.
"Honest and true,
Emil,
don't you want ANY girl?
Maybe there's some young lady in Lincoln,
now,
very grand,"--Amedee waved his hand languidly before his face
to denote the fan of heartless beauty,--"and you lost your heart up there.
Is that it?"
"Maybe,"
said Emil.
But Amedee saw no appropriate glow in his friend's face.
"Bah!"
he exclaimed in disgust.
"I tell all the French girls
to keep
'way from you.
You gotta rock in there,"
thumping Emil on the ribs.
When they reached the terrace at the side of the church,
Amedee,
who was excited by his success on the ball-grounds,
challenged Emil
to a jumping-match,
though he knew he would be beaten.
They belted themselves up,
and Raoul Marcel,
the choir tenor and Father Duchesne's pet,
and Jean Bordelau,
held the string over which they vaulted.
All the French boys stood round,
cheering and humping themselves up when Emil or Amedee went over the wire,
as if they were helping in the lift.
Emil stopped at five-feet-five,
declaring that he would spoil his appetite
for supper if he jumped any more.
Angelique,
Amedee's pretty bride,
as blonde and fair as her name,
who had come out
to watch the match,
tossed her head at Emil and said:--
"'Medee could jump much higher than you if he were as tall.
And anyhow,
he is much more graceful.
He goes over like a bird,
and you have
to hump yourself all up."
"Oh,
I do,
do I?"
Emil caught her and kissed her saucy mouth squarely,
while she laughed and struggled and called,
"'Medee!
'Medee!"
"There,
you see your
'Medee isn't even big enough
to get you away from me.
I could run away
with you right now and he could only sit down and cry about it.
I'll show you whether I have
to hump myself!"
Laughing and panting,
he picked Angelique up in his arms and began running about the rectangle
with her.
Not until he saw Marie Shabata's tiger eyes flashing from the gloom of the basement doorway did he hand the disheveled bride over
to her husband.
"There,
go
to your graceful;
I haven't the heart
to take you away from him."
Angelique clung
to her husband and made faces at Emil over the white shoulder of Amedee's ball-shirt.
Emil was greatly amused at her air of proprietorship and at Amedee's shameless submission
to it.
He was delighted
with his friend's good fortune.
He liked
to see and
to think about Amedee's sunny,
natural,
happy love.
He and Amedee had ridden and wrestled and larked together since they were lads of twelve.
On Sundays and holidays they were always arm in arm.
It seemed strange that now he should have
to hide the thing that Amedee was so proud of,
that the feeling which gave one of them such happiness should bring the other such despair.
It was like that when Alexandra tested her seed-corn in the spring,
he mused.
From two ears that had grown side by side,
the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light,
projecting themselves into the future,
and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted;
and nobody knew why.
X While Emil and Carl were amusing themselves at the fair,
Alexandra was at home,
busy
with her account-books,
which had been neglected of late.
She was almost through
with her figures when she heard a cart drive up
to the gate,
and looking out of the window she saw her two older brothers.
They had seemed
to avoid her ever since Carl Linstrum's arrival,
four weeks ago that day,
and she hurried
to the door
to welcome them.
She saw at once that they had come
with some very definite purpose.
They followed her stiffly into the sitting-room.
Oscar sat down,
but Lou walked over
to the window and remained standing,
his hands behind him.
"You are by yourself?"
he asked,
looking toward the doorway into the parlor.
"Yes.
Carl and Emil went up
to the Catholic fair."
For a few moments neither of the men spoke.
Then Lou came out sharply.
"How soon does he intend
to go away from here?"
"I don't know,
Lou.
Not
for some time,
I hope."
Alexandra spoke in an even,
quiet tone that often exasperated her brothers.
They felt that she was trying
to be superior
with them.
Oscar spoke up grimly.
"We thought we ought
to tell you that people have begun
to talk,"
he said meaningly.
Alexandra looked at him.
"What about?"
Oscar met her eyes blankly.
"About you,
keeping him here so long.
It looks bad
for him
to be hanging on
to a woman this way.
People think you're getting taken in."
Alexandra shut her account-book firmly.
"Boys,"
she said seriously,
"don't let's go on
with this.
We won't come out anywhere.
I can't take advice on such a matter.
I know you mean well,
but you must not feel responsible
for me in things of this sort.
If we go on
with this talk it will only make hard feeling."
Lou whipped about from the window.
"You ought
to think a little about your family.
You're making us all ridiculous."
"How am I?"
"People are beginning
to say you want
to marry the fellow."
"Well,
and what is ridiculous about that?"
Lou and Oscar exchanged outraged looks.
"Alexandra! Can't you see he's just a tramp and he's after your money?
He wants
to be taken care of,
he does!"
"Well,
suppose I want
to take care of him?
Whose business is it but my own?"
"Don't you know he'd get hold of your property?"
"He'd get hold of what I wished
to give him,
certainly."
Oscar sat up suddenly and Lou clutched at his bristly hair.
"Give him?"
Lou shouted.
"Our property,
our homestead?"
"I don't know about the homestead,"
said Alexandra quietly.
"I know you and Oscar have always expected that it would be left
to your children,
and I'm not sure but what you're right.
But I'll do exactly as I please
with the rest of my land,
boys."
"The rest of your land!"
cried Lou,
growing more excited every minute.
"Didn't all the land come out of the homestead?
It was bought
with money borrowed on the homestead,
and Oscar and me worked ourselves
to the bone paying interest on it."
"Yes,
you paid the interest.
But when you married we made a division of the land,
and you were satisfied.
I've made more on my farms since I've been alone than when we all worked together."
"Everything you've made has come out of the original land that us boys worked for,
hasn't it?
The farms and all that comes out of them belongs
to us as a family."
Alexandra waved her hand impatiently.
"Come now,
Lou.
Stick
to the facts.
You are talking nonsense.
Go
to the county clerk and ask him who owns my land,
and whether my titles are good."
Lou turned
to his brother.
"This is what comes of letting a woman meddle in business,"
he said bitterly.
"We ought
to have taken things in our own hands years ago.
But she liked
to run things,
and we humored her.
We thought you had good sense,
Alexandra.
We never thought you'd do anything foolish."
Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk
with her knuckles.
"Listen,
Lou.
Don't talk wild.
You say you ought
to have taken things into your own hands years ago.
I suppose you mean before you left home.
But how could you take hold of what wasn't there?
I've got most of what I have now since we divided the property;
I've built it up myself,
and it has nothing
to do
with you."
Oscar spoke up solemnly.
"The property of a family really belongs
to the men of the family,
no matter about the title.
If anything goes wrong,
it's the men that are held responsible."
"Yes,
of course,"
Lou broke in.
"Everybody knows that.
Oscar and me have always been easy-going and we've never made any fuss.
We were willing you should hold the land and have the good of it,
but you got no right
to part
with any of it.
We worked in the fields
to pay
for the first land you bought,
and whatever's come out of it has got
to be kept in the family."
Oscar reinforced his brother,
his mind fixed on the one point he could see.
"The property of a family belongs
to the men of the family,
because they are held responsible,
and because they do the work."
Alexandra looked from one
to the other,
her eyes full of indignation.
She had been impatient before,
but now she was beginning
to feel angry.
"And what about my work?"
she asked in an unsteady voice.
Lou looked at the carpet.
"Oh,
now,
Alexandra,
you always took it pretty easy! Of course we wanted you to.
You liked
to manage round,
and we always humored you.
We realize you were a great deal of help
to us.
There's no woman anywhere around that knows as much about business as you do,
and we've always been proud of that,
and thought you were pretty smart.
But,
of course,
the real work always fell on us.
Good advice is all right,
but it don't get the weeds out of the corn."
"Maybe not,
but it sometimes puts in the crop,
and it sometimes keeps the fields
for corn
to grow in,"
said Alexandra dryly.
"Why,
Lou,
I can remember when you and Oscar wanted
to sell this homestead and all the improvements
to old preacher Ericson
for two thousand dollars.
If I'd consented,
you'd have gone down
to the river and scraped along on poor farms
for the rest of your lives.
When I put in our first field of alfalfa you both opposed me,
just because I first heard about it from a young man who had been
to the University.
You said I was being taken in then,
and all the neighbors said so.
You know as well as I do that alfalfa has been the salvation of this country.
You all laughed at me when I said our land here was about ready
for wheat,
and I had
to raise three big wheat crops before the neighbors quit putting all their land in corn.
Why,
I remember you cried,
Lou,
when we put in the first big wheat-planting,
and said everybody was laughing at us."
Lou turned
to Oscar.
"That's the woman of it;
if she tells you
to put in a crop,
she thinks she's put it in.
It makes women conceited
to meddle in business.
I shouldn't think you'd want
to remind us how hard you were on us,
Alexandra,
after the way you baby Emil."
"Hard on you?
I never meant
to be hard.
Conditions were hard.
Maybe I would never have been very soft,
anyhow;
but I certainly didn't choose
to be the kind of girl I was.
If you take even a vine and cut it back again and again,
it grows hard,
like a tree."
Lou felt that they were wandering from the point,
and that in digression Alexandra might unnerve him.
He wiped his forehead
with a jerk of his handkerchief.
"We never doubted you,
Alexandra.
We never questioned anything you did.
You've always had your own way.
But you can't expect us
to sit like stumps and see you done out of the property by any loafer who happens along,
and making yourself ridiculous into the bargain."
Oscar rose.
"Yes,"
he broke in,
"everybody's laughing
to see you get took in;
at your age,
too.
Everybody knows he's nearly five years younger than you,
and is after your money.
Why,
Alexandra,
you are forty years old!"
"All that doesn't concern anybody but Carl and me.
Go
to town and ask your lawyers what you can do
to restrain me from disposing of my own property.
And I advise you
to do what they tell you;
for the authority you can exert by law is the only influence you will ever have over me again."
Alexandra rose.
"I think I would rather not have lived
to find out what I have to-day,"
she said quietly,
closing her desk.
Lou and Oscar looked at each other questioningly.
There seemed
to be nothing
to do but
to go,
and they walked out.
"You can't do business
with women,"
Oscar said heavily as he clambered into the cart.
"But anyhow,
we've had our say,
at last."
Lou scratched his head.
"Talk of that kind might come too high,
you know;
but she's apt
to be sensible.
You hadn't ought
to said that about her age,
though,
Oscar.
I'm afraid that hurt her feelings;
and the worst thing we can do is
to make her sore at us.
She'd marry him out of contrariness."
"I only meant,"
said Oscar,
"that she is old enough
to know better,
and she is.
If she was going
to marry,
she ought
to done it long ago,
and not go making a fool of herself now."
Lou looked anxious,
nevertheless.
"Of course,"
he reflected hopefully and inconsistently,
"Alexandra ain't much like other women-folks.
Maybe it won't make her sore.
Maybe she'd as soon be forty as not!"
XI Emil came home at about half-past seven o'clock that evening.
Old Ivar met him at the windmill and took his horse,
and the young man went directly into the house.
He called
to his sister and she answered from her bedroom,
behind the sitting-room,
saying that she was lying down.
Emil went
to her door.
"Can I see you
for a minute?"
he asked.
"I want
to talk
to you about something before Carl comes."
Alexandra rose quickly and came
to the door.
"Where is Carl?"
"Lou and Oscar met us and said they wanted
to talk
to him,
so he rode over
to Oscar's
with them.
Are you coming out?"
Emil asked impatiently.
"Yes,
sit down.
I'll be dressed in a moment."
Alexandra closed her door,
and Emil sank down on the old slat lounge and sat
with his head in his hands.
When his sister came out,
he looked up,
not knowing whether the interval had been short or long,
and he was surprised
to see that the room had grown quite dark.
That was just as well;
it would be easier
to talk if he were not under the gaze of those clear,
deliberate eyes,
that saw so far in some directions and were so blind in others.
Alexandra,
too,
was glad of the dusk.
Her face was swollen from crying.
Emil started up and then sat down again.
"Alexandra,"
he said slowly,
in his deep young baritone,
"I don't want
to go away
to law school this fall.
Let me put it off another year.
I want
to take a year off and look around.
It's awfully easy
to rush into a profession you don't really like,
and awfully hard
to get out of it.
Linstrum and I have been talking about that."
"Very well,
Emil.
Only don't go off looking
for land."
She came up and put her hand on his shoulder.
"I've been wishing you could stay
with me this winter."
"That's just what I don't want
to do,
Alexandra.
I'm restless.
I want
to go
to a new place.
I want
to go down
to the City of Mexico
to join one of the University fellows who's at the head of an electrical plant.
He wrote me he could give me a little job,
enough
to pay my way,
and I could look around and see what I want
to do.
I want
to go as soon as harvest is over.
I guess Lou and Oscar will be sore about it."
"I suppose they will."
Alexandra sat down on the lounge beside him.
"They are very angry
with me,
Emil.
We have had a quarrel.
They will not come here again."
Emil scarcely heard what she was saying;
he did not notice the sadness of her tone.
He was thinking about the reckless life he meant
to live in Mexico.
"What about?"
he asked absently.
"About Carl Linstrum.
They are afraid I am going
to marry him,
and that some of my property will get away from them."
Emil shrugged his shoulders.
"What nonsense!"
he murmured.
"Just like them."
Alexandra drew back.
"Why nonsense,
Emil?"
"Why,
you've never thought of such a thing,
have you?
They always have
to have something
to fuss about."
"Emil,"
said his sister slowly,
"you ought not
to take things
for granted.
Do you agree
with them that I have no right
to change my way of living?"
Emil looked at the outline of his sister's head in the dim light.
They were sitting close together and he somehow felt that she could hear his thoughts.
He was silent
for a moment,
and then said in an embarrassed tone,
"Why,
no,
certainly not.
You ought
to do whatever you want to.
I'll always back you."
"But it would seem a little bit ridiculous
to you if I married Carl?"
Emil fidgeted.
The issue seemed
to him too far-fetched
to warrant discussion.
"Why,
no.
I should be surprised if you wanted to.
I can't see exactly why.
But that's none of my business.
You ought
to do as you please.
Certainly you ought not
to pay any attention
to what the boys say."
Alexandra sighed.
"I had hoped you might understand,
a little,
why I do want to.
But I suppose that's too much
to expect.
I've had a pretty lonely life,
Emil.
Besides Marie,
Carl is the only friend I have ever had."
Emil was awake now;
a name in her last sentence roused him.
He put out his hand and took his sister's awkwardly.
"You ought
to do just as you wish,
and I think Carl's a fine fellow.
He and I would always get on.
I don't believe any of the things the boys say about him,
honest I don't.
They are suspicious of him because he's intelligent.
You know their way.
They've been sore at me ever since you let me go away
to college.
They're always trying
to catch me up.
If I were you,
I wouldn't pay any attention
to them.
There's nothing
to get upset about.
Carl's a sensible fellow.
He won't mind them."
"I don't know.
If they talk
to him the way they did
to me,
I think he'll go away."
Emil grew more and more uneasy.
"Think so?
Well,
Marie said it would serve us all right if you walked off
with him."
"Did she?
Bless her little heart! SHE would."
Alexandra's voice broke.
Emil began unlacing his leggings.
"Why don't you talk
to her about it?
There's Carl,
I hear his horse.
I guess I'll go upstairs and get my boots off.
No,
I don't want any supper.
We had supper at five o'clock,
at the fair."
Emil was glad
to escape and get
to his own room.
He was a little ashamed
for his sister,
though he had tried not
to show it.
He felt that there was something indecorous in her proposal,
and she did seem
to him somewhat ridiculous.
There was trouble enough in the world,
he reflected,
as he threw himself upon his bed,
without people who were forty years old imagining they wanted
to get married.
In the darkness and silence Emil was not likely
to think long about Alexandra.
Every image slipped away but one.
He had seen Marie in the crowd that afternoon.
She sold candy at the fair.
WHY had she ever run away
with Frank Shabata,
and how could she go on laughing and working and taking an interest in things?
Why did she like so many people,
and why had she seemed pleased when all the French and Bohemian boys,
and the priest himself,
crowded round her candy stand?
Why did she care about any one but him?
Why could he never,
never find the thing he looked
for in her playful,
affectionate eyes?
Then he fell
to imagining that he looked once more and found it there,
and what it would be like if she loved him,--she who,
as Alexandra said,
could give her whole heart.
In that dream he could lie
for hours,
as if in a trance.
His spirit went out of his body and crossed the fields
to Marie Shabata.
At the University dances the girls had often looked wonderingly at the tall young Swede
with the fine head,
leaning against the wall and frowning,
his arms folded,
his eyes fixed on the ceiling or the floor.
All the girls were a little afraid of him.
He was distinguished-looking,
and not the jollying kind.
They felt that he was too intense and preoccupied.
There was something queer about him.
Emil's fraternity rather prided itself upon its dances,
and sometimes he did his duty and danced every dance.
But whether he was on the floor or brooding in a corner,
he was always thinking about Marie Shabata.
For two years the storm had been gathering in him.
XII Carl came into the sitting-room while Alexandra was lighting the lamp.
She looked up at him as she adjusted the shade.
His sharp shoulders stooped as if he were very tired,
his face was pale,
and there were bluish shadows under his dark eyes.
His anger had burned itself out and left him sick and disgusted.
"You have seen Lou and Oscar?"
Alexandra asked.
"Yes."
His eyes avoided hers.
Alexandra took a deep breath.
"And now you are going away.
I thought so."
Carl threw himself into a chair and pushed the dark lock back from his forehead
with his white,
nervous hand.
"What a hopeless position you are in,
Alexandra!"
he exclaimed feverishly.
"It is your fate
to be always surrounded by little men.
And I am no better than the rest.
I am too little
to face the criticism of even such men as Lou and Oscar.
Yes,
I am going away;
to-morrow.
I cannot even ask you
to give me a promise until I have something
to offer you.
I thought,
perhaps,
I could do that;
but I find I can't."
"What good comes of offering people things they don't need?"
Alexandra asked sadly.
"I don't need money.
But I have needed you
for a great many years.
I wonder why I have been permitted
to prosper,
if it is only
to take my friends away from me."
"I don't deceive myself,"
Carl said frankly.
"I know that I am going away on my own account.
I must make the usual effort.
I must have something
to show
for myself.
To take what you would give me,
I should have
to be either a very large man or a very small one,
and I am only in the middle class."
Alexandra sighed.
"I have a feeling that if you go away,
you will not come back.
Something will happen
to one of us,
or
to both.
People have
to snatch at happiness when they can,
in this world.
It is always easier
to lose than
to find.
What I have is yours,
if you care enough about me
to take it."
Carl rose and looked up at the picture of John Bergson.
"But I can't,
my dear,
I can't! I will go North at once.
Instead of idling about in California all winter,
I shall be getting my bearings up there.
I won't waste another week.
Be patient
with me,
Alexandra.
Give me a year!"
"As you will,"
said Alexandra wearily.
"All at once,
in a single day,
I lose everything;
and I do not know why.
Emil,
too,
is going away."
Carl was still studying John Bergson's face and Alexandra's eyes followed his.
"Yes,"
she said,
"if he could have seen all that would come of the task he gave me,
he would have been sorry.
I hope he does not see me now.
I hope that he is among the old people of his blood and country,
and that tidings do not reach him from the New World."
PART III Winter Memories I Winter has settled down over the Divide again;
the season in which Nature recuperates,
in which she sinks
to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring.
The birds have gone.
The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated.
The prairie-dog keeps his hole.
The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch
to another and are hard put
to it
to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks.
At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste,
howling
for food.
The variegated fields are all one color now;
the pastures,
the stubble,
the roads,
the sky are the same leaden gray.
The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth,
whose slaty hue they have taken on.
The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot
to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields.
It is like an iron country,
and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy.
One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.
Alexandra has settled back into her old routine.
There are weekly letters from Emil.
Lou and Oscar she has not seen since Carl went away.
To avoid awkward encounters in the presence of curious spectators,
she has stopped going
to the Norwegian Church and drives up
to the Reform Church at Hanover,
or goes
with Marie Shabata
to the Catholic Church,
locally known as
"the French Church."
She has not told Marie about Carl,
or her differences
with her brothers.
She was never very communicative about her own affairs,
and when she came
to the point,
an instinct told her that about such things she and Marie would not understand one another.
Old Mrs. Lee had been afraid that family misunderstandings might deprive her of her yearly visit
to Alexandra.
But on the first day of December Alexandra telephoned Annie that to-morrow she would send Ivar over
for her mother,
and the next day the old lady arrived
with her bundles.
For twelve years Mrs. Lee had always entered Alexandra's sitting-room
with the same exclamation,
"Now we be yust-a like old times!"
She enjoyed the liberty Alexandra gave her,
and hearing her own language about her all day long.
Here she could wear her nightcap and sleep
with all her windows shut,
listen
to Ivar reading the Bible,
and here she could run about among the stables in a pair of Emil's old boots.
Though she was bent almost double,
she was as spry as a gopher.
Her face was as brown as if it had been varnished,
and as full of wrinkles as a washerwoman's hands.
She had three jolly old teeth left in the front of her mouth,
and when she grinned she looked very knowing,
as if when you found out how
to take it,
life wasn't half bad.
While she and Alexandra patched and pieced and quilted,
she talked incessantly about stories she read in a Swedish family paper,
telling the plots in great detail;
or about her life on a dairy farm in Gottland when she was a girl.
Sometimes she forgot which were the printed stories and which were the real stories,
it all seemed so far away.
She loved
to take a little brandy,
with hot water and sugar,
before she went
to bed,
and Alexandra always had it ready
for her.
"It sends good dreams,"
she would say
with a twinkle in her eye.
When Mrs. Lee had been
with Alexandra
for a week,
Marie Shabata telephoned one morning
to say that Frank had gone
to town
for the day,
and she would like them
to come over
for coffee in the afternoon.
Mrs. Lee hurried
to wash out and iron her new cross-stitched apron,
which she had finished only the night before;
a checked gingham apron worked
with a design ten inches broad across the bottom;
a hunting scene,
with fir trees and a stag and dogs and huntsmen.
Mrs. Lee was firm
with herself at dinner,
and refused a second helping of apple dumplings.
"I ta-ank I save up,"
she said
with a giggle.
At two o'clock in the afternoon Alexandra's cart drove up
to the Shabatas'
gate,
and Marie saw Mrs. Lee's red shawl come bobbing up the path.
She ran
to the door and pulled the old woman into the house
with a hug,
helping her
to take off her wraps while Alexandra blanketed the horse outside.
Mrs. Lee had put on her best black satine dress--she abominated woolen stuffs,
even in winter--and a crocheted collar,
fastened
with a big pale gold pin,
containing faded daguerreotypes of her father and mother.
She had not worn her apron
for fear of rumpling it,
and now she shook it out and tied it round her waist
with a conscious air.
Marie drew back and threw up her hands,
exclaiming,
"Oh,
what a beauty! I've never seen this one before,
have I,
Mrs. Lee?"
The old woman giggled and ducked her head.
"No,
yust las'
night I ma-ake.
See dis tread;
verra strong,
no wa-ash out,
no fade.
My sister send from Sveden.
I yust-a ta-ank you like dis."
Marie ran
to the door again.
"Come in,
Alexandra.
I have been looking at Mrs. Lee's apron.
Do stop on your way home and show it
to Mrs. Hiller.
She's crazy about cross-stitch."
While Alexandra removed her hat and veil,
Mrs. Lee went out
to the kitchen and settled herself in a wooden rocking-chair by the stove,
looking
with great interest at the table,
set
for three,
with a white cloth,
and a pot of pink geraniums in the middle.
"My,
a-an't you gotta fine plants;
such-a much flower.
How you keep from freeze?"
She pointed
to the window-shelves,
full of blooming fuchsias and geraniuMs. "I keep the fire all night,
Mrs. Lee,
and when it's very cold I put them all on the table,
in the middle of the room.
Other nights I only put newspapers behind them.
Frank laughs at me
for fussing,
but when they don't bloom he says,
'What's the matter
with the darned things?'
-What do you hear from Carl,
Alexandra?"
"He got
to Dawson before the river froze,
and now I suppose I won't hear any more until spring.
Before he left California he sent me a box of orange flowers,
but they didn't keep very well.
I have brought a bunch of Emil's letters
for you."
Alexandra came out from the sitting-room and pinched Marie's cheek playfully.
"You don't look as if the weather ever froze you up.
Never have colds,
do you?
That's a good girl.
She had dark red cheeks like this when she was a little girl,
Mrs. Lee.
She looked like some queer foreign kind of a doll.
I've never forgot the first time I saw you in Mieklejohn's store,
Marie,
the time father was lying sick.
Carl and I were talking about that before he went away."
"I remember,
and Emil had his kitten along.
When are you going
to send Emil's Christmas box?"
"It ought
to have gone before this.
I'll have
to send it by mail now,
to get it there in time."
Marie pulled a dark purple silk necktie from her workbasket.
"I knit this
for him.
It's a good color,
don't you think?
Will you please put it in
with your things and tell him it's from me,
to wear when he goes serenading."
Alexandra laughed.
"I don't believe he goes serenading much.
He says in one letter that the Mexican ladies are said
to be very beautiful,
but that don't seem
to me very warm praise."
Marie tossed her head.
"Emil can't fool me.
If he's bought a guitar,
he goes serenading.
Who wouldn't,
with all those Spanish girls dropping flowers down from their windows! I'd sing
to them every night,
wouldn't you,
Mrs. Lee?"
The old lady chuckled.
Her eyes lit up as Marie bent down and opened the oven door.
A delicious hot fragrance blew out into the tidy kitchen.
"My,
somet'ing smell good!"
She turned
to Alexandra
with a wink,
her three yellow teeth making a brave show,
"I ta-ank dat stop my yaw from ache no more!"
she said contentedly.
Marie took out a pan of delicate little rolls,
stuffed
with stewed apricots,
and began
to dust them over
with powdered sugar.
"I hope you'll like these,
Mrs. Lee;
Alexandra does.
The Bohemians always like them
with their coffee.
But if you don't,
I have a coffee-cake
with nuts and poppy seeds.
Alexandra,
will you get the cream jug?
I put it in the window
to keep cool."
"The Bohemians,"
said Alexandra,
as they drew up
to the table,
"certainly know how
to make more kinds of bread than any other people in the world.
Old Mrs. Hiller told me once at the church supper that she could make seven kinds of fancy bread,
but Marie could make a dozen."
Mrs. Lee held up one of the apricot rolls between her brown thumb and forefinger and weighed it critically.
"Yust like-a fedders,"
she pronounced
with satisfaction.
"My,
a-an't dis nice!"
she exclaimed as she stirred her coffee.
"I yust ta-ake a liddle yelly now,
too,
I ta-ank."
Alexandra and Marie laughed at her forehandedness,
and fell
to talking of their own affairs.
"I was afraid you had a cold when I talked
to you over the telephone the other night,
Marie.
What was the matter,
had you been crying?"
"Maybe I had,"
Marie smiled guiltily.
"Frank was out late that night.
Don't you get lonely sometimes in the winter,
when everybody has gone away?"
"I thought it was something like that.
If I hadn't had company,
I'd have run over
to see
for myself.
If you get down-hearted,
what will become of the rest of us?"
Alexandra asked.
"I don't,
very often.
There's Mrs. Lee without any coffee!"
Later,
when Mrs. Lee declared that her powers were spent,
Marie and Alexandra went upstairs
to look
for some crochet patterns the old lady wanted
to borrow.
"Better put on your coat,
Alexandra.
It's cold up there,
and I have no idea where those patterns are.
I may have
to look through my old trunks."
Marie caught up a shawl and opened the stair door,
running up the steps ahead of her guest.
"While I go through the bureau drawers,
you might look in those hat-boxes on the closet-shelf,
over where Frank's clothes hang.
There are a lot of odds and ends in them."
She began tossing over the contents of the drawers,
and Alexandra went into the clothescloset.
Presently she came back,
holding a slender elastic yellow stick in her hand.
"What in the world is this,
Marie?
You don't mean
to tell me Frank ever carried such a thing?"
Marie blinked at it
with astonishment and sat down on the floor.
"Where did you find it?
I didn't know he had kept it.
I haven't seen it
for years."
"It really is a cane,
then?"
"Yes.
One he brought from the old country.
He used
to carry it when I first knew him.
Isn't it foolish?
Poor Frank!"
Alexandra twirled the stick in her fingers and laughed.
"He must have looked funny!"
Marie was thoughtful.
"No,
he didn't,
really.
It didn't seem out of place.
He used
to be awfully gay like that when he was a young man.
I guess people always get what's hardest
for them,
Alexandra."
Marie gathered the shawl closer about her and still looked hard at the cane.
"Frank would be all right in the right place,"
she said reflectively.
"He ought
to have a different kind of wife,
for one thing.
Do you know,
Alexandra,
I could pick out exactly the right sort of woman
for Frank--now.
The trouble is you almost have
to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs;
and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
Then what are you going
to do about it?"
she asked candidly.
Alexandra confessed she didn't know.
"However,"
she added,
"it seems
to me that you get along
with Frank about as well as any woman I've ever seen or heard of could."
Marie shook her head,
pursing her lips and blowing her warm breath softly out into the frosty air.
"No;
I was spoiled at home.
I like my own way,
and I have a quick tongue.
When Frank brags,
I say sharp things,
and he never forgets.
He goes over and over it in his mind;
I can feel him.
Then I'm too giddy.
Frank's wife ought
to be timid,
and she ought not
to care about another living thing in the world but just Frank! I didn't,
when I married him,
but I suppose I was too young
to stay like that."
Marie sighed.
Alexandra had never heard Marie speak so frankly about her husband before,
and she felt that it was wiser not
to encourage her.
No good,
she reasoned,
ever came from talking about such things,
and while Marie was thinking aloud,
Alexandra had been steadily searching the hat-boxes.
"Aren't these the patterns,
Maria?"
Maria sprang up from the floor.
"Sure enough,
we were looking
for patterns,
weren't we?
I'd forgot about everything but Frank's other wife.
I'll put that away."
She poked the cane behind Frank's Sunday clothes,
and though she laughed,
Alexandra saw there were tears in her eyes.
When they went back
to the kitchen,
the snow had begun
to fall,
and Marie's visitors thought they must be getting home.
She went out
to the cart
with them,
and tucked the robes about old Mrs. Lee while Alexandra took the blanket off her horse.
As they drove away,
Marie turned and went slowly back
to the house.
She took up the package of letters Alexandra had brought,
but she did not read them.
She turned them over and looked at the foreign stamps,
and then sat watching the flying snow while the dusk deepened in the kitchen and the stove sent out a red glow.
Marie knew perfectly well that Emil's letters were written more
for her than
for Alexandra.
They were not the sort of letters that a young man writes
to his sister.
They were both more personal and more painstaking;
full of descriptions of the gay life in the old Mexican capital in the days when the strong hand of Porfirio Diaz was still strong.
He told about bull-fights and cock-fights,
churches and FIESTAS,
the flowermarkets and the fountains,
the music and dancing,
the people of all nations he met in the Italian restaurants on San Francisco Street.
In short,
they were the kind of letters a young man writes
to a woman when he wishes himself and his life
to seem interesting
to her,
when he wishes
to enlist her imagination in his behalf.
Marie,
when she was alone or when she sat sewing in the evening,
often thought about what it must be like down there where Emil was;
where there were flowers and street bands everywhere,
and carriages rattling up and down,
and where there was a little blind bootblack in front of the cathedral who could play any tune you asked
for by dropping the lids of blacking-boxes on the stone steps.
When everything is done and over
for one at twentythree,
it is pleasant
to let the mind wander forth and follow a young adventurer who has life before him.
"And if it had not been
for me,"
she thought,
"Frank might still be free like that,
and having a good time making people admire him.
Poor Frank,
getting married wasn't very good
for him either.
I'm afraid I do set people against him,
as he says.
I seem,
somehow,
to give him away all the time.
Perhaps he would try
to be agreeable
to people again,
if I were not around.
It seems as if I always make him just as bad as he can be."
Later in the winter,
Alexandra looked back upon that afternoon as the last satisfactory visit she had had
with Marie.
After that day the younger woman seemed
to shrink more and more into herself.
When she was
with Alexandra she was not spontaneous and frank as she used
to be.
She seemed
to be brooding over something,
and holding something back.
The weather had a good deal
to do
with their seeing less of each other than usual.
There had not been such snowstorms in twenty years,
and the path across the fields was drifted deep from Christmas until March.
When the two neighbors went
to see each other,
they had
to go round by the wagon-road,
which was twice as far.
They telephoned each other almost every night,
though in January there was a stretch of three weeks when the wires were down,
and when the postman did not come at all.
Marie often ran in
to see her nearest neighbor,
old Mrs. Hiller,
who was crippled
with rheumatism and had only her son,
the lame shoemaker,
to take care of her;
and she went
to the French Church,
whatever the weather.
She was a sincerely devout girl.
She prayed
for herself and
for Frank,
and
for Emil,
among the temptations of that gay,
corrupt old city.
She found more comfort in the Church that winter than ever before.
It seemed
to come closer
to her,
and
to fill an emptiness that ached in her heart.
She tried
to be patient
with her husband.
He and his hired man usually played California Jack in the evening.
Marie sat sewing or crocheting and tried
to take a friendly interest in the game,
but she was always thinking about the wide fields outside,
where the snow was drifting over the fences;
and about the orchard,
where the snow was falling and packing,
crust over crust.
When she went out into the dark kitchen
to fix her plants
for the night,
she used
to stand by the window and look out at the white fields,
or watch the currents of snow whirling over the orchard.
She seemed
to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there.
The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried
to break a twig.
And yet,
down under the frozen crusts,
at the roots of the trees,
the secret of life was still safe,
warm as the blood in one's heart;
and the spring would come again! Oh,
it would come again! II If Alexandra had had much imagination she might have guessed what was going on in Marie's mind,
and she would have seen long before what was going on in Emil's.
But that,
as Emil himself had more than once reflected,
was Alexandra's blind side,
and her life had not been of the kind
to sharpen her vision.
Her training had all been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken
to do.
Her personal life,
her own realization of herself,
was almost a subconscious existence;
like an underground river that came
to the surface only here and there,
at intervals months apart,
and then sank again
to flow on under her own fields.
Nevertheless,
the underground stream was there,
and it was because she had so much personality
to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them so completely,
that her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors.
There were certain days in her life,
outwardly uneventful,
which Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy;
days when she was close
to the flat,
fallow world about her,
and felt,
as it were,
in her own body the joyous germination in the soil.
There were days,
too,
which she and Emil had spent together,
upon which she loved
to look back.
There had been such a day when they were down on the river in the dry year,
looking over the land.
They had made an early start one morning and had driven a long way before noon.
When Emil said he was hungry,
they drew back from the road,
gave Brigham his oats among the bushes,
and climbed up
to the top of a grassy bluff
to eat their lunch under the shade of some little elm trees.
The river was clear there,
and shallow,
since there had been no rain,
and it ran in ripples over the sparkling sand.
Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed
to sleep in the sun.
In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers,
disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade.
They sat
for a long time,
watching the solitary bird take its pleasure.
No living thing had ever seemed
to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck.
Emil must have felt about it as she did,
for afterward,
when they were at home,
he used sometimes
to say,
"Sister,
you know our duck down there--"
Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life.
Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there,
swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight,
a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.
Most of Alexandra's happy memories were as impersonal as this one;
yet
to her they were very personal.
Her mind was a white book,
with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things.
Not many people would have cared
to read it;
only a happy few.
She had never been in love,
she had never indulged in sentimental reveries.
Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows.
She had grown up in serious times.
There was one fancy indeed,
which persisted through her girlhood.
It most often came
to her on Sunday mornings,
the one day in the week when she lay late abed listening
to the familiar morning sounds;
the windmill singing in the brisk breeze,
Emil whistling as he blacked his boots down by the kitchen door.
Sometimes,
as she lay thus luxuriously idle,
her eyes closed,
she used
to have an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong.
It was a man,
certainly,
who carried her,
but he was like no man she knew;
he was much larger and stronger and swifter,
and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat.
She never saw him,
but,
with eyes closed,
she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight,
and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him.
She could feel him approach,
bend over her and lift her,
and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields.
After such a reverie she would rise hastily,
angry
with herself,
and go down
to the bath-house that was partitioned off the kitchen shed.
There she would stand in a tin tub and prosecute her bath
with vigor,
finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far.
As she grew older,
this fancy more often came
to her when she was tired than when she was fresh and strong.
Sometimes,
after she had been in the open all day,
overseeing the branding of the cattle or the loading of the pigs,
she would come in chilled,
take a concoction of spices and warm home-made wine,
and go
to bed
with her body actually aching
with fatigue.
Then,
just before she went
to sleep,
she had the old sensation of being lifted and carried by a strong being who took from her all her bodily weariness.
PART IV The White Mulberry Tree I The French Church,
properly the Church of Sainte-Agnes,
stood upon a hill.
The high,
narrow,
red-brick building,
with its tall steeple and steep roof,
could be seen
for miles across the wheatfields,
though the little town of SainteAgnes was completely hidden away at the foot of the hill.
The church looked powerful and triumphant there on its eminence,
so high above the rest of the landscape,
with miles of warm color lying at its feet,
and by its position and setting it reminded one of some of the churches built long ago in the wheat-lands of middle France.
Late one June afternoon Alexandra Bergson was driving along one of the many roads that led through the rich French farming country
to the big church.
The sunlight was shining directly in her face,
and there was a blaze of light all about the red church on the hill.
Beside Alexandra lounged a strikingly exotic figure in a tall Mexican hat,
a silk sash,
and a black velvet jacket sewn
with silver buttons.
Emil had returned only the night before,
and his sister was so proud of him that she decided at once
to take him up
to the church supper,
and
to make him wear the Mexican costume he had brought home in his trunk.
"All the girls who have stands are going
to wear fancy costumes,"
she argued,
"and some of the boys.
Marie is going
to tell fortunes,
and she sent
to Omaha
for a Bohemian dress her father brought back from a visit
to the old country.
If you wear those clothes,
they will all be pleased.
And you must take your guitar.
Everybody ought
to do what they can
to help along,
and we have never done much.
We are not a talented family."
The supper was
to be at six o'clock,
in the basement of the church,
and afterward there would be a fair,
with charades and an auction.
Alexandra had set out from home early,
leaving the house
to Signa and Nelse Jensen,
who were
to be married next week.
Signa had shyly asked
to have the wedding put off until Emil came home.
Alexandra was well satisfied
with her brother.
As they drove through the rolling French country toward the westering sun and the stalwart church,
she was thinking of that time long ago when she and Emil drove back from the river valley
to the still unconquered Divide.
Yes,
she told herself,
it had been worth while;
both Emil and the country had become what she had hoped.
Out of her father's children there was one who was fit
to cope
with the world,
who had not been tied
to the plow,
and who had a personality apart from the soil.
And that,
she reflected,
was what she had worked for.
She felt well satisfied
with her life.
When they reached the church,
a score of teams were hitched in front of the basement doors that opened from the hillside upon the sanded terrace,
where the boys wrestled and had jumping-matches.
Amedee Chevalier,
a proud father of one week,
rushed out and embraced Emil.
Amedee was an only son,--hence he was a very rich young man,--but he meant
to have twenty children himself,
like his uncle Xavier.
"Oh,
Emil,"
he cried,
hugging his old friend rapturously,
"why ain't you been up
to see my boy?
You come to-morrow,
sure?
Emil,
you wanna get a boy right off! It's the greatest thing ever! No,
no,
no! Angel not sick at all.
Everything just fine.
That boy he come into this world laughin',
and he been laughin'
ever since.
You come an'
see!"
He pounded Emil's ribs
to emphasize each announcement.
Emil caught his arMs. "Stop,
Amedee.
You're knocking the wind out of me.
I brought him cups and spoons and blankets and moccasins enough
for an orphan asylum.
I'm awful glad it's a boy,
sure enough!"
The young men crowded round Emil
to admire his costume and
to tell him in a breath everything that had happened since he went away.
Emil had more friends up here in the French country than down on Norway Creek.
The French and Bohemian boys were spirited and jolly,
liked variety,
and were as much predisposed
to favor anything new as the Scandinavian boys were
to reject it.
The Norwegian and Swedish lads were much more self-centred,
apt
to be egotistical and jealous.
They were cautious and reserved
with Emil because he had been away
to college,
and were prepared
to take him down if he should try
to put on airs
with them.
The French boys liked a bit of swagger,
and they were always delighted
to hear about anything new:
new clothes,
new games,
new songs,
new dances.
Now they carried Emil off
to show him the club room they had just fitted up over the post-office,
down in the village.
They ran down the hill in a drove,
all laughing and chattering at once,
some in French,
some in English.
Alexandra went into the cool,
whitewashed basement where the women were setting the tables.
Marie was standing on a chair,
building a little tent of shawls where she was
to tell fortunes.
She sprang down and ran toward Alexandra,
stopping short and looking at her in disappointment.
Alexandra nodded
to her encouragingly.
"Oh,
he will be here,
Marie.
The boys have taken him off
to show him something.
You won't know him.
He is a man now,
sure enough.
I have no boy left.
He smokes terrible-smelling Mexican cigarettes and talks Spanish.
How pretty you look,
child.
Where did you get those beautiful earrings?"
"They belonged
to father's mother.
He always promised them
to me.
He sent them
with the dress and said I could keep them."
Marie wore a short red skirt of stoutly woven cloth,
a white bodice and kirtle,
a yellow silk turban wound low over her brown curls,
and long coral pendants in her ears.
Her ears had been pierced against a piece of cork by her great-aunt when she was seven years old.
In those germless days she had worn bits of broomstraw,
plucked from the common sweepingbroom,
in the lobes until the holes were healed and ready
for little gold rings.
When Emil came back from the village,
he lingered outside on the terrace
with the boys.
Marie could hear him talking and strumming on his guitar while Raoul Marcel sang falsetto.
She was vexed
with him
for staying out there.
It made her very nervous
to hear him and not
to see him;
for,
certainly,
she told herself,
she was not going out
to look
for him.
When the supper bell rang and the boys came trooping in
to get seats at the first table,
she forgot all about her annoyance and ran
to greet the tallest of the crowd,
in his conspicuous attire.
She didn't mind showing her embarrassment at all.
She blushed and laughed excitedly as she gave Emil her hand,
and looked delightedly at the black velvet coat that brought out his fair skin and fine blond head.
Marie was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her.
She simply did not know how
to give a half-hearted response.
When she was delighted,
she was as likely as not
to stand on her tip-toes and clap her hands.
If people laughed at her,
she laughed
with them.
"Do the men wear clothes like that every day,
in the street?"
She caught Emil by his sleeve and turned him about.
"Oh,
I wish I lived where people wore things like that! Are the buttons real silver?
Put on the hat,
please.
What a heavy thing! How do you ever wear it?
Why don't you tell us about the bullfights?"
She wanted
to wring all his experiences from him at once,
without waiting a moment.
Emil smiled tolerantly and stood looking down at her
with his old,
brooding gaze,
while the French girls fluttered about him in their white dresses and ribbons,
and Alexandra watched the scene
with pride.
Several of the French girls,
Marie knew,
were hoping that Emil would take them
to supper,
and she was relieved when he took only his sister.
Marie caught Frank's arm and dragged him
to the same table,
managing
to get seats opposite the Bergsons,
so that she could hear what they were talking about.
Alexandra made Emil tell Mrs. Xavier Chevalier,
the mother of the twenty,
about how he had seen a famous matador killed in the bull-ring.
Marie listened
to every word,
only taking her eyes from Emil
to watch Frank's plate and keep it filled.
When Emil finished his account,-bloody enough
to satisfy Mrs. Xavier and
to make her feel thankful that she was not a matador,--Marie broke out
with a volley of questions.
How did the women dress when they went
to bull-fights?
Did they wear mantillas?
Did they never wear hats?
After supper the young people played charades
for the amusement of their elders,
who sat gossiping between their guesses.
All the shops in Sainte-Agnes were closed at eight o'clock that night,
so that the merchants and their clerks could attend the fair.
The auction was the liveliest part of the entertainment,
for the French boys always lost their heads when they began
to bid,
satisfied that their extravagance was in a good cause.
After all the pincushions and sofa pillows and embroidered slippers were sold,
Emil precipitated a panic by taking out one of his turquoise shirt studs,
which every one had been admiring,
and handing it
to the auctioneer.
All the French girls clamored
for it,
and their sweethearts bid against each other recklessly.
Marie wanted it,
too,
and she kept making signals
to Frank,
which he took a sour pleasure in disregarding.
He didn't see the use of making a fuss over a fellow just because he was dressed like a clown.
When the turquoise went
to Malvina Sauvage,
the French banker's daughter,
Marie shrugged her shoulders and betook herself
to her little tent of shawls,
where she began
to shuffle her cards by the light of a tallow candle,
calling out,
"Fortunes,
fortunes!"
The young priest,
Father Duchesne,
went first
to have his fortune read.
Marie took his long white hand,
looked at it,
and then began
to run off her cards.
"I see a long journey across water
for you,
Father.
You will go
to a town all cut up by water;
built on islands,
it seems
to be,
with rivers and green fields all about.
And you will visit an old lady
with a white cap and gold hoops in her ears,
and you will be very happy there."
"Mais,
oui,"
said the priest,
with a melancholy smile.
"C'est L'Isle-Adam,
chez ma mere.
Vous etes tres savante,
ma fille."
He patted her yellow turban,
calling,
"Venez donc,
mes garcons! Il y a ici une veritable clairvoyante!"
Marie was clever at fortune-telling,
indulging in a light irony that amused the crowd.
She told old Brunot,
the miser,
that he would lose all his money,
marry a girl of sixteen,
and live happily on a crust.
Sholte,
the fat Russian boy,
who lived
for his stomach,
was
to be disappointed in love,
grow thin,
and shoot himself from despondency.
Amedee was
to have twenty children,
and nineteen of them were
to be girls.
Amedee slapped Frank on the back and asked him why he didn't see what the fortune-teller would promise him.
But Frank shook off his friendly hand and grunted,
"She tell my fortune long ago;
bad enough!"
Then he withdrew
to a corner and sat glowering at his wife.
Frank's case was all the more painful because he had no one in particular
to fix his jealousy upon.
Sometimes he could have thanked the man who would bring him evidence against his wife.
He had discharged a good farm-boy,
Jan Smirka,
because he thought Marie was fond of him;
but she had not seemed
to miss Jan when he was gone,
and she had been just as kind
to the next boy.
The farm-hands would always do anything
for Marie;
Frank couldn't find one so surly that he would not make an effort
to please her.
At the bottom of his heart Frank knew well enough that if he could once give up his grudge,
his wife would come back
to him.
But he could never in the world do that.
The grudge was fundamental.
Perhaps he could not have given it up if he had tried.
Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused than he would have got out of being loved.
If he could once have made Marie thoroughly unhappy,
he might have relented and raised her from the dust.
But she had never humbled herself.
In the first days of their love she had been his slave;
she had admired him abandonedly.
But the moment he began
to bully her and
to be unjust,
she began
to draw away;
at first in tearful amazement,
then in quiet,
unspoken disgust.
The distance between them had widened and hardened.
It no longer contracted and brought them suddenly together.
The spark of her life went somewhere else,
and he was always watching
to surprise it.
He knew that somewhere she must get a feeling
to live upon,
for she was not a woman who could live without loving.
He wanted
to prove
to himself the wrong he felt.
What did she hide in her heart?
Where did it go?
Even Frank had his churlish delicacies;
he never reminded her of how much she had once loved him.
For that Marie was grateful
to him.
While Marie was chattering
to the French boys,
Amedee called Emil
to the back of the room and whispered
to him that they were going
to play a joke on the girls.
At eleven o'clock,
Amedee was
to go up
to the switchboard in the vestibule and turn off the electric lights,
and every boy would have a chance
to kiss his sweetheart before Father Duchesne could find his way up the stairs
to turn the current on again.
The only difficulty was the candle in Marie's tent;
perhaps,
as Emil had no sweetheart,
he would oblige the boys by blowing out the candle.
Emil said he would undertake
to do that.
At five minutes
to eleven he sauntered up
to Marie's booth,
and the French boys dispersed
to find their girls.
He leaned over the cardtable and gave himself up
to looking at her.
"Do you think you could tell my fortune?"
he murmured.
It was the first word he had had alone
with her
for almost a year.
"My luck hasn't changed any.
It's just the same."
Marie had often wondered whether there was anyone else who could look his thoughts
to you as Emil could.
To-night,
when she met his steady,
powerful eyes,
it was impossible not
to feel the sweetness of the dream he was dreaming;
it reached her before she could shut it out,
and hid itself in her heart.
She began
to shuffle her cards furiously.
"I'm angry
with you,
Emil,"
she broke out
with petulance.
"Why did you give them that lovely blue stone
to sell?
You might have known Frank wouldn't buy it
for me,
and I wanted it awfully!"
Emil laughed shortly.
"People who want such little things surely ought
to have them,"
he said dryly.
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his velvet trousers and brought out a handful of uncut turquoises,
as big as marbles.
Leaning over the table he dropped them into her lap.
"There,
will those do?
Be careful,
don't let any one see them.
Now,
I suppose you want me
to go away and let you play
with them?"
Marie was gazing in rapture at the soft blue color of the stones.
"Oh,
Emil! Is everything down there beautiful like these?
How could you ever come away?"
At that instant Amedee laid hands on the switchboard.
There was a shiver and a giggle,
and every one looked toward the red blur that Marie's candle made in the dark.
Immediately that,
too,
was gone.
Little shrieks and currents of soft laughter ran up and down the dark hall.
Marie started up,--directly into Emil's arMs. In the same instant she felt his lips.
The veil that had hung uncertainly between them
for so long was dissolved.
Before she knew what she was doing,
she had committed herself
to that kiss that was at once a boy's and a man's,
as timid as it was tender;
so like Emil and so unlike any one else in the world.
Not until it was over did she realize what it meant.
And Emil,
who had so often imagined the shock of this first kiss,
was surprised at its gentleness and naturalness.
It was like a sigh which they had breathed together;
almost sorrowful,
as if each were afraid of wakening something in the other.
When the lights came on again,
everybody was laughing and shouting,
and all the French girls were rosy and shining
with mirth.
Only Marie,
in her little tent of shawls,
was pale and quiet.
Under her yellow turban the red coral pendants swung against white cheeks.
Frank was still staring at her,
but he seemed
to see nothing.
Years ago,
he himself had had the power
to take the blood from her cheeks like that.
Perhaps he did not remember--perhaps he had never noticed! Emil was already at the other end of the hall,
walking about
with the shoulder-motion he had acquired among the Mexicans,
studying the floor
with his intent,
deep-set eyes.
Marie began
to take down and fold her shawls.
She did not glance up again.
The young people drifted
to the other end of the hall where the guitar was sounding.
In a moment she heard Emil and Raoul singing:--
"Across the Rio Grand-e There lies a sunny land-e,
My bright-eyed Mexico!"
Alexandra Bergson came up
to the card booth.
"Let me help you,
Marie.
You look tired."
She placed her hand on Marie's arm and felt her shiver.
Marie stiffened under that kind,
calm hand.
Alexandra drew back,
perplexed and hurt.
There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist,
always disconcerting
to very young people,
who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms;
unless its strings can scream
to the touch of pain.
II Signa's wedding supper was over.
The guests,
and the tiresome little Norwegian preacher who had performed the marriage ceremony,
were saying good-night.
Old Ivar was hitching the horses
to the wagon
to take the wedding presents and the bride and groom up
to their new home,
on Alexandra's north quarter.
When Ivar drove up
to the gate,
Emil and Marie Shabata began
to carry out the presents,
and Alexandra went into her bedroom
to bid Signa good-bye and
to give her a few words of good counsel.
She was surprised
to find that the bride had changed her slippers
for heavy shoes and was pinning up her skirts.
At that moment Nelse appeared at the gate
with the two milk cows that Alexandra had given Signa
for a wedding present.
Alexandra began
to laugh.
"Why,
Signa,
you and Nelse are
to ride home.
I'll send Ivar over
with the cows in the morning."
Signa hesitated and looked perplexed.
When her husband called her,
she pinned her hat on resolutely.
"I ta-ank I better do yust like he say,"
she murmured in confusion.
Alexandra and Marie accompanied Signa
to the gate and saw the party set off,
old Ivar driving ahead in the wagon and the bride and groom following on foot,
each leading a cow.
Emil burst into a laugh before they were out of hearing.
"Those two will get on,"
said Alexandra as they turned back
to the house.
"They are not going
to take any chances.
They will feel safer
with those cows in their own stable.
Marie,
I am going
to send
for an old woman next.
As soon as I get the girls broken in,
I marry them off."
"I've no patience
with Signa,
marrying that grumpy fellow!"
Marie declared.
"I wanted her
to marry that nice Smirka boy who worked
for us last winter.
I think she liked him,
too."
"Yes,
I think she did,"
Alexandra assented,
"but I suppose she was too much afraid of Nelse
to marry any one else.
Now that I think of it,
most of my girls have married men they were afraid of.
I believe there is a good deal of the cow in most Swedish girls.
You high-strung Bohemian can't understand us.
We're a terribly practical people,
and I guess we think a cross man makes a good manager."
Marie shrugged her shoulders and turned
to pin up a lock of hair that had fallen on her neck.
Somehow Alexandra had irritated her of late.
Everybody irritated her.
She was tired of everybody.
"I'm going home alone,
Emil,
so you needn't get your hat,"
she said as she wound her scarf quickly about her head.
"Good-night,
Alexandra,"
she called back in a strained voice,
running down the gravel walk.
Emil followed
with long strides until he overtook her.
Then she began
to walk slowly.
It was a night of warm wind and faint starlight,
and the fireflies were glimmering over the wheat.
"Marie,"
said Emil after they had walked
for a while,
"I wonder if you know how unhappy I am?"
Marie did not answer him.
Her head,
in its white scarf,
drooped forward a little.
Emil kicked a clod from the path and went on:--
"I wonder whether you are really shallowhearted,
like you seem?
Sometimes I think one boy does just as well as another
for you.
It never seems
to make much difference whether it is me or Raoul Marcel or Jan Smirka.
Are you really like that?"
"Perhaps I am.
What do you want me
to do?
Sit round and cry all day?
When I've cried until I can't cry any more,
then--then I must do something else."
"Are you sorry
for me?"
he persisted.
"No,
I'm not.
If I were big and free like you,
I wouldn't let anything make me unhappy.
As old Napoleon Brunot said at the fair,
I wouldn't go lovering after no woman.
I'd take the first train and go off and have all the fun there is."
"I tried that,
but it didn't do any good.
Everything reminded me.
The nicer the place was,
the more I wanted you."
They had come
to the stile and Emil pointed
to it persuasively.
"Sit down a moment,
I want
to ask you something."
Marie sat down on the top step and Emil drew nearer.
"Would you tell me something that's none of my business if you thought it would help me out?
Well,
then,
tell me,
PLEASE tell me,
why you ran away
with Frank Shabata!"
Marie drew back.
"Because I was in love
with him,"
she said firmly.
"Really?"
he asked incredulously.
"Yes,
indeed.
Very much in love
with him.
I think I was the one who suggested our running away.
From the first it was more my fault than his."
Emil turned away his face.
"And now,"
Marie went on,
"I've got
to remember that.
Frank is just the same now as he was then,
only then I would see him as I wanted him
to be.
I would have my own way.
And now I pay
for it."
"You don't do all the paying."
"That's it.
When one makes a mistake,
there's no telling where it will stop.
But you can go away;
you can leave all this behind you."
"Not everything.
I can't leave you behind.
Will you go away
with me,
Marie?"
Marie started up and stepped across the stile.
"Emil! How wickedly you talk! I am not that kind of a girl,
and you know it.
But what am I going
to do if you keep tormenting me like this!"
she added plaintively.
"Marie,
I won't bother you any more if you will tell me just one thing.
Stop a minute and look at me.
No,
nobody can see us.
Everybody's asleep.
That was only a firefly.
Marie,
STOP and tell me!"
Emil overtook her and catching her by the shoulders shook her gently,
as if he were trying
to awaken a sleepwalker.
Marie hid her face on his arm.
"Don't ask me anything more.
I don't know anything except how miserable I am.
And I thought it would be all right when you came back.
Oh,
Emil,"
she clutched his sleeve and began
to cry,
"what am I
to do if you don't go away?
I can't go,
and one of us must.
Can't you see?"
Emil stood looking down at her,
holding his shoulders stiff and stiffening the arm
to which she clung.
Her white dress looked gray in the darkness.
She seemed like a troubled spirit,
like some shadow out of the earth,
clinging
to him and entreating him
to give her peace.
Behind her the fireflies were weaving in and out over the wheat.
He put his hand on her bent head.
"On my honor,
Marie,
if you will say you love me,
I will go away."
She lifted her face
to his.
"How could I help it?
Didn't you know?"
Emil was the one who trembled,
through all his frame.
After he left Marie at her gate,
he wandered about the fields all night,
till morning put out the fireflies and the stars.
III One evening,
a week after Signa's wedding,
Emil was kneeling before a box in the sittingroom,
packing his books.
From time
to time he rose and wandered about the house,
picking up stray volumes and bringing them listlessly back
to his box.
He was packing without enthusiasm.
He was not very sanguine about his future.
Alexandra sat sewing by the table.
She had helped him pack his trunk in the afternoon.
As Emil came and went by her chair
with his books,
he thought
to himself that it had not been so hard
to leave his sister since he first went away
to school.
He was going directly
to Omaha,
to read law in the office of a Swedish lawyer until October,
when he would enter the law school at Ann Arbor.
They had planned that Alexandra was
to come
to Michigan--a long journey
for her--at Christmas time,
and spend several weeks
with him.
Nevertheless,
he felt that this leavetaking would be more final than his earlier ones had been;
that it meant a definite break
with his old home and the beginning of something new--he did not know what.
His ideas about the future would not crystallize;
the more he tried
to think about it,
the vaguer his conception of it became.
But one thing was clear,
he told himself;
it was high time that he made good
to Alexandra,
and that ought
to be incentive enough
to begin with.
As he went about gathering up his books he felt as if he were uprooting things.
At last he threw himself down on the old slat lounge where he had slept when he was little,
and lay looking up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling.
"Tired,
Emil?"
his sister asked.
"Lazy,"
he murmured,
turning on his side and looking at her.
He studied Alexandra's face
for a long time in the lamplight.
It had never occurred
to him that his sister was a handsome woman until Marie Shabata had told him so.
Indeed,
he had never thought of her as being a woman at all,
only a sister.
As he studied her bent head,
he looked up at the picture of John Bergson above the lamp.
"No,"
he thought
to himself,
"she didn't get it there.
I suppose I am more like that."
"Alexandra,"
he said suddenly,
"that old walnut secretary you use
for a desk was father's,
wasn't it?"
Alexandra went on stitching.
"Yes.
It was one of the first things he bought
for the old log house.
It was a great extravagance in those days.
But he wrote a great many letters back
to the old country.
He had many friends there,
and they wrote
to him up
to the time he died.
No one ever blamed him
for grandfather's disgrace.
I can see him now,
sitting there on Sundays,
in his white shirt,
writing pages and pages,
so carefully.
He wrote a fine,
regular hand,
almost like engraving.
Yours is something like his,
when you take pains."
"Grandfather was really crooked,
was he?"
"He married an unscrupulous woman,
and then--then I'm afraid he was really crooked.
When we first came here father used
to have dreams about making a great fortune and going back
to Sweden
to pay back
to the poor sailors the money grandfather had lost."
Emil stirred on the lounge.
"I say,
that would have been worth while,
wouldn't it?
Father wasn't a bit like Lou or Oscar,
was he?
I can't remember much about him before he got sick."
"Oh,
not at all!"
Alexandra dropped her sewing on her knee.
"He had better opportunities;
not
to make money,
but
to make something of himself.
He was a quiet man,
but he was very intelligent.
You would have been proud of him,
Emil."
Alexandra felt that he would like
to know there had been a man of his kin whom he could admire.
She knew that Emil was ashamed of Lou and Oscar,
because they were bigoted and self-satisfied.
He never said much about them,
but she could feel his disgust.
His brothers had shown their disapproval of him ever since he first went away
to school.
The only thing that would have satisfied them would have been his failure at the University.
As it was,
they resented every change in his speech,
in his dress,
in his point of view;
though the latter they had
to conjecture,
for Emil avoided talking
to them about any but family matters.
All his interests they treated as affectations.
Alexandra took up her sewing again.
"I can remember father when he was quite a young man.
He belonged
to some kind of a musical society,
a male chorus,
in Stockholm.
I can remember going
with mother
to hear them sing.
There must have been a hundred of them,
and they all wore long black coats and white neckties.
I was used
to seeing father in a blue coat,
a sort of jacket,
and when I recognized him on the platform,
I was very proud.
Do you remember that Swedish song he taught you,
about the ship boy?"
"Yes.
I used
to sing it
to the Mexicans.
They like anything different."
Emil paused.
"Father had a hard fight here,
didn't he?"
he added thoughtfully.
"Yes,
and he died in a dark time.
Still,
he had hope.
He believed in the land."
"And in you,
I guess,"
Emil said
to himself.
There was another period of silence;
that warm,
friendly silence,
full of perfect understanding,
in which Emil and Alexandra had spent many of their happiest half-hours.
At last Emil said abruptly,
"Lou and Oscar would be better off if they were poor,
wouldn't they?"
Alexandra smiled.
"Maybe.
But their children wouldn't.
I have great hopes of Milly."
Emil shivered.
"I don't know.
Seems
to me it gets worse as it goes on.
The worst of the Swedes is that they're never willing
to find out how much they don't know.
It was like that at the University.
Always so pleased
with themselves! There's no getting behind that conceited Swedish grin.
The Bohemians and Germans were so different."
"Come,
Emil,
don't go back on your own people.
Father wasn't conceited,
Uncle Otto wasn't.
Even Lou and Oscar weren't when they were boys."
Emil looked incredulous,
but he did not dispute the point.
He turned on his back and lay still
for a long time,
his hands locked under his head,
looking up at the ceiling.
Alexandra knew that he was thinking of many things.
She felt no anxiety about Emil.
She had always believed in him,
as she had believed in the land.
He had been more like himself since he got back from Mexico;
seemed glad
to be at home,
and talked
to her as he used
to do.
She had no doubt that his wandering fit was over,
and that he would soon be settled in life.
"Alexandra,"
said Emil suddenly,
"do you remember the wild duck we saw down on the river that time?"
His sister looked up.
"I often think of her.
It always seems
to me she's there still,
just like we saw her."
"I know.
It's queer what things one remembers and what things one forgets."
Emil yawned and sat up.
"Well,
it's time
to turn in."
He rose,
and going over
to Alexandra stooped down and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
"Good-night,
sister.
I think you did pretty well by us."
Emil took up his lamp and went upstairs.
Alexandra sat finishing his new nightshirt,
that must go in the top tray of his trunk.
IV The next morning Angelique,
Amedee's wife,
was in the kitchen baking pies,
assisted by old Mrs. Chevalier.
Between the mixing-board and the stove stood the old cradle that had been Amedee's,
and in it was his black-eyed son.
As Angelique,
flushed and excited,
with flour on her hands,
stopped
to smile at the baby,
Emil Bergson rode up
to the kitchen door on his mare and dismounted.
"'Medee is out in the field,
Emil,"
Angelique called as she ran across the kitchen
to the oven.
"He begins
to cut his wheat to-day;
the first wheat ready
to cut anywhere about here.
He bought a new header,
you know,
because all the wheat's so short this year.
I hope he can rent it
to the neighbors,
it cost so much.
He and his cousins bought a steam thresher on shares.
You ought
to go out and see that header work.
I watched it an hour this morning,
busy as I am
with all the men
to feed.
He has a lot of hands,
but he's the only one that knows how
to drive the header or how
to run the engine,
so he has
to be everywhere at once.
He's sick,
too,
and ought
to be in his bed."
Emil bent over Hector Baptiste,
trying
to make him blink his round,
bead-like black eyes.
"Sick?
What's the matter
with your daddy,
kid?
Been making him walk the floor
with you?"
Angelique sniffed.
"Not much! We don't have that kind of babies.
It was his father that kept Baptiste awake.
All night I had
to be getting up and making mustard plasters
to put on his stomach.
He had an awful colic.
He said he felt better this morning,
but I don't think he ought
to be out in the field,
overheating himself."
Angelique did not speak
with much anxiety,
not because she was indifferent,
but because she felt so secure in their good fortune.
Only good things could happen
to a rich,
energetic,
handsome young man like Amedee,
with a new baby in the cradle and a new header in the field.
Emil stroked the black fuzz on Baptiste's head.
"I say,
Angelique,
one of
'Medee's grandmothers,
'way back,
must have been a squaw.
This kid looks exactly like the Indian babies."
Angelique made a face at him,
but old Mrs. Chevalier had been touched on a sore point,
and she let out such a stream of fiery PATOIS that Emil fled from the kitchen and mounted his mare.
Opening the pasture gate from the saddle,
Emil rode across the field
to the clearing where the thresher stood,
driven by a stationary engine and fed from the header boxes.
As Amedee was not on the engine,
Emil rode on
to the wheatfield,
where he recognized,
on the header,
the slight,
wiry figure of his friend,
coatless,
his white shirt puffed out by the wind,
his straw hat stuck jauntily on the side of his head.
The six big work-horses that drew,
or rather pushed,
the header,
went abreast at a rapid walk,
and as they were still green at the work they required a good deal of management on Amedee's part;
especially when they turned the corners,
where they divided,
three and three,
and then swung round into line again
with a movement that looked as complicated as a wheel of artillery.
Emil felt a new thrill of admiration
for his friend,
and
with it the old pang of envy at the way in which Amedee could do
with his might what his hand found
to do,
and feel that,
whatever it was,
it was the most important thing in the world.
"I'll have
to bring Alexandra up
to see this thing work,"
Emil thought;
"it's splendid!"
When he saw Emil,
Amedee waved
to him and called
to one of his twenty cousins
to take the reins.
Stepping off the header without stopping it,
he ran up
to Emil who had dismounted.
"Come along,"
he called.
"I have
to go over
to the engine
for a minute.
I gotta green man running it,
and I gotta
to keep an eye on him."
Emil thought the lad was unnaturally flushed and more excited than even the cares of managing a big farm at a critical time warranted.
As they passed behind a last year's stack,
Amedee clutched at his right side and sank down
for a moment on the straw.
"Ouch! I got an awful pain in me,
Emil.
Something's the matter
with my insides,
for sure."
Emil felt his fiery cheek.
"You ought
to go straight
to bed,
'Medee,
and telephone
for the doctor;
that's what you ought
to do."
Amedee staggered up
with a gesture of despair.
"How can I?
I got no time
to be sick.
Three thousand dollars'
worth of new machinery
to manage,
and the wheat so ripe it will begin
to shatter next week.
My wheat's short,
but it's gotta grand full berries.
What's he slowing down for?
We haven't got header boxes enough
to feed the thresher,
I guess."
Amedee started hot-foot across the stubble,
leaning a little
to the right as he ran,
and waved
to the engineer not
to stop the engine.
Emil saw that this was no time
to talk about his own affairs.
He mounted his mare and rode on
to Sainte-Agnes,
to bid his friends there good-bye.
He went first
to see Raoul Marcel,
and found him innocently practising the
"Gloria"
for the big confirmation service on Sunday while he polished the mirrors of his father's saloon.
As Emil rode homewards at three o'clock in the afternoon,
he saw Amedee staggering out of the wheatfield,
supported by two of his cousins.
Emil stopped and helped them put the boy
to bed.
V When Frank Shabata came in from work at five o'clock that evening,
old Moses Marcel,
Raoul's father,
telephoned him that Amedee had had a seizure in the wheatfield,
and that Doctor Paradis was going
to operate on him as soon as the Hanover doctor got there
to help.
Frank dropped a word of this at the table,
bolted his supper,
and rode off
to SainteAgnes,
where there would be sympathetic discussion of Amedee's case at Marcel's saloon.
As soon as Frank was gone,
Marie telephoned Alexandra.
It was a comfort
to hear her friend's voice.
Yes,
Alexandra knew what there was
to be known about Amedee.
Emil had been there when they carried him out of the field,
and had stayed
with him until the doctors operated
for appendicitis at five o'clock.
They were afraid it was too late
to do much good;
it should have been done three days ago.
Amedee was in a very bad way.
Emil had just come home,
worn out and sick himself.
She had given him some brandy and put him
to bed.
Marie hung up the receiver.
Poor Amedee's illness had taken on a new meaning
to her,
now that she knew Emil had been
with him.
And it might so easily have been the other way-Emil who was ill and Amedee who was sad! Marie looked about the dusky sitting-room.
She had seldom felt so utterly lonely.
If Emil was asleep,
there was not even a chance of his coming;
and she could not go
to Alexandra
for sympathy.
She meant
to tell Alexandra everything,
as soon as Emil went away.
Then whatever was left between them would be honest.
But she could not stay in the house this evening.
Where should she go?
She walked slowly down through the orchard,
where the evening air was heavy
with the smell of wild cotton.
The fresh,
salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer.
Wherever those ashes-ofrose balls hung on their milky stalks,
the air about them was saturated
with their breath.
The sky was still red in the west and the evening star hung directly over the Bergsons'
windmill.
Marie crossed the fence at the wheatfield corner,
and walked slowly along the path that led
to Alexandra's.
She could not help feeling hurt that Emil had not come
to tell her about Amedee.
It seemed
to her most unnatural that he should not have come.
If she were in trouble,
certainly he was the one person in the world she would want
to see.
Perhaps he wished her
to understand that
for her he was as good as gone already.
Marie stole slowly,
flutteringly,
along the path,
like a white night-moth out of the fields.
The years seemed
to stretch before her like the land;
spring,
summer,
autumn,
winter,
spring;
always the same patient fields,
the patient little trees,
the patient lives;
always the same yearning,
the same pulling at the chain--until the instinct
to live had torn itself and bled and weakened
for the last time,
until the chain secured a dead woman,
who might cautiously be released.
Marie walked on,
her face lifted toward the remote,
inaccessible evening star.
When she reached the stile she sat down and waited.
How terrible it was
to love people when you could not really share their lives! Yes,
in so far as she was concerned,
Emil was already gone.
They couldn't meet any more.
There was nothing
for them
to say.
They had spent the last penny of their small change;
there was nothing left but gold.
The day of love-tokens was past.
They had now only their hearts
to give each other.
And Emil being gone,
what was her life
to be like?
In some ways,
it would be easier.
She would not,
at least,
live in perpetual fear.
If Emil were once away and settled at work,
she would not have the feeling that she was spoiling his life.
With the memory he left her,
she could be as rash as she chose.
Nobody could be the worse
for it but herself;
and that,
surely,
did not matter.
Her own case was clear.
When a girl had loved one man,
and then loved another while that man was still alive,
everybody knew what
to think of her.
What happened
to her was of little consequence,
so long as she did not drag other people down
with her.
Emil once away,
she could let everything else go and live a new life of perfect love.
Marie left the stile reluctantly.
She had,
after all,
thought he might come.
And how glad she ought
to be,
she told herself,
that he was asleep.
She left the path and went across the pasture.
The moon was almost full.
An owl was hooting somewhere in the fields.
She had scarcely thought about where she was going when the pond glittered before her,
where Emil had shot the ducks.
She stopped and looked at it.
Yes,
there would be a dirty way out of life,
if one chose
to take it.
But she did not want
to die.
She wanted
to live and dream--a hundred years,
forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart,
as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon like that;
when it encircled and swelled
with In the morning,
when Emil came downstairs,
Alexandra met him in the sitting-room and put her hands on his shoulders.
"Emil,
I went
to your room as soon as it was light,
but you were sleeping so sound I hated
to wake you.
There was nothing you could do,
so I let you sleep.
They telephoned from SainteAgnes that Amedee died at three o'clock this morning."
VI The Church has always held that life is
for the living.
On Saturday,
while half the village of Sainte-Agnes was mourning
for Amedee and preparing the funeral black
for his burial on Monday,
the other half was busy
with white dresses and white veils
for the great confirmation service to-morrow,
when the bishop was
to confirm a class of one hundred boys and girls.
Father Duchesne divided his time between the living and the dead.
All day Saturday the church was a scene of bustling activity,
a little hushed by the thought of Amedee.
The choir were busy rehearsing a mass of Rossini,
which they had studied and practised
for this occasion.
The women were trimming the altar,
the boys and girls were bringing flowers.
On Sunday morning the bishop was
to drive overland
to Sainte-Agnes from Hanover,
and Emil Bergson had been asked
to take the place of one of Amedee's cousins in the cavalcade of forty French boys who were
to ride across country
to meet the bishop's carriage.
At six o'clock on Sunday morning the boys met at the church.
As they stood holding their horses by the bridle,
they talked in low tones of their dead comrade.
They kept repeating that Amedee had always been a good boy,
glancing toward the red brick church which had played so large a part in Amedee's life,
had been the scene of his most serious moments and of his happiest hours.
He had played and wrestled and sung and courted under its shadow.
Only three weeks ago he had proudly carried his baby there
to be christened.
They could not doubt that that invisible arm was still about Amedee;
that through the church on earth he had passed
to the church triumphant,
the goal of the hopes and faith of so many hundred years.
When the word was given
to mount,
the young men rode at a walk out of the village;
but once out among the wheatfields in the morning sun,
their horses and their own youth got the better of them.
A wave of zeal and fiery enthusiasm swept over them.
They longed
for a Jerusalem
to deliver.
The thud of their galloping hoofs interrupted many a country breakfast and brought many a woman and child
to the door of the farmhouses as they passed.
Five miles east of Sainte-Agnes they met the bishop in his open carriage,
attended by two priests.
Like one man the boys swung off their hats in a broad salute,
and bowed their heads as the handsome old man lifted his two fingers in the episcopal blessing.
The horsemen closed about the carriage like a guard,
and whenever a restless horse broke from control and shot down the road ahead of the body,
the bishop laughed and rubbed his plump hands together.
"What fine boys!"
he said
to his priests.
"The Church still has her cavalry."
As the troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the town,--the first frame church of the parish had stood there,--old Pierre Seguin was already out
with his pick and spade,
digging Amedee's grave.
He knelt and uncovered as the bishop passed.
The boys
with one accord looked away from old Pierre
to the red church on the hill,
with the gold cross flaming on its steeple.
Mass was at eleven.
While the church was filling,
Emil Bergson waited outside,
watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill.
After the bell began
to ring,
he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback and tie his horse
to the hitch-bar.
Marie,
then,
was not coming.
Emil turned and went into the church.
Amedee's was the only empty pew,
and he sat down in it.
Some of Amedee's cousins were there,
dressed in black and weeping.
When all the pews were full,
the old men and boys packed the open space at the back of the church,
kneeling on the floor.
There was scarcely a family in town that was not represented in the confirmation class,
by a cousin,
at least.
The new communicants,
with their clear,
reverent faces,
were beautiful
to look upon as they entered in a body and took the front benches reserved
for them.
Even before the Mass began,
the air was charged
with feeling.
The choir had never sung so well and Raoul Marcel,
in the
"Gloria,"
drew even the bishop's eyes
to the organ loft.
For the offertory he sang Gounod's
"Ave Maria,"-always spoken of in Sainte-Agnes as
"the Ave Maria."
Emil began
to torture himself
with questions about Marie.
Was she ill?
Had she quarreled
with her husband?
Was she too unhappy
to find comfort even here?
Had she,
perhaps,
thought that he would come
to her?
Was she waiting
for him?
Overtaxed by excitement and sorrow as he was,
the rapture of the service took hold upon his body and mind.
As he listened
to Raoul,
he seemed
to emerge from the conflicting emotions which had been whirling him about and sucking him under.
He felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind,
and
with it a conviction that good was,
after all,
stronger than evil,
and that good was possible
to men.
He seemed
to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin.
He looked across the heads of the people at Frank Shabata
with calmness.
That rapture was
for those who could feel it;
for people who could not,
it was non-existent.
He coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata's.
The spirit he had met in music was his own.
Frank Shabata had never found it;
would never find it if he lived beside it a thousand years;
would have destroyed it if he had found it,
as Herod slew the innocents,
as Rome slew the martyrs.
SAN--CTA MARI-I-I-A,
wailed Raoul from the organ loft;
O--RA PRO NO-O-BIS! And it did not occur
to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before,
that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation.
The confirmation service followed the Mass.
When it was over,
the congregation thronged about the newly confirmed.
The girls,
and even the boys,
were kissed and embraced and wept over.
All the aunts and grandmothers wept
with joy.
The housewives had much ado
to tear themselves away from the general rejoicing and hurry back
to their kitchens.
The country parishioners were staying in town
for dinner,
and nearly every house in Sainte-Agnes entertained visitors that day.
Father Duchesne,
the bishop,
and the visiting priests dined
with Fabien Sauvage,
the banker.
Emil and Frank Shabata were both guests of old Moise Marcel.
After dinner Frank and old Moise retired
to the rear room of the saloon
to play California Jack and drink their cognac,
and Emil went over
to the banker's
with Raoul,
who had been asked
to sing
for the bishop.
At three o'clock,
Emil felt that he could stand it no longer.
He slipped out under cover of
"The Holy City,"
followed by Malvina's wistful eye,
and went
to the stable
for his mare.
He was at that height of excitement from which everything is foreshortened,
from which life seems short and simple,
death very near,
and the soul seems
to soar like an eagle.
As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was
to lie,
and felt no horror.
That,
too,
was beautiful,
that simple doorway into forgetfulness.
The heart,
when it is too much alive,
aches
for that brown earth,
and ecstasy has no fear of death.
It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole;
its wooers are found among the young,
the passionate,
the gallant-hearted.
It was not until he had passed the graveyard that Emil realized where he was going.
It was the hour
for saying good-bye.
It might be the last time that he would see her alone,
and today he could leave her without rancor,
without bitterness.
Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of the ripe wheat,
like the smell of bread baking in an oven.
The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream.
He could feel nothing but the sense of diminishing distance.
It seemed
to him that his mare was flying,
or running on wheels,
like a railway train.
The sunlight,
flashing on the window-glass of the big red barns,
drove him wild
with joy.
He was like an arrow shot from the bow.
His life poured itself out along the road before him as he rode
to the Shabata farm.
When Emil alighted at the Shabatas'
gate,
his horse was in a lather.
He tied her in the stable and hurried
to the house.
It was empty.
She might be at Mrs. Hiller's or
with Alexandra.
But anything that reminded him of her would be enough,
the orchard,
the mulberry tree.
.
.
When he reached the orchard the sun was hanging low over the wheatfield.
Long fingers of light reached through the apple branches as through a net;
the orchard was riddled and shot
with gold;
light was the reality,
the trees were merely interferences that reflected and refracted light.
Emil went softly down between the cherry trees toward the wheatfield.
When he came
to the corner,
he stopped short and put his hand over his mouth.
Marie was lying on her side under the white mulberry tree,
her face half hidden in the grass,
her eyes closed,
her hands lying limply where they had happened
to fall.
She had lived a day of her new life of perfect love,
and it had left her like this.
Her breast rose and fell faintly,
as if she were asleep.
Emil threw himself down beside her and took her in his arMs. The blood came back
to her cheeks,
her amber eyes opened slowly,
and in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun.
"I was dreaming this,"
she whispered,
hiding her face against him,
"don't take my dream away!"
VII When Frank Shabata got home that night,
he found Emil's mare in his stable.
Such an impertinence amazed him.
Like everybody else,
Frank had had an exciting day.
Since noon he had been drinking too much,
and he was in a bad temper.
He talked bitterly
to himself while he put his own horse away,
and as he went up the path and saw that the house was dark he felt an added sense of injury.
He approached quietly and listened on the doorstep.
Hearing nothing,
he opened the kitchen door and went softly from one room
to another.
Then he went through the house again,
upstairs and down,
with no better result.
He sat down on the bottom step of the box stairway and tried
to get his wits together.
In that unnatural quiet there was no sound but his own heavy breathing.
Suddenly an owl began
to hoot out in the fields.
Frank lifted his head.
An idea flashed into his mind,
and his sense of injury and outrage grew.
He went into his bedroom and took his murderous 405 Winchester from the closet.
When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house,
he had not the faintest purpose of doing anything
with it.
He did not believe that he had any real grievance.
But it gratified him
to feel like a desperate man.
He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate straits.
His unhappy temperament was like a cage;
he could never get out of it;
and he felt that other people,
his wife in particular,
must have put him there.
It had never more than dimly occurred
to Frank that he made his own unhappiness.
Though he took up his gun
with dark projects in his mind,
he would have been paralyzed
with fright had he known that there was the slightest probability of his ever carrying any of them out.
Frank went slowly down
to the orchard gate,
stopped and stood
for a moment lost in thought.
He retraced his steps and looked through the barn and the hayloft.
Then he went out
to the road,
where he took the footpath along the outside of the orchard hedge.
The hedge was twice as tall as Frank himself,
and so dense that one could see through it only by peering closely between the leaves.
He could see the empty path a long way in the moonlight.
His mind traveled ahead
to the stile,
which he always thought of as haunted by Emil Bergson.
But why had he left his horse?
At the wheatfield corner,
where the orchard hedge ended and the path led across the pasture
to the Bergsons',
Frank stopped.
In the warm,
breathless night air he heard a murmuring sound,
perfectly inarticulate,
as low as the sound of water coming from a spring,
where there is no fall,
and where there are no stones
to fret it.
Frank strained his ears.
It ceased.
He held his breath and began
to tremble.
Resting the butt of his gun on the ground,
he parted the mulberry leaves softly
with his fingers and peered through the hedge at the dark figures on the grass,
in the shadow of the mulberry tree.
It seemed
to him that they must feel his eyes,
that they must hear him breathing.
But they did not.
Frank,
who had always wanted
to see things blacker than they were,
for once wanted
to believe less than he saw.
The woman lying in the shadow might so easily be one of the Bergsons'
farm-girls.
.
.
.
Again the murmur,
like water welling out of the ground.
This time he heard it more distinctly,
and his blood was quicker than his brain.
He began
to act,
just as a man who falls into the fire begins
to act.
The gun sprang
to his shoulder,
he sighted mechanically and fired three times without stopping,
stopped without knowing why.
Either he shut his eyes or he had vertigo.
He did not see anything while he was firing.
He thought he heard a cry simultaneous
with the second report,
but he was not sure.
He peered again through the hedge,
at the two dark figures under the tree.
They had fallen a little apart from each other,
and were perfectly still-No,
not quite;
in a white patch of light,
where the moon shone through the branches,
a man's hand was plucking spasmodically at the grass.
Suddenly the woman stirred and uttered a cry,
then another,
and another.
She was living! She was dragging herself toward the hedge! Frank dropped his gun and ran back along the path,
shaking,
stumbling,
gasping.
He had never imagined such horror.
The cries followed him.
They grew fainter and thicker,
as if she were choking.
He dropped on his knees beside the hedge and crouched like a rabbit,
listening;
fainter,
fainter;
a sound like a whine;
again--a moan--another--silence.
Frank scrambled
to his feet and ran on,
groaning and praying.
From habit he went toward the house,
where he was used
to being soothed when he had worked himself into a frenzy,
but at the sight of the black,
open door,
he started back.
He knew that he had murdered somebody,
that a woman was bleeding and moaning in the orchard,
but he had not realized before that it was his wife.
The gate stared him in the face.
He threw his hands over his head.
Which way
to turn?
He lifted his tormented face and looked at the sky.
"Holy Mother of God,
not
to suffer! She was a good girl--not
to suffer!"
Frank had been wont
to see himself in dramatic situations;
but now,
when he stood by the windmill,
in the bright space between the barn and the house,
facing his own black doorway,
he did not see himself at all.
He stood like the hare when the dogs are approaching from all sides.
And he ran like a hare,
back and forth about that moonlit space,
before he could make up his mind
to go into the dark stable
for a horse.
The thought of going into a doorway was terrible
to him.
He caught Emil's horse by the bit and led it out.
He could not have buckled a bridle on his own.
After two or three attempts,
he lifted himself into the saddle and started
for Hanover.
If he could catch the one o'clock train,
he had money enough
to get as far as Omaha.
While he was thinking dully of this in some less sensitized part of his brain,
his acuter faculties were going over and over the cries he had heard in the orchard.
Terror was the only thing that kept him from going back
to her,
terror that she might still be she,
that she might still be suffering.
A woman,
mutilated and bleeding in his orchard--it was because it was a woman that he was so afraid.
It was inconceivable that he should have hurt a woman.
He would rather be eaten by wild beasts than see her move on the ground as she had moved in the orchard.
Why had she been so careless?
She knew he was like a crazy man when he was angry.
She had more than once taken that gun away from him and held it,
when he was angry
with other people.
Once it had gone off while they were struggling over it.
She was never afraid.
But,
when she knew him,
why hadn't she been more careful?
Didn't she have all summer before her
to love Emil Bergson in,
without taking such chances?
Probably she had met the Smirka boy,
too,
down there in the orchard.
He didn't care.
She could have met all the men on the Divide there,
and welcome,
if only she hadn't brought this horror on him.
There was a wrench in Frank's mind.
He did not honestly believe that of her.
He knew that he was doing her wrong.
He stopped his horse
to admit this
to himself the more directly,
to think it out the more clearly.
He knew that he was
to blame.
For three years he had been trying
to break her spirit.
She had a way of making the best of things that seemed
to him a sentimental affectation.
He wanted his wife
to resent that he was wasting his best years among these stupid and unappreciative people;
but she had seemed
to find the people quite good enough.
If he ever got rich he meant
to buy her pretty clothes and take her
to California in a Pullman car,
and treat her like a lady;
but in the mean time he wanted her
to feel that life was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it.
He had tried
to make her life ugly.
He had refused
to share any of the little pleasures she was so plucky about making
for herself.
She could be gay about the least thing in the world;
but she must be gay! When she first came
to him,
her faith in him,
her adoration-Frank struck the mare
with his fist.
Why had Marie made him do this thing;
why had she brought this upon him?
He was overwhelmed by sickening misfortune.
All at once he heard her cries again-he had forgotten
for a moment.
"Maria,"
he sobbed aloud,
"Maria!"
When Frank was halfway
to Hanover,
the motion of his horse brought on a violent attack of nausea.
After it had passed,
he rode on again,
but he could think of nothing except his physical weakness and his desire
to be comforted by his wife.
He wanted
to get into his own bed.
Had his wife been at home,
he would have turned and gone back
to her meekly enough.
VIII When old Ivar climbed down from his loft at four o'clock the next morning,
he came upon Emil's mare,
jaded and lather-stained,
her bridle broken,
chewing the scattered tufts of hay outside the stable door.
The old man was thrown into a fright at once.
He put the mare in her stall,
threw her a measure of oats,
and then set out as fast as his bow-legs could carry him on the path
to the nearest neighbor.
"Something is wrong
with that boy.
Some misfortune has come upon us.
He would never have used her so,
in his right senses.
It is not his way
to abuse his mare,"
the old man kept muttering,
as he scuttled through the short,
wet pasture grass on his bare feet.
While Ivar was hurrying across the fields,
the first long rays of the sun were reaching down between the orchard boughs
to those two dewdrenched figures.
The story of what had happened was written plainly on the orchard grass,
and on the white mulberries that had fallen in the night and were covered
with dark stain.
For Emil the chapter had been short.
He was shot in the heart,
and had rolled over on his back and died.
His face was turned up
to the sky and his brows were drawn in a frown,
as if he had realized that something had befallen him.
But
for Marie Shabata it had not been so easy.
One ball had torn through her right lung,
another had shattered the carotid artery.
She must have started up and gone toward the hedge,
leaving a trail of blood.
There she had fallen and bled.
From that spot there was another trail,
heavier than the first,
where she must have dragged herself back
to Emil's body.
Once there,
she seemed not
to have struggled any more.
She had lifted her head
to her lover's breast,
taken his hand in both her own,
and bled quietly
to death.
She was lying on her right side in an easy and natural position,
her cheek on Emil's shoulder.
On her face there was a look of ineffable content.
Her lips were parted a little;
her eyes were lightly closed,
as if in a day-dream or a light slumber.
After she lay down there,
she seemed not
to have moved an eyelash.
The hand she held was covered
with dark stains,
where she had kissed it.
But the stained,
slippery grass,
the darkened mulberries,
told only half the story.
Above Marie and Emil,
two white butterflies from Frank's alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows;
diving and soaring,
now close together,
now far apart;
and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts
to die.
When Ivar reached the path by the hedge,
he saw Shabata's rifle lying in the way.
He turned and peered through the branches,
falling upon his knees as if his legs had been mowed from under him.
"Merciful God!"
he groaned;
Alexandra,
too,
had risen early that morning,
because of her anxiety about Emil.
She was in Emil's room upstairs when,
from the window,
she saw Ivar coming along the path that led from the Shabatas'.
He was running like a spent man,
tottering and lurching from side
to side.
Ivar never drank,
and Alexandra thought at once that one of his spells had come upon him,
and that he must be in a very bad way indeed.
She ran downstairs and hurried out
to meet him,
to hide his infirmity from the eyes of her household.
The old man fell in the road at her feet and caught her hand,
over which he bowed his shaggy head.
"Mistress,
mistress,"
he sobbed,
"it has fallen! Sin and death
for the young ones! God have mercy upon us!"
PART V Alexandra I Ivar was sitting at a cobbler's bench in the barn,
mending harness by the light of a lantern and repeating
to himself the 101st Psalm.
It was only five o'clock of a mid-October day,
but a storm had come up in the afternoon,
bringing black clouds,
a cold wind and torrents of rain.
The old man wore his buffalo-skin coat,
and occasionally stopped
to warm his fingers at the lantern.
Suddenly a woman burst into the shed,
as if she had been blown in,
accompanied by a shower of rain-drops.
It was Signa,
wrapped in a man's overcoat and wearing a pair of boots over her shoes.
In time of trouble Signa had come back
to stay
with her mistress,
for she was the only one of the maids from whom Alexandra would accept much personal service.
It was three months now since the news of the terrible thing that had happened in Frank Shabata's orchard had first run like a fire over the Divide.
Signa and Nelse were staying on
with Alexandra until winter.
"Ivar,"
Signa exclaimed as she wiped the rain from her face,
"do you know where she is?"
The old man put down his cobbler's knife.
"Who,
the mistress?"
"Yes.
She went away about three o'clock.
I happened
to look out of the window and saw her going across the fields in her thin dress and sun-hat.
And now this storm has come on.
I thought she was going
to Mrs. Hiller's,
and I telephoned as soon as the thunder stopped,
but she had not been there.
I'm afraid she is out somewhere and will get her death of cold."
Ivar put on his cap and took up the lantern.
"JA,
JA,
we will see.
I will hitch the boy's mare
to the cart and go."
Signa followed him across the wagon-shed
to the horses'
stable.
She was shivering
with cold and excitement.
"Where do you suppose she can be,
Ivar?"
The old man lifted a set of single harness carefully from its peg.
"How should I know?"
"But you think she is at the graveyard,
don't you?"
Signa persisted.
"So do I.
Oh,
I wish she would be more like herself! I can't believe it's Alexandra Bergson come
to this,
with no head about anything.
I have
to tell her when
to eat and when
to go
to bed."
"Patience,
patience,
sister,"
muttered Ivar as he settled the bit in the horse's mouth.
"When the eyes of the flesh are shut,
the eyes of the spirit are open.
She will have a message from those who are gone,
and that will bring her peace.
Until then we must bear
with her.
You and I are the only ones who have weight
with her.
She trusts us."
"How awful it's been these last three months."
Signa held the lantern so that he could see
to buckle the straps.
"It don't seem right that we must all be so miserable.
Why do we all have
to be punished?
Seems
to me like good times would never come again."
Ivar expressed himself in a deep sigh,
but said nothing.
He stooped and took a sandburr from his toe.
"Ivar,"
Signa asked suddenly,
"will you tell me why you go barefoot?
All the time I lived here in the house I wanted
to ask you.
Is it
for a penance,
or what?"
"No,
sister.
It is
for the indulgence of the body.
From my youth up I have had a strong,
rebellious body,
and have been subject
to every kind of temptation.
Even in age my temptations are prolonged.
It was necessary
to make some allowances;
and the feet,
as I understand it,
are free members.
There is no divine prohibition
for them in the Ten Commandments.
The hands,
the tongue,
the eyes,
the heart,
all the bodily desires we are commanded
to subdue;
but the feet are free members.
I indulge them without harm
to any one,
even
to trampling in filth when my desires are low.
They are quickly cleaned again."
Signa did not laugh.
She looked thoughtful as she followed Ivar out
to the wagon-shed and held the shafts up
for him,
while he backed in the mare and buckled the hold-backs.
"You have been a good friend
to the mistress,
Ivar,"
she murmured.
"And you,
God be
with you,"
replied Ivar as he clambered into the cart and put the lantern under the oilcloth lap-cover.
"Now
for a ducking,
my girl,"
he said
to the mare,
gathering up the reins.
As they emerged from the shed,
a stream of water,
running off the thatch,
struck the mare on the neck.
She tossed her head indignantly,
then struck out bravely on the soft ground,
slipping back again and again as she climbed the hill
to the main road.
Between the rain and the darkness Ivar could see very little,
so he let Emil's mare have the rein,
keeping her head in the right direction.
When the ground was level,
he turned her out of the dirt road upon the sod,
where she was able
to trot without slipping.
Before Ivar reached the graveyard,
three miles from the house,
the storm had spent itself,
and the downpour had died into a soft,
dripping rain.
The sky and the land were a dark smoke color,
and seemed
to be coming together,
like two waves.
When Ivar stopped at the gate and swung out his lantern,
a white figure rose from beside John Bergson's white stone.
The old man sprang
to the ground and shuffled toward the gate calling,
"Mistress,
mistress!"
Alexandra hurried
to meet him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"TYST! Ivar.
There's nothing
to be worried about.
I'm sorry if I've scared you all.
I didn't notice the storm till it was on me,
and I couldn't walk against it.
I'm glad you've come.
I am so tired I didn't know how I'd ever get home."
Ivar swung the lantern up so that it shone in her face.
"GUD! You are enough
to frighten us,
mistress.
You look like a drowned woman.
How could you do such a thing!"
Groaning and mumbling he led her out of the gate and helped her into the cart,
wrapping her in the dry blankets on which he had been sitting.
Alexandra smiled at his solicitude.
"Not much use in that,
Ivar.
You will only shut the wet in.
I don't feel so cold now;
but I'm heavy and numb.
I'm glad you came."
Ivar turned the mare and urged her into a sliding trot.
Her feet sent back a continual spatter of mud.
Alexandra spoke
to the old man as they jogged along through the sullen gray twilight of the storm.
"Ivar,
I think it has done me good
to get cold clear through like this,
once.
I don't believe I shall suffer so much any more.
When you get so near the dead,
they seem more real than the living.
Worldly thoughts leave one.
Ever since Emil died,
I've suffered so when it rained.
Now that I've been out in it
with him,
I shan't dread it.
After you once get cold clear through,
the feeling of the rain on you is sweet.
It seems
to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby.
It carries you back into the dark,
before you were born;
you can't see things,
but they come
to you,
somehow,
and you know them and aren't afraid of them.
Maybe it's like that
with the dead.
If they feel anything at all,
it's the old things,
before they were born,
that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little."
"Mistress,"
said Ivar reproachfully,
"those are bad thoughts.
The dead are in Paradise."
Then he hung his head,
for he did not believe that Emil was in Paradise.
When they got home,
Signa had a fire burning in the sitting-room stove.
She undressed Alexandra and gave her a hot footbath,
while Ivar made ginger tea in the kitchen.
When Alexandra was in bed,
wrapped in hot blankets,
Ivar came in
with his tea and saw that she drank it.
Signa asked permission
to sleep on the slat lounge outside her door.
Alexandra endured their attentions patiently,
but she was glad when they put out the lamp and left her.
As she lay alone in the dark,
it occurred
to her
for the first time that perhaps she was actually tired of life.
All the physical operations of life seemed difficult and painful.
She longed
to be free from her own body,
which ached and was so heavy.
And longing itself was heavy:
she yearned
to be free of that.
As she lay
with her eyes closed,
she had again,
more vividly than
for many years,
the old illusion of her girlhood,
of being lifted and carried lightly by some one very strong.
He was
with her a long while this time,
and carried her very far,
and in his arms she felt free from pain.
When he laid her down on her bed again,
she opened her eyes,
and,
for the first time in her life,
she saw him,
saw him clearly,
though the room was dark,
and his face was covered.
He was standing in the doorway of her room.
His white cloak was thrown over his face,
and his head was bent a little forward.
His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the world.
His right arm,
bared from the elbow,
was dark and gleaming,
like bronze,
and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers.
She knew at last
for whom it was she had waited,
and where he would carry her.
That,
she told herself,
was very well.
Then she went
to sleep.
Alexandra wakened in the morning
with nothing worse than a hard cold and a stiff shoulder.
She kept her bed
for several days,
and it was during that time that she formed a resolution
to go
to Lincoln
to see Frank Shabata.
Ever since she last saw him in the courtroom,
Frank's haggard face and wild eyes had haunted her.
The trial had lasted only three days.
Frank had given himself up
to the police in Omaha and pleaded guilty of killing without malice and without premeditation.
The gun was,
of course,
against him,
and the judge had given him the full sentence,--ten years.
He had now been in the State Penitentiary
for a month.
Frank was the only one,
Alexandra told herself,
for whom anything could be done.
He had been less in the wrong than any of them,
and he was paying the heaviest penalty.
She often felt that she herself had been more
to blame than poor Frank.
From the time the Shabatas had first moved
to the neighboring farm,
she had omitted no opportunity of throwing Marie and Emil together.
Because she knew Frank was surly about doing little things
to help his wife,
she was always sending Emil over
to spade or plant or carpenter
for Marie.
She was glad
to have Emil see as much as possible of an intelligent,
city-bred girl like their neighbor;
she noticed that it improved his manners.
She knew that Emil was fond of Marie,
but it had never occurred
to her that Emil's feeling might be different from her own.
She wondered at herself now,
but she had never thought of danger in that direction.
If Marie had been unmarried,
--oh,
yes! Then she would have kept her eyes open.
But the mere fact that she was Shabata's wife,
for Alexandra,
settled everything.
That she was beautiful,
impulsive,
barely two years older than Emil,
these facts had had no weight
with Alexandra.
Emil was a good boy,
and only bad boys ran after married women.
Now,
Alexandra could in a measure realize that Marie was,
after all,
Marie;
not merely a
"married woman."
Sometimes,
when Alexandra thought of her,
it was
with an aching tenderness.
The moment she had reached them in the orchard that morning,
everything was clear
to her.
There was something about those two lying in the grass,
something in the way Marie had settled her cheek on Emil's shoulder,
that told her everything.
She wondered then how they could have helped loving each other;
how she could have helped knowing that they must.
Emil's cold,
frowning face,
the girl's content--Alexandra had felt awe of them,
even in the first shock of her grief.
The idleness of those days in bed,
the relaxation of body which attended them,
enabled Alexandra
to think more calmly than she had done since Emil's death.
She and Frank,
she told herself,
were left out of that group of friends who had been overwhelmed by disaster.
She must certainly see Frank Shabata.
Even in the courtroom her heart had grieved
for him.
He was in a strange country,
he had no kinsmen or friends,
and in a moment he had ruined his life.
Being what he was,
she felt,
Frank could not have acted otherwise.
She could understand his behavior more easily than she could understand Marie's.
Yes,
she must go
to Lincoln
to see Frank Shabata.
The day after Emil's funeral,
Alexandra had written
to Carl Linstrum;
a single page of notepaper,
a bare statement of what had happened.
She was not a woman who could write much about such a thing,
and about her own feelings she could never write very freely.
She knew that Carl was away from post-offices,
prospecting somewhere in the interior.
Before he started he had written her where he expected
to go,
but her ideas about Alaska were vague.
As the weeks went by and she heard nothing from him,
it seemed
to Alexandra that her heart grew hard against Carl.
She began
to wonder whether she would not do better
to finish her life alone.
What was left of life seemed unimportant.
II Late in the afternoon of a brilliant October day,
Alexandra Bergson,
dressed in a black suit and traveling-hat,
alighted at the Burlington depot in Lincoln.
She drove
to the Lindell Hotel,
where she had stayed two years ago when she came up
for Emil's Commencement.
In spite of her usual air of sureness and selfpossession,
Alexandra felt ill at ease in hotels,
and she was glad,
when she went
to the clerk's desk
to register,
that there were not many people in the lobby.
She had her supper early,
wearing her hat and black jacket down
to the dining-room and carrying her handbag.
After supper she went out
for a walk.
It was growing dark when she reached the university campus.
She did not go into the grounds,
but walked slowly up and down the stone walk outside the long iron fence,
looking through at the young men who were running from one building
to another,
at the lights shining from the armory and the library.
A squad of cadets were going through their drill behind the armory,
and the commands of their young officer rang out at regular intervals,
so sharp and quick that Alexandra could not understand them.
Two stalwart girls came down the library steps and out through one of the iron gates.
As they passed her,
Alexandra was pleased
to hear them speaking Bohemian
to each other.
Every few moments a boy would come running down the flagged walk and dash out into the street as if he were rushing
to announce some wonder
to the world.
Alexandra felt a great tenderness
for them all.
She wished one of them would stop and speak
to her.
She wished she could ask them whether they had known Emil.
As she lingered by the south gate she actually did encounter one of the boys.
He had on his drill cap and was swinging his books at the end of a long strap.
It was dark by this time;
he did not see her and ran against her.
He snatched off his cap and stood bareheaded and panting.
"I'm awfully sorry,"
he said in a bright,
clear voice,
with a rising inflection,
as if he expected her
to say something.
"Oh,
it was my fault!"
said Alexandra eagerly.
"Are you an old student here,
may I ask?"
"No,
ma'am.
I'm a Freshie,
just off the farm.
Cherry County.
Were you hunting somebody?"
"No,
thank you.
That is--"
Alexandra wanted
to detain him.
"That is,
I would like
to find some of my brother's friends.
He graduated two years ago."
"Then you'd have
to try the Seniors,
wouldn't you?
Let's see;
I don't know any of them yet,
but there'll be sure
to be some of them around the library.
That red building,
right there,"
he pointed.
"Thank you,
I'll try there,"
said Alexandra lingeringly.
"Oh,
that's all right! Good-night."
The lad clapped his cap on his head and ran straight down Eleventh Street.
Alexandra looked after him wistfully.
She walked back
to her hotel unreasonably comforted.
"What a nice voice that boy had,
and how polite he was.
I know Emil was always like that
to women."
And again,
after she had undressed and was standing in her nightgown,
brushing her long,
heavy hair by the electric light,
she remembered him and said
to herself,
"I don't think I ever heard a nicer voice than that boy had.
I hope he will get on well here.
Cherry County;
that's where the hay is so fine,
and the coyotes can scratch down
to water."
At nine o'clock the next morning Alexandra presented herself at the warden's office in the State Penitentiary.
The warden was a German,
a ruddy,
cheerful-looking man who had formerly been a harness-maker.
Alexandra had a letter
to him from the German banker in Hanover.
As he glanced at the letter,
Mr. Schwartz put away his pipe.
"That big Bohemian,
is it?
Sure,
he's gettin'
along fine,"
said Mr. Schwartz cheerfully.
"I am glad
to hear that.
I was afraid he might be quarrelsome and get himself into more trouble.
Mr. Schwartz,
if you have time,
I would like
to tell you a little about Frank Shabata,
and why I am interested in him."
The warden listened genially while she told him briefly something of Frank's history and character,
but he did not seem
to find anything unusual in her account.
"Sure,
I'll keep an eye on him.
We'll take care of him all right,"
he said,
rising.
"You can talk
to him here,
while I go
to see
to things in the kitchen.
I'll have him sent in.
He ought
to be done washing out his cell by this time.
We have
to keep
'em clean,
you know."
The warden paused at the door,
speaking back over his shoulder
to a pale young man in convicts'
clothes who was seated at a desk in the corner,
writing in a big ledger.
"Bertie,
when 1037 is brought in,
you just step out and give this lady a chance
to talk."
The young man bowed his head and bent over his ledger again.
When Mr. Schwartz disappeared,
Alexandra thrust her black-edged handkerchief nervously into her handbag.
Coming out on the streetcar she had not had the least dread of meeting Frank.
But since she had been here the sounds and smells in the corridor,
the look of the men in convicts'
clothes who passed the glass door of the warden's office,
affected her unpleasantly.
The warden's clock ticked,
the young convict's pen scratched busily in the big book,
and his sharp shoulders were shaken every few seconds by a loose cough which he tried
to smother.
It was easy
to see that he was a sick man.
Alexandra looked at him timidly,
but he did not once raise his eyes.
He wore a white shirt under his striped jacket,
a high collar,
and a necktie,
very carefully tied.
His hands were thin and white and well cared for,
and he had a seal ring on his little finger.
When he heard steps approaching in the corridor,
he rose,
blotted his book,
put his pen in the rack,
and left the room without raising his eyes.
Through the door he opened a guard came in,
bringing Frank Shabata.
"You the lady that wanted
to talk
to 1037?
Here he is.
Be on your good behavior,
now.
He can set down,
lady,"
seeing that Alexandra remained standing.
"Push that white button when you're through
with him,
and I'll come."
The guard went out and Alexandra and Frank were left alone.
Alexandra tried not
to see his hideous clothes.
She tried
to look straight into his face,
which she could scarcely believe was his.
It was already bleached
to a chalky gray.
His lips were colorless,
his fine teeth looked yellowish.
He glanced at Alexandra sullenly,
blinked as if he had come from a dark place,
and one eyebrow twitched continually.
She felt at once that this interview was a terrible ordeal
to him.
His shaved head,
showing the conformation of his skull,
gave him a criminal look which he had not had during the trial.
Alexandra held out her hand.
"Frank,"
she said,
her eyes filling suddenly,
"I hope you'll let me be friendly
with you.
I understand how you did it.
I don't feel hard toward you.
They were more
to blame than you."
Frank jerked a dirty blue handkerchief from his trousers pocket.
He had begun
to cry.
He turned away from Alexandra.
"I never did mean
to do not'ing
to dat woman,"
he muttered.
"I never mean
to do not'ing
to dat boy.
I ain't had not'ing ag'in'
dat boy.
I always like dat boy fine.
An'
then I find him--"
He stopped.
The feeling went out of his face and eyes.
He dropped into a chair and sat looking stolidly at the floor,
his hands hanging loosely between his knees,
the handkerchief lying across his striped leg.
He seemed
to have stirred up in his mind a disgust that had paralyzed his faculties.
"I haven't come up here
to blame you,
Frank.
I think they were more
to blame than you."
Alexandra,
too,
felt benumbed.
Frank looked up suddenly and stared out of the office window.
"I guess dat place all go
to hell what I work so hard on,"
he said
with a slow,
bitter smile.
"I not care a damn."
He stopped and rubbed the palm of his hand over the light bristles on his head
with annoyance.
"I no can t'ink without my hair,"
he complained.
"I forget English.
We not talk here,
except swear."
Alexandra was bewildered.
Frank seemed
to have undergone a change of personality.
There was scarcely anything by which she could recognize her handsome Bohemian neighbor.
He seemed,
somehow,
not altogether human.
She did not know what
to say
to him.
"You do not feel hard
to me,
Frank?"
she asked at last.
Frank clenched his fist and broke out in excitement.
"I not feel hard at no woman.
I tell you I not that kind-a man.
I never hit my wife.
No,
never I hurt her when she devil me something awful!"
He struck his fist down on the warden's desk so hard that he afterward stroked it absently.
A pale pink crept over his neck and face.
"Two,
t'ree years I know dat woman don'
care no more
'bout me,
Alexandra Bergson.
I know she after some other man.
I know her,
oo-oo! An'
I ain't never hurt her.
I never would-a done dat,
if I ain't had dat gun along.
I don'
know what in hell make me take dat gun.
She always say I ain't no man
to carry gun.
If she been in dat house,
where she ought-a been-But das a foolish talk."
Frank rubbed his head and stopped suddenly,
as he had stopped before.
Alexandra felt that there was something strange in the way he chilled off,
as if something came up in him that extinguished his power of feeling or thinking.
"Yes,
Frank,"
she said kindly.
"I know you never meant
to hurt Marie."
Frank smiled at her queerly.
His eyes filled slowly
with tears.
"You know,
I most forgit dat woman's name.
She ain't got no name
for me no more.
I never hate my wife,
but dat woman what make me do dat-Honest
to God,
but I hate her! I no man
to fight.
I don'
want
to kill no boy and no woman.
I not care how many men she take under dat tree.
I no care
for not'ing but dat fine boy I kill,
Alexandra Bergson.
I guess I go crazy sure
'nough."
Alexandra remembered the little yellow cane she had found in Frank's clothes-closet.
She thought of how he had come
to this country a gay young fellow,
so attractive that the prettiest Bohemian girl in Omaha had run away
with him.
It seemed unreasonable that life should have landed him in such a place as this.
She blamed Marie bitterly.
And why,
with her happy,
affectionate nature,
should she have brought destruction and sorrow
to all who had loved her,
even
to poor old Joe Tovesky,
the uncle who used
to carry her about so proudly when she was a little girl?
That was the strangest thing of all.
Was there,
then,
something wrong in being warm-hearted and impulsive like that?
Alexandra hated
to think so.
But there was Emil,
in the Norwegian graveyard at home,
and here was Frank Shabata.
Alexandra rose and took him by the hand.
"Frank Shabata,
I am never going
to stop trying until I get you pardoned.
I'll never give the Governor any peace.
I know I can get you out of this place."
Frank looked at her distrustfully,
but he gathered confidence from her face.
"Alexandra,"
he said earnestly,
"if I git out-a here,
I not trouble dis country no more.
I go back where I come from;
see my mother."
Alexandra tried
to withdraw her hand,
but Frank held on
to it nervously.
He put out his finger and absently touched a button on her black jacket.
"Alexandra,"
he said in a low tone,
looking steadily at the button,
"you ain'
t'ink I use dat girl awful bad before--"
"No,
Frank.
We won't talk about that,"
Alexandra said,
pressing his hand.
"I can't help Emil now,
so I'm going
to do what I can
for you.
You know I don't go away from home often,
and I came up here on purpose
to tell you this."
The warden at the glass door looked in inquiringly.
Alexandra nodded,
and he came in and touched the white button on his desk.
The guard appeared,
and
with a sinking heart Alexandra saw Frank led away down the corridor.
After a few words
with Mr. Schwartz,
she left the prison and made her way
to the street-car.
She had refused
with horror the warden's cordial invitation to
"go through the institution."
As the car lurched over its uneven roadbed,
back toward Lincoln,
Alexandra thought of how she and Frank had been wrecked by the same storm and of how,
although she could come out into the sunlight,
she had not much more left in her life than he.
She remembered some lines from a poem she had liked in her schooldays:-Henceforth the world will only be A wider prison-house
to me,-and sighed.
A disgust of life weighed upon her heart;
some such feeling as had twice frozen Frank Shabata's features while they talked together.
She wished she were back on the Divide.
When Alexandra entered her hotel,
the clerk held up one finger and beckoned
to her.
As she approached his desk,
he handed her a telegram.
Alexandra took the yellow envelope and looked at it in perplexity,
then stepped into the elevator without opening it.
As she walked down the corridor toward her room,
she reflected that she was,
in a manner,
immune from evil tidings.
On reaching her room she locked the door,
and sitting down on a chair by the dresser,
opened the telegram.
It was from Hanover,
and it read:-Arrived Hanover last night.
Shall wait here until you come.
Please hurry.
CARL LINSTRUM.
Alexandra put her head down on the dresser and burst into tears.
III The next afternoon Carl and Alexandra were walking across the fields from Mrs. Hiller's.
Alexandra had left Lincoln after midnight,
and Carl had met her at the Hanover station early in the morning.
After they reached home,
Alexandra had gone over
to Mrs. Hiller's
to leave a little present she had bought
for her in the city.
They stayed at the old lady's door but a moment,
and then came out
to spend the rest of the afternoon in the sunny fields.
Alexandra had taken off her black travelingsuit and put on a white dress;
partly because she saw that her black clothes made Carl uncomfortable and partly because she felt oppressed by them herself.
They seemed a little like the prison where she had worn them yesterday,
and
to be out of place in the open fields.
Carl had changed very little.
His cheeks were browner and fuller.
He looked less like a tired scholar than when he went away a year ago,
but no one,
even now,
would have taken him
for a man of business.
His soft,
lustrous black eyes,
his whimsical smile,
would be less against him in the Klondike than on the Divide.
There are always dreamers on the frontier.
Carl and Alexandra had been talking since morning.
Her letter had never reached him.
He had first learned of her misfortune from a San Francisco paper,
four weeks old,
which he had picked up in a saloon,
and which contained a brief account of Frank Shabata's trial.
When he put down the paper,
he had already made up his mind that he could reach Alexandra as quickly as a letter could;
and ever since he had been on the way;
day and night,
by the fastest boats and trains he could catch.
His steamer had been held back two days by rough weather.
As they came out of Mrs. Hiller's garden they took up their talk again where they had left it.
"But could you come away like that,
Carl,
without arranging things?
Could you just walk off and leave your business?"
Alexandra asked.
Carl laughed.
"Prudent Alexandra! You see,
my dear,
I happen
to have an honest partner.
I trust him
with everything.
In fact,
it's been his enterprise from the beginning,
you know.
I'm in it only because he took me in.
I'll have
to go back in the spring.
Perhaps you will want
to go
with me then.
We haven't turned up millions yet,
but we've got a start that's worth following.
But this winter I'd like
to spend
with you.
You won't feel that we ought
to wait longer,
on Emil's account,
will you,
Alexandra?"
Alexandra shook her head.
"No,
Carl;
I don't feel that way about it.
And surely you needn't mind anything Lou and Oscar say now.
They are much angrier
with me about Emil,
now,
than about you.
They say it was all my fault.
That I ruined him by sending him
to college."
"No,
I don't care a button
for Lou or Oscar.
The moment I knew you were in trouble,
the moment I thought you might need me,
it all looked different.
You've always been a triumphant kind of person."
Carl hesitated,
looking sidewise at her strong,
full figure.
"But you do need me now,
Alexandra?"
She put her hand on his arm.
"I needed you terribly when it happened,
Carl.
I cried
for you at night.
Then everything seemed
to get hard inside of me,
and I thought perhaps I should never care
for you again.
But when I got your telegram yesterday,
then--then it was just as it used
to be.
You are all I have in the world,
you know."
Carl pressed her hand in silence.
They were passing the Shabatas'
empty house now,
but they avoided the orchard path and took one that led over by the pasture pond.
"Can you understand it,
Carl?"
Alexandra murmured.
"I have had nobody but Ivar and Signa
to talk to.
Do talk
to me.
Can you understand it?
Could you have believed that of Marie Tovesky?
I would have been cut
to pieces,
little by little,
before I would have betrayed her trust in me!"
Carl looked at the shining spot of water before them.
"Maybe she was cut
to pieces,
too,
Alexandra.
I am sure she tried hard;
they both did.
That was why Emil went
to Mexico,
of course.
And he was going away again,
you tell me,
though he had only been home three weeks.
You remember that Sunday when I went
with Emil up
to the French Church fair?
I thought that day there was some kind of feeling,
something unusual,
between them.
I meant
to talk
to you about it.
But on my way back I met Lou and Oscar and got so angry that I forgot everything else.
You mustn't be hard on them,
Alexandra.
Sit down here by the pond a minute.
I want
to tell you something."
They sat down on the grass-tufted bank and Carl told her how he had seen Emil and Marie out by the pond that morning,
more than a year ago,
and how young and charming and full of grace they had seemed
to him.
"It happens like that in the world sometimes,
Alexandra,"
he added earnestly.
"I've seen it before.
There are women who spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs,
just by being too beautiful,
too full of life and love.
They can't help it.
People come
to them as people go
to a warm fire in winter.
I used
to feel that in her when she was a little girl.
Do you remember how all the Bohemians crowded round her in the store that day,
when she gave Emil her candy?
You remember those yellow sparks in her eyes?"
Alexandra sighed.
"Yes.
People couldn't help loving her.
Poor Frank does,
even now,
I think;
though he's got himself in such a tangle that
for a long time his love has been bitterer than his hate.
But if you saw there was anything wrong,
you ought
to have told me,
Carl."
Carl took her hand and smiled patiently.
"My dear,
it was something one felt in the air,
as you feel the spring coming,
or a storm in summer.
I didn't SEE anything.
Simply,
when I was
with those two young things,
I felt my blood go quicker,
I felt--how shall I say it?-an acceleration of life.
After I got away,
it was all too delicate,
too intangible,
to write about."
Alexandra looked at him mournfully.
"I try
to be more liberal about such things than I used
to be.
I try
to realize that we are not all made alike.
Only,
why couldn't it have been Raoul Marcel,
or Jan Smirka?
Why did it have
to be my boy?"
"Because he was the best there was,
I suppose.
They were both the best you had here."
The sun was dropping low in the west when the two friends rose and took the path again.
The straw-stacks were throwing long shadows,
the owls were flying home
to the prairie-dog town.
When they came
to the corner where the pastures joined,
Alexandra's twelve young colts were galloping in a drove over the brow of the hill.
"Carl,"
said Alexandra,
"I should like
to go up there
with you in the spring.
I haven't been on the water since we crossed the ocean,
when I was a little girl.
After we first came out here I used
to dream sometimes about the shipyard where father worked,
and a little sort of inlet,
full of masts."
Alexandra paused.
After a moment's thought she said,
"But you would never ask me
to go away
for good,
would you?"
"Of course not,
my dearest.
I think I know how you feel about this country as well as you do yourself."
Carl took her hand in both his own and pressed it tenderly.
"Yes,
I still feel that way,
though Emil is gone.
When I was on the train this morning,
and we got near Hanover,
I felt something like I did when I drove back
with Emil from the river that time,
in the dry year.
I was glad
to come back
to it.
I've lived here a long time.
There is great peace here,
Carl,
and freedom.
.
.
.
I thought when I came out of that prison,
where poor Frank is,
that I should never feel free again.
But I do,
here."
Alexandra took a deep breath and looked off into the red west.
"You belong
to the land,"
Carl murmured,
"as you have always said.
Now more than ever."
"Yes,
now more than ever.
You remember what you once said about the graveyard,
and the old story writing itself over?
Only it is we who write it,
with the best we have."
They paused on the last ridge of the pasture,
overlooking the house and the windmill and the stables that marked the site of John Bergson's homestead.
On every side the brown waves of the earth rolled away
to meet the sky.
"Lou and Oscar can't see those things,"
said Alexandra suddenly.
"Suppose I do will my land
to their children,
what difference will that make?
The land belongs
to the future,
Carl;
that's the way it seems
to me.
How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years?
I might as well try
to will the sunset over there
to my brother's children.
We come and go,
but the land is always here.
And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."
Carl looked at her wonderingly.
She was still gazing into the west,
and in her face there was that exalted serenity that sometimes came
to her at moments of deep feeling.
The level rays of the sinking sun shone in her clear eyes.
"Why are you thinking of such things now,
Alexandra?"
"I had a dream before I went
to Lincoln-But I will tell you about that afterward,
after we are married.
It will never come true,
now,
in the way I thought it might."
She took Carl's arm and they walked toward the gate.
"How many times we have walked this path together,
Carl.
How many times we will walk it again! Does it seem
to you like coming back
to your own place?
Do you feel at peace
with the world here?
I think we shall be very happy.
I haven't any fears.
I think when friends marry,
they are safe.
We don't suffer like--those young ones."
Alexandra ended
with a sigh.
They had reached the gate.
Before Carl opened it,
he drew Alexandra
to him and kissed her softly,
on her lips and on her eyes.
She leaned heavily on his shoulder.
"I am tired,"
she murmured.
"I have been very lonely,
Carl."
They went into the house together,
leaving the Divide behind them,
under the evening star.
Fortunate country,
that is one day
to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom,
to give them out again in the yellow wheat,
in the rustling corn,
in the shining eyes of youth!
Email us:
Copyright© 2002.
info@acceleratedschools.org
All Rights Reserved.