1913
O PIONEERS!
by Willa Cather
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
O PIONEERS!
"Those fields, colored by various grain!"
MICKIEWICZ
DEDICATION
To the memory of SARAH ORNE JEWETT in whose beautiful and delicate
work there is the perfection that endures
PRAIRIE SPRING
-
EVENING and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
PART ONE
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 workhorses, 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 anyone, 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 someone 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 someone had taken advantage of him. When a drummer had
been knocking about in little drab towns and crawling across the
wintry country in dirty smoking-cars, 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
china-painting. 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 tomorrow. 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. Everyone 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 wagon-box. 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 somber 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 somber 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 today?" 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 prairie-dog 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 half-section 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 sitting-room, 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 stopped 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
missed the old country."
-
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 anymore?" he
asked.
Alexandra patted him. "No, not anymore. 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
horse-doctoring, it seemed rather shortsighted 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-the-mountain.
"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 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
repeated softly:
-
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.
-
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 today 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 everyone
on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of drouth and
failure, the last struggle of a wild sod 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 dear 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 low-spirited. 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, tonight, 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. 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.
Tonight, 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, chincebugs,
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." Today she
sat in the wooden rocking-chair 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
tomorrow 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 tonight, 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 be
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
threshing machine 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 TWO
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
checkerboard, 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 gaily 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 wheat-cutting 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 today, 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 twenty-one 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 gaiety. 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 coffee cups, 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-in-law, 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'am. 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.
Today 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 investigated 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 some injury when my
spells are on me. Mistress, how can anyone 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 everyone 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 anyone. 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 property-owner 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 practicing 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, watercolor 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 gold-fields."
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 going 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 |
