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O Pioneers!

by Willa Cather · English · Gutenberg #24 · 318,946 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: O Pioneers!

Author: Willa Cather


        
Release date: June 27, 2008 [eBook #24]
                Most recently updated: July 17, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24

Credits: Martin Robb and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK O PIONEERS! ***




O PIONEERS!

by Willa Sibert Cather




“Those fields, colored by various grain!”

MICKIEWICZ


Contents

 PART I. The Wild Land
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V

 PART II. Neighboring Fields
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII
 IX
 X
 XI
 XII

 PART III. Winter Memories
 I
 II

 PART IV. The White Mulberry Tree
 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII

 PART V. Alexandra
 I
 II
 III




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 I.
The Wild Land




I


One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored
on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist
of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low
drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The
dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some
of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if
they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open
plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling
wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply
rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway
station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the
lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this
road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general
merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the
saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled
snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come
back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The
children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets
but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long
caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives
to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one
store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a
few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their
blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not
be another train in until night.

On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy,
crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth coat was
much too big for him and made him look like a little old man. His
shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times and left a long
stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt and the tops of his
clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled down over his ears; his
nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red with cold. He cried
quietly, and the few people who hurried by did not notice him. He was
afraid to stop any one, afraid to go into the store and ask for help,
so he sat wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole
beside him, whimpering, “My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!” At
the top of the pole crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly
and clinging desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been
left at the store while his sister went to the doctor’s office, and in
her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole. The little
creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened to
move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country boy, and
this village was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where
people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. He always felt shy and
awkward here, and wanted to hide behind things for fear some one might
laugh at him. Just now, he was too unhappy to care who laughed. At last
he seemed to see a ray of hope: his sister was coming, and he got up
and ran toward her in his heavy shoes.

His sister was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and
resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was
going to do next. She wore a man’s long ulster (not as if it were an
affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and belonged to her;
carried it like a young soldier), and a round plush cap, tied down with
a thick veil. She had a serious, thoughtful face, and her clear, deep
blue eyes were fixed intently on the distance, without seeming to see
anything, as if she were in trouble. She did not notice the little boy
until he pulled her by the coat. Then she stopped short and stooped
down to wipe his wet face.

“Why, Emil! I told you to stay in the store and not to come out. What
is the matter with you?”

“My kitten, sister, my kitten! A man put her out, and a dog chased her
up there.” His forefinger, projecting from the sleeve of his coat,
pointed up to the wretched little creature on the pole.

“Oh, Emil! Didn’t I tell you she’d get us into trouble of some kind, if
you brought her? What made you tease me so? But there, I ought to have
known better myself.” She went to the foot of the pole and held out her
arms, crying, “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” but the kitten only mewed and
faintly waved its tail. Alexandra turned away decidedly. “No, she won’t
come down. Somebody will have to go up after her. I saw the Linstrums’
wagon in town. I’ll go and see if I can find Carl. Maybe he can do
something. Only you must stop crying, or I won’t go a step. Where’s
your comforter? Did you leave it in the store? Never mind. Hold still,
till I put this on you.”

She unwound the brown veil from her head and tied it about his throat.
A shabby little traveling man, who was just then coming out of the
store on his way to the saloon, stopped and gazed stupidly at the
shining mass of hair she bared when she took off her veil; two thick
braids, pinned about her head in the German way, with a fringe of
reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap. He took his cigar
out of his mouth and held the wet end between the fingers of his woolen
glove. “My God, girl, what a head of hair!” he exclaimed, quite
innocently and foolishly. She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian
fierceness and drew in her lower lip—most unnecessary severity. It gave
the little clothing drummer such a start that he actually let his cigar
fall to the sidewalk and went off weakly in the teeth of the wind to
the saloon. His hand was still unsteady when he took his glass from the
bartender. His feeble flirtatious instincts had been crushed before,
but never so mercilessly. He felt cheap and ill-used, as if some one
had taken advantage of him. When a drummer had been knocking about in
little drab towns and crawling across the wintry country in dirty
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 to-morrow. But he says father can’t get better;
can’t get well.” The girl’s lip trembled. She looked fixedly up the
bleak street as if she were gathering her strength to face something,
as if she were trying with all her might to grasp a situation which, no
matter how painful, must be met and dealt with somehow. The wind
flapped the skirts of her heavy coat about her.

Carl did not say anything, but she felt his sympathy. He, too, was
lonely. He was a thin, frail boy, with brooding dark eyes, very quiet
in all his movements. There was a delicate pallor in his thin face, and
his mouth was too sensitive for a boy’s. The lips had already a little
curl of bitterness and skepticism. The two friends stood for a few
moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two
travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their
perplexity in silence. When Carl turned away he said, “I’ll see to your
team.” Alexandra went into the store to have her purchases packed in
the egg-boxes, and to get warm before she set out on her long cold
drive.

When she looked for Emil, she found him sitting on a step of the
staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet department. He was
playing with a little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky, who was tying her
handkerchief over the kitten’s head for a bonnet. Marie was a stranger
in the country, having come from Omaha with her mother to visit her
uncle, Joe Tovesky. She was a dark child, with brown curly hair, like a
brunette doll’s, a coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow-brown
eyes. Every one noticed her eyes; the brown iris had golden glints that
made them look like gold-stone, or, in softer lights, like that
Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.

The country children thereabouts wore their dresses to their shoe-tops,
but this city child was dressed in what was then called the “Kate
Greenaway” manner, and her red cashmere frock, gathered full from the
yoke, came almost to the floor. This, with her poke bonnet, gave her
the look of a quaint little woman. She had a white fur tippet about her
neck and made no fussy objections when Emil fingered it admiringly.
Alexandra had not the heart to take him away from so pretty a
playfellow, and she let them tease the kitten together until Joe
Tovesky came in noisily and picked up his little niece, setting her on
his shoulder for every one to see. His children were all boys, and he
adored this little creature. His cronies formed a circle about him,
admiring and teasing the little girl, who took their jokes with great
good nature. They were all delighted with her, for they seldom saw so
pretty and carefully nurtured a child. They told her that she must
choose one of them for a sweetheart, and each began pressing his suit
and offering her bribes; candy, and little pigs, and spotted calves.
She looked archly into the big, brown, mustached faces, smelling of
spirits and tobacco, then she ran her tiny forefinger delicately over
Joe’s bristly chin and said, “Here is my sweetheart.”

The Bohemians roared with laughter, and Marie’s uncle hugged her until
she cried, “Please don’t, Uncle Joe! You hurt me.” Each of Joe’s
friends gave her a bag of candy, and she kissed them all around, though
she did not like country candy very well. Perhaps that was why she
bethought herself of Emil. “Let me down, Uncle Joe,” she said, “I want
to give some of my candy to that nice little boy I found.” She walked
graciously over to Emil, followed by her lusty admirers, who formed a
new circle and teased the little boy until he hid his face in his
sister’s skirts, and she had to scold him for being such a baby.

The farm people were making preparations to start for home. The women
were checking over their groceries and pinning their big red shawls
about their heads. The men were buying tobacco and candy with what
money they had left, were showing each other new boots and gloves and
blue flannel shirts. Three big Bohemians were drinking raw alcohol,
tinctured with oil of cinnamon. This was said to fortify one
effectually against the cold, and they smacked their lips after each
pull at the flask. Their volubility drowned every other noise in the
place, and the overheated store sounded of their spirited language as
it reeked of pipe smoke, damp woolens, and kerosene.

Carl came in, wearing his overcoat and carrying a wooden box with a
brass handle. “Come,” he said, “I’ve fed and watered your team, and the
wagon is ready.” He carried Emil out and tucked him down in the straw
in the wagonbox. The heat had made the little boy sleepy, but he still
clung to his kitten.

“You were awful good to climb so high and get my kitten, Carl. When I
get big I’ll climb and get little boys’ kittens for them,” he murmured
drowsily. Before the horses were over the first hill, Emil and his cat
were both fast asleep.

Although it was only four o’clock, the winter day was fading. The road
led southwest, toward the streak of pale, watery light that glimmered
in the leaden sky. The light fell upon the two sad young faces that
were turned mutely toward it: upon the eyes of the girl, who seemed to
be looking with such anguished perplexity into the future; upon the
sombre eyes of the boy, who seemed already to be looking into the past.
The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had
fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country
received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart;
here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching
in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to
overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its
sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s
mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to
make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve
its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its
uninterrupted mournfulness.

The wagon jolted along over the frozen road. The two friends had less
to say to each other than usual, as if the cold had somehow penetrated
to their hearts.

“Did Lou and Oscar go to the Blue to cut wood to-day?” Carl asked.

“Yes. I’m almost sorry I let them go, it’s turned so cold. But mother
frets if the wood gets low.” She stopped and put her hand to her
forehead, brushing back her hair. “I don’t know what is to become of
us, Carl, if father has to die. I don’t dare to think about it. I wish
we could all go with him and let the grass grow back over everything.”

Carl made no reply. Just ahead of them was the Norwegian graveyard,
where the grass had, indeed, grown back over everything, shaggy and
red, hiding even the wire fence. Carl realized that he was not a very
helpful companion, but there was nothing he could say.

“Of course,” Alexandra went on, steadying her voice a little, “the boys
are strong and work hard, but we’ve always depended so on father that I
don’t see how we can go ahead. I almost feel as if there were nothing
to go ahead for.”

“Does your father know?”

“Yes, I think he does. He lies and counts on his fingers all day. I
think he is trying to count up what he is leaving for us. It’s a
comfort to him that my chickens are laying right on through the cold
weather and bringing in a little money. I wish we could keep his mind
off such things, but I don’t have much time to be with him now.”

“I wonder if he’d like to have me bring my magic lantern over some
evening?”

Alexandra turned her face toward him. “Oh, Carl! Have you got it?”

“Yes. It’s back there in the straw. Didn’t you notice the box I was
carrying? I tried it all morning in the drug-store cellar, and it
worked ever so well, makes fine big pictures.”

“What are they about?”

“Oh, hunting pictures in Germany, and Robinson Crusoe and funny
pictures about cannibals. I’m going to paint some slides for it on
glass, out of the Hans Andersen book.”

Alexandra seemed actually cheered. There is often a good deal of the
child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. “Do bring it
over, Carl. I can hardly wait to see it, and I’m sure it will please
father. Are the pictures colored? Then I know he’ll like them. He likes
the calendars I get him in town. I wish I could get more. You must
leave me here, mustn’t you? It’s been nice to have company.”

Carl stopped the horses and looked dubiously up at the black sky. “It’s
pretty dark. Of course the horses will take you home, but I think I’d
better light your lantern, in case you should need it.”

He gave her the reins and climbed back into the wagon-box, where he
crouched down and made a tent of his overcoat. After a dozen trials he
succeeded in lighting the lantern, which he placed in front of
Alexandra, half covering it with a blanket so that the light would not
shine in her eyes. “Now, wait until I find my box. Yes, here it is.
Good-night, Alexandra. Try not to worry.” Carl sprang to the ground and
ran off across the fields toward the Linstrum homestead. “Hoo,
hoo-o-o-o!” he called back as he disappeared over a ridge and dropped
into a sand gully. The wind answered him like an echo, “Hoo,
hoo-o-o-o-o-o!” Alexandra drove off alone. The rattle of her wagon was
lost in the howling of the wind, but her lantern, held firmly between
her feet, made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper
and deeper into the dark country.




II


On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house in
which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier to find
than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy
stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood still, at the bottom
of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and
cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek gave a sort of identity to the
farms that bordered upon it. Of all the bewildering things about a new
country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing
and disheartening. The houses on the Divide were small and were usually
tucked away in low places; you did not see them until you came directly
upon them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only the
unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint tracks in
the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the
plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by
prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only
the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.

In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon
the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had
its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why.
Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The sick man
was feeling this as he lay looking out of the window, after the doctor
had left him, on the day following Alexandra’s trip to town. There it
lay outside his door, the same land, the same lead-colored miles. He
knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon. To the
south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle
corral, the pond,—and then the grass.

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One
winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of
his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had to be shot.
Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion
died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again his crops had failed. He
had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there
had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had at last
struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only
forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.

Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt,
and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages and had
ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned exactly six
hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his door; his own
original homestead and timber claim, making three hundred and twenty
acres, and the 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, cigar-makers, 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
stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it again if he could, not
he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it
all went to, what it all became.

His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She called him by
an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she was little and
took his dinner to him in the shipyard.

“Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I want to speak to them.”

“They are feeding the horses, father. They have just come back from the
Blue. Shall I call them?”

He sighed. “No, no. Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you will have
to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything will come on you.”

“I will do all I can, father.”

“Don’t let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto. I want them
to keep the land.”

“We will, father. We will never lose the land.”

There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen. Alexandra went to the
door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of seventeen and
nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of the bed. Their father
looked at them searchingly, though it was too dark to see their faces;
they were just the same boys, he told himself, he had not been mistaken
in them. The square head and heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the
elder. The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating.

“Boys,” said the father wearily, “I want you to keep the land together
and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her since I have been
sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no quarrels among my
children, and so long as there is one house there must be one head.
Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes. She will do the best
she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have
made. When you marry, and want a house of your own, the land will be
divided fairly, according to the courts. But for the next few years you
will have it hard, and you must all keep together. Alexandra will
manage the best she can.”

Oscar, who was usually the last to speak, replied because he was the
older, “Yes, father. It would be so anyway, without your speaking. We
will all work the place together.”

“And you will be guided by your sister, boys, and be good brothers to
her, and good sons to your mother? That is good. And Alexandra must not
work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now. Hire a man when
you need help. She can make much more with her eggs and butter than the
wages of a man. It was one of my mistakes that I did not find that out
sooner. Try to break a little more land every year; sod corn is good
for fodder. Keep turning the land, and always put up more hay than you
need. Don’t grudge your mother a little time for plowing her garden and
setting out fruit trees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has
been a good mother to you, and she has always 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 any more?” he asked.

Alexandra patted him. “No, not any more. And in two days they could use
her milk again.”

The road to Ivar’s homestead was a very poor one. He had settled in the
rough country across the county line, where no one lived but some
Russians,—half a dozen families who dwelt together in one long house,
divided off like barracks. Ivar had explained his choice by saying that
the fewer neighbors he had, the fewer temptations. Nevertheless, when
one considered that his chief business was horse-doctoring, it seemed
rather short-sighted of him to live in the most inaccessible place he
could find. The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and
grass banks, followed the bottom of winding draws, or skirted the
margin of wide lagoons, where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the
clear water and the wild ducks rose with a whirr of wings.

Lou looked after them helplessly. “I wish I’d brought my gun, anyway,
Alexandra,” he said fretfully. “I could have hidden it under the straw
in the bottom of the wagon.”

“Then we’d have had to lie to Ivar. Besides, they say he can smell dead
birds. And if he knew, we wouldn’t get anything out of him, not even a
hammock. I want to talk to him, and he won’t talk sense if he’s angry.
It makes him foolish.”

Lou sniffed. “Whoever heard of him talking sense, anyhow! I’d rather
have ducks for supper than Crazy Ivar’s tongue.”

Emil was alarmed. “Oh, but, Lou, you don’t want to make him mad! He
might howl!”

They all laughed again, and Oscar urged the horses up the crumbling
side of a clay bank. They had left the lagoons and the red grass behind
them. In Crazy Ivar’s country the grass was short and gray, the draws
deeper than they were in the Bergsons’ neighborhood, and the land was
all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges. The wild flowers
disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies grew a few
of the very toughest and hardiest: shoestring, and ironweed, and
snow-on-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 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 to-day more because I wanted to talk to you than
because I wanted to buy a hammock.”

“Yes?” The old man scraped his bare feet on the plank floor.

“We have a big bunch of hogs, Ivar. I wouldn’t sell in the spring, when
everybody advised me to, and now so many people are losing their hogs
that I am frightened. What can be done?”

Ivar’s little eyes began to shine. They lost their vagueness.

“You feed them swill and such stuff? Of course! And sour milk? Oh, yes!
And keep them in a stinking pen? I tell you, sister, the hogs of this
country are put upon! They become unclean, like the hogs in the Bible.
If you kept your chickens like that, what would happen? You have a
little sorghum patch, maybe? Put a fence around it, and turn the hogs
in. Build a shed to give them shade, a thatch on poles. Let the boys
haul water to them in barrels, clean water, and plenty. Get them off
the old stinking ground, and do not let them go back there until
winter. Give them only grain and clean feed, such as you would give
horses or cattle. Hogs do not like to be filthy.”

The boys outside the door had been listening. Lou nudged his brother.
“Come, the horses are done eating. Let’s hitch up and get out of here.
He’ll fill her full of notions. She’ll be for having the pigs sleep
with us, next.”

Oscar grunted and got up. Carl, who could not understand what Ivar
said, saw that the two boys were displeased. They did not mind hard
work, but they hated experiments and could never see the use of taking
pains. Even Lou, who was more elastic than his older brother, disliked
to do anything different from their neighbors. He felt that it made
them conspicuous and gave people a chance to talk about them.

Once they were on the homeward road, the boys forgot their ill-humor
and joked about Ivar and his birds. Alexandra did not propose any
reforms in the care of the pigs, and they hoped she had forgotten
Ivar’s talk. They agreed that he was crazier than ever, and would never
be able to prove up on his land because he worked it so little.
Alexandra privately resolved that she would have a talk with Ivar about
this and stir him up. The boys persuaded Carl to stay for supper and go
swimming in the pasture pond after dark.

That evening, after she had washed the supper dishes, Alexandra sat
down on the kitchen doorstep, while her mother was mixing the bread. It
was a still, deep-breathing summer night, full of the smell of the hay
fields. Sounds of laughter and splashing came up from the pasture, and
when the moon rose rapidly above the bare rim of the prairie, the pond
glittered like polished metal, and she could see the flash of white
bodies as the boys ran about the edge, or jumped into the water.
Alexandra watched the shimmering pool dreamily, but eventually her eyes
went back to the sorghum patch south of the barn, where she was
planning to make her new pig corral.




IV


For the first three years after John Bergson’s death, the affairs of
his family prospered. Then came the hard times that brought every one
on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of drouth and
failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching
plowshare. The first of these fruitless summers the Bergson boys bore
courageously. The failure of the corn crop made labor cheap. Lou and
Oscar hired two men and put in bigger crops than ever before. They lost
everything they spent. The whole country was discouraged. Farmers who
were already in debt had to give up their land. A few foreclosures
demoralized the county. The settlers sat about on the wooden sidewalks
in the little town and told each other that the country was never meant
for men to live in; the thing to do was to get back to Iowa, to
Illinois, to any place that had been proved habitable. The Bergson
boys, certainly, would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the
bakery shop in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant
to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in
a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about,
and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that
they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A
pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of
things more than the things themselves.

The second of these barren summers was passing. One September afternoon
Alexandra had gone over to the garden across the draw to dig sweet
potatoes—they had been thriving upon the weather that was fatal to
everything else. But when Carl Linstrum came up the garden rows to find
her, she was not working. She was standing lost in thought, leaning
upon her pitchfork, her sunbonnet lying beside her on the ground. The
dry garden patch smelled of drying vines and was strewn with yellow
seed-cucumbers and pumpkins and citrons. At one end, next the rhubarb,
grew feathery asparagus, with red berries. Down the middle of the
garden was a row of gooseberry and currant bushes. A few tough zenias
and marigolds and a row of scarlet sage bore witness to the buckets of
water that Mrs. Bergson had carried there after sundown, against the
prohibition of her sons. Carl came quietly and slowly up the garden
path, looking intently at Alexandra. She did not hear him. She was
standing perfectly still, with that serious ease so characteristic of
her. Her thick, reddish braids, twisted about her head, fairly burned
in the sunlight. The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant
on one’s back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a
hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky. Even Carl,
never a very cheerful boy, and considerably darkened by these last two
bitter years, loved the country on days like this, felt something
strong and young and wild come out of it, that laughed at care.

“Alexandra,” he said as he approached her, “I want to talk to you.
Let’s sit down by the gooseberry bushes.” He picked up her sack of
potatoes and they crossed the garden. “Boys gone to town?” he asked as
he sank down on the warm, sun-baked earth. “Well, we have made up our
minds at last, Alexandra. We are really going away.”

She looked at him as if she were a little frightened. “Really, Carl? Is
it settled?”

“Yes, father has heard from St. Louis, and they will give him back his
old job in the cigar factory. He must be there by the first of
November. They are taking on new men then. We will sell the place for
whatever we can get, and auction the stock. We haven’t enough to ship.
I am going to learn engraving with a German engraver there, and then
try to get work in Chicago.”

Alexandra’s hands dropped in her lap. Her eyes became dreamy and filled
with tears.

Carl’s sensitive lower lip trembled. He scratched in the soft earth
beside him with a stick. “That’s all I hate about it, Alexandra,” he
said slowly. “You’ve stood by us through so much and helped father out
so many times, and now it seems as if we were running off and leaving
you to face the worst of it. But it isn’t as if we could really ever be
of any help to you. We are only one more drag, one more thing you look
out for and feel responsible for. Father was never meant for a farmer,
you know that. And I hate it. We’d only get in deeper and deeper.”

“Yes, yes, Carl, I know. You are wasting your life here. You are able
to do much better things. You are nearly nineteen now, and I wouldn’t
have you stay. I’ve always hoped you would get away. But I can’t help
feeling scared when I think how I will miss you—more than you will ever
know.” She brushed the tears from her cheeks, not trying to hide them.

“But, Alexandra,” he said sadly and wistfully, “I’ve never been any
real help to you, beyond sometimes trying to keep the boys in a good
humor.”

Alexandra smiled and shook her head. “Oh, it’s not that. Nothing like
that. It’s by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you’ve
helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can
help another. I think you are about the only one that ever helped me.
Somehow it will take more courage to bear your going than everything
that has happened before.”

Carl looked at the ground. “You see, we’ve all depended so on you,” he
said, “even father. He makes me laugh. When anything comes up he always
says, ‘I wonder what the Bergsons are going to do about that? I guess
I’ll go and ask her.’ I’ll never forget that time, when we first came
here, and our horse had the colic, and I ran over to your place—your
father was away, and you came home with me and showed father how to let
the wind out of the horse. You were only a little girl then, but you
knew ever so much more about farm work than poor father. You remember
how homesick I used to get, and what long talks we used to have coming
from school? We’ve someway always felt alike about things.”

“Yes, that’s it; we’ve liked the same things and we’ve liked them
together, without anybody else knowing. And we’ve had good times,
hunting for Christmas trees and going for ducks and making our plum
wine together every year. We’ve never either of us had any other close
friend. And now—” Alexandra wiped her eyes with the corner of her
apron, “and now I must remember that you are going where you will have
many friends, and will find the work you were meant to do. But you’ll
write to me, Carl? That will mean a great deal to me here.”

“I’ll write as long as I live,” cried the boy impetuously. “And I’ll be
working for you as much as for myself, Alexandra. I want to do
something you’ll like and be proud of. I’m a fool here, but I know I
can do something!” He sat up and frowned at the red grass.

Alexandra sighed. “How discouraged the boys will be when they hear.
They always come home from town discouraged, anyway. So many people are
trying to leave the country, and they talk to our boys and make them
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, to-night, when they come home. They’ll be
talking wild, anyway, and no good comes of keeping bad news. It’s all
harder on them than it is on me. Lou wants to get married, poor boy,
and he can’t until times are better. See, there goes the sun, Carl. I
must be getting back. Mother will want her potatoes. It’s chilly
already, the moment the light goes.”

Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in the
west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark moving
mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in the herd
from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill to open the
corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise across the draw,
the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and bellowed. In the sky the
pale half-moon was slowly silvering. Alexandra and Carl walked together
down the potato rows. “I have to keep telling myself what is going to
happen,” she said softly. “Since you have been here, ten years now, I
have never really been lonely. But I can remember what it was like
before. Now I shall have nobody but Emil. But he is my boy, and he is
tender-hearted.”

That night, when the boys were called to supper, they sat down moodily.
They had worn their coats to town, but they ate in their striped shirts
and suspenders. They were grown men now, and, as Alexandra said, for
the last few years they had been growing more and more like themselves.
Lou was still the slighter of the two, the quicker and more
intelligent, but apt to go off at half-cock. He had a lively blue eye,
a thin, fair skin (always burned red to the neckband of his shirt in
summer), stiff, yellow hair that would not lie down on his head, and a
bristly little yellow mustache, of which he was very proud. Oscar could
not grow a mustache; his pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white
eyebrows gave it an empty look. He was a man of powerful body and
unusual endurance; the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller
as you would an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying,
without slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was
unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He
worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same
way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a
sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things
in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn’t bear
to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same
time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed
to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear
himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed,
he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain
there was, and thus prove his case against Providence.

Lou, on the other hand, was fussy and flighty; always planned to get
through two days’ work in one, and often got only the least important
things done. He liked to keep the place up, but he never got round to
doing odd jobs until he had to neglect more pressing work to attend to
them. In the middle of the wheat harvest, when the grain was over-ripe
and every hand was needed, he would stop to mend fences or to patch the
harness; then dash down to the field and overwork and be laid up in bed
for a week. The two boys balanced each other, and they pulled well
together. They had been good friends since they were children. One
seldom went anywhere, even to town, without the other.

To-night, after they sat down to supper, Oscar kept looking at Lou as
if he expected him to say something, and Lou blinked his eyes and
frowned at his plate. It was Alexandra herself who at last opened the
discussion.

“The Linstrums,” she said calmly, as she put another plate of hot
biscuit on the table, “are going back to St. Louis. The old man is
going to work in the cigar factory again.”

At this Lou plunged in. “You see, Alexandra, everybody who can crawl
out is going away. There’s no use of us trying to stick it out, just to
be stubborn. There’s something in knowing when to quit.”

“Where do you want to go, Lou?”

“Any place where things will grow,” said Oscar grimly.

Lou reached for a potato. “Chris Arnson has traded his half-section for
a place down on the river.”

“Who did he trade with?”

“Charley Fuller, in town.”

“Fuller the real estate man? You see, Lou, that Fuller has a head on
him. He’s buying and trading for every bit of land he can get up here.
It’ll make him a rich man, some day.”

“He’s rich now, that’s why he can take a chance.”

“Why can’t we? We’ll live longer than he will. Some day the land itself
will be worth more than all we can ever raise on it.”

Lou laughed. “It could be worth that, and still not be worth much. Why,
Alexandra, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Our place wouldn’t
bring now what it would six years ago. The fellows that settled up here
just made a mistake. Now they’re beginning to see this high land wasn’t
never meant to grow nothing on, and everybody who ain’t fixed to graze
cattle is trying to crawl out. It’s too high to farm up here. All the
Americans are skinning out. That man Percy Adams, north of town, told
me that he was going to let Fuller take his land and stuff for four
hundred dollars and a ticket to Chicago.”

“There’s Fuller again!” Alexandra exclaimed. “I wish that man would
take me for a partner. He’s feathering his nest! If only poor people
could learn a little from rich people! But all these fellows who are
running off are bad farmers, like poor Mr. Linstrum. They couldn’t get
ahead even in good years, and they all got into debt while father was
getting out. I think we ought to hold on as long as we can on father’s
account. He was so set on keeping this land. He must have seen harder
times than this, here. How was it in the early days, mother?”

Mrs. Bergson was weeping quietly. These family discussions always
depressed her, and made her remember all that she had been torn away
from. “I don’t see why the boys are always taking on about going away,”
she said, wiping her eyes. “I don’t want to move again; out to some raw
place, maybe, where we’d be worse off than we are here, and all to do
over again. I won’t move! If the rest of you go, I will ask some of the
neighbors to take me in, and stay and be buried by father. I’m not
going to leave him by himself on the prairie, for cattle to run over.”
She began to cry more bitterly.

The boys looked angry. Alexandra put a soothing hand on her mother’s
shoulder. “There’s no question of that, mother. You don’t have to go if
you don’t want to. A third of the place belongs to you by American law,
and we can’t sell without your consent. We only want you to advise us.
How did it use to be when you and father first came? Was it really as
bad as this, or not?”

“Oh, worse! Much worse,” moaned Mrs. Bergson. “Drouth, chince-bugs,
hail, everything! My garden all cut to pieces like sauerkraut. No
grapes on the creek, no nothing. The people all lived just like
coyotes.”

Oscar got up and tramped out of the kitchen. Lou followed him. They
felt that Alexandra had taken an unfair advantage in turning their
mother loose on them. The next morning they were silent and reserved.
They did not offer to take the women to church, but went down to the
barn immediately after breakfast and stayed there all day. When Carl
Linstrum came over in the afternoon, Alexandra winked to him and
pointed toward the barn. He understood her and went down to play cards
with the boys. They believed that a very wicked thing to do on Sunday,
and it relieved their feelings.

Alexandra stayed in the house. On Sunday afternoon Mrs. Bergson always
took a nap, and Alexandra read. During the week she read only the
newspaper, but on Sunday, and in the long evenings of winter, she read
a good deal; read a few things over a great many times. She knew long
portions of the “Frithjof Saga” by heart, and, like most Swedes who
read at all, she was fond of Longfellow’s verse,—the ballads and the
“Golden Legend” and “The Spanish Student.” To-day she sat in the wooden
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
to-morrow and drive down to the river country and spend a few days
looking over what they’ve got down there. If I find anything good, you
boys can go down and make a trade.”

“Nobody down there will trade for anything up here,” said Oscar
gloomily.

“That’s just what I want to find out. Maybe they are just as
discontented down there as we are up here. Things away from home often
look better than they are. You know what your Hans Andersen book says,
Carl, about the Swedes liking to buy Danish bread and the Danes liking
to buy Swedish bread, because people always think the bread of another
country is better than their own. Anyway, I’ve heard so much about the
river farms, I won’t be satisfied till I’ve seen for myself.”

Lou fidgeted. “Look out! Don’t agree to anything. Don’t let them fool
you.”

Lou was apt to be fooled himself. He had not yet learned to keep away
from the shell-game wagons that followed the circus.

After supper Lou put on a necktie and went across the fields to court
Annie Lee, and Carl and Oscar sat down to a game of checkers, while
Alexandra read “The Swiss Family Robinson” aloud to her mother and
Emil. It was not long before the two boys at the table neglected their
game to listen. They were all big children together, and they found the
adventures of the family in the tree house so absorbing that they gave
them their undivided attention.




V


Alexandra and Emil spent five days down among the river farms, driving
up and down the valley. Alexandra talked to the men about their crops
and to the women about their poultry. She spent a whole day with one
young farmer who had been away at school, and who was experimenting
with a new kind of clover hay. She learned a great deal. As they drove
along, she and Emil talked and planned. At last, on the sixth day,
Alexandra turned Brigham’s head northward and left the river behind.

“There’s nothing in it for us down there, Emil. There are a few fine
farms, but they are owned by the rich men in town, and couldn’t be
bought. Most of the land is rough and hilly. They can always scrape
along down there, but they can never do anything big. Down there they
have a little certainty, but up with us there is a big chance. We must
have faith in the high land, Emil. I want to hold on harder than ever,
and when you’re a man you’ll thank me.” She urged Brigham forward.

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide,
Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister
looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking
her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the
waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and
yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her
eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the
Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it,
must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The
history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Alexandra reached home in the afternoon. That evening she held a family
council and told her brothers all that she had seen and heard.

“I want you boys to go down yourselves and look it over. Nothing will
convince you like seeing with your own eyes. The river land was settled
before this, and so they are a few years ahead of us, and have learned
more about farming. The land sells for three times as much as this, but
in five years we will double it. The rich men down there own all the
best land, and they are buying all they can get. The thing to do is to
sell our cattle and what little old corn we have, and buy the Linstrum
place. Then the next thing to do is to take out two loans on our
half-sections, and buy Peter Crow’s place; raise every dollar we can,
and buy every acre we can.”

“Mortgage the homestead again?” Lou cried. He sprang up and began to
wind the clock furiously. “I won’t slave to pay off another mortgage.
I’ll never do it. You’d just as soon kill us all, Alexandra, to carry
out some scheme!”

Oscar rubbed his high, pale forehead. “How do you propose to pay off
your mortgages?”

Alexandra looked from one to the other and bit her lip. They had never
seen her so nervous. “See here,” she brought out at last. “We borrow
the money for six years. Well, with the money we buy a half-section
from Linstrum and a half from Crow, and a quarter from Struble, maybe.
That will give us upwards of fourteen hundred acres, won’t it? You
won’t have to pay off your mortgages for six years. By that time, any
of this land will be worth thirty dollars an acre—it will be worth
fifty, but we’ll say thirty; then you can sell a garden patch anywhere,
and pay off a debt of sixteen hundred dollars. It’s not the principal
I’m worried about, it’s the interest and taxes. We’ll have to strain to
meet the payments. But as sure as we are sitting here to-night, we can
sit down here ten years from now independent landowners, not struggling
farmers any longer. The chance that father was always looking for has
come.”

Lou was pacing the floor. “But how do you _know_ that land is going to
go up enough to pay the mortgages and—”

“And make us rich besides?” Alexandra put in firmly. “I can’t explain
that, Lou. You’ll have to take my word for it. I _know_, that’s all.
When you drive about over the country you can feel it coming.”

Oscar had been sitting with his head lowered, his hands hanging between
his knees. “But we can’t work so much land,” he said dully, as if he
were talking to himself. “We can’t even try. It would just lie there
and we’d work ourselves to death.” He sighed, and laid his calloused
fist on the table.

Alexandra’s eyes filled with tears. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“You poor boy, you won’t have to work it. The men in town who are
buying up other people’s land don’t try to farm it. They are the men to
watch, in a new country. Let’s try to do like the shrewd ones, and not
like these stupid fellows. I don’t want you boys always to have to work
like this. I want you to be independent, and Emil to go to school.”

Lou held his head as if it were splitting. “Everybody will say we are
crazy. It must be crazy, or everybody would be doing it.”

“If they were, we wouldn’t have much chance. No, Lou, I was talking
about that with the smart young man who is raising the new kind of
clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t
do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because father
had more brains. Our people were better people than these in the old
country. We _ought_ to do more than they do, and see further ahead.
Yes, mother, I’m going to clear the table now.”

Alexandra rose. The boys went to the stable to see to the stock, and
they were gone a long while. When they came back Lou played on his
_dragharmonika_ and Oscar sat figuring at his father’s secretary all
evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra’s project, but she felt
sure now that they would consent to it. Just before bedtime Oscar went
out for a pail of water. When he did not come back, Alexandra threw a
shawl over her head and ran down the path to the windmill. She found
him sitting there with his head in his hands, and she sat down beside
him.

“Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, Oscar,” she whispered. She
waited a moment, but he did not stir. “I won’t say any more about it,
if you’d rather not. What makes you so discouraged?”

“I dread signing my name to them pieces of paper,” he said slowly. “All
the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us.”

“Then don’t sign one. I don’t want you to, if you feel that way.”

Oscar shook his head. “No, I can see there’s a chance that way. I’ve
thought a good while there might be. We’re in so deep now, we might as
well go deeper. But it’s hard work pulling out of debt. Like pulling a
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 II.
Neighboring Fields




I


IT is sixteen years since John Bergson died. His wife now lies beside
him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams across the
wheat-fields. Could he rise from beneath it, he would not know the
country under which he has been asleep. The shaggy coat of the prairie,
which they lifted to make him a bed, has vanished forever. From the
Norwegian graveyard one looks out over a vast checker-board, marked off
in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light. Telephone
wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles. From
the graveyard gate one can count a dozen gayly painted farmhouses; the
gilded weather-vanes on the big red barns wink at each other across the
green and brown and yellow fields. The light steel windmills tremble
throughout their frames and tug at their moorings, as they vibrate in
the wind that often blows from one week’s end to another across that
high, active, resolute stretch of country.

The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy
harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make
labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying
than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single
field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a
strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it,
yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even
dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of
happiness. The 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 head-stone, he paused in his lively air,—the “Jewel”
song,—taking it up where he had left it when his scythe swung free
again. He was not thinking about the tired pioneers over whom his blade
glittered. The old wild country, the struggle in which his sister was
destined to succeed while so many men broke their hearts and died, he
can scarcely remember. That is all among the dim things of childhood
and has been forgotten in the brighter pattern life weaves to-day, in
the bright facts of being captain of the track team, and holding the
interstate record for the high jump, in the all-suffusing brightness of
being twenty-one. Yet sometimes, in the pauses of his work, the young
man frowned and looked at the ground with an intentness which suggested
that even 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 gayety. The wind was flapping her big hat and teasing a
curl of her chestnut-colored hair. She shook her head at the tall
youth.

“What time did you get over here? That’s not much of a job for an
athlete. Here I’ve been to town and back. Alexandra lets you sleep
late. Oh, I know! Lou’s wife was telling me about the way she spoils
you. I was going to give you a lift, if you were done.” She gathered up
her reins.

“But I will be, in a minute. Please wait for me, Marie,” Emil coaxed.
“Alexandra sent me to mow our lot, but I’ve done half a dozen others,
you see. Just wait till I finish off the Kourdnas’. By the way, they
were Bohemians. Why aren’t they up in the Catholic graveyard?”

“Free-thinkers,” replied the young woman laconically.

“Lots of the Bohemian boys at the University are,” said Emil, taking up
his scythe again. “What did you ever burn John Huss for, anyway? It’s
made an awful row. They still jaw about it in history classes.”

“We’d do it right over again, most of us,” said the young woman hotly.
“Don’t they ever teach you in your history classes that you’d all be
heathen Turks if it hadn’t been for the Bohemians?”

Emil had fallen to mowing. “Oh, there’s no denying you’re a spunky
little bunch, you Czechs,” he called back over his shoulder.

Marie Shabata settled herself in her seat and watched the rhythmical
movement of the young man’s long arms, swinging her foot as if in time
to some air that was going through her mind. The minutes passed. Emil
mowed vigorously and Marie sat sunning herself and watching the long
grass fall. She sat with the ease that belongs to persons of an
essentially happy nature, who can find a comfortable spot almost
anywhere; who are supple, and quick in adapting themselves to
circumstances. After a final swish, Emil snapped the gate and sprang
into the cart, holding his scythe well out over the wheel. “There,” he
sighed. “I gave old man Lee a cut or so, too. Lou’s wife needn’t talk.
I never see Lou’s scythe over here.”

Marie clucked to her horse. “Oh, you know Annie!” She looked at the
young man’s bare arms. “How brown you’ve got since you came home. I
wish I had an athlete to mow my orchard. I get wet to my knees when I
go down to pick cherries.”

“You can have one, any time you want him. Better wait until after it
rains.” Emil squinted off at the horizon as if he were looking for
clouds.

“Will you? Oh, there’s a good boy!” She turned her head to him with a
quick, bright smile. He felt it rather than saw it. Indeed, he had
looked away with the purpose of not seeing it. “I’ve been up looking at
Angélique’s wedding clothes,” Marie went on, “and I’m so excited I can
hardly wait until Sunday. Amédée 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 Angélique’s folks are baking for it, and all Amédée’s twenty
cousins. There will be barrels of beer. If once I get Frank to the
supper, I’ll see that I stay for the dance. And by the way, Emil, you
mustn’t dance with me but once or twice. You must dance with all the
French girls. It hurts their feelings if you don’t. They think you’re
proud because you’ve been away to school or something.”

Emil sniffed. “How do you know they think that?”

“Well, you didn’t dance with them much at Raoul Marcel’s party, and I
could tell how they took it by the way they looked at you—and at me.”

“All right,” said Emil shortly, studying the glittering blade of his
scythe.

They drove westward toward Norway Creek, and toward a big white house
that stood on a hill, several miles across the fields. There were so
many sheds and outbuildings grouped about it that the place looked not
unlike a tiny village. A stranger, approaching it, could not help
noticing the beauty and fruitfulness of the outlying fields. There was
something individual about the great farm, a most unusual trimness and
care for detail. On either side of the road, for a mile before you
reached the foot of the hill, stood tall osage orange hedges, their
glossy green marking off the yellow fields. South of the hill, in a
low, sheltered swale, surrounded by a mulberry hedge, was the orchard,
its fruit trees knee-deep in timothy grass. Any one thereabouts would
have told you that this was one of the richest farms on the Divide, and
that the farmer was a woman, Alexandra Bergson.

If you go up the hill and enter Alexandra’s big house, you will find
that it is curiously unfinished and uneven in comfort. One room is
papered, carpeted, over-furnished; the next is almost bare. The
pleasantest rooms in the house are the kitchen—where Alexandra’s three
young Swedish girls chatter and cook and pickle and preserve all summer
long—and the sitting-room, in which Alexandra has brought together the
old homely furniture that the Bergsons used in their first log house,
the family portraits, and the few things her mother brought from
Sweden.

When you go out of the house into the flower garden, there you feel
again the order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm;
in the fencing and hedging, in the windbreaks and sheds, in the
symmetrical pasture ponds, planted with scrub willows to give shade to
the cattle in fly-time. There is even a white row of beehives in the
orchard, under the walnut trees. You feel that, properly, Alexandra’s
house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she
expresses herself best.




II


Emil reached home a little past noon, and when he went into the kitchen
Alexandra was already seated at the head of the long table, having
dinner with her men, as she always did unless there were visitors. He
slipped into his empty place at his sister’s right. The three pretty
young Swedish girls who did Alexandra’s housework were cutting pies,
refilling coffeecups, placing platters of bread and meat and potatoes
upon the red tablecloth, and continually getting in each other’s way
between the table and the stove. To be sure they always wasted a good
deal of time getting in each other’s way and giggling at each other’s
mistakes. But, as Alexandra had pointedly told her sisters-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’m. But he scolds me about everything, like as if he
wanted to have me!”

At Alexandra’s left sat a very old man, barefoot and wearing a long
blue blouse, open at the neck. His shaggy head is scarcely whiter than
it was sixteen years ago, but his little blue eyes have become pale and
watery, and his ruddy face is withered, like an apple that has clung
all winter to the tree. When Ivar lost his land through mismanagement a
dozen years ago, Alexandra took him in, and he has been a member of her
household ever since. He is too old to work in the fields, but he
hitches and unhitches the work-teams and looks after the health of the
stock. Sometimes of a winter evening Alexandra calls him into the
sitting-room to read the Bible aloud to her, for he still reads very
well. He dislikes human habitations, so Alexandra has fitted him up a
room in the barn, where he is very comfortable, being near the horses
and, as he says, further from temptations. No one has ever found out
what his temptations are. In cold weather he sits by the kitchen fire
and makes hammocks or mends harness until it is time to go to bed. Then
he says his prayers at great length behind the stove, puts on his
buffalo-skin coat and goes out to his room in the barn.

Alexandra herself has changed very little. Her figure is fuller, and
she has more color. She seems sunnier and more vigorous than she did as
a young girl. But she still has the same calmness and deliberation of
manner, the same clear eyes, and she still wears her hair in two braids
wound round her head. It is so curly that fiery ends escape from the
braids and make her head look like one of the big double sunflowers
that fringe her vegetable garden. Her face is always tanned in summer,
for her sunbonnet is oftener on her arm than on her head. But where her
collar falls away from her neck, or where her sleeves are pushed back
from her wrist, the skin is of such smoothness and whiteness as none
but Swedish women ever possess; skin with the freshness of the snow
itself.

Alexandra did not talk much at the table, but she encouraged her men to
talk, and she always listened attentively, even when they seemed to be
talking foolishly.

To-day Barney Flinn, the big red-headed Irishman who had been with
Alexandra for five years and who was actually her foreman, though he
had no such title, was grumbling about the new silo she had put up that
spring. It happened to be the first silo on the Divide, and Alexandra’s
neighbors and her men were skeptical about it. “To be sure, if the
thing don’t work, we’ll have plenty of feed without it, indeed,” Barney
conceded.

Nelse Jensen, Signa’s gloomy suitor, had his word. “Lou, he says he
wouldn’t have no silo on his place if you’d give it to him. He says the
feed outen it gives the stock the bloat. He heard of somebody lost four
head of horses, feedin’ ’em that stuff.”

Alexandra looked down the table from one to another. “Well, the only
way we can find out is to try. Lou and I have different notions about
feeding stock, and that’s a good thing. It’s bad if all the members of
a family think alike. They never get anywhere. Lou can learn by my
mistakes and I can learn by his. Isn’t that fair, Barney?”

The Irishman laughed. He had no love for Lou, who was always uppish
with him and who said that Alexandra paid her hands too much. “I’ve no
thought but to give the thing an honest try, mum. ’T would be only
right, after puttin’ so much expense into it. Maybe Emil will come out
an’ have a look at it wid me.” He pushed back his chair, took his hat
from the nail, and marched out with Emil, who, with his university
ideas, was supposed to have instigated the silo. The other hands
followed them, all except old Ivar. He had been depressed throughout
the meal and had paid no heed to the talk of the men, even when they
mentioned cornstalk bloat, upon which he was sure to have opinions.

“Did you want to speak to me, Ivar?” Alexandra asked as she rose from
the table. “Come into the sitting-room.”

The old man followed Alexandra, but when she motioned him to a chair he
shook his head. She took up her workbasket and waited for him to speak.
He stood looking at the carpet, his bushy head bowed, his hands clasped
in front of him. Ivar’s bandy legs seemed to have grown shorter with
years, and they were completely misfitted to his broad, thick body and
heavy shoulders.

“Well, Ivar, what is it?” Alexandra asked after she had waited longer
than usual.

Ivar had never learned to speak English and his Norwegian was quaint
and grave, like the speech of the more old-fashioned people. He always
addressed Alexandra in terms of the deepest respect, hoping to set a
good example to the kitchen girls, whom he thought too familiar in
their manners.

“Mistress,” he began faintly, without raising his eyes, “the folk have
been looking coldly at me of late. You know there has been talk.”

“Talk about what, Ivar?”

“About sending me away; to the asylum.”

Alexandra put down her sewing-basket. “Nobody has come to me with such
talk,” she said decidedly. “Why need you listen? You know I would never
consent to such a thing.”

Ivar lifted his shaggy head and looked at her out of his little eyes.
“They say that you cannot prevent it if the folk complain of me, if
your brothers complain to the authorities. They say that your brothers
are afraid—God forbid!—that I may do you some injury when my spells are
on me. Mistress, how can any one think that?—that I could bite the hand
that fed me!” The tears trickled down on the old man’s beard.

Alexandra frowned. “Ivar, I wonder at you, that you should come
bothering me with such nonsense. I am still running my own house, and
other people have nothing to do with either you or me. So long as I am
suited with you, there is nothing to be said.”

Ivar pulled a red handkerchief out of the breast of his blouse and
wiped his eyes and beard. “But I should not wish you to keep me if, as
they say, it is against your interests, and if it is hard for you to
get hands because I am here.”

Alexandra made an impatient gesture, but the old man put out his hand
and went on earnestly:—

“Listen, mistress, it is right that you should take these things into
account. You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not
harm any living creature. You believe that every one should worship God
in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country.
The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not
wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions.
At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been
touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and
were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone.
But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put
him in the asylum. Look at Peter Kralik; when he was a boy, drinking
out of a creek, he swallowed a snake, and always after that he could
eat only such food as the creature liked, for when he ate anything
else, it became enraged and gnawed him. When he felt it whipping about
in him, he drank alcohol to stupefy it and get some ease for himself.
He could work as good as any man, and his head was clear, but they
locked him up for being different in his stomach. That is the way; they
have built the asylum for people who are different, and they will not
even let us live in the holes with the badgers. Only your great
prosperity has protected me so far. If you had had ill-fortune, they
would have taken me to Hastings long ago.”

As Ivar talked, his gloom lifted. Alexandra had found that she could
often break his fasts and long penances by talking to him and letting
him pour out the thoughts that troubled him. Sympathy always cleared
his mind, and ridicule was poison to him.

“There is a great deal in what you say, Ivar. Like as not they will be
wanting to take me to Hastings because I have built a silo; and then I
may take you with me. But at present I need you here. Only don’t come
to me again telling me what people say. Let people go on talking as
they like, and we will go on living as we think best. You have been
with me now for twelve years, and I have gone to you for advice oftener
than I have ever gone to any one. That ought to satisfy you.”

Ivar bowed humbly. “Yes, mistress, I shall not trouble you with their
talk again. And as for my feet, I have observed your wishes all these
years, though you have never questioned me; washing them every night,
even in winter.”

Alexandra laughed. “Oh, never mind about your feet, Ivar. We can
remember when half our neighbors went barefoot in summer. I expect old
Mrs. Lee would love to slip her shoes off now sometimes, if she dared.
I’m glad I’m not Lou’s mother-in-law.”

Ivar looked about mysteriously and lowered his voice almost to a
whisper. “You know what they have over at Lou’s house? A great white
tub, like the stone water-troughs in the old country, to wash
themselves in. When you sent me over with the strawberries, they were
all in town but the old woman Lee and the baby. She took me in and
showed me the thing, and she told me it was impossible to wash yourself
clean in it, because, in so much water, you could not make a strong
suds. So when they fill it up and send her in there, she pretends, and
makes a splashing noise. Then, when they are all asleep, she washes
herself in a little wooden tub she keeps under her bed.”

Alexandra shook with laughter. “Poor old Mrs. Lee! They won’t let her
wear nightcaps, either. Never mind; when she comes to visit me, she can
do all the old things in the old way, and have as much beer as she
wants. We’ll start an asylum for old-time people, Ivar.”

Ivar folded his big handkerchief carefully and thrust it back into his
blouse. “This is always the way, mistress. I come to you sorrowing, and
you send me away with a light heart. And will you be so good as to tell
the Irishman that he is not to work the brown gelding until the sore on
its shoulder is healed?”

“That I will. Now go and put Emil’s mare to the cart. I am going to
drive up to the north quarter to meet the man from town who is to buy
my alfalfa hay.”




III


Alexandra was to hear more of Ivar’s case, however. On Sunday her
married brothers came to dinner. She had asked them for that day
because Emil, who hated family parties, would be absent, dancing at
Amédée 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 practising on it so much spoils her touch. Her
teacher says so,” Annie brought out with spirit.

Oscar rolled his eyes. “Well, Milly must have got on pretty good if
she’s got past the organ. I know plenty of grown folks that ain’t,” he
said bluntly.

Annie threw up her chin. “She has got on good, and she’s going to play
for her commencement when she graduates in town next year.”

“Yes,” said Alexandra firmly, “I think Milly deserves a piano. All the
girls around here have been taking lessons for years, but Milly is the
only one of them who can ever play anything when you ask her. I’ll tell
you when I first thought I would like to give you a piano, Milly, and
that was when you learned that book of old Swedish songs that your
grandfather used to sing. He had a sweet tenor voice, and when he was a
young man he loved to sing. I can remember hearing him singing with the
sailors down in the shipyard, when I was no bigger than Stella here,”
pointing to Annie’s younger daughter.

Milly and Stella both looked through the door into the sitting-room,
where a crayon portrait of John Bergson hung on the wall. Alexandra had
had it made from a little photograph, taken for his friends just before
he left Sweden; a slender man of thirty-five, with soft hair curling
about his high forehead, a drooping mustache, and wondering, sad eyes
that looked forward into the distance, as if they already beheld the
New World.

After dinner Lou and Oscar went to the orchard to pick cherries—they
had neither of them had the patience to grow an orchard of their
own—and Annie went down to gossip with Alexandra’s kitchen girls while
they washed the dishes. She could always find out more about
Alexandra’s domestic economy from the prattling maids than from
Alexandra herself, and what she discovered she used to her own
advantage with Lou. On the Divide, farmers’ daughters no longer went
out into service, so Alexandra got her girls from Sweden, by paying
their fare over. They stayed with her until they married, and were
replaced by sisters or cousins from the old country.

Alexandra took her three nieces into the flower garden. She was fond of
the little girls, especially of Milly, who came to spend a week with
her aunt now and then, and read aloud to her from the old books about
the house, or listened to stories about the early days on the Divide.
While they were walking among the flower beds, a buggy drove up the
hill and stopped in front of the gate. A man got out and stood talking
to the driver. The little girls were delighted at the advent of a
stranger, some one from very far away, they knew by his clothes, his
gloves, and the sharp, pointed cut of his dark beard. The girls fell
behind their aunt and peeped out at him from among the castor beans.
The stranger came up to the gate and stood holding his hat in his hand,
smiling, while Alexandra advanced slowly to meet him. As she approached
he spoke in a low, pleasant voice.

“Don’t you know me, Alexandra? I would have known you, anywhere.”

Alexandra shaded her eyes with her hand. Suddenly she took a quick step
forward. “Can it be!” she exclaimed with feeling; “can it be that it is
Carl Linstrum? Why, Carl, it is!” She threw out both her hands and
caught his across the gate. “Sadie, Milly, run tell your father and
Uncle Oscar that our old friend Carl Linstrum is here. Be quick! Why,
Carl, how did it happen? I can’t believe this!” Alexandra shook the
tears from her eyes and laughed.

The stranger nodded to his driver, dropped his suitcase inside the
fence, and opened the gate. “Then you are glad to see me, and you can
put me up overnight? I couldn’t go through this country without
stopping off to have a look at you. How little you have changed! Do you
know, I was sure it would be like that. You simply couldn’t be
different. How fine you are!” He stepped back and looked at her
admiringly.

Alexandra blushed and laughed again. “But you yourself, Carl—with that
beard—how could I have known you? You went away a little boy.” She
reached for his suitcase and when he intercepted her she threw up her
hands. “You see, I give myself away. I have only women come to visit
me, and I do not know how to behave. Where is your trunk?”

“It’s in Hanover. I can stay only a few days. I am on my way to the
coast.”

They started up the path. “A few days? After all these years!”
Alexandra shook her finger at him. “See this, you have walked into a
trap. You do not get away so easy.” She put her hand affectionately on
his shoulder. “You owe me a visit for the sake of old times. Why must
you go to the coast at all?”

“Oh, I must! I am a fortune hunter. From Seattle I go on to Alaska.”

“Alaska?” She looked at him in astonishment. “Are you going to paint
the Indians?”

“Paint?” the young man frowned. “Oh! I’m not a painter, Alexandra. I’m
an engraver. I have nothing to do with painting.”

“But on my parlor wall I have the paintings—”

He interrupted nervously. “Oh, water-color sketches—done for amusement.
I sent them to remind you of me, not because they were good. What a
wonderful place you have made of this, Alexandra.” He turned and looked
back at the wide, map-like prospect of field and hedge and pasture. “I
would never have believed it could be done. I’m disappointed in my own
eye, in my imagination.”

At this moment Lou and Oscar came up the hill from the orchard. They
did not quicken their pace when they saw Carl; indeed, they did not
openly look in his direction. They advanced distrustfully, and as if
they wished the distance were longer.

Alexandra beckoned to them. “They think I am trying to fool them. Come,
boys, it’s Carl Linstrum, our old Carl!”

Lou gave the visitor a quick, sidelong glance and thrust out his hand.
“Glad to see you.”

Oscar followed with “How d’ do.” Carl could not tell whether their
offishness came from unfriendliness or from embarrassment. He and
Alexandra led the way to the porch.

“Carl,” Alexandra explained, “is on his way to Seattle. He is going to
Alaska.”

Oscar studied the visitor’s yellow shoes. “Got business there?” he
asked.

Carl laughed. “Yes, very pressing business. I’m going there to get
rich. Engraving’s a very interesting profession, but a man never makes
any money at it. So I’m going to try the goldfields.”

Alexandra felt that this was a tactful speech, and Lou looked up with
some interest. “Ever done anything in that line before?”

“No, but I’m going to join a friend of mine who went out from New York
and has done well. He has offered to break me in.”

“Turrible cold winters, there, I hear,” remarked Oscar. “I thought
people went up there in the spring.”

“They do. But my friend is going to spend the winter in Seattle and I
am to stay with him there and learn something about prospecting before
we start north next year.”

Lou looked skeptical. “Let’s see, how long have you been away from
here?”

“Sixteen years. You ought to remember that, Lou, for you were married
just after we went away.”

“Going to stay with us some time?” Oscar asked.

“A few days, if Alexandra can keep me.”

“I expect you’ll be wanting to see your old place,” Lou observed more
cordially. “You won’t hardly know it. But there’s a few chunks of your
old sod house left. Alexandra wouldn’t never let Frank Shabata plough
over it.”

Annie Lee, who, ever since the visitor was announced, had been touching
up her hair and settling her lace and wishing she had worn another
dress, now emerged with her three daughters and introduced them. She
was greatly impressed by Carl’s urban appearance, and in her excitement
talked very loud and threw her head about. “And you ain’t married yet?
At your age, now! Think of that! You’ll have to wait for Milly. Yes,
we’ve got a boy, too. The youngest. He’s at home with his grandma. You
must come over to see mother and hear Milly play. She’s the musician of
the family. She does pyrography, too. That’s burnt wood, you know. You
wouldn’t believe what she can do with her poker. Yes, she goes to
school in town, and she is the youngest in her class by two years.”

Milly looked uncomfortable and Carl took her hand again. He liked her
creamy skin and happy, innocent eyes, and he could see that her
mother’s way of talking distressed her. “I’m sure she’s a clever little
girl,” he murmured, looking at her thoughtfully. “Let me see—Ah, it’s
your mother that she looks like, Alexandra. Mrs. Bergson must have
looked just like this when she was a little girl. Does Milly run about
over the country as you and Alexandra used to, Annie?”

Milly’s mother protested. “Oh, my, no! Things has changed since we was
girls. Milly has it very different. We are going to rent the place and
move into town as soon as the girls are old enough to go out into
company. A good many are doing that here now. Lou is going into
business.”

Lou grinned. “That’s what she says. You better go get your things on.
Ivar’s hitching up,” he added, turning to Annie.

Young farmers seldom address their wives by name. It is always “you,”
or “she.”

Having got his wife out of the way, Lou sat down on the step and began
to whittle. “Well, what do folks in New York think of William Jennings
Bryan?” Lou began to bluster, as he always did when he talked politics.
“We gave Wall Street a scare in ninety-six, all right, and we’re fixing
another to hand them. Silver wasn’t the only issue,” he nodded
mysteriously. “There’s a good many things got to be changed. The West
is going to make itself heard.”

Carl laughed. “But, surely, it did do that, if nothing else.”

Lou’s thin face reddened up to the roots of his bristly hair. “Oh,
we’ve only begun. We’re waking up to a sense of our responsibilities,
out here, and we ain’t afraid, neither. You fellows back there must be
a tame lot. If you had any nerve you’d get together and march down to
Wall Street and blow it up. Dynamite it, I mean,” with a threatening
nod.

He was so much in earnest that Carl scarcely knew how to answer him.
“That would be a waste of powder. The same business would go on in
another street. The street doesn’t matter. But what have you fellows
out here got to kick about? You have the only safe place there is.
Morgan himself couldn’t touch you. One only has to drive through this
country to see that you’re all as rich as barons.”

“We have a good deal more to say than we had when we were poor,” said
Lou threateningly. “We’re getting on to a whole lot of things.”

As Ivar drove a double carriage up to the gate, Annie came out in a hat
that looked like the model of a battleship. Carl rose and took her down
to the carriage, while Lou lingered for a word with his sister.

“What do you suppose he’s come for?” he asked, jerking his head toward
the gate.

“Why, to pay us a visit. I’ve been begging him to for years.”

Oscar looked at Alexandra. “He didn’t let you know he was coming?”

“No. Why should he? I told him to come at any time.”

Lou shrugged his shoulders. “He doesn’t seem to have done much for
himself. Wandering around this way!”

Oscar spoke solemnly, as from the depths of a cavern. “He never was
much account.”

Alexandra left them and hurried down to the gate where Annie was
rattling on to Carl about her new dining-room furniture. “You must
bring Mr. Linstrum over real soon, only be sure to telephone me first,”
she called back, as Carl helped her into the carriage. Old Ivar, his
white head bare, stood holding the horses. Lou came down the path and
climbed into the front seat, took up the reins, and drove off without
saying anything further to any one. Oscar picked up his youngest boy
and trudged off down the road, the other three trotting after him.
Carl, holding the gate open for Alexandra, began to laugh. “Up and
coming on the Divide, eh, Alexandra?” he cried gayly.




IV


Carl had changed, Alexandra felt, much less than one might have
expected. He had not become a trim, self-satisfied city man. There was
still something homely and wayward and definitely personal about him.
Even his clothes, his Norfolk coat and his very high collars, were a
little unconventional. He seemed to shrink into himself as he used to
do; to hold himself away from things, as if he were afraid of being
hurt. In short, he was more self-conscious than a man of thirty-five is
expected to be. He looked older than his years and not very strong. His
black hair, which still hung in a triangle over his pale forehead, was
thin at the crown, and there were fine, relentless lines about his
eyes. His back, with its high, sharp shoulders, looked like the back of
an over-worked German professor off on his holiday. His face was
intelligent, sensitive, unhappy.

That evening after supper, Carl and Alexandra were sitting by the clump
of castor beans in the middle of the flower garden. The gravel paths
glittered in the moonlight, and below them the fields lay white and
still.

“Do you know, Alexandra,” he was saying, “I’ve been thinking how
strangely things work out. I’ve been away engraving other men’s
pictures, and you’ve stayed at home and made your own.” He pointed with
his cigar toward the sleeping landscape. “How in the world have you
done it? How have your neighbors done it?”

“We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had
its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to
work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out
of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we
suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. As for me, you
remember when I began to buy land. For years after that I was always
squeezing and borrowing until I was ashamed to show my face in the
banks. And then, all at once, men began to come to me offering to lend
me money—and I didn’t need it! Then I went ahead and built this house.
I really built it for Emil. I want you to see Emil, Carl. He is so
different from the rest of us!”

“How different?”

“Oh, you’ll see! I’m sure it was to have sons like Emil, and to give
them a chance, that father left the old country. It’s curious, too; on
the outside Emil is just like an American boy,—he graduated from the
State University in June, you know,—but underneath he is more Swedish
than any of us. Sometimes he is so like father that he frightens me; he
is so violent in his feelings like that.”

“Is he going to farm here with you?”

“He shall do whatever he wants to,” Alexandra declared warmly. “He is
going to have a chance, a whole chance; that’s what I’ve worked for.
Sometimes he talks about studying law, and sometimes, just lately, he’s
been talking about going out into the sand hills and taking up more
land. He has his sad times, like father. But I hope he won’t do that.
We have land enough, at last!” Alexandra laughed.

“How about Lou and Oscar? They’ve done well, haven’t they?”

“Yes, very well; but they are different, and now that they have farms
of their own I do not see so much of them. We divided the land equally
when Lou married. They have their own way of doing things, and they do
not altogether like my way, I am afraid. Perhaps they think me too
independent. But I have had to think for myself a good many years and
am not likely to change. On the whole, though, we take as much comfort
in each other as most brothers and sisters do. And I am very fond of
Lou’s oldest daughter.”

“I think I liked the old Lou and Oscar better, and they probably feel
the same about me. I even, if you can keep a secret,”—Carl leaned
forward and touched her arm, smiling,—“I even think I liked the old
country better. This is all very splendid in its way, but there was
something about this country when it was a wild old beast that has
haunted me all these years. Now, when I come back to all this milk and
honey, I feel like the old German song, ‘Wo bist du, wo bist du, mein
geliebtest Land?’—Do you ever feel like that, I wonder?”

“Yes, sometimes, when I think about father and mother and those who are
gone; so many of our old neighbors.” Alexandra paused and looked up
thoughtfully at the stars. “We can remember the graveyard when it was
wild prairie, Carl, and now—”

“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there,” said Carl
softly. “Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and
they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never
happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing
the same five notes over for thousands of years.”

“Oh, yes! The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy
them. There is my little neighbor, now; the people who bought your old
place. I wouldn’t have sold it to any one else, but I was always fond
of that girl. You must remember her, little Marie Tovesky, from Omaha,
who used to visit here? When she was eighteen she ran away from the
convent school and got married, crazy child! She came out here a bride,
with her father and husband. He had nothing, and the old man was
willing to buy them a place and set them up. Your farm took her fancy,
and I was glad to have her so near me. I’ve never been sorry, either. I
even try to get along with Frank on her account.”

“Is Frank her husband?”

“Yes. He’s one of these wild fellows. Most Bohemians are good-natured,
but Frank thinks we don’t appreciate him here, I guess. He’s jealous
about everything, his farm and his horses and his pretty wife.
Everybody likes her, just the same as when she was little. Sometimes I
go up to the Catholic church with Emil, and it’s funny to see Marie
standing there laughing and shaking hands with people, looking so
excited and gay, with Frank sulking behind her as if he could eat
everybody alive. Frank’s not a bad neighbor, but to get on with him
you’ve got to make a fuss over him and act as if you thought he was a
very important person all the time, and different from other people. I
find it hard to keep that up from one year’s end to another.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d be very successful at that kind of thing,
Alexandra.” Carl seemed to find the idea amusing.

“Well,” said Alexandra firmly, “I do the best I can, on Marie’s
account. She has it hard enough, anyway. She’s too young and pretty for
this sort of life. We’re all ever so much older and slower. But she’s
the kind that won’t be downed easily. She’ll work all day and go to a
Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a
cross man next morning. I could stay by a job, but I never had the go
in me that she has, when I was going my best. I’ll have to take you
over to see her to-morrow.”

Carl dropped the end of his cigar softly among the castor beans and
sighed. “Yes, I suppose I must see the old place. I’m cowardly about
things that remind me of myself. It took courage to come at all,
Alexandra. I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t wanted to see you very, very
much.”

Alexandra looked at him with her calm, deliberate eyes. “Why do you
dread things like that, Carl?” she asked earnestly. “Why are you
dissatisfied with yourself?”

Her visitor winced. “How direct you are, Alexandra! Just like you used
to be. Do I give myself away so quickly? Well, you see, for one thing,
there’s nothing to look forward to in my profession. Wood-engraving is
the only thing I care about, and that had gone out before I began.
Everything’s cheap metal work nowadays, touching up miserable
photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good ones. I’m
absolutely sick of it all.” Carl frowned. “Alexandra, all the way out
from New York I’ve been planning how I could deceive you and make you
think me a very enviable fellow, and here I am telling you the truth
the first night. I waste a lot of time pretending to people, and the
joke of it is, I don’t think I ever deceive any one. There are too many
of my kind; people know us on sight.”

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a
puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by
your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your
cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to
show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom
than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t
needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of
your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are
thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties,
we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know
where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our
mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle,
or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by.
All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent
that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of
things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in
the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and
concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and
shudder.”

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made
on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that she
understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would
rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a
high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here.
We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If
the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something
beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work. No,
I would rather have Emil like you than like them. I felt that as soon
as you came.”

“I wonder why you feel like that?” Carl mused.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my
hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years
ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and
over, and she didn’t see the use of it. After she had tried to kill
herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa
to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been
perfectly cheerful, and she says she’s contented to live and work in a
world that’s so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as
the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s
what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”




V


Alexandra did not find time to go to her neighbor’s the next day, nor
the next. It was a busy season on the farm, with the corn-plowing going
on, and even Emil was in the field with a team and cultivator. Carl
went about over the farms with Alexandra in the morning, and in the
afternoon and evening they found a great deal to talk about. Emil, for
all his track practice, did not stand up under farmwork very well, and
by night he was too tired to talk or even to practise on his cornet.

On Wednesday morning Carl got up before it was light, and stole
downstairs and out of the kitchen door just as old Ivar was making his
morning ablutions at the pump. Carl nodded to him and hurried up the
draw, past the garden, and into the pasture where the milking cows used
to be kept.

The dawn in the east looked like the light from some great fire that
was burning under the edge of the world. The color was reflected in the
globules of dew that sheathed the short gray pasture grass. Carl walked
rapidly until he came to the crest of the second hill, where the
Bergson pasture joined the one that had belonged to his father. There
he sat down and waited for the sun to rise. It was just there that he
and Alexandra used to do their milking together, he on his side of the
fence, she on hers. He could remember exactly how she looked when she
came over the close-cropped grass, her skirts pinned up, her head bare,
a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early
morning all about her. Even as a boy he used to feel, when he saw her
coming with her free step, her upright head and calm shoulders, that
she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself.
Since then, when he had happened to see the sun come up in the country
or on the water, he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her
milking pails.

Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the
grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny
instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to
twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill
noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and
snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed
to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in.

He crossed the fence into the pasture that was now the Shabatas’ and
continued his walk toward the pond. He had not gone far, however, when
he discovered that he was not the only person abroad. In the draw
below, his gun in his hands, was Emil, advancing cautiously, with a
young woman beside him. They were moving softly, keeping close
together, and Carl knew that they expected to find ducks on the pond.
At the moment when they came in sight of the bright spot of water, he
heard a whirr of wings and the ducks shot up into the air. There was a
sharp crack from the gun, and five of the birds fell to the ground.
Emil and his companion laughed delightedly, and Emil ran to pick them
up. When he came back, dangling the ducks by their feet, Marie held her
apron and he dropped them into it. As she stood looking down at them,
her face changed. She took up one of the birds, a rumpled ball of
feathers with the blood dripping slowly from its mouth, and looked at
the live color that still burned on its plumage.

As she let it fall, she cried in distress, “Oh, Emil, why did you?”

“I like that!” the boy exclaimed indignantly. “Why, Marie, you asked me
to come yourself.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said tearfully, “but I didn’t think. I hate to
see them when they are first shot. They were having such a good time,
and we’ve spoiled it all for them.”

Emil gave a rather sore laugh. “I should say we had! I’m not going
hunting with you any more. You’re as bad as Ivar. Here, let me take
them.” He snatched the ducks out of her apron.

“Don’t be cross, Emil. Only—Ivar’s right about wild things. They’re too
happy to kill. You can tell just how they felt when they flew up. They
were scared, but they didn’t really think anything could hurt them. No,
we won’t do that any more.”

“All right,” Emil assented. “I’m sorry I made you feel bad.” As he
looked down into her tearful eyes, there was a curious, sharp young
bitterness in his own.

Carl watched them as they moved slowly down the draw. They had not seen
him at all. He had not overheard much of their dialogue, but he felt
the import of it. It made him, somehow, unreasonably mournful to find
two young things abroad in the pasture in the early morning. He decided
that he needed his breakfast.




VI


At dinner that day Alexandra said she thought they must really manage
to go over to the Shabatas’ that afternoon. “It’s not often I let three
days go by without seeing Marie. She will think I have forsaken her,
now that my old friend has come back.”

After the men had gone back to work, Alexandra put on a white dress and
her sun-hat, and she and Carl set forth across the fields. “You see we
have kept up the old path, Carl. It has been so nice for me to feel
that there was a friend at the other end of it again.”

Carl smiled a little ruefully. “All the same, I hope it hasn’t been
_quite_ the same.”

Alexandra looked at him with surprise. “Why, no, of course not. Not the
same. She could not very well take your place, if that’s what you mean.
I’m friendly with all my neighbors, I hope. But Marie is really a
companion, some one I can talk to quite frankly. You wouldn’t want me
to be more lonely than I have been, would you?”

Carl laughed and pushed back the triangular lock of hair with the edge
of his hat. “Of course I don’t. I ought to be thankful that this path
hasn’t been worn by—well, by friends with more pressing errands than
your little Bohemian is likely to have.” He paused to give Alexandra
his hand as she stepped over the stile. “Are you the least bit
disappointed in our coming together again?” he asked abruptly. “Is it
the way you hoped it would be?”

Alexandra smiled at this. “Only better. When I’ve thought about your
coming, I’ve sometimes been a little afraid of it. You have lived where
things move so fast, and everything is slow here; the people slowest of
all. Our lives are like the years, all made up of weather and crops and
cows. How you hated cows!” She shook her head and laughed to herself.

“I didn’t when we milked together. I walked up to the pasture corners
this morning. I wonder whether I shall ever be able to tell you all
that I was thinking about up there. It’s a strange thing, Alexandra; I
find it easy to be frank with you about everything under the sun
except—yourself!”

“You are afraid of hurting my feelings, perhaps.” Alexandra looked at
him thoughtfully.

“No, I’m afraid of giving you a shock. You’ve seen yourself for so long
in the dull minds of the people about you, that if I were to tell you
how you seem to me, it would startle you. But you must see that you
astonish me. You must feel when people admire you.”

Alexandra blushed and laughed with some confusion. “I felt that you
were pleased with me, if you mean that.”

“And you’ve felt when other people were pleased with you?” he insisted.

“Well, sometimes. The men in town, at the banks and the county offices,
seem glad to see me. I think, myself, it is more pleasant to do
business with people who are clean and healthy-looking,” she admitted
blandly.

Carl gave a little chuckle as he opened the Shabatas’ gate for her.
“Oh, do you?” he asked dryly.

There was no sign of life about the Shabatas’ house except a big yellow
cat, sunning itself on the kitchen doorstep.

Alexandra took the path that led to the orchard. “She often sits there
and sews. I didn’t telephone her we were coming, because I didn’t want
her to go to work and bake cake and freeze ice-cream. She’ll always
make a party if you give her the least excuse. Do you recognize the
apple trees, Carl?”

Linstrum looked about him. “I wish I had a dollar for every bucket of
water I’ve carried for those trees. Poor father, he was an easy man,
but he was perfectly merciless when it came to watering the orchard.”

“That’s one thing I like about Germans; they make an orchard grow if
they can’t make anything else. I’m so glad these trees belong to some
one who takes comfort in them. When I rented this place, the tenants
never kept the orchard up, and Emil and I used to come over and take
care of it ourselves. It needs mowing now. There she is, down in the
corner. Maria-a-a!” she called.

A recumbent figure started up from the grass and came running toward
them through the flickering screen of light and shade.

“Look at her! Isn’t she like a little brown rabbit?” Alexandra laughed.

Maria ran up panting and threw her arms about Alexandra. “Oh, I had
begun to think you were not coming at all, maybe. I knew you were so
busy. Yes, Emil told me about Mr. Linstrum being here. Won’t you come
up to the house?”

“Why not sit down there in your corner? Carl wants to see the orchard.
He kept all these trees alive for years, watering them with his own
back.”

Marie turned to Carl. “Then I’m thankful to you, Mr. Linstrum. We’d
never have bought the place if it hadn’t been for this orchard, and
then I wouldn’t have had Alexandra, either.” She gave Alexandra’s arm a
little squeeze as she walked beside her. “How nice your dress smells,
Alexandra; you put rosemary leaves in your chest, like I told you.”

She led them to the northwest corner of the orchard, sheltered on one
side by a thick mulberry hedge and bordered on the other by a
wheatfield, just beginning to yellow. In this corner the ground dipped
a little, and the blue-grass, which the weeds had driven out in the
upper part of the orchard, grew thick and luxuriant. Wild roses were
flaming in the tufts of bunchgrass along the fence. Under a white
mulberry tree there was an old wagon-seat. Beside it lay a book and a
workbasket.

“You must have the seat, Alexandra. The grass would stain your dress,”
the hostess insisted. She dropped down on the ground at Alexandra’s
side and tucked her feet under her. Carl sat at a little distance from
the two women, his back to the wheatfield, and watched them. Alexandra
took off her shade-hat and threw it on the ground. Marie picked it up
and played with the white ribbons, twisting them about her brown
fingers as she talked. They made a pretty picture in the strong
sunlight, the leafy pattern surrounding them like a net; the Swedish
woman so white and gold, kindly and amused, but armored in calm, and
the alert brown one, her full lips parted, points of yellow light
dancing in her eyes as she laughed and chattered. Carl had never
forgotten little Marie Tovesky’s eyes, and he was glad to have an
opportunity to study them. The brown iris, he found, was curiously
slashed with yellow, the color of sunflower honey, or of old amber. In
each eye one of these streaks must have been larger than the others,
for the effect was that of two dancing points of light, two little
yellow bubbles, such as rise in a glass of champagne. Sometimes they
seemed like the sparks from a forge. She seemed so easily excited, to
kindle with a fierce little flame if one but breathed upon her. “What a
waste,” Carl reflected. “She ought to be doing all that for a
sweetheart. How awkwardly things come about!”

It was not very long before Marie sprang up out of the grass again.
“Wait a moment. I want to show you something.” She ran away and
disappeared behind the low-growing apple trees.

“What a charming creature,” Carl murmured. “I don’t wonder that her
husband is jealous. But can’t she walk? does she always run?”

Alexandra nodded. “Always. I don’t see many people, but I don’t believe
there are many like her, anywhere.”

Marie came back with a branch she had broken from an apricot tree,
laden with pale yellow, pink-cheeked fruit. She dropped it beside Carl.
“Did you plant those, too? They are such beautiful little trees.”

Carl fingered the blue-green leaves, porous like blotting-paper and
shaped like birch leaves, hung on waxen red stems. “Yes, I think I did.
Are these the circus trees, Alexandra?”

“Shall I tell her about them?” Alexandra asked. “Sit down like a good
girl, Marie, and don’t ruin my poor hat, and I’ll tell you a story. A
long time ago, when Carl and I were, say, sixteen and twelve, a circus
came to Hanover and we went to town in our wagon, with Lou and Oscar,
to see the parade. We hadn’t money enough to go to the circus. We
followed the parade out to the circus grounds and hung around until the
show began and the crowd went inside the tent. Then Lou was afraid we
looked foolish standing outside in the pasture, so we went back to
Hanover feeling very sad. There was a man in the streets selling
apricots, and we had never seen any before. He had driven down from
somewhere up in the French country, and he was selling them twenty-five
cents a peck. We had a little money our fathers had given us for candy,
and I bought two pecks and Carl bought one. They cheered us a good
deal, and we saved all the seeds and planted them. Up to the time Carl
went away, they hadn’t borne at all.”

“And now he’s come back to eat them,” cried Marie, nodding at Carl.
“That IS a good story. I can remember you a little, Mr. Linstrum. I
used to see you in Hanover sometimes, when Uncle Joe took me to town. I
remember you because you were always buying pencils and tubes of paint
at the drug store. Once, when my uncle left me at the store, you drew a
lot of little birds and flowers for me on a piece of wrapping-paper. I
kept them for a long while. I thought you were very romantic because
you could draw and had such black eyes.”

Carl smiled. “Yes, I remember that time. Your uncle bought you some
kind of a mechanical toy, a Turkish lady sitting on an ottoman and
smoking a hookah, wasn’t it? And she turned her head backwards and
forwards.”

“Oh, yes! Wasn’t she splendid! I knew well enough I ought not to tell
Uncle Joe I wanted it, for he had just come back from the saloon and
was feeling good. You remember how he laughed? She tickled him, too.
But when we got home, my aunt scolded him for buying toys when she
needed so many things. We wound our lady up every night, and when she
began to move her head my aunt used to laugh as hard as any of us. It
was a music-box, you know, and the Turkish lady played a tune while she
smoked. That was how she made you feel so jolly. As I remember her, she
was lovely, and had a gold crescent on her turban.”

Half an hour later, as they were leaving the house, Carl and Alexandra
were met in the path by a strapping fellow in overalls and a blue
shirt. He was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and was
muttering to himself.

Marie ran forward, and, taking him by the arm, gave him a little push
toward her guests. “Frank, this is Mr. Linstrum.”

Frank took off his broad straw hat and nodded to Alexandra. When he
spoke to Carl, he showed a fine set of white teeth. He was burned a
dull red down to his neckband, and there was a heavy three-days’
stubble on his face. Even in his agitation he was handsome, but he
looked a rash and violent man.

Barely saluting the callers, he turned at once to his wife and began,
in an outraged tone, “I have to leave my team to drive the old woman
Hiller’s hogs out-a my wheat. I go to take dat old woman to de court if
she ain’t careful, I tell you!”

His wife spoke soothingly. “But, Frank, she has only her lame boy to
help her. She does the best she can.”

Alexandra looked at the excited man and offered a suggestion. “Why
don’t you go over there some afternoon and hog-tight her fences? You’d
save time for yourself in the end.”

Frank’s neck stiffened. “Not-a-much, I won’t. I keep my hogs home.
Other peoples can do like me. See? If that Louis can mend shoes, he can
mend fence.”

“Maybe,” said Alexandra placidly; “but I’ve found it sometimes pays to
mend other people’s fences. Good-bye, Marie. Come to see me soon.”

Alexandra walked firmly down the path and Carl followed her.

Frank went into the house and threw himself on the sofa, his face to
the wall, his clenched fist on his hip. Marie, having seen her guests
off, came in and put her hand coaxingly on his shoulder.

“Poor Frank! You’ve run until you’ve made your head ache, now haven’t
you? Let me make you some coffee.”

“What else am I to do?” he cried hotly in Bohemian. “Am I to let any
old woman’s hogs root up my wheat? Is that what I work myself to death
for?”

“Don’t worry about it, Frank. I’ll speak to Mrs. Hiller again. But,
really, she almost cried last time they got out, she was so sorry.”

Frank bounced over on his other side. “That’s it; you always side with
them against me. They all know it. Anybody here feels free to borrow
the mower and break it, or turn their hogs in on me. They know you
won’t care!”

Marie hurried away to make his coffee. When she came back, he was fast
asleep. She sat down and looked at him for a long while, very
thoughtfully. When the kitchen clock struck six she went out to get
supper, closing the door gently behind her. She was always sorry for
Frank when he worked himself into one of these rages, and she was sorry
to have him rough and quarrelsome with his neighbors. She was perfectly
aware that the neighbors had a good deal to put up with, and that they
bore with Frank for her sake.




VII


Marie’s father, Albert Tovesky, was one of the more intelligent
Bohemians who came West in the early seventies. He settled in Omaha and
became a leader and adviser among his people there. Marie was his
youngest child, by a second wife, and was the apple of his eye. She was
barely sixteen, and was in the graduating class of the Omaha High
School, when Frank Shabata arrived from the old country and set all the
Bohemian girls in a flutter. He was easily the buck of the
beer-gardens, and on Sunday he was a sight to see, with his silk hat
and tucked shirt and blue frock-coat, wearing gloves and carrying a
little wisp of a yellow cane. He was tall and fair, with splendid teeth
and close-cropped yellow curls, and he wore a slightly disdainful
expression, proper for a young man with high connections, whose mother
had a big farm in the Elbe valley. There was often an interesting
discontent in his blue eyes, and every Bohemian girl he met imagined
herself the cause of that unsatisfied expression. He had a way of
drawing out his cambric handkerchief slowly, by one corner, from his
breast-pocket, that was melancholy and romantic in the extreme. He took
a little flight with each of the more eligible Bohemian girls, but it
was when he was with little Marie Tovesky that he drew his handkerchief
out most slowly, and, after he had lit a fresh cigar, dropped the match
most despairingly. Any one could see, with half an eye, that his proud
heart was bleeding for somebody.

One Sunday, late in the summer after Marie’s graduation, she met Frank
at a Bohemian picnic down the river and went rowing with him all the
afternoon. When she got home that evening she went straight to her
father’s room and told him that she was engaged to Shabata. Old Tovesky
was having a comfortable pipe before he went to bed. When he heard his
daughter’s announcement, he first prudently corked his beer bottle and
then leaped to his feet and had a turn of temper. He characterized
Frank Shabata by a Bohemian expression which is the equivalent of
stuffed shirt.

“Why don’t he go to work like the rest of us did? His farm in the Elbe
valley, indeed! Ain’t he got plenty brothers and sisters? It’s his
mother’s farm, and why don’t he stay at home and help her? Haven’t I
seen his mother out in the morning at five o’clock with her ladle and
her big bucket on wheels, putting liquid manure on the cabbages? Don’t
I know the look of old Eva Shabata’s hands? Like an old horse’s hoofs
they are—and this fellow wearing gloves and rings! Engaged, indeed! You
aren’t fit to be out of school, and that’s what’s the matter with you.
I will send you off to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis,
and they will teach you some sense, _I_ guess!”

Accordingly, the very next week, Albert Tovesky took his daughter, pale
and tearful, down the river to the convent. But the way to make Frank
want anything was to tell him he couldn’t have it. He managed to have
an interview with Marie before she went away, and whereas he had been
only half in love with her before, he now persuaded himself that he
would not stop at anything. Marie took with her to the convent, under
the canvas lining of her trunk, the results of a laborious and
satisfying morning on Frank’s part; no less than a dozen photographs of
himself, taken in a dozen different love-lorn attitudes. There was a
little round photograph for her watch-case, photographs for her wall
and dresser, and even long narrow ones to be used as bookmarks. More
than once the handsome gentleman was torn to pieces before the French
class by an indignant nun.

Marie pined in the convent for a year, until her eighteenth birthday
was passed. Then she met Frank Shabata in the Union Station in St.
Louis and ran away with him. Old Tovesky forgave his daughter because
there was nothing else to do, and bought her a farm in the country that
she had loved so well as a child. Since then her story had been a part
of the history of the Divide. She and Frank had been living there for
five years when Carl Linstrum came back to pay his long deferred visit
to Alexandra. Frank had, on the whole, done better than one might have
expected. He had flung himself at the soil with savage energy. Once a
year he went to Hastings or to Omaha, on a spree. He stayed away for a
week or two, and then came home and worked like a demon. He did work;
if he felt sorry for himself, that was his own affair.




VIII


On the evening of the day of Alexandra’s call at the Shabatas’, a heavy
rain set in. Frank sat up until a late hour reading the Sunday
newspapers. One of the Goulds was getting a divorce, and Frank took it
as a personal affront. In printing the story of the young man’s marital
troubles, the knowing editor gave a sufficiently colored account of his
career, stating the amount of his income and the manner in which he was
supposed to spend it. Frank read English slowly, and the more he read
about this divorce case, the angrier he grew. At last he threw down the
page with a snort. He turned to his farm-hand who was reading the other
half of the paper.

“By God! if I have that young feller in de hayfield once, I show him
someting. Listen here what he do wit his money.” And Frank began the
catalogue of the young man’s reputed extravagances.

Marie sighed. She thought it hard that the Goulds, for whom she had
nothing but good will, should make her so much trouble. She hated to
see the Sunday newspapers come into the house. Frank was always reading
about the doings of rich people and feeling outraged. He had an
inexhaustible stock of stories about their crimes and follies, how they
bribed the courts and shot down their butlers with impunity whenever
they chose. Frank and Lou Bergson had very similar ideas, and they were
two of the political agitators of the county.

The next morning broke clear and brilliant, but Frank said the ground
was too wet to plough, so he took the cart and drove over to
Sainte-Agnes to spend the day at Moses Marcel’s saloon. After he was
gone, Marie went out to the back porch to begin her butter-making. A
brisk wind had come up and was driving puffy white clouds across the
sky. The orchard was sparkling and rippling in the sun. Marie stood
looking toward it wistfully, her hand on the lid of the churn, when she
heard a sharp ring in the air, the merry sound of the whetstone on the
scythe. That invitation decided her. She ran into the house, put on a
short skirt and a pair of her husband’s boots, caught up a tin pail and
started for the orchard. Emil had already begun work and was mowing
vigorously. When he saw her coming, he stopped and wiped his brow. His
yellow canvas leggings and khaki trousers were splashed to the knees.

“Don’t let me disturb you, Emil. I’m going to pick cherries. Isn’t
everything beautiful after the rain? Oh, but I’m glad to get this place
mowed! When I heard it raining in the night, I thought maybe you would
come and do it for me to-day. The wind wakened me. Didn’t it blow
dreadfully? Just smell the wild roses! They are always so spicy after a
rain. We never had so many of them in here before. I suppose it’s the
wet season. Will you have to cut them, too?”

“If I cut the grass, I will,” Emil said teasingly. “What’s the matter
with you? What makes you so flighty?”

“Am I flighty? I suppose that’s the wet season, too, then. It’s
exciting to see everything growing so fast,—and to get the grass cut!
Please leave the roses till last, if you must cut them. Oh, I don’t
mean all of them, I mean that low place down by my tree, where there
are so many. Aren’t you splashed! Look at the spider-webs all over the
grass. Good-bye. I’ll call you if I see a snake.”

She tripped away and Emil stood looking after her. In a few moments he
heard the cherries dropping smartly into the pail, and he began to
swing his scythe with that long, even stroke that few American boys
ever learn. Marie picked cherries and sang softly to herself, stripping
one glittering branch after another, shivering when she caught a shower
of raindrops on her neck and hair. And Emil mowed his way slowly down
toward the cherry trees.

That summer the rains had been so many and opportune that it was almost
more than Shabata and his man could do to keep up with the corn; the
orchard was a neglected wilderness. All sorts of weeds and herbs and
flowers had grown up there; splotches of wild larkspur, pale
green-and-white spikes of hoarhound, plantations of wild cotton,
tangles of foxtail and wild wheat. South of the apricot trees,
cornering on the wheatfield, was Frank’s alfalfa, where myriads of
white and yellow butterflies were always fluttering above the purple
blossoms. When Emil reached the lower corner by the hedge, Marie was
sitting under her white mulberry tree, the pailful of cherries beside
her, looking off at the gentle, tireless swelling of the wheat.

“Emil,” she said suddenly—he was mowing quietly about under the tree so
as not to disturb her—“what religion did the Swedes have away back,
before they were Christians?”

Emil paused and straightened his back. “I don’t know. About like the
Germans’, wasn’t it?”

Marie went on as if she had not heard him. “The Bohemians, you know,
were tree worshipers before the missionaries came. Father says the
people in the mountains still do queer things, sometimes,—they believe
that trees bring good or bad luck.”

Emil looked superior. “Do they? Well, which are the lucky trees? I’d
like to know.”

“I don’t know all of them, but I know lindens are. The old people in
the mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away with
the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted from
heathen times. I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with
caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything else.”

“That’s a poor saying,” said Emil, stooping over to wipe his hands in
the wet grass.

“Why is it? If I feel that way, I feel that way. I like trees because
they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things
do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit
here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I
begin just where I left off.”

Emil had nothing to say to this. He reached up among the branches and
began to pick the sweet, insipid fruit,—long ivory-colored berries,
tipped with faint pink, like white coral, that fall to the ground
unheeded all summer through. He dropped a handful into her lap.

“Do you like Mr. Linstrum?” Marie asked suddenly.

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“Oh, ever so much; only he seems kind of staid and school-teachery.
But, of course, he is older than Frank, even. I’m sure I don’t want to
live to be more than thirty, do you? Do you think Alexandra likes him
very much?”

“I suppose so. They were old friends.”

“Oh, Emil, you know what I mean!” Marie tossed her head impatiently.
“Does she really care about him? When she used to tell me about him, I
always wondered whether she wasn’t a little in love with him.”

“Who, Alexandra?” Emil laughed and thrust his hands into his trousers
pockets. “Alexandra’s never been in love, you crazy!” He laughed again.
“She wouldn’t know how to go about it. The idea!”

Marie shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, you don’t know Alexandra as well as
you think you do! If you had any eyes, you would see that she is very
fond of him. It would serve you all right if she walked off with Carl.
I like him because he appreciates her more than you do.”

Emil frowned. “What are you talking about, Marie? Alexandra’s all
right. She and I have always been good friends. What more do you want?
I like to talk to Carl about New York and what a fellow can do there.”

“Oh, Emil! Surely you are not thinking of going off there?”

“Why not? I must go somewhere, mustn’t I?” The young man took up his
scythe and leaned on it. “Would you rather I went off in the sand hills
and lived like Ivar?”

Marie’s face fell under his brooding gaze. She looked down at his wet
leggings. “I’m sure Alexandra hopes you will stay on here,” she
murmured.

“Then Alexandra will be disappointed,” the young man said roughly.
“What do I want to hang around here for? Alexandra can run the farm all
right, without me. I don’t want to stand around and look on. I want to
be doing something on my own account.”

“That’s so,” Marie sighed. “There are so many, many things you can do.
Almost anything you choose.”

“And there are so many, many things I can’t do.” Emil echoed her tone
sarcastically. “Sometimes I don’t want to do anything at all, and
sometimes I want to pull the four corners of the Divide together,”—he
threw out his arm and brought it back with a jerk,—“so, like a
table-cloth. I get tired of seeing men and horses going up and down, up
and down.”

Marie looked up at his defiant figure and her face clouded. “I wish you
weren’t so restless, and didn’t get so worked up over things,” she said
sadly.

“Thank you,” he returned shortly.

She sighed despondently. “Everything I say makes you cross, don’t it?
And you never used to be cross to me.”

Emil took a step nearer and stood frowning down at her bent head. He
stood in an attitude of self-defense, his feet well apart, his hands
clenched and drawn up at his sides, so that the cords stood out on his
bare arms. “I can’t play with you like a little boy any more,” he said
slowly. “That’s what you miss, Marie. You’ll have to get some other
little boy to play with.” He stopped and took a deep breath. Then he
went on in a low tone, so intense that it was almost threatening:
“Sometimes you seem to understand perfectly, and then sometimes you
pretend you don’t. You don’t help things any by pretending. It’s then
that I want to pull the corners of the Divide together. If you WON’T
understand, you know, I could make you!”

Marie clasped her hands and started up from her seat. She had grown
very pale and her eyes were shining with excitement and distress. “But,
Emil, if I understand, then all our good times are over, we can never
do nice things together any more. We shall have to behave like Mr.
Linstrum. And, anyhow, there’s nothing to understand!” She struck the
ground with her little foot fiercely. “That won’t last. It will go
away, and things will be just as they used to. I wish you were a
Catholic. The Church helps people, indeed it does. I pray for you, but
that’s not the same as if you prayed yourself.”

She spoke rapidly and pleadingly, looked entreatingly into his face.
Emil stood defiant, gazing down at her.

“I can’t pray to have the things I want,” he said slowly, “and I won’t
pray not to have them, not if I’m damned for it.”

Marie turned away, wringing her hands. “Oh, Emil, you won’t try! Then
all our good times are over.”

“Yes; over. I never expect to have any more.”

Emil gripped the hand-holds of his scythe and began to mow. Marie took
up her cherries and went slowly toward the house, crying bitterly.




IX


On Sunday afternoon, a month after Carl Linstrum’s arrival, he rode
with Emil up into the French country to attend a Catholic fair. He sat
for most of the afternoon in the basement of the church, where the fair
was held, talking to Marie Shabata, or strolled about the gravel
terrace, thrown up on the hillside in front of the basement doors,
where the French boys were jumping and wrestling and throwing the
discus. Some of the boys were in their white baseball suits; they had
just come up from a Sunday practice game down in the ballgrounds.
Amédée, the newly married, Emil’s best friend, was their pitcher,
renowned among the country towns for his dash and skill. Amédée was a
little fellow, a year younger than Emil and much more boyish in
appearance; very lithe and active and neatly made, with a clear brown
and white skin, and flashing white teeth. The Sainte-Agnes boys were to
play the Hastings nine in a fortnight, and Amédée’s lightning balls
were the hope of his team. The little Frenchman seemed to get every
ounce there was in him behind the ball as it left his hand.

“You’d have made the battery at the University for sure, ’Médée,” Emil
said as they were walking from the ball-grounds back to the church on
the hill. “You’re pitching better than you did in the spring.”

Amédée grinned. “Sure! A married man don’t lose his head no more.” He
slapped Emil on the back as he caught step with him. “Oh, Emil, you
wanna get married right off quick! It’s the greatest thing ever!”

Emil laughed. “How am I going to get married without any girl?”

Amédée took his arm. “Pooh! There are plenty girls will have you. You
wanna get some nice French girl, now. She treat you well; always be
jolly. See,”—he began checking off on his fingers,—“there is Sévérine,
and Alphosen, and Joséphine, and Hectorine, and Louise, and
Malvina—why, I could love any of them girls! Why don’t you get after
them? Are you stuck up, Emil, or is anything the matter with you? I
never did know a boy twenty-two years old before that didn’t have no
girl. You wanna be a priest, maybe? Not-a for me!” Amédée swaggered. “I
bring many good Catholics into this world, I hope, and that’s a way I
help the Church.”

Emil looked down and patted him on the shoulder. “Now you’re windy,
’Médée. You Frenchies like to brag.”

But Amédée had the zeal of the newly married, and he was not to be
lightly shaken off. “Honest and true, Emil, don’t you want ANY girl?
Maybe there’s some young lady in Lincoln, now, very grand,”—Amédée
waved his hand languidly before his face to denote the fan of heartless
beauty,—“and you lost your heart up there. Is that it?”

“Maybe,” said Emil.

But Amédée saw no appropriate glow in his friend’s face. “Bah!” he
exclaimed in disgust. “I tell all the French girls to keep ’way from
you. You gotta rock in there,” thumping Emil on the ribs.

When they reached the terrace at the side of the church, Amédée, who
was excited by his success on the ball-grounds, challenged Emil to a
jumping-match, though he knew he would be beaten. They belted
themselves up, and Raoul Marcel, the choir tenor and Father Duchesne’s
pet, and Jean Bordelau, held the string over which they vaulted. All
the French boys stood round, cheering and humping themselves up when
Emil or Amédée went over the wire, as if they were helping in the lift.
Emil stopped at five-feet-five, declaring that he would spoil his
appetite for supper if he jumped any more.

Angélique, Amédée’s pretty bride, as blonde and fair as her name, who
had come out to watch the match, tossed her head at Emil and said:—

“’Médée could jump much higher than you if he were as tall. And anyhow,
he is much more graceful. He goes over like a bird, and you have to
hump yourself all up.”

“Oh, I do, do I?” Emil caught her and kissed her saucy mouth squarely,
while she laughed and struggled and called, “’Médée! ’Médée!”

“There, you see your ’Médée isn’t even big enough to get you away from
me. I could run away with you right now and he could only sit down and
cry about it. I’ll show you whether I have to hump myself!” Laughing
and panting, he picked Angélique up in his arms and began running about
the rectangle with her. Not until he saw Marie Shabata’s tiger eyes
flashing from the gloom of the basement doorway did he hand the
disheveled bride over to her husband. “There, go to your graceful; I
haven’t the heart to take you away from him.”

Angélique clung to her husband and made faces at Emil over the white
shoulder of Amédée’s ball-shirt. Emil was greatly amused at her air of
proprietorship and at Amédée’s shameless submission to it. He was
delighted with his friend’s good fortune. He liked to see and to think
about Amédée’s sunny, natural, happy love.

He and Amédée had ridden and wrestled and larked together since they
were lads of twelve. On Sundays and holidays they were always arm in
arm. It seemed strange that now he should have to hide the thing that
Amédée was so proud of, that the feeling which gave one of them such
happiness should bring the other such despair. It was like that when
Alexandra tested her seed-corn in the spring, he mused. From two ears
that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into
the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from
the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.




X


While Emil and Carl were amusing themselves at the fair, Alexandra was
at home, busy with her account-books, which had been neglected of late.
She was almost through with her figures when she heard a cart drive up
to the gate, and looking out of the window she saw her two older
brothers. They had seemed to avoid her ever since Carl Linstrum’s
arrival, four weeks ago that day, and she hurried to the door to
welcome them. She saw at once that they had come with some very
definite purpose. They followed her stiffly into the sitting-room.
Oscar sat down, but Lou walked over to the window and remained
standing, his hands behind him.

“You are by yourself?” he asked, looking toward the doorway into the
parlor.

“Yes. Carl and Emil went up to the Catholic fair.”

For a few moments neither of the men spoke.

Then Lou came out sharply. “How soon does he intend to go away from
here?”

“I don’t know, Lou. Not for some time, I hope.” Alexandra spoke in an
even, quiet tone that often exasperated her brothers. They felt that
she was trying to be superior with them.

Oscar spoke up grimly. “We thought we ought to tell you that people
have begun to talk,” he said meaningly.

Alexandra looked at him. “What about?”

Oscar met her eyes blankly. “About you, keeping him here so long. It
looks bad for him to be hanging on to a woman this way. People think
you’re getting taken in.”

Alexandra shut her account-book firmly. “Boys,” she said seriously,
“don’t let’s go on with this. We won’t come out anywhere. I can’t take
advice on such a matter. I know you mean well, but you must not feel
responsible for me in things of this sort. If we go on with this talk
it will only make hard feeling.”

Lou whipped about from the window. “You ought to think a little about
your family. You’re making us all ridiculous.”

“How am I?”

“People are beginning to say you want to marry the fellow.”

“Well, and what is ridiculous about that?”

Lou and Oscar exchanged outraged looks. “Alexandra! Can’t you see he’s
just a tramp and he’s after your money? He wants to be taken care of,
he does!”

“Well, suppose I want to take care of him? Whose business is it but my
own?”

“Don’t you know he’d get hold of your property?”

“He’d get hold of what I wished to give him, certainly.”

Oscar sat up suddenly and Lou clutched at his bristly hair.

“Give him?” Lou shouted. “Our property, our homestead?”

“I don’t know about the homestead,” said Alexandra quietly. “I know you
and Oscar have always expected that it would be left to your children,
and I’m not sure but what you’re right. But I’ll do exactly as I please
with the rest of my land, boys.”

“The rest of your land!” cried Lou, growing more excited every minute.
“Didn’t all the land come out of the homestead? It was bought with
money borrowed on the homestead, and Oscar and me worked ourselves to
the bone paying interest on it.”

“Yes, you paid the interest. But when you married we made a division of
the land, and you were satisfied. I’ve made more on my farms since I’ve
been alone than when we all worked together.”

“Everything you’ve made has come out of the original land that us boys
worked for, hasn’t it? The farms and all that comes out of them belongs
to us as a family.”

Alexandra waved her hand impatiently. “Come now, Lou. Stick to the
facts. You are talking nonsense. Go to the county clerk and ask him who
owns my land, and whether my titles are good.”

Lou turned to his brother. “This is what comes of letting a woman
meddle in business,” he said bitterly. “We ought to have taken things
in our own hands years ago. But she liked to run things, and we humored
her. We thought you had good sense, Alexandra. We never thought you’d
do anything foolish.”

Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles. “Listen,
Lou. Don’t talk wild. You say you ought to have taken things into your
own hands years ago. I suppose you mean before you left home. But how
could you take hold of what wasn’t there? I’ve got most of what I have
now since we divided the property; I’ve built it up myself, and it has
nothing to do with you.”

Oscar spoke up solemnly. “The property of a family really belongs to
the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything goes
wrong, it’s the men that are held responsible.”

“Yes, of course,” Lou broke in. “Everybody knows that. Oscar and me
have always been easy-going and we’ve never made any fuss. We were
willing you should hold the land and have the good of it, but you got
no right to part with any of it. We worked in the fields to pay for the
first land you bought, and whatever’s come out of it has got to be kept
in the family.”

Oscar reinforced his brother, his mind fixed on the one point he could
see. “The property of a family belongs to the men of the family,
because they are held responsible, and because they do the work.”

Alexandra looked from one to the other, her eyes full of indignation.
She had been impatient before, but now she was beginning to feel angry.
“And what about my work?” she asked in an unsteady voice.

Lou looked at the carpet. “Oh, now, Alexandra, you always took it
pretty easy! Of course we wanted you to. You liked to manage round, and
we always humored you. We realize you were a great deal of help to us.
There’s no woman anywhere around that knows as much about business as
you do, and we’ve always been proud of that, and thought you were
pretty smart. But, of course, the real work always fell on us. Good
advice is all right, but it don’t get the weeds out of the corn.”

“Maybe not, but it sometimes puts in the crop, and it sometimes keeps
the fields for corn to grow in,” said Alexandra dryly. “Why, Lou, I can
remember when you and Oscar wanted to sell this homestead and all the
improvements to old preacher Ericson for two thousand dollars. If I’d
consented, you’d have gone down to the river and scraped along on poor
farms for the rest of your lives. When I put in our first field of
alfalfa you both opposed me, just because I first heard about it from a
young man who had been to the University. You said I was being taken in
then, and all the neighbors said so. You know as well as I do that
alfalfa has been the salvation of this country. You all laughed at me
when I said our land here was about ready for wheat, and I had to raise
three big wheat crops before the neighbors quit putting all their land
in corn. Why, I remember you cried, Lou, when we put in the first big
wheat-planting, and said everybody was laughing at us.”

Lou turned to Oscar. “That’s the woman of it; if she tells you to put
in a crop, she thinks she’s put it in. It makes women conceited to
meddle in business. I shouldn’t think you’d want to remind us how hard
you were on us, Alexandra, after the way you baby Emil.”

“Hard on you? I never meant to be hard. Conditions were hard. Maybe I
would never have been very soft, anyhow; but I certainly didn’t choose
to be the kind of girl I was. If you take even a vine and cut it back
again and again, it grows hard, like a tree.”

Lou felt that they were wandering from the point, and that in
digression Alexandra might unnerve him. He wiped his forehead with a
jerk of his handkerchief. “We never doubted you, Alexandra. We never
questioned anything you did. You’ve always had your own way. But you
can’t expect us to sit like stumps and see you done out of the property
by any loafer who happens along, and making yourself ridiculous into
the bargain.”

Oscar rose. “Yes,” he broke in, “everybody’s laughing to see you get
took in; at your age, too. Everybody knows he’s nearly five years
younger than you, and is after your money. Why, Alexandra, you are
forty years old!”

“All that doesn’t concern anybody but Carl and me. Go to town and ask
your lawyers what you can do to restrain me from disposing of my own
property. And I advise you to do what they tell you; for the authority
you can exert by law is the only influence you will ever have over me
again.” Alexandra rose. “I think I would rather not have lived to find
out what I have to-day,” she said quietly, closing her desk.

Lou and Oscar looked at each other questioningly. There seemed to be
nothing to do but to go, and they walked out.

“You can’t do business with women,” Oscar said heavily as he clambered
into the cart. “But anyhow, we’ve had our say, at last.”

Lou scratched his head. “Talk of that kind might come too high, you
know; but she’s apt to be sensible. You hadn’t ought to said that about
her age, though, Oscar. I’m afraid that hurt her feelings; and the
worst thing we can do is to make her sore at us. She’d marry him out of
contrariness.”

“I only meant,” said Oscar, “that she is old enough to know better, and
she is. If she was going to marry, she ought to done it long ago, and
not go making a fool of herself now.”

Lou looked anxious, nevertheless. “Of course,” he reflected hopefully
and inconsistently, “Alexandra ain’t much like other women-folks. Maybe
it won’t make her sore. Maybe she’d as soon be forty as not!”




XI


Emil came home at about half-past seven o’clock that evening. Old Ivar
met him at the windmill and took his horse, and the young man went
directly into the house. He called to his sister and she answered from
her bedroom, behind the sitting-room, saying that she was lying down.

Emil went to her door.

“Can I see you for a minute?” he asked. “I want to talk to you about
something before Carl comes.”

Alexandra rose quickly and came to the door. “Where is Carl?”

“Lou and Oscar met us and said they wanted to talk to him, so he rode
over to Oscar’s with them. Are you coming out?” Emil asked impatiently.

“Yes, sit down. I’ll be dressed in a moment.”

Alexandra closed her door, and Emil sank down on the old slat lounge
and sat with his head in his hands. When his sister came out, he looked
up, not knowing whether the interval had been short or long, and he was
surprised to see that the room had grown quite dark. That was just as
well; it would be easier to talk if he were not under the gaze of those
clear, deliberate eyes, that saw so far in some directions and were so
blind in others. Alexandra, too, was glad of the dusk. Her face was
swollen from crying.

Emil started up and then sat down again. “Alexandra,” he said slowly,
in his deep young baritone, “I don’t want to go away to law school this
fall. Let me put it off another year. I want to take a year off and
look around. It’s awfully easy to rush into a profession you don’t
really like, and awfully hard to get out of it. Linstrum and I have
been talking about that.”

“Very well, Emil. Only don’t go off looking for land.” She came up and
put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve been wishing you could stay with me
this winter.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do, Alexandra. I’m restless. I want
to go to a new place. I want to go down to the City of Mexico to join
one of the University fellows who’s at the head of an electrical plant.
He wrote me he could give me a little job, enough to pay my way, and I
could look around and see what I want to do. I want to go as soon as
harvest is over. I guess Lou and Oscar will be sore about it.”

“I suppose they will.” Alexandra sat down on the lounge beside him.
“They are very angry with me, Emil. We have had a quarrel. They will
not come here again.”

Emil scarcely heard what she was saying; he did not notice the sadness
of her tone. He was thinking about the reckless life he meant to live
in Mexico.

“What about?” he asked absently.

“About Carl Linstrum. They are afraid I am going to marry him, and that
some of my property will get away from them.”

Emil shrugged his shoulders. “What nonsense!” he murmured. “Just like
them.”

Alexandra drew back. “Why nonsense, Emil?”

“Why, you’ve never thought of such a thing, have you? They always have
to have something to fuss about.”

“Emil,” said his sister slowly, “you ought not to take things for
granted. Do you agree with them that I have no right to change my way
of living?”

Emil looked at the outline of his sister’s head in the dim light. They
were sitting close together and he somehow felt that she could hear his
thoughts. He was silent for a moment, and then said in an embarrassed
tone, “Why, no, certainly not. You ought to do whatever you want to.
I’ll always back you.”

“But it would seem a little bit ridiculous to you if I married Carl?”

Emil fidgeted. The issue seemed to him too far-fetched to warrant
discussion. “Why, no. I should be surprised if you wanted to. I can’t
see exactly why. But that’s none of my business. You ought to do as you
please. Certainly you ought not to pay any attention to what the boys
say.”

Alexandra sighed. “I had hoped you might understand, a little, why I do
want to. But I suppose that’s too much to expect. I’ve had a pretty
lonely life, Emil. Besides Marie, Carl is the only friend I have ever
had.”

Emil was awake now; a name in her last sentence roused him. He put out
his hand and took his sister’s awkwardly. “You ought to do just as you
wish, and I think Carl’s a fine fellow. He and I would always get on. I
don’t believe any of the things the boys say about him, honest I don’t.
They are suspicious of him because he’s intelligent. You know their
way. They’ve been sore at me ever since you let me go away to college.
They’re always trying to catch me up. If I were you, I wouldn’t pay any
attention to them. There’s nothing to get upset about. Carl’s a
sensible fellow. He won’t mind them.”

“I don’t know. If they talk to him the way they did to me, I think
he’ll go away.”

Emil grew more and more uneasy. “Think so? Well, Marie said it would
serve us all right if you walked off with him.”

“Did she? Bless her little heart! SHE would.” Alexandra’s voice broke.

Emil began unlacing his leggings. “Why don’t you talk to her about it?
There’s Carl, I hear his horse. I guess I’ll go upstairs and get my
boots off. No, I don’t want any supper. We had supper at five o’clock,
at the fair.”

Emil was glad to escape and get to his own room. He was a little
ashamed for his sister, though he had tried not to show it. He felt
that there was something indecorous in her proposal, and she did seem
to him somewhat ridiculous. There was trouble enough in the world, he
reflected, as he threw himself upon his bed, without people who were
forty years old imagining they wanted to get married. In the darkness
and silence Emil was not likely to think long about Alexandra. Every
image slipped away but one. He had seen Marie in the crowd that
afternoon. She sold candy at the fair. _Why_ had she ever run away with
Frank Shabata, and how could she go on laughing and working and taking
an interest in things? Why did she like so many people, and why had she
seemed pleased when all the French and Bohemian boys, and the priest
himself, crowded round her candy stand? Why did she care about any one
but him? Why could he never, never find the thing he looked for in her
playful, affectionate eyes?

Then he fell to imagining that he looked once more and found it there,
and what it would be like if she loved him,—she who, as Alexandra said,
could give her whole heart. In that dream he could lie for hours, as if
in a trance. His spirit went out of his body and crossed the fields to
Marie Shabata.

At the University dances the girls had often looked wonderingly at the
tall young Swede with the fine head, leaning against the wall and
frowning, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on the ceiling or the floor.
All the girls were a little afraid of him. He was
distinguished-looking, and not the jollying kind. They felt that he was
too intense and preoccupied. There was something queer about him.
Emil’s fraternity rather prided itself upon its dances, and sometimes
he did his duty and danced every dance. But whether he was on the floor
or brooding in a corner, he was always thinking about Marie Shabata.
For two years the storm had been gathering in him.




XII


Carl came into the sitting-room while Alexandra was lighting the lamp.
She looked up at him as she adjusted the shade. His sharp shoulders
stooped as if he were very tired, his face was pale, and there were
bluish shadows under his dark eyes. His anger had burned itself out and
left him sick and disgusted.

“You have seen Lou and Oscar?” Alexandra asked.

“Yes.” His eyes avoided hers.

Alexandra took a deep breath. “And now you are going away. I thought
so.”

Carl threw himself into a chair and pushed the dark lock back from his
forehead with his white, nervous hand. “What a hopeless position you
are in, Alexandra!” he exclaimed feverishly. “It is your fate to be
always surrounded by little men. And I am no better than the rest. I am
too little to face the criticism of even such men as Lou and Oscar.
Yes, I am going away; to-morrow. I cannot even ask you to give me a
promise until I have something to offer you. I thought, perhaps, I
could do that; but I find I can’t.”

“What good comes of offering people things they don’t need?” Alexandra
asked sadly. “I don’t need money. But I have needed you for a great
many years. I wonder why I have been permitted to prosper, if it is
only to take my friends away from me.”

“I don’t deceive myself,” Carl said frankly. “I know that I am going
away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have
something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should
have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only
in the middle class.”

Alexandra sighed. “I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not
come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have
to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always
easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours, if you care enough
about me to take it.”

Carl rose and looked up at the picture of John Bergson. “But I can’t,
my dear, I can’t! I will go North at once. Instead of idling about in
California all winter, I shall be getting my bearings up there. I won’t
waste another week. Be patient with me, Alexandra. Give me a year!”

“As you will,” said Alexandra wearily. “All at once, in a single day, I
lose everything; and I do not know why. Emil, too, is going away.” Carl
was still studying John Bergson’s face and Alexandra’s eyes followed
his. “Yes,” she said, “if he could have seen all that would come of the
task he gave me, he would have been sorry. I hope he does not see me
now. I hope that he is among the old people of his blood and country,
and that tidings do not reach him from the New World.”




PART III.
Winter Memories




I


Winter has settled down over the Divide again; the season in which
Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the
fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone.
The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated.
The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one
frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find
frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry
waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now;
the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray.
The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare
earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard
that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed
fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its
rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead
landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.

Alexandra has settled back into her old routine. There are weekly
letters from Emil. Lou and Oscar she has not seen since Carl went away.
To avoid awkward encounters in the presence of curious spectators, she
has stopped going to the Norwegian Church and drives up to the Reform
Church at Hanover, or goes with Marie Shabata to the Catholic Church,
locally known as “the French Church.” She has not told Marie about
Carl, or her differences with her brothers. She was never very
communicative about her own affairs, and when she came to the point, an
instinct told her that about such things she and Marie would not
understand one another.

Old Mrs. Lee had been afraid that family misunderstandings might
deprive her of her yearly visit to Alexandra. But on the first day of
December Alexandra telephoned Annie that to-morrow she would send Ivar
over for her mother, and the next day the old lady arrived with her
bundles. For twelve years Mrs. Lee had always entered Alexandra’s
sitting-room with the same exclamation, “Now we be yust-a like old
times!” She enjoyed the liberty Alexandra gave her, and hearing her own
language about her all day long. Here she could wear her nightcap and
sleep with all her windows shut, listen to Ivar reading the Bible, and
here she could run about among the stables in a pair of Emil’s old
boots. Though she was bent almost double, she was as spry as a gopher.
Her face was as brown as if it had been varnished, and as full of
wrinkles as a washerwoman’s hands. She had three jolly old teeth left
in the front of her mouth, and when she grinned she looked very
knowing, as if when you found out how to take it, life wasn’t half bad.
While she and Alexandra patched and pieced and quilted, she talked
incessantly about stories she read in a Swedish family paper, telling
the plots in great detail; or about her life on a dairy farm in
Gottland when she was a girl. Sometimes she forgot which were the
printed stories and which were the real stories, it all seemed so far
away. She loved to take a little brandy, with hot water and sugar,
before she went to bed, and Alexandra always had it ready for her. “It
sends good dreams,” she would say with a twinkle in her eye.

When Mrs. Lee had been with Alexandra for a week, Marie Shabata
telephoned one morning to say that Frank had gone to town for the day,
and she would like them to come over for coffee in the afternoon. Mrs.
Lee hurried to wash out and iron her new cross-stitched apron, which
she had finished only the night before; a checked gingham apron worked
with a design ten inches broad across the bottom; a hunting scene, with
fir trees and a stag and dogs and huntsmen. Mrs. Lee was firm with
herself at dinner, and refused a second helping of apple dumplings. “I
ta-ank I save up,” she said with a giggle.

At two o’clock in the afternoon Alexandra’s cart drove up to the
Shabatas’ gate, and Marie saw Mrs. Lee’s red shawl come bobbing up the
path. She ran to the door and pulled the old woman into the house with
a hug, helping her to take off her wraps while Alexandra blanketed the
horse outside. Mrs. Lee had put on her best black satine dress—she
abominated woolen stuffs, even in winter—and a crocheted collar,
fastened with a big pale gold pin, containing faded daguerreotypes of
her father and mother. She had not worn her apron for fear of rumpling
it, and now she shook it out and tied it round her waist with a
conscious air. Marie drew back and threw up her hands, exclaiming, “Oh,
what a beauty! I’ve never seen this one before, have I, Mrs. Lee?”

The old woman giggled and ducked her head. “No, yust las’ night I
ma-ake. See dis tread; verra strong, no wa-ash out, no fade. My sister
send from Sveden. I yust-a ta-ank you like dis.”

Marie ran to the door again. “Come in, Alexandra. I have been looking
at Mrs. Lee’s apron. Do stop on your way home and show it to Mrs.
Hiller. She’s crazy about cross-stitch.”

While Alexandra removed her hat and veil, Mrs. Lee went out to the
kitchen and settled herself in a wooden rocking-chair by the stove,
looking with great interest at the table, set for three, with a white
cloth, and a pot of pink geraniums in the middle. “My, a-an’t you gotta
fine plants; such-a much flower. How you keep from freeze?”

She pointed to the window-shelves, full of blooming fuchsias and
geraniums.

“I keep the fire all night, Mrs. Lee, and when it’s very cold I put
them all on the table, in the middle of the room. Other nights I only
put newspapers behind them. Frank laughs at me for fussing, but when
they don’t bloom he says, ‘What’s the matter with the darned
things?’—What do you hear from Carl, Alexandra?”

“He got to Dawson before the river froze, and now I suppose I won’t
hear any more until spring. Before he left California he sent me a box
of orange flowers, but they didn’t keep very well. I have brought a
bunch of Emil’s letters for you.” Alexandra came out from the
sitting-room and pinched Marie’s cheek playfully. “You don’t look as if
the weather ever froze you up. Never have colds, do you? That’s a good
girl. She had dark red cheeks like this when she was a little girl,
Mrs. Lee. She looked like some queer foreign kind of a doll. I’ve never
forgot the first time I saw you in Mieklejohn’s store, Marie, the time
father was lying sick. Carl and I were talking about that before he
went away.”

“I remember, and Emil had his kitten along. When are you going to send
Emil’s Christmas box?”

“It ought to have gone before this. I’ll have to send it by mail now,
to get it there in time.”

Marie pulled a dark purple silk necktie from her workbasket. “I knit
this for him. It’s a good color, don’t you think? Will you please put
it in with your things and tell him it’s from me, to wear when he goes
serenading.”

Alexandra laughed. “I don’t believe he goes serenading much. He says in
one letter that the Mexican ladies are said to be very beautiful, but
that don’t seem to me very warm praise.”

Marie tossed her head. “Emil can’t fool me. If he’s bought a guitar, he
goes serenading. Who wouldn’t, with all those Spanish girls dropping
flowers down from their windows! I’d sing to them every night, wouldn’t
you, Mrs. Lee?”

The old lady chuckled. Her eyes lit up as Marie bent down and opened
the oven door. A delicious hot fragrance blew out into the tidy
kitchen. “My, somet’ing smell good!” She turned to Alexandra with a
wink, her three yellow teeth making a brave show, “I ta-ank dat stop my
yaw from ache no more!” she said contentedly.

Marie took out a pan of delicate little rolls, stuffed with stewed
apricots, and began to dust them over with powdered sugar. “I hope
you’ll like these, Mrs. Lee; Alexandra does. The Bohemians always like
them with their coffee. But if you don’t, I have a coffee-cake with
nuts and poppy seeds. Alexandra, will you get the cream jug? I put it
in the window to keep cool.”

“The Bohemians,” said Alexandra, as they drew up to the table,
“certainly know how to make more kinds of bread than any other people
in the world. Old Mrs. Hiller told me once at the church supper that
she could make seven kinds of fancy bread, but Marie could make a
dozen.”

Mrs. Lee held up one of the apricot rolls between her brown thumb and
forefinger and weighed it critically. “Yust like-a fedders,” she
pronounced with satisfaction. “My, a-an’t dis nice!” she exclaimed as
she stirred her coffee. “I yust ta-ake a liddle yelly now, too, I
ta-ank.”

Alexandra and Marie laughed at her forehandedness, and fell to talking
of their own affairs. “I was afraid you had a cold when I talked to you
over the telephone the other night, Marie. What was the matter, had you
been crying?”

“Maybe I had,” Marie smiled guiltily. “Frank was out late that night.
Don’t you get lonely sometimes in the winter, when everybody has gone
away?”

“I thought it was something like that. If I hadn’t had company, I’d
have run over to see for myself. If you get down-hearted, what will
become of the rest of us?” Alexandra asked.

“I don’t, very often. There’s Mrs. Lee without any coffee!”

Later, when Mrs. Lee declared that her powers were spent, Marie and
Alexandra went upstairs to look for some crochet patterns the old lady
wanted to borrow. “Better put on your coat, Alexandra. It’s cold up
there, and I have no idea where those patterns are. I may have to look
through my old trunks.” Marie caught up a shawl and opened the stair
door, running up the steps ahead of her guest. “While I go through the
bureau drawers, you might look in those hat-boxes on the closet-shelf,
over where Frank’s clothes hang. There are a lot of odds and ends in
them.”

She began tossing over the contents of the drawers, and Alexandra went
into the clothes-closet. Presently she came back, holding a slender
elastic yellow stick in her hand.

“What in the world is this, Marie? You don’t mean to tell me Frank ever
carried such a thing?”

Marie blinked at it with astonishment and sat down on the floor. “Where
did you find it? I didn’t know he had kept it. I haven’t seen it for
years.”

“It really is a cane, then?”

“Yes. One he brought from the old country. He used to carry it when I
first knew him. Isn’t it foolish? Poor Frank!”

Alexandra twirled the stick in her fingers and laughed. “He must have
looked funny!”

Marie was thoughtful. “No, he didn’t, really. It didn’t seem out of
place. He used to be awfully gay like that when he was a young man. I
guess people always get what’s hardest for them, Alexandra.” Marie
gathered the shawl closer about her and still looked hard at the cane.
“Frank would be all right in the right place,” she said reflectively.
“He ought to have a different kind of wife, for one thing. Do you know,
Alexandra, I could pick out exactly the right sort of woman for
Frank—now. The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can
find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort
you are not. Then what are you going to do about it?” she asked
candidly.

Alexandra confessed she didn’t know. “However,” she added, “it seems to
me that you get along with Frank about as well as any woman I’ve ever
seen or heard of could.”

Marie shook her head, pursing her lips and blowing her warm breath
softly out into the frosty air. “No; I was spoiled at home. I like my
own way, and I have a quick tongue. When Frank brags, I say sharp
things, and he never forgets. He goes over and over it in his mind; I
can feel him. Then I’m too giddy. Frank’s wife ought to be timid, and
she ought not to care about another living thing in the world but just
Frank! I didn’t, when I married him, but I suppose I was too young to
stay like that.” Marie sighed.

Alexandra had never heard Marie speak so frankly about her husband
before, and she felt that it was wiser not to encourage her. No good,
she reasoned, ever came from talking about such things, and while Marie
was thinking aloud, Alexandra had been steadily searching the
hat-boxes. “Aren’t these the patterns, Maria?”

Maria sprang up from the floor. “Sure enough, we were looking for
patterns, weren’t we? I’d forgot about everything but Frank’s other
wife. I’ll put that away.”

She poked the cane behind Frank’s Sunday clothes, and though she
laughed, Alexandra saw there were tears in her eyes.

When they went back to the kitchen, the snow had begun to fall, and
Marie’s visitors thought they must be getting home. She went out to the
cart with them, and tucked the robes about old Mrs. Lee while Alexandra
took the blanket off her horse. As they drove away, Marie turned and
went slowly back to the house. She took up the package of letters
Alexandra had brought, but she did not read them. She turned them over
and looked at the foreign stamps, and then sat watching the flying snow
while the dusk deepened in the kitchen and the stove sent out a red
glow.

Marie knew perfectly well that Emil’s letters were written more for her
than for Alexandra. They were not the sort of letters that a young man
writes to his sister. They were both more personal and more
painstaking; full of descriptions of the gay life in the old Mexican
capital in the days when the strong hand of Porfirio Diaz was still
strong. He told about bull-fights and cock-fights, churches and
_fiestas_, the flower-markets and the fountains, the music and dancing,
the people of all nations he met in the Italian restaurants on San
Francisco Street. In short, they were the kind of letters a young man
writes to a woman when he wishes himself and his life to seem
interesting to her, when he wishes to enlist her imagination in his
behalf.

Marie, when she was alone or when she sat sewing in the evening, often
thought about what it must be like down there where Emil was; where
there were flowers and street bands everywhere, and carriages rattling
up and down, and where there was a little blind boot-black in front of
the cathedral who could play any tune you asked for by dropping the
lids of blacking-boxes on the stone steps. When everything is done and
over for one at twenty-three, it is pleasant to let the mind wander
forth and follow a young adventurer who has life before him. “And if it
had not been for me,” she thought, “Frank might still be free like
that, and having a good time making people admire him. Poor Frank,
getting married wasn’t very good for him either. I’m afraid I do set
people against him, as he says. I seem, somehow, to give him away all
the time. Perhaps he would try to be agreeable to people again, if I
were not around. It seems as if I always make him just as bad as he can
be.”

Later in the winter, Alexandra looked back upon that afternoon as the
last satisfactory visit she had had with Marie. After that day the
younger woman seemed to shrink more and more into herself. When she was
with Alexandra she was not spontaneous and frank as she used to be. She
seemed to be brooding over something, and holding something back. The
weather had a good deal to do with their seeing less of each other than
usual. There had not been such snowstorms in twenty years, and the path
across the fields was drifted deep from Christmas until March. When the
two neighbors went to see each other, they had to go round by the
wagon-road, which was twice as far. They telephoned each other almost
every night, though in January there was a stretch of three weeks when
the wires were down, and when the postman did not come at all.

Marie often ran in to see her nearest neighbor, old Mrs. Hiller, who
was crippled with rheumatism and had only her son, the lame shoemaker,
to take care of her; and she went to the French Church, whatever the
weather. She was a sincerely devout girl. She prayed for herself and
for Frank, and for Emil, among the temptations of that gay, corrupt old
city. She found more comfort in the Church that winter than ever
before. It seemed to come closer to her, and to fill an emptiness that
ached in her heart. She tried to be patient with her husband. He and
his hired man usually played California Jack in the evening. Marie sat
sewing or crocheting and tried to take a friendly interest in the game,
but she was always thinking about the wide fields outside, where the
snow was drifting over the fences; and about the orchard, where the
snow was falling and packing, crust over crust. When she went out into
the dark kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by
the window and look out at the white fields, or watch the currents of
snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of all
the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they
wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under
the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was
still safe, warm as the blood in one’s heart; and the spring would come
again! Oh, it would come again!




II


If Alexandra had had much imagination she might have guessed what was
going on in Marie’s mind, and she would have seen long before what was
going on in Emil’s. But that, as Emil himself had more than once
reflected, was Alexandra’s blind side, and her life had not been of the
kind to sharpen her vision. Her training had all been toward the end of
making her proficient in what she had undertaken to do. Her personal
life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious
existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here
and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on
under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was there,
and it was because she had so much personality to put into her
enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them so completely, that
her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors.

There were certain days in her life, outwardly uneventful, which
Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy; days when she was close to
the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her own body
the joyous germination in the soil. There were days, too, which she and
Emil had spent together, upon which she loved to look back. There had
been such a day when they were down on the river in the dry year,
looking over the land. They had made an early start one morning and had
driven a long way before noon. When Emil said he was hungry, they drew
back from the road, gave Brigham his oats among the bushes, and climbed
up to the top of a grassy bluff to eat their lunch under the shade of
some little elm trees. The river was clear there, and s

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