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.”