Settlers of the Marsh (32 page)

All about reared the bush …

Even that small change spoke of years that had run down the river of time …

For a long while Niels stood and waited, trying to calm the turmoil in his heart …

He came like the prodigal son …

At last he went on.

He came to the gate, opened it, and entered the yard which was still covered by the short, clean sward of chickweed.

A dog sprang out of the barn, barked, and ran back; out again and in once more. It was a young dog, a bitch; and when Niels could look into the open door of the stable, her strange, fierce behaviour was explained; a litter of pups played there, in the drive-way …

He knocked at the door of the house.

A voice. “Come in.” Ellen's voice.

He opened, entered, stood …

Their eyes met. Niels lowered his.

What he had seen, shook him like an invisible hand; it hit him like a hammer blow at his heart. He could not bear it. He stood like one accused, like one pleading guilty …

What he had seen was this.

Behind the table—the same table at which, seventeen years ago, one winter morning, he had eaten his breakfast—on a straight-backed chair, sat a middle-aged woman, knitting, with shell-rimmed glasses on her eyes. Her features were no longer round; they were square; but her complexion was still that pure, Scandinavian white: her hair, strawyellow, streaked with grey … But now as then it was the expression that held him: hers was the face of a girl, not a woman; it was stern, to be sure; but in this sternness lay hidden the dream, the unfulfilled, uncompromising dream of a virgin child … No smile lighted her features. Her eyes looked searchingly out from behind her glasses: searchingly, questioningly, expectantly. There was nothing in them that seemed to condemn; they seemed to wonder and—what was hardest to bear—they were full of sympathy …

Then her voice, clear, high-pitched, not quite steady, “You have come …!” as if awed.

She had risen. Without looking, Niels was aware of her figure. A somewhat flat bust; wide, round hips …

When he did look, she had removed her glasses; her eyes, light-blue, were fixed on him, probingly, with infinite pity …

“Yes,” he said, falteringly, “I have come … as a brother …”

She came forward, leaving her work on the table, and moved a chair.

“I've been waiting,” she said, her voice still unsteady. “I've been waiting, Niels. I've waited twelve years …”

At that Niels broke down. He sat on the chair she had touched, his head bent, fighting for composure. And after several minutes, “Ellen …”

“I know,” she said and nodded. “No need to tell me. You've suffered …”

Silence.

He sat; she stood, very near.

“Shall we go?” she said at last, steadier now. “Behind the house, where we used to sit?”

Niels rose, took a chair, and turned to the door.

She picked her knitting up, adjusted her glasses, and followed.

When they arrived in the little natural bower formed by hazel brush and plum trees, he squatted down on the grass as he had done one day in haying time, ten, twelve years ago …

All about reared the bush. Tremulous stood the aspens, their buds just breaking, tasselled in grey and red. The plum trees, too, had the white buds of their blossoms just bursting. The air was spring-cool …

They sat in silence, a long, long while …

Once Niels tried to speak. His first attempt failed. His voice was hoarse, husky: it sounded so strange.

He tried again. “Ellen,” he said, “can you forgive?”

She looked up; he went silent.

“You came,” she said softly. “No need to speak …”

And so they sat on, now and then scanning each other, sometimes furtively, sometimes openly. They were feeling their way into a changed present; what they found in each other was the past.…

They sat for hours; till, under the westering sun, the air became chilly.

Ellen spoke. “Come,” she said. “Let's go to the house. I'll get supper.”

And once more Niels sat silent, in the corner of the room this time, behind the table, in the shadow of the wall. That shadow, too, was the shadow of the past.

Happiness almost ancient and a sense of infinite sorrow which was new were mixed in the mute abandonment to his feelings in which he sat there. The sorrow was at the lapse of time; the old, never ending sorrow that what was is no more; the happiness, at the bridging of the gulf of years, accomplished without words, without explanations …

As Ellen moved about, laying the cloth, heating water, breaking eggs—doing the small, trivial things of life, in the dusk: not with her former quick grace any longer, but with a pensive, quiet deliberation—his memory re-awoke: he saw her again as she had been in the years of their intimacy, their brotherhood: she was she, after all: the only woman …

He lulled his heart with a dream that was new: the dream of the restful perpetuation of this state of dusk, of mutual wordless comprehension, of dispassionate friendship, brotherly love …

The evening passed. Not many words were interchanged. Words were not needed.

Then, in the still early night, they went to the gate. There, separated from each other by the fence, they stood for a moment.

Ellen spoke. “Niels, I've waited for you. I knew you would come. Life will be bearable after this; it has been bearable the last ten years only through expectation … I want to say one more thing, Niels. I have been to blame towards you … Can you forgive? …”

Niels threw his hands up, a vague gesture to silence her. “Don't … Don't … If you speak that way, I cannot bear it … The wrong that was done was all on my side. I have repented …”

“Not all,” Ellen said, her voice shaking, “not chiefly, even …” And after a short silence, she added, “You will come again?”

Niels nodded silently, unseen. But in a chance motion his hand touched hers; and they knew …

O
NCE MORE
, during the week, Niels tried to drown his dreams in work. Once more he did what he had done many years ago: he worked passionately, as if his very existence depended on doing more than he could.

The smaller trees in the bluff blossomed forth: clouds of white blossoms: the leaves were hanging from the poplar twigs, weak, as if tired; young, helpless; before them the whole of summer lay, the summer of life.

In Niels' heart there was a strange struggle, a readjustment of many thoughts, feelings, anticipations.

It was a painful process: as if the parts of a broken limb were being fitted together, slowly, tentatively, by a skilled but callous physician who did not seem to succeed. It was as if some part were missing; or rather as if a superfluous part were there, preventing the perfect joint. And that superfluous part which prevented the past and the future from fitting together was a strange, new hope—a hope which it was almost painful to feel and altogether forbidden to face.

It was a mere adumbration of the thought of a possible outcome, a mere foreshadowing of a state of things that might, might come about like a miracle hardly to be visualised. It was at once suppressed with a beating of the heart, a scarlet flooding of the brain … To face it seemed equivalent to precluding it: it was such a tender, delicate thing of a hope.…

Niels felt like a convalescent who has, for many weeks and months, been forbidden to move and who, tentatively, first stirs a finger and then a hand … furtively, almost ashamed of the realisation of powers in him returning, re-awakening … He felt as if he must hold still so as not to frighten away what was preparing in him: a new health, a new strength, a new hope, a new life …

He saw the week going by, sometimes impatiently, sometimes in fear, always with pulse beating faster, with heart a-flutter, articulate thought blurred out, eye clouded.

And yet he said to himself, once, twice, a dozen times, “I am her brother … Nothing must interfere. I am her brother and nothing else …”

The days went by: the marvel of passing time.

A
NOTHER SUNDAY
, with white clouds sailing: a Sunday in June.

Ellen stands at the gate, looking along the road which is still no more than a bush trail.

They look at each other as they meet; and they blush.

Ellen swings the little gate open and turns; he follows.

Both know; and each knows that the other knows …

A new, strange thing has happened between them. Expectancy is in their eyes, emotion. They see that coming which makes their hearts beat—that which is like a memory of old times, long past. But it is not with fear that their pulse is quickened … It is with an anticipation which neither of them is unwilling to prolong; for behind that anticipation there stands a certainty …

Again, as they cross the yard in silence, going to the accustomed place—that natural bower in the fringe of the bush—imponderable things, incomprehensible waves of feeling pass to and fro between them: things too delicate for words: things somehow full of joy and disquieting though not unpleasurable expectation.

Spring breezes amble through the bush; a
meadow lark
sings on the nearby clearing; robins chase each other in the grass.

And as the silence lengthens between them, between man and woman, the consciousness arises in each that the other knows his inmost thought: that both have secretly, almost reluctantly, faced the same hope …

Colour comes and goes in their faces, imperceptible almost—not seen by either, for they avoid each other's eyes—yet divined.

And as they stand there, by the chairs which the woman has provided, a memory rises, flushing her face with a scarlet flood …

She speaks as if she would ward it off; she speaks hurriedly, like a girl, precipitately; and her words are the same as they were ten, twelve years ago. “Shall we sit here?” she says. “Let us have a walk rather, shall we?”

Niels nods. Her words are expression of his thought or his desire unformed; he does not think in articulate terms … “The bush hides,” she says. “It shelters, protects. It has served me well … But sometimes I wish I had a vista through it, out on the plains, to the horizon. I want to see wide, open, level spaces. Let us go to the slough …”

Again Niels nods. He does not trust himself to speak. His voice would seem so strange: it would break a spell. There is no barrier between them which would need to be bridged by words. They are not looking at each other: they are one.

“Wait,” says the girl. “I will get my hat.”

And she slips past him, into the house.

He idles back to the yard. The blood sings in his veins; he stands, strangely aglow.

Light-green, virgin, the bush rears all about. Aspen leaves shiver, reflecting little points of light from their still glossy surface.

“I love spring,” says the girl as she rejoins him, her hat slung by its ribbons over her arm. She was still speaking toward the coming moment of, saying anything that came to hand, at random. “I wish it were always spring …”

They pass through the gate and on to the bush road, turning north, side by side.

Again, between them, the tension grows less. What has happened between them is a beginning; it is not the end … What must come will come; there is much to follow. Why tremble? Why hasten it? To be merely alive is joy enough …

First they follow the bush road; then they leave it, threading a cattle path that branches off to the left where the road bends eastward.

Birds flutter up as they touch the bushes. They flit away, looking curiously at the intruding pair …

The cattle-path forks: the girl follows one branch, the man another. They do not flit and run: they go quietly, sedately. Still they avoid each other's eye; but each knows that the other is flushed, that his face smiles, with a strange, almost otherworldly smile. Whoever arrives first at the rejunction of the trails waits for the other: the other is coming …

Thus they reach the little school and look about. The yard is cleared; no
brambles
cover it any longer. Around the building the ground is bare, vegetation being worn down by many feet. They stand and look, their feelings half joy half sorrow …

They go to the windows of the school house and peer in. They do not laugh; but they smile at sight of benches and blackboards.

Then they go on, quietly, reminiscently. No need for words. Between them there stands the past; not as a barrier now; as a bond.

These two have been parted; and parting has opened their eyes. They have suffered; suffering has made them sweet, not made them bitter. Life has involved them in guilt; regret and repentance have led them together; they know that never again must they part. It is not passion that will unite them; what will unite them is love.…

They are older. Both feel it. Older than they were when they threaded these thickets before. They are quieter, less apt to rush at conclusions, to close in a struggle with life …

They come out to the slough and see the horizon, far in the north. They stand and look. Both think of a haystack that stood in the meadow, a few hundred yards in front. There is no hay-stack there now: it is spring, not autumn.

“Shall we sit?” says the girl.

They find a place in the grass, with a fallen tree for a back-rest.

They sit and look out, as if in resurrection of what was dead.

The man has turned. He was conscious of something in the girl by his side … of something disturbing or perhaps disturbed. He looks at her face which is held straight ahead, almost rigid. Something works in her features; and between the lashes of her lightblue eyes—white, sun-bleached lashes—there quivers a tear.

“Ellen,” he says, his voice a-tremble.

“Niels,” she replies, “it is time we make up for what we have done in the past … I have something to say to you, Niels. I should have thought of it twelve years ago; but I did not know it then. Yet I knew it the moment you had left my yard. Only I did not trust my own knowledge. Niels, I, too, am a woman. I, too, need more than mere brotherhood. The years go by; we both are passing through life. There is nothing that will remain when we are gone …”