Settlers of the Marsh Read Online Free PDF Page A

protective instincts, the impulses of the man in him.
    â€œMrs. Vogel,” Mrs. Lund had said in introducing her, “the gay widow of the settlement.”
    Mrs. Vogel’s face had lighted up. She had shuddered in mock seriousness. “Widow sounds so funereal,” she had said and stepped back. But the look from her dancing eyes had sent a thrill through Niels.
    The next moment he found himself involved in a conversation with a short, slight man of thirty-five or so who spoke a fluent English. It went, so far, quite beyond Niels’ understanding.
    Nelson joined the group.
    â€œWhere have you been?” Mrs. Lund veered about.
    â€œPut the horses in,” he replied.
    â€œWell,” she exclaimed, “what do you know about that?”
    And at once Nelson was surrounded by a laughing, hand-shaking crowd of men.
    On its outskirts lingered Olga Lund, a transfixed smile on her face and a red mark, as from a lover’s kiss, on her throat.
    Bobby had run off to join the children.
    â€œWell,” Mrs. Lund invited. “Come in, folks.”
    And she led the way into the house.
    â€œYooh-hooh,” a yodling shout rang out as soon as she opened the door.
    And Niels who happened to be next behind her saw three men sitting at an oil-cloth-covered table to the left of the large, low room. One of them was the yodler, a tall, slim man with a merry face and a black moustache, unmistakably German. The three were playing at cards.
    â€œHello, Nelson,” the same voice shouted. “Back again?”
    And Nelson, pushing through the crowd, shook hands, long and violently, both men laughing the while. There was ostentation and exaggeration about their meeting.
    The card-player raised a bottle. “Here, have a schnapps, boy, on your happy return.”
    For a moment there was a bedlam of noise, shouts, and laughter. Then, when the confusion subsided, Mrs. Lund who had dropped her wraps pushed through, with a view to the proprieties, and introduced Niels.
    But a few minutes later he found himself once more on the outskirts of the crowd, partly on account of his inability to speak either English or German, partly because it was his nature to be alone, even in a crowd.
    He looked about, appraisingly.
    The house, built of lumber, was unfinished inside: the raw joists showed in the walls. The floor was unpainted, splintered up to an alarming degree, its cracks filled with earth and dirt.
    The furnishings consisted of oddly assembled pieces: upholstered easy-chairs, worn down as it were to the bones; and threadbare and ragged hangings. In the south-west corner of the large room stood a plank-table, home-made, and strewn with papers: the post-office.
    Niels could not help contrasting the shabby, second-hand, defunct gentility of it all, and the squalour in which it was left, with the trim and spotless but bare austerity of Amundsen’s house. It struck him how little there was of comfort in that other home: Ellen’s home! And yet, how sincere it was in its severe utility as compared with this! Amundsen’s house represented a future; this one, the past: Amundsen’s growth; this one, decay. Every piece of the furniture here, with the exception of the post-office table and the oil-cloth, came from the home of some rich man; but before it had reached this room, it had slowly and roughly descended the social ladder till at last, at the tenth or twelfth hand, it had reluctantly and incongruously landed here as on a junk pile.
    And suddenly the problem of the woman’s and the girl’s clothes was solved as well: they were second-hand.
    In his mind’s eye Niels placed Ellen and Olga side by side: easy-going sloth and what was almost asceticism.
    He felt immensely depressed; for a moment he felt he must leave the house never to return.
    A commotion in the crowd roused him at last from his contemplation. The callers were getting ready to leave. Across the enormous slough the sun was