Free Settlers of the Marsh by Frederick Philip Grove

his arms above his head, and stretched … A lassitude came over him: a desire to evade life’s issues …
    He longed to be with his mother, to feel her gnarled, calloused fingers rumpling his hair, and to hear her crooning voice droning some old tune …
    And then he seemed to see her before him: a wrinkled, shrunk little face looking anxiously into his own.
    He groaned.
    That face with the watery, sky-blue eyes did not look for that which tormented him: what tormented him, he suddenly knew, had tormented her also; she had fought it down. Her eyes looked into himself, knowingly, reproachfully. There was pity in the look of the ancient mother: pity with him who was going astray: pity with him, not because of what assailed him from without; but pity with what he was in his heart …
    It was very clear now that the torrent which swept him away, the wind that bore him whither it listed came from his innermost self. If, for what had happened to him, anybody was to blame at all, it was he …
    As if to confirm it, there arose in him the vision again of that room where he sat with a woman, his wife. But no pitter-patter of little children’s feet sounded down from above; nor were they sitting on opposite sides of a table in front of a fire-place. He was crouching on a low stool in front of the woman’s seat; and he was leaning his head on her. And when he looked up into her face, that face bore the features and the smile of the woman who had spoken to him that very night …

CHAPTER TWO
NIELS
    Fall came. Niels “worked out.”
    In many ways he was changed. Every Sunday, during the summer, he had fought a savage fight with himself. He had gone across the sandy corner of the Marsh, to the bridge; and there he was torn between two desires: the desire to see Ellen and to have her quietly, critically gaze at him out of her eyes as if she were searching for something in him; and the desire to see, and to listen to, the other woman whose look and voice sent a thrill through his body and kindled his imagination.
    Invariably he had at last returned to his homestead and his tent without seeing either …
    One of these women had seemed to demand; the other, to give. Yet one was competent; the other, helpless. One was a mate; the other, a toy …
    When, on Monday mornings, he went to work again, fencing his claim, he shook all visions off and felt a grim sort of satisfaction at having resisted both temptations. But the fight drew sharp lines into his face and made him seem older than he was. He had become reticent again as he had perforce been during his first year in the new country. He never spoke a word beyond what was exactly needed to convey his meaning …
    He had grown tremendously strong. Among the harvest crews he enjoyed, though he never fought, the reputation of being a fighter. The men who chaffed everybody else left him alone …
    His outlooked also had changed. Life seemed irrelevant; success seemed idle. All he did he did mechanically.
    H E RETURNED to his homestead bringing a team. He began to cut the trees for his buildings, clearing a little field …
    And he put the buildings up, a stable and a granary which, so far, was to serve as a house …
    Then he thought of going for the grain which was his as his share of Nelson’s crop …
    It was a cold, frosty winter morning when he set out driving his horses.
    At the bridge he saw Amundsen working on the ice of the creek.
    Belated rains which, in the bush, had fallen on frozen ground had caused an abundant run-off; enough to fill the creek which usually, at the time of freeze-up, consisted merely of a string of pools at the bottom of the wide trough. The water, however, had at once frozen over; and, since the bed of the creek proceeded in a succession of terraces downward, it had run out from under the frozen bridges of ice, thus creating large hollow vaults at the bottom of which the trickle of the stream still fell