you know what I can stand? You wouldn't wait to find out."
Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would
ever come back--" she said defiantly.
"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went
away. However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back
to be a skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother mill be
here with a search warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced
her, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought
to be glad to see me, if you want something to happen. I'm
something, even without a will. We can have a little fun, can't
we? I think we can!"
She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their
eyes sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when
she had put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.
"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I
didn't know I was so proud of her. A regular pile driver. How
about little pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square
thing by those children?"
Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks
like the square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced
drolly at Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On
Sundays they all get together here and figure. He lets Peter and
Anders put in big bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays
them out of the estate. They are always having what they call
accountings. Olaf gets something out of it, too. I don't know
just how they do it, but it's entirely a family matter, as they
say. And when the Ericsons say that--" Clara lifted her eyebrows.
Just then the angry honk-honk of an approaching motor
sounded from down the road. Their eyes met and they began to
laugh. They laughed as children do when they can not contain
themselves, and can not explain the cause of their mirth to grown
people, but share it perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat
down at the piano after he was gone, she felt that she had laughed
away a dozen years. She practised as if the house were burning
over her head.
When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat
of the motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she
made no comment upon his truancy until she had turned her car and
was retracing her revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big
pasture. Then she remarked dryly:
"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while
you are here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men
without getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked
about before he married her."
"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.
Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem
to have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek
enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way.
He says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and
then he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks
in this district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb
you can always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."
Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him
a good deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"
Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in
her own name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She
will have a good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't
marry again. But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good
as other people's money,"
Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your
prejudices carry you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a
mighty decent sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."
Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily. "Oh, I know you always stood
up for them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never
did you any good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there.
There weren't so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell
you. She knew enough to grab her chance."
Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go
there, Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took
the trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this
country for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working
yourselves to death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full
of babies and washing and flies. oh, it was all right--I understand
that; but you are young only once, and I happened to be young then.
Now, Vavrika's was always jolly. He played the violin, and I used
to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to
sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for us--herrings
and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and preserves.
Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could tell
lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
the table, now. I don't know what I'd have done when I was a kid
if it hadn't been for the Vavrikas, really."
"And all the time he was taking money that other people had
worked hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.
"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People
ought to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old
Joe."
"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."
As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place,
Mrs. Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his
way from town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his
brother, who was waiting on the porch.
Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement.
His head was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at
a distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he
could recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils,
and pale blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were
rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and
flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years
as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of
its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at
him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had
always felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding
stickiness of wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf
the most difficult of his brothers.
"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"
"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this
country better than I used to."
"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.
"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm
about ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big
head ("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading
me to slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.
/>
Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned
in a day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.
"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant
to antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing
it. "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big
success, as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious.
I won't want much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."
Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to
ask Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't
have a business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he
hadn't more pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather
trunk to show for himself, and to present himself as the only
failure in the family. He did not ask one of these questions, but
he made them all felt distinctly.
"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when
he can butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a
word. I suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife
all the time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and
Olaf looked up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing
why, like little Eric. He's another cheerful dog."
"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let
his mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I
was hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business.
If he don't do any good among strangers, he never will." This was
a long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
buggy.
Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he
thought. "Hits from behind you every time. What a whale of a
man!" He turned and went round to the kitchen, where his mother
was scolding little Eric for letting the gasoline get low.
IV
Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf
and Mrs. Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a
little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the
county, ten level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see
her father almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in
the back yard of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings
was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in
summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry
bushes under his little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils
Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three days after his
return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was
lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his half-
emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the
house, under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there
long ago. Nils rose.
"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been
gossiping all afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."
She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf
doesn't like it. I must live up to my position, you know."
"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as
you used to? He has tamed you! Who keeps up these
flower-beds?"
"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the
Bohemian papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open.
What have you two been doing?"
"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my
travels. I find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."
Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white
moth that was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I
suppose you will never tell me about all those things."
"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly.
What's the matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively
with his hat to the bushes and the green table, where the flies
were singing lazily above the empty beer glasses.
Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides,
I am going now."
"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"
Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can
leave you if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with
Norman."
Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big
Joe, six feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped
him on the shoulder. "Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer,
you hear? Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty."
Joe wagged his fingers in imitation of the flute player's position.
"My Clara, she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not
like to play at Ericson's place." He shook his yellow curls and
laughed. "Not a Goddamn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday.
You like-a fun. No forget de flute." Joe talked very rapidly and
always tumbled over his English. He seldom spoke it to his
customers, and had never learned much.
Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west of
the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie
land and the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the declining
light, he saw Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on
horseback. He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the
white, level road, under the reddening sky. When he overtook
Olaf's wife he saw that she had been crying. "What's the matter,
Clara Vavrika?" he asked kindly.
"Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there
with father. I wonder why I ever went away."
Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
"That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the
last girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What
made you do it, Clara?"
"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbours"--Clara
tossed her head. "People were beginning to wonder."
"To wonder?"
"Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to
keep them in suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out
of consideration for the neighbourhood."
Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed.
"I'd have gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the
neighbourhood be damned.'"
Clara shook her head mournfully. "You see, they have it on
you, Nils; that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning
to go off. That's what makes us get married: we can't stand the
laugh."
Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop
before. Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of
her. "In your case, there wasn't something else?"
"Something else?"
"I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody? Somebody who
didn't come back?"
Clara drew herself up. "Oh, I never thought you'd come back.
Not after I stopped writing to you, at least. That was all
ov
er, long before I married Olaf."
"It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you
could do to me was to marry Olaf?"
Clara laughed. "No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf."
Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove. "You know,
Clara Vavrika, you are never going to stick it out. You'll cut
away some day, and I've been thinking you might as well cut away
with me."
Clara threw up her chin. "Oh, you don't know me as well as
you think. I won't cut away. Sometimes, when I'm with father, I
feel like it. But I can hold out as long as the Ericsons can.
They've never got the best of me yet, and one can live, so long as
one isn't beaten. If I go back to father, it's all up with Olaf in
politics. He knows that, and he never goes much beyond
sulking. I've as much wit as the Ericsons. I'll never leave them
unless I can show them a thing or two."
"You mean unless you can come it over them?"
"Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they
are, and who has more money."
Nils whistled. "Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The
Ericsons, take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should
think the excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this
time."
"It has, I'm afraid," Clara admitted mournfully.
"Then why don't you cut away? There are more amusing games
than this in the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse
me to bully a few quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've
almost decided I can get more fun for my money somewhere else."
Clara took in her breath sharply. "Ah, you have got the other
will! That was why you came home!"
"No, it wasn't. I came home to see how you were getting on
with Olaf."
Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was
far ahead of him. Nils dropped one word, "Damn!" and whipped after
her; but she leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind.
Her long riding skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun
was just sinking behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the
shadows drew across the fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely
keep in sight the dark figure on the road. When he overtook her he
caught her horse by the bridle. Norman reared, and Nils was
frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.
"Let me go, Nils Ericson!" she cried. "I hate you more than
any of them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of
you--to make me suffer in every possible way."
She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils
set his teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the
deserted road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.
They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall
into clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid
world. As he turned across the sand creek, he looked up at
the North Star and smiled, as if there were an understanding
between them. His mother scolded him for being late for supper.
V
On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt sleeves arid
carpet slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled
porcelain pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat
under the cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the, weekly
Bohemian papers. She had worn a white muslin dress under her
riding habit, and the leaves of the cherry tree threw a pattern of
sharp shadows over her skirt. The black cat was dozing in the
sunlight at her feet, and Joe's dachshund was scratching a hole
under the scarlet geraniums and dreaming of badgers. Joe was
filling his pipe for the third time since dinner, when he heard a
knocking on the fence. He broke into a loud guffaw and unlatched
the little door that led into the street. He did not call Nils by