Читать книгу Spring Came on Forever - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The week dragged for Matthias,--seven days that were weighted down with the iron of horseshoes and kettles, plowshares and skillets. The first part of it was all sunshine and mild showers, but on Thursday night a storm broke. The rains came in torrents. All day Friday they lashed and tore at the woods and the prairies. All night and all day Saturday and all that night they beat in a fierce onslaught. A part of the mill-dam went out and a weakened span of the river bridge could not stand the pounding of the flood waters. On Sunday morning the water was roaring and lashing through all the creek-beds and then spreading less turbulently over the valley, inundating all that which had been pasture lands.

Matthias made every attempt to make the trip to Amalia. All day he worked, hoping to find some means whereby he could get through. Many times he rode back and forth seeking some more narrow place where Trixie could make the crossing. But always it was too wide or too turbulent. He tried getting her into a flat boat but she reared and kicked and was completely beside herself with fear. He knew that even if he had been able to manage a boat through the roaring waters for himself the distance for walking was so great that it would have taken into the night to get there.

When he gave up the attempt, he stood for a long time on the bank as the water swept by. In a mental rage he watched a pigeon fly straight for the Big Woods community. How impotent was man. Only the birds could lift wings and soar high over the flood waters. Amalia was waiting for him over there but he was helpless in the face of nature. A winged thing could fly to its mate. Only man and the beasts must cling to the earth and crawl.

But on the next Sunday he could get through. The river was still high and the creek-beds running full, but man's ingenuity had made the river passable with a temporarily trussed-up bridge span.

He took a lantern with him for he knew he might be well into the night getting back. This was the day he was to confront Amalia's father, possibly the day he was to bring her home with him. He had a feeling that there would be a scene, ending, no doubt, in his taking Amalia away without baggage. If it came to that, he was prepared to do so.

Two weeks not to have seen her! The time had been interminable. But he was on his way at last even though the going was formidable. Sometimes Trixie sank in mud so deep she nearly floundered. Sometimes he had to dismount to clear fallen branches away from the wet timber road. Then he would mount and ride on with the air of a conqueror glorying in this journey which was to end by his claiming that which was his own,--the girl who had been his from the moment he first saw her. Occasionally he felt a bit of the winner's sympathy for his fallen adversary. But to have pledged a little sixteen-year-old girl to a mere family friend was unthinkable. Yes, if there was to be a scene, let it come to-day.

These terse thoughts went through his mind like so many pigeons going over, homing always to Amalia. He tied his horse in the dripping woods. This was the end of secretiveness,--on that he was determined.

She was not in the clearing. That would be on account of the dampness. He strode over to the sheep-shed. She might be there hiding mischievously from him. But she was not at that trysting place either. Might she be ill?

With that disquieting thought he started walking over toward the road that led to the house. Suddenly he stopped short. There was no kettle hanging there in the clearing,--only the tipped-over tripod of hickory sticks and the sodden black ashes of the last fire. Something seized him,--a premonition of impending disaster, so that he started on a lope toward the home buildings. A tow-headed young boy, the same who had directed him on his first visit, was coming toward him also with some haste. They met almost at the edge of the timber where the plowed land began.

"You didn't come last Sunday," the boy said in English. "I about give you up to-day, too . . . was just comin' to the clearin' once more. She said to give you this."

And he thrust into Matthias' hands a note directed in the precise and shaded letters of the German script.

As Matthias took the letter and tore hastily into it, the boy stepped away and began pulling bits of bark from the shaggy coat of a soft maple.

Even before he had read a word, Matthias knew it contained nothing but disaster. For a few moments, then, he stood looking at the neat script, frozen to immobility, too fearful of the contents to read.

To speak the language was easy enough,--he had heard it on all sides from boyhood. But the reading was more difficult for he had been to English schools, even to the Princeville Academy for a short time, and the writing of the language had been confined to early copy-book work. So it seemed that he must translate into English as he read.

In his agitation some peculiar instinctive knowledge of what had happened helped him to make the translation. By a labored reading, skipping some of the phrases, he got the gist of it:

This is news . . . convey to you . . . wagons of church people ready now . . . make long journey . . . new land. Men did not return . . . sent word by letter . . . meet them Nebraska City, Nebraska Territory. There they await us . . . show way to new lands. It is there in Nebraska City I marry.

And something more at the last pertaining to God and forgiveness for which Matthias at that moment was neither interested nor caring.

The words were all swimming together and the earth was falling away from his feet. He felt giddily ill. The boy who had been watching him covertly came up importantly then and Matthias saw him as through a haze. "She said she wanted I should get this one to you, too."

The second note was neither precise nor neat. It was ink-blurred, hurriedly folded, almost it might have been tear stained. In a fever of anxiety to release himself from the shock of the stunning news of the first letter he tried to read it quickly.

In his haste the translation seemed to be:

Matthias, my cruel note under command my father was written. This one I send after. The wishes of my father . . . can no longer hold out. Many times myself I ask why we met when nothing could be. I better could have gone on not knowing you,--indeed, I had not been too unhappy.

One sentence stood out with grim sardonic insistence--"One must not marry outside the church."

Near the last there was a sentence over which he labored to get just what she meant: "Manchmal sage Ich mir vielleicht ist es besser unsre Liebe zu gedenken als es war im Frühyahr." And when he got it, he knew it was: "Sometimes I tell myself perhaps it is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime."

There was something, too, about the quilt blocks: "Unless I can be with you again, I shall never finish. The pieces will lie in my box. I think my heart lies there too."

Matthias looked up through the wavering tree trunks. Dimly he saw the boy walking away. He called to him and gave him a small coin. "Thanks for coming. What day . . ." his throat was so dry the words seemed to crackle ". . . did they go?"

"Two weeks come next Wednesday."

The Wednesday after the Sunday in which he had left her standing so lovely there, in the clearing. Involuntarily he turned his eyes toward the alder thicket not far distant. For a moment he could see her as plainly as though she were there in reality. Then the picture grew dim, and nothing remained but the green dripping boughs of the alders.

Mechanically he turned toward Trixie, stumbling blindly into the protruding roots of a tree stump. When he reached the mare he did not mount her but walked along with the bridle over his arm, taking the right trail only because Trixie led him into it. Occasionally she touched his shoulder with her cold soft nose.

The pungent odor of the loosened moist leaves under them came up to him with every step. A meadow-lark sang its liquid notes at the edge of the clearing. Gone. Amalia was gone,--into the great unsettled west,--to be married there. It was a nightmare from which he would soon waken. No, it was true,--the reality after a short sweet dream.

Shaken to the depths, his thoughts tumbled about uncertainly in a whirling world. One emotion after another went flooding through him as the creek waters had flooded the lowlands. A sickening sense of loss and disappointment. Astonishment,--he had never dreamed of any other turn of events than that the seekers for land would first return home as Amalia had said. Self-remorse that he had been so slow. Self-chastisement that he had not forced some means of crossing the river. And then violent anger at man's feeble efficiencies,--at a God who had sent the water to overflow, at the tyranny of the father, at the narrowness of the church, at the weakness of the girl.

His body seemed drained of blood so there was no strength left in him, and he threw himself down on a wet and matted bed of oak leaves where they had turned to brown pulp.

Over and over in his mind he relived the circumstances of their meeting: the love that seemed to spring between them from that very first day, the trysts in the woods, the softness of her lips and the feel of her body in his arms. His kleine Taube, little dove.

All these weeks. And now he would not hold her in his arms in another week, nor in another month, nor a year, nor a decade, nor ever. Never! It rang in his mind like the brassy sound of a jangling bell. There was hollowness in the spring, mockery in the song of the meadow-lark. Life was empty, drained of its reason for being. He threw an arm across his eyes and turning his face down to the sodden earth, shed wild and angry tears.

For a long time he lay there in the midst of the fallen world in which disappointment and disillusion were the only factors. What matter now that the meadow-lark trilled the prairie's love song to the spring? Of what portent that the sun shone? That the sweet odors of the waxy white May flowers near by were heavy on the air? These were not of his man's mind. Over and over he lived the imaginary scenes of the journey upon which Amalia was being taken,--saw the covered wagons pulled through the stickiness of the mud with the father loudly chiding the lovely girl by his side,--visioned the arriving at the territorial town, the Herman of her betrothal meeting her, the marriage against which she was revolting. At that, in his sick imaginings, he felt himself snatching her away bodily from the outstretched arms of this strange man--

Suddenly a thought struck him with lightning-like effect. Immediately he sat up and brushed a hand across his eyes, a dozen things crowding his mind at once. The colonists were to meet the men in that far-off Nebraska City. Amalia couldn't be married until the wagons reached there. How long would it take them to make the trip? Four weeks, perhaps, if there were no delays. They had been gone twelve days.

The town lay hundreds of miles across the Illinois and Iowa plains on the Missouri River, a long, long journey. It had become a sort of gateway to the new country, the hub of the overland trails which stretched from it and on to the west beyond. It was the beginning of the young man's country, the young man's hope of wealth. Hundreds of them were seeking their fortune out there. Why not do so, too? What matter that his uncle expected him to stay and take over the business eventually? The Unknown Land was calling. This accounted for his restlessness, his vague irritation at everything about the little foundry. He, too, must answer the call.

If he could but get to this Nebraska City in some way before the wagons!

He read the note for the dozenth time. Amalia had told him the father's plans for her. Was it a veiled suggestion that he try to follow? To have said "Unless I can be with you again . . ." Did she hope? Did she have it in mind even as she wrote? Well, then, he would not fail her. He did not know just how or by what way, but he, too, would go. Perhaps by taking the river route he could arrive there ahead of the caravan. Then there would be no marriage to a member of the colony. He would snatch her from them, carry her away.

A wild exuberance seized him. His grief passed into a sense of exaltation, as though the thing were already accomplished. He jumped to his feet, shook the soggy leaves and twigs from his clothes, mounted Trixie and was off, crashing through the narrow dark timber road.