Part 18

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 over, 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.”