Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

Author:Martha Ostenso [Ostenso, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-285-3
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2008-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

II

Mark and Lind agreed to meet at the Sandbos until the return of the Klovaczs.

“School-ma’ams must toe the line,” she laughed at Mark, “and I just couldn’t stand a scene. That would finish me as far as earning my own living for the rest of the season is concerned.”

“I would like that,” Mark urged. “I really have a little money of my own, somewhere.”

But Lind would not listen to him. She would stay conscientiously to the end of the term.

At the Sandbos’ the chokecherry trees were bending over in wine-red arches. Sven picked Lind a tin-canful of them, and she and Mark ate them until their mouths were puckered and dry. Mrs Sandbo enjoyed having the Teacher and her “boy,” as she called Mark, around, had often served them with coffee and some trifle. At heart Mrs Sandbo was sound, and as she became more used to Lind’s visits, she did not ply her with her usual busy questions.

The Teacher walked with Mark to the edge of Latt’s Slough, where they knelt and picked tiny, black snails off the reeds. Lind found little waxy water-lilies growing there, but the mud was too soft at the edge of the swamp for her to reach out and get them.

“They would die right away after I got them, anyway,” she said to Mark, stepping back to firm ground.

“Yes, and they would be mostly long slimy roots,” he consoled her.

They walked half a mile or so to a little sunny knoll at the edge of Gare’s timber. Here they sat down, Lind spreading her pale, billowy dress out about her. In a little while Mark stretched himself out full length, shading his eyes with his hand and nibbling at a straw.

The grass below them leaned up the hill, like the smoothly combed hair of a person’s head. Lind regarded it curiously. The air was strung with humming insects, poised like little black periods in the light. Occasionally a bluebottle sailed majestically past, the tissue of its wings gathering the sun. A droning bee blundered into a swarm of tiny, jigging gnats, disentangled itself and soared lazily on to a distant flower, unconscious of the excitement it had caused. Below them, a few feet away, stood the grey, pocked cone of an ant hill; up and down its slope the ants twinkled, providently absorbed. A tiny world of intense life.

“Mark,” Lind said softly. “Every second something is going – going.”

“And coming, Lind,” he told her.

“I don’t know. We can’t stop the going – that’s beyond our control. But we can stop the coming – we have the power to stop everything, in ourselves.”

Mark would not be serious. He rolled over and put both his arms about her tightly, holding his head against her breast. “Don’t, Lindy – don’t. You saved me from all those gloomy contemplations. If anything happened now to take you away from me I don’t know what I’d do. I was always so alone, Lind – beached on a desert island. You don’t know how it was.

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