Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country.
Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she
invited him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen.
She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness,
she sneered at “social distinctions,”
she raged at her own taboos—and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady.
She sat in the dining-room and listened through the
door to Bjornstam’s booming and Bea’s
giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in
that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go
out to the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk
to them.
They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello
and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their
prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes: selling
horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam,
being impertinent to a “two-fisted” millionaire
lumberman. Bea gurgled “Oh my!” and
kept his coffee cup filled.
He took a long time to finish the wood. He had
frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm.
Carol heard him confiding to Bea, “You’re
a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman
like you I wouldn’t be such a sorehead.
Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel
sloppy. Say, that’s nice hair you got.
Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you’ll know it. Why, I could
pick you up with one finger, and hold you in the air
long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean through.
Ingersoll? Oh, he’s a religious writer.
Sure. You’d like him fine.”
When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely
at the window above, was envious of their pastoral.
“And I——But I will go on.”
They were driving down the lake to the cottages
that moonlit January night, twenty of them in the
bob-sled. They sang “Toy Land” and
“Seeing Nelly Home”; they leaped from
the low back of the sled to race over the slippery
snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on
the runners for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes
kicked up by the horses settled over the revelers
and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped,
beat their leather mittens against their chests.
The harness rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic,
Jack Elder’s setter sprang beside the horses,
barking.
For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air
gave fictive power. She felt that she could run
on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But
the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to
snuggle under the comforters which covered the hay
in the sled-box.
In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude.
Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were
inked on the snow like bars of music. Then the
sled came out on the surface of Lake Minniemashie.
Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut
for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels
of hard crust, flashes of green ice blown clear, chains
of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach—the
moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the
snow, it turned the woods ashore into crystals of
fire. The night was tropical and voluptuous.
In that drugged magic there was no difference between
heavy heat and insinuating cold.
