1. I am telling the story of Sylvia Castleman.
I should prefer to tell it without mention of myself;
but it was written in the book of fate that I should
be a decisive factor in her life, and so her story
pre-supposes mine. I imagine the impatience of
a reader, who is promised a heroine out of a romantic
and picturesque “society” world, and finds
himself beginning with the autobiography of a farmer’s
wife on a solitary homestead in Manitoba. But
then I remember that Sylvia found me interesting.
Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager
questions and her exclamations, I am able to see myself
as a heroine of fiction.
I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made
woman. I must have been the first “common”
person she had ever known intimately. She had
seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling
herself with the reflection that we probably did not
know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life.
But here I was, actually a soul like herself; and
it happened that I knew more than she did, and of
things she desperately needed to know. So all
the luxury, power and prestige that had been given
to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary
Abbott, with her modern attitude and her common-sense.
My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My
father had eight children, and he drank. Sometimes
he struck me; and so it came about that at the age
of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who worked
upon a neighbour’s farm. I wanted a home
of my own, and Tom had some money saved up. We
journeyed to Manitoba, and took out a homestead, where
I spent the next twenty years of my life in a hand-to-hand
struggle with Nature which seemed simply incredible
to Sylvia when I told her of it.
The man I married turned out to be a petty tyrant.
In the first five years of our life he succeeded in
killing the love I had for him; but meantime I had
borne him three children, and there was nothing to
do but make the best of my bargain. I became to
outward view a beaten drudge; yet it was the truth
that never for an hour did I give up. When I
lost what would have been my fourth child, and the
doctor told me that I could never have another, I took
this for my charter of freedom, and made up my mind
to my course; I would raise the children I had, and
grow up with them, and move out into life when they
did.
This was when I was working eighteen hours a day,
more than half of it by lamp-light, in the darkness
of our Northern winters. When the accident came,
I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men,
who were getting in the wheat upon which our future
depended. I fell in my tracks, and lost my child;
yet I sat still and white while the men ate supper,
and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was
my life in those days; and I can see before me the
face of horror with which Sylvia listened to the story.
But these things are common in the experience of women
who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman
has toiled since civilization began.
