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Page 34
That was Karin's most trying year. Her husband sometimes tormented
her until it seemed as though she could not stand it any longer.
The very air became polluted by his vile talk and profanity, so
that the home was like a hell. Karin begged the Storms to keep
little Ingmar with them also during the holidays; she did not want
her brother to be at home with her for a day, not even at
Christmas.
All the servants at the Ingmar Farm were distantly related to the
family, and had always lived on the place. But for the feeling that
they belonged to the Ingmarssons, they could not have gone on
serving under such conditions. There were precious few nights that
they were allowed to sleep in peace. Elof was constantly hitting
upon new ways of tormenting both the servants and Karin, to make
them give in to his demands.
In this misery Karin passed a winter and a summer and another
winter.
But Karin had a retreat to which she would flee at times in order
to be alone with her thoughts. Behind the hop garden there was a
narrow seat upon which she often sat, with her elbows on her knees
and her chin resting in her hands, staring straight ahead, yet
seeing nothing. Fronting her were great stretches of cornfields,
beyond which was the forest, and in the distance the range of hills
and Mount Klack.
One evening in April she sat on her bench, feeling tired and
listless, as one often does in the springtime when the snow turns
to slush and the ground is still unwashed by spring rains. The hops
lay sleeping under a cover of fir brush. Over against the hills
hung a thick mist, such as always accompanies a thaw. The birch
tops were beginning to turn brown, but all along the skirt of the
forest there was still a deep border of snow. Spring would soon
be there in earnest, and the thought of it made her feel even more
tired. She felt that she could never live through another summer
like the last one. She thought of all the work ahead of her--sowing
and haymaking; spring baking and spring cleaning; weaving and
sewing--and wondered how she would ever get through with it all.
"I might better be dead," she sighed. "I seem to be here for no
other purpose than to prevent Elof killing himself with drink."
Suddenly she looked up, as if she had heard some one calling her.
Leaning against the hedge, looking straight at her, stood Halvor
Halvorsson. She did not know just when he had come, but apparently
he had been standing there a good while.
"I thought I should find you over here," Halvor said.
"Oh, did you?"
"I remembered how in days gone by you used to step away, and come
here to sit and brood."
"I didn't have much to brood over at that time."
"Then your troubles were mostly imaginary."
Karin mused as she looked at Halvor: "He must be thinking what a
fool I was not to have married him, who is such a handsome and
dignified man. Now he's got me where he can crow over me, and he
has come only to laugh at me."
"I've been inside talking with Elof," Halvor enlightened. "It was
really him I wanted to see."
Karin made no reply, but sat there, frigid and unresponsive, her
eyes fixed on the ground and her hands crossed, prepared to meet
all the scorn she fancied Halvor would now heap upon her.
"I said to him," Halvor continued, "that I considered myself
largely to blame for his misfortune, since it was at my place that
he got hurt." He paused a moment, as if waiting for some expression
from her, either of approval or disapproval. But Karin was silent.
"So I have asked him to come and live with me for a while. It would
at least be a change, and he could see more people than he meets
here."
Then Karin raised her eyes, but otherwise remained as motionless as
before.
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