Perhaps that was why she bethought herself of Emil. The women were checking over their groceries and pinning their big red shawls about their heads. The men were buying tobacco and candy with what money they had left, were showing each other new boots and gloves and blue flannel shirts. Three big Bohemians were drinking raw alcohol, tinctured with oil of cinnamon.
This was said to fortify one effectually against the cold, and they smacked their lips after each pull at the flask. Their volubility drowned every other noise in the place, and the overheated store sounded of their spirited language as it reeked of pipe smoke, damp woolens, and kerosene. Carl came in, wearing his overcoat and carrying a wooden box with a brass handle. The heat had made the little boy sleepy, but he still clung to his kitten. Before the horses were over the first hill, Emil and his cat were both fast asleep.
The road led southwest, toward the streak of pale, watery light that glimmered in the leaden sky. The light fell upon the two sad young faces that were turned mutely toward it: The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a German anguished: Willa Cather 9 hollow.
But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes. The two friends had less to say to each other than usual, as if the cold had somehow penetrated to their hearts. But mother frets if the wood gets low. I wish we could all go with him and let the grass grow back over everything. Just ahead of them was the Norwegian graveyard, where the grass had, indeed, grown back over everything, shaggy and red, hiding even the wire fence.
Carl realized that he was not a very helpful companion, but there was nothing he could say. I almost feel as if there were nothing to go ahead for. He lies and counts on his fingers all day. I think he is trying to count up what he is leaving for us. Have you got it? I tried it all morning in the drug-store cellar, and it worked ever so well, makes fine big pictures. There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. Are the pictures colored? He likes the calendars I get him in town. I wish I could get more. After a dozen trials he succeeded in lighting the lantern, which he placed in front of Alexandra, half covering it with a blanket so that the light would not shine in her eyes.
Yes, here it is. Try not to worry. The rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind, but her lantern, held firmly between her feet, made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country. Decke, Bettdecke, die Decke, Umfassend, Pauschal. The Bergson homestead was easier to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash.
This creek gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only the unescapable ground in another form.
The roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings. In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it.
Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following German bewildering: Schlucht, Klamm, Felsenschlucht, Abgrund. There it lay outside his door, the same land, the same lead-colored miles.
He knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,--and then the grass. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself.
He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time. Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself in a Swedish athletic club.
So far John had not attempted to cultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land, and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather. John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
He had an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did. Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their homesteads. They had been handwerkers at home; tailors, locksmiths, joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a shipyard. For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things.
His bed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through the day, while the baking and German adjoining: Geschirr, anspannen, Kabelbaum, Joch, Gespann, Gurtwerk, vorspannen, spannen. Willa Cather 13 washing and ironing were going on, the father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight each of the steers would probably put on by spring.
He often called his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by the mistakes of their neighbors.
It was Alexandra who could always tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could never teach them to use their heads about their work. Late in life he married a second time, a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he, who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated, lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring men, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing.
But when all was said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proud little business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, and had proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognized the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things out, that had characterized his father in his better days.
He would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of his sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay there day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land. The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away. He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with all the work gone out of them.
He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He felt her youth and strength, how easily she moved and stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it again if he could, not he!
He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became. His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She called him by an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she was little and took his dinner to him in the shipyard. I want to speak to them.
They have just come back from the Blue. Shall I call them? Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you will have to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything will come on you.
I want them to keep the land. We will never lose the land. Alexandra went to the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of seventeen and nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of the bed. Their father looked at them searchingly, though it was too dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and German beckoned: Lampe, die Lampe, Laterne. Willa Cather 15 heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder.
The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating. I have talked to her since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no quarrels among my children, and so long as there is one house there must be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes. She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not make so many as I have made.
When you marry, and want a house of your own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts. But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must all keep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can.
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It would be so anyway, without your speaking. We will all work the place together. And Alexandra must not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now. Hire a man when you need help. She can make much more with her eggs and butter than the wages of a man. It was one of my mistakes that I did not find that out sooner.
O Pioneers! (Webster's German Thesaurus Edition) - PDF Free Download
Try to break a little more land every year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning the land, and always put up more hay than you need. She has been a good mother to you, and she has always missed the old country. Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies. John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a good housewife. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable about her; German according: Hausfrau, Frau des Hauses.
Kaninchen, Karnickel, Hase, das Kaninchen. For eleven years she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and getting careless in their ways.
The Bergsons had a log house, for instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house. She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing herself. Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey.
She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. The amount of sugar she used in these processes was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She was a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on the shelves, and sheets in the press.
She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud. Bergson, on her way to Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Manie, Wahnsinn, Fimmel, Rage. Oscar stopped the horses and waved to Carl, who caught up his hat and ran through the melon patch to join them. He might want it and take it right off your back. Did you ever hear him howl, Carl? People say sometimes he runs about the country howling at night because he is afraid the German clambering: Heulen, zischen, brausen, sausen. Flicken, ausbessern, Fleck, Korrektur.
Hemd, Bluse, Trikot, Oberhemd. Rad, Lenkrad, Scheibe, das Rad. Lord will destroy him. Mother thinks he must have done something awful wicked. He petted her just like you do your cats. Some days his mind is cloudy, like. But if you can get him on a clear day, you can learn a great deal from him. She was tearing all over the place, knocking herself against things. And at last she ran out on the roof of the old dugout and her legs went through and there she stuck, bellowing. Ivar came running with his white bag, and the German bellowing: Willa Cather 19 moment he got to her she was quiet and let him saw her horn off and daub the place with tar.
And in two days they could use her milk again. He had settled in the rough country across the county line, where no one lived but some Russians,-half a dozen families who dwelt together in one long house, divided off like barracks. Ivar had explained his choice by saying that the fewer neighbors he had, the fewer temptations.
Dido and Aeneas
Nevertheless, when one considered that his chief business was horsedoctoring, it seemed rather short-sighted of him to live in the most inaccessible place he could find. The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks rose with a whirr of wings.
Lou looked after them helplessly. Besides, they say he can smell dead birds. It makes him foolish. They had left the lagoons and the red grass behind them. Kuh, Rind, Rindvieh, die Kuh. Rand, Spielraum, Randlinie, Marge. The wild flowers disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest: At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside.
You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.
When the Bergsons drove over the hill, Ivar was sitting in the doorway of his house, reading the Norwegian Bible. He was a queerly shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on short bow-legs. His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks, made him look older than he was. He was barefoot, but he wore a clean shirt of unbleached cotton, open at the neck. He always put on a clean shirt when Sunday morning came round, though he never went to church.
He had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on with any of the denominations. He kept a calendar, and every morning he checked off a day, so that he was never in any doubt as to which day of the week it was. Ivar hired himself out in threshing and corn-husking time, and he doctored sick animals when he was sent for. When he was at home, he made hammocks out of twine and committed chapters of the Bible to memory. Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself. He disliked the litter of human dwellings: He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod.
He always said that the German barefoot: Wohnen, Wohnung, Hausen, Bewohnung. Sauberkeit, Ordnung, Reinlichheit, Geplegtheit. Willa Cather 21 badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. He best expressed his preference for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant.
He closed the book on his knee, keeping the place with his horny finger, and repeated softly: The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon which he hath planted; Where the birds make their nests: The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies. He dropped his arms and went up to the wagon, smiling amiably and looking at them out of his pale blue eyes. A few ducks this German amiably: But there was a crane last week. She spent one night and came back the next evening. It is not her season, of course.
Many of them go over in the fall. Then the pond is full of strange voices every night. I have heard so. A big white bird with long wings and pink feet. She came in the afternoon and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark. She was in trouble of some sort, but I could not understand her. She was going over to the other ocean, maybe, and did not know how far it was. She was afraid of never getting there. She was more mournful than our birds here; she cried in the night. She saw the light from my window and darted up to it.
Maybe she thought my house was a boat, she was such a wild thing. Next morning, when the sun rose, I went out to take her food, but she flew up into the sky and went on her way. They come from very far away and are great company. I hope you boys never shoot wild birds? He watches over them and counts them, as we do our cattle; Christ says so in the New Testament. And the bay with a colt at home! Alexandra wants to see your hammocks.
He had but one room, neatly plastered and whitewashed, and there was a wooden floor. There was a German brushed: Kran, Kranich, Giekbaum, Hebezug, Hebebalken. Willa Cather 23 kitchen stove, a table covered with oilcloth, two chairs, a clock, a calendar, a few books on the window-shelf; nothing more. But the place was as clean as a cupboard. Ivar unslung a hammock from a hook on the wall; in it was rolled a buffalo robe. A hammock is a good bed, and in winter I wrap up in this skin. Where I go to work, the beds are not half so easy as this. He thought a cave a very superior kind of house.
There was something pleasantly unusual about it and about Ivar. Is that why so many come? Ivar sat down on the floor and tucked his feet under him. From up there where they are flying, our country looks dark and flat. They must have water to drink and to bathe in before they can go on with their journey. They look this way and that, and far below them they see something shining, like a piece of glass set in the dark earth.
That is my pond. They come to it and are not disturbed. Maybe I sprinkle a little corn. They tell the other birds, and next year more come this way. They have their roads up there, as we have down here. The point of the wedge gets the worst of it; they cut the wind. They can only stand it there a little while--half an hour, maybe. Then they fall back and the wedge splits a little, while the rear ones come up the middle to the front.
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Then it closes up and they fly on, with a new edge. They are always changing like that, up in the air. Never any confusion; just like soldiers who have been drilled. They would not come in, but sat in the shade of the bank outside while Alexandra and Ivar talked about the birds and about his housekeeping, and why he never ate meat, fresh or salt. Robe, Talar, Kleid, Morgenrock. Alexandra was sitting on one of the wooden chairs, her arms resting on the table.
Ivar was sitting on the floor at her feet. What can be done? They lost their vagueness. And keep them in a stinking pen? I tell you, sister, the hogs of this country are put upon! They become unclean, like the hogs in the Bible. If you kept your chickens like that, what would happen? You have a little sorghum patch, maybe? Put a fence around it, and turn the hogs in.
Build a shed to give them shade, a thatch on poles. Let the boys haul water to them in barrels, clean water, and plenty. Get them off the old stinking ground, and do not let them go back there until winter. Give them only grain and clean feed, such as you would give horses or cattle. Hogs do not like to be filthy. Lou nudged his brother. Carl, who could not understand what Ivar said, saw that the two boys were displeased. They did not mind hard work, but they hated experiments and could never see the use of taking pains. Even Lou, who was more elastic than his older brother, disliked to do anything different from their neighbors.
He felt that it made them conspicuous and gave people a chance to talk about them. Once they were on the homeward road, the boys forgot their ill-humor and joked about Ivar and his birds. They agreed that German barrels: Brett, Planke, Tafel, Bohle. Willa Cather 25 he was crazier than ever, and would never be able to prove up on his land because he worked it so little. Alexandra privately resolved that she would have a talk with Ivar about this and stir him up. The boys persuaded Carl to stay for supper and go swimming in the pasture pond after dark.
It was a still, deep-breathing summer night, full of the smell of the hay fields. Sounds of laughter and splashing came up from the pasture, and when the moon rose rapidly above the bare rim of the prairie, the pond glittered like polished metal, and she could see the flash of white bodies as the boys ran about the edge, or jumped into the water. Alexandra watched the shimmering pool dreamily, but eventually her eyes went back to the sorghum patch south of the barn, where she was planning to make her new pig corral.
Schwein, Eber, das Schwein. Then came the hard times that brought every one on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of drouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare. The first of these fruitless summers the Bergson boys bore courageously. The failure of the corn crop made labor cheap. Lou and Oscar hired two men and put in bigger crops than ever before.
They lost everything they spent. The whole country was discouraged. Farmers who were already in debt had to give up their land. A few foreclosures demoralized the county. The settlers sat about on the wooden sidewalks in the little town and told each other that the country was never meant for men to live in; the thing to do was to get back to Iowa, to Illinois, to any place that had been proved habitable. The Bergson boys, certainly, would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the bakery shop in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country.
A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. Rand, Kante, Grat, Saum. Arbeit, Arbeiten, Verrichten, Tun. One September afternoon Alexandra had gone over to the garden across the draw to dig sweet potatoes-they had been thriving upon the weather that was fatal to everything else. But when Carl Linstrum came up the garden rows to find her, she was not working.
She was standing lost in thought, leaning upon her pitchfork, her sunbonnet lying beside her on the ground. The dry garden patch smelled of drying vines and was strewn with yellow seed-cucumbers and pumpkins and citrons. At one end, next the rhubarb, grew feathery asparagus, with red berries.
Down the middle of the garden was a row of gooseberry and currant bushes. A few tough zenias and marigolds and a row of scarlet sage bore witness to the buckets of water that Mrs. Bergson had carried there after sundown, against the prohibition of her sons. Carl came quietly and slowly up the garden path, looking intently at Alexandra. She did not hear him. She was standing perfectly still, with that serious ease so characteristic of her.
Her thick, reddish braids, twisted about her head, fairly burned in the sunlight. Even Carl, never a very cheerful boy, and considerably darkened by these last two bitter years, loved the country on days like this, felt something strong and young and wild come out of it, that laughed at care. We are really going away. Louis, and they will give him back his old job in the cigar factory.
He must be there by the first of November. They are taking on new men then. We will sell the place for whatever we can get, and auction the German asparagus: Salbei, Weise, Klug, Gescheit. I am going to learn engraving with a German engraver there, and then try to get work in Chicago. Her eyes became dreamy and filled with tears. He scratched in the soft earth beside him with a stick. We are only one more drag, one more thing you look out for and feel responsible for.
Father was never meant for a farmer, you know that. We also share information about the use of the site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Meaning of "Pfandflasche" in the German dictionary. Bottle on which pledge is levied. Flasche, auf die Pfand erhoben wird. Synonyms and antonyms of Pfandflasche in the German dictionary of synonyms. Examples of use in the German literature, quotes and news about Pfandflasche.
Eine angenehmeMischung aus Erleichterung und belebender Spannung ergriffAnsgar. Lebenslauf einer Pfandflasche , o. Die Zeit und die Flut dulden keinen Aufschub. Anker werden gelichtet und Segel entfaltet. Elissa blutet heut nacht, und Karthago steht morgen in Flammen. Elissa blutet heut nacht, Und Karthago steht morgen in Flammen, ha ha!
Bei der Erde und beim Himmel will ich klagen! Doch warum rufe ich Himmel und Erde an? Himmel und Erde planen meinen Fall: An das Schicksal wend ich meine Klage, denn andere Mittel bleiben mir nicht. Alles was gut ist, hast du betrogen. Flieg hin zu deinem versprochenen Reich, Und lass die verlassene Dido sterben. Keine Reue kann wieder erlangen Der verletzten Dido verachtete Liebe. Genug ist's, was auch immer du jetzt beschliessest, Dass du nur ein einziges Mal den Gedanken fasstest, mich zu verlassen.
Aeneas geht ab Doch ach, den Tod kann ich nicht meiden; Der Tod ist gewiss, ist er gegangen. An deinem Busen lass mich ruhen. Mehr wollt ich tun, doch der Tod ist in mir.
O Pioneers! (Webster's German Thesaurus Edition)
Der Tod ist nun ein willkommener Gast. So zart und sanft wie einst ihr Herz, Haltet Wache hier und geht nie fort. Over the Sea, The Nereids out of the Sea. His Coursers Advancing, Curvetting and Prancing. Phoebus all Events can see. Ten Thousand Thousand Harmes. These are all my Guards ye View, What can these blind Archers do. They Wound indeed, but 'tis a pleasing smart. All Resigning, None Repining. At her undisputed Sway. The Spring Enters with her Nymphs. He that fails of Addressing, 'Tis but Just he shou'd fail of Possessing.
Now make Trial, And take no Denial. Now carry your Game, or for ever give o're. And Venus Graces Flowing. Belinda, I am press'd With torment not to be confess'd, Peace and I are strangers grown. I languish till my grief is known, Yet would not have it guess'd. DIDO Whence could so much virtue spring? What storms, what battles did he sing?