Rousing from his own trouble, he looked at her. "You don't need to.
You'll see. Carter will come home one of these days." And during the
few days that he stayed with her he extended such brotherly sympathy
that she felt sincerely sorry when, having placed the sale of his farm
and effects in the hands of Danvers, he followed his faithless wife out
of her life and this story.
*XVIII*
*THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ESTABLISHED*
Save for a few dirty drifts in the shadows of the bluffs, the snow was
all gone when, one morning a week or so after Leslie's departure, Helen
went south under convoy of Jimmy Glaves to open school. The day was
beautiful. Once more the prairies wore the burned browns of autumn, but
to eyes that had grown to the vast snowscape during a half-year of
winter the huge monochrome rioted in color. In fact it had its values.
There a passing cloud threw a patch of black. Bowing to the soft
breeze, last year's grass sent sunlit waves chasing one another down to
the far horizon. Here and there a green stain on the edge of cropped
hay-sloughs bespoke the miracle of resurrection, eternal wonder of
spring, the young life bubbling forth from the decay and death of parent
plants. Also the prospect was checkered with the chocolate of ploughed
fields. On these slow ox-teams crawled, and the shouts of the drivers,
the snapping crack of long whips, alternated as they drove along with
the cheep of running gophers, the "pee-wee" of snipe, song of small
birds. Noise was luxury after the months of frozen silence. The warm,
damp air, the feel of balmy spring, the sunlight on the grasses were
delightfully relaxing. Helen gave herself up to it--permitted sensation
to rule and banish for the moment her tire and trouble. She chatted
quite happily with the trustee, who, however, seemed gloomy and
preoccupied.
A philosopher coined a phrase--"the persistence of the established"--to
explain the survival of phenomena after the original cause lies dead in
the past. It admirably defines the trustee's mental condition, which
was a product of causes set up by Helen in these last months. Ignorant
of the change in her feeling towards her English friends, he was vividly
aware of the prejudice which her dealings with them had aroused in the
settlers. In the beginning he and Flynn had earned severe criticism by
giving her the school. Since the Leslie scandal he doubted their
ability to keep her in it. At meeting, "bees," on trail, her name was
being coupled with grins or gloomy reprobation according to the years
and character of the critics. The women had plucked her character clean
as a chicken, and were scattering their findings to the four winds.
Just now, of course, the heavy work of seeding sadly interfered with
these activities and diversions, but Jimmy looked for trouble in the
slack season. If, in the mean time, she could be weaned from her liking
for the English Ishmael, they might be able to weather the prejudice.
To which end he steered the conversation to the greenness, credulity,
and execrable agriculture of the remittance-people.
"I kain't see," he said, among other things, "what a fine gal like you
kin see in 'em. They're dying stock, an' one o' these days the
fool-killer will come along an' brain the hull biling. Brain, did I
say? The Lord forgive me! Kedn't scratch up the makings of one outen
the hull bunch."
Had she known his mind she might easily have laid his misgivings.
Instead, she tried to modify his bitter opinion. "They are certainly
inefficient as farmers. But as regards their credulity, don't you think
it is largely due to a higher standard of business honor? Now when a
Canadian trades horses he expects to be cheated, while they are only
looking for a fair exchange."
Jimmy's face wrinkled in contemptuous disparagement. "Hain't that jes'
what I said? A man that expects to get his own outen a hoss-trade
kain't be killed too quick. It's tempting Providence to leave him
loose. As well expect a nigger to leave a fat rooster as a Canadian to
keep his hands off sech easy meat. 'Tain't human natur'. As for their
honor--" He sniffed. "Pity it didn't extend to their morals."
"It is, indeed."
Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his
doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious
clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity,
took the opposite side. And neither knew the other's mind--until too
late. But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.
Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they
forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of
Carter's drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an' we couldn't
have crossed."
He was right. That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off
several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it
waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had
saddled upon it. Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a
bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up
behind. But such triumph never endured. With axe, pevees, cant-hooks,
Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its
failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers
in backwaters among dense scrub.
To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived
near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze,
wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his
nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving
logs at some ticklish point. Then they would hang about the cook's
tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made
lumberman's cake by the cubic yard. Also there were peeps into the
sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts,
just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would
prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among
them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam--in which she had a
special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan
Red was again at his old tricks.
It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale. Dipping down, one end of a
bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed. A second
timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs
had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure.
"Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank
to bank so's they ked cut it from above. But one wasn't handy, an'
while they was waiting a big red man comes up an' hands Mr. Carter the
dare.
"'If you're scairt, gimme the axe an' I'll show you how we trim a jam in
Michigan.'
"But Mr. Carter wouldn't give it. 'No,' he says, awful quiet, yet
sorter funny, for all the men laughed--'no. They'll need you to show 'em
again.' Then he walks out on the jam an' goes to chopping, with Mr.
Bender calling for him to come back an' not make a damn fool of
himself."
The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail
for her pale audience of one--Carter astride of the key-log; his men,
bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender's distress; the
cynical grin of Michigan Red. Once, she said, a floating chip deflected
the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance
up to the bank. It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the
log, now quivering under tons of pressure. A huge baulk, it broke with
a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of
grinding death upon the chopper.
Then came his progress through the welter. As the jam bore down-stream,
timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still
quivered under the spurn of his leap. Young trees raised on end and
swept like battering-rams along the log he rode. Yet, jumping from log
to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.
"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished. "An' you
should have jes' seen that red man--he looked that sick an' green
through his wishy-washy smiling. But Mr. Carter! Ain't he a brave one?
You must be awful proud of him, ain't you, Miss Helen?"
What could she answer but "Yes," though the trembling admission covered
only a small portion of her psychology? Misery, fear, regret made up
the rest. The remainder of that day dragged wearily by to a distant
drone of lessons. She, who had tried to eject her husband from her
life, shuddered as she thought how nearly her wish had come to
accomplishment. Death's cold breath chilled resentment, expunged the
memory of her months of weary waiting. It would return, but in the mean
time she could think of nothing but his danger. Hurrying home, she
asked Glaves to saddle her a horse, saying that she would try to gallop
off a headache.
Heartache would have been more correct; but she certainly galloped, rode
westward, then swung around north on a wide circle that brought her, at
dusk of the short spring day, out on a bald headland that sheered down
to the river. Beneath her lay the camp, with its cooking-fires
flickering like wind-blown roses athwart the velvet pall of dusk, and in
either direction from that effulgent bouquet a crimson garland of
sentinel fires laid its miles of length along the valley.
Men moved about the nearer fires, appearing to her distant eyes as dim,
dark shapes. But what sight refused hearing supplied. She heard the
cook cursing his kettles with a volubility that would have brought shame
on the witches in Macbeth--the imprecations of some lumber-jack at war
with a threatened jam. Above all rose the voice of a violin, quivering
its infinite travail, expressing the throbbing pain of the world; then,
from far up the valley, a lonely tenor floated down the night.
"He went to cut a key-log an' the jam he went below,
He was the damnedest man that ever I did know."
Some lumberman was relieving his watch by chanting the deeds of a hero
of the camps, and as, like a dove of night, the voice floated high over
the river's growl through a score of verses, it helped to drive home
upon Helen a sense of the imminent jeopardy Carter had passed through
that day. While her beast pawed its impatience, she sat for an hour
trying to pick his voice from the hum of the camp. It was easy to
distinguish Bender's. His bass growl formed the substratum of sound.
She caught, once, the Cougar's strident tones. Then, just as she was
beginning to despair, a command, stern and clear, rose from the void.
"Lay on there with that pevee! Quick! or you'll have 'em piled to
heaven! Here!--Bender, Cougar!--lend a hand! this fellow's letting them
jam on him!"
She started as under a lash. All that day she had lived in a whirl of
feeling, and, just as a resolvent precipitates a chemical mixture, the
stern voice reduced her feeling to thought. Unfortunately, the tone was
not in harmony with her soft misery. If it had been--well, it was not.
Rather it recalled his contempt under the moonlight, her own solitary
shame. Whirling her bronco, she cut him over the flank and galloped, at
imminent risk of her neck, over the dark prairies in vain attempt to
escape the galling recurrence of injured pride, the stings of
disappointment.
"He doesn't care for me! He doesn't care for me!" It rang in her
brain. Then, when she was able to think, she added, in obedience to the
sex instinct which will not admit Love's mortality, "He never did,
otherwise he couldn't have left me!" Her conclusion, delivered that
night into a wet pillow, revealed the secret hope at the root of her
disappointment. "I won't ride that way again."
But she did, and her changed purpose is best explained by a conversation
between Carter and Bender as they stood drying themselves at the cook's
fire after averting the threatened jam.
Carter began: "I reckon you can get along well enough without me. Of
course I'd have liked to seen the drive down to the Assiniboin, but in
another week the frost will be out enough to start prairie grading. I'll
have to go. Let me see.... One week more on the creek, two on the
Assiniboin--three weeks will put the last timber into Brandon. In less
than a month you'll join me at the Prairie Portage."
Turning to bring another area of soaked clothing next to the fire, his
face came under strong light. These seven months of thought and
calculation had left their mark upon it--thinned and refined its lines,
tooled the features into an almost intellectual cast. His mouth,
perhaps, evidenced the greatest change, showing less humor, because,
perhaps, self-repression and the habit of command had drawn the lips in
tighter lines. Deeper set, his eyes seemed darker, while a straight
look into their depths revealed an underlying sadness. Sternness and
sadness, indeed, governed the face, without, however, banishing a
certain grave courtesy that found expression in pleasant thanks when,
presently, the cook brought them a steaming jug of coffee. Lastly,
determination stamped it so positively that only its lively intelligence
saved it from obstinacy. One glance explained Bender's answer to Jenny:
"He's stiffer'n all hell!"--his attitude to Helen. In him will
dominated the emotions. Summed, the face, with its power, dogged
resolution, imperturbable confidence, mirrored his past struggles, gave
earnest for his future battles.
A hint of these last inhered in a remark that Bender slid in between two
gulps of coffee. "They're saying as the C.P. will never let you cross
their tracks?"