It had all come about so subtilely and gradually that she was almost
unaware of it herself, this inward change _in_ herself. Nora had by
nature a quick and active mind, but she had also many inherited
prejudices. It is a truism that it is much harder to unlearn than to
learn, and for her it was harder, in the circumstances, than for the
average person. Not that she was more set in her ways than other people,
but that she had accepted from her childhood a definite set of ideas as
to the proper conduct of life; a code, in other words, from which she
had never conceived it possible to depart. People did certain things, or
they did not; you played the game according to certain prescribed rules,
or you didn't play it with decent people, that was all there was to it.
One might as well argue that there was no difference between right and
wrong as to say that this was not so.
Of course there were plenty of people on the face of the earth who
thought otherwise, such as Chinese, Aborigines, Turks, and all sorts of
unpleasant natives of uncivilized countries--Nora lumped them together
without discrimination or remorse--but no one planned to pass their
lives among them. And as for the sentiment that Trotter had enunciated
one day at her brother's, that Canada was a country where everybody was
as good as everybody else, that was, of course, utter nonsense. It was
because the country was raw and new that such silly notions prevailed.
No society could exist an hour founded upon any such theory.
And yet, here she was living with a man on terms of equality whom, when
measured up with the standards she was accustomed to, failed impossibly.
And yet, did he? That is, did he, in the larger sense? That he was
woefully deficient in all the little niceties of life, that he was
illiterate and ignorant could not be denied. But he was no man's fool,
and, as far as his light shone, he certainly lived up to it. That was
just it. He had a standard of his own.
She compared him with her brother, and with other men she had known and
respected. Was he less honest? less brave? less independent? less
scrupulous in his dealings with his fellowmen? To all these questions
she was obliged to answer "No." And he was proud, too, and ambitious;
ambitious to carve out a fortune with his own hands, beholden to neither
man nor circumstances for the achievement. Certainly there was much
that was fine about him.
And, as far as his treatment of herself was concerned, after that first
terrible struggle for mastery, she had had nothing to complain of. He
had been patient with her ignorance and her lack of capabilities in all
the things that the women in this new life were so proficient in. Did
she not, perhaps, fall as far below _his_ standard as he did before
hers? There was certainly something to be said on both sides.
There was one quality which he possessed to which she paid ungrudging
tribute; never had she met a man so free from all petty pretense. He
regretted his lack of opportunities for educating himself, but it
apparently never entered his head to pretend a knowledge of even the
simplest subject which he did not possess. The questions that he asked
her from time to time about matters which almost any schoolboy in
England could have answered, both touched and embarrassed her.
At first she had found the evenings the most trying part of the day.
When not taken up with her household cares, she found herself becoming
absurdly self-conscious in his society. They were neither of them
naturally silent people, and it was difficult not to have the air of
"talking down" to him, of palpably making conversation. Beyond the
people at her brother's and the Sharps, they had not a single
acquaintance in common. Her horizon, hitherto, had been, bounded by
England, his by Canada.
Finally, acting on the suggestion he had made, but never again referred
to, the unforgettable day when they were leaving for Winnipeg, she began
reading aloud evenings while he worked on his new chairs. The experiment
was a great success. Her little library was limited in range; a few
standard works and a number of books on travel and some of history. She
soon found that history was what he most enjoyed. Things that were a
commonplace to her were revealed to him for the first time. And his
comments were keen and intelligent, although his point of view was
strikingly novel and at the opposite pole from hers. To be sure, she had
been accustomed to accepting history merely as a more or less accurate
record of bygone events without philosophizing upon it. But to him it
was one long chronicle of wrong and oppression. He pronounced the dead
and gone sovereigns of England a bad lot and cowardly almost without
exception; not apparently objecting to them on the ground that they were
kings, as she had at first thought, but because they attained their
ends, mostly selfish, through cruelty and oppression, without any
regard for humane rights.
It was the same way with books of travel. The chateaus and castles, with
all their atmosphere of story and romance which she had always longed to
visit, interested him not a jot. In his opinion they were, one and all,
bloody monuments of greed and selfishness; the sooner they were razed to
the ground and forgotten, the better for the world.
It was useless to make an appeal for them on artistic grounds; art to
him was a doubly sealed book, and yet he frequently disclosed an innate
love of beauty in his appreciation of the changing panorama of the
winter landscape which stretched on every side before their eyes.
It was a picture which had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora
herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the
unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves. But she could not rid
herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson
to teach her. Twice they went in to Prentice. With these exceptions, she
saw no one but her husband and Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.
But it was, strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most
illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life. Not that
Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary. She was as
hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine. But her
natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great. From a
small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its
circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless
horizon of the prairie was indeed a far cry. How much inward
readjustment such a violent transplanting must require, Nora had
sufficient imagination to fully appreciate. But if Mrs. Sharp, herself,
were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having
triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of
it. Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she
breached over inexplicable chasms, "was all in a lifetime."
As she had a deeply rooted distaste for any form of exercise beyond that
which was required in the day's work, most of the visiting between them
devolved upon Nora. To her the distance that separated the two houses
was nothing, and as she had from the first taken a genuine liking to her
neighbor she found herself going over to the Sharps' several times a
week.
When, as was natural at first, she felt discouraged over her little
domestic failures, she found these neighborly visits a great tonic.
Mrs. Sharp was always ready to give advice when appealed to. And unlike
Gertie, she never expressed astonishment at her visitor's ignorance, or
impatience with her shortcomings. These became more and more infrequent.
Nora made up for her total lack of experience by an intelligent
willingness to be taught. There was a certain stimulation in the thought
that she was learning to manage her own house, that would have been
lacking while at her brother's even if Gertie had displayed a more
agreeable willingness to impart her own knowledge.
Nora had always been fond of children, and she found the Sharp children
unusually interesting. It was curious to see how widely the ideas of
this, the first generation born in the new country, differed, not only
from those of their parents, but from what they must have inevitably
been if they had remained in the environment that would have been theirs
had they been born and brought up back in England.
All of their dreams as to what they were going to do when they grew to
manhood were colored and shaped by the outdoor life they had been
accustomed to. They were to be farmers and cattle raisers on a large
scale. Mrs. Sharp used to shake her head sometimes as she heard these
grandiloquent plans, but Nora could see that she was secretly both
proud and pleased. After all, why should not these dreams be realized?
Everything was possible to the children of this new and wonderful
country, if they were only industrious and ambitious.
"I don't know, I'm sure, what their poor dear grandfather would have
said if he had lived to hear them," she used to say sometimes to Nora.
"_He_ used to think that there was nothing so genteel as having a good
shop. He quite looked down on farming folk. Still, everything is
different out here, ideas as well as everything else, and I'm not at all
sure they won't be better off in the end."
In which notion Nora secretly agreed with her. To picture these healthy,
sturdy, outdoor youngsters confined to a little dingy shop such as their
mother had been used to in her own childhood was impossible, as she
recalled to her mind the pale, anemic-looking little souls she had
occasionally seen during her stay in London. Was not any personal
sacrifice worth seeing one's children grow up so strong and healthy, so
manly and independent?
This, then, was the true inwardness of it all; the thing that dignified
and ennobled this life of toil and hardship, deprived of almost all the
things which she had always regarded as necessary, that the welfare,
prosperity and happiness of generations yet to come might be reared on
this foundation laid by self-denial and deprivation.
She felt almost humbled in the presence of this simple, unpretentious,
kindly woman who had borne so much without complaint that her children
might have wider opportunities for usefulness and happiness than she had
ever known.
Not that Mrs. Sharp, herself, seemed to think that she was doing
anything remarkable. She took it all as a matter of course. It was only
when something brought up the subject of the difficulties of learning to
do without this or that, that she alluded to the days when she also was
inexperienced and had had to learn for herself without anyone to advise
or help her.
Miles away from any help other than her husband could give her, she had
borne six children and buried one. And although the days of their worst
poverty seemed safely behind them, they had been able to save but
little, so that they still felt themselves at the mercies of the
changing seasons. Given one or two good years to harvest their crops,
they might indeed consider themselves almost beyond the danger point.
But with seven mouths to feed, one could not afford to lose a single
crop.
With her head teeming with all the new ideas that Mrs. Sharp's
experiences furnished, Nora felt that the time was by no means as wasted
as she had once thought it would be. There was no reason, after all,
that she should sink to the level of a mere domestic drudge. And if this
part of her life was not to endure forever, it would not have been
entirely barren, since it furnished her with much new material to ponder
over. After all, was it really more narrow than her life at Tunbridge
Wells? In her heart, she acknowledged that it was not.
To Frank, also, the winter brought a broader outlook. He had looked upon
Nora's little refinements of speech and delicate point of view, when he
had first known her at her brother's, as finicky, to say the least. All
women had fool notions about most things; this one seemed to have more
than the average share, that was all. He secretly shared Gertie's
opinion that women the world over were all alike in the essentials. He
had always been of the opinion that Nora had good stuff in her which
would come out once she had been licked into shape. Yet he found himself
not only learning to admire her for those same niceties but found
himself unconsciously imitating her mannerisms of speech.
Then, too, after they began the habit of reading in the evenings, he
found that she had no intention of ridiculing his ignorance and lack of
knowledge in matters on which she seemed to him to be wonderfully
informed. That they did not by any means always agree in the conclusions
they arrived at, in place of irritating him, as he would have thought,
he found only stimulating to his imagination. To attack and try to
undermine her position, as long as their arguments were conducted with
perfect good nature on either side, as they always were, diverted him
greatly. And he was secretly pleased when she defended herself with a
skill and address that defeated his purpose.
All the little improvements in the shack were a source of never-ending
pride and pleasure to him. Often when at work he found himself proudly
comparing his place with its newly added prettiness with the more gaudy
ornaments of Mrs. Sharp's or even with Gertie's more pretentious abode.
And it was not altogether the pride of ownership that made them suffer
in the comparison.
Looking back on the days before Nora's advent seemed like a horrible
nightmare from which he was thankful to have awakened. Once in a while
he indulged himself in speculating as to how it would feel to go back to
the old shiftless, untidy days of his bachelorhood. But he rarely
allowed himself to entertain the idea of her leaving, seriously. He was
like a child, snuggly tucked in his warm bed who, listening to the
howling of the wind outside, pictures himself exposed to its harshness
in order to luxuriate the more in its warmth and comfort.
But when, as sometimes happened, he could not close the door of his mind
to the thought of how he should ever learn to live without her again, it
brought an anguish that was physical as well as mental. Once, looking up
from her book, Nora had surprised him sitting with closed eye, his face
white and drawn with pain.
Her fright, and above all her pretty solicitude even after he had
assuaged her fears by explaining that he occasionally suffered from an
old strain which he had sustained a few years before while working in
the lumber camps, tried his composure to the utmost.
For days, the memory of the look in her eyes as she bent over him
remained in his mind. But he was careful not to betray himself again.
It was to prevent any repetition that he first resorted to working over
something while she was reading. While doubly occupied with listening
and working with his hands, he found that his mind was less apt to go
off on a tangent and indulge in painful and profitless speculations.
For, after all, as she had said, how could he prevent her going if her
heart was set on it? That she had given no outward sign of being unhappy
or discontented argued nothing. She was far too shrewd to spend her
strength in unavailing effort. Pride and ordinary prudence would counsel
waiting for a more favorable opportunity than had yet been afforded her.
She would not soon forget the lesson of the night he had beaten down her
opposition and dragged her pride in the dust.
And would she ever forgive it? That was a question that he asked himself
almost daily without finding any answer. There was nothing in her manner
to show that she harbored resentment or that she was brooding over plans
for escaping from the bondage of her life. But women, in his experience,
were deep, even cunning. Once given a strong purpose, women like Nora,
pursued it to the end. Women of this type were not easily diverted by
side issues as men so often were.
For weeks he lived in daily apprehension of Ed's arrival. There was no
one else she could turn to, and evoking his aid did not necessarily
argue that she must submit again to Gertie's grudging hospitality. Ed
might easily, unknown to his masterful better-half, furnish the funds to
return to England. She had not written him that he knew of. As a matter
of fact, she had not, but she might have given the letter to Sid Sharp
to post on one of his not infrequent trips into Prentice. It would only
have been by chance that Sid would speak of so trifling a matter. He was
much too proud to question him.
But as time went on and no Ed appeared, he began, if not exactly to hope
that, after all she was finding the life not unbearable, at least her
leaving was a thing of the more or less remote future. He summoned all
his philosophy to his aid. Perhaps by the time she did make up her mind
to quit him he would have acquired some little degree of resignation, or
at least would not be caught as unprepared as he frankly confessed
himself to be at the moment.
The spring, which brought many new occupations, mostly out of doors, had
passed, and summer was past its zenith. Frank had worked untiringly from
dawn to dark, so wearied that he frequently found it difficult to keep
his eyes open until supper was over. But his enthusiasm never flagged.
If everything went as well as he hoped, the additional quarter-section
was assured. For some reason or other, possibly because he was beginning
to feel a reaction after the hard work of the summer, Nora fancied that
his spirits were less high than usual. He talked less of the coveted
land than was his custom. She, herself, had never, in all her healthy
life, felt so glowing with health and strength. She, too, had worked
hard, finding almost every day some new task to perform. But aside from
the natural fatigue at night, which long hours of dreamless sleep
entirely dissipated, she felt all the better for her new experiences.
For one thing, her steady improvement in all the arts of the good
housewife made her daily routine much easier as well as giving her much
secret satisfaction. Never in her life had she looked so well. The
summer sun had given her a color which was most becoming.