received before he left New York, and he had read it so often that he
almost knew it by heart. "I have shot my arrow in the air," he wrote,
"and God alone knows where it may fall. My book is out, and there are
some signs that it may succeed. You know what I mean by that. The
only success I crave is to influence other minds in right directions.
Men have called me a dreamer, perhaps you yourself have thought so too;
but I know, and I think you know, that I have dreamed true. We are
moving toward a revolution. It is impossible that the present system
can endure much longer. My message is for the day after the revolution
is accomplished. Then will begin the reconstruction of life again from
the base upward, a simpler and an ampler life. It is for that day I
write, and my bones will thrill to it even in the grave. As for me, I
am like Balaam; I shall see it, but not now; I shall behold it, but not
nigh. Even so, I am content." There followed a fuller expression of
his social ideals, and the whole closed with this paragraph--"Your
mother came to see us last week. It was a great but very happy
surprise. Can you guess what we talked of? Of you, Arthur. For we
three know you as no others do, and we love you, and believe in you.
She kissed Elizabeth at parting, and said, 'Some day----' and then
stopped; but we knew what she meant. Well, you must work on toward
that some day. Poor lady! Deal tenderly with her. I think she has
sore wounds in her heart, and remember it was harder for her to part
from you than for you to go. By so much her quiet sacrifice is greater
than yours. She is the tarrier by the stuff, a harder lot, I think,
than his that goes down into the battle."
Tears filled his eyes as he read the words. There came to him a sudden
vision of the London he had left--the vast tribes of toiling men, the
blind pain and suffering of so many millions, the silent agonies that
hid beneath those gray skies and congregated roofs. And then, looking
from the windows, the eye dwelt again upon this magnificent heritage
that bore the flag of England, and he marvelled why men fought for bare
life in cities when an empty empire called for them. Surely some day
the wizard's spell would break, and London would pour its wasted tribes
into this land of fertility and beauty. To reconstruct life from the
base upward, that could never be done there; it might be done here.
Here the simpler, ampler life was possible. Ah! if he could not fight
by Vickars' side in London, he was still fighting for him here, and was
it not better to create the new than to rebuild the old?
The mountain peaks were gradually receding. The train crawled slowly
round the walls of precipice, hung suspended for a giddy instant, and
then, with a tumult of squealing brakes and hissing steam, plunged into
the abyss, doubling on itself a score of times, till it reached the
valley and the roaring river. It was past noon when the train stopped
beside a placid lake. Immense forests rose on every side; an
immemorial silence lay on all things, broken only by the gentle ripple
of the waters. A steamer lay beside the landing-stage; an hour later
he was afloat.
There were not many passengers, and what there were seemed
uncommunicative. They were for the most part long-limbed, sturdy men,
ranchers, traders, lumber-jacks, their faces bronzed with outdoor life.
They eyed him narrowly and critically. He knew quite well what their
criticism implied. He was a greenhorn, and no doubt looked like one.
As long as the light lasted he took no notice of them; he was too
absorbed in the unfolding beauty of the lake, and in curiosity as to
what it would reveal for him. Somewhere on the lake lay his small
estate, and he found himself studying with eager interest the wooded
shores, in the hope of discovering something that gave a hint of human
habitation. There was very little to reward his gaze. Twice he saw a
blue curl of smoke rising from the forest; once a rude hut, whose one
window glittered like a gem in the setting sun; beyond this nothing met
the eye but a shore of snow, the black bare poles of charred trees
rising above the living pines, and the solitary sky. The scene was
sombre; the silence so profound that the churning stern-wheel sounded
like the passage of an army. Night fell swiftly. It was seven o'clock
when a lighted hillside met the eye, and he was told that it was Nelson.
He slept that night at a small hotel near the shore, and rising early
next morning was quite unprepared for the beauty of the scene that
awaited him. The distant hills of snow were touched with rosy fire,
the lake was like a turquoise, and the town surprised him by its sober
aspect of prosperity. He scarce knew what he had expected in this
remote outpost of the Empire, but certainly not what he saw--broad
streets, buildings of hewn stone, substantial shops and warehouses, all
gathered round a curve of lake so exquisite that few places could
surpass it in its natural loveliness. The hotel was kept by an
Englishman, who made haste to cultivate his acquaintance. He was a
lightly built, bearded fellow, with a shrewd eye and a perpetual smile,
one of the numerous family of Smith.
"So you're going up the lake?" he inquired.
"Yes. I want a ranch called Bundy's."
"Bundy. Let me see. I don't know of any Bundy here."
"He isn't here. It's his ranch I want to find."
"Did he tell you where it was?"
"Poplar Point."
"Ah! now I know. If you'll come with me, I think I can show you
whereabouts it is." He took him to the landing-stage, and pointed out
a deep fold in the hills. "You make for that," he said. "Unless I
disremember, Bundy's ranch is there or thereabout. But people are
always going and coming here. These 'ere ranches are always changing
hands. Young fellows like you come out, and get tired of the work at
the end of the summer, and sell out. They're the plague of Nelson.
Quitters, we call 'em. I hope you ain't a quitter."
"I don't think I am. I've come here to live."
"Well, sir, you've come to a good place. But let me give you a word of
warning. It's only hard work that pays here, and you'll have to work
hard and wait long if you want to do anything in fruit. This is no
place for quitters."
He went on to give him many brief histories of the obnoxious tribe of
quitters. They were all looking out for a soft job--that was what was
the matter with them. Mamma's darlings--that's what they were. Did he
know what it was to handle an axe. No, he thought not. Land had to be
cleared--did he know what that meant?
"But mine is cleared," Arthur interrupted. "At least, fifty acres are."
At this he looked puzzled.
"I never heard of fifty acres of cleared land anywheres near Poplar
Point," he observed.
There happened to come along the landing-stage at that moment a
somewhat extraordinary-looking old man. He wore blue jeans, a red wool
sweater, and a battered felt hat. His hair and beard were unkempt, and
both were gray. A beggar could not have been worse dressed, and yet
there was about him something of the dignity that marks the open-air
man.
"That's Jim Flanagan," remarked Smith; "he ought to know. Here, Jim, I
want to speak to you."
The old man came towards them in silence.
"Jim, do you know a ranch at Poplar Point called Bundy's? You know
most of the places up and down the lake, don't you?"
"Yes, I know it. It lies back a quarter of a mile or so, on a bench."
"Cleared, is it?"
"Not much. It was once, but most of it's growed up again."
"Well, this gentleman's going there. Maybe you could give him
pointers."
"Going to live there?" asked Flanagan.
"Yes, I'm going to live there," said Arthur.
"Well, I don't know but what you can. There's a pretty good log-house.
I'm living not far away myself."
"Can't you row me over?"
"No, I can't do that. It wouldn't be no good if I did. You can't live
there without a good bit of preparation. There ain't no shops at
Poplar Point, and there ain't no hotel," he remarked with a grin.
"Now I'll tell you what I would do, if I was you," said the landlord.
"You just let Jim give you some pointers. He'll treat you right, will
Jim."
"I'll be glad to do anything I can," said the old man. "I've got an
hour to spare, any way."
Arthur took Flanagan up to the hotel with him, and was soon interested
in his strange preceptor. It seemed he was an old hunter and
prospector, a man of infinite adventures, with a dislike of
civilisation, which was perhaps his most marked characteristic. There
was no remote solitude of the surrounding woods with which he was not
acquainted.
"As for this ranch of yours, I guess you've been expecting too much,"
he remarked. "It's good enough land, that I believe. And I won't say
but what it has been planted all right once. But it's been let grow
up. I kind of remember a man called Bundy bought it--took it for a
debt, 'twas said. But he's never been here, not a£ I remember. And
I've been here and hereabout a matter of a dozen years."
So it appeared that Bundy had let the light of his imagination gild
Kootenay Lake with a delusive splendour, as it did all those
"propositions" which engaged his ardent rhetoric. But Arthur was in no
mood to judge his benefactor critically. The land was there--that was
something; and it would go hard with him if he could not make it all
that Bundy had imagined it. He might have known that Bundy had never
seen it for himself. The story of his having taken it for a debt had
the accent of truth. The mouth of the gift-horse must not be too
closely examined, but at least he was a veritable beast. And in spite
of the passing shadow of disappointment, Arthur's spirits rose at the
menace of unexpected difficulty.
"Well," said Flanagan. "I must be getting along. When will you be
coming out?"
"Immediately. Some time this afternoon."
"In that case you'll have to get a move on. You've a lot to do."
Flanagan thereupon sat down again and gave him a series of elaborate
instructions. He must first of all buy a boat; he'd need one, any way.
There was a boat he knew of that might be had second-hand for twenty
dollars. Then he'd want to buy an axe or two, a grub-hoe, a sack of
flour, sugar, rice, tea, coffee, tinned milk, and may be a side of
bacon and a case of eggs. That would do for a beginning.
The boat was duly bargained for upon the wharf. It was an interesting
ruin: the paint had long since disappeared, it had no rudder, and it
leaked like a sieve. Its owner, remarking Arthur's innocence, wished
to raise the price, but Jim kept him to the twenty dollars.
"That or nothing," he said sternly. "And put a couple of baling-tins
in. They'll be needed."
Arthur looked upon this ancient tub with frank dislike and with some
dismay. The beauty of the rose-tinted morn was over; the sky was gray,
and a rising north-west wind was making more than ripples on the lake.
"How far is Poplar Point?" he asked.
"Five miles," Jim answered. "But I guess you'll do it. You look
strong."
"It isn't myself I'm thinking of; it's the boat. Do you think she can
do it?"
"I've seen worse," said Jim. "Not many of them, though. But she'll do
it, never fear. That there old boat have been on the lake ever since I
knowed it."
Which, under the circumstances, was scarcely a recommendation.
By one o'clock, somehow or other, Arthur had got through his
preparations. His story had got about; he found himself stared at in
the streets as a greenhorn; but every one had shown him civility, and
some a rough kindness. At the bank a great surprise awaited him. He
found that Bundy had telegraphed a considerable sum of money to his
credit, more than enough to give him a fair and even generous start.
Willing hands helped him to pack his goods. They were all there--the
axes, the grub-hoe (with whose uses he was totally unacquainted), the
sack of flour, and the various provisions. His valise was shoved under
the stern seat, and with it half a dozen pamphlets on fruit-growing
which he collected in the town. Flanagan had gone two hours earlier,
with the promise that he would look out for him at Poplar Point.
"Keep your eye on the gap in the hills," was his final instruction,
"then push up the creek to the left; and if it's dark, I'll burn a
flare."
He had no sooner left the landing than he began to feel the force of
the wind. It blew with a steady and increasing violence, dead ahead;
pull as he would, he made little progress, and, to add to his
discomfiture, he had to be continually baling. The moment he stopped
to bale, the boat swung round or was driven backward. His hands were
soon blistered, his muscles ached, yet toil as he would the far-off gap
in the hills seemed no nearer. The water ran black and foam-flecked in
short, choppy waves; the sky had darkened rapidly, and presently a
cutting hail fell. In ordinary circumstances he would have turned
back, but he had a lively recollection of Smith's stinging phrases, and
had no mind to be written down a mamma's darling or derided as a
quitter. This was, in its way, his first test, and to succumb would be
to lose nerve for future difficulties. He was now in the very centre
of the lake, and a thrill of apprehension seized him as he saw how
small an object this crazy boat appeared in that loneliness of angry
water. Black water, black forests, and on the upper hills pale rays of
watery sunset--that was what he saw, and himself scarcely more
noticeable than a bird, buffeted by the impending storm. But he toiled
on, and at last got a little shelter from the shore. More than three
hours had passed since he left Nelson; and in this deep fissure of the
hills the night had already camped. The darkness deepened rapidly. It
was five o'clock when he rounded the point of the creek. Here the
water was smoother, and he could pull more leisurely; but it was now
quite dark. All his hopes were fixed on Flanagan. For another hour he
searched the shores eagerly for any sign of light. Nothing met his eye
but the tiny twinkling of a lamp here and there in the window of some
unseen house. At last, just when he had made up his mind to spend the
night upon the lake and wait for dawn, a sudden shaft of red flame
soared up not a hundred yards away. A voice hailed him, and never did
a human voice sound sweeter. Ten minutes later Flanagan's hand grasped
his, and he stepped ashore.
"The old boat's done it, then," said Flanagan. "I rather guessed she
would. Now you come right along with me."
"So it was only a guess, was it?"
"Well, most things in this world are a sort of guess," said the old
man. "The only thing sure is that men don't die till their hour's
come." He turned away gruffly, and at once began to shoulder Arthur's
goods.
"But you can't carry all that," cried Arthur, as the old man hoisted
the sack of flour upon his shoulders.
"Needs must when the devil drives," he said grimly. "There ain't no
hotel hereabouts, didn't I tell you? You've got to get all your goods
into the shack to-night. That wind's bringing up snow, and the sooner
we get this job done the better."
Arthur grasped his valise, and such impedimenta as Flanagan would let
him carry, and followed the old man.
The snow was deep and soft, in spite of the cold wind. The darkness
was like a solid wall on either side of the thin ray that fell from
Jim's lantern. Through the wood there ran a perpetual ghostly murmur,
a sound of sighing, groaning, struggling, as the branches beat to and
fro and rubbed against each other. Suddenly a long and terrible cry
rose above the noises of the forest, a cry of infinite pain, despair,
melancholy, and Arthur started back, shouting, "What's that?"
"Why, that's only a coyote," said Jim--"just an old dog coyote. Bless
you! he won't hurt you."
Arthur said no more, but he was glad that no one could see the colour
of his face. He struggled breathlessly in the steps of his guide. The
hill was steep, the foothold uncertain; more than once he waded to his
knees in a hidden bog-hole. And yet, in spite both of his discomfort
and his fear, he was conscious of a gradual heightening of his spirits.
There was something wild and savage in these black walls of forest that
encompassed him, in the mystery and solitude of this primeval place,
something that exhilarated while it awed him. He was conscious of the
falling from him of the trappings of a discarded civilisation. He had
come to a place where the artificialities of life had no significance;
where the natural man stood front to front with the stubborn earth,
with no weapons to subdue her but his own thews and muscles, his own
right of domination, and his unconquerable will.
The ground was easier now, and they moved more swiftly on a level
narrow trail. At last the darkness thinned a little; they had reached
a small clearing, and a light shone brightly.
"Here we are," said Jim. "And not sorry to get here either."
He pushed open the door of a log-hut. It was perhaps fourteen feet
square; a stove burned red-hot in the centre of the hut; on one side
was a long bunk built of red cedar.
"I done my best to clean it up," said Jim. "Maybe there's a rat or two
around, and perhaps a porcupine, but they won't hurt you. It's dry,
that's one thing. And now I'll say good-night."
He tramped off into the wood. Arthur stood a long time listening, but
Jim's footsteps were soon lost amid the groaning of the trees. The
long, melancholy cry of the coyote again thrilled the air. Arthur shut
the door.
And it was so that he came into his heritage.
XVII
THE NEW LIFE
He contrived to make himself some coffee, and after a while
extinguished the lamp and crawled into the bunk. The red-hot stove
filled the hut with a dim light, and he fell asleep.
An hour later he woke in a sweat of terror. The fire in the stove had
died down, the hut was bitterly cold, and he was in total darkness.
The darkness was like nothing he had known before; it closed round him
with a pressure that was almost tangible, and it seemed alive. There
was a horrible sense of something hostile in it; he could have thought
it moved stealthily, with a faint rustling of unseen robes, that it
breathed and palpitated, that it was a presence inimical to life. A
rat ran across his bed, and on the roof there was a long grating sound.
Outside, in the wide night, he could recognise the melancholy cry of
the coyote; but there were other cries and sounds which he could not
recognise. Close to the door of the hut there was audible what seemed
like deep, stertorous breathing, deepening into a human groan. From
the depth of the wood came a fearful wail, as of a woman in distress.
He sprang from the bunk, rushed to the door, and opened it. There was
a soft flutter of wings, and the groaning ceased; but the wailing in
the woods went on, upon a scale of rising agony. There was nowhere any
sign of life. The moon had risen, and the snow-laden trees rose pure
and mystic in the silver light. They were like a cohort of silent
watchers round his lonely hut, and he welcomed them as comrades.
Slowly his fears subsided. It was not until the next day he learned
from Flanagan that the soft groaning at the door proceeded from nothing
more alarming than a mountain owl, and that the wailing in the forest
was merely a mountain lion in search of prey.
This unforgetable night was his first and last occasion of terror. It
is only when the causes of phenomena are hidden from us that the
phenomena themselves are terrible. When we know that the tapping in
the wainscot is caused by an innocent insect, the movements in the
forest to be the work of wind or frost, the breathing in the dark to be
a sleeping owl, the mind at once regains the equipoise of reason.
Perhaps if we knew what really lay behind the mystery of death, we
should fear it as little as we do the commonplace phenomena of birth
and life.
The morning came at last in floods of living light, and as Arthur once
more stood at the cabin door, he thought that he had never looked upon
a scene so exquisite. Pale rays of colourless and pure fire spread
like a fan along the eastern sky; they deepened into momentary purple,
throbbed as with a pulse, and suddenly were quickened with a flood of
scarlet. The distant peaks of snow one by one caught the elemental
splendour, the higher summits topped with flame, the lower stained with
rose; and across the dim and quiet lake, from an open gateway of the
hills a shaft of light shot, slender as a spear and vibrating with the
joy of speed. A gust of air shook the forest, and the ice-clad boughs
tinkled like a chime of bells. There was no other sound except the
little song of water, running underneath its roof of ice. All around
rose the still and solemn woods. The miniature plains of snow gathered
at their feet glittered like a floor of diamonds. And from sky and
lake and forest came an air inimitably virginal, the cold and taintless
air of unviolated Nature, infinitely pure and strong and vital.
He stood for some moments quite silent, in that intense clarity of
dawn, scarcely conscious of himself, his whole being drawn out in a
kind of effortless and sacred awe. He had an inward sense of
lustration and release: the soul rose clean as from a bath of fire; the
will, so often misdirected, was modulated to the perfect harmony of
this external world. Such moods lie beyond reason, and are therefore
beyond the explication of the reason. The pivots upon which life moves
consist of a few rare and exquisite moments; for one man a sunrise, for
another a strain of music heard at midnight, for yet another the
sudden, arrowy fragrance of violets in a wood, and behold! life is
changed, something has been withdrawn from it and something added--a
new element, wholly authentic, yet wholly indefinable. It was such a
moment with this solitary exile. The dawn came to him as an omen and a
challenge. It was the porch of a new life, and he entered it with
willing feet.
He returned to the cabin, and breakfasted in haste after a fashion
which would have provoked pity and derision in the bosom of the British
house-wife. His coffee was boiled in a discarded meat-tin; bread he
had none; and his effort to fry eggs was probably among the least
successful of all recorded operations known to culinary science. In
the midst of his crude performance Jim Flanagan arrived, surveying him
from the doorway with a smile of irony.
When the meal was over, Jim began to talk in his slow, caustic way.
Like many men who have passed their lives in the open air and solitude,
Jim had acquired a certain rude philosophy, the fruit of much silent
thinking, experience, and observation. He had worked in lumber-camps,
mines, and on the railroads, but only by necessity; no sooner had he
acquired a little money than he had always gone off into solitude
again. Carrying all his scant possessions with him, he would disappear
into the forests and mountains, and would be lost to sight for many
months. What was he doing? Hunting, prospecting for gold and copper,
and loafing. He would return from these expeditions not a penny piece
the richer, a little raggeder, and with deeper lines upon his face,
having often suffered great privations, yet at the first opportunity he
would resume them. For all settled ways of life he had a positive
aversion, and not all the gold of Golconda could have bribed him to
reside in cities. This was the more remarkable because he had spent
his childhood and early youth in Liverpool, from which dim and dreary
city he had been thrust out by chance and poverty into the Canadian
wilderness. Till he landed in Canada he had never seen a forest or a
mountain, had scarcely looked upon a flower, and had breathed only the
tainted air of slums; but on his first view of the wooded heights of
Montreal, something woke in his heart, a dumb love of Nature, a passion
for freedom, an appetite for solitude. Friends he had none, and if he
ever had relations, he had long ago forgotten them. Thus left wholly
to himself, he had fashioned his own way of life with neither memory
nor obligation to restrain him; had considered his debt to civilization
cancelled; had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a taciturn
but contented nomad, whose feet had traversed the breadth of a mighty
continent, and penetrated a hundred savage solitudes where none but he
had trodden. Thus, in his own way, he had solved the problem of
existence; he had achieved freedom, and had enrolled himself among the
humble Argonauts of Empire.
The greatness of this half-discovered empire was his chief thought, and
upon this theme he was always ready to speak.
"England don't know what she's got in Canada," was a frequent sentiment
of his, often expressed with biting scorn. "She sends her worst out
here," he would continue--"dumps her rubbish on us." He made this
remark now, to which Arthur replied with a laugh, "I hope you don't
consider me rubbish, Jim."
"No, you're young, and I guess you're strong. But there's lots of hard
work ahead of you, and I've seen many a chap like you fly the tracks."
"I wish you'd tell me what I've got to do."
"Well, I ain't no fruit-rancher myself," said Jim. "But maybe I can
teach you. Suppose you and me take a look round."