After Marjorie had taken her dip, dried roughly behind a bush, twisted
her hair into a pigtail and coiled it under her hat, she amused herself
and Trafford as they clambered up through rocks and willows to the tent
again by cataloguing her apparatus of bath and toilette at Sussex Square
and tracing just when and how she had parted from each item on the way
to this place.
"But I _say!_" she cried, with a sudden, sharp note of dismay, "we
haven't soap! This is our last cake almost. I never thought of soap."
"Nor I," said Trafford.
He spoke again presently. "We don't turn back for soap," he said.
"We don't turn back for anything," said Marjorie. "Still--I didn't count
on a soapless winter."
"I'll manage something," said Trafford, a little doubtfully. "Trust a
chemist...."
That day they finished the portage and came out upon a wide lake with
sloping shores and a distant view of snow-topped mountains, a lake so
shallow that at times their loaded canoes scraped on the glaciated rock
below and they had to alter their course. They camped in a lurid sunset;
the night was warm and mosquitoes were troublesome, and towards morning
came a thunderstorm and wind and rain.
The dawn broke upon a tearing race of waves and a wild drift of slanting
rain sweeping across the lake before a gale. Marjorie peered out at this
as one peers out under the edge of an umbrella. It was manifestly
impossible to go on, and they did nothing that day but run up a canvas
shelter for the men and shift the tent behind a thicket of trees out of
the full force of the wind. The men squatted stoically, and smoked and
yarned. Everything got coldly wet, and for the most part the Traffords
sat under the tent and stared blankly at this summer day in Labrador.
"Now," said Trafford, "we ought to begin talking."
"There's nothing much to do else," said Marjorie.
"Only one can't begin," said Trafford.
He was silent for a time. "We're getting out of things," he said....
The next day began with a fine drizzle through which the sun broke
suddenly about ten o'clock. They made a start at once, and got a good
dozen miles up the lake before it was necessary to camp again. Both
Marjorie and Trafford felt stiff and weary and uncomfortable all day,
and secretly a little doubtful now of their own endurance. They camped
on an island on turf amidst slippery rocks, and the next day were in a
foaming difficult river again, with glittering shallows that obliged
every one to get out at times to wade and push. All through the
afternoon they were greatly beset by flies. And so they worked their
way on through a third days' journey towards the silent inland of
Labrador.
Day followed day of toilsome and often tedious travel; they fought
rapids, they waited while the men stumbled up long portages under vast
loads, going and returning, they camped and discussed difficulties and
alternatives. The flies sustained an unrelenting persecution, until
faces were scarred in spite of veils and smoke fires, until wrists and
necks were swollen and the blood in a fever. As they got higher and
higher towards the central plateau, the mid-day heat increased and the
nights grew colder, until they would find themselves toiling, wet with
perspiration, over rocks that sheltered a fringe of ice beneath their
shadows. The first fatigues and lassitudes, the shrinking from cold
water, the ache of muscular effort, gave place to a tougher and tougher
endurance; skin seemed to have lost half its capacity for pain without
losing a tithe of its discrimination, muscles attained a steely
resilience; they were getting seasoned. "I don't feel philosophical,"
said Trafford, "but I feel well."
"We're getting out of things."
"Suppose we are getting out of our problems!..."
One day as they paddled across a mile-long pool, they saw three bears
prowling in single file high up on the hillside. "Look," said the man,
and pointed with his paddle at the big, soft, furry black shapes,
magnified and startling in the clear air. All the canoes rippled to a
stop, the men, at first still, whispered softly. One passed a gun to
Trafford, who hesitated and looked at Marjorie.
The air of tranquil assurance about these three huge loafing monsters
had a queer effect on Marjorie's mind. They made her feel that they were
at home and that she was an intruder. She had never in her life seen
any big wild animals except in a menagerie. She had developed a sort of
unconscious belief that all big wild animals were in menageries
nowadays, and this spectacle of beasts entirely at large startled her.
There was never a bar between these creatures, she felt, and her
sleeping self. They might, she thought, do any desperate thing to feeble
men and women who came their way.
"Shall I take a shot?" asked Trafford.
"No," said Marjorie, pervaded by the desire for mutual toleration. "Let
them be."
The big brutes disappeared in a gully, reappeared, came out against the
skyline one by one and vanished.
"Too long a shot," said Trafford, handing back the gun....
Their journey lasted altogether a month. Never once did they come upon
any human being save themselves, though in one place they passed the
poles--for the most part overthrown--of an old Indian encampment. But
this desolation was by no means lifeless. They saw great quantities of
waterbirds, geese, divers, Arctic partridge and the like, they became
familiar with the banshee cry of the loon. They lived very largely on
geese and partridge. Then for a time about a string of lakes, the
country was alive with migrating deer going south, and the men found
traces of a wolf. They killed six caribou, and stayed to skin and cut
them up and dry the meat to replace the bacon they had consumed, caught,
fried and ate great quantities of trout, and became accustomed to the
mysterious dance of the northern lights as the sunset afterglow faded.
Everywhere, except in the river gorges, the country displayed the low
hummocky lines and tarn-like pools of intensely glaciated land;
everywhere it was carpeted with reindeer moss growing upon peat and
variegated by bushes of flowering, sweet-smelling Labrador tea. In
places this was starred with little harebells and diversified by
tussocks of heather and rough grass, and over the rocks trailed delicate
dwarf shrubs and a very pretty and fragrant pink-flowered plant of which
neither she nor Trafford knew the name. There was an astonishing amount
of wild fruit, raspberries, cranberries, and a white kind of strawberry
that was very delightful. The weather, after its first outbreak,
remained brightly serene....
And at last it seemed fit to Trafford to halt and choose his winter
quarters. He chose a place on the side of a low, razor-hacked rocky
mountain ridge, about fifty feet above the river--which had now dwindled
to a thirty-foot stream. His site was near a tributary rivulet that gave
convenient water, in a kind of lap that sheltered between two rocky
knees, each bearing thickets of willow and balsam. Not a dozen miles
away from them now they reckoned was the Height of Land, the low
watershed between the waters that go to the Atlantic and those that go
to Hudson's Bay. Close beside the site he had chosen a shelf of rock ran
out and gave a glimpse up the narrow rocky valley of the Green River's
upper waters and a broad prospect of hill and tarn towards the
south-east. North and north-east of them the country rose to a line of
low crests, with here and there a yellowing patch of last year's snow,
and across the valley were slopes covered in places by woods of stunted
pine. It had an empty spaciousness of effect; the one continually living
thing seemed to be the Green River, hurrying headlong, noisily,
perpetually, in an eternal flight from this high desolation. Birds were
rare here, and the insects that buzzed and shrilled and tormented among
the rocks and willows in the gorge came but sparingly up the slopes to
them.
"Here presently," said Trafford, "we shall be in peace."
"It is very lonely," said Marjorie.
"The nearer to God."
"Think! Not one of these hills has ever had a name."
"Well?"
"It might be in some other planet."
"Oh!--we'll christen them. That shall be Marjorie Ridge, and that Rag
Valley. This space shall be--oh! Bayswater! Before we've done with it,
this place and every feature of it will be as familiar as Sussex Square.
More so,--for half the houses there would be stranger to us, if we could
see inside them, than anything in this wilderness.... As familiar,
say--as your drawing-room. That's better."
Marjorie made no answer, but her eyes went from the reindeer moss and
scrub and thickets of the foreground to the low rocky ridges that
bounded the view north and east of them. The scattered boulders, the
tangles of wood, the barren upper slopes, the dust-soiled survivals of
the winter's snowfall, all contributed to an effect at once carelessly
desert and hopelessly untidy. She looked westward, and her memory was
full of interminable streaming rapids, wastes of ice-striated rocks,
tiresome struggles through woods and wild, wide stretches of tundra and
tarn, trackless and treeless, infinitely desolate. It seemed to her that
the sea coast was but a step from London and ten thousand miles away
from her.