They had talked out nearly every particular of their return before they
slept that night; they yarned away three hours over the first generous
meal that any one of them had eaten for many weeks. Louis Napoleon
stayed in the hut as a matter of course, and reposed with snores and
choking upon Marjorie's sledge and within a yard of her. It struck her
as she lay awake and listened that the housemaids in Sussex Square would
have thought things a little congested for a lady's bedroom, and then
she reflected that after all it wasn't much worse than a crowded
carriage in an all-night train from Switzerland. She tried to count how
many people there had been in that compartment, and failed. How stuffy
that had been--the smell of cheese and all! And with that, after a dream
that she was whaling and had harpooned a particularly short-winded whale
she fell very peacefully into oblivion.
Next day was spent in the careful preparation of the two sledges. They
intended to take a full provision for six weeks, although they reckoned
that with good weather they ought to be down at Hammond's in four.
The day after was Sunday, and Louis Napoleon would not look at the
sledges or packing. Instead he held a kind of religious service which
consisted partly in making Trafford read aloud out of a very oily old
New Testament he produced, a selected passage from the book of
Corinthians, and partly in moaning rather than singing several hymns. He
was rather disappointed that they did not join in with him. In the
afternoon he heated some water, went into the tent with it and it would
appear partially washed his face. In the evening, after they had supped,
he discussed religion, being curious by this time about their beliefs
and procedure.
He spread his mental and spiritual equipment before them very artlessly.
Their isolation and their immense concentration on each other had made
them sensitive to personal quality, and they listened to the broken
English and the queer tangential starts into new topics of this dirty
mongrel creature with the keenest appreciation of its quality. It was
inconsistent, miscellaneous, simple, honest, and human. It was as
touching as the medley in the pocket of a dead schoolboy. He was
superstitious and sceptical and sensual and spiritual, and very, very
earnest. The things he believed, even if they were just beliefs about
the weather or drying venison or filling pipes, he believed with
emotion. He flushed as he told them. For all his intellectual muddle
they felt he knew how to live honestly and die if need be very finely.
He was more than a little distressed at their apparent ignorance of the
truths of revealed religion as it is taught in the Moravian schools upon
the coast, and indeed it was manifest that he had had far more careful
and infinitely more sincere religious teaching than either Trafford or
Marjorie. For a time the missionary spirit inspired him, and then he
quite forgot his solicitude for their conversion in a number of
increasingly tall anecdotes about hunters and fishermen, illustrating at
first the extreme dangers of any departure from a rigid Sabbatarianism,
but presently becoming just stories illustrating the uncertainty of
life. Thence he branched off to the general topic of life upon the coast
and the relative advantages of "planter" and fisherman.
And then with a kindling eye he spoke of women, and how that some day he
would marry. His voice softened, and he addressed himself more
particularly to Marjorie. He didn't so much introduce the topic of the
lady as allow the destined young woman suddenly to pervade his
discourse. She was, it seemed, a servant, an Esquimaux girl at the
Moravian Mission station at Manivikovik. He had been plighted to her for
nine years. He described a gramophone he had purchased down at Port
Dupre and brought back to her three hundred miles up the coast--it
seemed to Marjorie an odd gift for an Esquimaux maiden--and he gave his
views upon its mechanism. He said God was with the man who invented the
gramophone "truly." They would have found one a very great relief to the
tediums of their sojourn at Lonely Hut. The gramophone he had given his
betrothed possessed records of the Rev. Capel Gumm's preaching and of
Madame Melba's singing, a revival hymn called "Sowing the Seed," and a
comic song--they could not make out his pronunciation of the title--that
made you die with laughter. "It goes gobble, gobble, gobble," he said,
with a solemn appreciative reflection of those distant joys.
"It's good to be jolly at times," he said with his bright eyes scanning
Marjorie's face a little doubtfully, as if such ideas were better left
for week-day expression.