Their return was a very different journey from the toilsome ascent of
the summer. An immense abundance of snow masked the world, snow that
made them regret acutely they had not equipped themselves with ski. With
ski and a good circulation, a man may go about Labrador in winter, six
times more easily than by the canoes and slow trudging of summer travel.
As it was they were glad of their Canadian snow shoes. One needs only
shelters after the Alpine Club hut fashion, and all that vast solitary
country would be open in the wintertime. Its shortest day is no shorter
than the shortest day in Cumberland or Dublin.
This is no place to tell of the beauty and wonder of snow and ice, the
soft contours of gentle slopes, the rippling of fine snow under a steady
wind, the long shadow ridges of shining powder on the lee of trees and
stones and rocks, the delicate wind streaks over broad surfaces like the
marks of a chisel in marble, the crests and cornices, the vivid
brightness of edges in the sun, the glowing yellowish light on sunlit
surfaces, the long blue shadows, the flush of sunset and sunrise and the
pallid unearthly desolation of snow beneath the moon. Nor need the
broken snow in woods and amidst tumbled stony slopes be described, nor
the vast soft overhanging crests on every outstanding rock beside the
icebound river, nor the huge stalactites and stalagmites of green-blue
ice below the cliffs, nor trees burdened and broken by frost and snow,
nor snow upon ice, nor the blue pools at mid-day upon the surface of the
ice-stream. Across the smooth wind-swept ice of the open tarns they
would find a growth of ice flowers, six-rayed and complicated, more
abundant and more beautiful than the Alpine summer flowers.
But the wind was very bitter, and the sun had scarcely passed its zenith
before the thought of fuel and shelter came back into their minds.
As they approached Partington's tilt, at the point where his trapping
ground turned out of the Green River gorge, he became greatly obsessed
by the thought of his traps. He began to talk of all that he might find
in them, all he hoped to find, and the "dallars" that might ensue. They
slept the third night, Marjorie within and the two men under the lee of
the little cabin, and Partington was up and away before dawn to a trap
towards the ridge. He had infected Marjorie and Trafford with a
sympathetic keenness, but when they saw his killing of a marten that was
still alive in its trap, they suddenly conceived a distaste for
trapping.
They insisted they must witness no more. They would wait while he went
to a trap....
"Think what he's doing!" said Trafford, as they sat together under the
lee of a rock waiting for him. "We imagined this was a free,
simple-souled man leading an unsophisticated life on the very edge of
humanity, and really he is as much a dependant of your woman's world,
Marjorie, as any sweated seamstress in a Marylebone slum. Lord! how far
those pretty wasteful hands of women reach! All these poor broken and
starving beasts he finds and slaughters are, from the point of view of
our world, just furs. Furs! Poor little snarling unfortunates! Their
pelts will be dressed and prepared because women who have never dreamt
of this bleak wilderness desire them. They will get at last into Regent
Street shops, and Bond Street shops, and shops in Fifth Avenue and in
Paris and Berlin, they will make delightful deep muffs, with scent and
little bags and powder puffs and all sorts of things tucked away inside,
and long wraps for tall women, and jolly little frames of soft fur for
pretty faces, and dainty coats and rugs for expensive little babies in
Kensington Gardens."...
"I wonder," reflected Marjorie, "if I could buy one perhaps. As a
memento."
He looked at her with eyes of quiet amusement.
"Oh!" she cried, "I didn't mean to! The old Eve!"
"The old Adam is with her," said Trafford. "He's wanting to give it
her.... We don't cease to be human, Madge, you know, because we've got
an idea now of just where we are. I wonder, which would you like? I dare
say we could arrange it."
"No," said Marjorie, and thought. "It would be jolly," she said. "All
the same, you know--and just to show you--I'm not going to let you buy
me that fur."
"I'd like to," said Trafford.
"No," said Marjorie, with a decision that was almost fierce. "I mean it.
I've got more to do than you in the way of reforming. It's just because
always I've let my life be made up of such little things that I mustn't.
Indeed I mustn't. Don't make things hard for me."
He looked at her for a moment. "Very well," he said. "But I'd have liked
to."...
"You're right," he added, five seconds later.
"Oh! I'm right."