sometimes hard to define that word. There are so many kinds of madness,
so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it
happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is
so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men
of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far,
something breaks and we go insane.
But I will tell you the story. That is what you want to hear, and you
expect that it will be prejudiced--that I will either deliberately
attempt to protect and prolong a human life, or shorten and destroy it.
I shall do neither, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police. I have a
faith in you that is in its way an unbounded as my faith in God. I have
looked up to you in all my life in the wilderness as the heart of
chivalry and the soul of honor and fairness to all men. Pathfinders,
men of iron, guardians of people and spaces of which civilization knows
but little, I have taught my children of the forests to honor, obey and
to trust you. And so I shall tell you the story without prejudice, with
the gratitude of a missioner who has lived his life for forty years in
the wilderness, gentlemen.
I am a Catholic. It is four hundred miles straight north by dog-sledge
or snowshoe to my cabin, and this is the first time in nineteen years
that I have been down to the edge of the big world which I remember now
as little more than a dream. But up there I knew that my duty lay, just
at the edge of the Big Barren. See! My hands are knotted like the snarl
of a tree. The glare of your lights hurts my eyes. I traveled to-day in
the middle of your street because my moccasined feet stumbled on the
smoothness of your walks. People stared, and some of them laughed.
Forty years I have lived in another world. You--and especially you
gentlemen who have trailed in the Patrols of the north--know what that
world is. As it shapes different hands, as it trains different feet, as
it gives to us different eyes, so also it has bred into my forest
children hearts and souls that may be a little different, and a code of
right and wrong that too frequently has had no court of law to guide
it. So judge fairly, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted Police! Understand,
if you can.
It was a terrible winter--that winter of Le Mort Rouge. So far down as
men and children now living will remember, it will be called by my
people the winter of Famine and Red Death. Starvation, gentlemen--and
the smallpox. People died like--what shall I say? It is not easy to
describe a thing like that. They died in tepees. They died in shacks.
They died on the trail. From late December until March I said my
prayers over the dead. You are wondering what all this has to do with
my story; why it matters that the caribou had migrated in vast herds to
the westward, and there was no food; why it matters that there were
famine and plague in the great unknown land, and that people were dying
and our world going through a cataclysm. My backwoods eyes can see your
thought. What has all this to do with Joseph Brecht? What has it to do
with Andre Beauvais? Why does this little forest priest take up so much
time in telling so little? you ask. And because it has its
place--because it has its meaning--I ask you for permission to tell my
story in my own way. For these sufferings, this hunger and pestilence
and death, had a strange and terrible effect on many human creatures
that were left alive when spring came. It was like a great storm that
had swept through a forest of tall trees. A storm of suffering that
left heads bowed, shoulders bent, and minds gone. Yes, GONE!
Since that winter of Le Mort Rouge I know of eyes into which the life
of laughter will never come again; I know of strong men who became as
little children; I have seen faces that were fair with youth shrivel
into age--and my people call it noot' akutawin keskwawin--the cold and
hungry madness. May God help Andre Beauvais!
I will tell the story now.
It was in June. The last of the mush-snows had gone early, nearly a
fortnight before, and the waters were free from ice, when word was
brought to me that Father Boget was dying at Old Fort Reliance. Father
Boget was twenty years older than I, and I called him mon pere. He was
a father to me in our earlier years. I made haste to reach him that I
might hold his hand before he died, if that was possible. And you,
Sergeant McVeigh, who have spent years in that country of the Great
Slave, know what a race with death from Christie Bay to Old Fort
Reliance would be. To follow the broken and twisted waters of the Great
Slave would mean two hundred miles, while to cut straight across the
land by smaller streams and lakelets meant less than seventy. But on
your maps that space of seventy miles is a blank. You have in it no
streams and no larger waters. You know little of it. But I can tell
you, for I have been though it. It is a Lost Hell. It is a vast country
in which berry bushes grow abundantly, but on which there are no
berries, where there are forests and swamps, but not a living creature
to inhabit them; a country of water in which there are no fish, of air
in which there are no birds, of plants without flowers--a reeking,
stinking country of brimstone, a hell. In your Blue Books you have
called it the Sulphur Country. And this country, as you draw a line
from Christie Bay to Old Fort Reliance, is straight between. Mon pere
was dying, and my time was short. I decided to venture it--cut across
that Sulphur Country, and I sought for a man to accompany me. I could
find none. To the Indian it was the land of Wetikoo--the Devil Country;
to the Breeds it was filled with horror. Forty miles distant there was
a man I knew would go, a white man. But to reach him would lose me
three days, and I was about to set out alone when the stranger came. He
was, indeed, a strange man. When he came to what I called my chateau,
from nowhere, going nowhere, I hardly knew whether to call him young or
old. But I made my guess. That terrible winter had branded him. When I
asked him his name, he said:
"I am a wanderer, and in wandering I have lost my name. Call me M'sieu."
I found this was a long speech for him, that his tongue was tied by a
horrible silence. When I told him where I was going, and described the
country I was going through, and that I wanted a man, he merely nodded
that he would accompany me.
We started in a canoe, and I placed him ahead of me so that I could
make out, if I could, something of what he was. His hair was dark. His
beard was dark. His eyes were sunken but strangely clear. They puzzled
me. They were always questing. Always seeking. And always expecting, it
seemed to me. A man of unfathomable mystery, of unutterable tragedy, of
a silence that was almost inhuman. Was he mad? I ask you,
gentlemen--was he mad? And I leave the answer to you. To me he was
good. When I told him what mon pere had been to me, and that I wanted
to reach him before he died, he spoke no word of hope or sympathy--but
worked until his muscles cracked. We ate together, we drank together,
we slept side by side--and it was like eating and drinking and sleeping
with a sphinx which some strange miracle had endowed with life.
The second day we entered the Sulphur Country. The stink of it was in
our nostrils that second night we camped. The moon rose, and we saw it
as if through the fumes of a yellow smoke. Far behind us we heard a
wolf howl, and it was the last sound of life. With the dawn we went on.
We passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose the sulphurous
fogs. In many places the water we touched with our hands was hot; in
other places the forests we paddled through were so dense they were
almost tropical. And lifeless. Still, with the stillness of death for
thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years. The food we ate
seemed saturated with the vileness of sulphur; it seeped into our
water-bags; it turned us to the color of saffron; it was terrible,
frightening, inconceivable. And still we went on by compass, and M'sieu
showed no fear--even less, gentlemen, than did I.
And then, on the third day--in the heart of this diseased and horrible
region--we made a discovery that drew a strange cry even from those
mysteriously silent lips of M'sieu.
It was the print of a naked human foot in a bar of mud.
How it came there, why it was there, and why if was a naked foot I
suppose were the first thoughts that leaped into our startled minds.
What man could live in these infernal regions? WAS it a man, or was it
the footprint of some primeval ape, a monstrous survival of the
centuries?
The trail led through a steaming slough in which the mud and water were
tepid and which grew rank with yellow reeds and thick grasses--grasses
that were almost flesh-like, it seemed to me, as if swollen and about
to burst from some dreadful disease, Perhaps your scientists can tell
why sulphur has this effect on vegetation. It is so; there was sulphur
in the very wood we burned. Through those reeds and grasses we soon
found where a narrow trail was beaten, and then we came to a rise of
land sheltered in timber, a sort of hill in that flat world, and on the
crest of this hill we found a cabin.
Yes, a cabin; a cabin built roughly of logs, and it was yellow with
sulphur, as if painted. We went inside and we found there the man whom
you know as Joseph Brecht. I did not look at M'sieu when he first rose
before us, but I heard a great gasp from his throat behind me. And I
think I stood as if life had suddenly gone out of me. Joseph Brecht was
half naked. His feet were bare. He looked like a wild man, with his
uncut hair--a wild man except that his face was smooth. Curious that a
man would shave there! And not so odd, perhaps, when one knows how a
beard gathers sulphur. He had risen from a cot on which there was a bed
of boughs, and in the light that came in through the open door he
looked terribly emaciated, with the skin drawn tightly over his cheek
bones. It was he who spoke first.
"I am glad you have come," he said, his eyes staring wildly. "I guess I
am dying. Some water, please. There is a spring back of the cabin."
Quite sanely he spoke, and yet the words were scarcely out of his mouth
when he fell back upon the cot, his eyes rolling in the top of his
head, his mouth agape, his breath coming in great panting gasps. It was
a strange sickness. I will not trouble you with all the details. You
are anxious for the story--the tragedy--which alone will count with you
gentlemen of the law. It came out in his fever, and in the fits of
sanity into which he at times succeeded in rousing himself. His name,
he said, was Joseph Brecht. For two years he had lived in that sulphur
hell. He had, by accident, found the spring of fresh, sweet water
trickling out of the hill--another miracle for which I have not tried
to account; he built his cabin; for two years he had gone with his
canoe to the shore of the great Slave, forty miles distant, for the
food he ate. But WHY was he here? That was the story that came bit by
bit, half in his fever, half in his sanity. I will tell it in my own
words. He was a Government man, mapping out the last timber lines along
the edge of the Great Barren, when he first met Andre Beauvais and his
wife, Marie. An accident took him to their cabin, a sprained leg. Andre
was a fox-hunter, and it was when he was coming home from one of his
trips that he found Joseph Brecht helpless in the deep snow, and
carried him on his shoulders to his cabin.
Ah, gentlemen, it was the old story--the story old as time. In his
sanity he told us about Marie, I hovering over him closely, M'sieu
sitting back in the shadows. She was like some wonderful wildflower,
French, a little Indian. He told us how her long black hair would
stream in a shining cascade, soft as the breast of a swan, to her knees
and below; how it would hang again in two great, lustrous braids, and
how her eyes were limpid pools that set his soul afire, and how her
slim, beautiful body filled him with a monstrous desire. She must have
been beautiful. And her husband, Andre Beauvais, worshipped her, and
the ground she trod on. And he had the faith in her that a mother has
in her child. It was a sublime love, and Joseph Brecht told us about it
as he lay there, dying, as he supposed. In that faith of his Andre went
unsuspectingly to his trap-lines and his poison-trails, and Marie and
Joseph were for many hours at a time alone, sometimes for a day,
sometimes for two days, and occasionally for three, for even after his
limb had regained its strength Joseph feigned that it was bad. It was a
hard fight, he said--a hard fight for him to win her; but win her he
did, utterly, absolutely, heart, body and soul. Remember, he was from
the South, with all its power of language, all its tricks of love, all
its furtiveness of argument, a strong man with a strong mind--and she
had lived all her life in the wilderness. She was no match for him. She
surrendered. He told us how, after that, he would unbind her wonderful
hair and pillow his face in it; how he lived in a heaven of transport,
how utterly she gave herself to him in those times when Andre, was away.
Did he love her?
Yes, in that mad passion of the brute. But not as you and I might love
a woman, gentlemen. Not as Andre loved her. Whether she had a heart or
a soul it did not matter. His eyes were blind with an insensate joy
when he shrouded himself in her wonderful hair. To see the wild color
painting her face like a flower filled his veins with fire. The beauty
of her, the touch of her, the mad beat of her heart against him made
him like a drunken man in his triumph. Love? Yes, the love of the
brute! He prolonged his stay. He had no idea of taking her with him.
When the time came, he would go. Day after day, week after week he put
it off, feigning that the bone of his leg was affected, and Andre
Beauvais treated him like a brother. He told us all this as he lay
there in his cabin in that sulphur hell. I am a man of God, and I do
not lie.
Is there need to tell you that Andre discovered them? Yes, he found
them--and with that wonderful hair of hers so closely about them that
he was still bound in the tresses when the discovery came.
Andre had come in exhausted, and unexpectedly. There was a terrible
fight, and in spite of his exhaustion he would have killed Joseph
Brecht if at the last moment the latter had not drawn his revolver.
After all is said and done, gentlemen, can a woman love but once?
Joseph Brecht fired. In that infinitesimal moment between the leveling
of the gun and the firing of the shot Marie Beauvais found answer to
that question. Who was it she loved? She sprang to her husband's
breast, sheltering him with the body that had been disloyal to its
soul, and she died there--with a bullet through her heart.
Joseph Brecht told us how, in the horror of his work--and possessed now
by a terrible fear--he ran from the cabin and fled for his life. And
Andre Beauvais must have remained with his dead. For it was many hours
later before he took up the trail of the man whom he made solemn oath
to his God to kill. Like a hunted hare, Joseph Brecht eluded him, and
it was weeks before the fox-trapper came upon him. Andre Beauvais
scorned to kill him from ambush. He wanted to choke his life out
slowly, with his two hands, and he attacked him openly and fairly.
And in that cabin--gasping for breath, dying as he thought, Joseph
Brecht said to us: "It was one or the other. He had the best of me. I
drew my revolver again--and killed him, killed Andre Beauvais, as I had
killed his wife, Marie!"
Here in the South Joseph Brecht might not have been a bad man,
gentlemen. In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know
the man as bad until the devil is roused. And passion, the mad passion
for a woman, had roused him. Now that it had made twice a murderer of
him the devil slunk back into his hiding, and the man who had once been
the clean-living, red-blooded Joseph Brecht was only a husk without a
heart, slinking from place to place in the evasion of justice. For you
men of the Royal Mounted Police were on his trail. You would have
caught him, but you did not think of seeking for him in the Sulphur
Hell. For two years he had lived there, and when he finished his story
he was sitting on the edge of the cot, quite sane, gentlemen.
And for the first time M'sieu, my comrade, spoke.
"Let us bring up the dunnage from the canoe, mon pere."
He led the way out of the cabin, and I followed. We were fifty steps
away when he stopped suddenly.
"Ah," he said, "I have forgotten something. I will overtake you."
He turned back to the cabin, and I went on to the canoe.
He did not join me. When I returned with my burden, M'sieu appeared at
the door. He amazed me, startled me, I will say, gentlemen. I could not
imagine such a change as I saw in him--that man of horrible silence, of
grim, dark mystery. He was smiling; his white teeth shone; his voice
was the voice of another man. He seemed to me ten years younger as he
stood there, and as I dropped my load and went in he was laughing, and
his hand was laid pleasantly on my shoulder.
Across the cot, with his head stretched down to the floor, his eyes
bulging and his jaws agape, lay Joseph Brecht. I sprang to him. He was
dead. And then I SAW Gentlemen, he had been choked to death!
"He made one leetle meestake, mon pere. Andre Beauvais did not die. I
am Andre Beauvais."
That is all, gentlemen of the Royal Mounted. May the Law have mercy!
THE OTHER MAN'S WIFE
Thornton wasn't the sort of man in whom you'd expect to find the devil
lurking. He was big, blond, and broad-shouldered. When I first saw him
I thought he was an Englishman. That was at the post at Lac la Biche,
six hundred miles north of civilization. Scotty and I had been doing
some exploration work for the government, and for more than six months
we hadn't seen a real white man who looked like home.
We came in late at night, and the factor gave us a room in his house.
When we looked out of our window in the morning, we saw a little shack
about a hundred feet away, and in front of that shack was Thornton,
only half dressed, stretching himself in the sun, and LAUGHING. There
wasn't anything to laugh at, but we could see his teeth shining white,
and he grinned every minute while he went through a sort of setting-up
exercise.
When you begin to analyze a man, there is always some one human trait
that rises above all others, and that laugh was Thornton's. Even the
wolfish sledge-dogs at the post would wag their tails when they heard
it.
We soon established friendly relations, but I could not get very far
beyond the laugh. Indeed, Thornton was a mystery. DeBar, the factor,
said that he had dropped into the post six months before, with a pack
on his back and a rifle over his shoulder. He had no business,
apparently. He was not a propectory and it was only now and then that
he used his rifle, and then only to shoot at marks.
One thing puzzled DeBar more than all else. Thornton worked like three
men about the post, cutting winter fire-wood, helping to catch and
clean the tons of whitefish which were stored away for the dogs in the
company's ice-houses, and doing other things without end. For this he
refused all payment except his rations.
Scotty continued eastward to Churchill, and for seven weeks I bunked
with Thornton in the shack. At the end of those seven weeks I knew
little more about Thornton than at the beginning. I never had a closer
or more congenial chum, and yet in his conversation he never got beyond
the big woods, the mountains, and the tangled swamps. He was educated
and a gentleman, and I knew that in spite of his brown face and arms,
his hard muscles and splendid health, he was three-quarters tenderfoot.
But he loved the wilderness.
"I never knew what life could hold for a man until I came up here," he
said to me one day, his gray eyes dancing in the light of a glorious
sunset.
"I'm ten years younger than I was two years ago."
"You've been two years in the north?"
"A year and ten months," he replied.
Something brought to my lips the words that I had forced back a score
of times.
"What brought you up here, Thornton?"
"Two things," he said quietly, "a woman--and a scoundrel."
He said no more, and I did not press the matter. There was a strange
tremble in his voice, something that I took to be a note of sadness;
but when he turned from the sunset to me his eyes were filled with a
yet stranger joy, and his big boyish laugh rang out with such wholesome
infectiousness that I laughed with him, in spite of myself.
That night, in our shack, he produced a tightly bound bundle of letters
about six inches thick, scattered them out before him on the table, and
began reading them at random, while I sat bolstered back in my bunk,
smoking and watching him. He was a curious study. Every little while
I'd hear him chuckling and rumbling, his teeth agleam, and between
these times he'd grow serious. Once I saw tears rolling down his cheeks.
He puzzled me; and the more he puzzled me, the better I liked him.
Every night for a week he spent an hour or two reading those letters
over and over again. I had a dozen opportunities to see that they were
a woman's letters: but he never offered a word of explanation.
With the approach of September, I made preparations to leave for the
south, by way of Moose Factory and the Albany.
"Why not go the shorter way--by the Reindeer Lake water route to Prince
Albert?" asked Thornton. "If you'll do that, I'll go with you."
His proposition delighted me, and we began planning for our trip. From
that hour there came a curious change in Thornton. It was as if he had
come into contact with some mysterious dynamo that had charged him with
a strange nervous energy. We were two days in getting our stuff ready,
and the night between he did not go to bed at all, but sat up reading
the letters, smoking, and then reading over again what he had read half
a hundred times before.
I was pretty well hardened, but during the first week of our canoe trip
he nearly had me bushed a dozen times. He insisted on getting away
before dawn, laughing, singing, and talking, and urged on the pace
until sunset. I don't believe that he slept two hours a night. Often,
when I woke up, I'd see him walking back and forth in the moonlight,
humming softly to himself. There was almost a touch of madness in it
all; but I knew that Thornton was sane.
One night--our fourteenth down--I awoke a little after midnight, and as
usual looked about for Thornton. It was glorious night. There was a
full moon over us, and with the lake at our feet, and the spruce and
balsam forest on each side of us, the whole scene struck me as one of
the most beautiful I had ever looked upon.
When I came out of our tent, Thornton was not in sight. Away across the
lake I heard a moose calling. Back of me an owl hooted softly, and from
miles away I could hear faintly the howling of a wolf. The night sounds
were broken by my own startled cry as I felt a hand fall, without
warning, upon my shoulder. It was Thornton. I had never seen his face
as it looked just then.
"Isn't it beautiful--glorious?" he cried softly.
"It's wonderful!" I said. "You won't see this down there, Thornton!"
"Nor hear those sounds," he replied, his hand tightening on my arm.
"We're pretty close to God up here, aren't we? She'll like it--I'll
bring her back!"
"She!" He looked at me, his teeth shining in that wonderful silent
laugh. "I'm going to tell you about it," he said. "I can't keep it in
any longer. Let's go down by the lake."
We walked down and seated ourselves on the edge of a big rock.
"I told you that I came up here because of a woman--and a man,"
continued Thornton. "Well, I did. The man and woman were husband and
wife, and I--"
He interrupted himself with one of his chuckling laughs. There was
something in it that made me shudder.
"No use to tell you that I loved her," he went on. "I worshipped her.
She was my life. And I believe she loved me as much. I might have added
that there was a third thing that drove me up here--what remained of
the rag end of a man's honor."
"I begin to understand," I said, as he paused. "You came up here to get
away from the woman. But this woman--her husband--"
For the first time since I had known him I saw a flash of anger leap
into Thornton's face. He struck his hand against the rock.
"Her husband was a scoundrel, a brute, who came home from his club
drunk, a cheap money-spender, a man who wasn't fit to wipe the mud from
her little feet, much less call her wife! He ought to have been shot. I
can see it, now; and--well, I might as well tell you. I'm going back to
her!"
"You are?" I cried. "Has she got a divorce? Is her husband still
living?"