The gulf of loneliness into which I fell on the night of Marjorie's
marriage was but the shallow waters of an ocean of despair in which I
floundered through the dreary days that followed. I now had occasion to
realize that loneliness is not a matter of space or distances, of the
many or of the few, but a matter of one's adjustment toward his
surroundings. In all the months of my life on Fourteen the devils of
loneliness had never wormed into my vitals; my hours had been as full of
companionship as though I had shared them with the throngs of some great
city. I had not found the prairies lonely; I had wasted no sighs on the
horizon that met the sky as far as the eye could bridge; I had been
filled and content with the life that lay about me.
Now, all was changed. I had given Jean up, under protest, as the only
thing to do. But having made my protest I meant to accept my fate with
dignity; I would take my sentence like a man, and serve it without
whining. In my fortitude I would, perhaps, present to Jean a more heroic
picture than in the days of my seeming success; my bearing as a rejected
suitor would have in it a touch of nobility--stern nobility, if you
like--for which there was little place in the character of an accepted
and happy lover. And because women love the heroic my demeanor might
reveal to Jean golden threads spun through my temperament which
otherwise she would not have perceived, until at last she would turn to
me with "Frank, I did not realize how much a man you are! Let us start
over again--at the beginning."
I flattered myself with all this nonsense about the fine figure I would
cut, but that was before Marjorie had crossed to Twenty-two and my house
had been left to me desolate; utterly desolate. As the grey light of the
late morning of that first day after Christmas filtered through the
frosted window-panes, slowly revealing the outlines of the table and the
stove and the other pieces of my rude furniture, I began to realize how
utterly empty and barren the wretched place was. While Marjorie had been
there she had given it a soul, and Jean, dropping in every day, had
added a quality that was even more than soul; it had in it something
that was spiritual, that was celestial, that was divine. But now soul
and spirit were gone and I was left amid the damp, drab clay.
I had been long in going to sleep, and as a consequence had awakened
late. The shack was bitterly cold; the only comfort lay under my heavy
blankets. As the light increased I counted the knobs of frost that had
formed on the ends of the nails that came through the roof. I had never
noticed that so many nails had missed the rafters. We were rather bad
carpenters. My mind leapt back to the time when we built the shack,
clearing all the events crowded between, as the vision leaps from height
to height across great valleys in the prairies. How unreal and far away
it all seemed! But another leap carried me to the bank of a river, and
little children playing in the sand, and a slow-pacing water wheel that
sprayed its mist of diamonds in the sunshine. I saw her little calico
dress, her little brown bare feet, the ringlets of yellow hair hung
about her cheeks. That was Jean. . . .
The clock had stopped! It was with terrific suddenness that I realized
the clock had stopped and in my barren shanty was the silence of the
tomb. Its round, glassy face grinned an imbecile grin at me from its
place on a shelf on the wall. Its hands showed a quarter to four. . . .
Well, there was nothing very mysterious about that. In the excitement of
the wedding party I had merely forgotten to wind the clock. Only an
overwrought nervous system could discern anything uncanny in that. I
reasoned all this out, with absurd deliberation, as I rubbed my eyes and
wondered why the clock had stopped. Or perhaps the frost had stopped it.
My watch had fared better, and when I drew it from my pocket on the
corner of the bed the friendly bustle of its ticking was reassuring to
my ear. I could hear the companionable canter of its balance wheel
galloping down the road of life by my side. "Next to a dog," I said to
myself, "a watch is the best friend a man can have."
That set me thinking about dogs, and I wondered why in all these months
I had neglected to provide myself with a dog. As a sort of insurance, I
grimly reflected. One always can fall back on a dog.
The hands of the watch said half-past eight, and I suddenly remembered
there were cattle to feed. It would be a decent thing to get up and do
all the chores that morning, if they were not already done. So I drew my
underwear from beneath my pillow, where I had learned to tuck it in cold
weather, and sprang from the friendly shelter of the blankets. One needs
no incentive to quick dressing in a temperature only a few points above
zero. I was fully clothed in less time than a city man, in his
steam-heated flat, takes to decide whether his collar really demands
changing.
I hurriedly started a fire; watched it until it had a proper draft;
turned the damper in the pipe to guard against its getting beyond
control after I left it. Then, after drawing on my pea-jacket, cap and
mitts, I set out for the stables. The morning was grey, with a scattered
sifting of small snowflakes, but the nip to the air was not nearly so
uncomfortable as it seemed when contemplated from under the warm
blankets. I reflected that comfort and happiness are largely a matter of
the point of view. But that doesn't help much when the bottom has fallen
out of your particular universe.
Buck and Bright were bawling before they heard my hand on the stable
door. An ox with an empty stomach has an uncanny ear for the food
purveyor. A half-inch fuzz of new untrodden snow was good evidence that
Jack was keeping hours even worse than mine. As I opened the door the
oxen turned their big, reproving eyes upon me, while even the cow tossed
her head from side to side in peevish protest.
"It's all right, old chaps," I assured them. "Blessed is he whose wants
are few and easily satisfied," as I threw them each a forkful of hay.
They made a great attack upon it, tossing it with their noses and their
horns in an atavistic appreciation of the good old days when their
ancestors roamed the range and were never tied by the neck to a manger
and left to starve while their masters married. Our cow was at present
enjoying her annual holidays, so there was no milking to be done, and my
morning chores were soon finished. Our pigs--we had two pigs
now--saluted me after the manner of their kind until I choked their
squeals with a dole of barley chop. Not even a pig can squeal through a
mouthful of dry barley chop.
While I was engaged in these operations the hens ran about my feet until
one happened to get tramped on. Her squawking reminded me that there
might be eggs, and search discovered two, fresh laid that morning. That
was a glint of sunshine through the gloom. I gathered them up and turned
it over in my mind for a moment whether I should take them to Jack and
Marjorie. But then that would leave Jean without. There would be noses
out of joint on Twenty-two soon enough, without provoking an issue. In
the interests of peace I decided to eat them myself.
I resisted a desire to go to Jack's door and announce that the morning
chores were done because I knew that at the bottom of that desire was a
hope that I should see and speak with Jean. One may be tied to a stake
but that is no reason why he should poke his feet needlessly in the
fire.
The stove lids were red hot and the kettle was belching forth a small
geyser of steam when I got back to the shack. My search for remnants
from the feast of the night before was astonishingly fruitless, until I
remembered that the young Hansens had been turned loose upon the
left-overs. So I cooked a mixture of oatmeal and water, which I called
porridge, boiled the two fresh eggs, thawed out part of a loaf of bread,
melted a piece of butter, and sat down to a meal that was hardly
calculated to make me rejoice in my single blessedness.
After breakfast I washed my few dishes, swept the floor, made my bed,
and generally set the house in order. Even then it was only ten o
'clock, with nothing more to do until noon. At noon there would be a
repetition of the routine, and then nothing to do until night. At night
there would be supper and the evening chores, and nothing more to do
until morning. And the next day the same, and the same, and the same.
Nature may be a wise designer, but she has an uncanny way of overdoing a
good thing. I thought of the thousand miles of timber we had passed
through on our way west, timber without end! All the world seemed
filled with trees, standing, fallen, piled in heaps in jagged
water-courses; dead and dying through leagues of swamp and muskeg;
towering over the highlands in an evergreen silhouette against the sky.
What a wonderful place for a few miles of prairie; say for every second
section of prairie, like the railway lands in the West! Then came the
prairies--a hundred treeless miles at a stretch; sky and grass without
limit, a horizon broken only by a settler's shack at great intervals,
into the farther West where even the settler's shack failed from view,
and one was alone with God and the world. Here was a land where the very
posts to mark our checker-board survey had to be shipped in from untold
distances. What a wonderful place for a few square miles of forest! And
yet they tell us Nature is wise.
And so it was in our labor; from spring till freeze-up we had scarcely
time to shave. Every hour of sunshine--and no country gives its sunshine
more lavishly--was money to the settler, and the settler's life from
April to November was a torrent of high-geared energy. I had been too
busy even to make love properly to Jean, and when it has been said that
a young man is too busy for that all other figures of speech fail.
Perhaps that was why my love-making, indifferently done, taking second
place to plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, had ended so
disasterously. And now, only a month or two later, the one thing in the
world of which I had too much was time. Now I could afford to make love
like an artist--but I had no canvas to splash on!
It is wonderful how much philosophizing one can accomplish between
washing the porridge pot and peeling the potatoes when there is nothing
else to be done. Just as the long summer evenings of this great West are
already giving the world a race of athletes, so must the long, sombre
winter days and nights, with their limitless opportunities for
reflection and introspection, breed for the world a new brand of
thinking, uncramped by convention and untamed by precedent. That is, if
the "advantages" of city life do not crowd in so rapidly that they
relieve us of the necessity of thinking.
It was mid-afternoon when Jack burst in upon me. "Well, old Robinson
Crusoe, how goes solitude?" he demanded.
"Rotten," said I, "but I can always change my mind if I want to."
"Aha!" he exclaimed, in return, clasping himself about the middle. "A
blow in the fifth rib! A subtle blow under the fifth rib!"
Jack was obviously in great spirits, but with a sudden soberness he sat
down beside me, and I felt his hand on my knee. "It's not quite the
thing, old chap," he said, "to cut us dead, just because we're
married--that is, some of us."
"I haven't cut you," I retorted. "Give me time."
"I know it's a raw deal for you," he went on, disregarding my
interruption, "and I'd give--I'd give--half of my happiness, if you
like, if I could put it right. It's a little embarrassing for us all.
But don't you think Jean is worth a fight--a little more fight than you
have made?"
"I understand English," I said, "particularly Jean's English. If she
wants me now she'll have to say so."
"Oh, get off your high horse. He's a lame nag, anyway! Jean thinks she
loves Spoof, but she doesn't. She's just infatuated with him. She'll
grow out of that. But you might help her along a little."
"I'm not so sure. Spoof's a pretty decent chap," I said, inwardly giving
myself credit for amazing magnanimity.
"Of course he is," Jack agreed, somewhat too readily, as it seemed to
me. "But that has nothing to do with it. Jean isn't putting you and
Spoof under the magnifying glass, so to speak, and studying out which is
the more decent chap. It isn't done that way. And to save her life she
couldn't tell you why, to-day, she thinks she loves Spoof, and why,
to-morrow, she will know she loves you. Reason doesn't enter into these
things at all."
"That doesn't make it any easier for me."
"Maybe not," Jack admitted. "And, as I have argued that reason doesn't
enter into the consideration, I suppose it is of no use to reason about
it. Then let us get on to ground you can understand. Come on over for
supper."
I accepted with more alacrity than might be expected of a young man who
was resolved that although tied to the stake he would not thrust his
feet in the fire. Marjorie kissed me when I went in,--a kiss for her
dear old bachelor brother, she said, obviously in fun, but I think there
was a pang of deep sisterly sympathy underneath. Jean was calm, poised,
self-controlled; her eyes seemed larger than usual, and the white of
them showed that clear blue tinge that is found in some kinds of
delicate china. Either the lamp light was peculiarly yellow or Jean's
complexion was below the mark. She chatted freely, almost too freely,
and laughed upon occasion, but there was no ring in her laughter.
Altogether, it was rather a difficult evening. We played cards after
supper, and tried, as so many others have done, to forget our troubles
in the chance of a lucky hand. Even the cards were against me. Jean and
I had always played together, but to-night Jack insisted that it was not
meet that a man should have his wife for a partner at cards, so our
combination was broken. I may have had a subconscious and disturbing
feeling that Jean's hand, to my left, would have made better holding
than anything I could hope to draw from the deck. At any rate I played
abominably and went home early.
And so the days dragged on. I kept a corner of my south window rubbed
clear of frost so that I might maintain a look-out for a visit from
Spoof, for although he was my rival, or because he was my rival, I felt
that I had with Spoof something very much in common. But Spoof seemed
suddenly to have discontinued his visits to Fourteen and Twenty-two,
and for the first time in that winter the trail to his shack was
entirely over-blown and obliterated in a waste of snow.
Jack came over every day, and Marjorie and Jean came two or three times
a week and gave my shack the womanly touches of which it was beginning
to stand in need, but Jean never came alone. I began to understand that
the prairies give solitude without privacy; if one seeks privacy he goes
to the city for it.
In this way a couple of weeks had passed when one evening it occurred to
me that I could kill a dull hour or two, and discharge a somewhat
neglected filial duty, by writing a letter to my father. Investigation
proved, what I greatly suspected, that I had no writing paper, so I went
over to Jack's to borrow some. They had none either, but Jack produced
an old account book with some blank sheets in it, which we decided would
do quite well. In those days we weren't particular about stationery.
Jean was in her room while I was there, and did not come out, so in a
few minutes I returned to Fourteen. There I set the lamp on the table
and spread the old account book out before me. It once had been owned by
Jack's father; the first pages were filled with items which apparently
had to do with the purchase of the Lane farm, and with Mr. Lane's
services in the woolen mill. I glanced over them with casual interest
and as I did so a loose slip fell from the pages. I picked it up from
the floor and found a number of lines in Jean's handwriting:
When through the livelong day I sigh
And ponder on my sad estate,
I would my Nemesis defy
And burst the bounding cords of Fate.
Now would I tear each bond away;
Now would I risk your sad reproof;
Come, let us live and love who may:
Come to me . . . Spoof.
"So it has come to that," I said to myself. "Love-sick doggerel!" I
crushed the sheet of paper in my hand in a rage, even while a hot flush
of color ran up my face at the realization of the fact that I had read
something never intended for my eyes--for _my_ eyes least of all. So she
could tear the bonds away; she could risk his "sad reproof"; she could
do anything but find words to fill out the feet of the last line. "Come
to me . . . Spoof!" With a sudden stabbing at my heart the question
interrogated me, Could Jean be ingenious enough to use those dots, after
the manner of our modern writers, to suggest something which she shrank
from saying in plain English? Here will I use some of them myself . . .