FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE
Mike Breyette took a last look over his shoulder as the current and the
thrust of two paddles carried the canoe around the first bend. Thompson
stood on the bank, watching them go.
"Bagosh, dat man hees gon' have dam toff time, Ah theenk," Breyette
voiced his conviction. "Feller lak heem got no beesness for be here
'tall."
"He didna have tae come here," MacDonald answered carelessly. "An' he
disna have tae stay."
"Oh, sure, Ah know dat, me," Mike agreed. "All same hees feel bad."
Which was a correct, if brief, estimate of Mr. Thompson's emotions as he
stood on the bank watching the gray canoe slip silently out of his ken.
That gave him a keener pang, a more complete sense of loss, than he had
ever suffered at parting with any one or anything. It was to him like
taking a last look before a leap in the dark. Thrown entirely upon his
own resources he felt wholly inadequate, found his breast filled with
incomprehensible misgivings. The work he had come there to do seemed to
have lost much of its force as a motive, as an inspiration. He felt
himself--so far as his mission to Lone Moose was concerned--in the
anomalous position of one compelled to make bricks without straw.
He was, in a word, suffering an acute attack of loneliness.
That was why the empty space of the clearing affected him with a
physical shrinking, why the neatly arranged interior of his cabin seemed
hollow, abandoned, terribly dispiriting. He longed for the sound of a
human voice, found himself listening for such a sound. The stillness was
not like the stillness of a park, nor an empty street, nor any of the
stillnesses he had ever experienced. It was not a kindly, restful
stillness,--not to him. It was the hollow hush of huge spaces emptied of
all life. Life was at his elbow almost but he could not make himself
aware of that. The forested wilderness affected him much as a small
child is affected by the dark. He was not afraid of this depressing
sense of emptiness, but it troubled him.
Before nine o'clock in the forenoon had rolled around he set off with
the express purpose of making himself acquainted with Sam Carr. Carr was
a white man, a scholar, MacLeod had said. Passing over the other things
MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized
need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a
scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude.
Thompson had run across that phrase in books--primeval solitude. He was
just beginning to understand what it meant.
He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded
hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the
spinster aunts, through the successive steps of education and his
ultimate training for the ministry as a profession, the theological note
had been the note in which he reasoned and thought and felt. His
environment had grounded him in the belief that all the world vibrated
in unison with the theological harmonies. He had never had any doubts or
equivocations. Faith was everything, and he had abundance of faith. As a
matter of fact, until he encountered MacLeod, the factor of Fort
Pachugan, he had never crossed swords with a man open and sincere in
disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and
some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping
denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted
monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was
his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to
hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice,
occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it
after all possible that the essence of Christianity might not be the
exclusive possession of Christians?
Insensibly he had to modify certain sweeping convictions. He was not
conscious of this inner compulsion when he concluded to try and meet Sam
Carr without making theology an issue. Somehow this man Carr began to
loom in the background of his thought as a commanding figure. At least,
Thompson said to himself as he passed through the fringe of timber, Sam
Carr by all accounts was a person to whom an educated man could speak
in words of more than two syllables without meeting the blank stare of
incomprehension.
The Lachlans were worthy people enough, but--He shook his head
despondently. As for the Crees--well, he had been at Lone Moose less
than forty-eight hours and he was wondering if the Board of Home
Missions always shot as blindly at a distant mark. It would take him a
year to learn the first smatterings of their tongue. A year! He had
understood that the Lone Moose Crees were partly under civilized
influences. Certainly he had believed that his predecessors in the field
had laid some sort of foundation for the work he was to carry on. It was
considered a matter of course that the mission quarters were livable,
that some sort of meeting place had been provided.
There was a monetary basis for that belief. Some two thousand dollars
had been expended, or perhaps the better word would be appropriated, for
that purpose. Mr. Thompson could not quite understand what had become of
this sum. There was nothing but a rat-ridden shack on a half-cleared
acre in the edge of the forest. There had never been anything else.
Nothing had been accomplished. Thompson shook his head again. His first
report would be a shock to the Board of Home Missions.
He bore straight for Sam Carr's house. While still some distance away he
made out two men seated on the porch. As he drew nearer a couple of
nondescript dogs rushed noisily to meet him. Thompson's general
unfamiliarity with the outdoor world extended to dogs. But he had heard
sometime, somewhere, that it was well to put on a bold front with
barking curs. He acted upon this theory, and the dogs kept their teeth
out of his person, though their clamor rose unabated until one of the
men harshly commanded them to be quiet. Thompson came up to the steps.
The two men nodded. Their eyes rested upon him in frank curiosity.
"My name is Thompson." His diffidence, verging upon forthright
embarrassment, precipitated him into abruptness. He was addressing the
older man, a spare-built man with a trim gray beard and a disconcerting
direct gaze. "I am a newcomer to this place. The factor of Fort Pachugan
spoke of a Mr. Carr here. Have I--er--the--ah--pleasure of addressing
that gentleman?"
Carr's gray eyes twinkled, the myriad of fine creases radiating from
their outer corners deepened.
"MacLeod mentioned me, eh? Did he intimate that meeting me might prove a
doubtful pleasure for a gentleman of your calling?"
That momentarily served to heighten Mr. Thompson's embarrassment--like a
flank attack while he was in the act of waving a flag of truce. But he
perceived that there was no malice in the words, only a flash of ironic
humor. Carr chuckled dryly.
"Meet Mr. Tommy Ashe, Mr. Thompson," he said. "Mr. Ashe is, like
yourself, a newcomer to Lone Moose. You may be able to exchange mutual
curses on the country. People usually do at first."
"I've been hereabouts six months," Ashe smiled as he rose to shake
hands. (Carr's friendliness seemed a trifle negative, reserved; he had
not offered his hand.)
"That means newly come, as time is reckoned here," Carr remarked. "It
takes at least a generation to make one permanent. Have a seat, Mr.
Thompson. What do you think, so far, of the country you have selected
for the scene of your operations?"
The slightly ironic inflection was not lost upon Thompson. It nettled
him a little, but it was too intangible to be resented, and in any case
he had no ready defence against that sort of thing. He took a third
chair between the two of them and occupied himself a moment
exterminating a few mosquitoes which had followed him from the grassy
floor of the meadow and now slyly sought to find painful lodgment upon
his face and neck.
"To tell the truth," he said at last, "everything is so different from
my expectations that I find myself a bit uncertain. One
finds--well--certain drawbacks."
"Material or spiritual?" Carr inquired gravely.
The Reverend Thompson considered.
"Both," he answered briefly.
This was the most candid admission he had ever permitted himself. Carr
laughed quietly.
"Well," said he, "we are a primitive folk in a primitive region. But I
daresay you hope to accomplish a vast change for the better in us, if
not in the country?"
Again there was that suggestion of mockery, veiled, scarcely
perceptible, a matter of inflection. Mr. Thompson found himself uttering
an entirely unpremeditated reply.
"Which I daresay you doubt, Mr. Carr. You seem to be fully aware of my
mission here, and rather dubious as to its merit."
Carr smiled.
"News travels fast in a country where even a passing stranger is a
notable event," he remarked. "Naturally one draws certain conclusions
when one hears that a minister has arrived in one's vicinity. As to my
doubts--first and last I've seen three different men sent here by your
Board of Home Missions. They have made no more of an impression than a
pebble chucked into the lake. Your Board of Missions must be a visionary
lot. They should come here in a body. This country would destroy some of
their cherished illusions."
"A desire to serve is not an illusion," Thompson said defensively.
"One would have to define service before one could dispute that," Carr
returned casually. "What I mean is that the people who send you here
have not the slightest conception of what they send you to. When you get
here you find yourself rather at sea. Isn't it so?"
"In a sense, yes," Thompson reluctantly admitted.
"Oh, well," Carr said, with a gesture of dismissing the subject, "that
is your private business in any case. We won't get on at all if we begin
by discussing theology, and dissecting the theological motive and
activities. Do you hunt or fish at all, Mr. Thompson?"
Mr. Thompson did not, and expressed no hankering for such pursuits.
There came a lapse in the talk. Carr got out his pipe and began stuffing
the bowl of it with tobacco. Tommy Ashe sat gazing impassively over the
meadow, slapping at an occasional mosquito.
"Tommy might give you a few pointers on game," Carr remarked at last.
"He has the sporting instinct. It hasn't become a commonplace routine
with him yet, a matter of getting meat, as it has to the rest of us up
here."
Ashe made his first vocal contribution.
"If you're going to be about here for awhile," said he pleasantly,
"you'll find it interesting to dodge about after things in the woods
with a gun. Keeps you fit, for one thing. Lots of company in a dog and a
gun. Is it a permanent undertaking, this missionary work of yours, Mr.
Thompson?"
"We hope to make it so," Mr. Thompson responded.
"I should say you've taken on the deuce of a job," Tommy commented
frankly.
Thompson had no inclination to dispute that. He had periods of thinking
so himself.
The conversation languished again.
Without ever having been aware of it Thompson's circle of friends and
acquaintances had been people of wordy inclination. Their thoughts
dripped unceasingly from their tongue's end like water from a leaky
faucet. He had never come in contact with a type of men who keep silent
unless they have something to say, who think more than they speak. The
spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of
no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been
much different. The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was
new to him. New and embarrassing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he
groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more
acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his
measure. Especially Sam Carr.
He wanted to go on talking. He protested against their intercourse
congealing in that fashion. But he could find no opening. His
conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally
unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically
inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a
banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed
offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and
frost. Then they were silent again.
Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he
sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his
calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which
his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of
intelligent companionship. He was like a man sentenced to solitary
confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such,
a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succumbing to a despair
of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about
to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr
standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness,
a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of
puzzlement.
A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.
Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a
comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his
blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does
happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of
Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman
first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a passionate sense of
incompleteness.
He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon
within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was
purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been
restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty
of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more
bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.
All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this
girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There
was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its
appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in
bead-ornamented moccasins. A woman's eyes, her hair, her hands, her
bearing--these things had never obtruded upon his notice before. Yet he
saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it shimmer like ripe
wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and
sweetly curved. But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive
beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that
afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations. He found
himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame. The world, the
flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.
He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this
was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty
wind through an open door. He had grown to manhood with nothing but a
cold, passionless tolerance in his attitude toward women. Technically he
was aware of sex, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually
he could grasp nothing of the sort. A very small child is incapable of
associating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him. Even
then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect. Neither could Thompson.
No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.
But this--this subtle, mysterious emanation from a smiling girl at his
elbow singed him like a flame. If he had been asleep he was now in a
moment breathlessly, confusedly awake.
The commotion was all inward, mental. Outwardly he kept his composure,
and the only sign of that turmoil was a tinge of color that rose in his
face. And as if there was some mysterious mode of communication
established between them a faint blush deepened the delicate tint of
Sophie Carr's cheeks. Thompson rose. So did Tommy Ashe with some haste
when he perceived her there.
"No, no," she protested. "Keep your chairs, please."
"Mr. Thompson," Carr's keen old eyes flickered between the two men and
the girl. "My daughter. Mr. Thompson is the latest leader of the
forlorn hope at Lone Moose, Sophie."
Mr. Thompson murmured some conventional phrase. He was mightily
disturbed without knowing why he was so disturbed, and rather fearful of
showing this incomprehensible state. The girl's manner put him a little
at his ease. She gave him her hand, soft warm fingers that he had a mad
impulse to press. He wondered why he felt like that. He wondered why
even the tones of her voice gave him a thrill of pleasure.
"So you are the newest missionary to Lone Moose?" she said. "I wish you
luck."
Although her voice was full, throaty like a meadow lark's, her tone
carried the same sardonic inflection he had noticed in her father's
comment on his mission. It pained Thompson. He had no available weapon
against that sort of attack. But the girl did not pursue the matter. She
said to her father:
"Crooked Tree's oldest son is in the kitchen and wants to speak to you,
Dad."
Carr rose. So did Thompson. He wanted to get away, to think, to fortify
himself somehow against this siren call in his blood. He was sadly
perplexed. Measured by his own standards, even to harbor such thoughts
as welled up in his mind was a sinful weakness of the flesh. He was in
as much anxiety to get away from Carr's as he had been to find a welcome
there.
"I think I shall be moving along," he said to Carr. "I'll say good-day,
sir."
Carr thrust out a brown sinewy hand with the first trace of heartiness
he had shown.
"Come again when you feel like it," he invited. "When you have time and
inclination we'll match our theories of the human problem, maybe. Of
course we'll disagree. But my bark is worse than my bite, no matter what
you've heard."
He strode off. Sophie bowed to Thompson, nodded to Tommy Ashe, and
followed her father. Ashe got up, stretched his sturdy young arms above
his fair, curly head. He was perhaps a year or two older than Thompson,
a little thicker through the chest, and not quite so tall. One imagined
rightly that he was very strong, that he could be swift and purposeful
in his movements, despite an apparent deliberation. His face was
boyishly expressive. He had a way of smiling at trifles. And one did not
have to puzzle over his nationality. He was English. His accent and
certain intonations established that.
He picked up a gun now from where it stood against the wall, whistled
shrilly, and a brown dog appeared hastily from somewhere in the grass,
wagging his tail in anticipation.
"Mind if I poke along with you," he said to Thompson. "There's a slough
over beyond your diggin's where I go now and then to pick up a duck or
two."
They fell into step across the meadow.
"Our host," Thompson observed, "is not quite the type one expects to
find here--permanently. I understand he has been here a long time."
"Fifteen years," Tommy supplied cheerfully. "Deuce of a time to be
buried alive, eh? Carr hasn't got rusty, though. No. Mind like a steel
trap, that man. Curious sort of individual. You ought to see the books
he's got. Amazing. Science, philosophy, the poets--all sorts. Don't try
arguing theology with him unless you're quite advanced. Of course, I
know the church is adapting itself to modern thought, in a way. But
he'll tie you in a bowknot if you hold to the old theological doctrines.
Fact. Carr's scholarly sort, but awfully radical. Awfully."
"It's queer," said Thompson, "why a man like that should bury himself
here so long. Is it a fact that he is married to a native woman? His
daughter now--one wouldn't imagine her--"
"No fear," Tommy Ashe interrupted. "Carr's got an Indian woman, right
enough. They've got three mixed-blood youngsters. But his daughter--"
He gave Thompson a quick sidelong glance.
"Sophie's pure blood," said he. "She's a thorough-bred."
He said it almost challengingly.