CERTAIN PERPLEXITIES
From the direction of the slough two shots sounded, presently followed
by two more. Then the gleeful yipping of Tommy's Ashe's retriever, and
Tommy's stentorian encouragement:
"That's the boy. Fetch him."
Close upon this Mr. Thompson's up-pricked ear detected another voice,
one that immediately set up in him an involuntary eagerness of
listening, a clear, liquid voice that called:
"Oh, Tommy, there's another wounded one, swimming away. Quick!"
Pow! Tommy's twelve-gauge cracked again. The two voices called
laughingly back and forth across the slough, mingled with the excited
barking of the brown dog as he retrieved the slaughtered ducks. After a
time silence fell. Thompson's nose detected an odor. He turned hastily
to his stove. But he had listened too long. The biscuits in his oven
were smoking.
That did not matter greatly in itself. It was merely one of a long
procession of culinary disasters. He could not, somehow, contrive to
prepare food in the simple manner of Mike Breyette's instructions. If
the biscuits had not scorched probably they would have been hopelessly
soggy, dismal things compared to the brown discs Mike had turned out of
the same oven. One was as bad as the other. Nothing seemed to work out
right. Nothing ever tasted right. Only a healthy hunger enabled him to
swallow the unsavory messes he concocted in the name of food.
He had been at Lone Moose two weeks now. His real work, his essential
labor in that untilled field, was no farther advanced. He made about the
same progress as a missionary that he made as a cook. In so far as Lone
Moose was concerned he accomplished nothing because, like Archimedes, he
lacked a foothold from which to apply his leverage. He had the
intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which
they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to
any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was
vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that
he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut glass in
a house where there is neither food nor drink.
Also he was no longer so secure in the comfortable belief that all
things work for an ultimate good. He was not so sure that a sparrow, or
even an ordained servant of God, might not fall and the Almighty be none
the wiser. The material considerations which he had always scorned
pressed upon him in an unescapable manner. There was no getting away
from them. Thrown at last upon his own resources he began to take stock
of his needs, his instincts, his impulses, and to compare them with the
needs and instincts and impulses of a more Godless humanity,--and he
could not escape certain conclusions. Faith may move mountains, but
chiefly through the medium of a shovel. When a man is hungry his need is
for food. When he is lonely he craves companionship. When he grieves he
desires sympathy. And the Providence Mr. Thompson had been taught to
lean so hard upon did not chop his wood, cook his meals, furnish him
with congenial society, comfort him when he was sad.
"Religion or nonreligion, belief in a personal, immanent God or a rank
materialism that holds to a purely mechanical theory of the universe, it
doesn't make much difference which you hold to if you do not set
yourself up as the supreme authority and insist that the other fellow
must believe as you do.
"Because, my dear sir, you cannot escape material factors. The human
organism can't exist without food, clothing, and shelter. Society cannot
attain to a culture which tends to soften the harshnesses of existence,
without leisure in which to develop that culture. Machinery and science
and art weren't handed to humanity done up in a package. Man only
attained to these things through a long process of evolution, and he
only attained them by the use of his muscle and the exercise of his
intellect. Strength and skill--plus application. Nothing else gets
either an individual or a race forward. Don't you see the force of that?
Here is man with his fundamental, undeniable needs. Here is the earth
with the fullness thereof. There's nothing mysterious or supernatural
about it. Brain and brawn applied to the problems of living. That's all.
And you can't dodge it. The first, pressing requirements of any man can
only be filled in two ways. First by working and planning and getting
for himself. Second by being able to compel the strength and skill of
others to function for him so that his needs will be supplied; in other
words, by some turn of circumstances, or some dominant quality in
himself, to get something for nothing."
Sam Carr had delivered himself of this as a wind-up to a conversation
with Thompson the evening before. Now, while his forgotten biscuits
scorched and he listened to Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr taking their toll
of meat from the flocks of waterfowl, he was thinking over what Carr had
said. He dissented. Oh, he dissented with a vigor that was almost
bitterness, because the smiling quirk of Sam Carr's lips when he uttered
the last sentence gave it something of a personal edge. However it was
meant, Thompson could not help taking it that way. And Mr. Thompson's
desire was to give--to give lavishly. Only here in this forsaken corner
of the world he seemed to have nothing to give that was of any value.
He was, at the same time, discovering in himself personal needs to which
he had never given a thought, sordid everyday necessities the
satisfaction of which had always been at hand, unquestioned, taken for
granted much as one takes the sun and the air for granted. His meals had
been provided. His bed had been provided. The funds which had clothed
and educated him and trained him for the ministry had been provided, and
likewise his transportation to the scene of his endeavors. How, he had
not known except in the vaguest way, he had not particularly inquired,
any more than the child inquires the whence and the why of luscious
berries he finds growing upon a bush in the garden.
Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment
and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked
close did he consider these things. Materially he was getting a
first-hand lesson in economics--and domestic science of a sort!
Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not
personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began
to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and
clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands,
skilful exercise of the thought-function.
If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a
minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt--unless he denied the justice
of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had
returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give?
Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but
the reflected glory of God, that faith was not a commodity to be
bartered.
He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming
involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly
for words to define the unrest that was in him.
While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched,
unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea
that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a
considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice
taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pass along one
edge of his clearing, a cluster of bright-winged ducks slung over
Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came
down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the
timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he
realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr
with a disturbing insistence.
The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and
for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere,
these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through
the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.
So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips
of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed
straw hat and sallied forth.
He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good.
He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just
such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the
crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials
of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an
illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was
resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these
primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation,
of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his
business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.
But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could
not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee
gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple
procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a
beginning--to learn the tribal language and to build a church.
He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than
he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled
him to assimilate the messes he cooked without suffering acute
indigestion. Likewise only a naïve turn of mind enabled him to ward off
mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the
defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had
considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was
not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the
Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of
eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he
struggled with pronunciations and meanings like a child learning the
alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons.
And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was
to be a meeting-house.
He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the
edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved.
He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to
proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place
in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be
erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his
model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as
if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of
finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp
blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's
work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.
He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task,
because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind
its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was nothing for
it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house,
with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come.
Indeed, they had come en masse. They packed the room he spoke in, big
and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the
overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof
low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that
was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and sturdy smell that
came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he
got outside. That closeness--to speak mildly--coupled with the heavy,
copper-red faces, impassive as masks, impersonally listening with
scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another
attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and
speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would
not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.
Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an
eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the
more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men
felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from
foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be
done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect
to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be
consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete
accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to
see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.
Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual
labor--that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body
is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all
slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt
joined the discarded garments.
Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform
to the clerical figure. He was the antithesis of asceticism, of
gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man
lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat
standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with
moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled
and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and
tightened as his arms swung. For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by
Nature in a generous mood. He was not a heroic figure, but he was big
and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very
straight when he stood erect. He had escaped the scholarly stoop. If his
muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.
He was more or less unconscious of all this. He had never thought of his
body as being strong or well-shaped, because he had never used it, never
pitted his strength against the strength of other men, never worked,
never striven. It had never been necessary for him to do so. He had been
taught that pride of that sort was sinful, and he had accepted the
teaching rather too literally.
Already a curious sort of change was manifesting in him. His blue eyes
had a different expression than one would have observed in them
during--well, during the period of his theological studies, shall we
say, when the state of his soul and the state of other people's souls
was the only consideration. One would have been troubled to make out any
pronounced personality then. He was simply a studious young man with a
sanctimonious air. But now that the wind and the sun had somewhat turned
his fair skin and brought out a goodly crop of freckles, now that the
vigor of his movements and the healthy perspiration had rumpled up his
reddish-brown hair and put a wave in it, he could--standing up on his
log--easily have passed for a husky woodsman; until some experienced eye
observed him make such sorry work of a woodsman's task. He had acquired
no skill with the axe. That takes time. But he made vigorous endeavor,
and he was beginning to feel strength flow through him, to realize it as
a potential blessing. Now that the soreness was working out of his
sinews it gave him a peculiar elation to lay hold of a log-end, to heave
until his arms and back grew rigid, and to feel the heavy weight move.
That exultant sense of physical power was quite new and rather puzzling
to him. He could not understand why he enjoyed chopping logs and moving
them about, and yet was prone to grow moody, to be full of disquieting
perplexities when he sat down to think.
He had been at work for perhaps two hours. He was resting. To be
explicit, he was standing on a fallen tree. Between his feet there was a
notch cut half-way through the wood. In this white gash the blade of his
axe was driven solidly, and he rested his hands on the rigid haft while
he stood drawing gulps of forest-scented air into his lungs.
Mr. Thompson was not gifted with eyes in the back of his head. His
hearing was keen enough, but the soft, turfy earth absorbed footfalls,
especially when that foot was shod with a buckskin moccasin. So he did
not see Sophie Carr, nor hear her until a thought that was running in
his mind slipped off the end of his tongue.
"This is going to make a terrible amount of labor."
He said this aloud, in a matter-of-fact tone.
"And a terrible waste of labor," Sophie answered him.
He looked quickly over one shoulder, saw her standing there, got down
off his log--blushing a little at his comparative nakedness. It seemed
to him that he must appear shockingly nude, since the upper part of his
body was but thinly covered by a garment that opened wide over his
breast. He felt a good deal like a shy girl first appearing on the beach
in an abbreviated bathing suit. But Sophie seemed unconscious of his
embarrassment, or the cause of it. However, Mr. Thompson picked up his
coat, and felt more at ease when he had slipped it on. He sat down,
still breathing heavily from his recent exertions.
"Why do you say that?" he asked.
"Oh, well," she said--and left the sentence unfinished, save by an
outward motion of her hands that might have meant anything. But she
smiled, and Mr. Thompson observed that she had fine, white, even teeth.
Each time he saw her some salient personal feature seemed to claim his
attention. To be sure he had seen other girls with good teeth and red
lips and other physical charms perhaps as great as Sophie Carr's. But
these things had never riveted his attention. There was something about
this girl that quickened every fiber of his being. And even while she
made him always acutely conscious of her bodily presence, he was a
little bit afraid of her. He had swift, discomforting visions of her
standing afar beckoning to him, and of himself unable to resist, no
matter what the penalty. She stirred up things in his mind that made him
blush. He was conscious of a desire to touch her hand, to kiss her. He
found himself totally unable to close the gates of his mind against such
thoughts when she was near him. And it was self-generated within him.
Sophie Carr was never more than impersonally pleasant to him. Sometimes
she was utterly indifferent. Often she said things about his calling
that made him wince.
"Tell me," Thompson said abruptly, after a momentary silence, "how it
happens that the men who have been here before me left no trace of
any--any--well, anything? There have been other missionaries. They had
funds. They were stationed here. What did they do? I have been going to
ask your father. I daresay you can tell me yourself."
The girl laughed, whether at the question or at his earnestness he could
not say.
"They did nothing," she answered in an amused tone. "What could they do?
You haven't begun to realize yet what a difficult job you've tackled.
The others came here, stayed awhile, threw up their hands and went away.
Their idea of doing good seemed to consist of having a ready-made church
and a ready-made congregation, and to preach nice little, ready-made
religiosities on a Sunday. You can't preach anything to a people who
don't understand a word you say, and who are mostly too busy with more
pressing affairs to listen if they did understand. And you see for
yourself there's no church."
"But what did these fellows do?" he persisted. That had been puzzling
him.
"Nothing," she said scornfully "nothing but sit around and complain
about the loneliness and the coarse food and the discouraging outlook.
Then they'd finally go away--go back to where they came from, I
suppose."
"The last man," Thompson ventured doubtfully. "The factor at Pachugan
told me Mr. Carr assaulted him. That seems rather odd to me, after what
I've seen of your father. Was it so?"
"The last missionary wasn't what you'd call a good man, in any sense,"
Sophie answered frankly. "He was here most of one summer, and toward the
last he showed himself up pretty badly. He developed a nasty trick of
annoying little native girls. Dad thrashed him properly. Dad took it as
a sort of reflection on us. Even the Indians don't approve of that sort
of thing. He left in a hurry, after that."
Thompson felt his face burn.
"Things like that made a bad impression," he returned diffidently. "I
suppose in all walks of life there are wolves in sheep's clothing. I
hope it hasn't prejudiced you against churchmen in general."
"One single incident?" she smiled. "That wouldn't be very logical, would
it? No. We're not so intolerant. I don't suppose dad would actually have
gone the length of thrashing him, if the preacher hadn't taken a high
and mighty tone as a sort of bluff. That particular preacher happened to
be a local nuisance. I suppose in a settled, well-organized community,
public opinion and convention is a check on such men. They keep within
bounds because there's a heavy penalty if they don't. Up here where law
and conventions and so on practically don't exist, men of a certain
stamp aren't long in reverting to pure animalism. It's natural enough, I
dare say. Dad would be the last one to set himself up as a critic of any
one's personal morality. But it isn't very nice, especially for
preachers, who come here posing as the representatives of all that is
good and pure and holy."
"You get terribly sarcastic at times, Miss Carr," Thompson complained.
"A man can preach the Gospel without losing his manhood."
"If he had any clear conception of manhood I don't see how he could
devote himself to preaching as a profession," she said composedly. "Of
course, it's perhaps an excellent means of livelihood, but rather a
parasitic means, don't you think?"
"When Christ came among men He was reviled and despised," Mr. Thompson
declared impressively.
"Do you consider yourself the prototype of Christ?" the girl inquired
mockingly. "Why, if the man of Galilee could be reincarnated the first
thing He would attack would be the official expounders of Christianity,
with their creeds and formalisms, their temples and their self-seeking.
The Nazarene was a radical. The average preacher is an out-and-out
reactionary."
"How do you know?" he challenged boldly. "According to your own account
of your life so far, you have never had opportunity to find the truth or
falsity of such a sweeping statement. You've always lived--" he looked
about the enfolding woods--"how can one know what the world outside of
Lake Athabasca is, if one has never been there?"
She laughed.
"One can't know positively," she said. "Not from personal experience.
But one can read eagerly, and one can think about what one reads, and
one can draw pretty fair conclusions from history, from what wise men,
real thinkers, have written about this big world one has never seen. And
the official exponents of theology show up rather poorly as helpful
social factors, so far as my study of sociology has gone."
"You seem to have a grudge against the cloth," Thompson hazarded a
shrewd guess. "I wonder why?"
"I'll tell you why," the girl said--and she laughed a little
self-consciously. "My reason tells me it's a silly way to feel. I can
never quite consider theology and the preachers from the same
dispassionate plane that dad can. There's a foolish sense of personal
grievance. Dad had it once, too, but he got over it long ago. I never
have. Perhaps you'll understand if I tell you. My mother was a vain,
silly, emotional sort of person, it seems, with some wonderful capacity
for attracting men. Dad was passionately fond of her. When I was about
three years old my foolish mother ran away with a young minister. After
living with him about six months, wandering about from place to place,
she drowned herself."
Thompson listened to this recital of human frailty in wonder at the calm
way in which Sophie Carr could speak to him, a stranger, of a tragedy so
intimate. She stopped a second.
"Dad was all broken up about it," she continued. "He loved my mother
with all her weaknesses--and he's a man with a profound knowledge of and
tolerance for human weaknesses. I daresay he would have been quite
willing to consider the past a blank if she had found out she cared most
for him, and had come back. But, as I said, she drowned herself. We
lived in the eastern States. It simply unrooted dad. He took me and came
away up here and buried himself. Incidentally he buried me too. And I
don't want to be buried. I resent being buried. I hope I shall not
always be a prisoner in these woods. And I grow more and more resentful
against that preacher for giving my father a jolt that made a recluse of
him. Don't you see? That one thing has colored my personal attitude
toward preachers as a class. I can never meet a minister without
thinking of that episode which has kept me here where I never see
another white woman, and very seldom a man. It's really a weak spot in
me, holding a grudge like that. One wouldn't condemn carpenters as a
body because one carpenter botched a house. And still--"
She made the queer little gesture with her hands that he had noticed
before. And she smiled quite pleasantly at Mr. Thompson in womanly
inconsistency with the attitude she had just been explaining she held
toward ministers.
"One gets such silly notions," she remarked. "Just like your idea that
you can come here and do good. You can't, you know--not for others--not
by your method. It's absurd. One can help others most, I really believe,
by helping oneself. I've noticed in reading of the phenomena of human
relations that the most pronounced idealists are frequently a sad burden
to others."
Mr. Thompson found himself at a loss for instant reply. It was a trifle
less direct, more subtle than he liked. It opened hazily paths of
speculation he had never explored because generalizations of that sort
had never been propounded to him--certainly never by a young woman whose
very physical presence disturbed him sadly.
And while he was turning that last sentence over uncomfortably in his
mind a hail sounded across the meadow. Sophie stood up and waved the tin
bucket she had in her hand. Tommy Ashe came striding toward them. He,
too, carried a tin bucket.
"We're going to a blackberry patch down the creek," Sophie answered
Thompson's involuntary look of inquiry. "Get a pail and come along."
"I must work," Thompson shook his head.
"Berry-picking's work, if work is what you want," she retorted. "You'd
think so by the time you'd picked a hundred quarts or more and preserved
them for winter use. But then I suppose _your_ winter supply will
emanate from some mysterious, beneficent source, without any effort on
your part. How fortunate that will be."
She tempered this sally with a laugh, and being presently joined by
Tommy Ashe, set off toward the bank of Lone Moose, leaving Mr. Thompson
sitting on his log, indulging in some very mixed reflections.
The task he was engaged upon seemed suddenly to have lost its savor.
Whether this arose from a depressing sense of inability to deny the
truth of much that Sophie Carr had just said, or from the fact that as
he sat there looking after them he found himself envying Tommy Ashe's
pleasant intimacy with the girl, he could not say. Indeed, he did not
inquire too closely of himself. Some of the conclusions he was latterly
arriving at were so radically different from what he was accustomed to
accepting that he was a little bit afraid of them.
It took him a considerable time to get back into a proper working frame
of mind. The progress of his wooden edifice suffered by that much. When
he went trudging home at last, sweaty and tired, with his axe over one
shoulder, he was wondering frankly if, after all, it was either wise or
necessary to establish a mission at Lone Moose. What good could he or
any other man possibly do there? The logical and proper answer to that
did not spring as readily to his lips as it would have done at the time
of his appointment by the Board of Home Missions.
Along with that he was troubled by a constant recurrence of his thoughts
to Sophie Carr. Nor was it a matter of wonder at her bookish knowledge,
her astonishing vocabulary, her ability to think and to express her
thoughts concisely. He conceded that she was a remarkable young woman in
that respect. It was not her intellectual capacity which concerned him
greatly, but the sunny aureole of her hair, the smiling curve of her
lips, the willowy pliancy of her well-developed body. Just to think of
her meant a colorful picture, a vision that filled him with uneasy
restlessness, with vague dissatisfaction, with certain indefinable
longings.
He was quite unable to define to himself the purport of these remarkable
symptoms.