A FORTUNE AND A FLITTING
Christmas had come and gone before Thompson finished his job at
Porcupine Lake, some ninety-odd miles, as the crow flies, north of Fort
Pachugan. The Porcupine was a marshy stretch of water, the home of
muskrat and beaver, a paradise for waterfowl when the heavy hand of
winter was lifted, a sheet of ice now, a white oval in the dusky green
of the forest. Here the free trader had built a fair-sized structure of
logs with goods piled in the front and the rearward end given over to a
stove, a table, and two bunks. In this place Thompson and Joe Lamont
plied their traffic. MacLeod sent them Indian and half-breed trappers
bearing orders for so much flour, so much tea, so many traps, so much
powder and ball and percussion caps for their nigh obsolete guns. They
took their "debt" and departed into the wilderness, to repay in the
spring with furs.
So, by degrees, the free-trader's stock approached depletion, until
there remained no more than two good dog teams could haul. With that on
sleds, and a few bundles of furs traded in by trappers whose lines
radiated from the Porcupine, Thompson and Joe Lamont came back to Fort
Pachugan.
The factor seemed well pleased with the undertaking. He checked up the
goods and opined that the deal would show a rare profit for the Company.
"Ye have a hundred an' twenty-six dollars due, over an' above a charge
or two against ye," he said to Thompson when they went over the
accounts. "How will ye have it? In cash? If ye purpose to winter at Lone
Moose a credit maybe'll serve as well. Or, if ye go out, ye can have a
cheque on the Company at Edmonton."
"Give me the hundred in cash," Thompson decided. "I'll take the twenty
odd in grub. I'm going to Lone Moose, but I don't know how long I'll
stay there. There's some stuff of mine there that I want to get. After
that--I'm a bit undecided."
In those long nights at the Porcupine he had done a good deal of
pondering over his next move. He had not yet come to a fixed decision.
In a general way he knew that he was going out into the world from
whence he had come, with an altogether different point of view, to work
out his future along altogether different lines. But he had not made up
his mind to do this at once. He was clearly conscious of one imperative
craving. That was for a sight of Sophie Carr and a chance to talk to her
again. His heart quickened when he thought of their parting. He knew she
was anything but indifferent. He was not an egotist, but he knew she
harbored a feeling akin to his own, and he built hopes on that, despite
her blunt refusal, the logical reasons she had set forth. He hoped
again. He saw himself in the way of becoming competent--as the North,
which is a keen judge, appraises competence. He had chucked some of his
illusions about relative values. He conceived that in time he might
approximate to Sophie Carr's idea of a man.
He wanted to see her, to talk with her, to make her define her attitude
a little more clearly. Looking back with his mind a great deal less
confused by emotion, he wondered why he had been so dumb, why he had not
managed to convey to her that the things she foresaw as denying them
happiness or even toleration for each other were not a final state in
him, that his ideas and habits and pursuits were in a state of flux that
might lead him anywhere. She had thrown cold water on the flame of his
passion. But he remembered with a glow of happiness that she had kissed
him.
He pondered deeply upon this, wondering much at the singular attraction
this girl held for him, the mystery of that strange quality that drew
him so. He lacked knowledge of the way and power of women. It had never
touched him before. It was indeed as if he had been asleep and had
wakened with a start. He was intensely curious about that, curious to
know why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score,
had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip
of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious
manner of thinking.
He looked forward eagerly to seeing her again. He somehow felt a little
more sure of himself now. He could think of a number of things he wished
to ask her, of ideas he wanted to expand into speech. The hurt of her
blank refusal had dulled a little. He could anticipate a keen pleasure
just in seeing her.
In the morning he set about outfitting. He had come down from Porcupine
with dogs. He had seen dog teams bearing the goods and chattels of
innumerable natives. He perceived the essential usefulness of dogs and
snowshoes and toboggans in that boundless region of snow. Canoes when
the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock
tight the waterways. So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the
gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont
had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a
small toboggan. A four-dog team will haul a sizable load. Two would move
all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession. He had
learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes--enough so that he was over the
poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls _mal de
racquette_. Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the
wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the
wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.
Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was
lonely still--but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of
the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted
themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the
woodsman to his woods, and the _boulevardier_ to his beloved avenues!
Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the
natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles
upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man
understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible
which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on
a man's soul.
Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had
learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had
acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and
axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the
toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little
enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.
When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set
out.
He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two
days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave
him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point
thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard
smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot
over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the
tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's
collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.
That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and
bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit
potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes
peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at
the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.
He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and
stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a
white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned
stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and
brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green.
Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he
opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some
one laughed.
The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes
he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven
from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight
closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs
snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when
they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near
the cabin wall.
Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor
and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it
to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion that "de wheesker, she's help keep
hout de fros', Bagosh." Thompson doubted the efficiency of whiskers as a
protection, and he wanted to appear like himself. He made that
concession consciously to his vanity.
He did not waste much time. While he shaved and washed, his supper
cooked. He ate, drew the parka over his head, hooked his toes into the
loops of his snowshoes and strode off toward Carr's house. The timidity
that made him avoid the place after his fight with Tommy Ashe and
subsequent encounter with Sophie had vanished. The very eagerness of his
heart bred a profound self-confidence. He crossed the meadow as
hurriedly as an accepted lover.
For a few seconds there was no answer to his knock. Then a faint
foot-shuffle sounded, and Carr's Indian woman opened the door. She
blinked a moment in the dazzle of lamp glare on the snow until,
recognizing him, her brown face lit up with a smile.
"You come back Lone Moose, eh?" she said. "Come in."
Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room
was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman
motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a
brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar.
There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and
read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp
gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed
the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the
gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.
"Mr. Carr and Sophie--are they home?" he asked at length.
The Indian woman shook her head.
"Sam and Sophie go 'way," she said placidly. "No come back Lone Moose
long time--maybe no more. Sophie leave sumpin' you. I get."
She crossed the room to a shelf above the serried volumes of Sam Carr's
library, lifted the cover of a tin tobacco box and took out a letter.
This she gave to Thompson. Then she sat down cross-legged on the
wolfskin beside her youngster, looking up at her visitor impassively,
her moon face void of expression, except perhaps the mildest trace of
curiosity.
Thompson fingered the envelope for a second, scarcely crediting his
ears. The letter in his hands conveyed nothing. He did not recognize the
writing. He was acutely conscious of a dreadful heartsinking. There was
a finality about the Indian woman's statement that chilled him.
"They have gone away?" he said. "Where? When did they go?"
"Long time. Two moon," she replied matter-of-factly. "Dunno where go.
Sam say he go--don't know when come back. Leave me house, plenty
blanket, plenty grub. Next spring he say he send more grub. That all.
Sophie go too."
Thompson stared at her. Perhaps he was not alone in facing something
that numbed him.
"Your man go away. Not come back. You sorry? You feel bad?" he asked.
Her lips parted in a wide smile.
"Sam he good man," she said evenly. "Leave good place for me. I plenty
warm, plenty to eat. I no care he go. Sam, pretty soon he get old. I
want ketchum man, I ketchum. No feel bad. No."
She shook her head, as if the idea amused her. And Mr. Thompson,
perceiving that a potential desertion which moved him to sympathy did
not trouble her at all, turned his attention to the letter in his hand.
He opened the envelope. There were half a dozen closely written sheets
within.
Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I
don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should
write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to
you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is
a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person
one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what
one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was
hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't
like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered.
Too much feeling--a sort of inward choking. And the last few
days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and
familiar with the details of the astonishing change which has
taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a
casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for
sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come
back--of course I think you will or I should not write.
But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone
Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to
give you when you do come.
Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor
brother who--it seems--knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he
and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do
not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some
six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It
was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that
ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being
penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous
to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways
and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I
am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours
dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and
beautiful things of all sorts--and men.
You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty
my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big
man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a
preacher--if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if
you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting
yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your
creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital--I--but
those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.
It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek
bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of
loving you--but it was under protest--under pretty much the same
protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried
away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental
reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of
that same passion stirred me--I can admit it now when the
distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your
hands--yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering:
"Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."
There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me.
But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's
deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate
protection--as he has often made plain--to think, to know why I
do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And
I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that
would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms
drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same
breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse
of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your
deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of
good and evil, of right and wrong--I what I am, a creature
craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever
and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I
wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in
that sort of atmosphere.
Even if you were not a minister--if you were just plain man--and
I wish you were--I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I
have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses
may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures
(_vide_ Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology
of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men
in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I
have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read
and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I
don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my
habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being
moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so
simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I
know myself, within certain limits--but men I do not know at all,
except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and
Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you
both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled
ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe
attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately--and that
alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many
matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more
protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you--and
mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I
could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours,
and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash,
until we should hate each other.
And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for
awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks
that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more
keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may
have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself
wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a
visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society
is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable.
Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if
you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I
started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am
oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from
its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous
journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have
regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and
my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity.
I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow
very strong if I let myself go.
I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself--looking at it from
your own peculiar angle--you will say: "She is not worth thinking
about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it
very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you
say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you,
just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living
with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought
and act that I could not endure, still--knowing all this--I feel
a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel
a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you--and that is
often.
I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love
doesn't endure to death--unless it is nurtured by association,
unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort,
a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks.
Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope
I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different.
But--a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you
to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by.
Sophie.
P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a
few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the
books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all
if you want them, or any of them, any time.
Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced
them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to
go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those
penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it
hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books,
orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his
sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books,
roused him to a swelling fury of anger.
The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The
economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in
multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial
intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter
tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of
Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array
of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw
deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old
evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual
realm--and which generally leave gods and religions out of account
except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those
damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught
to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific
artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!
He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon,
and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat
within.
The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost
nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And
his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst
of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had
loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him
and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil--tempted by a fortune
untimely directed to her hands.
He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in
their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse
about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across
that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in
forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes
stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the
melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.
A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his
mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He
lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A
man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer
pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure.
He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically--set his
teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much
the same.
He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a
hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a
room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been
carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky
black and white like a sketch in charcoal.
"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.
He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, passing near the
walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would
remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance
of an unrealizable, impractical dream.
Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in
his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another
toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs shifted furtively about at his
approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity
as to who, in the accustomed fashion of the North, had stopped and made
himself at home.
When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front
turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of
surprise, that his visitor was Tommy Ashe.