I held the horses in at the start. Somehow they realized that a new kind
of test was ahead. They caught the infection of speed from my voice,
I suppose, or from my impatience. They had not been harnessed by the
hostler either. When I came to the stable--it was in the forenoon, too,
at an hour when they had never been taken out before--the hostler had
been away hauling feed. The boys whom I had pressed into service had
pulled the cutter out into the street; it was there we hitched up.
Everything, then, had been different from the way they had been used to.
So, when at last I clicked my tongue, they bounded off as if they were
out for a sprint of a few miles only.
I held them in and pulled them down to a trot; for of all days to-day
was it of the utmost importance that neither one of them should play
out. At half past twelve a telephone message had reached me, after
having passed through three different channels, that my little girl was
sick; and over the wire it had a sinister, lugubrious, reticent sound,
as if the worst was held back. Details had not come through, so I was
told. My wife was sending a call for me to come home as quickly as I
possibly could; nothing else. It was Thursday. The Sunday before I had
left wife and child in perfect health. But scarlatina and diphtheria
were stalking the plains. The message had been such a shock to me that I
had acted with automatic precision. I had notified the school-board and
asked the inspector to substitute for me; and twenty minutes after word
had reached me I crossed the bridge on the road to the north.
The going was heavy but not too bad. Two nights ago there had been
a rather bad snowstorm and a blow, and during the last night an
exceedingly slight and quiet fall had followed it. Just now I had no eye
for its beauty, though.
I was bent on speed, and that meant watching the horses closely; they
must not be allowed to follow their own bent. There was no way of
communicating with my wife; so that, whatever I could do, was left
entirely to my divination. I had picked up a few things at the drug
store--things which had occurred to me on the spur of the moment
as likely to be needed; but now I started a process of analysis and
elimination. Pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlatina and measles--all these
were among the more obvious possibilities. I was enough of a doctor to
trust my ability to diagnose. I knew that my wife would in that respect
rather rely on me than on the average country-town practitioner. All the
greater was my responsibility.
Since the horses had not been fed for their midday-meal, I had in any
case to put in at the one-third-way town. It had a drug store; so there
was my last chance of getting what might possibly be needed. I made a
list of remedies and rehearsed it mentally till I felt sure I should not
omit anything of which I had thought.
Then I caught myself at driving the horses into a gallop. It was hard to
hold in. I must confess that I thought but little of the little girl’s
side of it; more of my wife’s; most of all of my own. That seems
selfish. But ever since the little girl was born, there had been only
one desire which filled my life. Where I had failed, she was to succeed.
Where I had squandered my energies and opportunities, she was to use
them to some purpose. What I might have done but had not done, she was
to do. She was to redeem me. I was her natural teacher. Teaching her
became henceforth my life-work. When I bought a book, I carefully
considered whether it would help her one day or not before I spent the
money. Deprived of her, I myself came to a definite and peremptory end.
With her to continue my life, there was still some purpose in things,
some justification for existence.
Most serious-minded men at my age, I believe, become profoundly
impressed with the futility of “it all.” Unless we throw ourselves into
something outside of our own personality, life is apt to impress us as
a great mockery. I am afraid that at the bottom of it there lies the
recognition of the fact that we ourselves were not worth while, that we
did not amount to what we had thought we should amount to; that we did
not measure up to the exigencies of eternities to come. Children are
among the most effective means devised by Nature to delude us into
living on. Modern civilization has, on the whole, deprived us of the
ability for the enjoyment of the moment. It raises our expectations too
high--realization is bound to fall short, no matter what we do. We
live in an artificial atmosphere. So we submerge ourselves in business,
profession, or superficial amusement. We live for something--do not
merely live. The wage-slave lives for the evening’s liberty, the
business man for his wealth, the preacher for his church. I used to live
for my school. Then a moment like the one I was living through arrives.
Nature strips down our pretences with a relentless finger, and we stand,
bare of disguises, as helpless failures. We have lost the childlike
power of living without conscious aims. Sometimes, when the aims have
faded already in the gathering dusk, we still go on by the momentum
acquired. Inertia carries us over the dead points--till a cog breaks
somewhere, and our whole machinery of life comes to with a jar. If no
such awakening supervenes, since we never live in the present, we
are always looking forward to what never comes; and so life slips by,
unlived.
If my child was taken from me, it meant that my future was made
meaningless. I felt that I might just as well lie down and die.
There was injustice in this, I know I was reasoning, as it were, in a
phantom world. Actualities, outlooks, retrospections--my view of them
had been jarred and distorted by an unexpected, stunning blow. For that
it did not really matter how things actually were up north. I had never
yet faced such possibilities; they opened up like an abyss which I had
skirted in the dark, unknowingly. True, my wife was something like a
child to me. I was old enough to be her father, older even in mind than
in actual years. But she, too, by marrying an aging man, had limited her
own development, as it were, by mine. Nor was she I, after all. My child
was. The outlook without her was night. Such a life was not to be lived.
There was the lash of a scourge in these thoughts, so that I became
nervous, impatient, and unjust--even to the horses. Peter stumbled, and
I came near punishing him with my whip. But I caught myself just before
I yielded to the impulse. I was doing exactly what I should not do. If
Peter stumbled, it was more my own fault than his. I should have
watched the road more carefully instead of giving in to the trend of my
thoughts. A stumble every five minutes, and over a drive of forty-five
miles: that might mean a delay of half an hour--it might mean the
difference between “in time” and “too late.” I did not know what waited
at the other end of the road. It was my business to find out, not to
indulge in mere surmises and forebodings.
So, with an effort, I forced my attention to revert to the things
around. And Nature, with her utter lack of sentiment, is after all the
only real soother of anguished nerves. With my mind in the state it was
in, the drive would indeed have been nothing less than torture, had I
not felt, sometimes even against my will, mostly without at any rate
consciously yielding to it, the influence of that merriest of all winter
sights which surrounded me.
The fresh fall of snow, which had come over night, was exceedingly
slight. It had come down softly, floatingly, with all the winds of
the prairies hushed, every flake consisting of one or two large, flat
crystals only, which, on account of the nearly saturated air, had
gone on growing by condensation till they touched the ground. Such a
condition of the atmosphere never holds out in a prolonged snowfall,
may it come down ever so soft-footedly; the first half hour exhausts the
moisture content of the air. After that the crystals are the ordinary,
small, six-armed “stars” which bunch together into flakes. But if the
snowfall is very slight, the moisture content of the lower air sometimes
is not exhausted before it stops; those large crystals remain at the
surface and are not buried out of sight by the later fall. These large,
coarse, slablike crystals reflect as well as refract the light of the
sun. There is not merely the sparkle and glitter, but also the colour
play. Facing north, you see only glittering points of white light; but,
facing the sun, you see every colour of the rainbow, and you see it
with that coquettish, sudden flash which snow shares only with the most
precious of stones.
Through such a landscape covered with the thinnest possible sheet of
the white glitter we sped. A few times, in heavier snow, the horses were
inclined to fall into a walk; but a touch of the whip sent them
into line again. I began to view the whole situation more quietly.
Considering that we had forty-five miles to go, we were doing very well
indeed. We made Bell’s corner in forty minutes, and still I was saving
the horses’ strength.
On to the wild land we turned, where the snow underfoot was soft and
free from those hard clods that cause the horses’ feet to stumble.
I beguiled the time by watching the distance through the surrounding
brush. Everybody, of course, has noticed how the open landscape seems to
turn when you speed along. The distance seems to stand still, while
the foreground rushes past you. The whole countryside seems to become a
revolving, horizontal wheel with its hub at the horizon. It is different
when you travel fast through half open bush, so that the eye on its way
to the edge of the visible world looks past trees and shrubs. In that
case there are two points which speed along: you yourself, and with you,
engaged, as it were, in a race with you, the distance. You can go many
miles before your horizon changes. But between it and yourself the
foreground is rushed back like a ribbon. There is no impression of
wheeling; there is no depth to that ribbon which moves backward and
past. You are also more distinctly aware that it is not the objects near
you which move, but you yourself. Only a short distance from you trees
and objects seem rather to move with you, though more slowly; and faster
and faster all things seem to be moving in the same direction with you,
the farther away they are, till at last the utmost distance rushes along
at an equal speed, behind all the stems of the shrubs and the trees, and
keeps up with you.
So is it truly in life. My childhood seems as near to me now as it was
when I was twenty--nearer, I sometimes think; but the years of my
early manhood have rushed by like that ribbon and are half swallowed by
oblivion.
This line of thought threw me back into heavier moods. And yet, since
now I banished the hardest of all thoughts hard to bear, I could not
help succumbing to the influence of Nature’s merry mood. I did so even
more than I liked. I remember that, while driving through the beautiful
natural park that masks the approach to the one-third-way town from
the south, I as much as reproached myself because I allowed Nature to
interfere with my grim purpose of speed. Half intentionally I conjured
up the vision of an infinitely lonesome old age for myself, and again
the sudden palpitation in my veins nearly prompted me to send my horses
into a gallop. But instantly I checked myself. Not yet, I thought. On
that long stretch north, beyond the bridge, there I was going to drive
them at their utmost speed. I was unstrung, I told myself; this was
mere sentimentalism; no emotional impulses were of any value; careful
planning only counted. So I even pulled the horses back to a walk. I
wanted to feed them shortly after reaching the stable. They must not be
hot, or I should have trouble.
Then we turned into the main street of the town. In front of the stable
I deliberately assumed the air of a man of leisure. The hostler came out
and greeted me. I let him water the horses and waited, watch in hand.
They got some hay, and five minutes after I had stopped, I poured their
oats into the feeding boxes.
Then to the drug store--it was locked. I hunted the druggist all over
town for nearly twenty minutes. Everybody had seen him a short while
ago; everybody knew exactly where he had been a minute before; but
nobody could discover him just then. I worked myself into a veritable
frenzy of hurry. The moisture began to break out all over my body.
I rushed back to the livery stable to tell the hostler to hitch up
again--and there stood the druggist, looking my horses over! I shall not
repeat what I said.
Five minutes later I had what I wanted, and after a few minutes more I
walked my horses out of town. It had taken me an hour and fifty minutes
to make the town, and thirty-five minutes to leave it behind.
One piece of good news I received before leaving. While I was getting
into my robes and the hostler hooked up, he told me that no fewer than
twenty-two teams had that very morning come in with cordwood from the
northern correction line. They had made a farm halfways to town by
nightfall of the day before; the rest they had gone that very day. So
there would be an unmistakable trail all the way, and there was no need
to worry over the snow.
I walked the horses for a while; then, when we were swinging round the
turn to the north, on that long, twenty-mile grade, I speeded them up.
The trail was good: that just about summarizes what I remember of the
road. All details were submerged in one now, and that one was speed. The
horses, which were in prime condition, gave me their best. Sometimes we
went over long stretches that were sandy under that inch or so of new
snow--with sand blown over the older drifts from the fields--stretches
where under ordinary circumstances I should have walked my horses--at
a gallop. Once or twice we crossed bad drifts with deep holes in them,
made by horses that were being wintered outside and that had broken in
before the snow had hardened down sufficiently to carry them. There, of
course, I had to go slowly. But as soon as the trail was smooth again,
the horses would fall back into their stride without being urged.
They had, as I said, caught the infection. My yearning for speed was
satisfied at last.
Four sights stand out.
The first is of just such bunches of horses that were being brought
through the winter with practically no yard feeding at all; and
consequently their healthy outdoor looks, and their velvety rumps were
very conspicuous as they scattered away from the trail on our approach.
Several times we dashed right in among them, and I had to shout in order
to clear the road. They did not like to leave the firm footing on the
trail, where they fed by pawing away the snow on both sides and baring
the weeds. Sometimes a whole bunch of them would thunder along in a
stampede ahead of us till they came to a cross-trail or to a farmyard;
there we left them behind. Sometimes only one of them would thus try
to keep in front, while the rest jumped off into the drifts; but, being
separated from his mates, he would stop at last and ponder how to get
back to them till we were right on him again. There was, then, no way to
rejoin those left behind except by doing what he hated to do, by getting
off the trail and jumping into the dreaded snow, thus giving us the
right of way. And when, at last, he did so, he felt sadly hampered and
stopped close to the trail, looking at us in a frightened and helpless
sort of way while we dashed by.
The next sight, too, impressed me with the degree to which snow
handicaps the animal life of our plains. Not more than ten feet from
the heads of my horses a rabbit started up. The horses were going at a
gallop just then. There it jumped up, unseen by myself until it moved,
ears high, eyes turned back, and giving a tremendous thump with its big
hind feet before setting out on its wild and desperate career. We were
pretty close on its heels and going fast. For maybe a quarter of a mile
it stayed in one track, running straight ahead and at the top of its
speed so that it pulled noticeably away. Every hundred yards or so,
however, it would slow down a little, and its jumps, as it glanced back
without turning--by merely taking a high, flying leap and throwing its
head aloft--would look strangely retarded, as if it were jumping from
a sitting posture or braking with its hind feet while bending its
body backward. Then, seeing us follow at undiminished speed, it would
straighten out again and dart away like an arrow. At the end of its
first straight run it apparently made up its mind that it was time
to employ somewhat different tactics in order to escape. So it jumped
slantways across the soft, central cushion of the trail into the other
track. Again it ran straight ahead for a matter of four or five hundred
yards, slowing down three or four times to reconnoitre in its rear.
After that it ran in a zigzag line, taking four or five jumps in one
track, crossing over into the other with a gigantic leap, at an angle
of not more than thirty degrees to its former direction; then, after
another four or five bounds, crossing back again, and so on. About every
tenth jump was now a high leap for scouting purposes, I should say. It
looked breathless, frantic, and desperate. But it kept it up for several
miles. I am firmly convinced that rabbits distinguish between the man
with a gun and the one without it. This little animal probably knew that
I had no gun. But what was it to do? It was caught on the road with us
bearing down upon it. It knew that it did not stand a chance of getting
even beyond reach of a club if it ventured out into the deep, loose
snow. There might be dogs ahead, but it had to keep on and take that
risk. I pitied the poor thing, but I did not stop. I wished for a
cross-trail to appear, so it would be relieved of its panic; and at last
there came one, too, which it promptly took.
And as if to prove still more strikingly how helpless many of our wild
creatures are in deep snow, the third sight came. We started a prairie
chicken next. It had probably been resting in the snow to the right
side of the trail. It began to run when the horses came close. And in a
sudden panic as it was, it did the most foolish thing it possibly could
do: it struck a line parallel to the trail. Apparently the soft snow in
which it sank prevented it from taking to its wings. It had them lifted,
but it did not even use them in running as most of the members of its
family will do; it ran in little jumps or spurts, trying its level
best to keep ahead. But the horses were faster. They caught up with it,
passed it. And slowly I pulled abreast. Its efforts certainly were as
frantic as those of the rabbit had looked. I could have picked it up
with my hands. Its beak was open with the exertion--the way you see
chickens walking about with open beaks on a swooningly hot summer day I
reached for the whip to lower it in front of the bird and stop it from
this unequal race. It cowered down, and we left it behind...
We had by that time reached the narrow strip of wild land which
separated the English settlements to the south from those of the Russian
Germans to the north. We came to the church, and like everything else it
rushed back to the rear; the school on the correction line appeared.
Strangely, school was still on in that yellow building at the corner. I
noticed a cutter outside, with a man in it, who apparently was waiting
for his children. This is the fourth of the pictures that stand out in
my memory. The man looked so forlorn. His horse, a big, hulking farm
beast, wore a blanket under the harness. I looked at my watch. It was
twenty-five minutes past four. Here, in the bush country where the
pioneers carve the farms out of the wilderness, the time kept is often
oddly at variance with the time of the towns. I looked back several
times, as long as I could see the building, which was for at least
another twenty minutes; but school did not close. Still the man sat
there, humped over, patiently waiting. It is this circumstance, I
believe, which fixed in my memory the exact hour at which I reached the
correction line.
Beyond, on the first mile of the last road east there was no possibility
of going fast. This piece was blown in badly. There was, however, always
a trail over this mile-long drift. The school, of course, had something
to do with that. But when you drive four feet above the ground, with
nothing but uncertain drifts on both sides of the trail, you want to be
chary of speeding your horses along. One wrong step, and a horse might
wallow in snow up to his belly, and you would lose more time than you
could make up for in an hour’s breathless career. A horse is afraid,
too, of trotting there, and it takes a great deal of urging to make him
do it.
So we lost a little time here; but when a mile or so farther on we
reached the bush, we made up for it. This last run of five or six miles
along the correction line consisted of one single, soft, smooth bed of
snow. The trail was cut in sharply and never drifted. Every successive
snowfall was at once packed down by the tree-fellers, and whoever drove
along, could give his horses the lines. I did so, too, and the horses
ran.
I relaxed. I had done what I could do. Anxiety there was hardly any
now. A drive over more than forty miles, made at the greatest obtainable
speed, blunts your emotional energies. I thought of home, to be sure,
did so all the time; but it was with expectation now, with nothing else.
Within half an hour I should know...
Then the bush opened up. The last mile led along between snow-buried
meadows, school and house in plain view ahead. There lay the cottage, as
peaceful in the evening sun as any house can look. Smoke curled up from
its chimney and rose in a nearly perpendicular column. I became aware
of the colder evening air, and with the chill that crept over me I was
again overwhelmed by the pitifully lonesome looks of the place.
Mostly I shouted when I drew near to tell of my coming. To-day I
silently swung up through the shrubby thicket in which the cottage and
the stable behind it lay embedded and turned in to the yard. As soon as
the horses stopped, I dropped the lines, jerked the door of the cutter
back, and jumped to the ground.
Then I stood transfixed. That very moment the door of the cottage
opened. There stood my wife, and between her knee and the door-post a
curly head pushed through, and a child’s voice shouted, “Daddy, come to
the house! Daddy, come to the house!”
A turn to the better had set in sometime during the morning. The fever
had dropped, and quickly, as children’s illness will come, it had
gone. But the message had sped on its way, irrevocable and, therefore,
unrevoked. My wife, when she told me the tale, thought, well had she
reason to smile, for had I not thus gained an additional holiday?