For a moment they sat listening to the clear staccato knocking of the
distant blows, and the more forceful thuds of the man nearer at hand. A
bird or so darted from the direction of the sound and shot silently into
the thicket behind them.
“What are they doing? Are they cutting lumber?” asked Hilda.
“No,” answered Thorpe, “we do not cut saw logs at this time of year.
They are clearing out a road.”
“Where does it go to?”
“Well, nowhere in particular. That is, it is a logging road that starts
at the river and wanders up through the woods where the pine is.”
“How clear the axes sound. Can't we go down and watch them a little
while?”
“The main gang is a long distance away; sound carries very clearly
in this still air. As for that fellow you hear so plainly, he is only
clearing out small stuff to get ready for the others. You wouldn't see
anything different from your Indian chopping the cordwood for your camp
fire. He won't chop out any big trees.”
“Let's not go, then,” said Hilda submissively.
“When you come up in the winter,” he pursued, “you will see any amount
of big timber felled.”
“I would like to know more about it,” she sighed, a quaint little air of
childish petulance graving two lines between her eyebrows. “Do you know,
Harry, you are a singularly uncommunicative sort of being. I have to
guess that your life is interesting and picturesque,--that is,” she
amended, “I should have to do so if Wallace Carpenter had not told me
a little something about it. Sometimes I think you are not nearly poet
enough for the life you are living. Why, you are wonderful, you men
of the north, and you let us ordinary mortals who have not the gift of
divination imagine you entirely occupied with how many pounds of iron
chain you are going to need during the winter.” She said these things
lightly as one who speaks things not for serious belief.
“It is something that way,” he agreed with a laugh.
“Do you know, sir,” she persisted, “that I really don't know anything
at all about the life you lead here? From what I have seen, you might
be perpetually occupied in eating things in a log cabin, and in
disappearing to perform some mysterious rites in the forest.” She
looked at him with a smiling mouth but tender eyes, her head tilted back
slightly.
“It's a good deal that way, too,” he agreed again. “We use a barrel of
flour in Camp One every two and a half days!”
She shook her head in a faint negation that only half understood what he
was saying, her whole heart in her tender gaze.
“Sit there,” she breathed very softly, pointing to the dried needles on
which her feet rested, but without altering the position of her head or
the steadfastness of her look.
He obeyed.
“Now tell me,” she breathed, still in the fascinated monotone.
“What?” he inquired.
“Your life; what you do; all about it. You must tell me a story.”
Thorpe settled himself more lazily, and laughed with quiet enjoyment.
Never had he felt the expansion of a similar mood. The barrier between
himself and self-expression had faded, leaving not the smallest debris
of the old stubborn feeling.
“The story of the woods,” he began, “the story of the saw log. It would
take a bigger man than I to tell it. I doubt if any one man ever would
be big enough. It is a drama, a struggle, a battle. Those men you
hear there are only the skirmishers extending the firing line. We are
fighting always with Time. I'll have to hurry now to get those roads
done and a certain creek cleared before the snow. Then we'll have to
keep on the keen move to finish our cutting before the deep snow; to
haul our logs before the spring thaws; to float them down the river
while the freshet water lasts. When we gain a day we have scored a
victory; when the wilderness puts us back an hour, we have suffered a
defeat. Our ammunition is Time; our small shot the minutes, our heavy
ordnance the hours!”
The girl placed her hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own.
“But we win!” he cried. “We win!”
“That is what I like,” she said softly, “the strong spirit that wins!”
She hesitated, then went on gently, “But the battlefields, Harry; to
me they are dreadful. I went walking yesterday morning, before you came
over, and after a while I found myself in the most awful place. The
stumps of trees, the dead branches, the trunks lying all about, and the
glaring hot sun over everything! Harry, there was not a single bird in
all that waste, a single green thing. You don't know how it affected me
so early in the morning. I saw just one lonesome pine tree that had been
left for some reason or another, standing there like a sentinel. I could
shut my eyes and see all the others standing, and almost hear the birds
singing and the wind in the branches, just as it is here.” She seized
his fingers in her other hand. “Harry,” she said earnestly, “I don't
believe I can ever forget that experience, any more than I could have
forgotten a battlefield, were I to see one. I can shut my eyes now, and
can see this place our dear little wooded knoll wasted and blackened as
that was.”
The man twisted his shoulder uneasily and withdrew his hand.
“Harry,” she said again, after a pause, “you must promise to leave this
woods until the very last. I suppose it must all be cut down some day,
but I do not want to be here to see after it is all over.”
Thorpe remained silent.
“Men do not care much for keepsakes, do they, Harry?--they don't save
letters and flowers as we girls do--but even a man can feel the value
of a great beautiful keepsake such as this, can't he, dear? Our
meeting-place--do you remember how I found you down there by the old
pole trail, staring as though you had seen a ghost?--and that beautiful,
beautiful music! It must always be our most sacred memory. Promise me
you will save it until the very, very last.”
Thorpe said nothing because he could not rally his faculties. The
sentimental association connected with the grove had actually never
occurred to him. His keepsakes were impressions which he carefully
guarded in his memory. To the natural masculine indifference toward
material bits of sentiment he had added the instinct of the strictly
portable early developed in the rover. He had never even possessed a
photograph of his sister. Now this sudden discovery that such things
might be part of the woof of another person's spiritual garment came to
him ready-grown to the proportions of a problem.
In selecting the districts for the season's cut, he had included in his
estimates this very grove. Since then he had seen no reason for changing
his decision. The operations would not commence until winter. By that
time the lovers would no longer care to use it as at present. Now
rapidly he passed in review a dozen expedients by which his plan might
be modified to permit of the grove's exclusion. His practical mind
discovered flaws in every one. Other bodies of timber promising a return
of ten thousand dollars were not to be found near the river, and time
now lacked for the cutting of roads to more distant forties.
“Hilda,” he broke in abruptly at last, “the men you hear are clearing a
road to this very timber.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“This timber is marked for cutting this very winter.”
She had not a suspicion of the true state of affairs. “Isn't it lucky
I spoke of it!” she exclaimed. “How could you have forgotten to
countermand the order! You must see to it to-day; now!”
She sprang up impulsively and stood waiting for him. He arose more
slowly. Even before he spoke her eyes dilated with the shock from her
quick intuitions.
“Hilda, I cannot,” he said.
She stood very still for some seconds.
“Why not?” she asked quietly.
“Because I have not time to cut a road through to another bunch of pine.
It is this or nothing.”
“Why not nothing, then?”
“I want the money this will bring.”
His choice of a verb was unfortunate. The employment of that one little
word opened the girl's mind to a flood of old suspicions which the frank
charm of the northland had thrust outside. Hilda Farrand was an heiress
and a beautiful girl. She had been constantly reminded of the one fact
by the attempts of men to use flattery of the other as a key to her
heart and her fortune. From early girlhood she had been sought by the
brilliant impecunious of two continents. The continued experience
had varnished her self-esteem with a glaze of cynicism sufficiently
consistent to protect it against any but the strongest attack. She
believed in no man's protestations. She distrusted every man's
motives as far as herself was concerned. This attitude of mind was not
unbecoming in her for the simple reason that it destroyed none of her
graciousness as regards other human relations besides that of love. That
men should seek her in matrimony from a selfish motive was as much to be
expected as that flies should seek the sugar bowl. She accepted the
fact as one of nature's laws, annoying enough but inevitable; a thing to
guard against, but not one of sufficient moment to grieve over.
With Thorpe, however, her suspicions had been lulled. There is something
virile and genuine about the woods and the men who inhabit them that
strongly predisposes the mind to accept as proved in their entirety all
the other virtues. Hilda had fallen into this state of mind. She endowed
each of the men whom she encountered with all the robust qualities
she had no difficulty in recognizing as part of nature's charm in the
wilderness. Now at a word her eyes were opened to what she had done. She
saw that she had assumed unquestioningly that her lover possessed the
qualities of his environment.
Not for a moment did she doubt the reality of her love. She had
conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young
girl. But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that
passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one
of her own poetizing imagination. The reality of the ideal she had
constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it
was not. So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality
of a loving heart, nor even the impartiality of one sitting in judgment,
but rather the perverted prejudice of one who actually fears the truth.
“Will you tell me for what you want the money?” she asked.
The young man caught the note of distrust. At once, instinctively, his
own confidence vanished. He drew within himself, again beyond the power
of justifying himself with the needed word.
“The firm needs it in the business,” said he.
Her next question countered instantaneously.
“Does the firm need the money more than you do me?”
They stared at each other in the silence of the situation that had so
suddenly developed. It had come into being without their volition, as a
dust cloud springs up on a plain.
“You do not mean that, Hilda,” said Thorpe quietly. “It hardly comes to
that.”
“Indeed it does,” she replied, every nerve of her fine organization
strung to excitement. “I should be more to you than any firm.”
“Sometimes it is necessary to look after the bread and butter,” Thorpe
reminded her gently, although he knew that was not the real reason at
all.
“If your firm can't supply it, I can,” she answered. “It seems strange
that you won't grant my first request of you, merely because of a little
money.”
“It isn't a little money,” he objected, catching manlike at the
practical question. “You don't realize what an amount a clump of pine
like this stands for. Just in saw logs, before it is made into lumber,
it will be worth about thirty thousand dollars,--of course there's the
expense of logging to pay out of that,” he added, out of his accurate
business conservatism, “but there's ten thousand dollars' profit in it.”
The girl, exasperated by cold details at such a time, blazed out. “I
never heard anything so ridiculous in my life!” she cried. “Either you
are not at all the man I thought you, or you have some better reason
than you have given. Tell me, Harry; tell me at once. You don't know
what you are doing.”
“The firm needs it, Hilda,” said Thorpe, “in order to succeed. If we do
not cut this pine, we may fail.”
In that he stated his religion. The duty of success was to him one of
the loftiest of abstractions, for it measured the degree of a man's
efficiency in the station to which God had called him. The money, as
such, was nothing to him.
Unfortunately the girl had learned a different language. She knew
nothing of the hardships, the struggles, the delight of winning for the
sake of victory rather than the sake of spoils. To her, success meant
getting a lot of money. The name by which Thorpe labelled his most
sacred principle, to her represented something base and sordid. She
had more money herself than she knew. It hurt her to the soul that the
condition of a small money-making machine, as she considered the lumber
firm, should be weighed even for an instant against her love. It was a
great deal Thorpe's fault that she so saw the firm. He might easily have
shown her the great forces and principles for which it stood.
“If I were a man,” she said, and her voice was tense, “if I were a man
and loved a woman, I would be ready to give up everything for her. My
riches, my pride, my life, my honor, my soul even,--they would be as
nothing, as less than nothing to me,--if I loved. Harry, don't let me
think I am mistaken. Let this miserable firm of yours fail, if fail
it must for lack of my poor little temple of dreams,” she held out her
hands with a tender gesture of appeal. The affair had gone beyond the
preservation of a few trees. It had become the question of an ideal.
Gradually, in spite of herself, the conviction was forcing itself upon
her that the man she had loved was no different from the rest; that the
greed of the dollar had corrupted him too. By the mere yielding to her
wishes, she wanted to prove the suspicion wrong.
Now the strange part of the whole situation was, that in two words
Thorpe could have cleared it. If he had explained that he needed the ten
thousand dollars to help pay a note given to save from ruin a foolish
friend, he would have supplied to the affair just the higher motive
the girl's clear spirituality demanded. Then she would have shared
enthusiastically in the sacrifice, and been the more loving and
repentant from her momentary doubt. All she needed was that the man
should prove himself actuated by a noble, instead of a sordid, motive.
The young man did not say the two words, because in all honesty he
thought them unimportant. It seemed to him quite natural that he should
go on Wallace Carpenter's note. That fact altered not a bit the
main necessity of success. It was a man's duty to make the best of
himself,--it was Thorpe's duty to prove himself supremely efficient in
his chosen calling; the mere coincidence that his partner's troubles
worked along the same lines meant nothing to the logic of the situation.
In stating baldly that he needed the money to assure the firm's
existence, he imagined he had adduced the strongest possible reason
for his attitude. If the girl was not influenced by that, the case was
hopeless.
It was the difference of training rather than the difference of ideas.
Both clung to unselfishness as the highest reason for human action; but
each expressed the thought in a manner incomprehensible to the other.
“I cannot, Hilda,” he answered steadily.
“You sell me for ten thousand dollars! I cannot believe it! Harry!
Harry! Must I put it to you as a choice? Don't you love me enough to
spare me that?”
He did not reply. As long as it remained a dilemma, he would not reply.
He was in the right.
“Do you need the money more than you do me? more than you do love?”
she begged, her soul in her eyes; for she was begging also for herself.
“Think, Harry; it is the last chance!”
Once more he was face to face with a vital decision. To his surprise
he discovered in his mind no doubt as to what the answer should be.
He experienced no conflict of mind; no hesitation; for the moment, no
regret. During all his woods life he had been following diligently
the trail he had blazed for his conduct. Now his feet carried him
unconsciously to the same end. There was no other way out. In the winter
of his trouble the clipped trees alone guided him, and at the end of
them he found his decision. It is in crises of this sort, when a little
reflection or consideration would do wonders to prevent a catastrophe,
that all the forgotten deeds, decisions, principles, and thoughts of a
man's past life combine solidly into the walls of fatality, so that in
spite of himself he finds he must act in accordance with them. In answer
to Hilda's question he merely inclined his head.
“I have seen a vision,” said she simply, and lowered her head to conceal
her eyes. Then she looked at him again. “There can be nothing better
than love,” she said.
“Yes, one thing,” said Thorpe, “the duty of success.”
The man had stated his creed; the woman hers. The one is born perfect
enough for love; the other must work, must attain the completeness of a
fulfilled function, must succeed, to deserve it.
She left him then, and did not see him again. Four days later the
camping party left. Thorpe sent Tim Shearer over, as his most efficient
man, to see that they got off without difficulty, but himself retired
on some excuse to Camp Four. Three weeks gone in October he received a
marked newspaper announcing the engagement of Miss Hilda Farrand to Mr.
Hildreth Morton of Chicago.
He had burned his ships, and stood now on an unfriendly shore. The first
sacrifice to his jealous god had been consummated, and now, live or die,
he stood pledged to win his fight.