“That was truly his name, m'sieu'--Raoul Vaillantcoeur--a name of the
fine sound, is it not? You like that word,--a valiant heart,--it pleases
you, eh! The man who calls himself by such a name as that ought to be a
brave fellow, a veritable hero? Well, perhaps. But I know an Indian
who is called Le Blanc; that means white. And a white man who is called
Lenoir; that means black. It is very droll, this affair of the names. It
is like the lottery.”
Silence for a few moments, broken only by the ripple of water under the
bow of the canoe, the persistent patter of the rain all around us,
and the SLISH, SLISH of the paddle with which Ferdinand, my Canadian
voyageur, was pushing the birch-bark down the lonely length of Lac
Moise. I knew that there was one of his stories on the way. But I must
keep still to get it. A single ill-advised comment, a word that would
raise a question of morals or social philosophy, might switch the
narrative off the track into a swamp of abstract discourse in which
Ferdinand would lose himself. Presently the voice behind me began again.
“But that word VAILLANT, m'sieu'; with us in Canada it does not mean
always the same as with you. Sometimes we use it for something that
sounds big, but does little; a gun that goes off with a terrible crack,
but shoots not straight nor far. When a man is like that he is FANFARON,
he shows off well, but--well, you shall judge for yourself, when you
hear what happened between this man Vaillantcoeur and his friend Prosper
Leclere at the building of the stone tower of the church at Abbeville.
You remind yourself of that grand church with the tall tower--yes? With
permission I am going to tell you what passed when that was made. And
you shall decide whether there was truly a brave heart in the story, or
not; and if it went with the name.”
Thus the tale began, in the vast solitude of the northern forest, among
the granite peaks of the ancient Laurentian Mountains, on a lake that
knew no human habitation save the Indian's wigwam or the fisherman's
tent.
How it rained that day! The dark clouds had collapsed upon the hills in
shapeless folds. The waves of the lake were beaten flat by the lashing
strokes of the storm. Quivering sheets of watery gray were driven before
the wind; and broad curves of silver bullets danced before them as they
swept over the surface. All around the homeless shores the evergreen
trees seemed to hunch their backs and crowd closer together in
patient misery. Not a bird had the heart to sing; only the
loon--storm-lover--laughed his crazy challenge to the elements, and
mocked us with his long-drawn maniac scream.
It seemed as if we were a thousand miles from everywhere and everybody.
Cities, factories, libraries, colleges, law-courts, theatres,
palaces,--what had we dreamed of these things? They were far off, in
another world. We had slipped back into a primitive life. Ferdinand was
telling me the naked story of human love and human hate, even as it has
been told from the beginning.
I cannot tell it just as he did. There was a charm in his speech too
quick for the pen: a woodland savour not to be found in any ink for sale
in the shops. I must tell it in my way, as he told it in his.
But at all events, nothing that makes any difference shall go into the
translation unless it was in the original. This is Ferdinand's story. If
you care for the real thing, here it is.
I
There were two young men in Abbeville who were easily the cocks of the
woodland walk. Their standing rested on the fact that they were the
strongest men in the parish. Strength is the thing that counts, when
people live on the edge of the wilderness. These two were well known all
through the country between Lake St. John and Chicoutimi as men of great
capacity. Either of them could shoulder a barrel of flour and walk off
with it as lightly as a common man would carry a side of bacon. There
was not a half-pound of difference between them in ability. But there
was a great difference in their looks and in their way of doing things.
Raoul Vaillantcoeur was the biggest and the handsomest man in the
village; nearly six feet tall, straight as a fir tree, and black as
a bull-moose in December. He had natural force enough and to spare.
Whatever he did was done by sheer power of back and arm. He could send
a canoe up against the heaviest water, provided he did not get mad and
break his paddle--which he often did. He had more muscle than he knew
how to use.
Prosper Leclere did not have so much, but he knew better how to handle
it. He never broke his paddle--unless it happened to be a bad one, and
then he generally had another all ready in the canoe. He was at least
four inches shorter than Vaillantcoeur; broad shoulders, long arms,
light hair, gray eyes; not a handsome fellow, but pleasant-looking and
very quiet. What he did was done more than half with his head.
He was the kind of a man that never needs more than one match to light a
fire.
But Vaillantcoeur--well, if the wood was wet he might use a dozen, and
when the blaze was kindled, as like as not he would throw in the rest of
the box.
Now, these two men had been friends and were changed into rivals. At
least that was the way that one of them looked at it. And most of the
people in the parish seemed to think that was the right view. It was a
strange thing, and not altogether satisfactory to the public mind,
to have two strongest men in the village. The question of comparative
standing in the community ought to be raised and settled in the usual
way. Raoul was perfectly willing, and at times (commonly on Saturday
nights) very eager. But Prosper was not.
“No,” he said, one March night, when he was boiling maple-sap in the
sugar-bush with little Ovide Rossignol (who had a lyric passion for
holding the coat while another man was fighting)--“no, for what shall I
fight with Raoul? As boys we have played together. Once, in the rapids
of the Belle Riviere, when I have fallen in the water, I think he has
saved my life. He was stronger, then, than me. I am always a friend to
him. If I beat him now, am I stronger? No, but weaker. And if he beats
me, what is the sense of that? Certainly I shall not like it. What is to
gain?”
Down in the store of old Girard, that night, Vaillantcoeur was holding
forth after a different fashion. He stood among the cracker-boxes and
flour-barrels, with a background of shelves laden with bright-coloured
calicoes, and a line of tin pails hanging overhead, and stated his view
of the case with vigour. He even pulled off his coat and rolled up his
shirt-sleeve to show the knotty arguments with which he proposed to
clinch his opinion.
“That Leclere,” said he, “that little Prosper Leclere! He thinks himself
one of the strongest--a fine fellow! But I tell you he is a coward.
If he is clever? Yes. But he is a poltroon. He knows well that I can
flatten him out like a crepe in the frying-pan. But he is afraid. He has
not as much courage as the musk-rat. You stamp on the bank. He dives. He
swims away. Bah!”
“How about that time he cut loose the jam of logs in the Rapide des
Cedres?” said old Girard from his corner.
Vaillantcoeur's black eyes sparkled and he twirled his mustache
fiercely. “SAPRIE!” he cried, “that was nothing! Any man with an axe can
cut a log. But to fight--that is another affair. That demands the brave
heart. The strong man who will not fight is a coward. Some day I will
put him through the mill--you shall see what that small Leclere is made
of. SACREDAM!”
Of course, affairs had not come to this pass all at once. It was a long
history, beginning with the time when the two boys had played together,
and Raoul was twice as strong as the other, and was very proud of it.
Prosper did not care; it was all right so long as they had a good time.
But then Prosper began to do things better and better. Raoul did not
understand it; he was jealous. Why should he not always be the leader?
He had more force. Why should Prosper get ahead? Why should he have
better luck at the fishing and the hunting and the farming? It was by
some trick. There was no justice in it.
Raoul was not afraid of anything but death; and whatever he wanted, he
thought he had a right to have. But he did not know very well how to get
it. He would start to chop a log just at the spot where there was a big
knot.
He was the kind of a man that sets hare-snares on a caribou-trail, and
then curses his luck because he catches nothing.
Besides, whatever he did, he was always thinking most about beating
somebody else. But Prosper eared most for doing the thing as well as
he could. If any one else could beat him--well, what difference did it
make? He would do better the next time.
If he had a log to chop, he looked it all over for a clear place before
he began. What he wanted was, not to make the chips fly, but to get the
wood split.
You are not to suppose that the one man was a saint and a hero, and
the other a fool and a ruffian. No; that sort of thing happens only in
books. People in Abbeville were not made on that plan. They were both
plain men. But there was a difference in their hearts; and out of that
difference grew all the trouble.
It was hard on Vaillantcoeur, of course, to see Leclere going ahead,
getting rich, clearing off the mortgage on his farm, laying up money
with the notary Bergeron, who acted as banker for the parish--it was
hard to look on at this, while he himself stood still, or even slipped
back a little, got into debt, had to sell a bit of the land that his
father left him. There must be some cheating about it.
But this was not the hardest morsel to swallow. The great thing that
stuck in his crop was the idea that the little Prosper, whom he could
have whipped so easily, and whom he had protected so loftily, when they
were boys, now stood just as high as he did as a capable man--perhaps
even higher. Why was it that when the Price Brothers, down at
Chicoutimi, had a good lumber-job up in the woods on the Belle Riviere,
they made Leclere the boss, instead of Vaillantcoeur? Why did the cure
Villeneuve choose Prosper, and not Raoul, to steady the strain of the
biggest pole when they were setting up the derrick for the building of
the new church?
It was rough, rough! The more Raoul thought of it, the rougher it
seemed. The fact that it was a man who had once been his protege, and
still insisted on being his best friend, did not make it any smoother.
Would you have liked it any better on that account? I am not telling
you how it ought to have been, I am telling you how it was. This isn't
Vaillantcoeur's account-book; it's his story. You must strike your
balances as you go along.
And all the time, you see, he felt sure that he was a stronger man and a
braver man than Prosper. He was hungry to prove it in the only way that
he could understand. The sense of rivalry grew into a passion of hatred,
and the hatred shaped itself into a blind, headstrong desire to fight.
Everything that Prosper did well, seemed like a challenge; every success
that he had was as hard to bear as an insult. All the more, because
Prosper seemed unconscious of it. He refused to take offence, went about
his work quietly and cheerfully, turned off hard words with a joke, went
out of his way to show himself friendly and good-natured. In reality, of
course, he knew well enough how matters stood. But he was resolved not
to show that he knew, if he could help it; and in any event, not to be
one of the two that are needed to make a quarrel.
He felt very strangely about it. There was a presentiment in his heart
that he did not dare to shake off. It seemed as if this conflict were
one that would threaten the happiness of his whole life. He still kept
his old feeling of attraction to Raoul, the memory of the many happy
days they had spent together; and though the friendship, of course,
could never again be what it had been, there was something of it left,
at least on Prosper's side. To struggle with this man, strike at his
face, try to maim and disfigure him, roll over and over on the ground
with him, like two dogs tearing each other,--the thought was hateful.
His gorge rose at it. He would never do it, unless to save his life.
Then? Well, then, God must be his judge.
So it was that these two men stood against each other in Abbeville. Just
as strongly as Raoul was set to get into a fight, just so strongly was
Prosper set to keep out of one. It was a trial of strength between two
passions,--the passion of friendship and the passion of fighting.
Two or three things happened to put an edge on Raoul's hunger for an
out-and-out fight.
The first was the affair at the shanty on Lac des Caps. The
wood-choppers, like sailors, have a way of putting a new man through a
few tricks to initiate him into the camp. Leclere was bossing the job,
with a gang of ten men from St. Raymond under him. Vaillantcoeur had
just driven a team in over the snow with a load of provisions, and
was lounging around the camp as if it belonged to him. It was Sunday
afternoon, the regular time for fun, but no one dared to take hold of
him. He looked too big. He expressed his opinion of the camp.
“No fun in this shanty, HE? I suppose that little Leclere he makes
you others work, and say your prayers, and then, for the rest, you can
sleep. HE! Well, I am going to make a little fun for you, my boys. Come,
Prosper, get your hat, if you are able to climb a tree.”
He snatched the hat from the table by the stove and ran out into the
snow. In front of the shanty a good-sized birch, tall, smooth, very
straight, was still standing. He went up the trunk like a bear.
But there was a dead balsam that had fallen against the birch and lodged
on the lower branches. It was barely strong enough to bear the weight
of a light man. Up this slanting ladder Prosper ran quickly in his
moccasined feet, snatched the hat from Raoul's teeth as he swarmed up
the trunk, and ran down again. As he neared the ground, the balsam,
shaken from its lodgement, cracked and fell. Raoul was left up the tree,
perched among the branches, out of breath. Luck had set the scene for
the lumberman's favourite trick.
“Chop him down! chop him down” was the cry; and a trio of axes were
twanging against the birch tree, while the other men shouted and laughed
and pelted the tree with ice to keep the prisoner from climbing down.
Prosper neither shouted nor chopped, but he grinned a little as he
watched the tree quiver and shake, and heard the rain of “SACRES!” and
“MAUDITS!” that came out of the swaying top. He grinned--until he saw
that a half-dozen more blows would fell the birch right on the roof of
the shanty.
“Are you crazy?” he cried, as he picked up an axe; “you know nothing how
to chop. You kill a man. You smash the cabane. Let go!” He shoved one of
the boys away and sent a few mighty cuts into the side of the birch that
was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts on the other side; the
tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept in a great arc toward the
deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top swung earthward, Raoul jumped
clear of the crashing branches and landed safely in the feather-bed of
snow, buried up to his neck. Nothing was to be seen of him but his head,
like some new kind of fire-work--sputtering bad words.
Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcoeur's
hunger to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend, even
if the friend does it for the sake of saving him from being killed by a
fall on the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part of it. What you
remember is the grin.
The second thing that made it worse was the bad chance that both of
these men had to fall in love with the same girl. Of course there were
other girls in the village beside Marie Antoinette Girard--plenty of
them, and good girls, too. But somehow or other, when they were beside
her, neither Raoul nor Prosper cared to look at any of them, but only
at 'Toinette. Her eyes were so much darker and her cheeks so much more
red--bright as the berries of the mountain-ash in September. Her hair
hung down to her waist on Sunday in two long braids, brown and shiny
like a ripe hazelnut; and her voice when she laughed made the sound of
water tumbling over little stones.
No one knew which of the two lovers she liked best. At school it was
certainly Raoul, because he was bigger and bolder. When she came back
from her year in the convent at Roberval it was certainly Prosper,
because he could talk better and had read more books. He had a volume of
songs full of love and romance, and knew most of them by heart. But
this did not last forever. 'Toinette's manners had been polished at the
convent, but her ideas were still those of her own people. She never
thought that knowledge of books could take the place of strength, in
the real battle of life. She was a brave girl, and she felt sure in her
heart that the man of the most courage must be the best man after all.
For a while she appeared to persuade herself that it was Prosper, beyond
a doubt, and always took his part when the other girls laughed at him.
But this was not altogether a good sign. When a girl really loves,
she does not talk, she acts. The current of opinion and gossip in
the village was too strong for her. By the time of the affair of the
“chopping-down” at Lac des Caps, her heart was swinging to and fro like
a pendulum. One week she would walk home from mass with Raoul. The next
week she would loiter in the front yard on a Saturday evening and talk
over the gate with Prosper, until her father called her into the shop to
wait on customers.
It was in one of these talks that the pendulum seemed to make its last
swing and settle down to its resting-place. Prosper was telling her of
the good crops of sugar that he had made from his maple grove.
“The profit will be large--more than sixty piastres--and with that I
shall buy at Chicoutimi a new four-wheeler, of the finest, a veritable
wedding carriage--if you--if I--'Toinette? Shall we ride together?”
His left hand clasped hers as it lay on the gate. His right arm stole
over the low picket fence and went around the shoulder that leaned
against the gate-post. The road was quite empty, the night already dark.
He could feel her warm breath on his neck as she laughed.
“If you! If I! If what? Why so many ifs in this fine speech? Of whom
is the wedding for which this new carriage is to be bought? Do you know
what Raoul Vaillantcoeur has said? 'No more wedding in this parish till
I have thrown the little Prosper over my shoulder!'”
As she said this, laughing, she turned closer to the fence and looked
up, so that a curl on her forehead brushed against his cheek.
“BATECHE! Who told you he said that?”
“I heard him, myself.”
“Where?”
“In the store, two nights ago. But it was not for the first time. He
said it when we came from the church together, it will be four weeks
to-morrow.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him perhaps he was mistaken. The next wedding might be after the
little Prosper had measured the road with the back of the longest man in
Abbeville.”
The laugh had gone out of her voice now. She was speaking eagerly, and
her bosom rose and fell with quick breaths. But Prosper's right arm
had dropped from her shoulder, and his hand gripped the fence as he
straightened up.
“'Toinette!” he cried, “that was bravely said. And I could do it. Yes, I
know I could do it. But, MON DIEU, what shall I say? Three years now, he
has pushed me, every one has pushed me, to fight. And you--but I cannot.
I am not capable of it.”
The girl's hand lay in his as cold and still as a stone. She was silent
for a moment, and then asked, coldly, “Why not?”
“Why not? Because of the old friendship. Because he pulled me out of the
river long ago. Because I am still his friend. Because now he hates
me too much. Because it would be a black fight. Because shame and evil
would come of it, whoever won. That is what I fear, 'Toinette!”
Her hand slipped suddenly away from his. She stepped back from the gate.
“TIENS! You have fear, Monsieur Leclere! Truly I had not thought of
that. It is strange. For so strong a man it is a little stupid to be
afraid. Good-night. I hear my father calling me. Perhaps some one in the
store who wants to be served. You must tell me again what you are going
to do with the new carriage. Good-night!”
She was laughing again. But it was a different laughter. Prosper, at
the gate, did not think it sounded like the running of a brook over
the stones. No, it was more the noise of the dry branches that knock
together in the wind. He did not hear the sigh that came as she shut
the door of the house, nor see how slowly she walked through the passage
into the store.