Produced by David Widger
YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
By Gilbert Parker
CONTENTS:
Volume 1.
PROEM
I. “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”
II. CLOSING THE DOORS
III. THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
IV. “STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE”
V. A STORY TO BE TOLD
Volume 2.
VI. “HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON”
VII. A WOMAN’S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
VIII. ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
X. “S. O. S.”
XI. IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
Volume 3.
XII. AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
XIII. KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
XIV. AWAITING THE VERDICT
XV. “MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM”
XVI. “‘TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE”
XVII. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
EPILOGUE
INTRODUCTION
This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
in the town of Askatoon in the far West. ‘The World for Sale’ and the
latter portion of ‘The Money Master’ deal with the same life, and ‘The
Money Master’ contained some of the characters to be found in ‘Wild
Youth’. ‘The World for Sale’ also was a picture of prairie country with
strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town
in the West. These books are of the same people; but ‘You Never
Know Your Luck’ and ‘Wild Youth’ have several characters which move
prominently through both.
In the introduction to ‘The World for Sale’ in this series, I drew a
description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
‘In You Never Know Your Luck’ there is a Proem which describes briefly
the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of
the people. The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
to her. One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years. My reply
is: that it is exactly what I myself did. I have still a letter written
to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago. I have never
read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
think, what its contents were. I knew that the letter would annoy, and
there it lies. The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
friend. The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
all the Irishman’s cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity;
for both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race,
and as I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and
why Crozier did. Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to
the Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the
great West breeds. She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that
Crozier had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier’s
sake; she made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again
in the envelope for Crozier to open and see. Whatever lack of morality
there was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though
it meant the sacrifice of Kitty’s love for Crozier, and the making of
his wife happy once more.
As for ‘Wild Youth’ I make no apology for it. It is still fresh in the
minds of the American public, and it is true to the life. Some critics
frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know
nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare’s
plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb
a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic.
Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man
over sixty is melodramatic. It may be, but I think it tragical, and so
it was in this case. As for Orlando Guise, I describe the man as I knew
him, and he is still alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that
it was impossible for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a
woman whom he loved without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It
is not sentimental to say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that
only sees evil in a situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to
make a young man and woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of
a critic is beyond imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it
in The Right of Way. I did it in others of my books. What happens to one
man and one woman does not necessarily happen to another. There are men
who, for love of a woman, would not take advantage of her insecurity.
There are others who would. In my books I have made both classes do
their will, and both are true to life. It does not matter what one book
is or is not, but it does matter that an author writes his book with a
sense of the fitting and the true.
Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
which is not wintry and forbidding. There is warmth of summer in both
tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside. As for
the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
below zero. Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre
roamed the very fields where these tales take place. It should never
be forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
rain instead of snow in winter.
There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
London. Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy. I
have a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a
faithful friend. Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia,
and all I did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few
miles from the border of the farthest Western province. The Chinaman’s
death was faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature. He had
to die, and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China
and Japan, he chose the better way, to his mind. Princes still destroy
themselves in old Japan, as recent history proves.
YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
PROEM
Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
salute the reaper and say, “All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall.” The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles
them to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
the dust of the world flushed away.
Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.
Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature’s travail which
is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
the “What cheer, partner!” of a mate in the scheme of nature.
Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash
of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by
its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very
good.
CHAPTER I. “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”
If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the “field of
the cloth of gold,” which your eye has already been invited to see.
With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair,
her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.
Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and
is never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl’s
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her
quite apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which
would have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so
black. Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it
may be a matter of parentage.
Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
of the girl’s slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul
as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter’s sake at least, keeping
herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl
was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who
can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
coast long since? Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
father’s. You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
pointedly designed to express the ancient dame’s colour-scheme, even to
the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
purse and scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in
her dress.
This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean
and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.
As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading. A man had once said to her that “she looked too gay to be
good,” but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the
old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and
fend herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free
and childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw
none of those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time
and look into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or
the grey-blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in
her life; but this girl of hers, with a man’s coat in her hand, and eyes
on the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She
had even sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer,
because strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not
so vain as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad,
however, when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang,
people stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all;
but it was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were
quite individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial
deserter will show.
This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom
to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when
he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as
a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
upon it. This was the song she sang:
“Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.
“Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
“Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown--
Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
“When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips
smiled, there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with
the coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of
the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
“Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” There was no one near,
so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
to herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If
any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
have wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, “What are you
dreaming about, Kitty?” she would have understood, however, for she had
had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
coat she was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the
man had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat
down over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from
beneath the rim. Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a
letter before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had
also noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a
closed letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because
she had seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a
sloping thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but
very often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get
him something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because
her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she
had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman’s
handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
coat--and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
Kerry, so he said.
Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but
she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up
fifty stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who
for over four years had lived in her mother’s house. He had become part
of her life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a
real home without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness;
indeed, he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous
hilarity. He undoubtedly was what her mother called “a queer dick,” but
also “a pippin with a perfect core,” which was her way of saying that
he was a man to be trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who
would stand loyally by a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both
when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer, who had boarded with them when
J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal
friendliness which marked the household, and by furtive attempts at
intimacy began to make life impossible for both mother and daughter.
Burlingame took it into his head, when he received notice that his rooms
were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it.
Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan
angrily unclasping Burlingame’s arm from around her waist, and had used
cutting and decisive words to the sensualist afterwards.
There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
for harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
as a wary bachelor of many years’ standing, it was a long time before
he showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named
Egan who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse
in uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse
Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently
so different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.
“Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain’t
for playing football with,” was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush
concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she
could not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a
long history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and
whom even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to “discover” when
he lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing
as a canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and
becoming means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature
of contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
it was she. She looked a soprano.
What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry’s coat in her hand
it would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no
consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her,
for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the
house, the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
“Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies’
Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?”’
She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of
laying his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had
said aloud to herself, “Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”
Perhaps--and perhaps not.
As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look
in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
“Villain’!” he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. “Hither with my coat; my
spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--
“‘For the earth of a dusty to-day
Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.’”
When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought
it was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble. “If it wasn’t for me
you’d be carted for rubbish,” she replied joyously as she helped him on
with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
“I heard you singing--what was it?” he asked cheerily, while it could
be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long
time, with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or
rear-guard or what you will:
“‘Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--’”
she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
the man’s face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
“That--oh, that!” he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
“Your hat!” she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
kindly at her.
“‘Whereaway, hereaway’ is a wonderful song,” he said. “We used to sing
it when I was a boy--and after, and after. It’s an old song--old as the
hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind to
a fellow like--me!”
“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”--these were the very words she had
used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make
Mr. Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
watched him striding down the street into the town.
Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
“Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat,” it said.
Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
struggle, into his coat.
“Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly,” she answered cheerily as she entered.
“Of course I’m not the star boarder--nothing for me!” he said in
affected protest.
“A little more to starboard and you’ll get it on,” she retorted with
a glint of her late father’s raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch
which put it right on the ample shoulders.
“Bully! bully!” he cried. “I’ll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup.”
“I’m a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers,” she returned
mockingly.
“I’ll turn Christian--I want to be loved,” he bleated from the doorway.
“Roll on, proud porpoise!” she rejoined, which shows that her
conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
“Golly, but she’s a gold dollar in a gold bank,” remarked Jesse Bulrush
warmly as he lurched into the street.
The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
way the two men had gone.
The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of
the solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
“What are you making, mother?” Kitty asked. “New blinds for Mr. Kerry’s
bedroom-he likes this green colour,” the widow added with a slight
flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
“Everybody does everything for him,” remarked the girl almost pettishly.
“That’s a nice spirit, I must say!” replied her mother reprovingly, the
machine almost stopping.
“If I said it in a different way it would be all right,” the other
returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
inflection, like a born actress.
“Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” declared her mother, and she
bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look
of pleasure stole over the girl’s face, and her bosom rose and fell with
a happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.