DURANCE VILE
By September first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful
certainty upon Stella. It had become her firm resolve to get what money
was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of
labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She
had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be
lazy. But she had had an overdose of unaccustomed drudgery, and she was
growing desperate. If there had been anything to keep her mind from
continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope
with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate,
slept, worked,--ate, slept, and worked again,--till every fibre of her
being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a
flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank
weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that
had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration,
were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying labor, from which she
felt that she must get away, or go mad.
But she did not go. Benton left to make his delivery to the mill
company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a
tug, the _Chickamin_ in attendance. Benton's crew accompanied the boom.
Fyfe's gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.
The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent. For the first time in three
months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy. Katy
John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people. Stella
loafed. For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical
torpor she had never known before. She did not want to read, to walk
about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed massive
across the lake. It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the
alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the
drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds' wings, and the lap
of water on the beach.
Presently, however, the old restless energy revived. The spring came
back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And
in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to
deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life
that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.
When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated
that to herself with determination. Between whiles she rambled about in
the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and
then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of
plans. So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but
she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling
which harassed her so when she first took train for her brother's camp.
She had passed through what she termed a culinary inferno. Nothing, she
considered, could be beyond her after that unremitting drudgery.
But Benton failed to come back on the appointed day. The four days
lengthened to a week. Then the _Panther_, bound up-lake, stopped to
leave a brief note from Charlie, telling her business had called him to
Vancouver.
Altogether it was ten days before the _Chickamin_ whistled up the bay.
She slid in beside the float, her decks bristling with men like a
passenger craft. Stella, so thoroughly sated with loneliness that she
temporarily forgot her grievances, flew to meet her brother. But one
fair glimpse of the disembarking crew turned her back. They were all in
varying stages of liquor--from two or three who had to be hauled over
the float and up to the bunkhouse like sacks of bran, to others who were
so happily under the influence of John Barleycorn that every move was
some silly antic. She retreated in disgust. When Charlie reached the
cabin, he himself proved to be fairly mellow, in the best of
spirits--speaking truly in the double sense.
"Hello, lady," he hailed jovially. "How did you fare all by your
lonesome this long time? I didn't figure to be gone so long, but there
was a lot to attend to. How are you, anyway?"
"All right," she answered coolly. "You evidently celebrated your log
delivery in the accepted fashion."
"Don't you believe it," he grinned amiably. "I had a few drinks with the
boys on the way up, that's all. No, sir, it was straight business with
a capital B all the time I was gone. I've got a good thing in hand,
Sis--big money in sight. Tell you about it later. Think you and Katy can
rustle grub for this bunch by six?"
"Oh, I suppose so," she said shortly. It was on the tip of her tongue to
tell him then and there that she was through,--like Matt, the cook, that
memorable afternoon, "completely an' ab-sho-lutely through." She
refrained. There was no use in being truculent. But that drunken crowd
looked formidable in numbers.
"How many extra?" she asked mechanically.
"Thirty men, all told," Benton returned briskly. "I tell you I'm sure
going to rip the heart out of this limit before spring. I've signed up a
six-million-foot contract for delivery as soon as the logs'll go over
Roaring Rapids in the spring. Remember what I told you when you came?
You stick with me, and you'll wear diamonds. I stand to clean up twenty
thousand on the winter's work."
"In that case, you should be able to hire a real cook," she suggested, a
spice of malice in her tone.
"I sure will, when it begins to come right," he promised largely. "And
I'll give you a soft job keeping books then. Well, I'll lend you a hand
for to-night. Where's the Siwash maiden?"
"Over at the camp; there she comes now," Stella replied. "Will you start
a fire, Charlie, while I change my dress?"
"You look like a peach in that thing." He stood off a pace to admire.
"You're some dame, Stell, when you get on your glad rags."
She frowned at her image in the glass behind the closed door of her
room as she set about unfastening the linen dress she had worn that
afternoon. Deep in her trunk, along with much other unused finery, it
had reposed all summer. That ingrained instinct to be admired, to be
garbed fittingly and well, came back to her as soon as she was rested.
And though there were none but squirrels and bluejays and occasionally
Katy John to cast admiring eyes upon her, it had pleased her for a week
to wear her best, and wander about the beaches and among the dusky
trunks of giant fir, a picture of blooming, well-groomed womanhood. She
took off the dress and threw it on the bed with a resentful rush of
feeling. The treadmill gaped for her again. But not for long. She was
through with that. She was glad that Charlie's prospects pleased him. He
could not call on her to help him out of a hole now. She would tell him
her decision to-night. And as soon as he could get a cook to fill her
place, then good-by to Roaring Lake, good-by to kitchen smells and flies
and sixteen hours a day over a hot stove.
She wondered why such a loathing of the work afflicted her; if all who
earned their bread in the sweat of their brow were ridden with that
feeling,--woodsmen, cooks, chauffeurs, the slaves of personal service
and the great industrial mills alike? Her heart went out to them if they
were. But she was quite sure that work could be otherwise than
repellent, enslaving. She recalled that cooks and maids had worked in
her father's house with no sign of the revolt that now assailed her. But
it seemed to her that their tasks had been light compared with the job
of cooking in Charlie Benton's camp.
Curiously enough, while she changed her clothes, her thoughts a jumble
of present things she disliked and the unknown that she would have to
face alone in Vancouver, she found her mind turning on Jack Fyfe. During
his three weeks' stay, they had progressed less in the direction of
acquaintances than she and Paul Abbey had done in two meetings. Fyfe
talked to her now and then briefly, but he looked at her more than he
talked. Where his searching gaze disturbed, his speech soothed, it was
so coolly impersonal. That, she deemed, was merely another of his odd
contradictions. He was contradictory. Stella classified Jack Fyfe as a
creature of unrestrained passions. She recognized, or thought she
recognized, certain dominant, primitive characteristics, and they did
not excite her admiration. Men admired him--those who were not afraid of
him. If he had been of more polished clay, she could readily have
grasped this attitude. But in her eyes he was merely a rude, masterful
man, uncommonly gifted with physical strength, dominating other rude,
strong men by sheer brute force. And she herself rather despised sheer
brute force. The iron hand should fitly be concealed beneath the velvet
glove.
Yet in spite of the bold look in his eyes that always confused and
irritated her, Fyfe had never singled her out for the slightest
attention of the kind any man bestows upon an attractive woman. Stella
was no fool. She knew that she was attractive, and she knew why. She had
been prepared to repulse, and there had been nothing to repulse. Once
during Charlie's absence he had come in a rowboat, hailed her from the
beach, and gone away without disembarking when she told him Benton was
not back. He was something of an enigma, she confessed to herself, after
all. Perhaps that was why he came so frequently into her mind. Or
perhaps, she told herself, there was so little on Roaring Lake to think
about that one could not escape the personal element. As if any one ever
could. As if life were made up of anything but the impinging of one
personality upon another. That was something Miss Stella Benton had yet
to learn. She was still mired in the rampant egotism of untried youth,
as yet the sublime individualist.
That side of her suffered a distinct shock later in the evening. When
supper was over, the work done, and the loggers' celebration was slowly
subsiding in the bunkhouse, she told Charlie with blunt directness what
she wanted to do. With equally blunt directness he declared that he
would not permit it. Stella's teeth came together with an angry little
click.
"I'm of age, Charlie," she said to him. "It isn't for you to say what
you will or will not _permit_ me to do. I want that money of mine that
you used--and what I've earned. God knows I _have_ earned it. I can't
stand this work, and I don't intend to. It isn't work; it's slavery."
"But what can you do in town?" he countered. "You haven't the least idea
what you'd be going up against, Stell. You've never been away from home,
and you've never had the least training at anything useful. You'd be on
your uppers in no time at all. You wouldn't have a ghost of a chance."
"I have such a splendid chance here," she retorted ironically. "If I
could get in any position where I'd be more likely to die of sheer
stagnation, to say nothing of dirty drudgery, than in this forsaken
hole, I'd like to know how. I don't think it's possible."
"You could be a whole lot worse off, if you only knew it," Benton
returned grumpily. "If you haven't got any sense about things, I have. I
know what a rotten hole Vancouver or any other seaport town is for a
girl alone. I won't let you make any foolish break like that. That's
flat."
From this position she failed to budge him. Once angered, partly by her
expressed intention and partly by the outspoken protest against the
mountain of work imposed on her, Charlie refused point-blank to give her
either the ninety dollars he had taken out of her purse or the three
months' wages due. Having made her request, and having met with this--to
her--amazing refusal, Stella sat dumb. There was too fine a streak in
her to break out in recrimination. She was too proud to cry.
So that she went to bed in a ferment of helpless rage. Virtually she was
a prisoner, as much so as if Charlie had kidnaped her and held her so by
brute force. The economic restraint was all potent. Without money she
could not even leave the camp. And when she contemplated the daily
treadmill before her, she shuddered.
At least she could go on strike. Her round cheek flushed with the
bitterest anger she had ever known, she sat with eyes burning into the
dark of her sordid room, and vowed that the thirty loggers should die of
slow starvation if they did not eat until she cooked another meal for
them.