Part of journal kept by Lady Angella Loring:
I hate men and despise women. I am afraid
of children. Animals are my only friends.
I'm not pretty. My face is hard, my hair--what is
left of it--of no color. My hands are calloused. I
am a "tough old nut" as once I heard a "hand" of the
Bar Q describe me. I wear men's clothes because they
are comfortable and because I want to forget that I
am a woman.
My father was the victim of a swindler, a smiling-faced,
lying-tongued scoundrel, who robbed him of all
we possessed in the world. The man I was to have
married was as surely my father's murderer as if he
had held the hand that sent the shot through my father's
brain that killed him. I am the last of the Lorings,
I--the poor old man-maid recluse, on the edge of Yankee
Valley in the Canadian Northwest.
This bit of Alberta land is all that is left of the
once vast Loring estate. That I still have this is due
purely to the accident of a groom paying back a debt
he owed my father. It was strange that I should have
learned of its existence at a time when I believed that
the end had come for me even as it had come for my
father. True, I was not to go out of life by the act
of my own hand and will. A quite eminent scientist
had pronounced my death sentence. He gave me a
few months in which to live. It was a ghastly situation
for one who had been through what I had and who desired
to live for the noble purpose of revenge. That
sounds melodramatic and I suppose if I were pious I
would hear in mind that revenge is sweet only for God.
But my nature is not sweet and hell raged within me
at that time. It was strange, as I have said, at that
time suddenly to learn of the existence of this ranch.
I seemed to see it as in a dream--it lay far off under
a spotlight of Alberta sunlight and it called to me with
a clarion call.
I came out here. I am hard and strong. I don't
intend to die. I've something to live for. Not a man.
I hate men, as I have said above. I have deep-rooted,
never-dying aversion for the whole mean race of men.
That which I have to live for is this quarter section
of Alberta land. It's mine. I love it better than anything
else on earth.
I broke my own land. I've put in my own crop. I
hayed and chored, fenced and drudged, both in house
and upon the land. I made most of my own furniture
and I practically rebuilt the inside of this old shack.
"Necessity is the mother of invention" goes the
proverb, but I loathe proverbs. One can find an opposing
one for even the best of them. Some people pin
proverbs and poems and texts upon their souls as on
their walls. I suppose they get the sort of comfort
and help from it that a cripple gets from a crutch.
As far as that goes we are all cripples in life, and few
there be who can walk without a crutch. I never saw
a human being yet who did not limp, at least mentally....
There's one man in Alberta who comes to see me
regularly once a month and no snub or plain telling
that I prefer my own company to that of any others
makes any impression upon him. He is painfully, hopelessly
Scotch. However, one cannot quarrel with a man
who has saved one's life. I am, or was, what they call
in the west a "lunger." I was definitely diagnosed as
"T.B." But if any one doubts that my lungs are sound
now they should hear me let out a war whoop that
would compare well with old Chief Pie Belly's. Pie
Belly is a Stony Indian and I have learned some things
of that Indian. Not that I make a daily practice of
war whooping, but there's sport in letting the full volume
and force of one's lungs pour out across the utter
silence of the prairie. If my voice carries to my neighbors--the
nearest is five miles off--no doubt they take
me for a coyote.
That Scotch doctor likes to pick a quarrel, to argue,
to find fault and to bark like a dog. Alberta, according
to him, is a "mon's land." There is no sentimental
reference to "God's country" or "Sunny Alberta" from
him. It is a hard land--a mon's land. I've no right
here. I should not work outside the house. I should
engage a couple to work the place on shares. I should
dress as a "lass"; I should permit my hair to grow "as
God planted it"; I should chasten my bitter tongue and
heart; I should cultivate my neighbors, and I should not
set myself up against my fellow men. Hm! Sounds
very fine, my Scotch friend, but what do you know of
what I have been through? How can you know that
I am frozen inside?
My ranch--and I would rather write of my ranch
than dig into my personal thoughts and emotions--if
there are any left in me--my ranch lies midway between
the good grain lands on one side and the hill
country, the cattle lands, on the other. I suppose I am
part of Yankee Valley. I am sorry for that because
I do not like Americans. They are noisy, insincere,
and a boasting, bragging lot. As far as that goes,
I like the English less. The Scotch are hard to tolerate,
and as for the Irish, the devil made them in his
own likeness. If it comes down to that, I don't know
a single nationality that I can respect, and I have
lived all over the world.
To farm is to gamble on the largest scale possible,
for the earth may be said to be our board, the seed our
dice and the elements, the soil, the parasites, the hail,
the frost and the drought, these are the cards stacked
against us. But, like all gamblers, we are reaching
out for a prize that enthralls and lures us, and that "pot
of gold at the end of our rainbow" is the harvest--the
wonderful, glorious golden harvest of Alberta.
Some day, it will come to me also.
In the spring, our land is excessively fragrant. The
black, loamy soil fairly calls to one to lay the seed
within its fertile bosom. Anything will grow in Alberta.
It's a thrilling sight to see the grain prick
up sturdy and strong. When first my own showed its
green head above the earth, I suffered such exhilaration
that I could have thrown myself upon the ground, and
kissed the good earth. Those tiny points of green,
there on the soil that I myself had plowed, disked, harrowed
and seeded. I suffered the exquisite pang of the
creator.
If only one might shut up memories in a box, close
the lid tight and turn the key upon them. If but the
past could be blotted out, as are our sins by death,
then, methinks, we would find comfort and compensation
in this poor life once again.
The last generation of the Lorings were a soft-handed,
dependent race. I come of an older, primitive
breed, I am a reversion to type, for I love to labor
with my hands. Had I been a man, I might have been
a ditch or a grave digger. I love the earth. When I
die, I do not want to be cremated. I want to go back
to the soil.
I talk here of compensations and of my ranch which
I say is what I have to live for, yet life has not been
sweet or easy for me in Alberta. It's been a battle with
a grim antagonist--for poverty and sickness and cold--what
can be grimmer than these? And then, much
as I love to put in my crop, I have not yet had the joy
of reaping it, for cutworm took my first, and this year
early frost destroyed my grain when it had attained
almost full growth. But never mind--that is all part
of the game. The hardest part has been the enforced
work at the Bar Q. No one enjoys laboring for those
beneath them. I don't mean the laboring men. I have
no sense of caste whatsoever, and they are as good as
I am, I suppose. But Bull Langdon, the man whose
pay I must take. He is a wild beast, one of the two
legged cattle that should go to the shambles with his
stock.
Yet I am not afraid of Bull Langdon. He never
shouts at me. He only blusters, and his bloodshot eyes
fall before mine. He may be the great boss and bully
of the Bar Q. With his big bull whip in hand, his
cattle may cower before him, and his men quail and
slink away; his wife and Jake may tremble at the
sound of his voice or step. I have his "number." I
know that he is a coward, a great sneaking bully. He
can lord it over small men and women and half-witted
Indian boys. He never employs stronger or bigger
men than himself. A giant in stature, and a Samson
in strength, nevertheless I assert he is a coward, a big
unwhipped bully, whose own strength will some day
prove his boomerang.
It's queer, as I have run along, I have omitted all
mention of one in Alberta whom I should call a friend.
Just a poor, illiterate young girl. I never can forget
Nettie Day as I first saw her. Sickness, delirium even,
may cast a glamour over things. It may be then our
imagination pictures things as they are not; but nevertheless,
Nettie's face, bending above my own, with its
gentle look of tenderness and compassion, seemed to me
as sweet as the "blessed damozel's" as she looked down
from heaven to the earth beneath. She had wide, deep
blue eyes, a child's eyes, full of an unplumbed innocence
and questioning. Strange how one can come
into our lives for such a little spell, disappear beyond
our sight, and still remain in our hearts. I have seen
little enough of Nettie, and the last time I saw her
I hate to recall that I scolded her.
Next to my place is a quarter section of homestead
land, owned by a young man named Stanley. One day
I was fencing, when this young fellow, who had made
attempts upon several occasions to speak to me, came
over and watched me at my work. I ignored him, but
like my doctor friend, above mentioned, he is Scotch
and thick. He didn't even know he was being ignored,
and presently in a disgustingly friendly way he had
the colossal nerve to attempt to instruct me in the art
of making post holes. At that juncture I turned
around and looked at him. Now I may seem as that
Bar Q hand said, like a "tough old nut." No doubt
I look like one, but I know the English trick of freezing
ordinary people by a mere look. It is a trick,
like the Englishman's monocle and the strange part is
only an English person can do it. You just stare,
stonily, at the insignificant atom before you. I begin
at the feet, and travel contemptuously up the whole
despised body, till I reach the abashed and propitiating
face. One need not say a single word. That look--if
you know the technique of the act--is enough. This
young Stanley dropped his hammer in a hurry and
turned very red.
"I say, you're not mad at me, are you?" he stammered.
And just then Nettie, whom the doctor had dropped
at my house that day, came from out the house, and
something about that boy's face, just a flicker of the
eye and the deepening red about his ears apprised me
of the reason why he was so keen on being friends with
me. I turned just in time to see on Nettie's guilty face
the identical flicker I had noted on Stanley's. As cross
as two sticks, I grabbed that girl by the arm and
shoved her along the field to the house.
Once inside, I made her sit down, while I told her in
detail all of the miseries and pitfalls and deceits and
heartbreaks, the general unhappiness that befalls one
foolish enough to fall in love. Love I told her was an
antiquated emotion which had been burned out by the
force of its own mad fire. I said something like that,
for I was talking with feeling, upon a topic I understood,
and as I talked, becoming more and more moved
and excited as my subject warmed me, suddenly I observed
that Nettie's eyes were fixed on space, as if on
something very far away. She had her large, white
hands unconsciously clasped upon her bosom; she was
kneeling beside me, and something about her pose struck
me at that moment as so divinely beautiful, so exquisitely
madonna-like and lovely, that I choked upon
my words and could go no further.
Then Nettie came out of her dream--I am sure she
had heard not a word of my discourse--and said:
"Thank you, Angel." That girl calls me--Angel.
God alone knows why. There is little of the angel
in me.
I have not seen her since that day. Life has played
strange tricks upon my little friend since then. Her
father dead, her brothers and sisters scattered about
in institutions and on farms, Nettie herself--at the
Bar Q--of all places in the world, the last I would have
wished to have seen her go!
Sometimes in the evening, when my work is done, I
can recall to my mind Nettie as I last saw her with
almost photographic clearness, and I experience a sense
of nearness to her. The other night I had an impulse
to start out then and there for the Bar Q. I felt that
she needed me.
That young man on the adjoining quarter section
sings a great deal as he works. I can hear him clear
across the field--he has a real voice, a full, fine baritone,
and in the still evenings, I confess there is something
uplifting about that fresh young voice as it rings
across the prairie. His home is nearing completion,
he says, and that is why he sings. The thought of
home and Nettie warms his heart till it bursts into
song. Ah--well, who am I to judge what is best for
these young people? So, sing on, young Cyril. I hope
that that clear brave voice of yours, as full of melody
as a lark's, will never falter.
Last night, when I came in from the field, the half-breed
Jake sidled along from behind my house. It gave
me a start to see the poor idiot with his wild, witless
face. He wanted to tell me something about the Bar
Q. He jabbered and gibbered, and I could hardly make
head or tail of what he was saying, save that Bull
Langdon was eating something up.