Читать книгу When the War Ends – Book Set - Bertrand William Sinclair - Страница 15

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Christmas had come and gone before Thompson finished his job at Porcupine Lake, some ninety-odd miles, as the crow flies, north of Fort Pachugan. The Porcupine was a marshy stretch of water, the home of muskrat and beaver, a paradise for waterfowl when the heavy hand of winter was lifted, a sheet of ice now, a white oval in the dusky green of the forest. Here the free trader had built a fair-sized structure of logs with goods piled in the front and the rearward end given over to a stove, a table, and two bunks. In this place Thompson and Joe Lamont plied their traffic. MacLeod sent them Indian and half-breed trappers bearing orders for so much flour, so much tea, so many traps, so much powder and ball and percussion caps for their nigh obsolete guns. They took their "debt" and departed into the wilderness, to repay in the spring with furs.

So, by degrees, the free-trader's stock approached depletion, until there remained no more than two good dog teams could haul. With that on sleds, and a few bundles of furs traded in by trappers whose lines radiated from the Porcupine, Thompson and Joe Lamont came back to Fort Pachugan.

The factor seemed well pleased with the undertaking. He checked up the goods and opined that the deal would show a rare profit for the Company.

"Ye have a hundred an' twenty-six dollars due, over an' above a charge or two against ye," he said to Thompson when they went over the accounts. "How will ye have it? In cash? If ye purpose to winter at Lone Moose a credit maybe'll serve as well. Or, if ye go out, ye can have a cheque on the Company at Edmonton."

"Give me the hundred in cash," Thompson decided. "I'll take the twenty odd in grub. I'm going to Lone Moose, but I don't know how long I'll stay there. There's some stuff of mine there that I want to get. After that—I'm a bit undecided."

In those long nights at the Porcupine he had done a good deal of pondering over his next move. He had not yet come to a fixed decision. In a general way he knew that he was going out into the world from whence he had come, with an altogether different point of view, to work out his future along altogether different lines. But he had not made up his mind to do this at once. He was clearly conscious of one imperative craving. That was for a sight of Sophie Carr and a chance to talk to her again. His heart quickened when he thought of their parting. He knew she was anything but indifferent. He was not an egotist, but he knew she harbored a feeling akin to his own, and he built hopes on that, despite her blunt refusal, the logical reasons she had set forth. He hoped again. He saw himself in the way of becoming competent—as the North, which is a keen judge, appraises competence. He had chucked some of his illusions about relative values. He conceived that in time he might approximate to Sophie Carr's idea of a man.

He wanted to see her, to talk with her, to make her define her attitude a little more clearly. Looking back with his mind a great deal less confused by emotion, he wondered why he had been so dumb, why he had not managed to convey to her that the things she foresaw as denying them happiness or even toleration for each other were not a final state in him, that his ideas and habits and pursuits were in a state of flux that might lead him anywhere. She had thrown cold water on the flame of his passion. But he remembered with a glow of happiness that she had kissed him.

He pondered deeply upon this, wondering much at the singular attraction this girl held for him, the mystery of that strange quality that drew him so. He lacked knowledge of the way and power of women. It had never touched him before. It was indeed as if he had been asleep and had wakened with a start. He was intensely curious about that, curious to know why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score, had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious manner of thinking.

He looked forward eagerly to seeing her again. He somehow felt a little more sure of himself now. He could think of a number of things he wished to ask her, of ideas he wanted to expand into speech. The hurt of her blank refusal had dulled a little. He could anticipate a keen pleasure just in seeing her.

In the morning he set about outfitting. He had come down from Porcupine with dogs. He had seen dog teams bearing the goods and chattels of innumerable natives. He perceived the essential usefulness of dogs and snowshoes and toboggans in that boundless region of snow. Canoes when the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock tight the waterways. So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a small toboggan. A four-dog team will haul a sizable load. Two would move all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession. He had learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes—enough so that he was over the poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls mal de racquette. Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.

Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was lonely still—but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the woodsman to his woods, and the boulevardier to his beloved avenues! Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on a man's soul.

Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.

When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set out.

He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.

That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.

He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green. Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some one laughed.

The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near the cabin wall.

Thompson had achieved a hair-cut at Pachugan. Now he got out his razor and painstakingly scraped away the accumulated beard. He had allowed it to grow upon Joe Lamont's assertion that "de wheesker, she's help keep hout de fros', Bagosh." Thompson doubted the efficiency of whiskers as a protection, and he wanted to appear like himself. He made that concession consciously to his vanity.

He did not waste much time. While he shaved and washed, his supper cooked. He ate, drew the parka over his head, hooked his toes into the loops of his snowshoes and strode off toward Carr's house. The timidity that made him avoid the place after his fight with Tommy Ashe and subsequent encounter with Sophie had vanished. The very eagerness of his heart bred a profound self-confidence. He crossed the meadow as hurriedly as an accepted lover.

For a few seconds there was no answer to his knock. Then a faint foot-shuffle sounded, and Carr's Indian woman opened the door. She blinked a moment in the dazzle of lamp glare on the snow until, recognizing him, her brown face lit up with a smile.

"You come back Lone Moose, eh?" she said. "Come in."

Thompson put back the hood of his parka and laid off his mitts. The room was hot by comparison with outdoors. He looked about. Carr's woman motioned him to a chair. Opposite him the youngest Carr squatted like a brown Billiken on a wolfskin. Every detail of that room was familiar. There was the heavy, homemade chair wherein Sam Carr was wont to sit and read. Close by it stood Sophie's favorite seat. A nickel-plated oil lamp gave forth a mellow light under a pale birch-bark shade. But he missed the old man with a pipe in his mouth and a book on his knee, the gray-eyed girl with the slow smile and the sunny hair.

"Mr. Carr and Sophie—are they home?" he asked at length.

The Indian woman shook her head.

"Sam and Sophie go 'way," she said placidly. "No come back Lone Moose long time—maybe no more. Sophie leave sumpin' you. I get."

She crossed the room to a shelf above the serried volumes of Sam Carr's library, lifted the cover of a tin tobacco box and took out a letter. This she gave to Thompson. Then she sat down cross-legged on the wolfskin beside her youngster, looking up at her visitor impassively, her moon face void of expression, except perhaps the mildest trace of curiosity.

Thompson fingered the envelope for a second, scarcely crediting his ears. The letter in his hands conveyed nothing. He did not recognize the writing. He was acutely conscious of a dreadful heartsinking. There was a finality about the Indian woman's statement that chilled him.

"They have gone away?" he said. "Where? When did they go?"

"Long time. Two moon," she replied matter-of-factly. "Dunno where go. Sam say he go—don't know when come back. Leave me house, plenty blanket, plenty grub. Next spring he say he send more grub. That all. Sophie go too."

Thompson stared at her. Perhaps he was not alone in facing something that numbed him.

"Your man go away. Not come back. You sorry? You feel bad?" he asked.

Her lips parted in a wide smile.

"Sam he good man," she said evenly. "Leave good place for me. I plenty warm, plenty to eat. I no care he go. Sam, pretty soon he get old. I want ketchum man, I ketchum. No feel bad. No."

She shook her head, as if the idea amused her. And Mr. Thompson, perceiving that a potential desertion which moved him to sympathy did not trouble her at all, turned his attention to the letter in his hand. He opened the envelope. There were half a dozen closely written sheets within.

Dear freckle-faced man: there is such a lot I want to say that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you'll think it queer I should write instead of telling you, but I have found it hard to talk to you, hard to say what I mean in any clear sort of way. Speech is a tricky thing when half of one's mind is dwelling on the person one is trying to talk to and only the other half alive to what one is trying to express. The last time we were together it was hard for me to talk. I knew what I was going to do, and I didn't like to tell you. I wanted to talk and when I tried I blundered. Too much feeling—a sort of inward choking. And the last few days, when I have become accustomed to the idea of going away and familiar with the details of the astonishing change which has taken place in my life, you have been gone. I dare not trust to a casual meeting between here and Pachugan. I do not even know for sure that you have gone to Pachugan, or that you will come back—of course I think you will or I should not write.

But unless you come back to-night you will not see me at Lone Moose. So I'm going to write and leave it with Cloudy Moon to give you when you do come.

Perhaps I'd better explain a little. Dad had an old bachelor brother who—it seems—knew me when I was an infant. Somehow he and dad have kept in some sort of touch. This uncle, whom I do not remember at all, grew moderately wealthy. When he died some six months ago his money was willed equally to dad and myself. It was not wholly unexpected. Dad has often reminded me of that ultimate loophole when I would grow discontented with being penned up in these dumb forests. I suppose it may sound callous to be pleased with a dead man's gift, but regardless of the ways and means provided it seems very wonderful to me that at last I am going out into the big world that I have spent so many hours dreaming of, going out to where there are pictures and music and beautiful things of all sorts—and men.

You see, I am trying to be brutally frank. I am trying to empty my mind out to you, and a bit of my heart. I like you a lot, big man. I don't mind making that confession. If you were not a preacher—if you did not see life through such narrow eyes, if you were more tolerant, if you had the kindly faculty of putting yourself in the other fellow's shoes now and then, if only your creeds and doctrines and formulas meant anything vital—I—but those cursed ifs cannot be gainsaid.

It's no use, preacher man. That day you kissed me on the creek bank and the morning I came to your cabin, I was conscious of loving you—but it was under protest—under pretty much the same protest with which you care for me. You were both times carried away so by your own passion that for the moment your mental reservations were in abeyance. And although perhaps a breath of that same passion stirred me—I can admit it now when the distance between us will not make that admission a weapon in your hands—yet there was somewhere in me a little voice whispering: "Sophie, it won't do. You can't mix oil and water."

There is a streak of my poor weak and passionate mother in me. But there is also a counterbalancing streak of my father's deliberate judgment. He has schooled me for my ultimate protection—as he has often made plain—to think, to know why I do a thing, to look, even if ever so briefly, before I leap. And I cannot help it, if when I felt tempted to say the word that would have given me the right to feel the ecstasy of your arms drawing me close and your lips pressed on mine, if in the same breath I was looking ahead and getting a disillusioning glimpse of what life together would mean for you and me, you with your deeply implanted prejudices, your hard and fast conceptions of good and evil, of right and wrong—I what I am, a creature craving pleasure, joy, luxury, if possible, happiness wherever and whenever I can assure myself I have really found it. I wouldn't make a preacher's wife at all, I know. I'd stifle in that sort of atmosphere.

Even if you were not a minister—if you were just plain man—and I wish you were—I don't know. I have to try my wings, now that I have the opportunity. How do I know what turn my vagrant impulses may take? I may be one of those queer, perverted creatures (vide Havelock Ellis. You'll find two volumes of his psychology of sex among dad's books) whose instincts incline toward many men in turn. I don't believe I am. A woman's destiny, in so far as I have been able to grasp the feminine function by what I've read and observed in a limited way, is to mate and to rear children. I don't think I'm a variation from the normal type, except in my habit of thinking deeply about these things rather than being moved by purely instinctive reactions. I could be happy ever so simply, I think. Mismated, I should be tigerishly miserable. I know myself, within certain limits—but men I do not know at all, except in theory. I have never had a chance to know men. You and Tommy Ashe have been the only two possibilities. I've liked you both. You, dear freckle-face, with the serious look and muddled ideas, far the better of the two. I don't know why. Tommy Ashe attracted me physically. I recognized that ultimately—and that alone isn't enough, although it is probably the basis of many matings. So do you likewise attract me, but with a tenderer, more protective passion. I'd like to mother you, to tease you—and mend your socks! Oh, my dear, I can't marry you, and I wish I could. I shrink from submerging my own individuality in yours, and without that sacrifice our life would be one continual clash, until we should hate each other. And still I know that I am going to be very lonely, to feel for awhile as if I'd lost something. I have felt that way these weeks that you kept to your cabin, avoiding me. I have felt it more keenly since your cabin is empty, and I don't know where you may have gone, nor if you will ever come back. I find myself wondering how you will fare in this grim country. You're such a visionary. You're so impractical. And neither nature nor society is kind to visionaries, to those who will not be adaptable. Do you understand what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am uncertain. I am doing the thing which my nature and my intelligence impel me to do, now that I have the opportunity. I am satisfying a yearning, and stifling a desire that could grow very strong if I let myself go. I can see you scowl. You will say to yourself—looking at it from your own peculiar angle—you will say: "She is not worth thinking about." And unless I have been mistaken in you you will say it very bitterly, and you will be thinking long and hard when you say it. Just as I, knowing that I am wise in going away from you, just as my reason points clearly to the fact that for me living with you would become a daily protest, a limitation of thought and act that I could not endure, still—knowing all this—I feel a strange reluctance to accepting the road I have chosen, I feel a disconcerting tug at my heart when I think of you—and that is often. I shall change, of course. So will you. Psychologically, love doesn't endure to death—unless it is nurtured by association, unless it has its foundation in community of interest and effort, a mutual affection that can survive hard knocks. Good-by, dear freckled man. You have taught me something. I hope I have done as much for you. I'm sorry it couldn't be different. But—a man must be able to stand on his own feet, eh? I leave you to puzzle out what "standing on his own feet" means. Good-by. Sophie. P.S. Dad says that if you winter at Lone Moose and care to kill a few of the long days you are welcome to help yourself to the books he left. He will tell Cloudy Moon you are to have them all if you want them, or any of them, any time.

Mr. Thompson folded up the sheets with deliberate precision, replaced them in the envelope and tucked the envelope in his pocket. He rose to go. He had a feeling of wanting to escape from that room which those penned pages and swiftly acute memories had filled with a presence it hurt him terribly to recall. His eye fell upon the rows of Carr's books, orderly upon their shelves. The postscript, fresh in his sense-impressions because it came last, and the sight of the books, roused him to a swelling fury of anger.

The heresies of Huxley and Darwin! The blasphemies of Tom Paine! The economic diatribes which began with Adam Smith and continued in multiplying volumes down to the latest emanation from professorial intellects in every civilized corner of the earth. The bulky, bitter tomes of Marx and Engels! The Lorias and Leacocks, the tribe of Gumplowicz, and Haeckel, the Lubbocks and Burtons, all that vast array of minds which calmly dissect man and his manifold activities, that draw deeply upon every branch of human knowledge to make clear the age-old evolution and revolution in both the physical and intellectual realm—and which generally leave gods and religions out of account except to analyze them as manifestations of social phenomena. Those damnable documents which he had never read, but which he had been taught to shun as the product of perverted intellects, blasts of scientific artillery, unkindly trained upon sacred concepts!

He put on his parka hood, gave an abrupt "good evening" to Cloudy Moon, and went out into the night which had deepened its shadows while he sat within.

The North lay hushed and hard under a wan moon. The teeth of the frost nipped at him. A wolf lifted a dismal howl as he crossed the meadow. And his anger died. That flare of resentment was, he recognized, but a burst of wrath against Sophie, a passionate protest at her desertion. She had loved him and she had left him, deliberately, calculatingly, left him and love, for the world, the flesh and the devil—tempted by a fortune untimely directed to her hands.

He did not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him like a dank mist.

A man must stand upon his own feet! That stabbed at him, cut across his mood like a slap in the face. Wasn't that what he was learning to do? He lifted his head with a sudden spirit of defiance, a bitter resolution. A man must stand on his own feet. Well, he would. If he could no longer pray and be comforted, he could grit his teeth and struggle and endure. He had begun to perceive that a man must do that physically—set his teeth and endure. In the less concrete matter of the spirit it was much the same.

He turned for a look at the yellow windows of Sam Carr's house. It was a hollow, empty place now, one that he never wanted to see again, like a room in which a beloved person has died and from which the body has been carried away. His eyes lingered on the dim bulk of the house, dusky black and white like a sketch in charcoal.

"Another bridge burned," he said wistfully to himself.

He faced about, crossed the dividing fringe of timber, passing near the walls of his unfinished church. A wry smile twisted his lips. That would remain, the uncompleted monument of his good intentions, the substance of an unrealizable, impractical dream.

Beyond that, as he came out into his own clearing, he saw a light in his cabin, where he had left no light. When he came to the door another toboggan lay beside his own. Strange dogs shifted furtively about at his approach. Warned by these signs he opened the door full of a curiosity as to who, in the accustomed fashion of the North, had stopped and made himself at home.

When the man sitting before the stove with his feet on the rusty front turned his head at Thompson's entrance, he saw, with a mild turn of surprise, that his visitor was Tommy Ashe.