Читать книгу When the War Ends – Book Set - Bertrand William Sinclair - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Mike Breyette took a last look over his shoulder as the current and the thrust of two paddles carried the canoe around the first bend. Thompson stood on the bank, watching them go.

"Bagosh, dat man hees gon' have dam toff time, Ah theenk," Breyette voiced his conviction. "Feller lak heem got no beesness for be here 'tall."

"He didna have tae come here," MacDonald answered carelessly. "An' he disna have tae stay."

"Oh, sure, Ah know dat, me," Mike agreed. "All same hees feel bad."

Which was a correct, if brief, estimate of Mr. Thompson's emotions as he stood on the bank watching the gray canoe slip silently out of his ken. That gave him a keener pang, a more complete sense of loss, than he had ever suffered at parting with any one or anything. It was to him like taking a last look before a leap in the dark. Thrown entirely upon his own resources he felt wholly inadequate, found his breast filled with incomprehensible misgivings. The work he had come there to do seemed to have lost much of its force as a motive, as an inspiration. He felt himself—so far as his mission to Lone Moose was concerned—in the anomalous position of one compelled to make bricks without straw.

He was, in a word, suffering an acute attack of loneliness.

That was why the empty space of the clearing affected him with a physical shrinking, why the neatly arranged interior of his cabin seemed hollow, abandoned, terribly dispiriting. He longed for the sound of a human voice, found himself listening for such a sound. The stillness was not like the stillness of a park, nor an empty street, nor any of the stillnesses he had ever experienced. It was not a kindly, restful stillness—not to him. It was the hollow hush of huge spaces emptied of all life. Life was at his elbow almost but he could not make himself aware of that. The forested wilderness affected him much as a small child is affected by the dark. He was not afraid of this depressing sense of emptiness, but it troubled him.

Before nine o'clock in the forenoon had rolled around he set off with the express purpose of making himself acquainted with Sam Carr. Carr was a white man, a scholar, MacLeod had said. Passing over the other things MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude. Thompson had run across that phrase in books—primeval solitude. He was just beginning to understand what it meant.

He set out upon his quest of Sam Carr with a good deal of unfounded hope. In his own world, beginning with the churchly leanings of the spinster aunts, through the successive steps of education and his ultimate training for the ministry as a profession, the theological note had been the note in which he reasoned and thought and felt. His environment had grounded him in the belief that all the world vibrated in unison with the theological harmonies. He had never had any doubts or equivocations. Faith was everything, and he had abundance of faith. As a matter of fact, until he encountered MacLeod, the factor of Fort Pachugan, he had never crossed swords with a man open and sincere in disbelief based on rational grounds. He had found those who evaded and some who were indifferent, many who compromised, never before a sweeping denial. He could not picture an atheist as other than a perverted monster, a moral degenerate, the personification of all evil. This was his conception of such as denied his God. Blasphemers. Foredoomed to hell. Yet he had found MacLeod hospitable, ready with kindly advice, occupying a position of trust in the service of a great company. Was it after all possible that the essence of Christianity might not be the exclusive possession of Christians?

Insensibly he had to modify certain sweeping convictions. He was not conscious of this inner compulsion when he concluded to try and meet Sam Carr without making theology an issue. Somehow this man Carr began to loom in the background of his thought as a commanding figure. At least, Thompson said to himself as he passed through the fringe of timber, Sam Carr by all accounts was a person to whom an educated man could speak in words of more than two syllables without meeting the blank stare of incomprehension.

The Lachlans were worthy people enough, but—He shook his head despondently. As for the Crees—well, he had been at Lone Moose less than forty-eight hours and he was wondering if the Board of Home Missions always shot as blindly at a distant mark. It would take him a year to learn the first smatterings of their tongue. A year! He had understood that the Lone Moose Crees were partly under civilized influences. Certainly he had believed that his predecessors in the field had laid some sort of foundation for the work he was to carry on. It was considered a matter of course that the mission quarters were livable, that some sort of meeting place had been provided.

There was a monetary basis for that belief. Some two thousand dollars had been expended, or perhaps the better word would be appropriated, for that purpose. Mr. Thompson could not quite understand what had become of this sum. There was nothing but a rat-ridden shack on a half-cleared acre in the edge of the forest. There had never been anything else. Nothing had been accomplished. Thompson shook his head again. His first report would be a shock to the Board of Home Missions.

He bore straight for Sam Carr's house. While still some distance away he made out two men seated on the porch. As he drew nearer a couple of nondescript dogs rushed noisily to meet him. Thompson's general unfamiliarity with the outdoor world extended to dogs. But he had heard sometime, somewhere, that it was well to put on a bold front with barking curs. He acted upon this theory, and the dogs kept their teeth out of his person, though their clamor rose unabated until one of the men harshly commanded them to be quiet. Thompson came up to the steps. The two men nodded. Their eyes rested upon him in frank curiosity.

"My name is Thompson." His diffidence, verging upon forthright embarrassment, precipitated him into abruptness. He was addressing the older man, a spare-built man with a trim gray beard and a disconcerting direct gaze. "I am a newcomer to this place. The factor of Fort Pachugan spoke of a Mr. Carr here. Have I—er—the—ah—pleasure of addressing that gentleman?"

Carr's gray eyes twinkled, the myriad of fine creases radiating from their outer corners deepened.

"MacLeod mentioned me, eh? Did he intimate that meeting me might prove a doubtful pleasure for a gentleman of your calling?"

That momentarily served to heighten Mr. Thompson's embarrassment—like a flank attack while he was in the act of waving a flag of truce. But he perceived that there was no malice in the words, only a flash of ironic humor. Carr chuckled dryly.

"Meet Mr. Tommy Ashe, Mr. Thompson," he said. "Mr. Ashe is, like yourself, a newcomer to Lone Moose. You may be able to exchange mutual curses on the country. People usually do at first."

"I've been hereabouts six months," Ashe smiled as he rose to shake hands. (Carr's friendliness seemed a trifle negative, reserved; he had not offered his hand.)

"That means newly come, as time is reckoned here," Carr remarked. "It takes at least a generation to make one permanent. Have a seat, Mr. Thompson. What do you think, so far, of the country you have selected for the scene of your operations?"

The slightly ironic inflection was not lost upon Thompson. It nettled him a little, but it was too intangible to be resented, and in any case he had no ready defence against that sort of thing. He took a third chair between the two of them and occupied himself a moment exterminating a few mosquitoes which had followed him from the grassy floor of the meadow and now slyly sought to find painful lodgment upon his face and neck.

"To tell the truth," he said at last, "everything is so different from my expectations that I find myself a bit uncertain. One finds—well—certain drawbacks."

"Material or spiritual?" Carr inquired gravely.

The Reverend Thompson considered.

"Both," he answered briefly.

This was the most candid admission he had ever permitted himself. Carr laughed quietly.

"Well," said he, "we are a primitive folk in a primitive region. But I daresay you hope to accomplish a vast change for the better in us, if not in the country?"

Again there was that suggestion of mockery, veiled, scarcely perceptible, a matter of inflection. Mr. Thompson found himself uttering an entirely unpremeditated reply.

"Which I daresay you doubt, Mr. Carr. You seem to be fully aware of my mission here, and rather dubious as to its merit."

Carr smiled.

"News travels fast in a country where even a passing stranger is a notable event," he remarked. "Naturally one draws certain conclusions when one hears that a minister has arrived in one's vicinity. As to my doubts—first and last I've seen three different men sent here by your Board of Home Missions. They have made no more of an impression than a pebble chucked into the lake. Your Board of Missions must be a visionary lot. They should come here in a body. This country would destroy some of their cherished illusions."

"A desire to serve is not an illusion," Thompson said defensively.

"One would have to define service before one could dispute that," Carr returned casually. "What I mean is that the people who send you here have not the slightest conception of what they send you to. When you get here you find yourself rather at sea. Isn't it so?"

"In a sense, yes," Thompson reluctantly admitted.

"Oh, well," Carr said, with a gesture of dismissing the subject, "that is your private business in any case. We won't get on at all if we begin by discussing theology, and dissecting the theological motive and activities. Do you hunt or fish at all, Mr. Thompson?"

Mr. Thompson did not, and expressed no hankering for such pursuits. There came a lapse in the talk. Carr got out his pipe and began stuffing the bowl of it with tobacco. Tommy Ashe sat gazing impassively over the meadow, slapping at an occasional mosquito.

"Tommy might give you a few pointers on game," Carr remarked at last. "He has the sporting instinct. It hasn't become a commonplace routine with him yet, a matter of getting meat, as it has to the rest of us up here."

Ashe made his first vocal contribution.

"If you're going to be about here for awhile," said he pleasantly, "you'll find it interesting to dodge about after things in the woods with a gun. Keeps you fit, for one thing. Lots of company in a dog and a gun. Is it a permanent undertaking, this missionary work of yours, Mr. Thompson?"

"We hope to make it so," Mr. Thompson responded.

"I should say you've taken on the deuce of a job," Tommy commented frankly.

Thompson had no inclination to dispute that. He had periods of thinking so himself.

The conversation languished again.

Without ever having been aware of it Thompson's circle of friends and acquaintances had been people of wordy inclination. Their thoughts dripped unceasingly from their tongue's end like water from a leaky faucet. He had never come in contact with a type of men who keep silent unless they have something to say, who think more than they speak. The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been much different. The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was new to him. New and embarrassing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure. Especially Sam Carr.

He wanted to go on talking. He protested against their intercourse congealing in that fashion. But he could find no opening. His conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost. Then they were silent again.

Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of intelligent companionship. He was like a man sentenced to solitary confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such, a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succumbing to a despair of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness, a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of puzzlement.

A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.

Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a passionate sense of incompleteness.

He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.

All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in bead-ornamented moccasins. A woman's eyes, her hair, her hands, her bearing—these things had never obtruded upon his notice before. Yet he saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it shimmer like ripe wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and sweetly curved. But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations. He found himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame. The world, the flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.

He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty wind through an open door. He had grown to manhood with nothing but a cold, passionless tolerance in his attitude toward women. Technically he was aware of sex, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually he could grasp nothing of the sort. A very small child is incapable of associating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him. Even then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect. Neither could Thompson. No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.

But this—this subtle, mysterious emanation from a smiling girl at his elbow singed him like a flame. If he had been asleep he was now in a moment breathlessly, confusedly awake.

The commotion was all inward, mental. Outwardly he kept his composure, and the only sign of that turmoil was a tinge of color that rose in his face. And as if there was some mysterious mode of communication established between them a faint blush deepened the delicate tint of Sophie Carr's cheeks. Thompson rose. So did Tommy Ashe with some haste when he perceived her there.

"No, no," she protested. "Keep your chairs, please."

"Mr. Thompson," Carr's keen old eyes flickered between the two men and the girl. "My daughter. Mr. Thompson is the latest leader of the forlorn hope at Lone Moose, Sophie."

Mr. Thompson murmured some conventional phrase. He was mightily disturbed without knowing why he was so disturbed, and rather fearful of showing this incomprehensible state. The girl's manner put him a little at his ease. She gave him her hand, soft warm fingers that he had a mad impulse to press. He wondered why he felt like that. He wondered why even the tones of her voice gave him a thrill of pleasure.

"So you are the newest missionary to Lone Moose?" she said. "I wish you luck."

Although her voice was full, throaty like a meadow lark's, her tone carried the same sardonic inflection he had noticed in her father's comment on his mission. It pained Thompson. He had no available weapon against that sort of attack. But the girl did not pursue the matter. She said to her father:

"Crooked Tree's oldest son is in the kitchen and wants to speak to you, Dad."

Carr rose. So did Thompson. He wanted to get away, to think, to fortify himself somehow against this siren call in his blood. He was sadly perplexed. Measured by his own standards, even to harbor such thoughts as welled up in his mind was a sinful weakness of the flesh. He was in as much anxiety to get away from Carr's as he had been to find a welcome there.

"I think I shall be moving along," he said to Carr. "I'll say good-day, sir."

Carr thrust out a brown sinewy hand with the first trace of heartiness he had shown.

"Come again when you feel like it," he invited. "When you have time and inclination we'll match our theories of the human problem, maybe. Of course we'll disagree. But my bark is worse than my bite, no matter what you've heard."

He strode off. Sophie bowed to Thompson, nodded to Tommy Ashe, and followed her father. Ashe got up, stretched his sturdy young arms above his fair, curly head. He was perhaps a year or two older than Thompson, a little thicker through the chest, and not quite so tall. One imagined rightly that he was very strong, that he could be swift and purposeful in his movements, despite an apparent deliberation. His face was boyishly expressive. He had a way of smiling at trifles. And one did not have to puzzle over his nationality. He was English. His accent and certain intonations established that.

He picked up a gun now from where it stood against the wall, whistled shrilly, and a brown dog appeared hastily from somewhere in the grass, wagging his tail in anticipation.

"Mind if I poke along with you," he said to Thompson. "There's a slough over beyond your diggin's where I go now and then to pick up a duck or two."

They fell into step across the meadow.

"Our host," Thompson observed, "is not quite the type one expects to find here—permanently. I understand he has been here a long time."

"Fifteen years," Tommy supplied cheerfully. "Deuce of a time to be buried alive, eh? Carr hasn't got rusty, though. No. Mind like a steel trap, that man. Curious sort of individual. You ought to see the books he's got. Amazing. Science, philosophy, the poets—all sorts. Don't try arguing theology with him unless you're quite advanced. Of course, I know the church is adapting itself to modern thought, in a way. But he'll tie you in a bowknot if you hold to the old theological doctrines. Fact. Carr's scholarly sort, but awfully radical. Awfully."

"It's queer," said Thompson, "why a man like that should bury himself here so long. Is it a fact that he is married to a native woman? His daughter now—one wouldn't imagine her—"

"No fear," Tommy Ashe interrupted. "Carr's got an Indian woman, right enough. They've got three mixed-blood youngsters. But his daughter—"

He gave Thompson a quick sidelong glance.

"Sophie's pure blood," said he. "She's a thorough-bred."

He said it almost challengingly.