Читать книгу North of Fifty-Three - Bertrand William Sinclair - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Through the night Hazel dozed fitfully, waking out of uneasy sleep to lie staring, wide-eyed, into the dark, every nerve in her body taut, her mind abnormally active. She tried to accept things philosophically, but her philosophy failed. There was a hurt, the pain of which she could not ease by any mental process. Grief and anger by turns mastered her, and at daybreak she rose, heavy-lidded and physically weary.

The first thing upon which her gaze alighted was the crumpled photo in its shattered frame; and, sitting on the side of her bed, she laughed at the sudden fury in which she had destroyed it; but there was no mirth in her laughter.

"'Would we not shatter it to little bits—and then,'" she murmured. "No, Mr. John Barrow, I don't believe I'd want to mold you nearer to my heart's desire. Not after yesterday evening. There's such a thing as being hurt so badly that one finally gets numb; and one always shrinks from anything that can deliver such a hurt. Well, it's another day. And there'll be lots of other days, I suppose."

She gathered up the bits of broken glass and the bent frame, and put them in a drawer, dressed herself, and went down to breakfast. She was too deeply engrossed in her own troubles to notice or care whether any subtle change was becoming manifest in the attitude of her fellow boarders. The worst, she felt sure, had already overtaken her. In reaction to the sensitive, shrinking mood of the previous day, a spirit of defiance had taken possession of her. Figuratively she declared that the world could go to the devil, and squared her shoulders with the declaration.

She had a little time to spare, and that time she devoted to making up a package of Barrow's ring and a few other trinkets which he had given her. This she addressed to his office and posted while on her way to work.

She got through the day somehow, struggling against thoughts that would persist in creeping into her mind and stirring up emotions that she was determined to hold in check. Work, she knew, was her only salvation. If she sat idle, thinking, the tears would come in spite of her, and a horrible, choky feeling in her throat. She set her teeth and thumped away at her machine, grimly vowing that Jack Barrow nor any other man should make her heart ache for long.

And so she got through the week. Saturday evening came, and she went home, dreading Sunday's idleness, with its memories. The people at Mrs. Stout's establishment, she plainly saw, were growing a trifle shy of her. She had never been on terms of intimacy with any of them during her stay there, hence their attitude troubled little after the first supersensitiveness wore off. But her own friends, girls with whom she had played in the pinafore-and-pigtail stages of her youth, young men who had paid court to her until Jack Barrow monopolized her—she did not know how they stood. She had seen none of them since Bush launched his last bolt. Barrow she had passed on the street just once, and when he lifted his hat distantly, she looked straight ahead, and ignored him. Whether she hurt him as much as she did herself by the cut direct would be hard to say.

On Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons ordinarily from two to a dozen girl friends called her up at the boarding-house, or dropped in by ones and twos to chat a while, tease her about Jack, or plan some mild frivolity. Hazel went home, wondering if they, too, would stand aloof.

When Sunday noon arrived, and the phone had failed to call her once, and not one of all her friends had dropped in, Hazel twisted her chair so that she could stare at the image of herself in the mirror.

"You're in a fair way to become a pariah, it seems," she said bitterly. "What have you done, I wonder, that you've lost your lover, and that Alice and May and Hortense and all the rest of them keep away from you? Nothing—not a thing—except that your looks attracted a man, and the man threw stones when he couldn't have his way. Oh, well, what's the difference? You've got two good hands, and you're not afraid of work."

She walked out to Granville Park after luncheon, and found a seat on a shaded bench beside the lake. People passed and repassed—couples, youngsters, old people, children. It made her lonely beyond measure. She had never been isolated among her own kind before. She could not remember a time when she had gone to Granville Park by herself. But she was learning fast to stand on her own feet.

A group of young people came sauntering along the path. Hazel looked up as they neared her, chattering to each other. Maud Steele and Bud Wells, and—why, she knew every one of the party. They were swinging an empty picnic basket, and laughing at everything and nothing. Hazel caught her breath as they came abreast, not over ten feet away. The three young men raised their hats self-consciously.

"Hello, Hazel!" the girl said.

But they passed on. It seemed to Hazel that they quickened their pace a trifle. It made her grit her teeth in resentful anger. Ten minutes later she left the park and caught a car home. Once in her room she broke down.

"Oh, I'll go mad if I stay here and this sort of thing goes on!" she cried forlornly.

A sudden thought struck her.

"Why should I stay here?" she said aloud. "Why? What's to keep me here? I can make my living anywhere."

"But, no," she asserted passionately, "I won't run away. That would be running away, and I haven't anything to be ashamed of. I will not run."

Still the idea kept recurring to her. It promised relief from the hurt of averted faces and coolness where she had a right to expect sympathy and friendship. She had never been more than two hundred miles from Granville in her life. But she knew that a vast, rich land spread south and west. She was human and thoroughly feminine; loneliness appalled her, and she had never suffered as Granville at large was making her suffer.

The legal notice of the bequest was mailed to her. She tore up the letter and threw it in the fire as if it were some poisonous thing. The idea of accepting his money stirred her to a perfect frenzy. That was piling it up.

All during the next week she worked at her machine in the office of the furniture company, keeping strictly to herself, doing her work impassively, efficiently, betraying no sign of the feelings that sometimes rose up, the despairing protest and angry rebellion against the dubious position she was in through no fault of her own. She swore she would not leave Granville, and it galled her to stay. It was a losing fight, and she knew it even if she did not admit the fact. If she could have poured the whole miserable tale into some sympathetic ear she would have felt better, and each day would have seemed less hard. But there was no such ear. Her friends kept away.

Saturday of the second week her pay envelope contained a brief notice that the firm no longer required her services. There was no explanation, only perfunctory regrets; and, truth to tell, Hazel cared little to know the real cause. Any one of a number of reasons might have been sufficient. But she realized how those who knew her would take it, what cause they would ascribe. It did not matter, though. The very worst, she reasoned, could not be so bad as what had already happened—could be no more disagreeable than the things she had endured in the past two weeks. Losing a position was a trifle. But it set her thinking again.

"It doesn't seem to be a case of flight," she reflected on her way home, "so much as a case of being frozen out, compelled to go. I can't stay here and be idle. I have to work in order to live. Well, I'm not gone yet."

She stopped at a news stand and bought the evening papers. Up in the top rack of the stand the big heads of an assorted lot of Western papers caught her eye. She bought two or three on the impulse of the moment, without any definite purpose except to look them over out of mere curiosity. With these tucked under her arm, she turned into the boarding-house gate, ran up the steps, and, upon opening the door, her ears were gladdened by the first friendly voice she had heard—it seemed to her—in ages, a voice withal that she had least expected to hear. A short, plump woman rushed out of the parlor, and precipitated herself bodily upon Hazel.

"Kitty Ryan! Where in the wide, wide world did you come from?" Hazel cried.

"From the United States and everywhere," Miss Ryan replied. "Take me up to your room, dear, where we can talk our heads off.

"And, furthermore, Hazie, I'll be pleased to have you address me as Mrs. Brooks, my dear young woman," the plump lady laughed, as she settled herself in a chair in Hazel's room.

"So you're married?" Hazel said.

"I am that," Mrs. Kitty responded emphatically, "to the best boy that ever drew breath. And so should you be, dear girl. I don't see how you've escaped so long—a good-looking girl like you. The boys were always crazy after you. There's nothing like having a good man to take care of you, dear."

"Heaven save me from them!" Hazel answered bitterly. "If you've got a good one, you're lucky. I can't see them as anything but self-centered, arrogant, treacherous brutes."

"Lord bless us—it's worse than I thought!" Kitty jumped up and threw her arms around Hazel. "There, there—don't waste a tear on them. I know all about it. I came over to see you just as soon as some of the girls—nasty little cats they are; a woman's always meaner than a man, dear—just as soon as they gave me an inkling of how things were going with you. Pshaw! The world's full of good, decent fellows—and you've got one coming."

"I hope not," Hazel protested.

"Oh, yes, you have," Mrs. Brooks smilingly assured her. "A woman without a man is only half a human being, anyway, you know—and vice versa. I know. We can cuss the men all we want to, my dear, and some of us unfortunately have a nasty experience with one now and then. But we can't get away from the fundamental laws of being."

"If you'd had my experience of the last two weeks you'd sing a different tune," Hazel vehemently declared. "I hate—I—"

And then she gave way, and indulged in the luxury of turning herself loose on Kitty's shoulder. Presently she was able to wipe her eyes and relate the whole story from the Sunday Mr. Bush stopped and spoke to her in the park down to that evening.

Kitty nodded understandingly. "But the girls have handed it to you worse than the men, Hazel," she observed sagely. "Jack Barrow was just plain crazy jealous, and a man like that can't help acting as he did. You're really fortunate, I think, because you'd not be really happy with a man like that. But the girls that you and I grew up with—they should have stood by you, knowing you as they did; yet you see they were ready to think the worst of you. They nearly always do when there's a man in the case. That's a weakness of our sex, dear. My, what a vindictive old Turk that Bush must have been! Well, you aren't working. Come and stay with me. Hubby's got a two-year contract with the World Advertising Company. We'll be located here that long at least. Come and stay with us. We'll show these little-minded folk a thing or two. Leave it to us."

"Oh, no, I couldn't think of that, Kitty!" Hazel faltered. "You know I'd love to, and it's awfully good of you, but I think I'm just about ready to go away from Granville."

"Well, come and stop with us till you do go," Kitty insisted. "We are going to take a furnished cottage for a while. Though, between you and me, dear, knowing people as I do, I can't blame you for wanting to be where their nasty tongues can't wound you."

But Hazel was obdurate. She would not inflict herself on the one friend she had left. And Kitty, after a short talk, berated her affectionately for her independence, and rose to go.

"For," said she, "I didn't get hold of this thing till Addie Horton called at the hotel this afternoon, and I didn't stop to think that it was near teatime, but came straight here. Jimmie'll think I've eloped. So ta-ta. I'll come out to-morrow about two. I have to confab with a house agent in the forenoon. By-by."

Hazel sat down and actually smiled when Kitty was gone. Somehow a grievous burden had fallen off her mind. Likewise, by some psychological quirk, the idea of leaving Granville and making her home elsewhere no longer struck her as running away under fire. She did not wish to subject Kitty Brooks to the difficulties, the embarrassment that might arise from having her as a guest; but the mere fact that Kitty stood stanchly by her made the world seem less harsh and dreary, made it seem as if she had, in a measure, justified herself. She felt that she could adventure forth among strangers in a strange country with a better heart, knowing that Kitty Brooks would put a swift quietus on any gossip that came her way.

So that Hazel went down to the dining-room light-heartedly, and when the meal was finished came back and fell to reading her papers. The first of the Western papers was a Vancouver World. In a real-estate man's half-page she found a diminutive sketch plan of the city on the shores of Burrard Inlet, Canada's principal outpost on the far Pacific.

"It's quite a big place," she murmured absently. "One would be far enough away there, goodness knows."

Then she turned to the "Help Wanted" advertisements. The thing which impressed her quickly and most vividly was the dearth of demand for clerks and stenographers, and the repeated calls for domestic help and such. Domestic service she shrank from except as a last resort. And down near the bottom of the column she happened on an inquiry for a school-teacher, female preferred, in an out-of-the-way district in the interior of the province.

"Now, that—" Hazel thought.

She had a second-class certificate tucked away among her belongings. Originally it had been her intention to teach, and she had done so one term in a backwoods school when she was eighteen. With the ending of the term she had returned to Granville, studied that winter, and got her second certificate; but at the same time she had taken a business-college course, and the following June found her clacking a typewriter at nine dollars a week. And her teacher's diploma had remained in the bottom of her trunk ever since.

"I could teach, I suppose, by rubbing up a little on one or two subjects as I went along," she reflected. "I wonder now—"

What she wondered was how much salary she could expect, and she took up the paper again, and looked carefully for other advertisements calling for teachers. In the World and in a Winnipeg paper she found one or two vacancies to fill out the fall term, and gathered that Western schools paid from fifty to sixty dollars a month for "schoolma'ams" with certificates such as she held.

"Why not?" she asked herself. "I've got two resources. If I can't get office work I can teach. I can do anything if I have to. And it's far enough away, in all conscience—all of twenty-five hundred miles."

Unaccountably, since Kitty Brooks' visit, she found herself itching to turn her back on Granville and its unpleasant associations. She did not attempt to analyze the feeling. Strange lands, and most of all the West, held alluring promise. She sat in her rocker, and could not help but dream of places where people were a little broader gauge, a little less prone to narrow, conventional judgments. Other people had done as she proposed doing—cut loose from their established environment, and made a fresh start in countries where none knew or cared whence they came or who they were. Why not she? One thing was certain: Granville, for all she had been born there, and grown to womanhood there, was now no place for her. The very people who knew her best would make her suffer most.

She spent that evening going thoroughly over the papers and writing letters to various school boards, taking a chance at one or two she found in the Manitoba paper, but centering her hopes on the country west of the Rockies. Her letters finished, she took stock of her resources—verified them, rather, for she had not so much money that she did not know almost where she stood. Her savings in the bank amounted to three hundred odd dollars, and cash in hand brought the sum to a total of three hundred and sixty-five. At any rate, she had sufficient to insure her living for quite a long time. And she went to bed feeling better than she had felt for two weeks.

Kitty Brooks came again the next afternoon, and, being a young woman of wide experience and good sense, made no further attempt to influence Hazel one way or the other.

"I hate to see you go, though," she remarked truthfully. "But you'll like the West—if it happens that you go there. You'll like it better than the East; there's a different sort of spirit among the people. I've traveled over some of it, and if Jimmie's business permitted we'd both like to live there. And—getting down to strictly practical things—a girl can make a much better living there. Wages are high. And—who knows?—you might capture a cattle king."

Hazel shrugged her shoulders, and Mrs. Kitty forbore teasing. After that they gossiped and compared notes covering the two years since they had met until it was time for Kitty to go home.

Very shortly thereafter—almost, it seemed, by return mail—Hazel got replies to her letters of inquiry. The fact that each and every one seemed bent on securing her services astonished her.

"Schoolma'ams must certainly be scarce out there," she told herself. "This is an embarrassment of riches. I'm going somewhere, but which place shall it be?"

But the reply from Cariboo Meadows, BC, the first place she had thought of, decided her. The member of the school board who replied held forth the natural beauty of the country as much as he did the advantages of the position. The thing that perhaps made the strongest appeal to Hazel was a little kodak print inclosed in the letter, showing the schoolhouse.

The building itself was primitive enough, of logs, with a pole-and-sod roof. But it was the huge background, the timbered mountains rising to snow-clad heights against a cloudless sky, that attracted her. She had never seen a greater height of land than the rolling hills of Ontario. Here was a frontier, big and new and raw, holding out to her as she stared at the print a promise—of what? She did not know. Adventure? If she desired adventure, it was purely a subconscious desire. But she had lived in a rut a long time without realizing it more than vaguely, and there was something in her nature that responded instantly when she contemplated journeying alone into a far country. She found herself hungering for change, for a measure of freedom from petty restraints, for elbow-room in the wide spaces, where one's neighbor might be ten or forty miles away. She knew nothing whatever of such a life, but she could feel a certain envy of those who led it.

She sat for a long time looking at the picture, thinking. Here was the concrete, visible presentment of something that drew her strongly. She found an atlas, and looked up Cariboo Meadows on the map. It was not to be found, and Hazel judged it to be a purely local name. But the letter told her that she would have to stage it a hundred and sixty-five miles north from Ashcroft, BC, where the writer would meet her and drive her to the Meadows. She located the stage-line terminal on the map, and ran her forefinger over the route. Mountain and lake and stream lined and dotted and criss-crossed the province from end to end of its seven-hundred-mile length. Back of where Cariboo Meadows should be three or four mining camps snuggled high in the mountains.

"What a country!" she whispered. "It's wild; really, truly wild; and everything I've ever seen has been tamed and smoothed down, and made eminently respectable and conventional long ago. That's the place. That's where I'm going, and I'm going it blind. I'm not going to tell any one—not even Kitty—until, like a bear, I've gone over the mountain to see what I can see."

Within an hour of that Miss Hazel Weir had written to accept the terms offered by the Cariboo Meadow school district, and was busily packing her trunk.