Читать книгу Mine Inheritance - Frederick Niven - Страница 9

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It was at Stornoway, in the Hebrides, that I joined the expedition, being sent thither to do so by one Captain Roderick who was recruiting for the Settlement Scheme in Glasgow, reporting myself, as I had been advised to do, to Captain Macdonell. My home, by the way, was in Paisley, but in a youthful discontent and ferment, seeking change and escape from much that irked me, to Glasgow I had gone on hearing of the Settlement, of the recruiting for it there, and to offer myself for its service.

In the bay at Stornoway three ships lay anchored, the Edward and Anne, the Prince of Wales, the Eddystone, and beyond them a fourth, the convoy for these on their intended voyage to Hudson Bay, the King George. Already, before the voyage had rightly begun, there was trouble. At Sheerness they had lost seven days, waiting for the convoy; out of the Thames they had met adverse winds and put into Yarmouth; putting out of Yarmouth they had been driven back there again by storm; against contrary winds they had arrived at Stromness; and here, at Stornoway, was more trouble, not from the weather but from the men.

All manner of impediments were being put in the way of the fleet’s departure, these, by much evidence, at the instigation of the North-West Company, that fur-trading company in rivalry to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its chiefs, with Sir Alexander Mackenzie at their head, were vigorously of opinion that a settlement of farming folk at Red River would mean eventually ruination to their lucrative trade. But at last all intimidations and frustrations were overcome and the fleet set sail.

The Governor, Captain Macdonell—tall, vigorous, with a long stride—I had seen frequently, very busy in his comings and goings between ship and shore during these annoying days, but beyond half a dozen terse words from him when I reported myself as come aboard had not had any speech with him. On the evening of the third day at sea, on the Edward and Anne, when I was watching the Eddystone, fairly close, climbing a hill of water and sliding down into the next hollow, the Prince of Wales bowing on her way and, a little way off, His Majesty’s ship with a long pennant streaming, he passed down from the poop to the main deck for a brisk walk there, and was on the point of making a rightabout turn when he noticed me standing alone by the windward bulwark.

“What are you thinking, young man?” he inquired, coming to a halt.

“I was just thinking, sir, that we must look to them—the folks on the other ship—very much as they look to us, with the foam spurting over our bow.”

“According to what I’ve been hearing we’ll look a bit worse to them,” replied Macdonell. “This vessel is what sailors call a tub. Have you ever been to sea before?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I have, many times, and sometimes I have been forced to recall the saying of one of the old voyageurs: ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’ How old are you, Baxter?”

“Twenty, sir.”

“What are you coming out for?” he inquired with the faintest smile. “To make a way in life for the sake of some girl? Or—er——” he left the rest unspoken, as though awaiting speech from me.

“Really more to get away from one, sir,” I answered abruptly.

He looked at me sharply.

“We hear of that often enough in the army,” he said. “So you are running away from responsibility.”

I was not slow to understand what he meant.

“No, no, sir, not that,” said I.

“That’s all to the good,” said he, as though relieved, and he smiled again. “You have wearied of a fickle fair one?”

A youthful grin, I recall, was all reply I had to that suggestion.

“For myself,” he went on, “I married when I was twenty-one. I believe in early marriage when there is true affection—and not only for its steadying effect. There are military commanders who do not care for ensigns or subalterns to be married. They think it makes them chary of risking their lives, but it all depends on the man—and the woman. After all, a soldier’s wife knows that her husband is a soldier. She too has to be prepared for a sudden end to happiness.”

He considered me from head to foot.

“I have been looking up the lists since getting to sea,” he said. “I notice you are down, as you told me when you reported arrival, as a writer. You are down as willing to go on with those who have to prepare the way for settlement at Red River.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I may have some work for you on the voyage, Baxter. There will be letters to copy and there are various documents that the Earl of Selkirk sent me for perusal that I should like to have copied before returning them to him. That will be something for you to do.”

“Do you want me to assist you now, sir, with the copying?” I asked.

“I’ll send for you when I want you,” he replied, suddenly very much the officer, and wheeled sharply away.

In latitude 59°, 50ⁿ, longitude 17°, 46^w (I made note of it in a small private log I kept), Captain Turner of the King George decided he had convoyed the three ships far enough upon their way. Ahead of us would be no dangers of enemy ships, only of the ice floes and the icebergs, and against these we would have to protect ourselves.

Already, by the time the King’s ship left us, I had made friends with two young men who were to play their part as definitely as I in the story of the Red River Settlement: John McLeod from Lewis, three or four years older than I, employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and John Bourke from Sligo, perhaps a year or two my senior, in service of the Settlement. Sailing on into the Atlantic we had a sense then very definitely as of sailing into a new world.

A month later, more than five weeks out of Stornoway, when coming on deck one day I stared into the north with amazement. An extraordinary light lay along the ragged edge of the world there. Between the ships and that horizon, as though elevated above the sea, adrift in air, there was a whiteness that was not of cloud. It might have been a vast cathedral of marble. In the undulations of the sea it slightly rose and fell as though buoyed up by a rising and falling of the air between the sea and it, but as I looked the mirage effect vanished. That white immensity dropped lower and was clearly of a mass of ice coming towards us on the long undulations. I watched that pinnacled ice island enormously drifting past. So engaged was I in contemplation of it that it was as though my spirit landed in a little cove upon its southern side, a sickle cove sculpt and smoothed by the waves. When they receded there was a radiance there of wet prismatic colours; when they swept up again she was just white and glistening. All that day as we sailed north-westward we met other icebergs. There would be a twinkle on the horizon and still one more would rise and grow in bulk and bear down on us, sometimes in doing so achieving again that illusion as of drifting in air.

In late afternoon there was a fluttering of signal flags from ship to ship, with directions regarding procedure in the night—if the word night could be used in these latitudes. For as we sailed north the last of the sunset had scarcely faded from the clouds that hung over the western horizon when dawn came eerily up out of the sea to east. It appeared often as though we were tacking into the very precincts of eternal light.

Among this strangeness of sea and sky and the islands of ice I at times thought of my home in Paisley, of the flagged entries, the cobbled streets, the weavers in their windows beside the looms with flying shuttles. I thought of the house I had left, of my mother with her gentle sadness: Long ago, before I could recall, my father had gone away across the Atlantic to one of the American colonies and had never again been heard of. Her husband had gone, said my mother, in the hope of being able to do better there and if his hopes materialised was to send money home for the passages of herself and the two boys—James, then five, and I, then a baby. He must have died there, or have been killed in the forests by some unfriendly natives, she told us; but as I grew older ever and again I wondered if she believed that. A chance remark here, a chance remark there, and something as it were in the quality of her settled melancholy made me surmise that this explanation might be but her public one for our father’s absence. As I grew in years I had an impression of her often as a woman not bereaved but discarded. By other chance remarks here, chance remarks there, from relatives, I had come by the opinion that my father had been somewhat of a scapegrace in his youth. There seemed more of determination not to tell me much of him when I made natural inquiries, than of inability to do so. As much by these refusals to speak as by those chance remarks, that suspicion had been increased for me. All that I knew for certain in the matter was that my father had gone to South Carolina, sent word of his safe arrival, and never had been heard of since. Mother made various attempts to trace him but all had failed.

I tried to put myself in her place. Not to know whether the father of her children was alive or dead: there must be a constant agony. To wonder if he was alive and had forsaken his family: there must be deep pain. Often when I came in and found her alone, I surprised sign of recent tears in her eyes.

A poor son I had been to her, I considered. There was no doubt that my brother’s criticisms of me were deserved. Pondering on home during the voyage I admitted the truth of much censorious that James had to say regarding me. It was true that so far I had done little—next to nothing—to aid in my mother’s support. James had progressed well, had his own cartage business between Glasgow and Paisley, was supporting mother. Nevertheless, I had wished that my brother would not rate me for my failure to obtain regular lucrative work. The charge was sound enough—I could not gainsay it—and the three years of seniority seemed to give James the right to censure; but in course of time, merely to avoid lectures, I became secretive regarding my comings and goings, and James, aware of that, was flattered thereby. My very avoidances of him he considered as tribute. I admired my brother’s uprightness and at the same time was irked by his manner of being master over me. For myself, I had no desire to be master over anybody. When homilies were being delivered, I noticed, mother seemed to be on the side of her elder son.

When I was not yet nineteen it was discovered that—in James’s word—I was “mooning” over young Janet Lennox, and more joy was tarnished for me. Let me fall short in any way and I would have it flung at me: “What would Janet think if she knew you for what you are?” I felt that there was a lack of grace in stabbing me with the question. But what a young gomeril I must have been! The worth of my devotion may be questioned by the fact that the frequent use of Janet’s name made me wish her blue eyes and her dimples had less power over me. And I began to realise that, like James, she had pleasure in finding evidences of her power. In those days I could only understand in others what I experienced in myself, and to lord it over any was not in me. Even so I could have enough, too much, of what I did not understand. Janet’s way was to raise my spirits and to dash them. I must never think I had her affection; when I seemed too sure of her she turned chill, she was My Lady Disdain. Once or twice the disdain had been too much for me and I believed myself discarded by her beyond any hope of pleading. Then she knew that she had gone too far and came fluttering back, chirping before me; and she was the one, by her complaints, who had been hurt by chilly treatment, and oh, how could I treat her so?

Thus it was that the announcements of Captain Roderick, appointed agent in Glasgow for the Lord Selkirk Settlement Scheme, had an appeal to me in a low fever! I would be gone from lectures. I would get away from these blue eyes and these dimples that made me too frequently demean myself against my will. Well, that was all over now, even to the last moment’s regret when, because of tears in my mother’s eyes, I was almost swamped by vacillation, had almost decided to remain at home. It was all over. And I told myself I had acted wisely.

Every day, as the ships voyaged on, I was employed upon the copying of letters and accounts for Captain Macdonell. There was plenty of work for me to do.