Читать книгу Our Daily Bread - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 7

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It was between eight and nine o'clock at night, two days later.

In the inky darkness of the stable Isabel was throwing the saddle on the old white horse which her brother John had given her. She wore a divided skirt of dark homespun, a shirt-waist, and a red neckerchief. Her head was covered with a small, battered man's hat of soft brown felt.

Her movements were quick, decisive, energetic like those of a man. Her voice as she spoke to the horse, though subdued, sounded impatient, urgent, almost harsh. Now and then she stepped into the open door and listened into the summer night.

At last she swung herself into the saddle of the curveting horse and grasped its flanks with her knees. The horse, an ancient racer, turned prancing and shot into the star-lit dark. Obeying the bridle, it circled the barn; and when it neared the line-fence, it doubled its pace and took the obstacle like a hurdle; Isabel kept her seat with the skilled ease of the practised horsewoman.

She turned east, climbing the steep, stony hill-side.

On its crest a horseman was waiting, the figure of a centaur: tall, slender, wiry, sitting an only half tamed, bucking broncho. As her eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, she could recognise every detail of his appearance: the coal-black, flowing hair which, parted in the centre, issued to both sides from under the rim of the hat which was negligently pushed back and knocked into many angles; the red neckerchief, tied over the left shoulder, so that its corner flowed out over the right sleeve of his white, collarless shirt; the wiry forearm which held the reins of the unruly mount with a gesture of studied nonchalance; and even the melancholy eyes, coal-black like his hair, which gleamed softly to both sides of a straight nose resembling that of the Praxitelean Hermes. As his horse, excited by Isabel's approach, reared and turned with a throw of its head, the butt of an ancient pistol, stuck into the belt of his trousers, caught and reflected the light of the stars overhead.

Isabel rode straight up to him and, shooting past, touched the rump of his mount with her riding whip.

A hoarse cry sprang from the mouth of the handsome horseman. His heels pinched the broncho's flanks.

Isabel's horse launched itself forward in a stretched gallop; and the two raced down into the hollow between the stark, bare hills, circling John Elliot's crop on the flat. Isabel laughed to herself.

But the horseman was catching up, his broncho being young and better used to the rough going over the prairie. Meanwhile he spoke.

"Doggone it, Is! You took me by surprise. Wait'll I catch you!"

Arrived at the very bottom of the draw, Isabel slowed down, humping her shoulders.

The horseman reached her and, swerving close, jerked her with a powerful lift of his arms clear of the saddle and swept her to his breast.

The horse, now without its rider, instantly fell to cropping the long grass of the slough.

"I've got you, you kitten!" the horseman whispered. "You've led me a bloody chase. You'll make up for it now."

Isabel gasped breathlessly. "Don't, Ken, don't! Be careful!" For he smothered her with kisses.

Kenneth Harvey was the son of the blacksmith in town; of Ontario-Scotch descent, a recent settler on a claim two miles south. He lived in a sod-shack, a small hut built of squares of soil lifted from the prairie. Since, a few years ago, he had arrived from the east, with his parents, he had aimed at reviving in words and acts what he considered to be the true life of the old wild west. His brain being filled with the picturesque descriptions of cowboy life, heard around the fire in lumber camps, he tried to imitate that curious creation of a romantic fancy. With boastful and calculated recklessness he rode unbroken horses, challenged to bucking contests, and declared that he was a "regular son-of-a-gun."

Endowed with a strange, almost Byronic beauty, he had broken many hearts; but when, coming west, he had found a number of unmarried girls in the Elliot household and tried to cast his spells, he had been received with a cool, mocking toleration. The Elliots considered themselves as being of a different class. But rebuffs merely sharpened his appetite. Henrietta, "a fine figure of a woman," attracted him first; but the cold disdain with which she treated his advances discouraged him. Next he had tried to get up a flirtation with Margaret who, however, parried the bold thrusts of his speech with the shy, careful modesty of unawakened maidenhood. When Cathleen came home, she froze him into a distant, respectful silence. Strange to say, he had at first paid least attention to Isabel who was no homelier than Henrietta and lacked her bold, domineering ways. Nor did he know that Isabel was his champion in the house where everybody else spoke of him with condescension. "A blacksmith," she said, "is every bit as good as a farmer."

John Elliot senior, who happened to hear this remark, turned a cold look on her. "A blacksmith," he said, "may be a gentleman; a farmer is not necessarily one."

Kenneth Harvey's face, with its soft, melancholy, yet fiery eyes, and with the exaggerated pallour of its smooth skin seemed to speak of hidden sorrows, of romantic remorse, perhaps of guilt to be atoned. The love of a virgin would redeem him. Her girl's imagination was at work, building about him a vast structure of romance, making him the hero of the true west. Like his, her mind was tinged by the early literature of the plains. He had never been invited into the house; she had never seen him at table, never heard him in conversation with the men of their kind. Instead, on his way to or from town, he had often stopped in the road and exchanged a few words with whoever happened to be in the yard. He had always been on horseback where he showed to advantage. And at last he had been struck by the ardent look in Isabel's light-blue eyes.

She had taken to riding in the direction of his homestead, displaying her horsemanship; and one night he had watched for her and joined her as by chance. Ostensibly he was chasing his cattle; for he professed to be a "rancher," not a farmer. They had dismounted and sat down by the road-side, allowing their mounts to graze on the prairie. He had explained that his father held the homestead next his own; there he was building a neat little cottage in which he, Kenneth, was going to live.

A silence had fallen. Then he had spoken boldly. "Doggone it! How about being my girl?"

He had reached for her waist; she had sunk into his arms.

Something of the kind was suspected at home. The girls, and even John, dropped teasing remarks, protesting. "You are lowering yourself!--Ken's a fake!--You went south? How's the cowboy today?--Seen anything of Bucking-Horse Farm?" Isabel had observed a sullen silence. A passion had sprung up to defy the world.

One day, two weeks ago, Kenneth Harvey--who was not a "bad boy" at heart and who, from many little signs, had arrived at the conclusion that, with this girl, there was "nothing doing" except in the regular way--had spoken decisive words.

"You know, Is, I am doggone poor. I've filed on the homestead; and I've twelve head of cattle. But I need a woman on the place. My old man will help. We might make it a go if we milked the bloody cows and shipped cream."

"Well, Kenneth," she had replied, rather thrilled than repelled by his coarseness of speech: it was so masculine, "all the settlers are poor. We are young. Life is long."

"It's a go, then, Is? We hook up in the fall?"

"I suppose so," Isabel had whispered, lowering her eyes.

Kenneth and Isabel--she having remounted--rounded her father's field and turned to the north-south road. Beyond the wheat, the hollow between the hills sank away to a slough, dry in rainless summers. Yet grass and semi-aquatic plants grew there so high that even in daytime the riders would have been half concealed. As, through this slough, they approached the trail, they saw, outlined against the starry sky, two figures coming down the hill-side from the south. In an impulse to hide Isabel dismounted again; and Kenneth did likewise.

"It's Cathleen with Mr. Ormond," Isabel whispered, crouching down.

"Who is that guy?"

"A professor in the university. Don't talk."

The two figures descended into the draw; the man stopped. "What is that?" he asked, pointing his cane.

"Horses." For the two mounts had at once begun to graze again. They were raising their heads and cocking their ears.

Cathleen and her escort reached the corner of the field. A stone pile, still warm from the sun of the day, offered the usual seats to strollers of the prairie. "Shall we sit for a moment?" Mr. Ormond's voice, calm, deliberate, well modulated, sounded clear and distinct through the fragrant dark.

"If you wish." Cathleen's outline, white, soft, and slender, looked lovely in the dim light from the stars.

"Miss Elliot . . ." The man fingered his cane. "You can imagine that I did not come to this part of the country without a purpose."

Cathleen sat very still. Her heart pounded. Take me, her bowed head seemed to say.

Mr. Ormond looked up. "You know I left Arkwright because I was called to the university. I have just received word that, in addition, I am to serve on an important government commission."

"I must congratulate you," Cathleen said with a voice which sounded artificially indifferent.

"I wrote at once. Do you remember the evening when I saw you at Arkwright? You said I should be welcome if I came and dropped in at your parents'."

"I remember." She held her breath.

"I wondered, then, whether you could ever think of me in a different way than as your friend?"

There was a silence. "I don't know how I am to understand this."

"Miss Elliot, I ask you to be my wife."

"I don't think," the quick answer came, "I am qualified for that position."

A low, masterful laugh greeted the reply. "Might I ask why that invitation was given?"

Cathleen rose. It was easy to divine the burning blush in her cheeks. Half averted, she spoke, too quickly for concealment of her emotion. "Because, since I had known you, a new ideal of manhood had come to me."

He, too, rose. "Cathleen . . ."

But Cathleen was flitting along the road; he followed.

"Doggone it!" Kenneth Harvey whispered where he and Isabel were hidden in the weeds. "That was slick. I'll tell the world!"

Summer madness was in the air that night.

In the great hollow between the hills warm shadows had gathered as the sun went down in a cloudless sky. The rising dark had obliterated all signs of the toil of the day; nothing remained of it except a fine smell of dust which filled the valley.

In the shelter of the rows of lilac bushes, carefully tended during the past decades, John Elliot and his wife were sitting on two chairs. Without words they conveyed to each other their sense of passing events. The father felt jealous of his daughters: he wanted to guide them, not let them choose for themselves. But instinct told him that, if he interfered, nothing would come of it but dissatisfaction and possibly tragedy.

The children were going their own way; they could not be stopped. He felt as if he had merely encountered them by the way-side whence they dispersed in all directions. That third thing which had grown in them, the mysterious addition to the parent natures of which they were compounded, their own individuality, proved more potent every day. Mary and Gladys had gone; Cathleen and Isabel were going. He knew it and felt his impotence to prevent it. "If we don't allow them to pick their own company," his wife had said one day, years ago, "how can they form any attachment?" Without probing things, he had since deferred to his wife.

She, too, felt strangely helpless; as if she could only look on and let matters take their predestined course. The example of two daughters, Gladys and Mary, was like a warning.

In addition to what occupied their thoughts, both felt that they sat in the shadow, not of the hills only, but of coming things, of a great separation.

Nothing needed to be said; things had their own voice proclaiming unalterable decisions. Mrs. Elliot was failing. A terrible thing was at work in her; and the consciousness of it, though imperfectly realised, stood between man and wife like a spectre.

Articulate thoughts were in town, with Mary; or still farther north, on a cheerless homestead where Gladys and Frank were drifting apart; or with the couple on horseback who had not been as unobserved as they imagined; or with the other two who, in the light of the setting sun, had gone south through the haze of dust; or with John over there, in his shack where a light was moving from window to window, for of late he had fallen into the habit of going to town after dark; or lastly, with Margaret at her first school; or with Henrietta, the lonely girl in the house. Whenever Mrs. Elliot thought of her, she felt overwhelmed with a conviction which had grown through many years that Henrietta was the tragic one of the girls, doomed to live through dark things in her life.

And Henrietta, too, was aware of what was going on. When Isabel had saddled her horse at the stable, Henrietta had stood at the pantry window behind the hall and listened. When Mr. Ormond and Cathleen had taken the south road, like a pair of casual acquaintances, she had stood upstairs and spied upon them as upon a guilty couple. And when, an hour later, John junior entered, in his blue suit, with lemon-coloured gloves on his small, shapely hands, but without the leering smile on his face, she confronted him angrily, asking, "Where are you going in that monkey outfit?"

"To town," he answered mildly, with mock reproach for the violence of her speech. "You know me, sweetheart. The night's astir with love. Where all the world does love, can John alone sit hating?"

"Chase yourself!" Henrietta cried.

"I will, I will, my dear!" And, having found whatever he had come for, he left through the kitchen door.

A few minutes later the creaking of wheels betrayed that he was driving north between the hills.

Henrietta went up into her little room--not hers, but Margaret's! Selfishness had debarred her from her own. She did not light a lamp. She sat on the edge of her bed, in the dark, and brooded.

She had had a letter from Pete Harrington. For the dozenth time Pete had asked her to be his wife. He was living in Manitoba again, where he had bought land in the hills of the Dusky Mountains. There he was farming, with forty-five acres broken. A living, he said, was assured. In time it would be more than a living. He was lonely and longed for a home of his own. Would she reconsider her former decision?

Henrietta's heart had beaten faster. She had hesitated. But the memory had come back to her of how she had invariably treated this man who looked and dressed like a labourer. Was Cathleen to marry this Mr. Ormond from the city while she, Henrietta, followed in Gladys' footsteps? She had sat down and written her answer, declining.

Of all this she thought as she sat in the dark. Bitterness filled her soul. She clasped her hands to her breasts and gripped them. Was not her body that of a woman? Was not her soul that of a girl?

True, in married life things did not come out as one wished and hoped for. Mary's example was a deterrent. And Gladys, poor Gladys with her desire for comfort and luxury! Living in a two-roomed shack, with a husband who had the soul of a trader and the body of a clerk and yet was condemned to handle horses which he feared and implements which he hated. She had two children and was committed. Life was leading her along a path which she had not chosen except for the fact that she had once on a time chosen a man, Frank Bramley, the druggist!

No, she, Henrietta, wanted to see what she was going into before she accepted.

Yet, during this night of summer madness, with the soft, dust-smelling air breathing into the room, she had only one desire: to be taken into the arms of some one, to be held tightly, to feel a caressing hand on her head, about her shoulders, along her spine. Life? What else had it to offer? She was getting old.

In the sudden realisation that she was giving in to things which might lead her she knew not where, she rose and shuddered. "The flesh is weak," she said; felt her way to the curtain which closed the door-frame--there were no doors upstairs--and into the hall and down the stairway. Arrived at the foot, she turned to the left, into the large dining room, lighted a lamp, searched on a shelf for a deck of cards, and sat down at the table to play a game of solitaire.

In town, John junior sat in a stall of the Rex Cafe. Opposite him sat a girl.

Small and delicate, she had the fast-fading prettiness of anaemic youth, a prim mouth, and movements of studied refinement. When she raised the spoon, sipping her ice, she bent the little finger of her manicured hand away from the others. And John who watched her with a look of exaggerated infatuation noted critically that that little finger was not quite straight.

"Sure," he said as if he were acting a comedy. "I am the gentleman of the family. It's a poor family that can't afford one gentleman. I have them all working for me, brothers and sisters."

"Father and mother, too?" she asked with an artificial laugh.

"Oh, father!" And with sudden soberness he added, "No, not mother. You must know, Miss Lillian, that I consider my mother the best woman that ever lived. That is one reason why I should like you to meet her. How about it? Will you come on Sunday? I'll fetch you, sure. I'll fetch you in style. That's what I got my democrat for. I'll come in gala. With my team of bronchos."

"I might," she smiled.

"Jakaloo!" he exclaimed, acting the clown. "You know, there are farmers and farmers. My father's one kind, I am the other. Great country this. Tickle the soil with a plow; and it smiles with a crop. If ever I marry . . ." And he laughed at her with a broad laugh, humping his back, drawing his head between his shoulders, and looking up at her with his enormous, light-blue goggle eyes, letting his lower lip hang, thus making capital out of his ugliness.

She, half overcome with this game of mocking admiration, picked the paper napkin up and hit him a playful blow over his half bald head with the yellow wreath of hair. "You are a monkey," she said, "Mr. . . ."

"John," he completed.

"Mr. John, then," she said primly, straightening so as to counteract the effect of her familiarity.

"What I was going to say," he drawled without changing his ludicrous attitude. "If ever I marry, Miss Lillian--you can take that whichever way you please . . . If ever I marry Miss Lillian,"--this time he spoke the clause without the comma--"my wife is not going to work unless she wants to: she can sit in state. Look at me!" He extended his long, strong arms. "Six years ago I homesteaded with seventeen cents in my pocket; and they were borrowed. I am worth five, six thousand dollars at the lowest valuation, not counting the land which I would not sell for ten thousand cash. There isn't much of a crop this year; we had no rain. But there is credit. I can walk into that there bank in the city and borrow. They'll be tickled to loan me whatever I need."

"I believe you, Sir John," the girl said with a smile and a sidelong glance.

Miss Lillian Flaws was the stenographer in the real-estate office of Mr. Howden; she was twenty-four years old and beginning to realise that she would soon be an old maid unless she was willing to accept what appeared to be the solid comforts of farm-life in lieu of the dreamt-of luxuries of the city. She was the daughter of a poor Ontario parson blessed with six children; and she had, from an early age, been condemned to make her own living. Already she felt that, in order to hold her own by the side of younger girls, she must have recourse to a discreet use of lip-stick and powder; and, though she was not, on principle, averse to such "aids to beauty," she viewed their necessity with alarm.

John Elliot junior had met her at a school picnic. In the bevy of rustic belles she had struck him by her air of exotic refinement. He had singled her out with his attentions; and she, awed by the name of Elliot, much respected in her employer's office, had mildly responded and played an adroit and careful game. People who watched them had said--the male part, "Lucky if he gets her!"--the female part, "It seems a disgrace, the way she is setting her cap for him."

Out of a flirtation begun in wantonness of spirit a situation had arisen where John's vanity was involved and where, had it been necessary, she might have claimed that he had compromised her and owed reparation.

John was half conscious of this mixture of motives; and he anticipated resistance at home. But that, unless the resistance came from his mother, was rather calculated to egg him on in his course. The affair carried him away just as, when a boy, he had been carried away by his devilries.

At moments, while at work in the field, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of the seriousness of the matter. He would stop whatever work he was engaged in and cast a wistful glance into the tenebrities of the future. But he was young. The blood coursed hotly through his veins. He had never known any girl with any degree of intimacy; and Lillian was pretty. She had thick tresses of black hair, neatly arranged on her small and delicate head. Her skin had the fine, fragrant smoothness of thin-blooded youth. And once, when she had bent forward, he had, with a thrill, caught sight of budding breasts beneath the filmy edge of her fine waist: she dressed with skill.

At thought of that, he yielded to incomprehensible stirrings and gave vent to them in a burst of coarseness.

"To hell with it all!" he yelled as he stood behind his horses, wiping the sweat from his brow and kicking the dust from a clod. "I am going to marry the chit!"

It was near midnight when he took leave from her in front of her boarding place. Holding the lines of his horses with his left, he reached out with his right for hers and asked once more, "You promise? Sunday? I'll be here at half past two."

"Yes," she said, smiling encouragingly up at him, her face bathed by the light of a street lamp.

Her hand rested in his; from the contact a stream of fire seemed to pass. He drew her to him and kissed her on mouth and eyes.

When he released her, she breathed, "Oh John!"

"That's settled," he said and sprang to the seat of his vehicle; and, with a wave of his disengaged hand, he vanished into the night.

On the face of the girl who gropingly entered the sleeping house lay a curious smile.

That night, in the distant city of Brandon, in Manitoba, a tall, broad man boarded a midnight train going west. He was clad in a dark suit of nondescript colour, with a cap on his tousled, ash-blond hair. Everything about him betrayed that he placed no value on his appearance.

It was Pete Harrington who, the day before, had received a letter from Henrietta Elliot who refused to be his wife. For twelve years he had courted her. Now that he had bought land and was making his way he felt that he could not go on without a woman on the place. On the farm, a man is only half a man when he has to cook meals and to wash dishes and sweep floors. He had tried to envisage a future with a stranger as his wife. He could not imagine it. There was only one woman. She had refused him by letter: she should once more refuse him by word of mouth or accept him.

Thus, as the second group of the Elliot children grew up, the leaven of sex was at work again, shaping their destinies for a future veiled in darkness.