Читать книгу The Master; a Novel - Israel Zangwill - Страница 12

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The old year had rolled off into the shadows, and the new had spun round as far as April. Spring came to earth for a few hours a day, and behind her Winter, whistling, clanged his iron gates, refreezing the morass to which she had reduced the roads. Even at noon there was no genial current in the air, unless you took the sheltered side of hills and trees, and found Spring nestling shyly in windless coverts, though many a seân-night had still to pass ere, upon some more shaded hummock, the harbinger Mayflower would timidly put forth a white bud laden with delicate odor. Everywhere, down the hills and along the tracks, in every rut and hollow, the sun saw a thousand dancing rivulets gleam and run, and great freshets stir up the sullen, ice-laden rivers to sweep away dams and mills, but the moon looked down on a white country demurely asleep.

Early in the month, Matt having previously said farewell in earnest to McTavitâs school-room, left home for the spring sugaring. Billy, alas! could not accompany him as of yore, so Sprat was left behind, too, by way of compensation to Billy. For company and co-operation, Matt took with him an Indian boy whose Christian name (for he was a Roman Catholic) was Tommy.

Matt had picked up Tommy in the proximate woods, where the noble savage ran wild in cast-off Christian clothes. Tommy belonged to a tribe that had recently pitched its wigwams in the backlands, a mile from Cobequid Village. To Mrs. Strang, who despatched the sugaring expedition and provisioned it, he was merely âa filthy brat who grinned like a Chessy cat,â but to Matt he incarnated the poetry of the primitive, and even spoke it. Not that Matt had more than a few words of Algonquinese, but Tommy broke English quite unhesitatingly; and his remarks, if terse and infrequent, were flowery and sometimes intelligible. They generally ran backward, after the manner of Micmac, which is as highly inflected as Greek or Hebrew. For the admiring Matt there was an atmosphere of romance about the red man which extended even to the red boy, and he had set himself to win Tommyâs heart in exchange for tobacco, which was itself obtained by another piece of barter. Tommy smoked a clay pipe, being early indurated to hardship, after the Spartan custom of his tribe. There were sketches of Tommy, colored like the Red Sea or the Bay of Fundy, in Mattâs secret gallery. Tommy was easy to do, owing to his other tribal habit of sitting silent for hours without moving a muscle. It was only rarely that Matt could extract from him native legends about Glooscap, the national hero, and Mundu, the devil.

The two boys set out together for a rock-maple district five miles off, drawing their impedimenta heaped high on a large sled. They were fortified for a three weeksâ stay. Mrs. Strang had baked them several batches of bread, and with unwonted enthusiasm supplied them with corn-meal for porridge, and tea and sugar, and butter and molasses, and salt pork and beef, all stowed into the barrel that would come home full of sugar. Their kitchen paraphernalia embraced a teapot and a teakettle, a frying-pan and a pot, while their manufacturing apparatus comprised tin pails, Yankee buckets, dippers, and axes. Guns, ammunition, and blankets completed their equipment. Mattâs painting materials were stowed away on his person unobtrusively.

They took possession of a disused log-cabin, formerly the property of a woodsman, as the advertising agent would have put it, had he penetrated to the backwoods. Possibly under his roseate vision it might have expanded into a detached villa without basement, or a bungalow standing in its own grounds, but a non-professional eye would have seen nothing but four walls and a pitched roof with a great square hole in it to let the light in and the smoke out. These walls were built of unhewn logs in their rough, natural bark. The floor was even more primitive, being simply the soil. It was necessary to thaw it by lighting the fire on it before the stakes could be driven in to support the cross-pieces from which the sugar-pot depended.

Then the boys chopped down a vast store of hardwood for fuel, and lanced the tall maples, catching their blood in birch-bark troughs through pine spills. They emptied the troughs into pails, and carried the sap to their cabin, and boiled it in the big pot, and cooled it again to sugar. A halcyon fortnight passed, full of work, yet leaving Matt leisure for daubing boyish fancies on pieces of birch-bark to cover withal the wooden walls of his home, which the aforesaid advertiser might not unwarrantably have described as a studio with a novel top-light in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Mattâs mural decorations would have enhanced the description. They comprised a fantastic medley of angels with faces more or less like Ruth Hailey, and devils fashioned more or less after the similitude of Bully Preep, and strange composite animals more or less like nothing on earth, moving amid hills and ships and lurid horizons. One night Matt sat by the fire in the centre of the hut painting a more realistic picture and meditating a weeding of his gallery. There had been no sap running that day, a sudden return of winter had congealed it, and so this extra artistic output during the comparatively idle hours had almost exhausted his hanging-space. While he painted he gave an eye to the seething pot in which the sap must change to molasses, and then thicken to maple syrup, and then to maple wax ere it was ladled into the birch-bark dishes and set to cool outside the hut. A piece of fat pork hanging from a hook in the cross-piece just touched the surface of the sap and prevented it from effervescing. Tommy was asleep on a heap of fir boughs in a corner, for the boys took it in turn to watch the pot and replenish the fire. The soundness of Tommyâs sleep to-night astonished Matt, for usually the young Micmac slept the sleep of the vigilant, a-quiver at the slightest unwonted sound. Matt did not know that his ingenious partner had just completed the distillation of a crude rum from a portion of sap arrested at the molasses stage, and that he had imbibed gloriously thereof.

Mattâs painting-stool was an inverted bucket. He wore a fur cap with pendent earlaps that gave him an elderly appearance; and his feet were cased in moccasins, made from the green shank of a cow. For some time he painted steadily, trying to reproduce the picturesque interior of the cabin with his rude home-made colors and brush. The air was warm and charged with resinous odors. The camp-fire burned brightly, the hardwood flaming without snapping or crackling, with only the soft hissing and spurting of liberated gases; the fire purred as if enjoying the warmth. The yellow billows curled round the bulging bottom of the three-legged pot, and sent up delicate spirals of blue smoke, tinged below with flame, to mingle with the white sappy steam that froze as soon as it got outside and disentangled itself from the wood smoke by falling as hoar-frost. At moments when all this smoke lifted Matt could see the stars shining on him through the hole in the roof, stainless and far away in a deep blue patch of heaven. Somehow they made him dissatisfied with his work; they seemed like calm, sovran eyes watching his puny efforts to reproduce, with his pitiable palette, the manifold hues and shades of the simple scene around him—the greasy copper of the Indian boyâs face, glistening against the yellow blanket which covered him and the olive-green boughs on which he lay; the motley firewood, the dull brown tones of the spruce branches, the silver of birch, the yellow of beech; the empty birch-bark troughs, silver-white outside and dull salmon within, touched with tints of light gold or gray. Why, there was a whole color-scheme of subdued rich tints in the moss alone—the dead dry moss that filled up the uneven rifts in the log-roof, and gleamed with a mottle of green and olive and russet. He threw down his brush in despair, longing for the rich, thick paints he vaguely imagined his uncle in London must have—real paints that did not fade as his did, despite the gums he mixed experimentally with them—pure reds and blues and greens and yellows, capable of giving real skies and real grass and real water, and of being mixed into every shade of color the heart could desire. Then he slipped out through the door, shutting it quickly to prevent the hut filling with smoke. The ground was white under a brilliant moon, with here and there patches of silver that wellnigh sparkled. Overhead mystic pallid-gold rays of northern light palpitated across the clear star-strewn heaven. The trees showed more sombre, the birches and maples bare of leafage, the spruces and hemlocks and all the tangled undergrowth reduced to a common gray in the moonlight. Here and there a brown hummock stood solemnly with bared head. And from all this sleeping woodland rose a restless breathing, that incessant stir of a vast alien, self-sufficient life, the rustle of creatures living and moving and having their being in another world than the human, in that dim, remote, teeming underworld of animal life, with its keen joys and transient pains. And every now and then a definite sound disengaged itself from the immense murmur: a chickadee chirped, a black-headed snow-bird twittered, a cat-owl hooted, a rabbit ran from the underwood, as faintly distinguishable from the snow in his white winter coat as he had been from the dead leaves over which he pattered in autumn in his gray homespun.

Matt stood leaning against the door, absorbed into the multifarious night, and hardly conscious of the cold; then he went in, thrilling with vague, sweet emotion, and vast manful resolutions that cast out despair. But he did not take up his brush again. He sat down before the fire in dreamy bliss; all the asperities of his existence softened by its leaping light, and even that dead face of his father thawed into the pleasant motions of life. The past shone through a mellow, rosy mist, and the future was like the scarlet sunrise of the forest, flaming from splendor to splendor—a future of artistic achievement upon which Ruth Haileyâs face smiled applause; a future of easy, unsought riches which banished the gloom upon his motherâs.

And then all of a sudden he caught sight of Tommyâs clay pipe, fallen from his mouth on to the blanket; and an unforeseen desire to smoke it and put the seal on this hour of happiness invaded the white boyâs breast. He rose and picked it up. It was full of charred tobacco. The craving to light it and taste its mysterious joys grew stronger. His mother had sternly forbidden him to smoke, backing up her prohibition by the text in Revelation—âAnd he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.â But now he remembered he had left school; he was a man. He put the stem into his mouth and plucked a brand from the fire, then stood for a moment irresolute. He wondered if any instinct warned his mother of what he was doing, and from that thought it was an easy transition to wondering what she was doing. His fancy saw her still running backward and forward, working that great buzzing wheel with stern, joyless face. He put down his pipe.

There was a fresh element in his dreamy bliss as he resumed his seat before the fire, a sense of something high and tranquillizing like the clear stars, yet touching the spring of tears. His head drooped in the drowsy warmth, he surrendered himself to voluptuous sadness, and the outside world grew faint and fading.

When he looked up again his heart almost ceased to beat. At his side loomed a strange female figure, her head covered with a drab shawl that hid her face. She stood in great snow-shoes as on a pair of pedestals, and the log walls repeated her form in contorted shadow.

The gentle purring of the fire, the Indian boyâs breathing, sounded painfully in the weird stillness. From without came the manifold rustle of the night.

âWho are you?â he whispered.

âGive me a glass of water,â she replied, sweetly.

âI hevânât any water,â he breathed.

âI am afire with thirst,â she cried. âQuench me! quench me!â Her shawl slipped back, revealing a face of wild, uncanny beauty crowned with an aureola of golden hair. But the awesome thrill that had permeated Mattâs being passed into one of æsthetic pleasure mingled with astonished recognition.

âWhy, itâs Mad Peggy!â he murmured.

âAye, itâs the Water-Drinker!â assented the beautiful visitor, in soft, musical tones, thereupon crying out, âWater, water, for Godâs sake!â

âI hevânât any water, I tell you. Not till I git some from the spring in the morninâ. Hev some sap!â

And Matt, starting to his feet, plunged the dipper into the barrel of raw sap that stood on the floor. Mad Peggy seized it greedily and drained the great ladle to the dregs. Then she filled it again with delicious fluid, and then again, and yet again, leaving Matt aghast at her gigantic capacity. She was filling the dipper a fourth time, but he pulled it out of her hand, fearing she would do herself a mischief.

âIâm so thirsty!â she whispered, plaintively, in her musical accents.

âWhat are you doinâ in the woods at this hour?â answered Matt, sternly.

âIâm looking for Peter. What a bonny fire!â And she bent over it, holding out her long, white hands to the flames.

Matt divined vaguely that Peter must be the sweetheart whose desertion had crazed the poor creature. It was reported in Cobequid Village that the handsome German immigrant who had been betrothed to her had gone off forever on the pretext of âsugaringâ when he learned that she was one of the Water-Drinkers—the unhappy family whose ancestor had refused a cup of cold water to a strange old woman, who thereupon put the curse upon him and his descendants that they