Burned Bridges Part 5

"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 st.u.r.dy 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 gra.s.s, wagging his tail in antic.i.p.ation.

"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.

CHAPTER VI

CERTAIN PERPLEXITIES

From the direction of the slough two shots sounded, presently followed by two more. Then the gleeful yipping of Tommy's Ashe's retriever, and Tommy's stentorian encouragement:

"That's the boy. Fetch him."

Close upon this Mr. Thompson's up-p.r.i.c.ked ear detected another voice, one that immediately set up in him an involuntary eagerness of listening, a clear, liquid voice that called:

"Oh, Tommy, there's another wounded one, swimming away. Quick!"

Pow! Tommy's twelve-gauge cracked again. The two voices called laughingly back and forth across the slough, mingled with the excited barking of the brown dog as he retrieved the slaughtered ducks. After a time silence fell. Thompson's nose detected an odor. He turned hastily to his stove. But he had listened too long. The biscuits in his oven were smoking.

That did not matter greatly in itself. It was merely one of a long procession of culinary disasters. He could not, somehow, contrive to prepare food in the simple manner of Mike Breyette's instructions. If the biscuits had not scorched probably they would have been hopelessly soggy, dismal things compared to the brown discs Mike had turned out of the same oven. One was as bad as the other. Nothing seemed to work out right. Nothing ever tasted right. Only a healthy hunger enabled him to swallow the unsavory messes he concocted in the name of food.

He had been at Lone Moose two weeks now. His real work, his essential labor in that untilled field, was no farther advanced. He made about the same progress as a missionary that he made as a cook. In so far as Lone Moose was concerned he accomplished nothing because, like Archimedes, he lacked a foothold from which to apply his leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut gla.s.s in a house where there is neither food nor drink.

Also he was no longer so secure in the comfortable belief that all things work for an ultimate good. He was not so sure that a sparrow, or even an ordained servant of G.o.d, might not fall and the Almighty be none the wiser. The material considerations which he had always scorned pressed upon him in an unescapable manner. There was no getting away from them. Thrown at last upon his own resources he began to take stock of his needs, his instincts, his impulses, and to compare them with the needs and instincts and impulses of a more G.o.dless humanity,--and he could not escape certain conclusions. Faith may move mountains, but chiefly through the medium of a shovel. When a man is hungry his need is for food. When he is lonely he craves companionship. When he grieves he desires sympathy. And the Providence Mr. Thompson had been taught to lean so hard upon did not chop his wood, cook his meals, furnish him with congenial society, comfort him when he was sad.

"Religion or nonreligion, belief in a personal, immanent G.o.d or a rank materialism that holds to a purely mechanical theory of the universe, it doesn't make much difference which you hold to if you do not set yourself up as the supreme authority and insist that the other fellow must believe as you do.

"Because, my dear sir, you cannot escape material factors. The human organism can't exist without food, clothing, and shelter. Society cannot attain to a culture which tends to soften the harshnesses of existence, without leisure in which to develop that culture. Machinery and science and art weren't handed to humanity done up in a package. Man only attained to these things through a long process of evolution, and he only attained them by the use of his muscle and the exercise of his intellect. Strength and skill--plus application. Nothing else gets either an individual or a race forward. Don't you see the force of that?

Here is man with his fundamental, undeniable needs. Here is the earth with the fullness thereof. There's nothing mysterious or supernatural about it. Brain and brawn applied to the problems of living. That's all.

And you can't dodge it. The first, pressing requirements of any man can only be filled in two ways. First by working and planning and getting for himself. Second by being able to compel the strength and skill of others to function for him so that his needs will be supplied; in other words, by some turn of circ.u.mstances, or some dominant quality in himself, to get something for nothing."

Sam Carr had delivered himself of this as a wind-up to a conversation with Thompson the evening before. Now, while his forgotten biscuits scorched and he listened to Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr taking their toll of meat from the flocks of waterfowl, he was thinking over what Carr had said. He dissented. Oh, he dissented with a vigor that was almost bitterness, because the smiling quirk of Sam Carr's lips when he uttered the last sentence gave it something of a personal edge. However it was meant, Thompson could not help taking it that way. And Mr. Thompson's desire was to give--to give lavishly. Only here in this forsaken corner of the world he seemed to have nothing to give that was of any value.

He was, at the same time, discovering in himself personal needs to which he had never given a thought, sordid everyday necessities the satisfaction of which had always been at hand, unquestioned, taken for granted much as one takes the sun and the air for granted. His meals had been provided. His bed had been provided. The funds which had clothed and educated him and trained him for the ministry had been provided, and likewise his transportation to the scene of his endeavors. How, he had not known except in the vaguest way, he had not particularly inquired, any more than the child inquires the whence and the why of luscious berries he finds growing upon a bush in the garden.

Not until he was torn by the roots out of the old, ordered environment and flung headlong into an environment where cause and effect are linked close did he consider these things. Materially he was getting a first-hand lesson in economics--and domestic science of a sort!

Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful exercise of the thought-function.

If this was so, he, Wesley Thompson, twenty-five years of age and a minister of the gospel, was deeply in debt--unless he denied the justice of giving value for value received. He had received much; he had returned nothing except perfunctory thanks. And what had he to give?

Even to him, transcendent as was his faith that the glory of man was but the reflected glory of G.o.d, that faith was not a commodity to be bartered.

He did not think these things in these terms. He found himself becoming involved in a maze of speculation, in which he could only grope feebly for words to define the unrest that was in him.

While he sat at his small table of rough-hewn boards with his scorched, unappetizing biscuits, ill-cooked potatoes and bacon, and a pot of tea that he could never brew to his liking (and Mr. Thompson, from a considerable amount of juggling afternoon teacups, had acquired a nice taste in that beverage) he saw Tommy Ashe and Sophie Carr pa.s.s along one edge of his clearing, a cl.u.s.ter of bright-winged ducks slung over Tommy's shoulder, their voices floating across to him as if they came down a long corridor. They disappeared toward Lone Moose through the timber, and Mr. Thompson sat brooding over his lonely meal until he realized with a start that his mind was concentrating upon Sophie Carr with a disturbing insistence.

The plague of mosquitoes had somewhat abated. In the early morning and for a time in the evening, and also when rain dampened the atmosphere, these pests still kept a man's hands busy warding them off. But through the dry heat of the day he could go abroad in reasonable comfort.

So now Mr. Thompson washed up his dishes in a fashion to make the lips of a careful housekeeper pucker in disdain, clapped on his broken-rimmed straw hat and sallied forth.

He was full of an earnest desire to do good, as he defined doing good.

He had come here for that purpose, backed by an organization for just such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation, of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of h.e.l.l, he deemed it his business to show them with certainty the paths that led to each.

But he could not reach them unless he could speak their tongue, he could not gather them about him in the open meadow as the Man of Galilee gathered his disciples about him. The climate was against that simple procedure. Therefore he postulated two things as necessary to make a beginning--to learn the tribal language and to build a church.

He was making an attempt at both, and making little more progress than he made in the culinary art. Only a naturally vigorous stomach enabled him to a.s.similate the messes he cooked without suffering acute indigestion. Likewise only a nave turn of mind enabled him to ward off mental indigestion in his struggles with the language. Whatever the defects of his training for what he considered his life work, he had considerable power of application. He might get discouraged, but he was not a quitter. He kept trying. This took the form of studying the Athabascan gutturals with the aid of Lachlan's second son, a boy of eighteen. For an hour in the forenoon and the same in the evening he struggled with p.r.o.nunciations and meanings like a child learning the alphabet, forgetting, like the child, a good deal of it between lessons.

And he had begun work on a log building twenty by thirty feet, that was to be a meeting-house.

He did not get on with this very fast. He laid his foundation in the edge of the timber to lessen the distance his material must be moved.

He had to fell trees, to lop off the branches, and cut the trunks to proper length, then roll them with infinite effort to their proper place in the structure. He could only gather how a log building could be erected by asking Lachlan, and by taking the Lone Moose cabins for his model. And he was a fearful and wonderful axeman. His log ends looked as if chewed by a beaver, except that they lacked the beaver's neatness of finish. His feet suffered manifold hairbreadth escapes from the sharp blade. He could never guess which way a tree would fall. For a week's work he had got two courses of logs laid in position.

He did not allow his mind to dwell on the ultimate outcome of this task, because he was uneasily aware that Lone Moose was smiling slyly behind its brown hand at him and his works. In his mind there was nothing for it but a church. He had tried one Sunday service at Lachlan's house, with Lachlan senior to interpret his words. The Indians had come.

Indeed, they had come en ma.s.se. They packed the room he spoke in, big and little, short, chunky natives, and tall, thin-faced ones, and the overflow spilled into the kitchen beyond. The day was very hot, the roof low, the windows closed. There was a vitiation of the atmosphere that was not helped by a strong bodily odor, a stout and st.u.r.dy smell that came near to sickening Mr. Thompson. He was extraordinarily glad when he got outside. That closeness--to speak mildly--coupled with the heavy, copper-red faces, impa.s.sive as masks, impersonally listening with scarcely a flicker of the eye-lids, made Thompson forswear another attempt to preach until he could speak to them in their own tongue and speak to them in a goodly place of worship where a man's thoughts would not be imperiously distracted by a pressing need of ventilation.

Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.

Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual labor--that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt joined the discarded garments.

Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform to the clerical figure. He was the ant.i.thesis of asceticism, of gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man l.u.s.tily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat standing out on brow and cheek, his st.u.r.dy neck all a-glisten with moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and tightened as his arms swung. For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by Nature in a generous mood. He was not a heroic figure, but he was big and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very straight when he stood erect. He had escaped the scholarly stoop. If his muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.

He was more or less unconscious of all this. He had never thought of his body as being strong or well-shaped, because he had never used it, never pitted his strength against the strength of other men, never worked, never striven. It had never been necessary for him to do so. He had been taught that pride of that sort was sinful, and he had accepted the teaching rather too literally.

Already a curious sort of change was manifesting in him. His blue eyes had a different expression than one would have observed in them during--well, during the period of his theological studies, shall we say, when the state of his soul and the state of other people's souls was the only consideration. One would have been troubled to make out any p.r.o.nounced personality then. He was simply a studious young man with a sanctimonious air. But now that the wind and the sun had somewhat turned his fair skin and brought out a goodly crop of freckles, now that the vigor of his movements and the healthy perspiration had rumpled up his reddish-brown hair and put a wave in it, he could--standing up on his log--easily have pa.s.sed for a husky woodsman; until some experienced eye observed him make such sorry work of a woodsman's task. He had acquired no skill with the axe. That takes time. But he made vigorous endeavor, and he was beginning to feel strength flow through him, to realize it as a potential blessing. Now that the soreness was working out of his sinews it gave him a peculiar elation to lay hold of a log-end, to heave until his arms and back grew rigid, and to feel the heavy weight move.