Neighbours Part 27

"'Give that,' my friend says, 'with my good wishes an' a touch o' my regrets, to the young lady on Twenty-two, with the compliments o'

Sergeant Brook,' he-says," and so Jake placed the little golden trinket in Jean's hands. . . . . It was a difficult situation. Jean's first impulse was to hand it back.

"Better accept it," I whispered to her. "The fewer explanations the better."

"But it--it's a wedding present," she remonstrated. "How can I . . . ?"

"Keep it until you need it," I suggested. Jean was very lovely in the heightened color of her embarra.s.sment, and as her hand fell by my side I seized it surrept.i.tiously in my own.

"Oh, Jean, why not make it to-night?" I whispered, mad with her beauty and her nearness.

"It's quite impossible," she answered, but she did not immediately withdraw her hand. She left me marvelling more and more over the tantalizing complexity of her att.i.tude toward me.

Fortunately, the interest of those about us had been quickly rearrested by Jake. "Havin' a little weakness o' my own," Jake was continuing, "although I never said nothin' about it, not wishing to take advantage o' my young friend, Sittin' Crow, or to start a scene with Bella Donna, I bought its mate fer the lady on Fourteen." And with this little speech he placed another pendant in the hands of Marjorie.

"When I came to Canada to farm," said Spoof, after the excitement over Jake's gift had died down, "I came equipped for everything but farming.

I could have started a second-hand store, a curiosity shop, an a.r.s.enal, or a music hall much better than I could start a farm. In fact, I feel like all of these things, except, perhaps, the music hall, when I look around my shack. Particularly well was I equipped against savages, grizzly bears, and mountain lions. I remember the days I spent in picking out my rifles, weighing the qualities of this arm and that, and the penetrating power of the different bullets. My biggest game so far has been a badger, _alias_ a chinook, whose hide now adorns the den of my immediate and admiring ancestor. Out of the abundance of my defences I now bring to you, John Lane, this piece of artillery, with the injunction that it must never be pointed toward section Two, and, preferably, not at anything else. Hang it over your portal, as evidence that you can be a desperate man upon occasion, and let it go at that. I have been thoughtful enough not to bring any ammunition." Spoof then produced, out of the bedroom where Brown, acting as his agent, had secretly cached it, a repeating rifle, which Jack handled with as much admiration as Marjorie spent on her pendant, and then placed it lovingly away.

"Now, I believe that's all," said Spoof.

"Not yet," Reddy interrupted. "I want to be in on this, although I didn't come prepared." He had written something in a note-book, which he now tore out and handed to Jack. It was a receipt for the price of his wedding ring. Jack protested, but Reddy would have it no other way.

The only one not represented by a presentation was the minister, but he proved equal to the occasion.

"My children," he said,--he was not much older than Jack or I, perhaps about the age of Spoof--"I am not a man of the world, and consequently cannot give you of the good things which the world provides. The theory that a minister should lay up his treasure in Heaven is taken rather literally in these times. I am not quarreling with that. Materialism is the murderous outlaw of the age, an enemy that goes bullying through the land, outraging our finer natures, overturning our ideals, polluting our ambitions. I hope I am not envious of his followers. And to you, and all of you, I give something that money could not buy--my blessing, with a promise of my ministrations, without charge, on those future occasions upon which it may be a.s.sumed you will be in need of them."

The minister had escaped from a somewhat embarra.s.sing position with the dignity that became his calling, and with a gentle joke that showed how very human he was at heart.

"Clear out the pork and the seed wheat," Spoof ordered, as there seemed likely to be a lull in the night's enjoyment. "Ole, it is fortunate that Mrs. Burke persuaded you not to bring in your load of hay."

So the floor was cleared. The door, when opened, revealed a wedge of snow-storm whistling by, but inside the wintry weather was forgotten and the tremor of our shanty's timbers pa.s.sed unnoticed. Reddy had mounted himself on our own table--the big one had been taken out, in pieces--and was twisting the strings of a violin to tune. Presently his bow cut loose a drone of dancing rhythm, and feet began to tap the plain pine boards of the floor.

"Pardners all!" Jake commanded. It was evident he was to be master of ceremonies; he had just taken a great chew of tobacco to promote the flow of language. The insistent note of the violin brought Jack and me, with Marjorie and Jean, Mr. and Mrs. Burke, and Mr. and Mrs. Brown, to the centre of the room. The dancing would be of the "square-dance"

variety which was no novelty to us or to the Burkes, and which the others would soon pick up under the guidance of Professer Jake.

"S'lute yer pardner! . . . Pa.s.s 'er by. . . Balance to the next." And we were off. Jake and the fiddler warmed up with the dancers, and presently the shanty was rocking with the stamp and the swing of it. Those were not the days of dancing that is little more than a walk; one danced with all his heart and body, and was not afraid to shake the floors and ceilings.

The end of the set found us perspiring and happy.

And so the evening wore on. Ole and Olga joined the dancers in the third set, and thereafter never left the floor; Andy Smith ventured into Marjorie's arms, and in five minutes was feeling younger than in the days of his apprenticeship on the Clyde; Spoof danced with Jean as much as seemed necessary. When Spoof was not monopolizing her, Burke or Brown or Smith was. But at length she spurned us all in order that she might win Mr. Sneezit to the floor. The Russian hesitated, fearing to appear foolish, but he would have been more or less than human if he could have resisted Jean's enticements, and presently she was leading him through the simple movements of a cotillion.

Then it was that the minister distinguished himself. He had kept aloof from the dancing, but now, seeing Mrs. Sneezit being left somewhat out of the party, his Christianity overcame his creed and, sweeping down upon her, he seized her in his strong arms and had her upon her feet before she knew it. Her protestations were of no avail; she must dance with him and dance she did. The music and the kindness and the humanity of it all seemed to penetrate her stolid heart, and Mrs. Sneezit--she of the brood with the peering eyes and the wistful, hungry mouths--was won by the magic of fiddle and foot back into the gay days of girlhood and danced as though the world were hers.

At length they went. The flurries of snow had driven by; the moon poured its silver radiance on a world of downy ivory, and the bigger stars blinked stolidly from a steel-blue heaven as our guests bundled themselves into jumpers and sleighs and took their departure. Their cries of good wishes and good luck were wafted back to us above the crunching of the snow. We watched them until they faded out of sight in the white moonlight.

Soon after Jack and Marjorie and Jean crossed the snow-filled valley to their over-crowded house, and left me to one that was over-empty. For a long time I stood looking into the stove, with lid and lifter in my hand, in the act of putting on more wood. The glow of the coals went grey as I watched, and, for the first time in my life, I measured the depth to which the plummet of loneliness can plunge. . . .

CHAPTER XIX.

The gulf of loneliness into which I fell on the night of Marjorie's marriage was but the shallow waters of an ocean of despair in which I floundered through the dreary days that followed. I now had occasion to realize that loneliness is not a matter of s.p.a.ce or distances, of the many or of the few, but a matter of one's adjustment toward his surroundings. In all the months of my life on Fourteen the devils of loneliness had never wormed into my vitals; my hours had been as full of companionship as though I had shared them with the throngs of some great city. I had not found the prairies lonely; I had wasted no sighs on the horizon that met the sky as far as the eye could bridge; I had been filled and content with the life that lay about me.

Now, all was changed. I had given Jean up, under protest, as the only thing to do. But having made my protest I meant to accept my fate with dignity; I would take my sentence like a man, and serve it without whining. In my fort.i.tude I would, perhaps, present to Jean a more heroic picture than in the days of my seeming success; my bearing as a rejected suitor would have in it a touch of n.o.bility--stern n.o.bility, if you like--for which there was little place in the character of an accepted and happy lover. And because women love the heroic my demeanor might reveal to Jean golden threads spun through my temperament which otherwise she would not have perceived, until at last she would turn to me with "Frank, I did not realize how much a man you are! Let us start over again--at the beginning."

I flattered myself with all this nonsense about the fine figure I would cut, but that was before Marjorie had crossed to Twenty-two and my house had been left to me desolate; utterly desolate. As the grey light of the late morning of that first day after Christmas filtered through the frosted window-panes, slowly revealing the outlines of the table and the stove and the other pieces of my rude furniture, I began to realize how utterly empty and barren the wretched place was. While Marjorie had been there she had given it a soul, and Jean, dropping in every day, had added a quality that was even more than soul; it had in it something that was spiritual, that was celestial, that was divine. But now soul and spirit were gone and I was left amid the damp, drab clay.

I had been long in going to sleep, and as a consequence had awakened late. The shack was bitterly cold; the only comfort lay under my heavy blankets. As the light increased I counted the k.n.o.bs of frost that had formed on the ends of the nails that came through the roof. I had never noticed that so many nails had missed the rafters. We were rather bad carpenters. My mind leapt back to the time when we built the shack, clearing all the events crowded between, as the vision leaps from height to height across great valleys in the prairies. How unreal and far away it all seemed! But another leap carried me to the bank of a river, and little children playing in the sand, and a slow-pacing water wheel that sprayed its mist of diamonds in the sunshine. I saw her little calico dress, her little brown bare feet, the ringlets of yellow hair hung about her cheeks. That was Jean. . . .

The clock had stopped! It was with terrific suddenness that I realized the clock had stopped and in my barren shanty was the silence of the tomb. Its round, gla.s.sy face grinned an imbecile grin at me from its place on a shelf on the wall. Its hands showed a quarter to four. . . .

Well, there was nothing very mysterious about that. In the excitement of the wedding party I had merely forgotten to wind the clock. Only an overwrought nervous system could discern anything uncanny in that. I reasoned all this out, with absurd deliberation, as I rubbed my eyes and wondered why the clock had stopped. Or perhaps the frost had stopped it.

My watch had fared better, and when I drew it from my pocket on the corner of the bed the friendly bustle of its ticking was rea.s.suring to my ear. I could hear the companionable canter of its balance wheel galloping down the road of life by my side. "Next to a dog," I said to myself, "a watch is the best friend a man can have."

That set me thinking about dogs, and I wondered why in all these months I had neglected to provide myself with a dog. As a sort of insurance, I grimly reflected. One always can fall back on a dog.

The hands of the watch said half-past eight, and I suddenly remembered there were cattle to feed. It would be a decent thing to get up and do all the ch.o.r.es that morning, if they were not already done. So I drew my underwear from beneath my pillow, where I had learned to tuck it in cold weather, and sprang from the friendly shelter of the blankets. One needs no incentive to quick dressing in a temperature only a few points above zero. I was fully clothed in less time than a city man, in his steam-heated flat, takes to decide whether his collar really demands changing.

I hurriedly started a fire; watched it until it had a proper draft; turned the damper in the pipe to guard against its getting beyond control after I left it. Then, after drawing on my pea-jacket, cap and mitts, I set out for the stables. The morning was grey, with a scattered sifting of small snowflakes, but the nip to the air was not nearly so uncomfortable as it seemed when contemplated from under the warm blankets. I reflected that comfort and happiness are largely a matter of the point of view. But that doesn't help much when the bottom has fallen out of your particular universe.

Buck and Bright were bawling before they heard my hand on the stable door. An ox with an empty stomach has an uncanny ear for the food purveyor. A half-inch fuzz of new untrodden snow was good evidence that Jack was keeping hours even worse than mine. As I opened the door the oxen turned their big, reproving eyes upon me, while even the cow tossed her head from side to side in peevish protest.

"It's all right, old chaps," I a.s.sured them. "Blessed is he whose wants are few and easily satisfied," as I threw them each a forkful of hay.

They made a great attack upon it, tossing it with their noses and their horns in an atavistic appreciation of the good old days when their ancestors roamed the range and were never tied by the neck to a manger and left to starve while their masters married. Our cow was at present enjoying her annual holidays, so there was no milking to be done, and my morning ch.o.r.es were soon finished. Our pigs--we had two pigs now--saluted me after the manner of their kind until I choked their squeals with a dole of barley chop. Not even a pig can squeal through a mouthful of dry barley chop.

While I was engaged in these operations the hens ran about my feet until one happened to get tramped on. Her squawking reminded me that there might be eggs, and search discovered two, fresh laid that morning. That was a glint of sunshine through the gloom. I gathered them up and turned it over in my mind for a moment whether I should take them to Jack and Marjorie. But then that would leave Jean without. There would be noses out of joint on Twenty-two soon enough, without provoking an issue. In the interests of peace I decided to eat them myself.

I resisted a desire to go to Jack's door and announce that the morning ch.o.r.es were done because I knew that at the bottom of that desire was a hope that I should see and speak with Jean. One may be tied to a stake but that is no reason why he should poke his feet needlessly in the fire.

The stove lids were red hot and the kettle was belching forth a small geyser of steam when I got back to the shack. My search for remnants from the feast of the night before was astonishingly fruitless, until I remembered that the young Hansens had been turned loose upon the left-overs. So I cooked a mixture of oatmeal and water, which I called porridge, boiled the two fresh eggs, thawed out part of a loaf of bread, melted a piece of b.u.t.ter, and sat down to a meal that was hardly calculated to make me rejoice in my single blessedness.

After breakfast I washed my few dishes, swept the floor, made my bed, and generally set the house in order. Even then it was only ten o 'clock, with nothing more to do until noon. At noon there would be a repet.i.tion of the routine, and then nothing to do until night. At night there would be supper and the evening ch.o.r.es, and nothing more to do until morning. And the next day the same, and the same, and the same.

Nature may be a wise designer, but she has an uncanny way of overdoing a good thing. I thought of the thousand miles of timber we had pa.s.sed through on our way west, timber without end! All the world seemed filled with trees, standing, fallen, piled in heaps in jagged water-courses; dead and dying through leagues of swamp and muskeg; towering over the highlands in an evergreen silhouette against the sky.

What a wonderful place for a few miles of prairie; say for every second section of prairie, like the railway lands in the West! Then came the prairies--a hundred treeless miles at a stretch; sky and gra.s.s without limit, a horizon broken only by a settler's shack at great intervals, into the farther West where even the settler's shack failed from view, and one was alone with G.o.d and the world. Here was a land where the very posts to mark our checker-board survey had to be shipped in from untold distances. What a wonderful place for a few square miles of forest! And yet they tell us Nature is wise.

And so it was in our labor; from spring till freeze-up we had scarcely time to shave. Every hour of sunshine--and no country gives its sunshine more lavishly--was money to the settler, and the settler's life from April to November was a torrent of high-geared energy. I had been too busy even to make love properly to Jean, and when it has been said that a young man is too busy for that all other figures of speech fail.

Perhaps that was why my love-making, indifferently done, taking second place to plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, had ended so disasterously. And now, only a month or two later, the one thing in the world of which I had too much was time. Now I could afford to make love like an artist--but I had no canvas to splash on!

It is wonderful how much philosophizing one can accomplish between washing the porridge pot and peeling the potatoes when there is nothing else to be done. Just as the long summer evenings of this great West are already giving the world a race of athletes, so must the long, sombre winter days and nights, with their limitless opportunities for reflection and introspection, breed for the world a new brand of thinking, uncramped by convention and untamed by precedent. That is, if the "advantages" of city life do not crowd in so rapidly that they relieve us of the necessity of thinking.

It was mid-afternoon when Jack burst in upon me. "Well, old Robinson Crusoe, how goes solitude?" he demanded.

"Rotten," said I, "but I can always change my mind if I want to."

"Aha!" he exclaimed, in return, clasping himself about the middle. "A blow in the fifth rib! A subtle blow under the fifth rib!"