THE WHISTLING OF ZOËTIQUE
As when a child shakes a kaleidoscope the bits of colored glass shift from one distinct pattern into another, so when I think of the events which came of Zoëtique Vézina’s gift of whistling, the little story falls into two or three sharply defined pictures, so different from each other, so linked, so filled with life, that, simple as it is, the tale appears to me dramatic enough to tell exactly as it happened.
It is a far cry from the moonlit stillness of an August night on a Canadian lake—a dark amphitheatre of hills guarding the sky-line, a road of light across the water, canoes floating black on silver—from that to the crowded glare of a New York theatre. Yet the span of life reaches easily across such distances, and the stage-settings of the play I am to tell were such. It was the last night of a fortnight’s visit to the Morgans’ camp, and they, as well as I, were going back to civilization next day. There was a ceremony to be celebrated which had become a custom of last nights, they explained to me—the guides gave a concert. It was always clear and always moonlight on a last night in camp—by law, young Bob Morgan gave me to understand. In any case, it was invariable, and here was this cloudless, bright evening to back up his assertion. There were two methods of giving the concert: either the messieurs, which included Mrs. Morgan, stayed in camp and the men paddled about at a picturesque distance, and serenaded them from boats; or else the messieurs went out in the canoes and the guides “howled from the underbrush,” as Bob put it. To-night, the air was so warm and the wet moonlight lay in such thick splashes over the water that no one wanted to stay on land. It gave a man a greedy feeling that he must get “au large” and loot jewelry and broken gold out of the night. So the canvas canoes slid from the quay with musical wooden and liquid noises, and off we drifted, two and two, into the perspective of a dream.
There were six of us, with the two strangers. Fishing down a deep bay of Lac Lumière that afternoon, Walter Morgan and I had dropped suddenly, around a corner, on a camp—two tents, two messieurs, four guides.
“The devil!” said Morgan, and I, though it was not my business to do the swearing, repeated the words.
It is the theory when one gets into camp that one has discovered an earth without inhabitants, and proof to the contrary is accounted a rudeness. We wished not to know that people lived, and it was immaterial and irrelevant—what Bob Morgan would sum up as “fresh”—of these unknown ones to thrust knowledge upon us. All the same, there were tents, guides, and an unmistakable monsieur in aggressive sporting clothes on the shore, and, within ten feet of our boat’s nose, another boat with a bored-looking Montagnais Indian paddling it, and in the bow a man with a rod whose first cast explained the Indian’s expression. A fisherman does not catalogue when he sees another man cast, but he knows the details, and he knows their summary—a greenhorn or an expert. Morgan was a crack, and I had studied under him, and before his slow “Good-day” greeted the stranger we were both aware that the rod weighed at least nine ounces, that the leader was too light for it, that a Yellow Sally for a hand-fly and a Scarlet Ibis for the tail were flies that, in this light, made a blot on a man’s character; that the man was casting from his neck down, and getting the flies in a mess as might be expected; that the thirty feet of line out was all and more than all that he could handle; and that, last and worst, the person who would fish for trout in that spot, at a little outlet, where the water was shallow and warm, in the month of August, was, as a fisherman, beneath contempt. I could hear Walter Morgan’s opinion of the person in that “Good day” when it came.
But I was to see his manner change. The stranger, his back toward us, at my friend’s voice arrested his line half-way through a convulsive recover, and the three flies fell in a heap about his shoulders—one caught in his brand-new corduroy hat, and the hook of another went into his thumb. He whirled about his brilliant tan-leather clad shoulders with a lurch which missed upsetting the boat, Montagnard and all, but neither episode disturbed him.
“Good day,” he returned cordially, with a smile which at once made a difference about an uninhabited earth. He went on quickly. “Am I in your way? I’m a greenhorn, and I don’t know other people’s rights, but I mean well. I’ve never had such fun in all my life,” he confided in us with a rush, like a small boy having too good a time to keep to himself. “I’ve never fished before, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I caught a trout a while ago. Do I do it all right?” he inquired wistfully. “I wish you’d tell me if anything’s wrong.”
A Roman candle exploded inside of Morgan could not have left him more scattered. The outcome was that we landed in a spirit of eager friendliness and partook of other spirits with this attractive débutant and his partner, who seemed a person of equal ignorance and equal, though quieter, enthusiasm. That this latter was a well-known playwright we made out shortly, and there was at once a free exchange of names among us, but our first acquaintance we did not then place. However, it took no time at all to see that two such whole-hearted babes in the woods had probably never before arrived, as such, at the approximate age of fifty. They were wax in the hands of their guides, and their guides were “doing” them without remorse. Morgan, pleased with the virgin soil, began gardening; he sowed seeds of woodcraft and of fishcraft which took root before his eyes, and, charmed with the business, he invited the two to dinner that night. That we were breaking camp next day, while they were just beginning their trip, was a point of genuine regret on both sides.
We hurried back to our log castle to see that pea soup and partridges and flapjacks and other delicacies were assured in force for the meal to come, and in an hour or two the meal did come, and I cannot recollect a gayer function. As with the San Francisco earthquake, there was not a dull moment from start to finish, and again and again I saw Morgan look at his wife triumphantly with the “Trust-me-to-bring-home-pleasant-people” expression of a man who has sometimes been less fortunate.
The dining-room was a moss-covered point; the water rippled about two sides of it, forest made its other walls, and a roof of birch bark its ceiling. This greenwood hall rang with laughter spontaneous as children’s, till the silver lake gleamed leaden through tree trunks, and purple hills turned black, and a rim of round moon rose into the twilight, big, over the shoulder of the lowest mountain. Then Godin, head guide and butler, lighted his lumières électriques—his candles arranged as a chandelier—and by their swinging light we finished a feast of the gods with maple sirup and delicate “mushi frite,” while the French-Canadian guides sat grouped in Rembrandt lights and shadows about the kitchen fire and laughed, too, to hear the peals which, at everything and nothing, rang across the lake to the lonely hills. Certainly in entertaining these strangers we had entertained angels unawares—angels of light-heartedness—for our sides ached when we slid from the board benches that were dining chairs and went down where the canoes lay beached, where guides evolved out of shadow to slip the boats into the water, to hold them steady, to direct our stumbling with deferential French syllables, as we embarked.
Two hundred yards down the lake, the “camp of the messieurs” stretched its log front of sixty feet. The lamplight shone ruddily through windows red-curtained, the door from the broad gallery stood open, the bare low room, as we entered, had the qualities which make a place attractive—space, brightness, order, and comfort. Many a time in a New York drawing-room I have thought of the charm of that big camp with its silver-brown bark of walls and ceiling, its scarlet cotton curtains, its rough floor, and rustic furniture; I have remembered how it breathed hospitality and the joy of life, and I have wondered what people wanted of more. Into this room we went, the three Morgans and Dr. Davidge and Mr. Esmond and I. Pipes and cigars were going in a moment, and soon young Bob was sent to find out the plans for the concert. He came back kicking his boyish long legs ecstatically. “It’s going to be a peach,” he announced. “Dr. Davidge’s guides sing, all four of them, and Henri, the old fellow, has a mouth-organ, and Zoëtique is going to whistle. It’ll be the pickles all right.”
“I didn’t know Zoëtique whistled,” said Walter Morgan. “I never heard him.”
Nor had I, but Bob hastened to enlighten us. “I have,” he said, “and it’s a wonder. Never heard anything like it. Godin says he’s the best whistler in Saint Raymond, and they always make him do it for parties, as a side show. Wait till you hear him—I’ll bet you’ll like it.”
Mr. Esmond looked up. “Really good whistling is rare,” he said, and then added as if to himself, “but of course this isn’t that sort.”
“How are they to arrange, Bob?” asked his sister. “Are they going out on the lake, or shall we?”
“Oh, they said just as the messieurs wished; so I settled it,” Bob answered in a lordly way. “It was such a whooping good night, I thought it would be the stunt to go out ourselves, and bum around in the canoes.”
So it was that in half an hour we drifted down the shore toward the point where the blaze from the guides’ camp shone and disappeared by glimpses, a star of orange fire in the trees above, an orange bar of fire in the water below. The men’s voices in excited conversation, as conversation is always with French Canadians, floated out to us; we caught words which showed the forest road of their thoughts—such words as “caribou,” and “carabine,” and “gros poisson de cinq livres,” and “un m’sieur qui tire b’en,” and there would be a hush while one deep voice told a story and then all together would break out in an abandonment of laughter. Suddenly some one, going outside the range of firelight, caught sight of the fleet on the lake, and there was a quick word—“les messieurs” and “les canots”—and then a silence.
Walter Morgan called from invisibility. “Godin,” he called—Godin was head guide.
“Oui, M’sieur,” came back with respectful good-will from among the trees. I listened closely now, for it is a pity to lose any of Morgan’s French.
“Est-ce que vous êtes mangé?” he demanded cheerfully, and Bob gave a snort—Bob knows French.
But Godin knew better than that—he knew his m’sieur and what he meant. “Mais oui, M’sieur, on a fini de dîner,” he responded promptly, shifting the sentence graciously.
“Êtes-vous preparry pour nous donner un concert?” Morgan went on, not bothering particularly to pronounce according to French models—“concert,” especially, being done in honest English.
There was an embarrassed ripple from among the trees—the strange guides believed that M’sieur was making a joke, and that it was civil to encourage him. But Godin understood.
“Oui, M’sieur,” his polite tones came back. “One will sing a song or two with pleasure, if the messieurs desire it.”
There was an undertone of talking back and forth, as we waited, and a little self-conscious laughing, a little chaffing evidently, and then a tremendous clearing of throats and trying of keys up and down the scale. A second’s silence and a voice which we of the camp knew for Blanc’s swung out over the water, musical, for all its occasional sharpness. It was one of the old voyageur songs he sang, filled with the sadness which the gay souls seemed to crave in their music.
C’est longtemps que j’ai t’aimé,
Jamais je ne t’oublierais.
The refrain came over and over through so many verses that I wished some one would choke Blanc and let the concert go on. Yet it was far from painful to lie in a canoe, with young Bob wielding a skilful paddle for my benefit, and listen to soft French words sprinkled over a sapphire night—on the whole, let Blanc pursue the subject through ten more stanzas if he must.
He came to an end; there was great hand-clapping from the floating audience; then from the hidden performers more earnest undertones of discussion as to the next number. We waited, smiling to ourselves, and soon the notes of old Henri’s mouth-organ sounded from the grove of spruce trees. I suppose a mouth-organ is not a high form of instrument, but I am glad that I am not too musical to have found it pretty that night. I had a vision, too, in my mind, of the grizzled, labor-worn face, and the knotted hands which held the cheap toy, and a thought came to me of a narrow life which had known little but hard work, to which this common music meant operas and oratorios. It was nice music, too—old Henri had a soul, and he put it heartily into his mouth-organ. We clapped that number and encored it, and the man played the second tune with a vim that showed pleasure. And while arrangements were making for the next event I heard Esmond talking in his canoe to Mrs. Morgan.
“It’s too charming for words,” he said. “I’ve never known anything at all like it. The old-world simplicity—the quaintness—the good-will and earnestness of it. I didn’t know such people existed outside of books. Why, if you could get this atmosphere on a stage—”
With that a preliminary silence and the clearing of a throat warned us that the performance was about to continue. A young voice rang out over the water with manly vigor and pleasant distinctness—one caught every word:
C’était le vingt-cinq de juillet
Lorsque je me suis engagé
Pour monter dans la rivière
Qu’on appelle la rivière enragé.
On a monté dans la rivièr-e
En canot dans la Gatineau;
Plus souvent les pieds à ter-re,
Avec la charge de sur le dos.
The chanson went on to tell in not too artistic rhymes the story of a logger on the River Gatineau. The words were a bit bald in spots, yet they bubbled with picturesqueness—the rhymer had told what he knew, and that had kept the song simple and strong. But the words were beside the question. Far from an accomplished musician, I yet knew in a few bars that the air was out of the common, and probably very old. I knew that many of the songs of the habitants came with their ancestors from France, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and this one had an ancient ring.
The song ended—it was rather long—there was a second’s pause, and then a frank, manly voice, the voice of the singer, spoke from the stage of the spruce grove.
“Excusez-la,” said the voice.
It was prettier than I can describe. What was implied was so plain and so graceful—and only a Frenchman could have said it without self-consciousness. “What I have done is poor, but it is all I can do. I hope you will let it please you. It is my best, excuse it,” the two gracious words asked from us.
I looked at Mr. Esmond—he seemed petrified—he could not even clap, as the rest of us did. “I never knew anything like it,” I heard him murmur.
Bob, seldom suppressed for long, came to the front. “Zoëtique, Zoëtique, whistle it—sifflez-le, sifflez,” he called, and added an explanatory word to us. “It’s twice as good when he whistles; it’s a decent tune sung, but wait till you hear him whistle—it’s a peach.”
Presently the whistle came.
I think there is not any other whistling like that in the world—certainly I have never heard any, and many people who should know have said the same. The canoes lay motionless, the people in them hardly breathed, and out from the spruces, over the track of the moon, floated to us the sweetest sound I have ever heard made by a human being. Birds on a dewy morning throw out notes as clear and silvery, but bird-notes are weak and are haphazard. These came freighted with the vigor of a man, with the thought of humanity; there was in them the gladness of youth, a rapture of artistic fulfilment; and, beyond what any words can say, there was in them a personality impossible to say—a personality cramped into a narrow life which spread its wings unashamed in these sounds of loveliness. He whistled the air that he had sung, the old French air of unexpected harmonies, and it was as if a magic flute repeated the logger song of the “River Gatineau, which one called the raging river in the springtime.”
He stopped, and out of the dark hill beyond us floated an echo like the ghost of a flute of long ago.
There was deep stillness for a second, and Zoëtique’s unconcerned, clear voice broke it.
“Excusez-la” he said.
For a moment we were too stirred to join Bob’s energetic hand clapping. “Don’t you like it?” the youngster demanded. “I think it’s great. For cat’s sake, why don’t you encourage the lad?”
And, so adjured, we broke into as great a storm of applause as six people can manage, and, after, we discussed the sensation of the evening from boat to boat while the performers arranged further their hand-to-mouth programme. The concert went on; there were choruses, charming to listen to, in the ten men’s voices, all sweet with the musical sense of these people; there were separate solos, “A l’école du Roi,” “Au clair de la lune,” “Alouette, gentille alouette,” and others characteristically voyageur and habitant; and old Henri was made to play again on his mouth-organ. But the hero of the concert was the whistler, and three times more he was called before the curtain—which is to say that three times more from out of the mysterious darkness of the trees the flute notes flooded full down the moon-path and thrilled the misty air about us. And each time, at the end came Zoëtique’s unconscious, honest little speech of two words:
“Excusez-là.”
It was only Mr. Esmond, I remarked, who did not discuss the whistling as we paddled back to “the camp of the messieurs,” where the lamplight through the scarlet-curtained windows of the long front sent out a comfortable glow to welcome us. It seemed to me that Esmond was strangely silent for a man as talkative as he had shown himself. Even Mrs. Morgan could not make him express enthusiasm as to the hit of the evening.
“I’m afraid you didn’t like our whistling gentleman as much as we did,” she complained at last, as I helped her out of the canoe.
“Mrs. Morgan,” Esmond answered quickly, in his decisive, impressive manner, “I liked it far more than anybody, because, from my peculiar position, I am able to appreciate its value better and to see more possibility in it than any one here. I am going to prove that to you.” The moment we were inside the camp Esmond turned to his host. “I don’t want to impose on your hospitality, and I won’t make any move without your consent, but I’d like to explain to you who I am and what I want to do.”
Everybody looked surprised, and conversation stopped. “Yes,” Morgan answered tentatively.
“Perhaps you know my name, if you’re theatre-goers,” the stranger went on. “I’m Charles Esmond, the theatrical manager, and I have quite a lot of stock companies and theatres more or less under my control. Looking out for new stars isn’t my business nowadays, but it used to be, and I haven’t lost my scent for a good thing, and the minute I heard that boy whistle I knew he was a good thing. He does what is called double-tongue whistling, and that in itself is not common. But that is only incidental—it’s the quality of his performance that is extraordinary. I have heard the best people that are known at the business—it’s a limited business—and I’ve never heard any one who touches this guide of yours. Take that young fellow and put him on the stage and he’d make a hit for us, and for himself he’d make what would seem a big fortune in little or no time. I’d like to talk to him—now—to-night. May I?”
Impetuosity is peculiarly winning when it is backed by knowledge, and Morgan laughed and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Surely,” he said. “It’s interesting to run into an adventure up here in the wilderness. The boy is a good guide and I like him, yet I would not stand in the way of making his fortune for anything. Bob—” But Master Bob’s long legs were already chasing each other out of the low doorway in a rush after Zoëtique. In three minutes he was back with the man in tow.
Zoëtique Vézina was perhaps twenty-two years old, a stocky, well-built chap of five feet ten or so, with deep, powerful shoulders and a small waist and a body that moved with the grace of efficient muscles. His face was roughly carved and of his class, but he held his head with an air that had pride and sensitiveness both in it, and when he spoke and smiled the commonplace modelling of his features lighted with a gentleness and a spirit which made you understand his whistling. There was character and shading back of this ordinary-looking block of humanity. He wore blackened bottes sauvages of caribou leather, laced with thongs of hide through huge brass eyelets; his trousers looked as if they might have been somebody’s dinner clothes five years before—somebody not particularly his shape; his coarse red and blue striped sweater was belted with a broad band of black leather around a waist as trim as a girl’s. He pulled a nondescript felt hat from a shock head of dark hair as he entered, and his blue eyes gazed about half startled and half friendly.
We sat and listened as if at a play, while Charles Esmond, the great theatrical manager, conspicuous on two continents, interviewed this unknown backwoodsman. He did it in fluent French, with his own charm of manner, but it took some time to make Zoëtique understand what he was offering, and when he did understand, to our astonishment he did not respond. Esmond mentioned a salary to begin with so large that I gasped, and to the guide, accustomed to two dollars a day in good times, it must have seemed fabulous. Morgan voiced my thought when he put in a quiet, reassuring word.
“The m’sieur will do what he says, Zoëtique. I know all about the m’sieur, and he is to be relied on.”
“Merci, m’sieur,” the man answered with ready French politeness, but his expression did not change.
His bright, light-blue eyes simply lifted a second to smile at Walter, and dropped to the floor again. All of us waited as he stared at one knot-hole—a minute, two minutes, three minutes we waited in silence while Zoëtique considered that knot-hole.
At last, “I don’t want to hurry you,” Esmond said, “yet I would like to know by to-morrow. It’s the chance of your life, you understand. You couldn’t make as much money here in forty years as you could make in a winter or two in New York. I do not see why you should hesitate five minutes. But think it over—talk it over with your friends. I will wait till you pass our camp with your messieurs to-morrow morning.” He smiled his sudden, fascinating smile at the guide, and the contrast between the two was sharp and picturesque—the finished, handsome man of the world and the awkward, ill-clothed child of the people. “I know it must be startling to you,” Esmond said kindly. “You will have to collect your ideas a bit. But you must answer as I wish. I will wait till morning.”
Then the guide lifted his clear, light eyes and met the other’s slightly pitying gaze with unexpected dignity. “The m’sieur need not wait,” he said serenely. “I know my answer at this time. The m’sieur is very good to me, and I am glad that he is content with my poor whistling. I would be happy to make all that great money—mais—oui!—but I cannot go to New York as the m’sieur wishes.”
“You cannot go?” Esmond repeated in surprise, and we all stared.
Zoëtique’s gentle tones went on firmly. “But no, m’sieur. I have the intention to marry myself in the spring, and this winter I build my house. Alixe, my fiancée, would be disappointed if I should not build our house this winter.”
“But, man, you’ll have money enough to build a dozen houses—you can build one ten times as fine—you can pay men to build it for you, think of that!”
Zoëtique smiled—his smile was winning, but very self-contained, and the tilt of his head was assured. “It would be another thing, m’sieur. Alixe-là, she would be disappointed.”
Esmond argued. Patiently, with amusement first, and then a bit hotly, but the guide never lost his gentle respectfulness of manner or his firmness. Walter Morgan put in another word.
“Think carefully before you decide to give up so much money as this means, Zoëtique. As the m’sieur says, it is a chance for all of your life.”
The young fellow’s alert, bright eyes flashed gratitude. “But yes, m’sieur. I understand. However, one knows that to make money is not always to be happy—is it not the truth, m’sieur? We are a poor people, we others, habitants, and yet we are content. I am afraid to lose the happiness that I have, in that great city which I do not know. Here—I know. I am strong”—he pushed his big shoulders forward and smiled proudly as he felt their muscles. “I am capable and can work hard—I have planned my life, and I have the things which I wish. Why should I risk all that for—I do not know what? I thank the m’sieur”—he turned his blue glance on Esmond with a self-possession which the cosmopolitan might not have bettered. “I thank also my m’sieur much for all his goodness to me.” He stood up, his shabby old hat crushed in his hand. “I thank madame and every one for their good wishes. I am content that madame and the messieurs found pleasure in my poor whistling. Good night, madame—good night, messieurs.”
He had made his bow, as his peasant ancestors had been taught to make theirs in old France two hundred years before, with deep respect, with hat in hand and head bent. Here was a man who knew when he had enough. The question was closed. He was gone.
The next year it was in September that the Morgans asked me to their camp. Air like cooled wine breathed life into me as my canoe flew down Lac Lumière to the double paddle-beat of Godin and Josef, who had been sent to the club to fetch me. Sunshine lay over the lake and laughed back at us from the hills, where flecks of gold through green tree-tops told that the birches had caught the frost. One peculiarity of the woods is that at whatever time you go to them they persuade you at once, with a wordless, answerless logic, that it is their best season.
“This is better than August,” I called out to Walter and Margaret Morgan, standing smiling on the quay, while Bob kicked chips toward me in welcome.
“A thousand times better,” they called back together, and Bob stopped his gattling to respond classically:
“Golly, you bet!”
And it certainly was—till the next August at least. There were no flies, and one could fish without tar oil or citronella; each breath pumped energy into the lungs; the snap of the water made a man laugh and shriek aloud as he plunged into the lake in the morning with air at forty-five degrees; the fishing and hunting were at their best.
Down by the mouth of the little Rivière à la Poêle—the “Frying-pan River”—the trout were massing for the frayage, the spawning, and there in the cool of the evening, when the shallow water was dim in the low light—at about six o’clock, perhaps—they jumped like mad things for the fly. You had but to paddle across the lake and through the rushes, slower and slower, till the rustling against the boat slid into silence as you halted; you had but to pull loose a few feet of line with your left hand and to listen to the whir of it spinning out as you put your right wrist into the cast; you had but to drop the flies over the mystery of the brown water by the edge of the lily-pads—gingerly, it must be understood; cautiously, for this is the first cast for a year; carefully, man, with a tiny lift of the rod-tip as the flies fall so that the Parmachene Belle on the tail takes water first, and the Reuben Wood touches not too soon, and the black hand-fly skims with its snell clear of the pool. Such fitting small precautions, such pleasant proprieties, were all one had to observe at the mouth of the river “A la Poêle.”
The sweet water would meet your searching with a smile as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s—with the smile it had worn, careless of your existence, all these centuries; up the river you would hear the dull boom of the rapids, the nearer, busy monotone of the falling stream. The utter quiet of the woods, with its deep undertone of teeming life, would fold you in—there is nothing stiller. Peace and silence and the tranquil pool—only the steady swish of the line as you cast.
Suddenly a wild lashing and splashing and spraying; the bubble, bubble, bubble of broken water; a white and scarlet flashing that comes and goes where the black hand-fly holds taut to the water; a thrill and tug on your wrist that brings your heart to your mouth. You have struck automatically; he is on; you are playing your first fish of the season.
“Pas trop fort,” Godin remarks calmly from the stern; “not too hard, m’sieur. It is a big one.”
Probably, for the candidates, a presidential election is more exciting than this—certainly it lasts longer—yet I doubt very much if any quarter-hour of it carries more of a thrill. You feel Godin’s sense of the importance of the situation by the way he handles the boat. With light manœuvres of the paddle, not to disturb the pool too much, he works you, towing the fish, to a place where the water is clear and you can play his rushing lordship without fear of getting him tangled about lily-roots, and so pulling loose from the fly.
The fight is well on—it is the contest of a man’s brain, working with the awkward tools of a man’s muscles, in an unaccustomed situation, against a wonderful expert and gymnast in his own element. The outcome is always a doubtful one—it is a fair fight—that is where the thrill comes in. The long runs when you must give line with a swiftness beyond thinking; the lightning rushes toward the boat when your reel must work faster than your brain or you lose him; the lifting, the lowering of the rod that must be done by a sense acquired in many such battles, a sense come to be instinct more than reason; the whisper in the muscles that tells you not to pull him when he sulks; that tells you not to let him get line enough to shake free—all these phases and a hundred more which fishermen know were in that fight of mine on September ninth with my big record trout, down at the mouth of the Rivière à la Poêle. I won. I landed him, and he weighed five and a quarter pounds by the scales. It was my first fish of the season, and Godin was almost as pleased as I with this good beginning. We kept at it, of course, and we had what would have seemed good luck on other days, for a spotted fellow of two pounds, and three more of a pound and a half soon decorated the bottom of the boat. But the battle of the giants had led off; we had trapped the patriarch first. And, seeing this, and happy enough with our afternoon’s work as it was, Godin and I fell to talking.
He had crossed the pool now, and worked into the river, and was paddling slowly up it, where birch-trees hung over and met across brown running water, foam-spotted from rapids above. I cast at intervals, leisurely, as we floated up-stream, and the intermittent bright flight of the flies punctuated the guide’s clear-cut French sentences. A sudden thought of last year came to my mind.
“Godin,” I asked, and watched the Parmachene Belle flash delicately scarlet toward a lily-leaf. “Godin, where is Zoëtique this year?”
“Ah—oui,” the voice came from behind me. “I was about to tell the m’sieur of that. The m’sieur had an interest in Zoëtique, eh?”
“Certainly, I have an interest in him,” I answered. “I meant to ask M’sieur Morgan about him this afternoon, but I forgot.”
“Ah—oui,” said Godin again, and no more. There was a note of importance in his tone, and I rose to it.
“Well, what is it, then? Why isn’t he here? Where is he?” I threw over my shoulder.
Godin cleared his throat for heavy conversation. “Zoëtique est à New York,” he announced.
My flies came slapping against the boat. I certainly was surprised. “In New York?” I repeated.
“Ah, oui, m’sieur,” said Godin again. “The m’sieur who was here last year, the strange m’sieur who wished that he should go to New York to whistle—that m’sieur sent again to search for him in the springtime, and Zoëtique was content to go.”
“But I thought he was so decided about not going. I thought he was to be married, and was satisfied to stay here. I thought he didn’t care about making money—I thought—” and I stopped.
“It is the truth, m’sieur. All that was quite true—last year,” said Godin. “But one changes. Things arrive, and one’s life changes, and so it happens that one changes. It was like that with Zoëtique. It was that he had a quarrel with his girl—with his fiancée. It was that which altered the opinion of Zoëtique. I know all about that affair—me—for it is I that am the cousin of that girl, and she has talked to me. She has explained to me about what happened, comme il faut. I am sorry for her and sorry also for Zoëtique—both the two. It is most unhappy. But”—Godin shrugged his shoulders with the philosophy which most of us can feel in another’s tragedy. “But—what can one do? It is malheur—too bad—but it is life.”
“Can you tell me about it, Godin?” I asked.
“But yes, m’sieur—most certainly. Yet it is a long story—m’sieur may be ennuyé. I will recount to m’sieur all the things which are of importance—is it not?”
“As you think best.” So Godin began, clearing his throat as always in preparation for vocal effort. It was an ordinary enough little history, of a high-spirited, light-hearted girl, full of coquetry, vain perhaps, quick-tempered and jealous and exacting, but all that from thoughtlessness, not from the heart, and with the good qualities of her defects. For Godin made me see, with his simple yet keen analysis of his cousin, that brighter side also, which each one of us has. He made me see a girl who was honest and warm-hearted and large-minded enough to acknowledge herself in the wrong and to do right with a will when she saw it—a woman strong and deep enough to keep the current of love alive like a flowing river on whose surface dead branches and bad things indeed collect and cover the bright rippling for a moment, yet whose rushing stream can sweep such débris easily away. He told me from how little the trouble had begun; how Alixe had imagined slights that Zoëtique had never meant; how the man had tried to be patient at first, and then resented what he could not understand—cavalier treatment which he knew to be undeserved; how each had said things hard to forget; how another man and another girl had come into the breach and made it wider, and how at last the two, who really loved each other still, were so warped from the way of happiness that each was wretched and unnatural with the other, and that all comfort in each other’s presence was gone.
I remembered the proud lift of Zoëtique’s head and his responsive quick smile, and the delicate, close searching of his blue, alert eyes, as Godin told me that he was vif—I understood how the big, strong fellow, with a soul sensitive as a child’s, a heart modest and secretly distrustful of its own power to hold affection—how he might have felt at the end that he had given all that was in him to a woman who did not care, who held him lightly, who played with him as he had seen her play with other men. So it did not surprise me when Godin went on to narrate how, when a letter had come again from Mr. Esmond, Zoëtique had suddenly cut loose from everything and had gone off, with a few curt words to Alixe for all good-by, to find a new way of life in New York.
There had been news from him once or twice, telling of his immediate success, of the astonishing gayeties of a great city, of his own happiness and absorption in them, and how he had already almost forgotten the narrow interests of the Canadian village. It was the letter that a sore and angry man would write, I reflected—hitting blindly as hard as he could, harder than he knew, at the hand that had hurt him.
“Do you believe he is as happy as all that?” I asked, thinking aloud.
Godin shrugged his talkative shoulders.
“’Sais pas,” he said. “My cousin Alixe, she is not happy. One does not know it—the world—but I know, for she has told me. She will never marry—she says it, and she is not a girl to change her mind. It is easy for her to flirt with this man and that—oh, yes! for she is a girl who draws the garçons. But for love—it is another matter. She will not love any but Zoëtique. It is malheur, for she is a good ménagère—a good worker—and she should marry. But it is that she will not do. It was to me she said that she was proud to have loved Zoëtique and proud that he should once have loved her and that she would rather have that pride than marry another. It is not reasonable—but it is Alixe. She goes about her affairs, oh, but certainly. One does not know that she still loves him—but I know it. She will not marry—it is certain. But as to Zoëtique—’sais pas. He gains b’en d’argent. He sees life. He amuses himself well. It is much. When one is light-hearted it is much. Yet when the heart is heavy all that makes nothing. It is a garçon—a fellow—of much heart always. Always he was faithful to his friends, Zoëtique. It seems drôle to me that he can so soon have lost the souvenir of his place and the people to whom he was accustomed. It is drôle that. Yet one cannot tell.” He shrugged his shoulders again as if to slip the whole question off them with the movement. “’Sais pas.”
In late November the days in the Morgans’ camp had become a page of past life, a page illuminated with blue and gold, hazy with romance, bright with adventure, marginally illustrated with the mighty shade of the bull moose I had shot, with the pink and silver vanishing glory of my five-pound trout, with flying pictures of black duck and partridges which had fallen to my gun; a page to be turned to and dreamed over, again and again, yet a page of the past for all that.
On an evening, then, of November, I went out to dinner and to the theatre afterward. It was to a vaudeville which was attracting attention that we were taken. I do not care for vaudeville, and I merely suffered the numbers to pass as civilly as I might, talking between them, during them if I could, to one or two people of the party who were more interesting. The big placard in the glare of the footlights was shifted, read No. 5. I turned my chair sidewise in the back of the box and leaned forward to the woman in front of me.
“Don’t watch this number—talk to me,” I suggested. “It’s an educated pig who does sums.”
“You’re trying to deceive me,” the woman said, and laughed, and picked up her fluttering play-bill. “No. 5—why, it isn’t a pig at all, it’s whistling.”
“Then, for heaven’s sake, talk to me,” I begged. “Some things I can live through, but fifteen minutes of whistling with no relief—talk to me. It’s life and death.”
“Look at the name,” she answered irrelevantly. “What a queer name—it starts out to be Zoroaster and gets side-tracked. This must be the wonderful whistling Mrs. Schuyler talked about—we must listen—they say it’s the best thing in the evening, and is making a sensation.”
“Let it—I don’t want to hear it,” I answered from a soul immune to vaudeville sensations, and I did not glance at the programme.
A boy came into the box swinging a tray of glasses of ice-water. I took one and held it in my hand as I spoke. At that moment No. 5 began. With a whirl of my chair which made the man next me frown with astonishment, I had twisted toward the stage, the glass crashed to the floor; the water splashed on a velvet gown and I did not see it; I saw only a figure which stood there, alone, by the footlights.
Strong, sweet, the song of the loggers on the River Gatineau rang flute-like through the theatre. The homely words, like meek handmaidens, followed in my mind the melody:
C’était le vingt-cinq de juillet
Lorsque je me suis engagé
Pour monter dans la rivière
Qu’on appelle la rivière enragé.
I gasped as if I had plunged suddenly into the cold rapids of a rushing little river. The crowded theatre, the heat, the glare, were gone; I lay in a canoe in misty moonlight, in deep peace of Canadian hills, and from the shore floated the bird-notes of Zoëtique’s whistling.
It took me a minute to get back to earth, and another to explain, and then I drifted again into the heart of the woods. Stillness, pure air, running water and rustling trees; brightness and shadow of long portages, starlight and firelight and sunny lengths of lakes, a thousand poignant memories, seized me and carried me into a quiet, keen world, with a joy that was almost pain, as I stared from the box at Zoëtique’s familiar figure standing back of the footlights.
There was a pause; the Gatineau song was finished, his winning smile flashed.
“Excusez-la,” said Zoëtique.
After the number was over I went back of the scenes and found him, and talked to him for an unsatisfactory five minutes. He was glad to see me, but some men whose air I did not like were waiting for him, and he was uneasy with me in their presence.
At that moment No. 5 began.
“Are you happy, Zoëtique?” I asked bluntly, as I told him good-by, and the blue eyes flashed to mine a second with an honest, half-tragic look. He shrugged his shoulders.
“’Sais pas, m’sieur. I am gaining much money. One is never too happy in this world, is it not? Or in any case, not for too long.”
We arranged that I should pick him up the next night after his number, and take him to my rooms, and with that I left him.
When I got back to my own place I could not shake off the idea of Zoëtique. I sat and smoked and considered for an hour, and I came to see that I was due to meddle in this affair. The boy was out of his proper atmosphere, and the glimpse I had had of him and of the men who were his companions had showed me that he was getting into bad hands. The Morgans were away—he knew no one else. I thought of the girl in the little French village in Canada eating out her heart for him, and of the happiness and self-respect and normal life waiting there for him, and a meteoric vaudeville success did not seem to me worth while as I thought of those things. So, as I sat smoking alone at three in the morning in a twelfth-story New York apartment, I elected to be guardian angel to this backwoods boy and settle him in a log cabin of his own with a wife who cared for him. I could not think of anything else as good that fate could give him.
I decided to see Charles Esmond next day and get his consent, as was only decent, to send the youngster about his business, and if there was any forfeit to pay I was luckily so situated that I could pay it. Bright and early I hunted up Esmond, and after a most unpromising start, including surprise, disgust, reluctance, on his part, I finally got at the man’s good feeling, and persuaded him.
“I think you’re clean gone off your head,” was his parting remark, “and I think I’m worse. But you’ve hypnotized me. Take your brat and ship him back, or I’ll change my mind.” And I left him in a hurry.
I bundled Zoëtique into a taxicab that night the moment he had finished his whistling, leaving two evil-appearing Frenchmen looking black at his evasion. I expected enthusiasm over the taxi, but the lad was too much for me.
“One drives in these wagons every day here,” he remarked calmly. “My friends tell me it is comme il faut.”
“The devil they do,” I responded in stout English. “You must be spending money like water.”
He shrugged his expressive shoulders. “Ça coute cher,” he acknowledged. “It is expensive. But what will you? One gains money every night, and one has nothing to save for. It is well to make pleasure for one’s friends.” And remembering the adventurers I had seen, I felt confirmed in my opinion that it was also well to snatch this brand from the burning.
Sophisticated as he had become, Zoëtique showed primitive interest in my rooms. He went from one thing to another, examining, asking deferential questions, and listening with deep attention to my answers. He put every picture in the place under analysis, and at length he came to a wide frame which held eight photographs set side by side. I heard him catch his breath as he bent over and saw what they were, and I heard his long-drawn “Ah, oui!” that was yet only a whisper. He stood like a statue, his head thrown forward, gazing.
After a while I put a hand on his shoulder and pointed to one of the prints. It was a snap-shot of himself and of me, taken an August morning on a little, lonely river. Zoëtique stood upright in the stern of the canoe, poling it through the shallows. His athletic figure swung with a sure balance; the wind swayed the grasses and floated the ends of the bandanna about his throat. I held my hat on my head as the breeze caught it, and he smiled broadly to see me. The spire of a tall spruce in the distance cut into the sky. It was one of those lucky amateur photographs which wing the spirit and the drawing combined. It takes perhaps a thousand films to produce one, but no professional work comes near the effect when such a one succeeds.
A tremor went through his shoulder as my hand fell on it. “Which is more pleasure for you and me, Zoëtique, to drive in a taxicab in New York, like to-night, or to be together en canot, like that?” I asked him.
The boy turned and shot at me a wild look, and with that he dropped into a chair by my writing-table and laid his head on his arms and sat motionless. I waited two or three minutes. Then I drew up a seat and sat down near him, and at the top of the rough head I fired my opening shot.
“I want you to go home, Zoëtique,” I said quietly. That brought him up staring.
“Mais, m’sieur—mais—c’est b’en impossible,” he stammered at me, startled.
So then I talked to him like a Dutch uncle, as a man of forty can talk to a lad of twenty-three. I told him, to begin with, that it was arranged with Mr. Esmond that he might go to-morrow if he would. I told him that while he was making money he was not saving any; that he was doing no good here, and was throwing away his life—and he agreed with pathetic readiness.
“One is not absolutely happy in this city, m’sieur,” he agreed. “One gets drunk every night, and it is not good for the health. At home I got drunk rarely, m’sieur—me—oh, but rarely. Perhaps at the fête de Noël, and when one finished logging in the spring—c’est tout. Not always as often—it is better for the health like that.”
It was not the psychological moment to lecture, but I put away a reflection or two at this point for Zoëtique’s later service.
“Yes, it is bad for the health, Zoëtique,” I answered with restraint. “It is bad for one in several ways. One is not so much of a man when one gets drunk. I’m glad you think with me that Canada is the place for you.”
There was deep silence. I felt distinctly the stone wall at which we had arrived, and I knew it must be taken down rock by rock. I knew that the question of the girl was coming.
“I cannot go, m’sieur.”
“Why not?”
“There are other things. It is difficult to say. The m’sieur is good to me. It makes nothing to me if the m’sieur knows. But it is a small affair—to all but me—and it would be ennuyant to the m’sieur to hear about it.”
“It would not be ennuyant at all, Zoëtique,” I said. “But I know already. Godin told me.”
“Ah!” He was wondering as to how much I knew.
“I know about your trouble with Alixe, and that it got worse and not better as time went on, until you were not happy with each other any more. I was sorry to hear that, for it is not a little thing to have a woman love one as Alixe loves you.”
Zoëtique, with his eyes glued on his great hands, which lay before him on the table, shook his head. “M’sieur is mistaken. Alixe does not love me.”
“Yes. She does. More than ever.”
The boy’s head lifted, and he flashed an inquiring glance. Then a look of sick disgust came over his face and he shook his head again sullenly.
“M’sieur is mistaken,” he repeated. “She does not care—Alixe.”
But I persisted. “I know, Zoëtique. I have heard news since you have heard. Alixe cares for you still—she has always cared. She is sorry for the wrong things she has done—she would not do them again. She loves you.”
Then the suppressed soreness of his soul broke out. It was no longer as guide to m’sieur, it was as man to man he talked. “m’sieur,” he said roughly, “I know. You do not know. Is it that a woman loves a man when she is ready to think him false, ready to believe he means bad things when he does not imagine anything bad? Is it that a woman loves a man when she says words to him that hurt as if one had cut with a knife? Is it that she loves him when she will not listen when he tries to make all right again? Is it that a woman loves a man when”—his light eyes blazed—“when she plays with other men—lets others be to her what only one should be—does that show love? Is it that a woman loves a man when these things are the truth?”
“Sometimes,” I said, and Zoëtique stared at me in dumb anger.
I went on. I tried to show him in simple words how each of us has a Doctor Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde more or less evenly developed in his or her make-up, and how at times the bad gets into the saddle and rides; how this devil of wrong-headedness holds possession and makes man and woman lose perspective, so that the brain does not see the ugliness of the words the mouth speaks; how it is most often to the ones we care for most that such things are said, because our very sense of love for them puts us off our guard. I asked him also—remembering something from a long time ago—if he had not perhaps put bad meaning into speeches that were innocent—if his imagination had not been partly responsible.
“’Sais pas,” said Zoëtique, and shrugged his shoulders. “One accustomed oneself to have her words hurt—it might be that one jumped before the whip fell.”
His face was bitter—this end of my job was no sinecure. I talked along, trying to put my finger on the thin part of the boy’s armor. I drew on Godin’s description, and pointed out how the girl was high-spirited and imaginative, and how some unmeant slight, most likely, had set her to thinking that his love had grown less. How her treatment of him, so bewildering and insulting, was thus an assertion of her dignity—foolish and mistaken, yet only, at the end, a woman’s self-respect. How her exactions, her air of calling him to account which had so galled him, were the poisonous flowers which had sprung in the shadow between them. I tried to make him see how such bad exotics would wither in five minutes of sunlight. I talked like a whole committee of grandfathers to Zoëtique Vézina that night. But at one time I thought I should have to give it up, for he simply shook his head.
“One does not put one’s hand into a trap to be cut off twice,” he said over and over.
Finally I violated Godin’s confidence. “Boy,” I said, “won’t you understand that you’re throwing away the most loyal wife a man could have? She is above the ordinary girl—you know it. If her faults are bigger than another’s, her virtues are bigger, too. She will never get into this hole again—you may wager your life on that. She is clever—she has learned her lesson. She will not risk shipwreck twice. And—I know this, for she has said it—she will never marry any one but you. The other man was a plaything—she tried to pique you with him. It is a foolish trick, but women and men will do it to the end of time.”
I wondered then if he suspected ever so dimly what buried memories made me want to save another man’s life from this foolishness. I looked squarely at him and met his eyes.
“Zoëtique,” I flung at him, out of the bottom of my soul, “do you love her?”
The bright light eyes wavered, looked miserably back at me—yet straight and honest. I waited, and out of the bottom of the lad’s soul came the reluctant answer:
“But yes, m’sieur, I love her.”
“Then, for Heaven’s sake, man, go to her and be happy!”
Once more the muscular arms were flung out on my writing-table and the dark head fell on them, but this time the bitterness was gone from the pose. The room was still for a minute, and then he lifted his face and it was smiling, and a tear was wet on his cheek.
“M’sieur has won—I will do as m’sieur wishes,” he said, embarrassed, laughing, and the rest of that interview was as uninteresting as the nations which have no history.
True love is no hot-house plant, and, like moss on the trees, it grows warmest where north winds are cold; but, for all that, it does not take to being sandpapered, and if one walks on it with hobnailed boots it is likely to die down. Yet it is true that deep roots may with cultivation sprout again—may even sprout thicker if cared for tenderly. All the same, it is ill-advised to try more than one episode of hobnails and sandpaper. Zoëtique and Alixe, learning it painfully, learned this lesson thoroughly, and I think that never again will they take liberties with their affection for each other. That it has sprung plentifully from the trodden roots I am led to believe from strangely spelled French letters which reach me from time to time. My conscience as a meddler is much soothed by these letters.
As for the other side of my meddling—a few nights ago I dined at the Lambs’ Club, and across the room was Charles Esmond, with a galaxy of stars shining about him. At the end of dinner he picked up his coffee and came over with it to us, smoking like a chimney as he came. He set down the cup and took my hand, and then shook his fist at me and laughed at my host—fascinating and unexpected as I remembered him in the Canadian camp.
“Dick,” said he to my friend, “this chap is a common burglar—don’t give him any more dinner. He burgled the best number out of the best vaudeville I ever staged—plain stole the boy without remorse—the most marvellous whistler the profession has ever seen. I’d have made a mint of money off the fellow—he was just beginning to make a sensation. And this man you’re feeding lifted him, inside of twenty-four hours, and shipped him back to Canada to the girl he’d left behind him.” He proceeded to make an anecdote five minutes in length and telling practically all I have told, from the gist of what I have spun out so long.
When I got back to my rooms that night I found in my mail a birch-bark enveloped photograph of my lovers, now married. Zoëtique, in store clothes which took all the good looks out of him, sat solemn in a chair with a cheap derby hat on his head, and Alixe stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder—smiling, dark-eyed, and graceful.
I looked at the heroine hard and long, and then I unlocked a drawer and took out an old photograph of another dark-eyed girl, and put them side by side and let myself dream how it would be if that hand were sometimes on my shoulder, if those eyes smiled, so, to be at my side—if we had not quarrelled. I do not often let myself have this dream, because it makes work and play harder for a day or two.
I look forward to a month in Canada next summer, and I expect to have a guide who will turn the woods upside down to get me good fishing and hunting, as is the just reward of a successful meddler. And in the intervals of serious business I expect to listen without paying admission to the “best number of the best vaudeville ever staged”—No. 5—Zoëtique’s whistling.
THE YOUNG MAN WITH WINGS