CHAPTER XXIII.
After the first blank moment of surprise I turned, not to Spoof or "Mrs. Alton" or the boy, but to Jean. There was a momentary tremulousness, but almost instantly Jean had herself under control; she was more the artist than I knew. I began to realize how far her artistry carried.
"This is news!" she cried. "When did——" She stopped short. A wave of color flushed her face. Gerald did not admit of casual explanation.
The child, now relieved of cumbersome clothing, was standing on sturdy feet in the middle of the room getting his bearings. His big, intelligent eyes were losing no time in making an appraisal of me and mine.
Jean swooped upon him; clasped him up in her arms. Perhaps it was because at that moment she must have action. Her face was pressed into his little white neck. "Big Boy, Big Boy," she whispered, "why didn't you tell me this before?"
Spoof and his wife and I still stood as though rooted to the floor. The woman seemed to avoid my gaze, but when at times I caught a glimpse of her face there was something finer than embarrassment in it; there was embarrassment, it is true, but something almost seraphic as well.
Suddenly, "I think we women should go over to Twenty-two," Jean exclaimed. "Marjorie must know the great news. Come, Jerry!"
At the door the collie joined them, capering uneasily in the snow. Spoof and I watched them as they took their way along the well-trodden trail across the gully; then we stabled his oxen in silence.
Back in the house, Spoof drank a cup of tea and rolled me a cigarette—I never smoked cigarettes except under Spoof's malign influence—before he showed a disposition to talk. Then, seated on one of my rough benches, behind the blue haze of his own tobacco smoke, he spoke.
"It's a long story, Hall, if one covered all the details," he said. "Fortunately, between friends, that isn't necessary."
"I married this woman that you know as Mrs. Alton five years ago Christmas Day. You will understand why Jack's wedding was something of an anniversary to me. In course of time Gerald was born. Up until then, and for some time afterwards, everything was all right.
"Then—something happened. In what I chose to call righteous indignation I turned her out. Perhaps it was more mortified pride, or just blind, beast jealousy. Never mind. Through it all I gave myself credit for being just, even generous. I gave her half of my ready money, which wasn't much; I've never been much of a money-grabber, Hall; it has always seemed such an inconsequential business. But I gave her half of what I had, and settled on Gerald the small income I could command, and let her keep the boy. That was the biggest thing. I see a good deal of it through different light to-day, but for letting her keep the boy I demand some credit still. I've done one or two hard things, Hall. Yon know. That was one of them."
He finished his cigarette and lit another.
"Then I came out here," he continued. "It seemed the wisest thing to do. I was settling into the hope of forgetting it all and making a new start when she followed me." He held up his hand as if to silence me, although I had made no move to speak. "I don't blame her—now," he said. "But then—last summer, you know—it rather interfered. I may as well be frank with you. I had an idea that Jean would just about complete section Two. She's a wonderful girl, Jean.
"Then came Alice, and I knew that wouldn't do. It would make blackmail too easy. I was base enough to think of that.
"After Jack's wedding I gave the whole thing some serious thought. I surmised how the land lay between you and Jean, and what had interrupted your plans. I concluded that the only decent thing to do was to drop out of your lives, for the time being. Well, Jean wouldn't have it. You know—the other day. . . . That was one of the hard things I was thinking about when I spoke of them a moment ago.
"Frank, she lit a thousand old fires of memory that morning. Moving about in my room; sitting at my table; pouring my tea—God, man, do you understand? It was too much for anybody. . . . I don't know what would have happened. At any rate, I ask you to believe that I was making my fight. . . . . Then you came."
He threw away half of an unsmoked cigarette and rolled another.
"Then I spent some sleepless nights, Frank, old boy. I was glad you had come, and even in my gladness for that sometimes I wished you—We humans are such queer mixtures; beyond analysis. But the more I admitted these things to myself the more I had also to admit that something might be said for Alice. Alice had once been to me all that it now seemed that Jean might be. I wondered if, by some miracle, that might not come again. Wasn't the obstacle, all the obstacle, the only obstacle, right in my own mind? What if I should root it out? What if I should say, 'I'm too big a man to submit to this; I refuse to be tyrannized by a little jealous demon in one corner of my mind?' . . .
"I began to think that perhaps after all Alice's purpose in following me here was quite different from what I had suspected. Women are strange creatures. They keep you guessing, as you say in this country."
"Better that than boredom," I heard my own voice saying.
"Shake!" said Spoof, springing suddenly to his feet and seizing me by the hand. "Shake! By Jove, I didn't know it was in you. If I were a moralist, setting light houses on the reefs about the sea of matrimony, I would set the biggest, blazingest light on Boredom. But nobody set a light on it for me . . .
"Besides, I wanted tremendously to see the boy.
"So yesterday I hitched the oxen and broke trail over to 'Widow Alton's.' My afflictions had brought me to a sufficiently humble frame of mind to let Alice say her say. For awhile she couldn't say anything; just wept, you know, and cried my name over and over, and sometimes Gerald's. Mighty uncomfortable for a man standing around and feeling that in some way he's to blame for it all.
"Well, when we got down to facts she had come in the hope of raising money by means of homesteading so that she could educate the boy. Fancy that, and me associating her with blackmail! But when she found, through old Jake, that I had located here, she wasn't above following. And yet she was afraid of me; afraid she'd meet me somewhere; afraid I'd come over to her homestead; and all the time hoping I would! Women are strange creatures.
"Well, we talked it all over, and"—and for the first time in his narrative Spoof's face lighted with a gentle smile—"I didn't go back to Two last night at all. We're planning a sort of quinquennial honeymoon progress about the district, and, properly enough, our first call is at Fourteen. And now that that's off my chest, behold a man happy once more. I am amazed at the folly that denied me all these years—— Men, too, are strange creatures.
"There's just one thing—a very insignificant thing compared with Alice's happiness, and mine, and Gerald's, but it's this: In taking up her homestead she had to declare herself a widow. She did it for the boy's sake, and she knows she will have to give up the claim, but will she get into further trouble? Will they let it go at that?"
That was a poser, and I turned it over in my mind for some minutes. "Better see Jake about that," I suggested. "He'll find a way."
"That's right!" said Spoof. "Jake's the boy. And he owes me something yet on that cogitation nut transaction.
"Just one more thing," Spoof resumed, after a little. "I've told you a great deal more than I propose to tell anyone else. It seemed to me that you—and Jean—had a peculiar right to know."
Almost before we knew it the springtime was upon us. It came suddenly, out of a March sky and a south-west wind, and the hard, illimitable distances of winter softened and mellowed before our eyes. The drifts fell away; brown spots came out on the edge of the gully; little streamlets cataracted over its banks; blue snow-water gathered in its depressions; adventurous early gophers sent their challenge from bank to bank. The waters in the gully gathered and grew; presently they were forcing ahead, into and under and over the drifts that barred their way; their pleasant gurglings came up through the clear, calm, lengthening twilights.
The bare fields came forth; the dark brown clodded earth looked up in a million mimic mountain peaks through a wrinkled blanket of snow; the grass stirred on the prairies; a flush of green ran down the long shadows of the evening. Once more was the world alive!
They were busy times for us. Every hour of springtime, like the seed sown in the spring, multiplies many fold by autumn; the tale of slothfulness in spring is written big in harvest—or rather, in lack of harvest. As soon as the snow was gone from the plowed fields and the frost was out an inch or two we were at work with our harrows; then, in a few days more, sowing our crops. There was a pleasant neighbourliness, a satisfying community of interest, in casting the eye across our level prairies and noting the slow-moving seeder-shuttles plying up and down across the cool, moist warp of earth.
The skies and clouds of springtime were almost as wonderful as the prairie dawns and sunsets. I suppose it is because of the vast sameness of the prairies themselves that we learned to turn our eyes so often to the heavens. When one's vision is hemmed about by woods and hills he is in danger of missing the greater majesty of the skies. Many a breathing spell had Buck and Bright while I turned in my plow-handles to watch the gentle drift of cloud shadows gliding over the fields, or to plunge my eyes into the blue vacuum of eternal space.
When Jean would bring my lunch at four in the afternoon we would sit on the grass in the shade of the wagon at the end of the field and daydream for a moment or two with feathery, fleecy, high-flying clouds of heaven as a background for our fancies. Sometimes great, billowy, boisterous, low-lying masses loomed up in our horizon, level along the bottom like islands floating in a sea of space; heaped and puffed and pinnacled in their upper parts. If these gathered and grew we might expect a dash of rain with a bright sun afterwards and a rainbow in the east.
Jean would throw the remaining crumbs to the gophers and massage Buck's forehead between the horns before she left. This was always a popular proceeding for Buck. He acknowledged it by circling his prodigious tongue about his nose, and sometimes embracing Jean's apron in its orbit.
It had been arranged that during the busy season I should take my meals at Jack's, and Jean had volunteered the duty of carrying my afternoon lunches to the field. There was little time now for either poetry or prose, and yet we lived amazingly in the spirit. Between the plow-handles one must think of something, and I recalled and re-recalled those things I had read during the winter. At lunch time, or in the evenings, I would talk of them with Jean, always trying to approach her from some new and unsuspected angle. As, for instance, when a summer shower threatened us, I quoted (I had borrowed a Shelley from Spoof):
"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noon-day dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one——"
Jean turned her face to mine, and something in her eyes was deeper than the great clouds gathering overhead. "A year ago you would have said, 'Looks like rain,'" was her ample comment.
With springtime came ducks to the pond, and to our table. Jean had so far overcome her reluctance to killing that she would crawl with me for what seemed ages, worming along through the grass of the slopes on the northern side of the pond, for the chance of sharing with me that moment of ecstasy in which I killed a living thing. The ducks had been much shot at in their flight northward and were careful to avoid the ambush afforded by the grove on the southern side of the pond. Eventually Jean began taking out the gun on her own account, and it was a tremendously proud day when she brought home her first mallard. Usually we did our shooting in the evening, when the banks were in the shadow but there was still light on the water. The sharp whistle of duck wings would be followed by the flash of my gun and the glow of burnt wadding. . . . Then there was the walk home through the gleaming night.
We had built a bridge of poles in the gully at the road between Fourteen and Twenty-two, as a stream a foot deep was now flowing across the path. One evening, just as I was unharnessing the oxen, Jean came rushing to me in great excitement.
"Frank, there are fish in the creek! I saw them darting in every direction! What can we catch them with?"
"Suckers, they'll be," said I, "but even a sucker is good in the spring." We hurried to the stable, where we got two hay forks.
"You stand on guard on the bridge, and if any go through, jab 'em," I directed. "I'll go down stream and drive 'em up."
It was not long until I detected half a dozen forms, almost black in the water, and resting in the most innocent stillness except for the constant dilation of mouth and gills. I jabbed at the nearest. But a fish in the water is not exactly where he seems to be, and I missed him. He and his company dashed at tremendous speed toward the bridge, with me in wild pursuit. After the first step or two I abandoned the bank and plunged into the stream, striking and jabbing recklessly. Suddenly I landed one—pierced through the tail, I must confess—and threw him far up the bank.
"Oh, they're coming, they're coming! I see them!" Jean shouted. She teetered for a moment on the plank; then jumped—or fell—into the stream and was jabbing about, somewhat to the menace of my feet, and her own. Her skirts trailed wetly down the tide, and clung about her limbs. But she was thinking not a bit of that. In wild triumph she threw out a fish bigger than mine, and jabbed where a fish ought to be jabbed.
One evening Spoof came over, carrying his gun.
"There's good crane shooting out at Reed Lake," he said. "Brown and I were up last night; got four beauties. Jean seems to be shooting rather well; thought you and she might like to go out on a crane hunt, so I brought over my gun."
"But you—you'll come, won't you?"
"No, not this time," said Spoof, sagely. "I've got all I can use for some days."
Jean was enthusiastic, so we quit work early the next afternoon and drove to Reed Lake, about seven or eight miles to the west. The sun was setting across an expanse of marshy water surrounded by low, reedy shores when we unspanned. A single clump of willows offered shelter on the eastern side of the lake, and we made our camp beside it.
Far out in the water were myriads of ducks but they kept well beyond range. We couldn't afford to waste cartridges on the snipe and plover that ran crying along the shore.
Slowly the long northern twilight settled into darkness as we sat in our camp and watched the colors gently dulling on the glass-like surface of the lake. Darker it grew, until the brighter stars came out. All was silent and still. But when one listened intently to the silence it became alive with noises. The grumbling of wild duck; the cry of a curlew; the blatant bombast of the bullfrog; the myriad industries of the little folk of night filled the air.
The light faded out of the west; the afterglow paled and darkened; a faint arc lay across the northern sky; a million stars winked at two campers sitting by a wagon and a willow bush, and drew their own conclusions.
I had fastened a horse blanket to the side of our wagon, dropping one edge to the ground. In front of it I spread another on the grass, and here we sat, sheltered from the cool night breezes that came solemnly whispering over the tops of the reeds that bordered the lake. While the light held out I had sat with a book in my hand, but we had not read; we were reading the book of earth and sky, of light and shadow, of wind and water, and perhaps of love.
"It is so dark," Jean said at length. "How can we see to shoot, even if they do come?"
Jean seemed to doubt the efficiency of any method of hunting that consisted in sitting down beside a horse blanket and waiting for the game to come up and be shot. She could understand crawling for a hundred yards, head down and heels down, except as a waving foot might serve to semaphore her signals. But to sit and wait. . . . . She was counting stars.
"There they come!" I suddenly breathed, scarce daring to whisper, as a new note came up from the water. "Quietly—quietly."
We rose to our feet and stalked silently to the water's edge. There was nothing to be seen. We were surrounded entirely by reeds higher than our heads. We were sinking slowly in the moist mud; water was trickling through the lace holes in my boots.
"We'll have to go in," I whispered. "Are you game?"
I felt the pressure of her free hand upon my arm.
"Anywhere—with you."
So we stepped quietly but boldly into the water. It came to the ankles, the calves, the knees. Then we were through the reeds and the lake lay before us, dim and misty, like a sheet of frosted glass.
"We'll wait here. If we're lucky they'll come our way."
Out of the air came a rushing. Great wings beat almost upon our heads. But they came and were gone before we knew it.
"Just a couple of strays beating around the lake," I explained. "We'll wait for the waders."
Presently, and without notice save the soft splashing of water, they came wading down the shallows close to where we stood, their great bodies dim and dark against the frosted glass; their long necks stretched high, or grubbing in the reeds beside them. One—two—three—four—five—six; on they came.
"Take the first two; I'll take the next."
Our guns came to our shoulders in the darkness; we looked, rather than sighted, at the great birds scarce a rod away; then—right barrel!—left barrel!—we woke the echoes of the lake and filled the air with tempestuous noises. From every side came the splash of water and the rush of wings. The stillness, the gentleness of the night in a moment became the wildest babel of confusion.
But we had no thought for that. Splashing right before us were great forms; flapping, struggling, eddying about. I would have held Jean back but she rushed ahead of me into the melee. She had one by the neck; the lust of killing was upon her; it was a fight to a finish. . . . Afterwards we dragged them out—three of them. Jean declared there had been another, but he managed to hide himself in the rushes.
Then we built a fire beside the willow and warmed ourselves.
Before the water was warm enough for bathing I sent to Regina for a bathing suit. "The gaudiest thing you have," I said, and they took me at my word. It was a great day when I made my appearance in it. In the evenings, after a day of dust in the fields, we revelled in the cool waters of our pond. Jean would race me from end to end, but she was much too good a swimmer for me.
Then came one of those rare summer nights—rare on the prairies—when the air does not cool off with the approach of evening, and all the heat of day seems hemmed in by black clouds crowding overhead. I had gone to bed, but not to sleep. The far away flashing of heat lightning continuously lit my room with a vague twilight; my blankets had become unbearable, and I threw them off. The silence was intense; the very night seemed to brood over me; the perspiration stood out upon me. It took me back to the hot nights of the East, so little known with us, and from that starting point my mind went wandering down through old ways, down to the dam and the mill-wheel and the little boy and girl who were the starting point of all my recollections. Jean it had been then; Jean it was, with whom all my thoughts were linked; Jean was still the innermost hope of my heart. I had waited, patiently as I could, and the spring and summer months had seen arise between us an affection deeper, vaster, wider than anything I had known in those days when we had talked of love together. Our world had grown and we had grown with it. Ours was continually the spirit of the new adventure; continually a faring forth into the unknown.
But I had not talked of love. It had been my conception of artistry to speak no more of love, daring all my hope on the prospect that the fires which I guessed had been rekindled in Jean's heart would in time burst all her womanly restraint. Then she would come to me. Jean was big enough for that.
I had tried to follow her in spirit through the torment of those days after Spoof's revelation. I had guessed how hard it had been for her, and I kept silence. I conceived that that was artistry.
But there must be an end sometime—sometime soon. I was not all artist, like Jean. Artistry was my means to an end. There must be an end. . . . Which would be the beginning. . . .
Came a tapping on my window. I sat up quickly.
"Frank?"
"Yes?"
"Asleep?"
"Not within miles of it. Whew! Ever see a night like this?" I had thrust my head through the open window and could see her form dimly outlined against the night.
"Used to be the usual thing, down East," she answered. "But we get out of the way of them, here. Get up and let's go for a swim."
A flash of lightning revealed her in her bathing suit. I was soon out of bed and into mine.
"Beat you to the other end of the pond," she said, as we threaded our way down the well-worn path.
"You always beat me," I confessed. "But I'm game; I'll try again."
We took the water together; its comforting tide wrapped us about as we swung through it with long, easy strokes. Jean suited her pace to mine; her body was a rhythmic machine, lithe, supple, almost serpentine in its movements. Her hair was down. When a glow of distant lightning fell about us her face was ivory white, cameo-like, against the black water.
At the far end was a small beach of sand, and we drew ourselves up upon it. Jean drew her feet up tailor-wise, shook out her hair; traced idly with her fingers in the sand.
"I had a dream, Frank," she said at length. "I dreamed you were wrecked on a lonely island, where you seemed doomed to spend all your days. But one night when you were sleeping a nymph of the wilderness stole up and whispered something in your ear. And this is what she said: 'Go down to the beach at midnight and light a fire on the sand, and a beautiful maiden shall come up out of the sea. Take her; she is yours.'
"And you turned in your sleep and said, 'Mine—forever?' And the nymph said, 'Forever, if you will obey the law.'
"And you said, 'What law?' And the nymph said, 'The law of romance, which is the law of imagination, which is the law of beauty, which is the law of love, which is the law of life. If you are true to that law she shall be yours not only now, but forever, and this shall no longer be a lonely island, but a place called Paradise.' And then I woke up.
"That was a very wonderful dream, Jean," I said. "A very wonderful dream."
"And I have been wondering, Frank," she continued, her liquid voice dropping very low and soft, "I have been wondering if you were to light a fire on this beach—what would happen."
"It would be an interesting experiment," I agreed, "but I have no matches."
"I have provided against that. See, on this stone are matches, and beside it wood for a fire.''
"Jean!" I exclaimed, a great light breaking about me. I extended my arms toward her; I would have rushed to her, but she evaded me in the darkness.
"Suppose you try the experiment, Frank," she said. "Let us see if there is anything in dreams."
I found the stone with the matches; I struck one; its light glowed genially in my face. I found the little pile of dry wood which she had gathered together; I knelt and set my match to it. I think in that moment I felt somewhat like a god before an altar; a whiff of fragrant willow smoke filled my nostrils like incense. Then I stood up and looked around for Jean. She was gone.
My little fire crackled and burned up merrily, sending its shaft of pale blue smoke heavenward in the night. The distant clouds still heliographed each other across the sky; their flashlights blinked on the surface of our pond from time to time.
Then I sat down and tried to recall what Jean had said. "A beautiful maiden shall come up . . . Take her. . . . She is yours—forever—if you obey the law."
"I will—I will obey!" I breathed.
Out on the dark water glowed a phosphorescent point. It drew steadily, straight toward me. It was the ripple of white water as a silent graceful figure cleft the tide in two. Onward she came, steadily, stroke by stroke. A flash of distant lightning lit her face cameo-like against the depths behind. She had touched the sand; she drew up from the water; she stood before me. I took her in my arms.
"Dreams do come true, if they're properly staged," she said when she could speak.