XVII
THE NEW LIFE
He contrived to make himself some coffee, and after a while extinguished the lamp and crawled into the bunk. The red-hot stove filled the hut with a dim light, and he fell asleep.
An hour later he woke in a sweat of terror. The fire in the stove had died down, the hut was bitterly cold, and he was in total darkness. The darkness was like nothing he had known before; it closed round him with a pressure that was almost tangible, and it seemed alive. There was a horrible sense of something hostile in it; he could have thought it moved stealthily, with a faint rustling of unseen robes, that it breathed and palpitated, that it was a presence inimical to life. A rat ran across his bed, and on the roof there was a long grating sound. Outside, in the wide night, he could recognise the melancholy cry of the coyote; but there were other cries and sounds which he could not recognise. Close to the door of the hut there was audible what seemed like deep, stertorous breathing, deepening into a human groan. From the depth of the wood came a fearful wail, as of a woman in distress. He sprang from the bunk, rushed to the door, and opened it. There was a soft flutter of wings, and the groaning ceased; but the wailing in the woods went on, upon a scale of rising agony. There was nowhere any sign of life. The moon had risen, and the snow-laden trees rose pure and mystic in the silver light. They were like a cohort of silent watchers round his lonely hut, and he welcomed them as comrades. Slowly his fears subsided. It was not until the next day he learned from Flanagan that the soft groaning at the door proceeded from nothing more alarming than a mountain owl, and that the wailing in the forest was merely a mountain lion in search of prey.
This unforgetable night was his first and last occasion of terror. It is only when the causes of phenomena are hidden from us that the phenomena themselves are terrible. When we know that the tapping in the wainscot is caused by an innocent insect, the movements in the forest to be the work of wind or frost, the breathing in the dark to be a sleeping owl, the mind at once regains the equipoise of reason. Perhaps if we knew what really lay behind the mystery of death, we should fear it as little as we do the commonplace phenomena of birth and life.
The morning came at last in floods of living light, and as Arthur once more stood at the cabin door, he thought that he had never looked upon a scene so exquisite. Pale rays of colourless and pure fire spread like a fan along the eastern sky; they deepened into momentary purple, throbbed as with a pulse, and suddenly were quickened with a flood of scarlet. The distant peaks of snow one by one caught the elemental splendour, the higher summits topped with flame, the lower stained with rose; and across the dim and quiet lake, from an open gateway of the hills a shaft of light shot, slender as a spear and vibrating with the joy of speed. A gust of air shook the forest, and the ice-clad boughs tinkled like a chime of bells. There was no other sound except the little song of water, running underneath its roof of ice. All around rose the still and solemn woods. The miniature plains of snow gathered at their feet glittered like a floor of diamonds. And from sky and lake and forest came an air inimitably virginal, the cold and taintless air of unviolated Nature, infinitely pure and strong and vital.
He stood for some moments quite silent, in that intense clarity of dawn, scarcely conscious of himself, his whole being drawn out in a kind of effortless and sacred awe. He had an inward sense of lustration and release: the soul rose clean as from a bath of fire; the will, so often misdirected, was modulated to the perfect harmony of this external world. Such moods lie beyond reason, and are therefore beyond the explication of the reason. The pivots upon which life moves consist of a few rare and exquisite moments; for one man a sunrise, for another a strain of music heard at midnight, for yet another the sudden, arrowy fragrance of violets in a wood, and behold! life is changed, something has been withdrawn from it and something added—a new element, wholly authentic, yet wholly indefinable. It was such a moment with this solitary exile. The dawn came to him as an omen and a challenge. It was the porch of a new life, and he entered it with willing feet.
He returned to the cabin, and breakfasted in haste after a fashion which would have provoked pity and derision in the bosom of the British house-wife. His coffee was boiled in a discarded meat-tin; bread he had none; and his effort to fry eggs was probably among the least successful of all recorded operations known to culinary science. In the midst of his crude performance Jim Flanagan arrived, surveying him from the doorway with a smile of irony.
When the meal was over, Jim began to talk in his slow, caustic way. Like many men who have passed their lives in the open air and solitude, Jim had acquired a certain rude philosophy, the fruit of much silent thinking, experience, and observation. He had worked in lumber-camps, mines, and on the railroads, but only by necessity; no sooner had he acquired a little money than he had always gone off into solitude again. Carrying all his scant possessions with him, he would disappear into the forests and mountains, and would be lost to sight for many months. What was he doing? Hunting, prospecting for gold and copper, and loafing. He would return from these expeditions not a penny piece the richer, a little raggeder, and with deeper lines upon his face, having often suffered great privations, yet at the first opportunity he would resume them. For all settled ways of life he had a positive aversion, and not all the gold of Golconda could have bribed him to reside in cities. This was the more remarkable because he had spent his childhood and early youth in Liverpool, from which dim and dreary city he had been thrust out by chance and poverty into the Canadian wilderness. Till he landed in Canada he had never seen a forest or a mountain, had scarcely looked upon a flower, and had breathed only the tainted air of slums; but on his first view of the wooded heights of Montreal, something woke in his heart, a dumb love of Nature, a passion for freedom, an appetite for solitude. Friends he had none, and if he ever had relations, he had long ago forgotten them. Thus left wholly to himself, he had fashioned his own way of life with neither memory nor obligation to restrain him; had considered his debt to civilization cancelled; had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a taciturn but contented nomad, whose feet had traversed the breadth of a mighty continent, and penetrated a hundred savage solitudes where none but he had trodden. Thus, in his own way, he had solved the problem of existence; he had achieved freedom, and had enrolled himself among the humble Argonauts of Empire.
The greatness of this half-discovered empire was his chief thought, and upon this theme he was always ready to speak.
"England don't know what she's got in Canada," was a frequent sentiment of his, often expressed with biting scorn. "She sends her worst out here," he would continue—"dumps her rubbish on us." He made this remark now, to which Arthur replied with a laugh, "I hope you don't consider me rubbish, Jim."
"No, you're young, and I guess you're strong. But there's lots of hard work ahead of you, and I've seen many a chap like you fly the tracks."
"I wish you'd tell me what I've got to do."
"Well, I ain't no fruit-rancher myself," said Jim. "But maybe I can teach you. Suppose you and me take a look round."
They went out together into the keen air. Around the cabin for a space of several acres the snow lay deep, its pure surface broken only by black tree-stumps. Farther back was a tangle of young wood, and beyond this the primeval forest. At a distance of fifty yards from the cabin the snow was discoloured, and Arthur recognised the bog-hole into which he had stumbled on the previous night.
"There seems a lot of bog, and I don't see any apple-trees," he remarked.
"That there bog's the best land you've got," Jim answered, "but it's got to be drained. The apple-trees are in the bush somewheres; didn't I tell you they've got growed up? You've got to start slashing that bush. It's a job that must be done. And I don't see how you're to do it all alone."
"Neither do I," said Arthur. "But if you'd help me, Jim, I think I could soon learn."
"I ain't no fruit-rancher," he began again.
"Unless I'm mistaken, you're just what you choose to be," said Arthur. "Name your own wage, Jim, and be my teacher."
"Well, I'll consider it," said the old man.
A couple of days passed, during which Arthur saw nothing of Jim. On the afternoon of the third day Arthur saw his boat moving toward the landing.
"I've been getting some things we'll want," said Jim. "You'll find 'em put down to your account. I may as well tell you I've been drunk. Maybe you won't want me now," he added with a grin.
"I'll take my chance on that, Jim."
"It's a thing what has to be," said the old man with a solemn roll of his gray head. "I ain't no drunkard, understand. I'd think shame of being that. But an occasional booze hurts no one, and is a necessity of life. It kind of limbers up one's wits."
"We'll let it go at that," laughed Arthur.
And thus the articles of this strange partnership were settled.
From that day began a life of furious and unremitting toil. Days and weeks passed unremarked in those Homeric labours; Arthur worked in blinding sweat, with aching muscles; rose early in the biting cold, plied the axe from morn to eve, and no sooner ate his rough evening meal than he was fast asleep. A hundred times it seemed as if no human organism could sustain the immense fatigue which he endured. As the snow melted, his task became the heavier. There were tree-stumps to be blasted, and the fumes of the blast left him with a splitting headache. There was the bog to be drained, and he worked for hours to his knees in water. There were trees to fell, to cut up into lengths for building, and the rest to be burned. Yet amid it all he was conscious of a growing sanity of mind and body. His hands, at first torn and wounded by his toil, hardened to their task; his shoulders broadened, his muscles grew supple, and on his cheek was the glow of health. A curt word of praise from Jim seemed the superlative of approbation; to hear him say, "Well, I guess you ain't no quitter," warmed him like a draught of wine. And the mental transformation was not less definite than the physical. The immediacy of his work, the constant need of patience, caution, and alertness, the mere brute vigour of his life, drove from his mind a hundred haunting ghosts. He had no time to debate on thin-spun theories of the universe and life, and even social problems sunk into insignificance. To see that a tree fell rightly, to disengage a fertile soil from the neglect of ages, to drain the bog—these were his problems, and he found them sufficiently absorbing. He had got back to the primeval; work and sleep and work again, all slowly issuing in a visible success—was not this the oldest and the one divine task of man, pursued through countless centuries, and furnishing the one solid base on which all human domination rested?
It might have been supposed that such a hard insistency of toil would have dulled the finer faculties. In so far as these faculties depended for their nourishment on books, no doubt they suffered; but they found a new and more vital food in the scenes which surrounded him. The inexhaustible surprise of sunrise and of sunset, the music of the forest, perpetual as the music of the sea, the blue expanse of lake, the wide array of snow-clad mountains—these and a hundred lesser things, such as the magic wrought by shafts of light in the deep shadows of the wood, trees glittering in a sheath of ice, moonlight upon snow, fascinated and absorbed him. He had never guessed how wonderful the world was. The laborious exercises of the human mind in quest of beauty seemed a tedious absurdity compared with this opulence of loveliness that met him everywhere. And he saw too that there is a kind of wisdom deeper than any that is found in books, which flows in upon the spirit which is in accord with Nature. Flanagan, with all his crudity and ignorance, had something of this wisdom. He moved at ease in his environment, envied no man, coveted no man's goods, brought to each returning day a strength precisely equal to his task; and Arthur asked himself if either religion or philosophy could produce a form of life more admirable or more efficient. In these daily toils Jim was his sole companion. They worked and ate together, and in the long evenings sat in the warm cabin talking endlessly. To his surprise, he found that the old man was an indefatigable reader, but of not more than half a dozen books. The Bible he knew with thoroughness, and upon it had built up theories of life which would have surprised the theologians.
"Them Jews were like us," he would declare. "They stole a country and drove the other people out. Like us with the Injuns, I guess. A dead Injun is the only kind of Injun I've got any use for. Them Philistines was a kind of Injun, by all I make out."
One story which he loved to discuss was the desire of Israel to have a king. "What did they want a king for?" he would cry. "They'd got on well enough without one, and they never had no luck after they'd got one. They should have stuck to Samuel." And then he would go on to recount all he knew about the wickedness of kings. "They'd never been no good. They just sucked the people's blood, that's what they did. Why, they wer'n't even soldiers, not nowadays—just dressed-up dolls. Some day the world would get rid of them, and the sooner the better, so said he. A pretty thing indeed that decent folk should pay taxes to support such a rotten lot as they were."
The one poet whom he knew was Burns. He carried with him in the pocket of his ragged coat an old leather-bound copy of Burns, with a brass clasp, closely printed in blinding type upon a page nearly destitute of margins. It was a tiny book, in size about three inches by two, published within a few years of the poet's death. It bore signs of hard usage: the cover was stained and polished by the touch of hands that long since were dust; doubtless it had been carried in the pockets of a race of humble men, read in swift glimpses behind the plough, as like as not, within sight of the very hills the poet loved, or pored over by eager eyes round peat fires in solitary clachans. It was safe to say that a book so humble had never known the touch of hands polite; its pages had been turned by clumsy fingers hardened with excessive toil, and the faces that had stooped above it were plain and homely faces, roughened with wind and weather. To this forgotten race of men it had doubtless brought gaiety and hope, the brief vision of things lovely and eternal, and above all the message of that inward liberty which man never loses save by his own cowardice or folly. From the soiled pages Jim Flanagan drew the same inspiration. They breathed into him the pride of freedom, fed his fierce joy of independence, helped him, as they had helped ten thousand others, to walk upright in a world where an innumerable host of men bend their backs to the unjust yoke and learn to cringe and crouch. As Jim recited the well-remembered verses in this lonely hut at night, his voice trembled, his eyes glowed, and all aspects of meanness and commonness fell from him, leaving something that was intrinsically fine and great. That a man so crudely ignorant as Flanagan should have anything to teach a youth like Arthur appears absurd; yet so it was. What that teaching was it would be difficult to state in words, but its effect was clear. By its quiet assertion of undeniable qualities where they might be least expected, a general sense of the worth of mankind was produced, an essential worth, which was wholly independent of outward circumstance.
As time went on, Arthur discovered also that his life was not nearly so isolated as he had supposed. Scattered along the shores of the lake were other men, like himself, engaged on a daring experiment of life. One or two were sullen, unapproachable, apparently afraid lest their dignity should be compromised by chance acquaintanceships, the kind of men who carry into a new world all that is socially most narrow and petty in the old. But these were the exceptions; among the rest there was a real and kindly sense of community. Many of them were persons interesting in themselves and in their histories. There were ex-army officers, public-school and university men, even a musician—all, for some cause or other, fugitives from the vain strifes of civilised life. They never complained, they never thought of going back, they were all full of hope about the future. They talked with buoyant faith of the day when Kootenay Lake would be as well known as Geneva or Lucerne, and when its shores, now clothed with darkling forests, would become one of the gardens of the world. They pointed out how each year marked the growing invasion of the orchard on the forest. And, whatever the hard tasks of their life, they were clearly in love with it, desired no better, and would not have exchanged it for anything that cities could have offered them.
He found among these settlers a disposition toward mutual service, notable in itself, and unique in his experience. A man thought nothing of giving a day's service to a neighbour, of loaning him a team, or helping him to build his house. Being all engaged on the same tasks, each relied upon the other, expecting and assuming that the help given to-day would be loyally returned when his own occasion came.
And, besides this, there was much mutual visiting, concerts, suppers, dances—a free and simple hospitality, without elaboration or pretence. The concerts might not have satisfied a Queen's Hall audience, and the dances were but feebly illumined with the grace of woman; but all was homely, honest, and sincere. And then the walk back along the narrow trail, with the moon riding overhead, or beneath a roof of stars, each keenly bright, and the fresh lake-breeze moving through the forest in low-breathed symphonies—ah! this was life indeed! Often and often, as he walked that trail at night, he opened his lungs to drink in the crystal air that seemed a draught of life itself, and he thought with commiseration of the herded life on city pavements, and thanked God for his deliverance.
The spring came with melting snow and soft winds, and he began to realise some progress in his work. When the new growth was cleared away, he discovered a few hundred apple-trees of five years' growth.
"You're luckier than I thought," said Jim. "They're Spitzenbergs. You'll get something from them this year, I guess."
Then June came with a rush of heat and light. A long procession of days followed, the sky exquisitely bright, the hills clad in living green, the lake sparkling like a floor of amethyst. And then the winter once more, with its wonder of snow, and skies full of unearthly splendour.
So two years passed, and at their close he saw the triumph of his labour. The forest was pushed back by many acres; where the dense undergrowth had thrived, there spread the level fields, with long rows of budding trees; and the bog was a fertile garden. He had built himself another house, more commodious than the first rude cabin. Upon its walls hung the ranchman's usual pictures, coloured prints from magazines; there was also a goodly shelf of books, and the photographs of those he loved. Here he sat and meditated in the long summer evenings. From Vickars he had received many letters, keen, witty, sad; it seemed he was famous, after a London fashion, but his constant complaint was that no one really listened to his message. Elizabeth had written him even more frequently, and each letter had strengthened the implicit bond between them. Love-letters they could not be called, for love was rarely mentioned in them; but they were letters that only love could write—they exhaled the very perfume of her heart. From his father and his sister he had heard not a word. Latterly even his mother's letters had become irregular, and he sometimes thought he could discern in them an effort at concealment, as if she purposely avoided something which her whole nature urged her to say.
He sat thus, thinking over all the past, upon a summer's evening, when he heard Jim's tread upon the wood-path. Jim had been into Nelson upon some errand in the afternoon, and had hurried back, contrary to his custom, for there was some heavy work to be done upon the morrow.
"Well, Jim, any news?"
"Not as I know of. But I've got you a paper. It's the English Daily Mail. You're always glad to see that."
"All right, Jim. Thank you. I'll look at it to-morrow."
Jim moved off to his own shack, and Arthur went into the house. It was quite late, it seemed hardly worth while to light the lamp, and he was about to get into bed in the dark, when the white outline of the paper lying on the table attracted his eye.
"I may as well look at that," he thought; "I'm not sleepy."
He lit the lamp, and unfolded the paper. His eye wandered casually over the crowded columns, finding little that was interesting. Then, with a sudden chill of apprehension, his eye caught the name of Masterman.
"The Affairs of the Amalgamated Brick Co.," the paragraph was headed. "It has been long suspected that the affairs of this company were not as prosperous as could be wished, but no serious complications were expected until the close of last week. There were various unpleasant rumours on the Stock Exchange late on Friday afternoon, and the stock dropped rapidly. On Monday morning it became known that serious frauds were charged against the company. The nature of these charges is not yet ascertained, but we understand that warrants have been issued for the arrest of Archibold Masterman, the chairman of the company, and Elisha Scales, its secretary. If the allegations made against the company are at all such as rumour represents them, very sensational developments may be anticipated."
The blood rushed back into his heart as he read. His very being was suspended.
"My God!" he cried. "I must go home at once!"
And in that cry all the old loyalties awoke, and, chief of all, the son's loyalty to his father.