I step carefully between the recumbent forms on the deck lest I hurt them or disturb their quietude. I am sorry now that I stole the mattresses. Surely I am a bitter sinner and unlovely of heart.
In the morning, when I told the Brothers how I had privily taken the mattresses because I disapproved of their vows concerning marriage, and because of the unseemly remarks Clement of Alexandria had applied to women in the early days of the Christian era, they laughed again and again with much hilarity. Indeed, one of the Brothers said he applauded my moderation and marvelled that I was good enough to leave their blankets and pillows. Another gave it as his opinion that Clement's pleasantry was a shabby-minded one and needlessly sarcastic, the result of an ill-governed disposition. But this Brother, like the others, took full care to evade the question I had raised as to celibacy....
What Clement of Alexandria said was that women, like Egyptian temples, were beautiful without, but when you entered and withdrew the veil, there was nothing behind it but a cat or a crocodile.
CHAPTER XI
SOME NORTHERN PIONEERS
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!—WHITMAN.
In the morning, soon after sunup, we continue our joyous journey on the Athabasca, but the birds are out and about before us. An occasional duck rises off the water sharply with a whir of wet wings, but generally they are self-complacent and play at last across the road with the ship, just as if they sought trouble and despised it. The young ducklings, who have only taken to water these few days agone, form themselves into tiny rafts and one might almost expect to see a fairy step aboard them. The fish jump out of the water, praying to be caught. They look like strips of silver ribbon. Mr. Patrick O'Kelly, who is also watching their come and go, declares this to be a sign of rain. "When birds fly low, lady, and when fish swim near the surface, it is well to bring in the clothes off the line." He also says that the plover's cry indicates rain, even as does its name—the pluvoir, or rain-bird.
There are few birds to be seen, except an occasional hawk, who seems to have no other object than to curvet about and display his clipper-built wings for our admiration. Sometimes he soars into the skies in order to exercise a keen vision that covers half the province, or, again, he appears to hang in the air with an invisible string, so perfect is his poise. It is foolish to call hawks ravening birds and to impute evil motives to them. We only do this because they like chickens and other gallinaceous fowl whose end we should prefer to be pot-pie. This is not a reprobate taste on the hawk's part, for, of course, he has never read the game-laws, nor the Book of Leviticus, and cannot be expected to know that certain flesh, in certain localities, in certain seasons, is the particular appurtenance of the genus homo. In truth, we are so uninstructed in these laws ourselves that the government must, perforce, keep game-wardens and the churches must keep preachers to educate us more fully.
The Athabasca River, Mr. O'Kelly calculates, is about eight hundred feet wide and about twelve feet deep. Its current is about five or six miles an hour. The less said about its colour the better. At Athabasca Landing they use the water as a top-dressing for the land.