"On the contrary, lady," snaps he, "I shall take blood for ink, that is what I will do."
"But," said I, "you must expect to be beat a few times in your life, little man, if you live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be as strong and healthy as you may." This was quite a clever answer, and I wish Charles Kingsley had not said it first, then it would have been original with me.
This young editor talks with so much vigor and so many gesticulations one might think he was acting a picture for a biograph machine. It is a pity his political heroes do not avail themselves of his services. As a fighter, the dear lad would have a fine genius if properly incited; also, he has a marvellous vocabulary of flaming adjectives.
There is an Indian woman on the ship who is married to a white man, who seems most kind to her. The northern woman who interpreted the Toa Song for me, says this man believes the world well lost for love, his heart being very full and his head very empty. You will observe that this northern woman is a philosopher, probably owing to the fact that she has had little to read and plenty of time to think. She was born in this country over fifty years ago but was educated in the South. At the age of sixteen, she married a Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and is now his widow. This year agone she has been in Europe, but has returned once more to her native North with its hidden wilds and yet unhappened things. I tell you that some secret presage lies upon this land, and one who has sensed it must come back again and again to its intangible allurement. It may be the strong, austere spirit of the land that holds one; or the vast voids of the sky, with their blue and gold, and blue and silver. Or it may be that Tornarsuk, the great devil of the Arctic, who rides on the wind, steals from their breasts the midget souls of humans so that they belong to him and must follow whither he wills. It is not for me to know the reason, or to tell it to you, for I am southron born and cannot construe aright.
Time was when this woman only tasted flour once a year. It was in New Year's Day, when her mother baked cakes for the gentlemen who came to pay their respects to her—the doctor, the missionary, the clerks at the post, or the visitors from other posts. On the first of these occasions her mother, with an ill-grounded confidence, passed the plate of cakes to the earliest visitors so that there were no cakes left for the callers who came afterwards.
When flour became more plentiful, it was her mother's custom to have cakes every Sunday evening. A cake was baked for each member of the family and one for the plate. No one dreamed of taking the last cake. It would have been accounted a gross breach of etiquette to have done so, and one not to be thought of.
"But what became of it?" I ask; "who ate it ultimately? Surely some one knew?"
Apparently no one did, for I am answered by a lift of one shoulder, suggestive of ignorance and possibly indifference—a little defensive shrug which precludes further intrusion into the subject. It is unkind of her to leave me with this worrying problem, for there are fifty-two cakes a year to be disposed of, and I may never hope to dispose of them alone.
The Indian woman who has the white husband gives me bon-bons from a box she purchased in Edmonton last week. Nothing so makes for confidence in women as to eat sweets together. Authors write much about breaking bread and the sacredness of salt, but, in actual life, nothing cements friendship like chocolate drops. This is why the woman opens her heart to me and says she desires to write a book—a great book about the white people of whom she knows many things. I have no doubt she does, and that if she put down all that is in her heart without one glance at the gallery and without trimming her language to the rules of syntax, her book would be the literary sensation of the year.
She wants to know if ever I wrote a book. Now, once I did, but it was a simple book, so that wise people did not care so much as one finger's fillip for it, but, sometime, I am going to put all their counsel together and compose a really great one. It will not be disjointed, but will flow along without a break in the smooth, natural way people talk when they are alone with their families. It shall concern psychic phenomena, yearnings, root-causes, the untrammelled life, strange decadencies, and things like that. It shall be paradoxical, epigrammatic, erudite, even vitriolic. I will pierce the self-conceit of these Canadians and tell them they have need to mend their manners; that they are primitive beasts—even Diprotodons.