"I doubt. We didn't come from a famous office, and it's not always enough to know your job."
"Somebody will get a better post, and if I'm lucky I'll stay. If not, I think I'll try the irrigation works."
"I feel like that," Kemp declared. "But suppose the irrigation people turn our application down?"
"Then I'll lie off for a time. Except when I went, to McGill with money I earned on a wheat barge, I haven't stopped work since I was a boy. Now I'm getting tired and think I'll pull out and go across to look at the Old Country. My father was an Englishman, and I have some money to burn."
"A good plan," Kemp agreed. "After a change you come back fresh with a stronger punch. Well, if we're not put on to the lake section, we'll try the irrigation scheme."
He got up and went off, but Lister sat on his bunk and smoked. The bunk was packed with swamp-grass on which his coarse Hudson's Bay blankets were laid, and the shack was bare. Ragged slickers and old overalls occupied the wall, long gum-boots a corner. A big box carried an iron wash-basin, and a small table some drawing instruments. Lister was not fastidious, and, as a rule, did not stop long enough at one spot to justify his making his shack comfortable. Besides, he found it necessary to concentrate on his work, and had not much time to think about refinements.
All the same, he felt the shack was dreary and his life was bleak. He had not felt this until he went to Winnipeg. On the whole, he had liked the struggle against physical obstacles. It was his proper job, but the struggle was stern and sometimes exhausting, and his reward was small. Now he wanted something different, and gave himself to vague and brooding discontent.
Ruth Duveen had broken his former tranquillity. In a sense, she had awakened him, and he imagined she had meant to do so. All the same, to think she loved him was ridiculous; she was rather experimenting with fresh material. Yet she was accountable for his discontent. She had helped him to see that while he labored in the woods he had missed much. He wanted the society of cultivated women and men with power and influence; to use control instead of carrying out orders; and to know something of refinement and beauty. After all, his father was a cultivated Englishman, although Lister imagined he had inherited qualities that helped him most from his Canadian mother. It was all he had inherited, except some debts he had laboriously paid.
He admitted that to realize his ambitions might be hard, but he meant to try. Canada was for the young and stubborn. If his chiefs did not promote him, he would make a plunge, and if his new plan did not work, he would go over and see the Old Country. Then he would come back, braced and refreshed, and try his luck again.
Putting down his pipe, he got into bed. He was tired and in the morning the gravel cars must be pulled out of the muskeg. The job was awkward, and while he thought about it he went to sleep.