“We are told that man was made to struggle; to use all his powers. If he rests too long beside the still backwaters of life in fairylike dales, they’re apt to atrophy, and he finds himself slack and nerveless when he goes out to face the world again.”
Evelyn nodded, for she had felt and striven against the insidious influence he spoke of. She had now and then left the drowsy dale for a while; but the life she had then caught glimpses of was equally sheltered, one possible only to the favoured few. Even the echoes of the real tense struggle seldom passed its boundaries.
“But you confessed not long ago that you loved the Western wilderness,” she said. “You have spent a good deal of time in it; you expect to do so again. After all, isn’t that only exchanging one beautiful, tranquil region for another? The bush must be even quieter than the English dales.”
“I expect I haven’t made the point quite clear. When one goes up into the bush it’s not to lounge and dream there, but to make war upon it with the axe and drill.” He pulled up his team and pointed to a clump of giant trees. “Look here. That’s Nature’s challenge to man in this country.”
Evelyn confessed that it was a very impressive one. The great trunks ran up far aloft, tremendous columns, before their higher portions were lost in the vaulted roof of sombre greenery. They dwarfed the rig and team; she felt herself a pigmy by comparison.
“They’re rather bigger than the average,” her companion resumed. “Still, that’s the kind of thing you run up against when you buy land to make a ranch of or clear the ground for a mine. Chopping, sawing up, splitting those giants doesn’t fill one with languorous dreams; the only ones our axe-men indulge in materialise. It’s a bracing struggle. There are leagues and leagues of trees, shrouding the valleys in a shadow that has lasted since the world was young; but you see the dawn of a wonderful future breaking in as the long ranks go down.”
Once more, without clearly intending it, he had stirred the girl. He had not spoken in that rather fanciful style to impress her; she thought he had, trusting in her comprehension, merely given his ideas free rein. But in doing so he had somehow made her hear the clear trumpet-call to action, which, for such men, rings through the roar of the river and the song of the tall black pines.
“Ah!” she said, “I dare say it’s a fine life in many ways, but it must have its drawbacks. The flesh must shrink from them.”
“The flesh?” he said and laughed. “In this land it takes second place—except, perhaps, in the cities.” Then he turned and looked at her curiously. “Why should you talk of shrinking? The bush couldn’t daunt you; you have courage.”
The girl’s eyes sparkled, but it was not at the compliment. His words rang with freedom, the freedom of the heights, where heroic effort was the rule in place of luxury. She longed now, as she had often done, to escape from bondage, to break away.