Avec la charge de sur le dos.
The chanson went on to tell in not too artistic rhymes the story of a logger on the River Gatineau. The words were a bit bald in spots, yet they bubbled with picturesqueness—the rhymer had told what he knew, and that had kept the song simple and strong. But the words were beside the question. Far from an accomplished musician, I yet knew in a few bars that the air was out of the common, and probably very old. I knew that many of the songs of the habitants came with their ancestors from France, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and this one had an ancient ring.
The song ended—it was rather long—there was a second’s pause, and then a frank, manly voice, the voice of the singer, spoke from the stage of the spruce grove.
“Excusez-la,” said the voice.
It was prettier than I can describe. What was implied was so plain and so graceful—and only a Frenchman could have said it without self-consciousness. “What I have done is poor, but it is all I can do. I hope you will let it please you. It is my best, excuse it,” the two gracious words asked from us.
I looked at Mr. Esmond—he seemed petrified—he could not even clap, as the rest of us did. “I never knew anything like it,” I heard him murmur.
Bob, seldom suppressed for long, came to the front. “Zoëtique, Zoëtique, whistle it—sifflez-le, sifflez,” he called, and added an explanatory word to us. “It’s twice as good when he whistles; it’s a decent tune sung, but wait till you hear him whistle—it’s a peach.”
Presently the whistle came.
I think there is not any other whistling like that in the world—certainly I have never heard any, and many people who should know have said the same. The canoes lay motionless, the people in them hardly breathed, and out from the spruces, over the track of the moon, floated to us the sweetest sound I have ever heard made by a human being. Birds on a dewy morning throw out notes as clear and silvery, but bird-notes are weak and are haphazard. These came freighted with the vigor of a man, with the thought of humanity; there was in them the gladness of youth, a rapture of artistic fulfilment; and, beyond what any words can say, there was in them a personality impossible to say—a personality cramped into a narrow life which spread its wings unashamed in these sounds of loveliness. He whistled the air that he had sung, the old French air of unexpected harmonies, and it was as if a magic flute repeated the logger song of the “River Gatineau, which one called the raging river in the springtime.”
He stopped, and out of the dark hill beyond us floated an echo like the ghost of a flute of long ago.