After breakfast I washed my few dishes, swept the floor, made my bed, and generally set the house in order. Even then it was only ten o 'clock, with nothing more to do until noon. At noon there would be a repetition of the routine, and then nothing to do until night. At night there would be supper and the evening chores, and nothing more to do until morning. And the next day the same, and the same, and the same.
Nature may be a wise designer, but she has an uncanny way of overdoing a good thing. I thought of the thousand miles of timber we had passed through on our way west, timber without end! All the world seemed filled with trees, standing, fallen, piled in heaps in jagged water-courses; dead and dying through leagues of swamp and muskeg; towering over the highlands in an evergreen silhouette against the sky. What a wonderful place for a few miles of prairie; say for every second section of prairie, like the railway lands in the West! Then came the prairies—a hundred treeless miles at a stretch; sky and grass without limit, a horizon broken only by a settler's shack at great intervals, into the farther West where even the settler's shack failed from view, and one was alone with God and the world. Here was a land where the very posts to mark our checker-board survey had to be shipped in from untold distances. What a wonderful place for a few square miles of forest! And yet they tell us Nature is wise.
And so it was in our labor; from spring till freeze-up we had scarcely time to shave. Every hour of sunshine—and no country gives its sunshine more lavishly—was money to the settler, and the settler's life from April to November was a torrent of high-geared energy. I had been too busy even to make love properly to Jean, and when it has been said that a young man is too busy for that all other figures of speech fail. Perhaps that was why my love-making, indifferently done, taking second place to plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing, had ended so disasterously. And now, only a month or two later, the one thing in the world of which I had too much was time. Now I could afford to make love like an artist—but I had no canvas to splash on!
It is wonderful how much philosophizing one can accomplish between washing the porridge pot and peeling the potatoes when there is nothing else to be done. Just as the long summer evenings of this great West are already giving the world a race of athletes, so must the long, sombre winter days and nights, with their limitless opportunities for reflection and introspection, breed for the world a new brand of thinking, uncramped by convention and untamed by precedent. That is, if the "advantages" of city life do not crowd in so rapidly that they relieve us of the necessity of thinking.
It was mid-afternoon when Jack burst in upon me. "Well, old Robinson Crusoe, how goes solitude?" he demanded.
"Rotten," said I, "but I can always change my mind if I want to."
"Aha!" he exclaimed, in return, clasping himself about the middle. "A blow in the fifth rib! A subtle blow under the fifth rib!"
Jack was obviously in great spirits, but with a sudden soberness he sat down beside me, and I felt his hand on my knee. "It's not quite the thing, old chap," he said, "to cut us dead, just because we're married—that is, some of us."
"I haven't cut you," I retorted. "Give me time."
"I know it's a raw deal for you," he went on, disregarding my interruption, "and I'd give—I'd give—half of my happiness, if you like, if I could put it right. It's a little embarrassing for us all. But don't you think Jean is worth a fight—a little more fight than you have made?"