For the first time Mr. Bang spoke to me without shrouded facetiousness but in earnest, and I felt pleased. I forgot he was a young man; and I am ready to believe he forgot I was a girl. We were just friends. It was a new experience to me and I welcomed it.
Suddenly I came to realize there were others about, that I was skating round and round the rink with my companion openly holding my hand. I brought myself up with a round turn, and suggested we practise our figures, threes and eights.
Mr. Bang came out of his reverie. He corrected my skating in a kindly way, though he was exact enough, and showed no tendency to gloss over my mistakes. After an hour’s skating, we decided to walk home. I was glad of this, for it gave opportunity for further conversation and I asked him several questions, to which generally he said—as well as I can remember it:
“I don’t think I was a bad boy; I never had any vices except indolence; yet I alienated my people at such an early date that I cannot remember the time when they did not think it necessary to apologize to others for me. Pleasant, wasn’t it? Ours was a large family, yet no member of it dreamed of planting in my mind those seeds of worldly wisdom so useful to youth. On the other hand, I was shunted, given up for hopeless, before I was well on the threshold of life. My mother, while she taught me the Bible, sighed: ‘What will become of the boy?’ That sort of apology did not improve me. One brother was in the habit of telling me I would be a perpetual expense to the family, though he did not help me to learn to do otherwise, or give me any money encouragement. I was certainly kept in the back ground. The result was that I early got so mean an opinion of myself that I was ready to apologize for my very existence. Whether this was an inherited trait and itself explains the attitude of my people towards me, or whether it developed under the contempt of my own people, I have no opinion. I had to be a sort of crab. Couldn’t help it!”
Mr. Bang could not have offered me a greater token of friendship than so to lay bare before me his thoughts and confidence like this. Why he should do so is the greater puzzle the more I think of it. Had I been as frank with him what a mean girl I should seem.
“I suppose,” he continued with a smile, “you will see me as the small boy, who ever laments that he is not understood—like so many martyrs in novels and dramas?”
I could only answer with a smile, also. Then we trudged along not speaking. The night was falling, the air was clear and refreshing: but the jingle of the bells on the passing sleighs, and hootings of the motor horns spoiled the peace. The bells brought to me visions of the old Canadian world, of a homely social life, such as Uncle talks of and looks back upon with sighs. The hootings seemed the message of a new order, the power of wealth—discordant and a pollution. And then I started inwardly; was I a traitor to my own ambitions? I had recently become a convert to the new order; why was I forsaking my allegiance?
As we were nearly home Mr. Bang added: “Being what I was, I followed the lines of least resistance and went west. Settled industry and competition with normal personalities offered me no field; and by a natural process I evaded the issue. I threw myself into the mill. I fought while I starved, and starved while I fought. It was a stern conflict, a bitter struggle.”
My companion paused ere he continued:
“There is no personality so out of tune with mankind but he will be attractive to some one; no nature so unlovely but will find a responding chord; no murderer but may gain an advocate; so there is no money-making scheme so unbalanced but will draw support from some foolish purse.”