| CHAPTER IV. OF A SCENE IN THE SLOUGH
Harvest was finished; and threshing started.
This part of the work entailed a good deal of cooperation, not only between Arthur and the Atkinsons, but involving a number of the later settlers and even one or two recent comers who were "foreigners". Mr. Wortleby owned the threshing outfit.
Around the separator, when two or three "bundled-wagons" were waiting to drive up to the feeder, the farmers gathered and talked. It was the time when all were still agreed that farming "paid". The previous generation to which Mr. Atkinson belonged, though he had been one of its youngest members, was already looked upon as the generation of the pioneers. It consisted of two distinct sets: on the one hand, the men who had come in with ample capital to start operations, called the "remittance-men"; and on the other those who had conquered the bush by dint of mere brawn and endurance.
Among the latter was an elderly man, short, stout, with an enormous, globular head around whose bald and mostly bare skull a snow-white wreath of fine, curly, and silky hair was forever blowing in the slightest breeze, reminding of the never-resting foliage of aspens. This man was a German by descent and the senior remaining settler of that first generation, a man with the constitution of an oak and the voice of a bugle. When the younger men complained of the low price of grain and the ever increasing cost of operation on the farm - speaking of a conspiracy of the city against the country, he pressed his wide lips together and spread his enormous mouth to both sides. Then, lowering his chin into the collar of his flannel shirt, he smiled with his small eyes and looked about till his glance alighted on Mr. Atkinson; and when it did so, he chuckled till his whole body shook, down to his short, stumpy legs. Challenged by one or the other of the younger men, he raised his broad, loose, fat shoulders till they reached the level of his ears and, perhaps, finally delivered
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himself of his speech, in a flat, squeezed voice of a volume which drowned the song of the steam-engine and the hum of the separator.
There was especially a young fellow by name of Stewart, a short, agile man with a pleasant red face and with small gold rings in the lobes of his ears who liked to provoke him. "Eh, Stivers," he would call out, "what have you got to grin there, old fox?"
"You make me tired," Stiewer would answer contemptuously. "You young whippersnappers! Ask Atkinson there! We built this country on thirty-cent wheat! You talk of hard times when you get eighty! And all through the winter we were on the go, hauling our grain a hundred and forty miles to the railway. You kick because it's four or five miles to the elevator!"
"Yes," Stewart said, laughing, "but you didn't have to spend as we do, either."
"Exactly!" Stiewer said with a rising voice as if that clinched his argument. "We were after a home; you are after money. Where we had a wagon; you must have a buggy. And drivers. Draught horses aren't fast enough for you any longer."
"You're right, Stivers," Wortleby shouted from behind. "And it's going to be motor cars soon!"
"Motor cars!" Stiewers snorted, turning to cast a contemptuous glance at Wortleby who was perched on the separator, near the grain-spout. "What next, I wonder?" Perhaps, that moment, the driver on the "bundle-wagon" in front was throwing off his last sheaves; and Stiewers ran, on his stumpy legs, to his rack and climbed up on his load with amazing agility, shouting to his horses as soon as he reached the top, "Get up, there, you lazy-bones!"
Those who remained behind looked at each other and winked.
"But he's right," somebody said. "He got rich on thirty-cent wheat. They say he's worth twenty thousand, apart from his farm."
Arthur who listened to all these things knew, however, one fact which did not seem to fit in with Stiewer's theories. Stiewer had
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three sons and a daughter; and all four lived in the city. Stiewers was a widower; and he was all alone in his house.
Arthur suffered from a feeling of failure; and that feeling had driven him to speculations on political and economic issues. He never spoke of them; but he listened much to the discussion of others. He was conscious of the fact that he was inclined to slip into an indiscriminate condemnation of things as they were; and he fought that tendency; for he was aware that life's values must not be judged on a purely personal basis.
The feeling of failure arose from two sources: from his relation to his brother and to Jane.
As for his brother, since he had been grown-up, he had often wished that they might be completely reconciled; and what had it come to? They were completely divided, instead. It is true that Jim had obtained all he had wanted; but in doing so, he had wronged him, Arthur; and instinctively Arthur felt that, while we can easily forgive him who has wronged us, we can never forgive him whom we have wronged. As a matter of fact, Jim had not returned to the farm. And from a certain delicacy of feeling, Arthur shrank from forcing himself on his brother. He heard, as threshing drew to completion all over the district - it took many weeks, for threshing outfits were not yet so numerous as they are today - that on Tenth Street in Stockton an office had been opened under the triple name "Carter, Forrest, and Mckay, Real Estate". He was given to understand that from the beginning the firm did a flourishing business. But it was mere hear-say.
As for Jane, he had tried to put the thought of her away. Yet he found it no easy task. He had always known that the engagement between her and him had been no more than a verbal thing; instinctively he had known that she had never realised its import. But at the same time he had always viewed his own future life as a domestic one, as a life of the hearth; he would have viewed it thus even if he had never known Jane. The trouble was that, having known her, she had given him a
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standard to which no others measured up. Yes, though he tried to persuade himself that he wished nothing so much as that she should be enabled to live her own life to the full, even though it might mean, as it apparently did, that he himself would have to vanish from her horizons, he was, at the bottom of his heart, too profoundly convinced that nobody else was able to appreciate her as he did to be entirely successful in his endeavour at self-effacement. He was human; he conceived the world with himself as its centre.
To this feeling of defeat a sense of loneliness was added. He did not like to thrust himself upon Jane; and so he discontinued his former, familiar calls at the Atkinson house. He mapped out a course of study for the winter; but, while the season remained open, he was restless. He thought of Messrs. Stiewers and Wortleby; for he felt that he might have much to learn from them; but he had never before cultivated their acquaintance.
As for the Atkinsons, he heard that Jane had, middle of August, left for Stockton to take up her duties on the "collegiate" staff; but her father drove into town every Friday to fetch her; and, she having friends in the city who owned cars, he could never be sure that he would not meet her. Besides, he suffered from a curious reluctance to meet even her parents. Then, to his immense surprise, he heard one day, through the boys, that his brother had been a week-end visitor at their house. This disquieted him all the more since he heard it casually only; Jim had not even thought it worth his while to drop in on him at the farm. What hurt him most was the surprise Roland Atkinson betrayed at his ignorance of the visit.
All the more restless, Arthur tried to find diversion by going to town. He did so two or three times, standing about, with other young men, in the stores and listening to the current talk about provincial and federal politics. He soon tired of that.
But the need for getting away from himself persisted. He took to walking; often going out at night, sometimes, when, after a rain or
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a sharp frost, work at ploughing was impossible, for a whole day; especially on Sundays.
He went north, to where, a mile or two beyond the school at the cross-roads, the hills fell abruptly away into the wide valley of Fisher Creek which was almost a river. There he seemed to forget himself; the more so when the woods which clothed the gulleys and glens on the hill-sides arrayed themselves in gold-yellow and sombre browns and purples. The broad flood-plain of the river, a hundred feet or so below, was covered by a dense tangle of red-barked willows, the paradise of rabbits and birds; it looked strangely pathetic at this fag-end of the season. So as to provide himself, in the eyes of such as he might meet, with a pretext for his rambles, he took to throwing his father's old shot-gun on his back when he set out. Once or twice he killed a rabbit; but he soon came to see that the chase was not for him, for he pitied the life he destroyed.
Then one night, on a Saturday, he met his brother on the road.
"Hello," Jim said cheerfully, as if intent upon disguising a fundamental embarrassment, "how's everything?"
"Oh, pretty much the same as ever, I suppose."
Jim laughed. "You don't exactly look gay."
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. Yes, he thought, Jim was the type that got most out of life. "There is nothing to be gay about, is there?"
"Well," Jim said, "I came out to do a bit of shooting." And, by a downward glance, he indicated his clothes. He was dressed in a light-grey Norfolk jacket, with breeches to match. He looked prosperous; even ostentatiously so. His handsome face proclaimed that he knew no care; his wide, strong shoulders seemed to quiver with vitality.
Arthur, as he stood by him in the road, felt laden down with the thought of the world. "Where are you stopping?" he asked though he knew.
"The Atkinsons," Jim replied. "I've met the daughter in town. The
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mother entrusted me some time ago with the task of finding a suitable boarding place for the boys. She thinks I've put her under an obligation...Why don't you come over?"
"Oh, I don't know."
"Well," Jim nodded, "so long. I'll be there till to-morrow night. Good luck to you."
Yes, Jim was prosperous, there could be no doubt. Arthur felt strangely as he looked after the figure of his brother who was striding briskly away, along the road. Instinctively he felt that he had been right in presuming that Jim bore him a grudge because he had wronged him. But there was something else. Jim was staying with the Atkinsons. Why, at that thought, did his blood course more hotly, almost rebelliously, through his veins?
He was to be enlightened as to the cause.
It was on Sunday, the day following his meeting with Jim. The world was enveloped in mist. All about the yard, the trees stood bare, looking immensely tall, with their leafless tops lost in the fog. A day for dreams. Arthur lingered over his chores as he fed and watered his stock. Such mists, in the hills, are the harbingers of snow.
Late in the afternoon, while Miss Marlowe read her weekly crop of religious tracts, he went out through the back gate into the field which lay black and cold, ready for winter. Throughout the day the mist had not disappeared; but it had lifted and lay now, slowly sinking again, like a white lid over all the landscape with its bare, dipping domes. The quality of the light, just before dusk, white and cold, partook of that of the early morning, or of a moon-lit night: the whole world was black and white, cold, resigned, as if already shrouded by death.
Without aim or purpose Arthur went to the southern edge of the field and then west along its margin. Even the aspens stood motionless now, since their leaves had fallen. Their white boles were slender and bare; as if they shivered in the late October air.
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As Arthur went on, he became aware, once or twice, of cold and warm streaks in the atmosphere. Along the cold streaks frost was going to draw its lanes overnight. Arthur felt desolate, thrown back upon himself; in such mists, there is no universe beyond what is immediately seen by the eye; whoever is out in field or wilderness is the heart of the visible world; his pulse seems to be enhanced in amplitude; he is doubly conscious of his joys or sorrows.
Arthur had almost reached the western line of his farm. There, to his left, on the other side of the fence, the Atkinson field dipped abruptly down to a small hollow filled by a slough. Where Arthur stood, he was surrounded by an open grove cleared of its underbrush, yet thick enough that on all sides he was looking out as through the columns of a sacred peristyle. The water in the slough, white under the mist, lay like a polished sheet of silver, unruffled even by a bird. Things had a breathless quality, as if, enchanted in their immobility. All about, dusk seemed to condense out of the atmosphere.
But in this very immobility of things Arthur was suddenly aware of a motion, perceived as with a sixth sense. With a rush of the blood to his heart he himself stood rigid. More even than before, his pulse was, for a moment, that of the visible world.
The motion had been west of him, on the road-allowance over which a trail wound from side to side. He was standing close to the fence dividing the fields.
Half a minute passed thus. The world was almost visibly paling. Dusk was thickening. Objects only a few feet away - the trees about him, a huge stone in the grassy slope dipping away to the slough, a single cow standing, unperceived as such, in the southern margin of the grove -seemed to assume an effect of distance, as if the whole world had telescoped away from his eyes. He was not looking; he listened.
Then, suddenly, on the far side of the fence, the figure of a girl
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in white flitted through the margin of the grove. It turned south, moving over the grass, till it stood at the edge of the pond-like slough, bending forward. A light, low laugh sounded through the evening world.
On the opposite side of the slough another figure appeared, that of a man, too far away to see the expression of face or of single features. But Arthur, with a sinking of his heart, recognised his brother who raised his arms as if stretching them over the water.
Then a voice floated through the air - the voice of the girl. It had that strange, clear quality, as if every note were a luminous, liquid drop falling, which voices assume when they are echoed from the surface of water; and that quality intensified the emotion with which it was charged.
"Dear, dear!" the voice said; and though it sounded perfectly clear through the dense air all about, it was no more than a whisper; Yet, though only a whisper, it was a carol, triumphant, exultant, a wonder and miracle to itself. It seemed to await from him to whom it was addressed all of life, while it folded back upon itself, expectant and trembling.
Arthur stood perfectly still. From the moment when he had recognised Jane, his pulse seemed to have ceased beating. No longer was his heart the heart of the visible world. His eye had become unseeing.
The man on the far side of the water came around the curve of the slough. As he reached its pointed corner, he cut across, through a hollow of tall, dry reeds.
The girl stood and waited.
Slowly, as something else began to move, Arthur's eyes were focused. In short, steady jerks the head of the dun-coloured cow in front of him turned, following with the dumb curiosity of beasts the progress of the man who came running.
Once more a voice. "Oh dear, you must not! Don't!"
And Arthur, bending a hard eye on the group at the edge of the
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water, saw that the man was holding the head of the girl between his two hands and covering it with kisses. He turned away, unseen.--
Though this scene at the slough of which he had been an unwilling witness oppressed him, he did not at once realise the full significance of his reaction. But knowledge came one night during the week.
No snow had fallen yet; but grey skies had announced its coming. Arthur had been working at a shed which held his implements and which needed repairing. It was just getting dark when he finished his work. This shed stood outside the yard fence, facing the field to the west. Between the bush spared out for a wind-break to the north and the back of the barn was a narrow lane in which the fallen leaves of the trees had accumulated to the depth of several inches. Coming from the shed, he turned into this lane at the precise moment when, from the grey, desolate dusk behind, a rush of wind broke loose, announcing the coming snow. All about him, the dry, rustling leaves whirled up.
Repeatedly, during the week, he had suddenly stopped in whatever work he was doing and stared ahead of him with unseeing eyes. He did that now. And, though his physical eyes remained unseeing, his mind's eye saw. Was it the wind or the whirl of the leaves that helped him to interpret his feelings?
He stood and clenched his fists, shaking with inner fevers in the sudden chill. He had thought that he was fully resigned. Now he knew that losing her was one thing; it was an entirely different thing to think of her as in the arms of another.
Yet he also knew that he could do only one single thing: disappear from the story of her life forever.
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