Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Complete - Gilbert Parker
"A murrain on y'r sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and
hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider. And out
o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there. Out of that, ye beast!
. . . But how can ye go back--you that's rolled in that sewer--to the
loveliest woman that ever trod the neck o' the world! Damned y' are in
every joint o' y'r frame, and damned is y'r sowl, I say, for bringing
sorrow to her; and I hate you as much for that, as I could worship her
was she not your wife and a lady o' blood, God save her!"
Then shaking his fist once more, he swung away slowly down the road.
During this the wife's teeth held together as though they were of a
piece. She looked after Tom Liffey and smiled; but it was a dreadful
smile.
"He worships me, that common man--worships me," she said. "This man who
was my husband has shamed me, left me. Well--"
The door of the house opened; a man came out. His wife leaned a little
forward, and something clicked ominously in her hand. But a voice came up
the road towards them through the clear air--the voice of Tom Liffey. The
husband paused to listen; the wife mechanically did the same. The husband
remembered this afterwards: it was the key to, and the beginning of, a
tragedy. These are the words the Irishman sang:
"She was a queen, she stood up there before me,
My blood went roarin' when she touched my hand;
She kissed me on the lips, and then she swore me
To die for her--and happy was the land."
A new and singular look came into her face. It trans formed her. "That,"
she said in a whisper to herself--"that! He knows the way."
As her husband turned towards his home, she turned also. He heard the
rustle of garments, and he could just discern the cloaked figure in the
shadows. He hurried on; the figure flitted ahead of him. A fear possessed
him in spite of his will. He turned back. The figure stood still for a
moment, then followed him. He braced himself, faced about, and walked
towards it: it stopped and waited. He had not the courage. He went back
again swiftly towards the house he had left. Again he looked behind him.
The figure was standing, not far, in the pines. He wheeled suddenly
towards the house, turned a key in the door, and entered.
Then the wife went to that which had been her home: Heldon did not go
thither until the first flush of morning. Pierre, returning from an
all-night sitting at cards, met him, and saw the careworn look on his
face. The half-breed smiled. He knew that the event was doubling on the
man. When Heldon reached his house, he went to his wife's room. It was
locked. Then he walked down to his mines with a miserable shame and anger
at his heart. He did not pass The Crimson Flag. He went by another way.
That evening, in the dusk, a woman knocked at Tom Liffey's door. He
opened it.
"Are you alone"? she said. "I am alone, lady."
"I will come in," she added. "You will--come in"? he faltered.
She drew near him, and reached out and gently caught his hand.
"Ah!" he said, with a sound almost like a sob in its intensity, and the
blood flushed to his hair.
He stepped aside, and she entered. In the light of the candle her eye
burned into his, but her face wore a shining coldness. She leaned towards
him.
"You said you could worship me," she whispered, "and you cursed him.
Well--worship me--altogether--and that will curse him, as he has killed
me."
"Dear lady!" he said, in an awed, overwhelmed murmur; and he fell back to
the wall.
She came towards him. "Am I not beautiful"? she urged. She took his hand.
His eye swam with hers. But his look was different from hers, though he
could not know that. His was the madness of a man in a dream; hers was a
painful thing. The Furies dwelt in her. She softly lifted his hand above
his head, and whispered: "Swear." And she kissed him. Her lips were icy,
though he did not think so. The blood tossed in his veins. He swore: but,
doing so, he could not conceive all that would be required of him. He was
hers, body and soul, and she had resolved on a grim thing. . . . In the
darkness, they left the hut and passed into the woods, and slowly up
through the hills.
Heldon returned to his home that night to find it empty. There were no
servants. There was no wife. Her cat and dog lay dead upon the hearthrug.
Her clothing was cut into strips. Her wedding-dress was a charred heap on
the fireplace. Her jewellery lay molten with it. Her portrait had been
torn from its frame.
An intolerable fear possessed him. Drops of sweat hung on his forehead
and his hands. He fled towards the town. He bit his finger-nails till
they bled as he passed the house in the pines. He lifted his arm as if
the flappings of The Crimson Flag were blows in his face.
At last he passed Tom Liffey's hut. He saw Pierre, coming from it. The
look on the gambler's face was one, of gloomy wonder. His fingers
trembled as he lighted a cigarette, and that was an unusual thing. The
form of Heldon edged within the light. Pierre dropped the match and said
to him,--"You are looking for your wife?"
Heldon bowed his head. The other threw open the door of the hut. "Come in
here," he said. They entered. Pierre pointed to a woman's hat on the
table. "Do you know that"? he asked, huskily, for he was moved. But
Heldon only nodded dazedly. Pierre continued: "I was to have met Tom
Liffey here--to-night. He is not here. You hoped--I suppose--to see your
wife in your--home. She is not there. He left a word on paper for me. I
have torn it up. Writing is the enemy of man. But I know where he is
gone. I know also where your wife has gone."
Heldon's face was of a hateful paleness. . . . They passed out into the
night.
"Where are you going"? Heldon said.
"To God's Playground, if we can get there."
"To God's Playground? To the glacier-top? You are mad."
"No, but he and she were mad. Come on." Then he whispered something, and
Heldon gave a great cry, and they plunged into the woods.
In the morning the people of Little Goshen, looking towards the glacier,
saw a flag (they knew afterwards that it was crimson) flying on it. Near
it were two human figures. A miner, looking through a field-glass, said
that one figure was crouching by the flag-staff, and that it was a woman.
The other figure near was a man. As the morning wore on, they saw upon a
crag of ice below the sloping glacier two men looking upwards towards the
flag. One of them seemed to shriek out, and threw up his hands, and made
as if to rush forward; but the other drew him back.
Heldon knew what revenge and disgrace may be at their worst. In vain he
tried to reach God's Playground. Only one man knew the way, and he was
dead upon it--with Heldon's wife: two shameless suicides. . . . When he
came down from the mountain the hair upon his face was white, though that
upon his head remained black as it had always been. And those frozen
figures stayed there like statues with that other crimson flag: until,
one day, a great-bodied wind swept out of the north, and, in pity,
carried them down a bottomless fissure.
But long before this happened, The Woman had fled from Little Goshen in
the night, and her house was burned to the ground.
THE FLOOD
Wendling came to Fort Anne on the day that the Reverend Ezra Badgley and
an unknown girl were buried. And that was a notable thing. The man had
been found dead at his evening meal; the girl had died on the same day;
and they were buried side by side. This caused much scandal, for the man
was holy, and the girl, as many women said, was probably evil altogether.
At the graves, when the minister's people saw what was being done, they
piously protested; but the Factor, to whom Pierre had whispered a word,
answered them gravely that the matter should go on: since none knew but
the woman was as worthy of heaven as the man. Wendling chanced to stand
beside Pretty Pierre.
"Who knows!" he said aloud, looking hard at the graves, "who knows! . . .
She died before him, but the dead can strike."
Pierre did not answer immediately, for the Factor was calling the earth
down on both coffins; but after a moment he added: "Yes, the dead can
strike." And then the eyes of the two men caught and stayed, and they
knew that they had things to say to each other in the world.
They became friends. And that, perhaps, was not greatly to Wendling's
credit; for in the eyes of many Pierre was an outcast as an outlaw. Maybe
some of the women disliked this friendship most; since Wendling was a
handsome man, and Pierre was never known to seek them, good or bad; and
they blamed him for the other's coldness, for his unconcerned yet
respectful eye.
"There's Nelly Nolan would dance after him to the world's end," said Shon
McGann to Pierre one day; "and the Widdy Jerome herself, wid her flamin'
cheeks and the wild fun in her eye, croons like a babe at the breast as
he slides out his cash on the bar; and over on Gansonby's Flat there's--"
"There's many a fool, 'voila,'" sharply interjected Pierre, as he pushed
the needle through a button he was sewing on his coat.
"Bedad, there's a pair of fools here, anyway, I say; for the women might
die without lift at waist or brush of lip, and neither of ye'd say,
'Here's to the joy of us, goddess, me own!'"
Pierre seemed to be intently watching the needlepoint as it pierced up
the button-eye, and his reply was given with a slowness corresponding to
the sedate passage of the needle. "Wendling, you think, cares nothing for
women? Well, men who are like that cared once for one woman, and when
that was over--But, pshaw! I will not talk. You are no thinker, Shon
McGann. You blunder through the world. And you'll tremble as much to a
woman's thumb in fifty years as now."
"By the holy smoke," said Shon, "though I tremble at that, maybe, I'll
not tremble, as Wendling, at nothing at all." Here Pierre looked up
sharply, then dropped his eyes on his work again. Shon lapsed suddenly
into a moodiness.
"Yes," said Pierre, "as Wendling, at nothing at all? Well?"
"Well, this, Pierre, for you that's a thinker from me that's none. I was
walking with him in Red Glen yesterday. Sudden he took to shiverin', and
snatched me by the arm, and a mad look shot out of his handsome face.
'Hush!' says he. I listened. There was a sound like the hard rattle of a
creek over stones, and then another sound behind that. 'Come quick,' says
he, the sweat standin' thick on him; and he ran me up the bank--for it
was at the beginnin' of the Glen where the sides were low--and there we
stood pantin' and starin' flat at each other. 'What's that? and what's
got its hand on ye? for y' are cold as death, an' pinched in the face,
an' you've bruised my arm,' said I. And he looked round him slow and
breathed hard, then drew his fingers through the sweat on his cheek. 'I'm
not well, and I thought I heard--you heard it; what was it like?' said
he; and he peered close at me. 'Like water,' said I; 'a little creek
near, and a flood comin' far off.' 'Yes, just that,' said he; 'it's some
trick of wind in the place, but it makes a man foolish, and an inch of
brandy would be the right thing.' I didn't say no to that. And on we
came, and brandy we had with a wish in the eye of Nelly Nolan that'd warm
the heart of a tomb. . . . And there's a cud for your chewin', Pierre.
Think that by the neck and the tail, and the divil absolve ye."
During this, Pierre had finished with the button. He had drawn on his
coat and lifted his hat, and now lounged, trying the point of the needle
with his forefinger. When Shon ended, he said with a sidelong glance:
"But what did you think of all that, Shon?"
"Think! There it was! What's the use of thinkin'? There's many a trick in
the world with wind or with spirit, as I've seen often enough in ould
Ireland, and it's not to be guessed by me." Here his voice got a little
lower and a trifle solemn. "For, Pierre," spoke he, "there's what's more
than life or death, and sorra wan can we tell what it is; but we'll know
some day whin--"
"When we've taken the leap at the Almighty Ditch," said Pierre, with a
grave kind of lightness. "Yes, it is all strange. But even the Almighty
Ditch is worth the doing: nearly everything is worth the doing; being
young, growing old, fighting, loving--when youth is on--hating, eating,
drinking, working, playing big games. All is worth it except two things."
"And what are they, bedad?"
"Thy neighbour's wife and murder. Those are horrible. They double on a
man one time or another; always."
Here, as in curiosity, Pierre pierced his finger with the needle, and
watched the blood form in a little globule. Looking at it meditatively
and sardonically, he said: "There is only one end to these. Blood for
blood is a great matter; and I used to wonder if it would not be terrible
for a man to see his death coming on him drop by drop, like that." He let
the spot of blood fall to the floor. "But now I know that there is a
punishment worse than that . . . 'mon Dieu!' worse than that," he added.
Into Shon's face a strange look had suddenly come. "Yes, there's
something worse than that, Pierre."
"So, 'bien?'"
Shon made the sacred gesture of his creed. "To be punished by the dead.
And not see them--only hear them." And his eyes steadied firmly to the
other's.
Pierre was about to reply, but there came the sound of footsteps through
the open door, and presently Wendling entered slowly. He was pale and
worn, and his eyes looked out with a searching anxiousness. But that did
not render him less comely. He had always dressed in black and white, and
this now added to the easy and yet severe refinement of his person. His
birth and breeding had occurred in places unfrequented by such as Shon
and Pierre; but plains and wild life level all; and men are friends
according to their taste and will, and by no other law. Hence these with
Wendling. He stretched out his hand to each without a word. The
hand-shake was unusual; he had little demonstration ever. Shon looked up
surprised, but responded. Pierre followed with a swift, inquiring look;
then, in the succeeding pause, he offered cigarettes. Wendling took one;
and all, silent, sat down. The sun streamed intemperately through the
doorway, making a broad ribbon of light straight across the floor to
Wendling's feet. After lighting his cigarette, he looked into the
sunlight for a moment, still not speaking. Shon meanwhile had started his
pipe, and now, as if he found the silence awkward,--"It's a day for God's
country, this," he said: "to make man a Christian for little or much,
though he play with the Divil betunewhiles." Without looking at them,
Wendling said, in a low voice: "It was just such a day, down there in
Quebec, when It happened. You could hear the swill of the river, the
water licking the piers, and the saws in the Big Mill and the Little Mill
as they marched through the timber, flashing their teeth like bayonets.
It's a wonderful sound on a hot, clear day--that wild, keen singing of
the saws, like the cry of a live thing fighting and conquering. Up from
the fresh-cut lumber in the yards there came a smell like the juice of
apples, and the sawdust, as you thrust your hand into it, was as cool and
soft as the leaves of a clove-flower in the dew. On these days the town
was always still. It looked sleeping, and you saw the heat quivering up
from the wooden walls and the roofs of cedar shingles as though the
houses were breathing."
Here he paused, still intent on the shaking sunshine. Then he turned to
the others as if suddenly aware that he had been talking to them. Shon
was about to speak, but Pierre threw a restraining glance, and, instead,
they all looked through the doorway and beyond. In the settlement below
they saw the effect that Wendling had described. The houses breathed. A
grasshopper went clacking past, a dog at the door snapped up a fly; but
there seemed no other life of day. Wendling nodded his head towards the
distance. "It was quiet, like that. I stood and watched the mills and the
yards, and listened to the saws, and looked at the great slide, and the
logs on the river: and I said ever to myself that it was all mine--all.
Then I turned to a big house on the hillock beyond the cedars, whose
windows were open, with a cool dusk lying behind them. More than all
else, I loved to think I owned that house and what was in it. . . . She
was a beautiful woman. And she used to sit in a room facing the
mill--though the house fronted another way--thinking of me, I did not
doubt, and working at some delicate needle-stuff. There never had been a
sharp word between us, save when I quarrelled bitterly with her brother,
and he left the mill and went away. But she got over that mostly, though
the lad's name was, never mentioned between us. That day I was so hungry
for the sight of her that I got my field-glass--used to watch my vessels
and rafts making across the bay--and trained it on the window where I
knew she sat. I thought, it would amuse her, too, when I went back at
night, if I told her what she had been doing. I laughed to myself at the
thought of it as I adjusted the glass. . . . I looked. . . . There was no
more laughing. . . . I saw her, and in front of her a man, with his back
half on me. I could not recognise him, though at the instant I thought he
was something familiar. I failed to get his face at all. Hers I found
indistinctly. But I saw him catch her playfully by the chin! After a
little they rose. He put his arm about her and kissed her, and he ran his
fingers through her hair. She had such fine golden hair--so light, and it
lifted to every breath. Something got into my brain. I know now it was
the maggot which sent Othello mad. The world in that hour was malicious,
awful. . . .
"After a time--it seemed ages, she and everything had receded so far--I
went . . . home. At the door I asked the servant who had been there. She
hesitated, confused, and then said the young curate of the parish. I was
very cool: for madness is a strange thing; you see everything with an
intense aching clearness--that is the trouble. . . . She was more kind
than common. I do not think I was unusual. I was playing a part well, my
grandmother had Indian blood like yours, Pierre, and I was waiting. I was
even nicely critical of her to myself. I balanced the mole on her neck
against her general beauty; the curve of her instep, I decided, was a
little too emphatic. I passed her backwards and forwards, weighing her at
every point; but yet these two things were the only imperfections. I
pronounced her an exceeding piece of art--and infamy. I was much
interested to see how she could appear perfect in her soul. I encouraged
her to talk. I saw with devilish irony that an angel spoke. And, to cap
it all, she assumed the fascinating air of the mediator--for her brother;
seeking a reconciliation between us. Her amazing art of person and mind
so worked upon me that it became unendurable; it was so exquisite--and so
shameless. I was sitting where the priest had sat that afternoon; and
when she leaned towards me I caught her chin lightly and trailed my
fingers through her hair as he had done: and that ended it, for I was
cold, and my heart worked with horrible slowness. Just as a wave poises
at its height before breaking upon the shore, it hung at every
pulse-beat, and then seemed to fall over with a sickening thud. I arose,
and acting still, spoke impatiently of her brother. Tears sprang to her
eyes. Such divine dissimulation, I thought--too good for earth. She
turned to leave the room, and I did not stay her. Yet we were together
again that night. . . . I was only waiting."
The cigarette had dropped from his fingers to the floor, and lay there
smoking. Shon's face was fixed with anxiety; Pierre's eyes played gravely
with the sunshine. Wendling drew a heavy breath, and then went on.
"Again, next day, it was like this-the world draining the heat. . . . I
watched from the Big Mill. I saw them again. He leaned over her chair and
buried his face in her hair. The proof was absolute now. . . . I started
away, going a roundabout, that I might not be seen. It took me some time.
I was passing through a clump of cedar when I saw them making towards the
trees skirting the river. Their backs were on me. Suddenly they diverted
their steps--towards the great slide, shut off from water this last few
months, and used as a quarry to deepen it. Some petrified things had been
found in the rocks, but I did not think they were going to these. I saw
them climb down the rocky steps; and presently they were lost to view.
The gates of the slide could be opened by machinery from the Little Mill.
A terrible, deliciously malignant thought came to me. I remember how the
sunlight crept away from me and left me in the dark. I stole through that
darkness to the Little Mill. I went to the machinery for opening the
gates. Very gently I set it in motion, facing the slide as I did so. I
could see it through the open sides of the mill. I smiled to think what
the tiny creek, always creeping through a faint leak in the gates and
falling with a granite rattle on the stones, would now become. I pushed
the lever harder--harder. I saw the gates suddenly give, then fly open,
and the river sprang roaring massively through them. I heard a shriek
through the roar. I shuddered; and a horrible sickness came on me. . . .
And as I turned from the machinery, I saw the young priest coming at me
through a doorway! . . . It was not the priest and my wife that I had
killed; but my wife and her brother. . . ."
He threw his head back as though something clamped his throat. His voice
roughened with misery. "The young priest buried them both, and people did
not know the truth. They were even sorry for me. But I gave up the
mills--all; and I became homeless . . . this."
Now he looked up at the two men, and said: "I have told you because you
know something, and because there will, I think, be an end soon." He got
up and reached out a trembling hand for a cigarette. Pierre gave him one.
"Will you walk with me"? he asked.
Shon shook his head. "God forgive you," he replied, "I can't do it."
But Wendling and Pierre left the hut together. They walked for an hour,
scarcely speaking, and not considering where they went. At last Pierre
mechanically turned to go down into Red Glen. Wendling stopped short,
then, with a sighing laugh, strode on. "Shoo has told you what happened
here"? he said.
Pierre nodded.
"And you know what came once when you walked with me.... The dead can
strike," he added. Pierre sought his eye. "The minister and the girl
buried together that day," he said, "were--"
He stopped, for behind him he heard the sharp, cold trickle of water.
Silent they walked on. It followed them. They could not get out of the
Glen now until they had compassed its length--the walls were high. The
sound grew. The men faced each other.
"Good-bye," said Wendling; and he reached out his hand swiftly. But
Pierre heard a mighty flood groaning on them, and he blinded as he
stretched his arm in response. He caught at Wendling's shoulder, but felt
him lifted and carried away, while he himself stood still in a screeching
wind and heard impalpable water rushing over him. In a minute it was
gone; and he stood alone in Red Glen.
He gathered himself up and ran. Far down, where the Glen opened to the
plain, he found Wendling. The hands were wrinkled; the face was cold; the
body was wet: the man was drowned and dead.
IN PIPI VALLEY
"Divils me darlins, it's a memory I have of a time whin luck wasn't
foldin' her arms round me, and not so far back aither, and I on the
wallaby track hot-foot for the City o' Gold."
Shon McGann said this in the course of a discussion on the prosperity of
Pipi Valley. Pretty Pierre remarked nonchalantly in reply,--"The wallaby
track--eh--what is that, Shon?"
"It's a bit of a haythen y' are, Pierre. The wallaby track? That's the
name in Australia for trampin' west through the plains of the Never-Never
Country lookin' for the luck o' the world; as, bedad, it's meself that
knows it, and no other, and not by book or tellin' either, but with the
grip of thirst at me throat and a reef in me belt every hour to quiet the
gnawin'." And Shon proceeded to light his pipe afresh.
"But the City o' Gold-was there much wealth for you there, Shon?"
Shon laughed, and said between the puffs of smoke, "Wealth for me, is it?
Oh, mother o' Moses! wealth of work and the pride of livin' in the heart
of us, and the grip of an honest hand betunewhiles; and what more do y'
want, Pierre?"
The Frenchman's drooping eyelids closed a little more, and he replied,
meditatively: "Money? No, that is not Shon McGann. The good fellowship of
thirst?--yes, a little. The grip of the honest hand, quite, and the
clinch of an honest waist? Well, 'peut-etre.'
"Of the waist which is not honest?--tsh! he is gay--and so!"
The Irishman took his pipe from his mouth, and held it poised before him.
He looked inquiringly and a little frowningly at the other for a moment,
as if doubtful whether to resent the sneer that accompanied the words
just spoken; but at last he good-humouredly said: "Blood o' me bones, but
it's much I fear the honest waist hasn't always been me portion--Heaven
forgive me!"