Romany of the Snows - Gilbert Parker
Pierre waved his hand towards space. "This," he said suggestively.
"What's this?" asked the other fretfully.
"The thing you feel round you here."
"I feel the cold," was the petulant reply.
"I feel the immense, the far off," said Pierre slowly.
The other did not understand as yet. "You've learned big words," he said
disdainfully.
"No; big things," rejoined Pierre sharply--"a few."
"Let me hear you preach them," half snarled Sherburne.
"You will not like to hear them--no."
"I'm not likely to think about them one way or another," was the
contemptuous reply.
Pierre's eyes half closed. The young, impetuous half-baked college man.
To set his little knowledge against his own studious vagabondage! At that
instant he determined to play a game and win; to turn this man into a
vagabond also; to see John the Baptist become a Bedouin. He saw the
doubt, the uncertainty, the shattered vanity in the youth's mind, the
missionary's half retreat from his cause. A crisis was at hand. The youth
was fretful with his great theme, instead of being severe upon himself.
For days and days Pierre's presence had acted on Sherburne silently but
forcibly. He had listened to the vagabond's philosophy, and knew that it
was of a deeper--so much deeper--knowledge of life than he himself
possessed, and he knew also that it was terribly true; he was not wise
enough to see that it was only true in part. The influence had been
insidious, delicate, cunning, and he himself was only "a voice crying in
the wilderness," without the simple creed of that voice. He knew that the
Methodist missionary was believed in more, if less liked, than himself.
Pierre would work now with all the latent devilry of his nature to unseat
the man from his saddle.
"You have missed the great thing, alors, though you have been up here two
years," he said. "You do not feel, you do not know. What good have you
done? Who has got on his knees and changed his life because of you? Who
has told his beads or longed for the Mass because of you? Tell me, who
has ever said, 'You have showed me how to live'? Even the women, though
they cry sometimes when you sing-song the prayers, go on just the same
when the little 'bless-you' is over. Why? Most of them know a better
thing than you tell them. Here is the truth: you are little--eh, so very
little. You never lied--direct; you never stole the waters that are
sweet; you never knew the big dreams that come with wine in the dead of
night; you never swore at your own soul and heard it laugh back at you;
you never put your face in the breast of a woman--do not look so wild at
me!--you never had a child; you never saw the world and yourself through
the doors of real life. You never have said, 'I am tired; I am
sick of all; I have seen all.' You have never felt what came
after--understanding. Chut, your talk is for children--and missionaries.
You are a prophet without a call, you are a leader without a man to lead,
you are less than a child up here. For here the children feel a peace in
their blood when the stars come out, and a joy in their brains when the
dawn comes up and reaches a yellow hand to the Pole, and the west wind
shouts at them. Holy Mother! we in the far north, we feel things, for all
the great souls of the dead are up there at the Pole in the pleasant
land, and we have seen the Scarlet Hunter and the Kimash Hills. You have
seen nothing. You have only heard, and because, like a child, you have
never sinned, you come and preach to us!"
The night was folding down fast, all the stars were shooting out into
their places, and in the north the white lights of the aurora were flying
to and fro. Pierre had spoken with a slow force and precision, yet, as he
went on, his eyes almost became fixed on those shifting flames, and a
deep look came into them, as he was moved by his own eloquence. Never in
his life had he made so long a speech at once. He paused, and then said
suddenly: "Come, let us run."
He broke into a long, sliding trot, and Sherburne did the same. With
their arms gathered to their sides they ran for quite two miles without a
word, until the heavy breathing of the clergyman brought Pierre up
suddenly.
"You do not run well," he said; "you do not run with the whole body. You
know so little. Did you ever think how much such men as Jacques Parfaite
know? The earth they read like a book, the sky like an animal's ways, and
a man's face like--like the writing on the wall."
"Like the writing on the wall," said Sherburne, musing; for, under the
other's influence, his petulance was gone. He knew that he was not a part
of this life, that he was ignorant of it; of, indeed, all that was vital
in it and in men and women.
"I think you began this too soon. You should have waited; then you might
have done good. But here we are wiser than you. You have no message--no
real message--to give us; down in your heart you are not even sure of
yourself."
Sherburne sighed. "I'm of no use," he said. "I'll get out. I'm no good at
all."
Pierre's eyes glistened. He remembered how, the day before, this youth
had said hot words about his card-playing; had called him--in effect--a
thief; had treated him as an inferior, as became one who was of St.
Augustine's, Canterbury.
"It is the great thing to be free," Pierre said, "that no man shall look
for this or that of you. Just to do as far as you feel, as far as you are
sure--that is the best. In this you are not sure--no. Hein, is it not?"
Sherburne did not answer. Anger, distrust, wretchedness, the spirit of
the alien, loneliness, were alive in him. The magnetism of this deep
penetrating man, possessed of a devil, was on him, and in spite of every
reasonable instinct he turned to him for companionship.
"It's been a failure," he burst out, "and I'm sick of it--sick of it; but
I can't give it up."
Pierre said nothing. They had come to what seemed a vast semicircle of
ice and snow, a huge amphitheatre in the plains. It was wonderful: a
great round wall on which the northern lights played, into which the
stars peered. It was open towards the north, and in one side was a
fissure shaped like a Gothic arch. Pierre pointed to it, and they did not
speak till they had passed through it. Like great seats the steppes of
snow ranged round, and in the centre was a kind of plateau of ice, as it
might seem a stage or an altar. To the north there was a great opening,
the lost arc of the circle, through which the mystery of the Pole swept
in and out, or brooded there where no man may question it. Pierre stood
and looked. Time and again he had been here, and had asked the same
question: Who had ever sat on those frozen benches and looked down at the
drama on that stage below? Who played the parts? Was it a farce or a
sacrifice? To him had been given the sorrow of imagination, and he
wondered and wondered. Or did they come still--those strange people,
whoever they were--and watch ghostly gladiators at their fatal sport? If
they came, when was it? Perhaps they were there now unseen. In spite of
himself he shuddered. Who was the keeper of the house?
Through his mind there ran--pregnant to him for the first tine--a chanson
of the Scarlet Hunter, the Red Patrol, who guarded the sleepers in the
Kimash Hills against the time they should awake and possess the land once
more: the friend of the lost, the lover of the vagabond, and of all who
had no home:
"Strangers come to the outer walls--
(Why do the sleepers stir?)
Strangers enter the Judgment House--
(Why do the sleepers sigh?)
Slow they rise in their judgment seats,
Sieve and measure the naked souls,
Then with a blessing return to sleep--
(Quiet the Judgment House.)
Lone and sick are the vagrant souls--
(When shall the world come home?)"
He reflected upon the words, and a feeling of awe came over him, for he
had been in the White Valley and had seen the Scarlet Hunter. But there
came at once also a sinister desire to play a game for this man's
life-work here. He knew that the other was ready for any wild move; there
was upon him the sense of failure and disgust; he was acted on by the
magic of the night, the terrible delight of the scene, and that might be
turned to advantage.
He said: "Am I not right? There is something in the world greater than
the creeds and the book of the Mass. To be free and to enjoy, that is the
thing. Never before have you felt what you feel here now. And I will show
you more. I will teach you how to know, I will lead you through all the
north and make you to understand the big things of life. Then, when you
have known, you can return if you will. But now--see: I will tell you
what I will do. Here on this great platform we will play a game of cards.
There is a man whose life I can ruin. If you win I promise to leave him
safe; and to go out of the far north for ever, to go back to Quebec"--he
had a kind of gaming fever in his veins. "If I win, you give up the
Church, leaving behind the prayerbook, the Bible and all, coming with me
to do what I shall tell you, for the passing of twelve moons. It is a
great stake--will you play it? Come"--he leaned forward, looking into the
other's face--"will you play it? They drew lots--those people in the
Bible. We will draw lots, and see, eh?--and see?"
"I accept the stake," said Sherburne, with a little gasp.
Without a word they went upon that platform, shaped like an altar, and
Pierre at once drew out a pack of cards, shuffling them with his mittened
hands. Then he knelt down and said, as he laid out the cards one by one
till there were thirty: "Whoever gets the ace of hearts first,
wins--hein?"
Sherburne nodded and knelt also. The cards lay back upwards in three
rows. For a moment neither stirred. The white, metallic stars saw it, the
small crescent moon beheld it, and the deep wonder of night made it
strange and dreadful. Once or twice Sherburne looked round as though he
felt others present, and once Pierre looked out to the wide portals, as
though he saw some one entering. But there was nothing to the
eye--nothing. Presently Pierre said: "Begin."
The other drew a card, then Pierre drew one, then the other, then Pierre
again; and so on. How slow the game was! Neither hurried, but both,
kneeling, looked and looked at the card long before drawing and turning
it over. The stake was weighty, and Pierre loved the game more than he
cared about the stake. Sherburne cared nothing about the game, but all
his soul seemed set upon the hazard. There was not a sound out of the
night, nothing stirring but the Spirit of the North. Twenty, twenty-five
cards were drawn, and then Pierre paused.
"In a minute all will be settled," he said. "Will you go on, or will you
pause?"
But Sherburne had got the madness of chance in his veins now, and he
said: "Quick, quick, go on!" Pierre drew, but the great card held back.
Sherburne drew, then Pierre again. There were three left. Sherburne's
face was as white as the snow around him. His mouth was open, and a
little white cloud of frosted breath came out. His hand hungered for the
card, drew back, then seized it. A moan broke from him. Then Pierre, with
a little weird laugh, reached out and turned over the ace of hearts!
They both stood up. Pierre put the cards in his pocket.
"You have lost," he said.
Sherburne threw back his head with a reckless laugh. The laugh seemed to
echo and echo through the amphitheatre, and then from the frozen seats,
the hillocks of ice and snow, there was a long, low sound, as of sorrow,
and a voice came after:
"Sleep--sleep! Blessed be the just and the keepers of vows."
Sherburne stood shaking, as though he had seen a host of spirits. His
eyes on the great seats of judgment, he said to Pierre:
"See, see, how they sit there, grey and cold and awful!"
But Pierre shook his head.
"There is nothing," he said, "nothing;" yet he knew that Sherburne was
looking upon the men of judgment of the Kimash Hills, the sleepers. He
looked round, half fearfully, for if here were those great children of
the ages, where was the keeper of the house, the Red Patrol?
Even as he thought, a figure in scarlet with a noble face and a high
pride of bearing stood before them, not far away. Sherburne clutched his
arm.
Then the Red Patrol, the Scarlet Hunter spoke: "Why have you sinned your
sins and broken your vows within our house of judgment? Know ye not that
in the new springtime of the world ye shall be outcast, because ye have
called the sleepers to judgment before their time? But I am the hunter of
the lost. Go you," he said to Sherburne, pointing, "where a sick man lies
in a hut in the Shikam Valley. In his soul find thine own again." Then to
Pierre: "For thee, thou shalt know the desert and the storm and the
lonely hills; thou shalt neither seek nor find. Go, and return no more."
The two men, Sherburne falteringly, stepped down and moved to the open
plain. They turned at the great entrance and looked back. Where they had
stood there rested on his long bow the Red Patrol. He raised it, and a
flaming arrow flew through the sky towards the south. They followed its
course, and when they looked back a little afterwards, the great
judgment-house was empty, and the whole north was silent as the sleepers.
At dawn they came to the hut in the Shikam Valley, and there they found a
trapper dying. He had sinned greatly, and he could not die without
someone to show him how, to tell him what to say to the angel of the
cross-roads.
Sherburne, kneeling by him, felt his own new soul moved by a holy fire,
and, first praying for himself, he said to the sick man: "For if we
confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Praying for both, his heart grew strong, and he heard the sick man say,
ere he journeyed forth to the crossroads:
"You have shown me the way. I have peace."
"Speak for me in the Presence," said Sherburne softly.
The dying man could not answer, but that moment, as he journeyed forth on
the Far Trail, he held Sherburne's hand.
THE GOING OF THE WHITE SWAN
"Why don't she come back, father?"
The man shook his head, his hand fumbled with the wolf-skin robe covering
the child, and he made no reply. "She'd come if she knew I was hurted,
wouldn't she?"
The father nodded, and then turned restlessly toward the door, as though
expecting someone. The look was troubled, and the pipe he held was not
alight, though he made a pretence of smoking.
"Suppose the wild cat had got me, she'd be sorry when she comes, wouldn't
she?"
There was no reply yet, save by gesture, the language of primitive man;
but the big body shivered a little, and the uncouth hand felt for a place
in the bed where the lad's knee made a lump under the robe. He felt the
little heap tenderly, but the child winced.
"S-sh, but that hurts! This wolf-skin's most too much on me, isn't it,
father?"
The man softly, yet awkwardly too, lifted the robe, folded it back, and
slowly uncovered the knee. The leg was worn away almost to skin and bone,
but the knee itself was swollen with inflammation. He bathed it with some
water, mixed with vinegar and herbs, then drew down the deer-skin shirt
at the child's shoulder, and did the same with it. Both shoulder and knee
bore the marks of teeth--where a huge wild cat had made havoc--and the
body had long red scratches.
Presently the man shook his head sorrowfully, and covered up the small
disfigured frame again, but this time with a tanned skin of the caribou.
The flames of the huge wood fire dashed the walls and floor with a
velvety red and black, and the large iron kettle, bought of the Company
at Fort Sacrament, puffed out geysers of steam.
The place was a low but with parchment windows and rough mud-mortar
lumped between the logs. Skins hung along two sides, with bullet-holes
and knife-holes showing: of the great grey wolf, the red puma, the bronze
hill-lion, the beaver, the bear, and the sable; and in one corner was a
huge pile of them. Bare of the usual comforts as the room was, it had a
sort of refinement also, joined to an inexpressible loneliness; you could
scarce have told how or why.
"Father," said the boy, his face pinched with pain for a moment, "it
hurts so all over, every once in a while."
His fingers caressed the leg just below the knee. "Father," he suddenly
added, "what does it mean when you hear a bird sing in the middle of the
night?" The woodsman looked down anxiously into the boy's face. "It
hasn't no meaning, Dominique. There ain't such a thing on the Labrador
Heights as a bird singin' in the night. That's only in warm countries
where there's nightingales. So--bien sur!"
The boy had a wise, dreamy, speculative look. "Well, I guess it was a
nightingale--it didn't sing like any I ever heard."
The look of nervousness deepened in the woodsman's face. "What did it
sing like, Dominique?"
"So it made you shiver. You wanted it to go on, and yet you didn't want
it. It was pretty, but you felt as if something was going to snap inside
of you."
"When did you hear it, my son?"
"Twice last night--and--and I guess it was Sunday the other time. I don't
know, for there hasn't been no Sunday up here since mother went away--has
there?"
"Mebbe not."
The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his
temples.
"'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had
Sunday, wasn't it?"
The man made no reply, but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips
doubled in as if he endured physical pain. He got to his feet and paced
the floor. For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk from this
wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting less and less
able to bear it. The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of speech,
the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and wise. The
only white child within a compass of three hundred miles or so; the
lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted to a
sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at camp-fires
and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he was swung in
a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a canoe; and,
more than all, the care of a good, loving--if passionate--little mother:
all these had made him far wiser than his years. He had been hours upon
hours each day alone with the birds, and squirrels, and wild animals, and
something of the keen scent and instinct of the animal world had entered
into his body and brain, so that he felt what he could not understand.
He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought of
something. "Daddy," he said, "let me have it."
A smile struggled for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the wall
and took down the skin of a silver fox. He held it on his palm for a
moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought it
over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped itself,
as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.
"Good! good!" he said involuntarily.
"Bon! bon!" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.
The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking the
fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should be
spent on a little pelt by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old son.
One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes fascinated
by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere vanity, or hunger,
or avarice in her face--only the love of the beautiful thing. But this
was an animal's skin. Did they feel the animal underneath it yet, giving
it beauty, life, glory?
The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye over the
sights of his father's rifle, as he rested the barrel on the window-sill,
and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole made by the
bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph. Minutes passed as
they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter proud of his son,
the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts suffering to get
the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as the wild passion
of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips his fingers at times
with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a lion fondling her
young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of the desert. This boy
had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and as it lay dying, drop
down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its handsomeness. Death is
no insult. It is the law of the primitive world--war, and love in war.
They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own way:
the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic feelings;
the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious atmosphere which
belongs to the north, and to the north alone. At last the boy lay back on
the pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole of the pelt. His eyes
closed, and he seemed about to fall asleep, but presently looked up and
whispered: "I haven't said my prayers, have I?"
The father shook his head in a sort of rude confusion.
"I can pray out loud if I want to, can't I?"
"Of course, Dominique." The man shrank a little.
"I forget a good many times, but I know one all right, for I said it when
the bird was singing. It isn't one out of the book Father Corraine sent
mother by Pretty Pierre; it's one she taught me out of her own head.
P'r'aps I'd better say it."
"P'r'aps, if you want to." The voice was husky. The boy began:
"O bon Jesu, who died to save us from our sins, and to lead us to Thy
country, where there is no cold, nor hunger, nor thirst, and where no one
is afraid, listen to Thy child. . . . When the great winds and rains come
down from the hills, do not let the floods drown us, nor the woods cover
us, nor the snow-slide bury us; and do not let the prairie-fires burn us.
Keep wild beasts from killing us in our sleep, and give us good hearts
that we may not kill them in anger."
His finger twisted involuntarily into the bullet-hole in the pelt, and he
paused a moment.
"Keep us from getting lost, O gracious Saviour." Again there was a pause,
his eyes opened wide, and he said:
"Do you think mother's lost, father?"
A heavy broken breath came from the father, and he replied haltingly:
"Mebbe, mebbe so."
Dominique's eyes closed again. "I'll make up some," he said slowly. "And
if mother's lost, bring her back again to us, for everything's going
wrong."
Again he paused, then went on with the prayer as it had been taught him.
"Teach us to hear Thee whenever Thou callest, and to see Thee when Thou
visitest us, and let the blessed Mary and all the saints speak often to
Thee for us. O Christ, hear us. Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ have
mercy upon us. Amen."
Making the sign of the cross, he lay back, and said "I'll go to sleep
now, I guess."
The man sat for a long time looking at the pale, shining face, at the
blue veins showing painfully dark on the temples and forehead, at the
firm little white hand, which was as brown as a butternut a few weeks
before. The longer he sat, the deeper did his misery sink into his soul.
His wife had gone, he knew not where, his child was wasting to death, and
he had for his sorrows no inner consolation. He had ever had that touch
of mystical imagination inseparable from the far north, yet he had none
of that religious belief which swallowed up natural awe and turned it to
the refining of life, and to the advantage of a man's soul. Now it was
forced in upon him that his child was wiser than himself, wiser and
safer. His life had been spent in the wastes, with rough deeds and rugged
habits, and a youth of hardship, danger, and almost savage endurance, had
given him a half-barbarian temperament, which could strike an angry blow
at one moment and fondle to death at the next.
When he married sweet Lucette Barbond his religion reached little farther
than a belief in the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills and those voices
that could be heard calling in the night, till their time of sleep be
past, and they should rise and reconquer the north.
Not even Father Corraine, whose ways were like those of his Master, could
ever bring him to a more definite faith. His wife had at first striven
with him, mourning yet loving. Sometimes the savage in him had broken out
over the little creature, merely because barbaric tyranny was in
him--torture followed by the passionate kiss. But how was she philosopher
enough to understand the cause?
When she fled from their hut one bitter day, as he roared some wild words
at her, it was because her nerves had all been shaken from threatened
death by wild beasts (of which he did not know), and his violence drove
her mad. She had run out of the house, and on, and on, and on--and she
had never come back. That was weeks ago, and there had been no word nor
sign of her since. The man was now busy with it all, in a slow, cumbrous
way. A nature more to be touched by things seen than by things told, his
mind was being awakened in a massive kind of fashion. He was viewing this
crisis of his life as one sees a human face in the wide searching light
of a great fire. He was restless, but he held himself still by a strong
effort, not wishing to disturb the sleeper. His eyes seemed to retreat
farther and farther back under his shaggy brows.