"My dear!" cried Marjorie, with a sharp note of amusement. "Whatisa Gawdsaker?"
"Oh," said Trafford, "haven't you heard that before? He's the person who gets excited by any deliberate discussion and gets up wringing his hands and screaming, 'For Gawd's sake, let'sdosomethingnow!' I think they used it first for Pethick Lawrence, that man who did so much to run the old militant suffragettes and burke the proper discussion of woman's future. You know. You used to have 'em in Chelsea—with their hats. Oh! 'Gawdsaking' is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption that kills a thousand good beginnings. You see it in small things and in great. You see it in my life; Gawdsaking turned my life-work to cash and promotions, Gawdsaking——Look at the way the aviators took to flying for prizes and gate-money, the waypure research is swamped by endowments for technical applications! Then that poor ghost-giant of an idea the socialists have;—it's been treated like one of those unborn lambs they kill for the fine skin of it, made into results before ever it was alive. Was there anything more pitiful? The first great dream and then the last phase! when your Aunt Plessington and the district visitors took and used it as a synonym for Payment in Kind.... It's natural, I suppose, for people to be eager for results, personal and immediate results—the last lesson of life is patience. Naturally they want reality, naturally! They want the individual life, something to handle and feel and use and live by, something of their very own before they die, and they want it now. But the thing that matters for the race, Marjorie, is a very different thing; it is to get the emerging thought process clear and to keep it clear—and to let those other hungers go. We've got to go back to England on the side of that delay, that arrest of interruption, that detached, observant, synthesizing process of the mind, that solvent of difficulties and obsolescent institutions, which is the reality of collective human life. We've got to go back on the side of pure science—literature untrammeled by the preconceptions of the social schemers—art free from the urgency of immediate utility—and a new, a regal, a god-like sincerity in philosophy. And, above all, we've got to stop this Jackdaw buying of yours, my dear, which is the essence of all that is wrong with the world, this snatching at everything, which loses everything worth having in life, this greedy confused realization of our accumulated resources! You're going to be a non-shopping woman now. You're to come out of Bond Street, you and your kind, like Israel leaving the Egyptian flesh-pots. You're goingto be my wife and my mate.... Less of this service of things. Investments in comfort, in security, in experience, yes; but not just spending any more...."
He broke off abruptly with: "I want to go back and begin."
"Yes," said Marjorie, "we will go back," and saw minutely and distantly, and yet as clearly and brightly as if she looked into a concave mirror, that tall and dignified study, a very high room indeed, with a man writing before a fine, long-curtained window and a great lump of rich-glowing Labradorite upon his desk before him holding together an accumulation of written sheets....
She knew exactly the shop in Oxford Street where the stuff for the curtains might be best obtained.
§ 17
One night Marjorie had been sitting musing before the stove for a long time, and suddenly she said: "I wonder if we shall fail. I wonder if we shall get into a mess again when we are back in London.... As big a mess and as utter a discontent as sent us here...."
Trafford was scraping out his pipe, and did not answer for some moments. Then he remarked: "What nonsense!"
"But we shall," she said. "Everybody fails. To some extent, we are bound to fail. Because indeed nothing is clear; nothing is a clear issue.... You know—I'm just the old Marjorie really in spite of all these resolutions—the spendthrift, the restless, the eager. I'm a born snatcher and shopper. We're just the same people really."
"No," he said, after thought. "You're all Labrador older."
"I alwayshavefailed," she considered, "when itcame to any special temptations, Rag. I can'tstandnot having a thing!"
He made no answer.
"And you're still the same old Rag, you know," she went on. "Who weakens into kindness if I cry. Who likes me well-dressed. Who couldn't endure to see me poor."
"Not a bit of it. No! I'm a very different Rag with a very different Marjorie. Yes indeed! Things—are graver. Why!—I'm lame for life—and I've a scar. The verylookof things is changed...." He stared at her face and said: "You've hidden the looking-glass and you think I haven't noted it——"
"It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes to that—where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just the superficial aspects of the case."
"Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence, "and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. Wearedifferent, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."...
"Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point. "Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending we shan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. We shall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and you can't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing and half-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing them and replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, try as I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive me again. You know——It's just as though we were each of us not one person, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together, and then disperse and forget and plot against eachother...."
"Oh, things will happen again," said Trafford, in her pause. "But they will happen again with a difference—after this. With a difference. That's the good of it all.... We've found something here—that makes everything different.... We've found each other, too, dear wife."
She thought intently.
"I am afraid," she whispered.
"But what is there to be afraid of?"
"Myself."
She spoke after a little pause that seemed to hesitate. "At times I wish—oh, passionately!—that I could pray."
"Why don't you?"
"I don't believe enough—in that. I wish I did."
Trafford thought. "People are always so exacting about prayer," he said.
"Exacting."
"You want to pray—and you can't make terms for a thing you want. I used to think I could. I wanted God to come and demonstrate a bit.... It's no good, Madge.... If God chooses to be silent—you must pray to the silence. If he chooses to live in darkness, you must pray to the night...."
"Yes," said Marjorie, "I suppose one must."
She thought. "I suppose in the end one does," she said....
§ 18
Mixed up with this entirely characteristic theology of theirs and their elaborate planning-out of a new life in London were other strands of thought. Queer memories of London and old times together would flash with a peculiar brightness across theircontemplation of the infinities and the needs of mankind. Out of nowhere, quite disconnectedly, would come the human, finite: "Do you remember——?"
Two things particularly pressed into their minds. One was the thought of their children, and I do not care to tell how often in the day now they calculated the time in England, and tried to guess to a half mile or so where those young people might be and what they might be doing. "The shops are bright for Christmas now," said Marjorie. "This year Dick was to have had his first fireworks. I wonder if he did. I wonder if he burnt his dear little funny stumps of fingers. I hope not."
"Oh, just a little," said Trafford. "I remember how a squib made my glove smoulder and singed me, and how my mother kissed me for taking it like a man. It was the best part of the adventure."
"Dick shall burn his fingers when his mother's home to kiss him. But spare his fingers now, Dadda...."
The other topic was food.
It was only after they had been doing it for a week or so that they remarked how steadily they gravitated to reminiscences, suggestions, descriptions and long discussions of eatables—sound, solid eatables. They told over the particulars of dinners they had imagined altogether forgotten; neither hosts nor conversations seemed to matter now in the slightest degree, but every item in the menu had its place. They nearly quarrelled one day abouthors-d'œuvre. Trafford wanted to dwell on them when Marjorie was eager for the soup.
"It's niggling with food," said Marjorie.
"Oh, but there's no reason," said Trafford, "why you shouldn't take a lot ofhors-d'œuvre. Three or four sardines, and potato salad and a big piece ofsmoked salmon, and some of that Norwegian herring, and so on, and keep the olives by you to pick at. It's a beginning."
"It's—it's immoral," said Marjorie, "that's what I feel. If one needs a whet to eat, one shouldn't eat. The proper beginning of a dinner is soup—good, hot,richsoup. Thick soup—with things in it, vegetables and meat and things. Bits of oxtail."
"Not peas."
"No, not peas. Pea-soup is tiresome. I never knew anything one tired of so soon. I wish we hadn't relied on it so much."
"Thick soup's all very well," said Trafford, "but how about that clear stuff they give you in the little pavement restaurants in Paris. You know—Croûte-au-pot, with lovely great crusts and big leeks and lettuce leaves and so on! Tremendous aroma of onions, and beautiful little beads of fat! And being a clear soup, you see what there is. That's—interesting. Twenty-five centimes, Marjorie. Lord! I'd give a guinea a plate for it. I'd give five pounds for one of those jolly white-metal tureens full—you know,full, with little drops all over the outside of it, and the ladle sticking out under the lid."
"Have you ever tasted turtle soup?"
"Rather. They give it you in the City. The fat's—ripping. But they're rather precious with it, you know. For my own part, I don't think soup should bedoledout. I always liked the soup we used to get at the Harts'; but then they never give you enough, you know—not nearly enough."
"About a tablespoonful," said Marjorie. "It's mocking an appetite."
"Still there's things to follow," said Trafford....
They discussed the proper order of a dinner very carefully. They decided that sorbets and ices werenot only unwholesome, but nasty. "In London," said Trafford, "one's taste gets—vitiated."...
They weighed the merits of French cookery, modern international cookery, and produced alternatives. Trafford became very eloquent about old English food. "Dinners," said Trafford, "should be feasting, not the mere satisfaction of a necessity. There should be—amplitude. I remember a recipe for a pie; I think it was in one of those books that man Lucas used to compile. If I remember rightly, it began with: 'Take a swine and hew it into gobbets.' Gobbets! That's something like a beginning. It was a big pie with tiers and tiers of things, and it kept it up all the way in that key.... And then what could be better than prime British-fed roast beef, reddish, just a shade on the side of underdone, and not too finely cut. Mutton can't touch it."
"Beef is the best," she said.
"Then our English cold meat again. What can equal it? Such stuff as they give in a good country inn, a huge joint of beef—you cut from it yourself, you know as much as you like—with mustard, pickles, celery, a tankard of stout, let us say. Pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutney, and then old cheese to follow. And boiled beef, with little carrots and turnips and a dumpling or so. Eh?"
"Of course," said Marjorie, "one must do justice to a well-chosen turkey, afatturkey."
"Or a good goose, for the matter of that—with honest, well-thought-out stuffing. I like the little sausages round the dish of a turkey, too; like cherubs they are, round the feet of a Madonna.... There's much to be said for sausage, Marjorie. It concentrates."
Sausage led to Germany. "I'm not one of thosepatriots," he was saying presently, "who run down other countries by way of glorifying their own. While I was in Germany I tasted many good things. There's their Leberwurst; it's never bad, and, at its best, it's splendid. It's only a fool would reproach Germany with sausage. Devonshire black-pudding, of course, is the master of any Blutwurst, but there's all those others on the German side, Frankfurter, big reddish sausage stuff again with great crystalline lumps of white fat. And how well they cook their rich hashes, and the thick gravies they make. Curious, how much better the cooking of Teutonic peoples is than the cooking of the South Europeans! It's as if one needed a colder climate to brace a cook to his business. The Frenchman and the Italian trifle and stimulate. It's as if they'd never met a hungry man. No German would have thought ofsoufflé. Ugh! it's vicious eating. There's much that's fine, though, in Austria and Hungary. I wish I had travelled in Hungary. Do you remember how once or twice we've lunched at that Viennese place in Regent Street, and how they've given us stuffed Paprika, eh?"
"That was a good place. I remember there was stewed beef once with a lot of barley—suchgoodbarley!"
"Every country has its glories. One talks of the cookery of northern countries and then suddenly one thinks of curry, with lots of rice."
"And lots of chicken!"
"And lots of hot curry powder,veryhot. And look at America! Here's a people who haven't any of them been out of Europe for centuries, and yet they have as different a table as you could well imagine. There's a kind of fish, planked shad, that they cook on resinous wood—roast it, I suppose. It's substantial, like nothing else in the world. And how good,too, with turkey are sweet potatoes. Then they have such a multitude of cereal things; stuff like their buckwheat cakes, all swimming in golden syrup. And Indian corn, again!"
"Of course, corn is being anglicized. I've often given you corn—latterly, before we came away."
"That sort of separated grain—out of tins. Like chicken's food! It's not the real thing. You should eat corn on the cob—American fashion! It's fine. I had it when I was in the States. You know, you take it up in your hands by both ends—you've seen the cobs?—and gnaw."
The craving air of Labrador at a temperature of -20° Fahrenheit, and methodically stinted rations, make great changes in the outward qualities of the mind. "I'dlike to do that," said Marjorie.
Her face flushed a little at a guilty thought, her eyes sparkled. She leant forward and spoke in a confidential undertone.
"I'd—I'd like to eat a mutton chop like that," said Marjorie.
§ 20
One morning Marjorie broached something she had had on her mind for several days.
"Old man," she said, "I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to thaw my scissors and cut your hair.... And then you'll have to trim that beard of yours."
"You'll have to dig out that looking-glass."
"I know," said Marjorie. She looked at him. "You'll never be a pretty man again," she said. "But there's a sort of wild splendour.... And I love every inch and scrap of you...."
Their eyes met. "We're a thousand deeps nowbelow the look of things," said Trafford. "We'd love each other minced."
She broke into that smiling laugh of hers. "Oh! it won't come tothat," she said. "Trust my housekeeping!"
§ 1
One astonishing afternoon in January a mancame out of the wilderness to Lonely Hut. He was a French-Indian half-breed, a trapper up and down the Green River and across the Height of Land to Sea Lake. He arrived in a sort of shy silence, and squatted amiably on a log to thaw. "Much snow," he said, "and little fur."
After he had sat at their fire for an hour and eaten and drunk, his purpose in coming thawed out. He explained he had just come on to them to see how they were. He was, he said, a planter furring; he had a line of traps, about a hundred and twenty miles in length. The nearest trap in his path before he turned northward over the divide was a good forty miles down the river. He had come on from there. Just to have a look. His name, he said, was Louis Napoleon Partington. He had carried a big pack, a rifle and a dead marten,—they lay beside him—and out of his shapeless mass of caribou skins and woolen clothing and wrappings, peeped a genial, oily, brown face, very dirty, with a strand of blue-black hair across one eye, irregular teeth in its friendly smile, and little, squeezed-up eyes.
Conversation developed. There had been doubts of his linguistic range at first, but he had an understanding expression, and his English seemed guttural rather than really bad.
He was told the tremendous story of Trafford's leg; was shown it, and felt it; he interpolated thick and whistling noises to show how completely he followedtheir explanations, and then suddenly he began a speech that made all his earlier taciturnity seem but the dam of a great reservoir of mixed and partly incomprehensible English. He complimented Marjorie so effusively and relentlessly and shamelessly as to produce a pause when he had done. "Yes," he said, and nodded to button up the whole. He sucked his pipe, well satisfied with his eloquence. Trafford spoke in his silence. "We are coming down," he said.
("I thought, perhaps——" whispered Louis Napoleon.)
"Yes," said Trafford, "we are coming down with you. Why not? We can get a sledge over the snow now? It's hard? I mean a flat sledge—likethis. See? Like this." He got up and dragged Marjorie's old arrangement into view. "We shall bring all the stuff we can down with us, grub, blankets—not the tent, it's too bulky; we'll leave a lot of the heavy gear."
"You'd have to leave the tent," said Louis Napoleon.
"Isaidleave the tent."
"And you'd have to leave ... some of those tins."
"Nearly all of them."
"And the ammunition, there;—except just a little."
"Just enough for the journey down."
"Perhaps a gun?"
"No, not a gun. Though, after all,—well, we'd return one of the guns. Give it you to bring back here."
"Bring back here?"
"If you liked."
For some moments Louis Napoleon was intently silent. When he spoke his voice was guttural withemotion. "After," he said thoughtfully and paused, and then resolved to have it over forthwith, "all you leave will be mine? Eh?"
Trafford said that was the idea.
Louis Napoleon's eye brightened, but his face preserved its Indian calm.
"I will take you right to Hammond's," he said, "Where they have dogs. And then I can come back here...."
§ 2
They had talked out nearly every particular of their return before they slept that night; they yarned away three hours over the first generous meal that any one of them had eaten for many weeks. Louis Napoleon stayed in the hut as a matter of course, and reposed with snores and choking upon Marjorie's sledge and within a yard of her. It struck her as she lay awake and listened that the housemaids in Sussex Square would have thought things a little congested for a lady's bedroom, and then she reflected that after all it wasn't much worse than a crowded carriage in an all-night train from Switzerland. She tried to count how many people there had been in that compartment, and failed. How stuffy that had been—the smell of cheese and all! And with that, after a dream that she was whaling and had harpooned a particularly short-winded whale she fell very peacefully into oblivion.
Next day was spent in the careful preparation of the two sledges. They intended to take a full provision for six weeks, although they reckoned that with good weather they ought to be down at Hammond's in four.
The day after was Sunday, and Louis Napoleonwould not look at the sledges or packing. Instead he held a kind of religious service which consisted partly in making Trafford read aloud out of a very oily old New Testament he produced, a selected passage from the book of Corinthians, and partly in moaning rather than singing several hymns. He was rather disappointed that they did not join in with him. In the afternoon he heated some water, went into the tent with it and it would appear partially washed his face. In the evening, after they had supped, he discussed religion, being curious by this time about their beliefs and procedure.
He spread his mental and spiritual equipment before them very artlessly. Their isolation and their immense concentration on each other had made them sensitive to personal quality, and they listened to the broken English and the queer tangential starts into new topics of this dirty mongrel creature with the keenest appreciation of its quality. It was inconsistent, miscellaneous, simple, honest, and human. It was as touching as the medley in the pocket of a dead schoolboy. He was superstitious and sceptical and sensual and spiritual, and very, very earnest. The things he believed, even if they were just beliefs about the weather or drying venison or filling pipes, he believed with emotion. He flushed as he told them. For all his intellectual muddle they felt he knew how to live honestly and die if need be very finely.
He was more than a little distressed at their apparent ignorance of the truths of revealed religion as it is taught in the Moravian schools upon the coast, and indeed it was manifest that he had had far more careful and infinitely more sincere religious teaching than either Trafford or Marjorie. For a time the missionary spirit inspired him, and then he quite forgot his solicitude for their conversion in a numberof increasingly tall anecdotes about hunters and fishermen, illustrating at first the extreme dangers of any departure from a rigid Sabbatarianism, but presently becoming just stories illustrating the uncertainty of life. Thence he branched off to the general topic of life upon the coast and the relative advantages of "planter" and fisherman.
And then with a kindling eye he spoke of women, and how that some day he would marry. His voice softened, and he addressed himself more particularly to Marjorie. He didn't so much introduce the topic of the lady as allow the destined young woman suddenly to pervade his discourse. She was, it seemed, a servant, an Esquimaux girl at the Moravian Mission station at Manivikovik. He had been plighted to her for nine years. He described a gramophone he had purchased down at Port Dupré and brought back to her three hundred miles up the coast—it seemed to Marjorie an odd gift for an Esquimaux maiden—and he gave his views upon its mechanism. He said God was with the man who invented the gramophone "truly." They would have found one a very great relief to the tediums of their sojourn at Lonely Hut. The gramophone he had given his betrothed possessed records of the Rev. Capel Gumm's preaching and of Madame Melba's singing, a revival hymn called "Sowing the Seed," and a comic song—they could not make out his pronunciation of the title—that made you die with laughter. "It goes gobble, gobble, gobble," he said, with a solemn appreciative reflection of those distant joys.
"It's good to be jolly at times," he said with his bright eyes scanning Marjorie's face a little doubtfully, as if such ideas were better left for week-day expression.
§ 3
Their return was a very different journey from thetoilsome ascent of the summer. An immense abundance of snow masked the world, snow that made them regret acutely they had not equipped themselves with ski. With ski and a good circulation, a man may go about Labrador in winter, six times more easily than by the canoes and slow trudging of summer travel. As it was they were glad of their Canadian snow shoes. One needs only shelters after the Alpine Club hut fashion, and all that vast solitary country would be open in the wintertime. Its shortest day is no shorter than the shortest day in Cumberland or Dublin.
This is no place to tell of the beauty and wonder of snow and ice, the soft contours of gentle slopes, the rippling of fine snow under a steady wind, the long shadow ridges of shining powder on the lee of trees and stones and rocks, the delicate wind streaks over broad surfaces like the marks of a chisel in marble, the crests and cornices, the vivid brightness of edges in the sun, the glowing yellowish light on sunlit surfaces, the long blue shadows, the flush of sunset and sunrise and the pallid unearthly desolation of snow beneath the moon. Nor need the broken snow in woods and amidst tumbled stony slopes be described, nor the vast soft overhanging crests on every outstanding rock beside the icebound river, nor the huge stalactites and stalagmites of green-blue ice below the cliffs, nor trees burdened and broken by frost and snow, nor snow upon ice, nor the blue pools at mid-day upon the surface of the ice-stream. Across the smooth wind-swept ice of the open tarns they would find a growth of ice flowers, six-rayed and complicated, more abundant and more beautiful than the Alpinesummer flowers.
But the wind was very bitter, and the sun had scarcely passed its zenith before the thought of fuel and shelter came back into their minds.
As they approached Partington's tilt, at the point where his trapping ground turned out of the Green River gorge, he became greatly obsessed by the thought of his traps. He began to talk of all that he might find in them, all he hoped to find, and the "dallars" that might ensue. They slept the third night, Marjorie within and the two men under the lee of the little cabin, and Partington was up and away before dawn to a trap towards the ridge. He had infected Marjorie and Trafford with a sympathetic keenness, but when they saw his killing of a marten that was still alive in its trap, they suddenly conceived a distaste for trapping.
They insisted they must witness no more. They would wait while he went to a trap....
"Think what he's doing!" said Trafford, as they sat together under the lee of a rock waiting for him. "We imagined this was a free, simple-souled man leading an unsophisticated life on the very edge of humanity, and really he is as much a dependant of your woman's world, Marjorie, as any sweated seamstress in a Marylebone slum. Lord! how far those pretty wasteful hands of women reach! All these poor broken and starving beasts he finds and slaughters are, from the point of view of our world, just furs. Furs! Poor little snarling unfortunates! Their pelts will be dressed and prepared because women who have never dreamt of this bleak wilderness desire them. They will get at last into Regent Street shops, and Bond Street shops, and shops in Fifth Avenue and in Paris and Berlin, they will make delightful deep muffs, with scent and little bags and powder puffs and allsorts of things tucked away inside, and long wraps for tall women, and jolly little frames of soft fur for pretty faces, and dainty coats and rugs for expensive little babies in Kensington Gardens."...
"I wonder," reflected Marjorie, "if I could buy one perhaps. As a memento."
He looked at her with eyes of quiet amusement.
"Oh!" she cried, "I didn't mean to! The old Eve!"
"The old Adam is with her," said Trafford. "He's wanting to give it her.... We don't cease to be human, Madge, you know, because we've got an idea now of just where we are. I wonder, which would you like? I dare say we could arrange it."
"No," said Marjorie, and thought. "It would be jolly," she said. "All the same, you know—and just to show you—I'm not going to let you buy me that fur."
"I'd like to," said Trafford.
"No," said Marjorie, with a decision that was almost fierce. "I mean it. I've got more to do than you in the way of reforming. It's just because always I've let my life be made up of such little things that I mustn't. Indeed I mustn't. Don't make things hard for me."
He looked at her for a moment. "Very well," he said. "But I'd have liked to."...
"You're right," he added, five seconds later.
"Oh! I'm right."
§ 4
One day Louis Napoleon sent them on along the trail while he went up the mountain to a trap among the trees. He rejoined them—not as his custom was, shouting inaudible conversation for the last hundredyards or so, but in silence. They wondered at that, and at the one clumsy gesture that flourished something darkly grey at them. What had happened to the man? Whatever he had caught he was hugging it as one hugs a cat, and stroking it. "Ugh!" he said deeply, drawing near. "Oh!" A solemn joy irradiated his face, and almost religious ecstasy found expression.
He had got a silver fox, a beautifully marked silver fox, the best luck of Labrador! One goes for years without one, in hope, and when it comes, it pays the trapper's debts, it clears his life—for years!
They tried poor inadequate congratulation....
As they sat about the fire that night a silence came upon Louis Napoleon. It was manifest that his mind was preoccupied. He got up, walked about, inspected the miracle of fur that had happened to him, returned, regarded them. "'M'm," he said, and stroked his chin with his forefinger. A certain diffidence and yet a certain dignity of assurance mingled in his manner. It wasn't so much a doubt of his own correctness as of some possible ignorance of the finer shades on their part that might embarrass him. He coughed a curt preface, and intimated he had a request to make. Behind the Indian calm of his face glowed tremendous feeling, like the light of a foundry furnace shining through chinks in the door. He spoke in a small flat voice, exercising great self-control. His wish, he said, in view of all that had happened, was a little thing.... This was nearly a perfect day for him, and one thing only remained.... "Well," he said, and hung. "Well," said Trafford. He plunged. Just simply this. Would they give him the brandy bottle and let him get drunk? Mr. Grenfell was a good man, a very good man, but he had made brandy dear—dear beyond the reach of commonmen altogether—along the coast....
He explained, dear bundle of clothes and dirt! that he was always perfectly respectable when he was drunk.
§ 5
It seemed strange to Trafford that now that Marjorie was going home, a wild impatience to see her children should possess her. So long as it had been probable that they would stay out their year in Labrador, that separation had seemed mainly a sentimental trouble; now at times it was like an animal craving. She would talk of them for hours at a stretch, and when she was not talking he could see her eyes fixed ahead, and knew that she was anticipating a meeting. And for the first time it seemed the idea of possible misadventure troubled her....
They reached Hammond's in one and twenty days from Lonely Hut, three days they had been forced to camp because of a blizzard, and three because Louis Napoleon was rigidly Sabbatarian. They parted from him reluctantly, and the next day Hammond's produced its dogs, twelve stout but extremely hungry dogs, and sent the Traffords on to the Green River pulp-mills, where there were good beds and a copious supply of hot water. Thence they went to Manivikovik, and thence the new Marconi station sent their inquiries home, inquiries that were answered next day with matter-of-fact brevity: "Everyone well, love from all."
When the operator hurried with that to Marjorie she received it off-handedly, glanced at it carelessly, asked him to smoke, remarked that wireless telegraphy was a wonderful thing, and then, in the midst of some unfinished commonplace about the temperature,broke down and wept wildly and uncontrollably....
§ 6
Then came the long, wonderful ride southward day after day along the coast to Port Dupré, a ride from headland to headland across the frozen bays behind long teams of straining, furry dogs, that leapt and yelped as they ran. Sometimes over the land the brutes shirked and loitered and called for the whip; they were a quarrelsome crew to keep waiting; but across the sea-ice they went like the wind, and downhill the komatic chased their waving tails. The sledges swayed and leapt depressions, and shot athwart icy stretches. The Traffords, spectacled and wrapped to their noses, had all the sensations then of hunting an unknown quarry behind a pack of wolves. The snow blazed under the sun, out to sea beyond the ice the water glittered, and it wasn't so much air they breathed as a sort of joyous hunger.
One day their teams insisted upon racing.
Marjorie's team was the heavier, her driver more skillful, and her sledge the lighter, and she led in that wild chase from start to finish, but ever and again Trafford made wild spurts that brought him almost level. Once, as he came alongside, she heard him laughing joyously.
"Marjorie," he shouted, "d'you remember? Old donkey cart?"
Her team yawed away, and as he swept near again, behind his pack of whimpering, straining, furious dogs, she heard him shouting, "You know, that old cart! Under the overhanging trees! So thick and green they met overhead! You know! When you and I had our first talk together! In the lane. It wasn'tso fast as this, eh?"...
§ 7
At Port Dupré they stayed ten days—days that Marjorie could only make tolerable by knitting absurd garments for the children (her knitting was atrocious), and then one afternoon they heard the gun of theGrenfell, the new winter steamer from St. John's, signalling as it came in through the fog, very slowly, from that great wasteful world of men and women beyond the seaward grey.
THE END
Transcriber's Notes:Obvious punctuation and hyphenation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Words with variable spelling have been retained. The following spelling and typographical emendations have been made:p. 22: broken text "were they living and moving realities" was completed to "were they living and moving realities when those others were at home again?"p. 34: protruberant replaced with protuberant ("large protuberant")p. 38: pay replaced with play ("what the play was")p. 40: Majorie replaced with Marjorie ("Marjorie loved singing")p. 40: feut replaced with felt ("that he felt")p. 60: téte-à-tête replaced with tête-à-tête ("silent tête-à-tête")p. 70: foundamental replaced with fundamental ("three fundamental things")p. 76: fina replaced with final ("working for her final")p. 88: challenege replaced with challenge ("challenge inattentive auditors")p. 92: presumbly replaced with presumably ("presumably Billy's")p. 115: ino replaced with into ("into the air")p. 141: himse_f replaced with himself ("ask himself")p. 147: contradication replaced with contradiction ("any sort of contradiction")p. 167: calcalculated replaced with calculated ("indeed calculated")p. 223: hestitated replaced with hesitated ("She hesitated")p. 230: intriques replaced with intrigues ("culminations and intrigues")p. 242: America replaced with American ("American minor poet")p. 265: acquiscent replaced with acquiescent ("by no means acquiescent")p. 313: "It's end" replaced with "Its end" ("Its end was the Agenda Club")p. 316: regime replaced with régime ("the new régime")p. 341: number of section 15 replaced with 16p. 342: gestulated replaced with gesticulated ("Solomonson gesticulated")p. 342: The paragraphs starting with: "It was all" and "You said good-bye" were mergedp. 346: The paragraphs starting with: "They aren't arranged" and "They'd get everything" were mergedp. 349: devine replaced with divine ("by right divine of genius")p. 368: presumptious replaced with presumptuous ("extremely presumptuous")p. 376: mispelling replaced with misspelling ("as much misspelling as")p. 376: The replaced with They ("They gave dinners")p. 378: The replaced with They ("They could play")p. 395: Docter replaced with Doctor ("Doctor Codger")p. 396: authoritive replaced with authoritative ("authoritative imagine")p. 399: shuldered replaced with shouldered ("As he shouldered")p. 403: wet replaced with went ("Trafford's eyes went from")p. 405: subthe replaced with subtle ("skilful, subtle appreciation")p. 426: fine replaced with find ("find God")p. 427: chidren replaced with children ("of having children at all")p. 441: serere replaced with serene ("brightly serene")p. 442: tundura replaced with tundra ("wide stretches of tundra")p. 457: rucksac replaced with rucksack ("chunks of dry paper, the rucksack")p. 481: realties replaced with realities ("expression of the realities")p. 485: the duplicate phrase "He stared at her" was removedp. 493: think replaced with thing ("salvation is a collective thing")p. 504: realty replaced with reality ("of sense and reality")p. 509: greal replaced with great ("a great lump")p. 512: caluclated replaced with calculated ("now they calculated")p. 515: travellel replaced with travelled ("I had travelled")p. 518: gutteral replaced with guttural ("seemed guttural")p. 520: gutteral replaced with guttural ("his voice was guttural")p. 524: slaughers replaced with slaughters ("he finds and slaughters")
Obvious punctuation and hyphenation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. Words with variable spelling have been retained. The following spelling and typographical emendations have been made: