River of Strangers Read online

  “Alouette, gentille Alouette, Alouette, je te plumerai,

  “Je te plumerai le nez,”

  they roared with obscene emendations. They drank Johnny’s health. Big Bertha swabbed off his wounded nose. Yes, he should be her lover for that night, and none else.

  “Dance, dance,” they yelled, and MacDonald’s fiddle put mettle in their heels.

  John Paul’s Lisa had lost her skirt and was dancing in her short petticoat. There were enough girls now, for three of the trappers had fallen on the floor. They were rolled against the wall, where they slept: the girls lasted better than the men.

  Duggan, who had been dozing after his last three fingers, sat up and began fumbling in his pocket. “I almost forgot,” he said to Alex. “Listen to this letter they brought up river to-day. Doesn’t it beat the cards? Listen!” And he read while Alex played.

  * * *

  —

  “ ‘The Company has heard with distress of the debauched life that you and your trappers and employees of the Company live in our post, River of Strangers. Such appalling reports of your drunkenness and licentiousness have reached us that, had it not been for your long service and that your accounts have always been in good order, you should have been recalled. At the instance and expense of the British Missionary Society, we are sending a missionary out to you, who, we hope, will restore decency and godliness to the Post. You will house him decently, pay him the respect due his calling, and see that he has every opportunity to preach the Gospel to the employees of the Company.’

  * * *

  —

  “Doesn’t it beat the cards! After all these comfortable years, a bloody parson coming out to Christianize us. Here, Alex, play the doxology, and I’ll announce it to the boys.”

  Alex drifted into the ancient hymn tune with all kinds of quaint improvised trills. The dancers’ feet got slower and slower, dragged, and stopped. With difficulty Duggan climbed upon a bench. He swayed to and fro, grasping in one hand the rail of the bar and waving in the other the Company’s letter. Two of the lamps were smoking; the room reeked like the pit of hell. The dancers clustered about the swaying Duggan, the downward glare of the lamps making high lights on their upturned encrimsoned faces.

  “Boys, the Company’s sending a bloody parson to Christianize us! A bloody parson.” Alex’s violin rambled on to Duggan’s rhythm, from the doxology to “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” in a strange, subdued minor key.

  “A bloody parson,” screamed Duggan.

  “A bloody parson,” yelled the gang.

  “Do we want him?”

  “No.”

  “He’ll have to be some kind of a parson to last around here.”

  “Is he a Presbyterian?” queried McGowan timidly.

  “Presbyterian be damned! Doesn’t the priest, Father what’s-his-name, come on here at Easter and forgive all the boys’ sins? Have you got anybody in the Presbyterian Church that can forgive sins? Tell me that, you drunken lout,” and he grasped McGowan by the blond forelock and used him as a support in place of the hand rail. Holding McGowan’s hair firmly he continued to speak.

  “We don’t want no parson in River of Strangers. House him well! In hell, yes, we’ll house him.” Here his little eyes twinkled. “We’ll house him with the doctor and Rosy. He’s the only learned man in these parts.

  “Boys, the party’s over. Get the girls home. We’re all drunk now! Hurrah!” He released McGowan’s hair and pitched forward. The door was flung open: men and girls wrapped furs about them and stepped out into the stinging night.

  “Hurrah for Christ,” yelled Lanky Morris, but that was too blasphemous, and someone struck him in the mouth.

  Alex placed his fiddle in the case and strolled toward the door. Roxy was holding Rosy by the waist and casting amorous glances upon her.

  “Come home now, Rosy,” said Alex.

  Roxy stepped back; they all feared the doctor. Rosy clung to Alex’s arm, and they stepped out into the night, the frosty snow crunching beneath their feet. The stars burned bright, and a curious draped aurora of red and lemon-yellow flickered across the sky. They walked up the hill to the bungalow Alex had built in a setting of pines and low spruces.

  CHAPTER II

  On the morning after the orgy, Alex lay late in bed. He half woke and looked about him, then turned over and snuggled under the clothes for another nap. At last he really woke and, sitting up, looked out of the window; the sun was shining, everything was a monotony of dazzling white. He slipped back again, yawning and running his hands through his hair. There was nothing much to get up for; the drunks would not wake till noon; he could tend them and, later, ski over to Fond du Lac to see John Paul, a case of pneumonia. He had neither a headache nor a bad conscience; he and Duggan had drunk good whisky. He picked up a book that lay on a box by his bedside, but after leafing it through, he laid it down, grinning broadly. He was thinking of Duggan’s indignation at the intention of the Company to reform the Post, how he had made his speech supported by McGowan’s hair, and toppled to the floor as the strands slipped through his fingers. The look on McGowan’s face had been most comical; he had hated to appear in an undignified position before the trappers, yet feared to offend his master. He had therefore smirked painfully, as if to indicate that he was a willing party to a difficult yet amusing situation. The door opened and in came Rosy with a steaming mug of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal porridge. Rosy loved to make Alex comfortable.

  “Lazy, lazy,” she said, placing the tray beside the bed.

  “You didn’t fiddle for six long hours.”

  “But I danced.”

  “Indeed you did, danced every dance and flirted shamefully with Roxy and Pete Surette. I watched you out of the tail of my eye.”

  Rosy stood in the middle of the floor with arms akimbo, her black eyes twinkling. She was plump, pretty, and her short well-combed curly hair hung about her shoulders. The name Rosy suited her well. Some sprightly, mischievous, and whimsical lower deity, half god, half fairy, must whisper to parents and god-parents the first names of children.

  “The poor fellows need a little comfort after six months in the far back country.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “I drink not at all; not that stuff. I pour it on the floor, when the boys not looking.”

  “That’s the reason you look so fresh this morning.”

  “Roxy bring me six fine mink skins. Do you mind, Alex? You know I stick to you.”

  “No, Rosy, I don’t mind. What are you going to do with them—sell them to McGowan or make yourself a neck piece?”

  “He sell them to McGowan first.”

  “And stole them afterward; good for Roxy. Any one who can steal from a Glasgow Scot has a real talent for business.”

  Rosy laughed and began picking up the clothes scattered about the room. She loved tidying up Alex’s things, and had a real flair for housekeeping and cooking.

  “What’s all this Duggan said about a parson? What’s a parson, anyway?”

  “A Protestant priest. He’s coming out here to make all the people good and honest. No more dancing and drunks at Duggan’s, or stealing mink skins for the girls, after he comes. We’ll have only hymn singing and prayer meetings.”

  “Hm, he’d better stay where he is.”

  “Duggan says he’s going to lodge him with us.”

  “That’ll spoil it all,” said Rosy with tearful, flashing eyes.

  “Not a bit; we’ll stick him in the far room in the ell, and he’ll be busy with his prayer book.”

  “Anyway, he can’t come for a long time.”

  “Clear out now, Rosy, I’m going to get up.”

  “You can dress in the living room; I put your things before the fire.” She smiled at him, blew a kiss, and went out.

  But Alex did not get up; he still la
y in bed thinking. If he must lodge the parson, it was lucky that he had made his house big. Its size and number of rooms had been a standing matter of jest with Duggan’s employees. They always implied that he meant to branch out after the manner of the factor and keep several girls. He had built it on the hill to be away from the others, to live apart, and now his privacy was to be invaded.

  He had built his house with loving care. For his first year he had lodged on the flat by the river in one of the Company’s shacks. But the life was too much in common, the trappers too dirty in their habits. He was restless and ill at ease. One day, as he stood looking across the river, his eye rested on the Company’s sawmill, backed by the mountain covered with a fine stand of spruce and pine. “Why not build myself a decent house?” he thought. “Here are the materials at hand.” He knew how to do things, for he had helped raise many a barn at home in Cape Breton. Next day, with the help of some half-breeds, he began to clear and break ground on the hill, after getting Duggan’s approval. On the spot, he had cut ten big pine trees that made his sills. It was hard work dislodging the roots, but, eventually, time and patience conquered them; the cellar was dug, walled, and floored with great slabs of aqueous rock that had slipped down the mountain-side into the river. Upon this massive foundation he laid his hand-hewn sills of pine. It had been great fun making the sweet-smelling chips fly with his broad ax. When the lumber was ready at the mill, he set up studding, plates, and rafters, planning as he built. He had triple-boarded floor, walls, and roof, laying tarred paper between the boards, and covered both walls and roof with hand-cut pine shingles that last for ever. Doors and windows had been the hardest problem, but he was skilful with his hands, and, by stolid perseverance, had overcome all difficulties. He had stained the outside with brown creosote, and painted doors, window sashes, and finish a dull green, to harmonize with the setting of brown tree trunks and evergreen foliage. When winter came and he stuck his wind-break, a hedge of young spruces, close to the sills, the bungalow nestled so closely to the corner of the hill that it seemed to have grown there, or to have arisen from the hillside by enchantment. The bungalow faced south, with two long ells stretching back toward the north, between them a tiny courtyard, paved, as was a path about the house, with gray flagstones from the river bank. In the western ell were Rosy’s room, a tiny kitchen and dining room; the two rooms of the eastern ell stood vacant. Why he had built that second ell, Alex had never known; it was of no use to him; he seemed to have been guided by some inscrutable order, and Alex, scientist as he was, believed dimly, as had his Scotch forbears, in fate, second sight, and a strange guiding of human affairs. Perhaps he remembered fondly, as he built, the interminable ells of milk houses, woodsheds, and stables that stretch from the backs of Cape Breton houses. Now, as he lay dreaming in bed, it came to him in a flash that he had built that ell for Duggan’s bloody parson.

  The front and main part of the house was divided into two parts; a smaller room on the western side and a large living room on the eastern side. The small western room, into which three doors opened, from dining room, living room, and outdoors, was Alex’s office and bedroom. It was furnished simply with a single couch on which the giant sprawled, a stove, table, desk, and a couple of chairs. Shelves running about the room were piled with books, bottles, instruments, and medical supplies. A rag mat—Rosy’s contribution—covered part of the floor. A case of whisky stood under the table. In this room Alex slept, saw his patients, and drank with Duggan and his gang when they visited him.

  The big eastern room with its wide fireplace was Alex’s own domain. Three doors opened into it: one from Alex’s office, one from the dining room, and one from the empty ell. The preparation and decoration of this room had been Alex’s great delight. He had stained the walls a light colour and covered the floor with choice skins of moose, bear, and caribou. There was nothing above this room; it was lofty, stretching upward to the darkness of the rafters. Of curly birch, he had built himself a great sofa, an oblong table, and two easy chairs; the sofa stood before the fireplace, the table behind it, while the chairs closed the gap between sofa ends and fireplace. Between the studding timbers that protruded into the room, he had built shelves on which stood his books; the first box, brought with Duggan, had been augmented by many more in each spring boat from England. On a table near the window was his microscope; in a rack above it, his beloved fiddle. Sofa and chairs were covered with beaver furs, edged with mink and muskrat. It was a wonderful room when the fireplace roared on a winter’s night. Here he never admitted Duggan or the gang. Now it was to be invaded by the parson.

  Alex rolled out of bed, washed himself, stuck his feet into house moccasins, and strolled out to the living room to dress. Quickly he donned the clothes warmed before the fire and, sitting down, stretched out his feet toward the blaze. It was still two hours before he need make rounds. He picked up his fiddle, tuned it, and played softly. He soon tired of that and, laying the fiddle down, he stared out of the window at the monotony of white. When would the spring come? He longed for it deeply as only those in the frozen Northland do. He longed for the time when the buds would swell and the sap flow in the maples.

  To the eastward of his bungalow, along the ridge of evergreens, was a grove of white birches, where a spring bubbled from white sand at the foot of a great rock. Alex had trimmed out the grove and built a rustic seat near the great rock and ever-running spring. He longed for this retreat as he gazed at the expanse of frozen whiteness. He sat there on warm days of July and August to watch the sunshine make mottled shadows on the gleaming tree trunks. There he read and thought much. His bower seemed to epitomize a complete cosmos. The pool at his feet swarmed with countless myriads of tiny things that the microscope revealed. There spirogyra lived and reproduced itself and regulated its affairs unnoticed by human eye. Through the trees loomed a mountain, testifying to the strength of the hills, convulsions of the earth’s crust and a million years of erosion. The great scratched boulder at his side was clear evidence of a glacier’s moraine in one of the ice ages. How slender and attenuated seemed Hebrew or Christian philosophy; not a philosophy for men at all, simply a rule of life. But what was the mystery of existence, what was worth while, what was hid at the centre?

  Sometimes he took out his fiddle and played to an audience of squirrels and blue jays, whose curiosity led them to chatter and draw nearer. Massenet’s “Meditation” or Handel’s “Largo” mingled with the gurgle of the spring and the wind among the trees. There, when he played, he sometimes felt like a god, knowing there was an absolute beauty that must be sought, something that came from nothing material. Perhaps that sum total of all beautiful things and ideals was God.

  Rosy was bustling about his bedroom and whistling scraps of a voyageur’s song. He turned from the window and flung himself down on the sofa to read, but after a few pages his attention wandered. He felt restless; the news of the parson had awakened in his bosom a strange feeling of discontent. Rosy whistled louder in the bedroom; she obviously wanted to come in and talk, but she never invaded his domain without invitation. To while away the time, he allowed himself to think, as he seldom did, of home and of himself as a little boy. Their house stood on a narrow strip hemmed in between forest and sea, both of which he feared. The sea, so powerful and relentless, had upset the dory of a big brother and swallowed him up; a neighbour’s boy had been lost for two days in the dark and foreboding forest. He remembered his father and the neighbours setting off with lanterns for the search, as he peeped at them through a crack of the kitchen door. In the solitude and loneliness of River of Strangers, he had sometimes tried his hand at turning those early impressions, especially his childish fear of sea and forest, into little poems.

  He never forgot his gratitude to the gracious fog bank that had rolled in every afternoon, to mingle in ragged mist swirls with the tops of towering spruces. In this friendly fog bank that hid both sea and forest, he had seen, even as a child, a friendly face smilin
g down upon him, a face unlike that of any one he had known. The face was oval, and its pallor was accentuated by a pair of tender brown eyes and by surrounding masses of dark, smooth hair. Whenever he had been afraid or in trouble, he had seen this kindly protecting face. In the night, when he had lain awake, listening to the ceaseless pounding of the surf upon the beach until he almost screamed at the dull threatening monotony, the kind face had smiled at him from the darkness and comforted him.

  He remembered his arrival at the famous academy whither his father had sent him, ill prepared, from a small country school, with but one suit of clothes, too short in sleeves and back—an ignominy to be borne for a whole year. On the first day, he had bought all the books he must study, and had carried them to the garret room of his boarding house, where he had piled them upon the table and looked at them in fear and discouragement. They were so many and so big and thick! He had read over the titles with staring wide-open eyes: Green’s “Short History of the English People,” Lounsbury’s “History of the English Language,” Norrie’s “Epitome of Navigation,” Smith’s “History of Greece and Rome,” Hall and Knight’s “Higher Algebra.” How could he ever master them! Evening began to fall, and he sat silent, in despair, before his pile of books. Suddenly, from the darkness, the Lady of his Dreams, as he had learned to call her, smiled down upon him. He lit his candle and opened Green’s “History” at chance. He never forgot the first sentence that caught his eye: it was the real beginning of his appreciation of literature:

  Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets, and dappled with the gray and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen.