Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ Before the continual impact of pain, death, horror and disgust, the sight and knowledge of merciless destruction, of blind and calculated killing, of flesh and blood ground up and poured into a bottomless pit to narrow a salient or test a military theory, Rod had sometimes wondered if something in his heart would burst; if something in his brain would crack from that inner ache, a quivering sensitiveness that drew his nerves tight as fiddle-strings, a going on by sheer will, with his heart burning in hatred of the bloody muddle that engulfed him and his fellows. ”

“ He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, gun in hand, of old Sam Carr in his moosehide chair, of the Indians, the forest, of all that goes to make the northern wilderness—and of himself moving through it all, an unheroic figure, a man who had failed in his work, in his love, in everything. ”

“ The sun hides behind gray banks of cloud, the shining face of him a rare miracle bestowed upon the sight of men as a promise that bright days and blossoming flowers will come again. When they do come the coast is a pleasant country. The mountains reveal themselves, duskily green upon the lower slopes, their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in July. The Gulf is a vista of purple-distant shore and island, of shimmering sea. And the fishermen come out of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear against the first salmon run. ”

“ Whitey Lewis set out. Bill stuck a map on their living-room wall and pointed off each day's journey with a pin. Hazel sometimes studied the map, and pitied them. So many miles daily in a dreary waste of snow; nights when the frost thrust its keen-pointed lances into their tired bodies; food cooked with numbed fingers; the dismal howling of wolves; white frost and clinging icicles upon their beards as they trudged across trackless areas; and over all that awesome hush which she had learned to dread—breathless, brooding silence. Gold madness or trail madness, or simply adventurous unrest? ”

“ No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome future didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here and there, forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field and lane and orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the hearts of men. All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed to hold out invisible hands to Robin. ”

“ Up on the hill Hollister's men felled trees with warning shouts and tumultuous crashings. They attacked the prone trunks with axe and saw and iron wedges, Lilliputians rending the body of a fallen giant. The bolt piles grew; they were hurled swiftly down the chute into the dwindling river, rafted to the mill. All this time the price of shingles in the open market rose and rose, like a tide strongly on the flood, of which no man could prophesy the high-water mark. Money flowed to Hollister's pockets, to the pockets of his men. The value of his standing timber grew by leaps and bounds. ”

“ If Jack Fyfe had no power to stir her,—and she told herself Jack had so failed, without asking herself why,—then some other man might easily accomplish that, to her unutterable grief. She had told herself many a time that no more terrible plight could overtake her than to love and be loved and sit with hands folded, foregoing it all. She shrank from so tragic an evolution. It meant only pain, the ache of unfulfilled, unattainable desires. If, she reflected cynically, this man beside her stood for such a motif in her life, he might better have left her out in the swamped canoe. ”

“ Jessie slept in the little round tent. Barreau and I burrowed with our bedding under the snow beside the fire. The time of arising found me with eyes that had not closed; and the night of wakefulness, the nearness of a danger that hovered unseen, stirred me to black, unreasoning anger. I wanted to shout curses at the North, at the Hudson’s Bay Company, at Barreau—at everything. And by the snap of his eye, the quick scowl at trivial things, I think Barreau was in as black a mood as I. The girl sensed it, too. She shrank from both of us. ”

“ He had seen Mark lie like a log for twenty minutes. It had never occurred to Robin that he wasn’t dead. How could a man, even an iron-hard man, survive a .45 slug through the base of his neck, in the region of his wishbone? Yet there he was, reining in a black horse that curvetted and twisted in eagerness to be off, while Mark talked to the stableman. Robin could see his lips move.
The old passion flickered up in Robin’s breast. All the indignity, the calculated insults, the treachery, Tex Matthews’ death, Steele’s bold thievery, stirred Robin’s blood again. ”

“ It had passed her by, that clean, spontaneous fusing of two personalities in the biggest passion life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded of her woman's heritage. ”

“ Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is as lonely and forbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. ”

“ He had given her up, and in giving up all hope of her, Sophie and everything that linked her with him from Lone Moose to the last time he saw her had grown dim, like a book read long ago and put by on the shelf. In the fierce usages of aërial warfare distracted thought, any relaxing from an eagle-like alertness upon the business in hand, meant death swift and certain. And no man, even a man whose heart is sore, wishes to die. The will-to-live is too strong in him. ”

“ Was that why Doris Cleveland had been deprived of her sight? Why Myra had been torn by contradictory passions during her troubled life and had perished at last, a victim of passions that burst control? All this evil that some hidden good might accrue? Hollister bared his teeth in defiance of such a conclusion. But he was in a mood to defy either gods or devils. In that mood he saw the Toba valley, the whole earth, as a sinister place,—a place where beauty was a mockery, where impassive silence was merely the threatening hush before some elemental fury. ”

“ At the bottom the wind was almost wholly shut off, so that sounds were easier to distinguish. The moon had passed its zenith long since, and half of the flat lay in dense shadow. Beyond the shadow a pall of smoke lay over everything, a shifting haze that made objects near at hand indefinite of outline, impossible to classify at a glance. A horse or a tree or a clump of brush loomed up grotesquely in the vaporous blur. ”

“ Here the current, thirty fathoms deep, free of all obstruction, shot through the Euclataws in a clear, straight line, pitching down in a slant perceptible to the eye, a strip of smooth jade-green bordered to right and left by eddies, whirlpools, white-tipped waves where conflicting currents met and slashed up foam. The song of running water crooned gently between wooded banks,—that song which would presently fill the air with deep-toned antiphony to the whisper of the winds.
"Now," Rod commanded. "Stow your paddle till I shout." ”

“ But Vesta Lorimer neither heeded nor halted. And Hazel went back to her room, quivering. Sometimes the truth is bitter and stirs to wrath. And mingled with other emotions was a dull pang of jealousy—the first she had ever known. For Vesta Lorimer was beautiful beyond most women; and she had but given ample evidence of the bigness of her soul. With shamed tears creeping to her eyes, Hazel wondered if she could love even Bill so intensely that she would drive another woman to his arms that he might win happiness. ”

“ The pussy willows had put out their fuzzy catkins and shed them for delicate foliage when MacRae came back to Squitty Cove. The alder, the maple and the wild cherry, all the spring-budding trees and shrubs, were making thicket and foreshore dainty green and full of pleasant smells. Jack wakened the first morning at daybreak to the muted orchestration of mating birds, the song of a thousand sweet-voiced, unseen warblers. The days were growing warm, full of sunshine. Distant mountain ranges stood white-capped and purple against sapphire skies. The air was full of the ancient magic of spring. ”

“ THE OPENING GUN
In between the high moments of any man’s existence life seems to flow evenly, with a monotonous smoothness, like the placid reaches of a slow stream between foaming rapids. For a time it was like that with Robin. He rose before dawn, performed small tasks, rode abroad more or less perfunctorily during the day. Storms blew up and blew over. Between blizzards the range lay quiescent. ”

“ So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges—not in the depths—of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. ”

“ To herself she seemed as irrevocably alone as if she had been lost in the depths of the dark timber that rose on every hand. And sitting there she heard at length the voices of men. Looking out through a window curtained with cheesecloth she saw her brother's logging gang swing past, stout woodsmen all, big men, tall men, short-bodied men with thick necks and shoulders, sunburned, all grimy with the sweat of their labors, carrying themselves with a free and reckless swing, the doubles in type of that roistering crew she had seen embark on Jack Fyfe's boat. ”

“ But all across the southern portion, the greater half of Big Dent, the thickets had been cut away, the patriarchal trees freed of the litter about their solidly planted feet, the sun let in, grass sowed, so that the eye could reach far down wooded corridors and get glimpses of sparkling sea; so that a Norquay or his guests could walk abroad in those friendly places and observe—if they were minded to observe—how man had imposed order and beauty upon the wasteful processes of nature by sweeping away all the detritus of the arboreal struggle to survive. ”

“ Hollister never forgot that summer. He was young. He had no cares. He was free. All life spread before him in a vast illusion of unquestionable joyousness. There was a rose-pink tinge over these months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed. ”

“ All that day the chinook blew, working its magic upon the land. When day broke again with a clearing sky, and the sun peered between the cloud rifts, his beams fell upon vast areas of brown and green, where but forty-eight hours gone there was the cold revelry of frost sprites upon far-flung fields of snow. Patches of earth steamed wherever a hillside lay bare to the sun. From some mysterious distance a lone crow winged his way, and, perching on a near-by tree-top, cawed raucous greeting.
Hazel cleared away the breakfast things, and stood looking out the kitchen window. ”

“ Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers. ”

“ He had loved the cliffs and the sea, the woods around the Cove with an affection bred in use and occupancy, confirmed by the sense of inviolate possession. Old things are dear, if a man has once loved them. They remain so. The aura of beloved familiarity clings to them long after they have passed into alien hands. When MacRae thought of this and turned his eyes upon this noble sweep of land and forest which his father had claimed for his own from the wilderness, it was as if some one had deprived him of an eye or an arm by trickery and unfair advantage. ”

“ At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. ”

“ By no exercise of any power he possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of war. ”

“ Shrub and tree bared gaunt limbs to every autumn wind. Only the spruce and pine stood forth in their year-round habiliments of green. The days shortened steadily. The nights grew long, and bitter with frost. Snow fell, blanketing softly the dead leaves. Old Winter cracked his whip masterfully over all the North.
Day by day, between tasks, and often while she worked, Hazel's eyes would linger on the edges of the clearing. Often at night she would lift herself on elbow at some unexpected sound, her heart leaping wild with expectation. ”

“ The Gulf of Georgia spread away endlessly, an immense, empty stretch of water bared to the hot eye of an August sun, its broad face only saved from oily smoothness by half-hearted flutterings of a westerly breeze. Those faint airs blowing up along the Vancouver Island shore made tentative efforts to fill and belly out strongly the mainsail and jib of a small half-decked sloop working out from the weather side of Sangster Island and laying her snub nose straight for the mouth of the Fraser River, some sixty sea-miles east by south. ”