| CHAPTER XV. OF TWO MEETINGS
When Jim, one Saturday afternoon, at the, for him, unusual hour of three o'clock,
entered his house, he found Jane sitting in an arm-chair before the huge fireless
fire-place in the hall. It was summer, in the month of July; it was hot. At her
knee stood a child of five or six, a boy, small of build, with a curiously precocious
face, light-brown, curly hair which was allowed to grow rather long, and appressed
ears - a younger replica of his grand-father on the mother's side. Jane was apparently
teaching him his A.B.C.'s.
Jim approached the group, walking slowly and diffidently. "I should like to see you on a business matter," he said, his look fastened on her face.
He had not been conscious of a third presence in the large room. But at his voice a young lady who had been reclining on the chesterfield, holding a book - he saw by the jacket that it was a sensational novel - rose to a sitting posture, dropping her hands. This was his daughter Norah. He had, of course, been aware of her growth; he had seen her daily. She was tall and somewhat prematurely developed; he even knew that she resembled him as he had been. But it came to him, on this afternoon, like a revelation that she was a young woman though a bare sixteen years old. The firm lines about her mouth made her appear wise and knowing beyond her years. He nodded to her; and she flashed him an unsmiling smile, saying, "Father!" The smile came merely from her lips; her soul remained critical, curious, observant.
Jane had pushed the boy aside. "Now wait, Sidney, till mother comes back."
The boy withdrew shyly.
Jane rose and led the way to her "library".
Jim followed. He had not entered that room since the boy had been born. He felt like a "roomer" or a boarder in what had once been his house. But neither had he seen Jane walk in front of him as she did now; to his eyes, her beauty was unimpaired, perhaps enhanced. She
page 210
looked regal in her middle-aged, slightly plump stateliness. Almost poignantly he felt that he could no longer acquiesce: between them, a destiny was still to be fulfilled.
Jane went to the door leading into the drawing room and closed it. Then she sat down in a chair alongside her small desk.
Jim closed the door through which he had entered and hesitated.
Jane pointed to a chair. "Sit down." And, as he had done so, "Business, you said? What is it?" Her tone was neither hostile nor friendly; it was merely matter-of-fact. He faltered under her look - the same look, slightly expectant, with which she might have received a stranger.
"I...I am facing bankruptcy," he said simply. "The war has ruined me."
"Oh?"
"I came to see you about those payments. Do you think that you can give me two weeks time?"
Jane pondered. "You mean about the household money?"
"Everything," he said. "I have been unlucky. There is no money."
"None at all?"
"No."
Jane opened a drawer and picked out a cheque-book. "I wish," she said, "you had let me know before this. I expected nothing of the kind and have therefore made no provision. I have even gone to quite unnecessary expense. I have just bought a car and paid cash in advance."
"A car?" he asked in surprise.
Jane looked at him for a moment, as if doubtful how to interpret that surprise. But she went on quite evenly. "Yes. The doctor recommended driving. And Sidney is to be out in the open air as much as he can."
"I see. One of the makes I handle?"
"No. I wanted a lighter car."
page 211
Jim nodded as if she, too, were a stranger to him.
"I see I have a balance of about two hundred dollars. If you can double that, I can take care of the Vancouver payment. As for the household, things can wait."
For a minute or so Jim did not answer. At last he asked, "You do not think that the Vancouver payment as you call it could also wait for a few weeks?"
"I do not. In fact, I should prefer, if need be, to sell something, anything, the house if need be."
Jim rose. "There will be no need. I shall find the money." He looked full into her eyes. Suddenly his jaw quivered.
"If you please," Jane said with her old frown flitting through her brow and with a slight thinning of her voice. "That sort of thing is distasteful."
He nodded, turned, and left her alone.
An hour later he was sitting in his car which was now an old and antiquated model, though mechanically it was still efficient enough. He left the city by the north road, driving fast. He had made up his mind to see his brother. The road led, first, through an almost level farming country with prosperous homesteads which, however, as has been the rule in the Canadian west, had already by the very reason of their prosperity passed into the hands of tenants, the original owners having moved to town after "having made their pile". Farming has not yet become the natural occupation of a large groundmass of the population; it is still a mere industry. Consequently this prosperity does not so much make the impression of a rising, as that of an ebbing tide: of a past in the state of decay.
Then the same road, as Jim entered the hill district, began to dip up and down. Here the fields were cleared bush land, bush remaining along their edges and covering the whole of as yet unsettled sections. Jim had not been here for a good many years. The country was much opener than it had been in the days of his childhood. But here, too,
page 212
it looked much less orderly, less taken care of than it used to do. Many of the farmsteads contained, in addition to house and barn, a car-shed which argued prosperity; but the new houses and barns, on the other hand, were less solidly and substantially built. He had been aware of the fact; but in his present mood it struck him more forcibly than it had ever done before.
Then he made a fourth and last turn, fairly within the bush country now; and he saw his father-in-law's place ahead; behind it lay his brother's. He slowed down.
He had not spoken to his brother since he had seen him at Winnipeg, years ago. He was acutely aware of the fact that he had once wronged him, in the matter of the inheritance. Could he now go and ask him for a loan? A loan? If this war went on, how was he going to repay it? Perhaps it might be best to see his father-in-law instead and to tell him the truth about his financial situation? But he saw the old man's clear and sharp look - Jane's look; he could not do it.
Two minutes later he reached the entrance to the second of the two adjacent farms. It would have to be his brother. He turned in.
The entrance, as it had always done, wound through half open bush. To his right was the cow-lot; beyond it, the horse-lot. Then, barring the road, came the gate to the yard. He had to get out of his car in order to open it. The house, of that he took mental note, had been repainted since he had seen it last. It was the old colour, a warm, medium-dark brown, with cream-coloured trimmings. The barn, huge, solid, built inside three-inch timbers, showed traces of recent repairs. The yard itself was clean and orderly; in front of the house there were beds of flowers. His appeal would at least not meet with the check of poverty.
He re-entered the car and drove to the back-stoop of the dwelling. As he stopped, an old woman came to the screen door of the kitchen; older, of course, than when he had seen her last, on the day of his wedding, eighteen years ago; she must be seventy now; but otherwise
page 213
she seemed little changed. From the way in which she looked at him, he concluded that he remained unrecognised. He felt relieved, for there had never been any love between them. She might have prevented him from seeing Arthur; he had come to the point where he expected hostility. His mind was active; there had been only one alternative to the present step left: to see Mr. Moffat, his banker; at the thought he shuddered.
"Mr. Forrest at home?" he sang out.
"No-oh," the old woman droned, standing at the door as if her upper body, slim and virgin, were a separate entity on the wide pedestal of her voluminous skirts. "What do you want of him?"
"Business," he answered briefly.
"Want to sell something?"
"No."
She eyed him through her glasses. Then she pushed them up on her forehead and eyed him without them. Apparently the scrutiny gave her no clue of suspicion.
"Well-l-l," she trumpeted out, "he's on the summerfallow on the west field. If you want to go in your car, you'd better go around by the road."
"The north road?"
"Yes. Half a mile north."
"All right," Jim said. "Thanks." And, throwing the clutch in, he turned his car. Her eye followed his movements. A moment later he tipped his hat and shot back to the road.
Along the west line of the farm, he had to go all the way south again before he came on his brother who was riding a cultivator and resting his horses, five of them hitched abreast.
Jim left his car in the margin of the trail and stepped over the fence. Arthur, recognising him, let himself down from his seat on the implement. Jim saw a man middle-aged like himself, broad-shouldered, of medium height, stooping slightly, but strong and active. His face,
page 214
with quiet, slightly deep-set eyes, was divided by a drooping moustache. He was clad in dusty overalls, a grey tweed-cap on his head.
They shook hands unsmilingly.
"How are you?" Jim asked.
"Well, thanks." Arthur did not reciprocate in the question but looked at his brother instead. Then he turned. Behind the cultivator there was shade from the afternoon sun. As he reached it, he took his cap off and wiped his brow; his hair, light brown like his brother's, was untouched by the years. He was four, but looked ten years younger than Jim; yet, in some undefinable way, he seemed maturer; perhaps it was because he stood squarely on his soil, in an unassailable position.
Jim spoke. "You look it. We city people live faster, I guess."
Arthur threw him a glance. "You were up to the house, I suppose?"
"Yes. I asked where you were. The aunt didn't recognise me; she took me for a salesman of some kind and would have denied you altogether, I think..."
Arthur smiled. There was a certain humorous tenderness for the old aunt in that smile.
In these first moments of a mutual feeling-out, a readjustment of instinctively preconceived notions, Jim became aware that he was facing a man with an inner life that was perfectly balanced. Life seemed to have gone past him; he had lived in the peace of a daily, monthly, yearly routine. The passions of life seemed never to have invaded his realm: such is a common error of city people when confronted with men who are rural from inclination.
"You are prosperous, it seems?"
Arthur shrugged his shoulders as he replaced his cap.
Jim felt discouraged in the face of this reticence and coolness. He divined that he, too, was being weighed. Yet, still obeying the impulse which had sent him hither, he went on, "Money laid by, I suppose?"
Arthur again raised a shoulder and a hand. "A little."
page 215
"That mortgage paid off?"
"Yes."
"Well, you're lucky."
As if in a sudden change of mind, Arthur pointed to a boulder. "Sit down." He himself squatted down with his back against the trunk of a tree. "I've a question to ask," he said. "It's waited for eighteen or twenty years. When we met down there" - a nod of his head pointed in the direction of Fisher Landing, the town in the valley - "and were treating about the partition of the inheritance, in lawyer Thorpe's office, you mentioned that you had an offer for the farm. Who was the man? It's mere curiosity that makes me ask."
Jim felt transferred back into the past as he sat on that boulder and looked out over the dark-brown field. What he experienced was not regret at what he had done; it was regret at the fact that that past was irrevocably gone. This time, when he answered, it was he who shrugged his shoulders. "Myself. That I had a backer was a bluff."
Arthur nodded without looking at him. "I've thought so for a good many years." Then he looked up. "And now let me hear your tale."
Jim looked at his brother. The realisation of how this brother saw him, arising from the fact that the second sentence followed immediately upon the first, was so sudden that it came with the effect of a shock. Something within him rebelled; he felt the need of defending himself; he felt suddenly more alone in the world than he had thought it possible that any one can feel. He had, then, not fathomed the depths when he had dwindled under Jane's eye. He felt unbalanced; and it showed in his eyes. He was aware, too, of how he had misjudged his brother. Arthur's inner balance was far from being the mere outcome of an undisturbed life: it was a peace conquered in the clash of battle; but Arthur had gone into battle clean. Here as elsewhere passions had swayed the human soul; the baffling thing was that these passions were such to which he himself was a stranger. A forlorn curiosity took hold of him. What was the secret of this brother's soul
?
page 216
Had others - Jane, Arthur - something within themselves which he, Jim, lacked - some principle to which they hitched their lives and which carried them through life and led them through experiences that melted their beings as in a fiery furnace but made them come out with souls tempered like steel? Was he, Jim, mentally or spiritually defective? Never before had this thought occurred to him; he rebelled against it though he saw clearly enough that it might have given him comfort. If he was merely the victim of a defect in his composition, then there was something outside of him on which the dismal failure of his life could be blamed. But he rejected that solution of his present perplexities. Man as a mechanism did not appeal to him; he felt that only in the revolt against the mechanism of life does man assert his manhood; in the fight of the free will against fate. But, if he rejected the opportunity to screen himself behind such a defect, inflicted upon him at birth, without any fault of his, then, so he saw clearly, for the first time in his life, he was guilty, not so much of what he had done, as of what he was; what he was was the result of innumerable small decisions throughout the course of the past - decisions in each of which he might have asserted a will opposed to fate, opposed to that pressure of circumstance which seemed to drive him in a given direction. If he had done so, he would have moulded himself in a different way.
It was fully ten minutes before he answered Arthur's summons. "There is no tale to tell," he said at last.
Arthur was still looking at him; perhaps he divined a portion of what went on in his heart. He, too, felt somewhat shaken by his brother's unexpected denial. In the light of this denial which seemed to illumine many things with the rapidity of a flash illuminating a benighted landscape, there were many things to be inferred. He felt impelled to hold out his hand to his brother; the tone in which the words had been said had betrayed a soul in real distress and in unquestionable need of help. But he could not do it; for there was Jane!
page 217
Thus, Arthur thought, do souls go past each other over the face of the earth, sometimes divining a presence nearby in the dark, but unable to see that presence clearly enough to discern it. In front of him sat Jim, a huge bulk of a man, overgrown in his fleshly envelope, and controlling his massive features in order not to let that little something peep out of which he perhaps thought he must feel ashamed, whereas it was none other than our common humanity cowed by the fate which it has itself created. Had Jim openly displayed the pain that had been inflicted, Arthur would have extended his hand; but that he did not do. And to overcome the barrier between the two, sympathy would have been needed; and sympathy we give only to those who give us joy. Arthur found almost to his surprise that the forgiveness to which he thought he had won through in the course of almost two decades was still tinged with resentment against this man who had once robbed him of the very possibility of a potential happiness in the flesh. Thus the moment passed; the hand remained where it rested.
Jim - who, by a second sight engendered through suffering, was conscious both of the birth and the death of that moment - stirred at last. "You've never married," he said with a relevance which made Arthur rise.
"No." This word forbade any further approach.
Jim, too, rose. They stood, facing each other with the knowledge that what each showed the other was a mask; but neither was willing any longer to drop that mask.
Thus it came about that, when the persisting impulse bore fruit, it led, not to an act of grace which might have brought salvation to a soul that was lost, but to an act which, though in its actual result identical with the one that remained suppressed, created nothing but bitterness.
"By the way," Arthur said casually, "I am not altogether uninformed with regard to your situation. There is talk going on in the district. I believe the only man who never hears of it is my neighbour." He nodded in the direction of the Atkinson farm. "I know
page 218
the war had upset the fortunes of many a man. If I can help out..." He looked at Jim's face.
Jim stood huge, towering, scowling. At this moment his perceptions were perhaps finer than those of his brother. Many rays of dark light were springing, in him, into a focus. He was somehow aware of the fact that he was passing through a crisis in his life. Since Arthur had permitted the moment in which they might have seen each the other's essential being to pass by unused, there seemed to be only one explanation left for his brother's offer. If what he had come prepared to wrest from unwilling hands was thus presented to him unasked for, it was done for the sake of a woman, not for his own sake; just as he himself had sought this interview for her sake. He was sorely tempted to decline it by a shrug of his shoulders. But he said in an almost indifferent voice, "Well, it would help perhaps..."
"How much?" It would have been hard to define the tone in which this was said. It sounded as if the speaker were mentally nodding, having received confirmation of a secret thought.
This tone held a sting for Jim; it had the effect of restoring to him his indifference to everything. They all despised him; well, he would earn their contempt. "Can you manage eight thousand?" he asked, shrugging his shoulders.
"If I've time. I can get six thousand at once."
"How am I to get it?"
"I'll have it transferred to your bank."
"What sort of security am I to furnish?"
Arthur waved a hand - a gesture which seemed, to Jim, to rid him of all responsibilities and obligations. He, Jim, had offered his soul; it had been rejected.
He held out his hand; his brother touched it. As he strode away over the dark-brown earth ridged by the teeth of the cultivator, he felt like a man on whom sentence of death has been pronounced.
|