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 number of 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 the toilsome 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 Alpine summer 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 all sorts 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 hundred yards 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.