Harold Bindloss - Lorimer of the Northwest

“Wasn’t she splendid! When she held out her hand to me I felt that I ought to go down on one knee and kiss it, and all that kind of thing, you know. Ralph, you stalked up like a bear; must have been dazed by too much brightness, because you never even raised your hat. Well, one can understand it; but I think some of the others would have liked to cut your big solid throat for you.”

Harry was both enthusiastic and impressionable, though I did not think so then, and the whole scene could scarcely have lasted five minutes, but it filled my mind for days afterward, and I can recall it clearly still.

It was a bitter night when Harry and I rode into the red glow of light that beat out through the windows of Lone Hollow, the furthest outlying farm of the Carrington group, where, now that the last bushel of his wheat had been sold in Winnipeg, Raymond Lyle was celebrating a bounteous harvest. Round about it, drawn up in ranks, stood vehicles – or rigs, as we call them – of every kind, for it seemed as if the whole country-side had driven in. Most of them were of better make than those we and the majority of the poorer settlers used, and it was hard not to covet when we managed to find a stall for our beasts.

When one has wasted precious time that in the whole season can scarcely be made up again, by riding behind oxen at the exhilarating pace of some two miles an hour, or hauling in grain with half-tamed horses which jib at every hill, it is easy to realize the advantages of an efficient team, and any of those we saw in the Lone Hollow stables would have saved us many dollars each year. Even in the West the poor man is handicapped from the beginning, and must trust to ready invention and lengthened hours of labor to make up for the shortcomings of indifferent tools.

Lyle, who had heard the trampling of hoofs, met us at the door. “It was kind of you to come, and I hope you will enjoy yourselves,” he said. “We have tried to make things homely, but, as you know, this isn’t England.”

We shook off our wrappings and entered the long lamp-lit hall, partly dazed by the sudden glare and warmth after the intense cold. It certainly was different from anything I had seen at home, for here in place of paint and gilding the decoration was in harmony with the country, bizarre and bountiful, with a beauty that was distinctly its own. Few oat-heads grown from English furrows might compare with the pale golden tassels that drooped in graceful festoons from the wall, while among the ruddier wheat-ears and bearded barley, antelope heads peeped out beside the great horns of caribou which the owner of Lone Hollow had shot in the muskegs of the north. Rifles and bright double-bitted axes of much the same pattern as those with which our forbears hewed through Norman mail caught the light of the polished brass lamps and flashed upon the wainscot, while even an odd cross-cut saw had been skillfully impressed into the scheme of ornamentation. But there was nothing pinchbeck or tawdry about them. Whirled high by sinewy hands, or clenched in hard brown fingers while a steady eye stared down the barrel, that a bridge might span a ravine where no bridge had been, or venison help to cut down the grocery bill and leave the more for the breaking of virgin soil, that steel had played its part in the opening up of a wide country. Yet, the suggestion of strict utility even enhanced its effectiveness, and I remembered with a smile the trophies of weapons stamped out by the gross in Birmingham which I had seen adorning our suburban villas at home.

The majority of the guests were English – one could see that at a glance, and the mother country had small reason to be ashamed of her outland sons. The clear skin showed through the snow-blink’s tan, and the eyes were bright with a steadfastness that comes from gazing into wide distance. Sun, wind, and snow, the dust of parched earth and the stinging smoke of the drifts, had played their part in hardening them, but still, a little deeper in color, a little stronger in limb, they were the same men one finds dwelling in many an English home. Standing beside a great open hearth, on which to aid the stove a huge pile of birch logs crackled joyously, the representative of an alien race drew a cunning bow across the strings of a dingy violin. He sprang from Gallic stock, a descendant of the old coureurs who for two centuries wandered in search of furs across the wilderness, even as far as the northern barrens, before the Briton came to farm. It was a waltz he played – at least, that was the time; but the music seemed filled with the sighing of limitless pines, and the air was probably known in France three hundred years ago. Still, weather-beaten men, and fair women who were considerably less numerous, swept light-heartedly round to it, and when, declining refreshment then, we found a corner, Harry and I sat staring with all our eyes at the scene before us.

After the monotonous labor of the past two years the swish of light dresses and the rhythmic patter of feet, with the merry faces and joyous laughter, moved me strangely. All this seemed to belong to a different world from the one in which we had been living, and I wondered whether any of those dainty daughters of Carrington would deign to dance with me. They might have been transplanted like English roses from some walled garden at home, and their refined beauty had grown to a fuller blossom on the prairie. Still, I knew they would have faded in the dry heat of the dwellings in an Eastern town.

“How do those French-Canadians learn to play like that?” said Harry. “No one taught them; inherited it, I suppose. I know that air; it’s very old, and he’s taking liberties with it masterfully; now it’s like the cypress singing in the big coulée. Of course, it wasn’t learned in one generation, but why does a waltz of that kind unsettle one so, with a suggestion of ancient sorrow sighing through its gladness? But I’m forgetting, and vaporing again. We are ox-drivers, you and I.”

I nodded silently, for I had not the gift of ready speech, and it was Harry who most often put my thoughts into words for me. Then I grew intent as he said:

“There she is. Who! – Miss Carrington – is there any one else to look at when she is in the room?”

Grace floated past us dressed as I had somewhere seen her before and could not recall it, though the memory puzzled me. Neither do I know what she wore, beyond that the fabric’s color was of the ruddy gold one sees among the stems of ripening grain, while wheat ears nestled between her neck and shoulder, and rustled like barley rippling to the breeze, as with the music embodied in each movement of her form she whirled by us on Ormond’s arm. He looked as he did when I last saw him, placidly good-humored, with the eyeglass dangling this time loosely by its cord.

Then I drew in my breath as the music ceased, and Raymond Lyle approached us, saying: “As usual, men are at a discount, but you have not had a dance, and most of the others have. Come, and I’ll find you partners. Ah, if you are not tired, Miss Carrington, will you take pity on an old friend of yours? I have many duties, and you will excuse me.”

He withdrew quickly, and Grace smiled. “One must never be too tired to dance with an old friend at a prairie feast,” she said, running her pencil through the initials on a program which had traveled several hundred miles from Winnipeg. Then I felt uncomfortable, for I guessed the letters R. L. represented my host, who had good-naturedly made way for me. It was a kindly thought, but Raymond Lyle, who was a confirmed bachelor living under his self-willed sister’s wing, had evidently guessed my interest and remembered the incident of the jibbing team. It was a square dance, and Harry with a laughing damsel formed my vis-à-vis , but having eyes only for my partner I saw little but a moving mixture of soft colors and embroidered deerskin, for some of the men were dressed in prairie fashion. I felt her warm breath on my neck, the shapely form yielding to my arm, and it was small wonder that I lost myself in the glamour of it, until with the crash of a final chord from the piano the music stopped.