Harold Bindloss - Lorimer of the Northwest

“Hurry on that dinner, Jess!”

Next, turning to me, he added: “You’re welcome to the horse, but it will be supper-time before you fetch Coombs’ homestead, and you mayn’t get much then. So lie right back where you are until dinner’s ready, and tell us the best news of the Old Country. Jess was born there.”

It was characteristic treatment, and though the meal was frugal – potatoes, pork, green tea, flapjacks and drips, which is probably glucose flavored with essences – they gave me of their best, as even the poorest settlers do. One might travel the wide world over to find their equal in kindly hospitality. Perhaps the woman noticed my bashfulness, for she laughed as she said:

“You’re very welcome to anything we have. New out from England, I see, and maybe we’re rough to look at. Still, you’ll learn to like us presently.”

In this, however, she was wrong. They were not rough to look at, for though it was plain to see that both toiled hard for a bare living there was a light-hearted contentment about them, and a curious something that seemed akin to refinement. It was not educational polish, but rather a natural courtesy and self-respect, though the words do not adequately express it, which seems born of freedom, and an instinctive realization of the brotherhood of man expressed in kindly action. Hard-handed and weather-beaten, younger son of good English family or plowman born, as I was afterward to find, the breakers of the prairie are rarely barbaric in manners or speech, and, in the sense of its inner meaning, most of them are essentially gentlemen.

It was with a lighter heart and many good wishes that I rode out again, and eventually reached Coombs’ homestead, where a welcome of a different kind awaited me. The house was well built of sawn lumber, and backed by a thin birch bluff, while there was no difficulty in setting down its owner as an Englishman of a kind that fortunately is not common. He was stout and flabby in face, with a smug, self-satisfied air I did not like. Leaning against a paddock rail, he looked me over while I told him what had brought me there. Then he said, with no trace of Western accent, which, it afterward appeared, he affected to despise:

“You should not have borrowed that horse, because if we come to terms I shall have to feed him a day or two. Of course you would be useless for several months at least, and with the last one I got a premium. However, as a favor I’ll take you until after harvest for your board.”

“What are the duties?” I asked cautiously. And he answered:

“Rise at dawn, feed the working cattle, and plow until the dinner-hour – when you learn how. Then you could water the stock while you’re resting; plow, harrow, or chop wood until supper; after that, wash up supper dishes, and – it’s standing order – attend family prayers. In summer you’ll continue hay cutting until it’s dark.”

Now the inhabitants of eastern Lancashire and the West Riding are seldom born foolish, and Jasper had cautioned me. So it may have been native shrewdness that led to my leaving the draft for one hundred pounds intact at the Winnipeg office of the Bank of Montreal and determining to earn experience and a living at the same time as promptly as possible. Also, though I did not discover it until later, this is the one safe procedure for the would-be colonist. There is not the slightest reason why he should pay a premium, because the work is the same in either case; and as, there being no caste distinction, all men are equal, hired hand and farmer living and eating together, he will find no difference in the treatment. In any case, I had no intention of working for nothing, and answered shortly:

“I’ll come for ten dollars a month until harvest. I shall no doubt find some one to give me twenty then.”

Coombs stared, surveyed me ironically from head to heel again, and, after offering five dollars, said very reluctantly:

“Seven-fifty, and it’s sinful extravagance. Put the horse in that stable and don’t give him too much chop. Then carry in those stove billets, and see if Mrs. Coombs wants anything to get supper ready.”

I was tired and sleepy; but Coombs evidently intended to get the value of his seven-fifty out of me – he had a way of exacting the utmost farthing – and after feeding the horse, liberally, I carried fourteen buckets of water to fill a tank from the well before at last supper was ready. We ate it together silently in a long match-boarded room – Coombs, his wife, Marvin the big Manitoban hired man, and a curly-haired brown-eyed stripling with a look of good breeding about him. Mrs. Coombs was thin and angular, with a pink-tipped nose; and in their dwelling – the only place I ever saw it on the prairie – she and her husband always sat with several feet of blank table between themselves and those who worked for them. They were also, I thought, representatives of an unpleasant type – the petty professional or suddenly promoted clerk, who, lacking equally the operative’s sturdiness and the polish of those born in a higher station, apes the latter, and, sacrificing everything for appearance, becomes a poor burlesque on humanity. Even here, on the lone, wide prairie, they could not shake off the small pretense of superiority. When supper was finished – and Coombs’ suppers were the worst I ever ate in Canada – the working contingent adjourned after washing dishes to the sod stable, where I asked questions about our employer.

“Meaner than pizon!” said Marvin. “Down East, on the ’lantic shore, is where he ought to be. Guess he wore them out in the old country, and so they sent him here.”

Then the young lad stretched out his hand with frank good-nature. “I’m Harry Lorraine, premium pupil on this most delectable homestead. You’re clearly fresh out from England, and I’m sure we’ll be good friends,” he said. “Coombs? Well, Jim Marvin is right. I’ve set him down in my own mind as a defaulting deacon, or something of the kind. Did my guardian out of a hundred and fifty as premium, with duck, brant-goose, and prairie-chicken shooting thrown in – and he sees I’ve never time to touch a gun. However, I’m learning the business; and in spite of his quite superfluous piety he can farm, in a get-all-you-can-for-nothing kind of way.”

“He can’t, just because of that same,” broke in the prairie-born. “I’m sick of this talking religion, but you’ll see it written plain on furrow and stock that when the Almighty gives the good soil freely He expects something back, and not a stinting of dumb beasts and land to roll up money in the bank. Take all and give nothing don’t pan out worth the washing, and that man will get let down of a sudden some cold day. Hallo! here’s the blamed old reprobate coming.”

Coombs slid through the stable with a cat-like gait and little eyes that noticed everything, while Harry leaned against a stall defiantly sucking at his pipe, and I wondered whether I was expected to be working at something.

“Idleness does not pay in this country, Lorimer,” he said, with a beatific air. “Diligence is the one road to success. There is a truss of hay waiting to go through the cutter. Harry, I notice more oats than need be mixed with that chop.”

He went out, and Harry laughed as he said, “Always the same! Weighs out the week’s sugar to the teaspoonful. But you look tired. If you feed I’ll work the infernal chopper.”

So for a time I fed in the hay, while Harry swung up and down at the wheel, slender and debonair in spite of his coarse blue garments, with merry brown eyes. He was younger than I, and evidently inferior in muscle; but, as I know now, he had inherited a spirit which is greater than mere bodily strength. No man had a truer comrade than I in Harry Lorraine, and the friendship which commenced in the sod stable that night when I was travel-worn and he cut the hay for me will last while we two remain on this earth, and after, hallowed in the survivor’s memory, until – but, remembering Coombs, I know that silence is often reverence, and so leave Grace’s clean lips to voice the eternal hope.