Herbert Wells - Marriage

"Here presently," said Trafford, "we shall be in peace."

"It is very lonely," said Marjorie.

"The nearer to God."

"Think! Not one of these hills has ever had a name."

"Well?"

"It might be in some other planet."

"Oh!—we'll christen them. That shall be Marjorie Ridge, and that Rag Valley. This space shall be—oh! Bayswater! Before we've done with it, this place and every feature of it will be as familiar as Sussex Square. More so,—for half the houses there would be stranger to us, if we could see inside them, than anything in this wilderness.... As familiar, say—as your drawing-room. That's better."

Marjorie made no answer, but her eyes went from the reindeer moss and scrub and thickets of the foreground to the low rocky ridges that bounded the view north and east of them. The scattered boulders, the tangles of wood, the barren upper slopes, the dust-soiled survivals of the winter's snowfall, all contributed to an effect at once carelessly desert and hopelessly untidy. She looked westward, and her memory was full of interminable streaming rapids, wastes of ice-striated rocks, tiresome struggles through woods and wild, wide stretches of tundra and tarn, trackless and treeless, infinitely desolate. It seemed to her that the sea coast was but a step from London and ten thousand miles away from her.

The men had engaged to build the framework of hut and store shed before returning, and to this under Trafford's direction they now set themselves. They were all half-breeds, mingling with Indian with Scottish or French blood, sober and experienced men. Three were named Mackenzie, two brothers and a cousin, and another, Raymond Noyes, was a relation and acquaintance of that George Elson who was with Wallace and Leonidas Hubbard, and afterwards guided Mrs. Hubbard in her crossing of Labrador. The fifth was a boy of eighteen named Lean. They were all familiar with the idea of summer travel in this country; quite a number, a score or so that is to say, of adventurous people, including three or four women, had ventured far in the wake of the Hubbards into these great wildernesses during the decade that followed that first tragic experiment in which Hubbard died. But that any one not of Indian or Esquimaux blood should propose to face out the Labrador winter was a new thing to them. They were really very sceptical at the outset whether these two highly civilized-looking people would ever get up to the Height of Land at all, and it was still with manifest incredulity that they set about the building of the hut and the construction of the sleeping bunks for which they had brought up planking. A stream of speculative talk had flowed along beside Marjorie and Trafford ever since they had entered the Green River; and it didn't so much come to an end as get cut off at last by the necessity of their departure.

Noyes would stand, holding a hammer and staring at the narrow little berth he was fixing together.

"You'll not sleep in this," he said.

"I will," replied Marjorie.

"You'll come back with us."

"Not me."

"There'll be wolves come and howl."

"Let 'em."

"They'll come right up to the door here. Winter makes 'em hidjus bold."

Marjorie shrugged her shoulders.

"It's that cold I've known a man have his nose froze while he lay in bed," said Noyes.

"Up here?"

"Down the coast. But they say it's 'most as cold up here. Many's the man it's starved and froze."...

He and his companions told stories,—very circumstantial and pitiful stories, of Indian disasters. They were all tales of weariness and starvation, of the cessation of food, because the fishing gave out, because the caribou did not migrate by the customary route, because the man of a family group broke his wrist, and then of the start of all or some of the party to the coast to get help and provisions, of the straining, starving fugitives caught by blizzards, losing the track, devouring small vermin raw, gnawing their own skin garments until they toiled half-naked in the snow,—becoming cannibals, becoming delirious, lying down to die. Once there was an epidemic of influenza, and three families of seven and twenty people just gave up and starved and died in their lodges, and were found, still partly frozen, a patient, pitiful company, by trappers in the spring....

Such they said, were the common things that happened in a Labrador winter. Did the Traffords wish to run such risks?

A sort of propagandist enthusiasm grew up in the men. They felt it incumbent upon them to persuade the Traffords to return. They reasoned with them rather as one does with wilful children. They tried to remind them of the delights and securities of the world they were deserting. Noyes drew fancy pictures of the pleasures of London by way of contrast to the bitter days before them. "You've got everything there, everything. Suppose you feel a bit ill, you go out, and every block there's a drug store got everything—all the new rem'dies—p'raps twenty, thirty sorts of rem'dy. Lit up, nice. And chaps in collars—like gentlemen. Or you feel a bit dully and you go into the streets and there's people. Why! when I was in New York I used to spend hours looking at the people. Hours! And everything lit up, too. Sky signs! Readin' everywhere. You can spend hours and hours in New York——"

"London," said Marjorie.

"Well, London—just going about and reading the things they stick up. Every blamed sort of thing. Or you say, let's go somewhere. Let's go out and be a bit lively. See? Up you get on a car and there you are! Great big restaurants, blazing with lights, and you can't think of a thing to eat they haven't got. Waiters all round you, dressed tremendous, fair asking you to have more. Or you say, let's go to a theatre. Very likely," said Noyes, letting his imagination soar, "you order up one of these automobillies."

"By telephone," helped Trafford.

"By telephone," confirmed Noyes. "When I was in New York there was a telephone in each room in the hotel. Each room. I didn't use it ever, except once when they didn't answer—but there it was. I know about telephones all right...."

Why had they come here? None of the men were clear about that. Marjorie and Trafford would overhear them discussing this question at their fire night after night; they seemed to talk of nothing else. They indulged in the boldest hypotheses, even in the theory that Trafford knew of deposits of diamonds and gold, and would trust no one but his wife with the secret. They seemed also attracted by the idea that our two young people had "done something." Lean, with memories of some tattered sixpenny novel that had drifted into his hands from England, had even some notion of an elopement, of a pursuing husband or a vindictive wife. He was young and romantic, but it seemed incredible he should suggest that Marjorie was a royal princess. Yet there were moments when his manner betrayed a more than personal respect....

One night after a hard day's portage Mackenzie was inspired by a brilliant idea. "They got no children," he said, in a hoarse, exceptionally audible whisper. "It worries them. Them as is Catholics goes pilgrimages, but these ain't Catholics. See?"

"I can't stand that," said Marjorie. "It touches my pride. I've stood a good deal. Mr. Mackenzie!... Mr.... Mackenzie."

The voice at the men's fire stopped and a black head turned around. "What is it, Mrs. Trafford?" asked Mackenzie.

She held up four fingers. "Four!" she said.

"Eh?"

"Three sons and a daughter," said Marjorie.

Mackenzie did not take it in until his younger brother had repeated her words.

"And you've come from them to this .... Sir, what have you come for?"

"We want to be here," shouted Trafford to their listening pause. Their silence was incredulous.