by Ruskin Bond
‘Henri! Henri! Wake up! What is the matter with you?’
His wife was shaking him. He blinked his way into a partial condition of consciousness. November sunlight was pouring into the room.
‘It’s late, isn’t it?’ he said, involuntarily.
‘It’s past eight. You’ll be late at the office. You didn’t go yesterday. If you go on like this you’ll get the sack, and then what shall we do?’
Slowly the recollection of last night’s events came back to him.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘I’m too ill to go to-day. Send them another telegram. It’ll be all right.’
His wife looked at him searchingly. ‘You’ve been drinking,’she said. “Oh, you men! God knows what will become of us.”
She appeared to be weeping in her apron. It struck him forcibly at that instant how provoking and small women are. Here was Jeannette crying over her petty troubles. Whereas he—
The whole thing was becoming vivid again. Where was Paul? What had happened? Was it at all likely that he could go down to an office on a day like this, a day that was to decide his fate?
He groaned, and elaborated rather pathetically his imaginary ailments, anything to keep this woman quiet. She left him at last, and he lay there waiting for something to happen. The hours passed. What would be the first intimation? Paul or the gendarmes? Thoughts of the latter stirred him to a state of fevered activity. About midday he arose, dressed, and went out. He told his wife he was going to the office, but he had no intention of doing so. He went and drank coffee at a place up in the Marais. He was terrified of his old haunts. He wandered from place to place, uncertain how to act. Late in the afternoon he entered a café in the Rue Alibert. At a kiosk outside he bought a late edition of an afternoon newspaper. He sat down, ordered a drink, and opened the newspaper. He glanced at the central news page, and as his eye absorbed one paragraph he unconsciously uttered a low scream. The paragraph was as follows:
MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT CHANTILLY
A mysterious affair occurred at Chantilly this morning. A middle-aged man, named Paul Denoyel, complained of pains in the stomach after eating an omelette. He died soon after in great agony. He was staying with his aunt, Mme Taillandier. No other members of the household were affected. The matter is to be inquired into.
The rest was a dream. He was only vaguely conscious of the events which followed. He wandered through it all, the instinct of self-preservation bidding him hold his tongue in all circumstances. He knew nothing. He had seen nothing. He had a visionary recollection of a plump, weeping Ernestine, at the inquest, enlarging upon the eccentricities of her mistress. A queer woman, who would brook no contradiction. He heard a lot about the fish day and the soufflé day, and how the old lady insisted that this was a fish day, and, and that she had had a souffle the day before. You could not argue with her when she was like that. And, Ernestine had beaten up the eggs all ready for the soufflé—most provoking! But Ernestine was a good cook, of method and economy. She wasted nothing. What should she do with the eggs? Why, of course, Mr Paul, who since he had come to live there was never content with a café complet. He must have a breakfast, like these English and other foreigners do. She made him an omelette, which he ate heartily.
Then the beaten-up eggs with their deadly mixture were intended for Mme Taillandier? But who was responsible for this? Ernestine? But there was no motive here. Ernestine gained nothing by her mistress’s death. Indeed she only stood to lose her situation. Motive? Was it possible that the deceased...The inquiry went on a long while. Henri himself was conscious of being in the witness-box. He knew nothing. He couldn’t understand it. His brother would not be likely to do that. He himself was prostrate with grief. He loved his brother.
There was nothing to do but return an open verdict. Shadowy figures passed before his mind’s eye—shadowy figures and shadowy realisations. He had perfectly murdered his brother. The whole of the dividends of the estate would one day be his, and his wife’s and children’s. Eighteen thousand francs a year! One day
One vision more vivid than the rest—the old lady on the day following the inquest, seated bolt upright at her table, like a figure of perpetuity, playing with the old grey perroquet, stroking its mangy neck.
‘There’s a pretty lady! Oh, my sweet! Another nice grape for my little one. There’s a pretty lady!’
THE LAST MATCH
EDWARD FITZ-GERALD FRIPP
‘Well, I guess we’d better be hitting for home. I don’t like the smell of that wind. She’s going to blizz before long, or I miss my guess.’
‘By golly, I believe you’re right. A dollar, fifty. That’s right. Good-bye, Mr Mawson. Good-bye, Mrs Mills.’
The owner of the feed company dumped the sack of corn meal behind the seat, Mawson clicked his tongue to his horse and the cutter moved off up the one street of Sunset with a merry jingling of sleigh bells.
The little prairie town was half asleep under its mantle of snow, for it was the third winter since the slump in wheat. For three years the price of No.1 Northern had hovered round sixty cents on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, and times were hard: harder than anyone could remember, butter being used for axle grease and eggs fed direct to the pigs for lack of a better market.
The neighbouring farmers no longer thronged into Sunset on Saturdays in their cars. One of the two garages was closed, and the other only employed one man instead of four. The cinema gave one performance a week, and the Rex Café and the Good Eats Café had an occasional customer. The stores were listless, and Ed Wilson’s barber’s shop and pool-room were nearly empty. This latter fact proved the severity of the depression beyond any doubt, for when the pool-room is empty, times are hard indeed. Not even the farmers themselves scanned the news of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange with greater eagerness than did the storekeepers and merchants of Sunset. Wheat was no longer king when No.l Northern was only sixty cents a bushel.
Within a minute or two the cutter had left the little town behind, and the main street of Sunset had given place to a long straight road, stretching endlessly and always perfectly straight across the bald prairie. Behind them the grain elevator reared its white height into the air, watching over Sunset as the church spire watches over the villages of older lands.
For some time the man and woman drove in silence, wrapped in the warm buffalo robe which keeps out any draughts. The noise of the horse’s hoofs was deadened by the snow, and the only sound was the jingling of the sleigh bells. Talk held no attraction for either of them; talk meant discussion of the price of wheat, and No.l Northern was only sixty cents in Winnipeg.
At last Mawson spoke:
‘Seems queer to be driving in a cutter again. Takes me back to before the war. I guess we’d all have been better off if we’d never had any cars; but once you’ve had one, you kind a seem lost without it. A rig seems so slow.’
‘It certainly does,’ she answered, and they drove on in silence.
The winter had been extraordinarily mild without one subzero spell. For the last two days it had been snowing with a slight south wind: a steady fall of what the prairie calls wet snow (though, even so, far drier than any which ever falls in England). The air was still full of white flakes, falling silently and yet at the same time making a gentle, almost imperceptible, patter as they settled on their hats and on the buffalo robe, which was now altogether white where it covered their knees.
The trail they had made driving into Sunset was vague and nearly obliterated. It was hard work for the horse breaking a fresh track, and progress was slow. The flakes of snow seemed to be growing smaller and falling faster, and, though they had blown into their faces during the drive into Sunset, now on the return trip they still blew slantwise against them.
‘I don’t like the smell of it,’ Mawson muttered. ‘The wind’s backed to the north and that sure means something.’ He raised his voice and called, ‘Git on there, Pete.’
Pete shook his ears and settled his shoulders int
o the traces. He needed no urging, for he, too, had felt the change of wind and wanted to get back to his stable.
Gradually the gusts increased in force. On the drive in it had been pleasant to feel the south wind driving the soft flakes against their faces. They had felt almost warm as they touched the cheek.
But there was a bite in this new wind. There was no doubt now that the flakes had grown much smaller. They grew smaller every minute until they were tiny atoms blowing straight against them in a line almost parallel with the ground. The wind, coming in a sweep across hundreds of miles of barren tundra in the Arctic Circle, without a single obstacle in the way to lessen its force, brought a wave of cold that made them shiver.
Already the mercury in thermometers on the international boundary was beginning to fall. By midnight it would be falling in the cities of the middle United States, and by midnight, twenty-four hours later, workers on cotton plantations in the Mississippi Valley, 2,000 miles to the south, would be shivering as the tail end of the storm reached them, tamed at last after its swoop across the prairies.
Presently the tiny flakes of snow began to sting their faces. As the gusts increased, the snow came in swirling clouds, rather as though someone was shaking the folds of a gigantic white carpet. During these gusts it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, and the sense of direction was lost as in a fog. It almost seemed that the snow was a fog, so dry it was, filtering like a fog into tiny gaps in the clothing. It crept between the top of the gloves and the sleeve of the overcoat and down the gap between the muffler and coat collar.
The wind, devoid of moisture, dried the snow which had already fallen, whirling it up into twisting spirals to join the horizontal sweep of the driven flakes. It drove the light powder against the slightest obstacles, so that each fence post was covered for a few inches on its windward side. By morning they would be nearly buried in the drifts, whose nucleus they were forming.
The man and woman sat closer together on the seat of the cutter, their heads thrust forward so that the snow would have less chance of seeping down their necks. He raised his hands to pull down his ear-flaps, and the snow fell off his mittens like powdered salt. Not a single flake had stuck to them, it was so dry.
At length Mawson indulged in the gloomy satisfaction of a prophet whose words have come true.
‘I knew I could smell a blizzard coming,’ he said. ‘It’s lucky we weren’t two hours late. I guess your husband ought to be safely in the shack by now.’
She turned to answer him, and the movement allowed the wind to blow all the snow from her hat.
‘Yes, he’ll be all right. Reckoned he’d reach there by three.’
She bent her head to face the wind again, and they drove in silence. Her husband had left home at four o’clock that morning to drive to the bush, which began in sheltered bluffs to the north of them. The northern prairie gives way to belts of semi-stunted trees where the ground holds more moisture.
With No.l Northern only sixty cents a bushel in Winnipeg the farmer cannot afford to buy coal, and her husband and a neighbour had gone to cut a year’s supply of fuel in the poplar bluffs. Later they would have to haul it thirty miles to their homes, sitting on top of their loads as the sleighs crossed the snowy plain, the thermometer below zero and as likely as not a bitter wind numbing them in body and mind.
The cutter was approaching a house standing a little back from the road; a gaunt, unpainted, wooden house without any pretensions to adornment. It was simply an enclosed rectangle, with a front door and a back door and four rooms, and the necessary windows to admit light: a house rather than a home, a place in which to eat and sleep and take shelter from the weather, like most of the other houses on prairie farms.
It rose straight from the flat field. There was no hedge, no railings, no lawn, no flower garden, to separate it from the wheat-land. Close beside it was a huge barn, dwarfing the house as the farm dwarfed the human beings who worked it.
Mawson drove up to the back door, and the woman got out, taking with her a shallow, open, wooden box which had once contained cans of condensed milk. It was now piled with brown-paper parcels, the groceries for which she had traded her butter, and underneath was her mail. The parcels were covered with a thick powder of snow which had filtered in under the buffalo robe, filling up the spaces between them till they looked like one amorphous lump.
‘Thanks for driving me in,’ she shouted.
‘Aw, shucks, that’s nothing. You’re sure you’ll be all right alone?’
‘Yes, Jim fixed up everything before he left.’
‘Have you got everything?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she shouted as a gust, fiercer than any which had come before, enveloped them in swirling white.
It blew the tiny flakes into their eyes and ears and down their necks, and lifted a cloud from the box that for a minute blinded them. She had a fleeting impression that one of the top parcels had blown into the drift already forming; but when she was able to see again and looked at the box, it was once more covered white. And the snow round them looked just as it had done.
She was half frozen and wanted to gain the warmth of the house; Pete was pawing his feet, longing to be on the way to his stable, and she knew it was not wise for Mawson to linger. He had three more miles to go before he reached home, and if he did not go quickly he might be badly frostbitten, as the blizzard was increasing every minute.
She looked at her box again. It seemed just the same. She must have been mistaken in thinking that anything had been blown out of it. Even if it had, it would make no difference. She would never find it until the spring, and in any case there was plenty of food in the house.
Mawson, plainly anxious to be off, again asked: ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes,’ she shouted, ‘and thanks a lot for the lift.’
He waved his hand, and Pete seized the opportunity to dash forward. In a moment the cutter was lost to view in the driving snow, and she turned hurriedly to the door.
From the uncovered rafters of the veranda hung quantities of meat impaled on hooks, cuts of veal and pork, for her husband had lately killed a calf and a pig.
That is one good thing about the prairie winter, she thought, as she ran up the three steps. You killed a pig, simply hung up the meat and then it froze immediately, and stayed frozen until you wanted it. Pretty convenient, and they were lucky to have so much in hard times.
The snow had drifted against the back door, half hiding the washing-machine and brooms leaning against the wall. All the rest of the veranda floor was bare, every particle of dirt dried into dust and swept away by the wind; the boards looked as if they had been scrubbed.
She had no need to search for a key. You do not lock your door on the prairie when you go away for the day. She kicked the drift with a sweep of her foot, and it disappeared in a fine mist, which swirled up into her face and vanished as the wind sucked it away.
She pulled the door open quickly, and almost jumped into the kitchen in her haste to enter before another drift could accumulate and blow in after her.
What a relief to be out of that biting wind! The kitchen was almost eerie with its comparative warmth and silence after the buffeting outside. It felt curious to be there alone without her husband, even frightening with the blizzard increasing in fury. For a moment the prospect appalled her, but she was the wife of a prairie farmer and resolutely thrust off her depression.
A gust of wind, which seemed as if it would carry away the whole house, sent an icy blast under the door and through the keyhole. It was a warning not to waste time. She had to milk yet, and it would not be safe to cross the corral in the dark. A second gust roused her to action.
Lifting the lid of the stove, she saw there was a little pile of embers. She snatched two sticks of wood from the box and thrust them into the opening, pulling back the draught as she did so. The two bedrooms and the sitting-room were warmed by a box heater, but owing to the warm weather of the two previou
s days, she had not lighted it in her efforts to economise.
She looked hesitatingly at it, for it would be so comforting to come back to a thoroughly warm house after the frozen barn, but another roar of wind made her resist the temptation. The intensity of the storm was terrifying, and she knew both from experience and from warning that she must be back in the house before it was dark, The heater would have to wait.
She took off her good coat and hat, shook the snow off them and flung them on a chair. The loneliness of the empty room began to affect her nerves. It was more lonely than she had thought it would be, and the noises of the blizzard intensified the loneliness until she felt flustered and a little panic-stricken at the thought of the solitary vigil before her.
Her one idea now was haste—haste to get done with the milking and then to come back to the task of keeping the house warm, and its precious supply of vegetables in the cellar.
She put on her woollen blizzard-cap so that it reached halfway down her neck, and left only a tiny opening for the eyes and nose. Next she put on an old farm overcoat, fastening the collar over the lower part of her blizzard-cap so that there was no chance of her neck being frozen. Then her woollen mittens, and over them the buckskin outer mittens.
No fear of frostbite now for a little while; but she had to hurry. Every second was of importance. Should she leave the draught on in the stove to make sure of the wood catching? If she did, it would probably have burnt away by the time she came back. She could not wait to give it more time. It would soon be dark. The wood was dry and must have caught by this time, and it always burnt easily in zero weather.
Without pausing to look in her flurry, she thrust back the damper with her thumb. It closed with a clang and she hurried to the door, taking a kettle with her.
It was all she could do to open the door. The wind and cold made her gasp for breath, and a cloud of snow like the finest powder blew past her into the room. The door slammed behind her, and she picked up her milk-pail from beside the washing-machine.
