Mary stared at her husband. It had been the most cruel disappointment of her life when, twenty-five years ago, he had told her that she must never have children. Since that day the fact had not been touched on between them except in a painful silence. By mentioning it now, he placed the whole case on a different plane. She had thought him only mildly interested. This argument undeceived her. She had made the mistake which strangers often made about him: she had under-estimated his emotional involvement, intense to a degree of passion. He was voicing a protest against the violation of a fundamental right: the right of every human being to determine his own course of action. She thought she knew Abe; she thought she knew exactly what he would do. She felt sorry for him; more than she could express. But if her husband thought that Abe, no matter what might be the consequence, would have wanted to know; if he thought Abe would consider himself deprived of his very freedom unless he were told, then, indeed, there was no way but to tell him. “I hope you are right,” she said. “What do you suppose?”
The doctor smiled at her from where he sat, his right foot drawn up on his left knee. “I advise to withdraw the charge.”
“The charge has been withdrawn.”
“Good. Then I shall without delay run down in the car and fetch Abe home. What do you say, Ruth?”
“I think so,” Ruth said with an immense relief in her voice.
ABE
When Abe, in the field, was told that his brother-in-law was waiting for him at the gate of Rogers’s yard, the mood of the last day spent in his own meadow still persisted. He had resigned himself; he would rebuild life on a smaller scale. There was peace ahead; rest after a feverish life. Ruth, too, would be willing to give and to take….
He crossed the field and yard and went to the highway. “Anything wrong?” he asked when he saw the doctor behind the wheel of his car.
“Ruth wants you, Abe.”
“All right. I’ll be back in a minute. I must wash.”
A quarter of an hour later they were gliding north along the highway, in silence.
“Abe,” said the doctor after a while, “I want to tell you something.”
Abe looked up, still half withdrawn.
“I want to tell you why I gave up my practice.”
Again there was a silence before the doctor went on:
“One night, twenty-four years ago, I was called out of bed by a message summoning me to the house of a farmer whom I knew slightly. I was called in as a consultant; a doctor from St. Cecile was in charge. When I arrived, after a drive of fifteen miles, I found a competent nurse in the house. Everything was ready for an emergency operation. I met my colleague in the parlour; and he told me about the course of the illness without giving me his own diagnosis. It was he who had called me in, not the patient’s wife. At the bedside, I made my own diagnosis with the greatest care. When I returned to my colleague, I found we were in complete agreement. An immediate operation seemed to offer the only chance of life. But there was one trouble. The condition of the respiratory organs contra-indicated an ether anaesthesia. It was a serious case. If our diagnosis was correct–and we did not doubt it–delay spelt danger. On the other hand, so long as there was a ghost of a chance of recovery without the operation, it was our duty to wait and to get an anaesthetic other than ether. The chances of the patient’s living through an ether anaesthesia were one in ten. No other anaesthetic was available; we were many hours from the nearest source of supply; it was before the day of the car; and it was winter. My colleague had been prepared to proceed even before I arrived. That I came in time was a tremendous relief to him. We weighed every possibility; we decided not to wait and reported accordingly to the patient’s wife, not disguising the fact that the operation might be fatal. She placed her husband in our hands. As soon as the incision was made, the man died under the anaesthetic. My colleague, bent over the body while the nurse and I tried artificial respiration, looked up at me, ghastly white. A glance showed me that our diagnosis had been mistaken. If we had waited, the man would have lived.”
Abe sat and pondered, resenting the fact that this tale should be intruded on his mood. “Why,” he asked, “do you tell me that now?”
“Abe,” said the doctor, “I never trusted myself again. My colleague had a more robust conscience. He is in practice to-day. I sold out.”
“That I understand. But why tell me to-day?”
“Nobody knows except that colleague, Mary, and you. I tell you because it might be well for you to know before you go home. It has ruined my career and darkened my life. I was a young man then and have been an old man since. A human life was given into my hands, and I took it. Of that fact I cannot dispose. Not even to-day does it avail me that I acted according to the best of my knowledge; not that probably any other consultant would have made the same mistake. We never see all the facts of a case. The greatest in my profession might have erred. Few, perhaps, leave this life without having to look back on similar errors. But all that is beside the point. We act and blunder. We can never tell. Perhaps this knowledge may help to sustain you.”
Abe sat silent, huge, disturbed. “Sustain me in what?” The doctor shrugged a shoulder and raised a hand from the wheel.
Again there was silence. The prairie to both sides of the highway was as flat as in Spalding District; but it was densely settled; and every farmstead was sheltered by wind-breaks and drained by shallow ditches. To the east, the bush fringe of the river closed the horizon.
In the north, the grain elevators of Somerville rose up; and in twenty minutes they turned west in the centre of the town.
“Any one sick?” Abe asked as the car sped into the open country again which here looked less cared for, even the road being rougher.
“It isn’t that.”
Abe half turned to his companion. “Well, tell me, what is it?”
“Ruth wants you. Be patient.”
They were nearing Morley when Abe’s groping thought hit on the school-house in his district. That district was claiming him. He would have to obey the call….
The car passed Morley School. “Ruth is with Mary,” the doctor said. “We shall pick her up.”
At the house Ruth came down the steps as the car came to a stop. Abe noticed every detail: the faded mauve hat, too small and too glossy, the dress of black, flowered voile, too tight over the hips. In times past he would have been touched by distaste at her sight; to-day he saw that this woman, human like himself, was stirred to her depth; and he noticed her immense relief at his return. He nodded to Mary who stood on the stoop and, in answer, raised her brows.
At the stable, Ruth and the doctor remained in their seats while Abe fetched the horse. It was four o’clock. While they waited, the whistle of the afternoon train which was late shrilled over the prairie from the east. When the buggy was ready, Ruth alighted; and the doctor, with a brief nod, backed his car away.
Abe turned into Main Street. To their left, the train was slowing down for the stop at the station, two hundred yards ahead. The ordinarily deserted platform burst into momentary life. Bags were thrown from the mail car; cream cans clattered from the van. A few passengers alighted as the buggy passed in the rear of the buildings.
Abe happened to look at Ruth. Her face held the same expression of a veiled reticence which he had seen in the doctor and Mary.
Then several things happened at once.
From the group of people who had alighted and were now passing out, one figure detached itself at a run. Abe was on the point of pulling the pony to a stop; but Ruth reached for the whip in its socket and brought it down on the horse’s back. People stopped, laughing.
The little horse broke into a trot and, at a second blow from the whip, into a gallop.
The man who had started to run was still following them, shouting. Abe, whose attention was claimed by the horse, did not understand all he said, but he caught a few words about “getting even with the whole Spalding outfit.” He had not recognized the man.
Then came Ruth’s voice. “Don’t stop. I must talk to you first.”
The whip coming down a third time, the horse took the turn to the north at a gallop, with the buggy running precariously on two wheels.
For several minutes Abe did not speak. When he did, his voice held a note of weary patience. “Was that McCrae at the station?”
“Yes.”
“You mustn’t get so upset about things…. Is Frances alone?”
Ruth’s heart pounded. “Take me home first. Then I shall tell you.”
Abe nodded; a deep, trench-like frown settled on his brow.
They came to the second mile-crossing with the bridge over the so-called first ditch. Beyond, to the right, John Elliot was crossing his yard, swinging his long arms, his bullet head bent to one side. As he heard the rumble of the buggy on the culvert, he stopped and turned. Seeing Abe, he broke into a sort of gallop to intercept him.
To the left, an old woman, working on a flower bed close to the road, in front of Hilmer’s shack, rested from her labours, leaning on the handle of her hoe, her wide, ragged skirt hanging unevenly about her broomstick legs. She stared at the two, the man in the buggy, straight and stern, and the other by his side, one hand on a wheel.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, Spalding,” Elliot said. “Things can’t go on the way they’re going down there at the school. Drinking and dancing all night and every night. And worse things. It’s got to be stopped. We have to have someone else on the board. We’re all agreed that you are the man. But I’ve promised, if you refuse, I’ll run myself.”
Abe nodded. Then, to the other’s amazement, he said slowly, “I suppose I’ll have to go on that board.”
“All right. I am with you. And so is every decent settler.”
As Abe moved on, Mrs. Grappentin shouted after him; but as she spoke in German, he did not understand. “Ah now!” she called. “Is the great lord stepping down from his shining height? Now he’s got a whore in the family like other common folk?” And she broke into a cackling laugh, waving her hand after the buggy in the greeting of fellowship. Grappentin, her sponging husband who had come back since his stepson was working for wages again, stepped into the open door and joined in her villainous laugh, spitting tobacco juice into a bed of blooming asters.
A shudder ran down Abe’s spine at the sound; and Ruth paled. The voice, unintelligible though it was, sounded like the voice of the prairie which lay swooning under the afternoon sun.
They passed Dave Topp’s place, a one-roomed shed resembling a granary. He lived very quietly now and played his violin of an evening in front of his door. Next, Henry Topp’s yard, unchanged in all these years. Of the three brothers, only Slim succeeded in making his place look like a farm; but people said that, at the rate at which he spent money, he would never “make his place a go,” to say nothing of paying his debt to the Government. His new white house presented a striking contrast to Horanski’s establishment across the road with its low, dark buildings in keeping with the soil. Yet Horanski was said to be making money.
Old man Blaine’s cottage followed next, to the right and just south of the school which had become the abode of iniquity. A curtain moved in the window; and behind the pane trembled a leonine head. Man passes, they say; his work remains. Does it? It seemed vain in the face of the composure of this prairie. This was the district: farmsteads to east, west, south, and north: and that district was calling for Abe. Dare he decline to take hold?
Nicoll’s wind-break across the corner was mature now, too; and when the buggy turned the corner, Abe almost felt compassionate eyes peering after him. At the gate, he caught a glimpse of a stout, towering female in the shade, no doubt muttering in her pathetic way, “There goes the fallen hero! The shame and pity of it!” In days long past Abe had laughed at her dramatic ways.
And on, past Dick Nicoll’s, for another two miles, to his own place which, for a while, would stand as a monument to man’s endeavour. South of the ditch, the meadow stretched away, mamillated with haystacks.
Alighting at the little gate near the house, Abe said with sombre sobriety, “Go in. I’ll turn the pony out. I won’t need him again.”
A lump rose in Ruth’s throat. His was a commonplace remark, meaning only that, for the day, Abe’s driving was done. Yet, in the light of Mary’s forebodings, it had a sinister sound. “Abe, I’ll go with you.”
He looked at her. Then, “Come along if you want to.”
And so, as in years long gone by, Ruth stood in the door of the barn as Abe stripped the harness off the pony’s back and turned him out.
Then, side by side, they went to the house and sat down in the dining-room. Abe was visibly, painstakingly collecting his thoughts.
“Tell me in detail just what you have done,” he said at last.
Ruth told her story without the slightest attempt to shield man or girl: for her, something more than Frances was at stake.
Abe listened patiently, letting her go back and forth over the story and asking her to repeat certain statements–as that regarding the significance of the amount at which bail had been fixed. At last he nodded. “You did right. You did right even in getting me out of the way. I might not have had the patience to go through with it.” And, after a while, “It is a case where the law fails us.”
“Then the law is evil,” Ruth cried.
“No. It is merely imperfect.” And again he sat and pondered, Ruth torturing a handkerchief in her hands. “You have done,” he repeated, “what I should have done. I am glad it isn’t to do over again.”
“I felt that the man must be punished,” Ruth said as if still in self-defence.
“I could not have done what you did in getting the admission from the man,” Abe said, rising. “It clears the case. And now I want to be alone for a while. Don’t follow me; and don’t worry.”
He went out and across the yard, through the old barn, into the pasture where he stared unseeingly at horses and cows. Every now and then a tremor ran through his body.
In the hall of the house stood a gun-rack; and he thought of it. He might load one of these guns, go down to the man’s shack, call him out, and shoot him down like a dog. His hand seemed to close about the weapon where stock and barrel join, a finger on the trigger….
But what would be gained by it? Abe’s body relaxed. The district, the municipality, the province, the country would be supplied with a thrill, to be forgotten the next day or the day after; and then the matter would pass into the void of oblivion, to be revived perhaps now and then in tales around the stove.
What else? The district was calling. There, too, he had started a machinery which he could not stop and which imposed its law upon him. But suddenly he felt that, if he followed its call, that district would rally about him: the Ukrainians, Hilmer, the Jew, and Baker; Dave Topp, Stanley, Elliot, Nicoll–a clear majority over the gang–the moment he gave them a chance to align themselves by his side. The gang had been running the district because he, Abe, had stood aloof.
Resignation? The thing he had dreamt of for a week had been no resignation at all: he had nursed his anger and shut himself off. He had meant to do what, in his weariness, seemed fulfilment of his desires. True resignation meant accepting one’s destiny; to him, it meant accepting the burden of leadership; and the moment he saw that, he felt at one with the district, with his brother-in-law who had told him his story, with Ruth in her sorrow, and, strangely, with himself; for here was something to do once more: the gang would vanish into thin air. His own life had been wrong, or all this would not have happened. He had lied to himself and had had to learn that it could not be done….
There were further searchings, painfully proving; but all led to the same result. “Yes,” he muttered to himself, “I’ll go on…. To the end…. Whatever it may be.”
And when, in the dusk, he returned to the house where he knew Ruth was waiting in distress and anxiety, his mind was made up.
He sat down in the dining-room; and in a su
dden impulse Ruth came to his side and half bent over him. “Abe,” she said, “for my sake, let him go.”
He placed his hand on hers which rested on the table; and for the first time in many years, he felt her touch on his shoulder. “I can hardly do that,” he said with an effort. “He is not alone in his doings. And this is my district, founded by me and bearing my name. Shall his example stand for all time to come? What would it mean? That a man can do as he pleases, living the life of the beast within him. If Frances was in any way to blame, that is her concern. But McCrae is not a giddy boy. If he were, I’d make him marry the girl and keep him straight. But look at the case. He is married. He has children of his own. He is a ratepayer, entitled to office if he can muster followers enough to elect him as Wheeldon did. He enjoys all the rights and privileges of others. Has he none of their duties? I had withdrawn from the district; I did wrong; and this has risen up against me. I see my duty again. It is out of cases of self-help that the law has arisen; whatever I do will have its effect on the law; or at least on its interpretation within this district. No, I shall have to act. I shall have to drive him out.”
Ruth was tense, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I have wronged the district,” he went on. “And, Ruth, I have wronged you.”
She sobbed convulsively; her hand gripped his shoulder.
“And I have wronged my children as well,” he added painfully.
“Abe–––” But she could not speak.
“You thought I should kill him,” he went on more composedly. “It would not serve the case. On that score you may be at rest. The district as well as I will have to live this down; it will have to vindicate me and itself by casting him out. I shall have to take office again, and not only here but in the municipality as well.”
At ten o’clock, that night, Abe was at Nicoll’s Corner, looking across at the meeting place of the gang; and then, through the utter darkness of a moonless night, he approached the building. As he came in line with the open door, he could see through the whole of the classroom to the far end where the three musicians sat: Slim, Henry, and a stranger. Abe stopped for a second and then went on till he was mounting the concrete steps and entering the vestibule. He passed the cloakroom to his left and the partition of the office to his right. Up to the moment when he actually entered the dance-floor where half a dozen couples were turning, he was in deep shade, for the gasoline lamp which lighted the dancers was suspended close to the ceiling.
Fruits of the Earth Page 32
