by Ruth Glover
The bicycle, until now considered a boy’s or man’s possession, and for the reason of transportation, had dropped part of the frame so that women cyclists could be accommodated. In so doing it became a thing of evil. “It is undoubtedly the bicycle that is giving the nineties a reputation for gaiety,” one columnist wrote, which hurt its sale not a whit. There was no doubt about it—the two-wheeled monster challenged churches, contributed to the emancipation of women, and revolutionized manners. That her beloved Frances should lend her influence in that direction greatly grieved propriety-bound Charlotte.
Charlotte was out of the room, however, and Kerry, with the streak of fun that had always identified her, declared her intention of trying on the outrageous garment. She and Franny were in the midst of this distraction, laughing as they tugged the bloomers into place, when Gladdy appeared, holding aloft the letter.
“Oh, do give it to me!” squealed the excited Franny, and the teasing Gladdy dropped it into her outstretched hands. Reluctantly Gladdy turned and left, having other things to do and catching on quickly that Miss Franny was not going to read the epistle while she was in the room.
Franny tore open the familiar envelope. Her eager eyes scanned the page in silence, a half-smile on her tenderly curved lips. The smile vanished, her eyes widened, her hand trembled. Her face blazed scarlet and waned to white. She staggered.
Kerry saw the transformation, her own thoughts going from interest to dismay. If it had not been for her outstretched hand, her arm quickly going around the sagging body, Franny would have crumpled into a heap on the floor.
Indeed, Franny was in a half-swoon; it seemed she was barely breathing, and what breath she had was ragged and shallow. Greatly alarmed, Kerry half carried, half dragged her to the bed, letting her fall across it. She removed Franny’s slippers, swung her feet up, and thrust a pillow under her head. From her nerveless fingers the letter fluttered to the floor. Kneeling, Kerry gathered it to her, her eyes swiftly scanning the brief paragraph.
Dear Miss Bentley: [How stilted, how impersonal! How revealing!]
It has been pleasant corresponding with you. I trust you have benefited from my descriptions of, and introductions to, the bush. Indeed it is a place of great attraction. But as a place to live, not so. You will be forever grateful that you have not experienced it firsthand. Indeed I do you a great favor by courteously but insistently discouraging you from any further thoughts westward.
If any words of mine have misled you, you may know it has been unintentional.
Wishing you the best, I remain,
yr. obdnt. servant,
Connor Dougal
Reading material, in the bush, was treasured, passed from hand to hand, read and reread—especially during the long winter months—until it fell apart and was used to start someone’s morning fire, if the fire had by some misfortune gone out during the night.
Dudley never knew, nor did he care, where the old material on the Cariboo Trail came from; obviously someone had hoarded it and felt it was worthy of sharing. And so several newspaper copies—The Cariboo Sentinel, British Columbian, Colonist, and others, as well as R. Byron Johnson’s Very Far West Indeed—ended up in his possession, having made the rounds, stirring the heart of the adventurous, the dreamer, and the desperate.
Dudley was desperate, feeling as caught as a rabbit in a trap. That desperation had made him a dreamer. Seeing no way out of his present situation yet never settling for it, his plans became wilder and more unattainable as time passed. His dreams rarely touched on reality. There was—he sometimes felt with despair—no hope.
The Cariboo was the maddest, perhaps the biggest, gold hunt to convulse the West, and the sandbars and creeks along the Fraser River had yielded an estimated $50 million worth of gold before it panned out. But what gripped Dudley was more than the gold—it was the free lifestyle, the fever that gripped the hearts of those thousands who came. Surely, somewhere, there was a challenge for him! A challenge that would take him away from the farm, away from the routine of barn-cleaning, horse-currying, egg-gathering, cow-milking, manure-pitching that marked his winter days. Away from home . . . away from the sight of Matilda and Bert Felker together . . . away from Ma and her eternal guardianship of his every move.
Perhaps Della, knowing her son better than he realized, suspected the discontent, suspicioned the dreams, and supposed the inevitable—escape.
With the snow—soft but deadly—beating soundlessly against the windowpanes, with the fire in the heater roaring and Dudley seated across its width from her, Della’s sharp eyes noted her son’s fascination with what he was reading. Having glanced at the papers and being familiar with the contents, she followed his thoughts with remarkable accuracy.
“Gorges five thousand feet deep,” she said into the silence. “Box canyons of perpendicular red rock. Boiling with rapids and whirlpools. That’s the Fraser for you.”
Dudley started, his rapt attention interrupted by his mother’s grim words.
Cariboo country, which Dudley found fascinating—a twenty-two-mile-wide plateau slashed by the Fraser River, beginning its flow at Buffalo Dung Lake (a name Della chose to ignore)—was the source of the most vivid stories that ever came out of any venture of man. Dudley had been immersed in an account of the intrepid prospectors and with them “battled the currents in wooden bateaux lashed like pontoon rafts, six abreast to carry mules and Newfoundland dogs,” and with them removed his boots and attempted to climb the trench cliffs barefoot. Reading on, he forsook that group and aligned himself instead with the wiser men who strapped hundred-pound packs of “Cariboo turkey” (bacon) and “Cariboo strawberries” (beans) to their dogs and mules and took the Indian trails along the bank.
“Think of it, Ma . . . Mum! Billy Barker—you’ve heard of him, Barkerville is named after him—hit a lode that had nuggets as big as hen’s eggs!”
“And died a pauper in the Old Men’s Home in Victoria.”
“A baroness in England arranged with the Bishop of London to send over a ‘bride ship.’ Did you ever hear the like, Ma?” Dudley asked admiringly. “The Colonist identifies them as ‘sixty maidens meditating matrimony—ages from fourteen to uncertain.’ All of them found mates, Ma, after walking down that gangplank into the midst of all those whiskery, eager faces.” Dudley actually chortled at the picture this conjured up.
“Maybe one of them married ‘Cariboo’ Cameron,” Della said quenchingly. “His wife, you may recall, died, and ‘Cariboo’ paid big prices for men to help take her body to the coast. He pickled her in alcohol in a lead-lined box, put the box on a toboggan, and dragged it to New Westminster for shipment. He finally got her to Ontario all right and buried her there. And what happened to ‘Cariboo’ and his millions? Died penniless. No, my boy, you are better off with the farm, dying in your own bed—”
Della stopped abruptly with a sudden remembrance of Henley dying in a scarred school desk during a church service in a small schoolhouse in the bush. Dudley, also remembering, added silently, yes, and he died penniless, and never had any adventure getting that way.
“Well,” he plunged ahead, “if the Cariboo Trail is out, there’s always the Peace River country.”
“Not open,” his mother said, and she dismissed the subject as being unworthy of discussion.
“Maybe not,” Dudley continued doggedly, “but it will be. As the prairies and the bush fill up, there’s going to be a spilling out into these more rugged, remote areas. One of these days the government will open roads back in there—”
“The latitude is too high for farming.”
“No, it’s not, Ma! Gregor was there before he settled down here, and—”
“Why didn’t he stay there, the foreigner!”
Dudley explained patiently, “He thought about it. In fact, somewhere over there he did some trapping. But without the railway, you can’t get furs out that easily. I think he made arrangements with someone there to buy some land . . . he had cash, maybe still does, I don’t
know. Anyway, he liked that country.”
“The more fool, he.”
The conversation languished there, as it always did when Dudley revealed any hint of his desire to get out . . . to get away.
The following afternoon, between dinner and supper, under a lowering sky and an ominous silence that often presaged a snowstorm, Dudley made his slow way, through snowbanks and along snow-rutted roads, to the quarter section that was Gregor Slovinski’s property.
“Hello-o-o!” he called, receiving no answer to his knock on the cabin door but noting the smoke from the stovepipe.
The door to the small log barn was thrust open, and Gregor’s palely pink hair, topped with a lopsided cap, appeared.
“Hello, yourself. Go on in and make yourself at home! I’m coming.”
Dudley waited on the small stoop, and soon Gregor was at his side, stamping the snow from his felt boots, sweeping the encrustation of ice and snow from Dudley’s legs and feet, smiling a white-toothed greeting, and urging his company into his home.
Gregor’s cabin was small and crowded but not offensively smelly or messy. The atmosphere, always closed in at this time of the year, was redolent with wood smoke, bacon grease, and a carbolic odor that could only come from medicated soap.
Gregor pulled off his cap, removed his gloves and coat, and invited Dudley to do likewise. He motioned his guest toward the one and only comfortable chair—a scarred wooden rocker; then he pulled an enamel coffeepot forward from the back of the range top and reached for a couple of cups. Flinching at the black brew, Dudley sipped cautiously.
“How iss eferyting going?” Gregor inquired when the man and the youth were seated at the side of the stove, the only reasonable spot in any busy home to relax and be comfortable.
“Pretty good, I guess,” Dudley answered in a tight voice, and Gregor looked at the younger man with a question in his narrowed eyes.
He suspected this was not a casual visit. No one, in the dead of winter, had sufficient reason—outside of an emergency or sheer desperation in the face of loneliness—to trek somewhere through bad weather just to sit. It was done, but always with a purpose.
So they talked about feed, cows going dry, hens freezing. They talked about being isolated and snowbound; they talked about loneliness. They talked about the future.
“Yah,” Gregor confirmed, “dis iss da place for me. Lonely or not, I got me a goot place. Besides, I tink I yust luff Bliss. You?”
“Oh, Bliss is all right. But I dunno . . . it’s not the only place on earth, is it?”
Gregor’s light-colored eyebrows lifted. “Nah,” he agreed. “I guess dere’s udder places. You tinking about any special place?”
“Well, don’t you get, ah, lonely for that place of yours in the Peace River country? On the Parsnip, wasn’t it?”
“It’s yust timberland. Nah, I’m bedder off here.”
Silence.
Gregor gulped his coffee, and Dudley was glad Ma wasn’t around to hear it. The fire snapped and popped.
Silence.
A clock ticked clearly, and Dudley’s eyes were drawn to the sound.
On a shelf on the wall sat an incongruous item, made more so because of the cabin’s masculine look and smell and the massive size and prodigious strength of the man who owned it. It was a clock, no larger than six inches high and five inches wide. The case was made to resemble a basket and was cast in bronze. It had a handle of twisted brass, and from the open top of the basket two tiny brass kittens peeped out, one looking down at the clock dial, the other with a paw raised, batting at something unseen. Dudley was mesmerized. What was the story behind this girlish item?
Gregor watched his guest for the moment. Then, quietly, he explained.
“Dat belonged to my Marta. My vife. She iss buried in da old coundry and our liddle dodder vit her.”
Suddenly Dudley’s portrayal of being a landowner and adult vanished. Although past his nineteeth birthday, he was as gauche and dumbstruck as any ten-year-old.
“I didn’t know,” he mumbled, going fiery red. “I’m sorry.”
“I’s vy I’m here, I guess you’d say,” Gregor continued. “Dere was nodding for me over dere anymore. So I vent to da Peace country . . . too lonely. And den I come here, to Bliss. Here I like; here I gonna stay.”
After an uncomfortable silence on Dudley’s part, he finally spoke, trying to make his voice natural and probably failing, for Gregor’s sharp eyes studied the young man’s face, learning more than words alone implied. “Well, then, if you’re going to stay in Bliss, maybe you want to get rid of your property in the Peace country.” Casual, so casual.
“I tink aboud it, sometimes, yah.”
“Well, listen.”
And Gregor did so while Dudley proposed a most amazing offer.
“I own half interest in our place,” Dudley explained in a rush of words, as though they were pent up and ready to burst the dam that had held them back. “I want to get away . . . start new somewhere else. You own a place in the Peace country and don’t need it, maybe don’t want it. It’s just sitting there waiting to be tamed. Could we make some kind of trade? Maybe with a little cash thrown in, on your part, or some arrangement for payments because of my place being proved up and in pretty good shape? Whaddya say, Gregor? Eh? Eh?”
Dudley was pale now, his few remaining blemishes standing out like bare spots in a field of snow. His words, once started, tripped over themselves, and he studied the face of the older man with blazing, eager eyes.
What he had suggested was incredible. Or was it? Gregor, like all homesteaders, planned to farm more than his original quarter-section. But to obtain more land, unless he sold and moved, he would have acreage that was separated from his homestead, perhaps by a great distance, making it next to impossible to work both places. The Baldwin place was the fourth quarter in his own section.
Gregor drew a deep breath; there was one insurmountable problem. Or was there?
“Della—your mudder. Vat does she say? Haff you talked mit her aboud it?”
Dudley’s slender shoulders sagged. “No.”
“Vould she agree, do ya tink?”
“No. Never.”
“Vell den—”
“Listen, Gregor—”
A desperate Dudley laid out his case: He had to get away, start on his own, be his own man. Gregor nodded. “I own half the homestead,” Dudley explained. “I can sell it, or trade it. Or just let it sit idle!” And now Dudley’s voice was a tightly worded threat: Just let it sit!
“It’s blackmail, I suppose, of a sort,” Dudley admitted. “Ma can’t work our place alone, and if I leave it sit, she’s sunk! She’ll have to agree, if I stick to my decision. She’ll be glad to agree—either to have someone work it on shares or buy it outright.”
“Vat if she don’t?”
“She doesn’t have to agree, Gregor. That’s my land, or half of everything is, and I can sell or trade it. She’ll have to go along with it. She won’t have any choice.”
“If I don’t do it, Dudley, vill you fin’ someone else?” Gregor asked quietly.
“Absolutely! I’m getting out of here!”
Perhaps Gregor thought compassionately of the widow with an uncaring, ruthless partner. Perhaps he saw the arrangement a true godsend. Perhaps, having prayed about additional land, he had a feeling this might be God’s answer.
“Tell you vat—I’ll tink aboud it some more. How’s dat?”
“You will? Honest?” Again the young man sounded like a child. Laying out his offer had been easier than he had anticipated. It was, after all the planning and explaining, too good to be true. Dudley found himself trembling, partly from relief, partly from anxiety that it wouldn’t work out after all.
“Gif me a liddle vile, yah? Ve’ll see vat ve can vork oud.” After that amazing demonstration of his grasp of the English language, Gregor subsided.
Dudley’s back straightened. His breath, as quickened as though he had been in a race or, more l
ikely, a tough fight, returned to normal. His rapid heartbeat slowed.
“Gimme some of that coffee,” he said, holding out his cup.
Dr. Blake came out of the sickroom looking very grave. Very grave indeed. Charlotte and Kerry were awaiting him in the parlor, and it was there Gladdy led the dignified man of medicine. There with a sigh he seated himself, at Charlotte’s invitation.
With two faces turned toward him—one lined and pale and obviously greatly concerned; the other young and pale, and just as concerned—his usual brisk demeanor gentled, and with sympathy he said, “It’s not what you wish to hear, ladies. Not at all, I’m afraid.”
“I knew it!” the young woman muttered half aloud, her pale face clouding with the feelings that darkened it. Her fingers were threaded into a knot in her lap, and her lips, usually full and full of fun, were as twisted as her fingers, and the agony in each was clear to be seen.
“Yes,” Charlotte said sadly, “hoping for good news, I’ve been braced for bad. The evidence before our eyes is overwhelming. Nothing we do seems to help—not palatable food, which Mrs. Finch has worked so faithfully to provide, not loving encouragement, not even the mild scolds I’ve administered for her own good. Nothing has reached her; it’s as if she’s shut away in a cocoon of suffering and won’t, perhaps can’t, come out. We’ve tried humor, music, reading to her—though it was all pretty poor stuff, I’m afraid. We couldn’t reach past the barrier. The barrier,” she finished bitterly, “that cruelty erected.”
Kerry spoke up. “I don’t know if it was so much cruelty as carelessness. And that’s what puts me in a rage! That . . . that man, that creature, just so carelessly tossed her aside, as if she didn’t matter! I’ve heard of men who consider women nothing more than playthings! It’s as if he were playing with her. His careless unconcern for her feelings was the cruelest blow of all. Now it seems that blow was a deathblow! Something in her died; it’s as if she doesn’t want to have help . . . doesn’t care anymore.”
