by Pat Barr
She clung to that, but he was determined to disabuse her of all illusion and lay bare his tortured soul, as the Victorian novelists might have put it (their influence on Isabella’s vocabulary in these particular letters is marked). So, as they rode, he thrust upon her the most harrowing details of his dissolute life, and through his narrative thudded the crack of rifle and whip, the thunder of hooves, the screams of hunter and victim – thrilling and violent as the wild beat of a war-dance. ‘Vain, even in his dark mood, he told me that he was idolised by women, and that in his worst hours he was always chivalrous to good women. He described himself as riding through camps in his scout’s dress with a red scarf round his waist, and sixteen golden curls, eighteen inches long, hanging over his shoulders. The handsome, even superbly handsome, side of his face was towards me as he spoke.’ As he grew older, his periods of reckless ruffianism and dissipation reached new depths, after which, all seed and money spent, he skulked back to his lair ‘full of hatred and self-scorn’ till the next time. ‘My heart dissolved with pity for him and his dark, lost, self-ruined life. He is so lovable and yet so terrible’, she wrote.
Guiding her to a shelter out of the snow-laden wind, he reined his horse, faced her and shouted, ‘Now you see a man who has made a devil of himself! Lost! Lost! I believe in God. I’ve given Him no choice but to put me with “the devil and his angels”. I’m afraid to die. You’ve stirred the better nature in me too late. I can’t change. If ever a man were a slave, I am. Don’t speak to me of repentance and reformation. I can’t reform … How dare you ride with me? You won’t speak to me again, will you?’ Pity, awe, warmth, sadness swelled in her throat; ‘I told him I could not speak to him, I was so nervous, and he said if I could not speak to him he would not see me again. He would go and camp out on the Snowy Range till I was gone’ … And then he wheeled his horse and thundered away into the blinding storm. Miserably, Isabella rode back to the ranch alone and ‘I could not bear to think of him last night out in the snow, neither eating nor sleeping, mad, lost, wretched, hopeless …’
Nor, of course, could she think of anything else. For the first time in her life, as far as we know, and certainly for the last, her whole nature was aroused – her keenly developed instincts of compassion and warmth, her latent, hardly touched sexuality. She blamed herself for her involvement and vulnerability, and blamed him for his lack of reticence. ‘It was very wrong of him to speak as he did, he should have let me go without the sorrow of knowing this. It takes peace away,’ she complained with prim irritability, feeling the injustice of being trapped in such a distracting situation in this idyllic, remote spot. ‘I cannot but think of poor Mr Wilson in Hawaii and his quiet, undemonstrative, unannoying ways, and comparing him with this dark, tempestuous, terrible character, wondering how it is that the last is so fascinating.’
Surely this was a little naïve, for Jim had all the melodramatic attraction of the talented wastrel and a theatrical flair for playing the role to the hilt. So much of his promise crumbled to regret, so much of his energy ground to vindictiveness, so much of his intelligence blown out to idle bluster. He was unconventional, footloose, a true lover of nature and physical activity, the sort of ‘manly’ man she admired; he was handsome, chivalrous, witty, cultured, to boot, and with, she admits, a real ‘gift of the gab’ that much appealed to her own unacknowledged yearning for high drama. So really it was not in the least surprising that she found him much more alluring than blunt Mr Wilson, in spite of his manifold sins. More surprising, really, was that a man like Nugent should declare his love for a short, plump, devout, high-minded English spinster of over forty – proof positive of what a gay and original spirit lurked beneath Isabella’s rather unexciting exterior.
Shying away from the knowledge of what she had unknowingly started, Isabella sought a typically feminine refuge in vigorous housework. She baked four pounds of biscuits, made rolls raised with six-week-old buttermilk, re-patched a chemise, fed the horses, tended a sick cow, wielded the buffalo tail in every corner. She marshalled her thoughts back to familiar channels: ‘I am always thinking of my own darling,’ she affirmed to Hennies trenuously. ‘I keep its picture always on the table by me and when it [Hennie] says any nice words to me I read them over and over again. I care for it unspeakably.’ Her dream life was less easy to direct, and wandered among fantasies whose probable interpretation in modern Freudian terms would have appalled her. ‘I dreamt last night that as we were sitting by the fire Mr Nugent came in with his revolver in his hand and shot me …’
The next day, Jim arrived carrying a revolver that he laid on the table, and Isabella found her hand veering instinctively towards it. His manner was ‘freezing, courteous of course, but the manner of a corpse’. They went for a mute, dismal ride, Jim looking pale, haggard and coughing continuously – determined that she should feel guilty for the cold he had presumably caught while in exile on the bare mountain. Isabella was furious with herself and him; her hearty appetite had quite deserted her; she was tense, fretful, piqued as a love-lorn adolescent, and she wouldn’t endure it. Sitting miserably by the fire she was haunted by doubts of his sincerity. How much was all this a pose, a cynical bit of Irish blarney produced for sheer devilment and the slim hope that he might add her to his list of conquests? At last, impatient, she wrote to him: ‘Dear Sir, In consequence of the very blameworthy way in which you spoke to me on Monday, there can be nothing but constraint between us … It is my wish that our acquaintance should at once terminate. Yours truly, I.L.B.’ On the way to his cabin, they met, he took the odd, stilted missive and pocketed it unread, saying that an old arrow-wound was troubling him and he was going to bed. ‘He looked so ill and wretched going to his dark lonely lair, and I felt I had stabbed him and not made sufficient allowance for him …’ She longed to ‘make him warm tea and be kind to him’, joke and chat with him, instead of playing out this wretched little melodrama of pride, suspicion, sexual tension.
Two days later, a trapper called to say that Jim was very ill; she saddled Birdie at once and galloped towards his cabin – and met him, not so ill or so proud, coming to her. Glad to be together, they sat under a tree and had a muted, honest talk. ‘I told him that if all circumstances on both sides had been favourable and I had loved him with my whole heart, I would not dare to trust my happiness to him because of the whisky … He said he would never say another word of love.’ So love, with its fearful promises and precarious commitments was laid aside in favour of mutually acknowledged affection, and perhaps there was never really anything more to it. Yet Jim must at some point have actually proposed marriage, for she says that ‘he had built such castles in the air’ of Hennie coming to join them in the mountains, which presumably meant that she would have been living there permanently with him. ‘There’s a man I could have married,’ she tells Hennie, but she was a little too mature for such a preposterously reckless step, and her deep love for her sister pulled her homeward. ‘You would like Jim so,’ she assures Hennie, but her optimism must have faltered at the vision of pious little Miss Henrietta Bird of Edinburgh actually faced with her dear, ragamuffin desperado. Clearly it had to be one or the other; clearly it couldn’t be a man with blood on his hands, lawlessness in his heart and whisky-fumes so often on his breath. Fortified by her strong instinct of self-preservation and a very prudent distrust, she allowed herself only a deep and genuine compassion for this man with two faces – one of them scarred by violence and recklessness, the other handsome, sensitive and warm.
At that point, light relief arrived unexpectedly at the ranch in the shape of ‘Mr Allan’, a callow, brash theology student come to earn his keep. Though both lean and lazy, Allan was blessed with a gargantuan appetite which was exceedingly inconvenient at the time, for food supplies were desperately short, and Edwards, who was supposed to bring replenishments, failed to appear. ‘The boy’, as they called Allan, just kept eating willy-nilly, and nothing was safe from his greed. ‘He has eaten two pounds of dried cherries from th
e shelf, half of my second four-pound spiced loaf before it was cold, licked up my custard sauce in the night, and privately devoured the pudding which was to be for supper. He confesses to it all, and says, “I suppose you think me a case.”’ Each morning, his first query was, ‘“Will Miss B. make us a nice pudding today?”’ One day Miss B. did bake a nice cake, but added cayenne pepper instead of ginger. ‘During the night we heard a commotion in the kitchen and much choking, coughing and groaning, and at breakfast the boy was unable to swallow food with his usual ravenousness. After breakfast he came to me whimpering, and asking for something soothing for his throat, admitting that he had seen the “ginger-bread” and “felt so starved” in the night that he got up to eat it…. He is a most vexing addition to our party, yet one cannot help laughing at him.’ By this time, the Park was set fast in the grip of winter, holding the five of them, Isabella, Jim, Kavanagh, Buchan and the vexing newcomer in close and interdependent proximity. The lake was rigid enough to wheel a waggon over, snow blew constantly through the chinks in the cabin walls and layers of it drifted on to the table, over their beds at night, and mixed with the mud on the ‘parlour’ floor. Water froze as it came from a heated kettle, milk froze in the churn, ink in the bottle, molasses in the pan, eggs in the shell, and when Isabella got her hair wet in a storm it froze to her head in plaits.
None of this bothered her, but the bother was still Jim who, after their last talk, had wrapped himself in ‘an ugly fit’ as harsh as the weather itself. She invited him to share the special Thanksgiving Dinner that she cooked, but ‘he said he was not fit for society and would not come…. It is really miserable to see him … I believe he hates himself and me and everyone else … I can’t do with this at all.’ Poor Isabella! It was true indeed that she had never in her life before ‘had to do’ with anyone like Jim. And it was perhaps just her unsophisticated honesty, her refusal to be quite swept off her feet by his dramatics, her lack of any sort of affectation or the flirtatious coquetry of ‘having to do’ with men that won his heart. But still he unsettled her, and despite their reconciliation it was apparent that his very presence in the Park precluded peace. ‘I am howling frightfully, fearfully, about leaving this place,’ she told Hennie. ‘It will be better when it is over now … I could not prolong my stay here because of him’ Clearly it was another case of ‘better a finger off than aye wagging’, she told herself firmly.
And yet and yet how she loved the land: the purity of air, earth and water, the snow that snapped and sparkled from the horses’ hooves, the intense sunlight glaring on the pearly peaks; the comfortable homely sounds of chopping wood, lowing cows, rattling buckets and men talking about the elks in the forest, the trout under the ice, a horse that bolted, a sick calf in the pen. The life fitted her right and tight; she was so healthy and energetic; she felt ‘like a centaur’ on horseback; she could lasso cattle, bake bread, drive a waggon. ‘It is so sad that you can never see me as I am now,’ she told Hennie, ‘with an unconstrained manner and an up-to-anything free-legged air.’ And yet and yet, they had no tea, flour or sugar left, the venison was going sour, Kavanagh and Buchan wanted to go hunting further afield, Jim was still there.
On 1 December she went to see him, taking young Allan as a sort of chaperon and intending it as a farewell visit. His ‘den was dense with smoke, and very dark, littered with hay, old blankets, skins, bones, tins, logs, powder-flasks, magazines, old books, old moccasins, horseshoes and relics of all kinds. He had no better seat to offer me than a log, but offered it with a graceful unconciousness that it was anything less luxurious than an easy-chair.’ The very squalor and neglect of his surroundings, indeed, threw into fairer contrast ‘the grace of his manner and the genius of his conversation.’ The shadow of her impending departure brought a return of their gay companionship. They talked for hours, free in the awareness that Allan’s presence would keep a curb on the encounter. She read him her account of the Long’s Peak ascent, and he listened with attention and enthusiasm and, as ‘a true child of nature’, ‘tears rolled down his cheek when I read the account of the glory of the sunrise’. Not to be outdone, he read part of his ‘very able paper’ on Spiritualism to her. With subdued gallantry, he suggested that he would ‘guide’ her to the plains when she left, and she agreed, though she knew the way perfectly well.
She lingered for another week, during which Evans and Edwards finally turned up with the supplies and introduced a stern parsimony into the household’s regime. Evans (though he repaid Isabella, to his credit) was in considerable financial difficulties; Edwards, the lean and cheerless, held the whip hand and served scraps of dried venison and rationed the milk. Jim came along to dazzle her that Sunday, arrayed in his ‘best’, clean, spruce, looking ‘barely forty’ and ‘with sixteen shining gold curls falling down his collar’. He stayed to dine, the perfect gentleman, but his arrival only increased the tension; Evans was ‘not himself’ and Jim adopted a ‘stiffly-assumed cordiality, significant, I fear, of lurking hatred on both sides’.
It had come to the crunch with Evans’s return, and what could she do but go? The Park would be closed until the next May, only the few men would stay with the wolves, the bears, the elk come down from the heights. ‘By May we shall be little better than brutes in our manners at least,’ one of them prophesied, in reference to her salutary presence among them as the only woman. And Isabella concurred in the view, explaining that the ‘mission’ of ‘every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman’ was to exert a restraining and civilising influence where she could, and not to forfeit her traditional role ‘by noisy self-assertion, masculinity or fastness’. Even in her wildest moments of ‘free-leggism’, she was not a hoyden, and that too greatly attracted Jim – the piquant combination of utter fearlessness and womanly sympathy, of spirited dash and capable housewifery. The combination came to her naturally, was her nature, and she could have stayed there indulging it for the whole winter, except for Jim who took peace away.
On the day of her departure she rose early, and sadly watched ‘the red and gold of one of the most glorious winter sunrises and the slow lighting up of one peak after another’. Evans rode with her to Jim’s cabin where she parted with the faithful pretty Birdie. When Griff had gone, Jim presented her with his finest ‘mouse-coloured kitten beaver’s skin’, and then they rode from the Park together, she astride his skittish Arab mare. Soon the ‘dismalness of the level land’ swamped them; Jim was subdued; ‘like all true children of the mountains he pined even when temporarily absent from them’ was her explanation of his silence. That night they lodged at a queer little inn at St Louis, from where she would get the waggon-coach for Cheyenne the next day. The landlady, a competent, florid widow ‘top heavy with hair’, was thrilled to learn that the ‘quiet kind gentleman’ with Isabella was none other than Rocky Mountain Jim himself; for, she explained, he was the family bogeyman, and if her children were naughty, she told them that ‘he would get them, for he came down from the mountains every week and took back a child with him to eat!’ In spite of his sinister gastronomic reputation, she was ‘as proud of having him in her house as if he had been the President, and I gained a reflected importance’. The children, braving his voracity, crawled on Jim’s lap and played with his golden curls and even the local men crowded the doorway to get a glimpse of him.
After supper the kitchen was specially cleared in their honour, and while the music for a local barn-dance thumped and skirled in the background, she shared for the last time the sweet pleasure of his company. Again she ‘urged upon him the necessity for a reformation in his life, beginning with the giving up of whisky, going so far as to tell him that I despised a man of his intellect for being a slave to such a vice. Too late, too late! he always answered, for such a change…. He shed tears quietly. “It might have been once,” he said.’ Yes, it might have been; that was the deepest poignancy of their whole encounter.
The next morning was beautiful beyond endurance. There was a ‘frost-fair’ of frozen mois
ture-particles floating and glittering in the pure air like feathers, ferns, diamonds, and the violet mountains she had left were ‘softened by a veil of the tenderest blue’. When the waggon rolled up, there was aboard one Mr Haigh, an English dandy whom she had briefly met elsewhere. She introduced the men to each other and Haigh ‘put out a small hand cased in a perfectly-fitting lemon-coloured kid glove. As the trapper stood there in his grotesque rags and odds and ends of apparel, his gentlemanliness of deportment brought into relief the innate vulgarity of the rich parvenu.’ That brief moment, when the immaculate, pretentious kid glove was grasped by the large rough paw of her dear desperado, was one she long remembered with distress. It symbolised for her what lay ahead, compared with what she had left behind; more than that, it had dire consequences far beyond her reckoning at the time.
