Tekahionwake [E. Pauline Johnson] (1861—1913)
Tekahionwake, or Emily Pauline Johnson, was bom on March 10, 1861, at Chiefswood, her childhood home, on the Six Nations Reservation in the Grand River valley, Ontario, Canada. She died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 7, 1913. From the 1890s until her death she was acclaimed as a leading poet, writer, and performer in Canada, England, and the United States. To honor her contributions, a Canadian commemorative postage stamp was issued in 1961, upon the centennial of her birth.
Her mother, Emily Susanna Howells, was from an English Quaker family that migrated to Ohio after the death of Emilys mother and remarriage of her father. Henry Charles Howells was a stem and strange school-master who became deeply involved in the movement to abolish slavery and hid numerous slaves in his home as a station on the Underground Railway. In her story “My Mother” (1909), Pauline Johnson described her maternal grandfather as “a man of vast peculiarities, prejudices and extreme ideas—a man of contradictions so glaring that even his own children never understood him,” who despite his Quaker beliefs beat and terrorized his numerous children. Through his brother, Pauline was cousin to William Dean Howells, the influential literary critic and prolific novelist of radical ideas. Emily left her fathers home in 1845 to join her younger sister Eliza and Eliza's husband, the Reverend Adam Elliot, in the Tuscarora parsonage on the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario. There she met George Henry Martin Johnson, a Mohawk of distinguished ancestry, whose grandmother was a white woman adopted by the Mohawks. Emily and George Johnson married, over the objections of both families, in 1853. Emily Pauline, who went by the name Pauline, was the youngest of their four children. Pauline had only a few years of formal schooling and was educated primarily by Emily, who read her children Keats and Byron instead of nursery rhymes and introduced them to works by many distinguished poets and writers of English and American literary history.
George Johnsons parents were reconciled to his marriage with Emily after the birth of their first child, and Pauline grew up in the warm and stimulating family environment of the eminent Mohawks of Brantford (the town named for the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant). George was educated in both Mohawk and English language and traditions, knew all six languages of the confederation, and was the official interpreter for the English church missions on the reservation. He was a powerful orator and a respected leader, one of nine Mohawk chiefs on the Grand Council of the Six Nations. The Six Nations had supported the British and Canadians in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, for which the British had provided them a large tract of land in the Grand River valley in compensation for lands they lost in those wars, and the Brantford Mohawks were particularly renowned for their loyalty and heroism. Pauline was deeply influenced by the stories of Mohawk history and traditions that she learned from her father and her paternal grandparents, Helen and John “Smoke” Johnson, whose Indian family name was Tekahionwake (“Double Wampum”). For his marriage, George Johnson had built the ample family estate overlooking the Grand River, Chiefswood (now restored as a museum), where the Johnsons extended gracious hospitality to both Indian and white visitors of varied station and interests. These were happy years, in which Pauline began to write verse and perform in private theatricals. But George Johnsons life was shortened by a series of severe beatings he sustained at the hands of whites because of his efforts to defend Indian rights and stop the illegal traffic in liquor and timber on the reservation. After his death in 1884, the family moved to modest lodgings in Brantford, and Pauline turned to writing to earn her living.
Among her early publications, beginning in 1885, were some of her most famous poems, particularly “A Cry from an Indian Wife” and “The Song My Paddle Sings,” representing on the one hand the politics and on the other hand the lyrical qualities that were both central to her later work. In 1892 she gave the first of the public readings of her own work that electrified audiences for whom she later performed with conviction and passion as “The Mohawk Princess.” In 1894 she performed to acclaim in London and was able to secure publication of her first volume of collected poems, The White Wampum, at the Bodley Head, then the foremost publisher of new poetry in England.
From then until 1910, Tekahionwake maintained a heavy schedule of writing and performances, touring Canada repeatedly from coast to coast, returning to London to perform at the Steinway Hall and other theaters in 1906 and 1907, and appearing also in the United States. Her second volume of poetry, Canadian Born, appeared in 1903, and her short stories and articles were in demand for the popular press, including Harpers Weekly, Saturday Night, the Toronto Globe, the Canadian Magazine, Mothers Magazine, and Boy’s World. Beginning in 1897 she often toured with Walter McRaye as her performing partner and manager. She was engaged in January 1898 to Charles Drayton of Page 246 →Toronto, but the engagement was broken off by the end of the year, in the face of his family's opposition to the mixed marriage and her continuing career as a stage performer. She never married, nor did her older sister Evelyn and brother Henry. Despite various rumors, little is known about her intimate relations, in part because many of Pauline's personal papers were destroyed or heavily edited after her death by Walter McRaye and Evelyn Johnson.
In London in 1906 Tekahionwake met Chief Joe of the Capilano Squamish Indians, on his mission to protest to King Edward VII infringements of Indian rights by the Columbia Games Act. When she settled in Vancouver in 1909, she learned from him the legends of the Pacific Coast Indians that she shaped into the book published in 1912 as Legends of Vancouver. He emphasized that she was the first English-speaking person to whom he had told these tales, and her preservation of them is seen as one of her lasting contributions. Already severely ill with cancer, she was helped by friends and supporters to publish a collected edition of her poetry under the title Flint and Feather, and a collection of short stories, published shortly after her death in 1913, under the title The Moccasin Maker. Another collection entitled The Shagganappi, stories for boys, was also published posthumously in 1913.
Johnson's work is filled with the tensions of race and gender conflict, the anguish and joys of love and nature, and the contradictions of pride and patriotism, identity and unity. Her poetry, prose, and performances reflected her multiple roots but also shaped the complex ideas, emotions, and social relations of her peoples. Her poetry and prose reached wide audiences, from highly educated white elites who purchased her books and attended elegant stage performances in the East to the mixed audiences of her tours of western Canada and the six hundred thousand readers of the Mother’s Magazine. To most of her white readers and audiences she brought knowledge and insights of Indian life and culture they had never previously encountered. To many western audiences she brought experiences of literary and performance arts that were rare in their communities. To Indian peoples she brought her voice and her pen to speak and write their history, their anger, their values, refracted through her insider/outsider vision.
Among the Indian traditions that Pauline Johnson admired were the power and status of women in the governance of the Six Nations. In “My Mother," she wrote of her Mohawk grandmother: “She was 'Chief Matron of her entire blood relations, and commanded the enviable position of being the one and only person, man or woman, who could appoint a chief to fill the vacancy of one of the great Mohawk law-makers." In an article for the London Daily Express in 1906 she wrote: “I have heard that the daughters of this vast city cry out for a voice in the Parliament of this land. There is no need for an Iroquois woman to clamour for recognition in our councils; she has had it for upwards of four centuries. The highest title known to us is that of the 'chief matron,"' who names the successor to a chiefs seat on the council. “The old and powerful chiefs-in-council never attempt to question her decision; her appointment is final and ...the chief matron may, if she so desires, enter the council-house and publicly make an address to the chiefs, braves, and warriors assembled, and she is listened to not only with attention, but respect. There are fifty matrons possessing this right in the Iroquois Confederacy. I have not heard of fifty white women even among those of noble birth who may speak and be listened to in the lodge of the law-makers here” (Moccasin Maker, 232).
Many of Johnson's writings express her anger at white racism and experiences of oppression, injustice, and violence of whites toward Indians and “mixed bloods," as in “The Cattle Thief," “Wolverine," and “A Red Girl's Reasoning" (below). But she also portrays the pain and violence suffered by Indians, whites, and “mixed bloods” at the hands of Indians, as in “A Cry from an Indian Wife" and “Dawendine" (below), as well as in some passages of her autobiographical story, “My Mother. " Yet throughout, she offered powerful models of resistance and survival.
These models were not always pacific, even for women. In the poem “Ojistoh" a captive woman deceives and kills her captor. In “As It Was in the Beginning" (one of the “woman-warrior" stories selected by Paula Gunn Allen for Spiderwoman’s Granddaughters), “Esther” takes control of her fate, as an Indian and as a woman, by poisoning her white lover Laurence with snake venom when he cravenly abandons her before the racist insults of his uncle, the mission parson. The latter, who has raised her since childhood as a Christian (forbidding her use of her Cree language and contact with her people) now declares that being of mixed blood, “a bad, bad mixture," she is untrustworthy as “a caged animal that has once been wild ... a strange snake.” Though he claims to have devoted his whole life to bringing Indians into the church, “it is a different thing to marry with one of them” (Moccasin Maker, 152). Esther returns to her people, and although she is suspected of Laurence's murder, there is no proof. Brooding on what she has done, she thinks: “They account for it by the fact that l am a Redskin. They seem to have forgotten I am a woman." In the poem “A Cry from an Indian Wife," an Indian woman curses the fate that sends young warriors to kill and be killed and laments the pain of the pale-faced women praying for their own, yet she sends her warrior into battle: “Go forth, nor bend to Page 247 →greed of white mens hands / By right, by birth we Indians own these lands....”
Despite such metaphoric calls to battle against whites to reclaim Indian heritage, Johnson also wrote patriotic poems celebrating Canadian unity, the North-west Mounted Police, and the British Empire. She claimed and promoted a Canadian identity encompassing both the European and the Indian peoples. As she wrote in the “Inscription” for Canadian Born: “Let him who is Canadian bom regard these poems as written to himself—whether he be my paleface compatriot who has given to me his right hand of good fellowship, in the years I have appealed to him by pen and platform, or whether he be that dear Red brother of whatsoever tribe or Province, it matters not—White Race and Red are one if they are but Canadian bom.” Many of her admirers saw this as one of her greatest contributions. In her tours of remote communities across Canada, “she brought word of a great new country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.... And in her own person she was tangible proof that Canada had a past that extended back beyond the arrival of the white man—a past, moreover, in which she proclaimed that all Canadians should take unqualified pride” (Van Steen, 26).
But as a “mixed blood” herself, Johnson was acutely conscious of the current problems, responsibilities, and opportunities of this group. In the title story of The Shagganappi, she addressed the terminology applied to mixed-race children, arguing in favor of “half-blood” in place of “half-breed” (for “breed” was “a term for cattle” and should not be applied to human beings) and questioning why “white people of mixed nations are never called half-breeds.” Yet in the end, the mixed-race boy heroes of her story embrace “half-breed” with defiant pride. This remarkable story, serialized in Boy’s World in 1908, confronts issues of prejudice, discrimination, “passing,” and resistance at a boys' school with astonishing frankness, if with more hope than realism in its happy ending. Unfortunately, the persistence of stereotypes she had struggled to overcome remained evident even in the eulogy written in 1913 by Theodore Watts-Dunton for the revised edition of Flint and Feather. “Of all Canadian poets,” he wrote, “she was the most distinctly a daughter of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing, and of the greater race that has supplanted it” (Flint and Feather, 1914, xvi),
Johnson herself would not have accepted the image of her Indian people as a “primeval race now so rapidly vanishing” nor that whites were “the greater race.” Indeed, she identified herself primarily as Indian. In his memorial note for Shagganappi, Ernest Thompson Seton wrote that she rejected being called a white woman and that she spoke of the name she was known by as forced upon her by whites: “Was not my Indian name good enough? Do you think you help us by bidding us forget our blood? by teaching us to cast off all memory of our high ideals and our glorious past? I am an Indian. My pen and my life I devote to the memory of my own people. Forget that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people....” Beth Brant has written that she “began a movement that has proved unstoppable in its momentum—the movement of First Nations women to write down our stories of history, of revolution, of sorrow, of love”
The following selections include four poems from The White Wampum (1895) and the short story “A Red Girl's Reasoning” (1893).
BAC
Sources and Suggested Readings
- Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989.
- Brant, Beth. “The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, 1 (1997): 193-206.
- Foster, Annie (Mrs. W. Garland). The Mohawk Princess, Being Some Account of the Life of Teka-hion-wake (E. Pauline Johnson). Vancouver: Lion’s Gate, 1931.
- Johnson, E. Pauline (Tekahionwake). Canadian Bom. Toronto: Morang, 1903.
- ———. Flint and Feather. Collected Verse. Introduction by Theodore Watts-Dunton. 3rd ed. Toronto: Musson Book Company, 1914.
- ———. The Moccasin Maker. Vancouver: Briggs, 1913.
- ———. The Moccasin Maker. Introduction, Annotation, and Bibliography by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987.
- ———. “A Red Girl’s Reasoning.” Dominion Magazine 2, 1 (February 1893): 19-28.
- ———. The Shagganappi. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1913. “Dedicated to the Boy Scouts.” Introduction by Ernest Thompson Seton.
- ———. The White Wampum. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1895.
- Keller, Betty. Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981.
- Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “Justice for Indians and Women: The Protest Fiction of Alice Callahan and Pauline Johnson.” World Literature Today 66, 2 (Spring 1992): 249-55.
- Simard, Rodney. “American Indian Literatures, Authenticity, and the Canon.” World Literature Today 66, 2 (Spring 1992): 243-48.
- Van Steen, Marcus. Pauline Johnson: Her Life and Work. Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965.
The White Wampum (1895)
The Cattle Thief
They were coming across the prairie, they were galloping hard and fast;
For the eyes of those desperate riders had sighted their man at last—
Sighted him off to Eastward, where the Cree encampment lay,
Where the cotton woods fringed the river, miles and miles away.
Mistake him? Never! Mistake him? the famous Eagle Chief!
That terror to all the settlers, that desperate Cattle Thief—
That monstrous, fearless Indian, who lorded it over the plain,
Who thieved and raided, and scouted, who rode like a hurricane!
But they’ve tracked him across the prairie; they’ve followed him hard and fast;
For those desperate English settlers have sighted their man at last.
Up they wheeled to the tepees, all their British blood aflame,
Bent on bullets and bloodshed, bent on bringing down their game;
But they searched in vain for the Cattle Thief: that lion had left his lair,
And they cursed like a troop of demons—for the women alone were there.
“The sneaking Indian coward,” they hissed; “he hides while yet he can;
He’ll come in the night for cattle, but he’s scared to face a man”
“Never!” and up from the cotton woods rang the voice of Eagle Chief;
And right out into the open stepped, unarmed, the Cattle Thief.
Was that the game they had coveted? Scarce fifty years had rolled
Over that fleshless, hungry frame, starved to the bone and old;
Over that wrinkled, tawny skin, unfed by the warmth of blood.
Over those hungry, hollow eyes that glared for the sight of food.
He turned, like a hunted lion: “I know not fear,” said he;
And the words outleapt from his shrunken lips in the language of the Cree.
“I’ll fight you, white-skins, one by one, till I kill you all” he said;
But the threat was scarcely uttered, ere a dozen balls of lead
Whizzed through the air about him like a shower of metal rain,
And the gaunt old Indian Cattle Thief dropped dead on the open plain.
And that band of cursing settlers gave one triumphant yell,
And rushed like a pack of demons on the body that writhed and fell.
“Cut the fiend up into inches, throw his carcass on the plain;
Let the wolves eat the cursed Indian, he’d have treated us the same.”
A dozen hands responded, a dozen knives gleamed high,
But the first stroke was arrested by a woman’s strange, wild cry.
And out into the open, with a courage past belief,
She dashed, and spread her blanket o’er the corpse of the Cattle Thief;
And the words outleapt from her shrunken lips in the language of the Cree,
“If you mean to touch that body, you must cut your way through me.”
And that band of cursing settlers dropped backward one by one,
For they knew that an Indian woman roused, was a woman to let alone.
And then she raved in a frenzy that they scarcely understood,
Raved of the wrongs she had suffered since her earliest babyhood:
“Stand back, stand back, you white-skins, touch that dead man to your shame;
You have stolen my father’s spirit, but his body I only claim.
You have killed him, but you shall not dare to touch him now he’s dead.
You have cursed, and called him a Cattle Thief, though you robbed him first of bread—
Robbed him and robbed my people—look there, at that shrunken face,
Starved with a hollow hunger, we owe to you and your race.
What have you left to us of land, what have you left of game,
Page 249 →What have you brought but evil, and curses since you came?
How have you paid us for our game? how paid us for our land?
By a book, to save our souls from the sins you brought in your other hand.
Go back with your new religion, we never have understood
Your robbing an Indian’s body, and mocking his soul with food.
Go back with your new religion, and find—if find you can—
The honest man you have ever made from out a starving man.
You say your cattle are not ours, your meat is not our meat;
When you pay for the land you live in, we'll pay for the meat we eat.
Give back our land and our country, give back our herds of game;
Give back the furs and the forests that were ours before you came;
Give back the peace and the plenty. Then come with your new belief,
And blame, if you dare, the hunger that drove him to be a thief."
A Cry from an Indian Wife
My Forest Brave, my Red-skin love, farewell;
We may not meet to-morrow; who can tell
What mighty ills befall our little band,
Or what you’ll suffer from the white man’s hand?
Here is your knife! I thought ’twas sheathed for aye.
No roaming bison calls for it to-day;
No hide of prairie cattle will it maim;
The plains are bare, it seeks a nobler game:
’Twill drink the life-blood of a soldier host.
Go; rise and strike, no matter what the cost.
Yet stay. Revolt not at the Union Jack,
Nor raise Thy hand against this stripling pack
Of white-faced warriors, marching West to quell
Our fallen tribe that rises to rebel.
They all are young and beautiful and good;
Curse to the war that drinks their harmless blood.
Curse to the fate that brought them from the East
To be our chiefs—to make our nation least
That breathes the air of this vast continent.
Still their new rule and council is well meant.
They but forget we Indians owned the land
From ocean unto ocean; that they stand
Upon a soil that centuries agone
Was our sole kingdom and our right alone.
They never think how they would feel to-day,
If some great nation came from far away,
Wresting their country from their hapless braves,
Giving what they gave us—but wars and graves.
Then go and strike for liberty and life,
And bring back honour to your Indian wife.
Your wife? Ah, what of that, who cares for me?
Who pities my poor love and agony?
What white-robed priest prays for your safety here,
As prayer is said for every volunteer
That swells the ranks that Canada sends out?
Who prays for vict’ry for the Indian scout?
Who prays for our poor nation lying low?
None—therefore take your tomahawk and go.
My heart may break and burn into its core,
But I am strong to bid you go to war.
Yet stay, my heart is not the only one
That grieves the loss of husband and of son;
Think of the mothers o’er the inland seas;
Think of the pale-faced maiden on her knees;
One pleads her God to guard some sweet-faced child
That marches on toward the North-West wild.
The other prays to shield her love from harm,
To strengthen his young, proud uplifted arm.
Ah, how her white face quivers thus to think,
Your tomahawk his life’s best blood will drink.
She never thinks of my wild aching breast,
Nor prays for your dark face and eagle crest
Endangered by a thousand rifle balls,
My heart the target if my warrior falls.
O! coward self I hesitate no more;
Go forth, and win the glories of the war.
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men’s hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low ...
Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so.
Dawendine
There’s a spirit on the river, there’s a ghost upon the shore,
They are chanting, they are singing through the starlight evermore,
As they steal amid the silence,
And the shadows of the shore.
Page 250 →You can hear them when the Northern candles light the Northern sky,
Those pale, uncertain candle flames, that shiver, dart and die,
Those dead men's icy finger tips,
Athwart the Northern sky.
You can hear the ringing war-cry of a long-forgotten brave
Echo through the midnight forest, echo o'er the midnight wave,
And the Northern lanterns tremble
At the war-cry of that brave.
And you hear a voice responding, but in soft and tender song;
It is Dawendine’s spirit singing, singing all night long;
And the whisper of the night wind
Bears afar her Spirit song.
And the wailing pine trees murmur with their voice attuned to hers,
Murmur when they 'rouse from slumber as the night wind through them stirs;
And you listen to their legend,
And their voices blend with hers.
There was feud and there was bloodshed near the river by the hill;
And Dawendine listened, while her very heart stood still:
Would her kinsman or her lover
Be the victim by the hill?
Who would be the great unconquered? who come boasting how he dealt
Death? and show his rival's scalplock fresh and bleeding at his belt.
Who would say, “O Dawendine!
Look upon the death I dealt?”
And she listens, listens, listens—till a war-cry rends the night,
Cry of her victorious lover, monarch he of all the height;
And his triumph wakes the horrors,
Kills the silence of the night.
Heart of her! it throbs so madly, then lies freezing in her breast,
For the icy hand of death has chilled the brother she loved best;
And her lover dealt the death-blow;
And her heart dies in her breast.
And she hears her mother saying, “Take thy belt of wampum white;
Go unto yon evil savage while he glories on the height;
Sing and sue for peace between us:
At his feet lay wampum white.
“Lest thy kinsmen all may perish, all thy brothers and thy sire
Fall before his mighty hatred as the forest falls to fire;
Take thy wampum pale and peaceful,
Save thy brothers, save thy sire.”
And the girl rises softly, softly slips toward the shore;
Loves she well the murdered brother, loves his hated foeman more,
Loves, and longs to give the wampum;
And she meets him on the shore.
“Peace,” she sings, “O mighty victor, Peace! I bring thee wampum white.
Sheathe thy knife whose blade has tasted my young kinsmans blood to-night
Ere it drink to slake its thirsting,
I have brought thee wampum white.”
Answers he, “O Dawendine! I will let thy kinsman be,
I accept thy belt of wampum; but my hate demands for me
That they give their fairest treasure,
Ere I let thy kinsman be.
“Dawendine, for thy singing, for thy suing, war shall cease;
For thy name, which speaks of dawning, Thou shalt be the dawn of peace;
For thine eyes whose purple shadows tell of dawn,
My hate shall cease.
“Dawendine, Child of Dawning, hateful are thy kin to me;
Red my fingers with their heart blood, but my heart is red for thee:
Dawendine, Child of Dawning,
Wilt thou fail or follow me?”
And her kinsmen still are waiting her returning from the night,
Page 251 →Waiting, waiting for her coming with her belt of wampum white;
But forgetting all, she follows,
Where he leads through day or night.
There’s a spirit on the river, there’s a ghost upon the shore,
And they sing of love and loving through the starlight evermore,
As they steal amid the silence,
And the shadows of the shore.
Wolverine
“Yes, sir, it’s quite a story, though you won’t believe it’s true,
But such things happened often when I lived beyond the Soo.’’
And the trapper tilted back his chair and filled his pipe anew.
“I ain’t thought of it neither fer this many ’n many a day,
Although it used to haunt me in the years that’s slid away;
The years I spent a-trappin’ for the good old Hudson’s Bay.
“Wild? You bet, ’twas wild then, an’ few an’ far between
The squatters’ shacks, for whites was scarce as furs when things is green,
An’ only reds an’ ‘Hudson’s’ men was all the folk I seen.
“No. Them old Indyans ain’t so bad, not if you treat ’em square.
Why, I lived in amongst ’em all the winters I was there,
An’ I never lost a copper, an’ I never lost a hair.
“But I’d have lost my life the time that you’ve heard tell about;
I don’t think I’d be settin’ here, but dead beyond a doubt,
If that there Indyan Wolverine’ jest hadn’t helped me out.
“’Twas freshet time, ’way back, as long as sixty-six or eight,
An’ I was cornin’ to the Post that year a kind of late,
For beaver had been plentiful, and trappin’ had been great.
“One day I had been settin’ traps along a bit of wood,
An’ night was catchin’ up to me jest faster ’an it should,
When all at once I heard a sound that curdled up my blood.
“It was the howl of famished wolves—I didn’t stop to think
But jest lit out across for home as quick as you could wink,
But when I reached the river’s edge I brought up at the brink.
“That mornin’ I had crossed the stream straight on a sheet of ice
An’ now, God help me! There it was, churned up an’ cracked to dice,
The flood went boiling past—I stood like one shut in a vice,
“No way ahead, no path aback, trapped like a rat ashore,
With naught but death to follow, and with naught but death afore;
The howl of hungry wolves aback—ahead, the torrent’s roar.
“An’ then—a voice, an Indyan voice, that called out clear and clean,
‘Take Indyan’s horse, I run like deer, wolf can’t catch Wolverine.’
I says, Thank Heaven.’ There stood the chief I’d nicknamed Wolverine.
“I leapt on that there horse, an’ then jest like a coward fled,
An’ left that Indyan standin’ there alone, as good as dead,
With the wolves a-howlin’ at his back, the swollen stream ahead.
“I don’t know how them Indyans dodge from death the way they do,
You won’t believe it, sir, but what I’m tellin’ you is true,
But that there chap was ’round next day as sound as me or you.
“He came to get his horse, but not a cent he’d take from me.
Page 252 →Yes, sir, you’re right, the Indyans now ain’t like they used to be;
We’ve got ’em sharpened up a bit an’ now they’ll take a fee.
“No, sir, you’re wrong, they ain’t no 'dogs.’ I’m not through tell in’ yet;
You’ll take that name right back again, or else jest out you get!
You’ll take that name right back when you hear all this yarn, I bet.
“It happened that same autumn, when some Whites was cornin’ in,
I heard the old Red River carts a-kickin’ up a din,
So I went over to their camp to see an English skin.
“They said, "They’d had an awful scare from Injuns,’ an’ they swore
That savages had come around the very night before
A-brandishing their tomahawks and painted up for war.
“But when their plucky Englishmen had put a bit of lead
Right through the heart of one of them, an’ rolled him over, dead,
The other cowards said that they had come on peace instead.
“"That they (the Whites) had lost some stores, from off their little pack,
An’ that the Red they peppered dead had followed up their track,
Because he’d found the packages an’ came to give them back.’
“‘Oh!’ they said, "they were quite sorry, but it wasn’t like as if
They had killed a decent Whiteman by mistake or in a tiff,
It was only some old Injun dog that lay there stark an’ stiff.’
“I said, "You are the meanest dogs that ever yet I seen,’
Then I rolled the body over as it lay out on the green;
I peered into the face—My God! ’twas poor old Wolverine.”
A Red Girl's Reasoning (1893)
“Be pretty good to her, Charlie, my boy, or she’ll balk sure as shooting.”
That was what old Jimmy Robinson said to his brand new son-in-law, while they waited for the bride to reappear.
“Oh! you bet, there’s no danger of much else. I’ll be good to her, help me Heaven,” replied Charlie McDonald, brightly.
“Yes, of course you will,” answered the old man, “but don’t you forget, there’s a good big bit of her mother in her, and,” closing his left eye significantly, “you don’t understand these Indians as I do.”
“But I’m just as fond of them, Mr. Robinson,” Charlie said assertively, “and I get on with them too, now, don’t I?”
"Yes, pretty well for a town boy; but when you have lived forty years among these people, as I have done; when you have had your wife as long as I have had mine—for there’s no getting over it, Christine’s disposition is as native as her mother’s, every bit—and perhaps when you’ve owned for eighteen years a daughter as dutiful, as loving, as fearless, and, alas! as obstinate as that little piece you are stealing away from me today —I tell you, youngster, you’ll know more than you know now. It is kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet, blood for blood. Remember, what you are, she will be,” and the old Hudson Bay trader scrutinized Charlie McDonald’s face like a detective.
It was a happy, fair face, good to look at, with a certain ripple of dimples somewhere about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the very sunniness of their owner’s soul. There was not a severe nor yet a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson’s Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of a long census-taking.
As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth he had studied Indian archaeology and folklore, as a man he consummated his predilections for Indianology by loving, winning and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who himself had married a native woman some twenty years ago. The country was all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman’s heart had gone out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had Page 253 →withal that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the higher tribes of North American Indians.
Like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in mental and social habits, she had developed from absolute pagan indifference into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored face, were the joy of old Robinson’s declining years.
He had given their daughter Christine all the advantages of his own learning—which, if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl had a fair common education, and the native adaptability to progress.
She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the other, that one familiar with native Canadian life would find it difficult to determine her nationality.
She looked very pretty to Charles McDonald's loving eyes, as she reappeared in the doorway, holding her mother's hand and saying some happy words of farewell. Personally she looked much the same as her sisters, all Canada through, who are the offspring of red and white parentage—olive-complexioned, grey-eyed, black-haired, with figure slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable expression in her whole face that turns one so heart-sick as they glance at the young Indians of to-day—it is the forerunner too frequently of "the white man’s disease,” consumption—but McDonald was pathetically in love, and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
There had not been much of a wedding ceremony. The priest had cantered through the service in Latin, pronounced the benediction in English, and congratulated the “happy couple” in Indian, as a compliment to the assembled tribe in the little amateur sanctuary that did service at the post as a sanctuary.
But the knot was tied as firmly and indissolubly as if all Charlie McDonald’s swell city friends had crushed themselves up against the chancel to congratulate him, and in his heart he was deeply thankful to escape the flower-pelting, white gloves, rice-throwing, and ponderous stupidity of a breakfast, and indeed all the regulation gimcracks of the usual marriage celebrations, and it was with a hand trembling with absolute happiness that he assisted his little Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that, hitched to an underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betrayingnothing of visible emotion, and then the pony, roughshod and shaggy, trudged on, while mutual handwaves were kept up until the old Hudson’s Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts, deliriously happy, jogged on over the uneven trail.
She was “all the rage” that winter at the provincial capital. The men called her a “deuced fine little woman.” The ladies said she was “just the sweetest wildflower.” Whereas she was really but an ordinary, pale, dark girl who spoke slowly and with a strong accent, who danced fairly well, sang acceptably, and never stirred outside the door without her husband.
Charlie was proud of her; he was proud that she had “taken” so well among his friends, proud that she bore herself so complacently in the drawing rooms of the wives of pompous Government officials, but doubly proud of her almost abject devotion to him. If ever human being was worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could scarcely have been otherwise, for the almost godlike strength of his passion for that little wife of his would have mastered and melted a far more invincible citadel than an already affectionate woman’s heart.
Favorites socially, McDonald and his wife went everywhere. In fashionable circles she was "new”—a potent charm to acquire popularity, and the little velvet-clad figure was always the centre of interest among all the women in the room. She always dressed in velvet. No woman in Canada, has she but the faintest dash of native blood in her veins, but loves velvets and silks. As beef to the Englishman, wine to the Frenchman, fads to the Yankee, so are velvet and silk to the Indian girl, be she wild as prairie grass, be she on the borders of civilization, or, having stepped within its boundary, mounted the steps of culture even under its superficial heights.
“Such a dolling little appil blossom,” said the wife of a local M.P., who brushed up her etiquette and English once a year at Ottawa. "Does she always laugh so sweetly, and gobble you up with those great big grey eyes of hers, when you are togetheah at home, Mr. McDonald? If so, I should think youah pooah brothah would feel himself terribly de trop”
He laughed lightly. "Yes, Mrs. Stuart, there are not two of Christie; she is the same at home and abroad, and as for Joe, he doesn’t mind us a bit; he’s no end fond of her.”
“I’m very glad he is. I always fancied he did not care for her, d’you know.”
If ever a blunt woman existed it was Mrs. Stuart. Page 254 →She really meant nothing, but her remark bothered Charlie. He was fond of his brother, and jealous for Christie’s popularity. So that night when he and Joe were having a pipe he said:
“I’ve never asked you yet what you thought of her, Joe.” A brief pause, then Joe spoke. Tm glad she loves you.”
“Why?”
“Because that girl has but two possibilities regarding humanity—love or hate.”
“Humph! Does she love you or hate you?”
“Ask her.”
“You talk bosh. If she hated you, you’d get out. If she loved you I’d make you get out.”
Joe McDonald whistled a little, then laughed.
“Now that we are on the subject, I might as well ask—honestly, old man, wouldn’t you and Christie prefer keeping house alone to having me always around?”
“Nonsense, sheer nonsense. Why, thunder, man, Christie’s no end fond of you, and as for me—you surely don’t want assurances from me?”
“No, but I often think a young couple—”
“Young couple be blowed! After a while when they want you and your old surveying chains, and spindle-legged tripod telescope kickshaws, farther west, I venture to say the little woman will cry her eyes out— won’t you, Christie?” This last in a higher tone, as through clouds of tobacco smoke he caught sight of his wife passing the doorway.
She entered. “Oh, no, I would not cry; I never do cry, but I would be heart-sore to lose you, Joe, and apart from that”—a little wickedly—“you may come in handy for an exchange some day, as Charlie does always say when he hoards up duplicate relics.”
“Are Charlie and I duplicates?”
“Well—not exactly”—her head a little to one side, and eyeing them both merrily, while she slipped softly on to the arm of her husband’s chair—“but, in the event of Charlie’s failing me”—everyone laughed then. The “some day” that she spoke of was nearer than they thought. It came about in this wise.
There was a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor’s, and the world and his wife were there. The nobs were in great feather that night, particularly the women, who flaunted about in new gowns and much splendor. Christie McDonald had a new gown also, but wore it with the utmost unconcern, and if she heard any of the flattering remarks made about her she at least appeared to disregard them.
“I never dreamed you could wear blue so splendidly,” said Captain Logan, as they sat out a dance together.
“Indeed she can, though,” interposed Mrs. Stuart, halting in one of her gracious sweeps down the room with her husband’s private secretary.
“Don’t shout so, captain. I can hear every sentence you uttah—of course Mrs. McDonald can wear blue— she has a morning gown of cadet blue that she is a picture in.”
“You are both very kind,” said Christie. “I like blue; it is the color of all of the Hudson’s Bay posts, and the factor’s residence is always decorated in blue.”
“Is it really? How interesting—do tell us some more of your old home, Mrs. McDonald; you so seldom speak of you life at the post, and we fellows so often wish to hear of it all,” said Logan eagerly.
“Why do you not ask me of it, then?”
“Well—er, I’m sure I don’t know; I’m fully interested in the Ind—in your people—your mother’s people, I mean, but it always seems so personal, I suppose; and a—a—”
“Perhaps you are, like all other white people, afraid to mention my nationality to me.”
The captain winced, and Mrs. Stuart laughed uneasily. Joe McDonald was not far off, and he was listening, and chuckling, and saying to himself, “That’s you, Christie, lay ’em out; it won’t hurt ’em to know how they appear once in a while.”
“Well, Captain Logan” she was saying, “what is it you would like to hear—of my people, or my parents, or myself?”
“All, all, my dear” cried Mrs. Stuart clamorously. “I’ll speak for him—tell us of yourself and your mother —your father is delightful. I am sure—but then he is only an ordinary Englishman, not half as interesting as a foreigner, or—or, perhaps I should say, a native.”
Christie laughed. “Yes,” she said, “my father often teases my mother now about how very native she was when he married her; then, how could she have been otherwise? She did not know a word of English, and there was not another English-speaking person besides my father and his two companions within sixty miles.”
“Two companions, eh? One a Catholic priest and the other a wine merchant, I suppose, and with your father in the Hudson’s Bay, they were good representatives of the pioneers in the New World,” remarked Logan, waggishly.
“Oh, no, they were all Hudson’s Bay men. There were no rumsellers and no missionaries in that part of the country then.”
Mrs. Stuart looked puzzled. “No missionaries?” she repeated with an odd intonation.
Christie’s insight was quick. There was a peculiar expression of interrogation in the eyes of her listeners, and the girl’s blood leapt angrily up into her temples as she said hurriedly, “I know what you mean; I know Page 255 →what you are thinking. You are wondering how my parents were married—”
“Well—er, my dear, it seems peculiar—if there was no priest, and no magistrate, why—a—” Mrs. Stuart paused awkwardly.
“The marriage was performed by Indian rites,” said Christie.
“Oh, do tell me about it; is the ceremony very interesting and quaint—are your chieftains anything like Buddhist priests?” It was Logan who spoke.
“Why, no,” said the girl in amazement at that gentleman's ignorance. “There is no ceremony at all, save a feast. The two people just agree to live only with and for each other, and the man takes his wife to his home, just as you do. There is no ritual to bind them; they need none; an Indian’s word was his law in those days, you know.”
Mrs. Stuart stepped backwards. “Ah!” was all she said. Logan removed his eye-glass and stared blankly at Christie, “and did McDonald marry you in this singular fashion?” he questioned.
“Oh, no, we were married by Father O'Leary. Why do you ask?”
“Because if he had, I'd have blown his brains out to-morrow.”
Mrs. Stuart’s partner, who had hitherto been silent, coughed and began to twirl his cuff stud nervously, but nobody took any notice of him. Christie has risen, slowly, ominously—risen, with the dignity and pride of an empress.
“Captain Logan,” she said, “what do you dare to say to me? What do you dare to mean? Do you presume to think it would not have been lawful for Charlie to marry me according to my people’s rites? Do you for one instant dare to question that my parents were not as legally—”
“Don't, dear, don’t,” interrupted Mrs. Stuart hurriedly; “it is bad enough now, goodness knows; don’t make—” Then she broke off blindly. Christie's eyes glared at the mumbling woman, at her uneasy partner, at the horrified captain. Then they rested on the McDonald brothers, who stood within earshot, Joe's face scarlet, her husband’s white as ashes, with something in his eyes she had never seen before. It was Joe who saved the situation. Stepping quickly across towards his sister-in-law, he offered her his arm, saying, “The next dance is ours, I think, Christie.”
Then Logan pulled himself together, and attempted to carry Mrs. Stuart off for the waltz, but for once in her life that lady had lost her head. “It is shocking!” she said, “outrageously shocking! I wonder if they told Mr. McDonald before he married her!” Then looking hurriedly round, she too saw the young husband's face and knew that they had not.
“Humph! deuced nice kettle of fish—poor old Charlie has always thought so much of honorable birth.”
Logan thought he spoke in an undertone, but “poor old Charlie” heard him. He followed his wife and brother across the room. “Joe,” he said, “will you see that a trap is called?” Then to Christie, “Joe will see that you get home all right.” He wheeled on his heel then and left the ball-room.
Joe did see.
He tucked a poor, shivering, pallid little woman into a cab, and wound her bare throat up in the scarlet velvet cloak that was hanging uselessly over her arm. She crouched down beside him, saying, “I am so cold, Joe; I am so cold,” but she did not seem to know enough to wrap herself up. Joe felt all through this long drive that nothing this side of Heaven would be so good as to die, and he was glad when the poor little voice at his elbow said, “What is he so angry at, Joe?”
“I don’t know exactly, dear,” he said gently, “But I think it was what you said about this Indian marriage.”
“But why should I not have said it? Is there anything wrong about it?” she asked pitifully.
“Nothing, that I can see—there was no other way; but Charlie is very angry, and you must be brave and forgiving with him, Christie, dear.”
“But I did never see him like that before, did you?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“Oh, at college, one day, a boy tore his prayerbook in half, and threw it into the grate, just to be mean, you know. Our mother had given it to him at his confirmation.”
“And did he look so?”
“About, but it all blew over in a day—Charlie's tempers are short and brisk. Just don’t take any notice of him; run off to bed, and he’ll have forgotten it by the morning.”
They reached home at last. Christie said good-night quietly, going directly to her room. Joe went to his room also, filled a pipe and smoked for an hour. Across the passage he could hear her slippered feet pacing up and down, up and down the length of her apartment. There was something panther-like in those restless footfalls, a meaning velvetyness that made him shiver, and again he wished he were dead—or elsewhere.
After a time the hall door opened, and someone came upstairs, along the passage, and to the little woman's room. As he entered, she turned and faced him.
“Christie,” he said harshly, “do you know what you have done?”
“Yes,” taking a step nearer him, her whole soul springing up to her eyes, “I have angered you, Charlie, and-”
Page 256 →“Angered me? You have disgraced me; and moreover, you have disgraced yourself and both your parents."
“Disgraced?”
“Yes, disgraced; you have literally declared to the whole city that your father and mother were never married, and that you are the child of—what shall we call it—love? Certainly not legality."
Across the hallway sat Joe McDonald, his blood freezing; but it leapt into every vein like fire at the awful anguish in the little voice that cried simply, “Oh! Charlie!"
“How could you do it, how could you do it, Christie, without shame either for yourself or for me, let alone your parents?"
The voice was like an angry demon's—not a trace was there in it of the yellow-haired, blue-eyed, laughing-lipped boy who had driven away so gaily to the dance five hours before.
“Shame? Why should I be ashamed of the rites of my people any more than you should be ashamed of the customs of yours—of a marriage more sacred and holy than half of your white man's mockeries?”
It was the voice of another nature in the girl—the love and the pleading were dead in it.
“Do you mean to tell me, Charlie—you who have studied my race and their laws for years—do you mean to tell me that, because there was no priest and no magistrate, my mother was not married? Do you mean to say that all my forefathers, for hundreds of years back, have been illegally born? If so, you blacken my ancestry beyond—beyond—beyond all reason."
“No, Christie, I would not be so brutal as that; but your father and mother live in more civilized times. Father O’Leary has been at the post for nearly twenty years. Why was not your father straight enough to have the ceremony performed when he did get the chance?”
The girl turned upon him with the face of a fury. “Do you suppose," she almost hissed, “that my mother would be married according to your white rites after she had been five years a wife, and I had been born in the meantime? No, a thousand times I say no. When the priest came with his notions of Christianizing, and talked to them of re-marriage by the Church, my mother arose and said, "Never—never—I have never had but this one husband; he has had none but me for wife, and to have you re-marry us would be to say as much to the whole world as that we had never been married before. You go away; I do not ask that your people be remarried; talk not so to me. I am married, and you or the Church cannot do or undo it."'
“Your father was a fool not to insist upon the law, and so was the priest.”
“Law? My people have no priest, and my nation cringes not to law. Our priest is purity, and our law is honor. Priest? Was there a priest at the most holy marriage known to humanity—that stainless marriage whose offspring is the God you white men told my pagan mother of?”
“Christie—you are worse than blasphemous; such a profane remark shows how little you understand the sanctity of the Christian faith—”
“I know what I do understand; it is that you are hating me because I told some of the beautiful customs of my people to Mrs. Stuart and those men.”
“Pooh! Who cares for them? It is not them; the trouble is they won’t keep their mouths shut. Logan’s a cad and will toss the whole tale about at the club before to-morrow night; and as for the Stuart woman, I'd like to know how I'm going to take you to Ottawa for presentation and the opening, while she is blabbing the whole miserable scandal in every drawing-room, and I'll be pointed out as a romantic fool, and you—as worse; I cant understand why your father didn’t tell me before we were married; I at least might have warned you to never mention it.” Something of recklessness rang up through his voice, just as the panther-likeness crept up from her footsteps and couched itself in hers. She spoke in tones quiet, soft, deadly.
“Before we were married! Oh! Charlie, would it have—made—any—difference?”
“God knows,” he said, throwing himself into a chair, his blonde hair rumpled and wet. It was the only boyish thing about him now.
She walked towards him, then halted in the centre of the room. “Charlie McDonald,” she said, and it was as if a stone had spoken, “look up.” He raised his head, startled by her tone. There was a threat in her eyes that, had his rage been less courageous, his pride less bitterly wounded, would have cowed him.
“There was no such time as that before our marriage, for we are not married now. Stop,” she said, outstretching her palms against him as he sprang to his feet, “I tell you we are not married. Why should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine? According to your own words, my parents should have gone through your church ceremony as well as through an Indian contract; according to my words, we should go through an Indian contract as well as through a church marriage. If their union is illegal, so is ours. If you think my father is living in dishonor with my mother, my people will think I am living in dishonor with you. How do I know when another nation will come and conquer you as you white men conquered us? And they will have another marriage rite to perform, and they will tell us another truth, that you are not my husband, that you Page 257 →are but disgracing and dishonoring me, that you are keeping me here, not as your wife, but as your—your squaw”
The terrible word had never passed her lips before, and the blood stained her face to her very temples. She snatched off her wedding ring and tossed it across the room, saying scornfully, "That thing is as empty as the Indian rites to you.”
He caught her by the wrists; his small white teeth were locked tightly, his blue eyes blazed into hers.
"Christine, do you dare to doubt my honor towards you? you, whom I should have died for; do you dare to think I have kept you here, not as my wife, but—”
"Oh, God! You are hurting me; you are breaking my arm,” she gasped.
The door was flung open, and Joe McDonald's sinewy hands clinched like vices on his brother's shoulders.
"Charlie, you’re mad, mad as the devil. Let go of her this minute.”
The girl staggered backwards as the iron fingers loosed her wrists. "Oh, Joe,” she cried, “I am not his wife, and he says I am born—nameless.”
"Here,” said Joe, shoving his brother towards the door. "Go downstairs till you can collect your senses. If ever a being acted like an infernal fool, you’re the man.”
The young husband looked from one to the other, dazed by his wife’s insult, abandoned to a fit of ridiculously childish temper. Blind as he was with passion, he remembered long afterwards seeing them standing there, his brother’s face darkened with a scowl of anger —his wife, clad in the mockery of her ball dress, her scarlet velvet cloak half covering her bare brown neck and arms, her eyes like flames of fire, her face like a piece of sculptured greystone.
Without a word he flung himself furiously from the room, and immediately afterwards they heard the heavy hall door bang behind him.
"Can I do anything for you, Christie?” asked her brother-in-law calmly.
"No, thank you—unless—I think I would like a drink of water, please.”
He brought her up a goblet filled with wine; her hand did not even tremble as she took it. As for Joe, a demon arose in his soul as he noticed she kept her wrists covered.
"Do you think he will come back?” she said.
"Oh, yes, of course; he’ll be all right in the morning. Now go to bed like a good little girl, and—and, I say, Christie, you can call me if you want anything; I’ll be right here, you know.”
"Thank you, Joe; you are kind—and good.”
He returned then to his apartment. His pipe was out, but he picked up a newspaper instead, threw himself into an armchair, and in a half-hour was in the land of dreams.
When Charlie came home in the morning, after a six-mile walk into the country and back again, his foolish anger was dead and buried. Logan’s "Poor old Charlie” did not ring so distinctly in his ears. Mrs. Stuart’s horrified expression had faded considerably from his recollection. He thought only of that surprisingly tall, dark girl, whose eyes looked like coals, whose voice pierced him like a flint-tipped arrow. Ah, well, they would never quarrel again like that, he told himself. She loved him so, and would forgive him after he had talked quietly to her, and told her what an ass he was. She was simple-minded and awfully ignorant to pitch those old Indian laws at him in her fury, but he could not blame her; oh, no, he could not for one moment blame her. He had been terribly severe and unreasonable, and the horrid McDonald temper had got the better of him; and he loved her so. Oh! He loved her so! She would surely feel that, and forgive him, and—He went straight to his wife’s room. The blue velvet evening dress lay on the chair into which he had thrown himself when he doomed his life’s happiness by those two words, "God knows.” A bunch of dead daffodils and her slippers were on the floor, everything—but Christie.
He went to his brother’s bedroom door.
"Joe,” he called, rapping nervously thereon; "Joe, wake up; where’s Christie, d’you know?”
"Good Lord, no,” gasped that youth, springing out of his armchair and opening the door. As he did so a note fell from off the handle. Charlie’s face blanched to his very hair while Joe read aloud, his voice weakening at every word:
DEAR OLD JOE—I went into your room at daylight to get that picture of the Post on your bookshelves. I hope you do not mind, but I kissed your hair while you slept; it was so curly and yellow, and soft, just like his. Good-bye, Joe.
CHRISTIE
And when Joe looked into his brother’s face and saw the anguish settle in those laughing blue eyes, the despair that drove the dimples away from that almost girlish mouth; when he realized that this boy was but four-and-twenty years old, and that all his future was perhaps darkened and shadowed for ever, a great, deep sorrow arose in his heart, and he forgot all things, all but the agony that rang up through the voice of the fair, handsome lad as he staggered forward, crying, "Oh, Joe—what shall I do—what shall I do?”
Page 258 →It was months and months before he found her, but during all that time he had never known a hopeless moment; discouraged he often was, but despondent, never. The sunniness of his ever-boyish heart radiated with a warmth that would have flooded a much deeper gloom than that which settled within his eager young life. Suffer? ah! Yes, he suffered, not with locked teeth and stony stoicism, not with the masterful self-command, the reserve, the conquered bitterness of the still-water sort of nature, that is supposed to run to such depths. He tried to be bright, and his sweet old boyish self. He would laugh sometimes in a pitiful, pathetic fashion. He took to petting dogs, looking into their large, solemn eyes with his wistful, questioning blue ones; he would kiss them, as women sometimes do, and call them “dear old fellow,” in tones that had tears; and once in the course of his travels, while at a little way-station, he discovered a huge St. Bernard imprisoned by some mischance in an empty freight car; the animal was nearly dead from starvation, and it seemed to salve his own sick heart to rescue back the dog’s life. Nobody claimed the big starving creature, the train hands knew nothing of its owner, and gladly handed it over to its deliverer. “Hudson,” he called it, and afterwards when Joe McDonald would relate the story of his brother’s life he invariably terminated it with, “And I really believe that big lumbering brute saved him.” From what, he was never known to say.
But all things end, and he heard of her at last. She had never returned to the Post, as he at first thought she would, but had gone to the little town of B—, in Ontario, where she was making her living at embroidery and plain sewing.
The September sun had set redly when at last he reached the outskirts of the town, opened up the wicket gate, and walked up the weedy, unkept path leading to the cottage where she lodged.
Even through the twilight, he could see her there, leaning on the rail of the verandah—oddly enough she had about her shoulders the scarlet velvet cloak she wore when he had flung himself so madly from the room that night.
The moment the lad saw her his heart swelled with a sudden heat, burning moisture leapt into his eyes, and clogged his long, boyish lashes. He bounded up the steps—“Christie,” he said, and the word scorched his lips like audible flame.
She turned to him, and for a second stood magnetized by his passionately wistful face; her peculiar greyish eyes seemed to drink the very life of his unquenchable love, though the tears that suddenly sprang into his seemed to absorb every pulse in his body through those hungry, pleading eyes of his that had, oh! so often, been blinded by her kisses when once her whole world lay in their blue depths.
“You will come back to me, Christie, my wife? My wife, you will let me love you again?”
She gave a singular little gasp, and shook her head. “Don’t, oh! Don’t,” he cried piteously. “You will come to me, dear? It is all such a bitter mistake—I did not understand. Oh! Christie, I did not understand, and you’ll forgive me, and love me again, won’t you— won’t you?”
“No,” said the girl with quick, indrawn breath.
He dashed the back of his hand across his wet eyelids. His lips were growing numb, and he bungled over the monosyllable “Why?”
“I do not like you,” she answered quietly.
“God! Oh, God, what is there left?”
She did not appear to hear the heart-break in his voice; she stood like one wrapped in sombre thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in her eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth. The wind was blowing her cloak aside, and the only visible human life in her whole body was once when he spoke the muscles of her brown arm seemed to contract.
“But, darling, you are mine—mine—we are husband and wife! Oh, heaven, you must love me, you must come to me again.”
“You cannot make me come,” said the icy voice, “neither church, nor law, nor even”—and the voice softened—“nor even love can make a slave of a red girl.”
“Heaven forbid it,” he faltered. “No, Christie, I will never claim you without your love. What reunion would that be? But, oh, Christie, you are lying to me, you arc lying to yourself, you are lying to heaven."
She did not move. If only he could touch her he felt as sure of her yielding as he felt sure there was a hereafter. The memory of times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most passionate response from her filled his heart with a torture that choked all words before they reached his lips; at the thought of those days he forgot she was unapproachable; forgot how forbidding were her eyes, how stony her lips. Flinging himself forward, his knees on the chair at her side, his face pressed hardly in the folds of the cloak on her shoulder, he clasped his arms about her with a boyish petulance, saying, “Christie, Christie, my little girl wife, I love you, I love you, and you are killing me.”
She quivered from head to foot as his fair, wavy hair brushed her neck, his despairing face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire, rested on the cool, olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture oozed up through her skin, and as he felt its glow he looked up. Her teeth, white and cold, were locked over her under lip, and her eyes as grey stones.
Page 259 →Not murderers alone know the agony of a death sentence.
“Is it all useless? All useless, dear?” he said, with lips starving for hers.
“All useless,” she repeated. “I have no love for you now. You forfeited me and my heart months ago, when you said those two words.”
His arms fell away from her wearily, he arose mechanically, he placed his little grey checked cap on the back of his yellow curls, the old-time laughter was dead in the blue eyes that now looked scared and haunted, the boyishness and the dimples crept away for ever from the lips that quivered like a child’s; he turned from her, but she had looked once into his face as the Law Giver must have looked at the land of Canaan outspread at his feet. She watched him go down the long path and through the picket gate, she watched the big yellowish dog that had waited for him lumber up to its feet—stretch—then follow him. She was conscious of but two things, the vengeful lie in her soul, and a little space on her arm that his wet lashes had brushed.
It was hours afterwards when he reached his room. He had said nothing, done nothing—what use were words or deeds? Old Jimmy Robinson was right; she had “balked” sure enough.
What a bare, hotelish room it was! He tossed off his coat and sat for ten minutes looking blankly at the sputtering gas jet. Then his whole life, desolate as a desert, loomed up before him with appalling distinctness. Throwing himself on the floor beside his bed, with clasped hands and arms outstretched on the white counterpane, he sobbed. “Oh! God, dear God, I thought you loved me; I thought you’d let me have her again, but you must be tired of me, tired of loving me, too. I’ve nothing left now, nothing! It doesn’t seem that I even have you to-night.”
He lifted his face then, for his dog, big and clumsy and yellow, was licking at his sleeve.