To Him That Hath: A Tale of the West of Today. Ralph Connor
And till they drew up at the Rectory door no more was said.
Maitland drove homeward through the mellow autumn evening with a warmer, kindlier glow in his heart than he had known through all the dreary weeks that had followed his return from the war. For the war had wrought desolation for him in a home once rich in the things that make life worth while, by taking from it his mother, whose rare soul qualities had won and held through her life the love, the passionate, adoring love of her sons, and his twin brother, the comrade, chum, friend of all his days, with whose life his own had grown into a complete and ideal unity, deprived of whom his life was left like a body from whose raw and quivering flesh one-half had been torn away.
The war had left his life otherwise bruised and maimed in ways known only to himself.
Returning thus from his soul-devastating experience of war to find his life desolate and maimed in all that gave it value, he made the appalling discovery that he was left almost alone of all whom he had known and loved in past days. For of his close friends none were left as before. For the most part they were lying on one or other of the five battle fronts of the war. Others had found service in other spheres. Only one was still in his home town, poor old Phil Amory, Frances' brother, half-blind in his darkened room, but to bring anything of his own heart burden to that brave soul seemed sacrilege or worse. True enough, he was passing through the new and thrilling experience of making acquaintance with his father. But old Grant Maitland was a hard man to know, and they were too much alike in their reserve and in their poverty of self-expression to make mutual acquaintance anything but a slow and in some ways a painful process.
Hence in Maitland's heart there was an almost extravagant gratitude toward this young generous-hearted girl whose touch had thrilled his heart and whose voice with its passionate note of loyal and understanding comradeship still sang like music in his soul, “Always and always, Captain Jack, and evermore.”
“By Jove, I have got to find some way of playing up to that,” he said aloud, as he turned from the gravelled driveway into the street. And in the months that followed he was to find that the search to which he then committed himself was to call for the utmost of the powers of soul which were his.
CHAPTER II
THE COST OF SACRIFICE
Perrotte was by all odds the best all-round man in the planing mill, and for the simple reason that for fifteen years he had followed the lumber from the raw wood through the various machines till he knew woods and machines and their ways as no other in the mill unless it was old Grant Maitland himself. Fifteen years ago Perrotte had drifted down from the woods, beating his way on a lumber train, having left his winter's pay behind him at the verge of civilisation, with old Joe Barbeau and Joe's “chucker out.” It was the “chucker out” that dragged him out of the “snake room” and, all unwitting, had given him a flying start toward a better life. Perrotte came to Maitland when the season's work was at its height and every saw and planer were roaring night and day.
“Want a job?” Maitland had shouted over the tearing saw at him. “What can you do?”
“(H)axe-man me,” growled Perrotte, looking up at him, half wistful, half sullen.
“See that slab? Grab it, pile it yonder. The boards, slide over the shoot.” For these were still primitive days for labor-saving devices, and men were still the cheapest thing about a mill.
Perrotte grabbed the slab, heaved it down to its pile of waste, the next board he slid into the shoot, and so continued till noon found him pale and staggering.
“What's the matter with you?” said Maitland.
“Notting—me bon,” said Perrotte, and, clutching at the door jamb, hung there gasping.
Maitland's keen blue eyes searched his face. “Huh! When did you last eat? Come! No lying!”
“Two day,” said Perrotte, fighting for breath and nerve.
“Here, boy,” shouted Maitland to a chore lad slouching by, “jump for that cook house and fetch a cup of coffee, and be quick.”
The boss' tone injected energy into the gawky lad. In three minutes Perrotte was seated on a pile of slabs, drinking a cup of coffee; in five minutes more he stood up, ready for “(h)anny man, (h)anny ting.” But Maitland took him to the cook.
“Fill this man up,” he said, “and then show him where to sleep. And, Perrotte, to-morrow morning at seven you be at the tail of the saw.”
“Oui, by gar! Perrotte be dere. And you got one good man TOO-day, for sure.”
That was fifteen years ago, and, barring certain “jubilations,” Perrotte made good his prophecy. He brought up from the Ottawa his Irish wife, a clever woman with her tongue but a housekeeper that scandalised her thrifty, tidy, French-Canadian mother-in-law, and his two children, a boy and a girl. Under the supervision of his boss he made for his family a home and for himself an assured place in the Blackwater Mills. His children fell into the hands of a teacher with a true vocation for his great work and a passion for young life. Under his hand the youth of the rapidly growing mill village were saved from the sordid and soul-debasing influences of their environment, were led out of the muddy streets and can-strewn back yards to those far heights where dwell the high gods of poesy and romance. From the master, too, they learned to know their own wonderful woods out of which the near-by farms had been hewn. Many a home, too, owed its bookshelf to Alex Day's unobtrusive suggestions.
The Perrotte children were prepared for High School by the master's quiet but determined persistence. To the father he held up the utilitarian advantages of an education.
“Your boy is quick—why should not Tony be a master of men some day? Give him a chance to climb.”
“Oui, by gar! Antoine he's smart lee'le feller. I mak him steeck on his book, you mak him one big boss on some mill.”
To the mother the master spoke of social advantages. The empty-headed Irish woman who had all the quick wit and cleverness of tongue characteristic of her race was determined that her girl Annette should learn to be as stylish as “them that tho't themselves her betters.” So the children were kept at school by their fondly ambitious parents, and the master did the rest.
At the Public School, that greatest of all democratic institutions, the Perrotte children met the town youth of their own age, giving and taking on equal terms, sharing common privileges and advantages and growing into a community solidarity all their own, which in later years brought its own harvest of mingling joy and bitterness, but which on the whole made for sound manhood and womanhood.
With the girl Annette one effect of the Public School and its influences, educational and social, was to reveal to her the depth of the educational and social pit from which she had been taken. Her High School training might have fitted her for the teaching profession and completed her social emancipation but for her vain and thriftless mother, who, socially ambitious for herself but more for her handsome, clever children, found herself increasingly embarrassed for funds. She lacked the means with which to suitably adorn herself and her children for the station in life to which she aspired and for which good clothes were the prime equipment and to “eddicate” Tony as he deserved. Hence when Annette had completed her second year at the High School her mother withdrew her from the school and its associations and found her a place in the new Fancy Box Factory, where girls could obtain “an illigant and refoined job with good pay as well.”
This change in Annette's outlook brought wrathful disappointment to the head master, Alex Day, who had taken a very special pride in Annette's brilliant school career and who had outlined for her a University course.