The Law-bringers/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
"THE LAW IS POWERLESS THERE"
"The Indians throughout this region come yearly to Fort Resolution for Treaty, and, having no permanent camps, would not be benefited by a Police Department in the vicinity. The tribes are Yellow Knives and Dog Ribs, and they bear a fairly good reputation and seem passably prosperous. The Esquimaux"
Tempest turned in the big chair where he sat propped with all the pillows which the barracks at Fort Churchill could muster.
"Those dogs are making an awful row," he said.
"They always fight in the first snow. Besides, the moon excites them." Dick drove his pen into the ink again. "Well?" he said. "The Esquimaux are not a very potent factor. I guess they can worry along all right without us.
"So long as they dress by their ancient laws and customs they're better without the white-man element. Yes. Er—The Esquimaux on the Hudson Bay side of Height of Land"
Dick went on writing, and for a while there was no sound in the room but Tempest's quiet voice and the scribble of the pen and the noise of the husky dogs outside the window. The blind was up, and the white square of the moonlit snow showed beyond the black shadows of the buildings. Occasionally a dog shot across it, followed by the flickering ghosts of the mob. Then the square lay naked again, and in the little room where the black stove-pipe ran, oozing warmth, the two men worked on steadily.
It was just the fitting of another little grey unnoticed chip of mosaic into the huge pavement of the Empire which thrusts its length around the world; just a curt telling of the necessary things with all that made it a human record left out. In the Parliament Buildings at Ottawa one man would read it. In the printing-room and proof-room one or two more would run over it with skilled eyes and brain elsewhere before it went to swell the size of the yearly Blue Book of the Royal North-West Mounted Police. Some day in argument a clerk or a minister might turn up the report and find that the Hudson Bay Customs could conveniently be collected from Churchill. If a police map were near he might run his finger north until, between fifty-eight and sixty degrees of latitude, he found the little red flag which proclaimed that Fort Churchill was a post of the police. It might even interest him to see that it was just two thousand nine hundred and twenty-five miles from Liverpool, England. But this was not likely; nor was it likely that he or any other man would read, word by word, the report-sheets which lay on the floor round Dick's feet.
In Dick's black decided hand some of the headings showed on those scattered papers. Game; Topography; Temperature; Inhabitants; each slip filled up with curt, direct sentences which said nothing of the dreams under a blue sky with a fair wind in the sails; of the struggles and the suffering; of the solitude when the sound of a little bird calling floods the heart with a longing for home. The actual mileage was added to the foot of the report, as witness to the labours of four white men in the unconsidered areas; but few would heed it, although it ran well into the thousands. For this patrol was to stand with so many others among the things which do not matter particularly, and both men knew it as they patiently built up the report, page by page; Tempest in his chair, reading from blotted note-books and diaries; Dick at the table, with his tunic-collar loosed and his forehead knit and the rough edge of his hand making a little scratching sound on the paper as he wrote.
It was Tempest who sat crippled in the chair, but it was Dick's face which showed the burden of those past days. Ducane had been worse than useless in the canoes, and the journey down the Beverley Lake and along Chesterfield Inlet had dragged on until Dick was maddened beyond thought or speech. A cold, driving rain which no coverings could keep out had put rheumatism into that ricked back of Tempest's, and the two days of sailing and paddling up Hudson Bay itself into Fullerton, when it was found that the steamer had not waited for them, did not ease the trouble. Rough weather between Fullerton and Fort Churchill, with the little open steamer battling through the big seas and an early winter spurting in icy blasts down from the North had broken even Tempest's courage, and he accepted the decision of the men at the Fort Churchill post, and prepared to surrender up his reins of government to Dick.
Already Dick had taken up all those threads which it had been necessary for Tempest to drop. He had managed Ducane as no other man could have done; he had arranged the slow and exceedingly difficult matter of procuring dog-train outfits, and in the morning he was to leave with Ducane and Myers for the South. Previous instructions had transferred Depache to the Fullerton post, and Tempest would not soon forget the trouble in the man's gentle eyes as the little steamer snorted off from the wharf. Depache had looked after him with wonderful tenderness and forethought, and when he was left behind Tempest suffered considerably under Myers' rough hands and Dick's abrupt strength. Now he dropped the last pencil-scrawled, weather-stained note-book with a sigh of relief.
"I guess it's all in," he said. "Bring it here and let me look over it. You've got Earner's Fullerton reports all right, have you?"
"Yes. He's wanting a whole lot of lumber sent in next spring. Hope he'll get it." Dick gathered up the sheets and carried them over the room. "Do you want those ermine skins sent east right away?"
"Not if you can get them properly cured and made up in Winnipeg. If you wire Harley to meet you at the station he'll take charge of them. Tell him I want them fixed into the fashionable kind of furs women wear now. And tell him they're for my sister. He knows Betty."
So did Dick, and his memory jumped back to days in the old home far off in Ontario when he and Betty had climbed apple-trees together and pelted Tempest where he lay in the long grass with "The Canterbury Tales," or Schiller, or, in later days, Tolstoi or Schopenhauer. He looked down at Tempest's long hands moving with difficulty among the papers, and looked away again sharply.
"Hellier is making things good and snug here for the winter," he said. "They've hauled no end of wood, and the whole place has been freshly muddied-up. You will be happy as a coon in a hollow tree, Tempest."
"Yes. I wish I could have got through." Tempest's eyes darkened. "Hellier has written the Commissioner, telling him that I'm not fit."
"He'd know that, I imagine. He knows you. And it's going to be a beast of a time. Soft snow and rotten dogs. I've got scratch teams if ever I saw them! Thank the Lord, Myers is a first-class driver, though."
"Yes," said Tempest absently.
He went on reading, and Dick thrust some more wood in the stove; lit his fourth pipe that evening; roamed through the room restlessly, straying at last to the blindless window. He smoked in long breaths, screwing his eyes up, as a painter does in seeking for his values. But he was not thinking of that bold beauty which the snowy night held.
The strained, unnatural mood which had held him for days after that fight with Tempest had gone, as a matter of course. But he could not wholly forget it. He could not forget that for the time he had absolutely believed in a God: that he had cried to that God for help: that he had felt the reality of that God more keenly than he had ever felt anything in his life. He knew that Tempest believed, and he guessed that here lay the secret of Tempest's unclouded eyes and calm forehead, and his patience under pain. But that did not clear the matter for his own mind. Logically, without bias, he had endeavoured to thresh it out, and he could see no reason for belief in an all-prevailing Godhead. The sorrow and the torment of the world was to his understanding clear proof against it, and the comparison between his own virile strength and Tempest's bowed body sharpened that proof until he turned from the struggle bitterly. But over and over again, unbidden, unwelcomed, it came back.
He leaned his knee on the window-sill, staring out with both hands in his pockets. And his face was drawn into a heavy frown. Suddenly he felt that Tempest was watching him, and he swung round, reddening angrily. Each day it became harder to meet the light in those unconquered eyes.
"You've had a hard day," said Tempest. "But everything is fixed now, isn't it?"
"Why, yes. I could only get four dogs for each team, and they're a mangy lot. Mongrel curs, most of 'em; one or two huskies, and a Mackenzie hound. He'll pull like a bullock if the huskies don't kill him. They'll try. It's not going to be a good trip. Snow isn't fit. But Myers and I are in splendid fettle, and Ducane has picked up a lot. We have a breed too, as far as Split Lake. Couldn't persuade him to come further. He's in for the trapping."
Tempest asked several questions more, and then came silence again. Across the passage the men of Fort Churchill detachment were laughing uproariously in the mess-room. Here, in Hellier's private room, these two men of the little northern patrol sat without speech. Dick was searching for words, but he could not find them. Twice in his life he had set out to save a brother's soul and each time he had cut his own fingers to the bone instead. Then Tempest said:
"You still have that paper of Robison's?"
"Certainly."
"You will give it in to the Commissioner at Regina?"
"Certainly."
Dick jerked out his pouch and proceeded to refill his pipe, sitting astride a chair. His manner could not have been more brutally indifferent, and yet he had never so deeply longed to tell Tempest how much he cared for him.
"Why wouldn't you give it to me when I asked you?"
"I didn't intend that you should destroy it."
"Ah!" It was a quick note of surprise. "You thought I meant that?"
"What else should I think?" Dick twisted the chair, looking with resentful eyes. "I consider you acted like it."
"I had not thought of your suspecting that," said Tempest with sudden haughtiness. "You might naturally have imagined that I would have wanted to read it for myself, and when you refused I remembered some special reasons why you should not have been the man to deny me that right." His voice changed suddenly. He sighed. "I don't believe I thought much after that," he said. "If I had I hope I'd have behaved differently. What illogical, disreputably-minded beings we are—all of us. And yet how splendid we are—most of us."
"Ducane, for instance," said Dick bitterly.
"I was thinking of Robison. And you believed that I wanted to destroy that paper? The thing has gone far beyond that—unless I could at the same time destroy the deed and the conditions that made for it."
A twinge of mental or physical pain stopped him. Dick lit his pipe with hurried, impatient hands. His own part in this affair seemed to be showing less nobly. But how could he have known? And then, with sudden force, the explanation hit him. A man naturally judges others by himself.
"We recognise the responsibility of the criminal fast enough," said Tempest slowly. "I wonder if we are always so sure of his identity."
"She did it long before I had any"
"Leave the personal element out," said Tempest. "We can't alter that by discussing it. I told you it had gone far beyond that. But—because the representation will lie in your hands now, I want to speak to you about this. We white men make and enforce the criminal laws of a country. But it is not taken sufficiently into consideration that in very many cases we also make the conditions, which, later on, call for the enforcements of those laws. So that the punishment, when it falls, often falls on the wrong person."
His voice was so quiet that Dick could not guess in how far his heart was stirred.
"That's an old story," he said. "It's the same all the world over. We can't help it. We are only sufficiently advanced to see the obvious yet. We do our best—with the limited sense we've got."
"I don't think we do. We don't take into consideration the fact that the civilisation of those who make the laws is in many cases about a thousand years older than the civilisation of those whom we force to obey them. When we spend less money on paying men to tinker with those laws, and more on teaching men how to live so that they won't need those laws, then we may be really doing something towards the development of the individual. But we won't study economics sufficiently for that. We make laws. And at the same time we are making criminals."
"Punishment for crime is not man's idea. You're rating his intellect too highly. It's one of the natural primary laws."
"Of course. The moral punishment. I was speaking of the physical. The moral punishment falls on the race—on the nation. And we think to avoid it by visiting physical punishment on the few. That doesn't alter our obligations."
"Well, what are you going to do about it? I fancy other men have been struck with the same notion. But I don't observe that it's affected the world at all."
"But that doesn't alter our obligations. We white men have chosen to be rulers of the world. Do the best we can we'll have a mighty reckoning to pay for that pride. And we'll have a mighty reward for that service. But until we recognise our brotherhood, until we recognise our individual responsibility, we are not going to get much virtue out of our inheritance."
"I tell you we do what we can. I think the law is too ready to look for extenuating circumstances."
"Do you think it will find any extenuating circumstances in Andree's case?"
Dick shut his teeth with a snap on the pipe-stem. He did not look at the other man.
"How can I tell?" he said sullenly.
"Do you?"
"No."
"Nor do I. And yet we both know that they are there, and we know that the law can't recognise them. The responsibility lies with those who make it possible for a girl to grow up with no restraint, no moral training, no traditions. And it lies with those white men—those rulers of the country—who take advantage of that. We know that, too, and the law knows it But the law is powerless there—and so are we."
"I thought you knew human nature better than to talk like that. We can't get back to the original factor in an individual case, anyway. He's generally dead."
"No, he isn't," said Tempest quietly. "He's always living—plenty of him. He's you and me, and all the other men who help to rule and serve Canada. He is every man who hasn't got five cents to spare for the Missionary box; and who can't be bothered to subscribe to the Hospital Fund, and who makes a ring on the Education Board because of the money he can get out of it. He is every man who won't put sin or temptation out of another's path because he's afraid of dirtying his own hands. He is every man who takes advantage of the laws of the country to add to that sin and temptation. Oh, he isn't dead. Don't you think it. He's alive, and he's going to keep on living. And he is going to keep on governing the world."
Dick was on his feet now. He walked through the room. Then he came back and stood over Tempest. His face was black.
"Because you're a Puritan you needn't curse all other men," he said. "I imagine we are as God made us—if there is a God."
Tempest flushed painfully.
"I don't want to curse other men. But—I can be glad that she is to die for this. It was life that I was afraid of for her."
Dick walked back to the window. He stood there some time. Then he said:
"On my honour, I never meant to make her love me."
"What happened to your honour when you gave me your word that you'd leave her alone, and then broke it?" said Tempest sternly.
Dick turned round. That crumpled body with the clear, menacing eyes seemed suddenly terrible. He understood that this man was fighting for more than "the individual case."
"Oh, you can't understand," he said impatiently. "If you could you wouldn't need to ask. You'd know for yourself. A man struggles—or he doesn't struggle. And it all comes to the same in the end if it's built that way."
"That can't be true." Tempest lay back, staring at the wall. "Good and Evil are forces," he said. "Whether we generate them ourselves and let them loose in the universe, or whether they are in the universe and we have power to annex them, doesn't matter much, I think. We have access to them, anyway. And we can choose which we will have access to principally, and we know that the more we have to do with the one the less we can have to do with the other. That seems to have proved itself. Those forces are indestructible. Huge blind gods, perhaps. Purposeful things with individual power to attract or repel, perhaps. We don't know anything about all that. But we do know that we can draw those forces into ourselves and transmute them by the alchemy of our own souls into potent things. And we do know that, whether we like it or not, we have got to transmit those potent things to others. It may be possible for mankind to so absorb the Good that it will in time kill all sin out of being, as inoculation destroys disease. That is another thing we can only guess at. It is certainly possible for us individually to absorb the evil so far that we seem unable to retain the good. But the Good must be meant to win out if we would only help it. There is no other solution for the making of Life. And how do we know that the Good is not seeking us as we are seeking it? A new Force, like electricity or magnetism, ready to enlighten the whole universe if we would only give it a chance. We grope in the dark. How do we know that we haven't got the match in our hand, waiting to be lit."
His face was glowing and his eyes deep with a glory that Dick had not seen even in Tempest before. Dick looked at him in envy.
"I reckon you have lit your match," he said.
"No, no. Oh, God knows I haven't." Tempest put up his shaking hands to his face. "There were times when I could have killed you," he said.
Dick drew a long breath.
"Thank the Lord for that," he said. "You've sometimes scared me into thinking you couldn't be human. I was afraid you only wanted to kill yourself."
"I did want to." Still Tempest spoke with his face hidden. "I knew that I had to see this thing in a larger way or I probably would." He broke off, sitting silent; and Dick walked through the room with his lips tight-shut. At last he touched Tempest on the shoulder.
"Here's your our medicine," he said. "Let me hold the glass. What do you expect me to think of a God or a Good that can let you suffer this way while I go free?"
Tempest looked up. His forehead was wet near the hair, and his eyes were very sad.
"Do you go free?" he asked.
Dick looked away. The blind battling soul in him desired intensely to cry out its doubts and troubles to this man. But his stubborn heart held him back. Besides, he told himself that he could not speak of Jennifer.
"I'd give my own strength to get yours back," he said.
"It will come back." Tempest smiled a little. "I'm not going to be laid on the shelf yet. And I owe you more than you owe me."
"What? Dick looked at him in sudden distrust.
"You did turn me back into the trail again. And I believe that you began to do it honestly. And I have no right to judge you. I have failed too far myself. I had thought that I could stand—and it needed her sorrow as well as mine to show me the only way in which I could stand. She had to pay so that I should learn, you see. I have got to do something with that learning."
"Tempest! Do you love her still as a man loves the woman he wants for his wife?"
Dick blurted the question out, half-afraid, half-desperate. With that paper in his pocket he knew that he must know this.
"No," said Tempest, very low. "Not that way any more."
He did not explain further. But Dick guessed, and he did not guess so very far wrong. Tempest loved Andree now for all that she was not. For all that an unripe and over-strenuous civilisation had made her. For all her kin who would sin and suffer under that same civilisation. For all that ignorance required at the hands of knowledge—and did not get.
There was silence again in the room. And then Hellier, Sergeant in charge of the post, came in, and after that the wheels of life took up their ordinary running once more. There was much to be said yet. Much that never would be said. Tempest had forgiven Dick. But he had shown very fully how much there was to forgive. And Dick, although feeling painfully that he should be grateful, set out on the winter trail with no light heart.
On the third night out they camped on the edge of the heavy timber, and the morning gave a cold world of wind and storm and a drifted trail that demanded constant breaking. Each man but Ducane took his turn at that and his turn at holding the blinded, struggling dogs into it when it was broken; and each man but Ducane laboured to put the tent up in the teeth of the wind that night, and to make a fire with the little green twigs torn off the bowed spruces. But it was Ducane who refused to turn out of his blankets on the following morning. He complained of that cramp which had caught him by Beverley Lake, and Dick, who had expected this, found a sinful delight in administering some medicine which kept Ducane passably civil for two full days.
The three men of the Outer Places were wolf-thewed and tireless. They could break trail for a half-day and feel no after pains. They would curl up in their wet furs and sleep, and wake cheerfully to another day of labour. But Ducane had never belonged to the Outer Places, and in a very little while he began to drive Dick desperate with his complaints. Dick cured his toothache by threatening to abstract the tooth, and he heard no more of Ducane's weak ankle after the night on which he urged the teams forward, leaving Ducane to limp sulkily into camp when supper was done. But through the cold and heavy fortnight of travel which landed them at Split Lake Ducane made life for those about him an infinitely more wearisome thing than it had any need to be.
It was on the trail to Norway House where the police flag flew at the head of Lake Winnipeg that Ducane asked the question which Dick had been expecting since they first met.
"Where is Jenny?" he asked; and Dick stopped his walk and looked at him.
"With her mother in Toronto. You expect her to come and bail you out, of course?"
"What business is that of yours?" snarled Ducane. Then he looked at the other man in sharp suspicion. "What business is it of yours what my wife does or doesn't do?" he said again. He thrust his watery eyes and ragged beard close to Dick. "Do you love her?" he snapped suddenly.
"What business is that of yours?" countered Dick lazily.
"Why—I guess it is my business, too. I"
"No, it is not." Dick turned on his heel. "The next time you poke your nose into my private affairs you'll likely get hurt, Mr. Ducane," he said; and left the other man puzzled and staring.