"You're only wasting your time," Mrs. Sharp had remarked grimly. "There ain't going to be anything done to any of them barns before I get a lean-to on the house. You'd think even a man would know that a house that's all right for two gets a little small for seven," she added, scornfully, to Nora.
"Are there seven of you?"
"Me and Sid and five little ones. If that don't make seven, I've forgotten all the 'rithmetic I ever learned," said Mrs. Sharp briefly. "And let me tell you, you who're just starting in, that having children out here on the prairie half the time with no proper care, and particularly in winter, when maybe you're snowed up and the doctor can't get to you, ain't my idea of a bank holiday."
"I shouldn't think it would be," said Nora, sincerely shocked, although she found it difficult to hide a smile at her visitor's comparison; bank holidays being among her most horrid recollections.
Mrs. Sharp, despite a rather emphatic manner which softened noticeably as her visit progressed, turned out to be a stout, red-faced woman of middle age who seemed to be troubled with a chronic form of asthma. She was as unmistakably English as her husband. But like him, she had lost much of her native accent, although occasionally one caught a faint trace of the Cockney. She had two rather keen brown eyes which, as she talked, took in the room to its smallest detail.
"Well, I declare, I think you've done wonders considering you've only had a day and not used to work like this," she said heartily. "When Sid told me that Frank was bringing home a wife I said to myself: 'Well, I don't envy her her job; comin' to a shack that ain't been lived in for nigh unto six months and when it was, with only a man runnin' it.'"
"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of men's ability in the domestic line," said Nora with a smile.
"I can tell you just how high it is," said Mrs. Sharp with decision. "I would just as soon think of consultin' little Sid--an' he's goin' on three--about the housekeepin' as I would his father. It ain't a man's work. Why should he know anything about it?"
"Still," demurred Nora, "lots of men look after themselves somehow."
"Somehow's just the word; they never get beyond that. Of course I knew Frank would be sure to marry some day. And with his good looks it's a wonder he didn't do so long ago. Most girls is so crazy about a good-lookin' fellow that they never stop to think if he has anything else to him. Not that he hasn't lots of good traits, I don't mean that. But," she added shrewdly, "you don't look like the silly sort that would be taken in by good looks alone."
"No," said Nora dryly, "I don't think I am."
After that, until the two men returned, they talked of household matters, and Nora found that her new neighbor had a store of useful and practical suggestions to make, and, what was even better, seemed glad to place all her experience at her disposal in the kindliest and most friendly manner possible, entirely free from any trace of that patronage which had so maddened her in her sister-in-law.
"Now mind you," called Mrs. Sharp, as she laboriously climbed up to the seat beside her husband as they were driving away, "if Frank, here, gets at all upish--and he's pretty certain to, all newly married men do--you come to me. I'll settle him, never fear."
Frank laughed a little over-loudly at this parting shot, and Nora noticed that for some time after their guests had gone, he seemed unusually silent.
As for the Sharps, they also maintained an unwonted silence--which for Mrs. Sharp, at least, was something unusual--until they had arrived at their own door.
"Well?" queried Sharp, as they were about to turn in.
"It beats me," replied his wife. "Why, she's a lady. But she'll come out all right," she finished enigmatically, "she's got the right stuff in her, poor dear!"
In after years, when Nora was able to look back on this portion of her life and see things in just perspective, she always felt that she could never be too thankful that her days had been crowded with occupation. Without that, she must either have gone actually insane, or, in a frenzy of helplessness, done some rash thing which would have marred her whole life beyond repair.
After she found herself growing more accustomed to her new life--and, after all, the growing accustomed to it was the hardest part--she realized that she was only following the universal law of life in paying for her own rash act. The thought that she was paying with interest, being overcharged as it were, was but faint consolation: it only meant that she had been a fool. That conviction is rarely soothing.
Then, too, she gradually began to look at the situation from Frank's point of view. He had certainly acted within his rights, if with little generosity. But she had to acknowledge to herself that the obligation to be generous on his part was small. She could hardly be said to have treated him with much liberality in the past.
She had used him without scruple as a means to an end. She had made him the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found unbearably irksome. That she had done so in the heat of passion was small palliation. For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make the best of things. It could not last forever. The day must come when she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.
It was characteristic of her unyielding pride, of her reluctance to confess to defeat, that the thought of appealing to her brother never once entered her head.
For this reason, it was long before she could bring herself to write the promised letter to Eddie. What was there to say? The things that would have relieved her, in a sense, to tell, must remain forever locked in her own heart. In the end, she compromised by sending a letter confined entirely to describing her new home. As she read it over, she thanked the Fates that Eddie's was not a subtile or analytical mind. He would read nothing between the lines. But Gertie? Well, it couldn't be helped!
It was some two months after her marriage that she received a letter from Miss Pringle in answer to the one she had written while she was still an inmate of her brother's house.
Miss Pringle confined herself largely to an account of her Continental wanderings and her bloodless encounters with various foreigners and their ridiculous un-English customs from which she had emerged triumphant and victorious. Mrs. Hubbard's precarious state of health had led her into being unusually captious, it seemed. Miss Pringle was more than ever content to be back in Tunbridge Wells, where all the world was, by comparison, sane and reasonable in behavior.
When it came to touching upon her friend's amazing environment and unconventional experiences, Miss Pringle was discretion itself. But if her paragraphs had bristled with exclamation points, they could not, to one who understood her mental processes, have more clearly betrayed her utter disapproval and amazement that English people, and descendants of English people, could so far forget themselves as to live in any such manner.
Replying to this letter was only a degree less hard than writing to Eddie. Nora's ready pen faltered more than once, and many pages were destroyed before an answer was sent. She confined herself entirely to describing the new experience of a Canadian winter. Of her departure from her brother's roof and of her marriage, she said nothing whatever.
In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days, interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.
To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up the entire dinner.
Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.
"Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying? 'Hell wasn't built in a day'?"
Nora screa
med with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions."
"Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case."
He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious beginning.
The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was perfectly unconscious on his part.
For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and pans.
Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was equally trying, he seemed to have divined her thoughts, for his smile, upon receiving her halting thanks, had not been without a touch of malicious amusement.
On the other hand, all her little efforts to beautify the little house and make it more livable met with his enthusiastic approval and support. He was as delighted as a child with everything she did, and often, when baffled for the moment by some lack of material for carrying out some proposed scheme, he came to the rescue with an ingenious suggestion which solved the vexed problem at once.
And so, gradually, to the no small wonder of her neighbor, Mrs. Sharp, the shack began to take on an air of homely brightness and comfort which that lady's more pretentious place lacked, even after a residence of thirteen years.
Curtains tied back with gay ribands, taken from an old hat and refurbished, appeared at the windows; the old tin syrup cans, pasted over with dark green paper, were made to disgorge their mouldy stores and transform themselves into flower-pots holding scarlet geraniums; even the disreputable, rakish old rocking chair assumed a belated air of youth and respectability, wearing as it did a cushion of discreetly patterned chintz; and the packing-box table hid its deficiencies under a simple cloth. All these magic transformations Nora had achieved with various odds and ends which she found in her trunk.
Not to be outdone, Frank had contributed a well-made shelf to hold Nora's precious books and a sort of cupboard for her sewing basket and, for the crowning touch, had with much labor contrived some rough chairs to take the place of the packing-box affairs of unpleasant memory.
As has been said, Mrs. Sharp came, saw and wondered; but she had her own theory, all the same, which she confided to her husband.
All these little but significant changes, the result of their co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short, although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations, when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with both pleasure and dread.
Through many a dark winter day she had pictured to herself how beautiful the prairie must be, clad in all the verdant livery of the most wonderful of the seasons. And yet it would mean a new solitude and loneliness to her, her husband, of necessity, being away through all the long daylight hours. She began to understand Gertie's dread of having no one to speak to. She avoided asking herself the question as to whether it was loneliness in general or the particular loneliness of missing her husband that she dreaded.
But she was obliged to admit to herself that the winter had wrought more transformations than were to be seen in the little shack.
CHAPTER XV
It had all come about so subtilely and gradually that she was almost unaware of it herself, this inward change in herself. Nora had by nature a quick and active mind, but she had also many inherited prejudices. It is a truism that it is much harder to unlearn than to learn, and for her it was harder, in the circumstances, than for the average person. Not that she was more set in her ways than other people, but that she had accepted from her childhood a definite set of ideas as to the proper conduct of life; a code, in other words, from which she had never conceived it possible to depart. People did certain things, or they did not; you played the game according to certain prescribed rules, or you didn't play it with decent people, that was all there was to it. One might as well argue that there was no difference between right and wrong as to say that this was not so.
Of course there were plenty of people on the face of the earth who thought otherwise, such as Chinese, Aborigines, Turks, and all sorts of unpleasant natives of uncivilized countries--Nora lumped them together without discrimination or remorse--but no one planned to pass their lives among them. And as for the sentiment that Trotter had enunciated one day at her brother's, that Canada was a country where everybody was as good as everybody else, that was, of course, utter nonsense. It was because the country was raw and new that such silly notions prevailed. No society could exist an hour founded upon any such theory.
And yet, here she was living with a man on terms of equality whom, when measured up with the standards she was accustomed to, failed impossibly. And yet, did he? That is, did he, in the larger sense? That he was woefully deficient in all the little niceties of life, that he was illiterate and ignorant could not be denied. But he was no man's fool, and, as far as his light shone, he certainly lived up to it. That was just it. He had a standard of his own.
She compared him with her brother, and with other men she had known and respected. Was he less honest? less brave? less independent? less scrupulous in his dealings with his fellowmen? To all these questions she was obliged to answer "No." And he was proud, too, and ambitious; ambitious to carve out a fortune with his own hands, beholden to neither man nor circumstances for the achievement. Certainly there was much that was fine about him.
And, as far as his treatment of herself was concerned, after that first terrible struggle for mastery, she had had nothing to complain of. He had been patient with her ignorance and her lack of capabilities in all the things that the women in this new life were so proficient in. Did she not, perhaps, fall as far below his standard as he did before hers? There was certainly something to be said on both sides.
There was one quality which he possessed to which she paid ungrudging tribute; never had she met a man so free from all petty pretense. He regretted his lack of opportunities for educating himself, but it apparently never entered his head to pretend a knowledge of even the simplest subject which he did not possess. The questions that he asked her from time to time about matters which almost any schoolboy in England could have answered, both touched and embarrassed her.
At first she had found the evenings the most trying part of the day. When not taken up with her household cares, she found herself becoming absurdly self-conscious in his society. They were neither of them naturally silent people, and it was difficult not to have the air of "talking down" to him, of palpably making conversation. Beyond the people at her brother's and the Sharps, they had not a single acquaintance in common. Her horizon, hitherto, had been, bounded by England, his by Canada.
Finally, acting on the suggestion he had made, but never again referred to, the unforgettable day when they were leaving for Winnipeg, she began reading aloud evenings while he worked on his new chairs. The experiment was a great success. Her little library was limited in range; a few standard works and a number of books on travel and some of history. She soon found that history was what he most enjoyed. Things that were a commonplace to her were revealed to him for the first time. And his comments were keen and intelligent, although his point
of view was strikingly novel and at the opposite pole from hers. To be sure, she had been accustomed to accepting history merely as a more or less accurate record of bygone events without philosophizing upon it. But to him it was one long chronicle of wrong and oppression. He pronounced the dead and gone sovereigns of England a bad lot and cowardly almost without exception; not apparently objecting to them on the ground that they were kings, as she had at first thought, but because they attained their ends, mostly selfish, through cruelty and oppression, without any regard for humane rights.
It was the same way with books of travel. The chateaus and castles, with all their atmosphere of story and romance which she had always longed to visit, interested him not a jot. In his opinion they were, one and all, bloody monuments of greed and selfishness; the sooner they were razed to the ground and forgotten, the better for the world.
It was useless to make an appeal for them on artistic grounds; art to him was a doubly sealed book, and yet he frequently disclosed an innate love of beauty in his appreciation of the changing panorama of the winter landscape which stretched on every side before their eyes.
It was a picture which had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves. But she could not rid herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson to teach her. Twice they went in to Prentice. With these exceptions, she saw no one but her husband and Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.
But it was, strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life. Not that Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary. She was as hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine. But her natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great. From a small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless horizon of the prairie was indeed a far cry. How much inward readjustment such a violent transplanting must require, Nora had sufficient imagination to fully appreciate. But if Mrs. Sharp, herself, were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of it. Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she breached over inexplicable chasms, "was all in a lifetime."
The Land of Promise: A Comedy in Four Acts (1922) Page 15