Part 9

Two hundred yards down the lake, the “camp of the _messieurs_” stretched its log front of sixty feet. The lamplight shone ruddily through windows red-curtained, the door from the broad gallery stood open, the bare low room, as we entered, had the qualities which make a place attractive—space, brightness, order, and comfort. Many a time in a New York drawing-room I have thought of the charm of that big camp with its silver-brown bark of walls and ceiling, its scarlet cotton curtains, its rough floor, and rustic furniture; I have remembered how it breathed hospitality and the joy of life, and I have wondered what people wanted of more. Into this room we went, the three Morgans and Dr. Davidge and Mr. Esmond and I. Pipes and cigars were going in a moment, and soon young Bob was sent to find out the plans for the concert. He came back kicking his boyish long legs ecstatically. “It’s going to be a peach,” he announced. “Dr. Davidge’s guides sing, all four of them, and Henri, the old fellow, has a mouth-organ, and Zoëtique is going to whistle. It’ll be the pickles all right.”

“I didn’t know Zoëtique whistled,” said Walter Morgan. “I never heard him.”

Nor had I, but Bob hastened to enlighten us. “I have,” he said, “and it’s a wonder. Never heard anything like it. Godin says he’s the best whistler in Saint Raymond, and they always make him do it for parties, as a side show. Wait till you hear him—I’ll bet you’ll like it.”

Mr. Esmond looked up. “Really good whistling is rare,” he said, and then added as if to himself, “but of course this isn’t that sort.”

“How are they to arrange, Bob?” asked his sister. “Are they going out on the lake, or shall we?”

“Oh, they said just as the _messieurs_ wished; so I settled it,” Bob answered in a lordly way. “It was such a whooping good night, I thought it would be the stunt to go out ourselves, and bum around in the canoes.”

So it was that in half an hour we drifted down the shore toward the point where the blaze from the guides’ camp shone and disappeared by glimpses, a star of orange fire in the trees above, an orange bar of fire in the water below. The men’s voices in excited conversation, as conversation is always with French Canadians, floated out to us; we caught words which showed the forest road of their thoughts—such words as “_caribou_,” and “_carabine_,” and “_gros poisson de cinq livres_,” and “_un m’sieur qui tire b’en_,” and there would be a hush while one deep voice told a story and then all together would break out in an abandonment of laughter. Suddenly some one, going outside the range of firelight, caught sight of the fleet on the lake, and there was a quick word—“_les messieurs_” and “_les canots_”—and then a silence.

Walter Morgan called from invisibility. “Godin,” he called—Godin was head guide.

“_Oui, M’sieur_,” came back with respectful good-will from among the trees. I listened closely now, for it is a pity to lose any of Morgan’s French.

“_Est-ce que vous êtes mangé_?” he demanded cheerfully, and Bob gave a snort—Bob knows French.

But Godin knew better than that—he knew his _m’sieur_ and what he meant. “_Mais oui, M’sieur, on a fini de dîner_,” he responded promptly, shifting the sentence graciously.

“_Êtes-vous preparry pour nous donner un concert?_” Morgan went on, not bothering particularly to pronounce according to French models—“concert,” especially, being done in honest English.

There was an embarrassed ripple from among the trees—the strange guides believed that _M’sieur_ was making a joke, and that it was civil to encourage him. But Godin understood.

“_Oui, M’sieur_,” his polite tones came back. “One will sing a song or two with pleasure, if the _messieurs_ desire it.”

There was an undertone of talking back and forth, as we waited, and a little self-conscious laughing, a little chaffing evidently, and then a tremendous clearing of throats and trying of keys up and down the scale. A second’s silence and a voice which we of the camp knew for Blanc’s swung out over the water, musical, for all its occasional sharpness. It was one of the old _voyageur_ songs he sang, filled with the sadness which the gay souls seemed to crave in their music.

C’est longtemps que j’ai t’aimé, Jamais je ne t’oublierais.

The refrain came over and over through so many verses that I wished some one would choke Blanc and let the concert go on. Yet it was far from painful to lie in a canoe, with young Bob wielding a skilful paddle for my benefit, and listen to soft French words sprinkled over a sapphire night—on the whole, let Blanc pursue the subject through ten more stanzas if he must.

He came to an end; there was great hand-clapping from the floating audience; then from the hidden performers more earnest undertones of discussion as to the next number. We waited, smiling to ourselves, and soon the notes of old Henri’s mouth-organ sounded from the grove of spruce trees. I suppose a mouth-organ is not a high form of instrument, but I am glad that I am not too musical to have found it pretty that night. I had a vision, too, in my mind, of the grizzled, labor-worn face, and the knotted hands which held the cheap toy, and a thought came to me of a narrow life which had known little but hard work, to which this common music meant operas and oratorios. It was nice music, too—old Henri had a soul, and he put it heartily into his mouth-organ. We clapped that number and encored it, and the man played the second tune with a vim that showed pleasure. And while arrangements were making for the next event I heard Esmond talking in his canoe to Mrs. Morgan.

“It’s too charming for words,” he said. “I’ve never known anything at all like it. The old-world simplicity—the quaintness—the good-will and earnestness of it. I didn’t know such people existed outside of books. Why, if you could get this atmosphere on a stage—”

With that a preliminary silence and the clearing of a throat warned us that the performance was about to continue. A young voice rang out over the water with manly vigor and pleasant distinctness—one caught every word:

C’était le vingt-cinq de juillet Lorsque je me suis engagé Pour monter dans la rivière Qu’on appelle la rivière enragé.

On a monté dans la rivièr-e En canot dans la Gatineau; Plus souvent les pieds à ter-re, Avec la charge de sur le dos.

The _chanson_ went on to tell in not too artistic rhymes the story of a logger on the River Gatineau. The words were a bit bald in spots, yet they bubbled with picturesqueness—the rhymer had told what he knew, and that had kept the song simple and strong. But the words were beside the question. Far from an accomplished musician, I yet knew in a few bars that the air was out of the common, and probably very old. I knew that many of the songs of the _habitants_ came with their ancestors from France, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and this one had an ancient ring.

The song ended—it was rather long—there was a second’s pause, and then a frank, manly voice, the voice of the singer, spoke from the stage of the spruce grove.

“_Excusez-la_,” said the voice.

It was prettier than I can describe. What was implied was so plain and so graceful—and only a Frenchman could have said it without self-consciousness. “What I have done is poor, but it is all I can do. I hope you will let it please you. It is my best, excuse it,” the two gracious words asked from us.

I looked at Mr. Esmond—he seemed petrified—he could not even clap, as the rest of us did. “I never knew anything like it,” I heard him murmur.

Bob, seldom suppressed for long, came to the front. “Zoëtique, Zoëtique, whistle it—_sifflez-le, sifflez_,” he called, and added an explanatory word to us. “It’s twice as good when he whistles; it’s a decent tune sung, but wait till you hear him whistle—it’s a peach.”

Presently the whistle came.

I think there is not any other whistling like that in the world—certainly I have never heard any, and many people who should know have said the same. The canoes lay motionless, the people in them hardly breathed, and out from the spruces, over the track of the moon, floated to us the sweetest sound I have ever heard made by a human being. Birds on a dewy morning throw out notes as clear and silvery, but bird-notes are weak and are haphazard. These came freighted with the vigor of a man, with the thought of humanity; there was in them the gladness of youth, a rapture of artistic fulfilment; and, beyond what any words can say, there was in them a personality impossible to say—a personality cramped into a narrow life which spread its wings unashamed in these sounds of loveliness. He whistled the air that he had sung, the old French air of unexpected harmonies, and it was as if a magic flute repeated the logger song of the “River Gatineau, which one called the raging river in the springtime.”

He stopped, and out of the dark hill beyond us floated an echo like the ghost of a flute of long ago.

There was deep stillness for a second, and Zoëtique’s unconcerned, clear voice broke it.

“_Excusez-la_” he said.

For a moment we were too stirred to join Bob’s energetic hand clapping. “Don’t you like it?” the youngster demanded. “I think it’s great. For cat’s sake, why don’t you encourage the lad?”

And, so adjured, we broke into as great a storm of applause as six people can manage, and, after, we discussed the sensation of the evening from boat to boat while the performers arranged further their hand-to-mouth programme. The concert went on; there were choruses, charming to listen to, in the ten men’s voices, all sweet with the musical sense of these people; there were separate solos, “_A l’école du Roi_,” “_Au clair de la lune_,” “_Alouette, gentille alouette_,” and others characteristically _voyageur_ and _habitant_; and old Henri was made to play again on his mouth-organ. But the hero of the concert was the whistler, and three times more he was called before the curtain—which is to say that three times more from out of the mysterious darkness of the trees the flute notes flooded full down the moon-path and thrilled the misty air about us. And each time, at the end came Zoëtique’s unconscious, honest little speech of two words:

“_Excusez-là._”

It was only Mr. Esmond, I remarked, who did not discuss the whistling as we paddled back to “the camp of the _messieurs_,” where the lamplight through the scarlet-curtained windows of the long front sent out a comfortable glow to welcome us. It seemed to me that Esmond was strangely silent for a man as talkative as he had shown himself. Even Mrs. Morgan could not make him express enthusiasm as to the hit of the evening.

“I’m afraid you didn’t like our whistling gentleman as much as we did,” she complained at last, as I helped her out of the canoe.

“Mrs. Morgan,” Esmond answered quickly, in his decisive, impressive manner, “I liked it far more than anybody, because, from my peculiar position, I am able to appreciate its value better and to see more possibility in it than any one here. I am going to prove that to you.” The moment we were inside the camp Esmond turned to his host. “I don’t want to impose on your hospitality, and I won’t make any move without your consent, but I’d like to explain to you who I am and what I want to do.”

Everybody looked surprised, and conversation stopped. “Yes,” Morgan answered tentatively.

“Perhaps you know my name, if you’re theatre-goers,” the stranger went on. “I’m Charles Esmond, the theatrical manager, and I have quite a lot of stock companies and theatres more or less under my control. Looking out for new stars isn’t my business nowadays, but it used to be, and I haven’t lost my scent for a good thing, and the minute I heard that boy whistle I knew he was a good thing. He does what is called double-tongue whistling, and that in itself is not common. But that is only incidental—it’s the quality of his performance that is extraordinary. I have heard the best people that are known at the business—it’s a limited business—and I’ve never heard any one who touches this guide of yours. Take that young fellow and put him on the stage and he’d make a hit for us, and for himself he’d make what would seem a big fortune in little or no time. I’d like to talk to him—now—to-night. May I?”

Impetuosity is peculiarly winning when it is backed by knowledge, and Morgan laughed and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Surely,” he said. “It’s interesting to run into an adventure up here in the wilderness. The boy is a good guide and I like him, yet I would not stand in the way of making his fortune for anything. Bob—” But Master Bob’s long legs were already chasing each other out of the low doorway in a rush after Zoëtique. In three minutes he was back with the man in tow.

Zoëtique Vézina was perhaps twenty-two years old, a stocky, well-built chap of five feet ten or so, with deep, powerful shoulders and a small waist and a body that moved with the grace of efficient muscles. His face was roughly carved and of his class, but he held his head with an air that had pride and sensitiveness both in it, and when he spoke and smiled the commonplace modelling of his features lighted with a gentleness and a spirit which made you understand his whistling. There was character and shading back of this ordinary-looking block of humanity. He wore blackened _bottes sauvages_ of caribou leather, laced with thongs of hide through huge brass eyelets; his trousers looked as if they might have been somebody’s dinner clothes five years before—somebody not particularly his shape; his coarse red and blue striped sweater was belted with a broad band of black leather around a waist as trim as a girl’s. He pulled a nondescript felt hat from a shock head of dark hair as he entered, and his blue eyes gazed about half startled and half friendly.

We sat and listened as if at a play, while Charles Esmond, the great theatrical manager, conspicuous on two continents, interviewed this unknown backwoodsman. He did it in fluent French, with his own charm of manner, but it took some time to make Zoëtique understand what he was offering, and when he did understand, to our astonishment he did not respond. Esmond mentioned a salary to begin with so large that I gasped, and to the guide, accustomed to two dollars a day in good times, it must have seemed fabulous. Morgan voiced my thought when he put in a quiet, reassuring word.

“The _m’sieur_ will do what he says, Zoëtique. I know all about the _m’sieur_, and he is to be relied on.”

“_Merci, m’sieur_,” the man answered with ready French politeness, but his expression did not change.

His bright, light-blue eyes simply lifted a second to smile at Walter, and dropped to the floor again. All of us waited as he stared at one knot-hole—a minute, two minutes, three minutes we waited in silence while Zoëtique considered that knot-hole.

At last, “I don’t want to hurry you,” Esmond said, “yet I would like to know by to-morrow. It’s the chance of your life, you understand. You couldn’t make as much money here in forty years as you could make in a winter or two in New York. I do not see why you should hesitate five minutes. But think it over—talk it over with your friends. I will wait till you pass our camp with your _messieurs_ to-morrow morning.” He smiled his sudden, fascinating smile at the guide, and the contrast between the two was sharp and picturesque—the finished, handsome man of the world and the awkward, ill-clothed child of the people. “I know it must be startling to you,” Esmond said kindly. “You will have to collect your ideas a bit. But you must answer as I wish. I will wait till morning.”

Then the guide lifted his clear, light eyes and met the other’s slightly pitying gaze with unexpected dignity. “The _m’sieur_ need not wait,” he said serenely. “I know my answer at this time. The _m’sieur_ is very good to me, and I am glad that he is content with my poor whistling. I would be happy to make all that great money—_mais—oui!_—but I cannot go to New York as the _m’sieur_ wishes.”

“You cannot go?” Esmond repeated in surprise, and we all stared.

Zoëtique’s gentle tones went on firmly. “But no, m’sieur. I have the intention to marry myself in the spring, and this winter I build my house. Alixe, my _fiancée_, would be disappointed if I should not build our house this winter.”

“But, man, you’ll have money enough to build a dozen houses—you can build one ten times as fine—you can pay men to build it for you, think of that!”

Zoëtique smiled—his smile was winning, but very self-contained, and the tilt of his head was assured. “It would be another thing, _m’sieur_. Alixe-_là_, she would be disappointed.”

Esmond argued. Patiently, with amusement first, and then a bit hotly, but the guide never lost his gentle respectfulness of manner or his firmness. Walter Morgan put in another word.

“Think carefully before you decide to give up so much money as this means, Zoëtique. As the _m’sieur_ says, it is a chance for all of your life.”

The young fellow’s alert, bright eyes flashed gratitude. “But yes, _m’sieur_. I understand. However, one knows that to make money is not always to be happy—is it not the truth, _m’sieur_? We are a poor people, we others, _habitants_, and yet we are content. I am afraid to lose the happiness that I have, in that great city which I do not know. Here—I know. I am strong”—he pushed his big shoulders forward and smiled proudly as he felt their muscles. “I am capable and can work hard—I have planned my life, and I have the things which I wish. Why should I risk all that for—I do not know what? I thank the _m’sieur_”—he turned his blue glance on Esmond with a self-possession which the cosmopolitan might not have bettered. “I thank also my _m’sieur_ much for all his goodness to me.” He stood up, his shabby old hat crushed in his hand. “I thank madame and every one for their good wishes. I am content that madame and the _messieurs_ found pleasure in my poor whistling. Good night, madame—good night, _messieurs_.”

He had made his bow, as his peasant ancestors had been taught to make theirs in old France two hundred years before, with deep respect, with hat in hand and head bent. Here was a man who knew when he had enough. The question was closed. He was gone.

The next year it was in September that the Morgans asked me to their camp. Air like cooled wine breathed life into me as my canoe flew down Lac Lumière to the double paddle-beat of Godin and Josef, who had been sent to the club to fetch me. Sunshine lay over the lake and laughed back at us from the hills, where flecks of gold through green tree-tops told that the birches had caught the frost. One peculiarity of the woods is that at whatever time you go to them they persuade you at once, with a wordless, answerless logic, that it is their best season.

“This is better than August,” I called out to Walter and Margaret Morgan, standing smiling on the quay, while Bob kicked chips toward me in welcome.

“A thousand times better,” they called back together, and Bob stopped his gattling to respond classically:

“Golly, you bet!”

And it certainly was—till the next August at least. There were no flies, and one could fish without tar oil or citronella; each breath pumped energy into the lungs; the snap of the water made a man laugh and shriek aloud as he plunged into the lake in the morning with air at forty-five degrees; the fishing and hunting were at their best.

Down by the mouth of the little Rivière à la Poêle—the “Frying-pan River”—the trout were massing for the _frayage_, the spawning, and there in the cool of the evening, when the shallow water was dim in the low light—at about six o’clock, perhaps—they jumped like mad things for the fly. You had but to paddle across the lake and through the rushes, slower and slower, till the rustling against the boat slid into silence as you halted; you had but to pull loose a few feet of line with your left hand and to listen to the whir of it spinning out as you put your right wrist into the cast; you had but to drop the flies over the mystery of the brown water by the edge of the lily-pads—gingerly, it must be understood; cautiously, for this is the first cast for a year; carefully, man, with a tiny lift of the rod-tip as the flies fall so that the Parmachene Belle on the tail takes water first, and the Reuben Wood touches not too soon, and the black hand-fly skims with its snell clear of the pool. Such fitting small precautions, such pleasant proprieties, were all one had to observe at the mouth of the river “A la Poêle.”

The sweet water would meet your searching with a smile as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s—with the smile it had worn, careless of your existence, all these centuries; up the river you would hear the dull boom of the rapids, the nearer, busy monotone of the falling stream. The utter quiet of the woods, with its deep undertone of teeming life, would fold you in—there is nothing stiller. Peace and silence and the tranquil pool—only the steady swish of the line as you cast.

Suddenly a wild lashing and splashing and spraying; the bubble, bubble, bubble of broken water; a white and scarlet flashing that comes and goes where the black hand-fly holds taut to the water; a thrill and tug on your wrist that brings your heart to your mouth. You have struck automatically; he is on; you are playing your first fish of the season.

“_Pas trop fort_,” Godin remarks calmly from the stern; “not too hard, _m’sieur_. It is a big one.”

Probably, for the candidates, a presidential election is more exciting than this—certainly it lasts longer—yet I doubt very much if any quarter-hour of it carries more of a thrill. You feel Godin’s sense of the importance of the situation by the way he handles the boat. With light manœuvres of the paddle, not to disturb the pool too much, he works you, towing the fish, to a place where the water is clear and you can play his rushing lordship without fear of getting him tangled about lily-roots, and so pulling loose from the fly.

The fight is well on—it is the contest of a man’s brain, working with the awkward tools of a man’s muscles, in an unaccustomed situation, against a wonderful expert and gymnast in his own element. The outcome is always a doubtful one—it is a fair fight—that is where the thrill comes in. The long runs when you must give line with a swiftness beyond thinking; the lightning rushes toward the boat when your reel must work faster than your brain or you lose him; the lifting, the lowering of the rod that must be done by a sense acquired in many such battles, a sense come to be instinct more than reason; the whisper in the muscles that tells you not to pull him when he sulks; that tells you not to let him get line enough to shake free—all these phases and a hundred more which fishermen know were in that fight of mine on September ninth with my big record trout, down at the mouth of the Rivière à la Poêle. I won. I landed him, and he weighed five and a quarter pounds by the scales. It was my first fish of the season, and Godin was almost as pleased as I with this good beginning. We kept at it, of course, and we had what would have seemed good luck on other days, for a spotted fellow of two pounds, and three more of a pound and a half soon decorated the bottom of the boat. But the battle of the giants had led off; we had trapped the patriarch first. And, seeing this, and happy enough with our afternoon’s work as it was, Godin and I fell to talking.

He had crossed the pool now, and worked into the river, and was paddling slowly up it, where birch-trees hung over and met across brown running water, foam-spotted from rapids above. I cast at intervals, leisurely, as we floated up-stream, and the intermittent bright flight of the flies punctuated the guide’s clear-cut French sentences. A sudden thought of last year came to my mind.