Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
The rest of the first day was spent in packing and lugging first the
cargoes and then the canoes up through thickets and over boulders and
across stretches of reindeer moss for the better part of two miles to a
camping ground about half-way up the rapids. Marjorie and Trafford tried
to help with the carrying, but this evidently shocked and distressed the
men too much, so they desisted and set to work cutting wood and
gathering moss for the fires and bedding for the camp. When the iron
stove was brought up the man who had carried it showed them how to put
it up on stakes and start a fire in it, and then Trafford went to the
river to get water, and Marjorie made a kind of flour cake in the
frying-pan in the manner an American woman from the wilderness had once
shown her, and boiled water for tea. The twilight had deepened to night
while the men were still stumbling up the trail with the last two
canoes.
It gave Marjorie a curiously homeless feeling to stand there in the open
with the sunset dying away below the black scrubby outlines of the
treetops uphill to the northwest, and to realize the nearest roof was
already a day's toilsome journey away. The cool night breeze blew upon
her bare face and arms--for now the insects had ceased from troubling
and she had cast aside gloves and veil and turned up her sleeves to
cook--and the air was full of the tumult of the rapids tearing seaward
over the rocks below. Struggling through the bushes towards her was an
immense, headless quadruped with unsteady legs and hesitating paces, two
of the men carrying the last canoe. Two others were now assisting
Trafford to put up the little tent that was to shelter her, and the
fifth was kneeling beside her very solemnly and respectfully cutting
slices of bacon for her to fry. The air was very sweet, and she wished
she could sleep not in the tent but under the open sky.
It was queer, she thought, how much of the wrappings of civilization had
slipped from them already. Every day of the journey from London had
released them or deprived them--she hardly knew which--of a multitude of
petty comforts and easy accessibilities. The afternoon toil uphill
intensified the effect of having clambered up out of things--to this
loneliness, this twilight openness, this simplicity.
The men ate apart at a fire they made for themselves, and after Trafford
and Marjorie had supped on damper, bacon and tea, he smoked. They were
both too healthily tired to talk very much. There was no moon but a
frosty brilliance of stars, the air which had been hot and sultry at
mid-day grew keen and penetrating, and after she had made him tell her
the names of constellations she had forgotten, she suddenly perceived
the wisdom of the tent, went into it--it was sweet and wonderful with
sprigs of the Labrador tea-shrub--undressed, and had hardly rolled
herself up into a cocoon of blankets before she was fast asleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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