PROLOGUE

Trench had been fishing above Dixon’s mill. Dixon was gone from that shadowy deep wild of granite and cedar, having left the key of his cabin for Trench. But, after all, this is not the way to begin. I tell a tale of the twenty-eighth of June. June—but the proper start is neither Dixon nor brides nor the odour of roses; the proper start is a leaf of history.

On June 28, 323 B.C., Alexander of Macedon died, having quieted all the world except Macedon, which is not quiet yet. On June 28, 1389 A.D., the Serbian nation was crushed by the Turks at Kosovo. On June 28, 1891, the alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy was renewed. On June 28, 1908, the late Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had completed his preparations for annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary. On June 28, 1909, Austria was trying fifty-three Slavs for high treason. On June 28, 1910, the newly established Diet of Bosnia-Herzegovina decided that the proffered constitution did not suit the needs of the people, and adjourned for the annual day of Serbian sorrow.

It was on June 28, 1911, that Trench went fishing. On that day the German corvette Panther was setting out for Morocco to test the strength of the Triple Entente, and King George was opening the Royal Agricultural Show at Norwich. But on exactly that date, June 28, 1911, the ladyslippers burst into bloom, opening a still more royal show. This was on King [2]George’s loyal island of St. Joseph, between Superior and Huron. Because Trench went fishing on that day, and because of the trivial dear event that he plucked a ladyslipper, this tale came to be written.

He had whipped the brown stream far into the cedar uplands. At six o’clock his creel was full of ferns and fish, and it was time to quit. He felt some regret at leaving so good a stream, and imagined the orange tails of the survivors all pointing downstream in the deep pools, waving an insolent farewell. But he corrected that idle fancy. Trout are not insolent, and trout do not wave farewell.

Being very hungry, he built a tiny fire, broiled a half-pounder, ate the crisp flesh, and tossed the lacy skeleton away. It fell on a flat rock, where it looked like a fossil. It was no different from the skeleton of its millionth ancestor. The generations of trout had pulsed along without progress or meaning.

As Trench started back towards Encampment, a white-throated sparrow was asking some sort of heavenly question from the top of a charred tree. He left a thin, sweet query in the air, as if he suspected that the universe is a great unfinished adventure. So it struck Trench at first, till he reflected that it was all a matter of the chemistry of light. The song was inevitably started by sunshine and inevitably stopped by darkness.

As he stopped to listen, turning a lean cheek away from the level sun, Trench presumed that the thoughts of any white-throated girl were as automatic as those of the white-throated sparrow. The young physician—he was a specialist in the diseases of children—was determined to be impersonal.

For he had lost his father and mother in 1907, by the sinking of a ship. The court of inquiry had not been able to fix the blame, and certainly the ocean was not to blame. Oxygen and hydrogen are what they [3]are, and not some other thing. They are quite impersonal, and Trench was subduing his bitter heart to the quality of these lords.

Naturally he had found it hard to think impersonally of his little mother. The last time he saw her was at Genoa, as she was about to go on board. She had stood on the pier with a scarf fluttering around her neck like a bluebird. She had put her arms around his neck, and told him how proud she was of him. He had kissed her good-bye, not knowing that the atoms of her lips would presently fade forever from that sweet pattern.

There was a vain search for the bodies, and then Trench went quietly back to Chicago. In the spring of 1909, when he was appointed instructor at Lister, he built in Halsted Street, like an immigrant making a new start. It was in Halsted property that the elder Trench had made his first money—a part of the quarter million which now fell to his son.

In unobserved ways Trench proceeded to return the income of that inheritance to the Halsted region. In so doing he was aware of no motive. He was neither bestowing charity nor returning property. When he put antitoxin where it could be had within five minutes by any physician in certain wards, his one concern was to keep the fact out of the newspapers.

Trench had chosen pediatrics deliberately, because children would let him alone. I do not know whether his brooding should be called abnormal or not. But it was as uncommon as the death of parents is common. And it is uncommon that any man, year after year, should keep a rose burning before his mother’s picture in his bedroom.

As for marriage, the thought of it had dropped from him automatically. He was straight and alert and masculine, but the faces of dead mothers and dead children filled his brain. He was nine and twenty, and [4]scornfully clean. Immigrants poured into Halsted Street and bred there, and Trench worked hard to save the creatures bred. But he felt no desire to continue his own line. He saw too many children dying—as in the streets of a pillaged town.

Dusk gathered as he strode along, and a cricket chirped. He recollected that the female cricket eats a part of her mate after pairing. The phenomenon had its parallels in human life, but he must regard it impersonally.

The wood road dipped downward, and by the edge he noted a gleam of colour. He knew it for an orchid, a specimen of the showy ladyslipper. He cut the long stalk of springing leaves and looked at the great blossom. It seemed a bit of afterglow caught in the woodland. Yet how firmly it swung out, cunningly backed by four white wings, like bridal ribbons flaring. Some woman must have made the exquisite thing.

On second thought it was not exquisite. It was a mechanism of six parts. He saw the upper stamen—tongue-like, but not a tongue. He saw the pollen masses, and remembered how the first bee would lighten them and make them change position, so as to admit the second bee to the stigma. It was all automatic, and should remind him of nothing purposive. Yet inexorably it reminded him of Chicago. The first bee was like the envoy of the vice trust, the second was the ordinary libertine.

Against such natural forces he felt himself to be powerless. A vice commission had recently laid bare the facts, long known to Trench, but he had no faith that any good would come of it. He must learn to think of men and women as bees and orchids. He must not blame them. He must think vileness a matter of instinct, and instinct a matter of chemistry.

It was at this point, when his efforts to be impersonal seemed to be succeeding, that he was intruded [5]upon by persons. He heard a voice above him on the slope, and knew it for that of little Mildred, the daughter of his washerwoman. “If I was dead, Miss Edith, now if I was dead and going to heaven, I’d want some of them put on me to make me pretty.”

He did not catch what the other voice said in reply, but presently the cedars parted, and the two persons came into the path above him, with their hands full of such flowers as he had just tossed away. Mildred ran to meet him, while the lady stood there in the path. He reached out his hand to Mildred, but kept looking at the figure above him.

Fine balance, he thought to himself. It had required a great many vain repetitions of the human biped to produce a girl who could stand like that. She would make a good mother, and at forty she would be almost as slender as she was now.

Little Mildred marched him up the slope and introduced him in her own fashion to Miss Bridgman, who lived in Chicago the same as the doctor, and why didn’t he know her already?

“The blossoms are just opening,” said Edith Bridgman, “and it really seemed a pity to take so many.”

“They are exquisite mechanisms,” said Trench, forgetting that he had decided against the adjective. Then he added, “It would be hard to name a finer orchid.”

She did not answer at once, but stood looking at him. Then she slowly said, “They declare the glory of God in the wilderness.”

There was not much talking on the homeward way. At the trill of a notably insistent cricket, Edith Bridgman remarked that she had always wanted a cricket on the hearth. Trench said “Well,” and seemed about to discuss crickets, but ended by merely remarking that he wondered what was the key of the cricket’s song.

They came out at the brow of the steep hill and [6]stood looking down on the Straits of St. Mary, where a can buoy was fading and brightening, like the superficial daily routine of consciousness, on the surface of the deep swift stream. It was pretty dark now, and Trench saw to it that a neighbouring farmer took little Mildred home.

Then he himself took the lady home to the Jackson cottage, where he met her sister, Helena Drummond, and presented her with half his catch. Helena was the Wife of John the banker. Trench knew the firm of Drummond and Vevers well enough by hearsay. He knew that both the founders were Scotch, that it was now in the hands of the second generation, and that John lived in a comfortable West Side house built by his father. With Helena was her only child, Robert Ogden, a boy of eight. He learned later that an older brother of Robert had died.

As Trench was leaving, to cross to the American side, Edith Bridgman offered him a share of the flowers, and he took a few for Mrs. Jamison, the old lady who had mothered him during his vacations. Mrs. Jamison was honoured by every white man and Indian for fifty miles around, for in her veins ran noble blood of both races. She had taught Trench to call her Nokomis, the Ojibway word for grandmother. In turn she called him medicine man, Mushkekeewinini.

“Ah, you bring me the mokesin,” she exclaimed, catching the flowers to her breast. “But you must take back two and keep them—for the feet of your first child.” To humour her, Trench put the two in fresh water every day thereafter, till the blossoms paled. They did not wither, but remained toughly delicate in texture.

He had met Edith Bridgman the second evening after his own arrival. He always took his vacation early, to be ready for the stress of summer work, and there remained only ten days before he must return. [7]During these he made himself agreeable. Bobbie took to him at once, and together they visited Indian camps.

He rowed the Chicago women across the river and introduced them to Mrs. Jamison and Moira and Shane, and thereafter Edith and Helena went over almost daily. Helena was an ardent suffragist, and the old lady discussed the subject with an insight which astonished her. Helena did not know that in her girlhood Nokomis had stepped in and out of great London houses with as little self-consciousness as if she were in the wigamigs of her famous grandfather. “You are tired of being squaws, I suppose. It is a hateful word, and does not exist in the Ojibway language. With us a woman is equay—just a woman. But with us, too, women have sat in the councils. My dear, I shall call you council-woman, ‘Gegidoquay.’ And this girl who brings me sunlight every day I will call ‘Gizhegoquay,’ woman of the morning.”

On Sunday of that week, Potter, an unsuccessful little man who lived in an unwholesome little bay, came to report that Mildred was sick, and wanted to see the doctor and Miss Edith. They ran down in the Jackson launch, an old-fashioned naphtha affair, and Trench found the child suffering from injudicious feeding. Mrs. Potter, a tawny, fiercely maternal young woman, marvelled at the gentleness and swiftness with which the doctor made his examination, and the way the child clung to him. Mildred was the one thing in Mrs. Potter’s life. The cabin was poverty stricken.

On the way back Edith was full of questions about pediatrics, and managed to learn something of Trench’s surgical work, and the fact that a certain finger-tip was more useful to him than both eyes.

As they passed the point it blew a gale, and suddenly half the launch seemed to leap into flame. Something had happened to those open rows of naphtha jets. The cutoff was aft, and before Trench could [8]move, Edith had thrust her left hand and arm into the flame. She groped for the valve that supplied the fuel, and found it and closed it. She had saved Trench’s surgical finger, and scarred herself for life.

When he had extinguished the remaining fire, Trench turned to the victim, and she held up her burnt hand. Instantly there rushed upon him a passionate desire to press it to his lips, and he was surprised at the degree of self-control he had suddenly to exert.

But the impulse passed, and he stripped off his flannel coat-shirt and ripped it into bandages. The girl rocked back and forth to ease the anguish, but she joked as if it were all a merry game. She should never want to wear a short-sleeved dress again, she said, but she thought short sleeves becoming to the doctor, who was now poising above her in the tossing boat like a sea gull. Trench unscrewed the oil cup from the engine, anointed the wounds gently, and swathed hand and arm. Never had he done a quicker or neater job, but he would much rather have given his own hand for amputation. That night in a dream he kissed the injured hand, and caught her to his breast. He coldly charged up the dream to physiological profit and loss.

A week later he strapped his suitcase, helped Shane Jamison carry down his trunk, and went back to make sure that he had forgotten nothing. The two cypripediums stood in the old bit of lustre ware that Nokomis had lent him. He was about to toss them out the window when another insane impulse mastered him, and he hid them in his long pocket-book.

Half an hour later he was standing on the deck of the little mail steamer. Everybody had come to see him off. Even Mrs. Jamison had got herself into a canoe, and there she sat with a paddle in her hand, pretending that her son needed help.

“Good-bye, Nokomis,” called Trench softly, as he leaned over the rail.

[9]

“Good-bye, Mushkekeewinini,” she answered tremulously, like the secret voice of all the woods bidding a lover farewell.

He gazed down at the swart and noble old face, and thought of his little mother, tossing somewhere with tangle and with shells. Once more he leaned down and called. “Send for me, dear, if you need me.”

The boat swung away, and he lifted his hat to all the good friends on the pier. But what lingered in his gaze was something that fluttered from a right hand—the other being still in a sling. Edith’s handkerchief rippled in the brilliant northern air, an evanescent patch of light against the eternal shadow of the woods. So she herself had gleamed across the shadow of his life. Well, he had not made the mistake of offering her that shadow to live in.

But even as he reasoned, he wished that she were there beside him on the deck, that he might throw about her an arm which would neither press her nor release her till he had kissed all that refinement of feature. He walked forward and stood in the bow. The fresh breeze smote him in the face like a restorative, and he vowed that he would never set foot in Drummond’s house, where she lived, an orphan like himself.

He thought to end it so. But Trench was the slave of memory, the memory to which many a child owed its life. During that winter he never saw her, and yet the thing was happening to him. The infection was in every vein. His unwilling blood was perfumed with her. The dream he had suffered at Encampment began to recur. Once more the launch would spring aflame, and once more she would hold up her burnt hand, like a child, to be kissed. He would catch her to his breast—when instantly the boat would disappear and they would drift side by side on a black ocean—where steamers called to each other wistfully. She seemed [10]a patch of phosphorescence, and he another, impotent phosphorescence of reason on an ocean of instinct.

The parting request which he had made to Mrs. Jamison was earnestly meant and seriously taken. In the dead of winter he was not surprised to receive a wire from Miss Moira: “Mother has pneumonia. We must not be selfish, but she wants you to know.” Trench had a cold, but he caught the first train to Sault Ste. Marie, was met next day by Shane Jamison with a sleigh, and sped twenty miles down the frozen straits under a lowering sky. Late in the afternoon, far ahead of them, something crossed the ice like a sinister thought. “Timber wolf,” said Shane.

He frowned as his gaze followed it. “Last night,” he said, “I heard a knocking at the back door, and opened, and there was no one there. That is what I heard the night before my father died. It was his call.”

After warming his hands, Trench went up to the patient’s room, and found the windows admitting plenty of fresh air. Mrs. Jamison was propped on pillows, breathing rapidly, and coughing a little. The massive, prophetic old face lighted up.

“I knew you would come, and the tribes in Chicago must spare you, because I have something to say to you for their good.”

Trench kissed her, regardless of the risk, and made his examination. The red count and white count were satisfactory, and there was some temperature, a fact at which he was rather pleased than otherwise. The heart was not so good.

“Have you any hopes that I am going to get well? I know that what you say will be the truth.”

“Yes, Nokomis. Good hopes.”

“I would like to live another year,” she said, “for two reasons. I want to eat huckleberries again. I want to eat meenin and milk, but mostly I want to see [11]you married. You brought your Gizhegoquay to see me.”

“Not mine, Nokomis,—and I am afraid that talking will tire you.”

“I have eyes, my son, and I looked into yours. I still have eyes, and down the years there are children waiting for the right parents.”

Trench was silent.

“Ah,” she said, “I feel better, now that I have told you. I feel well enough to die. I am a foolish old Indian, who needs to die and learn something. I want to know why Gizhe Manido had to let his son die on the cross. I want to know why it was necessary to kill so many children when my grandfather drove the Sioux out of this country. In my heart there is a birch bark scroll with many questions to ask in heaven. I’ll find my husband, and my two little boys, and we’ll go to get our answers. There’ll be some sort of place where He will answer—not one by one, for there are millions in the class, all hearts together. There are millions in the class, but only One to answer. He’ll stand there in a seamless robe with light and a smile.”

Trench seemed to choke as he listened. Strange world of the imagination—illusions exhaled by the human brain so soon to be resolved into silence and the winds—why should it exist at all? And why should it tear so at his heart strings? He could not say, but he must try to think these matters out, in physiological terms.

He rose now, and insisted that she must sleep. He administered the heart stimulant, sent Miss Moira to bed, and settled Shane on the couch downstairs in the living room.

The birch snapped in the fireplace, and he remembered the Ojibway tradition that when the hearth burns bright, the spirits of the children who have died are laughing there. But the wind howled outside, and a snowstorm was in progress. It must have been eleven [12]o’clock when there came a knocking. He heard Shane spring to his feet and go to open the door, for Shane had no fear of ghosts, although he heartily believed in them.

Nokomis was resting quietly, and Trench slipped downstairs. He saw the muffled form of little Potter, standing in snowshoes. Under his arm he carried a second pair, and in his hand a lantern.