“Here ENDETH the first lesson”
The stillness of a summer’s day in Prairie Land
has all the characteristics of music. That is
not so paradoxical as it seems. The effect of
some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the
senses, a suspension of motion and aggressive life;
to reduce existence to mere pulsation. It was
this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of
sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story.
The sounds that sprinkled the general stillness were
in themselves sleepy notes of the pervasive music
of somnolent nature—the sough of the pine
at the door, the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding
beat of the steam-thresher out of sight hard by, the
purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan as,
with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the
tale of a life as distant from that which she lived
as she was from Eve.
She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on;
it even seemed to her she was listening to a theme
beyond her sphere, like some shameless eavesdropper
at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once
or twice she looked at her mother and at the Young
Doctor, as though to reassure herself that she was
not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive
to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene
at the Logan Trial when a man was sentenced to death.
It was strangely magnetic, this tale of a man’s
existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time,
seemed only part of some mysterious machinery of life.
Once a dove swept down upon the window-sill, and,
peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a
small blue cloud into the wide and—as it
seemed—everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
There was nothing at all between themselves and the
far sky-line save little clumps of trees here and
there, little clusters of buildings and houses—no
visible animal life. Everything conspired to
give a dignity in keeping with the drama of failure
being unfolded in the commonplace home of the widow
Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity.
The engineer father had had tastes, and he had insisted
on plain, unfigured curtains and wallpaper and carpets,
when carpets were used; and though his wife had at
first protested against the unfigured carpets as more
difficult to keep clean and as showing the dirt too
easily, she had come to like the one-colour scheme,
and in that respect her home had an individuality rare
in her surroundings.
That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background;
for what her bright colouring would have been in the
midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes and “Axminsters,”
such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid,
mean, or incongruous surroundings that Crozier told
his tale; as would no doubt have been arranged by
a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting
of the story; and if it were not a true tale told
just as it happened.
