Coming now to the site he had chosen, he stood for a moment casting an
eye over the scene of his undertaking. The longer he looked at it the
more of an undertaking it seemed. He had heard Lachlan speak of two men
felling trees and putting up a sixteen-foot cabin complete from
foundation to ridgelog in three days. He did not see how it could be
done. He was thoroughly incredulous of that statement. But he did expect
to roof in that church before the snow fell. Its walls would be
consecrated with sweat and straining muscles. It would be a concrete
accomplishment. The instinct to create, the will to fashion and mold, to
see something take form under his hands, had begun to stir in him.
Axe in hand, he set to work. He had learned the first lesson of manual
labor--that a man cannot swing his arms and breathe deeply if his body
is swaddled in clothes. His coat came off and his vest and his hat, all
slung across a fallen tree. Presently, as he warmed up, his outer shirt
joined the discarded garments.
Stripped for action in a literal sense he did not in the least conform
to the clerical figure. He was the antithesis of asceticism, of
gentleness, of spiritual and scholarly repose. He was simply a big man
lustily chopping, red in the face from his exertions, beads of sweat
standing out on brow and cheek, his sturdy neck all a-glisten with
moisture. Under his thin, short-sleeved undershirt his biceps rippled
and played. The flat muscle-bands across his broad chest slackened and
tightened as his arms swung. For Mr. Thompson had been fashioned by
Nature in a generous mood. He was not a heroic figure, but he was big
and built as a man should be, deep in the chest, flat-backed, very
straight when he stood erect. He had escaped the scholarly stoop. If his
muscles were soft they were in a fair way to become hardened.
He was more or less unconscious of all this. He had never thought of his
body as being strong or well-shaped, because he had never used it, never
pitted his strength against the strength of other men, never worked,
never striven. It had never been necessary for him to do so. He had been
taught that pride of that sort was sinful, and he had accepted the
teaching rather too literally.
Already a curious sort of change was manifesting in him. His blue eyes
had a different expression than one would have observed in them
during--well, during the period of his theological studies, shall we
say, when the state of his soul and the state of other people's souls
was the only consideration. One would have been troubled to make out any
pronounced personality then. He was simply a studious young man with a
sanctimonious air. But now that the wind and the sun had somewhat turned
his fair skin and brought out a goodly crop of freckles, now that the
vigor of his movements and the healthy perspiration had rumpled up his
reddish-brown hair and put a wave in it, he could--standing up on his
log--easily have passed for a husky woodsman; until some experienced eye
observed him make such sorry work of a woodsman's task. He had acquired
no skill with the axe. That takes time. But he made vigorous endeavor,
and he was beginning to feel strength flow through him, to realize it as
a potential blessing. Now that the soreness was working out of his
sinews it gave him a peculiar elation to lay hold of a log-end, to heave
until his arms and back grew rigid, and to feel the heavy weight move.
That exultant sense of physical power was quite new and rather puzzling
to him. He could not understand why he enjoyed chopping logs and moving
them about, and yet was prone to grow moody, to be full of disquieting
perplexities when he sat down to think.