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Jack London

The Marriage of Lit-lit

Zamążpójście Lit-Lit

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THE MARRIAGE OF LIT-LIT

When John Fox came into a country where whisky freezes solid and may be used as a paper-

weight for a large part of the year, he came without the ideals and illusions that usually hamper

the progress of more delicately nurtured adventurers. Born and reared on the frontier fringe of

the United States, he took with him into Canada a primitive cast of mind, an elemental

simplicity and grip on things, as it were, that insured him immediate success in his new career.

From a mere servant of the Hudson Bay Company, driving a paddle with the voyageurs and

carrying goods on his back across the portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and took charge

of a trading post at Fort Angelus.

Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a native wife, and, by reason of

the connubial bliss that followed, he escaped the unrest and vain longings that curse the days

of more fastidious men, spoil their work, and conquer them in the end. He lived contentedly,

was at single purposes with the business he was set there to do, and achieved a brilliant record

in the service of the Company. About this time his wife died, was claimed by her people, and

buried with savage circumstance in a tin trunk in the top of a tree.

Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he journeyed with them

still deeper into the vastness of the North-West Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he

took charge of a new post in a more important fur field. Here he spent several lonely and

depressing months, eminently disgusted with the unprepossessing appearance of the Indian

maidens, and greatly worried by his growing sons who stood in need of a mother’s care. Then

his eyes chanced upon Lit-lit.

“Lit-lit—well, she is Lit-lit,” was the fashion in which he despairingly described her to his chief

clerk, Alexander McLean.

McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing—“not dry behind the ears yet,” John Fox

put it—to take to the marriage customs of the country. Nevertheless he was not averse to the

Factor’s imperilling his own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an ominous attraction

himself for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to clinch his own soul’s safety by seeing her married

to the Factor.

Nor is it to be wondered that McLean’s austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in

the sunshine of Lit-lit’s eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive

face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. “Lit-lit,” so called from her fashion,

even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being

inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she darted and danced about.

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