VII
TheCharonsped straight north, out of the Sound, through the inside passage. Days were bright; skies were clear, displaying at night a marvelous intricacy of stars; the seas glittered from the kindly September sun. They put in at Vancouver the night following their departure from Seattle, loaded on certain heavy stores, and continued their way in the lea of Vancouver Island.
Straight north, day after day! To McNab, a man who had cruised ten years on Alaskan waters, the air began to feel like home. It was crisp, surging cool in the lungs, fragrant with balsam from the wooded islands. Already Ned had begun to readjust some of his ideas in regard to the North. It was no longer easy to believe that his father had exaggerated its beauty and its appeal, its desolation and its vastness. It was a strange thing for a man used to cities to go day upon day without seeing scarcely a village beside the sea, a single human being other than those of his own party. Here was one place, it seemed, that the hand of man had touched but lightly if at all.
The impression grew the farther north he went. Ever there was less sign of habitation upon the shore. The craft passed through narrow channels between mountains that cropped up from the sea, it skirted wooded islands, it passed forgotten Indian villages where the totem poles stood naked and weather-stained before the forsaken homes of the chiefs. The glasses brought out a wonderland scene just beyond the reach of their unaided sight,—glacier and snow-slide, lofty peaks and water-falls. The mystic, brooding spirit of the North was already over them.
They had touched at Ketchikan, the port of entry to Alaska, and thence headed almost straight west, across the gulf of Alaska and toward the far-stretching end of the Alaskan Peninsula. During these days they were far out of sight of land, surrounded only by an immeasurable ocean that rolled endlessly for none to see or hear.
They were already far beyond the limits of ordinary tourist travel. The big boats plied as far as Anchorage at the head of Cook Inlet—to the north and east of them now—but beyond that point the traffic was largely that of occasional coastal traders, most of them auxiliary schooners of varying respectability. They seemed to have the ocean almost to themselves, never to see the tip of a sail on the horizon, or a fisherman’s craft scudding into port. And the solitude crept into the spirits of the passengers of theCharon.
It became vaguely difficult to keep up a holiday atmosphere. It was increasingly hard to be gay, to fight down certain inner voices that had hitherto been stifled. Some way, life didn’t seem quite the same, quite the gay dream it had hitherto been. And yet this immeasurable vista of desolate waters—icy cold for all the sunlight that kissed the upreaching lips of the waves—was some way like a dream too. The brain kept clear enough, but it was all somewhat confusing to an inner brain, a secret self that they had scarcely been aware of before. It was hard to say which was the more real,—the gay life they had left, the laughter of which was still an echo in their ears, or these far-stretching wastes of wintry waters.
They couldn’t help but be thoughtful. Realities went home to them that they had no desire to admit. A fervent belief in their own sophistication had been their dominant point of view, a disillusionment and a realism that was the tone of their generation, denying all they could not see or hear, holding themselves superciliously aloof from that gracious wonder and simplicity that still blesses little children; but here was something that was inscrutably beyond them. They couldn’t laugh it away. They couldn’t cast it off with a phrase of cheap slang; demeaning it in order to hold firm to their own philosophy of Self. Here was something that shook their old attitude of self-love and self-sufficiency to its foundations. They thought they knew life, these three; they thought they were bigger than life, that they had mastered it and found it out and stripped all delusions from it, but now their unutterable conceit, the pillar of their lives, was threatening to fall. This sunlit sea was too big for them: too big and too mighty and too old.
The trouble with Ned’s generation was that it was a godless generation: the same evil that razed Babylon to the dust. Ned and his kind had come to be sufficient unto themselves. They had lost the wonder and fear of life, and that meant nothing less than the loss of their wonder and fear of the great Author of life. To these, life had been a game that they thought they had mastered. They had laughed to scorn the philosophies that a hundred generations of nobler men had built up with wondering reverence. Made arrogant by luxury and ease, they knew of nothing too big for them, no mystery that their contemptuous gaze could not penetrate, no wonder that their reckless hands could not unveil. They were drunk with their own glories, and the ultimate Source of all things had no place in their philosophies or their thoughts. It was true that churches flourished among them, that Charity received her due; but the old virile faith, the reverent wonder, the mighty urge that has achieved all things that have been worth achieving were cold and dead in their hearts. But out here in this little, wind-blown craft, surrounded by an immensity of desolation beyond the power of their minds to grasp, it was hard to hold to their old complacency. Their old philosophies were barrenly insufficient, and they couldn’t repel an ever deepening sense of awe. The wind, sweeping over them out of the vastness, was a new voice, striking the laughter from their lips and instilling a coldness that was almost fear in their warm, youthful blood. The sun shone now, but soon vast areas, not far off, would be locked tight with ice; never the movement of a wave, never the flash of a sea-bird’s wing over the wastes; and the thought sobered them and perhaps humbled them a little too. Sometimes, alone on the deck at night, Ned was close to the dearest reality, the most profound discovery that could possibly touch his life: that the dreadful spirit of God moved upon the face of these desolate waters, no less than, as is told in Genesis, at creation’s dawn.
Everything would have been different if they had come in a larger boat, for instance, one of the great liners that plied between Seattle and Anchorage. In that case, likely they would have had no trouble in retaining their old point of view. The brooding tone of the North would have passed them by; the journey could still have remained a holiday instead of the strange, wandering dream that it was. The reason was simply that on a liner they would not have broken all ties with their old life. There would have been games and dancing, the service of menials, social intercourse and all the superficialities and pretenses that had until now composed their lives. Their former standards, the attitudes from which they regarded life, would have been unaltered. There would have been no isolation, and thus no darkening of their moods, no haunting uneasiness that could not be named or described, no whispering voices heard but dimly out of the sea. They could have remained in their own old ramparts of callousness and scorn. But here they were alone,—lost and far on an empty sea, under an empty sky.
There was such a little group of them, only eight in all. The ship was a mere dot in the expanse of blue. Around them endlessly lay the sea, swept by unknown winds, cursed by the winter’s cold, like death itself in its infinity and its haunting fear. The life they had left behind was already shadowed and dim: the farewell shouts, the laughter, the gaiety, the teeming crowds that moved and were never still were all like something imagined, unspeakably far off. Only the sea and the sky were left, and the craft struggling wearily, ever farther into the empty North.
Lenore found herself oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Realities were getting home to her, and she was afraid of them. It would have been wiser not to come, yet she couldn’t have told why. The launch was wholly comfortable; she was already accustomed to the cramped quarters. The men of the crew were courteous, Ned the same devoted lover as always. The thing was more an instinct with her: such pleasure as the trip offered could not compensate for an obscure uneasiness, a vague but ominous shadow over her mood and heart that was never lifted. Perhaps a wiser and secret self within the girl, a subconsciousness which was wise with the knowledge of the ages before ever her being emerged from the germ plasm was even now warning her to turn back. It knew her limitations; also it knew the dreadful, savage realm she had dared to penetrate. The North would have no mercy for her if she were found unworthy.
Perhaps in her heart she realized that she represented all that was the antithesis of this far northern domain. She was the child of luxury and ease: the tone and spirit of these wintry seas were travail and desolation. She was the product of a generation that knew life only as a structure that men’s civilization had built; out here was life itself, raw and naked, stripped and bare. She was lawless, undisciplined, knowing no code but her own desires; all these seas and the gray fog-laden shores they swept were in the iron grip of Law that went down to the roots of time. She had never looked beyond the surface of things; the heart that pulsed in the breast of this wintry realm lay so deep that only the most wise and old, devotees to nature’s secrets, could ever hear it beat. She had the unmistakable feeling that, in an unguarded moment, she had blundered into the camp of an enemy. Ever she discerned a malevolence in the murmur of the wind, a veritable threat in the soft voices of the night.
The nights, her innate sense of artistry told her, were unspeakably beautiful. She had never seen such stars before. They were so large, so white, and yet so unutterably aloof. Sometimes the moon rose in a splash of silver, and its loveliness on the far seas was a thing that words couldn’t reach. Yet Lenore did not like things she could not put in words. For all their beauty those magic nights dismayed and disquieted her. They too were of the realities, and for all her past attitude of sophistication, she found that realism was the one thing she could not and dared not accept. Such realities as these, the wide-stretching seas and the infinity of stars, were rapidly stripping her of her dearest delusions; and with them, the very strongholds of her being. Heretofore she had placed her faith in superficialities, finding strength for her spirit and bolstering up her self-respect with such things as pride of ancestry, social position, a certain social attitude of recklessness that she thought became her, and most of all by refusing to believe that life contained any depth that she had not plumbed, any terrors that she dared not brave, any situation that she could not meet and master. But here these things mattered not at all. Neither ancestry nor social position could save her should the winter cold, hinted at already in the bitter frost of the dawns, swoop down and find her unprotected. Her own personal charm would not fight for her should she fall overboard into the icy waters. Here was a region where recklessness could very easily mean death; and where life itself was suddenly revealed utterly beyond her ken. But there was no turning back. Every hour theCharonbore her farther from her home.
Mrs. Hardenworth, whose habits of thought were more firmly established, was only made irritable and petulant by the new surroundings. Never good company except under the stimulation of some social gathering, she was rapidly becoming something of a problem to Ned and Lenore. She was irritable with the crew, on the constant verge of insult to Bess, forecasting disaster for the entire expedition. Unlike Bess, she had never been disciplined to meet hardship and danger; her only resource was guile and her only courage was recklessness; so now she tried to overcome her inner fears with a more reckless attitude toward life. It was no longer necessary for Ned and Lenore to seek the shelter of the pilot house for their third whisky-and-soda. She was only too glad to take it with them. More than once the dinner hour found her glassy-eyed and almost hysterical, only a border removed from actual drunkenness. Never possessing any true moral strength or real good breeding, a certain abandon began to appear in her speech. And they had not yet rounded the Alaskan Peninsula into Bering Sea.
To Ned, the long north and westward journey had been even more a revelation. He also knew the fear, the disillusionment, a swift sense of weakness when before he had been perfectly sure in his own strength; but there was also a more complex reaction,—one that he could not analyze or put into words. He couldn’t call it happiness. It wasn’t that, unless the mood that follows the hearing of wonderful music is also happiness. Perhaps that was the best comparison: the passion he felt was something like the response made to great music. There had been times at the opera, when all conditions were exactly favorable, that he had felt the same, and once when he had heard Fritz Kreisler play Handel’s “Largo.” It was a strange reaching and groping, rather than happiness. It was a stir and thrill that touched the most secret chords of his being.
He felt it most at night when the great, white northern stars wheeled through the heavens. It was good to see them undulled by smoke; they touched some side of him that had never been stirred into life before. At such times the sea was lost in mystery.
The truth was that Ned, by the will of the Red Gods, was perceiving something of the real spirit of the North. A sensitive man to start with, he caught something of its mystery and wonder of which, as yet, Lenore had no glimpse. And the result was to bring him to the verge of a far-reaching discovery: that of his own weakness.
He had never admitted weakness before. He had always been so sure of himself, so complacent, so self-sufficient. But curiously these things were dying within him. He found himself doubting, for the first time, the success of this northern adventure. Could he cope with the realities that were beginning to press upon him? Would not this northern wilderness show him up as the weakling he was?
For the first time in his life Ned Cornet knew what realism was. He supposed, in his city life, that he had been a realist: instead he had only been a sophist and a mocker in an environment that was never real from dawn to darkness. He had read books that he had acclaimed among his young friends as masterpieces of realism—usually works whose theme and purpose seemed to be a bald-faced portrayal of sex—but now he saw that their very premise was one of falsehood. Here were the true realities,—unconquerable seas and starry skies and winds from off the waste places.
Unlike Lenore, Ned’s regrets were not that he had ever launched forth upon the venture. Rather he found himself regretting that he was not better fitted to contend with it. Perhaps, after all, his father had been right and he had been wrong. For the first time in his life Ned felt the need of greater strength, of stronger sinews.
What if his father had told the truth, and that strict trials awaited him here. It was no longer easy to disbelieve him. Almost any disaster could fall upon him here, in these wastes of sunlit water, in the very shadow of polar ice. The sun itself had lost its warmth. It slanted down upon them from far to the south, and it seemed to be beguiling them, with its golden beauty on the waters, into some deadly trap that had been set for them still farther north. It left Ned some way apprehensive and dismayed. He wished he hadn’t been so sure of himself, that he had taken greater pains, in his wasted years, to harden and train himself. Perhaps he was to be weighed in the balance, and it was increasingly hard to believe that he would not be found wanting.
In such a mood he recalled his father’s words regarding that dread realm of test and trial that lay somewhere beyond the world: “some bitter, dreadful training camp for those that leave this world unfitted to go on to a higher, better world.” He had scorned the thought at first, but now he could hardly get it out of his mind. It suggested some sort of an analogy with his present condition. These empty seas were playing tricks on his imagination; he could conceive that the journey of which his father had spoken might not be so greatly different than this. There would be the same desolation, the same nearness of the stars, the emptiness and mystery, the same sense of gathering, impending trial and stress. The name of the craft was theCharon! The thought chilled him and dismayed him.
For all his boasted realism, Ned Cornet had never got away from superstition. Man is still not far distant from the Cave and the Squatting Place, and superstition is a specter from out the dead centuries that haunts all his days. The coincidence that their craft, plying through these deathly waters, should bear such a name as theCharonsuddenly suggested a dark possibility to Ned. All at once this man, heretofore so sure, so self-sufficient, so incredulous of anything except his own continued glory and happiness and life, was face to face with the first fear—the simple, primitive fear of death.
Was that his fate at the journey’s end? Not mere trial, mere hardship and stress and adventure, but uncompromising death! Was he experiencing a premonition? Was that training camp soon to be a reality, as terribly real as these cold seas and this sky of stars, instead of a mere figment of an old man’s childish fancy?
The thought troubled and haunted him, but it proved to be the best possible influence for the man himself. For the first time in his life Ned Cornet was awake. He had been dreaming before: for the first time he had wakened tolife. Fear, disaster, the dreadful omnipotence of fate were no longer empty words to him: they were stern and immutable realities. He knew what the wolf knows, when he howls to the winter moon from the snow-swept ridge: that he was a child in the hands of Powers so vast and awful that the sublimest human thought could not even reach to them! He could see, dimly as yet but unmistakably, the shadow of that travail that haunts men’s days from the beginning to the end.
His father’s blood, and in some degree his father’s wisdom, was beginning to manifest itself in him. It was only a whispered voice as yet, wholly to be disregarded in the face of too great temptation, yet nevertheless it was the finest and most hopeful thing in his life. And it came particularly clear one still, mysterious night, shortly after the dinner hour, as he faced the North from the deck of theCharon.
The schooner’s auxiliary engines had pumped her through Unimak Pass by now, the passage between Unimak and Akun Islands, and now she had launched forth into that wide, western portal of the Arctic,—Bering Sea. Still the wonderful succession of bright days had endured, no less than marvelous, along the mist-swept southern shore of the peninsula, but now the brisk, salty wind from the northwest indicated an impending weather change. It had been a remarkably clear and windless day, and the night that had come down, so swiftly and so soon, was of strange and stirring beauty. The stars had an incredible luster; the sea itself was of an unnamed purple, marvelously deep,—such a color as scientists might find lying beyond the spectrum. And Ned’s eyes, to-night, were not dulled by the effects of strong drink.
For some reason that he himself could not satisfactorily explain he hadn’t partaken of his usual afternoon whiskies-and-sodas. He simply wasn’t in a drinking mood, steadfastly refusing to partake. Lenore, though she had never made it a point to encourage Ned’s drinking habits, could not help but regard the refusal as in some way a slight to herself, and was correspondingly downcast and irritable. Wholly out of sorts, she had let him go to the deck alone.
The night’s beauty swept him, touching some realm of his spirit deep and apart from his mere love of pleasing visual image. His imagination was keenly alive, and he had a distinct feeling that the North had a surprise in store for him to-night. Some stress and glory was impending: what he did not know.
Facing over the bow he suddenly perceived a faint silver radiance close to the horizon. His first impression was that the boat had taken a south-easternly course, and this argent gleam was merely the banner of the rising moon. Immediately he knew better: except by the absolute disruption of cosmic law, the moon could not rise for at least four hours. He knew of no coast light anywhere in the region, and it was hard to believe that he had caught the far-off glimmer of a ship’s light. Seemingly such followers of the sea had been left far behind them.
But as he watched the light grew. His own pulse quickened. And presently a radiant streamer burst straight upward like a rocket, fluttered a moment, and died away.
A strange thrill and stir moved through the intricacy of his nerves. He knew now what this light portended; it was known to every wayfarer in the North, yet the keenest excitement took hold of him. It moved him more than any painted art had ever done, more than any wonderful maze of color and light that a master stage director could effect. The streamer shot up again, more brightly colored now, and then a great ball of fire rolled into the sky, exploded into a thousand flying fragments, and left a sea of every hue in the spectrum in its wake.
“The Northern Lights!” he told himself. A quiver of exultation passed over him.
There could be no mistake. This was the radiance, the glory that the Red Gods reserve for those who seek the far northern trails. Ever the display increased in wonder and beauty. The streamers were whisking in all directions now, meeting with the effect of collision in the dome of the sky, remaining there to shiver and gleam with incredible beauty; the surging waves of light spread ever farther until, at times, the sky was a fluttering canopy of radiance.
He thought of calling Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth; but some way the idea slipped out of his mind. In a moment he was too deep in his own mood even to remember that they existed. But not only his exterior world faded from his consciousness. For the moment he forgothimself; and with it the old self-love and self-conceit that had pervaded every moment of his past life, colored all his views, and shaped the ends of his destiny. All that was left was that incredible sky and its weird, reflected glamor in the sea.
This wasAurora Borealis, never to be known, in its full glory, to those that shun the silent spaces of the North. Suddenly he felt glad that he was here. The moment, by measure of some queer balance beyond his sight, was worth all the rest of his past life put together. Great trials might lie ahead, temptations might tear him down, his own weakness and folly of the past might lay him low in some woeful disaster of the future; yet he was glad that he had come! It was the most profound, the most far-reaching moment of his life.
Always he had lived close to and bound up in a man-made civilization. In his heart he had worshipped it, rather than the urge and the inspiration that had made it possible: he had always judged the Thing rather than the Source. But for the first time in his life he was close to nature’s heart. He had seen a glory, at nature’s whim, that transcended the most glorious work of man ever beheld in his native city. He was closer to redemption than at any time in his life.
A few feet distant on the deck Bess’s eyes turned from the miracle in the skies to watch the slowly growing light in Ned Cornet’s face. It was well enough for him to find his inspiration in the majesty of nature. Bess was a woman, and that meant that man that is born of woman was her work and her being. She turned her eyes from God to behold this man.
And it was well for her that Lenore was not near enough to see her face in the wan, ghostly radiance of the Northern Lights. Her woman’s intuition would have been quick to lay bare the secret of the girl’s wildly leaping heart. Bess’s eyes were suddenly lustrous with a light no less wonderful than that which played in glory in the sky. Her face was swiftly unutterably beautiful in its tenderness and longing.
And had she not fought against this very thing? She had not dreamed for a moment but that she had conquered and shut away the appeal that this man made to her heart. It would have been easy enough to conquer if he had only remained what he had been,—selfish, reckless, self-loving, inured to his tawdry philosophy of life. But to-night a new strength had come into his face. Perhaps it would be gone to-morrow, but to-night his manhood had come to him. And she couldn’t resist it. It swept her heart as the wind sweeps a sea-bird through the sky.
VIII
Beforeever that long night was done, clouds had overswept the sky and a cold rain was beating upon the sea. It swept against the ports of the little craft and brought troubled dreams to Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth. Bess, who knew life better than these two, to whom the whole journey had been a joyous adventure, did not wholly escape a feeling of uneasiness and dismay. At this latitude and season the weather was little to be trusted.
The drizzle changed to snow that lay white on the deck and hissed softly in the water. As yet, however, it was nothing to fear. Snow was common in these latitudes in September. The sudden break of winter might lead to really serious consequences—perhaps the unpleasant prospect of being ice-bound in some island harbor—but in all probability real winter was still several weeks distant. The scene looked wintry enough to Lenore and Ned, however. The air and the sky and the sea seemed choked with snow.
Lenore found herself wishing she had not been so contemptuous of the North. Perhaps it would have been better not to have taken so many worn-out dresses to trade, but to have filled her chests with woolens and furs. Even in her big coat she couldn’t stay warm on the deck. The wind was icy out of the Arctic seas.
Once more the craft plied among islands; but now that they had passed into Bering Sea the character of the land had changed. These were not the dull-green, wooded isles met with on first entering Alaskan waters. Wild and inhospitable though the latter had seemed, they were fairy bowers compared to these. Nor did the mossy mainland continue to show a marvelous beryl green through mist.
In the first place, even the prevailing color scheme had undergone an ominous change from blue to gray. The sun kissed the sea no more: under the sifting snow it stretched infinitely bleak and forbidding. Gray were the clouds in the sky that had been the purest, most serene blue. And now even the islands had lost their varied tints.
Evergreen forests almost always look blue at a distance,—bluish-green when the sun is bright, bluish-black under clouds. But these voyagers saw, with a dim, haunting dread, that the forests mostly had been left far behind them. The islands they passed now were no longer heavily wooded; only a few of the sheltered valleys and the south slopes of the hills bore thickets of stunted aspen, birch, and Sitka spruce. Mostly these too were gray, gray as granite, merely a different shade of gray from that of the sea from which they rose.
The truth was that these islands were far-scattered fragments of the Barrens, those great wastes of moss and tundra between the timber belt and the eternal ice cap of the pole. Largely treeless, wind-swept, mostly unpeopled except for a few furtive creatures of the wild, they seemed no part of the world that Ned and Lenore had previously known. They were all so gray, so bleak, swept with an unearthly sadness, silent except for the weary beat of waves upon their craggy shores.
Mostly the islands were mere snow-swept mountains protruding above the waters, at a distance seemingly as gray as the rest of the toneless landscape. Only the less mountainous of the islands had human occupants, and these were in small, far-scattered Indian villages. Seemingly they had reached the dim, gray limits of the world: surely they must soon turn back. Indeed, these were the Skopins, the group that comprised Ned’s first trading ground, and Muchinoff Island, the northern-most land in the group and the point selected as his first stopping place, from which he would begin the long homeward journey from island to island, was only a few days’ journey beyond.
Yet they sped northward a while more, nothing changing except day and night. Indeed, day and night itself seemed no longer the unvarying reality that it used to be. Between the dark clouds and the dark sea, night never seemed to go completely away. Day after day they caught no glimpse of the sun.
The islands were seen but dimly through mist, as might the outlying shores of a Twilight Land, a place where souls might come but never living men,—a gray and eerie training camp like that of which Ned’s father had spoken. It was all real enough, truly, remorselessly real; yet Ned couldn’t escape from the superstitious fear he had known at first. The gray, desolate character of the islands seemed to bear it out. It grew on him, rather than lessened.
Yet his standards were changing. Things that had not concerned him a few weeks before mattered terribly now. For instance, the bareness of the islands oppressed him, and he found himself longing for the sight of trees. Just trees,—bending in the wind, shaking off their leaves in the fall. They hadn’t mattered before: he had regarded them as mere ornaments that nature supplied for lawns and parks, if indeed he had ever consciously regarded them at all; but now they were ever so much more important than a hundred things that had previously seemed absolutely essential to his life and happiness. Had his thought reached further, he could have understood, now, the joy of Columbus—journeying in waters scarcely less known than these—at the sight of the floating branch; or the exultation in the Ark when the dove returned with its sprig of greenery.
Lately the ship had taken a northeastern turn, following the island chain, and the cloudy, windy, rainy days found them not far from the mainland, in a region that would be wholly ice-bound in a few weeks more. And when they were still a full day from their turning point, Knutsen sought out Ned on the deck.
“Mr. Cornet, do you know where we’re getting?” he asked quietly.
Unconsciously startled by his tone, Ned whirled toward him. “I don’t know these waters,” he replied. “I suppose we’re approaching Muchinoff Island.”
“Quite a sail between here and der, yet. Mr. Cornet, we’re getting into de most unknown and untraveled waters in all dis part of the Nort’. De boats to Nome go way outside here, and de trut’ is I’m way out of my old haunts. I’m traveling by chart only; neither me nor McNab, nor very many oder people know very much the waterways between dese islands. You’re up here to trade for furs, and you haven’t got all winter. You know dat dese waters here, shut off from the currents, are going to be tighter dan a drum before very many weeks. Why don’t you make your destination Tzar Island, and start back from dere?”
“You think it’s really dangerous?”
“Not really dangerous, maybe, but mighty awkward if anyt’ing should go wrong wit’ de old brig. You understan’ dat not one out of four of dese little islands is inhabited. Some of de larger islands have only a scattered village or two; some of ’em haven’t a living human being. Der’s plenty and plenty of islands not even named in dis chart, and I’d hate to hit the reefs of one after dark! Der’s no one to send S. O. S. calls to, in case of trouble, even if we had wireless. De only boat I know dat works carefully through dis country is anot’er trader, theIntrepid—and dat won’t be along till spring. Mr. Cornet, it’s best for you to know dat you’re in one of the most uninhabited and barren countries——”
“And the most dreary and generally damnable,” Ned agreed with enthusiasm. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? Muchinoff Island isn’t anything in my young life. I picked it out as a starting point simply because it was the farthest north of the Skopins, but since there seems to be plenty of territory——”
“It will make you hump some to cover all de good territory now, including some of the best of de Aleuts, and get around Alaskan Peninsula before winter sets in, in earnest. Tzar Island is yust to our nort’east. Shall I head toward it?”
“How long will it take——”
“Depends on de wind. Dis is a ticklish stretch of water in here, shallow in spots, but safe enough, I guess. I think we can skim along and make it in long before dawn.”
“Then do it!” Ned’s face suddenly brightened. “The sooner I can shake my legs on shore, the better I’ll like it.”
The seaman left him, and for a moment Ned stood almost drunk with exultation on the deck. Even now they were nearing the journey’s end. A few hours more, and they could turn back from this dreary, accursed wintry sea,—this gray, unpeopled desolation that had chilled his heart. It was true that the long journey home, broken by many stops, still lay before, but at least he would face the south! Once on his native shores, forever out of this twilight land and away from its voice of reproach, he could be content with his old standards, regain his old self-confidence. He could take up his old life where he had left it, forgetting these desolate wastes as he would a dream.
He was a fool ever to regret his wasted days! He laughed at himself for ever giving an instant’s thought to his father’s doleful words. The worst of the journey was over, they had only to go back the way they had come; and his puzzling sense of weakness, his premonition of disaster, most of all his superstitious fear of death had been the veriest nonsense. His imagination had simply got out of bounds.
The oldCharon! He had been afraid of her name. Seemingly he had forgotten, for the time, that he was a man of the twentieth century, the product of the most wonderful civilization the world had ever seen. He had been frightened by old bogeys, maudlin with time-worn sentiments. And now his old egotism had returned to him, seemingly unshaken.
Presently he turned, made his way into the hold, and opened one of a pile of iron-bound wooden cases. When he returned to the dining saloon he carried a dark bottle in each hand.
“All hands celebrate to-night!” he cried. “We’re going to go home!”
Out of the sea the wind seemed to answer him. It swept by, laughing.
IX
Ned’snews was received with the keenest delight by Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth. The latter regained her lost amiability with promptness. Lenore’s reaction was not dissimilar from Ned’s; in her native city she could come into her own again.
The bottles were greeted with shouts of delight. Ned went immediately to the sideboard and procured half a dozen glasses.
“All hands partake to-night,” he explained. “It’s going to be arealparty.”
He mixed whiskies-and-sodas for Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth; then started to make the rounds of the crew with a bottle and glasses. He did not, however, waste time offering any to Bess. The latter had already evinced an innate fear of it, wholly apart from sentimentality and nonsense. She had lived in a circle and environment where strong drink had not been merely a thing to jest over and sing songs about, to drink lightly and receive therefrom pleasant exhilaration; but where it was a living demon, haunting and shadowing every hour. She had no false sophistication—her knowledge of life was all too real—and she had no desire to toy with poison and play with fire. Both were realities to her. She knew that they had blasted life on life, all as sturdy and seemingly as invincible as her own. Her abstinence was not a moral issue with her. It was simply that she knew here was a foe that met men in their pleasant hours, greeted them in friendly ways, and then, by insidious, slow attack, cast them down and left them miserably to die; and she was simply afraid for her life of it. Ned, on the other hand, would have laughed at the thought of its ever mastering him. He felt himself immune from the tragedies that had afflicted other men. It was part of the conceit of his generation.
But Ned found plenty of customers for his whisky. McNab, at the wheel, wished him happy days over two fingers of straight liquor in the glass, and Knutsen, his pale eyes gleaming, poured himself a staggering portion. “Go ahead,” Ned encouraged him when the seaman apologized for his greediness. “The sky’s the limit to-night.” And Forest in the engine room, and Julius in the kitchen absorbed a man’s-size drink with right good will.
Ned was able to make the rounds again before the call for dinner; and the attitude of his guests was changed in but one instance. McNab seemed to be measuring his liquor with exceeding care. He was a man who knew his own limits, and he apparently did not intend to overstep them. He took a small drink, but Knutsen, his superior, consumed as big a portion as before.
It was an elated, spirited trio that sat down at the little table in the saloon. Not one of them could ever remember a happier mood. Julius served the dinner with a flourish; and they had only laughter when a sudden lurch of the craft slid the sugar bowl off the table to the floor.
“Hello, the ship’s drunk too,” Ned commented gaily.
They were really in too glad a mood to see anything but sport in the suddenly rocking table. The truth was that the wind had suddenly sprung into a brisk gale, rolling heavy seas and bobbing the little craft about like a cork. The three screamed with laughter, holding fast to their slipping chairs, and Lenore rescued the bottle that was tipping precariously on the buffet.
“We’d better have a little extra one,” she told them. “I’ll be seasick if we don’t.”
She had to speak rather loudly to make herself heard. The wind was no longer laughing lightly and happily at their port bows. It had suddenly burst into a frantic roar, swelling to the proportions of a thunder clap and dying away on a long, weird wail that filled the sky and the sea. Instantly it burst forth loudly again, and the snow whipped against the glass of the ports.
Ned stood up, braced himself, and immediately poured the drinks. But it was not only to save Lenore an attack of sea-sickness. He was also swayed by the fact that the heat of the room seemed to be swiftly escaping. Fortunately, there was still warmth in plenty in the bottle, so he need not be depressed by a mere fall of temperature. He glanced about the room, rather suspecting that one of the ports had been left open. The saloon, however, was as tightly closed as was possible for it to be.
He turned at once, made his way through the gale that swept the deck, and procured Lenore’s and Mrs. Hardenworth’s heaviest coats. He noticed as he passed that Bess had sought refuge in the engine room. Ned waved to her then returned to his guests.
The room was already noticeably colder, not so much from the drop in temperature—a thermometer would have still registered above freezing—as from the chilling, penetrating quality of the wind that forced an entrance as if through the ship’s seams. There seemed no pause, now, between the mighty, roaring gusts. The long, weird wail they had heard at first was only an overtone, in some way oppressive to the imagination. The rattle at the window was loud for the soft sweep of snow. Ned saw why in a moment: the snow had changed to sleet.
There was no opportunity to make comment before Knutsen lurched into the room. “It’s tough, isn’t it?” he commented. “Mr. Cornet, I want another shot of dat stuff before I take de wheel.”
Ned, not uninfluenced by his cups, extended the bottle with a roar of laughter. “You know what’s good for you,” he commented. “Where’s McNab? Let him have one too.”
“He’s still at de wheel, but I don’t think he’d care for one. He’s a funny old wolf, at times. Mrs. Hardenworth, how do you like dis weat’er?”
“I don’t like it very well.” She held fast to the slipping table. “Of course, you’d tell us if there was any danger——”
“Not a bit of danger. Yust a squall. Dis isn’t rough—you ought to see what it would be outside dis chain of islands. But it’s mighty chilly.” He poured the stiff drink down his great throat, then buttoned his coat tight.
Ned, for a moment secretly appalled by the storm, felt his old recklessness returning. The captain said it was only a squall,—and were they not soon to turn south? In fact, their direction now was no longer north, but rather in an easternly direction toward Tzar Island. He was warm now, glowing; the rocking of the boat only increased his exhilaration.
“There’s only three or four shots left in this bottle,” he said, holding up the second of the two quarts he had taken from the case. “You’d better have one more with us before you go. A man burns up lots of whisky without hurting him any on a night like this. Then take the bottle in with you to keep you warm at the wheel.”
Knutsen needed no second urging. He was of a race that yields easily to drink, and he wanted to conquer the last, least little whisper of his fear of the night and the storm. He drank once more, pocketed the bottle, then made his way to the pilot house.
“You’re not going to try to ride her through?” McNab asked, as he yielded the wheel.
“Of course. You’re not afraid of a little flurry like dis.”
His voice gave no sign of the four powerful drinks he had consumed. A tough man physically, the truth was he was still a long way from actual drunkenness. But even a small amount of liquor had a distressing effect upon him,—a particularly unfortunate effect for one who habitually has the lives of other human beings in his charge. He always lost the fine edge of his caution. With drink upon him, he was willing to take a chance.
McNab stared into his glittering eyes, and for a moment his lips were tightly compressed. “This isn’t a little flurry,” he answered at last coldly. “It’s a young gale, and God knows what it will be by morning. You know and I know we shouldn’t attempt things here that we can do with safety in waters we’re familiar with. Right now we can run into the lea of Ivan Island and find a harbor. There’s a good one just south of the point.”
“We’re not going to run into Ivan Island. I want to feel dry land. We’re going to head on toward Tzar Island.”
“You run a little more of that bottle down your neck and you’ll be heading us into hell. Listen, Cap’n.” McNab paused, deeply troubled. “You let me take the wheel, and you go in and celebrate with the party. You won’t do any damage then.”
“And you get back to your engine and mind your own business.” Little angry points of light shot into Knutsen’s eyes. “And if you see Cornet, tell him to bring up anoder bottle. Dis one’s almost empty.”
McNab turned to the door, where for a moment he stood listening to the wild raging of the wind. Then he climbed down into the engine room.
There was nothing in his face, as he entered, to reveal the paths of his thought. He was wholly casual, wholly commonplace, seemingly not in the least alarmed. He stepped to Bess’s side, half smiling.
“I wonder if you can help me?” he asked.
The girl stood up, a straight, athletic figure at his side. “I’ll try, of course.”
“It depends—have you any influence with young Cornet?”
Bess slowly shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she told him, very gravely. “I have no influence with him at all. What is it you wanted me to do?”
“I wanted you to tell him to put up the booze. Particularly to keep the captain from getting any more. This is a bum night. It’s against the rules of the sea to scare passengers, but somehow, I figure you’re the stuff that can stand it and maybe hold out. This isn’t a night to have a shipload of drunks. There may be some tight places before the morning.
“There’s only one way.” The girl’s lips were close to his ear, else he couldn’t have heard in the roar of the storm and the flapping of the sails. “Listen, McNab. How much has he got in the dining saloon?”
“None, now, I don’t think. He only brought up two bottles, and Knutsen’s got one of ’em—not much in it, though. They must have emptied the other.”
“Then we’re all clear.” She suddenly straightened, a look of unswervable intent in her face. “McNab, it’s better to make some one—violently mad at you—isn’t it, if maybe you can save him from trouble? If you want to see him get ahead and make a success of a big venture—it isn’t wrong, is it, to do something against his will that you know is right?”
McNab looked at her as before now he had looked at strong men with whom he had stood the watch. “What are you gettin’ at?”
His voice was gruff, but it didn’t offend her. She felt that they were on common ground.
“If may be human lives are the stake, a person can’t stand by for one man’s anger,” she went on.
“Human lives are the first consideration,” the man answered. “That’s the rule of the sea. Most sea rules are good rules—built on sense—all except the one that you can’t take the wheel away from a drunken captain. What’s your idea?”
“You know as well as I do. I promised his father before I left that I’d look after Ned. He was in earnest—and Ned needs looking after now if he ever did. Mr. Cornet won’t blame me, either. Show me how to get down in the hold.”
McNab suddenly chuckled and patted her on the back with rough familiarity, yet with fervent companionship. “You’ve got the stuff,” he said. “But you can’t lift them alone. I’m with you till the last dog is hung.”