CHAPTER XXXVIIITHE WHITE NIGHT
“LORD, I’m tired,” groaned Rickard, stumbling into camp, wet to the skin. “Don’t you say letters to me, Mac. I’m going to bed. Tell Ling I don’t want any dinner. He’ll want to fuss up something. I don’t want to see food.”
As he moved on to his tent, MacLean noted a dragging step and a feverish face. But his anxiety was dwarfed by Ling’s. The Chinese immediately invaded Rickard’s tent, leaving the dishing of the dinner to Godfrey. Ling found Rickard, burning with fever, stripping for a cold shower.
“Velly bad, velly bad,” he exclaimed. “Hi, there, you stop,” as Rickard went on stripping. “Hi, there, no cold watel. Me ketchem hot watel.”
“‘Hotwatel’! I’m burning up now!”
“Here you, get into bed, hop. I ketchem warm watel. Cold watel no good, make velly sick. Hop.”
Rickard hopped. He was worn to the point of yielding to any authoritative voice. The day had been exhausting. His eyes closed with weariness. He did not watch Ling’s new captaincy. The Chinese, soft-slippered, pattered around the tent, and out. The sheets felt cool and comfortable. Rickard had a sensation of dropping, falling into oblivion.
The day, confused and jumbled, burned across his eyeballs; a turmoil of bustle and hurry of insurrection. He had made a swift stand against that. He was to be minded to the last man-jack of them, or any one would go, his threat including the engineers, Silent, Irish, Wooster, Hardin himself. This was no time for factions, for leader feeling. They knew he meant business; perhaps the tussle with the Indians had had good effect. But he had lost his temper with Hardin and Wooster; he didn’t feel pleased with himself. It left a sting of self-discontent which pulled him back from the rest into which he was sinking. A man can enjoy the mastery over other men if he gets out of it with self-control. It seemed worse now than when he had been in the clamor and the contention of the day. Tossing feverishly on his bed, the day’s perspective gave no order, no progress. His body was hot, his head on fire.
His grouch focused on Wooster. “The gall of him!” He recalled the snapping black beads of eyes as they resented Rickard’s criticism of his handling of the rock.
“Who’s superintendent here?” had growled Wooster.
“It is a pity that I must superintend your superintending,” had been his answer. “You will obey my orders, or quit.”
“He’s had an ax for me ever since I came; he’s been sore ever since I won over the Indians. He thought he was going to see me crushed. The whole camp would have crowed had those Indians marched out. Lord, what a head I have!”
Ling came in, towing a portable tub of galvanized tin, a bucket of steaming water in his other hand.
“If you think you’re going to get me into that, you’re mistaken,” Rickard raised his head to scowl at thebucket. Ling had the tact not to answer. Quiet as a cat, he placed the tub by the bedside, and emptied the bucket. Pattering to the door, he took from an unseen waiting hand, another pail of rising steam, and a large yellow-papered tin of mustard.
“You needn’t think you’re going to boss me,” Rickard flared with impotent resistance. “Mustard! I’ve not taken that since I was a small boy. I’m not going to put my foot in it, do you hear?”
Ling would not hear. He was moving noiselessly around the tent, blind and deaf to scowls and grumbling. Rickard watched him collect blankets and towels. His rebellion was deflected. What an amusing race it was, at cooking, nursing or diplomacy equally facile!
“Who was that outside the door?” The hand suddenly reassured to him.
“Mlister Godfley.” Ling, the laconic, went on with his preparations. When he had finished, he stopped suddenly in front of the bed. Rickard was off guard.
“Here you, ketchem bath. Hop.”
“A bath, get in that? Not on your life,” defied Rickard. But he knew he was as putty in Ling’s hands.
“Hop, velly quick,” commanded Ling.
As Rickard did not hop, he was pulled out of bed by soft Chinese, work-wrinkled fingers. After a sputtering resistance to the sting of the hot mustard, he lay back, an unexpected relaxation meeting his supineness. The first sting over, the pain began to melt from his bones, from his strained aching muscles. His irritability began to dissolve. He decided to forgive Ling, who had left the tent.
His eyes closed. He caught an instant’s doze. Ling’s entrance wakened him.
“This salad water’s all right! I’m going to stay here all night.”
The Chinese had a hot, pungent smelling drink in his hand.
“Oh, say,” groaned the engineer. “I don’t have to drink that!”
“All lite tamale,” replied the calm doctor. “Hi, there, get up. Hop. Pletty quick. Take heap cold. Velly bad.”
In bed, Ling’s hot drink inside him, the day with its irritations fell away. He could see now the step ahead that had been taken; the last trestle was done; the rock-pouring well on; he called that going some! He felt pleasantly languid, but not yet sleepy. His thought wandered over the resting camp. TheDeltawas no longer entertaining; the days were too strenuous for that. Frank Godfrey must be finding them dull. And then Innes Hardin came to him.
Not herself, but as a soft little thought which came creeping around the corner of his dreams. She had been there, of course, all day, tucked away in his mind, as though in his home waiting for him to come back to her, weary from the pricks of the day. The way he would come home to her, please God, some day. Not bearing his burdens to her, he did not believe in that, but asking her diversions. Perhaps she would sing to him, or play to him, little tender tunes he could understand. He had never had time to keep up with the new-fangled music which sounded to his ear like a distinct endeavor to be unmusical and bizarre. All the melodies have been used up; Mozart and those old boys had hogged them. The moderns have had to invent a schoolof odd discords and queer rhythms. Innes would tell him about that! Some day! Contentment spread her soft wings over him. When Ling came stealing back, his patient was asleep.
The tent was a wash of white light when he woke; the moon was filtering through the white canvas; a band of pale radiance was streaming through the screen door. Rickard wakened as to a call. What had startled him? He had been sleeping heavily, the deep sleep that knows no dreaming. He listened, raising himself by his elbow. From a distance, a sweet high voice, unreal in its pitch and thrilling quality, came to him. It pieced on to his last waking thought. For an instant, he thought it was Innes.
Awake, the rhythmic beat coming clear and sweet to him, he knew it was Godfrey; Godfrey, somewhere on the levee, singing by the river.
“What a voice that fellow has!” He wondered what it was he was singing. “The quality of the angels, and the lure of the sirens besides!”
There was a haunting thrill to the air; something he should remember. He used to be able to carry tunes; was it too late, he wondered, to sharpen his musical memory? The soft side of life he had left alone, music, ease, poetry; they went with women, and his swift marching life had had no time for them. Women and little children. Was it too late to begin? Had he worked too long to learn to play? What was that tune Godfrey was singing now? He knew that; it was about the age of seventeen. It brought him again to Innes Hardin. He pulled aside his curtain which hung over the screening of his tent and looked out into a moon-flooded world.The stars were dimmed, thrust into their real distances by the world’s white courier. Rickard’s eyes fell on a little tent over yonder, a white shrine. “White as that fine sweet soul of hers!”
Wandering into the night, Godfrey passed down the river, singing alone. His voice, the footlights, the listening great audiences were calling to him. To him, the moon-flooded levee, the glistening water, made a star-set scene. He was treading the boards, the rushing waters by the bank gave the orchestration for his melody—La Donna è Mobile. He began it to Gerty Hardin; she would hear it in her tent; she would take it as the tender reproach he had teased her with that afternoon in the ramada.
He forgot her as he sang, the footlights, the great audiences claiming him. They called him back! “Bis! bis!” He gave it again. Still, they called for him. He must come back! He gave them for encore a ballad long forgotten; he had pulled it back from the cobwebs of two decades; he had made it his own; reviving it to a larger popularity; they were selling records of it now on Broadway. In South America, in Mexico, in lonely ranches, distant barrancas, the far-spread audiences listened to his imprisoned voice, by modern magic released to them.
Detached, as an observer he worshiped his wonderful gift; impersonally, it was guarded; he could speak of it without vanity. Pity, the fellow who wrote the simple air was dead; it was enriching publishers; those “canned music people!”
The audience, South American, English, Mexican, was calling. Australia, now, was clapping her hands. That last verse again.
“But, my darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me.”
“But, my darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me.”
“But, my darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me.”
The hush, that wonderful hush which always greets that ballad, falls on the house again.
It came, the soaring voice, to Tom Hardin, outside Gerty’s tent on his lonely cot. He knew that song. He had shouted it with the fellows at college, passing through the Lawrence streets at night. The words came running back to meet him. “Woman is changeable.” Had he sensed the words then? “Woman is changeable.” All of them then, not alone Gerty. For she had loved him once, he had seen her face flushing answer into his. Changed altogether, the changeable. Disdained by his wife, a pretty figure a man cuts! If his wife can’t stand him, who can? He wasn’t good enough for her. He was rough. His life had kept him from fitting himself to her taste. She needed people who could talk like Rickard, sing like Godfrey. People, other people, might misconstrue her preferences. He knew they were not flirtations; she needed her kind. She would always keep straight; she was straight as a whip. Life was as hard for her as it was for him; he could feel sorry for her; his pity was divided between the two of them, the husband, the wife, both lonely in their own way.
Then his bitterness softened to the new air Godfrey was singing. He could hear his mother’s voice humming it over her task in her rough pioneer kitchen. He lay quite still listening, life crowding before his open eyes. No use coaxing sleep, with the moon making day of the night. His memory was a harp, and Godfrey was plucking at the strings.
On the other side of the canvas walls, Gerty Hardinlay listening to the message meant for her. The fickle sex, he had called hers; no constancy in woman, he had declared, fondling her hair. He had tried to coax her into pledges, pledges which were also disavowals to the man outside.
Silver threads!Age shuddered at her threshold. She would not get old, oh, why would he not sing something else? She hated that song. Cruel, life had been to her, none of its promises had been kept. To be happy, why, that was a human’s birthright; grab it, that was her creed! Before you get old, before the pretty face wrinkles, and men forget to look at you with the worship beauty brings. She wanted to die before that happened—she would push age away from her—she could. But before that awful time which offered no alleviation, she must be happy, she must taste of success, hear the plaudits of the crowd left behind. When God made the world, He did not make enough happiness to go around; one must snatch it as it passed. There was a chance yet; youth had not gone. He was singing it to her, her escape—
“Darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me.”
“Darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me.”
“Darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me.”
It was not true. The song was a lie. He would not love her when she was old. Men don’t. They want roses and bright eyes, youth. Cruel, men are. But she had a few years yet. She would live those years, not spend them with regrets.
She had a wild thought of running out to him, to cry her joy, her bitterness in his arms! He was waitingfor her, hoping for her down by the levee; his love was like a schoolboy’s in its eagerness. But the sulky figure of Tom guarded her door. Tom was like Innes, always watching her with distrust, suspicion in his eyes. Whatever she would do, they would have driven her to it. She was going to be happy—to be happy before she was old!
Godfrey, singing to Gerty Hardin, had awakened the camp. Once roused, the brilliant night made sleep impossible. Innes, in her tent, too, was listening. Once, in her childhood, she had wakened to the sound of near music, sweet, unearthly, in its soaring lightness, now antiphonal, now in unison. To-night, so Godfrey’s song pierced her dreams, and brought back that unreal childish night, another white night such as this. She opened her curtain to the wide spread of silvered desert; the moonlight streamed in on her bed.
“Darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me!”
“Darling, you will be,Ever young and fair to me!”
“Darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me!”
So that is the miracle, that wild rush of certain feeling! Yesterday, doubting, to-morrow, more doubts—but to-night, the song, the night isolated them, herself and Rickard, into a world of their own. To-night, it did not even pain her that he had been the lover of Gerty Hardin, faithful through years, as Gerty had hinted, to a love that was not ever to be rewarded; nor that it had passed to her so lightly. Accidental, propinquitous, seemed his love for her. Not based on congeniality, or knowledge of sympathies. She was not vocal with him—what did he love in her? A trick of smile or speech?Better that, even, than that he had yielded, simply, to the human need of loving! Even that did not have a sting for her this night. Life with him on any terms she wanted. To-morrow, the proud rebellions might return; now, she could see the risk of losing him! She had not the trick of persuasion; only one way she knew! When he was her own, they might face their differences, then kiss them away! Daring, then witchery! For she wanted to charm her husband; that, the proudest conquest of all. The wonder it was that all women could not see it that way. To win over again, to conquer against commonplaceness, against satiety—to bewitch one’s own!
Godfrey was returning to Australia’s clapping hands. The desert, Gerty Hardin, were forgotten in the ardor of his singing. To pour out song like that, to make a world listen, be the voice that summons memory! Such a night as this—“Tanto amor—!”
On his army cot, Wooster stirred restlessly between his coarse cotton sheets. Something was disturbing him. He was heavy with sleep. But something was the matter with the night. He covered his ears, but the irritation crept through. He raised his head from the pillow, the small snapping eyes accusing the unknown disturber of his peace.
“Those Indians!” he muttered, dragging the sheet over his ears. “Drunk again!”
“Tanto amor!” Godfrey was looking down on the river.
Such a night! It poured wine into the veins of one! Such a voice! To pour it out, thrilling himself over the call of it! Touching something, what was it he touched?That gleam of moonlight on the river, footlights of fairies. Ah, holy night! “Tanto amor!”
Caught in his own spell, Godfrey passed down the levee. And the camp slept again. But even the dreams of Wooster were of love.