Part 11

Daylight only lasted about five hours, but there was a moon half-way to the full; the weather was clear and still—so still that there was not a sound to be heard save the shrieking runners as the sledge put out from the shack, like a small ship putting out from a familiar harbour into a trackless sea; Kob whimpering a little under the furs, the strange late sun gilding the south, and the great stars lighting the rim of the grey northern snows.

That sea was not trackless to Garry. His young eyes, weather-wrinkled at the lids like an old man’s, picked up this mark and that; the wrinkle in the vast white plain that was a river-bed, and the low hills like a rampart, the wedge of spruce that drove to meet them like the vanguard of an army fronting the implacable north. He knew it, was at home here, soul and body. But now he felt a sudden pang of desolation at the thought of the trodden snow about the shack; that ahead was untouched, unmarked. The north receives no impress from man but a few foot-prints in the ever-changing, eternal snow. For all his strength, that was the only mark he had made on this land.

“You quite warm, Kob?”

Kob’s voice came, weak and muffled.

“Well, I ain’t exactly _warm_.”

“You c’n feel your hands ’n’ feet, Kob?”

“Oh, yes, I feel ’em!”

“That’s all right.” Garry slackened an instant, and shifted the sealskin band that ran from the traces around his chest. It would cut him, eventually, he knew, with that weight behind, in spite of the dried moss he had stuffed into his shirt. The sledge sped on again, swiftly; the miles were marked by no more than the imperceptible advance of the spruce-belt and Garry’s monotonous, careful questions; “You all right, Kob? How’s your feet, Kob? Do you still feel your hands?”

They made the edge of the trees that night under an electric-white moon. The slope of the land had been in Garry’s favour, and the going easy. He set up the tiny tent, packed Kob into the back of it, started the lamp, made tea and cooked pork; then himself slept across the opening, shielding Kob with the warmth of his own body, grimly satisfied. He wondered if he had not set up a new record for single-sledge travelling. Likely enough he had.

The next day was also clear and fair. Kob seemed stronger, and was remarkably cheerful; he sang, under the muffling furs, sang of “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower:”

“Fair as a lily, Joyous and free; Light of the prairie Home was she-ee.”

But they made slower progress among the trees, thin though these were. They saw fox-tracks, and sighted a wolf in the distance. The second night was colder, but Garry collected dead wood, and coaxed a fire, and they were content. They woke to find that snow had fallen while they slept, to the depth of a couple of inches—no more. The clouds had gone, and the sun rose at last on a dazzling world. Before the second hour of daylight they had emerged from the narrow belt of trees and were once more in rolling, open country.

The third day was absolutely uneventful, still, brief, radiant. But the temperature dropped, and Kob’s spirits seemed to fall with it. He complained of pains in his limbs; twice Garry had to stop, set up tent and stove, and warm him back to life. In Garry himself there was no change beyond a certain rigidity, a grim and watchful silence, that told the fight was on. He set up the tent that night in a hollow, scooped in a drift of deep snow. They were warm. But in the morning, tent and sleeping-bags were stiff as boards, all but impossible to stow on the sledge. The temperature was nearly forty below zero.

Again, there was no wind, not a cloud in the almost violet sky; nothing but a vast, white circle that enclosed them, seeming to move as they moved. Kob was quiet and drowsy. Garry’s attention was focussed on him; so intense was his care of Kob that there seemed to be some mysterious physical sympathy set up between them; so that Garry knew when Kob’s left foot was frozen before Kob did himself. It took Garry two hours to bring the foot round. They travelled on under a moon rounding to the full. Sometimes their shadows streamed ink-black behind them; sometimes these shadows shot suddenly to the front, as the aurora blazed and shook gigantic spears that dimmed the moon. The rigidity in Garry became more noticeable. He went on untiring, but bought every mile at the price of that intense watchfulness. He did nothing but pull the sledge and care for Kob, in a single monotony of effort. And all the time he was fighting—fighting for all he was worth.

They camped for their fourth night under an outcrop of rock. Garry was very silent. He slept restlessly, and once or twice groaned in his sleep. Clouds rolled up from the south, covered the moon and the great arching stars, and the temperature rose immediately. But the North had struck at them.

They started in a soft, grey twilight, under those merciful low clouds, for the fifth day of Garry’s fight. Kob was cheerful again with the rising temperature, sat up among his furs, and talked of Fort Scarlett, and how nice it would be to lie up in hospital.

“You does your best for me, Garry, and you’re as white to me as a feller could be, but there’s lots you can’t do, stands to reason. Not but what you always does your best.”

“Yes,” said Garry, slowly, “I does my best for you.”

“I know it, Garry. But there’s lots you can’t do. You’re tired, Garry?”

“No, Kob, I ain’t tired.”

Kob glanced at the great fur-clad limbs, tireless as machinery; at the great shoulders bent to the yoke. A certain uneasiness stirred in him.

“You’re going mighty slow, Garry——”

Suddenly, with a great, slow sigh, Garry stopped. He stood, arms folded on the yoke, head turned to the south, still as a rock.

“Kob!”

“What’s gettin’ you, Garry?”

“Kob, there should be a hill to the west, not a mile away—a hill breaking out o’ the level like a cliff. Look and tell me if it’s there.”

As his voice ceased, the terrible silence closed in on them like iron, so that all the senses ached to its grip.

“Garry!”

“Yes, Kob?”

“Garry! . . . . My God! . . . . You don’t mean—”

“I’m a’most blind, Kob. It’s the sun and the new snow. I can make shift to see my feet—in a kind of red mist. No more. Is the hill there, Kob?”

The silence took them again, broken now by Kob, who screamed out like a woman.

“Oh God, oh God, we’re done! You blind, and me sick! We’ll die here. You’ll never get me to Fort Scarlett! Oh, why didn’t I stay at the shack, and die there?”

When he had done, Garry spoke, gently, almost gaily. Kob could not see the grey granite of his face.

“I passed you my word I’d get you to Fort Scarlett, Kob. You ain’t found me break my word yet. I’ll get you there. I ain’t quite blind. No more’n a horse in blinkers. You’ll have to be driver, Kob, and tell me where to go.”

To all Kob’s cries and curses, to all the wild utterances of a sick man’s despair, he answered the same thing:

“I’ll get you to Fort Scarlett, Kob, if you tell me where to go.”

Noon, and a vast sun showing momentarily through the fleeing rack: found them going forward slowly, but steadily, Kob sitting erect in the sledge and shouting to the blinded Garry as a man shouts to his dog-team. Once and again Garry stopped, to feel Kob’s flesh with his own bare hands, in fear of frostbite, to feed him, to wrap him more closely in the soft seal fur. He was fighting every foot of the way. Kob watched him, fear in his hollowed eyes; later, more than fear. He whispered:

“If it had not been for him, I’d ’a’ been home now, I’d ’a’ been safe.”

“Can you see a big rock nor’-by-east, Kob?”

“Yes, I see it, not half of a mile away, Garry, hang you!”

“Then we’re running true. Don’t you worry, Kob. I’ll get you to the Fort. I passed you my word, Kob, didn’t I? And have you ever known me go back on it?”

That day passed.

In the night Kob moaned and cursed. Garry said, “He’s ill,” and felt no blame for Kob, nor for himself. He crawled out of his bag and rubbed Kob’s feet for an hour. Once he stopped suddenly; he thought the entrance to the tent darkened, and that John Akkamuk stood there, holding the torn bit of newspaper. He grabbed at it, and it was gone. The intense pain that accompanies snow-blindness was making Garry light-headed. But he took care of Kob just the same. He always had taken care of Kob.

The sixth day came, and Garry fought through it.

The sixth night he had no sleep. He wanted none. He was comforted with visions as with rest. The visions were always of himself and Kob; not the Kob who cursed and cried, but the old comrade Kob; they were washing gold together away back in the Far-alone; or speeding south to spend it, behind the finest team of huskies east of the Slave; or advancing together, shoulder to shoulder, to some unknown victory or unfeared defeat. But always together.

The seventh day Garry began to see this old Kob, pulling beside him on the trace, as he had pulled a thousand times before. The new Kob, in the sledge, cursed him horribly, and threw bits of ice at him to make him go faster. In the night, Garry got up and heated tea for Kob, and softened bits of pork in it, and fed him. Kob complained of pains in the stomach, and Garry wrapped him in some of the blanket-strips he wore in his own larrigans. All the time the vision went on—strange, nameless events, and peopled starry spaces. But always Kob and himself together.

The eighth day, Garry could barely see his own feet. He began to stumble and fall frequently. After one of these falls and slow recoveries, Garry thought the sledge ran light. He turned back to it, felt it over, and it was empty. On hands and knees he felt his way back along their trail; found Kob where he had fallen off in the snow, half delirious; carried him back to the sledge, wrapped him up, and tied him on with a spare trace. Blood was on Garry’s parka; under it, his chest was cut to the bone, where the trace pressed. But after this, he ceased to be conscious of even suffering.

He knew nothing until he found the sledge running light as a feather; it might have been hours after, or days, or years. In a brief glimmer of sight, he saw a man beside him, pulling. A tall man, not Kob. His face turned to Garry, seemed gentle in the shadow of the parka hood. Old tales, old legends of lovely faith, returned to Garry Redmond; like a child he leaned on the stranger.

* * * * *

In a certain blue-covered volume issued from Ottawa you will find, should you care to look, the report of Brant Durgan, Sergeant, R.N.W.M.P.

“I have the honour to report,” wrote the sergeant, laboriously, among other things, “that on December 6th inst., coming into Fort Scarlett with Patterson, trooper, from the Southern Moon, I encountered a sledge party ten miles east of the Go-Soak, and about the same distance from the Fort. There were two men and one sledge. It was apparent, from a distance, that they were in difficulties. When I overhauled them it was to find one man ill and tied to the sledge, and the man who pulled it suffered from snow-blindness. Both being—(‘batty’ was crossed out in the original)—both being delirious from exhaustion and exposure, we assisted them to the Fort.”

That is all you will find. Some while after the report had gone in, Garry opened his eyes. He was in a comfortable room, in a comfortable cot, under a red H.B.C. blanket. There is an H.B.C. post at Fort Scarlett, and a medical mission, and nearly twenty houses. It’s a great place. The medical missionary, who had been busy for three weeks saving Garry’s sight, and his feet, and his life, came in and looked at him; Garry grinned anxiously.

“I got him here?” he said.

“You did,” said the missionary, who was a man of few words, but those generally the right ones. “You got him in on your own, except the last few miles. He’s all right. Like to see him?”

“No, not yet,” answered Garry, after a silence. “I’d like to see the latest paper you got first, please.”

“For five minute,” said the missionary, looking at his eyes. But when the paper came, it only took Garry about two seconds to find out. He knew. Like a man of old, he turned his face to the wall.

He knew that never would he and Kob march shoulder to shoulder to any defeat or victory. Kob would never pull beside him on any trace; never work with him, drink with him, quarrel with him. It was all over. The great gulf was fixed. The war reached out and touched him already, to his hurt. He would not be taking care of Kob any more. Never again would Britisher and German share the same shack.

In the spring, when he was healed, Garry went down to Winnipeg, and enlisted. Away back in the All-alone, the sun melted the trodden snow about the shack. And a little mouse got in and nibbled all the morsels of newspaper off the broken bottle.

THE PRISONER

The car was hopelessly dislocated, that was evident; when Berry started the engine, it clucked like a dying hen for a few revolutions, and failed. He was minded to waste no more time on it. He stowed the contents of the tool-box mysteriously about his person, hid the spare can of petrol in the ditch, and departed to find his bearings, and, if possible, a warm barn to sleep in. Once he looked back at the car. “You look lorst, old girl,” said Berry, “but you aint ’arf so lorst and lonesome as me.”

There are degrees of lostness. Private Berry was lost in the superlative degree—utterly, hopelessly, intensively. It was one o’clock in the morning and cold. The moon was up, so round and white, it reminded him of a peeled onion but persistently in the wrong quarter of the sky. He sighed. He had with him a tin of those striped delicacies known as humbugs, and with these he stayed himself while proceeding to cross the very loneliest landscape he had ever seen in his life.

Nothing moved within the scope of the moon, but Private Berry. He moved stiffly, chinking a little, and leaving behind him an almost visible trail of peppermint. As he walked, he considered and rehearsed what sort of excuses might most reasonably be offered for his late chapter of accidents. “Waited an hour in the market place for Private Corkery, Sir,” he said aloud in a high, hurt voice. “Not my fault I was alone, Sir. . . I dunno, Sir. Maybe ’e got lorst too. . . No, Sir, not when I see ’im. . . Yes, Sir, workshop job. I tried an hour. . . I should say twenty mile, or maybe twenty-two, or a bit to that. . . Yes, Sir, _all_ the way. . Yes, Sir, thank you, Sir.” But the silence spun out his voice so startlingly that he stopped and looked about him. “It’s a cemetery without no monuments,” said Private Berry.

“Talk about a silence that might be felt! You can jolly well ’ear this one.”

It was the quietness that troubled him. Into what country had he wandered, and where were the lines? He had been moving towards a low ridge that ran about a mile from the road where he had left the motor. He topped this rise at last, grunting a little, and very wary. And there beneath him, in the hollow, was the little town.

If Berry had been an imaginative man, he might have thought that the deathly silence possessing the world had its source and origin in this hollow. But he had seen many such villages before—unburied corpses lying where the tides of war had left them; won and lost, lost and won so often that now they had nothing more to win or lose forever, and so were briefly, at peace. He found a downward path contentedly enough. If there was anything left in the place, a roof, an egg, a heap of straw—he relied on himself to find it. But as he descended farther, he began to doubt if he should find even as little as the straw. He had never seen a town so scraped and scoured by destruction. He wondered if he would not have done better to stay by the car.

His boots rang on the first of the paving. A cracked trough with a puddle in it, reflected the moon frostily, and a whirl of dead leaves rustled past him and settled on a door-step that had no house behind it. “Bare as the back of my ’and,” muttered Berry. “I wonder which side ’eld it last. Them, I’ll bet.” And for no reason, a name sprang into his mind—“Von Eichensau.” It was said that no one swept a place so bare as Von Eichensau; other things were said of him too. A fear took hold on Berry that he might be straying into the enemy’s lines; he tried to tiptoe along the cobbles. He tiptoed massively for several minutes down the long wall of a building that might have been a school, but was so torn and shattered by shell that only a paved court and a small cupola over the gate remained to suggest its past. This court was raised from the street; half a dozen steps led to it. And here Berry stopped with a jerk. For an old woman was sitting there.

He couldn’t have told you why she startled him; “Seeing her so sudden,” he would probably have said. But the shock lay in seeing her so orderly, so secure, so very _usual_; she must have affronted him almost like an indecency in the midst of that ravaged corpse of a town—she, stout, fresh and unfrightened, in a blue cloak and a clean apron, and holding on her knee a big basket covered with a square of shiny waterproof cloth.

For a moment the old woman gazed at Berry; not with fear; but with a certain promise of blank resistance. The moon, however, was kind to Private Berry’s honest “chunky” countenance: accentuated the appeal of a pair of eyes as innocent as a hungry calf’s; glinted on a battered badge. He could feel the precise instant when, without smile or sign, the old woman became friendly. He took heart and a long breath, and achieved his linguistic triumph—“Gee swee perdoo.”

A torrent of rapid nods and words answered him. The old soul clattered to her feet, patted his arm, beckoned him to follow her. She whisked off so quickly that he was left behind, staring in the moonlight; overtaking her in three strides, and relieving her, with a not disinterested gallantry, of the basket, he nearly tossed it over his own head; for he had expected it to be heavy, and he found it light. Peeping under a corner of the cover, he saw that it was full of little paper toys—rosettes, streamers, windmills, red, blue and yellow. He wondered greatly. But his French was not equal to the whole of the situation; he followed in silence through the moon-whitened sepulchre that had been a town.

A single window warmed the black shadows behind the half burnt church with a glow so dim it would have been invisible in the moonlight. Here they stopped and crept through a door veiled in ruin and drunkenly ajar. The room they first entered was so wrecked that they crawled over piles of dust and rubbish, under sooty beams that let the blank white night through. Berry, very much on the alert, saw nothing unharmed, nothing that had kept its shape and use, but a single shelf upon which set a row of tiny wooden dolls. Then they went under a curtain of dirty canvas, into warmth and firelight and a singular peace.

The room beyond the curtain was undamaged, except that the plaster had fallen from the brick in many places; and it was neat and clean. A cheap lamp with a bright tin reflector was on the wall, there was a table covered with a blue checked cloth, a dresser with some old blue earthenware, a chair or two, an old painted bench, fire in a brazier. Two men were sitting on the bench as Berry entered, and they flashed to their feet with a swiftness of movement that was uncanny; for both were old. The woman began to explain in a shower of nods, patting Berry’s arm. He caught “Anglais, Anglais,” and patted his own chest, saying vigorously “That’s me. . .” At the sound of his voice, they relaxed; one, who was a priest, dropped back upon the bench; the other came forward, bowing and rubbing his hands; he shook Berry’s hand timidly. He was a small man who carried his head bent, and continually looked up under gray apologetic eyebrows. Berry liked him somehow; he returned the handshake heartily, and even attained to a “Bongser, Mosoo le cury,” for the priest. The old woman passed into a room beyond, smiling and nodding back at Berry. And after a pause the priest answered in a voice rough and rich with the country’s accent, “I speak some English, my friend.”

“And very well too, Sir,” returned Berry, politely at his ease and unburdening himself of the heavier portions of the tool kit. “I can get along well enough in the Francy, but it takes time. . . and maybe you could tell me where I am, Sir, for it’s a matter of three hours since I knew!”

“This was St. Aubyn.” The priest spoke with long pauses and hesitations, as if not sure of what he would say. The little man, who had been standing aside with his meek look of inquiry bent on Berry, now said something friendly, helped him off with his coat, patted him into a chair near the brazier, and called gently, “Judic, Judic!” The old woman came back with something thin but hot in a bowl and a plate of bread. Berry shook his head at her, he had some rations left, he didn’t want to deprive them. . . But the curé said in his heavy voice, “You need not hesitate. There is plenty.” So he ate and drank, watched by three pairs of eyes that were singularly incurious; it was not so much that they were uninterested in him as that they were absorbed in something else. And Berry, trained by war to be never entirely trustful, wondered what it was. He resolved to know.

St. Aubyn. . . “You may well say. This _was_ St. Aubyn.” He addressed the company in general, and beamed on Mère Judic as she took away the empty bowl. “I’ve seen some places. . . None so bad as this, though. None so downright thorough. Which makes it all the queerer, if you’ll excuse me, to find this”—he circled a thumb slowly about the dim, quiet room—“to find anything so ’omelike as this at two-o’clock in the morning.” To himself he added, “You’ve a fine old face, Mossoo le cury, but it’s a listenin’ face. I wonder what you three are waitin’ here for?”

“You know where you are?” asked the priest, calmly. “You have perhaps heard of this—this town before?”

“I ’ave.” Berry was blunt. “Most of us ’ave. But I’d never ’ave thought to find a livin’ soul inside of it, though.”

“Ah!” The word was a slow sigh. “And yet there are three—living souls. Three.”

“What makes you stay?” asked Berry suddenly, and he had not meant to say it. “If it’d been me—if this’d been my town—”

“Yes?” The old man on the bench smiled faintly.

Berry leaned forward. “Well, look ’ere,” he went on rapidly, almost in a whisper, “wasn’t this where Von Eichensau turned the guns on a school—because ’e said a shot had come from a winder?”

Again, faintly, the priest smiled. “Yes, my friend,” he answered, with the air of politely answering irrelevant questions, “Yes, it was here. And that was the school, where our old Judic saw you first. You can see the marks on the walls. There was—how do you say it?—no place of refuge for the children—the little small children. . . Two of our good Rogiet’s were there.”

“Oui, oui.” The small meek Rogiet seemed to catch the sense, and nodded and smiled nervously, like a shy child to whom attention has suddenly been drawn. “Oui, oui. Deux de mes petites filles.”

“Well, then—” Berry stammered, and fell suddenly silent. The two Frenchmen had exchanged a brief glance, as two intimates exchange glances in a crowd of strangers; and it was like the revelation of a hidden country by flashlight, a momentary rending of a veil in the temple of human pain. He felt himself a stranger, an alien to the passions, the thoughts, the memories that gave to the stuffy cheerful room the atmosphere of a spiritual battlefield. Here in truth was a language he did not know. He turned with relief to old Judic, who had appeared, with a candle-end, at his elbow.