Part 5
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 the _Charon_ bore 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 the _Charon_! 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 the _Charon_ suddenly 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 to _life_. 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 the _Charon_.
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 forgot _himself_; 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 was _Aurora 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
Before ever 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, the _Intrepid_—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.”