Chapter IV (3)

THE THIRD GENERATION

No shanty fires shall cheer them,
No comrades march beside,
But the northern lights shall beckon
And the wandering winds shall guide.
They shall cross the silent waters
By a trail that is wild and far.
To the place of the lonely lodges
Under a lonely star.
_La Longue Traverse._

“Bob, is this Lake Lemaire?”

Bob Lemaire, leaning against a wind-twisted tamarack on the ridge above the portage, looked long and very long at the desolate country spread out beneath them. Then he looked at a map, drawn on parchment in faded ink, which he had just unfolded from a waterproof case. “I can’t identify it,” he confessed at last, “but I think—”

“If you say another word,” groaned Barrett, “about the reliability of your grandfather, I—I’ll heave rocks at you.” Lemaire smiled slowly, and the smile transfigured his lean, serious face; he folded the map and replaced it in the little case “Well,” he answered, comfortingly, “we can’t mistake P’tite Babiche, anyway, when we come to it.”

“If the thing exists. . . Oh, I know your grandfather said he found it, and stuck it on his map. But no one else has ever found it since.”

“No one else,” said Lemaire, quietly, “has been so far west from the Gran’ Babiche.”

He looked again at the land, one of the most desolate in the world, across which they must go. Lake, rapid, river; rock, scrub, pine, and caribou moss—here the world held only these things, repeated to infinity. But as Lemaire’s grave eyes rested on them, those eyes showed nothing but stillness and a strange content. And Barrett, who had been watching his friend and not the new chain of lakes ahead, cried suddenly, “Bob, I believe you like it!”

“Yes, I like it—if like is the word.”

“O gosh! And you never saw it till five years ago?”

“No.”

“And your father never saw it at all?”

“No. He married young, you know, and had no money. He worked in an office all his life. My mother said he used to talk in his sleep of—all this—which he had never seen. And when I saw it, it just seemed to—come natural.” He smiled again. “We’ve three—four—more portages,” he went on, “before we camp.”

“And it’s along of having Forbes Lemaire for a grandfather,” groaned Barrett, as he limped after Lemaire’s light stride, down the rocky slope to the little beach where they had left their canoe.

They launched the canoe, thigh deep in the rush of the ice-clear water, and put out into yet another of that endless chain of unknown and uncharted lakes whose course they were following. Only one map in the world showed these lakes, those low iron hills, that swamp—the map made by Bob Lemaire’s grandfather fifty years before; as far as was known, only one white man before themselves had ever tried the journey from the Gran’ Babiche due west to the P’tite Babiche, that mythical river; and that had been Forbes Lemaire. As Barrett said, it was a tour personally conducted by the ghost of a grandfather.

Another wet portage—tripping and sliding under a low cliff among fallen shale and willow bushes—another lake, as wide, as lonely, as the former one. So for three hours. And then the afternoon shut down in drive on drive of damp gray mist; and they edged the canoe inshore, and beached it at last upon a dun ridge of sand, the shadows of dwarfed bullpines promising firing.

Too tired to speak, they made their camp, deftly, as long practice had taught them. Tinned beef, flapjacks and coffee had power, however, to change the very aspect of the weather. And Barrett, smoking the pipe of repletion, under a wisp of tent, had time to admire the Japanese effect of the writhed pines in the fog, to hear a sort of wild music in the voices of rain and water, and to meditate on the chances of an ouananiche for the morning’s meal.

The shadows of the fog were changing to the shadows of night, and the silent Lemaire rose and flung wood on the fire. It sent out a warm glow; and as if it had been a signal, a living shadow crept from the shadow of the rocks, and very timidly approached the light.

Both men rose with an exclamation; for they had not seen a human being for nearly a month. Barrett said, “An Indian,” and sank back on his blanket, leaving Lemaire to ask questions. Lemaire went round the fire, and stooped over the queer huddled shadow on the ground.

“Well?” Barrett called after him at last.

“A Montagnais,” Lemaire answered after a pause, some trouble in his voice. “About the oldest old Indian I’ve ever seen; they aren’t long-lived. . . . . . He seems a bit wrong in the head. He doesn’t seem to know his name or where he comes from. But—he says he’s going to a big encampment many day’s journey west. He says he’s been following us. He says he’s a friend of mine.”

“Is he?”

“I never saw him before. . . That’s all I can get out of him. He’s probably been cast off by his tribe. Why? Oh, too old to be useful.”

“Cruel brutes.”

“Not so cruel as some white men,” said Lemaire, half to himself. He had come back to the firelight, and was rummaging among their stores, none too plentiful. He returned to the old Indian, carrying food; and presently Barrett heard snapping sounds, as of a hungry dog feeding. Lemaire came again to his nook under the tent; and Barrett smoked out his pipe in silence. Then, as he knocked the ashes, fizzling, into a little pool of rain, he said gently, “Bob, what makes you so uncommonly good to the Indians?”

Quiet Lemaire did not attempt to evade the direct question. But a rather shy flush rose to his dark, lean cheeks as he said diffidently, “I suppose—because I feel my family—any one of my name—owes ’em something.”

“The grandfather again, eh?”

“Yes. . . . Men had no souls in those days, Barrett. I think the tremendous loneliness—the newness—the lack of responsibility—something killed their souls. . . . . . Wait.”

Leaning forward, he flung more wood on the fire. And the red light flickered on his strong and gentle face. He glanced at his friend, and went on abruptly. “I’ve my grandfather’s maps and journals, you know—what my father called the shameful records of his fame. He was absolutely explicit in ’em. I never saw them in father’s lifetime, but he left them to me, saying I could read them or not, as I liked. I was very proud of them. I read them. And upon my word—though from them I got the hints that may lead us to the rediscovery of the Lost Babiche—I’m almost sorry I did. It leaves a bad taste in the mind, if you know what I mean, to think that one’s father’s father was such a heroic scoundrel.”

“A bad record, Bobby?”

“Bad even for those days. Listen to me. While he was on this very expedition we’re on now, he was taken sick. He was very sick, and going to be worse. He knew what it was. He was near the big summer camp of a tribe of Indians that had been very kind to him, coast Indians, come inland for the caribou hunting; he went to them. He was sick, and they took him in, and nursed him. And all the time he knew what it was he had. It was the smallpox.

“You know what La Picotte is in the wilds. They’ve a song about it still, down along the Lamennais. . . For of all that tribe, only one family, they say, escaped. All the others died; they died as if the Angel of Destruction had come among them with his sword—they died like flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees stood for years, ragged, blowing in the winds. And then the skins rotted, and the bare poles stood, gleaming white, over the rotting bones that covered an acre of ground, they say. No one ever went to that place any more. It was cursed. . . because of my grandfather.”

“Monsieur Forbes made his get-away?”

“Yes, or I shouldn’t be telling you about it.” Lemaire summoned a smile, but his eyes were sombre. “And so I guess—that’s one reason why. One among many.”

“You’re a likeable old freak,” murmured Barrett affectionately, “but—_you_ ain’t responsible, you know!”

“As I look at it, we’re all responsible.”

“Well—anyway, I wouldn’t give that old scarecrow too much of our grubstake, old man. We’ve none too much, if the Babiche doesn’t turn up according to schedule.”

“Probably we won’t see any more of him. He’ll be gone by the morning.”

He was gone with the morning. But as day followed weary day, and there was still no sign of the lakes narrowing to the long-sought river, Barrett was increasingly conscious that the old man was close upon their trail. Sometimes, in the brief radiance of the September dawns, he would see, far and far behind on the wrinkled silver water, a warped canoe paddling feebly. They always hauled away, by miles, from that decrepit canoe. But always, some time in the dark hours, it crept up again. Sometimes, he would see, in the sunset, a wavering thread of smoke arising from the site of their last-camp-but-one. It irritated him at last; the thought of that ragged, cranky canoe, paddled by the ragged, dirty, old imbecile, forever following them—creeping, creeping, under the great gaunt stars, creeping, creeping, under the flying dawns, the stormy moons; when he found Lemaire leaving little scraps of precious tobacco, a pinch of flour in a screw of paper, or a fresh-caught fish beside the trodden ashes of their cooking-place, he exploded.

“I can’t help it,” Lemaire apologized, “I _know_ I’m all kinds of a fool, Barrett. But the poor old wretch is nearly blind—from long-ago smallpox, I should think. He can’t catch things for himself much.”

Barrett, aware that wisdom was on his side, yet felt sorry for his explosion. He said nothing more. Soon he forgot the matter, having much else to think about.

For the Lost Babiche, the once-discovered river, did not “turn up according to schedule.”

The chain of lakes they had been following turned due south. They left them, and, after a terrible portage, launched the canoe in a stream that ran west. Here their progress was very slow, for there were rapids, and consequent portages, every mile or so. This stream, instead of feeding another lake, died out in impassable quaking mosses. They saw a range of low hills some four or five miles ahead; so again they left the canoe and struck out for them on foot, half-wading, half-walking. It was exhausting work. At last they climbed the barren spurs and saw beyond, under a flaring yellow sunset, a world of interlacing waterways, unvisited and unknown, that seemed then as if they smoked under the vast clouds and spirals of wildfowl settling homeward to the reeds. The two men watched that wonderful sight in silence.

At last, “They’re gathering to go south,” said Lemaire briefly. And Barrett answered, “D’you know what date it is? It’s the day on which we said we’d turn back if we hadn’t found the Lost Babiche. It’s the fifteenth of September.”

“Well. . . are we going back?”

“Not till we’ve found our river,” cried Barrett, with half a laugh and half a curse. They gripped hands, smiling rather grimly. They made a miserable, fireless camp, and went back the next day, carrying canoe and supplies, in four toilsome trips, across the hills; repacking and relaunching the second day on a new lake, where in all probability no white man—but one—had ever before dipped paddle.

They had been in the wilderness so long that they had fallen into the habit of carrying on conversations as if the lapse of two or three days had been as many minutes. Barrett knew to what Lemaire referred when he said abruptly, “After all, it isn’t as if you were ignorant of the risks.”

“I guess I know just as much about them as you,” said Barrett, cheerily. “We’re taking chances on the grub, aren’t we? If we find the Lost Babiche before the game moves, we’ll be alright, though our own supplies won’t take us there. Once there, Bob, we’re pretty sure to find friendly Indians when we link up with the Silver Fork—which we do seventy miles down the P’tite Babiche if your grandpa’s map’s correct. Well there are a good many ‘if’s’ in the programme, but don’t you worry. We’ll get through or out, somehow. There’s always fish. I’ve a feeling that this country _can’t_ go back on a Lemaire!”

They went on to a pleasant camp that night on a sandy islet overgrown with dwarf willow, and a wild-duck supper. The current of these new lakes went west with such increasing strength that Lemaire thought they were feeling the “pull” of some big river into which the system drained; and if so, it could be no river but the lost Babiche. They slept, all a-tingle with the fever of discovery and re-made maps in their dreams.

Behind them many miles, a wandering smoke arose from the ashes of their last camp. The old Indian, about whom they had almost forgotten, had gained on them while they packed their supplies over the hills. Now he was close upon them again.

The life of that old savage seemed thin and wavering as the smoke of the fire he made. All night he sat in the ashes, motionless as a stone. Only once, just before the fierce dawn, he rose to his feet with an inarticulate cry, stirred to some instinctive excitement. For in a moment the vast, chill dusk was filled with a musical thrill, a tremendous clamour and rush of life, as thousand by thousand after their kinds, teal and widgeon, mallard and sheldrake, lifted from the reeds and fled before the coming cold. As the old man dimly watched, two delicate things fell and touched his face; one was a feather, the second was a flake of snow.

In those few delicate flakes, Lemaire and Barrett seemed to feel for the first time the ever-present hostility of nature; with such a brief, exquisite touch were they first made aware of the powers against which they strove. The new waterways seemed to stretch interminably. Each time they cleared one of the deep-cut channels which linked lake with lake as regularly as a thread links beads, they looked ahead with the same question. Each time they saw the same expanse of gray water, low islets, barren shores; the country passed them changing and unchanging as a dream. They seemed to be moving in a dream, conscious of nothing but the pressure of the current on their paddles.

Then came the mist.

It shut them into a circle ten feet wide, a pearl-white prison. Outside the circle were shadows, wandering voices, trees as men walking. For two days they felt their way westward through this fog; two nights they shivered over a damp-wood fire, hearing nothing but water beading and dripping everywhere with a sound of grief. It strangely broke Lemaire’s steel nerve. On the second night he said, restlessly, “We must turn back to-morrow.”

“Bob!”

He flung out a tanned hand passionately. “I know. . . . But can’t you feel it? Things have turned against us. These things.” He pointed at the veiled sky, the milky water. “I daren’t go on. If we don’t find the river to-morrow, we’ll go back. And then. . . . the land will have done for me what it never did for my grandfather.”

“What, Bob, old fellow?”

“Beaten me,” said Lemaire, and rolled into his blankets without another word.

He woke next morning with the touch of clear sunlight on his eyelids. He leaped to his feet silently, without waking Barrett, and as he did so, ice broke and tinkled like glass where the edge of the blankets had lain in a little pool of moisture. The last of the fog was draining in golden smoke from the low, dark hills. He strode to the edge of the water, and stopped, shaking suddenly as if he were cold. Then he went to Barrett, and stooped over him.

“Hullo, Bob, is it morning?” Then, as he saw Lemaire’s face, “My God, what is it?”

Twice Lemaire tried to speak. Then he pointed eastward to three high rocky islands which lay across the water, exactly spaced, like the ruined spans of a great bridge which once had stretched from shore to shore.

“Barrett,” he said huskily, “We entered the Lost Babiche yesterday in the fog, and never knew. Those islands are ten miles down the river on Forbes Lemaire’s map.”

They faced each other in silence, too much moved to speak. Their hands met in a long grip. Then Barrett said suddenly, “Anything else.”

“Yes. It’s freezing hard.”

“But. . . we’ve won, Bob, we’ve won!”

“Not yet,” said the man whose fathers had been bred in the wilderness, and wed to it. “Not yet. It’s still against us.”

But there was no talk now of turning back.

The Lost Babiche—lost no more—was a noble river; a gray and ice-clear stream winding in generous curves between high cliffs of slate-coloured rock. These cliffs were much cut into ravines and gullies, where grew timber of fine size for that country. But as their tense excitement lessened a little, they were struck by the absence of all life; even in the deep rock-shadows they saw no fish. Of human life there was not a sign; though in Forbes Lemaire’s days the country had supported many Indians. And now—“Not a soul but ourselves,” said Barrett, in an awed voice; “not a living soul. . .”

Yes. One soul yet living. Far behind them, in the staggering old canoe, the old Indian paddled valiantly on their trail. But he had forgotten them now, as they had long forgotten him. He stopped no more for the offal of their camps. A stronger instinct even than that of hunger was drawing him on the way they also went; down the Lost Babiche. Had they looked, they would not have seen him. And soon, between him and them, the clouds which had been gathering all day dropped a curtain of fine snow.

The first sting of the tiny balled flakes on his knuckles was to Lemaire like the thunder of guns, the opening of a battle.

He had no need to speak to Barrett. They bent over the paddles and the canoe surged forward. It was a race; a race between the early winter and themselves. If the cold weather set in so soon, if they found no Indians on the little-known Silver Fork—there were a dozen “ifs” in their minds as, mile after mile, they fled down the P’tite Babiche. Even as they fled from the winter, so that other white man long ago had fled from the sickness; seen those stark bluffs unrolling; viewed perhaps those very trees.

They made a record distance that day. “We’re winning, Bob, we’re winning,” said Barrett over the fire that night. Lemaire had not the heart to contradict him; but Lemaire’s instincts, inherited from generations, told him that the wilderness was still mysteriously their enemy. He sat smoking, silent, hearing nothing but the faint, innumerable hiss of the snowflakes falling into the flames.

The snow was thickening in the morning, and by noon a bitter wind arose, blowing in their faces and against the stream. Soon the canoe was smack-smack-smacking on the waves, and the snow was driving almost level. The continual pressure of wind and snow drugged their senses. They never heard the voice of the rapids until, rounding an abrupt bend, the ravelled water seemed to leap at them from under the very bow of the canoe.

There was only one thing to be done, and—“Let her go!” yelled Lemaire, crouching tense as a spring above the steering paddle.

Now for the trained eye, the strong hand—the eye to see the momentary chance, the hand to obey without a falter.

Now for the sleeping instincts of a brain inherited from far generations of wanderers and voyageurs. Flash on flash of leaping water, the drive of spray and snow, the canoe staggering and checking like a thing hurt, but always recovering.

Barrett, in the bows, paddled blindly. His life lay in Bob Lemaire’s hands, and he was content to leave it there during those roaring moments. But those hands failed—by an inch.

They were in smooth water. Barrett would have paused to take breath, but Lemaire’s voice barked at him from the stern. He obeyed. The canoe drove forward again—forward in great leaps, towards the point of a small island ahead, dimly seen through the snow—something wrong, though, thought Barrett, grunting; he could get no “beef” on the thing—it dragged; you’d have thought Bob was paddling against him. Then, suddenly, he understood. He called up the last of his strength, drove the paddle in, once, twice—again—heard a shout, flung himself overside into water waist-deep, and just as the canoe was sinking under them, he and Lemaire caught it and ran it ashore. Then, dripping, they looked each other in the face, and each seemed to see the face of disaster.

“It was a rock,” said Lemaire at last, very quietly, “a few inches below the surface. It has almost cut the canoe in two.”

“What’s to be done?”

“Find shelter, I suppose.”

They were very quiet about it. There was no shelter on their islet but a few rocks and a dead spruce in the middle. Here they set up their tent as a wind-break. It was bitterly cold; the island was sheathed with white ice, for the spray from the rough water froze now as it fell; everything in the canoe was wet; they were wet to their waists. They tried to induce the dead tree to burn, but the wood was so rotted with wet it only smouldered and went out. They had a little cooking-lamp and a few squares of compressed fuel for it; they lighted this, and Lemaire made tea with numbed hands. It renewed the life in them, but could not dry them. They huddled against the little lamp in silence, waiting—waiting.

After some time Lemaire heard a curious sound from Barrett; his teeth were chattering. Lemaire saw that his face had taken a waxy white hue. He spoke to him, and Barrett looked up, but his eyes were dim and glazed. “It’ll be all right,” he said, thickly, “we’ll get through, somehow. I’ve a feeling that this country can’t go back on a Lemaire.”

They were the first symptoms of collapse. Lemaire groaned. He got to his feet, and staggered across the slippery rocks. He shook his fist in the implacable face of the desolation. He shouted, foolish rage and defiance, caught back at his sanity; shouted again. . . . This time he thought he heard a faint cry in the snow. It whipped him back to self-control. He splashed out into the curdling shallows, shouting desperately.

Out of the gray drive of snow loomed the ghost of a canoe, paddled, as it seemed, by a ghost. It was the old Indian, whom Lemaire had long forgotten; the weather had not hindered him, the rapids had not wrecked him. At Lemaire’s cry he raised his head, and the canoe put inshore, waveringly. Lemaire splashed to meet it, met the incurious gaze of the half-blind old eyes under the scarred lids, and read into the wrinkled, foul old face, a sort of animal kindness.

Five minutes later he was desperately trying to rouse Barrett. Barrett looked at him at last, and Lemaire saw that the brief delirium was past. “What is it, Bob?” he asked, weakly. And Lemaire broke into a torrent of words.

“The old Indian—the old Indian you said was a hoodoo—don’t you remember? He’s here. He has caught us up, God knows how. He says his canoe’ll hold three. He says that a very little way on there’s a big camp, and that he’ll take us there—in a very little while. He says his tribe is always kind to strangers, to white men. . . . I can’t make out all he says, he’s queer in his head. But he’s dead sure of the encampment. He says it’s always there. .”

Still talking eagerly, Lemaire snatched together a few things, got an arm round Barrett, lifted him up to his feet, got him reeling to the canoe, laid him in the bottom, and helped the old Indian push off. There was no second paddle. There was no need of it. The current took them at once.

The cold was increasing, as the wind died and the snow thinned. Lemaire ceased to be conscious of the passing of time, but within himself the stubborn life burned; he was strongly curious to know the end, to discover what it was the wilderness had in store for him after five years, to read the riddle of that relationship with himself which had called him from the cities to this.

He was aware, at last, of a vast, golden light. The clouds were parting behind the snow, and the sunset was gleaming through. It turned the snow into a mist of rose and molten gold. The old Indian feebly turned the canoe. It crept toward the shore.

“The lodges of my people,” muttered the old Indian. He stood erect, and pointed with his bleached paddle. “They are very many—a very strong tribe.”

Lemaire also looked, and saw.

Silently, the canoe took the half-frozen sand. Silently, very slowly, Lemaire stepped out. The old Indian waited for him. It seemed that the whole world was waiting for him.

He, like a man in a dream, moved slowly into the midst of a level stretch of sand, and stood there. All about him, covering the whole level, were the ridgepoles of wigwams, but the coverings had long fallen away and rotted, and the sunset glowed through the gaunt poles. Lemaire stretched out his hand, and touched the nearest; they fell into dust and rot. . . . Under his feet he crushed the bones of the dead—the dead, who had died fifty years before, and had waited for him here ever since, under the blown sand and the ground willows . . . . “They’ve a song about it, down along the Lamennais. For of all that tribe, only one family, they say, escaped. All the others died . . . . they died like flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees stood for years . . . . No one ever went to that place any more. It was cursed . . . . because of my grandfather . . . .”

He went back to the canoe. Whining like an old animal, the old Indian was busied above Barrett. “The lodges of my people,” he muttered, “a very strong tribe, and kind to the white men.”

Very gently, Lemaire put aside the blind old hands that touched Barrett’s unconscious face. “Don’t wake him,” he said.

THE GIRL ON THE OTHER SIDE

As Dick Lewis went up the steps, the front door opened and old Jaffray’s moved face showed against the dark of the hall. Lewis noticed, with his new and wondering appreciation for the beauty of common things, that it was finely carved as ivory against the shadow. Then, he was shaking the old man’s hand.

“I’m glad to see you, Mr. Lewis. Glad from my ’eart, sir, if you’ll allow me. We were all very glad to hear of your safety. Miss Guida, she’s waiting for you. . . Yes, in the library, sir.”

“Thank you, Jaffray.”

He went to the familiar door and opened it, and the woman who had been sitting for an hour listening for his step and the sound of the opening door, rose and went forward swiftly to meet him. She said only “Dick!” Then, as they clasped hands: “I need not tell you our joy and relief when we heard.”

“Thank you, Guida. You had my letter?”

“Yes, I kept it to myself—greedy me! The others don’t know you’re here yet. And you’ve come—?”

“Just on my way back. To say good-bye.”

She smiled, summoning that light speech so many use for a shield and buckler. “Don’t! No good-byes between friends! I shall say ‘Au ’voir’ as usual.”

But he did not respond to her mood. He said gently, “I think good-bye—and all it stands for—is a good thing to say between friends.” And instantly something alert and frightened stood up in the woman’s soul, crying “He’s changed, he’s different. Something’s happened. This is not Dick. . .”

She met his eyes, resting on her with a sort of abstract delight. From her pale crinkled hair to her slender feet, she was good for eyes to rest on; many eyes had told her so. But Dick Lewis seemed for the first time to see her at a very far distance; and the dumb fear at her heart spread to her body, so that she pressed her hands hard together to prevent them shaking.

“I—want to hear about your escape, Dick,” she said aloud.

There was a long pause. At last he turned to her with a simplicity as strange as it was new. “And I—want to tell you, Guida. I—came to tell you. But I don’t quite know how to do it without hurting you.” His eyes were infinitely kind. “You’ve been so good to me, you see.”

She looked at him. “Don’t think of me,” she said clearly; “I knew from your letter there was something you wanted to tell me. Don’t think of me, except that I want to listen. And always want to—help, if I can. . . Wait till I get settled comfy. There. Go on.”

He leaned forward and touched her hand an instant. “You’re a dear,” he said, rather huskily; “you’ve been listening to my tales for—five years or so, isn’t it? Well, listen to the last. Your friendship’s been the best thing those five years have known.”

Her eyes were like steel as she said with careful lightness, “But why speak of it in the past tense, Richard?”

He was silent; she felt his kindness reaching out to her as he had reached his hand; a kindness somehow pitiful. At last he said quietly, “Because—this time—I believe it really will be good-bye, Guida. I don’t think I shall come back.”

“You mean. . . ?”

His eyes met hers, gravely, across that strange distance. “I mean—if there’s any justice, or any mercy, in earth or heaven, I _can’t_ come back.”

She said at once. “You’ll have to tell me the whole thing. You owe me that.”

“Yes, I owe you that. . . and so much more! If only I can make you understand. . .”

Sheer fright was sickening her. A hundred broken words beat on her bewildered mind. Exposure—shock—could his brain be affected? That small crying voice repeated over and over, “What is it, O, what is it? What’s happened to him? What does it mean?” She did not know she had spoken the last words aloud till he answered them.

“I mean only that I believe, this time, I shan’t come back, my dear.”

“But you’ve come through safely—come through everything—up till now!”

He smiled at her affectionately from his far distance. “O, I don’t mean warnings or presentiments, or any of that rot! I mean a reasoned assurance that I am not to survive the war.”

She managed a smile also. “You look—very much alive, Dick!”

“Yes.” He was looking at her very straightly. “But you see—it’s not my own life. It’s just on loan for a time. That’s the way I look at it.”

She heard her own voice saying, “You must try to make me understand, Dick.” He answered at once, “I’ll try, Guida.”

“You know all the newspaper part of it. You know the ship was torpedoed without warning; that she sank in eight minutes; that the sea was so rough only three boats were launched safely? Yes? Well, you know as much of that part of it as I do, then. For I fell when she heeled to the explosion, and either struck my head, or was struck by something. I remember nothing till I found myself fighting upwards out of the sea; not much then; I was pretty far gone. . . ‘All Thy waves and billows are gone over me.’ You’ve read that. So had I. But it’s a strange thing to _feel_ it.

“I was swimming by instinct when I came to myself. My head felt as if it was split in two, and I could scarcely see, what with dizziness and salt water. But there was some sort of wreckage floating near, and I made for it. It was one of those collapsible canvas boats. I don’t know where it came from. It was floating bottom up and crumpled. The air caught under it, made it float like a buoy, but it gave a bit with my weight. Then I saw that there was someone else clinging to the other side of it. A girl.

“I was quite in possession of myself, but awfully sick and shaken. I said ‘Will it bear two, d’you think?’ And she said, ‘Yes, rather. Can you get hold of it?’

“I got hold of it after a fashion. My hands didn’t seem to belong to me. She watched me across the keel with some anxiety. I misread this, and said, ‘I’ll just rest here a bit, if you don’t mind, and then I’ll swim off and find something else. She said at once, ‘Please don’t. If we keep the gunwale under each side, the air won’t leak out so much. It kept bobbing up before you came. You’re a soldier, aren’t you? I saw you on board.’

“I said, Yes, I was a soldier; wounded, sent south, and just on my way back. Couldn’t say I’d noticed her on board, for I hadn’t. I noticed her now, though. She was quite young; her hair was tied in a sopping tail at the back of her neck, schoolgirl fashion, her face was fair, rather square, perfectly calm, and streaming, I thought at first with sea-water. Then I saw it was with tears. She saw me look at her and said at once, ‘There were children on board, you know. I was playing with them this morning. Jolly lucky for us that it’s not cold, and that we can both swim.’ I said, Yes, jolly lucky. . .”

He stopped. He was silent so long that the woman listening stirred and drew a long breath like a sob. He looked at her quickly. “You and I,” he went on in a low voice, “we’ve talked so much of life and . . . death, and what death means. And there, with that girl, nearer to it than I’d ever been before, I hadn’t a thought or a word different to what you’d have at five o’clock tea! She talked a good deal—rather off-hand and slangy like a boy—of a safety-waistcoat and a certain Miss Matthews. ‘We’d only one,’ she said, ‘and of course, I put it on Miss Matthews, and she sat up all night in it, reading Gold Dust. . . Beastly little books.’ She said, when did I think we’d be picked up? And I said ‘O, any moment,’ though I’d the greatest doubts if we’d be picked up at all. Then wave after wave of pain and sickness came over me. My head was on fire. I thought I must let go. But I hung on; really because I didn’t want to leave the girl alone. . . When I came out of ’em, she—she comforted me. How? O, I don’t know. She just said ‘Stick to it. O _do_ stick to it! You can manage it a bit longer, and a ship is sure to turn up.’ So I kept on managing it a bit longer.

“I’d have done better to let go then.

“Once, though, I must have fainted or something. I came to, and she had swum round, and was supporting me. I don’t know what I said, but she dived back to the other side like a fish. ‘Jolly lucky,’ she told me, ‘that I went in for swimming. I’ve two cups.’ We talked about the cups, I remember; and that Miss Matthews had thought it unladylike to choose cups when you might have had teaspoons instead.

“We must have been two hours in the water. My God! such hours! Not that we suffered much. But that passive _waiting_ was so strange. It called for every ounce of endurance in soul and body; I’ve never felt such a strain on me, even in the trenches. And she—that girl—bore it, and better than I. . .”

He was silent again. Guida listened to the ticking of a little French clock, whose pendulum was a gilded Love swinging on a wreath of roses. Presently it sounded a small ringing chime; and a peal beaten by iron hammers in a hundred towers could not have been more remorseless than the fairy sound.

“From first to last we saw nothing of the other boats, nor of any other survivors. The sea seemed to have been swept clear, even of the tragedy. I did see one smear of smoke on the horizon, but would not draw her attention to it, and it quickly passed.

“I roused from a sort of doze—if it’s possible to doze clinging to an upturned boat, with a broken head. The sky seemed lower and darker. The waves seemed to run against it. It was a funny effect. I expected them to splash and flop back! We were very low in the sea. I thought the boat we clung to was lower. And evening was coming on. Our last hope, I thought, would go with the day. . .

“I looked across the keel. That brave child’s face was very pale. Her mouth was set in such resolution it made her look old. She said quietly. ‘The air’s leaking out of the boat.’

“Not a thing could I do or say to help her! I don’t hold it’s any part of a man’s duty to throw dust in the eyes of a plucky girl facing danger; but I _did_ long to be able to ease it a bit for her. And beyond what comfort the mere presence of another human being gave her, I was utterly useless. However, something in her face made me think she’d have been worse off alone, and I resolved to cling on to the last possible moment. But I was very weak and drowsy. I’d have let go and given up if it hadn’t been for her.

“‘If it sinks any lower.’ I told her, ‘you must work round to the stern and cling on there, and I’ll swim alongside.’ I knew I shouldn’t swim far; but I thought the thing would serve to keep her head out of the water for another couple of hours, anyway. And then she leaned a little forward and said ‘No!’

“‘You must,’ I said. But she went on quite quietly, ‘No. If this boat will only support one—if only one of us is to be saved—then it must be you.’

“I laughed. I was very angry with her—with that small, steady, white face of hers. I said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, if you please. It’s all quite bad enough without that. You’ll do as you’re told.’ I suppose I was awfully rude to her. . . But she made me listen.

“‘That’s all right,’ she said, in her boyish way, ‘when other things are all right. But everything’s upside down now. Nothing is as usual. You know what I mean. And of the two, you _must_ be saved, if there’s a choice. Just _because_ of—of women and children. Just _because_ you’re a man, and can fight, and help to stop—this. Don’t you see? Can’t you see?’

“I talked a lot more—talked like a Dutch Uncle. We argued the rights and wrongs of it for ever so long. It must have been. . . funny. . . we two specks of human beings, talking like that in the middle of the Atlantic! Her arguing was not the least use, of course. She to argue down the deepest instinct in the nature of any decent man of our race—she, that little thing! She was silent at last. I thought I’d convinced her of the sheer, rank, outrageous impossibility of her idea. And all the time I was longing to give in and let go there and then. Only I read in her face—somehow; how does one know things at such times?—that her one fear was just being left alone. She wasn’t afraid of death; but she _was_ afraid of the gray twilight and the empty, empty sea.

“We did not speak for a long time after that. We were too tired. That wild suggestion of hers never crossed my mind again. I was thinking,—chiefly of going ratting with Gherkin, the terrier I left with the Dunstables! I was in a sort of dream, I think. But once I heard her speak, low and clearly. ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘hold on. Stick it out! It’s your duty. You’re not your own now. You belong to every weak and defenceless thing there is in the world. . .’ I didn’t quite take in what she said, or its meaning; I was too far gone. But I lifted my head—I was resting it against the bulge of the broken canvas keel—and nodded to her, and she nodded back at me. I remembered afterwards that her eyes were starry bright. . . Then I let my head go down again, and shut my eyes a minute. . .”

He turned slowly, so that he faced Guida full. She saw, with an indescribable wrench of pain, that his brown cheeks were glistening wet; and as she saw it, he wiped the tears away, openly, on his knuckles, like a child. His eyes, looking into hers, held the reflection of a great light. And he was miles away; separated from her by measureless emotion, as by time and space.

He said, quite steadily, “I never saw her again.

“When I remember anything more, I was in the vast blaze of a searchlight—an agony of light, it seemed to me, boring through me. Then there were black shapes of men, trying to lift me into a boat. My hands were so clenched and numbed on the gunwale of that canvas thing that they had to cut free the bits I was hanging on to. . . for fear I left the girl in the lurch. And I shouted to them ‘Have you got the lady? Have you got the young lady? Take her first!’ And one of them put his ear down to my mouth, and listened carefully, and then looked at the others. And he said, very gently, ‘There ain’t no young lady, sir. You’re the only one on that boat.’”

Pity rushed over the frozen woman in the chair; pity, warm and blinding. “O, the poor child!” she said, “O, the poor child!”

But Lewis swung on her almost angrily. “Don’t pity her,” he said at once. “There’s nothing to pity in such a royal sort of generosity as hers! She and her gift are not to be pitied. Don’t waste pity on—either of us, Guida.”

Meeting her dumb, bewildered look, after a moment he went on, “If I’m sure of anything, in earth or heaven, I’m sure that she gave her life for mine—that she let go her hold on that boat deliberately—to give me a better chance—because she thought mine the more useful life.”

“You can’t be _sure_, my poor Dick!”

“But I am sure. She was in better case to stick to that boat than I was. She gave me my life—no, lent it!—the divine, unpardonable child. . . She lent it, in her own words, to all the weak things of the world, because I could fight on their side till such deeds as _that_ were done away. I take it so. I believe I am—meant to take it so. It’s not my own life any more. It’s a loan, till the end of justice has been reached—the end we all have fought for, she not less than I. God knows! And when that end’s attained, I think God in His mercy will call in the debt—that He won’t leave me under such a proud, intolerable, burden. . . What a lot we’ve talked about—things—before. And here, I suppose, is the strangest thing of all. Only it doesn’t seem strange to me. Just natural. One didn’t exactly run away from. . . death. . . before, you know. The difference now is only that, when I see it coming, I shall run to meet it.”

She could find no relief in thought or feeling. He sat quite still in his pet chair, the traces of those unashamed tears still on his cheeks, staring at the rug; and as she watched him, she saw a terror opening before her, a gray desolation. The familiar room, the afternoon sunlight in squares on the carpet, the faint rattle of a wind-stirred blind—all the old familiar things were there. But in the half of an hour, the soul of them was changed past any recall of hers.

She tried once, timidly, desperately, “But if she _gave_ it to you. . .”

He answered quickly, “For that! Just for that. I shall have no right to the loan any longer.” He looked at her quietly. And she spoke, answering something his eyes had said rather than his lips.

“I see. And nothing I can say will make you look at it differently. . .”

“No. I don’t think it will, Guida. I’ve had a long time to think things out, you see.”

The familiar room, the familiar figure, Guida saw them as in a glass darkly. She knew it was no use fighting. Something confronted her which was implacable by words or tears or prayers; implacable as death, yet wearing the bright face of life and love.

He was watching her, with infinite kindness, from that great and starry distance. “I didn’t do wrong to tell you, did I?” he asked gently. “There was more or less of an unspoken compact—we always talked out our philosophies. How thin they seem—now. . . . And I thought you wouldn’t—grieve—when it comes. . . If I could show you that grief was—would be—out of place.”

She bent her head and after a minute asked calmly, “when do you go?”

“This evening.” And afterwards she could remember no interval between his saying so and his rising to go. A few more brief sentences, broken words of courage that were on a thousand lips; then he was at the door, turning with a smile. She did not press him to stay. Life was going with him; but better it should go, she thought. She knew afterwards that he had held her hands, kissed her once, and blessed her for “the truest friend ever man had.” But all the time their souls were divided by a barrier of great and shining things in which she had no share.

“Good-bye, Guida.”

“No, Dick, no! Au ’voir!”

For a moment that light seemed to include her as she defied it, to shine on her too. Then it was gone with him, and the door closed.

She stayed quiet, as she was, for a long time; then she slid forward slowly to the floor and knelt there, her face in her hands. Later she rose, and went to a glass, and mercilessly examined her beauty.

“A little while, my dear,” she said, “a little while, and you’ll be old. And lonely. . . Would it have made any difference if you’d told Dick you loved him?”

“Would it have made it seem _happier_ to Guida,” Dick Lewis was asking himself, “if I could have told her that I’ll be not only willing, but glad—eager—to go, for the sake of the one chance in a thousand that I’ll find that girl again—the girl whose name I never knew—the girl on the other side?”

THE DISTANT DRUMS

War broke out in August, 1914, as everyone knows. In the October of that same memorable year, Garry Redmond, descending from the Far-alone country to the comparative civilisation of the All-alone, found in the possession of John Akkamuk a bottle, with a scrap of newspaper stuck to it.

Squatting in the thick murk of John Akkamuk’s winter house, Garry lifted the bottle to the lamplight, and read the paper.

“You give me this, John?” he suggested.

John thought his white friend had gone mad; but then, he often thought so.

“Yes,” he said, “you have him. You good feller.” He had just struck an excellent bargain with Garry over a loon-skin rug, and felt generous.

Garry pulled out of his pocket a tiny canvas bag, from which he shook into his broad palm a glittering fairy pyramid of gold dust.

“Where you get that?” asked John, leaning forward.

Garry grinned at him, happily.

“Ne’er mind, my simple heathen,” said he. “I’ll get lots more of it next summer. This is just a free sample; but I’ll give it to you right now if you can find me the bit that’s tore off this paper.”

“No go,” said John, gloomily. He had never had any more of the paper than that piece stuck on the bottle. Garry took the bottle and the loon-skin rug home with him, and when he had gone, John turned to and beat his wives, one after the other, out of sheer vexation.

Garry’s home that winter was a one-roomed shack, lined with skins, buried to the roof in earth, gravel, turf—anything that would keep the winds out. It was built on the clean rock, because if you built on the earth, the whole thing was likely to collapse in sludge, after the stove had been lighted long enough to melt the ice under the earth. There was not room in the shack for much but the stove, two bunks, and some soapstone lamps that the Inniut use.

Kob Smit was lying in one of the bunks. He turned his head, with a dim smile, as Garry entered. The whole of him was dimmed, sapped, whitened, like a plant that’s been away from the light too long. Weeks earlier he had fallen on the rocks, and had been ill since. He had a hard time of it, fighting out from the Far-alone. Now he was “resting up,” in the midst of every luxury to be had north of sixty-five; for next summer was to bring the partners luck at last.

“This is for you, Kob,” said Garry, flinging the lovely feather rug over his feet. “It’ll keep you fine and warm.”

“It’ll keep me fine and warm,” agreed Kob, nodding and smiling. He had a gentle, docile voice, like a big child’s. “You’re a good feller, Garry. Always white to me.”

“What d’you make of this?” Garry wished to change the subject, and thrust the bottle forward where Kob could see it. Kob frowned at the blurred words, reading them out almost letter by letter.

“Eng—land De—clares War—” he read. Then, with a sudden, mild brightening: “Well, say, Garry, that’s quite interesting, ain’t it?’ England Declares War.’ But it don’t say who with, eh, Garry?”

“No, it don’t,” said Garry. “You wait now, Kob; I’m just goin’ to fix you up some broth.”

“You’re awful good to me, Garry.”

Garry took the bottle away and hid it under his bunk. But Kob talked a lot about the scrap of newspaper.

“My father,” said Kob, “he fought in a war over there, somewheres. He’d got a wound, too.”

Garry did not talk of it again. But, sometimes when Kob was asleep, he pulled the bottle out from under his bunk, and read the message on it over and over. Once Kob woke in the night, and saw Garry standing over him.

“What’s your real name, Kob?” said Garry.

“Yawcob Schmidt, I guess. But are you crazy, Garry?”

“No,” said Garry. “Hush up! Sleep!”

“Well,” Garry told himself, “I’ll know in the spring. Maybe it ain’t anything, either.”

He settled down to the interminable monotony of wintering north—not his first experience. What to another and softer breed of men would have been a hardship and desolation unspeakable, he half-unconsciously enjoyed. It was in this environment in which all his qualities of body and soul, having freest range, came to their finest, stoic fruition. He loved the first storms out of the Arctic, heralded by their clanging clouds of wildfowl; the rare days of clear sun, when the sky was a turquoise, and the poudre played its magic with the hills; track of wolf and hare and caribou among the low birch scrub for his following. And the nights—above all, the nights—when the earth was a star glittering under the icy fires of the universe unveiled. All these things he had loved, without knowing. That winter he began to know.