Chapter V

Molly and Jeff made friends rather quickly as the _Ethan Allen_ sailed northward. While the girl did not conform to Jeff’s idea of a lady, at least she was agreeable company, quick-witted and bright, and highly appreciative of his faultless courtesy and constant—though somewhat patronizing—attentions. Her business in the North was simply to keep her uncle company, she said; she would return from Sitka on this same ship.

They had rather pleasant times together. They fed the gulls that trailed them, they watched the mysterious shore line, they had long, friendly talks on the deck. Jeff told her much about his past life, but he was not so garrulous as to confess his real mission in the North. He had too good manners to tell her his aristocratic views, and he was not in the least tempted even to hint at his viewpoint regarding the Union and America. He realized that Molly, sympathetic and generous though she was, could not be a good listener to disloyal talk. Her views on such matters were already clear.

As the days passed and the North Star neared, Jeff began to experience a growing interest in the land by which the ship passed. Here was certainly the wilderness: a country inconceivably vast, unknown, almost unpeopled, dark with unbroken leagues of forest. Together they saw deep bays in which a ship had never come to rest, far mountain ranges white with snows that had never held a white man’s footprint, wonderful sylvan scenes that filled them with delight only to fade at once in the haze. Jeff was stirred with the wild beauty of the land, and at the same time he found himself curiously mystified and thoughtful.

There were nights of startling beauty that wakened strange fancies and unfamiliar moods in the two travelers who sat on the moonlit deck. There was a vastness here that Jeff had never thought of before. Indeed, the sea and the land and the sky were created on a scale that filled him with silent awe. He felt little and futile in comparison, and the things that he lived by seemed of no great moment after all—but he soon fought away such vagrant thoughts as these. In such wondrous nights the two sat for long hours with hardly a word, stirred by the magic of the sea in the moonlight, listening to its eternal, moaning voice.

“Do you suppose any one will ever live up here?” he asked Molly one night, pointing to the darkened shore. “Can any one exist in such a place?”

“People live up here now,” was the girl’s reply. “Hardy trappers and miners, not to mention the natives, gain their living from this wilderness.”

“How can anybody bear to do it! It just means throwing his life away.”

The girl sat with her chin resting in her pink palm, and her gaze was a thousand miles away. “I don’t think they would agree with you. I know that I don’t agree with you, Mr. Sharp. In the happy years before the war—did you consider that you were throwing your life away?”

“Of course not. No one could have lived a more perfect, idyllic life than I did. Why, I didn’t have a worry. Nothing but pleasant things to do from morning till night—”

“That is the way I thought it was. But if one of those hardy, hairy frontiersmen I speak of had been in your place, he would have thought that his time was worse than wasted.”

“Oh, I suppose one man’s drink is another’s poison. But you must remember—those men are a different breed from me. They haven’t the same traditions, the same precedents, nothing of the same tastes. They are practically barbarians—knowing nothing of refinement, culture—anything that matters. I don’t suppose they could be happy in a gentleman’s station—simply because they would feel out of place.”

“What is culture—refinement—compared to achievement, Mr. Sharp? Where would culture and refinement be except for the achievement that has made them possible? I’ll tell you why those men I speak of couldn’t be contented in your old sphere. Of course, if they had been trained to it, as you were, they would like it well enough, but they could never be transplanted now. Those men must have work to do, or they waste away. They must have trial and stress—adventure—battle. They know their keen eyes will dull if they don’t have the light-and-shadow of the forest to keep them trained; their trigger finger will grow lax, their muscles soften. They must have a patch of woodland to clear for sowing; they must build a trail through the woods. It isn’t such luxury as you had, Mr. Sharp, that makes America great. It is these trail-breakers in the forest. And I don’t know what will happen to us when the last of the land is tamed, and no trails are left to blaze.

“Yours was a beautiful life, lovely as a dream, I suppose, but I don’t know what common good could come of it,” she went on, warming to her subject. “Those men in the woods yonder are building for the future—they are making an America that will be mankind’s hope in years to come. Because of the efforts of such men as those—such men as are now peopling the West—we will have a country where the common man has some kind of a chance—where the mass of people will be better fed and better clothed and happier than any race of people have ever been since the world began. When a man builds in this country he does not build for a king, or a noble—he isn’t making something that a king’s hired army is going to come along and take away from him. He builds for all the people.

“Only the bravest and the toughest can live out there in the woods. Only the brave and the hardy have ever dared come to America; that is why this continent is now peopled with a brood of eagles. And they can’t stay still, those eagle-children. They must ever fly farther into the wilderness. They are essentially home-makers, not just spoilers, and future generations will reap the reward of their courage and strength. They may not be gentlemen and ladies in the sense you use the word, but you can never say they have thrown away their lives.”

Jeff looked at the girl with widening eyes. He had not dreamed that she could be so fervent. The subject had evidently stirred her to the depths of a nature which he realized now was neither vulgar nor superficial. He found, in the days that followed, that her words lingered in his consciousness, and particularly he retained the picture of her as she was speaking them—seated on the deck with the moonlight in her eyes, her strong little hands occasionally gesturing in her earnestness, her lovely face lifted to his.

He was glad to have gained an appreciation of her; for it seemed that their time of parting was near. The ship was rapidly approaching its destination. One afternoon they came in sight of Baronof Island, the seat of the capital city of the Czar’s American possessions; and as night lowered they steamed into the harbor.

The last of August is almost always lovely in southeastern Alaska; but this night turned out to be perfect beyond his imagination. It was as if nature were outdoing herself for his special benefit. The stars were out in countless legions and were imaged in the harbor depths; as the moon rolled up around the curve of the earth, the wilderness at the edge of the sea became an incredible fairyland of mystery and loveliness. Always susceptible to beauty, a strange, lonely, poetic mood overcame him; and he found himself regretting that the journey was over.

Surely such regrets were foolish and inconsistent in one of his standards and ideas. What was there about those two commonplace people, Captain Skinner and his niece, that he should regret leaving them. Perhaps the real explanation lay in the uncertainty of the future, the unhappy prospect of many weeks spent in an inhospitable, bleak, and dismal trading post in the North Pacific. He felt that he knew all too well what Sitka would be like. He was prepared for weeks of hopeless boredom while he waited for a ship to take him home.

Partly because he was so enthralled with the beauty of the night, and partly because he took little interest in the small Russian city that marked the journey’s end, he made no attempt to watch for the first light of the port. As a result, the city burst upon his view like a place of enchantment, up out of the empty air. There were lights everywhere—stretching far along the harbor like a string of gleaming jewels, climbing the hills, illuminating what seemed to be fair-sized buildings. Sitka looked considerably larger than he supposed it would be. Perhaps it was only his long absence from the centers of civilization that made it seem so imposing; yet surely it promised more than he had hoped for at first. It was the last outpost, the farthest place from anywhere, the final limit of the Czar’s dominions, yet it looked like a center of civilization.

“It seems to be quite a place,” he observed to Molly, who stood beside him. “I suppose it is the effect of the lights.”

“It is quite a place,” the girl answered. “You don’t understand. This is the capital of a Russian province. The majesty of the Czar carries even here. Besides, it is the center of everything in Alaska. It is one of the fur-trading centers of the world. Almost every skin taken over all this vast province goes through Sitka before it is shipped. Transpacific boats stop here for ice. Look at the ships!”

Jeff’s eyes opened wide as he saw there were a half dozen large vessels of various nations and kinds lying at anchor. And now he was aware of an even more amazing thing.

He suddenly heard music. It came stealing over the water, hallowed by distance, sublimely sweet in the hushed darkness. It was thin and nebulous as moonlight itself; it did not seem like sound, but only an incredible fragrance of the night. This was not the music of a savage people; a native dance to a pagan god. There was no blood-curdling beat of a tomtom in accompaniment. Such music as this was the heritage of old civilizations, the voice of ancient cities in far lands. This was not America, new and raw, that spoke across the water. It was the music, the articulate soul of far-off, unhappy kingdoms beyond the interminable seas.

“It’s Strauss, isn’t it?” the girl whispered at his side. “It comes from Baronof Castle—the governor’s house on the hill.”

But Jeff did not answer or turn his head. He had forgotten the girl’s existence.