Chapter XI

Rough seas prevailed during the first five days of their isolation, and these were followed by a long period of comparative calm,—a pleasant change indeed, in Ivan’s mind. The weather on the mainland, however, continued unsettled,—clouds that drifted in over the ranges, lowered threateningly and vanished; occasional showers followed by short bursts of yellow sunlight in which the wet moss steamed, rainbows bending down into the sea and thrilling Dorothy with renewed hope, and nights of bitter, penetrating cold. It was unpleasant, threatening weather, yet nothing to keep stout ships in from the sea; and at the end of ten days of waiting that which at first was only a vague fear became almost a certainty: that the _Warrior_ had gone down among the island crags and would not return.

They had given her five days of bad weather in which to lie at anchor in some sheltered harbor, and five days more to pull up and make the run back to the rocky coast where they were; and even Pete had to agree that this was time enough. On top of this they waited a few extra days for good measure, an impatient wait that, on Ivan’s part at least, was endured only because no other way was open. And now the castaways found themselves confronted by an ugly situation. As their hopes of rescue by the _Warrior_ went down, the available supply of food likewise decreased, and autumn was dying in the land. The northern winter is a formidable prospect at best; and even such seasoned old wilderness men as Pavlof and Fortune Joe did not care to face it with inadequate supplies of food.

So one evening Pete called an informal council of war. “I’ll admit we’ve got to do something, and we can’t wait very much longer,” he began. “We’ve given the _Warrior_ time in plenty to get back, with some days to spare to take care of breakdowns—and we haven’t as much as had word of her. It may be she’ll get back yet—delayed through some more or less serious accident we haven’t figured on—and again she may not. This is a port of missing ships, out here. I don’t see how we dare wait much longer for her to come.”

“Agreed,” Dorothy replied promptly. “What do you suggest we do about it?”

“Let’s sum it all up first, and see where we are. Let’s assume the worst, that the _Warrior_ has gone down, and that she went down before she got word to anybody to come and rescue us. Let’s see first if anybody will become worried about us, and send after us. Of course somebody will—in time—but our plans didn’t include returning to Squaw Harbor, and the winter watchman there won’t give us a thought. Sooner or later Bradford and De Long, down in Seattle, will learn that the _Warrior_ did not come into Seward, but she wasn’t likely expected at any definite time, if she was expected at all, and it may be months before a search party is sent out,—a half-hearted search party at that, because they will naturally think we went down with the _Warrior_. After the same long period of weeks and months, some of your relatives and friends down below will become anxious about you and dispatch some search parties; but they will likely become discouraged by the same news—that we went down with the _Warrior_—and rank us among the missing.” Pete did not add that this business of being included with the missing was an old game to him: rather he looked quietly, half-smiling, out to sea.

“But say they do come and search this shore: at least, it will be a matter of weeks and months. And weeks and months in this climate, and winter and with little food, is a deadly deal. We have only one pair of snow-shoes, and not near enough winter equipment to supply the five of us here on the mainland. Of course we may get picked up by a passing trader, but the sea lanes are quite far out here, pretty well out of sight of land. We can’t rely on such a long chance as that. There remains the dory, and the difficult, more or less dangerous trip down the coast to some settlement.

“Of course, it’s the only possible plan now; you’ll agree with me in that. But our food supplies are already so low it wouldn’t be safe to attempt the trip for the five of us. There will likely be long periods, days and days, of being tied up on sandy spits where there isn’t a particle of fuel. To attempt that trip, you’ve got to have plenty of already cooked food—dried meat, canned goods, and things like that—and we haven’t got ’em. It will be the toughest kind of a tough project at best, but we can’t do anything else.

“We’ve got to get busy quick. The natives are already getting scared; they say they can smell winter, that it’s going to set in early. I don’t put my own fear into their mouths either—I’ll stick it out as long as you say—but these men are natives, and they have not white man’s fortitude to hold them up. Now this is my plan.

“To-morrow you let me take three days’ rations of grub—a Siwash outfit, the men up here call it—and start off across the Peninsula on foot. It’s no trip for a woman, Mrs. Newhall; for you to go would be absolutely out of the question. I’ll pick my way over that range, sleeping out at night, and down on to the Pacific side, where I’m bound to run into some native village or trapper’s hut in a few days’ travel. Then I’ll get a hundred pounds of canned goods and come back here. Meanwhile the natives will go hunting and kill all the venison they can, which we’ll dry over the fire—cut it into strips and jerk it the best we can. Then with that fresh supply of food, you two, with the two natives to man the oars, can work down the coast and out.”

“And what will you do, in the meantime?” Dorothy asked.

“You can leave me a little flour and my rifle, and I’ll make it through; when you hit a settlement you can ask a native to pack me in a load of grub. That isn’t a very big boat, and your grub will be limited, the best you can do. Besides, there’s a possibility that some one will come here to look for you, and in that case one of us ought to be here to tell him where to pick you up.”

It was a good plan; she felt at once that it was the only plan. But when she tried to be hopeful, a deep wave of depression seemed to engulf her, a feeling of hopelessness, indifference to the future, almost as if old age had suddenly claimed her. Perhaps it was merely an outgrowth of a hidden fear of the difficult, dangerous journey that waited her in the open dory. Of conscious fear there was none.

Pete would be left here, then, to the desolation and the storm. What a fate for a man of his character and instinctive refinement! Even when she took up her old life anew with Ivan—in the gaiety that would drown her remorse and still the yearning in her heart—she would never cease to think of him, living out his life on this lonely shore, standing stanch against the storm; lifting awe-filled eyes to the tempestuous sea; misty—like a ghost—in the drifting clouds of fog.

“I don’t see why it will be necessary for any one to cross the mainland,” Ivan said, in the hush that followed Pete’s mellow, deep baritone. He spoke with considerable emphasis and urgency. “While you were gone, we’d just be eating more grub all the time. We’d better start in the dory to-morrow.”

Pete shook his head. “It wouldn’t be safe, with our supplies so far reduced. You must remember that while I’m gone the natives can be hunting and drying meat.”

“Perhaps the best plan would be for you to stay and hunt too: jerked venison is a fine ration, and with the little we have here it would be all we’d need for the trip.”

“But only one of us can hunt, because we’ve got only one rifle, Mr. Ishmin,” Pete argued politely. “Pavlof can take that; of course, by careful stalking, Fortune Joe might get a head or two with your pistol. While they’re doing that, I’ll be getting a good backload of essentials.”

Ivan hesitated, and his face looked yellowish-white in the fading light of day. “If some one is going to go, it had better be me,” he said at last. “I can cross the ranges as well as you can.” Pete’s eyes dropped over the Mongol’s graceful, yet powerful form, and he believed that this was true. “If help can be found, I’ll find it—I’m not afraid of hardship, either. I’ve seen plenty of it, in my training for the Russian army. The great advantage of this is that the camp’s supply of venison can be piled up twice as fast; while the two breeds are hunting and packing in, you can work at curing it. Otherwise one of them would have to be here all the time. You can take care of Mrs. Newhall and look out for her comfort as you’ve done previously.”

Pete glanced at Dorothy to see what her face showed; but she was evidently neutral. “Perhaps Mrs. Newhall would not want to be left here—without your protection,” he said simply.

“On the contrary, I’m perfectly willing to do what’s best for all concerned,” Dorothy remarked. “If you think you can make the trip successfully, Ivan, and it’s best for everybody, you needn’t worry about me.”

“I’m sure it would be best. You need Pete here to look out for your comfort, to dry the venison and to take care of the camp while the natives are hunting. I have every confidence in you, Pete; and so has Mrs. Newhall.”

It was true: there was nothing of the degenerate, the wild beast in the man who had been chosen to guide them in the wilderness. His instinctive chivalry was not to be doubted. “I appreciate what you say, very much,” Pete returned.

“I do mean it. You’ve kept your place so far and I know you’ll continue to keep it. You can watch out for the breeds as well as I can. We’ll call it decided—only, if you don’t mind, Dorothy, we’ll wait one more day to see if the ship comes in.”

Thus it was arranged, and now, as the night lowered, Ivan and Dorothy sat by the fireside at the door of her tent. Her gray mood of hopelessness had not yet lifted; and Ivan’s most ardent wooing, his most brilliant discourse did not beguile her from her own, dark musings. At first she sat only dull and inert, depressed both physically and spiritually, as she watched the hopeless fight of the little, upward-leaping tongues of flame against the immensity of the growing darkness.

But soon she forgot herself in the eerie, imponderable air of mystery that the night had brought. Her imagination began to catch fire. Somehow she was near the heart of things to-night: there were profound, eternal secrets in the soft sound of the waves on the shore, in the whispering of the winds that confided together in the thickets, in the thousand, little, half-guessed noises that blend together and make the silence of the wilderness night. She felt small and fragile in the face of powers too vast and awful for her to name.

The natives’ camp fire burned fitfully,—a smudge of dull red in the gloom. She could just see the long curves of the waves as they rolled and changed, ceaselessly, against the pale, late-evening sky. Swift clouds were scurrying through the heavens, and sometimes stars showed through their tattered rents, and sometimes the moon brought dimly the white glory of the distant peaks. There was a pronounced threat in the tone of the night she had never sensed before, as in the wind that blows before an invading, ravishing army. She felt that the very elements, long at peace, were assembling in battle array and would soon swoop down in fury upon these gray shores. She sensed the truth not only in those scurrying clouds, but in the lash of the wind that swept down into the fire’s glow; the sense of impending disaster that haunted every living thing upon that rock-bound coast. She felt baffled and estranged, and her thoughts wandered in little-known fields.

Ivan was always as sensitive as a delicate electrical instrument, and he also was aware of the sinister tone of the night. He was a brave man, and the only fear he had was small and dim, too obscure for him to fasten his thought upon; yet the deadly magic of the hour did not spare him. The voice of the land was clear to-night, and he found himself answering, to the full, its primal appeal; and in gathering himself to meet the onslaught of the raw forces of the winter that now threatened him, he seemed to strip off more and more of his Occidental veneer, and more and more the soul of Asia was revealed. Because it was his first need, his desire for Dorothy was immeasurably enhanced. He wooed her with a fire she had never seen in him before.

To-night he urged immediate marriage. When she asked him how, exiled as they were from civilization, immediate marriage could be brought about, he had a ready answer. “Can marriages occur only in civilization?” he asked. “It’s especially simple here—you know that Nick Pavlof is empowered to marry people. As you must have heard, he has some sort of right from the Greek Church—hereditary, I guess—and it holds good through all this end of Alaska. It wouldn’t be quite conventional, I’ll admit, but it would be holy, and it would stand. A license is not required when there is no way to get it—it’s just a legal record, at best—and if you wish, that could be handled when we get to Seward. Marry me to-night, Dorothy—then together we’ll go away—to Russia, to the South Seas, anywhere. If you say the word, we’ll lose ourselves in some savage native village on this coast and never emerge again. I’d renounce the world in an instant for you.”

She did not doubt this. His face was stark white; his eyes glowed like the coals of the dying fire. Her lips trembled piteously as she sought his hand in the dusk. “Don’t talk about it to-night,” she urged, almost pleading. “I’m so troubled—the future is so uncertain——”

He looked straight into her eyes, as if he would hypnotize her. “You’re troubled only because you haven’t as yet made up your mind to accept me—a decision you are sure to make in the end,” he told her slowly, with deep emphasis. “You won’t quit being troubled until you do it—because you love me in your heart. For this same reason your future seems so dark and uncertain. Dorothy, the women of my race are never troubled, because they put their destinies absolutely in the hands of the men they love. That’s the lesson your western women have got to learn before they can ever find real peace, real poise. Dorothy, marry me to-night and put your destiny in my hands.”

She would not hear of it, yet the idea disturbed her and stimulated her imagination. Perhaps that was the answer: to forget the hundreds of doubts and fears that oppressed her and place her destiny irrevocably in Ivan’s hands. Her course would be settled then, and she would have to make the best of it. At least she would be free of the haunting, maddening uncertainty—the light and the shadow—the hesitancy and the faltering. Perhaps, after all, her alternate periods of happiness and despair were all born of a thwarted love for this distinguished man of the Orient; perhaps all her unrest was due to the fact that she loved Ivan in her heart and because of some erratic impulse—possibly her remorse for the part she had played in Peter’s downfall and death—she would not let herself yield to him. If she turned, accepted his offer and married him here beside the sea, all her problems would solve themselves, if for no other reason than that all other gates would be closed.

“I don’t want to think about it any more to-night,” she told him earnestly. “Ivan, I wish you would play. Sometimes music is like a light, helping me to straighten everything out——”

He took the violin in his slim hands. “What kind of music?” he asked. “The ‘Humoresque’——?”

“No. I don’t want laughter in the midst of tears. That won’t help. Play a song of _life_, if you know what I mean——”

“That means a song of death.” He hesitated, then began softly the immortal “Elegie” by Massenet. This song of tears, deathlessly sweet, brought her very nearly to the answer of her problem. She did not actually come to a conclusion in regard to Ivan’s suit, but she believed she found the reason why she had not yielded to him long since, and thus the source of all her uncertainty, her haunting doubts and fears. This was a song of the dead, and through the magic of its genius she was able, vaguely, to pierce the veil of death.

It was, indeed, a loyalty to Peter—mistaken, perhaps, but yet an emotion of great power—that had kept her from Ivan’s arms so long. Partly this loyalty was an echo of her remembered love for him, partly it was born of her remorse for failure in duty toward him. And now that she stood at Peter’s grave, the situation had reached its crisis.

But her thoughts reached further. A dim sense that previously had been too vague to put into concrete thought became suddenly an unqualified conviction. And the wonder of it brought a mist of tears to her eyes.

She heard the marvelous music through to the end, carried out of herself by its wailing beauty, moved to the depths of her heart. The last note died away; and Ivan, ever the genius, listened, rapt by his own magic, for the last, dying echo.

“Tell me something, Ivan?” The girl spoke quietly, her low, deep, beautiful voice tremulous with wonder, and the soft, starlike luster of tears in her eyes. “Ivan, do you believe in ghosts?”

It was no petty question, blasphemous in the holy spell of his music. She was deeply in earnest and he gave her an earnest answer.

“Of course,” he said. “Who doesn’t? No one can believe in immortality and not, strictly speaking, believe in ghosts. The whole world knows of them—not just believes in them.”

“But do you believe they come back—to this earth?”

“Yes. I believe that too: every man does, in his heart. I don’t even think it’s a matter of conjecture.”

“A great truth has just come to me.” The girl was exalted. “I’ve known it all the time, but I just wasn’t aware of it. Maybe that isn’t plain. I mean that I’ve sensed it, subconsciously—all the time I’ve been here—in some back part of myself; and I can’t imagine why I’ve taken so long for my conscious self to be aware of it. The music sent it home to me, just now.”

“It often takes music, or some other stimulus to the emotions, to send home the truth. What is it?” he asked gently.

“Peter is watching over me. I feel his presence just as surely as if he were in the flesh.”