Chapter VIII

Dorothy could scarcely believe her eyes at first. Then she leaped out from her shelter—a slender, appealing figure in the clouds of rain—and called sobbingly, as if her voice would carry out to sea. Then she turned in desperation to the head guide.

“Launch the boat quick, Pete,” she said. “Maybe we can catch her yet——”

He shook his head, soberly and respectfully. “You’d better get back under cover, Mrs. Newhall,” he advised. “It would just mean to be lost if we tried to catch her. She probably had good reasons for going——”

“But to leave us here, in this awful place——”

“She probably didn’t have any other choice. I think likely her anchor chain broke, and she had to use the power of her engines to keep from being blown upon the reefs. Her crew is heading her for some shelter where she can lie at anchor—possibly clear to Port Heiden. She’ll lay up there till the storm is over, then come back for us. I’ll make you comfortable; the best thing for you now is to keep dry till we can make camp.”

“But how long before they’ll be back?”

He looked straight into her wide-open, violet eyes. “That’s a question, Mrs. Newhall. When these storms come up, no one knows when they are going to go away, but surely it won’t be more than a few days, at most. It will be quite an adventure for you. Fortunately we’ve got plenty of grub—a good part of my winter supply that will last the five of us nearly a month, with fresh meat. I’ve got my rifle here, so we won’t starve. Perhaps they will be back to-morrow.”

“And you’re sure we’ll have to spend the night on this barren, stormy shore——”

“No help for it, Mrs. Newhall. And maybe a few other nights besides. But we are a thousand times safer than your uncle and the crew of the launch, at that.”

She got the puzzling impression that his face looked somewhat white, as if with exultation. She did not know that this was like a new lease of life to a condemned man,—these few extra days of happiness that were the gift of the storm. Work on the grave was immediately given over, and the three men turned to the establishment of a comfortable camp.

Pete himself was not an experienced camper, but he was a strong man, deft with his hands, and a few camping trips and deer-hunts in the last year had taught him the rudiments of woodcraft. In addition he had at his command the genuine woods skill of the two natives. He selected for their camp the first alder thicket adjacent to the boat, which happened to be on an easy slope, immediately above and less than fifty yards back from the grave on the beach. A small stream flowed past their camp and down to the sea, providing plenty of pure water; and the grass of its bank was deep and rich. A space was cleared in the center with the axe, and here, in a place of comparative shelter from the wind, he spread his own light, compact, waterproof tent. Here, on the soft moss under the canvas, he spread the girl’s sleeping robe. “Duck for it quick,” he told Dorothy, as he wrapped his own great slicker coat about her. “You’ll be more comfortable than under the boat.”

Ivan turned as if he would resent even this shadow of familiarity, but what he saw on the girl’s face silenced him. Dorothy had evidently not taken offense. Presently, her hand in his, they were racing together across the tundra toward the shelter of Pete’s tent.

One of the natives dug up the roots of a certain dwarf willow that grew beside the creek, and here he found dry kindling that soon developed a cheery fire. The alder sticks that comprised the fuel burned like coal, slowly, with an intense heat. Pete’s own camp stove soon had the tent thoroughly warm and dry.

The situation looked a little better to Dorothy by now, but it was still a doleful project. The tent was for one person only; she could not image how the four men were to find shelter from the storm. This, however, did not prove difficult. Nick Pavlof was adept at building the combination dugout and turf house that is almost the only kind of human habitation known on the Bering Sea side of the Alaskan Peninsula, and he soon had a shelter that not only defied the rain, but also wind and cold. One phase of it amused Dorothy exceedingly: that proud Ivan would be obliged to sleep in the same quarters, the same room, in fact, with the three guides.

Pete disappeared with his rifle up the hill; and soon Dorothy heard him shoot. He returned in a moment with a plump grouse, nearly as large as a chicken, that he explained was the incomparable ptarmigan of the barren lands. He was not a particularly fancy shot, but he had been able to approach within a few feet of the bird and snick off its head with his rifle bullet. Pavlof, who had been given the job of assistant cook, cleaned it and it was soon frying merrily on the camp stove.

The entire company was improved in spirits after a lunch of the tender, delicious flesh of ptarmigan, fried potatoes, and reflector biscuits served with marmalade. It was not, Dorothy considered, served in just the way to which she was accustomed; yet it certainly filled a very human need. Pete himself superintended her coffee, and he seemed to know by instinct just how she liked it! It was rich and dark and smooth: though of a land of coffee drinkers, she herself could not have made it better.

Camp work was completed in the afternoon while Ivan and Dorothy played cards to pass the time. Dorothy was already reconciled to a few days’ delay on the mainland; but her companion could not conceal, beneath his courtesy and good-sportsmanship, an ardent desire to turn back toward home. They watched together the gray of twilight thicken over the land, followed soon by the swift-falling darkness. The three workmen moved dimly in and out of the firelight as they prepared the evening meal.

Pete himself filled the girl’s plate and brought the food, steaming hot, to her side. She ate heartily, grateful to him, and his last work was to dig roots from beneath her sleeping robe so that she might spend the night in comparative comfort.

He paused for a single instant in the half-darkness beside her. “If the rain quits to-morrow, I’ll cut a lot of tundra grass and make you a real bed,” he told her quietly. His voice was almost tremulous in the dusk, and it some way carried her back to the manner in which Peter had spoken, in sacred moments of their first months of marriage. “Perhaps this won’t be too bad to-night.”

Ivan himself could not have been more considerate of her. She couldn’t explain how, yet this man’s understanding of the North, his confidence in his own ability to cope with it and conquer it, passed to her and comforted her. “You don’t think we’ll have to spend another night here, do you?” she asked.

“I think it very likely. Is that all I can do for you, Mrs. Newhall?”

“Everything, Pete. You are very kind. Pete, what part of England are you from? Your accent is not greatly different from the men of my own country.”

He looked straight at her. “Liverpool. But I’ve been in America so long, in the North, it is queer my accent would be anything but Siwash.”

“One thing more. I want you to reassure me. Say that something happened that the _Warrior_ did not come back—that she’d go to pieces in those awful waves. What would happen to us?”

“It would be serious, but not necessarily tragic—for us. If worst came to worst, you could take supplies and follow down the coast in the dory until you reached some sort of a settlement. But it would be a dangerous trip—subject to long delays on account of bad weather—and not to be attempted except in an emergency. You’d have to have ample supplies, too. But don’t worry—the _Warrior_ is a staunch little boat.”

He bade her good night and soon vanished into the murk of the storm. She sat a while with Ivan, listening to the beat of the rain on the tent.

The hour had a quality of mystery,—the deep dark, unbroken except for the low, sullen glow of the fire; the long wail of the wind and the beat of the waves; and about them the unconquerable wild. A sea gull called desolately from the shore. Ivan lighted a cigarette, and the match flare showed his face curiously strained and intent. His hand trembled as he held the match.

“Dorothy,” he asked suddenly, “does this land take hold of you?”

She waited an instant, half-dreaming, before she attempted reply. “It gets my imagination, some way,” she confessed at last. “It has given me the queerest moods, the strangest thoughts—all day long. How does it affect you?”

He moved nearer, groping for her hand. He caught it at last, and his throbbed with the fierce pulse of his arteries. “Do you want to know how it affects me? It just seems to peel me down—to strip off a veneer of civilization that I’ve picked up somewhere and just leave the basic part of me. That part of me is something that you yet don’t fully know—and I’m some way afraid to have you fully know it.” His voice was subdued, and he spoke with evident difficulty. “To-night I’m the man of the Ural Mountains. The Occident falls away—and leaves only Asia.”

A dim fear trickled through her, a sense of estrangement and at the same time of deep fascination; and she struggled to regain her poise and self-confidence. “Yet this isn’t Asia,” she said.

“I don’t know. It’s so far west that it is almost east. It’s like my own Siberia. Dorothy, did you notice Pavlof’s attitude toward me?”

“No. Not particularly.”

“It’s like a slave for his master. I am not boasting, Dorothy. That man has enough echo of Asia in him to see Asia in me, and he bows before it. I can understand him perfectly, sense his moods, and if he didn’t half worship me the same time that he fears me, I could imagine circumstances whereby I would have to fear his knife. But I haven’t anything on earth in common with that big guide, Pete. You, on the other hand, seem to get along well with him. You instinctively like him.”

“The East is East, and the West is West,” she quoted thoughtfully.

“That’s it. Your Pete is an Anglo-Saxon—the most dominant of all Western peoples. I am a Russian—strictly speaking, I am a Mongol, and Oriental blood has slanted my eyes. There’s no use of trying to hide that fact from you, even if I were not proud of it. Pete and I could never understand each other; we’d fight and kill each other in a minute if the gallows and several other things didn’t drop a shadow between.”

“Yet—I am an Anglo-Saxon,” she told him.

“Yes.” He hesitated. “But also you are a woman. We men of the East do not look on women as we look on men. I don’t love you for what you racially are. I love you because you are a woman, and beautiful. Racial differences don’t have to interfere in a love like ours—in a marriage such as ours would be, that would move like a dream—in a garden.”

“A marriage of the Orient!” she prompted.

“Yes, but who but the Orientals know what love is? A marriage of lips, of clinging arms, of beauty and loveliness. What could an Anglo-Saxon give you half so wonderful! And to-night, when I’m stripped down to myself, I want you with a want I never began to reach before. It’s almost incredible to me that I can’t have you—that I should let anything stand in the way! If I were true to my Eastern birthright I’d take you—to-night.”

Yet she felt that he would not take her—to-night! The fear that now swept her, vague and dim, was not of actual, imminent danger to her integrity; rather it was of a barrier of race that this wild, storm-tossed coast had revealed and made manifest between them. It was true that from his point of view this barrier of race could not and did not exist. It did not conflict with the kind of love he had for her, simply because such did not take human fellowship into consideration. Perhaps, after all, he did not really care whether she loved him, in the Western sense,—the love that is born of comradeship, that is strengthened by the years and by united struggle against the cruel rigors of the world. It was enough just that she gave herself to him.

He took his violin from its case and held it a while, lovingly, in his white hands. He began to play for her, softly.

The composition he chose was one that she had never heard before: a wild, haunting thing in the minor that she guessed was a folk melody of his own Urals. He was not playing to her, to-night. He was simply seeking expression of his own unfathomable, Oriental soul. As always his technique was flawless; yet to-night he played with a fire and an ardor she had never heard in him before. The music soared and wailed; paled away with a strange sense of exquisite discord that seemed to rip apart the nerves but which yet streamed through the whole fabric of being; rose to a fierce, incredible crescendo; broke sharply off into a lilt of cloying sweetness, then soared and wailed again. Pavlof, in the dugout, heard the melody, and his eyes glittered, and he loved Ivan as a dog loves his master. The Indian heard it, and was lost in dreams. And Peter, as that weird music poured through him, experienced a vague, slowly creeping fear for the woman he loved.

It was but a prank of the imagination, soon to pass away, but as long as those sweet, wild notes worked their music in the night, no power of his could dispel it. He did not dream that Dorothy was likewise afraid. Yet to-night Ivan’s soul was bared to her sight, and she could not forget that—except for three menials she had known for only a few days—she was wholly at his mercy. He had shaken off his conventionality as a moth shakes off its stale cocoon; and there was no visible refuge from him. The strength she had once relied on—in the casket now, or whispering in the wind above her head—could not come to her aid. It was only a fancy, born of the music, but like the guide who listened from the dugout, she could not shake it off.

Ivan played on and caught the soul of this North in the wild, plaintive tones. The music mingled with the sound of the storm, the rain lashing the tent, the long shriek of the wind, the beat of the waves on the shore.