Murder Point Part 9

(Granger knew that he also would have felt like that. The mere denial of such a fact would have seemed somehow to reserve her more entirely for himself.)

He had not been able to bear the thought that, now that she was beyond reach of all men's search, her memory should be shared with him by another man with an equal quality of affection--it had seemed to him like her hand stretched out from the grave to strip him of the few mementoes of her which he had. For these reasons he might even have lied truthfully, being self-persuaded that this Jervis Mordaunt was a different girl.

Granger heartily hoped that his suspicions might be mistaken, but . . . Whatever happened he must come up with him, and ask him that question once again. Maybe last time he had not spoken plainly; Strangeways had not grasped what he meant. He could not remember how his question had been phrased, but this time it should be worded with such brutal frankness that there could be no chance of error. He would lay hold of him strongly, and clasp him about the knees so that he could not escape. He would never release his hold till his doubts had been set at rest. He would say to him quite clearly, "I loved a girl in the Klondike who called herself Jervis Mordaunt; she pa.s.sed for a man, and was clothed in a Yukon placer-miner's dress. She did not know that I loved her; so you need not grieve if this murdered girl whom you loved, and the one whom I call Mordaunt, were one and the same. I fled from the Shallows where we worked together, partly in order that she might not know that. Now will you tell me, once and for all, was this girl, whom Spurling murdered, called Mordaunt? If you love G.o.d, tell me the truth and speak out. I can bear the truth, but I cannot endure this suspense."

With the careful precision of a mind uncertain of its own sanity, he repeated and re-balanced his phrases, distrusting his own exactness, fearful lest he had not chosen such words as would make his meaning plain. Ah, but by his gestures, if language failed him, he would cause him to understand. For such news, even though it should be bad news, he would pledge his honour to help Strangeways in his search for Spurling. He would even volunteer to go single-handed and capture him himself--bring him down to Murder Point by guile, where Strangeways would be waiting to take him. The best and worst which he himself could derive from such a promise would be only that he should meet with death--but he should have thought of that offer earlier, and made it while Strangeways was with him.

At that word _death_ the purpose of his present errand flared vividly in his mind, and he hurried his pace.

Looking back across his shoulder through the darkness, for the moon was under cloud, he could just make out where his store pinnacled the mound at the Point; he had left the door open in the haste of his departure and, over the threshold slantwise across the snow, the fire from the stove threw an angry glare. It was only a mile from the Point to the bend, yet he seemed to have been journeying for hours. The surface of the river was difficult to travel because the snow which had fallen was wet; it shrank away from the feet at every stride. For this season of the year in Keewatin the night was mild; there was a damp rawness, but scarcely any frost in the air. If the ice had been rotten in the morning at the bend, it would be doubly treacherous now.

Ah, but he had warned Strangeways! Surely he would be sufficiently cautious to half-believe him at least in that. When he came to where the river turned northwards, he would forsake the short-cut of the old trail and swing out into the middle stream, or work safely round along the bank. If he couldn't scent danger for himself, his huskies would choose their own path and save him, unless--unless, feeling the smoothness of the old trail beneath the snow, they should lazily choose that, or unless that leader of Spurling's should wilfully lead them astray; but surely the four hind-dogs would have sense not to follow him, and would hang back.

He kept his eyes on the darkness before him, but to the northeast all was shadowy; he could discern nothing. Yes, there was something moving over there. He judged that he had already traversed three-quarters of that interminable mile; surely he would be able to catch up with him now. The recent blizzard had wiped out the old trail, but he could still feel it firm beneath the snow; he was following in Strangeways'

tracks--Strangeways' which had been Spurling's. Then he came to a point where the staler tracks, which were Spurling's, had branched out into mid-stream to round the bend; but he saw to his horror that Strangeways' had kept on to the left by the winter trail, toward the spot of which he had warned him--he had even suspected that that final warning was a trap.

Ah, there he was straight ahead of him; he could see him distinctly now. The moon, rising clear of cloud, made his figure plain. He called to him, and it seemed that he half-turned his head. He was keeping perilously near in to the bend. He called to him again, and signed to him with his arms to drive out. Then once more a cloud pa.s.sed before the moon, making the land seem dead.

He advanced cautiously, moving slowly, testing the strength of the ice at each fresh step before trusting it with his weight. Underneath he could hear the lapping of the current as it rushed rapidly round the bend, and could feel the trembling of the crust beneath his feet, as a man does the vibration of an Atlantic liner when the engines are working at full pressure, and every plank and bolt begins to shake and speak. When he had come to where Strangeways had been standing, he stood still and listened. He could hear no sound of travel, no cursing a man's voice, urging his dogs forward, or cracking of a whip.

Then he felt the ice sagging from under him, and the cold touch of water creeping round his moccasins. From a rift in the cloud, a segment of the moon looked out. Before and behind him lay the frozen expanse of river, with its piled-up banks on either hand, and its heavy blanketing of snow, smooth and level, making its pa.s.sage seem safe. Far over to the right stretched the trail of Spurling, showing ugly and black against the white, where his steps and the steps of his dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant, the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child in its cot, which has wakened too early and is trying to clamber out.

As Granger watched, heedless of his own safety, a hand pushed out above the current, the hooked fingers of which searched gropingly for something to which they might make fast. Granger, throwing himself flat in the snow, so as to distribute his weight, crawled towards it.

The hand rose higher, and then the arm, followed at last by the head and eyes of Strangeways, but not the mouth. He had caught hold of a point of ice and was trying to pull himself up by that; but something (was it the swiftness of the current?) was dragging his body away from under him so that the water was still above his nose and mouth.

Granger wormed his way to within arm-stretch and clasped his hand; but the moment he commenced to pull, the weight became terrific--more than the weight of one man--and he himself began to slide slowly forward till his head and shoulders were above the water. Something was tugging at Strangeways from below the river, so that his body jerked and quivered like a fisherman's line when a well-hooked salmon is endeavouring to make a rush at the other end.

Granger was leaning far out now, the surface was curving from under him and his chest had left the ice. Then he realised what had happened: the loaded sledge had sunk to the bottom of the river-bed, and was holding down the four rear-dogs by their traces; but the leader, by struggling, had fought his way to within a few inches of the outer air, and, clinging on to Strangeways' throat and breast, was fiercely striving to climb up him with his teeth to where breathing might be found, in somewhat the same manner as Archbishop Salviati did in Florence to Francesco Pazzi, when the Gonfalonier hurled them both out of the Palazzo window, each with a rope about his neck.

(Strange what men will think of at a crisis! Granger was grimly amused, and half-disgusted with himself. How absurd that of all things at such a time he should have remembered that!)

The weight of the four rear-dogs and the loaded sledge were gradually dragging the leader down, and, with him, Strangeways. He held on desperately; now and then, as he made a fresh effort, his yellow snout would appear above the water or the top of his yellow head--except for that, he might not have been there. But Granger was intent on Strangeways; staring into his eyes, which were distant the length of his arm out-stretched, he was appalled at the consternation they reflected, and the evident terror of the end. If he could only get at his knife, he might be able to effect something; but his knife was beneath his capote, in his belt, and both his hands were occupied, the one with supporting the drowning man, the other with preventing himself from slipping further.

He wanted to speak to Strangeways, but he could not think of any words which were not so trivial as to sound blasphemous on such an occasion.

The man was growing weaker and heavier to hold; his eyes were losing their vision, and the water rose in bubbles from his mouth. There was only one last chance, that if he could support him long enough for the husky at his throat to release his grip and die first, he might be able to drag him out.

Though all this had been the work of only a few seconds, his arm was becoming numb and intolerably painful. Whatever it might cost him, he promised himself that he would not let go till hope was at an end. He was slipping forward again; he would soon overbalance. But what did that matter to one who did not fear death? After all, an honourable out-going is the best El Dorado which any man can hope to find as reward for his long life's search. If he were to die for and with Strangeways, he would at least prove to him that he was not entirely worthless.

Then, before it was too late, he found his words. "Be brave," he shouted hoa.r.s.ely, "be brave! It is only death."

It would have seemed a preposterous supposition yesterday that the private trader at Murder Point should ever be in a position to bid the veriest sc.u.m among cowards to be brave. As he spoke, the intelligence came back to Strangeways' eyes, the fear went out from them and the features, losing their agony, straightened into an expression which was almost grave. His hand became small in Granger's palm, as though it were offering to slip away.

Some deep instinct stirred in Granger; he suddenly loved this man for the self-denial which that act betrayed. If there was to be a denial of self, however, he was emphatic that his should be the sacrifice.

Was it this thought of sacrifice which brought religion to his mind--some haunting, quick remembrance of those wise words about "dying for one's friend"?

Quite irrationally and without connection with anything which had previously occurred, leaning yet further out at his own immediate peril, s.h.i.+fting his grip to Strangeways' wrist that he might hold him more firmly, he whispered, "Jesus of Galilee! Jesus Christ!"

The face of the drowning man took on an awful serenity, a look of holiness, as if at sight of something which stood behind Granger, which he had only just discerned. He even smiled. Suddenly, with the determination of one who had concluded and conquered an old temptation, he wrenched away his hand. Granger made one last effort to reach him, but the tugging of the beast below the surface, or its dead weight, had drifted him out of arm-stretch. He sank lower. The water rose, almost leisurely it seemed as if now certain of the one thing it had desired, higher and higher up his face till it had reached his eyes, quenched them, and nothing was left but a few bubbles which floated to the surface and broke, sparkling in the moonlight. Granger did not stir; as he had been paralysed, he lay there rigid with the black waters was.h.i.+ng about his face and hands. Then very slowly, as though reluctant not to die, he drew himself back. When he had reached safety, rising up, he gazed around; the land looked more desolate than ever. The first words which he said were spoken sacredly, with bated breath. "And that man told me," he muttered, "that he was afraid of death. . . . To prefer to die at such a time, rather than risk my life, was the act of a man who was very brave." And next he said, "I wonder what were his last words when he crashed through the ice? I expect he said, 'd.a.m.n.' Well, that was as good as any other word to say; after all, all swearing, taken in a certain sense, is a form of prayer--a bluff a.s.sertion of belief in the divine."

Granger turned slowly about, and commenced to make his way back to the Point. At first he spoke aloud to himself as a thought occurred. "I distrusted that yellow beast of Spurling's from the first." "Now at any rate Spurling is safe." "I haven't yet discovered whether Mordaunt is dead,"--and so on. Then he ceased to speak with his lips, and his thoughts were uttered in the silence of his brain. They had all to do with Strangeways.

He wondered what vision had been his, causing him to smile as he sank.

Did he think of that girl, and that he was going to meet her? Or of the old home in England? Or of his school-days? Or was it the Thames he thought about--of Oxford with its many towers, and the cry of the coach along the tow-path as the eight swings homeward up-stream, in the grey of a winter afternoon, to the regular click of the rowlocks as the men pluck their blades from the water, feather and come forward for the next stroke, making ready to drive back their slides as one man with their legs? He was certain that whatever happened, and however he should go out of life, did G.o.d spare him a moment's consciousness, it would be the vision of Oxford with its domes and spires, its austere and romantic quiet, its echoing cloisters and pa.s.sages, its rivers with their sedges of silver and of grey, which would float before his dying eyes,--or would he think of Christ? Had Christ been the vision which this man had seen?

Strange thoughts for Keewatin! But death is always strange.

CHAPTER IX

THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE

Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.

Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, men in Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true the lesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world ever since the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that there are no such ontological facts as Time and s.p.a.ce. Among the men of this vast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare; they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as are superficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the two sternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct is manifest. As it would be sacrilege to count G.o.d's breaths, were that possible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number the recurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceived seems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence it happens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of having journeyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, and embraces only his own immediate actions--he has travelled so many "sleeps," nothing more.

As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and can give no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined, if they have one, in symbols which they use as decorations, painted on the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of the years from some event which was once important to themselves, or to their tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a robe represent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a broken leg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina, One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparatively immediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to be inquisitive.

"Real are the dreams of G.o.ds, and smoothly pa.s.s Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."

So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is not necessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion, whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a _dream-being_, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy again--always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream going from them, they awake--motionlessly pa.s.s out of life, and enter into _What_?

If smoothness of pa.s.sage and apparent endlessness be the two main qualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatin are both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would call this same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturing agony.

The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century with normal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred years there had been no summer. In them he had lived through and remembered every emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused with remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which would never come again. He had nearly succ.u.mbed to that most unmanly of all spiritual a.s.sailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have succ.u.mbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.

From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees had uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river, reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its surface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strange they seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.

Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawing faces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they were mostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. The faces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded to the first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, having dreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to the window was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own, yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to him in the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover the reason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as a child came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heard it_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, _and the woman_."

So he knew that it was G.o.d's hand which had etched that warning likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone _and Spurling_." So Granger had agreed with G.o.d that day that he would cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with Spurling. He did not dare to tell G.o.d all his thoughts, but he felt certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough to have to dwell between G.o.d's footsteps, as all men must who live in Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the Last Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.

In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, which he chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened by a thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river had broken up and the ice was going out, as though G.o.d, having finished His argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words.

Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shouting like a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men, both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river which stretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakened as he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing what he was doing, rus.h.i.+ng half-clad beneath the stars down to the river-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice--the loneliness, which throughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all that they had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply.

But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and cried aloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its hands and squeezed its pa.s.sage, and huddled between its ruined winter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.

This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, and the Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raise it up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; and afterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a king from his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe to-night. For the moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and the millennium had begun--chaos, which men mistake for millennium.

Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "The ice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a fact incredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earth was shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurried by in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some of his fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battle which was being fought, and one which must be lost.

As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, he could hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs, and the clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagine anything when Nature was making a change so t.i.tanic. Now the water was the black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back who carried "a balance in his hand,"--and he was in pursuit. And the ice was the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and Hades followed with him,--and he was in flight. And now, when some great floe jammed in its pa.s.sage round the Point, and the ice piled up, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, which a dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish.

Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but within it was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.

He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to their furthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evil with terror, peering out from the cas.e.m.e.nts, and the stern old enchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white beard. He could hear the hoa.r.s.e-throated clamour of the knight as he led his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway, shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and the turret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. The sorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay--he could not withstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreading abroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. The dark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and the avenging host were gone--all was resolved into turbid water and submerged, groaning ice.

So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the river which, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, left him stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River would some day be washed up in a wave on the tropic sh.o.r.es of Ceylon, or, having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a berg and, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till they came to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands of dusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending down baled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground, saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at his folly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it also will journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. In G.o.d's good time I also shall wander round the world."

"But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit of discontent inquired.

Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw off these troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he had not recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangeways conscious of his body's release, and the permission which death had given him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which had been born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which had strolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulating and talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had brought the man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soul had departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself in Arctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of this new adventure? Well, if G.o.d was so anxious to take care of Spurling, He could be trusted to look after Strangeways--if anything of him survived.