FIVE NIGHTS
A Novel
By
Victoria Cross
1908
By Victoria Cross
Five Nights
Life's Shop Window
Anna Lombard
Six Women
Six Chapters of a Man's Life
The Woman Who Didn't
To-morrow?
Paula
A Girl of the Klondike
The Religion of Evelyn Hastings
Life of my Heart
CONTENTS
PART I
The Gold Night
I THE TAKU INLET
II THE TEA-SHOP
III IN THE WOOD
PART II
The Violet Night
IV AT THE STUDIO
V THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO
PART III
The Black Night
VI IN MAYFAIR
VII FREEDOM
PART IV
The Crimson Night
VIII LOSS
IX IN 'FRISCO
X IN THE SHADOW OF THE VOLCANO
XI THE WAY OF THE GODS
PART V
The White Night
XII THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACE
FIVE NIGHTS
"The nights have different colours. Some nights are black, the
nights of storm: some are electric blue, some are silver, the
moon-filled nights: some are red under the hot planet Mars or the
fierce harvest moon. Some are white, the white nights of the
Arctic winter: but this was a violet night, a hot, mysterious,
violet night of Midsummer."
_LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW_.
INTRODUCTION
As one looks over any period of one's life, it appears behind one as
a shining maze of brilliant colour with spots in it here and there of
brighter or darker hue. Each spot represents a period of time when our
happiness has glowed brighter or waned; sometimes it is a day, more
often it is a night. Looking back now, over a stretch of my existence
I see many such spots gleaming brightly; they are nights of colour.
The history of many of these is too sacred to be written, but there
are Five Nights, which, though not the dearest to my memory, have yet
stamped themselves and their colour on it for ever. And the record of
these five nights is contained in the following pages.
TREVOR LONSDALE.
PART ONE
THE GOLD NIGHT
CHAPTER I
THE TAKU INLET
It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to the
deck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning
in Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for in
this far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizon
at midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in
limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing to
its full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.
Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and we
were steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by great
glittering blocks of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by
on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the colouring of sea and
sky! Both were so vividly blue, the note of each so deep, so intense,
one seemed almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the vessel's
side, then made my way forward and stood there; I, the lover of the
East, dazzled by the beauty of the North! The marvellous picture
before me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold, and white.
The sides of the inlet were jagged lines of white, the sparkling
crystalline whiteness of eternal snow on sharp-pointed, almost
lance-like mountain peaks; the water a broad band of blue, the sky
above a canopy of blue, and there at the end of the inlet, closing it,
like some colossal monster crouched awaiting us, lay the Muir, the
huge glacier, a solid wedge of ice, white also, but a transparent
white full of blue shadows.
Who shall describe the wonderful air and atmosphere of the North? Its
brilliancy, its delicacy, its radiant diamond-like clearness? And the
silence, the enchanted stillness of the North? Now as we crept slowly
onwards over the vivid water between the flashing icebergs, there was
no sound. Complete silence round us, on earth and sea and in the blue
vault above, impressive, glittering silence. None of the passengers
had broken their sleep to come up to the glory above them, and I stood
alone at the forward part of the vessel gliding on through this dream
of lustrous blue. Slowly we advanced towards the Muir; very slowly,
for these shining bergs carried death with them if they should graze
hard against the steamer's side, and, cautiously, steered with
infinite pains, the little boat crept on, zigzagging between them. A
frail little toy of man, it seemed, to venture here alone; small,
black, impertinent atom forcing its way so hardily into this
magnificence of colour, this silent splendour, this radiant stillness
of the North. Into this very fastness of the most gigantic forces of
Nature it had penetrated, and the sapphire sea supported it, the
transparent light illumined it, the lance-like mountains looked down
upon it, and the glistening bergs forbore to crush it, as if
disdaining to harm so fragile a thing.
Very slowly we pushed up the inlet, approaching the shimmering
blue-green wall of ice that barred the upper end; seven hundred feet
down below the clear surface of the water descends this wall, while
three hundred feet of it rise above, forming a glorious shining
palisade across the entire width of the inlet. As the sun played on
the glittering façade, rays struck out from it as from a reflector, of
every shade of green and blue, the deepest hue of emerald mingling
with the lightest sapphire, iridescent, sparkling, wonderful. As we
crept still nearer, over the living blue of the water, the continual
fall of the icebergs from the front wall of the glacier became
apparent. At intervals of about five minutes, with a terrific crash
like thunder a great wedge of the glittering wall would fall forward
into the blue-green depths, and a cloud of snowy spray rise up
hundreds of feet into the air. The berg, thus detached, after a few
minutes would rise to the surface, glistening, dazzling, and begin
its joyous, buoyant voyage downwards to the sea. In all this brilliant
setting, with this glory of light around and the triumphal crash of
sound like the salute of cannon, amid this joyous movement and in this
blaze of colour, amid all that seemed to personify life, we were
watching the death of the glacier.
The colossal Muir Glacier, the remains of a world the history of which
is lost in the dim twilight none can now penetrate, is dying slowly
through a million years. From the mountains, eternally snow-covered,
where its huge body, three hundred and fifty miles in extent, has
rested through the centuries, it creeps forward slowly towards the sea
to meet its doom. Formerly its lip touched the open ocean where now
the Taku inlet commences to run inland. But the icy waters, that yet
are so much warmer than itself, caressed it with eroding caresses and
melted it, and broke bergs from it and rushed inwards, following it
till they formed the Taku Inlet, and now the process still goes on,
the gigantic body moves forward inch by inch and the green waves break
the bergs from its face as the sun invades its structure; and so it
lies there, dying slowly through the countless years, glorious,
miraculous.
The Captain had promised to approach the face of the glacier as near
as was reasonably safe and lie there at anchor for an hour, that the
passengers might land at the side of the inlet and those who wished
could explore the glacier.
An hour! What was an hour? Those sixty golden minutes would be gone in
a flash. Yet it would be an hour of life, of deep emotion, face to
face with this monster, strange relic of a forgotten world, stretched
on its glorious death-bed.
I was alone still. Not another passenger had yet come up, and I could
lean there undisturbed, trying to open my eyes still wider, to expand
my heart, to stretch my brain, that I might drink in more of the
inimitable grandeur and beauty round me.
The nearer we drew to the glacier the closer packed became the water
with the floating bergs; they threatened the ship now on every side,
and so slowly did we move we hardly seemed advancing. The bergs
flashed and shone as they passed us, rayed through with jewel-like
colours, and on one gliding by far from the ship's side I saw two
seals at play. For many hundred miles past these seals were the only
living things I had seen. The forests on the shore, so thick in the
first part of the journey by the Alaskan coast, had long since given
way to barren rocks, snow-capped peaks, and ice-filled clefts. No life
seemed possible there, the wide distant blue above had shown no bird
nor shadow of bird passing. There was no voice of insect nor the least
of Nature's children here. Between the thunderous crash of the
ice-falls that seemed to shiver the golden air there was intense and
solemn stillness.
But the seals played merrily on their floating berg as they passed me,
and I watched them long through field-glasses as the joyous, turbulent
blue waves carried them far out of my sight towards the open sea.
The clanging of the breakfast bell made me leave my place and go down
for a hurried breakfast. I was chilled through, for the early morning
air is keen, the pure breath of infinite snowfields, and I took my
coffee gratefully amongst the crowd of hungry passengers.
Rough miners some of them, going up to Sitka from the great Treadwell
mine at Juneau, traders on their way to Fort Wrangle, and some few
explorers. Amongst them were four men our boat had taken on board as
we passed the mouth of the Stickeen river. They had started from
Canada, lured by the light of the gold that lay under the snows of the
Klondike, intending to travel there overland. Losing their way, they
had wandered with their pack train for eighteen months in these vast
solitudes of ice and snow, groping blindly towards the coast.
Food had failed them, their horses had died by the way from want or
fatigue. Faced by starvation, the men had eaten those of their pack
animals that had survived, then, finally, when hope had almost left
them, they came in sight of the sea.
They were talking of this and their terrible conflict with snow-storm
and ice-floe as I joined them, of the plans for making money with
which they had started and their failure.
I got away from them all and went back to my place as soon as I could,
and spent the rest of the morning as I had begun it, alone at the
forward end.
There were very few passengers like myself. Not many people for mere
pleasure would take that hazardous voyage along the coast, for it was
new country and not a tenth of the sunken rocks and dangerous shoals
were yet on any chart. All the way up along that rocky and treacherous
shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere.
Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of
sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral,
telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming
waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little
coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the
natives, and as we passed these half submerged masts, we often asked
ourselves--"Will the Cottage City be more lucky?" She was trading,
like all the other boats that go there, with the Alaskan natives, and
to go as far north as the Muir was no part of the official programme.
But the fares of the few passengers who really wished to take all
risks and go there was a temptation and overcame the fear of the
dreaded Taku Inlet with its monstrous crashing bergs and its
possibility of sudden and furious storms. So the little steamer was
here, creeping up slowly through this vision of mystic blue towards
the glacier, which lay there white, vast, shadowy, mysterious, and my
heart beat quicker and quicker as we approached.
I went off in one of the first boats and the moment it touched the
pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away,
eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping
voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness"
of ideas that humanity drags with it everywhere.
As I turned from the boat the voices followed me clearly, distinctly,
in the exquisite rarefied air.
Thin waves of laughter mingled with them from time to time, growing
faint behind me, then the distance closed up between us and I heard no
more.
The steamer had landed about thirty passengers and crew, and they
seemed immediately lost in these vast expanses. When I had walked a
few minutes up the beach from the water's edge, I looked round and was
apparently alone. Some few black dots here and there disfiguring the
snowy slopes and glittering ice-covered rocks was all that remained of
them. In the midst of the vivid blue-green of the inlet behind me, a
little wedge of black, lay the steamer, the only reminder that I was
one also of these miserable black dots and in an hour I should be
collected and taken away as one of them. For this hour, however, I was
free and at one with the divine glory about me.
It was just noon. The sky was of a pale and perfect blue, the air
still, of miraculous clearness and radiant with the pure light of the
North, unshaded, unsoftened by the smallest mist or cloud. The silence
was unbroken except for the regular thunder of the falling bergs, that
continued with absolute precision at the five-minute interval, and the
accompanying splash of the water. I walked on up the strand, having
the great glistening wall of the glacier's face somewhat on my left.
It was impossible to approach it on land, as the fervid green water
lay deep all about its base. It was only at the side of the inlet that
little beaches had been formed, and on one of these I stood. The
steamer could not get nearer the glacier for fear of the floating
bergs, and a small boat could only approach with deadliest peril at
the risk of being crushed beneath the falling ice or swamped by the
wild division and upheaval of the water that it caused.
But here, on the beach, was a world of enchantment second only in
beauty to the glacier itself, for many of the bergs had been stranded
there by the playful tides. They stood there now towering up in a
thousand different forms, hundreds of feet above one's head, drawing
all the light of the sunbeams into their glittering recesses, turning
them there into violet, purple, and crimson hues, mauve, saffron, and
emerald, blood-red and topaz, and then throwing them out in a million
lance-like rays of colour, dazzling and blinding the vision. Like the
most wonderful rainbows turned into solid masses they stood there, or
like the jewels, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds broken from some
giant's crown and scattered recklessly along the strand.
I went up to them and walked beneath an ice arch that glowed rose
without as the sun touched it and deepest violet within. Then on, into
a cave beyond where the last chamber was coldest white but the outer
rim seemed hung with blood-red fire and the middle wall glowed deepest
emerald. On, on from one to another, each like a perfect dream of
exquisite colour: sunrise and sunset, and all the hues of earth that
we ever see were blended together in those glorious bergs.
What a phantasmagoria of colour, what a wonderful vision! Wrapped up
in the delight of it, I passed on through some and round others,
pursuing my way up the beach, and ascended slowly the rocks, the huge
morain at the side of the glacier, while impressively from the inlet
came unvaryingly the thunder of the five-minute guns, hastening my
steps, dogging them, as it were, with warning of the passing time.
After a heavy climb taken too quickly, when I put my foot first on the
clear blue-green surface of the glacier, its immensity, its grandeur
came home to me. The idea of the huge size of it seems to take the
human mind in a curious grip and appal it. Three hundred and fifty
square miles of ice stretched round me, white, unbroken, except here
and there where gigantic fissures and ravines opened in its surface;
ravines where deep blue-green colour glowed in the sides, as if it
were the blue-green blood of the glacier. A tiny wind from the north,
keen as a knife blade, blew in my face as I stood there, out of the
calm blue sky, and seemed to whisper to me of the terrifying nights of
storm, of the deadly wind before which all life goes down like a
straw, that raged here in the winter. On every side, as far as the
eyes could reach, wide white plains of undulating ice and snow, broken
here and there by patches of barren rock, that seemed now by some
optical delusion, against the glaring white, to be of the brightest
mauve and violet tints. Only that; ice and snow and rock for mile upon
mile, until the tale of three hundred and fifty is told. No track or
trace of bird, no sweet companionship of little furred, four-footed
things, no blade of grass or smallest plant or flower, no sound but
the roar of the riven ice, the groans of the dying glacier.
I walked on slowly, looking inland towards the white fields
stretching away endlessly into the distance till the blue of the sky
seems to come down and mingle with the blue shadows in the snow.
Beneath my feet glimmered sometimes the green glass-like surface of
smooth ice, at others the thin crisp covering of drifted snow crackled
at every step. Sometimes the crevasses were so narrow one could easily
walk over them, others yawned widely, many yards across, necessitating
a long detour to pass round them.
Looking back from the side of one of them as I walked up it to find
the narrowest part, I saw the objectionable black dots had swarmed up
on to the edge of the glacier and through the thin, glittering air
their voices and laughter at intervals came faintly to me. I sprang
over the crevasse and walked on quickly to a point where the fissures
grew thick about my feet and the green-blue blood of the glacier
glowed in them on every side.
I was looking now down the inlet and was near enough to the face of
the glacier to hear, though dulled by distance, the crash of the
falling bergs into the foaming water beneath. I could not approach
nearer for crevasses hemmed me in; the ice showed itself clear of snow
and was so slippery I could hardly stand. One false step now, one
small slip and I should disappear down one of these green rents,
swallowed up in between those gleaming crystal sides to remain one
with the glacier for all time. My idea had been to approach the face
of the glacier from the top, but I found this to be as impossible, by
reason of the crevasses, as it had been to approach it from the sea on
account of the falling bergs.
Sacred, inaccessible, guarded above and below, the great gleaming wall
stood there through the centuries, defying the puny curiosity, the
feeble efforts of man to even gaze upon it and marvel over it, except
from a long distance. I would have given all I had to have been able
to advance to the very edge and, kneeling there, look over it down
those majestic palisades of white flushed through with green, throwing
back to the sun, their destroyer and conqueror, a thousand flashing
rays as if in defiance of the slow death being dealt out to them, like
one who dies brandishing to the last his sword in the face of his
enemy. I longed to look over, down the glimmering wall, to the
swelling rush of the green waters as they leapt up rejoicing to
receive the colossal diamond-like berg as it crashed down to them, to
see them seethe over it and fling their spray high up in the sunshine
in mocking revelry; but it was impossible. The fissures in the ice
multiplied themselves as one neared the edge and now were spread round
my feet in a perfect network, like the meshes of a snare. It was
impossible to go forward, and I was unwilling to go back. I stood
motionless on a little tongue of polished ice between two blue-green
chasms, so deep that they seemed riven down to the very heart of the
glacier; stood there, drinking in the keen gold air and the beauty of
the blue arch above, of the boundless spaces of glittering white round
me, of the narrow green inlet so far below from which echoed the
reverberating roar of the falling ice.
I was debating with myself, should I stay here alone for a time,
letting the steamer go, after having stored some provisions for me on
the shore, and call again for me a few weeks later, in any case before
the short summer of these northern latitudes was over, and winter
closed the inlet?
To stay here alone, the one single human being, in a thousand miles of
space, and not only the one human being, but the one _life_, with no
companionship of animal, bird, or insect, that would be an experience
of solitude indeed!
The idea attracted me; all day and all night to hear nothing but that
thunderous roar, and see nothing but the shining sea, the gleaming
ice-fields, and the glittering bergs, to be alone with Nature, to see
her, as it were, intimately in her awful beauty, with breast and brow
unveiled--and, perhaps, have death as one's reward!
There was fascination in the thought.
What ideas would come to one as one watched the little steamer, the
only link that held one still bound to the world of men, weigh anchor
and steam slowly down the green inlet, departing and leaving one
behind it, as one watched it growing smaller, dwindling ever, till it
was a mere speck, and then saw it vanish, leaving the green riband of
water unbroken save for the passing bergs? How one would realise
solitude when the boat had absolutely disappeared, and how that
solitude would thrill through and through one's blood as the long
light night rolled by and dawn and day succeeded with their unvarying
march of silent glittering hours!
And if death came on the wings of a storm such as rises suddenly in
these regions and piled high the snow over the camp, freezing the
inmate, or if it came by slow starvation, the steamer having been lost
on that dangerous rocky coast and none other having come in time, how
would death seem to one here, already so far removed from men and all
desire and lust of the world, here, where already all earthly things
had almost ceased to be and one's spirit had merged into the Infinite?
Death would seem to one in different guise from when he comes to us in
the midst of the delights of the world, with the baubles of life
around us, or in the stress of the battle-field in the moment of
victory, surrounded by our comrades.
Death here would come but as the crown, the climax to the solitude,
the detachment, the isolation, would seem but as the laying down the
head on the breast of Nature, becoming one with her immensity, her
grandeur.
For some minutes I was keenly tempted to stay, the idea held my mind
and fascinated it, but with the vision of death came the recoil from
it born from the remembrance of my art. The same recoil that had saved
me many times before, for youth is usually greatly inclined to
suicide, either directly or indirectly in the dangers it courts. But
in an artist this is strangely balanced by his love for his work. When
he has ceased to wish for life or heed it for himself he still feels
instinctive revolt against extinguishing that diviner spark than life
itself, his genius, lent him from the celestial fire.
The thought of my work dispelled the enchanted dream into which I had
fallen. Instinctively I turned and very slowly began to retrace my
steps amongst the yawning pitfalls. As I did so I heard a hoarse hoot
from the steamer lying below, to tell me it was about to leave,
another and another resounded dully from it, warning me to hasten my
return.
I made my way back to the shore where the boat and the impatient
sailors awaited me. I took my seat in it, turning my eyes to the
glistening, glimmering white palisade rising over the sapphire sea.
When we had reached the steamer and its head was turned round I stood
at the stern and watched that palisade for long, as it receded and
receded. At last the blue distance swallowed it up. I could see no
more than a silvery line dividing the blues of meeting sea and sky.
Then I went down to my cabin and locked the door and lay down on my
berth in the quiet, trying to live over again that one hour of close
contact with the beauty of the North.
After dinner that night I wrote a long letter to my cousin Viola about
the beauty of the Muir. She would understand, I knew. What I thought
she would feel, for our brains were cast in the same mould. The letter
finished, it was still too early to go to bed; so I picked up a
curious book called "Life's Shop Window" which I had been reading the
previous night, and read this passage which had struck me before, over
again:
"So, as we look into our future, we see ourselves beloved and wealthy;
victorious, famous, and free to wander through the sweetest paths of
the world, passing through a thousand scenes, sometimes loving,
sometimes warring, tasting and drinking of everything sweet and
stimulating, knowing all things, enjoying all in turn; but this is the
life of a God, not a man. And it is perhaps the God in us which so
savagely demands the life of a God."
"But it is not granted to us."
Yet this was the life I was trying to lead, and to some extent I
succeeded. Change, change, it is the life of life, perhaps especially
to the artist.
And I was an artist now, thanks to the decision of the Royal Academy
last year to accept the worst picture I had submitted to them for four
years. Ever since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they
had loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied
painting under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or
three years I had done really good work, with the divine afflatus
thrilling through every vein. And last year I had painted rather a
commonplace picture and it had been hung on the line in the Academy,
and so my friends all said I really was an artist now, and I modestly
accepted the style and title, with outward diffidence.
How little any of them guessed, as they congratulated me, of the wild
rapture of feeling, of intense gratitude with which I had listened to
the Divine whisper that had come to my ears as a boy of seventeen
sitting in a small bare bedroom, on the floor with the sheet of paper
before me on which I had drawn a woman's head. As I looked at it, I
knew suddenly my power, and the Voice that is above all others said
within me: "_I_ have made you an artist. None can undo or dispute MY
work."
From that moment I cared for neither praise nor blame. The opinion of
men affected me not at all. My gift was mine, and I knew it. I held it
straight from the Divine hands. I had the Divine promise with me for
as long as I should live on this earth.
And I was filled with a boundless delight in life and my own powers.
When I showed my original pictures all painted under inspiration to my
father, he carefully put on his pince-nez and studied them very
closely. After that he said he must reserve his judgment. When they
went to the Academy and were promptly refused, he drew a long face and
said I had better have gone into the Indian Civil Service as he
wished. Subsequently, when I had sold them all, and not one for less
than a thousand guineas, he began to enter upon a placid state of
contentment with me which induced him to say to other captious
relations--"Let the boy alone, he will be an artist some day." At
which I used to laugh inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to
the Divine voice dictating fresh pictures to me. For five years in
Italy I had studied closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself
for my art alone and existing only in it. My teachers had called me
industrious. Another phrase which always must make an artist laugh
when applied to his art.
To those who know the wild pleasure, the almost mad joy of exercising
a really natural gift, it sounds as funny as to talk of a drunkard
industriously getting drunk.
However, this by the way. The world is the world, and artists are
artists; the artist may understand the world, but the world can never
understand the artist.
I was happy, life passed like a golden dream till I was twenty-two,
and my father was satisfied that I was an "industrious" student.
From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened out
into fuller colour still. My art remained the life of the soul, of all
that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward,
demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many
coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen
that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion,
and woven much with that.
I had travelled, passing from country to country, city to city,
finding love and inspiration everywhere, for the world is full of both
for those who desire and look for them, and now I had come on this
coasting trip along the shores of Alaska in the same spirit, looking
for pictures in the golden atmosphere, for joy in the golden days and
nights.
My sketch-book was full of ideas and jottings, and I looked forward
much to the landing at Sitka where I hoped to find new and good
material. The hopeless ugliness of the Alaskan natives had so far
appalled me. An artist chiefly of the face and figure, as I was, could
not hope to find a model amongst them. As our steamer had come up the
coast I had looked in vain for even a decent-sized woman or child
amongst them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing
neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump
shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and
wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged
and go on growing older.
No, I had really had no luck at present on my Alaskan tour, but I was
naturally sanguine and hoped still something from Sitka.
Most capitals give you something if you visit them, and Sitka was the
capital of Alaska.
As I lay in my berth that night, made wakeful by the bright light, I
was thinking over past incidents in my life and all the Minnies and
Marys that had been connected with them. They seemed all to have been
Mary or Minnie with Marias in Italy and France. I fell asleep at last,
hoping whatever Fate had in store for me at Sitka, it wouldn't be a
Mary or a Minnie, but some new name embodying a new idea.