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 Space. 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 God'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 Gods, and smoothly pass
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 pass out of life, and enter
into _What_?
If smoothness of passage 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 succumbed to that most unmanly
of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would have
succumbed, 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 God'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 God that day that he would
cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with
Spurling. He did not dare to tell God 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 God'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 God, 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, rushing 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 passage, 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 titanic. 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 passage 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 casements, and the stern old
enchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white
beard. He could hear the hoarse-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 shores 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
God'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 God was so anxious to take care of Spurling,
He could be trusted to look after Strangeways--if anything of him
survived.
The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yet
living body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of that
small part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking one
last look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, the
pinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed,
"Courage!" he said, "for this is life."