In three days' time they were back at the hut, and the last two days
they wore blue spectacles because of the mid-day glare of the sunlit
snow.
It amazed Marjorie to discover as she lay awake in the camp on the edge
of the ravine close to the hut to which she had lugged Trafford during
the second day, that she was deeply happy. It was preposterous that she
should be so, but those days of almost despairful stress were irradiated
now by a new courage. She was doing this thing, against all Labrador and
the snow-driving wind that blew from the polar wilderness, she was
winning. It was a great discovery to her that hardship and effort almost
to the breaking-point could ensue in so deep a satisfaction. She lay and
thought how deep and rich life had become for her, as though in all this
effort and struggle some unsuspected veil had been torn away. She
perceived again, but now with no sense of desolation, that same infinite
fragility of life which she had first perceived when she had watched the
Aurora Borealis flickering up the sky. Beneath that realization and
carrying it, as a river flood may carry scum, was a sense of herself as
something deeper, greater, more enduring than mountain or wilderness or
sky, or any of those monstrous forms of nature that had dwarfed her
physical self to nothingness.
She had a persuasion of self detachment and illumination, and withal of
self-discovery. She saw her life of time and space for what it was. Away
in London the children, with the coldest of noses and the gayest of
spirits, would be scampering about their bedrooms in the mild morning
sunlight of a London winter; Elsie, the parlourmaid, would be whisking
dexterous about the dining-room, the bacon would be cooking and the
coffee-mill at work, the letters of the morning delivery perhaps just
pattering into the letter-box, and all the bright little household she
had made, with all the furniture she had arranged, all the
characteristic decoration she had given it, all the clever convenient
arrangements, would be getting itself into action for another day--and
_it wasn't herself!_ It was the extremest of her superficiality.
She had come out of all that, and even so it seemed she had come out of
herself; this weary woman lying awake on the balsam boughs with a brain
cleared by underfeeding and this continuous arduous bath of toil in
snow-washed, frost cleansed, starry air, this, too, was no more than a
momentarily clarified window for her unknown and indefinable reality.
What was that reality? what was she herself? She became interested in
framing an answer to that, and slipped down from the peace of soul she
had attained. Her serenity gave way to a reiteration of this question,
reiterations increasing and at last oppressing like the snowflakes of a
storm, perpetual whirling repetitions that at last confused her and hid
the sky....
She fell asleep....