In the long, tedious journey between Washington and San Francisco, Jeff
had various side lights on America never before glimpsed; and he did not
always know what to make of them. His own South was already old and
tame, possessing as high a state of civilization as the most of Europe,
but this West was wild as the buffalo herds that roamed it, and
glittering, glaring, brand new. He saw the march of the colonists who
beheld visions in the clouds of dust that all but hid the lumbering
wagons; he saw ugly towns rising up on blizzard-swept prairies; he saw
Indian villages and mining camps. He wondered about the gaunt stage
driver, with little, hard eyes set in the old-leather wrinkles of his
face; he was stared at, in rapt amazement, by a crowd of cattlemen who
had gathered to meet the stage; he was introduced in spite of himself to
the entire stage-load of raw-boned, uncultured frontiersmen and women,
who shook him freely by the hand and conversed pleasantly with him. All
these things and people he hated and scorned. He was more convinced than
ever that the South had been put upon and crushed by an ignoble horde of
peasants; that the Republican idea was an abomination and a failure; and
that further existence in the United States was more than he could bear.
He was wholly sincere in all this. It was not a pose with him; his
belief in the superiority of birth and culture over strength and
achievement had, ever since the war, been nursed and cherished until it
was an absolute conviction. Nor was he ever a cad, descending to a cheap
snob’s tricks to impress the humble people. He was secure enough in
himself so that he did not care to impress them, in the first place.
Throughout the journey his perfect manners never faltered; and while
these clear-eyed frontiersmen would have been quick to detect a false
front and hilariously tear it down, laughing to scorn in a moment any
pose or affectation, they were really secretly impressed with Jeff; and
except for irrepressible curiosity, treated him with entire respect.
They were even more humble, less presuming than Jeff thought they would
be. If in reality he missed the real spirit of the West; if he failed to
discern something noble and fine and far-reaching in the struggle of
these precursers in the wilderness, it was not because of cheap
standards. However mistaken his philosophy, he was devout in it.
He arrived in San Francisco about the middle of August, not more than
three weeks after he had left home. As Seward had promised, the _Ethan
Allen_ was waiting to take him to Alaska.
She proved to be a rather small, but quite comfortable steam schooner,
built during the war and having the mechanical improvements that the war
developed and improved, including a screw propeller in place of a paddle
wheel. Jeff did not, however, feel any increased enthusiasm for the
journey. She was merely a trading vessel of an ordinary sort, possessing
none of the luxuries such as he used to know on the Mississippi packets;
and none of his kind were on board. In these days America was great on
the sea as well as on land, and the _Ethan Allen_ was manned by
Americans rather than by the seafarers of foreign countries; but Jeff’s
training did not permit companionship with such men as these. To him
they were an unfamiliar type: lean, brawny men of Boston. Evidently he
was the only passenger on board.
He had hoped to enjoy the captain’s company, at least; but now he gave
over the idea. Some of the captains in command of the Confederate
men-of-war had been officers and gentlemen of the most gallant sort, but
evidently the commanders of small traders came of another school. At
first he could hardly believe that the short, heavily built old fellow
giving commands from the bridge was actually the captain of the ship.
He wore no coat at all, his only insignia was a dingy cap of blue; he
bawled like a steer when he gave his orders; and his manner was
decidedly not that of a gentleman. Jeff noticed one or two significant
things concerning him, however. One of them was that his sailors looked
at him with a certain look of trust and confidence which Jeff had seen
too many times—in terrible days of the Red Years—ever to mistake.
Another was that he seemed to get things done.
On closer inspection Jeff saw that he was a man about sixty years of
age, with knotty hands, a chest like a barrel, and a round, good-natured
face that was lighted rather frequently with a remarkably pleasant
smile. He had rather bright blue eyes, twinkling at times; and was
evidently gifted with considerable humor of an obvious kind.
“So you are the important passenger we were told to wait two weeks for,”
the Captain began cordially. “It’s hotter’n a horned toad, ain’t it? Why
don’t you have off your coat?”
Jeff felt like explaining that a gentleman did not go about with his
coat off; but he knew that this would be wasting his sweetness on desert
air. He simply protested that he did not feel the heat.
“You needn’t keep your com’ny manners with us,” Captain Skinner informed
him. “We’re just plain folks. Say, you’re not English, are you?”
“No. I am from North Carolina.”
“Good. I’m glad you are an American. I just sailed from England, and it
sure is good to be back among real Americans. You’re keepin’ your coat
on sort of reminded me of them. They’re stiff devils. For my part I
don’t want no shakes with ’em.”
“You don’t believe, then, that England is the greatest nation in the
world to-day?” Jeff asked gravely.
“Believe what! My Gosh, do I look plumb water-logged to you? England the
greatest country! We’ll show England who’s the greatest country, if she
ever gets gay with us! My boy, did you ever hear of the United States?
Do you know what we’ve accomplished in ninety years? Lor’ love me, I
never heard tell of no such question as that before.”
Jeff started to turn away, estranged rather than amused, but he did not
have the opportunity. Suddenly the skipper began to bawl, loud and more
loudly, until it seemed that the ships beyond the Golden Gate would hear
him and come in. He seemed to be calling a name, but what it was Jeff
could not tell for sure. It sounded like Moll—long-drawn-out like the
name of a family cow—as much as anything else. And now he had his
answer.
“Here I am,” some one said from the door of the pilot house. “Uncle
Dave, you will call out the fire department with such a voice.”
Jeff looked up, startled by the tone, and saw what he had hardly
expected to see on an Alaska-bound trading vessel—a young and
undeniably pretty girl. She was not, Jeff felt, his own kind of
girl—the kind to whom he had once showed the finest of Southern
chivalry—yet to deny that she was pretty would be simply to talk
through his tall, silk, fashionable hat! He had an uncomfortable feeling
that she was almost beautiful, possessing deep, blue, radiant, and
certainly lovely eyes, lively color, pleasant-curving lips and a
magnificent crown of corn-colored hair. She spoke rather boldly, Jeff
thought; not modestly and quietly as was the way of speaking among the
girls he knew. Yet he was a just man, and he had to admit that the voice
affected him rather cheerily, and he would not quickly tire of hearing
it.
For all these points in her favor, Jeff most certainly and surely
disapproved of the girl who now stood at the captain’s side. In the
first place, he was shocked at her garb. She wore a midshipman’s
uniform—trousers and all—and though the suit brought out her
well-curved little figure in a manner somehow pleasing to the
imagination Jeff was sure he didn’t like the effect. It wasn’t modest,
hang it! Girls he knew did not go around in men’s pants! She looked
somehow too nimble in the outfit, capable and spry and hobbledehoy. Jeff
suspected that she was an incorrigible tomboy, a creature which in
general he disapproved of. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her go
skipping to the tops. Even at that, she was as much as he could expect
of Captain Skinner’s niece.
Such dignity and courtly grace as the early ante-bellum years demanded
in woman were conspicuously absent in Molly. There was not a thing
dignified about her. Jeff would not say that she was actually
ungraceful, but at least she did not strike the graceful and picturesque
poses—hands turned out and chin inclined over shoulder—which the
latest books on etiquette recommended. And now Captain Skinner was
introducing him to her.
“My dear, this is the young man who is going to sail with us—Mr.
Jefferson Sharp. Molly, you ought to heard the question this feller just
asked me.”
“What was it, Uncle Dave?”
“He just asked me if I didn’t think England was the greatest country in
the world. Honey, does the old man begin to look foolish in his old age
that people say such things to him?”
“There are Americans who really think so,” the girl told him, smiling
quietly. “There are people who think everything foreign is superior to
everything American; they have been told that so many times by
foreigners they have begun to believe it.”
Jeff stood a trifle more erect. “I wouldn’t care to argue the point,” he
said stiffly. “We all have our views.”
“No, we wouldn’t want to start an argument that might end in a squabble,
considering we are going to have so many days in one another’s company,”
the girl replied. “Of course we can assume you are an American?”
Jeff looked at her with growing displeasure. “By conquest only,” he
said, bowing slightly. “My home was in North Carolina.”
The girl’s expression changed: there was something almost like
compassion in her bright eyes. “It will be a little hard, at first, to
readjust yourself to new conditions. I can well understand that. It may
be hard to consider yourself an American again, to feel as you used to
feel, before the war. I’m sure you’ll accomplish it in time.”
“I never can, I’m afraid, Miss—”
“Miss Forest. Try, anyway, Mr. Sharp. It is worth while, I assure you. A
republic makes many mistakes, but it’s worth clinging to in the end. Try
to forget your grief.”
She smiled rather tenderly; and Jeff felt grateful in spite of himself.
This girl was of a different caste and class; yet in her was the dream
of motherhood, and that had reached out to Jeff. If there was anything
on earth of which this lonely, embittered boy stood most in need, it was
mothering; and no wonder that she had struck a responsive chord. He had
always been easily moved, tender-hearted as a child. Union men who had
been taken prisoners by his battalion had cause to know this fact. He
looked at her with shining eyes.
Now, as they waited, the ship moved from the dock. Captain Skinner
bawled certain orders; a handful of people on the dock waved in
farewell. The little waves moved between the ship and the shore.
“We’re off,” Jeff said quietly.
“Yes. We are saying farewell to America for some weeks, at least.” She
was still deep in the thoughtful mood of a moment ago, as she watched
the shore recede. “Farewell to the land of friendly faces!”
“And I guess it is farewell to civilization, too.”
“Yes, we are leaving civilization behind us—the kind of civilization
that Lincoln believed in—the kind that America stands for.” She looked
at him mysteriously. “It will be different from what you think, though.
It may be exactly to your liking.” So they stood and watched the little
ship leaping into the waves, and their youthful dreams no man could
know.
V
Molly and Jeff made friends rather quickly as the _Ethan Allen_ sailed
northward. While the girl did not conform to Jeff’s idea of a lady, at
least she was agreeable company, quick-witted and bright, and highly
appreciative of his faultless courtesy and constant—though somewhat
patronizing—attentions. Her business in the North was simply to keep
her uncle company, she said; she would return from Sitka on this same
ship.
They had rather pleasant times together. They fed the gulls that trailed
them, they watched the mysterious shore line, they had long, friendly
talks on the deck. Jeff told her much about his past life, but he was
not so garrulous as to confess his real mission in the North. He had too
good manners to tell her his aristocratic views, and he was not in the
least tempted even to hint at his viewpoint regarding the Union and
America. He realized that Molly, sympathetic and generous though she
was, could not be a good listener to disloyal talk. Her views on such
matters were already clear.
As the days passed and the North Star neared, Jeff began to experience a
growing interest in the land by which the ship passed. Here was
certainly the wilderness: a country inconceivably vast, unknown, almost
unpeopled, dark with unbroken leagues of forest. Together they saw deep
bays in which a ship had never come to rest, far mountain ranges white
with snows that had never held a white man’s footprint, wonderful sylvan
scenes that filled them with delight only to fade at once in the haze.
Jeff was stirred with the wild beauty of the land, and at the same time
he found himself curiously mystified and thoughtful.
There were nights of startling beauty that wakened strange fancies and
unfamiliar moods in the two travelers who sat on the moonlit deck. There
was a vastness here that Jeff had never thought of before. Indeed, the
sea and the land and the sky were created on a scale that filled him
with silent awe. He felt little and futile in comparison, and the things
that he lived by seemed of no great moment after all—but he soon fought
away such vagrant thoughts as these. In such wondrous nights the two sat
for long hours with hardly a word, stirred by the magic of the sea in
the moonlight, listening to its eternal, moaning voice.
“Do you suppose any one will ever live up here?” he asked Molly one
night, pointing to the darkened shore. “Can any one exist in such a
place?”
“People live up here now,” was the girl’s reply. “Hardy trappers and
miners, not to mention the natives, gain their living from this
wilderness.”
“How can anybody bear to do it! It just means throwing his life away.”
The girl sat with her chin resting in her pink palm, and her gaze was a
thousand miles away. “I don’t think they would agree with you. I know
that I don’t agree with you, Mr. Sharp. In the happy years before the
war—did you consider that you were throwing your life away?”
“Of course not. No one could have lived a more perfect, idyllic life
than I did. Why, I didn’t have a worry. Nothing but pleasant things to
do from morning till night—”
“That is the way I thought it was. But if one of those hardy, hairy
frontiersmen I speak of had been in your place, he would have thought
that his time was worse than wasted.”
“Oh, I suppose one man’s drink is another’s poison. But you must
remember—those men are a different breed from me. They haven’t the same
traditions, the same precedents, nothing of the same tastes. They are
practically barbarians—knowing nothing of refinement, culture—anything
that matters. I don’t suppose they could be happy in a gentleman’s
station—simply because they would feel out of place.”
“What is culture—refinement—compared to achievement, Mr. Sharp? Where
would culture and refinement be except for the achievement that has made
them possible? I’ll tell you why those men I speak of couldn’t be
contented in your old sphere. Of course, if they had been trained to it,
as you were, they would like it well enough, but they could never be
transplanted now. Those men must have work to do, or they waste away.
They must have trial and stress—adventure—battle. They know their keen
eyes will dull if they don’t have the light-and-shadow of the forest to
keep them trained; their trigger finger will grow lax, their muscles
soften. They must have a patch of woodland to clear for sowing; they
must build a trail through the woods. It isn’t such luxury as you had,
Mr. Sharp, that makes America great. It is these trail-breakers in the
forest. And I don’t know what will happen to us when the last of the
land is tamed, and no trails are left to blaze.
“Yours was a beautiful life, lovely as a dream, I suppose, but I don’t
know what common good could come of it,” she went on, warming to her
subject. “Those men in the woods yonder are building for the
future—they are making an America that will be mankind’s hope in years
to come. Because of the efforts of such men as those—such men as are
now peopling the West—we will have a country where the common man has
some kind of a chance—where the mass of people will be better fed and
better clothed and happier than any race of people have ever been since
the world began. When a man builds in this country he does not build for
a king, or a noble—he isn’t making something that a king’s hired army
is going to come along and take away from him. He builds for all the
people.
“Only the bravest and the toughest can live out there in the woods. Only
the brave and the hardy have ever dared come to America; that is why
this continent is now peopled with a brood of eagles. And they can’t
stay still, those eagle-children. They must ever fly farther into the
wilderness. They are essentially home-makers, not just spoilers, and
future generations will reap the reward of their courage and strength.
They may not be gentlemen and ladies in the sense you use the word, but
you can never say they have thrown away their lives.”
Jeff looked at the girl with widening eyes. He had not dreamed that she
could be so fervent. The subject had evidently stirred her to the depths
of a nature which he realized now was neither vulgar nor superficial. He
found, in the days that followed, that her words lingered in his
consciousness, and particularly he retained the picture of her as she
was speaking them—seated on the deck with the moonlight in her eyes,
her strong little hands occasionally gesturing in her earnestness, her
lovely face lifted to his.
He was glad to have gained an appreciation of her; for it seemed that
their time of parting was near. The ship was rapidly approaching its
destination. One afternoon they came in sight of Baronof Island, the
seat of the capital city of the Czar’s American possessions; and as
night lowered they steamed into the harbor.
The last of August is almost always lovely in southeastern Alaska; but
this night turned out to be perfect beyond his imagination. It was as if
nature were outdoing herself for his special benefit. The stars were out
in countless legions and were imaged in the harbor depths; as the moon
rolled up around the curve of the earth, the wilderness at the edge of
the sea became an incredible fairyland of mystery and loveliness. Always
susceptible to beauty, a strange, lonely, poetic mood overcame him; and
he found himself regretting that the journey was over.
Surely such regrets were foolish and inconsistent in one of his
standards and ideas. What was there about those two commonplace people,
Captain Skinner and his niece, that he should regret leaving them.
Perhaps the real explanation lay in the uncertainty of the future, the
unhappy prospect of many weeks spent in an inhospitable, bleak, and
dismal trading post in the North Pacific. He felt that he knew all too
well what Sitka would be like. He was prepared for weeks of hopeless
boredom while he waited for a ship to take him home.
Partly because he was so enthralled with the beauty of the night, and
partly because he took little interest in the small Russian city that
marked the journey’s end, he made no attempt to watch for the first
light of the port. As a result, the city burst upon his view like a
place of enchantment, up out of the empty air. There were lights
everywhere—stretching far along the harbor like a string of gleaming
jewels, climbing the hills, illuminating what seemed to be fair-sized
buildings. Sitka looked considerably larger than he supposed it would
be. Perhaps it was only his long absence from the centers of
civilization that made it seem so imposing; yet surely it promised more
than he had hoped for at first. It was the last outpost, the farthest
place from anywhere, the final limit of the Czar’s dominions, yet it
looked like a center of civilization.
“It seems to be quite a place,” he observed to Molly, who stood beside
him. “I suppose it is the effect of the lights.”
“It is quite a place,” the girl answered. “You don’t understand. This is
the capital of a Russian province. The majesty of the Czar carries even
here. Besides, it is the center of everything in Alaska. It is one of
the fur-trading centers of the world. Almost every skin taken over all
this vast province goes through Sitka before it is shipped. Transpacific
boats stop here for ice. Look at the ships!”
Jeff’s eyes opened wide as he saw there were a half dozen large vessels
of various nations and kinds lying at anchor. And now he was aware of an
even more amazing thing.
He suddenly heard music. It came stealing over the water, hallowed by
distance, sublimely sweet in the hushed darkness. It was thin and
nebulous as moonlight itself; it did not seem like sound, but only an
incredible fragrance of the night. This was not the music of a savage
people; a native dance to a pagan god. There was no blood-curdling beat
of a tomtom in accompaniment. Such music as this was the heritage of old
civilizations, the voice of ancient cities in far lands. This was not
America, new and raw, that spoke across the water. It was the music, the
articulate soul of far-off, unhappy kingdoms beyond the interminable
seas.
“It’s Strauss, isn’t it?” the girl whispered at his side. “It comes from
Baronof Castle—the governor’s house on the hill.”
But Jeff did not answer or turn his head. He had forgotten the girl’s
existence.