VII

The _Charon_ sped straight north, out of the Sound, through the inside

passage. Days were bright; skies were clear, displaying at night a

marvelous intricacy of stars; the seas glittered from the kindly

September sun. They put in at Vancouver the night following their

departure from Seattle, loaded on certain heavy stores, and continued

their way in the lea of Vancouver Island.

Straight north, day after day! To McNab, a man who had cruised ten years

on Alaskan waters, the air began to feel like home. It was crisp,

surging cool in the lungs, fragrant with balsam from the wooded islands.

Already Ned had begun to readjust some of his ideas in regard to the

North. It was no longer easy to believe that his father had exaggerated

its beauty and its appeal, its desolation and its vastness. It was a

strange thing for a man used to cities to go day upon day without seeing

scarcely a village beside the sea, a single human being other than those

of his own party. Here was one place, it seemed, that the hand of man

had touched but lightly if at all.

The impression grew the farther north he went. Ever there was less sign

of habitation upon the shore. The craft passed through narrow channels

between mountains that cropped up from the sea, it skirted wooded

islands, it passed forgotten Indian villages where the totem poles stood

naked and weather-stained before the forsaken homes of the chiefs. The

glasses brought out a wonderland scene just beyond the reach of their

unaided sight,—glacier and snow-slide, lofty peaks and water-falls. The

mystic, brooding spirit of the North was already over them.

They had touched at Ketchikan, the port of entry to Alaska, and thence

headed almost straight west, across the gulf of Alaska and toward the

far-stretching end of the Alaskan Peninsula. During these days they were

far out of sight of land, surrounded only by an immeasurable ocean that

rolled endlessly for none to see or hear.

They were already far beyond the limits of ordinary tourist travel. The

big boats plied as far as Anchorage at the head of Cook Inlet—to the

north and east of them now—but beyond that point the traffic was

largely that of occasional coastal traders, most of them auxiliary

schooners of varying respectability. They seemed to have the ocean

almost to themselves, never to see the tip of a sail on the horizon, or

a fisherman’s craft scudding into port. And the solitude crept into the

spirits of the passengers of the _Charon_.

It became vaguely difficult to keep up a holiday atmosphere. It was

increasingly hard to be gay, to fight down certain inner voices that had

hitherto been stifled. Some way, life didn’t seem quite the same, quite

the gay dream it had hitherto been. And yet this immeasurable vista of

desolate waters—icy cold for all the sunlight that kissed the

upreaching lips of the waves—was some way like a dream too. The brain

kept clear enough, but it was all somewhat confusing to an inner brain,

a secret self that they had scarcely been aware of before. It was hard

to say which was the more real,—the gay life they had left, the

laughter of which was still an echo in their ears, or these

far-stretching wastes of wintry waters.

They couldn’t help but be thoughtful. Realities went home to them that

they had no desire to admit. A fervent belief in their own

sophistication had been their dominant point of view, a disillusionment

and a realism that was the tone of their generation, denying all they

could not see or hear, holding themselves superciliously aloof from that

gracious wonder and simplicity that still blesses little children; but

here was something that was inscrutably beyond them. They couldn’t laugh

it away. They couldn’t cast it off with a phrase of cheap slang;

demeaning it in order to hold firm to their own philosophy of Self. Here

was something that shook their old attitude of self-love and

self-sufficiency to its foundations. They thought they knew life, these

three; they thought they were bigger than life, that they had mastered

it and found it out and stripped all delusions from it, but now their

unutterable conceit, the pillar of their lives, was threatening to fall.

This sunlit sea was too big for them: too big and too mighty and too

old.

The trouble with Ned’s generation was that it was a godless generation:

the same evil that razed Babylon to the dust. Ned and his kind had come

to be sufficient unto themselves. They had lost the wonder and fear of

life, and that meant nothing less than the loss of their wonder and fear

of the great Author of life. To these, life had been a game that they

thought they had mastered. They had laughed to scorn the philosophies

that a hundred generations of nobler men had built up with wondering

reverence. Made arrogant by luxury and ease, they knew of nothing too

big for them, no mystery that their contemptuous gaze could not

penetrate, no wonder that their reckless hands could not unveil. They

were drunk with their own glories, and the ultimate Source of all things

had no place in their philosophies or their thoughts. It was true that

churches flourished among them, that Charity received her due; but the

old virile faith, the reverent wonder, the mighty urge that has achieved

all things that have been worth achieving were cold and dead in their

hearts. But out here in this little, wind-blown craft, surrounded by an

immensity of desolation beyond the power of their minds to grasp, it was

hard to hold to their old complacency. Their old philosophies were

barrenly insufficient, and they couldn’t repel an ever deepening sense

of awe. The wind, sweeping over them out of the vastness, was a new

voice, striking the laughter from their lips and instilling a coldness

that was almost fear in their warm, youthful blood. The sun shone now,

but soon vast areas, not far off, would be locked tight with ice; never

the movement of a wave, never the flash of a sea-bird’s wing over the

wastes; and the thought sobered them and perhaps humbled them a little

too. Sometimes, alone on the deck at night, Ned was close to the dearest

reality, the most profound discovery that could possibly touch his life:

that the dreadful spirit of God moved upon the face of these desolate

waters, no less than, as is told in Genesis, at creation’s dawn.

Everything would have been different if they had come in a larger boat,

for instance, one of the great liners that plied between Seattle and

Anchorage. In that case, likely they would have had no trouble in

retaining their old point of view. The brooding tone of the North would

have passed them by; the journey could still have remained a holiday

instead of the strange, wandering dream that it was. The reason was

simply that on a liner they would not have broken all ties with their

old life. There would have been games and dancing, the service of

menials, social intercourse and all the superficialities and pretenses

that had until now composed their lives. Their former standards, the

attitudes from which they regarded life, would have been unaltered.

There would have been no isolation, and thus no darkening of their

moods, no haunting uneasiness that could not be named or described, no

whispering voices heard but dimly out of the sea. They could have

remained in their own old ramparts of callousness and scorn. But here

they were alone,—lost and far on an empty sea, under an empty sky.

There was such a little group of them, only eight in all. The ship was a

mere dot in the expanse of blue. Around them endlessly lay the sea,

swept by unknown winds, cursed by the winter’s cold, like death itself

in its infinity and its haunting fear. The life they had left behind was

already shadowed and dim: the farewell shouts, the laughter, the gaiety,

the teeming crowds that moved and were never still were all like

something imagined, unspeakably far off. Only the sea and the sky were

left, and the craft struggling wearily, ever farther into the empty

North.

Lenore found herself oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Realities were

getting home to her, and she was afraid of them. It would have been

wiser not to come, yet she couldn’t have told why. The launch was wholly

comfortable; she was already accustomed to the cramped quarters. The men

of the crew were courteous, Ned the same devoted lover as always. The

thing was more an instinct with her: such pleasure as the trip offered

could not compensate for an obscure uneasiness, a vague but ominous

shadow over her mood and heart that was never lifted. Perhaps a wiser

and secret self within the girl, a subconsciousness which was wise with

the knowledge of the ages before ever her being emerged from the germ

plasm was even now warning her to turn back. It knew her limitations;

also it knew the dreadful, savage realm she had dared to penetrate. The

North would have no mercy for her if she were found unworthy.

Perhaps in her heart she realized that she represented all that was the

antithesis of this far northern domain. She was the child of luxury and

ease: the tone and spirit of these wintry seas were travail and

desolation. She was the product of a generation that knew life only as a

structure that men’s civilization had built; out here was life itself,

raw and naked, stripped and bare. She was lawless, undisciplined,

knowing no code but her own desires; all these seas and the gray

fog-laden shores they swept were in the iron grip of Law that went down

to the roots of time. She had never looked beyond the surface of things;

the heart that pulsed in the breast of this wintry realm lay so deep

that only the most wise and old, devotees to nature’s secrets, could

ever hear it beat. She had the unmistakable feeling that, in an

unguarded moment, she had blundered into the camp of an enemy. Ever she

discerned a malevolence in the murmur of the wind, a veritable threat in

the soft voices of the night.

The nights, her innate sense of artistry told her, were unspeakably

beautiful. She had never seen such stars before. They were so large, so

white, and yet so unutterably aloof. Sometimes the moon rose in a splash

of silver, and its loveliness on the far seas was a thing that words

couldn’t reach. Yet Lenore did not like things she could not put in

words. For all their beauty those magic nights dismayed and disquieted

her. They too were of the realities, and for all her past attitude of

sophistication, she found that realism was the one thing she could not

and dared not accept. Such realities as these, the wide-stretching seas

and the infinity of stars, were rapidly stripping her of her dearest

delusions; and with them, the very strongholds of her being. Heretofore

she had placed her faith in superficialities, finding strength for her

spirit and bolstering up her self-respect with such things as pride of

ancestry, social position, a certain social attitude of recklessness

that she thought became her, and most of all by refusing to believe that

life contained any depth that she had not plumbed, any terrors that she

dared not brave, any situation that she could not meet and master. But

here these things mattered not at all. Neither ancestry nor social

position could save her should the winter cold, hinted at already in the

bitter frost of the dawns, swoop down and find her unprotected. Her own

personal charm would not fight for her should she fall overboard into

the icy waters. Here was a region where recklessness could very easily

mean death; and where life itself was suddenly revealed utterly beyond

her ken. But there was no turning back. Every hour the _Charon_ bore her

farther from her home.

Mrs. Hardenworth, whose habits of thought were more firmly established,

was only made irritable and petulant by the new surroundings. Never good

company except under the stimulation of some social gathering, she was

rapidly becoming something of a problem to Ned and Lenore. She was

irritable with the crew, on the constant verge of insult to Bess,

forecasting disaster for the entire expedition. Unlike Bess, she had

never been disciplined to meet hardship and danger; her only resource

was guile and her only courage was recklessness; so now she tried to

overcome her inner fears with a more reckless attitude toward life. It

was no longer necessary for Ned and Lenore to seek the shelter of the

pilot house for their third whisky-and-soda. She was only too glad to

take it with them. More than once the dinner hour found her glassy-eyed

and almost hysterical, only a border removed from actual drunkenness.

Never possessing any true moral strength or real good breeding, a

certain abandon began to appear in her speech. And they had not yet

rounded the Alaskan Peninsula into Bering Sea.

To Ned, the long north and westward journey had been even more a

revelation. He also knew the fear, the disillusionment, a swift sense of

weakness when before he had been perfectly sure in his own strength; but

there was also a more complex reaction,—one that he could not analyze

or put into words. He couldn’t call it happiness. It wasn’t that, unless

the mood that follows the hearing of wonderful music is also happiness.

Perhaps that was the best comparison: the passion he felt was something

like the response made to great music. There had been times at the

opera, when all conditions were exactly favorable, that he had felt the

same, and once when he had heard Fritz Kreisler play Handel’s “Largo.”

It was a strange reaching and groping, rather than happiness. It was a

stir and thrill that touched the most secret chords of his being.

He felt it most at night when the great, white northern stars wheeled

through the heavens. It was good to see them undulled by smoke; they

touched some side of him that had never been stirred into life before.

At such times the sea was lost in mystery.

The truth was that Ned, by the will of the Red Gods, was perceiving

something of the real spirit of the North. A sensitive man to start

with, he caught something of its mystery and wonder of which, as yet,

Lenore had no glimpse. And the result was to bring him to the verge of a

far-reaching discovery: that of his own weakness.

He had never admitted weakness before. He had always been so sure of

himself, so complacent, so self-sufficient. But curiously these things

were dying within him. He found himself doubting, for the first time,

the success of this northern adventure. Could he cope with the realities

that were beginning to press upon him? Would not this northern

wilderness show him up as the weakling he was?

For the first time in his life Ned Cornet knew what realism was. He

supposed, in his city life, that he had been a realist: instead he had

only been a sophist and a mocker in an environment that was never real

from dawn to darkness. He had read books that he had acclaimed among his

young friends as masterpieces of realism—usually works whose theme and

purpose seemed to be a bald-faced portrayal of sex—but now he saw that

their very premise was one of falsehood. Here were the true

realities,—unconquerable seas and starry skies and winds from off the

waste places.

Unlike Lenore, Ned’s regrets were not that he had ever launched forth

upon the venture. Rather he found himself regretting that he was not

better fitted to contend with it. Perhaps, after all, his father had

been right and he had been wrong. For the first time in his life Ned

felt the need of greater strength, of stronger sinews.

What if his father had told the truth, and that strict trials awaited

him here. It was no longer easy to disbelieve him. Almost any disaster

could fall upon him here, in these wastes of sunlit water, in the very

shadow of polar ice. The sun itself had lost its warmth. It slanted down

upon them from far to the south, and it seemed to be beguiling them,

with its golden beauty on the waters, into some deadly trap that had

been set for them still farther north. It left Ned some way apprehensive

and dismayed. He wished he hadn’t been so sure of himself, that he had

taken greater pains, in his wasted years, to harden and train himself.

Perhaps he was to be weighed in the balance, and it was increasingly

hard to believe that he would not be found wanting.

In such a mood he recalled his father’s words regarding that dread realm

of test and trial that lay somewhere beyond the world: “some bitter,

dreadful training camp for those that leave this world unfitted to go on

to a higher, better world.” He had scorned the thought at first, but now

he could hardly get it out of his mind. It suggested some sort of an

analogy with his present condition. These empty seas were playing tricks

on his imagination; he could conceive that the journey of which his

father had spoken might not be so greatly different than this. There

would be the same desolation, the same nearness of the stars, the

emptiness and mystery, the same sense of gathering, impending trial and

stress. The name of the craft was the _Charon_! The thought chilled him

and dismayed him.

For all his boasted realism, Ned Cornet had never got away from

superstition. Man is still not far distant from the Cave and the

Squatting Place, and superstition is a specter from out the dead

centuries that haunts all his days. The coincidence that their craft,

plying through these deathly waters, should bear such a name as the

_Charon_ suddenly suggested a dark possibility to Ned. All at once this

man, heretofore so sure, so self-sufficient, so incredulous of anything

except his own continued glory and happiness and life, was face to face

with the first fear—the simple, primitive fear of death.

Was that his fate at the journey’s end? Not mere trial, mere hardship

and stress and adventure, but uncompromising death! Was he experiencing

a premonition? Was that training camp soon to be a reality, as terribly

real as these cold seas and this sky of stars, instead of a mere figment

of an old man’s childish fancy?

The thought troubled and haunted him, but it proved to be the best

possible influence for the man himself. For the first time in his life

Ned Cornet was awake. He had been dreaming before: for the first time he

had wakened to _life_. Fear, disaster, the dreadful omnipotence of fate

were no longer empty words to him: they were stern and immutable

realities. He knew what the wolf knows, when he howls to the winter moon

from the snow-swept ridge: that he was a child in the hands of Powers so

vast and awful that the sublimest human thought could not even reach to

them! He could see, dimly as yet but unmistakably, the shadow of that

travail that haunts men’s days from the beginning to the end.

His father’s blood, and in some degree his father’s wisdom, was

beginning to manifest itself in him. It was only a whispered voice as

yet, wholly to be disregarded in the face of too great temptation, yet

nevertheless it was the finest and most hopeful thing in his life. And

it came particularly clear one still, mysterious night, shortly after

the dinner hour, as he faced the North from the deck of the _Charon_.

The schooner’s auxiliary engines had pumped her through Unimak Pass by

now, the passage between Unimak and Akun Islands, and now she had

launched forth into that wide, western portal of the Arctic,—Bering

Sea. Still the wonderful succession of bright days had endured, no less

than marvelous, along the mist-swept southern shore of the peninsula,

but now the brisk, salty wind from the northwest indicated an impending

weather change. It had been a remarkably clear and windless day, and the

night that had come down, so swiftly and so soon, was of strange and

stirring beauty. The stars had an incredible luster; the sea itself was

of an unnamed purple, marvelously deep,—such a color as scientists

might find lying beyond the spectrum. And Ned’s eyes, to-night, were not

dulled by the effects of strong drink.

For some reason that he himself could not satisfactorily explain he

hadn’t partaken of his usual afternoon whiskies-and-sodas. He simply

wasn’t in a drinking mood, steadfastly refusing to partake. Lenore,

though she had never made it a point to encourage Ned’s drinking habits,

could not help but regard the refusal as in some way a slight to

herself, and was correspondingly downcast and irritable. Wholly out of

sorts, she had let him go to the deck alone.

The night’s beauty swept him, touching some realm of his spirit deep and

apart from his mere love of pleasing visual image. His imagination was

keenly alive, and he had a distinct feeling that the North had a

surprise in store for him to-night. Some stress and glory was impending:

what he did not know.

Facing over the bow he suddenly perceived a faint silver radiance close

to the horizon. His first impression was that the boat had taken a

south-easternly course, and this argent gleam was merely the banner of

the rising moon. Immediately he knew better: except by the absolute

disruption of cosmic law, the moon could not rise for at least four

hours. He knew of no coast light anywhere in the region, and it was hard

to believe that he had caught the far-off glimmer of a ship’s light.

Seemingly such followers of the sea had been left far behind them.

But as he watched the light grew. His own pulse quickened. And presently

a radiant streamer burst straight upward like a rocket, fluttered a

moment, and died away.

A strange thrill and stir moved through the intricacy of his nerves. He

knew now what this light portended; it was known to every wayfarer in

the North, yet the keenest excitement took hold of him. It moved him

more than any painted art had ever done, more than any wonderful maze of

color and light that a master stage director could effect. The streamer

shot up again, more brightly colored now, and then a great ball of fire

rolled into the sky, exploded into a thousand flying fragments, and left

a sea of every hue in the spectrum in its wake.

“The Northern Lights!” he told himself. A quiver of exultation passed

over him.

There could be no mistake. This was the radiance, the glory that the Red

Gods reserve for those who seek the far northern trails. Ever the

display increased in wonder and beauty. The streamers were whisking in

all directions now, meeting with the effect of collision in the dome of

the sky, remaining there to shiver and gleam with incredible beauty; the

surging waves of light spread ever farther until, at times, the sky was

a fluttering canopy of radiance.

He thought of calling Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth; but some way the idea

slipped out of his mind. In a moment he was too deep in his own mood

even to remember that they existed. But not only his exterior world

faded from his consciousness. For the moment he forgot _himself_; and

with it the old self-love and self-conceit that had pervaded every

moment of his past life, colored all his views, and shaped the ends of

his destiny. All that was left was that incredible sky and its weird,

reflected glamor in the sea.

This was _Aurora Borealis_, never to be known, in its full glory, to

those that shun the silent spaces of the North. Suddenly he felt glad

that he was here. The moment, by measure of some queer balance beyond

his sight, was worth all the rest of his past life put together. Great

trials might lie ahead, temptations might tear him down, his own

weakness and folly of the past might lay him low in some woeful disaster

of the future; yet he was glad that he had come! It was the most

profound, the most far-reaching moment of his life.

Always he had lived close to and bound up in a man-made civilization. In

his heart he had worshipped it, rather than the urge and the inspiration

that had made it possible: he had always judged the Thing rather than

the Source. But for the first time in his life he was close to nature’s

heart. He had seen a glory, at nature’s whim, that transcended the most

glorious work of man ever beheld in his native city. He was closer to

redemption than at any time in his life.

A few feet distant on the deck Bess’s eyes turned from the miracle in

the skies to watch the slowly growing light in Ned Cornet’s face. It was

well enough for him to find his inspiration in the majesty of nature.

Bess was a woman, and that meant that man that is born of woman was her

work and her being. She turned her eyes from God to behold this man.

And it was well for her that Lenore was not near enough to see her face

in the wan, ghostly radiance of the Northern Lights. Her woman’s

intuition would have been quick to lay bare the secret of the girl’s

wildly leaping heart. Bess’s eyes were suddenly lustrous with a light no

less wonderful than that which played in glory in the sky. Her face was

swiftly unutterably beautiful in its tenderness and longing.

And had she not fought against this very thing? She had not dreamed for

a moment but that she had conquered and shut away the appeal that this

man made to her heart. It would have been easy enough to conquer if he

had only remained what he had been,—selfish, reckless, self-loving,

inured to his tawdry philosophy of life. But to-night a new strength had

come into his face. Perhaps it would be gone to-morrow, but to-night his

manhood had come to him. And she couldn’t resist it. It swept her heart

as the wind sweeps a sea-bird through the sky.