We didn't like Montague Prosser at first--he was too clean. He wore his
virtue like a bath-robe, flapping it in our faces. It was Whitewater
Kelly who undertook to mitigate him one day, but, being as the nuisance
stood an even fathom high and had a double-action football motion about
him, Whitewater's endeavors kind of broke through the ice and he
languished around in his bunk the next week while we sat up nights and
changed his bandages.
Yes, Monty was equally active at repartee or rough-house, and he knocked
Whitewater out from under his cap, slick and clean, just the way you
snap a playing-card out from under a coin, which phenomenon terminated
our tendencies to scoff and carp.
Personally, I didn't care. If a man wants to wallow about in a
disgusting daily debauch of cleanliness, it is his privilege. If he
squanders the fleeting moments brushing teeth, cleaning fingernails, and
such technicalities, it stands to reason he won't have much time left to
attend to his work and at the same time cultivate the essentials of life
like smoking, drinking, and the proper valuation of a three-card draw.
But, as I say, it's up to him, and outsiders who don't see merit in such
a system shouldn't try to bust up his game unless they've got good
foot-work and a knockout punch.
It wasn't so much these physical refinements that riled us as the
rarefied atmosphere of his general mental and moral altitudes. To me
there's eloquence and sentiment and romance and spiritual uplift in a
real, full-grown, black-whiskered cuss-word. It's a great help in a
mountainous country. Profanity is like steam in a locomotive--takes more
to run you up-hill than on the level, and inasmuch as there's only a few
men on the level, a violent vocabulary is a necessity and appeals to me
like a certificate of good character and general capability.
There wasn't a thing doing with Prosser in the idiom line, however. His
moral make-up was like his body, big and sound and white and manicured,
and although his talk, alongside of ours, listened like it was skimmed
and seminaried, still when we got to know him we found that his verbal
structures had vital organs and hair on their chests just like anybody
else's, and at the same time had the advantage of being fit to send
through the mails.
He had left a widowed mother and come north on the main chance, like the
rest of us, only he originated farther east. What made the particular
ten-strike with us was the pride he took in that same mother. He gloried
in her and talked about her in that hushed and nervous way a man speaks
about a real mother or a regular sweetheart. We men-folks liked him all
the better for it. I say we men, for he was a "shine" with the
women--all nine of them. The camp was fifteen hundred strong that
winter, over and above which was the aforesaid galaxy of nine, stranded
on their way up-river to a Dawson dance-hall. The Yukon froze up and
they had to winter with us. Of course there were the three married
ladies, too, living with their husbands back on the Birch Ridge, but we
never saw them and they didn't count. The others went to work at
Eckert's theater.
Monty would have been right popular at Eckert's--he was a handsome
lad--but he couldn't see those people with a field-glass. They simply
scandalized him to death.
"I love to dance," said he, one night, as we looked on, "and the music
sends thrills through me, but I won't do it."
"Why not?" I asked. "This is Alaska. Be democratic. You're not so
awfully nice that a dance-hall girl will contaminate you."
"It's not democracy that I lack, nor contamination that I'm afraid of,"
he replied. "It's the principle back of it all. If we encourage these
girls in the lives they lead, we're just as bad as they are."
"Look here, son, when I quit salt water I left all that garbage and
bilge-water talk about 'guilt' and 'responsibility' behind. The days are
too short, the nights are too cold, and grub is too dear for me to spare
time to theorize. I take people the way I take work and play--just as
they come--and I'd advise you to do the same."
"No, sir; I won't associate with gamblers and crooks, so why should I
hobnob with these women? They're worse than the men, for all the
gamblers have lost is their honesty. Every time I see these girls I
think of the little mother back home. It's awful. Suppose she saw me
dancing with them?"
Well, that's a bad line of talk and I couldn't say much.
Of course, when the actresses found out how he felt they came back at
him strong, but he wrapped himself up in his dignity and held himself
aloof when he came to town, so he didn't seem to mind it.
It was one afternoon in January, cold and sharp, that Ollie Marceau's
team went through the ice just below our camp. She was a great
dog-puncher and had the best team in camp--seven fine malamoots--which
she drove every day. When the animals smelled our place they ran away
and dragged her into the open water below the hot springs. She was wet
for ten minutes, and by the time she had got out and stumbled to our
bunk-house she was all in. Another ten minutes with the "quick" at
thirty below would have finished her, but we rushed her in by the fire
and made her drink a glass of "hootch." Martin got her parka off somehow
while I slashed the strings to her mukluks and had her little feet
rubbed red as berries before she'd quit apologizing for the trouble
she'd made. A fellow learns to watch toes pretty close in the winter.
"Lord! stop your talk," we said. "This is the first chance we have had
to do anything for a lady in two years. It's a downright pleasure for us
to take you in this way."
"Indeed!" she chattered. "Well, it isn't mutual--" And we all laughed.
We roused up a good fire and made her take off all the wet clothes she
felt she could afford to, then wrung them out and hung them up to dry.
We made her gulp down another whisky, too, after which I gave her some
footgear and she slipped into one of Martin's Mackinaw shirts. We knew
just how faint and shaky she felt, but she was dead game and joked with
us about it.
I never realized what a cute trick she was till I saw her in that great,
coarse, blue shirt with her feet in beaded moccasins, her yellow hair
tousled, and the sparkle of adventure in her bright eyes. She stood out
like a nugget by candle-light, backed as she was, by the dingy bark
walls of our cabin.
I suppose it was a bad instant for Prosser to appear. He certainly cued
in wrong and found the sight shocking to his Plymouth Rock proprieties.
The raw liquor we had forced on her had gone to her head a bit, as it
will when you're fresh from the cold and your stomach is empty, so her
face was flushed and had a pretty, reckless, daring look to it. She had
her feet high up on a chair, too--not so very high, either--where they
were thawing out under the warmth of the oven, and we were all laughing
at her story of the mishap.
Monty stopped on recognizing who she was, while the surprise in his face
gave way to disapproval. We could see it as plain as if it was blazoned
there in printer's ink, and it sobered us. The girl removed her feet and
stood up.
"Miss Marceau has just had an accident," I began, but I saw his eyes
were fastened on the bottle on the table, and I saw also that he knew
what caused the fever in her cheeks.
"Too bad," he said, coldly. "If I can be of any assistance you'll find
me down at the shaft-house." And out he walked.
I knew he didn't intend to be inhospitable; that it was just his
infernal notions of decency, and that he refused to be a party to
anything as devilish as this looked--but it wasn't according to the
Alaska code, and it was like a slap in the girl's face.
"I am quite dry," she said. "I'll be going now."
"You will not. You'll stay to supper and drive home by moonlight," says
we. "Why, you'd freeze in a mile!" And we made her listen to us.
During the meal Prosser never opened his mouth except to put something
into it, but his manner was as full of language as an oration. He didn't
thaw out the way a man should when he sees strangers wading into the
grub he's paid a dollar a pound for, and when we'd finally sent the
young woman off Martin turned on him.
"Young feller," said he--and his eyes were black--"I've rattled around
for thirty years and seen many a good and many a bad man, but I never
before seen such an intelligent dam' fool as you are."
"What do you mean?" said the boy.
"You've broke about the only law that this here country boasts of--the
law of hospitality."
"He didn't mean it that way," I spoke up. "Did you, Monty?"
"Certainly not. I'd help anybody out of trouble--man or woman--but I
refuse to mix with that kind of people socially."
"'That kind of people,'" yelled the old man. "And what's the matter with
that kind of people? You come creeping out of the milk-and-water East,
all pink and perfumed up, and when you get into a bacon-and-beans
country where people sweat instead of perspiring you wrinkle your nose
like a calf and whine about the kind of people you find. What do you
know about people, anyhow? Did you ever want to steal?"
"Of course not," said Prosser, who kept his temper.
"Did you ever want to drink whisky so bad you couldn't stand it?"
"No."
"Did you ever want to kill a man?"
"No."
"Were you ever broke and friendless and hopeless?"
"Why, I can't say I ever was."
"And you've never been downright hungry, either, where you didn't know
if you'd ever eat again, have you? Then what license have you got to
blame people for the condition you find them in? How do you know what
brought this girl where she is?"
"Oh, I pity any woman who is adrift on the world, if that's what you
mean, but I won't make a pet out of her just because she is friendless.
She must expect that when she chooses her life. Her kind are bad--bad
all through. They must be."
"Not on your life. Decency runs deeper than the hives."
"Trouble with you," said I, "you've got a juvenile standard--things are
all good or all bad in your eyes--and you can't like a person unless the
one overbalances the other. When you are older you'll find that people
are like gold-mines, with a thin streak of pay on bed-rock and lots of
hard digging above."
"I didn't mean to be discourteous," our man continued, "but I'll never
change my feelings about such things. Mind you, I'm not preaching, nor
asking you to change your habits--all I want is a chance to live my own
life clean."
The mail came in during March, five hundred pounds of it, and the camp
went daffy.
Monty had the dogs harnessed ten minutes after we got the news, and we
drove the four miles in seventeen minutes. I've known men with
sweethearts outside, but I never knew one to act gladder than Monty did
at the thought of hearing from his mother.
"You must come and see us when you make your pile," he told me,
"or--what's better--we'll go East together next spring and surprise her.
Won't that be great? We'll walk in on her in the summer twilight while
she is working in her flower-garden. Can't you just see the green trees
and smell the good old smells of home? The catbirds will be calling and
the grass will be clean and sweet. Why, I'm so tired of the cold and the
snow and the white, white mountains that I can hardly stand it."
He ran on in that vein all the way to town, glad and hopeful and
boyish--and I wondered why, with his earnestness and loyalty and broad
shoulders, he had never loved any woman but his mother. When I was
twenty-three my whole romantic system had been mangled and shredded from
heart to gizzard. Still, some men get their age all in a lump; they're
boys up till the last minute, then they get the Rip Van Winkle while you
wait.
This morning was bitter, but the "sour doughs" were lined up outside the
store, waiting their turns like a crowd of Parsifal first-nighters, so
we fell in with the rest, whipping our arms and stamping our moccasins
till the chill ate into our very bones. It took hours to sort the
letters, but not a man whimpered. When you wait for vital news a tension
comes that chokes complaint. There was no joking here, nor that
elephantine persiflage which marks rough men when they forgather in the
wilderness. They were the fellows who blazed the trail, bearded, shaggy,
and not pretty to look at, for they all knew hardship and went out
strong-hearted into this silent land, jesting with danger and singing in
the solitudes. Here in the presence of the Mail they laid aside their
cloaks of carelessness and saw one another bared to the quick, timid
with hunger for the wives and little ones behind.
There were a few like Prosser, in whom there was still the glamour of
the Northland and the mystery of the unknown, but they were scattered,
and in their eyes the anxious light was growing also.
Five months is a wearying time, and silent suspense will sap the
courage. If only one could banish worry; but the long, unbearable nights
when the mind leaps and scurries out into the voids of conjecture like
sparks from a chimney--well, it's then you roll in your bunk and your
sigh ain't from the snow-shoe pain.
A half-frozen man in an ice-clogged dory had brought us our last news,
one October day, just before the river stopped, and now, after five
months, the curtain parted again.
I saw McGill, the lawyer, in the line ahead of me and noted the grayness
of his cheeks, the nervous way his lips worked, and the futile,
wandering, uselessness of his hands. Then I remembered. When his letter
came the fall before it said the wife was very low, that the crisis was
near, and that they would write again in a few days. He had lived this
endless time with Fear stalking at his shoulder. He had lain down with
it nightly and risen with it grinning at him in the slow, cold dawn. The
boys had told me how well he fought it back week after week, but now,
edging inch by inch toward the door behind which lay his message, it got
the best of him.