THE WHITE NIGHT
“LORD, I’m tired,” groaned Rickard, stumbling into camp, wet to the
skin. “Don’t you say letters to me, Mac. I’m going to bed. Tell Ling I
don’t want any dinner. He’ll want to fuss up something. I don’t want to
see food.”
As he moved on to his tent, MacLean noted a dragging step and a
feverish face. But his anxiety was dwarfed by Ling’s. The Chinese
immediately invaded Rickard’s tent, leaving the dishing of the dinner
to Godfrey. Ling found Rickard, burning with fever, stripping for a
cold shower.
“Velly bad, velly bad,” he exclaimed. “Hi, there, you stop,” as Rickard
went on stripping. “Hi, there, no cold watel. Me ketchem hot watel.”
“‘_Hot_ watel’! I’m burning up now!”
“Here you, get into bed, hop. I ketchem warm watel. Cold watel no good,
make velly sick. Hop.”
Rickard hopped. He was worn to the point of yielding to any
authoritative voice. The day had been exhausting. His eyes closed
with weariness. He did not watch Ling’s new captaincy. The Chinese,
soft-slippered, pattered around the tent, and out. The sheets felt cool
and comfortable. Rickard had a sensation of dropping, falling into
oblivion.
The day, confused and jumbled, burned across his eyeballs; a turmoil
of bustle and hurry of insurrection. He had made a swift stand against
that. He was to be minded to the last man-jack of them, or any one
would go, his threat including the engineers, Silent, Irish, Wooster,
Hardin himself. This was no time for factions, for leader feeling. They
knew he meant business; perhaps the tussle with the Indians had had
good effect. But he had lost his temper with Hardin and Wooster; he
didn’t feel pleased with himself. It left a sting of self-discontent
which pulled him back from the rest into which he was sinking. A
man can enjoy the mastery over other men if he gets out of it with
self-control. It seemed worse now than when he had been in the clamor
and the contention of the day. Tossing feverishly on his bed, the day’s
perspective gave no order, no progress. His body was hot, his head on
fire.
His grouch focused on Wooster. “The gall of him!” He recalled the
snapping black beads of eyes as they resented Rickard’s criticism of
his handling of the rock.
“Who’s superintendent here?” had growled Wooster.
“It is a pity that I must superintend your superintending,” had been
his answer. “You will obey my orders, or quit.”
“He’s had an ax for me ever since I came; he’s been sore ever since I
won over the Indians. He thought he was going to see me crushed. The
whole camp would have crowed had those Indians marched out. Lord, what
a head I have!”
Ling came in, towing a portable tub of galvanized tin, a bucket of
steaming water in his other hand.
“If you think you’re going to get me into that, you’re mistaken,”
Rickard raised his head to scowl at the bucket. Ling had the tact
not to answer. Quiet as a cat, he placed the tub by the bedside, and
emptied the bucket. Pattering to the door, he took from an unseen
waiting hand, another pail of rising steam, and a large yellow-papered
tin of mustard.
“You needn’t think you’re going to boss me,” Rickard flared with
impotent resistance. “Mustard! I’ve not taken that since I was a small
boy. I’m not going to put my foot in it, do you hear?”
Ling would not hear. He was moving noiselessly around the tent, blind
and deaf to scowls and grumbling. Rickard watched him collect blankets
and towels. His rebellion was deflected. What an amusing race it was,
at cooking, nursing or diplomacy equally facile!
“Who was that outside the door?” The hand suddenly reassured to him.
“Mlister Godfley.” Ling, the laconic, went on with his preparations.
When he had finished, he stopped suddenly in front of the bed. Rickard
was off guard.
“Here you, ketchem bath. Hop.”
“A bath, get in that? Not on your life,” defied Rickard. But he knew he
was as putty in Ling’s hands.
“Hop, velly quick,” commanded Ling.
As Rickard did not hop, he was pulled out of bed by soft Chinese,
work-wrinkled fingers. After a sputtering resistance to the sting of
the hot mustard, he lay back, an unexpected relaxation meeting his
supineness. The first sting over, the pain began to melt from his
bones, from his strained aching muscles. His irritability began to
dissolve. He decided to forgive Ling, who had left the tent.
His eyes closed. He caught an instant’s doze. Ling’s entrance wakened
him.
“This salad water’s all right! I’m going to stay here all night.”
The Chinese had a hot, pungent smelling drink in his hand.
“Oh, say,” groaned the engineer. “I don’t have to drink that!”
“All lite tamale,” replied the calm doctor. “Hi, there, get up. Hop.
Pletty quick. Take heap cold. Velly bad.”
In bed, Ling’s hot drink inside him, the day with its irritations fell
away. He could see now the step ahead that had been taken; the last
trestle was done; the rock-pouring well on; he called that going some!
He felt pleasantly languid, but not yet sleepy. His thought wandered
over the resting camp. The _Delta_ was no longer entertaining; the days
were too strenuous for that. Frank Godfrey must be finding them dull.
And then Innes Hardin came to him.
Not herself, but as a soft little thought which came creeping around
the corner of his dreams. She had been there, of course, all day,
tucked away in his mind, as though in his home waiting for him to
come back to her, weary from the pricks of the day. The way he would
come home to her, please God, some day. Not bearing his burdens to
her, he did not believe in that, but asking her diversions. Perhaps
she would sing to him, or play to him, little tender tunes he could
understand. He had never had time to keep up with the new-fangled music
which sounded to his ear like a distinct endeavor to be unmusical and
bizarre. All the melodies have been used up; Mozart and those old
boys had hogged them. The moderns have had to invent a school of odd
discords and queer rhythms. Innes would tell him about that! Some day!
Contentment spread her soft wings over him. When Ling came stealing
back, his patient was asleep.
The tent was a wash of white light when he woke; the moon was filtering
through the white canvas; a band of pale radiance was streaming through
the screen door. Rickard wakened as to a call. What had startled him?
He had been sleeping heavily, the deep sleep that knows no dreaming.
He listened, raising himself by his elbow. From a distance, a sweet
high voice, unreal in its pitch and thrilling quality, came to him. It
pieced on to his last waking thought. For an instant, he thought it was
Innes.
Awake, the rhythmic beat coming clear and sweet to him, he knew it was
Godfrey; Godfrey, somewhere on the levee, singing by the river.
“What a voice that fellow has!” He wondered what it was he was singing.
“The quality of the angels, and the lure of the sirens besides!”
There was a haunting thrill to the air; something he should remember.
He used to be able to carry tunes; was it too late, he wondered, to
sharpen his musical memory? The soft side of life he had left alone,
music, ease, poetry; they went with women, and his swift marching
life had had no time for them. Women and little children. Was it too
late to begin? Had he worked too long to learn to play? What was that
tune Godfrey was singing now? He knew that; it was about the age of
seventeen. It brought him again to Innes Hardin. He pulled aside his
curtain which hung over the screening of his tent and looked out into
a moon-flooded world. The stars were dimmed, thrust into their real
distances by the world’s white courier. Rickard’s eyes fell on a little
tent over yonder, a white shrine. “White as that fine sweet soul of
hers!”
Wandering into the night, Godfrey passed down the river, singing alone.
His voice, the footlights, the listening great audiences were calling
to him. To him, the moon-flooded levee, the glistening water, made a
star-set scene. He was treading the boards, the rushing waters by the
bank gave the orchestration for his melody--_La Donna è Mobile_. He
began it to Gerty Hardin; she would hear it in her tent; she would take
it as the tender reproach he had teased her with that afternoon in the
ramada.
He forgot her as he sang, the footlights, the great audiences claiming
him. They called him back! “_Bis! bis!_” He gave it again. Still, they
called for him. He must come back! He gave them for encore a ballad
long forgotten; he had pulled it back from the cobwebs of two decades;
he had made it his own; reviving it to a larger popularity; they were
selling records of it now on Broadway. In South America, in Mexico, in
lonely ranches, distant barrancas, the far-spread audiences listened to
his imprisoned voice, by modern magic released to them.
Detached, as an observer he worshiped his wonderful gift; impersonally,
it was guarded; he could speak of it without vanity. Pity, the fellow
who wrote the simple air was dead; it was enriching publishers; those
“canned music people!”
The audience, South American, English, Mexican, was calling. Australia,
now, was clapping her hands. That last verse again.
“But, my darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me.”
The hush, that wonderful hush which always greets that ballad, falls on
the house again.
It came, the soaring voice, to Tom Hardin, outside Gerty’s tent on
his lonely cot. He knew that song. He had shouted it with the fellows
at college, passing through the Lawrence streets at night. The words
came running back to meet him. “Woman is changeable.” Had he sensed
the words then? “Woman is changeable.” All of them then, not alone
Gerty. For she had loved him once, he had seen her face flushing answer
into his. Changed altogether, the changeable. Disdained by his wife,
a pretty figure a man cuts! If his wife can’t stand him, who can? He
wasn’t good enough for her. He was rough. His life had kept him from
fitting himself to her taste. She needed people who could talk like
Rickard, sing like Godfrey. People, other people, might misconstrue her
preferences. He knew they were not flirtations; she needed her kind.
She would always keep straight; she was straight as a whip. Life was as
hard for her as it was for him; he could feel sorry for her; his pity
was divided between the two of them, the husband, the wife, both lonely
in their own way.
Then his bitterness softened to the new air Godfrey was singing. He
could hear his mother’s voice humming it over her task in her rough
pioneer kitchen. He lay quite still listening, life crowding before his
open eyes. No use coaxing sleep, with the moon making day of the night.
His memory was a harp, and Godfrey was plucking at the strings.
On the other side of the canvas walls, Gerty Hardin lay listening
to the message meant for her. The fickle sex, he had called hers; no
constancy in woman, he had declared, fondling her hair. He had tried to
coax her into pledges, pledges which were also disavowals to the man
outside.
_Silver threads!_ Age shuddered at her threshold. She would not get
old, oh, why would he not sing something else? She hated that song.
Cruel, life had been to her, none of its promises had been kept. To be
happy, why, that was a human’s birthright; grab it, that was her creed!
Before you get old, before the pretty face wrinkles, and men forget to
look at you with the worship beauty brings. She wanted to die before
that happened--she would push age away from her--she could. But before
that awful time which offered no alleviation, she must be happy, she
must taste of success, hear the plaudits of the crowd left behind. When
God made the world, He did not make enough happiness to go around; one
must snatch it as it passed. There was a chance yet; youth had not
gone. He was singing it to her, her escape--
“Darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me.”
It was not true. The song was a lie. He would not love her when she was
old. Men don’t. They want roses and bright eyes, youth. Cruel, men are.
But she had a few years yet. She would live those years, not spend them
with regrets.
She had a wild thought of running out to him, to cry her joy, her
bitterness in his arms! He was waiting for her, hoping for her down
by the levee; his love was like a schoolboy’s in its eagerness. But
the sulky figure of Tom guarded her door. Tom was like Innes, always
watching her with distrust, suspicion in his eyes. Whatever she would
do, they would have driven her to it. She was going to be happy--to be
happy before she was old!
Godfrey, singing to Gerty Hardin, had awakened the camp. Once roused,
the brilliant night made sleep impossible. Innes, in her tent, too, was
listening. Once, in her childhood, she had wakened to the sound of near
music, sweet, unearthly, in its soaring lightness, now antiphonal, now
in unison. To-night, so Godfrey’s song pierced her dreams, and brought
back that unreal childish night, another white night such as this. She
opened her curtain to the wide spread of silvered desert; the moonlight
streamed in on her bed.
“Darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me!”
So that is the miracle, that wild rush of certain feeling! Yesterday,
doubting, to-morrow, more doubts--but to-night, the song, the night
isolated them, herself and Rickard, into a world of their own.
To-night, it did not even pain her that he had been the lover of
Gerty Hardin, faithful through years, as Gerty had hinted, to a love
that was not ever to be rewarded; nor that it had passed to her so
lightly. Accidental, propinquitous, seemed his love for her. Not based
on congeniality, or knowledge of sympathies. She was not vocal with
him--what did he love in her? A trick of smile or speech? Better that,
even, than that he had yielded, simply, to the human need of loving!
Even that did not have a sting for her this night. Life with him on
any terms she wanted. To-morrow, the proud rebellions might return;
now, she could see the risk of losing him! She had not the trick of
persuasion; only one way she knew! When he was her own, they might face
their differences, then kiss them away! Daring, then witchery! For she
wanted to charm her husband; that, the proudest conquest of all. The
wonder it was that all women could not see it that way. To win over
again, to conquer against commonplaceness, against satiety--to bewitch
one’s own!
Godfrey was returning to Australia’s clapping hands. The desert, Gerty
Hardin, were forgotten in the ardor of his singing. To pour out song
like that, to make a world listen, be the voice that summons memory!
Such a night as this--“_Tanto amor--!_”
On his army cot, Wooster stirred restlessly between his coarse cotton
sheets. Something was disturbing him. He was heavy with sleep. But
something was the matter with the night. He covered his ears, but the
irritation crept through. He raised his head from the pillow, the small
snapping eyes accusing the unknown disturber of his peace.
“Those Indians!” he muttered, dragging the sheet over his ears. “Drunk
again!”
“_Tanto amor!_” Godfrey was looking down on the river.
Such a night! It poured wine into the veins of one! Such a voice! To
pour it out, thrilling himself over the call of it! Touching something,
what was it he touched? That gleam of moonlight on the river,
footlights of fairies. Ah, holy night! “_Tanto amor!_”
Caught in his own spell, Godfrey passed down the levee. And the camp
slept again. But even the dreams of Wooster were of love.