Mrs. Locke had gone below and left them staring at one another.
“I haven’t the smallest recollection of the woman.”
She clutched at hope. “You couldn’t have been the one.”
“_She_ doesn’t seem to have much doubt about it.”
“But you didn’t—I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I certainly did push my way about in that crowd.”
“So did everybody.”
“I’m afraid it stands to reason a man does that kind of thing more
effectually than a woman. Your Mrs. What’s-her-name may be right.”
“Oh, Louis!”
“If she is, I’m sorry.”
“You simply _couldn’t_ have—”
“Well, I don’t know. I remember perfectly, I was frantic at not finding
you.”
Ashamed of the warmth his words brought welling up about her heart—“And
you didn’t think much of the women you did find. Yes, I remember what you
said about the women who go on this sort of journey. But you’re wrong,
you see. I know them now.”
He made no answer. Just stood there, hands in pockets, arctic cap
rolled back, so that it sat turban-like on the crown of his head; the
perplexity in the face giving way to a somewhat dogged good-temper that
declined to be ruffled by the incident.
“Some of the women are just as—are more deserving of being treated well
than I am.”
“Oh, I dare say some of them are all right.” He leaned against the
railing, his square chin lifted, and he studied the man in the
crow’s-nest—but he went on saying in that cool way, “I’m not denying that
I would have broken any number of bones rather than not get to you in
time to save you from coming to harm.”
“Oh, _don’t_ say it! That’s exactly what Mrs. Locke thinks.”
“Oh, Mrs. Locke!”—he moved his shoulders impatiently—“I’m sorry if she
got hurt. But in my opinion neither of you ought to have been there.
Don’t think my view about that is altered by your having come off scot
free so far. You see somebody did suffer.”
“Mrs. Locke.”
“It’s just a chance it wasn’t you.”
“Don’t you see that it wouldn’t be a chance if men treated all women as
well as you’d have treated me?”
“Men would have to feel about all women as I feel about you before that
could come about, and that wouldn’t even be desirable. It certainly isn’t
practical politics.”
“Oh, I wish I were clever and could argue. I know there are things to say
only I don’t see how to put them.”
“There’s this to say”—he stood up, a little impatiently—“I’ve never
posed as a passive individual. If I see things in my way I”—he made an
expressive little gesture—“I set them aside. If I hurt Mrs. Locke in
setting her aside, I’m sorry. But women have no business being in the way
at such times.”
“I am glad to think you aren’t in your heart taking it as lightly as you
pretend.”
But the incident rather spoilt things. Instead of being able to yield
unreservedly to the comfort, yes, the joy of his being there, a counter
influence was at work. A watchfulness, critical, even painful. Not so
much of Cheviot as of herself. _Was_ she the kind of girl Mrs. Locke had
meant?—the kind who said, “I’m all right. What does it matter about other
women.” Something in her soul revolted at the charge. In other moods she
was conscious only of a blind rebellion against this evil trick fate had
played her—perversely thrusting into the foreground a thing so little
representative of the man. Offering this, forsooth, as a symbol of all
that lay behind. A lying symbol. He wasn’t like that. _Was_ he? He had
been “frantic” about her. Ah, the subtle danger of that solace, feeding
self-love, divorcing her from her less fortunate sisters.
Few people minded the lowering weather the next day, since it brought a
sight of land. Yet one had need to be at sea for a week and a half to
find comfort in this vision of a dim gray rock rising out of a gray sea
to starboard; or on the port side, a range of snow-flecked hills, with
clouds hanging low over the crater of an extinct volcano. How bleak the
world up here in the Aleutians! Then suddenly, for Hildegarde, the chill
vision warmed and glowed. “This is the kind of thing John Galbraith is
looking at on the other side of the globe!”
To every one’s huge satisfaction the _Los Angeles_, skirting Ounalaska,
showed no sign of pausing. Instead of turning off toward Dutch Harbor
to learn if the ice had yielded up yonder and the way was clear, boldly
the ship took the short cut through Unimak Pass into the Bering Sea.
What splendid time they were making under the convoy of this best of all
captains! People went about boasting, “Nome by Sunday!”
“We’ll make the record trip!”
“—Make the big fortunes!”
“We’ll beat creation!”
“Splendid fellow, our captain!”
Never such luck before in this bedeviled course.
Toward three o’clock the next morning Hildegarde was waked by the noise
of hurrying feet above her head and a great hubbub in the saloon.
“Mrs. Locke?” Her berth was empty.
In the narrow cabin two half-dressed women were agitatedly hunting their
belongings, while the dressmaker, Miss Tillie Jump, screamed through the
door to know if there was any danger.
“What’s happened?” asked Hildegarde, tumbling down out of her berth.
“We are in the ice.”
“Masses all round us high as the ship.”
Certainly Mrs. Locke had vanished. “I’m very calm,” said Miss Mar to
herself, with a certain admiring surprise. And then her self-esteem fell
from her with the realization that in the back of her head she knew
there could not possibly be any immediate danger, or Cheviot would have
made some sign. All the same, her tranquillity did not prevent her from
picturing a shipwreck, in which the clearest impression was that of
Cheviot saving Mrs. Locke’s life at risk of his own. The lady’s heartfelt
acknowledgments and tableau.
On deck, in the gray milky light, a different picture. No Cheviot and
no discernible danger. Plenty of broken, moving ice, but nothing like
the towering bergs of saloon rumor. Going forward at low pressure the
_Los Angeles_ was picking her way among the water-worn shapes that stood
dazzling white, each on a pale green base, submerged yet partly visible.
Strange sculpture of the sea, that, like a Rodin statue, gained meaning
as you gazed. This rough-hewn mass was a crouching polar bear; that a
saurian, antediluvian, vast. Some of the ice-cakes, flat, featureless,
were mere lonely white rafts drifting from nowhere, bound nowhere; others
manned by dwarf snowmen, misshapen, spectral.
Though so unlike report, there was something here expected, hauntingly
familiar, like a single surviving impression out of a vanished life. From
a long, long distance O’Gorman’s voice recalled her as he came down the
deck with Mrs. Locke. “What do you think of this for a change?”
Hildegarde was still looking round for Cheviot, as she answered, “It’s
all much flatter and less tremendous than I expected.”
“Three fourths of the ice is under water. I’m afraid you’ll find it quite
tremendous enough.”
Here at last was Louis! “What’s going to happen?” Hildegarde hailed him.
He only pulled off his cap for her benefit. It was to O’Gorman he said,
half aside, “We’ll have to get out of this.”
While the two men stood there looking gravely out, the ship put her nose
into the ice-pack, shivered, and drew back.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re reversing engines.”
Hildegarde had put her question with a dawning sense of obscurer energies
here at work than she had apprehended, and with that the thought of
Galbraith took on a sudden something like its old ineluctable hold on her
imagination. These the forces that had fashioned life for him. Yes, and
for others, too.
The whole of that raw morning she haunted the upper deck, for the most
part alone. If Mrs. Locke avoided her, it would seem that Cheviot was
inclined to do the same. He had struck up a friendship with O’Gorman.
They walked about or sat together in the smoking-room. The feeling of
tension that pervaded the _Los Angeles_ was manifest even in the Kangaroo
Court. No livelier precinct hitherto on the _Los Angeles_ than this
part of the fo’c’sle, where, from the eminence of the judge’s bench (a
great coil of rope), Mr. Gedge imposed upon his much-diverted public
a parody of those forms of legal procedure learned in his experience
as a shorthand reporter of “cases,” or, as he called himself, a court
stenographer. Gedge modeled his style upon those administrators
of justice who think because a man has disobeyed one law, his
fellow-creatures may with respect to him (or rather without “respect”)
break all rules governing human intercourse. With the aid of unlimited
audacity and a ready tongue, Mr. Matthew Gedge made things lively within
the precincts of the Kangaroo Court. And with impunity, for an unwritten
law ordains that no one, however great a personage, shall dare to defy
the authority of the mock court, or can safely set aside its judgments.
Woe betide any one who seriously persists in so unpopular a course.
Whatever the case being tried, no bystander, no unwary passer even, but
goes in peril of being summoned. If he know himself unable to beat Gedge
at the sharp word game, it behooves the witness to bear himself meekly.
If he thinks to flee, let him expect to hear Gedge roar with grim zest,
“Constable! Do your duty. Arrest that man!” and sometimes half way to
cover the offender is caught and haled back amid a general hilarity, to
find himself, however confused, speechless or unwilling, clapped into the
witness-box (a big iron boiler) and kept stewing there while he meets as
best he may a fire of merciless questions and the bubbling merriment of
the deck.
But to-day the sittings of the Court were suspended. The loungers who
came to Gedge for diversion or enlightenment, got only a grumbled, “I
pass!” or “Guess we’re euchred!” And even such popularity as Gedge’s was
threatened with eclipse for putting into words the silent misgivings of
all men. The very sky looked evil. The ragged gray-brown clouds had been
racing across the heavens like tatterdemalions hearing of mischief afoot
and eager for a share. Now they were massed there in the southwest, a
dirty, featureless mob, in which the ineffectual units were lost and the
whole fused into a vast somber-hued menace.
The faithful Blumpitty sought out Miss Mar. “No—o,” he drawled, rolling
his eye among the fantastic ice shapes. “No—o, it don’t look good to me,
this don’t.” But Blumpitty had news. “That feller who discovered—yes.
And wus dyin’ as hard as he could last fall. Well, he’s alive yet.”
“How do you know?”
“Joslin says so. He had a letter at Seattle from a man who’d come down to
Nome from Polaris over the ice at Christmas. Not that it matters much.
The sick feller don’t seem to have let on to them others. Anyways, they’s
good and plenty in the Mother Lode. What I don’t see is how he managed
it.”
“Managed what?”
“To hang on. If ever I see death in a man’s face! But I always said they
wusn’t like anything I ever seen before.”
“What wasn’t?”
“_Them eyes._”
“Near Nome, is it—the place where he—”
“Oh, no, a good ways north.”
“Heavens, north even of Nome?”
“Yes, it’s the farthest north camp they is. Think o’ him hangin’ on all
through the winter. In that place!” Blumpitty’s pale gaze sought vainly
for enlightenment among the moving ice masses.
“People do get through in worse places than that,” said his companion.
“They ain’t no worse places than Polaris.”
“Yes, there’s Franz Josef Land.”
“Never heard o’ that camp.”
“I wish _I_ were going as far as Polaris.”
“Why, come right along.”
She laughed. “I only wish I could. I’d like to know a man who’d lived in
the farthest north camp of all—the farthest on our side. What’s that?”
“Where?”
“Out there.” She pointed to a ghostly something, faint as smoke against
the high light of the ice rim on the far horizon.
Blumpitty stared. “Reckon it’s a cloud. They’s two more! And another. No,
by gum, it’s ships!”
And ships they were, five of them, the first seen since leaving
Vancouver!—spectacle to stir the chilled blood of watchers on the _Los
Angeles_. For these dreamlike apparitions were vessels such as theirs,
threatened like them with ice-pack and with storm. A detachment of the
Nome fleet! None came any nearer, except the _Ohio_ and the little
_Charles Nelson_. They spoke and passed, the Ohio speedily to vanish;
_Charles Nelson_ to tack about, hunting an outlet, and then, discouraged,
turn south as the bigger _Los Angeles_ pushed valiantly through the ice
to the North. “Turn back! No use!” _Charles Nelson_ warned, and then,
quicker than ever you saw in your life, the fog swooped down and wiped
everything off the ocean except the nearer ice. The _Los Angeles_ turned
and tacked about to the tune of the fog-horn, trying to find a way
through the heavier floe, only to be headed off by bigger masses looming
through the haze, majestic slow-sailing ice-ships, some like white
gondolas, some like sturdy, low-built castles set fantastically on a
field of fleece, for the exposed parts of the berg had rotted in the sun,
and in the wind been rippled, so that a nearer sight showed the surfaces
honeycombed, disintegrate. And again to Hildegarde Mar came that sense
of its all being familiar, as though she had been here before. So she
had, in spirit. With a thrilling sense of recognition she discovered the
original of more than one picture in that book of Galbraith’s that she
and Bella had pored over in their school-days.
When, early in the afternoon, the fog lifted a little, a message came
from the captain inviting Miss Mar to the bridge that she might have a
better view. By the time she had obeyed the summons the wind had risen.
The captain was looking through his glass, and Mrs. Locke was at his
side. He left both visitors with harassed face and called down to Cheviot
walking below with O’Gorman. And now Louis stood beside the captain on
the bridge, looking to the northeast, and talking in an undertone.
“What does he know,” said Mrs. Locke, referring to Cheviot for the first
time, “about navigation?”
“Nothing, I should think,” said Hildegarde serenely, yet with that
stirring of pride that visits a woman when the man she is interested in
is called to counsel. “You see Louis has been up here before, and so few
people have.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Locke turned indifferently away and looked out over the
white-patched water. The girl felt anew and keenly the embarrassment
that had come of the confrontation of these two. Impossible for her to
think it didn’t matter. No vulgarity of soul helped her to meet the
issue with, “Mrs. Locke’s ‘nobody,’—a little book-keeping woman we shall
never see again!” She could not even, as a feebler nature would, simply
ignore the incident of the day before, accepting for Louis Mrs. Locke’s
evil opinion, accepting for Mrs. Locke his professed regret but real
indifference, verging on dislike.
“Of course,” Hildegarde drew closer, “I’ve thought a great deal about
what happened yesterday—I mean what happened on the wharf.”
“Oh, put it out of your head.”
“It’s hardly been out of my head a minute, except the two hours I slept
this morning.”
“I ought to have held my tongue.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Because now I know something more than that he hurt
you.”
“What do you know?”
“How much he can hurt _me_,” was on her tongue, but the only answer she
made was, “I mustn’t let you think that I’m going to turn a cold shoulder
on my friend because—”
“Oh, no.” It was said not scornfully—just accepting it.
“I think a month ago I would either not have believed it or I would have
explained it all away to myself. I’d have said he didn’t know what he was
doing. He—he was—Oh, there are a dozen excuses I might have made for him.”
“Yes, dozens.”
“But now I don’t make one. I say, ‘Yes, he did it, and he doesn’t even
realize how terrible it was.’”
Mrs. Locke glanced at her curiously. “It’s true a good deal has to happen
before men and women can treat each other fairly.”
Hildegarde nodded. “I’m beginning to see that. Louis hasn’t begun—not
yet. But about other things he’s always been the one who’s helped and
taught me. Done it for lots of other people, too, of course,” she
hastened to add. “I’d never once thought of him as a person I could
help.”
“And now—”
“Now—” Her grave look went as far as that of the blind who seem to
descry Truth riding on the viewless air, or sitting on the round world’s
uttermost rim. Certainly Hildegarde had been given such extension of
vision in these hours that plainly enough she saw that it was not till
a cloud settled on Cheviot’s fame that she knew how much its fairness
meant to her. Acceptance of that had brought her acquainted with yet
another new aspect of experience. Here was a man that had everybody and
everything to recommend him—_up to yesterday_. Since yesterday she knew
not only that his nature and his outlook were on one side defective, she
had glimpses of a faith that, precisely because of this, he had a need
of her beyond the one he had been used to urge. A light shone in the
thought that there was something she could do for him that perhaps no
other creature could. A perception this of infinite significance to such
as Hildegarde Mar, belonging as she did to the bigger of the two camps
into which womankind are naturally divided. For, _pace_ the satirists,
those of her sex who make most stir in the world and cause most commotion
in the hearts of men—those daughters of the horse leech, whose unappeased
hunger cries ever “More, more! Give! and give again!” they are in the
minority. To the larger, if less striking army, those whose primal
passion is to give—of them was Hildegarde.
“It looks as if—for all Louis is so wonderfully clear-headed and I’m
so—the other way, there are some things I can see plainer than he. But it
seems to me that’s only a reason for”—her voice dropped a little—“for—”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Locke.
Hildegarde flushed faintly. “For trying, I don’t mean by preaching, but
trying to help him to see—well, some of the things you’ve given me an
inkling of.” She laid her hand gently on the older woman’s. Mrs. Locke’s
fingers closed round the girl’s, but she said nothing. “So, though he
nearly broke your arm, you will have done him a service.”
The white face smiled its enigmatic little smile. But presently, “I’m
glad I know you,” she said.
“Are you? Then let’s be friends!”
As though some tangible barrier had been beaten down they went nearer the
two men. The captain was ending, “—and if the ice closes in behind us
we’ll be trapped.”
“Oh, is that all!” said Cheviot, glancing toward Hildegarde.
“No, it isn’t all. We’d be carried wherever the floe goes—and that’s not
Nome.” Gillies lowered the glass, and his strained-looking eyes fell on
the two he had forgotten. “Sorry, ladies, you must go below.”
Not only rather snubbed, but feeling now the gravity of affairs,
Hildegarde and her companion departed with some precipitation, while the
captain’s hoarse shout rang out in an indistinguishable order to some
invisible officer.
A few minutes later, standing on bales of merchandise for’ard on the
upper deck, they watched the altering of the course and the race for
that single opening, narrow and ever narrower in the close-packed ice.
It was exciting enough, for they got out just in time. Thirty-four hours
afterward the _Los Angeles_ was still beating about on the edge of the
pack, looking for another break in the long white line.
The spirits of the passengers steadily sank. To their jealous imagining
all those phantom ships, and the score unseen, were now forging ahead.
Only the _Los Angeles_ besieged the ice in vain. Men stood in knots
discussing the captain’s mistakes and airing their own knowledge. They
had expected this state of things if he persisted in keeping so far to
the east. Hour by hour Gillies’s credit fell.
The only break in the dead monotony of the afternoon was suggested in the
general invitation to come for’ard and hear Gedge roast the captain. It
went ill that day with any witness in Gillies’s favor.
In the middle of dinner people looked up from their plates and said:
“What’s that?”
The bean-feaster was the first to find his tongue. “By ——,” he said,
“we’ve stopped!” The passengers dropped their knives and forks and rushed
on deck. The bean-feaster was right. In trying to get round the eastern
shoulder of the floe, the _Los Angeles_ had run aground in Norton Sound,
thirty miles from the mainland. The engines were reversed, and the
water round the propeller was set boiling. The ship never budged. The
deck resounded to the uproar of many tongues. To waste thirty-six hours
feeling her way round the floe was bad enough, but to be “hung up on a
sand-bar,” a hundred and fifty miles from Nome, with a wicked-looking
ice-pack bearing down on you from the west—! And here comes the _Charles
Nelson_ once more, very perky this time, profiting by the object lesson
and steering clear of the bar. The _Los Angeles_ humbled her pride
to ask for a line. “Can’t get near enough,” the word came back. “I’m
in three fathom now!” and away _Charles Nelson_ goes, leaving the big
steamer to her fate.
“What’s that feller calls himself a captain, what’s he goin’ to _do_?”
demanded Mr. Gedge of his satellites. “‘Wait for the tide!’ Yah! He’s got
the most high-spirited idears of any man I ever—‘Wait!’ After wastin’ two
days and nights a’ready! ‘Wait!’ While the other fellers are knockin’ the
bottom out o’ Nome!”
This was a harassing thought, but the captain still had his apologists,
even in the Kangaroo Court. It was O’Gorman’s friend with the fiery
beard who dared to point out, “Mr. Gedge told us on Friday and Saturday
the captain was ‘incompetent and foolhardy.’ On Sunday and Monday he’s
‘over-cautious and damnably slow.’ To-night Mr. Gedge tells us—”
“To-night,” that gentleman shouted, “I’m tellin’ you still more about
this —— captain. Did they or did they not say to us in Seattle that
Gillies was a first-rate seaman?”
“Yes, and so he is!”
“Did they or did they not tell us he knew his job?”
“Right! Knows this ship as you know the way to your mouth.”
“Yah! Knows what she can do on the Japan route. But this, gentlemen
and ladies, ain’t the road to Manila. And do you know what? This here
is Captain Gillies’s first trip to Alaska!” Gedge brought it out with
a sledge-hammer effect. The audience felt they were expected to be
dumfounded. They complied.
But a voice was heard: “It’s most people’s first trip to Alaska.”
“I tell you,” said Gedge, judicially, “he knows as little about these
northern seas as that boy there with the banjer.”
“This self-appointed judge,” Cheviot’s voice rose steadily above the
growing murmur, “hasn’t heard apparently that _nobody_ knows these
waters.”
“Would you mind repeatin’ that, sir?”
“Not at all. In the first place, the Bering is a practically uncharted
sea. That may be a disgrace to our Coast Survey, but it’s hardly the
captain’s fault.”
Gedge looked stumped for a moment. If this were true it wouldn’t do for
him not to know it.
Cheviot was making good the diversion in the captain’s favor, when Gedge
interrupted: “Does the captain’s friend pretend to say that the whalers
and sealers and fellers who’ve been up here before gold was thought
of—that none o’ _them_ don’t know enough to keep off a damned sand-bank?”
Looking his wiliest: “Now, if we had one o’ them sort here—” Then, with a
highly effective coup: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”
“Here on this ship?”
“Right here on board the _Los Angeles_!”
“Where? Who, who? Name?” Everybody but Cheviot and a few women were
shouting themselves hoarse.
“What y’ got to say to that, Mr.— You, there, with the arctic cap and the
tender heart fur captains?”
“I’ve got this to say. That even the men who sailed along here last
fall, don’t know Norton Sound this summer.”
“_Wot?_”
“Can’t know it.”
“And why not?”
“For the good reason that new sand-bars are formed up here every spring.
Not a ship that sails for any port on the northwest coast but goes on
what’s practically an exploring expedition. That’s our true danger. The
captain’s no less than ours.”
“Oh, yes, we all know you’re in with his nibs, but what my friends don’t
know is that Billings & Co. sent a pilot aboard this ship.”
“Why, then,” roared half-a-dozen voices, “why ain’t he pilotin’!”
“Why?” Mr. Gedge shouted above the din. “_I_ can tell—” His sentence was
jerked to an abrupt close. “What in hell’s up?”
Two or three women had uttered little shrieks, and, “What was that?”
people asked one another. Men turned and looked in each other’s faces.
“What _was_ it?”
The sudden jar and vibration of the ship lent added force to Mr. Gedge’s
charge. “The reason the pilot ain’t pilotin’ is because the captain
ordered him off the bridge the second day out.”
“Now I know what it means when the papers say, ‘Sensation in the court’!”
a little Canadian hospital nurse whispered to Mrs. Locke. But in another
second she was clinging to that lady and her eyes were scared and wide;
for, as if under the assault of a battering-ram, the _Los Angeles_ was
shaking from stem to stern.
Hildegarde felt a warm hand laid on her two, tight-clasped and cold.
Cheviot had put an arm through the outer fringe of the group where she
and Mrs. Locke were standing. “Come for’ard,” he said.
“Was that the ice?” Mrs. Locke whispered, allowing herself to be drawn
along.
All the rest of the people stood hushed for a moment as if stunned by the
concussion. The three who alone in those first instants seemed to retain
power of movement quietly made their way out of the throng, while every
ear was filled with the horrible secondary sounds of that mighty impact—a
slow grinding, a horrible gritting, as of granite jaws reducing the bones
of prey to powder.
“I want you to stay here till I come back.” Cheviot left the two women
under the bridge. As Hildegarde listened with beating heart to the sound
of the ice against the ship, she said to herself: “These are moments Jack
Galbraith has known. After to-night I shall understand better. I shall
be closer to a part of his life than Bella ever will.” Every sense was
set to note the change that in the last few minutes had come over the
spirit of the ship. No wild commotion, a hush rather. But a thing of
eery significance. No more shrill harangues in the Kangaroo Court. No
dancing on the upper deck. No _tink-a-tink_ of banjo in the steerage. Men
gathering in groups, talking for the most part quite quietly, but agreed
that “the old sea tramp” wouldn’t stand much of this kind of thing. With
a single mind the women, as soon as they had pulled themselves together,
hastened down below.
“I think I’ll go down, too, and see—” Hildegarde began. “I won’t be two
minutes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the cabin. Do you want anything brought up?”
“No.”
The girl was longer than two minutes, but she was no less surprised when,
upon her reappearance with a small hand-bag, she found Cheviot talking to
Mrs. Locke. “The current is carrying the ice out all right. Probably the
only danger is the passengers making fools of themselves. But if they’ll
only go quietly to bed—”
“They won’t,” said Mrs. Locke. The two discussed this quite in the tone
of being allies. “Nobody will go to bed to-night,” she assured him.
“What do they want to do?” he demanded.
“Sit up till one in the morning,” Mrs. Locke answered, “and see the tide
float us off the bar.”
“Well, the women at all events”—Cheviot looked about with an air of
relief—“the women have gone to bed already.”
“No, indeed,” said Hildegarde. “They’re tumbling over one another down in
the saloon, in and out of the state-rooms collecting their things. Some
are saying their prayers, and some—”
“Do you sing?” Cheviot demanded.
“I?” Mrs. Locke stared. “No.”
“Who does?” he appealed to Hildegarde.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, I heard a woman yesterday—”
“Oh, that awful Miss Pinckney, you know, with the draggled feathers!”
“Well, go and find her and get her to sing now.”
“_Sing?_”
“Yes, sing. It may make just all the difference.” Cheviot was in the act
of bolting back to the captain.
“She can’t sing.” Hildegarde followed him a step.
He misunderstood it for an untimely musical criticism. “Then let her make
a noise of some sort.”
“Oh, she’s doing that—screaming with hysterics down in the saloon.”
Cheviot flashed back to say confidentially, not to Hildegarde, but to
Mrs. Locke: “Go and see if you can’t get up a concert.” With which cool
and apparently crazy suggestion he vanished.
Twenty minutes later a woman, wearing diamond ear-rings and a sealskin
jacket, paused in her flight up the companionway and leaned an instant,
panting, against the music-room door. Now she was lifting her head with
a slow incredulity, as an unsteady voice near by began to quaver out a
rag-time ballad, highly offensive to sensitive ears, but a tune familiar
and to many on the ship most dear. The woman peered round the half-open
door, staring from one to the other of those callous creatures within,
making merry on the brink of destruction—Miss Mar at the piano, and at
her side the draggled Miss Pinckney. Ah, no, that red-eyed woman wasn’t
callous. She sang the inane words with lips that trembled. Now she was
breaking down.
“No, no. Go on,” Miss Mar insisted. “Think of the others.”
“They’ll never listen. Everybody’s too—too—”
“Well, let’s see. Now!” and very ineffectually Hildegarde took up the
second verse. Miss Pinckney plucked the strain away as two men looked in.
There was nothing especial to take them up or down. They stood near the
woman with the diamond ear-rings, hardly knowing that they listened.
In that first twenty minutes, every time the ice struck the ship, Miss
Pinckney would hesitate and her voice would fly off the scale in a faint
scream.
“Oh, _please_! That’s enough to scare anybody!” and Hildegarde played
doggedly on. “Now, let’s try again!” It was, however, as if not Miss
Mar’s admonishing, but the rude insistence of the tune dragged Miss
Pinckney along, pulling her out of the pit of her fears and landing her
“Down along the Bowery,” or “In Gay Paree,” or some place equally remote
from the sand-bar in the Bering Sea.
Mrs. Locke, with the Blumpittys and a brace of doctors in tow, appeared
in the act of descending for a muster of “the company.” Cheviot came
flying down behind them, two steps at a time. He was about to turn in at
the music-room, when a woman pushed past him, showing a panic-stricken
face above the sleeping child that she carried clutched tight against her
breast. A sudden jar made the sleeper lift a cropped head and look about
with wide eyes.
“Hello!” said Cheviot reassuringly, in a cheerful and commonplace voice.
“This is a passenger I haven’t seen before. Aren’t you rather too big,
sir, to be carried?”
—“hasn’t been well!” muttered the woman, taking breath to recommence the
ascent.
“Look here, where are you going?” And without waiting to know, “Some of
us can carry—” He was taking the burden out of the thin arms.
“No,” remonstrated the woman, as Cheviot turned in at the music-room, “we
must go up to father.”
“I’ll send him down to you.”
“No, no. We’ve got to go up and—be ready.”
“Ready for what?” He fixed upon the woman a pair of faith-inspiring eyes
so unclouded that she stared.
“Don’t you want to listen to the singing?” Cheviot bent smiling to the
little person who lay quite content in his arms, studying the man’s face
with the solemn absorption of childhood.
Not many there besides him, but because Cheviot had come in the concert
had begun. Others besides Hildegarde felt this quickening of life in any
room he entered. Miss Pinckney remembered she had the music of a “reel
pretty song” out of the “Belle of New York.” She’d go and get it.
“Do you hear that?” Cheviot said, depositing the child on one of the
rickety chairs. “You’ve just come in time,” and he stood a moment talking
to the mother. The child sat askew, with its father’s great waterproof
cape hitched up on one side and trailing on the other. When the little
figure made the slightest movement the lop-sided chair wobbled and
threatened collapse. Instantly the child desisted and became nervously
engrossed in the problem of a nice equilibrium. The little face took on a
look of tense uneasiness. It was plain that courage was lacking so much
as to pull a good deep breath lest it draw ruin down. Cheviot, still
talking with the mother, turned to take in his the small child hand that
clutched the chair. Was it the look of heavy responsibility in the small
face, or was it another onslaught of ice against the ship that made him
say, “Music’s soon going to begin, little—what’s your name?”
The child opened thin lips and emitted a careful sound.
“Joseph? Well, I hope you’ll like the concert, Joseph.” That was too much
for the occupant of the _siege perilous_. There was a howl above the
mother’s reproachful correction. “Her name’s Josephine,”—a general giving
way to overstrain, and chair and child were in ruins on the floor.
Miss Mar, glancing over her shoulder, shaking with hysterical laughter,
saw that Louis, gathering up the sobbing Josephine, bit his lip as though
in mere dismay, forbearing to wound the luckless one by laughing at her
discomfiture.
“Yes, that’s like him, too,” Hildegarde said to herself, as one welcoming
one more of a cloud of witnesses. She fell upon the piano with redoubled
vigor. Loud and fast she hammered out the wildest jig she could remember.
Miss Pinckney coming back, music in hand, stopped with a scream. Bang!
Bang! Grit! Grind! went the ice. Josephine shrieked without intermission
till Cheviot, having found a chair with more than three legs, anchored
her securely in that haven. With the first words of Miss Pinckney’s song,
Cheviot was flying back to the deck.
Bang! Grit! Grind! Was she awake, Hildegarde asked herself, or was this
fetid room and were these harsh, assailing sounds a form of nightmare?
Steadily she played on. Cheviot looked in again, but it was to Mrs.
Locke he whispered: “We must break up the Kangaroo Court. Musical talent
going to waste there.” She followed him out. In passing Hildegarde
he had bent his head. “Keep it up,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t
stop.” She reflected a little enviously that she could be quite as
happy running about the deck with Louis as pinned to the moth-eaten
music-stool, grinding out cheap airs. Then she found herself smiling.
Not the least strange part of this strange evening that Louis should be
sending Mrs. Locke on errands, and that Mrs. Locke should be going. The
room was filling. Upon the lady’s reappearance with the banjo boy and
the cross-eyed flute-player, the concert was in full swing. Now Mrs.
Locke was telling Hildegarde to play the “Battle Hymn,” and presently
several of the men were helping Miss Pinckney to send John Brown’s soul
marching on. Oh, for a little air! Surely there wasn’t room for any more
people in this overcrowded space. But still they came. It was curious to
watch the new faces at the door peering over the shoulders of those who
stood about the piano. Little by little you could see the strain going
out of the tense features. Not that their anxieties vanished, but they
were softened, humanized through the humble agency of a ramshackle piano
and an untrained voice in a song. Even the steps, from the very top to
the bottom of the companionway, were crowded now. That fact of itself
made for quiescence on the decks. People could no longer run freely up
or down. While they paused and wormed their way, they were laid hold of
by their ears. The little room was packed to suffocation. Deserted by
his audience, even Gedge came down to see what was up. Thicker and more
stifling grew the air. In a pause between songs a scrap of conversation
floated over Hildegarde’s shoulder, “Lucky there’s no wind.”
“God, yes! If there was wind—”
“Shut up!”
“What then, if there was wind—?” a third insisted, barely audible.
“Oh, _then_, we’d get off the bar.” Clear enough to one of those for
whose weaker sake the truth was veiled—clear enough what the ironic
comfort meant. If behind the ice were wind as well as current, the ship
wouldn’t live an hour. Steadily the girl played on. Wasn’t the onslaught
of the ice heavier that last time? Was the wind rising then? Yes, surely,
surely, the wind had risen. Well, one must play the louder. But her
tranced eyes turned now right, now left. Some faces clearer than others
in the haze. Gedge, with his pasty visage bleached to chalk, and of his
cheap but heady eloquence never a word. Others here that Hildegarde had
seen night after night, gambling, drinking, quarreling—and now ...!
These rude fellow-creatures, little admirable as they might show
themselves in happier hours, wore something very like dignity to-night.
How still they were! It did not escape Hildegarde that all these many
pairs of eyes were either lowered or fixed on space, as if each one
forebore to read in his fellow’s face confirmation of his own grim
knowledge. Each avoiding the other’s eyes, they stood there listening to
those sounds the puny piano was ineffectual to drown—the crash of impact
and the yet more horrible crunching, vicious and prolonged, as though
man’s arch-enemy of the deep, after battering vainly for admission, would
gnaw his admission to this strange concert on the ice-beleaguered bar.
While the nerves of the people still vibrated under the bombardment, some
one started “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Strangest of all on that strange
evening was the revelation that in this particular company hardly one
but seemed to know the hymn, and few that were not singing it with
abandon to the thunderous bass of the ice. Whatever your own thoughts
might be, you read in more than one of these faces that of a certainty
God was “nearer” this night than He had often been before. At the
beginning of the last verse, the loudest crash of all, as if a hundred
tons of iron had been hurled at the _Los Angeles_. The people, led by
one unfaltering voice, kept on singing. Only Hildegarde’s flying fingers
stumbled as the ship shrank and cowered under the blow. Had it ended like
this for Galbraith, too? Would he and she meet down there in the kind sea
caves?
Cheviot’s face looked in through the haze. Of course she had known he
would come for her at the last. When those firm lips opened she would
hear him saying: “Stop your playing. We’ve done what we could—you down
here, I on deck. Let us go now and meet the end.” Oh, it was well that he
was here! Through the haze his face swam nearer, and what he was really
saying was: “Good girl! If only you can keep it up a little longer!” And
with that the face grew dim.
“A little longer!” Faintness, like sleep, stole over the good girl. As a
peculiar throbbing went through the ship, Hildegarde felt the hulk of the
_Los Angeles_ open, and knew vaguely that she was falling.
[Illustration: “Nearer, my God, to Thee”]
When she opened her eyes Louis was lifting her up. She was not clinging
to a berg, nor even sitting on a cake of ice. Still in the noisome little
room, and still that throbbing was shaking the ship. The people who had
been so quiet were pushing, jostling, shouting, frantic to get— Where? To
the boats, of course! All except Louis and Mrs. Locke. Noble souls, they
were ready to stay and die with Hildegarde Mar! She must exert herself.
“Now I can go.”
“There’s no hurry,” says Cheviot.
“Oh, yes, come. We must try—we, too.”
“Try what?”
“Why, to—to save ourselves.”
He laughed. “Poor girl, do you feel dreadfully shipwrecked?”
“What, then, are they all running for?” She looked round bewildered.
“The engines have started. Tide’s nearly flood. Can you walk? That’s
right.” They helped her to the deck. Long after midnight—and the world so
bright! Oh, the blessing of the pure, cold air! While she breathed it in,
O’Gorman stopped to whisper in Cheviot’s ear: “By George, you’ve saved a
panic!”
“No,” says Cheviot, “it wasn’t my concert.”