Late the next evening, standing with Louis and Captain Gillies on the
bridge, Hildegarde saw ships on the western horizon. The fleet at last!
anchored two miles off from Nome. It was bedtime, but quite impossible
to sleep, though there would be no landing till next day. They said
“Good-night” to the captain, and found their way to a corner of the deck,
where alone together they might see the belated sun setting, and watch
a pale-gold moon of enormous size riding portentously the clear-colored
sky, too bright for stars. Hand in hand, hidden among the freight, they
talked of the future, arranging it in the high fashion of the young, as
though they two had been gods seated on Olympus. And as they talked the
faint flush over yonder turned the purest rose, then deepened as each
beautiful moment sped, till the sun, gone but now, hastened back like one
who abandons a projected journey, and on the heels of his good-by comes
shamefaced home. What would it be like, this day that he was bringing?
What was waiting over yonder in that mysterious land, still in shadow,
that skirts the hills of Nome? Just a little longer the weary passengers
hung about the decks, while the blood-red sun peered at them over a
violet sea, ready, when the shadow-curtain lifted, to clothe the naked
truth of Nome with a final splendor. Whatever might come after, in this
first actual vision of the place people had fared so far to find, it was
to wear the hues of heaven. For the “boat-load of failure,” the dream
they had called “Nome” was to die in a glory of gold and fire.
The decks that had swarmed with excited people were falling silent. Men
and women, whose whole lives hung upon what they should find waiting
for them yonder, must be in bed betimes, that they might be ready to go
ashore in the first boat. Soon only Hildegarde and Cheviot remained. But
they were silent, watching all those white sails turn pink against the
purple distance—sea and sky alike dyed deep, and still the honey-colored
moon hanging there, immense, unreal. Whichever way they looked, this
northern world was like something seen in a dream, spectral, uncanny,
fitly ushered in by the sunrise in the night.
To Hildegarde, as though given in that hour some gift of prophecy,
it seemed that after all her journeying the land she looked on was
still beyond the reach of sober day, fated to be for ever outside the
experience of waking hours.
Yet this incredible country for two years had been her father’s home!
Louis would go ashore in the first boat and prepare Nathaniel Mar for his
daughter’s coming.
“If I were alone I should be imagining he might be dead.” Even as she
said “if,” an inward dread clutched at her.
“If you were alone I should be imagining things worse than death.” They
drew together. As he held her, looking down into her eyes, a new gravity
came into his own. “Are you sure _at last_?” he said.
“You know I am. But I don’t scold you for asking. It’s the more beautiful
of you to have quite realized and yet—yet not despise me for all that
romantic feeling about some one I’ve never seen.”
“Your mother once helped me there.”
“My mother! What does she know about—”
“More than you might think. When I’d lost patience one day, she told
me the only difference between you and other girls was that you were
honester and stubborner than most.”
“I can hear her saying ‘stubborner.’”
“Yes, but it was curious to hear her saying few women, if they remember
their youth, can truthfully say it went by without some such—well—she
called it names—”
“I know one of them. Some such silly ‘infatuation.’” Hildegarde smiled,
but not he. “I wonder if my mother ever—Oh, it’s a wild idea!”
“I don’t know. She said it was usually either a great soldier or a
clergyman, often an actor, sometimes a poet, or ‘even a bachelor
statesman.’ And she said that last with such an edge in her voice I
wondered at the time what American statesman was still unmarried when
Mrs. Mar was in her ’teens.” And their own cloud was dispersed in smiling
at another’s.
Hildegarde, coming on deck at six o’clock, found sunshine whitening all
the thousand tents of Nome. Frame dwellings, too, the eye found out—one
standing boldly forth with flag flying. That, Blumpitty said, was the
hospital. Was her father there? Courage! Louis was at her side, with
confident looks and shining eyes that saw no shadow save the purple
splotch in the sea to the left—“Sledge Island.” Had she noticed the
snow-seamed hills? She must take his glass and look at that higher lift
in the low, undulant line; could she see a queer knob? “_Anvil Rock!_”
But the main impression up the beach, and down the beach, and away over
the tundra, was tents, tents. And between the _Los Angeles_ and the
surf-whitened shore, sails, sails! Ships of every size and kind. Big
steamers from Seattle, from San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver, smart
sailing vessels, lumbering freight boats, whalers, and among them—darting
back and forth like a flock of brown sparrows under the gleaming wings
of seagulls—were myriads of little skiffs, dories, lighters, canoes, and
here and there a steam launch, bobbing, swarming, surrounding “the last
boat in,” and ready to take all and sundry to Nome for dazzling sums.
While the more enterprising of the _Los Angeles’_ contingent (swallowing
their resentment at the captain’s failure to set them instantly ashore)
bargained with the owners of the small craft, a rumor ran about the ship
that not even a millionaire might leave till certain formalities had been
complied with. But Cheviot had in some way got a special permit to go
ashore with one of the officers.
While Hildegarde waited after breakfast for his return, she tried to
deaden fear of the news he might bring back, listening to the scraps of
talk between the touting boatmen and the passengers longingly suspended
over the _Los Angeles’_ side.
Some old acquaintance called out “Howdy” to the bean-feaster, and after
hearing what the Commission had settled in far away Washington, screamed
back Nome news in return. They were “havin’ a red hot roarin’ boom,”
and Jolly Haley had made a million. One of the great steamers was spoken
as she moved majestically by. Others, besides the _Los Angeles_, were
overdue, the captain of the _Akron_ said. Those haggard wrecks down there
toward Cape Nome—they were only two, but the Bering Sea was full of
ships disabled or gone down in these last days. Gillies asked for news
of friends and rivals. The _Congress_ had put into Dutch Harbor “for
repairs,” he was told, and the men exchanged grim smiles. The _Santa
Ana_ was burned to within two feet of the water. The passengers on the
_Chiquita_ had been all but starved to death, and the _St. John_ had made
escape from the ice-pack only to go to pieces on the rocks. Then, like
some sentient thing exulting in her enviable fate, the _Akron_ steamed
away in the sunshine.
Popular interest shifted to starboard when the whaler _Beluga_ drew
’longside. Her captain, a hard-looking customer, came on board the _Los
Angeles_ to talk to Gillies. O’Gorman discovered a man he knew on board
the whaler. “Going to Nome?” he asked him. “No, better than that. Gettin’
out.” Where was the ex-Nomite off to? “Up the coast.” The _Beluga_ was
to meet some south-bound whalers up in Grantley Harbor in a day or
two—might come south herself afterward, or might go still farther north
to Kotzebue. O’Gorman’s friend didn’t care where, just so it wasn’t Nome.
The people of the _Los Angeles_ only laughed. Clear that fellow was a
hoodoo. The more luck in Nome, since he was leaving it!
“He might be able to give you news about your father,” O’Gorman said
aside to Miss Mar. But before she answered he saw, from the sudden fear
in the girl’s face, that she couldn’t risk having bawled at her in public
tidings that more and more she dreaded.
“He—Mr. Cheviot will soon be back,” she said.
“Has he been in Nome all winter?—your _Beluga_ friend?” Mrs. Locke asked
O’Gorman.
“Yes, I guess so.”
“I’d like to inquire about my firm, Dixon and Blumenstein.” O’Gorman
called out the question for her.
“Lots o’ folks inquirin’ ’bout Dixon and Blumenstein,” the man on the
whaler roared back.
“How so?”
“Lit out.”
“Gone away?”
“You bet.”
“What for?”
“Busted.”
“Oh, Mrs. Locke, what shall you do?” While Hildegarde, vaguely aware of
the unusual sound of a dog howling distractedly, stood beside the woman
who in those seconds had seen her hoped-for home, her very bread swept
from her, Louis’s voice was audible over the girl’s shoulder. Hildegarde
turned to find herself in her father’s arms. She did not notice how wet
he was with sea-water. “Oh, you are ill!” she faltered.
“My child! My child!” he kept repeating, and then: “What a journey!”
“But you see I’ve got to Nome all right.”
“To Nome! God forbid!”
“But God hasn’t forbidden,” said the girl, swallowing the sob that sight
of the haggard face had brought into her throat. She was conscious, too,
that her fellow-travelers were eagerly listening to the colloquy.
“I’ve been telling Cheviot I can’t think how he could allow you—” Mr. Mar
caught himself up and laid his hand affectionately on the young man’s
shoulder. “Of course Louis didn’t really know. The Nome he left was bad
enough, but that Nome has passed away. To-day it isn’t a place for a girl
to stay in an hour.”
“’Sh! father! You’ll scare my friends. This is Mrs. Blumpitty. She thinks
very highly of Nome. And this is Mr. Blumpitty. Mother put me under their
care, and they’ve been _so_ kind. They’ve brought a big party up again
this year. We’ve all come believing great things of the new camp.”
The moment the handshaking was over, “This way,” Cheviot said, and while
the talk buzzed, and the dog somewhere down yonder among the swarming
rowboats howled dismally, and questions showered on the man from Nome,
Louis was leading Mr. Mar toward the companionway.
“Oh, yes,” said Hildegarde, “my suit-case and things. But father needn’t
trouble to come below. I’ve had everything packed and ready _for hours_!”
She smiled at Cheviot across the halting figure. “What kept you so,
Louis? Couldn’t you find him?”
“You can’t get along very fast over there,” Cheviot answered.
“_You_ couldn’t?”
“Nobody can. There’s a wall of stuff piled higgledy-piggledy for a mile
along the shore.”
“Dingleys and McKeowns, and—”
“Yes, and grub. Tons of it. Hundreds of barrels of whisky. Thousands of
bags of flour and beans piled higher than my head. Lumber—acres of it.
Furniture and bedding, engines and boilers, mixed up with sides of bacon
and blankets, and a sprinkling of centrifugal pumps and Klondike thawers.
How they’ll ever sort that chaos—”
“The next high tide will save them the trouble,” said Nathaniel Mar.
“Well, it’s a queer sight. Hundreds and hundreds of people, Hildegarde,
sitting on top of their worldly goods, looking as if they’d never stir
again. Like so many Robinson Crusoes, each one on his own desert island,
among the wreck of his possessions.” Hildegarde smiled. Louis was only
pointing out that Nome justified his prophecy. A form of “I told you so.”
But he was speaking to her father. “And the faces! You’re used to them,
but I—” He caught Hildegarde’s significant little smile and deliberately
changed the tune. “Of course there’s a lot of hustling, too,” he ended,
stopping by the smoking-room door.
“Yes, the old story,” said Hildegarde’s father, wearily. “All land there
free and equal from the common life of the ships. Twenty minutes, and
some are masters and others are slaves.”
“I thought there’d be no one here!” Cheviot said with satisfaction, as he
held open the door.
“Isn’t the boat ready to take us back?” Hildegarde asked.
“I suppose,” said her father, leaning heavily on his stick and looking
at her from under his bushy eyebrows, “you think we’ve got hotels over
yonder.”
“Oh, no.”
“There isn’t even a boarding-house—”
“Mrs. L’Estrange _will_ be glad! She’s going to set up the very thing,
and make her everlasting fortune.”
“Well, _I’m_ glad”—Mar dropped into the nearest seat—“very glad you’re a
sensible girl and take it like that.”
Imagine his thinking she’d come expecting a hotel and all the comforts
of home! That was why he seemed so harassed. “Poor father!” She put
an arm about his crooked shoulders. It had been hard for him to make
his way over the chaos of the beach, and he had got so wet coming out.
How thoughtful of that dear Louis to bring him in here to rest before
undertaking the return trip.
The old man crossed his wrinkled hands on the knob of his heavy stick and
slowly shook his head. “No, Nome wasn’t Paradise before, but since the
invasion it’s a hell upon earth.”
“Oh, father!”
“Well, think of it! Something like forty thousand homeless people
stranded over yonder on the beach.”
“I’m glad _you_ haven’t been one of the homeless ones,” she said gently.
“I don’t know how glad you’d be if you saw my one-roomed tent on the
boggy tundra.”
“Dearest.” She took off his big soft hat that impeached his dignity with
an absurd operatic air, and she stroked the whitened hair. “It’s well
I”—she looked across at her lover—“_we’ve_ come to look after you.”
“Oh, I’m one of the fortunate Nomites! I tell you a man with _any_ sort
of shelter over his head is in luck. Hundreds are sleeping on the beach
in the cold and rain.”
“Silly people not to buy a tent.”
“Most of them did, and can’t get it landed or can’t find it in the
hurly-burly.”
“Oh, I hope mine won’t get lost!”
“_Yours!_”
“Yes, father, I’ve got a tent and two pairs of Hudson Bay blankets,
waterproof boots, stout netting—for the mosquitoes, you know. Oh, I have
heard all about those mosquitoes! I’ve got a canvas knapsack and an
oil-stove, and oceans of oil, and a pistol and plenty of chocolates and
six weeks’ provisions.” With a little encouragement she would have told
him every item in that six weeks’ provision. She was distinctly proud of
her list. Many people on the _Los Angeles_ had complimented her upon its
judicious selection.
But Nathaniel Mar’s face showed no pride—showed something even like
horror. “I can’t think what you were about, Cheviot,” he said almost
sharply.
Hildegarde was still incredulous that Louis had been able to resist
the natural temptation of “telling on her,” and saving his own credit.
“Doesn’t father know—anything?”
“Oh, yes, I told him—about us.”
“It’s the one redeeming feature in the present situation,” said Mr. Mar.
“Father!” She was really wounded by that.
“But as I’ve told you already”—he turned his melancholy eyes on the young
man—“I’d take more comfort in the intelligence if you hadn’t brought her
up here!”
“Does he say he brought me?”
“He can’t say he prevented you.”
“I _would_ come. I was afraid we’d never get you back.” She was on the
verge of tears.
“Well, well,” said Cheviot briskly, “it’s no use spilling milk.”
“No,” agreed the old man. “It might be worse. After all, the ship is
going back in a week and I’ll make arrangements for you to live on board
till then.”
Hildegarde withdrew her arm. She came and stood in front of the bowed old
man. “You can’t mean that while I _am_ here, I’m not to stay with you—or
in my own tent near—”
“Your tent!” Mr. Mar lifted one hand, calling heaven to witness his
offspring’s folly. “As to ‘near’ _me_, I’m sleeping in a ghastly
lodging-house myself at the moment. We pay ten dollars a night for floor
space. Spread a blanket on filthy boards, and try to get some rest in
spite of drunken rows and vermin.”
“I should think even a tent in the bog was better than that.”
“Much. I’ve lent mine for a few nights to a miserable woman and her
daughter, who’d slept a week on the beach. Like Hildegarde here, they
‘bought a tent!’ It’s on that steamer we passed. There are half a dozen
ships that can’t get unloaded.”
“I don’t know that I like those other women living in your tent,” said
Hildegarde, with frank envy.
“Some of us are arranging to get the daughter home.”
“Not the mother?”
“No.”
“She’s going to stay?”
“She’s got consumption.”
“Oh!”
“They came in the steerage. No, the mother won’t go home, and won’t need
my tent long, I think.”
Hildegarde stroked his hand. “It was like you, father, to give them
shelter.”
“It’s been pretty much as you saw it this morning”—Mar turned to
Louis—“for two weeks now. People are paralyzed. The fall from the height
of their anticipations has stunned them. The women sit and wait. For
what, they don’t know. The men drink and play high, and when they’re
cleaned out and can’t think of anything else to do, they shoot. There
were two men killed last night in a fight over a lot. In the last week
there have been six suicides. Nobody minds. What’s the spilling of a
little blood? A thing far more important is the scarcity of water. You
buy it by the small bucketful and carry it home yourself. If you don’t
boil it, you get typhoid. The mayor told somebody that, after all, we
lacked only two things here—water and good society. The stranger said:
‘It’s all the damned lack.’” It was as striking to ears that heard the
retort then for the first time as though the saying had not grown hoary.
“You’ll see,” Mar said, as though Cheviot had denied such a possibility,
“it’ll be worse here than ever Dawson was in the toughest times. We
haven’t got any such body of men to keep the peace as the mounted police.”
“And to think it’s all your fault, father.”
Mar stared at her.
“Two years ago and nobody cared a pin to go to Nome. You couldn’t induce
the boys to come. You had to bribe even Louis. Now forty thousand
people, and all that tangle on the beach.” Her eyes were eager. “Nome,
at this minute, must be the most wonderful sight in the world.”
“It’s the dump-heap of the nations! I’ll tell you what happened a week
ago.” Mr. Mar was almost voluble in his anxiety to convince his daughter
of the unfitness of Nome as a subject of feminine curiosity. “I’d been
to the A.C. store and got a small draft cashed. Then I went up to Penny
River and was gone all day. As I came back, behind the big Music Hall
tent, I was held up. Two men turned out my pockets and made off with my
thirty dollars. It was no use reporting the robbery. I was very tired,
and I went to bed. I was waked up by some one rummaging about. But before
I realized what was happening inside, I saw there were holes cut in the
off wall of my tent, and two pairs of eyes were watching me. A little
lower down the bores of a couple of pistols were sticking through. I lay
perfectly still, and presently the man inside, who’d been going through
my grip-sack, threw it down. ‘Where do you keep your stuff, anyhow?’ he
said, and then I recognized him. ‘You’re not in luck. You’ve got hold of
the same person twice,’ I said. ‘Think we didn’t know that?’ he said. ‘We
made such a devilish poor haul we thought we’d give you another chance.
Come along,’ he said, ‘where do you keep the rest?’ And when he found
there wasn’t anything in the tent but a match and a pistol—well, he was
good enough to tell me his opinion of me.”
“I don’t understand—isn’t it daylight all night?”
“Yes, but some of the honest people try to sleep, and then the crooks
take over the town. The place is full of the professional criminal
class. And if it weren’t, Nome, as it is to-day, would breed them. My
next-door neighbor says if he owned all the Nome district and owned hell,
he’d sell Nome and live in hell.”
“But the thing that brought everybody here—the gold!”
“The sour-doughs are getting some out of the creeks. But there aren’t any
more windfalls for late comers, since the beach was worked out.”
“I did see one or two cheechalkers rocking in a hole here and there,”
said Cheviot.
“Go back to-morrow; you won’t see the same faces. ‘Poor man’s
country!’—where bread costs more than luxuries anywhere else on earth!
Any business that’s done in Nome to-day is buying and selling and
brokerage precisely as it is in Wall Street. For the moneyless mass there
isn’t only disappointment, there isn’t only hardship; there’s acute
suffering down on the beach. I don’t know, for my part, where it’s going
to end.”
“I don’t mind not staying _long_,” said Miss Mar obligingly, “in a place
where you wake up to find pistols and eyes peering in at you; but I
wouldn’t, _for all the world_, I wouldn’t miss just seeing it.”
Mr. Mar moved his stick impatiently.
“_I’d_ be willing enough to miss seeing it,” said Cheviot, “and I’m not
squeamish either. But, Lord! some of those faces!”
The old man nodded. “I keep away from the water front as much as I can.
Can’t stand it. I’ve never seen such despair in human eyes. If there are
lost souls on the earth, I’ve seen them on the beach at Nome.”
“Well, I dare say a little of it will go a long way with me, too.”
“Hildegarde, you’re growing very like your mother.”
“Thank you, father,” said the girl, imperturbably.
“The trouble is if you insisted on having ‘a little’ of Nome, you might
have to take a great deal,” Cheviot said.
“Why might I?”
He exchanged a look with Mr. Mar. “Come out here, Hildegarde, and I’ll
show you.”
As she followed to the ship’s side, “What makes the dog howl so?” she
asked. “Look! he’ll be out of that little boat in a minute—he’ll be
drowned.”
Cheviot leaned over. “Shut up!” he called down. “Say, _Red_! D’you hear?
Shut up, I tell you!”
The dog looked critically at Cheviot, ears cocked, nose pointed, forefeet
on the gunwale of the lighter, which was bobbing about at the foot of the
_Los Angeles’_ ladder.
“Louis, is that father’s Reddy? Oh, I do so want to make friends with
him! Red! Red! how d’you do? Be a good dog, we’re coming down in a
minute.”
“I’ll get one of the sailors to bring him up. Here”—Cheviot adjusted his
glass for her—“now look off there to the right—farther, beyond the wreck
of the _Pioneer_. Do you see that big tent with the flag?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see what flag it is?”
“It isn’t Stars and Stripes. It looks all yellow.”
“Yes.”
“Who are the people who have a yellow flag?”
“The people who have smallpox. That’s the pest-house.”
On their way back they met Blumpitty asking, sadder than ever, if anybody
knew how soon quarantine was going to be declared. “Pretty rough on the
people who get shut out,” murmured Blumpitty.
“Rougher on those who get shut in,” said Cheviot.
Joslin was furious at either prospect. “Damned nonsense,” he said,
“spoilin’ the finest boom since ’49, all on account of a little smallpox.”
They found Mr. Mar in the smoking-room, in the same weary attitude, head
hung over his wide breast, hat hung on the sound knee, wooden leg stiffly
slanting, eyes among the cigar ashes on the floor.
“Whatever else I do, father, I can’t go home without _you_.”
“Oh, I’ll take you home, my dear,” said Mar, with alacrity. “I’ve nothing
to keep me here now, except my claims at Polaris.”
“Oh,” said the girl, losing some of her gloom, “have you got a share in
the Mother Lode?”
He smiled faintly at miners’ superstition on his daughter’s lips. “I’ve
got something worth looking after,” he said, “though, as I told Louis, I
wish my good luck wasn’t always so inaccessible. Only two boats touched
Polaris last year. I don’t know how it will be this summer. I wasn’t able
to go in either of those that have set off so far. But I sent up a man to
do the assessment work.”
“I’ll find a way of seeing what he’s made of his job.” Cheviot seemed to
ratify some arrangement. Then turning to Hildegarde: “And I’ll follow you
in the first ship.”
“Follow? Can’t you go and get back in a week?”
“I might, if there should happen to be a boat.” He was touchingly pleased
at Hildegarde’s unwillingness to go home without him.
Quite suddenly she remembered O’Gorman’s loud-voiced friend of the
whaler. “I’ve got an inspiration,” she said gaily. “Why shouldn’t we
all three go up to Polaris in the bark _Beluga_? Yes, yes, that whaler
alongside is going north in a day or two. Now, don’t say it’s impossible
till you see.” Quickly she outlined a delightful plan. They could all
come back in one of the boats waiting about in Grantley Harbor. Or why
shouldn’t they (after they’d attended to the Mother Lode), why shouldn’t
they go in the _Beluga_ as far as Kotzebue? Nobody realized in the very
least, she said, her immense interest in all this queer northern world.
And after what she’d gone through to get here, they wanted to forbid her
Nome! Adroitly she spoke, as though their success were still a matter of
doubt. _If_ she didn’t see Nome, oh, how she’d be laughed at in Valdivia!
But _if_ she didn’t, why shouldn’t she be a little compensated for so
huge a disappointment? But that wasn’t the main consideration. How could
anybody expect her to go away in this very same horrible boat that had
brought her, and go _without_ Louis? Was her father grown so hard-hearted
up here as to expect to part them when they’d only just found each other?
Half-smiling, but serious enough in reality, as Mar could see, she
pleaded for her plan. Louis was plainly a convert, though he did say in
a feeble and highly unconvinced fashion, that if he hadn’t used up all
his credit with her on the subject of travel, he’d point out that the
accommodation on board these coasting vessels—
“Oh, _don’t_ be so careful of me—you two!” she wailed. “The reasons why
I mustn’t see Nome surely don’t apply to Polaris. Why mayn’t I have a
look at that miraculous Mother Lode? Besides, Polaris! why, that’s where
Blumpitty’s hermit lives! Dearest father, I’ve been dying to see the
hermit. Was it he who told you, too, where to get claims?”
“Certainly not. I wouldn’t go near the imposter! Living on people’s
greedy hopes. That’ll come to an end, too, some fine day!”
“Well, if it hasn’t come to an end yet, you won’t mind my seeing him,
will you, dearest? It isn’t just idle curiosity. You really ought to
sympathize a little. I must have got it from you—all this interest in
the North, that we used to think was left out of the rest of the family.
Don’t you remember, I never wondered at the hold it had on you? Even when
I was quite little—” She pulled herself up suddenly, with an anxious
glance at Cheviot’s averted face. But he turned briskly at that first
pause and said: “I’ll leave you to butter the parsnips, Hildegarde, while
I tackle the captain.”
When Cheviot had gone, “What’s the news?” said Mar.
“Oh, they’re all well, and the boys are getting on splendidly. Mother
sends you—”
“Nothing yet from Jack Galbraith?”
“Nothing, up to the day I left. Father, it bores Louis dreadfully,
hearing about—arctic exploration. We won’t talk about Jack Galbraith
before Louis. But I’ve often thought, while I’m crawling up this side of
the round world, Jack is probably sliding down the other.”
“It’s one of the reasons for going home,” said the old man, thinking
aloud.