That Vance Corliss wanted to see more of the girl he had divided
blankets with, goes with the saying. He had not been wise enough to
lug a camera into the country, but none the less, by a yet subtler
process, a sun-picture had been recorded somewhere on his cerebral
tissues. In the flash of an instant it had been done. A wave message
of light and color, a molecular agitation and integration, a certain
minute though definite corrugation in a brain recess,--and there it
was, a picture complete! The blazing sunlight on the beetling black; a
slender gray form, radiant, starting forward to the vision from the
marge where light and darkness met; a fresh young morning smile
wreathed in a flame of burning gold.
It was a picture he looked at often, and the more he looked the greater
was his desire, to see Frona Welse again. This event he anticipated
with a thrill, with the exultancy over change which is common of all
life. She was something new, a fresh type, a woman unrelated to all
women he had met. Out of the fascinating unknown a pair of hazel eyes
smiled into his, and a hand, soft of touch and strong of grip, beckoned
him. And there was an allurement about it which was as the allurement
of sin.
Not that Vance Corliss was anybody's fool, nor that his had been an
anchorite's existence; but that his upbringing, rather, had given his
life a certain puritanical bent. Awakening intelligence and broader
knowledge had weakened the early influence of an austere mother, but
had not wholly eradicated it. It was there, deep down, very shadowy,
but still a part of him. He could not get away from it. It distorted,
ever so slightly, his concepts of things. It gave a squint to his
perceptions, and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned,
determined his classifications. He prided himself on his largeness
when he granted that there were three kinds of women. His mother had
only admitted two. But he had outgrown her. It was incontestable that
there were three kinds,--the good, the bad, and the partly good and
partly bad. That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly. In
its very nature such a condition could not be permanent. It was the
intermediary stage, marking the passage from high to low, from best to
worst.
All of which might have been true, even as he saw it; but with
definitions for premises, conclusions cannot fail to be dogmatic. What
was good and bad? There it was. That was where his mother whispered
with dead lips to him. Nor alone his mother, but divers conventional
generations, even back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from
the soil and looked down. For Vance Corliss was many times removed
from the red earth, and, though he did not know it, there was a clamor
within him for a return lest he perish.
Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited definitions.
He refused to classify her at all. He did not dare. He preferred to
pass judgment later, when he had gathered more data. And there was the
allurement, the gathering of the data; the great critical point where
purity reaches dreamy hands towards pitch and refuses to call it
pitch--till defiled. No; Vance Corliss was not a cad. And since
purity is merely a relative term, he was not pure. That there was no
pitch under his nails was not because he had manicured diligently, but
because it had not been his luck to run across any pitch. He was not
good because he chose to be, because evil was repellant; but because he
had not had opportunity to become evil. But from this, on the other
hand, it is not to be argued that he would have gone bad had he had a
chance.
He was a product of the sheltered life. All his days had been lived in
a sanitary dwelling; the plumbing was excellent. The air he had
breathed had been mostly ozone artificially manufactured. He had been
sun-bathed in balmy weather, and brought in out of the wet when it
rained. And when he reached the age of choice he had been too fully
occupied to deviate from the straight path, along which his mother had
taught him to creep and toddle, and along which he now proceeded to
walk upright, without thought of what lay on either side.
Vitality cannot be used over again. If it be expended on one thing,
there is none left for the other thing. And so with Vance Corliss.
Scholarly lucubrations and healthy exercises during his college days
had consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a
wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus
energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the
conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result:
A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in
trepidation; a very strong young man, whose substance had not been
wasted in riotous living; a very learned young man, with a Freiberg
mining engineer's diploma and a B.A. sheepskin from Yale; and, lastly,
a very self-centred, self-possessed young man.
Now his greatest virtue lay in this: he had not become hardened in the
mould baked by his several forbears and into which he had been pressed
by his mother's hands. Some atavism had been at work in the making of
him, and he had reverted to that ancestor who sturdily uplifted. But
so far this portion of his heritage had lain dormant. He had simply
remained adjusted to a stable environment. There had been no call upon
the adaptability which was his. But whensoever the call came, being so
constituted, it was manifest that he should adapt, should adjust
himself to the unwonted pressure of new conditions. The maxim of the
rolling stone may be all true; but notwithstanding, in the scheme of
life, the inability to become fixed is an excellence par excellence.
Though he did not know it, this inability was Vance Corliss's most
splendid possession.
But to return. He looked forward with great sober glee to meeting
Frona Welse, and in the meanwhile consulted often the sun-picture he
carried of her. Though he went over the Pass and down the lakes and
river with a push of money behind him (London syndicates are never
niggardly in such matters). Frona beat him into Dawson by a fortnight.
While on his part money in the end overcame obstacles, on hers the name
of Welse was a talisman greater than treasure. After his arrival, a
couple of weeks were consumed in buying a cabin, presenting his letters
of introduction, and settling down. But all things come in the fulness
of time, and so, one night after the river closed, he pointed his
moccasins in the direction of Jacob Welse's house. Mrs. Schoville, the
Gold Commissioner's wife, gave him the honor of her company.
Corliss wanted to rub his eyes. Steam-heating apparatus in the
Klondike! But the next instant he had passed out of the hall through
the heavy portieres and stood inside the drawing-room. And it was a
drawing-room. His moose-hide moccasins sank luxuriantly into the deep
carpet, and his eyes were caught by a Turner sunrise on the opposite
wall. And there were other paintings and things in bronze. Two Dutch
fireplaces were roaring full with huge back-logs of spruce. There was
a piano; and somebody was singing. Frona sprang from the stool and
came forward, greeting him with both hands. He had thought his
sun-picture perfect, but this fire-picture, this young creature with
the flush and warmth of ringing life, quite eclipsed it. It was a
whirling moment, as he held her two hands in his, one of those moments
when an incomprehensible orgasm quickens the blood and dizzies the
brain. Though the first syllables came to him faintly, Mrs.
Schoville's voice brought him back to himself.
"Oh!" she cried. "You know him!"
And Frona answered, "Yes, we met on the Dyea Trail; and those who meet
on the Dyea Trail can never forget."
"How romantic!"
The Gold Commissioner's wife clapped her hands. Though fat and forty,
and phlegmatic of temperament, between exclamations and hand-clappings
her waking existence was mostly explosive. Her husband secretly
averred that did God Himself deign to meet her face to face, she would
smite together her chubby hands and cry out, "How romantic!"
"How did it happen?" she continued. "He didn't rescue you over a
cliff, or that sort of thing, did he? Do say that he did! And you
never said a word about it, Mr. Corliss. Do tell me. I'm just dying
to know!"
"Oh, nothing like that," he hastened to answer. "Nothing much. I,
that is we--"
He felt a sinking as Frona interrupted. There was no telling what this
remarkable girl might say.
"He gave me of his hospitality, that was all," she said. "And I can
vouch for his fried potatoes; while for his coffee, it is
excellent--when one is very hungry."
"Ingrate!" he managed to articulate, and thereby to gain a smile, ere
he was introduced to a cleanly built lieutenant of the Mounted Police,
who stood by the fireplace discussing the grub proposition with a
dapper little man very much out of place in a white shirt and stiff
collar.
Thanks to the particular niche in society into which he happened to be
born, Corliss drifted about easily from group to group, and was much
envied therefore by Del Bishop, who sat stiffly in the first chair he
had dropped into, and who was waiting patiently for the first person to
take leave that he might know how to compass the manoeuvre. In his
mind's eye he had figured most of it out, knew just how many steps
required to carry him to the door, was certain he would have to say
good-by to Frona, but did not know whether or not he was supposed to
shake hands all around. He had just dropped in to see Frona and say
"Howdee," as he expressed it, and had unwittingly found himself in
company.
Corliss, having terminated a buzz with a Miss Mortimer on the decadence
of the French symbolists, encountered Del Bishop. But the pocket-miner
remembered him at once from the one glimpse he had caught of Corliss
standing by his tent-door in Happy Camp. Was almighty obliged to him
for his night's hospitality to Miss Frona, seein' as he'd ben
side-tracked down the line; that any kindness to her was a kindness to
him; and that he'd remember it, by God, as long as he had a corner of a
blanket to pull over him. Hoped it hadn't put him out. Miss Frona'd
said that bedding was scarce, but it wasn't a cold night (more blowy
than crisp), so he reckoned there couldn't 'a' ben much shiverin'. All
of which struck Corliss as perilous, and he broke away at the first
opportunity, leaving the pocket-miner yearning for the door.
But Dave Harney, who had not come by mistake, avoided gluing himself to
the first chair. Being an Eldorado king, he had felt it incumbent to
assume the position in society to which his numerous millions entitled
him; and though unused all his days to social amenities other than the
out-hanging latch-string and the general pot, he had succeeded to his
own satisfaction as a knight of the carpet. Quick to take a cue, he
circulated with an aplomb which his striking garments and long
shambling gait only heightened, and talked choppy and disconnected
fragments with whomsoever he ran up against. The Miss Mortimer, who
spoke Parisian French, took him aback with her symbolists; but he
evened matters up with a goodly measure of the bastard lingo of the
Canadian _voyageurs_, and left her gasping and meditating over a
proposition to sell him twenty-five pounds of sugar, white or brown.
But she was not unduly favored, for with everybody he adroitly turned
the conversation to grub, and then led up to the eternal proposition.
"Sugar or bust," he would conclude gayly each time and wander on to the
next.
But he put the capstone on his social success by asking Frona to sing
the touching ditty, "I Left My Happy Home for You." This was something
beyond her, though she had him hum over the opening bars so that she
could furnish the accompaniment. His voice was more strenuous than
sweet, and Del Bishop, discovering himself at last, joined in raucously
on the choruses. This made him feel so much better that he
disconnected himself from the chair, and when he finally got home he
kicked up his sleepy tent-mate to tell him about the high time he'd had
over at the Welse's. Mrs. Schoville tittered and thought it all so
unique, and she thought it so unique several times more when the
lieutenant of Mounted Police and a couple of compatriots roared "Rule
Britannia" and "God Save the Queen," and the Americans responded with
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee" and "John Brown." Then big Alec Beaubien,
the Circle City king, demanded the "Marseillaise," and the company
broke up chanting "Die Wacht am Rhein" to the frosty night.
"Don't come on these nights," Frona whispered to Corliss at parting.
"We haven't spoken three words, and I know we shall be good friends.
Did Dave Harney succeed in getting any sugar out of you?"
They mingled their laughter, and Corliss went home under the aurora
borealis, striving to reduce his impressions to some kind of order.