"And why should I not be proud of my race?"
Frona's cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkling. They had both been
harking back to childhood, and she had been telling Corliss of her
mother, whom she faintly remembered. Fair and flaxen-haired, typically
Saxon, was the likeness she had drawn, filled out largely with
knowledge gained from her father and from old Andy of the Dyea Post.
The discussion had then turned upon the race in general, and Frona had
said things in the heat of enthusiasm which affected the more
conservative mind of Corliss as dangerous and not solidly based on
fact. He deemed himself too large for race egotism and insular
prejudice, and had seen fit to laugh at her immature convictions.
"It's a common characteristic of all peoples," he proceeded, "to
consider themselves superior races,--a naive, natural egoism, very
healthy and very good, but none the less manifestly untrue. The Jews
conceived themselves to be God's chosen people, and they still so
conceive themselves--"
"And because of it they have left a deep mark down the page of
history," she interrupted.
"But time has not proved the stability of their conceptions. And you
must also view the other side. A superior people must look upon all
others as inferior peoples. This comes home to you. To be a Roman
were greater than to be a king, and when the Romans rubbed against your
savage ancestors in the German forests, they elevated their brows and
said, 'An inferior people, barbarians.'"
"But we are here, now. We are, and the Romans are not. The test is
time. So far we have stood the test; the signs are favorable that we
shall continue to stand it. We are the best fitted!"
"Egotism."
"But wait. Put it to the test."
As she spoke her hand flew out impulsively to his. At the touch his
heart pulsed upward, there was a rush Of blood and a tightening across
the temples. Ridiculous, but delightful, he thought. At this rate he
could argue with her the night through.
"The test," she repeated, withdrawing her hand without embarrassment.
"We are a race of doers and fighters, of globe-encirclers and
zone-conquerors. We toil and struggle, and stand by the toil and
struggle no matter how hopeless it may be. While we are persistent and
resistant, we are so made that we fit ourselves to the most diverse
conditions. Will the Indian, the Negro, or the Mongol ever conquer the
Teuton? Surely not! The Indian has persistence without variability;
if he does not modify he dies, if he does try to modify he dies anyway.
The Negro has adaptability, but he is servile and must be led. As for
the Chinese, they are permanent. All that the other races are not, the
Anglo-Saxon, or Teuton if you please, is. All that the other races
have not, the Teuton has. What race is to rise up and overwhelm us?"
"Ah, you forget the Slav," Corliss suggested slyly.
"The Slav!" Her face fell. "True, the Slav! The only stripling in
this world of young men and gray-beards! But he is still in the
future, and in the future the decision rests. In the mean time we
prepare. If may be we shall have such a start that we shall prevent
him growing. You know, because he was better skilled in chemistry,
knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the
Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its
resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip
the Slav ere he grows a thatch to his lip?"
Vance Corliss shook his head non-committally, and laughed.
"Oh! I know I become absurd and grow over-warm!" she exclaimed. "But
after all, one reason that we are the salt of the earth is because we
have the courage to say so."
"And I am sure your warmth spreads," he responded. "See, I'm beginning
to glow myself. We are not God's, but Nature's chosen people, we
Angles, and Saxons, and Normans, and Vikings, and the earth is our
heritage. Let us arise and go forth!"
"Now you are laughing at me, and, besides, we have already gone forth.
Why have you fared into the north, if not to lay hands on the race
legacy?"
She turned her head at the sound of approaching footsteps, and cried
for greeting, "I appeal to you, Captain Alexander! I summon you to
bear witness!"
The captain of police smiled in his sternly mirthful fashion as he
shook hands with Frona and Corliss. "Bear witness?" he questioned.
"Ah, yes!
"'Bear witness, O my comrades, what a hard-bit gang were we,--
The servants of the sweep-head, but the masters of the sea!'"
He quoted the verse with a savage solemnity exulting through his deep
voice. This, and the appositeness of it, quite carried Frona away, and
she had both his hands in hers on the instant. Corliss was aware of an
inward wince at the action. It was uncomfortable. He did not like to
see her so promiscuous with those warm, strong hands of hers. Did she
so favor all men who delighted her by word or deed? He did not mind
her fingers closing round his, but somehow it seemed wanton when shared
with the next comer. By the time he had thought thus far, Frona had
explained the topic under discussion, and Captain Alexander was
testifying.
"I don't know much about your Slav and other kin, except that they are
good workers and strong; but I do know that the white man is the
greatest and best breed in the world. Take the Indian, for instance.
The white man comes along and beats him at all his games, outworks him,
out-roughs him, out-fishes him, out-hunts him. As far back as their
myths go, the Alaskan Indians have packed on their backs. But the
gold-rushers, as soon as they had learned the tricks of the trade,
packed greater loads and packed them farther than did the Indians.
Why, last May, the Queen's birthday, we had sports on the river. In
the one, two, three, four, and five men canoe races we beat the Indians
right and left. Yet they had been born to the paddle, and most of us
had never seen a canoe until man-grown."
"But why is it?" Corliss queried.
"I do not know why. I only know that it is. I simply bear witness. I
do know that we do what they cannot do, and what they can do, we do
better."
Frona nodded her head triumphantly at Corliss. "Come, acknowledge your
defeat, so that we may go in to dinner. Defeat for the time being, at
least. The concrete facts of paddles and pack-straps quite overcome
your dogmatics. Ah, I thought so. More time? All the time in the
world. But let us go in. We'll see what my father thinks of it,--and
Mr. Kellar. A symposium on Anglo-Saxon supremacy!"
Frost and enervation are mutually repellant. The Northland gives a
keenness and zest to the blood which cannot be obtained in warmer
climes. Naturally so, then, the friendship which sprang up between
Corliss and Frona was anything but languid. They met often under her
father's roof-tree, and went many places together. Each found a
pleasurable attraction in the other, and a satisfaction which the
things they were not in accord with could not mar. Frona liked the man
because he was a man. In her wildest flights she could never imagine
linking herself with any man, no matter how exalted spiritually, who
was not a man physically. It was a delight to her and a joy to look
upon the strong males of her kind, with bodies comely in the sight of
God and muscles swelling with the promise of deeds and work. Man, to
her, was preeminently a fighter. She believed in natural selection and
in sexual selection, and was certain that if man had thereby become
possessed of faculties and functions, they were for him to use and
could but tend to his good. And likewise with instincts. If she felt
drawn to any person or thing, it was good for her to be so drawn, good
for herself. If she felt impelled to joy in a well-built frame and
well-shaped muscle, why should she restrain? Why should she not love
the body, and without shame? The history of the race, and of all
races, sealed her choice with approval. Down all time, the weak and
effeminate males had vanished from the world-stage. Only the strong
could inherit the earth. She had been born of the strong, and she
chose to cast her lot with the strong.
Yet of all creatures, she was the last to be deaf and blind to the
things of the spirit. But the things of the spirit she demanded should
be likewise strong. No halting, no stuttered utterance, tremulous
waiting, minor wailing! The mind and the soul must be as quick and
definite and certain as the body. Nor was the spirit made alone for
immortal dreaming. Like the flesh, it must strive and toil. It must
be workaday as well as idle day. She could understand a weakling
singing sweetly and even greatly, and in so far she could love him for
his sweetness and greatness; but her love would have fuller measure
were he strong of body as well. She believed she was just. She gave
the flesh its due and the spirit its due; but she had, over and above,
her own choice, her own individual ideal. She liked to see the two go
hand in hand. Prophecy and dyspepsia did not affect her as a
felicitous admixture. A splendid savage and a weak-kneed poet! She
could admire the one for his brawn and the other for his song; but she
would prefer that they had been made one in the beginning.
As to Vance Corliss. First, and most necessary of all, there was that
physiological affinity between them that made the touch of his hand a
pleasure to her. Though souls may rush together, if body cannot endure
body, happiness is reared on sand and the structure will be ever
unstable and tottery. Next, Corliss had the physical potency of the
hero without the grossness of the brute. His muscular development was
more qualitative than quantitative, and it is the qualitative
development which gives rise to beauty of form. A giant need not be
proportioned in the mould; nor a thew be symmetrical to be massive.
And finally,--none the less necessary but still finally,--Vance Corliss
was neither spiritually dead nor decadent. He affected her as fresh
and wholesome and strong, as reared above the soil but not scorning the
soil. Of course, none of this she reasoned out otherwise than by
subconscious processes. Her conclusions were feelings, not thoughts.
Though they quarrelled and disagreed on innumerable things, deep down,
underlying all, there was a permanent unity. She liked him for a
certain stern soberness that was his, and for his saving grace of
humor. Seriousness and banter were not incompatible. She liked him
for his gallantry, made to work with and not for display. She liked
the spirit of his offer at Happy Camp, when he proposed giving her an
Indian guide and passage-money back to the United States. He could
_do_ as well as talk. She liked him for his outlook, for his innate
liberality, which she felt to be there, somehow, no matter that often
he was narrow of expression. She liked him for his mind. Though
somewhat academic, somewhat tainted with latter-day scholasticism, it
was still a mind which permitted him to be classed with the
"Intellectuals." He was capable of divorcing sentiment and emotion
from reason. Granted that he included all the factors, he could not go
wrong. And here was where she found chief fault with him,--his
narrowness which precluded all the factors; his narrowness which gave
the lie to the breadth she knew was really his. But she was aware that
it was not an irremediable defect, and that the new life he was leading
was very apt to rectify it. He was filled with culture; what he needed
was a few more of life's facts.
And she liked him for himself, which is quite different from liking the
parts which went to compose him. For it is no miracle for two things,
added together, to produce not only the sum of themselves, but a third
thing which is not to be found in either of them. So with him. She
liked him for himself, for that something which refused to stand out as
a part, or a sum of parts; for that something which is the corner-stone
of Faith and which has ever baffled Philosophy and Science. And
further, to like, with Frona Welse, did not mean to love.
First, and above all, Vance Corliss was drawn to Frona Welse because of
the clamor within him for a return to the soil. In him the elements
were so mixed that it was impossible for women many times removed to
find favor in his eyes. Such he had met constantly, but not one had
ever drawn from him a superfluous heart-beat. Though there had been in
him a growing instinctive knowledge of lack of unity,--the lack of
unity which must precede, always, the love of man and woman,--not one
of the daughters of Eve he had met had flashed irresistibly in to fill
the void. Elective affinity, sexual affinity, or whatsoever the
intangible essence known as love is, had never been manifest. When he
met Frona it had at once sprung, full-fledged, into existence. But he
quite misunderstood it, took it for a mere attraction towards the new
and unaccustomed.
Many men, possessed of birth and breeding, have yielded to this clamor
for return. And giving the apparent lie to their own sanity and moral
stability, many such men have married peasant girls or barmaids, And
those to whom evil apportioned itself have been prone to distrust the
impulse they obeyed, forgetting that nature makes or mars the
individual for the sake, always, of the type. For in every such case
of return, the impulse was sound,--only that time and space interfered,
and propinquity determined whether the object of choice should be
bar-maid or peasant girl.
Happily for Vance Corliss, time and space were propitious, and in Frona
he found the culture he could not do without, and the clean sharp tang
of the earth he needed. In so far as her education and culture went,
she was an astonishment. He had met the scientifically smattered young
woman before, but Frona had something more than smattering. Further,
she gave new life to old facts, and her interpretations of common
things were coherent and vigorous and new. Though his acquired
conservatism was alarmed and cried danger, he could not remain cold to
the charm of her philosophizing, while her scholarly attainments were
fully redeemed by her enthusiasm. Though he could not agree with much
that she passionately held, he yet recognized that the passion of
sincerity and enthusiasm was good.
But her chief fault, in his eyes, was her unconventionality. Woman was
something so inexpressibly sacred to him, that he could not bear to see
any good woman venturing where the footing was precarious. Whatever
good woman thus ventured, overstepping the metes and bounds of sex and
status, he deemed did so of wantonness. And wantonness of such order
was akin to--well, he could not say it when thinking of Frona, though
she hurt him often by her unwise acts. However, he only felt such
hurts when away from her. When with her, looking into her eyes which
always looked back, or at greeting and parting pressing her hand which
always pressed honestly, it seemed certain that there was in her
nothing but goodness and truth.
And then he liked her in many different ways for many different things.
For her impulses, and for her passions which were always elevated. And
already, from breathing the Northland air, he had come to like her for
that comradeship which at first had shocked him. There were other
acquired likings, her lack of prudishness, for instance, which he awoke
one day to find that he had previously confounded with lack of modesty.
And it was only the day before that day that he drifted, before he
thought, into a discussion with her of "Camille." She had seen
Bernhardt, and dwelt lovingly on the recollection. He went home
afterwards, a dull pain gnawing at his heart, striving to reconcile
Frona with the ideal impressed upon him by his mother that innocence
was another term for ignorance. Notwithstanding, by the following day
he had worked it out and loosened another finger of the maternal grip.
He liked the flame of her hair in the sunshine, the glint of its gold
by the firelight, and the waywardness of it and the glory. He liked
her neat-shod feet and the gray-gaitered calves,--alas, now hidden in
long-skirted Dawson. He liked her for the strength of her slenderness;
and to walk with her, swinging her step and stride to his, or to merely
watch her come across a room or down the street, was a delight. Life
and the joy of life romped through her blood, abstemiously filling out
and rounding off each shapely muscle and soft curve. And he liked it
all. Especially he liked the swell of her forearm, which rose firm and
strong and tantalizing and sought shelter all too quickly under the
loose-flowing sleeve.
The co-ordination of physical with spiritual beauty is very strong in
normal men, and so it was with Vance Corliss. That he liked the one
was no reason that he failed to appreciate the other. He liked Frona
for both, and for herself as well. And to like, with him, though he
did not know it, was to love.