Under a noon sun the vast, flat country, buried deep in snow, lay like a
paper hoop rimmed by the dark primeval forest; its surface shone with an
unbearable brightness as of sun-struck glass, every crystal gleaming
and quivering with intense cold light. To the north a single blunt, low
mountain-head broke the evenness of the horizon line.
Hugh Garth seemed to leap through paper like a tiny active clown as he
dropped down into the small space shoveled clear in front of his hidden
cabin door. The roof was weighted with drift, so that a curling mass
like the edge of a wind-crowded wave about to break hung low over the
eaves. Long icicles as thick as a man’s arm stretched from roof to
ground in a row of twisted columns. Under this overhanging cornice of
snow near the door there was a sudden icy purple darkness.
As Hugh plunged down into it, his face lost a certain rapt brightness
and shadowed deeply. He let slip the load of fresh pelts from his back,
drew his feet from the skis which he stuck up on their ends in the snow,
and removed the fur cap from his head and the huge dark spectacles from
his eyes. Then, crouching, he went in at the low, ill-hung door. It
stuck to its sill, and he cursed it; all his movements expressed the
anger of frustration. He slammed the door behind him.
Buried in drifts, the cabin was dim even at this bright hour of noon.
The stove glowed in a corner with a subdued redness, its bulging cheeks
and round mouth dully scarlet. The low room was pleasant to look at,
for it had the beauty of brown bark and the salmon tints of old rough
boards, and its furniture, wrought painstakingly by an unskillful hand,
had the charm of all handwork even when unskilled. Some of the chairs
were rudely carved, one great throne especially, awkward, pretentious,
and carefully ornate.
There was, too, a solid table in the center of the floor; and on it a
woman was setting heavy earthenware plates nicked and discolored. She
was heavy and discolored herself, but like the stove, she too seemed
to have a dull glow. She was no longer young, but she might still have
encouraged her youthfulness to linger pleasantly; she was not in the
least degree beautiful, but she might have fostered a charm that lurked
somewhere about her small, compact body and in her square, dark face.
Her hair of a sandy brown was stretched back brutally so that her
bright, devoted eyes--gray and honest eyes, very deep-set beneath their
brows--lacked the usual softness and mystery of women’s eyes. Her lips
were tight set; her chin held out with an air of dogged effort which
seemed to possess no relation to her mechanical occupation, yet to have
a strong habitual relation to her state of mind. She seemed, in fact,
under a shell of self-control, to conceal an inner light, like a dimly
burning dark-lantern. Her expression was dumb. She moved about like
a deaf-mute. Indeed, her stillness and stony self-repression were
extraordinary.
A youth rose from a chair near the stove and greeted Hugh as he entered.
“Hullo,” he said. “How many did you get?”
It was the eager questioning of a modest, affectionate boy who curbs his
natural effervescence of greeting like a well-trained dog. The tone was
astonishingly young, a quiet, husky boy-voice.
“Damn you, Pete!” was snarled at him for answer. “Haven’t you got my
boot mended yet?”
The boot, still lacking its heel, lay on the floor near the stove, and
Hugh now picked it up and hurled it half across the room.
“I have to get out into this ice chest of a wilderness and this flaming
glare that cuts my eyeballs open, and work till the sweat freezes on my
face, and then come home to find you loafing by the fire as if you were
a house cat--purring and rubbing against my legs when I come in,” he
snarled. “Thanking me for a quiet nap and a saucer of milk, eh? You
loafer! What do I keep you for? You gorge the bread and meat I earn
by sweating and freezing, and you keep your sluggish mountain of bones
covered. A year or two ago I’d have urged you along with a stick. I used
to get some work out of you then. But you think you’re too big for that,
now, don’t you? You fancy I’m afraid of your bigness, eh? Well, do you
want me to try it out? What about it?”
During the first part of his brother’s speech, Pete had faced him, but
in the middle he had turned his back and stood in front of one of the
clumsy windows. He looked out now at a white wall of snow, above which
shone the dazzle of the midday. He whistled very softly to himself and
sank his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroys. He did not answer
the snarling question, but his wide, quiet mouth, exquisitely shaped,
ran into a smile and a dimple, deep and narrow, cut into his thin and
ruddy cheek.
Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had come
into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled the
floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.
He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the
waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with an
ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who limped
and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his tongue,
gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon the silence.
Suddenly the woman spoke. She turned back on the threshold of the
kitchen door through which her work had been taking her to and fro
during Garth’s outbreak. Her voice was monotonous and smothered; it had
its share in her unnatural self-repression.
“Why don’t you tell him to be quiet, Pete? You’ve been chopping wood
since daybreak to make up for what he didn’t do last week, and you only
came in about ten minutes before he did. Why don’t you speak out? You’re
getting to be pretty close to a man now, and it isn’t suitable for you
to let yourself be talked to that way. You always stand like a fool and
take it from him.”
Pete turned. “Oh, well,” he answered good-humoredly, “I guess maybe he’s
tired. Let up, Hugh, will you? I’ll finish your boot after dinner.”
“The hell you will! You’ll do it now!” Venting on his brother his anger
at the woman’s intervention, Garth swung his misshapen body around the
end of the table and thrust an elbow violently against Pete’s chest.
The attack was so unexpected that Pete staggered, lost his balance, and
stepping down into the shallow depression of a pebbled hearth, fell,
twisting his ankle. The agony was sharp. After a dumb minute he lifted
a white face and pulled himself up, one hand clutching the board mantel.
“Now you’ve done it!” he said between his teeth. “How will you get your
pelts to the station now? I won’t be able to take them.”
There ensued a dismayed silence. The woman had come back from the
kitchen and stood with a steaming dish in her hands. After the brief
pause of consternation she set down the dish and went over to Pete.
“Here,” she said, “sit down and let me take off your moccasin and bathe
your ankle before it begins to swell.”
Hugh Garth had seated himself in the thronelike chair at the head of the
table. His expression was still defiant, indifferent, and lordly.
“Come and eat your dinner, both of you,” he commanded. “You’ve had your
lesson, Pete. After this, I guess you’ll do what I tell you to--not
choose the work that happens to suit your humor. Don’t, for God’s sake,
baby him, Bella. Don’t start being a grandmother before you’ve ever been
a sweetheart. You’re too young for the one even if you’re getting a bit
too old for the other!”
Bella flushed deep and hot. She went to her place, and Pete hobbled to
his, opposite his brother. Between them the woman sat, dyed deep in her
sudden unaccustomed wave of scarlet. Pete’s whiteness too was stained in
sympathy. But Hugh only chuckled. “As for the pelts,” he said royally,
“I’ll take them down myself.”
Bella looked slowly up.
“You think I don’t mean it, I suppose?” Hugh demanded.
They did not answer, but the eyes of the boy and the woman met. This
silence and this dumb exchange of understanding infuriated Garth. He
clinched his hands on the carved arms of his chair and leaned a little
forward.
“I’ll take the pelts myself,” he repeated boisterously. “I’m not afraid
to be seen at the station. I’m sick of skulking. Buried here--with _my_
talents--in this damn country, spending my days trapping and skinning
beasts to keep the breath in our three useless bodies. Wouldn’t death be
better for a man like me? Easier to bear? Fifteen years of it! Fifteen
years! My best years!” He stared over Pete’s head. “In all that time no
beauty to feed my starved senses, no work for my starved brain, no hope
for my starved heart.” The woman and the youth watched him still in
silence. “That fox I killed this morning had a better life to lose than
I.”
“It wouldn’t be safe for you to go, Hugh,” said Pete gently.
“Why not--watchdog?”
The sneer deepened the flush on Pete’s face, but he answered with the
same gentleness, fixing his blue eyes on his brother’s.
“Because not two months ago there was a picture of you tacked up in the
post-office.”
Bella’s face whitened, and Hugh’s cheeks grew a shade more leaden.
“T-two months ago!” he stammered painfully; “but that’s not p-possible.
They--they’ve given me up. They’ve f-forgotten me. They th-think I’m
dead. After fifteen years? My God, Pete! Why didn’t you tell me?” He
pleaded the last with a shaken sort of sharpness, in pitiful contrast to
the bombast of the preceding speech.
“I didn’t see the good of telling you. I was waiting until this trip to
see if the picture was still there, and maybe to ask some questions.”
“What does it mean?” whispered Bella.
“It means they’ve some fresh reason to hunt me--some fresh impulse--God
knows what or why. How can we tell out here, buried in the snows of
fifteen winters. Well!” He struck his hands down on the table edge and
stood up. He drew his mouth into a crooked smile and looked at the other
two as a naughty child looks at its doting but disapproving elders. The
smile transfigured his ugliness. “I’ve a fancy to see that picture. Want
to be reminded of what I looked like fifteen years ago. I was a handsome
fellow then. I’m going to take the pelts.”
Pete looked dumbly up at him, his lips parted. Bella twisted her apron
about her hands. Both seemed to know the hopelessness of protest. In the
same anxious dumbness they watched Garth make ready for his trip. As he
pulled his cap down close about his ears, Pete at last found his voice.
“Hugh,” he began doubtfully, “I wish you wouldn’t risk it. We can get on
without supplies until next trading-day, when I’ll surely be all right.”
“Hold your tongue! I’m going,” was the answer. “I tell you, the spirit
of adventure has me. Who knows what I may meet with out there?” He flung
back the door and, pointing with a long arm, stood silhouetted against
the dazzle.
“Beauty? Opportunity? Danger? Hope? Death? I shan’t shirk it this time.
I’ll meet whatever comes. But--” He came back a step into the room. His
harsh face melted to a shamefaced gentleness; his voice softened. “If
they get me down there, if I _don’t_ come back, you two try to think
kindly of me, will you? I know what you think of me now. I know you
won’t see me as I am--no one but God will ever do me that kindness; but
you two--be easy with me in your memories.”
Bella, her arms now twisted to their red elbows in her apron, took a
few stiff steps across the floor. Her face was expressionless, her eyes
lowered. Garth smiled at them both and went out, shutting the door. They
heard him singing as he put on his skis:
A hundred men were riding,
A-hunting for Pierre.
They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.
They rode around by moonlight;
They rode around by day;
They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.
Then came the sharp scraping of his runners across the surface of the
snow on a level with the buried roof. It lessened from a hissing speech
to a hissing whisper. It sighed away. Bella sat down abruptly on a
chair, pulled in her chin like an unhappy child; her bosom lifted as
though a sob would force its way out.
“If he doesn’t come back!” she murmured. “If he doesn’t come back!” She
was speaking to God.