[Illustration]
George Maltham, wandering out on the Point one Sunday morning in the
early spring-time--he had just come up from Chicago to take charge of
the Duluth end of his father's line of lake steamers and was lonely
in that strange place, and was the more disposed to be misanthropic
because he had a headache left over from the previous wet night at
the club--came promptly to the conclusion that he never had struck a
place so god-forsakenly dismal. Aside from his own feelings, there was
even more than usual to justify this opinion. The day was grey and
chill. A strong northeast wind was blowing that covered the lake with
white-caps and that sent a heavy surf rolling shoreward. A little ice,
left from the spring break-up, still was floating in the harbour. Under
these conditions the Point was at its cheerless worst.
Maltham had crossed the canal by the row-boat ferry. Having mounted
the sodden steps and looked about him for a moment--in which time his
conclusion was reached as to the Point's god-forsaken dismalness--he
was for abandoning his intended explorations and going straight-away
back to the mainland. But when he turned to descend the steps the boat
had received some waiting passengers--three church-bound Swedish women
in their Sunday clothes--and had just pushed off. That little turn of
chance decided him. After all, he said to himself, it did not make
much difference. What he wanted was a walk to rid him of his headache;
and the Point offered him, as the rocky hill-sides of the mainland
conspicuously did not, a good long stretch of level land.
Before him extended an absurdly wide street--laid out in magnificent
expectation of the traffic that never came to it--flanked in
far-reaching perspective by the little houses which sprang up in such
a hurry when the "boom" was on. In its centre was the tramway, its
road-bed laid with wooden planks. The dingy open tram-car, in which
the church-bound Swedish women had come up to the ferry, started away
creakingly while he stood watching it. That was the only sight or sound
of life. For some little time, in the stillness, he could hear the
driver addressing Swedish remarks of an encouraging or abusive nature
to his mule.
Taking the planked tramway in preference to the rotten wooden sidewalks
full of pitfalls, Maltham walked on briskly for a mile or so--his
headache leaving him in the keen air--until the last of the little
houses was passed. There the vast street suddenly dribbled off into
a straggling sandy road, which wound through thickets of bushy white
birch and a sparse growth of stunted pines. The tramway, along which
he continued, went on through the brush in a straight line. The
Point had narrowed to a couple of hundred yards. Through rifts in
the tangle about him he could see heaps of storm-piled drift-wood
scattered along the lake-side beach--on which the surf was pounding
heavily. On the harbour side the beach was broken by inthrusts of
sedgy swamp. Presently he came to a sandy open space in which, beside
a weather-worn little wooden church, was a neglected graveyard that
seemed to give the last touch of dreariness to that dismal solitude.
The graveyard was a waste of sand, save where bushy patches of birch
had sprung up in it from wind-borne seeds. Swept by many storms, the
sandy mounds were disappearing. Still marking the graves were a few
shabby wooden crosses and a dozen or so of slanting or fallen wooden
slabs. Once these short-lived monuments had been painted white and had
borne legends in black lettering. But only a Swedish word or a Swedish
name remained here and there legible--for the sun and the wind and the
rain had been doing their erasing work steadily for years. One slab
alone stood nearly upright and retained a few partly decipherable lines
in English. But even on that Maltham could make out only the scattered
words: "Sacred.... Ulrica.... Royal House of Sweden ... ever beloved
... of Major Calhoun Ashley," and a date that seemed to be 1879.
His headache had gone, but it had left him heavy and dejected. That
fragmentary epitaph increased his sombreness. Even had he been in a
cheerful mood he could not have failed to perceive the pathetic irony
of it all. There was more than the ordinary cruelty of death and
forgetfulness, he thought, about that grave so desolate of one who
had been connected--it did not matter how--with a "royal house," and
who was described in those almost illegible lines as "ever beloved."
That was human nature down to the hard pan, he thought; and with a
half-smile and a half-sigh over the fate of that poor dead Ulrica he
turned away from the graveyard and walked on. Half-whimsically he
wondered if he had reached the climax of the melancholy which brooded
over that dreary sand spit. As he stated the case to himself, short of
finding a man lying murdered among the birch-bushes it was not likely
that he would strike anything able to raise that graveyard's hand!
The murdered man did not materialize, and the next out-of-the-way
sight that he came across--when he had walked on past the dingy and
forgotten-looking little church--was a big ramshackling wooden house
of such pretentious absurdity that his first glimpse of it fairly made
him laugh. Its square centre was a wooden tower of three stories,
battlemented, flanked by two battlemented wings. A veranda ran along
the lower floor, and above the veranda was a gallery. Some of the
windows were boarded over; others had scraps of carpet stuck into their
glassless gaps--and all had Venetian shutters (singularly at odds with
the climate of that region) hanging dubiously and with many broken
slats. The paint had weathered away, and bricks had fallen from the
chimney-tops--a loss which gave to the queer structure, in conjunction
with lapses in its wooden battlements, a sadly broken-crested air.
As a whole, it suggested a badly done caricature of an old-fashioned
Southern homestead--of which the essence of the caricature was finding
it in that bleak Northern land.