Page 12 of Marriage

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  LONELY HUT

  Sec. 1

  Marjorie and Trafford walked slowly back to the hut. "There is much todo before the weather breaks," he said, ending a thoughtful silence."Then we can sit inside there and talk about the things we need to talkabout."

  He added awkwardly: "Since we started, there has been so much to holdthe attention. I remember a mood--an immense despair. I feel it's stillsomewhere at the back of things, waiting to be dealt with. It's ouressential fact. But meanwhile we've been busy, looking at fresh things."

  He paused. "Now it will be different perhaps...."

  For nearly four weeks indeed they were occupied very closely, and creptinto their bunks at night as tired as wholesome animals who drop tosleep. At any time the weather might break; already there had been twoovercast days and a frowning conference of clouds in the north. When atlast storms began they knew there would be nothing for it but to keep inthe hut until the world froze up.

  There was much to do to the hut. The absence of anything but stunted andimpoverished timber and the limitation of time, had forbidden a log hut,and their home was really only a double framework, rammed tight betweeninner and outer frame with a mixture of earth and boughs and twigs ofwillow, pine and balsam. The floor was hammered earth carpeted withbalsam twigs and a caribou skin. Outside and within wall and roof werefaced with coarse canvas--that was Trafford's idea--and their bunksoccupied two sides of the hut. Heating was done by the sheet-iron stovethey had brought with them, and the smoke was carried out to the roof bya thin sheet-iron pipe which had come up outside a roll of canvas. Theyhad made the roof with about the pitch of a Swiss chalet, and it wascovered with nailed waterproof canvas, held down by a large number ofbig lumps of stone. Much of the canvassing still remained to do when themen went down, and then the Traffords used every scrap of packing-paperand newspaper that had come up with them and was not needed for liningthe bunks in covering any crack or join in the canvas wall.

  Two decadent luxuries, a rubber bath and two rubber hot-water bottles,hung behind the door. They were almost the only luxuries. Kettles andpans and some provisions stood on a shelf over the stove; there was alsoa sort of recess cupboard in the opposite corner, reserve clothes werein canvas trunks under the bunks, they kept their immediate supply ofwood under the eaves just outside the door, and there was a big can ofwater between stove and door. When the winter came they would have tobring in ice from the stream.

  This was their home. The tent that had sheltered Marjorie on the way upwas erected close to this hut to serve as a rude scullery and outhouse,and they also made a long, roughly thatched roof with a canvas cover,supported on stakes, to shelter the rest of the stores. The stuff intins and cases and jars they left on the ground under this; therest--the flour, candles, bacon, dried caribou beef, and so forth, theyhung, as they hoped, out of the reach of any prowling beast. And finallyand most important was the wood pile. This they accumulated to thenorth and east of the hut, and all day long with a sort of ant-likeperseverance Trafford added to it from the thickets below. Once ortwice, however, tempted by the appearance of birds, he went shooting,and one day he got five geese that they spent a day upon, plucking,cleaning, boiling and putting up in all their store of empty cans,letting the fat float and solidify on the top to preserve this additionto their provision until the advent of the frost rendered all otherpreservatives unnecessary. They also tried to catch trout down in theriver below, but though they saw many fish the catch was less than adozen.

  It was a discovery to both of them to find how companionable theseoccupations were, how much more side by side they could be amateurishlycleaning out a goose and disputing about its cooking, than they had evercontrived to be in Sussex Square.

  "These things are so infernally interesting," said Trafford, surveyingthe row of miscellaneous cans upon the stove he had packed withdisarticulated goose. "But we didn't come here to picnic. All this iseating us up. I have a memory of some immense tragic purpose----"

  "That tin's _boiling!_" screamed Marjorie sharply.

  He resumed his thread after an active interlude.

  "We'll keep the wolf from the door," he said.

  "Don't talk of wolves!" said Marjorie.

  "It is only when men have driven away the wolf from the door--oh!altogether away, that they find despair in the sky? I wonder----"

  "What?" asked Marjorie in his pause.

  "I wonder if there is nothing really in life but this, the food hunt andthe love hunt. Is life just all hunger and need, and are we left withnothing--nothing at all--when these things are done?... We'reinfernally uncomfortable here."

  "Oh, nonsense!" cried Marjorie.

  "Think of your carpets at home! Think of the great, warm, beautifulhouse that wasn't big enough!--And yet here, we're happy."

  "We _are_ happy," said Marjorie, struck by the thought. "Only----"

  "Yes."

  "I'm afraid. And I long for the children. And the wind _nips_."

  "It may be those are good things for us. No! This is just a lark as yet,Marjorie. It's still fresh and full of distractions. The discomforts areamusing. Presently we'll get used to it. Then we'll talk out--what wehave to talk out.... I say, wouldn't it keep and improve this goose ofours if we put in a little brandy?"

  Sec. 2

  The weather broke at last. One might say it smashed itself over theirheads. There came an afternoon darkness swift and sudden, a wild galeand an icy sleet that gave place in the night to snow, so that Traffordlooked out next morning to see a maddening chaos of small white flakes,incredibly swift, against something that was neither darkness nor light.Even with the door but partly ajar a cruelty of cold put its clawwithin, set everything that was moveable swaying and clattering, andmade Marjorie hasten shuddering to heap fresh logs upon the fire. Onceor twice Trafford went out to inspect tent and roof and store-shed,several times wrapped to the nose he battled his way for fresh wood, andfor the rest of the blizzard they kept to the hut. It was slumberouslystuffy, but comfortingly full of flavours of tobacco and food. Therewere two days of intermission and a day of gusts and icy sleet again,turning with one extraordinary clap of thunder to a wild downpour ofdancing lumps of ice, and then a night when it seemed all Labrador,earth and sky together, was in hysterical protest against inconceivablewrongs.

  And then the break was over; the annual freezing-up was accomplished,winter had established itself, the snowfall moderated and ceased, and anice-bound world shone white and sunlit under a cloudless sky.

  Sec. 3

  Through all that time they got no further with the great discussion forwhich they had faced that solitude. They attempted beginnings.

  "Where had we got to when we left England?" cried Marjorie. "Youcouldn't work, you couldn't rest--you hated our life."

  "Yes, I know. I had a violent hatred of the lives we were leading. Ithought--we had to get away. To think.... But things don't leave usalone here."

  He covered his face with his hands.

  "Why did we come here?" he asked.

  "You wanted--to get out of things."

  "Yes. But with you.... Have we, after all, got out of things at all? Isaid coming up, perhaps we were leaving our own problem behind. Inexchange for other problems--old problems men have had before. We've gotnearer necessity; that's all. Things press on us just as much. There'snothing more fundamental in wild nature, nothing profounder--onlysomething earlier. One doesn't get out of life by going here orthere.... But I wanted to get you away--from all things that had such ahold on you....

  "When one lies awake at nights, then one seems to get down intothings...."

  He went to the door, opened it, and stood looking out. Against a wandaylight the snow was falling noiselessly and steadily.

  "Everything goes on," he said.... "Relentlessly...."

  Sec. 4

  That was as far as they had got when the storms ceased and they came outagain into an air inexpressibly fresh and sharp and sweet, and into aworld b
lindingly clean and golden white under the rays of the morningsun.

  "We will build a fire out here," said Marjorie; "make a great pile.There is no reason at all why we shouldn't live outside all through theday in such weather as this."

  Sec. 5

  One morning Trafford found the footmarks of some catlike creature in thesnow near the bushes where he was accustomed to get firewood; they ledaway very plainly up the hill, and after breakfast he took his knife andrifle and snowshoes and went after the lynx--for that he decided theanimal must be. There was no urgent reason why he should want to kill alynx, unless perhaps that killing it made the store shed a trifle safer;but it was the first trail of any living thing for many days; itpromised excitement; some primordial instinct perhaps urged him.

  The morning was a little overcast, and very cold between the gleams ofwintry sunshine. "Good-bye, dear wife!" he said, and then as sheremembered afterwards came back a dozen yards to kiss her. "I'll not belong," he said. "The beast's prowling, and if it doesn't get wind of meI ought to find it in an hour." He hesitated for a moment. "I'll not belong," he repeated, and she had an instant's wonder whether he hid fromher the same dread of loneliness that she concealed. Or perhaps he onlyknew her secret. Up among the tumbled rocks he turned, and she was stillwatching him. "Good-bye!" he cried and waved, and the willow thicketsclosed about him.

  She forced herself to the petty duties of the day, made up the fire fromthe pile he had left for her, set water to boil, put the hut in order,brought out sheets and blankets to air and set herself to wash up. Shewished she had been able to go with him. The sky cleared presently, andthe low December sun lit all the world about her, but it left her spiritdesolate.

  She did not expect him to return until mid-day, and she sat herself downon a log before the fire to darn a pair of socks as well as she could.For a time this unusual occupation held her attention and then her handsbecame slow and at last inactive, and she fell into reverie. She thoughtat first of her children and what they might be doing, in England acrossthere to the east it would be about five hours later, four o'clock inthe afternoon, and the children would be coming home through the warmmuggy London sunshine with Fraulein Otto to tea. She wondered if theyhad the proper clothes, if they were well; were they perhaps quarrellingor being naughty or skylarking gaily across the Park. Of course FrauleinOtto was all right, quite to be trusted, absolutely trustworthy, andtheir grandmother would watch for a flushed face or an irrationalpetulance or any of the little signs that herald trouble with more thana mother's instinctive alertness. No need to worry about the children,no need whatever.... The world of London opened out behind thesethoughts; it was so queer to think that she was in almost the samelatitude as the busy bright traffic of the autumn season in KensingtonGore; that away there in ten thousand cleverly furnished drawing-roomsthe ringing tea things were being set out for the rustling advent ofsmart callers and the quick leaping gossip. And there would be all sortsof cakes and little things; for a while her mind ran on cakes and littlethings, and she thought in particular whether it wasn't time to begincooking.... Not yet. What was it she had been thinking about? Ah! theSolomonsons and the Capeses and the Bernards and the Carmels and theLees. Would they talk of her and Trafford? It would be strange to goback to it all. Would they go back to it all? She found herself thinkingintently of Trafford.

  What a fine human being he was! And how touchingly human! The thoughtsof his moments of irritation, his baffled silences, filled her with awild passion of tenderness. She had disappointed him; all that lifefailed to satisfy him. Dear master of her life! what was it he needed?She too wasn't satisfied with life, but while she had been able toassuage herself with a perpetual series of petty excitements, theatres,new books and new people, meetings, movements, dinners, shows, he hadgrown to an immense discontent. He had most of the things men sought,wealth, respect, love, children.... So many men might have blunted theirheart-ache with--adventures. There were pretty women, clever women,unoccupied women. She felt she wouldn't have minded--_much_--if it madehim happy.... It was so wonderful he loved her still.... It wasn't thathe lacked occupation; on the whole he overworked. His businessinterests were big and wide. Ought he to go into politics? Why was itthat the researches that had held him once, could hold him now no more?That was the real pity of it. Was she to blame for that? She couldn'tstate a case against herself, and yet she felt she was to blame. She hadtaken him away from those things, forced him to make money....

  She sat chin on hand staring into the fire, the sock forgotten on herknee.

  She could not weigh justice between herself and him. If he was unhappyit was her fault. She knew if he was unhappy it was no excuse that shehad not known, had been misled, had a right to her own instincts andpurposes. She had got to make him happy. But what was she to do, whatwas there for her to do?...

  Only he could work out his own salvation, and until he had light, allshe could do was to stand by him, help him, cease to irritate him,watch, wait. Anyhow she could at least mend his socks as well aspossible, so that the threads would not chafe him....

  She flashed to her feet. What was that?

  It seemed to her she had heard the sound of a shot, and a quick briefwake of echoes. She looked across the icy waste of the river, and thenup the tangled slopes of the mountain. Her heart was beating very fast.It must have been up there, and no doubt he had killed his beast. Someshadow of doubt she would not admit crossed that obvious suggestion.

  This wilderness was making her as nervously responsive as a creature ofthe wild.

  Came a second shot; this time there was no doubt of it. Then thedesolate silence closed about her again.

  She stood for a long time staring at the shrubby slopes that rose to thebarren rock wilderness of the purple mountain crest. She sighed deeplyat last, and set herself to make up the fire and prepare for the mid-daymeal. Once far away across the river she heard the howl of a wolf.

  Time seemed to pass very slowly that day. She found herself goingrepeatedly to the space between the day tent and the sleeping hut fromwhich she could see the stunted wood that had swallowed him up, andafter what seemed a long hour her watch told her it was still onlyhalf-past twelve. And the fourth or fifth time that she went to look outshe was set atremble again by the sound of a third shot. And then atregular intervals out of that distant brown purple jumble of thicketsagainst the snow came two more shots. "Something has happened," shesaid, "something has happened," and stood rigid. Then she became active,seized the rifle that was always at hand when she was alone, fired intothe sky and stood listening.

  Prompt come an answering shot.

  "He wants me," said Marjorie. "Something----Perhaps he has killedsomething too big to bring!"

  She was for starting at once, and then remembered this was not the wayof the wilderness.

  She thought and moved very rapidly. Her mind catalogued possiblerequirements, rifle, hunting knife, the oilskin bag with matches, andsome chunks of dry paper, the rucksack--and he would be hungry. She tooka saucepan and a huge chunk of cheese and biscuit. Then a brandy flaskis sometimes handy--one never knows. Though nothing was wrong, ofcourse. Needles and stout thread, and some cord. Snowshoes. A waterproofcloak could be easily carried. Her light hatchet for wood. She castabout to see if there was anything else. She had almost forgottencartridges--and a revolver. Nothing more. She kicked a stray brand or sointo the fire, put on some more wood, damped the fire with an armful ofsnow to make it last longer, and set out towards the willows into whichhe had vanished.

  There was a rustling and snapping of branches as she pushed her waythrough the bushes, a little stir that died insensibly into quiet again;and then the camping place became very still....

  Scarcely a sound occurred, except for the little shuddering and stirringof the fire, and the reluctant, infrequent drip from the icicles alongthe sunny edge of the log hut roof. About one o'clock the amber sunshinefaded out altogether, a veil of clouds thickened and became greylyominous, and a little after two the firs
t flakes of a snowstorm fellhissing into the fire. A wind rose and drove the multiplying snowflakesin whirls and eddies before it. The icicles ceased to drip, but one ortwo broke and fell with a weak tinkling. A deep soughing, a shudderinggroaning of trees and shrubs, came ever and again out of the ravine, andthe powdery snow blew like puffs of smoke from the branches.

  By four the fire was out, and the snow was piling high in the darklingtwilight against tent and hut....

  Sec. 6

  Trafford's trail led Marjorie through the thicket of dwarf willows anddown to the gully of the rivulet which they had called Marjorie Trickle;it had long since become a trough of snow-covered rotten ice; the trailcrossed this and, turning sharply uphill, went on until it was clear ofshrubs and trees, and in the windy open of the upper slopes it crossed aridge and came over the lip of a large desolate valley with slopes ofice and icy snow. Here she spent some time in following his loops backon the homeward trail before she saw what was manifestly the final trailrunning far away out across the snow, with the spoor of the lynx, alightly-dotted line, to the right of it. She followed this suggestion ofthe trail, put on her snowshoes, and shuffled her way across thisvalley, which opened as she proceeded. She hoped that over the ridge shewould find Trafford, and scanned the sky for the faintest discolourationof a fire, but there was none. That seemed odd to her, but the wind wasin her face, and perhaps it beat the smoke down. Then as her eyesscanned the hummocky ridge ahead, she saw something, something veryintent and still, that brought her heart into her mouth. It was a big,grey wolf, standing with back haunched and head down, watching andwinding something beyond there, out of sight.

  Marjorie had an instinctive fear of wild animals, and it still seemeddreadful to her that they should go at large, uncaged. She suddenlywanted Trafford violently, wanted him by her side. Also she thought ofleaving the trail, going back to the bushes. She had to take herself inhand. In the wastes one did not fear wild beasts. One had no fear ofthem. But why not fire a shot to let him know she was near?

  The beast flashed round with an animal's instantaneous change of pose,and looked at her. For a couple of seconds, perhaps, woman and bruteregarded one another across a quarter of a mile of snowy desolation.

  Suppose it came towards her!

  She would fire--and she would fire at it. She made a guess at the rangeand aimed very carefully. She saw the snow fly two yards ahead of thegrisly shape, and then in an instant it had vanished over the crest.

  She reloaded, and stood for a moment waiting for Trafford's answer. Noanswer came. "Queer!" she whispered, "queer!"--and suddenly such ahorror of anticipation assailed her that she started running andfloundering through the snow to escape it. Twice she called his name,and once she just stopped herself from firing a shot.

  Over the ridge she would find him. Surely she would find him over theridge.

  She found herself among rocks, and there was a beaten and trampled placewhere Trafford must have waited and crouched. Then on and down a slopeof tumbled boulders. There came a patch where he had either thrownhimself down or fallen.

  It seemed to her he must have been running....

  Suddenly, a hundred feet or so away, she saw a patch of violentlydisturbed snow--snow stained a dreadful colour, a snow of scarletcrystals! Three strides and Trafford was in sight.

  She had a swift conviction he was dead. He was lying in a crumpledattitude on a patch of snow between convergent rocks, and the lynx, amass of blood smeared silvery fur, was in some way mixed up with him.She saw as she came nearer that the snow was disturbed round about them,and discoloured copiously, yellow widely, and in places bright red, withcongealed and frozen blood. She felt no fear now, and no emotion; allher mind was engaged with the clear, bleak perception of the fact beforeher. She did not care to call to him again. His head was hidden by thelynx's body, it was as if he was burrowing underneath the creature; hislegs were twisted about each other in a queer, unnatural attitude.

  Then, as she dropped off a boulder, and came nearer, Trafford moved. Ahand came out and gripped the rifle beside him; he suddenly lifted adreadful face, horribly scarred and torn, and crimson with frozen blood;he pushed the grey beast aside, rose on an elbow, wiped his sleeveacross his eyes, stared at her, grunted, and flopped forward. He hadfainted.

  She was now as clear-minded and as self-possessed as a woman in a shop.In another moment she was kneeling by his side. She saw, by the positionof his knife and the huge rip in the beast's body, that he had stabbedthe lynx to death as it clawed his head; he must have shot and woundedit and then fallen upon it. His knitted cap was torn to ribbons, andhung upon his neck. Also his leg was manifestly injured; how, she couldnot tell. It was chiefly evident he must freeze if he lay here. Itseemed to her that perhaps he had pulled the dead brute over him toprotect his torn skin from the extremity of cold. The lynx was alreadyrigid, its clumsy paws asprawl--the torn skin and clot upon Trafford'sface was stiff as she put her hands about his head to raise him. Sheturned him over on his back--how heavy he seemed!--and forced brandybetween his teeth. Then, after a moment's hesitation, she poured alittle brandy on his wounds.

  She glanced at his leg, which was surely broken, and back at his face.Then she gave him more brandy and his eyelids flickered. He moved hishand weakly. "The blood," he said, "kept getting in my eyes."

  She gave him brandy once again, wiped his face and glanced at his leg.Something ought to be done to that she thought. But things must be donein order.

  She stared up at the darkling sky with its grey promise of snow, anddown the slopes of the mountain. Clearly they must stay the night here.They were too high for wood among these rocks, but three or fourhundred yards below there were a number of dwarfed fir trees. She hadbrought an axe, so that a fire was possible. Should she go back to campand get the tent?

  Trafford was trying to speak again. "I got----" he said.

  "Yes?"

  "Got my leg in that crack. Damn--damned nuisance."

  Was he able to advise her? She looked at him, and then perceived shemust bind up his head and face. She knelt behind him and raised his headon her knee. She had a thick silk neck muffler, and this shesupplemented by a band she cut and tore from her inner vest. She boundthis, still warm from her body, about him, wrapped her cloak round him.The next thing was a fire. Five yards away, perhaps, a great mass ofpurple gabbro hung over a patch of nearly snowless moss. A hummock tothe westward offered shelter from the weakly bitter wind, the icydraught, that was soughing down the valley. Always in Labrador, if youcan, you camp against a rock surface; it shelters you from the wind,reflects your fire, guards your back.

  "Rag!" she said.

  "Rotten hole," said Trafford.

  "What?" she cried sharply.

  "Got you in a rotten hole," he said. "Eh?"

  "Listen," she said, and shook his shoulder. "Look! I want to get you upagainst that rock."

  "Won't make much difference," said Trafford, and opened his eyes."Where?" he asked.

  "There."

  He remained quite quiet for a second perhaps. "Listen to me," he said."Go back to camp."

  "Yes," she said.

  "Go back to camp. Make a pack of all the strongestfood--strenthin'--strengthrin' food--you know?" He seemed troubled toexpress himself.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Down the river. Down--down. Till you meet help."

  "Leave you?"

  He nodded his head and winced.

  "You're always plucky," he said. "Look facts in the face. Kiddies.Thought it over while you were coming." A tear oozed from his eye. "Notbe a fool, Madge. Kiss me good-bye. Not be a fool. I'm done. Kids."

  She stared at him and her spirit was a luminous mist of tears. "You old_coward_," she said in his ear, and kissed the little patch of rough andbloody cheek beneath his eye. Then she knelt up beside him. "_I'm_ bossnow, old man," she said. "I want to get you to that place there underthe rock. If I drag, can you help?"

  He answered obstinately: "You'd better go."

  "I'
ll make you comfortable first," she answered, "anyhow."

  He made an enormous effort, and then with her quick help and with hisback to her knee, had raised himself on his elbows.

  "And afterwards?" he asked.

  "Build a fire."

  "Wood?"

  "Down there."

  "Two bits of wood tied on my leg--splints. Then I can drag myself. See?Like a blessed old walrus."

  He smiled, and she kissed his bandaged face again.

  "Else it hurts," he apologized, "more than I can stand."

  She stood up again, thought, put his rifle and knife to his hand forfear of that lurking wolf, abandoning her own rifle with an effort, andwent striding and leaping from rock to rock towards the trees below. Shemade the chips fly, and was presently towing three venerable pinedwarfs, bumping over rock and crevice, back to Trafford. She flung themdown, stood for a moment bright and breathless, then set herself to hackoff the splints he needed from the biggest stem. "Now," she said, comingto him.

  "A fool," he remarked, "would have made the splints down there.You're--_good_, Marjorie."

  She lugged his leg out straight, put it into the natural and leastpainful pose, padded it with moss and her torn handkerchief, and boundit up. As she did so a handful of snowflakes came whirling about them.She was now braced up to every possibility. "It never rains," she saidgrimly, "but it pours," and went on with her bone-setting. He was badlyweakened by pain and shock, and once he swore at her sharply. "Sorry,"he said.

  She rolled him over on his chest, and left him to struggle to theshelter of the rock while she went for more wood.

  The sky alarmed her. The mountains up the valley were already hidden bydriven rags of slaty snowstorms. This time she found a longer but easierpath for dragging her boughs and trees; she determined she would notstart the fire until nightfall, nor waste any time in preparing fooduntil then. There were dead boughs for kindling--more than enough. Itwas snowing quite fast by the time she got up to him with her secondload, and a premature twilight already obscured and exaggerated therocks and mounds about her. She gave some of her cheese to Trafford, andgnawed some herself on her way down to the wood again. She regrettedthat she had brought neither candles nor lantern, because then she mighthave kept on until the cold of night stopped her, and she reproachedherself bitterly because she had brought no tea. She could forgiveherself the lantern, she had never expected to be out after dark, butthe tea was inexcusable. She muttered self-reproaches while she workedlike two men among the trees, panting puffs of mist that froze upon herlips and iced the knitted wool that covered her chin. Why don't theyteach a girl to handle an axe?...

  When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it foundTrafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughsbetween the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well husbandedfire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup oflynx-flesh, that she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy.Then they tried roast lynx and ate a little, and finished with somescraps of cheese and deep draughts of hot water. Then--oh Tyburnia andChelsea and all that is becoming!--they smoked Trafford's pipe foralternate minutes, and Marjorie found great comfort in it.

  The snowstorm poured incessantly out of the darkness to become flakes ofburning fire in the light of the flames, flakes that vanished magically,but it only reached them and wetted them in occasional gusts. What didit matter for the moment if the dim snow-heaps rose and rose about them?A glorious fatigue, an immense self-satisfaction possessed Marjorie; shefelt that they had both done well.

  "I am not afraid of to-morrow now," she said at last--a thought matured."_No!_"

  Trafford had the pipe and did not speak for a moment. "Nor I," he saidat last. "Very likely we'll get through with it." He added after apause: "I thought I was done for. A man--loses heart. After a loss ofblood."

  "The leg's better?"

  "Hot as fire." His humour hadn't left him. "It's a treat," he said. "Thehottest thing in Labrador."

  "I've been a good squaw this time, old man?" she asked suddenly.

  He seemed not to hear her; then his lips twitched and he made a feeblemovement for her hand. "I cursed you," he said....

  She slept, but on a spring as it were, lest the fire should fall. Shereplenished it with boughs, tucked in the half-burnt logs, and went tosleep again. Then it seemed to her that some invisible hand was pouringa thin spirit on the flames that made them leap and crackle and spreadnorth and south until they filled the heavens. Her eyes were open andthe snowstorm overpast, leaving the sky clear, and all the westwardheaven alight with the trailing, crackling, leaping curtains of theAurora, brighter than she had ever seen them before. Quite clearlyvisible beyond the smoulder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock andsnow, boulder beyond boulder, passed into a dun obscurity. The mountainto the right of them lay long and white and stiff, a shrouded death. Allearth was dead and waste and nothing, and the sky alive and coldlymarvellous, signalling and astir. She watched the changing, shiftingcolours, and they made her think of the gathering banners of inhumanhosts, the stir and marshalling of icy giants for ends stupendous andindifferent to all the trivial impertinence of man's existence....

  That night the whole world of man seemed small and shallow and insecureto her, beyond comparison. One came, she thought, but just a little wayout of its warm and sociable cities hither, and found this homelesswilderness; one pricked the thin appearances of life with microscope ortelescope and came to an equal strangeness. All the pride and hope ofhuman life goes to and fro in a little shell of air between this ancientglobe of rusty nickel-steel and the void of space; faint specks we arewithin a film; we quiver between the atom and the infinite, being hardlymore substantial than the glow within an oily skin that drifts upon thewater. The wonder and the riddle of it! Here she and Trafford were!Phantasmal shapes of unsubstantial fluid thinly skinned againstevaporation and wrapped about with woven wool and the skins of beasts,that yet reflected and perceived, suffered and sought to understand;that held a million memories, framed thoughts that plumbed the deeps ofspace and time,--and another day of snow or icy wind might leave themjust scattered bones and torn rags gnawed by a famishing wolf!...

  She felt a passionate desire to pray....

  She glanced at Trafford beside her, and found him awake and staring. Hisface was very pale and strange in that livid, flickering light. Shewould have spoken, and then she saw his lips were moving, and something,something she did not understand, held her back from doing so.

  Sec. 7

  The bleak, slow dawn found Marjorie intently busy. She had made up thefire, boiled water and washed and dressed Trafford's wounds, and madeanother soup of lynx. But Trafford had weakened in the night, the stuffnauseated him, he refused it and tried to smoke and was sick, and thensat back rather despairfully after a second attempt to persuade her toleave him there to die. This failure of his spirit distressed her and alittle astonished her, but it only made her more resolute to go throughwith her work. She had awakened cold, stiff and weary, but her fatiguevanished with movement; she toiled for an hour replenishing her pile offuel, made up the fire, put his gun ready to his hand, kissed him,abused him lovingly for the trouble he gave her until his poor torn facelit in response, and then parting on a note of cheerful confidence setout to return to the hut. She found the way not altogether easy to makeout, wind and snow had left scarcely a trace of their tracks, and hermind was full of the stores she must bring and the possibility of movinghim nearer to the hut. She was startled to see by the fresh, deep spooralong the ridge how near the wolf had dared approach them in thedarkness....

  Ever and again Marjorie had to halt and look back to get her directionright. As it was she came through the willow scrub nearly half a mileabove the hut, and had to follow the steep bank of the frozen riverdown. At one place she nearly slipped upon an icy slope of rock.

  One possibility she did not dare to think of during that time; ablizzard now would cut her off absolutely from any return to Trafford.Short
of that she believed she could get through.

  Her quick mind was full of all she had to do. At first she had thoughtchiefly of his immediate necessities, of food and some sort of shelter.She had got a list of things in her head--meat extract, bandages,corrosive sublimate by way of antiseptic, brandy, a tin of beef, somebread and so forth; she went over that several times to be sure of it,and then for a time she puzzled about a tent. She thought she couldmanage a bale of blankets on her back, and that she could rig a sleepingtent for herself and Trafford with one and some bent sticks. The bigtent would be too much to strike and shift. And then her mind went on toa bolder enterprise, which was to get him home. The nearer she couldbring him to the log hut, the nearer they would be to supplies. She castabout for some sort of sledge. The snow was too soft and broken forrunners, especially among the trees, but if she could get a flat ofsmooth wood she thought she might be able to drag him. She decided totry the side of her bunk. She could easily get that off. She would have,of course, to run it edgewise through the thickets and across theravine, but after that she would have almost clear going until shereached the steep place of broken rocks within two hundred yards of him.The idea of a sledge grew upon her, and she planned to nail a rope alongthe edge and make a kind of harness for herself.

  She found the camping-place piled high with drifted snow, which hadinvaded tent and hut, and that some beast, a wolverine she guessed, hadbeen into the hut, devoured every candle-end and the uppers ofTrafford's well-greased second boots, and had then gone to the corner ofthe store shed and clambered up to the stores. She made no account ofits depredations there, but set herself to make a sledge and get hersupplies together. There was a gleam of sunshine, but she did not likethe look of the sky, and she was horribly afraid of what might behappening to Trafford. She carried her stuff through the wood and acrossthe ravine, and returned for her improvised sledge. She was stillstruggling with that among the trees when it began to snow again.

  It was hard then not to be frantic in her efforts. As it was, she packedher stuff so loosely on the planking that she had to repack it, and shestarted without putting on her snowshoes, and floundered fifty yardsbefore she discovered that omission. The snow was now falling fast,darkling the sky and hiding everything but objects close at hand, andshe had to use all her wits to determine her direction; she knew shemust go down a long slope and then up to the ridge, and it came to heras a happy inspiration that if she bore to the left she might strikesome recognizable vestige of her morning's trail. She had read of peoplewalking in circles when they have no light or guidance, and thattroubled her until she bethought herself of the little compass on herwatch chain. By that she kept her direction. She wished very much shehad timed herself across the waste, so that she could tell when sheapproached the ridge.

  Soon her back and shoulders were aching violently, and the rope acrossher chest was tugging like some evil-tempered thing. But she did notdare to rest. The snow was now falling thick and fast, the flakes tracedwhite spirals and made her head spin, so that she was constantly fallingaway to the south-westward and then correcting herself by the compass.She tried to think how this zig-zagging might affect her course, but thesnow whirls confused her mind and a growing anxiety would not let herpause to think. She felt blinded; it seemed to be snowing inside hereyes so that she wanted to rub them. Soon the ground must rise to theridge, she told herself; it must surely rise. Then the sledge camebumping at her heels and she perceived she was going down hill. Sheconsulted the compass, and she found she was facing south. She turnedsharply to the right again. The snowfall became a noiseless, pitilesstorture to sight and mind.

  The sledge behind her struggled to hold her back, and the snow balledunder her snowshoes. She wanted to stop and rest, take thought, sit fora moment. She struggled with herself and kept on. She tried walkingwith shut eyes, and tripped and came near sprawling. "Oh God!" shecried, "oh God!" too stupefied for more articulate prayers.

  Would the rise of the ground to the ribs of rock never come?

  A figure, black and erect, stood in front of her suddenly, and beyondappeared a group of black, straight antagonists. She staggered ontowards them, gripping her rifle with some muddled idea of defence, andin another moment she was brushing against the branches of a stuntedfir, which shed thick lumps of snow upon her feet. What trees werethese? Had she ever passed any trees? No! There were no trees on her wayto Trafford....

  She began whimpering like a tormented child. But even as she wept sheturned her sledge about to follow the edge of the wood. She was too muchdownhill, she thought and she must bear up again.

  She left the trees behind, made an angle uphill to the right, and waspresently among trees again. Again she left them and again came back tothem. She screamed with anger at them and twitched her sledge away. Shewiped at the snowstorm with her arm as though she would wipe it away.She wanted to stamp on the universe....

  And she ached, she ached....

  Something caught her eye ahead, something that gleamed; it was exactlylike a long, bare rather pinkish bone standing erect on the ground. Justbecause it was strange and queer she ran forward to it. Then as she camenearer she perceived it was a streak of barked trunk; a branch had beentorn off a pine tree and the bark stripped down to the root. And thenher foot hit against a freshly hewn stump, and then came another, pokingits pinkish wounds above the snow. And there were chips! This filledher with wonder. Some one had been cutting wood! There must be Indiansor trappers near, she thought, and then realized the wood-cutter couldbe none other than herself.

  She turned to the right and saw the rocks rising steeply close at hand."Oh Rag!" she cried, and fired her rifle in the air.

  Ten seconds, twenty seconds, and then so loud and near it amazed her,came his answering shot. It sounded like the hillside bursting.

  In another moment she had discovered the trail she had made overnightand that morning by dragging firewood. It was now a shallow soft whitetrench. Instantly her despair and fatigue had gone from her. Should shetake a load of wood with her? she asked herself, in addition to theweight behind her, and had a better idea. She would unload and pile herstuff here, and bring him down on the sledge closer to the wood. Shelooked about and saw two rocks that diverged with a space between. Sheflashed schemes. She would trample the snow hard and flat, put hersledge on it, pile boughs and make a canopy of blanket overhead andbehind. Then a fire in front.

  She saw her camp admirable. She tossed her provisions down and ran upthe broad windings of her pine-tree trail to Trafford, with the unloadedsledge bumping behind her. She ran as lightly as though she had donenothing that day.

  She found him markedly recovered, weak and quiet, with snow driftingover his feet, his rifle across his knees, and his pipe alight. "Backalready," he said, "but----"

  He hesitated. "No grub?"

  She knelt over him, gave his rough unshaven cheek a swift kiss, and veryrapidly explained her plan.

  Sec. 8

  In three days' time they were back at the hut, and the last two daysthey wore blue spectacles because of the mid-day glare of the sunlitsnow.

  It amazed Marjorie to discover as she lay awake in the camp on the edgeof the ravine close to the hut to which she had lugged Trafford duringthe second day, that she was deeply happy. It was preposterous that sheshould be so, but those days of almost despairful stress were irradiatednow by a new courage. She was doing this thing, against all Labrador andthe snow-driving wind that blew from the polar wilderness, she waswinning. It was a great discovery to her that hardship and effort almostto the breaking-point could ensue in so deep a satisfaction. She lay andthought how deep and rich life had become for her, as though in all thiseffort and struggle some unsuspected veil had been torn away. Sheperceived again, but now with no sense of desolation, that same infinitefragility of life which she had first perceived when she had watched theAurora Borealis flickering up the sky. Beneath that realization andcarrying it, as a river flood may carry scum, was a sense of herself assomething deeper, gre
ater, more enduring than mountain or wilderness orsky, or any of those monstrous forms of nature that had dwarfed herphysical self to nothingness.

  She had a persuasion of self detachment and illumination, and withal ofself-discovery. She saw her life of time and space for what it was. Awayin London the children, with the coldest of noses and the gayest ofspirits, would be scampering about their bedrooms in the mild morningsunlight of a London winter; Elsie, the parlourmaid, would be whiskingdexterous about the dining-room, the bacon would be cooking and thecoffee-mill at work, the letters of the morning delivery perhaps justpattering into the letter-box, and all the bright little household shehad made, with all the furniture she had arranged, all thecharacteristic decoration she had given it, all the clever convenientarrangements, would be getting itself into action for another day--and_it wasn't herself!_ It was the extremest of her superficiality.

  She had come out of all that, and even so it seemed she had come out ofherself; this weary woman lying awake on the balsam boughs with a braincleared by underfeeding and this continuous arduous bath of toil insnow-washed, frost cleansed, starry air, this, too, was no more than amomentarily clarified window for her unknown and indefinable reality.What was that reality? what was she herself? She became interested inframing an answer to that, and slipped down from the peace of soul shehad attained. Her serenity gave way to a reiteration of this question,reiterations increasing and at last oppressing like the snowflakes of astorm, perpetual whirling repetitions that at last confused her and hidthe sky....

  She fell asleep....

  Sec. 9

  With their return to the hut, Marjorie had found herself encountering anew set of urgencies. In their absence that wretched little wolverinehad found great plenty and happiness in the tent and store-shed; itstraces were manifest nearly everywhere, and it had particularly assailedthe candles, after a destructive time among the frozen caribou beef. Ithad clambered up on the packages of sardines and jumped thence on to asloping pole that it could claw along into the frame of the roof. Sherearranged the packages, but that was no good. She could not leaveTrafford in order to track the brute down, and for a night or so shecould not think of any way of checking its depredations. It came eachnight.... Trafford kept her close at home. She had expected that when hewas back in his bunk, secure and warm, he would heal rapidly, butinstead he suddenly developed all the symptoms of a severe feverishcold, and his scars, which had seemed healing, became flushed andugly-looking. Moreover, there was something wrong with his leg, anominous ache that troubled her mind. Every woman, she decided, ought toknow how to set a bone. He was unable to sleep by reason of thesemiseries, though very desirous of doing so. He became distressingly weakand inert, he ceased to care for food, and presently he began ta talk tohimself with a complete disregard of her presence. Hourly she regrettedher ignorance of medicine that left her with no conceivable remedy forall the aching and gnawing that worried and weakened him, except bathingwith antiseptics and a liberal use of quinine.

  And his face became strange to her, for over his flushed and sunkencheeks, under the raw spaces of the scar a blond beard bristled andgrew. Presently, Trafford was a bearded man.

  Incidentally, however, she killed the wolverine by means of a trap ofher own contrivance, a loaded rifle with a bait of what was nearly herlast candles, rigged to the trigger.

  But this loss of the candles brought home to them the steady lengtheningof the nights. Scarcely seven hours of day remained now in the black,cold grip of the darkness. And through those seventeen hours of chillaggression they had no light but the red glow of the stove. She had toclose the door of the hut and bar every chink and cranny against the icyair, that became at last a murderous, freezing wind. Not only did sheline the hut with every scrap of skin and paper she could obtain, butshe went out with the spade toiling for three laborious afternoons inpiling and beating snow against the outer frame. And now it was thatTrafford talked at last, talked with something of the persistence ofdelirium, and she sat and listened hour by hour, silently, for he gaveno heed to her or to anything she might say. He talked, it seemed, toGod....

  Sec. 10

  Darkness about a sullen glow of red, and a voice speaking.

  The voice of a man, fevered and in pain, wounded and amidst hardship anddanger, struggling with the unrelenting riddle of his being. Ever andagain when a flame leapt she would see his face, haggard, bearded,changed, and yet infinitely familiar.

  His voice varied, now high and clear, now mumbling, now vexed andexpostulating, now rich with deep feeling, now fagged and slow; hismatter varied, too; now he talked like one who is inspired, and now likeone lost and confused, stupidly repeating phrases, going back upon amisleading argument, painfully, laboriously beginning over and overagain. Marjorie sat before the stove watching it burn and sink,replenishing it, preparing food, and outside the bitter wind moaned andblew the powdery snow before it, and the shortening interludes ofpallid, diffused daylight which pass for days in such weather, came andwent. Intense cold had come now with leaden snowy days and starlessnights.

  Sometimes his speech filled her mind, seemed to fill all her world;sometimes she ceased to listen, following thoughts of her own.Sometimes she dozed; sometimes she awakened from sleep to find himtalking. But slowly she realized a thread in his discourse, a progressand development.

  Sometimes he talked of his early researches, and then he would tracecomputations with his hands as if he were using a blackboard, and becamedistressed to remember what he had written. Sometimes he would be underthe claws of the lynx again, and fighting for his eyes. "Ugh!" he said,"keep those hind legs still. Keep your hind legs still! Knife? Knife?Ah! got it. Gu--u--u, you _Beast!_"

  But the gist of his speech was determined by the purpose of his journeyto Labrador. At last he was reviewing his life and hers, and all thattheir life might signify, even as he determined to do. She began toperceive that whatever else drifted into his mind and talk, thisrecurred and grew, that he returned to the conclusion he had reached,and not to the beginning of the matter, and went on from that....

  "You see," he said, "our lives are nothing--nothing in themselves. Iknow that; I've never had any doubts of that. We individuals just pickup a mixed lot of things out of the powers that begat us, and lay themdown again presently a little altered, that's all--heredities,traditions, the finger nails of my grandfather, a great-aunt's lips, thefaith of a sect, the ideas of one's time. We live and then we die, andthe threads run, dispersing this way and that. To make other peopleagain. Whatever's immortal isn't that, our looks or our habits, ourthoughts or our memories--just the shapes, these are, of one immortalstuff.... One immortal stuff."...

  The voice died away as if he was baffled. Then it resumed.

  "But we ought to _partake_ of immortality; that's my point. We ought topartake of immortality.

  "I mean we're like the little elements in a magnet; ought not to liehiggledy-piggledy, ought to point the same way, bepolarized----Somethingmicrocosmic, you know, ought to be found in a man.

  "Analogies run away with one. Suppose the bar isn't magnetized yet!Suppose purpose has to come; suppose the immortal stuff isn't yet, isn'tbeing but struggling to be. Struggling to be.... Gods! that morning! Whenthe child was born! And afterwards she was there--with a smile on herlips, and a little flushed and proud--as if nothing had happened so verymuch out of the way. Nothing so wonderful. And we had another lifebesides our own!..."

  Afterwards he came back to that. "That was a good image," he said,"something trying to exist, which isn't substance, doesn't belong tospace or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to getthrough. Just confused birth cries, eyes that hardly see, deaf ears,poor little thrusting hands. A thing altogether blind at first, atwitching and thrusting of protoplasm under the waters, and then theplants creeping up the beaches, the insects and reptiles on the marginsof the rivers, beasts with a flicker of light in their eyes answeringthe sun. And at last, out of the long interplay of desire and fear, anape, an ape that sta
red and wondered, and scratched queer pictures on abone...."

  He lapsed into silent thought for a time, and Marjorie glanced at hisdim face in the shadows.

  "I say nothing of ultimates," he said at last.

  He repeated that twice before his thoughts would flow again.

  "This is as much as I see, in time as I know it and space as I knowit--_something struggling to exist_. It's true to the end of my limits.What can I say beyond that? It struggles to exist, becomes conscious,becomes now conscious of itself. That is where I come in, as a part ofit. Above the beast in me is that--the desire to know better, toknow--beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge. That's all there is inlife for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up. This Being--openingits eyes, listening, trying to comprehend. Every good thing in man isthat;--looking and making pictures, listening and making songs, makingphilosophies and sciences, trying new powers, bridge and engine, sparkand gun. At the bottom of my soul, _that_. We began withbone-scratching. We're still--near it. I am just a part of thisbeginning--mixed with other things. Every book, every art, everyreligion is that, the attempt to understand and express--mixed withother things. Nothing else matters, nothing whatever. I tellyou----Nothing whatever!

  "I've always believed that. All my life I've believed that.

  "Only I've forgotten."

  "Every man with any brains believes that at the bottom of his heart.Only he gets busy and forgets. He goes shooting lynxes and breaks hisleg. Odd, instinctive, brutal thing to do--to go tracking down a lynx tokill it! I grant you that, Marjorie. I grant you that."

  "Grant me what?" she cried, startled beyond measure to hear herselfaddressed.

  "Grant you that it is rather absurd to go hunting a lynx. And what bigpaws it has--disproportionately big! I wonder if that's an adaptation tosnow. Tremendous paws they are.... But the real thing, I was saying, thereal thing is to get knowledge, and express it. All things lead up tothat. Civilization, social order, just for that. Except for that, allthe life of man, all his affairs, his laws and police, his morals andmanners--nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Lynx hunts! Just ways of gettingthemselves mauled and clawed perhaps--into a state of understanding. Whoknows?..."

  His voice became low and clear.

  "Understanding spreading like a dawn....

  "Logic and language, clumsy implements, but rising to our needs, risingto our needs, thought clarified, enriched, reaching out to every manalive--some day--presently--touching every man alive, harmonizing actsand plans, drawing men into gigantic co-operations, tremendousco-operations....

  "Until man shall stand upon this earth as upon a footstool and reach outhis hand among the stars....

  "And then I went into the rubber market, and spent seven years of mylife driving shares up and down and into a net!... Queer game indeed!Stupid ass Behrens was--at bottom....

  "There's a flaw in it somewhere...."

  He came back to that several times before he seemed able to go on fromit.

  "There _is_ a collective mind," he said, "a growing generalconsciousness--growing clearer. Something put me away from that, but Iknow it. My work, my thinking, was a part of it. That's why I was so madabout Behrens."

  "Behrens?"

  "Of course. He'd got a twist, a wrong twist. It makes me angry now. Itwill take years, it will eat up some brilliant man to clean up afterBehrens----"

  "Yes, but the point is"--his voice became acute--"why did I go makingmoney and let Behrens in? Why generally and in all sorts of things doesBehrens come in?..."

  He was silent for a long time, and then he began to answer himself. "Ofcourse," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about this collectivemind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out oflife--not the common stuff of life. An exhalation.... It's like thelittle tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comesdrifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet....The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It'swhat I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Justas far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling andthought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expressionof the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieveSalvation.... Salvation!...

  "I wonder, is Salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one manSalvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art,and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. Hehas to do it in the spirit...."

  There came a silence as though some difficulty baffled him, and he wasfeeling back to get his argument again.

  "This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposelesstriviality, _isn't_ life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point.That's a very important point."

  Something had come to him.

  "I've never talked of this to Marjorie. I've lived with her nine yearsand more, and never talked of religion. Not once. That's so queer of us.Any other couple in any other time would have talked religion no end....People ought to."

  Then he stuck out an argumentative hand. "You see, Marjorie _is_ life,"he said.

  "She took me."

  He spoke slowly, as though he traced things carefully. "Before I met herI suppose I wasn't half alive. No! Yet I don't remember I feltparticularly incomplete. Women were interesting, of course; they excitedme at times, that girl at Yonkers!--H'm. I stuck to my work. It was finework, I forget half of it now, the half-concealed intimations Imean--queer how one forgets!--but I know I felt my way to wide, deepthings. It was like exploring caves--monstrous, limitless caves. Suchcaves!... Very still--underground. Wonderful and beautiful.... They'relying there now for other men to seek. Other men will find them.... Then_she_ came, as though she was taking possession. The beauty of her, oh!the life and bright eagerness, and the incompatibility! That's theriddle! I've loved her always. When she came to my arms it seemed to methe crown of life. Caves indeed! Old caves! Nothing else seemed tomatter. But something did. All sorts of things did. I found that outsoon enough. And when that first child was born. That for a time wassupreme.... Yes--she's the quintessence of life, the dear greed of her,the appetite, the clever appetite for things. She grabs. She's so damnedclever! The light in her eyes! Her quick sure hands!... Only my work wascrowded out of my life and ended, and she didn't seem to feel it, shedidn't seem to mind it. There was a sort of disregard. Disregard. Asthough all that didn't really matter...."

  "_My dear!_" whispered Marjorie unheeded. She wanted to tell him itmattered now, mattered supremely, but she knew he had no ears for her.

  His voice flattened. "It's perplexing," he said. "The two differentthings."

  Then suddenly he cried out harshly: "I ought never to have marriedher--never, never! I had my task. I gave myself to her. Oh! the highimmensities, the great and terrible things open to the mind of man! Andwe breed children and live in littered houses and play with our food andchatter, chatter, chatter. Oh, the chatter of my life! The folly! Thewomen with their clothes. I can hear them rustle now, whiff the scent ofit! The scandals--as though the things they did with themselves and eachother mattered a rap; the little sham impromptu clever things, thetrying to keep young--and underneath it all that continual cheating,cheating, cheating, damning struggle for money!...

  "Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie! Why is she so good and no better! Whywasn't she worth it altogether?...

  "No! I don't want to go on with it any more--ever. I want to go back.

  "I want my life over again, and to go back.

  "I want research, and the spirit of research that has died in me, andthat still, silent room of mine again, that room, as quiet as a cell,and the toil that led to light. Oh! the coming of that light, the uprushof discovery, the solemn joy as the generalization rises like a sun uponthe facts--floods them with a common meaning. That is what I want. Thatis what I have always wanted....

  "Give me my time oh God! again; I am sick of this life I have chosen. Iam sick of it! This--busy death! Give me my time again.... Why did youmake m
e, and then waste me like this? Why are we made for folly uponfolly? Folly! and brains made to scale high heaven, smeared into thedust! Into the dust, into the dust. Dust!..."

  He passed into weak, wandering repetitions of disconnected sentences,that died into whispers and silence, and Marjorie watched him andlistened to him, and waited with a noiseless dexterity upon his everyneed.

  Sec. 11

  One day, she did not know what day, for she had lost count of the days,Marjorie set the kettle to boil and opened the door of the hut to lookout, and the snow was ablaze with diamonds, and the air was sweet andstill. It occurred to her that it would be well to take Trafford outinto that brief brightness. She looked at him and found his eyes uponthe sunlight quiet and rather wondering eyes.

  "Would you like to get out into that?" she asked abruptly.

  "Yes," he said, and seemed disposed to get up.

  "You've got a broken leg," she cried, to arrest his movement, and helooked at her and answered: "Of course--I forgot."

  She was all atremble that he should recognize her and speak to her. Shepulled her rude old sledge alongside his bunk, and kissed him, andshowed him how to shift and drop himself upon the plank. She took him inher arms and lowered him. He helped weakly but understandingly, and shewrapped him up warmly on the planks and lugged him out and built up abig fire at his feet, wondering, but as yet too fearful to rejoice, atthe change that had come to him.

  He said no more, but his eyes watched her move about with a kind oftired curiosity. He smiled for a time at the sun, and shut his eyes, andstill faintly smiling, lay still. She had a curious fear that if shetried to talk to him this new lucidity would vanish again. She wentabout the business of the morning, glancing at him ever and again, untilsuddenly the calm of his upturned face smote her, and she ran to himand crouched down to him between hope and a terrible fear, and foundthat he was sleeping, and breathing very lightly, sleeping with the deepunconsciousness of a child....

  When he awakened the sun was red in the west. His eyes met hers, and heseemed a little puzzled.

  "I've been sleeping, Madge?" he said.

  She nodded.

  "And dreaming? I've a vague sort of memory of preaching and preaching ina kind of black, empty place, where there wasn't anything.... A fury ofexposition ... a kind of argument.... I say!--Is there such a thing inthe world as a new-laid egg--and some bread-and-butter?"

  He seemed to reflect. "Of course," he said, "I broke my leg. Gollys! Ithought that beast was going to claw my eyes out. Lucky, Madge, itdidn't get my eyes. It was just a chance it didn't."

  He stared at her.

  "I say," he said, "you've had a pretty rough time! How long has thisbeen going on?"

  He amazed her by rising himself on his elbow and sitting up.

  "Your leg!" she cried.

  He put his hand down and felt it. "Pretty stiff," he said. "You get mesome food--there _were_ some eggs, Madge, frozen new-laid, anyhow--andthen we'll take these splints off and feel about a bit. Eh! why not? Howdid you get me out of that scrape, Madge? I thought I'd got to be frozeas safe as eggs. (Those eggs ought to be all right, you know. If you putthem on in a saucepan and wait until they boil.) I've a sort of muddledimpression.... By Jove, Madge, you've had a time! I say you _have_ had atime!"

  His eyes, full of a warmth of kindliness she had not seen for longweeks, scrutinized her face. "I say!" he repeated, very softly.

  All her strength went from her at his tenderness. "Oh, my dear," shewailed, kneeling at his side, "my dear, dear!" and still regardful ofhis leg, she yet contrived to get herself weeping into his coveted arms.

  He regarded her, he held her, he patted her back! The infinite luxury toher! He'd come back. He'd come back to her.

  "How long has it been?" he asked. "Poor dear! Poor dear! How long can ithave been?"

  Sec. 12

  From that hour Trafford mended. He remained clear-minded, helpful,sustaining. His face healed daily. Marjorie had had to cut away greatfragments of gangrenous frozen flesh, and he was clearly destined tohave a huge scar over forehead and cheek, but in that pure, clear air,once the healing had begun it progressed swiftly. His leg had set, alittle shorter than its fellow and with a lump in the middle of theshin, but it promised to be a good serviceable leg none the less. Theyexamined it by the light of the stove with their heads together, anddiscussed when it would be wise to try it. How do doctors tell when aman may stand on his broken leg? She had a vague impression you mustwait six weeks, but she could not remember why she fixed upon that time.

  "It seems a decent interval," said Trafford. "We'll try it."

  She had contrived a crutch for him against that momentous experiment,and he sat up in his bunk, pillowed up by a sack and her rugs, andwhittled it smooth, and padded the fork with the skin of thatslaughtered wolverine, poor victim of hunger!--while she knelt by thestove feeding it with logs, and gave him an account of their position.

  "We're somewhere in the middle of December," she said, "somewherebetween the twelfth and the fourteenth,--yes! I'm as out as that!--andI've handled the stores pretty freely. So did that little beast until Igot him." She nodded at the skin in his hand. "I don't see myselfshooting much now, and so far I've not been able to break the ice tofish. It's too much for me. Even if it isn't too late to fish. This bookwe've got describes barks and mosses, and that will help, but if westick here until the birds and things come, we're going to be preciousshort. We may have to last right into July. I've plans--but it may cometo that. We ought to ration all the regular stuff, and trust to luck fora feast. The rations!--I don't know what they'll come to."

  "Right O," said Trafford admiring her capable gravity. "Let's ration."

  "Marjorie," he asked abruptly, "are you sorry we came?"

  Her answer came unhesitatingly. "_No!_"

  "Nor I."

  He paused. "I've found you out," he said. "Dear dirty living thing!...You _are_ dirty, you know."

  "I've found myself," she answered, thinking. "I feel as if I've neverloved you until this hut. I suppose I have in my way----"

  "Lugano," he suggested. "Don't let's forget good things, Marjorie. Oh!And endless times!"

  "Oh, of course! As for _that_----! But now--now you're in my bones. Wewere just two shallow, pretty, young things--loving. It was sweet,dear--sweet as youth--but not this. Unkempt and weary--then oneunderstands love. I suppose I _am_ dirty. Think of it! I've lugged youthrough the snow till my shoulders chafed and bled. I cried with pain,and kept on lugging----Oh, my dear! my dear!" He kissed her hair. "I'veheld you in my arms to keep you from freezing. (I'd have frozen myselffirst.) We've got to starve together perhaps before the end.... Dear, ifI could make you, you should eat me.... I'm--I'm beginning tounderstand. I've had a light. I've begun to understand. I've begun tosee what life has been for you, and how I've wasted--wasted."

  "_We've_ wasted!"

  "No," she said, "it was I."

  She sat back on the floor and regarded him. "You don't remember thingsyou said--when you were delirious?"

  "No," he answered. "What did I say?"

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing clearly. What did I say?"

  "It doesn't matter. No, indeed. Only you made me understand. You'd neverhave told me. You've always been a little weak with me there. But it'splain to me why we didn't keep our happiness, why we were estranged. Ifwe go back alive, we go back--all that settled for good and all."

  "What?"

  "That discord. My dear, I've been a fool, selfish, ill-trained andgreedy. We've both been floundering about, but I've been the mischief ofit. Yes, I've been the trouble. Oh, it's had to be so. What are wewomen--half savages, half pets, unemployed things of greed anddesire--and suddenly we want all the rights and respect of souls! I'vehad your life in my hands from the moment we met together. If I hadknown.... It isn't that we can make you or guide you--I'm not pretendingto be an inspiration--but--but we can release you. We needn't press uponyou; we can save you from the instincts and passions that try to
wasteyou altogether on us.... Yes, I'm beginning to understand. Oh, my child,my husband, my man! You talked of your wasted life!... I've beenthinking--since first we left the Mersey. I've begun to see what it isto be a woman. For the first time in my life. We're the responsible sex.And we've forgotten it. We think we've done a wonder if we've borne meninto the world and smiled a little, but indeed we've got to bear themall our lives.... A woman has to be steadier than a man and moreself-sacrificing than a man, because when she plunges she does more harmthan a man.... And what does she achieve if she does plunge?Nothing--nothing worth counting. Dresses and carpets and hangings andpretty arrangements, excitements and satisfactions and competition andmore excitements. We can't _do_ things. We don't bring things off! Andyou, you Monster! you Dream! you want to stick your hand out of all thatis and make something that isn't, begin to be! That's the man----"

  "Dear old Madge!" he said, "there's all sorts of women and all sorts ofmen."

  "Well, our sort of women, then, and our sort of men."

  "I doubt even that."

  "I don't. I've found my place. I've been making my master my servant. Wewomen--we've been looting all the good things in the world, and helpingnothing. You've carried me on your back until you are loathing life.I've been making you fetch and carry for me, love me, dress me, keep meand my children, minister to my vanities and greeds.... No; let me goon. I'm so penitent, my dear, so penitent I want to kneel down here andmarry you all over again, heal up your broken life and begin again."...

  She paused.

  "One doesn't begin again," she said. "But I want to take a new turn.Dear, you're still only a young man; we've thirty or forty years beforeus--forty years perhaps or more.... What shall we do with our years?We've loved, we've got children. What remains? Here we can plan it out,work it out, day after day. What shall we do with our lives and life?Tell me, make me your partner; it's you who know, what are we doing withlife?"

  Sec. 13

  What are we doing with life?

  That question overtakes a reluctant and fugitive humanity. The Traffordswere but two of a great scattered host of people, who, obeying all theurgencies of need and desire, struggling, loving, begetting, enjoying,do nevertheless find themselves at last unsatisfied. They have lived theround of experience, achieved all that living creatures have soughtsince the beginning of the world--security and gratification andoffspring--and they find themselves still strong, unsatiated, with powerin their hands and years before them, empty of purpose. What are they todo?

  The world presents such a spectacle of evasion as it has never seenbefore. Never was there such a boiling over and waste of vital energy.The Sphinx of our opportunity calls for the uttermost powers of heartand brain to read its riddle--the new, astonishing riddle of excessivepower. A few give themselves to those honourable adventures that extendthe range of man, they explore untravelled countries, climb remotemountains, conduct researches, risk life and limb in the fantasticexperiments of flight, and a monstrous outpouring of labour and materialgoes on in the strenuous preparation for needless and improbable wars.The rest divert themselves with the dwarfish satisfactions of recognizedvice, the meagre routine of pleasure, or still more timidly with sportand games--those new unscheduled perversions of the soul.

  We are afraid of our new selves. The dawn of human opportunity appalsus. Few of us dare look upon this strange light of freedom and limitlessresources that breaks upon our world.

  "Think," said Trafford, "while we sit here in this dark hut--think ofthe surplus life that wastes itself in the world for sheer lack ofdirection. Away there in England--I suppose that is westward"--hepointed--"there are thousands of men going out to-day to shoot. Think ofthe beautifully made guns, the perfected ammunition, the excellentclothes, the army of beaters, the carefully preserved woodland, theadmirable science of it--all for that idiot massacre of half-tame birds!Just because man once had need to be a hunter! Think of the othersagain--golfing. Think of the big, elaborate houses from which they come,the furnishings, the service. And the women--dressing! Perpetuallydressing. _You_, Marjorie--you've done nothing but dress since wemarried. No, let me abuse you, dear! It's insane, you know! You dressyour minds a little to talk amusingly, you spread your minds out tobackgrounds, to households, picturesque and delightful gardens,nurseries. Those nurseries! Think of our tremendously cherished andeducated children! And when they grow up, what have we got for them? Afeast of futility...."

  Sec. 14

  On the evening of the day when Trafford first tried to stand upon hisleg, they talked far into the night. It had been a great and eventfulday for them, full of laughter and exultation. He had been at firstridiculously afraid; he had clung to her almost childishly, and she hadheld him about the body with his weight on her strong right arm and hisright arm in her left hand, concealing her own dread of a collapse undera mask of taunting courage. The crutch had proved admirable. "It's mysilly knees!" Trafford kept on saying. "The leg's all right, but I getput out by my silly knees."

  They made the day a feast, a dinner of two whole day's rations and aspecial soup instead of supper. "The birds will come," they explained toeach other, "ducks and geese, long before May. May, you know, is thelatest."

  Marjorie confessed the habit of sharing his pipe was growing on her."What shall we do in Tyburnia!" she said, and left it to theimagination.

  "If ever we get back there," he said.

  "I don't much fancy kicking a skirt before my shins again--and I'll be ablack, coarse woman down to my neck at dinner for years to come!..."

  Then, as he lay back in his bunk and she crammed the stove with freshboughs and twigs of balsam that filled the little space about them withwarmth and with a faint, sweet smell of burning and with flitting redreflections, he took up a talk about religion they had begun some daysbefore.

  "You see," he said, "I've always believed in Salvation. I suppose aman's shy of saying so--even to his wife. But I've always believed moreor less distinctly that there was something up to which a lifeworked--always. It's been rather vague, I'll admit. I don't think I'veever believed in individual salvation. You see, I feel these are deepthings, and the deeper one gets the less individual one becomes. That'swhy one thinks of those things in darkness and loneliness--and findsthem hard to tell. One has an individual voice, or an individualbirthmark, or an individualized old hat, but the soul--the soul'sdifferent.... It isn't me talking to you when it comes to that.... Thisquestion of what we are doing with life isn't a question to begin withfor you and me as ourselves, but for you and me as mankind. Am Ispinning it too fine, Madge?"

  "No," she said, intent; "go on."

  "You see, when we talk rations here, Marjorie, it's ourselves, but whenwe talk religion--it's mankind. You've either got to be Everyman inreligion or leave it alone. That's my idea. It's no more presumptuous tothink for the race than it is for a beggar to pray--though that meansgoing right up to God and talking to Him. Salvation's a collective thingand a mystical thing--or there isn't any. Fancy the Almighty and mesitting up and keeping Eternity together! God and R. A. G. Trafford,F.R.S.--that's silly. Fancy a man in number seven boots, and atailor-made suit in the nineteen-fourteen fashion, sitting before God!That's caricature. But God and Man! That's sense, Marjorie."...

  He stopped and stared at her.

  Marjorie sat red-lit, regarding him. "Queer things you say!" she said."So much of this I've never thought out. I wonder why I've never doneso.... Too busy with many things, I suppose. But go on and tell me moreof these secrets you've kept from me!"

  "Well, we've got to talk of these things as mankind--or just leave themalone, and shoot pheasants."...

  "If I could shoot a pheasant now!" whispered Marjorie, involuntarily.

  "And where do we stand? What do we need--I mean the whole race ofus--kings and beggars together? You know, Marjorie, it's this,--it'sUnderstanding. That's what mankind has got to, the realization that itdoesn't understand, that it can't express, that it's purblind. Wehaven't got eyes for those greater t
hings, but we've got thepromise--the intimation of eyes. We've come out of an unsuspectingdarkness, brute animal darkness, not into sight, that's been themistake, but into a feeling of illumination, into a feeling of lightshining through our opacity....

  "I feel that man has now before all things to know. That's his supremeduty, to feel, realize, see, understand, express himself to the utmostlimits of his power."

  He sat up, speaking very earnestly to her, and in that flickering lightshe realized for the first time how thin he had become, how bright andhollow his eyes, his hair was long over his eyes, and a rough beardflowed down to his chest. "All the religions," he said, "all thephilosophies, have pretended to achieve too much. We've no language yetfor religious truth or metaphysical truth; we've no basis yet broadenough and strong enough on which to build. Religion and philosophy havebeen impudent and quackish--quackish! They've been like the doctors, whohave always pretended they could cure since the beginning of things,cure everything, and to this day even they haven't got more than thebeginnings of knowledge on which to base a cure. They've lackedhumility, they've lacked the honour to say they didn't know; thepriests took things of wood and stone, the philosophers took little oddarrangements of poor battered words, metaphors, analogies, abstractions,and said: "That's it! Think of their silly old Absolute,--ab-solutus, anuntied parcel. I heard Haldane at the Aristotelian once, go on for anhour--no! it was longer than an hour--as glib and slick as a well-oiledsausage-machine, about the different sorts of Absolute, and not a soulof us laughed out at him! The vanity of such profundities! They've nofaith, faith in patience, faith to wait for the coming of God. And sincewe don't know God, since we don't know His will with us, isn't it plainthat all our lives should be a search for Him and it? Can anything elsematter,--after we are free from necessity? That is the work now that isbefore all mankind, to attempt understanding--by the perpetual findingof thought and the means of expression, by perpetual extension andrefinement of science, by the research that every artist makes forbeauty and significance in his art, by the perpetual testing anddestruction and rebirth under criticism of all these things, and by aperpetual extension of this intensifying wisdom to more minds and moreminds and more, till all men share in it, and share in the making ofit.... There you have my creed, Marjorie; there you have the very marrowof me."...

  He became silent.

  "Will you go back to your work?" she said, abruptly. "Go back to yourlaboratory?"

  He stared at her for a moment without speaking. "Never," he said atlast.

  "But," she said, and the word dropped from her like a stone that fallsdown a well....

  "My dear," he said, at last, "I've thought of that. But since I leftthat dear, dusty little laboratory, and all those exquisite subtlethings--I've lived. I've left that man seven long years behind me. Someother man must go on--I think some younger man--with the riddles I foundto work on then. I've grown--into something different. It isn't howatoms swing with one another, or why they build themselves up so and notso, that matters any more to me. I've got you and all the world in whichwe live, and a new set of riddles filling my mind, how thought swingsabout thought, how one man attracts his fellows, how the waves of motiveand conviction sweep through a crowd and all the little driftingcrystallizations of spirit with spirit and all the repulsions and eddiesand difficulties, that one can catch in that turbulent confusion. I wantto do a new sort of work now altogether.... Life has swamped me once,but I don't think it will get me under again;--I want to study men."

  He paused and she waited, with a face aglow.

  "I want to go back to watch and think--and I suppose write. I believe Ishall write criticism. But everything that matters is criticism!... Iwant to get into contact with the men who are thinking. I don't mean tomeet them necessarily, but to get into the souls of their books. Everywriter who has anything to say, every artist who matters, is thestronger for every man or woman who responds to him. That's the greatwork--the Reality. I want to become a part of this stuttering attempt toexpress, I want at least to resonate, even if I do not help.... And youwith me, Marjorie--you with me! Everything I write I want you to see andthink about. I want you to read as I read.... Now after so long, nowthat, now that we've begun to talk, you know, talk again----"

  Something stopped his voice. Something choked them both into silence. Heheld out a lean hand, and she shuffled on her knees to take it....

  "Don't please make me," she stumbled through her thoughts, "one of thoselittle parasitic, parroting wives--don't pretend too much aboutme--because you want me with you----. Don't forget a woman isn't a man."

  "Old Madge," he said, "you and I have got to march together. Didn't Ilove you from the first, from that time when I was a boy examiner andyou were a candidate girl--because your mind was clear?"

  "And we will go back," she whispered, "with a work----"

  "With a purpose," he said.

  She disengaged herself from his arm, and sat close to him upon thefloor. "I think I can see what you will do," she said. She mused. "Forthe first time I begin to see things as they may be for us. I begin tosee a life ahead. For the very first time."

  Queer ideas came drifting into her head. Suddenly she cried out sharplyin that high note he loved. "Good heavens!" she said. "The absurdity!The infinite absurdity!"

  "But what?"

  "I might have married Will Magnet----. That's all."

  She sprang to her feet. There came a sound of wind outside, a shiftingof snow on the roof, and the door creaked. "Half-past eleven," sheexclaimed looking at the watch that hung in the light of the stove door."I don't want to sleep yet; do you? I'm going to brew some tea--make aconvivial drink. And then we will go on talking. It's so good talking toyou. So good!... I've an idea! Don't you think on this special day, itmight run to a biscuit?" Her face was keenly anxious. He nodded. "Onebiscuit each," she said, trying to rob her voice of any note ofcriminality. "Just one, you know, won't matter."

  She hovered for some moments close to the stove before she went into thearctic corner that contained the tin of tea. "If we can really live likethat!" she said. "When we are home again."

  "Why not?" he answered.

  She made no answer, but went across for the tea....

  He turned his head at the sound of the biscuit tin and watched her putout the precious discs.

  "I shall have another pipe," he proclaimed, with an agreeable note ofexcess. "Thank heaven for unstinted tobacco...."

  And now Marjorie's mind was teaming with thoughts of this new conceptionof a life lived for understanding. As she went about the preparation ofthe tea, her vividly concrete imagination was active with therealization of the life they would lead on their return. She could notsee it otherwise than framed in a tall, fine room, a study, a study insombre tones, with high, narrow, tall, dignified bookshelves and richdeep green curtains veiling its windows. There should be a fireplace ofwhite marble, very plain and well proportioned, with furnishings of oldbrass, and a big desk towards the window beautifully lit by electriclight, with abundant space for papers to lie. And she wanted some touchof the wilderness about it; a skin perhaps....

  The tea was still infusing when she had determined upon an enormouspaper-weight of that iridescent Labradorite that had been so astonishinga feature of the Green River Valley. She would have it polished on oneside only--the other should be rough to show the felspar in its naturalstate....

  It wasn't that she didn't feel and understand quite fully the intentionand significance of all he had said, but that in these symbols oftexture and equipment her mind quite naturally clothed itself. Andwhile this room was coming into anticipatory being in her mind, she wasmaking the tea very deftly and listening to Trafford's every word.

  Sec. 15

  That talk marked an epoch to Marjorie. From that day forth herimagination began to shape a new, ordered and purposeful life forTrafford and herself in London, a life not altogether divorced fromtheir former life, but with a faith sustaining it and aims controllingit. She had always k
nown of the breadth and power of his mind, but nowas he talked of what he might do, what interests might converge and giveresults through him, it seemed she really knew him for the first time.In his former researches, so technical and withdrawn, she had seenlittle of his mind in action: now he was dealing in his own fashion withthings she could clearly understand. There were times when his talkaffected her like that joy of light one has in emerging into sunshinefrom a long and tedious cave. He swept things together, flashedunsuspected correlations upon her intelligence, smashed and scatteredabsurd yet venerated conventions of thought, made undreamt-of courses ofaction visible in a flare of luminous necessity. And she could followhim and help him. Just as she had hampered him and crippled him, so nowshe could release him--she fondled that word. She found a preposterousimage in her mind that she hid like a disgraceful secret, that she triedto forget, and yet its stupendous, its dreamlike absurdity had somethingin it that shaped her delight as nothing else could do; she was, shetold herself--hawking with an archangel!...

  These were her moods of exaltation. And she was sure she had never lovedher man before, that this was indeed her beginning. It was as if she hadjust found him....

  Perhaps, she thought, true lovers keep on finding each other all throughtheir lives.

  And he too had discovered her. All the host of Marjories he had known,the shining, delightful, seductive, wilful, perplexing aspects that hadso filled her life, gave place altogether for a time to this steady-eyedwoman, lean and warm-wrapped with the valiant heart and thefrost-roughened skin. What a fine, strong, ruddy thing she was! How gladhe was for this wild adventure in the wilderness, if only because it hadmade him lie among the rocks and think of her and wait for her anddespair of her life and God, and at last see her coming back to him,flushed with effort and calling his name to him out of that whirlwind ofsnow.... And there was at least one old memory mixed up with all thesenew and overmastering impressions, the memory of her clear unhesitatingvoice as it had stabbed into his life again long years ago, minute andbright in the telephone: "_It's me, you know. It's Marjorie!_"

  Perhaps after all she had not wasted a moment of his life, perhaps everyissue between them had been necessary, and it was good altogether to beturned from the study of crystals to the study of men and women....

  And now both their minds were Londonward, where all the tides anddriftage and currents of human thought still meet and swirl together.They were full of what they would do when they got back. Marjoriesketched that study to him--in general terms and without thepaper-weight--and began to shape the world she would have about it. Shemeant to be his squaw and body-servant first of all, and then--amother. Children, she said, are none the worse for being kept a littleout of focus. And he was rapidly planning out his approach to the newquestions to which he was now to devote his life. "One wants somethingto hold the work together," he said, and projected a book. "One cannotstruggle at large for plain statement and copious and free andcourageous statement, one needs a positive attack."

  He designed a book, which he might write if only for the definition itwould give him and with no ultimate publication, which was to be called:"The Limits of Language as a Means of Expression." ... It was to be apragmatist essay, a sustained attempt to undermine the confidence of allthat scholasticism and logic chopping which still lingers like the_sequelae_ of a disease in our University philosophy. "Those duffers sitin their studies and make a sort of tea of dry old words--and thinkthey're distilling the spirit of wisdom," he said.

  He proliferated titles for a time, and settled at last on "From Realismto Reality." He wanted to get at that at once; it fretted him to have tohang in the air, day by day, for want of books to quote and opponents tolance and confute. And he wanted to see pictures, too and plays, readnovels he had heard of and never read, in order to verify or correct theideas that were seething in his mind about the qualities of artisticexpression. His thought had come out to a conviction that the line towider human understandings lies through a huge criticism and cleaning upof the existing methods of formulation, as a preliminary to the widerand freer discussion of those religious and social issues our generationstill shrinks from. "It's grotesque," he said, "and utterly true thatthe sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits ofgeneralization." There was not even paper for him to make notes orprovisional drafts of the new work. He hobbled about the camp frettingat these deprivations.

  "Marjorie," he said, "we've done our job. Why should we wait here onthis frosty shelf outside the world? My leg's getting sounder--if itwasn't for that feeling of ice in it. Why shouldn't we make anothersledge from the other bunk and start down--"

  "To Hammond?"

  "Why not?"

  "But the way?"

  "The valley would guide us. We could do four hours a day before we hadto camp. I'm not sure we couldn't try the river. We could drag and carryall our food...."

  She looked down the wide stretches of the valley. There was the hillthey had christened Marjorie Ridge. At least it was familiar. Everynight before nightfall if they started there would be a fresh campingplace to seek among the snow-drifts, a great heap of wood to cut to lastthe night. Suppose his leg gave out--when they were already some daysaway, so that he could no longer go on or she drag him back to thestores. Plainly there would be nothing for it then but to lie down anddie together....

  And a sort of weariness had come to her as a consequence of two monthsof half-starved days, not perhaps a failure so much as a reluctance ofspirit.

  "Of course," she said, with a new aspect drifting before her mind,"then--we _could_ eat. We _could_ feed up before we started. We couldfeast almost!"

  Sec. 16

  "While you were asleep the other night," Trafford began one day as theysat spinning out their mid-day meal, "I was thinking how badly I hadexpressed myself when I talked to you the other day, and what a queer,thin affair I made of the plans I wanted to carry out. As a matter offact, they're neither queer nor thin, but they are unreal in comparisonwith the common things of everyday life, hunger, anger, all theimmediate desires. They must be. They only begin when those others areat peace. It's hard to set out these things; they're complicated andsubtle, and one cannot simplify without falsehood. I don't want tosimplify. The world has gone out of its way time after time throughsimplifications and short cuts. Save us from epigrams! And when onethinks over what one has said, at a little distance,--one wants to goback to it, and say it all again. I seem to be not so much thinkingthings out as reviving and developing things I've had growing in my mindever since we met. It's as though an immense reservoir of thought hadfilled up in my mind at last and was beginning to trickle over and breakdown the embankment between us. This conflict that has been going onbetween our life together and my--my intellectual life; it's only justgrowing clear in my own mind. Yet it's just as if one turned up a lighton something that had always been there....

  "It's a most extraordinary thing to think out, Marjorie, thatantagonism. Our love has kept us so close together and always ourpurposes have been--like that." He spread divergent hands. "I'vespeculated again and again whether there isn't something incurablyantagonistic between women (that's _you_ generalized, Marjorie) and men(that's me) directly we pass beyond the conditions of theindividualistic struggle. I believe every couple of lovers who've evermarried have felt that strain. Yet it's not a difference in kind betweenus but degree. The big conflict between us has a parallel in a littleinternal conflict that goes on; there's something of man in every womanand a touch of the feminine in every man. But you're nearer as woman tothe immediate personal life of sense and reality than I am as man. It'sbeen so ever since the men went hunting and fighting and the women kepthut, tended the children and gathered roots in the little cultivationclose at hand. It's been so perhaps since the female carried and suckledher child and distinguished one male from another. It may be it willalways be so. Men were released from that close, continuous touch withphysical necessities long before women were. It's only now that womenbegin to be r
eleased. For ages now men have been wandering from fieldand home and city, over the hills and far away, in search of adventuresand fresh ideas and the wells of mystery beyond the edge of the world,but it's only now that the woman comes with them too. Our differenceisn't a difference in kind, old Marjorie; it's the difference betweenthe old adventurer and the new feet upon the trail."

  "We've got to come," said Marjorie.

  "Oh! you've got to come. No good to be pioneers if the race does notfollow. The women are the backbone of the race; the men are just theindividuals. Into this Labrador and into all the wild and desolateplaces of thought and desire, if men come you women have to cometoo--and bring the race with you. Some day."

  "A long day, mate of my heart."

  "Who knows how long or how far? Aren't you at any rate here, dear womanof mine.... (_Surely you are here_)."

  He went off at a tangent. "There's all those words that seem to meansomething and then don't seem to mean anything, that keep shifting toand fro from the deepest significance to the shallowest of claptrap,Socialism, Christianity.... You know,--they aren't anything really, asyet; they are something trying to be.... Haven't I said that before,Marjorie?"

  She looked round at him. "You said something like that when you weredelirious," she answered, after a little pause. "It's one of the ideasthat you're struggling with. You go on, old man, and _talk_. We'vemonths--for repetitions."

  "Well, I mean that all these things are seeking after a sort ofco-operation that's greater than our power even of imaginativerealization; that's what I mean. The kingdom of Heaven, the communion ofsaints, the fellowship of men; these are things like high peaks far outof the common life of every day, shining things that madden certainsorts of men to climb. Certain sorts of us! I'm a religious man, I'm asocialistic man. These calls are more to me than my daily bread. I'vegot something in me more generalizing than most men. I'm more so thanmany other men and most other women, I'm more socialistic than you...."

  "You know, Marjorie, I've always felt you're a finer individual than me,I've never had a doubt of it. You're more beautiful by far than I, womanfor my man. You've a keener appetite for things, a firmer grip on thesubstance of life. I love to see you do things, love to see you move,love to watch your hands; you've cleverer hands than mine by far.... Andyet--I'm a deeper and bigger thing than you. I reach up to something youdon't reach up to.... You're in life--and I'm a little out of it, I'mlike one of those fish that began to be amphibian, I go out intosomething where you don't follow--where you hardly begin to follow.

  "That's the real perplexity between thousands of men and women....

  "It seems to me that the primitive socialism of Christianity and all thestuff of modern socialism that matters is really aiming--almostunconsciously, I admit at times--at one simple end, at the release ofthe human spirit from the individualistic struggle----

  "You used 'release' the other day, Marjorie? Of course, I remember. It'squeer how I go on talking after you have understood."

  "It was just a flash," said Marjorie. "We have intimations. Neither ofus really understands. We're like people climbing a mountain in a mist,that thins out for a moment and shows valleys and cities, and thencloses in again, before we can recognize them or make out where we are."

  Trafford thought. "When I talk to you, I've always felt I mustn't be toovague. And the very essence of all this is a vague thing, something weshall never come nearer to it in all our lives than to see it as ashadow and a glittering that escapes again into a mist.... And yet it'severything that matters, everything, the only thing that matters trulyand for ever through the whole range of life. And we have to serve itwith the keenest thought, the utmost patience, inordinate veracity....

  "The practical trouble between your sort and my sort, Marjorie, is thetrouble between faith and realization. You demand the outcome. Oh! and Ihate to turn aside and realize. I've had to do it for seven years.Damnable years! Men of my sort want to understand. We want tounderstand, and you ask us to make. We want to understand atoms, ions,molecules, refractions. You ask us to make rubber and diamonds. Isuppose it's right that incidentally we should make rubber anddiamonds. Finally, I warn you, we will make rubber unnecessary anddiamonds valueless. And again we want to understand how people reactupon one another to produce social consequences, and you ask us to putit at once into a draft bill for the reform of something or other. Isuppose life lies between us somewhere, we're the two poles of truthseeking and truth getting; with me alone it would be nothing but aluminous dream, with you nothing but a scramble in which sooner or laterall the lamps would be upset.... But it's ever too much of a scrambleyet, and ever too little of a dream. All our world over there is full ofthe confusion and wreckage of premature realizations. There's no realfaith in thought and knowledge yet. Old necessity has driven men so hardthat they still rush with a wild urgency--though she goads no more.Greed and haste, and if, indeed, we seem to have a moment's breathingspace, then the Gawdsaker tramples us under."

  "My dear!" cried Marjorie, with a sharp note of amusement. "What _is_ aGawdsaker?"

  "Oh," said Trafford, "haven't you heard that before? He's the person whogets excited by any deliberate discussion and gets up wringing his handsand screaming, 'For Gawd's sake, let's _do_ something _now!_' I thinkthey used it first for Pethick Lawrence, that man who did so much to runthe old militant suffragettes and burke the proper discussion of woman'sfuture. You know. You used to have 'em in Chelsea--with their hats. Oh!'Gawdsaking' is the curse of all progress, the hectic consumption thatkills a thousand good beginnings. You see it in small things and ingreat. You see it in my life; Gawdsaking turned my life-work to cash andpromotions, Gawdsaking----Look at the way the aviators took to flyingfor prizes and gate-money, the way pure research is swamped byendowments for technical applications! Then that poor ghost-giant of anidea the socialists have;--it's been treated like one of those unbornlambs they kill for the fine skin of it, made into results before everit was alive. Was there anything more pitiful? The first great dream andthen the last phase! when your Aunt Plessington and the districtvisitors took and used it as a synonym for Payment in Kind.... It'snatural, I suppose, for people to be eager for results, personal andimmediate results--the last lesson of life is patience. Naturally theywant reality, naturally! They want the individual life, something tohandle and feel and use and live by, something of their very own beforethey die, and they want it now. But the thing that matters for the race,Marjorie, is a very different thing; it is to get the emerging thoughtprocess clear and to keep it clear--and to let those other hungers go.We've got to go back to England on the side of that delay, that arrestof interruption, that detached, observant, synthesizing process of themind, that solvent of difficulties and obsolescent institutions, whichis the reality of collective human life. We've got to go back on theside of pure science--literature untrammeled by the preconceptions ofthe social schemers--art free from the urgency of immediate utility--anda new, a regal, a god-like sincerity in philosophy. And, above all,we've got to stop this Jackdaw buying of yours, my dear, which is theessence of all that is wrong with the world, this snatching ateverything, which loses everything worth having in life, this greedyconfused realization of our accumulated resources! You're going to be anon-shopping woman now. You're to come out of Bond Street, you and yourkind, like Israel leaving the Egyptian flesh-pots. You're going to bemy wife and my mate.... Less of this service of things. Investments incomfort, in security, in experience, yes; but not just spending anymore...."

  He broke off abruptly with: "I want to go back and begin."

  "Yes," said Marjorie, "we will go back," and saw minutely and distantly,and yet as clearly and brightly as if she looked into a concave mirror,that tall and dignified study, a very high room indeed, with a manwriting before a fine, long-curtained window and a great lump ofrich-glowing Labradorite upon his desk before him holding together anaccumulation of written sheets....

  She knew exactly the shop in Oxford Street where the stuff for thecurtains mi
ght be best obtained.

  Sec. 17

  One night Marjorie had been sitting musing before the stove for a longtime, and suddenly she said: "I wonder if we shall fail. I wonder if weshall get into a mess again when we are back in London.... As big a messand as utter a discontent as sent us here...."

  Trafford was scraping out his pipe, and did not answer for some moments.Then he remarked: "What nonsense!"

  "But we shall," she said. "Everybody fails. To some extent, we are boundto fail. Because indeed nothing is clear; nothing is a clear issue....You know--I'm just the old Marjorie really in spite of all theseresolutions--the spendthrift, the restless, the eager. I'm a bornsnatcher and shopper. We're just the same people really."

  "No," he said, after thought. "You're all Labrador older."

  "I always _have_ failed," she considered, "when it came to any specialtemptations, Rag. I can't _stand_ not having a thing!"

  He made no answer.

  "And you're still the same old Rag, you know," she went on. "Who weakensinto kindness if I cry. Who likes me well-dressed. Who couldn't endureto see me poor."

  "Not a bit of it. No! I'm a very different Rag with a very differentMarjorie. Yes indeed! Things--are graver. Why!--I'm lame for life--andI've a scar. The very _look_ of things is changed...." He stared at herface and said: "You've hidden the looking-glass and you think I haven'tnoted it----"

  "It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes tothat--where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just thesuperficial aspects of the case."

  "Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence,"and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. We _are_different, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."...

  "Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point."Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending weshan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. Weshall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and youcan't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing andhalf-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing themand replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, tryas I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive meagain. You know----It's just as though we were each of us not oneperson, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together,and then disperse and forget and plot against each other...."

  "Oh, things will happen again," said Trafford, in her pause. "But theywill happen again with a difference--after this. With a difference.That's the good of it all.... We've found something here--that makeseverything different.... We've found each other, too, dear wife."

  She thought intently.

  "I am afraid," she whispered.

  "But what is there to be afraid of?"

  "_Myself_."

  She spoke after a little pause that seemed to hesitate. "At times Iwish--oh, passionately!--that I could pray."

  "Why don't you?"

  "I don't believe enough--in that. I wish I did."

  Trafford thought. "People are always so exacting about prayer," he said.

  "Exacting."

  "You want to pray--and you can't make terms for a thing you want. I usedto think I could. I wanted God to come and demonstrate a bit.... It's nogood, Madge.... If God chooses to be silent--you must pray to thesilence. If he chooses to live in darkness, you must pray to thenight...."

  "Yes," said Marjorie, "I suppose one must."

  She thought. "I suppose in the end one does," she said....

  Sec. 18

  Mixed up with this entirely characteristic theology of theirs and theirelaborate planning-out of a new life in London were other strands ofthought. Queer memories of London and old times together would flashwith a peculiar brightness across their contemplation of the infinitiesand the needs of mankind. Out of nowhere, quite disconnectedly, wouldcome the human, finite: "Do you remember----?"

  Two things particularly pressed into their minds. One was the thought oftheir children, and I do not care to tell how often in the day now theycalculated the time in England, and tried to guess to a half mile orso where those young people might be and what they might be doing. "Theshops are bright for Christmas now," said Marjorie. "This year Dick wasto have had his first fireworks. I wonder if he did. I wonder if heburnt his dear little funny stumps of fingers. I hope not."

  "Oh, just a little," said Trafford. "I remember how a squib made myglove smoulder and singed me, and how my mother kissed me for taking itlike a man. It was the best part of the adventure."

  "Dick shall burn his fingers when his mother's home to kiss him. Butspare his fingers now, Dadda...."

  The other topic was food.

  It was only after they had been doing it for a week or so that theyremarked how steadily they gravitated to reminiscences, suggestions,descriptions and long discussions of eatables--sound, solid eatables.They told over the particulars of dinners they had imagined altogetherforgotten; neither hosts nor conversations seemed to matter now in theslightest degree, but every item in the menu had its place. They nearlyquarrelled one day about _hors-d'oeuvre_. Trafford wanted to dwell onthem when Marjorie was eager for the soup.

  "It's niggling with food," said Marjorie.

  "Oh, but there's no reason," said Trafford, "why you shouldn't take alot of _hors-d'oeuvre_. Three or four sardines, and potato salad anda big piece of smoked salmon, and some of that Norwegian herring, and soon, and keep the olives by you to pick at. It's a beginning."

  "It's--it's immoral," said Marjorie, "that's what I feel. If one needs awhet to eat, one shouldn't eat. The proper beginning of a dinner issoup--good, hot, _rich_ soup. Thick soup--with things in it, vegetablesand meat and things. Bits of oxtail."

  "Not peas."

  "No, not peas. Pea-soup is tiresome. I never knew anything one tired ofso soon. I wish we hadn't relied on it so much."

  "Thick soup's all very well," said Trafford, "but how about that clearstuff they give you in the little pavement restaurants in Paris. Youknow--_Croute-au-pot_, with lovely great crusts and big leeks andlettuce leaves and so on! Tremendous aroma of onions, and beautifullittle beads of fat! And being a clear soup, you see what there is.That's--interesting. Twenty-five centimes, Marjorie. Lord! I'd give aguinea a plate for it. I'd give five pounds for one of those jollywhite-metal tureens full--you know, _full_, with little drops all overthe outside of it, and the ladle sticking out under the lid."

  "Have you ever tasted turtle soup?"

  "Rather. They give it you in the City. The fat's--ripping. But they'rerather precious with it, you know. For my own part, I don't think soupshould be _doled_ out. I always liked the soup we used to get at theHarts'; but then they never give you enough, you know--not nearlyenough."

  "About a tablespoonful," said Marjorie. "It's mocking an appetite."

  "Still there's things to follow," said Trafford....

  They discussed the proper order of a dinner very carefully. Theydecided that sorbets and ices were not only unwholesome, but nasty. "InLondon," said Trafford, "one's taste gets--vitiated."...

  They weighed the merits of French cookery, modern international cookery,and produced alternatives. Trafford became very eloquent about oldEnglish food. "Dinners," said Trafford, "should be feasting, not themere satisfaction of a necessity. There should be--_amplitude_. Iremember a recipe for a pie; I think it was in one of those books thatman Lucas used to compile. If I remember rightly, it began with: 'Take aswine and hew it into gobbets.' Gobbets! That's something like abeginning. It was a big pie with tiers and tiers of things, and it keptit up all the way in that key.... And then what could be better thanprime British-fed roast beef, reddish, just a shade on the side ofunderdone, and not too finely cut. Mutton can't touch it."

  "Beef is the best," she said.

  "Then our English cold meat again. What can equal it? Such stuff as theygive in a good country inn, a huge joint of beef--you cut from ityourself, you know as much as you like--with mustard, pickl
es, celery, atankard of stout, let us say. Pressed beef, such as they'll give you atthe Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutney, and thenold cheese to follow. And boiled beef, with little carrots and turnipsand a dumpling or so. Eh?"

  "Of course," said Marjorie, "one must do justice to a well-chosenturkey, a _fat_ turkey."

  "Or a good goose, for the matter of that--with honest, well-thought-outstuffing. I like the little sausages round the dish of a turkey, too;like cherubs they are, round the feet of a Madonna.... There's much tobe said for sausage, Marjorie. It concentrates."

  Sausage led to Germany. "I'm not one of those patriots," he was sayingpresently, "who run down other countries by way of glorifying their own.While I was in Germany I tasted many good things. There's theirLeberwurst; it's never bad, and, at its best, it's splendid. It's only afool would reproach Germany with sausage. Devonshire black-pudding, ofcourse, is the master of any Blutwurst, but there's all those others onthe German side, Frankfurter, big reddish sausage stuff again with greatcrystalline lumps of white fat. And how well they cook their richhashes, and the thick gravies they make. Curious, how much better thecooking of Teutonic peoples is than the cooking of the South Europeans!It's as if one needed a colder climate to brace a cook to his business.The Frenchman and the Italian trifle and stimulate. It's as if they'dnever met a hungry man. No German would have thought of _souffle_. Ugh!it's vicious eating. There's much that's fine, though, in Austria andHungary. I wish I had travelled in Hungary. Do you remember how once ortwice we've lunched at that Viennese place in Regent Street, and howthey've given us stuffed Paprika, eh?"

  "That was a good place. I remember there was stewed beef once with a lotof barley--such _good_ barley!"

  "Every country has its glories. One talks of the cookery of northerncountries and then suddenly one thinks of curry, with lots of rice."

  "And lots of chicken!"

  "And lots of hot curry powder, _very_ hot. And look at America! Here's apeople who haven't any of them been out of Europe for centuries, and yetthey have as different a table as you could well imagine. There's a kindof fish, planked shad, that they cook on resinous wood--roast it, Isuppose. It's substantial, like nothing else in the world. And howgood, too, with turkey are sweet potatoes. Then they have such amultitude of cereal things; stuff like their buckwheat cakes, allswimming in golden syrup. And Indian corn, again!"

  "Of course, corn is being anglicized. I've often given youcorn--latterly, before we came away."

  "That sort of separated grain--out of tins. Like chicken's food! It'snot the real thing. You should eat corn on the cob--American fashion!It's fine. I had it when I was in the States. You know, you take it upin your hands by both ends--you've seen the cobs?--and gnaw."

  The craving air of Labrador at a temperature of -20 deg. Fahrenheit, andmethodically stinted rations, make great changes in the outwardqualities of the mind. "_I'd_ like to do that," said Marjorie.

  Her face flushed a little at a guilty thought, her eyes sparkled. Sheleant forward and spoke in a confidential undertone.

  "_I'd--I'd like to eat a mutton chop like that_," said Marjorie.

  Sec. 20

  One morning Marjorie broached something she had had on her mind forseveral days.

  "Old man," she said, "I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to thaw myscissors and cut your hair.... And then you'll have to trim that beardof yours."

  "You'll have to dig out that looking-glass."

  "I know," said Marjorie. She looked at him. "You'll never be a prettyman again," she said. "But there's a sort of wild splendour.... And Ilove every inch and scrap of you...."

  Their eyes met. "We're a thousand deeps now below the look of things,"said Trafford. "We'd love each other minced."

  She broke into that smiling laugh of hers. "Oh! it won't come to_that_," she said. "Trust my housekeeping!"