by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE PILGRIMAGE TO LONELY HUT
Sec. 1
Marjorie was surprised to find how easy it was at last to part from herchildren and go with Trafford.
"I am not sorry," she said, "not a bit sorry--but I am fearfully afraid.I shall dream they are ill.... Apart from that, it's strange how yougrip me and they don't...."
In the train to Liverpool she watched Trafford with the queer feelingwhich comes to all husbands and wives at times that that other partneris indeed an undiscovered stranger, just beginning to show perplexingtraits,--full of inconceivable possibilities.
For some reason his tearing her up by the roots in this fashion hadfascinated her imagination. She felt a strange new wonder at him thathad in it just a pleasant faint flavour of fear. Always before she hadfelt a curious aversion and contempt for those servile women who aresaid to seek a master, to want to be mastered, to be eager even for thephysical subjugations of brute force. Now she could at least understand,sympathize even with them. Not only Trafford surprised her but herself.She found she was in an unwonted perplexing series of moods. All herfeelings struck her now as being incorrect as well as unexpected; notonly had life become suddenly full of novelty but she was making novelresponses. She felt that she ought to be resentful and tragically sorryfor her home and children. She felt this departure ought to have thequality of an immense sacrifice, a desperate and heroic undertaking forTrafford's sake. Instead she could detect little beyond an adventurousexhilaration when presently she walked the deck of the steamer that wasto take her to St. John's. She had visited her cabin, seen her luggagestowed away, and now she surveyed the Mersey and its shipping with arenewed freshness of mind. She was reminded of the day, now nearly nineyears ago, when she had crossed the sea for the first time--to Italy.Then, too, Trafford had seemed a being of infinitely wonderfulpossibilities.... What were the children doing?--that ought to have beenher preoccupation. She didn't know; she didn't care! Trafford came andstood beside her, pointed out this and that upon the landing stage, nolonger heavily sullen, but alert, interested, almost gay....
Neither of them could find any way to the great discussion they had setout upon, in this voyage to St. John's. But there was plenty of timebefore them. Plenty of time! They were both the prey of that uneasydistraction which seems the inevitable quality of a passenger steamship.They surveyed and criticized their fellow travellers, and prowled up anddown through the long swaying days and the cold dark nights. They sleptuneasily amidst fog-horn hootings and the startling sounds of wavesswirling against the ports. Marjorie had never had a long sea voyagebefore; for the first time in her life she saw all the world, through asuccession of days, as a circle of endless blue waters, with the starsand planets and sun and moon rising sharply from its rim. Until one hashad a voyage no one really understands that old Earth is a wateryglobe.... They ran into thirty hours of storm, which subsided, and thencame a slow time among icebergs, and a hooting, dreary passage throughfog. The first three icebergs were marvels, the rest bores; a passingcollier out of her course and pitching heavily, a lonely black and dirtyship with a manner almost derelict, filled their thoughts for half aday. Their minds were in a state of tedious inactivity, eager for suchsmall interests and only capable of such small interests. There was nohurry to talk, they agreed, no hurry at all, until they were settledaway ahead there among the snows. "There we shall have plenty of timefor everything...."
Came the landfall and then St. John's, and they found themselves side byside watching the town draw near. The thought of landing andtransference to another ship refreshed them both....
They were going, Trafford said, in search of God, but it was far morelike two children starting out upon a holiday.
Sec. 2
There was trouble and procrastination about the half-breed guides thatTrafford had arranged should meet them at St. John's, and it was threeweeks from their reaching Newfoundland before they got themselves andtheir guides and equipment and general stores aboard the boat for PortDupre. Thence he had planned they should go in the Gibson schooner toManivikovik, the Marconi station at the mouth of the Green River, andthence past the new pulp-mills up river to the wilderness. There weredelays and a few trivial, troublesome complications in carrying out thisscheme, but at last a day came when Trafford could wave good-bye to theseven people and eleven dogs which constituted the population of PeterHammond's, that last rude outpost of civilization twenty miles above thepulp-mill, and turn his face in good earnest towards the wilderness.
Neither he nor Marjorie looked back at the headland for a last glimpseof the little settlement they were leaving. Each stared ahead over thebroad, smooth sweep of water, broken by one transverse bar of foamingshallows, and scanned the low, tree-clad hills beyond that drew togetherat last in the distant gorge out of which the river came. The morningwas warm and full of the promise of a hot noon, so that the veils theywore against the assaults of sand-flies and mosquitoes were already alittle inconvenient. It seemed incredible in this morning glow that thewooded slopes along the shore of the lake were the border of a land inwhich nearly half the inhabitants die of starvation. The deep-ladencanoes swept almost noiselessly through the water with a rhythmicalternation of rush and pause as the dripping paddles drove andreturned. Altogether there were four long canoes and five Indian breedsin their party, and when they came to pass through shallows bothMarjorie and Trafford took a paddle.
They came to the throat of the gorge towards noon, and found strongflowing deep water between its high purple cliffs. All hands had topaddle again, and it was only when they came to rest in a pool to eat amid-day meal and afterwards to land upon a mossy corner for a stretch anda smoke, that Marjorie discovered the peculiar beauty of the rock aboutthem. On the dull purplish-grey surfaces played the most extraordinarymist of luminous iridescence. It fascinated her. Here was a land whosecommon substance had this gemlike opalescence. But her attention wasvery soon withdrawn from these glancing splendours.
She had had to put aside her veil to eat, and presently she felt thevividly painful stabs of the black-fly and discovered blood upon herface. A bigger fly, the size and something of the appearance of a smallwasp, with an evil buzz, also assailed her and Trafford. It was a badcorner for flies; the breeds even were slapping their wrists andswearing under the torment, and every one was glad to embark and push onup the winding gorge. It opened out for a time, and then the woodedshores crept in again, and in another half-hour they saw ahead of them along rush of foaming waters among tumbled rocks that poured down from abrimming, splashing line of light against the sky. They crossed theriver, ran the canoes into an eddy under the shelter of a big stone andbegan to unload. They had reached their first portage.
The rest of the first day was spent in packing and lugging first thecargoes and then the canoes up through thickets and over boulders andacross stretches of reindeer moss for the better part of two miles to acamping ground about half-way up the rapids. Marjorie and Trafford triedto help with the carrying, but this evidently shocked and distressed themen too much, so they desisted and set to work cutting wood andgathering moss for the fires and bedding for the camp. When the ironstove was brought up the man who had carried it showed them how to putit up on stakes and start a fire in it, and then Trafford went to theriver to get water, and Marjorie made a kind of flour cake in thefrying-pan in the manner an American woman from the wilderness had onceshown her, and boiled water for tea. The twilight had deepened to nightwhile the men were still stumbling up the trail with the last twocanoes.
It gave Marjorie a curiously homeless feeling to stand there in the openwith the sunset dying away below the black scrubby outlines of thetreetops uphill to the northwest, and to realize the nearest roof wasalready a day's toilsome journey away. The cool night breeze blew uponher bare face and arms--for now the insects had ceased from troublingand she had cast aside gloves and veil and turned up her sleeves tocook--and the air was full of the tumult of the rapids tearing seawardover
the rocks below. Struggling through the bushes towards her was animmense, headless quadruped with unsteady legs and hesitating paces, twoof the men carrying the last canoe. Two others were now assistingTrafford to put up the little tent that was to shelter her, and thefifth was kneeling beside her very solemnly and respectfully cuttingslices of bacon for her to fry. The air was very sweet, and she wishedshe could sleep not in the tent but under the open sky.
It was queer, she thought, how much of the wrappings of civilization hadslipped from them already. Every day of the journey from London hadreleased them or deprived them--she hardly knew which--of a multitude ofpetty comforts and easy accessibilities. The afternoon toil uphillintensified the effect of having clambered up out of things--to thisloneliness, this twilight openness, this simplicity.
The men ate apart at a fire they made for themselves, and after Traffordand Marjorie had supped on damper, bacon and tea, he smoked. They wereboth too healthily tired to talk very much. There was no moon but afrosty brilliance of stars, the air which had been hot and sultry atmid-day grew keen and penetrating, and after she had made him tell herthe names of constellations she had forgotten, she suddenly perceivedthe wisdom of the tent, went into it--it was sweet and wonderful withsprigs of the Labrador tea-shrub--undressed, and had hardly rolledherself up into a cocoon of blankets before she was fast asleep.
She was awakened by a blaze of sunshine pouring into the tent, a smellof fried bacon and Trafford's voice telling her to get up. "They've goneon with the first loads," he said. "Get up, wrap yourself in a blanket,and come and bathe in the river. It's as cold as ice."
She blinked at him. "Aren't you stiff?" she asked.
"I was stiffer before I bathed," he said.
She took the tin he offered her. (They weren't to see china cups againfor a year.) "It's woman's work getting tea," she said as she drank.
"You can't be a squaw all at once," said Trafford.
Sec. 3
After Marjorie had taken her dip, dried roughly behind a bush, twistedher hair into a pigtail and coiled it under her hat, she amused herselfand Trafford as they clambered up through rocks and willows to the tentagain by cataloguing her apparatus of bath and toilette at Sussex Squareand tracing just when and how she had parted from each item on the wayto this place.
"But I _say!_" she cried, with a sudden, sharp note of dismay, "wehaven't soap! This is our last cake almost. I never thought of soap."
"Nor I," said Trafford.
He spoke again presently. "We don't turn back for soap," he said.
"We don't turn back for anything," said Marjorie. "Still--I didn't counton a soapless winter."
"I'll manage something," said Trafford, a little doubtfully. "Trust achemist...."
That day they finished the portage and came out upon a wide lake withsloping shores and a distant view of snow-topped mountains, a lake soshallow that at times their loaded canoes scraped on the glaciated rockbelow and they had to alter their course. They camped in a lurid sunset;the night was warm and mosquitoes were troublesome, and towards morningcame a thunderstorm and wind and rain.
The dawn broke upon a tearing race of waves and a wild drift of slantingrain sweeping across the lake before a gale. Marjorie peered out at thisas one peers out under the edge of an umbrella. It was manifestlyimpossible to go on, and they did nothing that day but run up a canvasshelter for the men and shift the tent behind a thicket of trees out ofthe full force of the wind. The men squatted stoically, and smoked andyarned. Everything got coldly wet, and for the most part the Traffordssat under the tent and stared blankly at this summer day in Labrador.
"Now," said Trafford, "we ought to begin talking."
"There's nothing much to do else," said Marjorie.
"Only one can't begin," said Trafford.
He was silent for a time. "We're getting out of things," he said....
The next day began with a fine drizzle through which the sun brokesuddenly about ten o'clock. They made a start at once, and got a gooddozen miles up the lake before it was necessary to camp again. BothMarjorie and Trafford felt stiff and weary and uncomfortable all day,and secretly a little doubtful now of their own endurance. They campedon an island on turf amidst slippery rocks, and the next day were in afoaming difficult river again, with glittering shallows that obligedevery one to get out at times to wade and push. All through theafternoon they were greatly beset by flies. And so they worked theirway on through a third days' journey towards the silent inland ofLabrador.
Day followed day of toilsome and often tedious travel; they foughtrapids, they waited while the men stumbled up long portages under vastloads, going and returning, they camped and discussed difficulties andalternatives. The flies sustained an unrelenting persecution, untilfaces were scarred in spite of veils and smoke fires, until wrists andnecks were swollen and the blood in a fever. As they got higher andhigher towards the central plateau, the mid-day heat increased and thenights grew colder, until they would find themselves toiling, wet withperspiration, over rocks that sheltered a fringe of ice beneath theirshadows. The first fatigues and lassitudes, the shrinking from coldwater, the ache of muscular effort, gave place to a tougher and tougherendurance; skin seemed to have lost half its capacity for pain withoutlosing a tithe of its discrimination, muscles attained a steelyresilience; they were getting seasoned. "I don't feel philosophical,"said Trafford, "but I feel well."
"We're getting out of things."
"Suppose we are getting out of our problems!..."
One day as they paddled across a mile-long pool, they saw three bearsprowling in single file high up on the hillside. "Look," said the man,and pointed with his paddle at the big, soft, furry black shapes,magnified and startling in the clear air. All the canoes rippled to astop, the men, at first still, whispered softly. One passed a gun toTrafford, who hesitated and looked at Marjorie.
The air of tranquil assurance about these three huge loafing monstershad a queer effect on Marjorie's mind. They made her feel that they wereat home and that she was an intruder. She had never in her life seenany big wild animals except in a menagerie. She had developed a sort ofunconscious belief that all big wild animals were in menageriesnowadays, and this spectacle of beasts entirely at large startled her.There was never a bar between these creatures, she felt, and hersleeping self. They might, she thought, do any desperate thing to feeblemen and women who came their way.
"Shall I take a shot?" asked Trafford.
"No," said Marjorie, pervaded by the desire for mutual toleration. "Letthem be."
The big brutes disappeared in a gully, reappeared, came out against theskyline one by one and vanished.
"Too long a shot," said Trafford, handing back the gun....
Their journey lasted altogether a month. Never once did they come uponany human being save themselves, though in one place they passed thepoles--for the most part overthrown--of an old Indian encampment. Butthis desolation was by no means lifeless. They saw great quantities ofwaterbirds, geese, divers, Arctic partridge and the like, they becamefamiliar with the banshee cry of the loon. They lived very largely ongeese and partridge. Then for a time about a string of lakes, thecountry was alive with migrating deer going south, and the men foundtraces of a wolf. They killed six caribou, and stayed to skin and cutthem up and dry the meat to replace the bacon they had consumed, caught,fried and ate great quantities of trout, and became accustomed to themysterious dance of the northern lights as the sunset afterglow faded.
Everywhere, except in the river gorges, the country displayed the lowhummocky lines and tarn-like pools of intensely glaciated land;everywhere it was carpeted with reindeer moss growing upon peat andvariegated by bushes of flowering, sweet-smelling Labrador tea. Inplaces this was starred with little harebells and diversified bytussocks of heather and rough grass, and over the rocks trailed delicatedwarf shrubs and a very pretty and fragrant pink-flowered plant of whichneither she nor Trafford knew the name. There was an astonishing amountof wild fruit, raspberries, cranberries
, and a white kind of strawberrythat was very delightful. The weather, after its first outbreak,remained brightly serene....
And at last it seemed fit to Trafford to halt and choose his winterquarters. He chose a place on the side of a low, razor-hacked rockymountain ridge, about fifty feet above the river--which had now dwindledto a thirty-foot stream. His site was near a tributary rivulet that gaveconvenient water, in a kind of lap that sheltered between two rockyknees, each bearing thickets of willow and balsam. Not a dozen milesaway from them now they reckoned was the Height of Land, the lowwatershed between the waters that go to the Atlantic and those that goto Hudson's Bay. Close beside the site he had chosen a shelf of rock ranout and gave a glimpse up the narrow rocky valley of the Green River'supper waters and a broad prospect of hill and tarn towards thesouth-east. North and north-east of them the country rose to a line oflow crests, with here and there a yellowing patch of last year's snow,and across the valley were slopes covered in places by woods of stuntedpine. It had an empty spaciousness of effect; the one continually livingthing seemed to be the Green River, hurrying headlong, noisily,perpetually, in an eternal flight from this high desolation. Birds wererare here, and the insects that buzzed and shrilled and tormented amongthe rocks and willows in the gorge came but sparingly up the slopes tothem.
"Here presently," said Trafford, "we shall be in peace."
"It is very lonely," said Marjorie.
"The nearer to God."
"Think! Not one of these hills has ever had a name."
"Well?"
"It might be in some other planet."
"Oh!--we'll christen them. That shall be Marjorie Ridge, and that RagValley. This space shall be--oh! Bayswater! Before we've done with it,this place and every feature of it will be as familiar as Sussex Square.More so,--for half the houses there would be stranger to us, if we couldsee inside them, than anything in this wilderness.... As familiar,say--as your drawing-room. That's better."
Marjorie made no answer, but her eyes went from the reindeer moss andscrub and thickets of the foreground to the low rocky ridges thatbounded the view north and east of them. The scattered boulders, thetangles of wood, the barren upper slopes, the dust-soiled survivals ofthe winter's snowfall, all contributed to an effect at once carelesslydesert and hopelessly untidy. She looked westward, and her memory wasfull of interminable streaming rapids, wastes of ice-striated rocks,tiresome struggles through woods and wild, wide stretches of tundra andtarn, trackless and treeless, infinitely desolate. It seemed to her thatthe sea coast was but a step from London and ten thousand miles awayfrom her.
Sec. 4
The men had engaged to build the framework of hut and store shed beforereturning, and to this under Trafford's direction they now setthemselves. They were all half-breeds, mingling with Indian withScottish or French blood, sober and experienced men. Three were namedMackenzie, two brothers and a cousin, and another, Raymond Noyes, was arelation and acquaintance of that George Elson who was with Wallace andLeonidas Hubbard, and afterwards guided Mrs. Hubbard in her crossing ofLabrador. The fifth was a boy of eighteen named Lean. They were allfamiliar with the idea of summer travel in this country; quite a number,a score or so that is to say, of adventurous people, including three orfour women, had ventured far in the wake of the Hubbards into thesegreat wildernesses during the decade that followed that first tragicexperiment in which Hubbard died. But that any one not of Indian orEsquimaux blood should propose to face out the Labrador winter was a newthing to them. They were really very sceptical at the outset whetherthese two highly civilized-looking people would ever get up to theHeight of Land at all, and it was still with manifest incredulity thatthey set about the building of the hut and the construction of thesleeping bunks for which they had brought up planking. A stream ofspeculative talk had flowed along beside Marjorie and Trafford eversince they had entered the Green River; and it didn't so much come to anend as get cut off at last by the necessity of their departure.
Noyes would stand, holding a hammer and staring at the narrow littleberth he was fixing together.
"You'll not sleep in this," he said.
"I will," replied Marjorie.
"You'll come back with us."
"Not me."
"There'll be wolves come and howl."
"Let 'em."
"They'll come right up to the door here. Winter makes 'em hidjus bold."
Marjorie shrugged her shoulders.
"It's that cold I've known a man have his nose froze while he lay inbed," said Noyes.
"Up here?"
"Down the coast. But they say it's 'most as cold up here. Many's the manit's starved and froze."...
He and his companions told stories,--very circumstantial and pitifulstories, of Indian disasters. They were all tales of weariness andstarvation, of the cessation of food, because the fishing gave out,because the caribou did not migrate by the customary route, because theman of a family group broke his wrist, and then of the start of all orsome of the party to the coast to get help and provisions, of thestraining, starving fugitives caught by blizzards, losing the track,devouring small vermin raw, gnawing their own skin garments until theytoiled half-naked in the snow,--becoming cannibals, becoming delirious,lying down to die. Once there was an epidemic of influenza, and threefamilies of seven and twenty people just gave up and starved and died intheir lodges, and were found, still partly frozen, a patient, pitifulcompany, by trappers in the spring....
Such they said, were the common things that happened in a Labradorwinter. Did the Traffords wish to run such risks?
A sort of propagandist enthusiasm grew up in the men. They felt itincumbent upon them to persuade the Traffords to return. They reasonedwith them rather as one does with wilful children. They tried to remindthem of the delights and securities of the world they were deserting.Noyes drew fancy pictures of the pleasures of London by way of contrastto the bitter days before them. "You've got everything there,everything. Suppose you feel a bit ill, you go out, and every blockthere's a drug store got everything--all the new rem'dies--p'rapstwenty, thirty sorts of rem'dy. Lit up, nice. And chaps in collars--likegentlemen. Or you feel a bit dully and you go into the streets andthere's people. Why! when I was in New York I used to spend hourslooking at the people. Hours! And everything lit up, too. Sky signs!Readin' everywhere. You can spend hours and hours in New York----"
"London," said Marjorie.
"Well, London--just going about and reading the things they stick up.Every blamed sort of thing. Or you say, let's go somewhere. Let's go outand be a bit lively. See? Up you get on a car and there you are! Greatbig restaurants, blazing with lights, and you can't think of a thing toeat they haven't got. Waiters all round you, dressed tremendous, fairasking you to have more. Or you say, let's go to a theatre. Verylikely," said Noyes, letting his imagination soar, "you order up one ofthese automobillies."
"By telephone," helped Trafford.
"By telephone," confirmed Noyes. "When I was in New York there was atelephone in each room in the hotel. Each room. I didn't use it ever,except once when they didn't answer--but there it was. I know abouttelephones all right...."
Why had they come here? None of the men were clear about that. Marjorieand Trafford would overhear them discussing this question at their firenight after night; they seemed to talk of nothing else. They indulged inthe boldest hypotheses, even in the theory that Trafford knew ofdeposits of diamonds and gold, and would trust no one but his wife withthe secret. They seemed also attracted by the idea that our two youngpeople had "done something." Lean, with memories of some tatteredsixpenny novel that had drifted into his hands from England, had evensome notion of an elopement, of a pursuing husband or a vindictive wife.He was young and romantic, but it seemed incredible he should suggestthat Marjorie was a royal princess. Yet there were moments when hismanner betrayed a more than personal respect....
One night after a hard day's portage Mackenzie was inspired by abrilliant idea. "They got no children," he said, in a hoarse,e
xceptionally audible whisper. "It worries them. Them as is Catholicsgoes pilgrimages, but these ain't Catholics. See?"
"I can't stand that," said Marjorie. "It touches my pride. I've stood agood deal. Mr. Mackenzie!... Mr.... Mackenzie."
The voice at the men's fire stopped and a black head turned around."What is it, Mrs. Trafford?" asked Mackenzie.
She held up four fingers. "Four!" she said.
"Eh?"
"Three sons and a daughter," said Marjorie.
Mackenzie did not take it in until his younger brother had repeated herwords.
"And you've come from them to _this_.... Sir, what _have_ you come for?"
"We want to be here," shouted Trafford to their listening pause. Theirsilence was incredulous.
"We wanted to be alone together. There was too much--over there--toomuch everything."
Mackenzie, in silhouette against the fire, shook his head, entirelydissatisfied. He could not understand how there could be too much ofanything. It was beyond a trapper's philosophy.
"Come back with us sir," said Noyes. "You'll weary of it...."
Noyes clung to the idea of dissuasion to the end. "I don't care to leaveye," he said, and made a sort of byword of it that served when there wasnothing else to say.
He made it almost his last words. He turned back for another handclaspas the others under their light returning packs were filing down thehill.
"I don't care to leave ye," he said.
"Good luck!" said Trafford.
"You'll need it," said Noyes, and looked at Marjorie very gravely andintently before he turned about and marched off after his fellows....
Both Marjorie and Trafford felt a queer emotion, a sense of loss anddesertion, a swelling in the throat, as that file of men receded overthe rocky slopes, went down into a dip, reappeared presently small andremote cresting another spur, going on towards the little wood that hidthe head of the rapids. They halted for a moment on the edge of the woodand looked back, then turned again one by one and melted stride bystride into the trees. Noyes was the last to go. He stood, in anattitude that spoke as plainly as words, "I don't care to leave ye."Something white waved and flickered; he had whipped out the letters theyhad given him for England, and he was waving them. Then, as if by aneffort, he set himself to follow the others, and the two still watcherson the height above saw him no more.