Love of Life Page 4

  “Haythorne, if you’ll take my word for it. I gave up cards with civilization.”

  “And Mrs. Haythorne,” Messner smiled and bowed.

  She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.

  Haythorne was about to ask the other’s name. His mouth had opened to form the question when Messner cut him off.

  “Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my curiosity. There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or three years ago. The wife of one of the English professors-er, if you will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne-disappeared with some San Francisco doctor, I understood, though his name does not just now come to my lips. Do you remember the incident?”

  Haythorne nodded his head. “Made quite a stir at the time. His name was Womble-Graham Womble. He had a magnificent practice. I knew him somewhat.”

  “Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them. I was wondering if you had heard. They left no trace, hide nor hair.”

  “He covered his tracks cunningly.” Haythorne cleared his throat. “There was rumor that they went to the South Seas -were lost on a trading schooner in a typhoon, or something like that.”

  “I never heard that,” Messner said. “You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?”

  “Perfectly,” she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that Haythorne might not see.

  The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner remarked:

  “This Dr. Womble, I’ve heard he was very handsome, and-er-quite a success, so to say, with the ladies.”

  “Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair,” Haythorne grumbled.

  “And the woman was a termagant-at least so I’ve been told. It was generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life-er-not exactly paradise for her husband.”

  “I never heard that,” Haythorne rejoined. “In San Francisco the talk was all the other way.”

  “Woman sort of a martyr, eh?-crucified on the cross of matrimony?”

  The doctor nodded. Messner’s gray eyes were mildly curious as he went on:

  “That was to be expected-two sides to the shield. Living in Berkeley I only got the one side. She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems.”

  “Some coffee, please,” Haythorne said.

  The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light laughter.

  “You’re gossiping like a pair of beldames,” she chided them.

  “It’s so interesting,” Messner smiled at her, then returned to the doctor. “The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation in San Francisco?”

  “On the contrary, he was a moral prig,” Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. “He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in his body.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Never laid eyes on him. I never knocked about in university circles.”

  “One side of the shield again,” Messner said, with an air of weighing the matter judicially. “While he did not amount to much, it is true-that is, physically-I’d hardly say he was as bad as all that. He did take an active interest in student athletics. And he had some talent. He once wrote a Nativity play that brought him quite a bit of local appreciation. I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head of the English department, only the affair happened and he resigned and went away. It quite broke his career, or so it seemed. At any rate, on our side the shield, it was considered a knock-out blow to him. It was thought he cared a great deal for his wife.”

  Haythorne, finishing his mug of coffee, grunted uninterestedly and lighted his pipe.

  “It was fortunate they had no children,” Messner continued.

  But Haythorne, with a glance at the stove, pulled on his cap and mittens.

  “I’m going out to get some wood,” he said. “Then I can take off my moccasins and he comfortable.”

  The door slammed behind him. For a long minute there was silence. The man continued in the same position on the bed. The woman sat on the grub-box, facing him.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked abruptly.

  Messner looked at her with lazy indecision. “What do you think I ought to do? Nothing scenic, I hope. You see I am stiff and trail-sore, and this bunk is so restful.”

  She gnawed her lower lip and fumed dumbly.

  “But-” she began vehemently, then clenched her hands and stopped.

  “I hope you don’t want me to kill Mr.-er-Haythorne,” he said gently, almost pleadingly. “It would be most distressing, and, I assure you, really it is unnecessary.”

  “But you must do something,” she cried.

  “On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that I do not have to do anything.”

  “You would stay here?”

  He nodded.

  She glanced desperately around the cabin and at the bed unrolled on the other bunk. “Night is coming on. You can’t stop here. You can’t! I tell you, you simply can’t!”

  “Of course I can. I might remind you that I found this cabin first and that you are my guests.”

  Again her eyes travelled around the room, and the terror in them leaped up at sight of the other bunk.

  “Then we’ll have to go,” she announced decisively.

  “Impossible. You have a dry, hacking cough-the sort Mr.-er-Haythorne so aptly described. You’ve already slightly chilled your lungs. Besides, he is a physician and knows. He would never permit it.”

  “Then what are you going to do?” she demanded again, with a tense, quiet utterance that boded an outbreak.

  Messner regarded her in a way that was almost paternal, what of the profundity of pity and patience with which he contrived to suffuse it.

  “My dear Theresa, as I told you before, I don’t know. I really haven’t thought about it.”

  “Oh! You drive me mad!” She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in impotent wrath. “You never used to be this way.”

  “I used to be all softness and gentleness,” he nodded concurrence. “Was that why you left me?”

  “You are so different, so dreadfully calm. You frighten me. I feel you have something terrible planned all the while. But whatever you do, don’t do anything rash. Don’t get excited-”

  “I don’t get excited any more,” he interrupted. “Not since you went away.”

  “You have improved-remarkably,” she retorted.

  He smiled acknowledgment. “While I am thinking about what I shall do, I’ll tell you what you will have to do-tell Mr.-er-Haythorne who I am. It may make our stay in this cabin more-may I say, sociable?”

  “Why have you followed me into this frightful country?” she asked irrelevantly.

  “Don’t think I came here looking for you, Theresa. Your vanity shall not be tickled by any such misapprehension. Our meeting is wholly fortuitous. I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere. To be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place you were least liable to be in.”

  There was a fumbling at the latch, then the door swung in and Haythorne entered with an armful of firewood. At the first warning, Theresa began casually to clear away the dishes. Haythorne went out again after more wood.

  “Why didn’t you introduce us?” Messner queried.

  “I’ll tell him,” she replied, with a toss of her head. “Don’t think I’m afraid.”

  “I never knew you to be afraid, very much, of anything.”

  “And I’m not afraid of confession, either,” she said, with softening face and voice.

  “In your case, I fear, confession is exploitation by indirection, profit-making by ruse, self-aggrandizement at the expense of God.”

  “Don’t be literary,” she pouted, with growing tenderness. “I never did like epigrammatic discussion. Besides, I’m not afraid to ask you to forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, Theresa. I really should thank
you. True, at first I suffered; and then, with all the graciousness of spring, it dawned upon me that I was happy, very happy. It was a most amazing discovery.”

  “But what if I should return to you?” she asked.

  “I should” (he looked at her whimsically), “be greatly perturbed.”

  “I am your wife. You know you have never got a divorce.”

  “I see,” he meditated. “I have been careless. It will be one of the first things I attend to.”

  She came over to his side, resting her hand on his arm. “You don’t want me, John?” Her voice was soft and caressing, her hand rested like a lure. “If I told you I had made a mistake? If I told you that I was very unhappy?-and I am. And I did make a mistake.”

  Fear began to grow on Messner. He felt himself wilting under the lightly laid hand. The situation was slipping away from him, all his beautiful calmness was going. She looked at him with melting eyes, and he, too, seemed all dew and melting. He felt himself on the edge of an abyss, powerless to withstand the force that was drawing him over.

  “I am coming back to you, John. I am coming back to-day… now.”

  As in a nightmare, he strove under the hand. While she talked, he seemed to hear, rippling softly, the song of the Lorelei. It was as though, somewhere, a piano were playing and the actual notes were impinging on his ear-drums.

  Suddenly he sprang to his feet, thrust her from him as her arms attempted to clasp him, and retreated backward to the door. He was in a panic.

  “I’ll do something desperate!” he cried.

  “I warned you not to get excited.” She laughed mockingly, and went about washing the dishes. “Nobody wants you. I was just playing with you. I am happier where I am.”

  But Messner did not believe. He remembered her facility in changing front. She had changed front now. It was exploitation by indirection. She was not happy with the other man. She had discovered her mistake. The flame of his ego flared up at the thought. She wanted to come back to him, which was the one thing he did not want. Unwittingly, his hand rattled the door-latch.

  “Don’t run away,” she laughed. “I won’t bite you.”

  “I am not running away,” he replied with childlike defiance, at the same time pulling on his mittens. “I’m only going to get some water.”

  He gathered the empty pails and cooking pots together and opened the door. He looked back at her.

  “Don’t forget you’re to tell Mr.-er-Haythorne who I am.”

  Messner broke the skin that had formed on the water-hole within the hour, and filled his pails. But he did not return immediately to the cabin. Leaving the pails standing in the trail, he walked up and down, rapidly, to keep from freezing, for the frost bit into the flesh like fire. His beard was white with his frozen breath when the perplexed and frowning brows relaxed and decision came into his face. He had made up his mind to his course of action, and his frigid lips and cheeks crackled into a chuckle over it. The pails were already skinned over with young ice when he picked them up and made for the cabin.

  When he entered he found the other man waiting, standing near the stove, a certain stiff awkwardness and indecision in his manner. Messner set down his water-pails.

  “Glad to meet you, Graham Womble,” he said in conventional tones, as though acknowledging an introduction.

  Messner did not offer his hand. Womble stirred uneasily, feeling for the other the hatred one is prone to feel for one he has wronged.

  “And so you’re the chap,” Messner said in marvelling accents. “Well, well. You see, I really am glad to meet you. I have been-er-curious to know what Theresa found in you-where, I may say, the attraction lay. Well, well.”

  And he looked the other up and down as a man would look a horse up and down.

  “I know how you must feel about me,” Womble began.

  “Don’t mention it,” Messner broke in with exaggerated cordiality of voice and manner. “Never mind that. What I want to know is how do you find her? Up to expectations? Has she worn well? Life been all a happy dream ever since?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Theresa interjected.

  “I can’t help being natural,” Messner complained.

  “You can be expedient at the same time, and practical,” Womble said sharply. “What we want to know is what are you going to do?”

  Messner made a well-feigned gesture of helplessness. “I really don’t know. It is one of those impossible situations against which there can be no provision.”

  “All three of us cannot remain the night in this cabin.”

  Messner nodded affirmation.

  “Then somebody must get out.”

  “That also is incontrovertible,” Messner agreed. “When three bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one must get out.”

  “And you’re that one,” Womble announced grimly. “It’s a ten-mile pull to the next camp, but you can make it all right.”

  “And that’s the first flaw in your reasoning,” the other objected. “Why, necessarily, should I be the one to get out? I found this cabin first.”

  “But Tess can’t get out,” Womble explained. “Her lungs are already slightly chilled.”

  “I agree with you. She can’t venture ten miles of frost. By all means she must remain.”

  “Then it is as I said,” Womble announced with finality.

  Messner cleared his throat. “Your lungs are all right, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but what of it?”

  Again the other cleared his throat and spoke with painstaking and judicial slowness. “Why, I may say, nothing of it, except, ah, according to your own reasoning, there is nothing to prevent your getting out, hitting the frost, so to speak, for a matter of ten miles. You can make it all right.”

  Womble looked with quick suspicion at Theresa and caught in her eyes a glint of pleased surprise.

  “Well?” he demanded of her.

  She hesitated, and a surge of anger darkened his face. He turned upon Messner.

  “Enough of this. You can’t stop here.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “I won’t let you.” Womble squared his shoulders. “I’m running things.”

  “I’ll stay anyway,” the other persisted.

  “I’ll put you out.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  Womble stopped a moment to steady his voice and control himself. Then he spoke slowly, in a low, tense voice.

  “Look here, Messner, if you refuse to get out, I’ll thrash you. This isn’t California. I’ll beat you to a jelly with my two fists.”

  Messner shrugged his shoulders. “If you do, I’ll call a miners’ meeting and see you strung up to the nearest tree. As you said, this is not California. They’re a simple folk, these miners, and all I’ll have to do will be to show them the marks of the beating, tell them the truth about you, and present my claim for my wife.”

  The woman attempted to speak, but Womble turned upon her fiercely.

  “You keep out of this,” he cried.

  In marked contrast was Messner’s “Please don’t intrude, Theresa.”

  What of her anger and pent feelings, her lungs were irritated into the dry, hacking cough, and with blood-suffused face and one hand clenched against her chest, she waited for the paroxysm to pass.

  Womble looked gloomily at her, noting her cough.

  “Something must be done,” he said. “Yet her lungs can’t stand the exposure. She can’t travel till the temperature rises. And I’m not going to give her up.”

  Messner hemmed, cleared his throat, and hemmed again, semi-apologetically, and said, “I need some money.”

  Contempt showed instantly in Womble’s face. At last, beneath him in vileness, had the other sunk himself.

  “You’ve got a fat sack of dust,” Messner went on. “I saw you unload it from the sled.”

  “How much do you want?” Womble demanded, with a contempt in his voice equal to that in his face.

  “I made an estimate of the sack, a
nd I-ah-should say it weighed about twenty pounds. What do you say we call it four thousand?”

  “But it’s all I’ve got, man!” Womble cried out.

  “You’ve got her,” the other said soothingly. “She must be worth it. Think what I’m giving up. Surely it is a reasonable price.”

  “All right.” Womble rushed across the floor to the gold-sack. “Can’t put this deal through too quick for me, you-you little worm!”

  “Now, there you err,” was the smiling rejoinder. “As a matter of ethics isn’t the man who gives a bribe as bad as the man who takes a bribe? The receiver is as bad as the thief, you know; and you needn’t console yourself with any fictitious moral superiority concerning this little deal.”

  “To hell with your ethics!” the other burst out. “Come here and watch the weighing of this dust. I might cheat you.”

  And the woman, leaning against the bunk, raging and impotent, watched herself weighed out in yellow dust and nuggets in the scales erected on the grub-box. The scales were small, making necessary many weighings, and Messner with precise care verified each weighing.

  “There’s too much silver in it,” he remarked as he tied up the gold-sack. “I don’t think it will run quite sixteen to the ounce. You got a trifle the better of me, Womble.”

  He handled the sack lovingly, and with due appreciation of its preciousness carried it out to his sled.

  Returning, he gathered his pots and pans together, packed his grub-box, and rolled up his bed. When the sled was lashed and the complaining dogs harnessed, he returned into the cabin for his mittens.

  “Good-by, Tess,” he said, standing at the open door.

  She turned on him, struggling for speech but too frantic to word the passion that burned in her.

  “Good-by, Tess,” he repeated gently.

  “Beast!” she managed to articulate.

  She turned and tottered to the bunk, flinging herself face down upon it, sobbing: “You beasts! You beasts!”

  John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face. At the bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled. He worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water-hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents of the sack into the water. The river was shallow at that point, and two feet beneath the surface he could see the bottom dull-yellow in the fading light. At the sight of it, he spat into the hole.