Chapter XIV: Introduction: I (13)

A sudden, sinuous motion, and Ah-king-ah was facing the west. The drum began a soft, rolling accompaniment to his rising, long-drawn croon. The tawny torsos of the hunters, moving to and fro from the hips, caught the light in zigzag waves.

Ah-king-ah’s tones grew louder, the tempo of the drum quickened, and its sound swelled until it became the voice of the wind, the thunder of crashing seas, the expression of nature in all her moods of fury. Swaying bodies responded. The people began to shout, to vent queer cries in unison, urging the shaman to greater efforts, deeper magic. Excitement grew until it was a very frenzy of earnestness that increased the heat of the _kashim_ and started the sweat on the sixty bodies packed there. The reek of them was sickening, the deluge of sounds deafening.

Suddenly everything stopped. Ah-king-ah grew rigid. While the jade and amber beads dangling from the plugs in his lower lip quivered into life, his dark face took on the look of a demon. He flung out his arms, raised his chin, and sent an intonation soaring through the din of the gale.

“Thou, Almighty Devil----”

“Stop!” The small figure of the missionary catapulted to the middle of the room, one arm outstretched, one thin finger extended. “Stop, blasphemer!” he shouted, lost to all sense of danger in the fervor of his religious indignation. “Servant of Satan! son of Belial! wouldst thou anger God by thy sacrilege?” His pale eyes flashed in his twitching face, his accusing fingers trembled. “God alone is mighty! God alone is good! Oh, poor deluded ones,”--he turned pleadingly to the stunned and wondering people--“shut your ears to the evils of this sorcerer! Turn to the true God, and the blizzard will die, and you shall have meat!”

In the smoky light the astonished expressions on the dark faces changed. They grew sullen, grew threatening, in a silence that was pregnant with hostility. One wolf-step brought Ah-king-ah close to the white man, who became dwarfed and insignificant beside the powerful Eskimo. Ah-king-ah’s voice rang deep and mellow and supremely exalted after the thin, excited tones of the missionary.

“The white man has spoken, my brothers. But--did we of In-ga-lee-nay ask him for this God whom he says we insult? The white man has broken in upon us. He has crossed the sign that warns all strangers from our council-house. He has spoken. Listen now to Ah-king-ah and compare the wisdom of our tongues.” He paused until the murmur of approval went around the hunters’ shelf. “Well ye know that our people have lived on In-ga-lee-nay for ten times a thousand moons, happy in the customs of the ancient ones. Well ye know that our island and the waters about our island have ever been the abode of plenty, the breeding-place of birds, the dwelling-place of land-creatures, the home of sea-creatures. In all the land of the Innuits no village has been so favored by the spirits. In no village but thine could a man sit in his doorway and shoot enough seals to give a feast.”

The hunters grunted assent and gravely nodded their heads above their folded arms.

“Yea, my brothers, in the old time ye were happy. Your bellies were rounded and well filled. Skins of oil hung from your ceilings, and oil in plenty burned in the lamps of your igloos. This was the happy way of life under the wise laws of your fathers.” Ah-king-ah shifted his drum from one hip to the other and resumed with quickened utterance:

“Then comes this white man from the South. Uninvited, he pushes his way into your igloos with the words of his God. He comes with the ringing of the bell that is bad medicine in the ears of the almighty devil, tossing in his hands the ivory ball of the world. Then, my brothers, from the Place of Winds strange evils have come upon you. Why? Why, my brothers?”

He allowed a moment’s silence before he leaned forward and whispered slowly in a way that left the room ringing:

“The--almighty--devil--is--angry--with--you!”

In the hush that followed, the sound of the blizzard seeped in through the thick walls. Ah-king-ah suddenly flung himself upright, and continued in a voice that gathered volume as he proceeded:

“The almighty devil is angry with you for harkening to new words. Behold, your bellies grow flat against your backs. Your igloos grow cold. Your dogs consume each other. Oh, hear the words of Ah-king-ah, my brothers, whom the spirits have taught concerning these things of mystery.” The shaman wheeled, and with a quick, accusing finger transfixed the missionary. “It is because of this white man and his ringing bell that the devil is angry!” he shouted. “Wherefore, I say, let this white man take his God back to his own kind--back to the land of his fathers!” The words rose to a shriek. “Let him take his God back to the land of his fathers!”

The muttering of the crowd broke loose in a yelling frenzy as men, women, and children took up the cry. In the seething, sweating mass of humanity the missionary’s protests were lost; but the dauntless little man wrested himself from the hands of the medicine-man’s apprentices, snatched the drum from the great Ah-king-ah himself, and leaped to the now empty shelf of the _kashim_.

“Wait! Wait!” he commanded. His fist banged the devil-drum, which none but a shaman might touch on penalty of death. The very magnitude of the sacrilege bludgeoned the people into an aghast silence. “For the sake of your starving women and children, listen to the words of the white man’s God. In the Book of which I have told you it is written: ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do!’ Oh, poor benighted ones, pray to God for help, and He will answer. For two months ye have watched Ah-king-ah with his devil tricks trying to change the wind. His words are a lie within his mouth! His sorceries are an abomination to the Lord. His----”

A lightning movement, and Ah-king-ah had snatched the drum to him.

“We do not know this man’s God, and we do not want to know Him!” The shaman’s mighty voice extinguished the missionary’s. “Let the white man take his God back to the land of his fathers!” The rumble of the drum began, and the shaman’s feet resumed their weird passes. Again and again he repeated the words. His rhythmic chanting and the booming of the drum woke the mob spirit in the people. The yelling crowd that surged threateningly toward the missionary was led by Milli-ru-ak, who leaped to the shelf and crooked his avid fingers about the white man’s throat.

“Stop, my brothers!” The medicine-man’s authoritative voice rang out. He had ceased his capering, and there was a light of apprehension in his wary eyes. “Milli-ru-ak, lay thy hands off! It is not well that the people of In-ga-lee-nay do violence to such as he, for well ye know how the long arm of the white man’s law reaches even from the South, where the sun sinks under the world, to the North, where the water ends. Have ye forgotten the fate of the three medicine-men, Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock in the year of the Red Death? They did but bind the man O’Ryan until his spirit fled--the strange man O’Ryan, who swung the little cup of smoke before his God, and wore the long garment of a woman, with a cross about his neck. Remember my brothers, how in the Season of the Sun there came high chiefs from the South, mighty in anger, and with stars on their breasts glittering like the fishes’ scales? Remember how they hanged Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock high on the slope back of the village? Have ye the minds of children that ye can forget the long moons their bones rattled in the chains as the east wind lipped them? I, Ah-king-ah, to whom spirits whisper, tell ye it is not well that we do violence to a white man,”--he woke again the rumbling rhythm of the drum--“but let him leave us in peace to practice the ways of our fathers. Let him take his God back to his own land!”

“Yea! Yea!” The people took up the words in a clamoring chorus, while the shaman’s three apprentices seized the protesting missionary and carried him to the opening in the floor. One of them placed his feet on the ladder. The other two pressed him down rung by rung until he found himself on the floor of the tunnel, where the eyes of starving dogs menaced him.

He stood uncertain for a moment while the _oom-oom_ of the devil-drum rolled in his ears. Then blindly he groped and beat his way along the slippery passage.

“Oh, Thou, Almighty Devil--” The propitiatory chant of Ah-king-ah followed him out into the blizzard.

Darkness had already fallen. The malicious wind flung ice-dust like splintered glass through the fur about his face. He shut his eyes against the sting of it, and stumbled forward, a small, forlorn figure in the polar night. A gust flung him into a drift, and he crawled on his hands and knees until he encountered a dog asleep under the snow. He rose hastily, shivering as the roused animal’s howls set all its mates wailing their hunger in the blackness.

Back in the chill emptiness of his igloo he swayed toward his bunk and, dropping on tense knees beside it, began to pray.

III

Day after day the blizzard continued unabated. The supply of moldy seal-meat dwindled, vanished. The people began eating the walrus-skin coverings of the oomiaks. They chewed the hide dry because there was no oil for cooking except in the house of the medicine-man. The thin-faced children and babies suffered mutely, sucking on sealskin ropes, on thongs of snow-shoes, on anything that contained a bit of nourishment. The dogs, with uncanny prescience, left the habitations of their masters for the heights back of the village. There in the graveyard, where the iron chains still clanked a warning against the hanging-posts of Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock, the gaunt beasts riddled the sepulchers and fought like werwolves over what they found. Not even Milli-ru-ak, the greatest hunter on In-ga-lee-nay, could battle his way up through the blizzard to shoot at them for food.

Hunger gnawed at the stomachs of the people and marked their faces with hollows, yet there were no lamentations, no visible evidences of despair. After the fatalistic manner of their race they waited patiently, stoically, for a change of weather--or for death.

One night the old mother of Miak, the witch-woman, froze to death. The next day every family moved to the _kashim_, where, by shutting out the air and huddling close together, the people could keep warm without oil. Once a day Ah-king-ah brought them hope and comfort by lighting the stone lamp and chanting magical words to the almighty devil.

The missionary in his igloo spent desperate hours on his knees pleading with his God to change the wind. In the darkness he paced his room, warming his thin body by the exercise and striving for courage by repeating over and over the promises of the Bible. Sternly he reduced the rations for his scant daily meal until hunger brought upon him that strange fanatical exultation which is akin to the ecstasy that causes the fasting prophet to prophesy, or the medicine-man to perform his greatest feats of magic. With the passage of each dreary day the conviction grew upon him that this unprecedented blizzard had been sent to test his zeal as a worker in the vineyard of the Lord. This blizzard was his opportunity to win an entire village from the heathen sway of the medicine-man. With every atom of his being the little missionary grew to believe that if once he could persuade the people to enter the meeting-house, if once he could induce them to pray to his God, the wind would die, and the hunters be able to get food.

This conviction forced him every afternoon through the gale to the _kashim_. He ignored every rebuff, ignored utterly the danger to himself, although he knew that Ah-king-ah, should he forget the fate of the priest-murdering medicine-men, might have him killed as a witch who had brought misfortune on the village. Sometimes, by dint of superhuman self-denial, he brought bits of hardtack for the strangely quiet little ones clinging to their mothers in the _kashim_. Always he pleaded with the elders to turn from shamanism to the true God. The Eskimos, apathetic from prolonged hunger, suffered his presence. While he was with them, there was at least the light of his kerosene lantern. Otherwise, the _kashim_ was always in darkness now, for Ah-king-ah’s oil was gone.

Construing this tolerance as an encouraging sign, the earnest little man brought his Bible, and standing under the swinging light of the lantern, he translated page after page of Exodus--the promises of the Lord to the Children of Israel, the feeding of the wanderers in the desert. But the Eskimos sat stolid, unmoved, apathetic. Even his ardent rendering of the miracle of the loaves and fishes fell flat. Ah-king-ah, as if in weary scorn of his rival, stretched himself on the skins of his shelf and slept, or appeared to sleep.

One day, by accident, the missionary read of the magicians and sorcerers who competed with Moses and Aaron at the court of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Milli-ru-ak raised his eyes from a sad contemplation of his ailing infant son asleep in its mother’s arms. Miak, the witch-woman, leaned forward over her empty lamp to listen. A stir of interest went among the people. Here at last was something they could understand.

The white man had heretofore preached only a kind and beneficent God, but seeing in this an opening in the wall of their indifference, he plunged into detailed descriptions of the misfortunes that had visited the Egyptians. His gaunt face and sunken eyes glowed with fervor. Hunger lent a delirious and terrible vividness to his speech. Vicariously, the starving Eskimos were drowned in his Biblical rivers of blood. They were tormented by plagues of frogs and boils, locusts and lice. They were terrified by hails and thunders. Aware of the Eskimos’ almost idolatrous love for their offspring, he loosed his tongue of all restraint when he pictured the smiting of the first-born. To the sound of the howling blizzard he dwelt long on the pathos of the dead childish faces in those desolate homes along the Nile. Ah-king-ah bestirred himself and sat up. There was a murmuring among the hunters. The mothers caught their children to their breasts and swayed back and forth, moaning. The missionary, light-headed from hunger and emotion, reeled under the swinging shadows of the lantern.

“Would ye, like the Egyptians, harden your hearts against the word of God and bring death to your children?” he shouted. “Oh, come, my friends! Come with me before your little ones lie dead in your arms. Pray to Almighty God and be delivered! Follow me before it is too late!” Carried away by the effect of his eloquence on the hitherto indifferent Eskimos, he caught at the lantern and lurched forward toward the exit of the _kashim_. “Follow me to the house of God!”

The mothers rose with hysterical cries. The hunters began to get down from their shelf. But before the missionary had reached the ladder, Ah-king-ah was standing in the middle of the floor. Calm and dignified, he made a single motion with one hand. Not a soul moved farther to follow the white man.

The next day, when the missionary climbed to the opening of the _kashim_, he found the hole covered. His knocks and pleas for entrance met with no response, because Ah-king-ah was sitting on the door to hold it down.

Night brought a drop in temperature and an increase in the force of the gale. The grinding and crash of the ice-pack seemed to threaten the very foundations of the island. With the exception of the missionary, every soul on In-ga-lee-nay was packed in the _kashim_. Men, women, and children chewed desperately on dry walrus-hide and clung together to keep from freezing. The little ones wedged between their parents whimpered in misery. At last the company, weary from many wakeful nights, jerked and flung their arms about in troubled sleep.

When morning broke Milli-ru-ak’s child was dead.

The wailing of the mothers mingled with the roar of the blizzard and the increased fervor of the medicine-man’s incantations. Before the day was done, two more little ones died.

It was then that Milli-ru-ak, with three of the council men, appeared in the igloo of the white man.

“We will pray to your God,” said the hunter, wearily.

The peals of the bell that summoned the people to the prayer-meeting were freighted with the little missionary’s joy in the fulfilment of his mission. He had wrested a whole village from the dominance of the medicine-man!

The sunken eyes in his gaunt, unshaven face glowed with fanatic happiness as he looked down on the crowded room. Eskimos filled the benches, stood about the walls, and squatted on the floor about the last of his oil burning in the stone lamp below the pulpit. Of all the village only Ah-king-ah was absent. The people sat silent, grave, attentive, their eyes fixed on the Bible lying open on the pulpit.

The missionary began his exhortation, raising his voice above the raging of the blizzard and the rending of the icepack. Thrilled by a sense of achievement and inspired by faith, he spoke with a confidence and an eloquence he had never known before. Within him woke the spirit of the evangelist. During the hour he worked upon his congregation he felt himself rising to the sublime heights from which Jesus himself had dominated all physical conditions. So exalted was he that his preaching aroused a measure of faith in the starving Eskimos, even as the incantations of Ah-king-ah had done.

“Such is the might and goodness of our God,” he shouted after he had combed the Bible for incidents showing the stilling of storms, the feeding of the hungry, the raising of the dead. “And He is the same yesterday, today, and forever! Oh, down on your knees, my friends!” he cried with sudden vehemence. “Down on your knees and prove him now--now!”

His impassioned utterance swept his listeners to their knees, shouting, praying, pleading in long, fragmentary prayers for food, for life, for a change of wind. The fervid little white man leading them felt the whole room to be charged with power--an invincible power that flowed from him and from each one and definitely made its connection with the Infinite Mind that rules creation.

When he sprang to his feet at the end of the supplication, his thin face was alight.

“Go home, my people!” his voice rang out with confidence. “Go home and wait on the salvation of our Lord. Sharpen your spears; put an edge on your skinning-knives. Make ready your gears, for the day of hunting is near!”

“If the white man’s God answers, we will all become Christians!” cried Milli-ru-ak, rising and bringing the others with him.

“Yea! Yea!” came the chorus of assent. Miak, the witch-woman, sidled close to the pulpit, putting out a curious, but cautious, finger to feel the Bible.

“If the white man’s God changes the wind,” she croaked, slanting a wise, bleary eye up at the missionary, “the people of In-ga-lee-nay will come when the bell calls and listen again to the words in the black medicine-book.”

From the supreme heights of his faith the missionary watched his fur-clad congregation depart, seeing in them brands he had plucked from the burning, souls he had saved from destruction. Finally, in his cold living-room, he staggered toward his bunk and in sudden exhaustion sank upon it. He had scarcely drawn the fur robes about him when he was plunged into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

IV

He awoke to a hush so intense that his soul ached with it. It was as if the world had died, leaving him the only living thing upon it. After a moment’s bewilderment he realized that the wind was still, and there was no sound of grinding ice! His nerves, for ten weeks made taut by the continuous shriek of the blizzard, relaxed with a suddenness that was like a fall from a great height. Like a man swimming in a sea of silence, he raised his hands, groping for the luminous-faced watch by his bunk. He saw, with a gasp of incredulity, that he had slept eighteen hours!

Still dazed with sleep and hunger, he crawled from his robes and hurried out into the glimmering twilight of the arctic day. Great as was his faith in the power of prayer, he was astonished at the sight that met his eyes.

Under dark, moving clouds strangely shot with silver the ice-pack lay quiet and gray. A quarter of a mile away an inky, jagged line marked a lead of open water among the bergs. Every hunter in the village was squatted along the lead, and, as he looked, a sudden fusillade of rifle-shots registered the death of seals coming up to breathe.

Along the shores women and children and old men swarmed laughing, shouting, as some one threw a seal-hook into a dead animal and drew it to the ice. They crowded about it, their excited yells increasing. Five minutes later they were devouring the steaming flesh, stopping often to toss bits to the dogs, which gulped it ravenously.

The missionary bowed his head, a great gratitude, a great wonder in his heart. God had listened. God had heard. The famine was over.

Like the blizzard, that day’s hunting was unprecedented in In-ga-lee-nay. Thirty seals and a sixty-foot whale fell to the lot of the hunters. There was food in abundance, and oil for the lamps and for the torches that fluttered yellow lights over the ice-bound shores where the people worked joyously over the kill. All day the missionary moved among them. He was happy, elated. They were his flock, his children. In the flush of his joy he had to exercise considerable self-control to keep from calling attention to the glory of God’s mercy. The following day, Saturday, was also filled with unusual activities, but he permitted himself to speak of the meeting of thanksgiving which he would hold for them on Sunday. The Eskimos nodded, and laughed in answer to his enthusiasm. Light-hearted, variable, they had already forgotten the misery of the famine in the plentitude of feasting.

But the children with whom he had divided his last hardtack came shyly to his side and took hold of his hands. They had not forgotten. The little missionary had not realized his utter loneliness, his craving for friendship, for love, until he felt the clinging of their small, warm fingers. His vision was blurred as, one by one, he gathered them up in his arms and talked to them. Here indeed was his work among these benighted little ones and their parents. Here would he stay as long as he lived, teaching them the ways of truth and civilization. His last thought that night was of the meeting-house on the morrow filled with grateful Eskimos sending up their praises to God. Perhaps even Ah-king-ah, the defeated, might come to listen to the Holy Word and become converted.

Sunday morning found him up early preparing his sermon. He melted ice, and for the first time in many weeks was able to shave. As he lighted the blubber-lamps to heat the meeting-house, he noted a small pair of fur mittens left by some child who had accompanied its mother to the first gathering. He picked them up and placed them on the pulpit, intending to return them later. The thought of the youngster sent him to the bottom of his trunk for the flag he always carried with him. He could not begin too soon to familiarize the little ones with their country’s flag, he thought, as he pinned the Stars and Stripes above the blackboard in anticipation of the near day when the people should send their children to school.

He rang the first bell, and then busied himself with a rearrangement of the benches. Engrossed in happy thoughts, he did not realize how swiftly time was passing until he glanced at his watch. Half an hour had gone by since his call to meeting! Apprehension stirred in him as he reached for the cord to ring the second bell, but before his outstretched fingers touched it, he stiffened in the attitude of arrested action.

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._ The air suddenly began vibrating to the deep boom of the devil-drum. His hand fell to his side. Incredulity, comprehension, anger, succeeded each other in his face. Without pausing to tighten his parka hood he rushed out into the calm arctic noon, and ran toward the _kashim_ tunnel. One leap carried him over the medicine-man’s crossed sticks at the entrance, the next plunged him into the darkness of the passage.

Beat of drum and pagan chanting grew louder as he thrust his head up through the opening in the floor which was once more the stage for Ah-king-ah. Behind the shaman stood Milli-ru-ak, with the three whale hunters who had helped him kill the whale. Bird-beaks and crab-claws on their scanty garments were clattering to every motion of their dancing bodies. Their feathered heads swayed above whale-charms of jade that dangled on cords about their necks. Four Eskimo maidens in primitive finery stood together, holding by its ivory chains the Ceremonial Cup of the Whale filled with blubber cubes. At intervals, when the medicine-man signaled, they held the cup aloft and uttered long, weird cries like gulls.

The people who had so recently prostrated themselves in supplication before the white man’s God were now as fervently assisting Ah-king-ah in the ancient rites of thanksgiving to the Spirit of the Whale. Their faces glowed with happiness and well-being; their voices rose in joyous unison with the voice of the shaman.

At sight of the missionary the dancing and chanting ceased abruptly. Ah-king-ah took a confident step forward.

“Why does the white man bring his long face here to anger the spirits of the hunt?” he asked.

The missionary’s sunken eyes passed slowly over the faces of the hunters squatted on the shelf, over the faces of the mothers and of the old men and the children below. His anger ebbed to a great hopelessness that showed in the weary sag of his shoulders. He was defeated, yet he climbed to the floor of the _kashim_ and stood beside the half-nude figure of the giant shaman.

“Were your words then a lie within your mouths, ye people of In-ga-lee-nay?” he asked quietly. “Ye did promise this day to send up thanks to Almighty God for his mercies. If these promises were lies, why did ye come to pray with me?”

Milli-ru-ak started forward, his eyes narrowed with anger, but the medicine-man gestured for silence.

“Listen to the words of Ah-king-ah!” He spoke with primitive dignity, his authoritative voice instantly quelling the murmur of the hunters. “It was I, Ah-king-ah, who sent my people to the _kashim_ of the white man.”

The missionary turned incredulously.

“Long had I chanted the runes that please the almighty devil tossing in his hands the ivory ball of the world,” went on the medicine-man. “And I knew the time was ripe for fulfilment. Yet the wisdom of my fathers tells me that all things change form, even as the ice-pack changes its face in the arms of the wind. New spirits come. Old spirits die. There is sorcery in all things. Perhaps there is sorcery in the black Book the white man keeps. Perhaps there is not. But I, Ah-king-ah, maker of medicine, am not a man of wisdom if I protect not my people against it. Therefore I sent them to thee, white man, who knoweth the ways of thy God in the black Book, but before I sent them I promised that I, Ah-king-ah, who knoweth the ways of the almighty devil, would stay alone, working for them my strongest magic while they pray. They know my medicine is great, for, behold! the storm dies like the last grunt of the stricken walrus and”--he drew himself up proudly, resting his drum on his thigh--“it is I, Ah-king-ah, mightiest shaman of the North, who changed the wind!”

In the approving chorus that filled the room the missionary tried to make himself heard, but Ah-king-ah’s voice continued, vanquishing every other sound:

“And why should thy God be thanked?” he asked in the earnest manner of one seeking to understand another’s point of view. “Thou hast told my people He is a good God wanting to do only good to man. Why pray to Him when he can do us no harm? But the almighty devil--he is evil, evil. All his pleasure comes from doing evil to man. Therefore we must sing the magic runes that please him, so he leaves us alone. Therefore we must dance before the Spirit of the Whale to show our joy at the good fortune the devil has permitted. White man”--Ah-king-ah’s shrewd dark eyes were not unkind as he looked down on the little missionary “our ways are still the ways of our fathers. Thy ways are the ways of thy fathers. Leave us, then, and give thy thanks to whom it please thee.” He raised the drum from his thigh and made a quick motion with it. As the booming sounded, the three apprentices sprang forward. Not ungently they laid hold of the missionary and led him to the opening in the floor. Then rung by rung he was forced down the ladder until his feet touched the icy cobblestones at the bottom. The trap-door dropped above him, leaving him in darkness.

As he stumbled over wolf-dogs gorged with food and indifferent with sleep, his ears rang to the thump of the devil-drum and the pagan chanting of well fed, joyous people. The sounds followed him from the passage into the awful pervading silence of the polar day. He dragged his forlorn figure back along the snowy trail to the meeting-house. His knees trembled. A sudden awareness of his isolation from his kind struck through his heart like a sickness.

Past the mocking bareness of the benches, past the blackboard where the flag, loosed from three of its tacks, hung limp and dispirited, he made his way to the shaky little pulpit. He rubbed a fumbling hand across his eyes then, as a hurt child seeks the comfort of its mother’s breast, his gray head sank on his folded arms, and he pressed his face against the open Bible.

Numbed by his disappointment, crushed by his failure, he lay, a small, defeated white man in the primitive fur garments of an alien race. Gradually into his memory began to crowd the long months of loneliness, sacrifice, and privation he had borne to bring the comforts of religion and the uplift of civilization to an ungrateful heathen people. For them he had given up everything a white man holds dear. For them he had been willing to give even his life. His work had been futile. Futility! The word stood out in letters of ice against the blackness of his misery. But he was at the end. He was through. In the spring, when the first boat came from the mainland, he would leave In-ga-lee-nay. He _would_ take his God back to his own land, where there was at least the companionship of his kind.

Sagging wearily against the pulpit, he was oblivious to the passage of time, deaf to the increasing happy shouts from the _kashim_. The oil in the lamps burned away, the sputtering wicks grew black. Unconsciously, one hand, opening and shutting in anguish, had taken hold of something soft and warm. When at last he raised his face from his cramped arms, his eyes, dull with brooding, fell on the tiny pair of mittens he had placed on the pulpit that morning.

For the space of a dozen breaths he stared at them, then slowly, meditatively he began stroking them. Into his tired mind crept thoughts of yesterday. Children had come to him then--children with upraised, trusting eyes and warm, clinging fingers. They had come because they believed in him. They liked him. They were potential hunters and mothers of hunters. With their small clinging hands they were already molding the future of their race.

Little by little the look of hopelessness faded from his eyes, and a new determination crept into his thin face. When he stepped from the pulpit he turned and pinned the flag back into place, then hung the mittens on a nail beside it.

It was very late for the second bell, but the missionary crossed over to the bell-rope. His step was firm again, his dogged chin upraised. He laid hold of the rope and began pulling it vigorously, hopefully.

Out over the still, white bergs of Bering Strait two sounds strove once more for dominance in the arctic air:

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._

_D-i-n-g-d-o-n-g, d-i-n-g-d-o-n-g. D-i-n-g-d-o-n-g._

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Copyright, 1925, by The Century Company.
Copyright, 1926, by Barrett Willoughby.

GIDEON’S REVENGE[20]

By ELINOR WYLIE

(From _The Century Magazine_)

Gideon extinguished the flame wherewith he had lit his pipe; he dropped the match tidily behind the wallflowers, and looked about him with quiet, but incredulous, joy. Standing at the door of the cottage, his head was stooped a little beneath the lintel, partly from actual necessity and partly in a courteous gesture of apology to this exquisite scene in which only children or delicately formed and tinted women might appear appropriate and untarnished. Above him the freshness of the honey-colored thatch contrasted pleasantly with the rose-purple of ancient brick; the watery sheen of the upper windows reflected a few hanging strands of straw, like gilded seaweed observed in the profundity of a wave. Inclosed by its clipped hedge, the garden lay like a small square pool of flowers drawn together in concentrated brightness, as if many larger and grosser gardens had been melted into one and poured into this narrow space. Across the green a dew pond reversed the sky to another pool, and permitted Gideon’s vision to plumb without fatigue the utmost depth of the empyrean.

Gideon was a tall old man; his age was perhaps seventy. His face had more of the falcon than the eagle in its lines; the beaked nose, the bony setting of the large bright eyes, the hollowed cheek and temple, were all carved and polished to a pattern sufficiently bold, but light and restless and uneasy. His eyes were gray; his hair, which had once been reddish, had now the faintly yellowed whiteness of flax; it rose steeply to a crest above his brow. The garments which he wore hung somewhat awkwardly upon his emaciation--an emaciation suggesting austerity rather than weakness. The correct and shabby tweeds were excellent in themselves, molded to fit with easy perfection the scene and circumstance, but although they clothed with tolerable grace the mortal form of Gideon, they did not fit his soul. You saw him preferably in rusty black, with a hat remotely Spanish, and a cloak; decidedly the soul of Gideon wore a black cloak. And indeed at this very moment, within the cottage, Caroline was brushing just such a cloak preparatory to putting it away forever with beautiful cakes of gum camphor crumbling like soft and fragrant ice among its mysterious folds.

Gideon turned and entered the cottage; the rooms appeared deliciously chilled and shadowed by the green orchard to the east. Avoiding the larger chamber, where Caroline whisked fantastic garments into the bland, golden obscurity of a tulip-wood chest of drawers, he turned into the kitchen and surveyed its cool and ordered colors with minute approval. It was a room decorous and subtly bright, a place for the concoction of junkets and cherry pies. Gideon sighed with pleasure; it was a miracle that he, a lawless, bitter man, should have imagined this room and made it. Of course there had been the skeleton ready to his hand--the stone floor, the beams, the fireplace--but he had breathed upon cold ashes, and they had flowered like a domestic rose.

Caroline had climbed the steep little stairs to the attic; he could hear portmanteaus bumping about overhead like huge frolicsome beasts; he had a sudden picture of the trim, pink-faced servant surrounded by portmanteaus and kit-bags, labeled in dusty, barbaric scarlet, enormous in the gloom. He reflected with satisfaction that all his papers were already neatly pigeon-holed in his grandfather’s desk and his mother’s boule cabinet; Caroline was merely rummaging among ponchos and sombreros.

Slowly, with a fastidious, yet sensual, savoring of his delights, Gideon entered the other room and strolled down its entire length, stopping here and there to touch the lovely surface of wood perversely satin-skinned, or velvet worn and rosy as immemorial lichen. Here again was something more than human in the happy confluence of various times and manners; he had seen these objects scattered in obscure exile among the Victorian ineptitudes of his mother’s vast drawing rooms, or lately huddled ignominiously in storage warehouses; he had purchased some of them carelessly at the ragged ends of the earth, and now they were gathered together under the green and glazing twilight of the apple trees to make a miraculous whole. He had bought a cottage, knocked down a partition or two, and engaged a certain number of pantechnicon vans; he had expected the place to be comfortable and rather absurd, and by some curious necromancy of chance it was grave and exquisite. It was as if it had always been so, and his. Between open windows, his desk was flooded by calm radiance.

As he fingered the firmly packed bundles of letters, bound with pink legal tape, or more sentimentally confined by blue ribbons, he considered the future with approval. It was eminently fitting; it was, indeed, inevitable. How, save under conditions of the most shining peace, could he hope to relax into that judicial clarity of mind so necessary to his great project? The hardships, the astringent horrors of his past career, had precisely steeled his hand to execution; it now remained for a poor, but honest, gentleman to judge the culprits before killing them, and Gideon was acutely aware of the propriety of being equitable to begin with, if only to augment the pleasure of being savage in the final sentence, the final act of revenge.

He stared retrospectively down the lurid vista of the last twenty-five years, his mind’s eye blinking, for all its falcon look, in the full chemical glare of recollection. There had been, quite literally, singularly little sunlight in the vista, and that little had quivered to a tropical intensity removed by several continents from this subaqueous glimmer stained by apple trees. But mostly, he remembered, things had happened at night; that was, perhaps, the reason he had achieved so flattering and profitable a reputation as special correspondent.

Special! Oh, very special indeed! For who but Gideon would have been clever enough to be forever on the spot, the often bloody and unhealthy spot, where things were happening at night? What other nocturnal vigilance had so well observed, what vitriolic pen recorded, alike the curious minutiæ and the vast apocalypse of life? From the beginning to the end of that bewildering vista he had contrived to see the event strangely, and to make the strangeness vivid by his words. Also, he had advanced in wisdom and cunning; he recalled with contempt how crudely he had daubed hell-fire and sanguine upon his earlier efforts. In ninety-eight, when he had seen the _Maine_ intemperately uncurl a million fronds of brilliance against the plushy dark, he could not, telling the dreadful thing beheld, curdle the reader’s veins as now his lightest, coolest whisper curdled them. The latest of all his writings, the wry, amused account of Lenine stretched upon his crimson upholstery under the great glass bell like some horrible wax flower, blooming through unnatural, and electric, days, that was excellent, that was art.

II

And now, the quarter-century past, he was quit of restraints, of delicacies and decencies; now he was free of galling secret vows and public scruples. The very last of the Pennimans had died twenty years ago in the person of old Joseph; Gideon had kept his promise to Millicent, and Millicent herself had been dead for twenty-five years.

He was free to turn that intricate and fiery engine, his mind, upon the people he had hated and had, for a measured space of time, striven to forget. At first, after his wife’s death, he had acidly regretted his promise to her--the promise given to the expiring appeal of her large blue eyes, but never ratified by their wedded spirits in this world or the vaguer one into whose ambiguities she had at once departed. He had kept the promise because it was a promise; he had been totally untrammeled by sympathy for its purpose or its beneficiaries. He had spared the Pennimans for a score of years; he had not written a book, no, not so much as an epitaph upon any of them until two decades had yellowed the latest of their tombs. It had been a hellish bore, but now he was glad he had refrained. The long and lenten abstinence from revenge had but given edge to his appetite and sharpened his powers to austere perfection.

Gideon drew a dozen slim and pointed pencils from a drawer of the desk; upon its dark-amber surface he placed a formidable pile of copy paper. The book loomed before his happy contemplation, tremendous, Protean, monstrous, yet alluring. A book, but not alone a book; a mighty chase, a dexterous unmasking, a trial, and an execution. And Gideon, at once Justice incarnate and the instrument of Justice, Gideon must be both judge and executioner. The book was to be a headsman’s ax, savage, medieval, elegant, and efficient. Then, picturing a row of Penniman faces upon the spikes of Temple Bar, Gideon smiled a slight abstemious smile.

Apart from fancies, however charming, the facts were these; he reviewed them swiftly, leaning back luxuriously in a chair whose polished curves were as velvet to his neuralgic bones. The book was a debt to his own soul, long overdue, heavy with accretion of interest. He had waited, for Millicent’s darling and ridiculous sake, until all kith and kin of hers were moldered into complete indifference. She had desired to shield them from anger and annoyance, for surely their fatted, gelded souls were incapable of pain; she had interposed her threadbare little body between their torpor and his vengeance. Very well; it had been so, but now he would remember it all, and set it down, and verily the page should shrivel beneath the fire of his revelation. Though they skulked in their sepulchers, shrouded in this their last cowardice, he would burn them out of oblivion; the flame of their destruction should ascend forever, purified and fervent, sweet in the nostrils of the brave. He would tell the tale; he would release that holy indignation which for so long had made his heart a fever.

Milly--that foolish nickname wherein her family, with characteristic impertinence, had clothed the golden pallor of her girlhood! If Gideon pronounced her name, he enriched the vowels with a foreign inflection which made it more Melisande than Millicent. That was her proper appellation, that long soft veil of sound, fitting her sallow-flaxen beauty with an enduring garment.

She, who had lain so long asleep in his heart, should be brought forth once more into the wide, bright chamber of his mind; he would look at her in the unpitying glare of that illumination. She would stand, willowy and disarming, lovely and ineffectual, beside the solid, stolid forms of her murderers, the Pennimans. Gideon would look at them all; the Pennimans would tremble and grow pale, they would even grow thin perhaps; Millicent would smile. It would not be the smile of her later days, painted narrow and colorless by despair; it would be the smile of the beginning, of hope and casual courage and unconsidered joy. Gideon ground his teeth, thinking how the Pennimans had destroyed her gaiety and trust. She had loved her father and mother; she had even loved the unspeakable Ambrose, with his long nose and liquid, languid eyes; by love she had been broken and undone.

Of course they had opposed the match; they were obstructive by instinct and conviction, and Gideon, who had refused to be a barrister in order to write for the lesser journals, was sufficiently above them in family and below them in fortune to irritate their every prejudice. His wit inflamed their mental tissues like cayenne pepper; his tongue was gall and vinegar. They resented his height and were half afraid of his hair, which was never properly brushed; he seemed an enigma designed to insult them; his doing could not be other than wrong, but his mere being was the radical error. Gideon knew that, and the reflection soothed him; it meant that he had always, even without trying, done his best to please them: his best must always fail with the Pennimans, and he was glad he had not tried too hard. Millicent had tried too hard, and, in foredoomed endeavor, been destroyed.

He had been a strange son-in-law for the Pennimans; he had fluttered that dove-cote with a vengeance. Fat pigeons they were, and Ambrose with the melting gaze of a turtle above his little waistcoat’s curve. And Millicent among them, white and fluttering, with her perpetual olive branch: she was truly a dove!

Without the Pennimans, pecking and obese, how far might they not have flown together, Gideon and Millicent, the falcon and the dove! God knew she had always wanted to be free; God had known it all along, in fact, and that was Gideon’s quarrel with God, second only to his quarrel with the Pennimans. For the Deity, frequently invoked by that pious family, had apparently been moved by their flatteries rather than by Gideon’s dignified silence; God had not saved Millicent even at the last minute: he had, by allowing her to die, given her back to the Pennimans. Gideon, who had never believed in God, found this impossible to forgive; in his indignation he realized that he was a Christian.

The Pennimans, outrageous to the last, had always blamed him for his wife’s death; they had pecked her into shreds while he was cynically examining the Spanish-American War. They had not even taken the trouble to cable news of her illness; he had returned to find her _in extremis_. Gideon was frantic; the Pennimans were sorrowful and mildly complacent. They expressed surprise at his reappearance, and disgust at what they were pleased to term his neglect. Millicent had, apparently, been killed by the absence of a husband whose presence had always, according to the Pennimans, constituted a criminal menace to her health and sanity. The bronze door of the Penniman vault shut firmly upon her mortal remains; the family, in solemn conclave, decided that Gideon was sailing for South Africa with Milly’s blood upon his hands. Gideon knew that their own hands were dabbled in her innocence.

Gideon found the South African War a personal convenience, but against the Pennimans he was very bitter, and his amazing despatches, colored and brilliant with hate, were only a partial relief to his feelings. He found it impossible to dislike the Boers with the authentic fervor so desirable in a special correspondent; quite deliberately he dipped his pen into his private gall before writing, and his passionate loathing for a respectable family at Wimbledon fired half England to a pure flame of patriotism. But it was all very unsatisfactory and rather troublesome, this inner pretense that Cronje and Wessels were in reality Mrs. Penniman and Ambrose. His despatches were devoured raw by the popular appetite, but he himself went hungry; he starved for his revenge. Gideon, remembering those days, laughed heartily. How fierce he had been, and how frustrate!

The sunlight fell across his dusky golden desk, and still he remembered, and did not write. That was twenty-five years ago, and this was England, and he was old, but neither frustrate nor starving. The Gideon of the Transvaal had been a widowed Gideon of forty-odd, bereaved and raging--a Gideon who had but just observed the wife of his romantic youth go down to the grave shrunken to premature decay, quenched in body and soul, the clear flame withered, the bright stem trodden underfoot. For a long and parching term of years he had beheld her obliquely in the flawed mirror of her dying face; later he had shut his eyes while she slept in his heart. Now he looked at her again, in the cool and blessed light of these windows, in the peace of this quiet room; she was a girl again, and beautiful. But Millicent had always been beautiful.

It was the other Pennimans who had been ugly; how ugly he shuddered to recall. He drew a packet of papers toward him. These were photographs of the criminals, letters from Milly, letters from Ambrose, his own wild scrawls. Gideon adjusted his spectacles.

III

At seven o’clock Caroline lit the lamp; it was a pale unluminous yellow against the western window-panes, where rose color was fading. Half an hour later she placed a small tray at Gideon’s elbow; the noiseless hand was also skilful, for the cutlet was done to a turn, the coffee superlative. Gideon ate and drank, thanking the stars now set in chrysoprase above the apple trees. At nine he put down the last of the letters, and, lifting one of the photographs, examined it intently. A curious trembling seized him; he appeared a prey to obscure emotions, and his face was visibly convulsed.

The picture, a highly glazed _carte-de-visite_ of the eighties, showed a family group augmented by one stranger: it showed, clearly enough, the four Pennimans and Gideon. There, seated side by side, were old Joseph and his wife; at their feet was Ambrose; behind them, poised as if for flight, the less substantial forms of Gideon and Millicent wavered against a painted frieze of foliage. The faces were remarkably distinct--distinct as the golden syllables of Harrogate bitten into grayish cardboard below them.

The photograph completed at a single shattering blow the annihilation of Gideon’s hard-won calm. The tears poured from his eyes upon the glassy countenance of Ambrose while Gideon laughed and laughed.

Here, presented upon a little slip of grimy cardboard, was the whole stupendous farce; the farce was here reduced to such miniature proportions that the human eye could grasp it and the human understanding contain it without effort. During the last three hours, while letter after letter passed into the relentless illumination of his mind, Gideon had gradually perceived the outlines of this farce; they were at first too huge for his comprehension. But now, under the complacent glow of the lamp, the picture made them very plain, very clear and definite.

The Pennimans were funny, and he was a fool. They had always been funny, and he had always been a blazing fool not to see it. They were harmless and absurd; anyone with eyes in his head could see that now. Joseph was funny and innately charming; a perfect Cruikshank portrait of a blustering, heavy father born fifty years too late. Mrs. Penniman was funny and pathetic and rather a dear; yes, she was entirely a dear, with her cotton-wool hair and her face like a frightened baby’s. And Ambrose was funny, and--well, Ambrose was enormously funny; Gideon left it at that. As for Millicent and Gideon, they were funniest of all; they were, he realized, tremendous.

There was Milly--and oh, how right the Pennimans had been to call her Milly! There she was, in her famous green silk frock from Liberty’s, looking like a Du Maurier drawing executed not in ink, but in China tea, the sweet little ghost of a Du Maurier drawing. How sweet she looked, and how extraordinarily silly! Yes, of course, that was the word; that was precisely it--silly Milly, adorably silly Milly, clinging to the arm of her devoted young husband. To the stalwart arm? Perhaps not quite to the stalwart arm, but at least to the protecting arm of a fiercely possessive Gideon in the first of all the black cloaks, with the biggest and blackest of all the sombreros pulled down over smoldering eyes, whose expression was accurately compounded of love for his bride and haughty malevolence for the rest of the world. Which meant, mostly, the Pennimans. No wonder poor Ambrose lifted his own eyes in alarm to the face of his tall brother-in-law.

Was it possible that he had ever believed himself a suitable husband for that delightful little idiot in green silk and Italian corals who was so obviously made of pink sugar candy? Both sun and rain must inevitably melt the pretty creature; the chills and ardors of common life must reduce her to crumbs of sugary dust. Brittle and soft and sweet, Milly was always sweet. Oh, he had loved her right enough, and she had loved him; but Milly had loved every one, and Gideon had loved no one but Milly.