Murder Point: A Tale of Keewatin Read online

  CHAPTER IX

  THE BREAK-UP OF THE ICE

  Nearly a month had gone by since the night on which Strangeways died.Not that time mattered much to Granger, for, like the immortals, menin Keewatin have dispensed with time: they have accepted as true thelesson which philosophers have been striving to teach the world eversince the human intellect first commenced to philosophise--that thereare no such ontological facts as Time and Space. Among the men of thisvast northern territory the outward expression of religion is rare;they do not often speak, and then only of such interests as aresuperficial to their lives. Yet here, in their fine neglect of the twosternest of self-imposed, human limitations, the religious instinct ismanifest. As it would be sacrilege to count God's breaths, were thatpossible, so to them it seems a kind of blasphemy to number therecurrence of their own small perceptions when the Divine Perceivedseems so entirely unconscious of their very existence. Hence ithappens that one does not often hear a traveller speak of havingjourneyed so many days or miles; his division is more casual, andembraces only his own immediate actions--he has travelled so many"sleeps," nothing more.

  As a rule, Indians are utterly deficient in the time-sense and cangive no intelligent account of their age. Their calendar is enshrined,if they have one, in symbols which they use as decorations, paintedon the inside of their finest skins. They make their reckoning of theyears from some event which was once important to themselves, or totheir tribe. Thus, stars falling from the top to the bottom of a roberepresent the year of 1833, and an etching of an Indian with a brokenleg and a horn on his head stands for the year in which Hay-waujina,One Horn, had his leg "killed." Back of that which is comparativelyimmediate to their own experience, they have ceased to count or to beinquisitive.

  "Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream."

  So with both the joys and sorrows of these Northland men; hurry is notnecessary where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion,whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a_dream-being_, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personalunimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place ofLife allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, noabrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings andendings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chaptersnor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy tocomedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedyagain--always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle ofthe Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow withoutpreface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes growclear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dreamgoing from them, they awake--motionlessly pass out of life, and enterinto _What_?

  If smoothness of passage and apparent endlessness be the two mainqualities of the divine existence, then the lives of men in Keewatinare both divine and real; only we, of the outside world, would callthis same smoothness dulness, and its endlessness its most torturingagony.

  The past month had dragged by with Granger as would a century withnormal men, except that in the entire span of those hundred yearsthere had been no summer. In them he had lived through and rememberedevery emotion which had ever come to him. His brain was confused withremembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, whichwould never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanlyof all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity--would havesuccumbed, had not Self-Scorn rendered him aid.

  From sunrise to sunset the winter had slowly thawed: the trees haduncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth frombeneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river,reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved byminiature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across itssurface. Strange messages those narrow streams of water wrote; strangethey seemed at least to Granger as he watched them day by day.Sometimes they seemed to be writing words, and sometimes drawingfaces. The words he could not always decipher; when he did they weremostly proper names, STRANGEWAYS, SPURLING, MORDAUNT, EL DORADO. Thefaces were more easy to recognise, and three of them corresponded tothe first three names. There was one morning when he awoke, havingdreamed of the horrible revenge which he would take, and going to thewindow was appalled to see a new face scrawled upon the ice--his own,yet not his own; the evil likeness to the self which had come to himin the Klondike. He was puzzled, and set to work to discover thereason for these signs. Then a verse which he had once learnt as achild came back to him, "Jesus stooped down and wrote with his fingeron the ground, _as though he heard them not_. And _they which heardit_, being convicted by _their own_ conscience, went out one by one,beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone,_and the woman_."

  So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warninglikeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusinghim. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was hisown voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thouhast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone _andSpurling_." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he wouldcease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone withSpurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he feltcertain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would havepreferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enoughto have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live inKeewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked byseemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there whenHe had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while Hisgaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from humanjustice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him asyour accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of theLast Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that inmaking that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.

  In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, whichhe chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened bya thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river hadbroken up and the ice was going out, as though God, having finishedHis argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words.Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shoutinglike a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men,both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river whichstretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakenedas he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing whathe was doing, rushing half-clad beneath the stars down to theriver-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice--the loneliness, whichthroughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all thatthey had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply.But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and criedaloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its handsand squeezed its passage, and huddled between its ruinedwinter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.

  This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, andthe Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raiseit up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; andafterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a kingfrom his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe to-night. Forthe moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and themillennium had begun--chaos, which men mistake for millennium.

  Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "Theice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a factincredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earthwas shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurriedby in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some ofhis fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battlewhich was being fought, and one which must be lost.

  As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, hecould hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs,and th
e clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagineanything when Nature was making a change so titanic. Now the water wasthe black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back whocarried "a balance in his hand,"--and he was in pursuit. And the icewas the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, andHades followed with him,--and he was in flight. And now, when somegreat floe jammed in its passage round the Point, and the ice piledup, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, whicha dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish.Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but withinit was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.

  He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to theirfurthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evilwith terror, peering out from the casements, and the stern oldenchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-whitebeard. He could hear the hoarse-throated clamour of the knight as heled his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway,shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and theturret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. Thesorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay--he could notwithstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreadingabroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. Thedark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! ForChrist!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and theavenging host were gone--all was resolved into turbid water andsubmerged, groaning ice.

  So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the riverwhich, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, lefthim stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River wouldsome day be washed up in a wave on the tropic shores of Ceylon, or,having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a bergand, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till theycame to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands ofdusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending downbaled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground,saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at hisfolly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it alsowill journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. InGod's good time I also shall wander round the world."

  "But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit ofdiscontent inquired.

  Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw offthese troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he hadnot recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangewaysconscious of his body's release, and the permission which death hadgiven him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which hadbeen born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which hadstrolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulatingand talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had broughtthe man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soulhad departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself inArctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of thisnew adventure? Well, if God was so anxious to take care of Spurling,He could be trusted to look after Strangeways--if anything of himsurvived.

  The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yetliving body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of thatsmall part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking onelast look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, thepinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed,"Courage!" he said, "for this is life."