Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/By Way of Experience
IX.—BY WAY OF EXPERIENCE
You creature with the eyes!
If I could look forever up to them,
As now you let me—I believe, all sin,
All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,
Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth
Whence all that's low comes.—Pippa Passes.
AS she sat in the log hut miles away from habitation, Pippa found herself ironically repeating her words of six hours before.
“Yes, I should like to go up Mount Pelican—just by way of experience.”
It had sounded so cheerfully and safely adventurous in the quiet dining room of the Daltons in the comfortable little town in the valley. It had seemed so simple a matter to fit her out with tramping togs, and to engage a guide who knew the mountains. And then had come the snowstorm, and the starting of sundry old snowslides under the furiously rising wind. It had ended in a scramble for this hill shelter, the hut used by divers trappers and lumberjacks through the long winters; and now—well, it looked like an all-night job, at the least of it, said the guide. And all “by way of experience!”
Philippa Carpenter was spending a month in Oregon with the Daltons, people she had met on her world-wide wanderings. The little town of Barrow nestled among the chaos of rugged hills, and filled with the roar of stream that carried the logs down from the mountain forests, had been a tremendous tonic and inspiration to her. Every morning she rose to greet mighty Mount Shasta shining white in the first sunshine, and found new hope and strength in that marvelous vision. Not being a mountain climber, she could not essay any of the higher bliss, but she had decided to go up Mount Pelican “by way of experience!”
Pippa could almost have laughed, albeit hysterically, at the way that sill phrase reiterated itself in her tired brain. With a rueful, yet humorous, twist of thought, she determined to fight shy of all new experiences forever after, amen!
In all her luxurious life she had never come so near to practical realities as to-night. Time and again, she had found herself close to the heart of life, but it was the heart of passionate and emotional life, not merciless and uncompromising physical life. Here in the bare and comfortless hut, with the winds shrieking outside, Philippa felt a sense of awe and wonder. Had such things been going on all along, while she trailed French clothes about Paris, and New York, and Vienna, and dreamed herself into love affairs? Had the mountains been swept by these ravaging tempests year after year—tempests in which strong men suffered and sometimes died?
The realization of a new view of life is always rather staggering to the soul, Pippa was more adaptable, more sentient, and more imaginative than most women, and had a bigger outlook and a broader grasp of things; yet she felt as helpless as a little child as she sat there listening to the howling wind, and waiting for the guide to come back.
He had only gone to a shed near by where the trappers kept wood against just such times of need; he had been gone barely five minutes, yet already Pippa was restless. She was, however, able to realize the quaintness of the situation, and to smile wryly at the way the only man present becomes inevitably The Man upon whom a woman leans. Guide, king, knave, scholar, or fool—it made very little difference, philosophized Philippa—in times of trouble or danger, women were only too willing, like Portia, to let him pass for a man!
A wilder noise of storm, and a gust of icy wind, made her start up eagerly. The guide hastily closed the door behind him, and stood beating the snow from his cap against his knee.
He had a haggard, handsome face, stained about the eyes with gray shadows. The eyes themselves were dark blue and very clear; it seemed to Mrs. Carpenter that there was an incurably hurt look in them, like that of a beaten dog. The mouth—how sensitive it was! Full of lip and deeply creased at the corners, it told of a thousand moods and emotions still-born, or smothered at the moment of birth. A man who had lived and suffered, clearly. Mrs. Carpenter understood men; it was not, perhaps, only a passing impulse that made her desire to understand this man.
For the moment, however, she was too full of the urgency of their situation to allow her thoughts to go very far afield.
“Well?” she said quickly.
The man shrugged his big shoulders and walked heavily across the room to the fire. It flared up, showing the board walls of the hut, rough and stained, and full of knot holes; showing, too, the bunks built against them, like steamer berths. The place smelled musty, but it was the clean mustiness of old, damp timber.
“No wood left,” he said laconically. “It's been a bad winter. Guess the last lumber gang used it up and forgot to replenish.”
Pippa looked at him in bewilderment that slowly changed to horror.
“But—we'll freeze!” she exclaimed.
The man laughed. His laughter had a rusty sound, as if it were not often called into use.
“No,” he said. “We shan't freeze. There's enough wood in the house here to keep the fire going nearly all night—without counting the table and chairs, all good combustibles.”
The intonation, or the choice of the words, arrested Pippa's imagination. The man must be educated to speak like that. And there was just a hint of accent For a moment she forgot the dire straits they were in and surveyed him with a keen interest.
“Please tell me,” she said abruptly—she never wasted time on preliminaries, which was one reason why she always got on better with men than with women—“aren't you English?”
The man began to poke the fire—carefully, so as to waste no ounce of fuel.
“Somersetshire,” he rejoined briefly. And then, with a twisted smile: “Do you read Kipling?” Pippa nodded silently.
He began to quote under his breath:
“We're little black sheep that have gone astray,
Baa, baa, baa”
He stopped short and gave the fire a particularly vicious poke.
“Oh, hell!” he said. Pippa had never dreamed that the profane word could contain so much pathos.
“I've always been crooked,” he said heavily, crouched before the fire. “I suppose it was in my blood
“From the legion of the lost ones,
From the cohorts of the damned
“That's where I come in, Mrs. Carpenter. I've never lived straight two months on end. But this time I'm going to win out—and go—home!”
“To England?”
“Where else?” His look held a vague wonder. “There was a girl—but that was nearly ten years ago. She's probably got a husband and six children by now.”
Suddenly he straightened up and faced her.
“Do you realize just what the situation is?” he demanded. “How many inquiries did you make, when you started to look for a guide?”
Pippa stared at him, startled.
“Why” she began, haltingly and rather vaguely, “I—I don't believe I made any! Mr. Dalton was away, and I thought”
“Exactly. Mr. Dalton was away. If he had been at home he would never have let you come up Pelican with me. I” He stopped and drew a long breath. “I'm a crook, Mrs. Carpenter.”
“What are you talking about?” She was honestly bewildered.
“I'm a crook, I tell you,” he persisted doggedly. “I came up here as a guide just to get out of town.”
“And stage-managed the storm and everything, I suppose!” she appended, unbelievingly and somewhat derisively.
He smiled a rather twisted smile as he shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I didn't plan the snow. I'm not sure whether it's going to be a help or a hindrance—yet! It's this way” He paused and drew a wooden stool closer to the fire. “Wouldn't you be warmer here?” he suggested deferentially.
Philippa moved to the point nearer the blaze, and held out her chilled hands to the warmth.
“Go on,” she said.
The man stood now, looking down into the flame and glow.
“I had to get out of Barrow,” he said finally, in a very simple fashion. “I've—lit out with ten thousand bucks that don't belong to me.”
Pippa's eyes, raised to his, were filled with an amazement that was for the moment too great to include horror.
“Ten thousand dollars! Why—then” she gasped, still gazing through the firelight at the lined and haggard face, “you're a thief?”
The man nodded, without apparent emotion. He still stared into the fire, and Philippa still stared at him.
A wild burst of wind shook the little hut, sending flurries of snow under the rattling door, but neither of them noticed it. A silence was poised fast between them, and hung so, growing more and more tense every moment.
The night seemed full of voices. Were they warning, menacing, mocking—or all three? The strings of Pippa's life had been tautly strung, and she recognized an urgency that pervaded the atmosphere. She was not in the least afraid of the man. She was never afraid of anything. But she was more thrilled and interested than in many a long, chill moon. And, characteristically, she forgot the dangers of cold, hunger, and isolation in her absorption of the moment.
“What did you do it for?” she asked, simply and without preamble.
“To get away,” was the equally direct answer.
Pippa reflected hastily.
“But can't they follow you—overtake you here—to-night?”
The man shrugged a pair of lean but sturdy shoulders.
“Maybe,” he remarked laconically. “If they can get up the trail. But that works two ways. It wouldn't be any cinch to get over the pass and away, a night like this. Besides” He paused.
“Besides—what?” said Pippa.
“Nothing. It's a bad night, and”
“Nevertheless,” she thrust in swiftly, and with conviction, “if you weren't with me you would take the chance, storm or not? It's having a woman on your hands that hampers you?”
“Perhaps,” he admitted, without emotion. “I couldn't very well leave you to the chance of freezing, in case they don't come, could 1?”
“Why not?” she asked him quietly.
“Oh—because!”
She could almost have laughed, albeit half tenderly, at the slow, yet boyish, flush that accompanied the word.
“But,” she went on quickly, “what reason could there be for taking a chance of this sort—palming yourself off as a dependable guide, taking me up here, with the full intention of giving me and every one else the slip, and getting away—and then—quitting?”
She was purposely using words here and there that she knew to be from the cruder vernacular.
“You ought to understand,” said the man, without looking at her. “You're—different. I wouldn't have cared, with most women. I'd have left them to be frozen or rescued, just as things happened to turn out. But you” She saw his knuckles whiten as he clenched the hand that hung at his side. “You're different. In the first place, you're a lady. You don't belong out here, or with people like—me; and yet, believe it or not, the women of my people have been ladies, too. I've been away from God's country for nearly ten years, but—I can't leave you here alone in the storm any more than I could leave one of my mother's guests without”
His voice failed him. Suddenly becoming self-conscious, like nearly all human males when laboring under sincere emotion, he tramped to the door and tried the fastenings.
“Come here!” said Pippa Carpenter. Her voice was like a bell. She sat there in the firelight with the red radiance glittering on her red hair, and her eyes unbelievably dark in her white face.
The man, as if in wonder, went slowly back to her. Pippa stretched out a slim, cold hand and took one of his. Almost without his knowing it, he slipped to one knee before her, and the unfathomable purple-gray eyes looked straight into his.
“I want you to go away,” she said gently. “But I want you to leave the money with me. Will you do that?”
“But how can I” he was beginning. Her vehement voice broke in and stopped him short.
“Work! Walk! But go! And go home. Perhaps the girl will have waited. How can we know?. I should have!”
He stared into her eyes a long moment. When he spoke, there was a queer break in his voice.
“Yes. You would have. Only—the Lord was too busy filling the world with just—people to take the time to make many like you. Here's the money.”
He took from his pocket a roll of bills with a rubber band about them, and put them into her hands. Gravely and quite deliberately, she drew from the roll one bill, and gave it back to him.
“It will carry you part of the way, anyway,” she said.
He looked at the crumpled green slip in his hand.
“And you want me to take this” he was beginning, frowning, when she checked him.
“As a loan from me. I shall pay it back myself. And you shall pay me back, when you—get home.”
Their eyes met in a long look.
“What sort of a woman are you?” whispered the man, and she felt his tremulous, hard kiss upon her hand.
The next moment both started, and Pippa hid the money inside the loose blouse of her dress. In a lull in the tempest they could hear the sound of clumping footsteps and smothered voices.
“So it's too late, after all!” muttered the Englishman, rising to his feet.
Pippa was listening intently.
“It's the rescue party, of course,” she said.
“Sure,” said the man, with a rather bitter grin; “but a rescue party ready for a little lynching séance on the side. They know jolly well I'm here!”
He laughed and began to examine his revolver.
“Wait!” said Pippa, low, but sharply. The wind had risen again, and they could not tell how close the men had drawn. “I have an idea! Do what I tell you! Go into that other room. Instantly—do you hear? Do what I tell you!” as he hesitated. 'And while I am talking to the men, get out of the window and away—and—God be good to you!” She ended gently. Then, as a heavy knock sounded on the door, she pushed him frantically. “Will you go?” she almost screamed at him, though it was an inaudible scream.
When the men from Barrow came in, they found a white-faced woman sitting calmly by the fire.
“Well, gentlemen?” she said coolly. “What is it you want? Shelter from the storm, I suppose?”
“We want Oliver Crane, ma'am,” said the spokesman, a big, rough-bearded fellow.
“What do you want with him?” she demanded. She looked very lovely, with the red firelight playing on her tumbled hair.
“We want to lock him up!” said the fellow grimly. “He's no guide, ma'am—he's a thief!”
“Oh—no!” she gasped.
“Yes'm. Where is he?”
“But what has he done?” she temporized. How many minutes had passed, she wondered.
“Stolen a wad from a chap down below. Better let us take him, ma'am, without a fuss.”
“But suppose he gives the money back?” urged Pippa. Her great eyes searched their faces anxiously. Some of the men laughed.
“No fear, ma'am,” said the spokesman. “But even if he did, I'm obliged to arrest him, anyway. I'm deputy sheriff round here, and law is law!”
“I thought I had seen you with one of the lumber gangs,” said Pippa, suddenly regarding him.
“Well, I'm a lumberjack, too,” he grinned,
Pippa drew a long breath, and then faced them more squarely.
“Why won't you give him his chance?” she pleaded, a strange, but appealing Portia, in flannel shirt and climbing skirt. “Would one of you want to be punished—punished hopelessly and irrevocably—for keeps, I mean?” She corrected the more difficult word to meet the understanding of her audience. “Would you like to feel that just because you slipped up once, you'd have to pay, pay, pay all your life?”
“That's all right, ma'am,” spoke up a little, sandy fellow from the bunch of men, “but we can't afford to have crooks loose in our camp—not on your life we can't!”
“Crook!” began Philippa indignantly. “He isn't a regular crook! He's a”
She checked herself, realizing how absurd her explanation would sound.
“He's a damned good imitation of one,” the bearded man remarked dryly.
Pippa cast wildly about in her own mind for some argument that would hold them for a few minutes longer.
“I've heard,” she said slowly, “that when you run the logs down in the spring, there are sometimes dams and breakwaters belonging to other men that you have to break down. Is that so?”
“That's so, ma'am.”
“It's illegal—against the law, isn't it?”
The men grinned a little sheepishly. They began to see what she was driving at.
“It don't happen very often,” one of them ventured, rather unwisely.
“Ah!” exclaimed Pippa. “But say it happened once even—it was against the law. Suppose you were sent to jail for it?”
“That ain't the question, ma'am,” the big man said bluntly. “Breakin' dams and stealin' money's two different things, I reckon. We want Ol Crane, and we're goin' to get him!”
Pippa suddenly flamed upon them.
“You're not going to get him!” she cried, almost savagely. “I'm going to stop you from getting him. I won't see any man put in jail for just one mad thing he did!”
“You're plumb interested in him, ain't you, ma'am?” drawled out a fat fellow who hadn't spoken before. The tone was frankly insolent. Pippa Carpenter had never been so whitely angry in her life. But even through her rage she wondered—wondered—whether he had gotten away.
“Well, boys,” said the bearded man, “we'd better search the premises, and then be moving on.”
As her last coup, Pippa pulled the roll of bills from her dress and cried:
“Here's the wretched money! Now will you let him alone?”
All the men started and stared, and then there was a whoop of coarse laughter.
“So it was you he stole it for!” shouted the fat man. “Say, boys, it's great, ain't it? Ol Crane and a—lady!”
Pippa stood there, feeling rather sick and faint with the shock.
“The wind's down!” cried some one near the door. He opened it, and added exultantly: “An' it's stopped snowin', too!”
A sudden stillness had fallen about the cabin; in it, one could hear the crackle of a falling icicle and the blurred thud of a slipping drift.
“Oh, thank God!” gasped Pippa, and hid her face in her hands, for she knew that with the wind and snow both stilled, it would be a short matter to get either down the mountain or over the pass.
But at the moment in which she breathed the words, that closed inner door banged so violently that every one—Pippa with the rest—started in astonishment.
The Englishman, Oliver Crane, stood there, rather grim, but perfectly tractable.
“I guess I'm the one you're out after, boys,” he said. “I've got the money you're looking for, and I guess I've got the proofs of identity.”
Two minutes later he stepped close to Pippa, and, unseen, shook her arm, almost roughly.
“The money!” he muttered. “Quick! I want to take it back myself.”
Silently she passed it to him. The men were conferring at the door as to the advisability of attempting the down trail immediately.
Pippa lifted streaming eyes to his. Her red hair glittered in waves about her white cheeks. Her face was pleading and oddly young, as she looked at him.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered, choking. “Why did you come back? Oh, why—why did you do it?”
“Do you think I could stand there in hiding to hear you fight for me like that? And be insulted for it—you?” His own voice shook, and he was even whiter than she was. “You see—I had just found out that—I love you!”
“I guess we'll try the descent now, ma'am,” said the bearded man, turning into the room.
But he had to say it more than once. for Pippa was crying too hard to hear him.