The Shaman/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
It was morning when our tired dogs scented madame's village and began to run more eagerly and to give tongue. The noise awoke the shaman, who clutched the sides of the sled and pulled himself painfully upward.
“Think bes' go Lady's house,” he said, then mumbled something and shook his head doubtfully. I thought I caught the words in his own tongue, as if he were still bewildered and soliloquizing, “She must decide what is to be done. Must tell her everything. Too bad. She can put all the blame on me.”
His words weren't at all reassuring. If she had sent us out to slaughter, the sole hope we could have would rest in her relenting from her purpose and reprieving us. I believed we should have an advocate in the shaman, but was certain that if it came to a free-for-all battle in the village, his wound would prevent his putting up much of a struggle. I was weighing our complexities when we emerged from the forest trail, swung round through the clearing, and halted in front of the great house. The noise of our arrival had disturbed the whole village, and its population came running toward us just as the door which had so recently closed upon us opened and Malitka hastened forth.
Her whole manner betrayed her astonishment; but before she could speak the shaman turned and looked her full in the face and said, in his tongue, “Lady, I have brought the voyageurs back.” He was climbing weakly from the sled as he spoke, and I assisted him until he stood upon his feet, though bent over as if in pain. He held his uninjured hand toward her and lifted his head with something akin to barbaric nobility as his voice gathered some of its old resonance. “You told me to speed them safely on their way and not to let them return. That I could not do! You told me to protect them, Lady, and I—I—have done my best!”
And then before I could either recover from my astonishment, or reach out a hand to assist him, he pitched forward in the snow.
“Done his best?” I blurted, forgetful that I was not supposed to understand his tongue. “My God! He's fought to the death for us! This is a man!” And as I spoke I sprang to lift him, and Jack, too, plunged forward to his assistance.
“He is wounded?” I heard madame cry.
“Yes, Maiitka, badly, we fear,” Jack answered, as we gathered the big, inert form up.
Instantly she was cool again and took command.
“Carry him inside to the room next the one you occupied,” she said, “and put him in the bed.” Then, reverting to the native tongue, she called a man by name and said, “Take the dogs to your place and care for them. The others of you people go back to your homes. See to it that you talk not too much among yourselves until I learn what all this means. Go back, I say. If I need the help of any of you I shall send.”
“Madame,” I shouted over my shoulder, for by now we were entering her door, “be sure to bring the rifles with you. Don't let the natives have them!”
I caught her sharp exclamation. My words had further warned her that there might be danger afoot. Yet one swift, backward look showed me that she was outwardly calm and self-possessed as she deliberately gathered the weapons from the sled. Already some of the natives were hastening homeward in obedience to her commands and others were standing sullenly in groups and staring at us with anything but friendly eyes.
We carried the shaman into the room she had indicated, laid him upon the bed and stripped him of his clothing. Not until then had I fully appreciated his splendid physique, his great muscular development, the full size of his torso. And not until then did Jack or I know that he had admitted only the most serious wound, the one we had so crudely bandaged, for he had refrained from mentioning that three other bullets had found marks. Those others that he had disdained to mention lest we lose time in bandaging them, had done the most damage. Although none of them was more than a flesh wound, loss of blood had sapped his strength. One bullet had torn through the great muscles of his back indicating that he had been on hands and knees when struck, another had ripped through the fleshy part of his thigh, as if he had been running forward when it came, and the third had grazed his arm with a savage slash. We had to cut most of his clothing from him to remove it.
“You said it,” Jack muttered, while we ministered to him as best we could, “Peluk's all man!”
With what skill we possessed, aided by our crude knowledge of surgery, after satisfying ourselves that all the bullets had passed through, we cleansed his hurts with hot water Jack obtained from the kitchen, before Malitka entered.
“He's not a very pleasant sight,” Jack protested, but almost scornfully she waved him aside.
“Don't be a fool!” she exclaimed, and without mock modesty examined him herself. “Leave him as he is,” she said, and fastened from the room to return with a surgical chest from which she took antiseptics, bandages, and surgeon's tape. “I have seen more wounded than either of you could have dreamed of in your worst nightmares,” she said grimly. “I have held the heads of women disemboweled by Turkish swords; bandaged the feet of human beings whose naked soles had been shod with horseshoes by Turkish officers; heard the dying whispers of mangled Russian peasants who had suffered ruthless steel! For the love of pity! Let us not be foolish!”
Her cold vehemence appalled me. It was as if in that moment she had burst forth into long-suppressed expression, heedless of what she might reveal.
“Lift him up!” she ordered, and with white probing fingers estimated the wound in the shaman's shoulder.
“He is now blessedly unconscious,” she said as she applied burning antiseptics to the wounds. “It is well. I have neither ether nor chloroform. But this work is thorough. His enormous vitality should do the rest. He will live.”
She had skillfully and deftly bandaged him and turned away before she asked a question.
“Where did this happen?”
“Up on the trail from the mining camp,” I answered.
She whirled and eyed me.
“What do you know about the mining camp?” she demanded.
Jack spared me the embarrassment of answering by moving toward her and saying, “The shaman took us there. There is no occasion for anger, Malitka. He took us there to save our lives, and there he fought for us, and from there he brought us, fighting on the way here.”
The steadiness and readiness of his reply caused her to hesitate.
“We can talk about all that later, can't we?” he asked gently.
She glanced at the shaman, then at me, and then her eyes rested upon Jack the longest time of all. “Yes, I suppose that is best,” she assented. And then suddenly she became all woman again, sympathetic, solicitous, and hastened to him. “And you are tired? You must be. I take it that you have been traveling all night.”
“We have,” he replied.
“Come to the living room, have something to eat, and rest before telling me what has taken place,” she said.
“We could eat,” said Jack, with his irrepressible smile.
“Then, if you two will go to the room you occupied before, and make whatever change you wish, I'll see that you are—fed!” she remarked, and for the first time since our return I saw her face relax into a faint smile.
“Changes such as we can make, Malitka,” said Jack whimsically, “are few. Everything we had when we left here, save our rifles and that in which we stand, are—scattered over some hundred or more miles of trail.”
For a moment she stood in the doorway staring absently at the floor and then with a slight shrug, said, as if answering some self-debated question of delicacy, “After all, one must bow to common sense. Necessity breaks all barriers. Wait here a minute.”
She was gone but a few minutes in which time I gravely inspected the shaman. He seemed to have passed from the unconsciousness of wounds to the response of quiet sleep. His breathing had become regular and deep.
“For you,” said Malitka to me when she returned, “I can provide garments that will more or less fit. But for you”—addressing Jack—“it's more difficult. I have sent to Peluk's house for a change of underwear and his spare clothing, because he is nearer your stature, although perhaps somewhat larger. He is a big man. However, until those arrive, you will find some few toilet necessities in your old room.”
She turned and left us, and we trudged back to the room that had so recently been ours. I saw, laid out upon the bed, pressed but with undoubted indications that they had been recently removed from box, trunk, or storage, a neat and well-tailored suit of clothes. It was such as a prosperous business man might have worn in a style of perhaps ten to fifteen years previous. Also, undergarments to fit a man of my stature were there. A hip bath had been deposited in the center of the room into which a native servant poured pails of steaming water before I had time to examine my new garb.
“This is what I call luxury!” I heard Jack exclaim, and saw that he was lifting, piece by piece, a case of razors, silver military brushes, and a man's manicure set. “Where on earth do you suppose she got these?” he exclaimed. “Monogram on 'em, but I can't make it out. Anyhow, we can clean up a bit. You to the bath, me for a shave.”
With his usual insistence upon taking every vicissitude as a joke, he made useless, irrelevant remarks while I took advantage of the tin tub and the clean undergarments. I had pulled on trousers when the native woman entered, without knocking, and proceeded to empty the tub and refill it for Jack, who, clean shaven, and humming a tune, sat on the edge of a chair. He had started to cast off his outer clothing when she reappeared with ordinary red flannel undergarments, woolen socks, and—strangest of all, a suit of clothes such as are called “hand-me-downs” in the outer world, which she threw upon the bed.
“Great Scott! Peluk must have been a swell when he wore these,” Jack commented as he held the coat up to inspect it. “He's broader than I am, but—old man, this looks like New York, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or any other old town.”
He plunged into the bath gratefully, while I wondered whether my coat might suit my requirements. It did. Not fitting perhaps as if tailored to my form but serviceable, I scrutinized it more closely. Surely this garment was tailor made. I threw back a coat lapel and turned outward the inner pocket, looking for a tailor's tab. It was there. It read: “Harris Barnes. No, F. 2167. Bretherton Bros., Fashionable Tailors, Fifth Avenue, New York.”
I sat down on the nearest chair holding the garment in my hands and reread that startling scrawl. Harris Barnes, the man whom, or of whose fate, we sought! For a moment it seemed incredible. She had handed me a murdered man's garments to relieve my distress! And then I recalled other things, tried to correlate, but reasoned that at any rate, whether the man concerning whose existence or death it was my duty to learn were dead or alive, the garments must minister to my needs, and slipped into the coat. It fitted fairly well. My common sense told me that nothing less than dire urgency and utter lack of substitutes could have induced her to such an offering. Speechless, I threw it and the waistcoat off again, and utilized a razor. Clean once more, I picked up the silver brushes and inspected them. To me the ornate monogram was plain. It was decipherable as nothing other than “H. B.”
“I'm an ax-handle's width across the shoulders, but I'll be hanged if the shaman's store clothes don't hang on me like a bag! You're going to be dressed like an Oxford Street model, and I've got to look like a cannibal in the clothes of a missionary off whom I've just dined,” growled Jack.
His voice disturbed my thoughts. A man who could jest after all that we had so recently passed through, and in the midst of such a situation as we then were, impressed me as either irresponsible or a freak. The full light of the arctic day was breaking through the windows. Doubled as they were the frost had coated with lavish or delicate pattern nearly all the outer panes; but through one clear space of glass I could see the frowning darkness of forest beyond the clearing, the trail over which so short a time before we had struggled. Far away, climbing up as if to attack the very sky itself, towered the sharp white peaks that guarded that place of gold from which, through the valiance of but one man, we had escaped. In that moment, recognizing his great worth, my heart warmed to the shaman, my anxiety and compassion for him stabbed.
I walked to the door, flung it open, and slipped to the adjoining room. The door was ajar. Malitka was there, half kneeling above the shaman and listening intently to his breathing. She heard me enter, turned, arose, laid a finger upon her lips to impress silence and gestured me to withdraw. She was all woman in that moment. Yes, in that moment she was exquisitely and beautifully human.
With an exaggerated caution we passed through the door before she whispered, “He sleeps well. He will recover soon. I have seen so many thus, or worse, that—I tell you I know! It's not so much the wounds as exhaustion from the loss of blood and overfatigue that have beaten him. When he wakens he will be all right.”
And then, as if for the first time she had discerned my garb, she started back, put her hands before her eyes, removed them, faltered, recovered, and laid a hand upon my coat. Her white fingers slipped across my sleeve as if in a caress of memory.
“I have honored you,” she whispered. “There can be no nobility of man finer, cleaner than that of the one who last wore this.”
I did not deliberately take advantage of a momentary emotion. It was nothing less than sheer stupidity, I think, a temporary confusion, that made me blurt out, in that same whisper lest we disturb the rest of the man behind the door, “Barnes. Harris Barnes.”
“Yes. It was his,” she replied, and then, turning from all that was dead to present reality, she started back, caught her breath, came closer and with staring eyes fixed upon mine cried, “How did you know?”
I was so startled that I did not immediately answer, and now her hands caught the lapels of my coat not in caress but in demand, and she repeated her question. I had not time to answer before a door opened and through it came my partner, who, seeing us in that position, straightened, stopped, and then said, “Hello! What's up?”
Instantly she withdrew her hands, fell back a pace or two as if confused, and then said, “Nothing! I think your breakfast is waiting. If you gentlemen will come in and”
She quietly walked to and through the door of the living room, beckoned us to seats and seated herself as imperturbably aloof as ever she had been. “Well,” she said, “perhaps you can now explain what has happened. Why is it that you are again my guests? Why is it that you return as you do, in haste, with a wounded man who means very much to me, and whom I admire and respect, as your burden?”
Jack looked at me. I waited for him to act as spokesman.
“What is the mystery about it that makes both of you so slow to answer?” she asked, looking from one to the other of us.
“As far as I'm concerned, there's no mystery, Malitka,” said Jack softly, continuing to use that Indian name as if he loved it and had used it with her before. “My partner can explain better than I can; first, because until last night when he heard the shaman's last talk before he collapsed, he mistrusted you; and second, because he understands this native lingo as well as if it were his own.”
She turned indignant eyes upon me. I fancied that there was, furthermore, an expression of hurt and astonishment.
“You—you—mistrusted me? And—and you understand the native tongue? Then why”
Her face set into colder expression and her eyes betrayed rising anger. I don't think it affected me much. I was not in love with her, though I admired her. And yet I felt that I had done her a mental injustice for which I must make apologies.
“Come!” she insisted. “You are a blunt man. One who I am certain has neither fear nor could be restrained by the thought that your words might hurt the feelings of either man or woman. You are not a parlor puppet who invents graceful speeches. You are one who deals in hard truths. So I ask you, what is the meaning of all this mystery?”
“You wish and shall have it all, cold, naked,” I said, exasperated by her insistence.
“Truth is always—just that,” she said.
“You shall have it,” I replied. “When we came here—blundered here—in the plight you saw and appreciated, your manner did not indicate any particular welcome; your questions even before succoring us, spent as we were, could scarcely hasten trust and liking; your reluctance to”
“You didn't understand! You don't understand yet!” she cried, in self-defense, as if denying imputations of inhumanity. “Do you think that I would turn half-dying men—one of whom was blind!—from my door?”
I paid no heed to her indignation. I had anticipated it.
“What we thought then or what were then your reasons for action, are of no importance now—save as they bear upon my explanation,” I checked her. “It's sufficient that after the strange superstition in which your name was held, the hints of mystery and of fear and the warnings to avoid you and yours uttered by a well-meaning Indian some hundreds of miles from here, the manner of your reception was anything but encouraging. It was a confirmation of mystery and of doubt. For hundreds of miles around your village the natives dread you and yours, speak of you in whispers, or—speak not at all! ”
“Incredible! Impossible!” she exclaimed.
“Malitka—Malitka—it's so.” Jack's soothing voice interjected.
She turned upon him angrily, but his calm eyes, carrying his unabashed devotion, softened her as swiftly as do June rains the arctic snows.
“Jim can't explain it all, can he, if you get angry and interrupt him?”
With a gesture indicating that she was partially mollified, or at least ready for a truce, she turned to me and said, “I am sorry. Pardon me. Please tell me the whole of it.”
“Well, Peluk and I struck up a friendship. I found out the secret of the gold camp back there in the hills. Peluk doubtless told you that he learned that I knew of it, and”
“I had no idea of that. He never told me!” she again interrupted.
It was my turn for surprise.
“If you had known of my knowledge, what would you have done?” I asked.
“Just exactly as I did. Pledged you to secrecy and pledged him to send you safely on your way.”
“We are coming to an understanding,” I said, looking at her with frank apology in my stare. “I thought you knew. I wonder if you know that natives who have ventured too close to this place have been ruthlessly driven away; that a white man and two natives were once followed for long, hard days and nights over the trail from here and killed; that”
“My God!” she exclaimed in distraction. “You believed me capable of ordering tragedies like those?”
“I did!”
“I swear to you that until this moment I never knew of them! That I have never taken nor ordered life to be taken! That—who told you this?”
“Peluk, the shaman,” I replied. “Can you then blame me for distrusting you at the moment when, in the nighttime, in our tent, we were fallen upon, fought, overpowered, and carried back to the very gold camp I had stumbled upon?”
She stared at me for a moment as if tearing from me the conviction of truth, and then, as if convinced, fell back into her chair with an air of bewildered resignation and surrender. Her face, white with the winter pallor of the North that through a protracted period of sunless days brands its mark, became even whiter with horror. In that instant I was convinced of her innocence and of the ugliness of my delusions and misconceptions.
“I am sorry,” I said. “Very sorry! But that is what I thought. That is how I misjudged you. Malitka, I am mentally upon my knees at your feet. I think I can say no more. But I must tell you what happened after we left here.”
She lifted her eyes and glanced at me, and I thought I read in them forgiveness. So with no further interruption I told her all that had taken place. No, not all, for I was ashamed to confess how, surreptitiously, I had learned the native tongue and practiced my ears to its understanding. Strangely enough, she did not then, or even after, question me as to that accomplishment.
I had but completed my confession and recountal when we were interrupted by the entrance of the klootch—a young unmarried woman—who came expecting to clear away the table. The food upon it had cooled, was untouched, so great had been our stress. Malitka awoke to immediate physical requirements and suggested that we breakfast before further conversation. We did so. I had not appreciated my hunger nor weariness. We ate silently, and grateful to me was the strong, hot coffee that ended our meal. But I could not avoid observing that Malitka was too distressed to indulge appetite. She appeared relieved when Jack and I, replete, waited for her to summon the native maid.
It was not until the latter had gone and we were again alone that she reverted to our subject. And then it was as if in that silent interim she had weighed all that had been told, correlated it as far as possible, and reached a conclusion. She resumed our conversation, as if there had been no pause.
“So, the conditions are now these: Peluk has, without orders or knowledge of mine, killed any or every one who jeopardized this place. He has fought for and protected you at his own expense. He promised me to send you upon your way, did his best, protected you in the end at the cost of other lives and his own wounds, and, unable to do more, returned you here—to me. I can no more weigh the situation than can you; but this I tell you—because I know these natives better than you—is not the finish. Those men back up there in the gold camp will not be content to let matters rest. They will cry for blood. The savage instinct in them will overcome all they have been taught. If you think they will submit easily, you are mistaken. These are fighting men. We have much to face, myself as well as you. And Peluk sleeps.”
There was something of tragedy in her final words, “Peluk sleeps!” The swift, tragic news on the eve of Waterloo that Napoleon Bonaparte was desperately ill and incapacitated when nations trembled in the balance, could have conveyed no more import than did the shaman's incapacitation to us three human beings of the white race in a village of mere hundreds—all of whom, however, might become enemies while the man who mastered all our future was inert.
“Madame Malitka,” I said, after she had reverted to silence as if having nothing more to say, “have I now your forgiveness for having mistrusted you? Is there other amend I can make?”
Even then she weighed my confession for a moment before committing herself.
“Yes,” she said with a perturbed but frank smile, “I can't blame you. And—yes—we are quits. I think—I think we are destined to become friends—fast friends.”
Time proved it so. Of all women I have known in this world, through which I so much alone have adventured, I have known none who might take her place in my affection and esteem.
“Then,” said I gently, “can you not tell me of Harris Barnes, the quest of whom brought us here? If there is anything you would conceal I give you my word of honor your wish shall be respected. And, what is more, I shouldn't ask you of him, were it not that this is our mission. For its accomplishment I have accepted money, and am bounden. If we escape from this predicament, my search must go on—to the end. Can you not assist me?”
Both Jack and I watched her as she sat there hesitant and distressed. Her agitation was manifested by the way in which her white fingers, resting in her lap, intertwined themselves and twisted together. She looked at me questioningly, seemed satisfied, and then stared at Jack. There was a vast difference in her regard of him. I was aware that she was more concerned in what effect any admission she might make would have in that quarter than upon me. Somehow I had sympathy with her then, feeling that to her this was a prodigiously vital moment, in which she must cast precious and valued emprises upon the scales of fate. I knew, too, that she was brave enough and honest enough to dare. Finally she looked away, deliberately disengaging herself from us, and fixed her eyes on the frosty window.
“Yes, I can assist you,” she said very quietly. “Harris Barnes was my husband. He brought me here. Here he died. Here he is buried. His grave is up there on a high hill, wind swept, facing summer suns because he loved them, fearless of winter's snows because he braved them. That is my answer. You may make use of it. It may cost me my life.”
“Cost you your life?” both Jack and I exclaimed.
Many years have passed since that hour, but clear and vivid it and its emotion return to me—Malitka sitting there, white-faced and as if at bay—my comrade half risen from his chair as though about to spring toward her, his lean face with its resolute chin thrust forward, his eyes fixed upon her with the unmistakable light of a great affection—and I, grizzled, with a skin seamed, wrinkled and hardened by years of desert suns, jungle sweats, and mountain winds, nearly old enough to be father to both, absorbed in what she had admitted as much as in what she might further say—the picture all comes back to me. The room had become so still that its tiny intimate sounds became loudly audible; the crackling of the flames when a half-consumed log sagged, threw upward a cloud of sparks, and burst into broader blaze; the ticking of the clock that stood on top of the library shelf; the monotonous droning song of some native servant sweeping the hallway; a faint clash of crockery from the far end of the house and the barking of dogs playing somewhere out in the still, cold forenoon whose clear light made of the windows great spots of brilliance.
For a confused instant it seemed incredible that all the long hardships of our quest, the dangers, the neck-to-neck races with death, the subsequent tragedies, had been answered in such few sentences from Malitka's lips and the object of our mission so unexpectedly accomplished in full.
No longer mistrusting or fearing this extraordinary woman, but pitying her for what she must so bravely have endured and overcome, I sat quietly waiting for her to speak what I surmised must be nothing less than a confession to the man who loved her and whom she loved. I appreciated somewhat the agony of her position and, could I have done so, would have spared her the humiliation which might be involved in the full candor of words. I don't think she rebelled against it. She was too brave to evade an issue. But I do believe that her long hesitancy was due to her great desire to formulate what she must say into an appeal. Portia, fighting for her love, did that. It was but natural.
Both women and men have, through all time, battled for an ideal; both have gathered and fought as tribes, as countries, as nations; but the sternest fight ever waged is, after all, that of man for woman, or woman for man. The fight for love! And it is only we who have lost, and must forever dwell in the despair of irrevocable loneliness and defeat who can comprehend the meaning of such an issue.