"All ready!" Corliss lifted the bow of La Bijou and looked back.
The turbid water lashed by on the heels of the ice-run. Courbertin took the stern in the steep descent, and Del marshalled Tommy"s reluctant rear. A flat floe, dipping into the water at a slight incline, served as the embarking-stage.
"Into the bow with you, Tommy!"
The Scotsman groaned, felt Bishop breathe heavily at his back, and obeyed; Frona meeting his weight by slipping into the stern.
"I can steer," she a.s.sured Corliss, who for the first time was aware that she was coming.
He glanced up to Jacob Welse, as though for consent, and received it.
"Hit "er up! Hit "er up!" Del urged impatiently. "You"re burnin"
daylight!"
CHAPTER XXV
La Bijou was a perfect expression of all that was dainty and delicate in the boat-builder"s soul. Light as an egg-sh.e.l.l, and as fragile, her three-eighths-inch skin offered no protection from a driving chunk of ice as small as a man"s head. Nor, though the water was open, did she find a clear way, for the river was full of scattered floes which had crumbled down from the rim-ice. And here, at once, through skilful handling, Corliss took to himself confidence in Frona.
It was a great picture: the river rushing blackly between its crystalline walls; beyond, the green woods stretching upward to touch the cloud-flecked summer sky; and over all, like a furnace blast, the hot sun beating down. A great picture, but somehow Corliss"s mind turned to his mother and her perennial tea, the soft carpets, the prim New England maid-servants, the canaries singing in the wide windows, and he wondered if she could understand. And when he thought of the woman behind him, and felt the dip and lift, dip and lift, of her paddle, his mother"s women came back to him, one by one, and pa.s.sed in long review,--pale, glimmering ghosts, he thought, caricatures of the stock which had replenished the earth, and which would continue to replenish the earth.
La Bijou skirted a pivoting floe, darted into a nipping channel, and shot out into the open with the walls grinding together behind. Tommy groaned.
"Well done!" Corliss encouraged.
"The fule wumman!" came the backward snarl. "Why couldna she bide a bit?"
Frona caught his words and flung a laugh defiantly. Vance darted a glance over his shoulder to her, and her smile was witchery. Her cap, perched precariously, was sliding off, while her flying hair, aglint in the sunshine, framed her face as he had seen it framed on the Dyea Trail.
"How I should like to sing, if it weren"t for saving one"s breath. Say the "Song of the Sword," or the "Anchor Chanty.""
"Or the "First Chanty,"" Corliss answered. ""Mine was the woman, darkling I found her,"" he hummed, significantly.
She flashed her paddle into the water on the opposite side in order to go wide of a jagged cake, and seemed not to hear. "I could go on this way forever."
"And I," Corliss affirmed, warmly.
But she refused to take notice, saying, instead, "Vance, do you know I"m glad we"re friends?"
"No fault of mine we"re not more."
"You"re losing your stroke, sir," she reprimanded; and he bent silently to the work.
La Bijou was driving against the current at an angle of forty-five degrees, and her resultant course was a line at right angles to the river. Thus, she would tap the western bank directly opposite the starting-point, where she could work up-stream in the slacker flood.
But a mile of indented sh.o.r.e, and then a hundred yards of bluffs rising precipitously from out a stiff current would still lie between them and the man to be rescued.
"Now let us ease up," Corliss advised, as they slipped into an eddy and drifted with the back-tide under the great wall of rim-ice.
"Who would think it mid-May?" She glanced up at the carelessly poised cakes. "Does it seem real to you, Vance?"
He shook his head.
"Nor to me. I know that I, Frona, in the flesh, am here, in a Peterborough, paddling for dear life with two men; year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, Alaska, Yukon River; this is water, that is ice; my arms are tired, my heart up a few beats, and I am sweating,--and yet it seems all a dream. Just think! A year ago I was in Paris!" She drew a deep breath and looked out over the water to the further sh.o.r.e, where Jacob Welse"s tent, like a snowy handkerchief, sprawled against the deep green of the forest. "I do not believe there is such a place," she added. "There is no Paris."
"And I was in London a twelvemonth past," Corliss meditated. "But I have undergone a new incarnation. London? There is no London now. It is impossible. How could there be so many people in the world? This is the world, and we know of fact that there are very few people in it, else there could not be so much ice and sea and sky. Tommy, here, I know, thinks fondly of a place he calls Toronto. He mistakes. It exists only in his mind,--a memory of a former life he knew. Of course, he does not think so. That is but natural; for he is no philosopher, nor does he bother--"
"Wheest, will ye!" Tommy fiercely whispered. "Your gabble"ll bring it doon aboot oor heads."
Life is brief in the Northland, and fulfilment ever clutters the heels of prophecy. A premonitory tremor sighed down the air, and the rainbow wall swayed above them. The three paddles gripped the water with common accord. La Bijou leaped out from under. Broadside after broadside flared and crashed, and a thousand frigid tons thundered down behind them. The displaced water surged outward in a foamy, upstanding circle, and La Bijou, striving wildly to rise, ducked through the stiff overhang of the crest and wallowed, half-full, in the trough.
"Dinna I tell ye, ye gabbling fules!"
"Sit still, and bail!" Corliss checked him sharply. "Or you"ll not have the comfort of telling us anything."
He shook his head at Frona, and she winked back; then they both chuckled, much like children over an escapade which looks disastrous but turns out well.
Creeping timidly under the shadow of the impending avalanches, La Bijou slipped noiselessly up the last eddy. A corner of the bluff rose savagely from the river--a monstrous ma.s.s of naked rock, scarred and battered of the centuries; hating the river that gnawed it ever; hating the rain that graved its grim face with unsightly seams; hating the sun that refused to mate with it, whereof green life might come forth and hide its hideousness. The whole force of the river hurled in against it, waged furious war along its battlements, and caromed off into mid-stream again. Down all its length the stiff waves stood in serried rows, and its crevices and water-worn caverns were a-bellow with unseen strife.
"Now! Bend to it! Your best!"
It was the last order Corliss could give, for in the din they were about to enter a man"s voice were like a cricket"s chirp amid the growling of an earthquake. La Bijou sprang forward, cleared the eddy with a bound, and plunged into the thick. _Dip and lift, dip and lift_, the paddles worked with rhythmic strength. The water rippled and tore, and pulled all ways at once; and the fragile sh.e.l.l, unable to go all ways at once, shook and quivered with the shock of resistance.
It veered nervously to the right and left, but Frona held it with a hand of steel. A yard away a fissure in the rock grinned at them. La Bijou leaped and shot ahead, and the water, slipping away underneath, kept her always in one place. Now they surged out from the fissure, now in; ahead for half a yard, then back again; and the fissure mocked their toil.
Five minutes, each of which sounded a separate eternity, and the fissure was past. Ten minutes, and it was a hundred feet astern. _Dip and lift, dip and lift_, till sky and earth and river were blotted out, and consciousness dwindled to a thin line,--a streak of foam, fringed on the one hand with sneering rock, on the other with snarling water.
That thin line summed up all. Somewhere below was the beginning of things; somewhere above, beyond the roar and traffic, was the end of things; and for that end they strove.
And still Frona held the egg-sh.e.l.l with a hand of steel. What they gained they held, and fought for more, inch by inch, _dip and lift_; and all would have been well but for the flutter of Tommy"s soul. A cake of ice, sucked beneath by the current, rose under his paddle with a flurry of foam, turned over its toothed edge, and was dragged back into the depths. And in that sight he saw himself, hair streaming upward and drowned hands clutching emptiness, going feet first, down and down. He stared, wide-eyed, at the portent, and his poised paddle refused to strike. On the instant the fissure grinned in their faces, and the next they were below the bluffs, drifting gently in the eddy.
Frona lay, head thrown back, sobbing at the sun; amidships Corliss sprawled panting; and forward, choking and gasping and nerveless, the Scotsman drooped his head upon his knees. La Bijou rubbed softly against the rim-ice and came to rest. The rainbow-wall hung above like a fairy pile; the sun, flung backward from innumerable facets, clothed it in jewelled splendor. Silvery streams tinkled down its crystal slopes; and in its clear depths seemed to unfold, veil on veil, the secrets of life and death and mortal striving,--vistas of pale-shimmering azure opening like dream-visions, and promising, down there in the great cool heart, infinite rest, infinite cessation and rest.
The topmost tower, delicately ma.s.sive, a score of feet above them, swayed to and fro, gently, like the ripple of wheat in light summer airs. But Corliss gazed at it unheeding. Just to lie there, on the marge of the mystery, just to lie there and drink the air in great gulps, and do nothing!--he asked no more. A dervish, whirling on heel till all things blur, may grasp the essence of the universe and prove the G.o.dhead indivisible; and so a man, plying a paddle, and plying and plying, may shake off his limitations and rise above time and s.p.a.ce.
And so Corliss.
But gradually his blood ceased its mad pounding, and the air was no longer nectar-sweet, and a sense of things real and pressing came back to him.
"We"ve got to get out of this," he said. His voice sounded like a man"s whose throat has been scorched by many and long potations. It frightened him, but he limply lifted a shaking paddle and shoved off.
"Yes; let us start, by all means," Frona said in a dim voice, which seemed to come to him from a far distance.
Tommy lifted his head and gazed about. "A doot we"ll juist hae to gie it oop."
"Bend to it!"
"Ye"ll no try it anither?"
"Bend to it!" Corliss repeated.