Love of Life - Jack London (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📗

with softening face and voice.

“In your case, I fear, confession is exploitation by indirection, profit-making by ruse, self-aggrandizement at the expense of God.”

“Don’t be literary,” she pouted, with growing tenderness. “I never did like epigrammatic discussion. Besides, I’m not afraid to ask you to forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive, Theresa. I really should thank you. True, at first I suffered; and then, with all the graciousness of spring, it dawned upon me that I was happy, very happy. It was a most amazing discovery.”

“But what if I should return to you?” she asked.

“I should” (he looked at her whimsically), “be greatly perturbed.”

“I am your wife. You know you have never got a divorce.”

“I see,” he meditated. “I have been careless. It will be one of the first things I attend to.”

She came over to his side, resting her hand on his arm. “You don’t want me, John?” Her voice was soft and caressing, her hand rested like a lure. “If I told you I had made a mistake? If I told you that I was very unhappy? - and I am. And I did make a mistake.”

Fear began to grow on Messner. He felt himself wilting under the lightly laid hand. The situation was slipping away from him, all his beautiful calmness was going. She looked at him with melting eyes, and he, too, seemed all dew and melting. He felt himself on the edge of an abyss, powerless to withstand the force that was drawing him over.

“I am coming back to you, John. I am coming back to-day … now.”

As in a nightmare, he strove under the hand. While she talked, he seemed to hear, rippling softly, the song of the Lorelei. It was as though, somewhere, a piano were playing and the actual notes were impinging on his ear-drums.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet, thrust her from him as her arms attempted to clasp him, and retreated backward to the door. He was in a panic.

“I’ll do something desperate!” he cried.

“I warned you not to get excited.” She laughed mockingly, and went about washing the dishes. “Nobody wants you. I was just playing with you. I am happier where I am.”

But Messner did not believe. He remembered her facility in changing front. She had changed front now. It was exploitation by indirection. She was not happy with the other man. She had discovered her mistake. The flame of his ego flared up at the thought. She wanted to come back to him, which was the one thing he did not want. Unwittingly, his hand rattled the door-latch.

“Don’t run away,” she laughed. “I won’t bite you.”

“I am not running away,” he replied with childlike defiance, at the same time pulling on his mittens. “I’m only going to get some water.”

He gathered the empty pails and cooking pots together and opened the door. He looked back at her.

“Don’t forget you’re to tell Mr. - er - Haythorne who I am.”

Messner broke the skin that had formed on the water-hole within the hour, and filled his pails. But he did not return immediately to the cabin. Leaving the pails standing in the trail, he walked up and down, rapidly, to keep from freezing, for the frost bit into the flesh like fire. His beard was white with his frozen breath when the perplexed and frowning brows relaxed and decision came into his face. He had made up his mind to his course of action, and his frigid lips and cheeks crackled into a chuckle over it. The pails were already skinned over with young ice when he picked them up and made for the cabin.

When he entered he found the other man waiting, standing near the stove, a certain stiff awkwardness and indecision in his manner. Messner set down his water-pails.

“Glad to meet you, Graham Womble,” he said in conventional tones, as though acknowledging an introduction.

Messner did not offer his hand. Womble stirred uneasily, feeling for the other the hatred one is prone to feel for one he has wronged.

“And so you’re the chap,” Messner said in marvelling accents. “Well, well. You see, I really am glad to meet you. I have been - er - curious to know what Theresa found in you - where, I may say, the attraction lay. Well, well.”

And he looked the other up and down as a man would look a horse up and down.

“I know how you must feel about me,” Womble began.

“Don’t mention it,” Messner broke in with exaggerated cordiality of voice and manner. “Never mind that. What I want to know is how do you find her? Up to expectations? Has she worn well? Life been all a happy dream ever since?”

“Don’t be silly,” Theresa interjected.

“I can’t help being natural,” Messner complained.

“You can be expedient at the same time, and practical,” Womble said sharply. “What we want to know is what are you going to do?”

Messner made a well-feigned gesture of helplessness. “I really don’t know. It is one of those impossible situations against which there can be no provision.”

“All three of us cannot remain the night in this cabin.”

Messner nodded affirmation.

“Then somebody must get out.”

“That also is incontrovertible,” Messner agreed. “When three bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one must get out.”

“And you’re that one,” Womble announced grimly. “It’s a ten-mile pull to the next camp, but you can make it all right.”

“And that’s the first flaw in your reasoning,” the other objected. “Why, necessarily, should I be the one to get out? I found this cabin first.”

“But Tess can’t get out,” Womble explained. “Her lungs are already slightly chilled.”

“I agree with you. She can’t venture ten miles of frost. By all means she must remain.”

“Then it is as I said,” Womble announced with finality.

Messner cleared his throat. “Your lungs are all right, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but what of it?”

Again the other cleared his throat and spoke with painstaking and judicial slowness. “Why, I may say, nothing of it, except, ah, according to your own reasoning, there is nothing to prevent your getting out, hitting the frost, so to speak, for a matter of ten miles. You can make it all right.”

Womble looked with quick suspicion at Theresa and caught in her eyes a glint of pleased surprise.

“Well?” he demanded of her.

She hesitated, and a surge of anger darkened his face. He turned upon Messner.

“Enough of this. You can’t stop here.”

“Yes, I can.”

“I won’t let you.” Womble squared his shoulders. “I’m running things.”

“I’ll stay anyway,” the other persisted.

“I’ll put you out.”

“I’ll come back.”

Womble stopped a moment to steady his voice and control himself. Then he spoke slowly, in a low, tense voice.

“Look here, Messner, if you refuse to get out, I’ll thrash you. This isn’t California. I’ll beat you to a jelly with my two fists.”

Messner shrugged his shoulders. “If you do, I’ll call a miners’ meeting and see you strung up to the nearest tree. As you said, this is not California. They’re a simple folk, these miners, and all I’ll have to do will be to show them the marks of the beating, tell them the truth about you, and present my claim for my wife.”

The woman attempted to speak, but Womble turned upon her fiercely.

“You keep out of this,” he cried.

In marked contrast was Messner’s “Please don’t intrude, Theresa.”

What of her anger and pent feelings, her lungs were irritated into the dry, hacking cough, and with blood-suffused face and one hand clenched against her chest, she waited for the paroxysm to pass.

Womble looked gloomily at her, noting her cough.

“Something must be done,” he said. “Yet her lungs can’t stand the exposure. She can’t travel till the temperature rises. And I’m not going to give her up.”

Messner hemmed, cleared his throat, and hemmed again, semi-apologetically, and said, “I need some money.”

Contempt showed instantly in Womble’s face. At last, beneath him in vileness, had the other sunk himself.

“You’ve got a fat sack of dust,” Messner went on. “I saw you unload it from the sled.”

“How much do you want?” Womble demanded, with a contempt in his voice equal to that in his face.

“I made an estimate of the sack, and I - ah - should say it weighed about twenty pounds. What do you say we call it four thousand?”

“But it’s all I’ve got, man!” Womble cried out.

“You’ve got her,” the other said soothingly. “She must be worth it. Think what I’m giving up. Surely it is a reasonable price.”

“All right.” Womble rushed across the floor to the gold-sack. “Can’t put this deal through too quick for me, you - you little worm!”

“Now, there you err,” was the smiling rejoinder. “As a matter of ethics isn’t the man who gives a bribe as bad as the man who takes a bribe? The receiver is as bad as the thief, you know; and you needn’t console yourself with any fictitious moral superiority concerning this little deal.”

“To hell with your ethics!” the other burst out. “Come here and watch the weighing of this dust. I might cheat you.”

And the woman, leaning against the bunk, raging and impotent, watched herself weighed out in yellow dust and nuggets in the scales erected on the grub-box. The scales were small, making necessary many weighings, and Messner with precise care verified each weighing.

“There’s too much silver in it,” he remarked as he tied up the gold-sack. “I don’t think it will run quite sixteen to the ounce. You got a trifle the better of me, Womble.”

He handled the sack lovingly, and with due appreciation of its preciousness carried it out to his sled.

Returning, he gathered his pots and pans together, packed his grub-box, and rolled up his bed. When the sled was lashed and the complaining dogs harnessed, he returned into the cabin for his mittens.

“Good-by, Tess,” he said, standing at the open door.

She turned on him, struggling for speech but too frantic to word the passion that burned in her.

“Good-by, Tess,” he repeated gently.

“Beast!” she managed to articulate.

She turned and tottered to the bunk, flinging herself face down upon it, sobbing: “You beasts! You beasts!”

John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face. At the bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled. He worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water-hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents of the sack into the water. The river was shallow at that point, and two feet beneath the surface he could see the bottom dull-yellow in the fading light. At the sight of it, he spat into the hole.

He started the dogs along the Yukon trail. Whining spiritlessly, they were reluctant to work. Clinging to the gee-pole with his right band and with his left rubbing cheeks and nose, he stumbled over the rope as the dogs swung on a bend.

“Mush-on, you poor, sore-footed brutes!” he cried. “That’s it, mush-on!”

 

THE WHITE MAN’S WAY

 

“TO cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night,” I had announced on entering old Ebbits’s cabin; and he had looked at me blear-eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a contemptuous grunt. Zilla was his wife, and no more bitter-tongued, implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon. Nor would I have stopped there had my dogs