Читать книгу Rocking Moon - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 5

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As Colonel Jeff and his companion stood on the dock at Rezanoff watching the vanishing Seal Pup, Sasha Larianoff, fifteen miles away, lay in the grass just below the weathered planks of a watch-tower which crested the highest promontory on her Island of Rocking Moon. Beside her, Alexander Baranoff, her pet blue fox, sat on his haunches looking out over the sunny, silvered water of the straits.

The August sun blended the scents of earth, trampled grass and wild flowers about her. Through half-closed eyes she watched seagulls flying over, their breasts sleek and white, their heads turning alertly from side to side. Little wind gusts came blowing across the spruce groves back of her, spicing the air with a savor of forest and the freshness of the open sea. They brought her the drowsy murmur of surf from the outer beach of the Island, and rustled the purple panicles of wild hay that bowed daringly over the fringe of space beyond her feet.

After a morning of hard work it was good to lie against the warm, sweet earth. She stirred in lazy content and tilted her chin in a frank yawn as she stretched her lithe, young limbs luxuriously. Her out-flung arm came in contact with the meditative Alexander, nearly knocking him over. He recovered his balance and withdrew to the shade of a tall lupine, from whence he eyed her with reproachful dignity.

Sasha sat up laughing. "Oh, Alexander! 'scuse me, you comical, human little thing!" Her voice, banteringly affectionate, had a low, faint huskiness that was singularly pleasing. "But really," she went on, shaking a finger at her offended pet, "you ought to be over on the other side of the Island helping your spouse take care of her puppies.... What's that you say? She's tired having you everlastingly under foot!... Oh-o-o! P-o-o-r Alexander! Nobody loves him at all? Come over to me, old honey, and I'll rub your funny head for you."

Her slim, outstretched hands invited him, but the fox blinked his yellow eyes, and running his tongue over thin, black lips, turned his head away as if in supreme disgust at the words she had put into his mouth. Then, suddenly changing his mind, he came toward her with deliberate, dainty steps, his great, plumy tail trailing through the grass. He settled himself with his muzzle on Sasha's lap, and closed his eyes as she began stroking his maltese-colored fur.

The sunlight heightened the clearness of the girl's creamy skin, the deep amber of her long-lashed eyes, and the undertone of gold in her dark, copper-colored hair. "Larianoff red" they called Sasha's hair over in Rezanoff where she had been born twenty-three years before. All the Larianoffs had it, from the time of the first young Anton Larianoff, a secular priest, who came from the land of the Tsar in the historic galiot Simeon, the Friend of God, and Anna the Prophetess, in the days when the naïve Russians leavened their fur-trading with piety.

It was Anton who rang the first church bell that called the savage Aleuts to worship in Russian America. It was he who established the first school for their children. Sasha bore the name of his Russian wife, and through her had inherited the Island of Rocking Moon. In the North everyone knows that the first-born son of a Larianoff becomes a priest, and the first-born daughter inherits the Island of Rocking Moon.

Ever since Sasha could remember she had heard stories of Anton, the Fighting Priest, and while she admired the zealous exploits of this sturdy, red-headed one who fought and loved and worked and died nearly a century and a half ago, she had always taken an unholy delight in the extremely pious and lengthy name that adorned his vessel. As a little girl, despite the shocked disapproval of old Seenia, her Aleut nurse, she had bestowed it on all her father's rowboats and bidarkas, joyously rolling the ponderous syllables on her irreverent young tongue. Today, the modern gas-boat that enabled her to carry on the business of her fox-ranch bore the historic appellation, shortened affectionately to Simmie and Ann.

It was time for the Simmie and Ann to be heading home now from Rezanoff, where Colonel Jeff had gone for supplies. The girl hoped he would bring Zoya back with him. Ever since she could remember, Zoya and Feodor had been more her friends and companions than her servants, for in her father's house no one was called servant.

Her father's house! A pang of homesickness stirred in her heart for the substantial, homely comfort of the old hewed-log parish house at Rezanoff; for the happy, hospitable years she had known there before the World War. Then Zoya's mother, who now kept the Rezanoff hotel, had been her father's housekeeper, and they never knew how many were to sit down to the table. Always there had been three extra covers laid in preparation, and always there were present the regular visitors, pensioners and orphans living with them.

And her father! Never was he so happy as when, in those days of plenty, he played host at the head of his long, candle-lighted table. Sasha's eyes grew fond as she envisaged him—a slender, rather small figure in clerical black; genial, humorous, kindly, but eagerly argumentative. How dear he was with his thick, white hair always ruffled on top of his head, his sapphire-blue eyes flashing above the white of his close-cropped beard, as they did when he made a point in a discussion! And with what an air he leaned back in his chair afterward, lifting to his lips the long, slender holder of Alaskan jade in which he smoked his single, daily cigarette! Sasha marveled that his hands, so slim, so sentient on the keys of a piano or the strings of a violin, could handle a spear or a gun with equal skill, or paddle a bidarka safely through the gale-lashed breakers of the North Pacific, as he was often obliged to do when he visited his outlying parishes.

Sasha mused on, absent-mindedly stroking Alexander's fur. She recalled her father's delight in the happiness of his dance-loving flock at Rezanoff. Never had his birthday gone by without all of them turning out to serenade him—guitars slung from their shoulders, voices raised in the old Slavonian melodies he loved so well. She wondered if he would get back from the South in time for his birthday festival this year. Mentally she computed the weeks, counting them over on her fingers. Six weeks, if he were fortunate in finding in the Juneau library what he wanted to complete his book.

She wished it were her father she was waiting for today, instead of good-hearted, blundering Colonel Jeff, who was doing his best to look out for her. But perhaps the Colonel would have letters from her father. Although no mail-boat had come from the South, there was always a chance that the Starr, coming from the West'ard, might bring a strayed mail-sack.

"No more rubs, now, Alexander," she said at last, as she lifted the animal from her lap. "We'll see if Colonel Jeff is coming home yet."

She rose, shaking the clinging grasses from her narrow green frock while she climbed the few feet to the watch-tower.

About her the wild hay stood shoulder high, shimmering and swaying in the wind. A single larkspur tapped with purple fingers the broken pane of the tower window, which commanded a view of the waters north, east and west. No craft could approach unseen from any of those directions.

Sasha never failed to thrill to the incipient romance of the half-ruined old Lookout house. It was suggestive of those first wild and unsuccessful days of fox-farming in Alaska over half a century ago, when a San Francisco company had leased Rocking Moon from her grandmother and begun an industry hitherto unknown. Then it had been necessary, when the furs were prime, to post guards in the tower and keep a constant watch for the approach of Aleut hunters in their bidarkas—natives who slipped over from the other islands hovering like chicks along the mother-coast of the Alaskan mainland.

The natives had no sense of stealing when they took the foxes. Before that time the whole country had been theirs for hunting, and every wild animal their legitimate kill. By the time the pioneer fox-ranchers had taught them to distinguish between "mine and thine," the poaching had effectively put an end to the first attempt to establish a fur-farm on the Island of Rocking Moon.

Sasha felt thankful that in these days of civilization poaching was unknown. She could not afford to lose a single fox this winter, with everything she and her father had at stake—everything, that is except the Mask of Jade.... But the Mask of Jade—where was it? Where could old Seenia have hidden it so carefully that neither she nor anyone else could find it—not even at the time, two years ago, when so much depended upon it?

For a moment the intensive expression in Sasha's eyes deepened as she pondered this question that was with her daily. Then, as usual, she dismissed it unanswered; and, leaning back against the old tower wall, she shaded her eyes to look toward Rezanoff.

A line of water-birds winging low over the straits was the only sign of life. The kelp beds that were the wonder of the old time voyagers, lay like masses of brown, shimmering ribbons hopelessly entangled along the rocky beach of Windward Island across the channel. Windward was one of the many low islands that interposed heavy spruce forests between her and the hidden village of Rezanoff lying at the foot of far, hazy, velvet-textured hills. Rimming the distance behind them lifted a line of shadowy, lilac-toned mountains, marked with traces of volcanic ash from the last eruption of Mt. Katmai. They were gentle, sloping pyramids bathed today in colors so lovely that the very clouds deserted the blue of the zenith to hover above their snow-tipped peaks. Sasha watched the slow-moving, sun-shot masses of vapor billow in faint shades of silver and primrose and coral, from plum-colored depths. Clouds gave her a feeling of tremendous spaces, utter freedom; a delicious sense of detachment from all earthbound things. A sort of radiance welled up within her as she looked.

"Hello, God!" she said softly.

Ever since she could remember she had said that when she looked on some beautiful manifestation of nature. She said it, despite old Seenia's years of predicting that such awful familiarity with the Deity would bring a curse on the house of Larianoff. Sasha smiled a little now, remembering her old Aleut nurse's habit of hastily crossing herself while she darted fearful glances about. Dear, funny old Seenia! Not even her long residence with two generations of Larianoff priests could keep her from wearing a devil-charm about her withered neck—on the same string that held a tiny Christian cross! And she still spoke respectfully to the Volcano Oo-koon!

But Seenia, filled with native superstition, was yet at heart a romanticist, a chronicler of the loves and high adventures of the Larianoffs. Sasha had sat at her feet many an evening listening to the story of the first Anton who successfully competed with dashing Russian officers for the hand of a governor's daughter. And there was that delectable tale of her grandfather when he was studying for the priesthood at the old monastery at Sitka. The girl never tired of hearing how the ardent young lover interrupted his studies long enough to elope with the daughter of a dissenting sea captain. Those two had not merely out-witted the captain, but had confiscated the irate parent's schooner and sailed away in it to the nearest village to be married! Ah, thought Sasha, how wonderfully men and women loved in those days! How good to have lived in those romantic times! Nothing like that happened now. Still, sometimes, when she stood alone on Lookout Point in the evening, watching the radiance of the sunset, she caught herself waiting.... It seemed, because of the sheer, unspeakable beauty of the world, a lover must come to her out of the veiled amethystine mysteries of those western hills....

Gradually, through her dreaming, she became aware that the quiet of the afternoon had been broken. Then, like a rude, arrogant voice echoing against the cliffs of Rocking Moon, came the loud, staccato put-put-put of a gas engine. Across the channel a launch swiftly rounded the point of Windward Island. She watched its approach.

"The Seal Pup, Alexander," she said to her pet. "We might have known that only Nicolai would arrive with such speed—and commotion, mightn't we?"

She made no effort to go down to the house. Let Seenia tell him where she was. She liked Nicolai best with a setting of mountains and the sea, anyway. Ever since his return from France she had felt a vague uneasiness when he came close to her indoors—Nicolai, whom she had known ever since she could remember.

She sat down amid the grasses, the patient little Alexander taking his place at her side. She could hear the launch coming nearer. Its echoing put-put-put marked its progress along the cliffs below her and into the little bay as definitely as if she were watching it.

Now, she thought, Nick was tying the Seal Pup to the float before the ranch-house. Now he was striding impatiently up the strip of beach that led to the path through the rice grass. With the eyes of her mind she saw him pause before the wide veranda where old Seenia sat drowsing. Perhaps he had a package for her—music or candy. A question, and he was away again, tramping across the meadow with its patches of blooming fire-weed; skirting the lily-pond that reflected the edge of the forest; climbing the hillside at her back, ruthlessly stamping down the blue-bells and snatching off the heads of the Indian celery. That was Nicolai—ruthless, inexorable when he wanted anything, or when he was going anywhere—even to see her. Nicolai who had as many moods as a woman. What would he be today, she wondered—the charming, irresponsible Irishman, or the moody and savage Russian?

At her side Alexander moved uneasily, rose and turned his muzzle to the wind. A time or two he raised it high in an exploratory sniff, then abruptly trotted off into the grass, just as footsteps sounded behind her.

"Why, Sasha!" Nick's voice carried a distinct tone of resentment. "Didn't you see me coming down the strait?"

"Didn't I see him coming down the strait!" Sasha repeated banteringly. "Yes, Nicolai, I did. And what's more I heard you, too, not being stone deaf." She looked up over her shoulder into his face, and met the sullen expression of his agate eyes with a laugh. "Just look at his offended Majesty!" she went on, playfully addressing the bowing larkspur. "I do believe he expected me to dash down the hill and catch his line as he came sweeping in to the float!" With her arms she pantomimed the arrival of the Seal Pup, and the casting of the line.

"Sasha!" The word was snapped out like a command. "There you go, always laughing at me—ridiculing me—keeping me away from you with your mockeries and your devilish—" An impatient movement of his clenched hand finished the sentence. "Every time I come near you, lately, you say something to set me off wrong! You never used to be this way, Sasha," he finished irritably.

The girl did not answer at once. A puff of wind set all the seed-pods on the lupines clicking like fairy castanets; set all the blue-bells ringing on their thread-like stems. But she banished her impulse to call Nick's attention to them. Nick's ears never had been attuned to fairy music. He always laughed at what he called her childish notions, just as he always failed to play up to her bantering. Perhaps it was because he had lived for a time in the States, that far-away country of civilization which she had never seen. Even her father, who had often been to San Francisco, told her people were different in the States.

"Nicolai," she said, presently, in the same tone she had used to pacify the offended Alexander an hour and a half before. "Nicolai, your serious ways crash down on my spirit like a boulder from the crater of Oo-koon! Surely, now, you know I was just trying to have a little jest with you.... Come, Cross-patch.... Come sit beside me here where we can look toward Rezanoff and——"

"I'm tired looking at Rezanoff, Sasha!" Nick interrupted her with rudeness that was apparently unconscious. A peculiar, a smoldering look crept into his eyes, a look the girl knew portended one of his restless, "devil" moods. "I tell you I'm sick of the whole country! For Heaven's sake, let's turn our backs on Alaska and look toward the South—toward civilization—for once." He thrust his hands out to assist her with an air that brooked no refusal.

She caught them and came lightly to her feet. "All right, old bear!" she agreed cheerfully.

A few moments later they were seated on the other side of the watch-tower, their backs to its weather-worn planks. Nick's moody eyes traveled over the scene below them.

"God!" he exclaimed. "Look at it, Sasha!... I should think you'd go mad here." He threw out his hand. "The loneliness—the cursed peace of it all!"

Sasha's eyes followed his. Below them the hillside was a-stir with waving grasses, bee-haunted celery blooms, golden-rod and blue geraniums. Eastward the riot of color fell away to a small horseshoe bay ringed with clean, gray sand. In the shallows below she could see the bottom of flour-like volcanic ash glimmering through the green water. The Seal Pup reflected its white, graceful length at the float. Back from the edge of the beach the red roof of the wide old ranch-house was rivaling the bright color of the fireweed which splashed the meadow; and a forest of tapering spruce trees, heavy with cones, marched down to meet the wire meshes of the fox-corrals back of the log barn.

To the Alaskan girl it was home—home beautiful in the way of the wilderness; comfortable, too, and far from lonely. Were there not the gulls always calling overhead, the magpies and the blackbirds rollicking in the spruce tops, and one or more of her pure-bred blue foxes tiptoeing along the sands—her furry beauties that had no equals on the coast of Alaska? But then, Nicolai never had approved of her running the fox-ranch. He believed that women should be dependent on men in every way.

"The South!" Nick was repeating. "Oh, Sasha, if you could see it once—that country down there!" His voice thrilled to memory and his hand swept out across the green forest below, across the whole Island of Rocking Moon to the far line of purple sea showing on the other side. "If you could see it! The great, rich cities, with their high buildings, and miles and miles of chimneys sending up smoke to the sky. The luxuries! The conveniences!... God! I've been away from it all a year this time, and I'm hungry for it again—the city at night with the lights, the music, the perfume.... And the women—wonderful, subtle women, Sasha, with tinted faces and smooth, soft shoulders showing through the half-veiling, gauzy things they wear. And there's the dancing, and the—but oh! what's the use of talking to you, Sasha," he broke off, as if he despaired of conveying to her his ideas. "You have never even seen an automobile!"

There was a touch of intolerance in his voice. He drew a package of cigarettes from his coat pocket and selecting one, tapped the end of it impatiently against his hand. Sasha, listening, her arms clasped about her drawn-up knees, could feel no remoteness from that world she had never known. At Nick's last words, with their implication of pitying impatience, her heart suddenly flamed with a feeling of defensive loyalty for the land of her birth. Abruptly she shot her feet out in front of her and turned to look at him, frowning under the tangle of her wind-blown hair. Her dark amber eyes were bright with resentment and the pink in her cheeks deeper.

"Auto-mo-beel!" She rolled the word scornfully on her tongue, unconsciously adopting her father's pronunciation of it. "Why is it that I should know the auto-mo-beel?" She lifted her firm little chin indignantly. "You forget, Nicolai, that I have seen it all in the moving pictures! I have seen your cities of stone and brick, with no place to breathe in the narrow gray cañons of streets, and the unfortunate inhabitants swarming through them—hurrying, jostling, yes, leaping aside to avoid collision with those auto-mo-beels that are darting about, crazy, like bugs! Auto-mo-beel!" she made a deliciously rude face. "Pooph!" And with a quick, outward flirt of both hands she added to her expressed opinion.

Nick paused in the act of striking a match and snatched the unlighted cigarette from his lips.

"Yes, yes," he returned in surprising agreement. "That's just it, Sasha, for those down there who must work for little money—and walk. But for the rich—the ones who ride—Ah, Sasha, you have no idea of the power money brings! You have no idea of the world of pleasure it opens up! Money! Power!" He brought his fist down on his knee. "I've tasted it down there in the States! I've spent my money like a millionaire—while it lasted. I've had the jackals of traffic and trade slinking at my heels, fawning on me, giving me of their best. But I knew, damn 'em, that I was a king only as long as my money lasted. And always before I went broke, I had sense enough to come back here, back to Alaska to make more.... But it's getting harder every year to get it. The natives are bringing in fewer furs; the government is tying everything up. God!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I had lived in the old sea-otter days, when there was no cursed law in the land!"

The girl plucked a long spike of lupine and tapped the purple flowers against the palm of her hand. She was used to Nick's outbursts. He was always in rebellion against something.

"Yes, Nicolai," she nodded. "I've no doubt but that you'd have been one of the wildest of the sea-otter hunters, herding your poor Aleuts like a slave-driver." Her eyes began to twinkle. "But I'm sure downright piracy would have suited you better, Nick. Captain Kidd, for instance, did a fine business outside the law, you know." She smiled now, her short-lived resentment giving place to some picture of her imagination. "Oh, yes, Nicolai! I can see you swashbuckling along the deck of the Adventure in high boots and a clanking cutlass—see, like this—" She thrust out her chest, brandished the lupine, and with indrawn chin and protruding lips sang in a deep, artificial voice:

My name was Captain Kidd, as I sailed, as I sailed! "And so wickedly I did, as I sailed!"

She waited a moment to see if Nick would smile. But he did not look at her at all. He lighted his cigarette and threw the match away.

"Oh, very well, sir. We'll be serious if you insist.... Anyway, I'm glad we live in a law-abiding community, even if traveled young men like yourself won't admit we're civilized."

The trader turned to her. "But don't you see, Sasha, we're neither one thing nor the other here in Rezanoff. Law is all right down in the States—but there ought to be some place in the world where a man can go and be himself—be free. When I'm in the States I want every comfort and luxury money can buy, and I'm willing to abide by the restrictions. But when I'm in Alaska where I can get none of those things, I want no restrictions. That's what makes me so restless here now—" he jerked his cap off his head and shook the light hair from his brow—"I'm tied to the trading-post since Dad is gone—tied to it and making just a little more than an ordinary salary. If I were getting money enough I wouldn't mind it for a few months in the year. I could always go to the States and have my fling then.... But—But—" He hesitated. "You see, Sasha, my ideas have changed a lot since the war. I never felt the need of money until now—a lot of money I mean. And I've decided to make it—or throw up everything and head for Siberia, or some place where there's freedom. I've got to make money. I'm going to make a pile of it next year—every year. Enough to live where I please,—anyway, eight months in the year. And Sasha ... Sasha ..." His voice softened as he leaned toward her, his enigmatic eyes seeking hers. "When I go—I want you with me."

The girl held up her hand quickly as if for silence, but he went on unheeding.

"Yes, I'm going to marry you and take you down to the States to see what the Outside is like. And I'm going to dress you better than any of them, Sasha, you little devil!" His gaze traveled appraisingly from the girl's curl-crowned head to her small feet. "You pretty little red-headed devil!" He laughed as if in sudden appreciation. "By George, there are none of them that can compare with you down there, Sasha—even as you are now.... Come, sweetheart! Come, lubimaya! Don't look at me like that—You know you like me, Sasha." He slid his hand out with the instinctive arrogance of one used to submission. It closed over hers in a grip that hurt her. "Let's——"

With a sudden spring the girl was on her feet facing him. But she matter-of-factly shook her green skirts to dislodge the clinging grass, and with her lips pursed, began gingerly to rub the red spot on her hand. Only recently Nick had begun this talk of marriage. It troubled her, but with a desire to preserve their old-time friendliness, she refused to take him seriously.

"Blessed Peter!" she exclaimed with mild impatience. "How many times must I tell you, Nick, that I will not be courted in that love-me-or-I'll-beat-you-to-death fashion? How often must I repeat that I am never going to marry you, foolish boy?"

A silence that was somehow ominous answered her. She raised her face, for her companion was standing now. He was looking down on her. The wind blew his hair back from his lean face. His mouth was pressed into a straight, lipless line that hinted of cruelty, and his eyes were smoldering as she had sometimes seen the autumn sun smolder behind the fog banks. For the first time she tried to read his eyes—those indecipherable eyes that were neither blue nor brown. Fear of something unknown, transient but chilling, touched her.

"Look here, Sasha! You really mean that, do you?" His voice had taken on a rough intensity, and a muscle at the flange of his nose twitched spasmodically.

"Yes ... Oh, don't take it that way, Nick!" she cried, her heart stirred with sudden sympathy. "I'm fond of you—just as I've always been—but not that way.... Don't be like this any more, Nicolai!" She started forward, her hands held out impulsively. "Please ... P-l-e-a-s-e be just brotherly to me as you used to be before you went to France!" she pleaded, her faintly husky voice tremulous with the memory of those other happier years when she alone, of all Rezanoff, could make wild Nick Nash listen to reason.

But the trader's expression did not change. He neither moved nor spoke.

"Nicolai?" she said, coaxingly.

She took another step forward and stood looking up into his sullen face with the playful, friendly smile they both had known. "Nicolai...." The boy Nick had always given in when she coaxed him thus—had always said, a little abashed, "Oh, well—All right, Sasha, if you want it so." But the man——

Without warning he snatched her against his coat. She heard his heart beating and felt his hot face roughly, eagerly seeking her own.

From startled amazement her mood changed swiftly to the frantic, caged feeling of one imprisoned and, in some way, profaned by the imprisonment. She was filled with panic and a furious momentary strength. She kicked gamin-like, and struck out with her fists, wrenched herself sideways under his arm, and before he could renew his hold, had squirmed from beneath his elbow. With both hands she pushed him from her and darted away, putting the length of the tower-house between them. Then she faced him, a panting, disheveled little figure, her bright hair tumbling about her shoulders, the back of her hand pressed against her quivering mouth, hot tears threatening to overflow on her cheeks.

She tried to make herself realize that it was Nick who stood there—Nick who used to haul her to the trading-post on his sled to buy candy; Nick whom she had always regarded as an older brother. But the bulk of him swam in her tear-dimmed gaze, huge, unfamiliar, repellent.

With an emotion strangely compounded of sadness, indignation and farewell, she turned from him, and, stifling a sob, ran blindly down the hill.