Читать книгу Rocking Moon - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 6

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Instead of taking the meadow-path that led directly to the ranch-house, Sasha turned out toward the beach. Her chaotic emotions of a few moments back had, by their very intensity, left her bewildered and strangely void of feeling. She knew only that she could not bear to see Nicolai again that day. She wanted to get away from him as far as possible.

She brushed swiftly through the tall grass at the foot of the hill, making a detour to avoid a lone spruce tree that spread cone-laden branches over a circle of wild roses. As she sped by, she was aware that Alexander, the fox, had glided out from the thicket and was trotting like a dog at her heels. A few moments later her sandals touched the hard, clean beach, and instinctively the girl fell into the trail walk of the North—the swinging, rhythmic gait that covers the ground almost without conscious effort.

To her left she passed the float where the Seal Pup lay, while on her right the roofs of the ranch-houses made red peaks above tall grass bordering the high-tide line. The smell of the sea came up damp and keen from the mark of the receding tide. Long, slim shadows of the girl and the fox moved smoothly before her on the sand, pointing eastward toward Lampadny Point a mile away.

Her little home bay lay between Lampadny and Lookout Points, but the former was the only Point on the Island which was not a boulder-covered beach backed by beetling crags of talus-walled cliffs. Here the timbered hills of Rocking Moon sloped gently down until the forest fringed out at the edge of sand dunes where single trees, few and far between, stood out in blue, tapering beauty. But the dunes, thick with rice-grass, lupine and wild peas, rolled on in green and lavender softness until they diminished in a long sand spit. This curved about the bay like a protecting arm.

Sasha, arrived at the Point, turned into the swaying, waist-high tangle, and made her way across it to the seaward side of the Island. The wind was in her face.

She loved that moment of exquisite freedom that came to her when she emerged at the edge of the beach-drift and looked away over the silvered purple of the North Pacific, where no land lay between her and the horizon. Today, despite the disturbing events of the afternoon, she sprang, as usual, to a drift-log and stood a moment with lifted chin and outspread arms while the light wind fluttered her garments about her. It was a playful summer wind that chased big, deliberate, purple rollers in from the open sea, until, unable longer to withstand the teasing, they broke in spraying emerald and silver on the beach of Rocking Moon.

Sasha always sought the sea when she was troubled. There was something in its immensity, its permanency, that soothed and comforted her as religion comforts some women. She felt its calming influence now as she stepped down off the log and turned toward her goal fifty feet to the left.

There, topping a sand dune, a log tomb held aloft its six-foot Greek cross against the summer sky. Above the shimmering rice-grass, the timbers of the flat roof showed ivory-white, marking the grave of Father Paul, a Russian missionary of the old days, who was beloved by the whole Aleut nation for his deeds of kindness and sacrifice. Nearly a century has passed since his body was laid away and the little log house built above his resting-place; yet the spot is still held sacred, and many a tale of averted shipwreck the brown fishermen of Rezanoff tell—fishermen who in time of sea-peril, look toward Lampadny Point and send up a prayer for safety, just as their fathers did.

Sasha climbed the low wall; and, with a movement of content, seated herself with her back against the upright of the cross. She felt a sense of protection beneath the widespreading arms. Above her, in the intersection facing the sea, was a box-like receptacle with a glass door. It held the lamp, which, in accordance with the old custom of her people, was always lighted on the name-day of Father Paul. Each year this anniversary was the occasion of a pilgrimage from Rezanoff to Lampadny Point, where a vesper service was held in loving memory of the old monk. Sasha's mind, seeking the comfort and assurance of some dear, familiar thing, went back to the first pilgrimages she could remember, in the days before launches and steamboats were common in the North. Rocking Moon had been a lonely shrine then, uninhabited.

She recalled her father on the morning of the holiday, happy, energetic, setting forth from Rezanoff at the head of a flotilla of rowboats and bidarkas, over the fifteen miles of sun-jeweled sea that lay between the village and Lampadny Point. She saw herself, very little, clasped in the circle of old Seenia's arm, sitting in the stern of her father's boat, on the vermilion chest that held his vestments. She heard the singing of the Aleuts as they paddled in a double row behind—the wild, chorded sweetness of native voices that floated out over the water, her father's tenor soaring above all in the chanting of the psalms.

"Let the heavens rejoice, And let the earth be glad; Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof!

Let the field be joyful, And all that is therein; Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice!"

In those days she thought this had been written about her country. It was Alaska in summer. The remembered harmony had power to stir her yet with its beauty—a beauty to which still clung the intangible, fairy-like magic of melodies heard in childhood.

Then, swiftly and unbidden, flashed another mental picture—that of a tall, light-haired boy who stood recklessly in the bow of the boat directly behind her father; a boy who stood with his thin, young chin lifted and sang, as her father often said, in the tones of an angel, while he plotted some deed of the devil. Nicolai's boyish voice had been at once the despair and the delight of the music-loving Father Anton.

Sasha shook her head to dismiss the picture. She did not want to think of Nicolai. She rested her bronzed curls against the log cross and allowed her fancy to dwell on the landing of the flotilla on the other side of Lampadny Point, from which she had just come.

There had been the boats drawn up on the sand, the happy calling and running about, the camp-fires glowing under the trees. Almost she could smell the pungent beach-wood smoke that drifted blue in the spruce branches, as the picnicking pilgrims prepared their afternoon meal. Some of them brought samovars and served tea, as at home. Nick's Russian mother had been one of those. Zoya's mother, then housekeeper for Father Anton, did so, too, while Sasha and the other children played below in the sand.

The old monk's name-day came in the summer season of the long, light nights. After the picnic dinner, the peace of the early evening enfolded sea and land with amethyst mists, and dusts of malachite and rose. It was then that Seenia slipped away to light the lampada on the cross of Father Paul. Afterward, the little girl Sasha had always taken her place with delight in that long procession of pilgrims that formed on the beach of Rocking Moon. Even now Sasha's heart thrilled faintly remembering her father, splendid in his vestments of scarlet and gold, attended by his acolytes holding aloft the silver banners and the gilded cross. The grass lay crushed and sweet where he led his people across the Point to gather about the tomb for vespers.

The cool air of those bygone evenings had been pungent with incense from the swinging censers, piquant with the tang of the tide. The plaint of low-flying sea-birds keened through the chanting of the choir. The gold on her father's robes turned crimson in the glow of the sunset as he stood below the cross holding out his hands in benediction above the kneeling figures on the sand.

Something in this outdoor ceremony, with its mingling of orthodox pomp and Arcadian simplicity, appealed strongly to Sasha. God seemed very near then, very simple, very beautiful. Not the God who was worshipped in her father's gilded church at Rezanoff, but her own God of the sea and the land and the sweeping winds. Sometimes she wondered if she were not a bit like old Seenia with her cross and her devil-charm and her respect for Oo-koon.

At the thought she looked up toward the East where the purple, tapering volcano of Oo-koon rose from its island foundation. Thirty miles across the water it reared its dim cone five thousand feet above the swells which sucked in and out the caves, honeycombing its base. A steamy jet of vapor curled lazily from its summit, as Sasha had seen it on clear days ever since she could remember. But Seenia, who was ninety years old, could tell of a time when the slumbering Oo-koon awoke and its crater vomited columns of flame and clouds of ashes. The melting snow on its sides descended in terrific torrents, sweeping away the native village at its feet. Seenia could tell of a time even before that, when the great Cave of Oo-koon was the scene of barbaric ceremonies, and Aleut maidens, in masks to their shoulders, danced naked beneath the swinging mummies suspended from the vault of the cavern. Those mysteries had all been banished by the priests, the masks burned and broken. That is, all except the precious, eyeless Mask of Jade.

The Mask of Jade! As the moments went by, Sasha's thoughts became busy with the mystery of its disappearance. But she was no nearer to solving it when Alexander thrust his weird little face out from the rice-grass below, and sprang to the top of the tomb.

When she turned to make room for him beside her, her attention was drawn to some marks which dotted the upright of the cross just under the lampada. They were three nearly obliterated depressions with splintered edges—bullet holes. She recalled well the day they had been made by the boy Nicolai, who had used the cross as a target one evening to try a new gun, just before the pilgrims embarked for home. It was for this reason she had never told him her great secret about the tomb—the secret Seenia had confided to her childish ears; the secret of the hinged log that swung in and afforded an opening to the tomb. Nicolai! Everything seemed to lead back to him today. She pressed her fingers in the depressions and slowly shook her head. Nicolai held nothing sacred. She knew it now; not even their friendship of a lifetime.

It came over her with a pang of sadness, a sense of loss, that today ended that laughing, teasing comradeship which had always existed between her and Nick Nash. She did not know why, but she felt the same emotion she had experienced when she—a wide-eyed little girl—had watched him use the old monk's cross for a target.

This was a negative sensation, however, compared with the sudden tyranny of feeling that seized her when Nicolai's face flashed before her—the face of the new and repellent Nick who had snatched her to him that afternoon on the Lookout. And he called that love! She did not want love from him. She wanted him always as she had known him before he went to France.

Sasha dreamed of love as something powerful, yet delicate; something strong yet tender. She expected it to come to her some day, romantically and beautifully as it had to all her people. But if love brought that look to men's faces—She shivered again at the recollection, and threw an impulsive arm about Alexander's soft neck, hiding her forehead against his fur.

Then, with a queer, disturbing touch, there came for the first time a realization of her obligation to Nicholas Nash, the trader. It was the Nash money that had paid for Alexander, for the Simmie and Ann, for the very dress upon her back, for the food she had eaten for a year. True, it was old Martin Nash who had advanced nearly all the money with which Sasha began her fox-ranching. It was Nicolai's father, who, protesting vigorously in his Irish brogue, had finally taken as security a mortgage on Rocking Moon and everything the Larianoffs owned. Gladly would the old man have made the loan without security, but the Larianoff pride had insisted otherwise. The combined possessions of Sasha and her father seemed little enough to offer as security in a country where a man may have as much land as he needs for the staking. But Martin Nash—her father's best friend—was dead, and it was to Nicolai they owed the money now. Before this she had felt no uneasiness about it, no weight of obligation. Now, because of Nicolai's behavior that afternoon, she longed intensely to free herself from the debt at once. Yet this was not possible. She must wait until December when she sold her foxes. There was no need to worry about paying the full amount then, for success had attended her efforts, and Rocking Moon vixens were already noted for producing the largest litters of pups on the coast. Rocking Moon Blues were in demand.

Disturbing this mood of self-confidence came memories of the failures of other fur farms in the vicinity. A fluttering feeling of impotence seized her for a moment as she considered her own possible failure. Then she hugged the passive Alexander tightly against her and spoke aloud to reassure herself.

"No, no, Alexander. That never can happen to us!" Swiftly she computed: there would be sixty foxes ready for shipment in December—thirty pairs of the finest Blues on the coast of Alaska. And she would get $350 a pair for them. "So you see we can't fail...." Alex nuzzled his cold little nose against her neck. "We can't fail, honey."

Nevertheless, the thought of disease, accident, crept insidiously into her mind, drawing in its wake a train of appalling possibilities. She, a priest's daughter, had upset all precedent by engaging in business where no woman did such things. Against her father's advice, and the advice of all her friends, she had staked everything they owned on this fox venture—after she discovered that the Mask of Jade was gone.

The Mask! She looked out across the water to Oo-koon, milky-rose now in the late afternoon sun. It was over there in the great Cave beneath that tapering cone that her ancestor, the first Anton, had come into possession of the eyeless Mask of Jade, that famous relic of a heathen time which had come down through generations of Larianoffs; that last weird symbol of barbarism which collectors from the largest museums in the world had tried in vain to buy from her father during those comfortable days before the war. Later—how well she remembered—when he would have parted with it for enough to finance for her the Rocking Moon Ranch—it was gone.

Seenia, for sixty-five years its guardian, could not tell whether it had been stolen or whether she herself had hidden it in some new place and forgotten. Seenia had lapses of memory now—the mark of her great age. Sasha knew the old Aleut was living on only in the hope that some day she might remember. Sasha encouraged her to talk of it each day, hoping, too, that the subconscious might give up its secret.

Four years ago a collector from a New York museum, more eager than the rest, had left in the bank at Seward a deposit of $8,000, together with a photograph and a detailed description of the relic. The money was to be delivered only to Father Anton or to Sasha any time within five years, if they brought the Mask of Jade. The time limit expired in December, little over four months distant. But Sasha was not troubled about this, for she had long ceased depending on the Mask of Jade to revive the family fortunes.

Busy with her thoughts though she was, the girl had not forgotten to listen for the sound of Nicolai's departing launch. She had not heard it, but the outgoing tide gave evidence that she must have been at the tomb an hour. Off the beach below her, boulders were thrusting their weed-crowned heads through the breakers, and already three sinuously stepping foxes explored for sea-food in the windrows of grasses left on the sand by the tide.

The girl watched their approach. Familiarity had never dimmed that feeling of awe and delight with which she regarded them. Even in the sunlight their maltese-colored fur made them shadowy, graceful wraiths of the wild. Now they stopped to raise pointed muzzles, sniffing the air for possible danger. Now they poked their noses among the bits of seaweed; now, as if in time to some inaudible rhythm, they trotted swiftly along the sand, their heavy tails carried low and to one side.

When Sasha saw them moving thus she knew why a certain dance-step which Nicolai had taught her, was called a fox-trot down there in the big United States she had never seen. Nicolai knew all the dances of civilization, just as he knew those of the North. Often, when in one of his boyish "devil" moods, he had danced for her and Zoya, to the music of rattles made of the crimson, clattering beaks of sea-parrots; danced the Whaler's Incantation and the Shaman's Dance. When he stepped those heathen figures there was about him a superlative savagery at once dangerous and alluring. She liked him then better than at any other time. She, a daughter of a long line of priests, found some buried instinct within herself rising and responding. She had even composed and played for him on the piano a muted, booming bass accompaniment to the castanets.

But as the years went by, Nicolai ceased to dance the old Aleut figures, at least where she could see him. She knew, however, that on his macoola parties to the Westward he did. When with her, he wanted to dance only those steps he brought back from the States—the dances of civilization. For years now he had expressed a contempt for all things Alaskan. He was fond of telling Sasha that she was "provincial." While she admitted there was a certain fascination in the matter-of-fact way in which Nick mentioned the customs of New York, San Francisco, and, after the war, Paris and London, she fiercely resented his attitude toward the land of his birth. It cheapened him in her eyes. Sometimes she thought she might have cared for Nicolai as he wished her to, if he had remained loyal to his own country.

She raised her head now as her ears caught the sound of the Seal Pup's exhaust assaulting the cliffs below the Lookout. Nicolai had waited long for her to come back, she thought. She gave Alexander's head a pat and came to her feet.

Her eyes were even with the glassed-in box which held the lamp of Father Paul. A small blackened wick lay dry on the bottom of a deep bowl of heavy opaque glass. The oil had burned away, for it had been over a month since the last vespers at the tomb. Zoya now performed the ceremony of lighting the lamp at vespers, for Seenia had given up this duty nearly five years ago.

Sasha opened the little glass door and turned the bowl upside down to keep out the drifting sand. Sometimes fishermen, grateful for a big haul, landed to refill the bowl with oil and set it burning.

The girl stood a moment longer looking out across the sea. Though the sun was still high there was in the air that indefinable freshness that tells of evening coming on. Between her and the ethereal wedge of Oo-koon a flock of sand-pipers curved and swerved with thin, eerie cries. The blue of the zenith melted into opal and pale amber out on the horizon, and the wind was dying away on the receding tide.

"Come on, Alexander. We're going home, little man," she said, stepping to the edge of the tomb. She jumped lightly to the sand and the fox leaped after her. Her thoughts were still busy with the events of the afternoon as she retraced her steps across the Point toward the ranch-house.

On the other side the little home bay lay smooth as a mirror. Ravens and magpies played in the rock weed left bare by the tide, and half a dozen foxes scampered along the edge of the drift, already anticipating feeding time. Just as she was nearing the float her own launch, the Simmie and Ann, rounded into view from the west.

Sasha quickened her pace and ran out on the float to wait for it. She could see Colonel Jeff and Zoya seated placidly, as usual, on boxes of supplies on the stern deck. Knowing how helpless the Colonel was in matters pertaining to the launch, she made ready to catch the line when Feodor should dart from the wheel and throw it to her.

But could that be Feodor she saw dimly in the shadow of the pilot-house? She tensed the muscles about her eyes as she looked again. No, decidedly it was not. A strange man, with a short, dark beard, was steering the Simmie and Ann in to the float. Feodor was nowhere in sight.

Interest gave place to anxiety. She remembered she had not asked Nicolai about the Colonel and Feodor. What could have happened in Rezanoff? She checked her conjectures with the thought that the creole was no doubt below at the engine, and the Colonel had brought back one of the friends who were ever dropping in on him from remote corners of Alaska.

The launch was close in now and slowing down. The new helmsman was making a good landing. She hoped Colonel Breeze would not try to toss her the line and fall overboard as he had done on several former occasions. She called out a cheery greeting to him and Zoya, and then motioned to the man at the wheel. He gave it a turn, working the wheel-house control of the engine, and ran nimbly to the bow to throw her the rope. She caught it and snubbed the craft to the float.

"Where's Feodor, Colonel?" she inquired, when the half-breed failed to appear.

"Feodor is hors de combat for the present," announced Colonel Jeff, pronouncing the foreign phrase exactly as spelled. "But I rustled you some one else in his place, Sasha. Mr. Tynan, here, is a first-class engineer." With a bow and a gesture the Colonel managed an introduction, and then proceeded to explain to the anxious Sasha the stranger's rescue of Feodor, and the latter's plight.

Sasha, though listening to the old fellow's long-winded discourse, was able also to observe the new man, for Tynan did not wait to be told what to do. He was already unloading the supplies.

She was somewhat surprised at his appearance. No one dressed like that in Alaska. The smock, the high, foreign boots, the beard all gave him the look of a brigand. Yet he was not unattractive. She liked his height, and the way his shoulder muscles rippled under the thin smock. She liked the way the old suit-case strap fell low on his narrow hips. His eyes were very deep and gray beneath the blackness of his hair, and his teeth very white in the tan of his face when he smiled, as he did while helping Zoya, the half-breed, from the launch to the float. All during the Colonel's recital this undercurrent of observation went on in her mind. When the old man finished, something she called her "malamute instinct" had approved of and accepted the stranger.

She stepped aboard the craft and looked down into the concrete-lined pit that was brimming with fresh salmon, whose silver scales caught the light in an iridescent gleam.

"Oh, Colonel, you did bring the fox-feed!" she exclaimed. "I was afraid your troubles had made you forget. Zoya, run along, please, and get us an early supper. Afterwards, I shall go with Mr. Tynan on the launch and show him the feeding-stations about the Island. Did you get any mail, Colonel Jeff? Any word from Dad?"

"That I did, Sasha. The Starr had a small sack of mail that had been carried by to the West'ard. Here you are, my dear." He held out to her a couple of letters bound together by a rubber band.

Sasha sprang to the float and took them. After a word concerning the storing of the supplies, she tucked the letters in her pocket and followed Zoya to the house.

The wide veranda, with its uprights of spruce logs, was deserted. Seenia had sought her warm corner in the living-room and her porch chair was empty. Beside it, just under the old ship's bell used to call the men to dinner, stood a rough table. It held a copper dish overflowing with blue wind-flowers, and a package. The package had not been there when Sasha left the house.

She walked over to see what it might be, though she was sure it was one of the large boxes of candy Nicolai sent to San Francisco to get for her,—the kind, so he had told her often, lovers give to their sweethearts in the States. Slipped beneath the string was a folded paper, a sheet hastily torn from a note book. He must have put the note there after she left him on the Lookout.

She drew it out slowly and with conflicting emotions read it. Nicolai had written in Russian, the language of his mother:

"Sasha, forgive me. I am very unhappy."