Читать книгу Empty Hands - Stringer Arthur - Страница 10

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Grimshaw struggled to his feet heavily, and stared down, for a helpless moment, at the huddled white body on the sand-slope. He was not shocked at its nudity. What startled him was its air of fragility, its impassiveness, its resemblance to a body from which life had already slipped away.

That both terrified him and spurred him into action. Remembering his first-aid to the drowning instructions from his earliest army days, he promptly turned the woman over on her face. Stooping above her, he grasped the lean ribs and lifted her waist as high as he was able. When sure that her throat and bronchial tubes were clear of water, he turned her on her back, with a flat stone under her shoulders to expand her chest. Then he began a rhythmic upward and downward movement of her arms, pressing sharply on the lean-ribbed torso at the end of each downward sweep of the arms. Much sooner than he had expected he saw the lungs fill and empty of their own accord. When he looked into her face, at a small and throaty sound from her, he saw that her eyes were open.

He took the stone from under her shoulder-blades and pillowed her wet head on it. He was foolishly disturbed, when he looked at her face again, to find that her eyes were once more closed. But under the firm flat breast he could feel the languid beat of her heart. He could see by the rise and fall of her bosom that she was breathing regularly. He knew that heat was the one thing her bruised and water-chilled body now needed and he knew that this was being beneficently poured into her by both the sun overhead and the warm sand on which she lay. But that untempered sun, he remembered, would soon burn the skin of her body, so disturbingly white from her shoulder-blades to her thighs and so amazingly brown about the neck and arms and legs. He stood momentarily bewildered by this odd contrast in coloring until he remembered her bathing-suit and realized how little of her body, in days gone by, that flimsy attire must have protected from the sun. He found something vaguely fortifying in the thought of how such exposure had already partly Indianized her, just as he found something intimidating in the thought of her tenderness, her vulnerability, as revealed by the milky whiteness of the pathetically denuded torso. The one thing essential, he felt, was to protect that tenderness, was to restore its violated reticences, was to shield it from roughness of wind and light.

So he turned away and crossed the wide slope of sand, clambering up the broken rock-wall beyond until he came to a stretch of swampy ground where alders grew. From these he tore away a number of the smaller branches.

It was not until he carried these back to the figure lying so incredibly flat on the sand that he realized his own body was altogether unclad. He knew by the regular rise and fall of her bosom, as he covered the white body from shoulder to thighs with the aromatic leafy branches, that strength was returning to her. But he was grateful for the drowsy stupor that kept her eyes closed and her face turned indifferently away from him. So he left her, without further loss of time, and climbed to a region of upland muskeg where swamp-willows grew in profusion. He picked his way with the utmost care, guarding his feet against injury, knowing only too well how calamitous a foot-wound might prove, under the circumstances.

From the young shrub-willows along the swamp-edge he broke away the long and pliant wands festooned with velvety leaves. Then with a flake of slate-stone, to which he had given a cutting-edge by chipping with a boulder of quartz, he tore away strips of the inner bark of the larger willow-trunks. These he plaited hurriedly together. When he had enough of these improvised thongs made ready he selected his willow-branches and laid them side by side, almost touching each other at the butts. Then with his braided bark-thongs he knotted the serried wands together, first at the heavier ends and then half-way down. After securing heavier strands of the tough-fibered willow-bark, he wove them patiently in and out through the sappy willow-sticks, making a rough but pliant wicker-work which ended in a pendent fringe of leaves. Then he double-braided still heavier thongs of bark-fiber and wove and knotted them into the sides of his rough fabric, for tying-straps.

When he had bound this closely about his body and pulled it in at the waist-line by still another thong, he found himself covered from the armpits to almost the knees with a sort of flexible basketwork which served to keep both the sun and the black flies from his skin. But that, he knew, was not altogether the reason why he worked so feverishly and yet so stubbornly at his weaving. For, once he saw himself even thus primitively clothed, he found a new sense of fortitude creep back into his tired body. He was no longer a helpless being stripped bare and tossed aside by the forces of nature. He was once more man the artificer, confronting those forces and demanding that they restore to him his lost dignity. He was a man, with his nakedness covered, clothed against sun and wind.

With the consciousness of this first small conquest over helplessness came the knowledge that he must make similar clothing for his partner in destitution. She, too, must promptly know the taste of that recovered dignity. But a glance at the sun told him that precious moments were slipping past. And he was averse to the thought of remaining long away from the figure he had left huddled so helpless on its bank of sloping sand. So he gathered an ample supply of willow wands and bark-fiber and hurried back to the river-bank, resolved that the rest of his wattling should be done closer to his companion.

He called to her, reassuringly, as he clambered down the rock-wall. But she attempted no answer to that call.

When he dropped his burden and ran to her, alarmed at her silence, he found her half-turned on her side, with her head resting on one brown arm. Her eyes were open and her glance met his as he kneeled down and stooped over her.

"Are you all right?" he asked. Those, he remembered, were the first words he had spoken to her. And, once he had uttered them, they impressed him as foolishly inadequate words.

She looked up at him, studying him with oddly impersonal and meditative eyes. But still she did not speak. Her embittered gaze merely continued to study his face. Then she emitted a small sound that was neither a gasp nor a sob.

"Why didn't you let me die?" she demanded in a voice flatted with hopelessness. "Why didn't you?"

"Why should I?" he countered with studied curtness as he replaced some of the alder-boughs which she had thrust aside in turning.

"It—it would have been better than this!" she said with a small hand-movement of abandonment, of utter hopelessness.

"This may not be so bad as it looks," he valorously contended. And she lay silent again, studying him intently, her face puckered with perplexity.

"But what can we do?" she finally asked, out of the abysmal silence that hung between them. Her voice impressed him as thin and singularly humbled.

He sat back on his haunches, at that question, and stared up at the open sky. They were alone in the northern wilderness, as much alone as though they had been cast up on an island in mid-ocean. They were alone in the untracked forest, without food, without fire, without clothing or shelter, without arms or tools. To the southwest lay the great barrier of rock and muskeg, of cliffs and upland tundra pierced by its one impassable seething canyon, which cut off all mortal help from them. And there could be no going back the way they had come. To the east, where the spent river still ran in foam-flecked tumult and a loon was crying desolately among the reed-grown backwaters, a terra incognita of woodland and rock and swampland lay empty before the lengthening shadows of the waning afternoon sun. And to the north, where a wolf howled and was answered from a farther hill by a fainter howl, the dark ridges of the pinelands stretched inimitably off toward the pale green horizon of the Sub-Arctics. Somewhere, beyond those uncounted leagues of solitude, lay the watery desolation of Hudson's Bay. There was, he knew, a post on that bay. But it was hundreds of miles away. And there was no road open to it, and no paths leading to it.

"What can we do?" repeated the woman, her voice made tremulous by the gravity of his face.

He looked down into her eyes again. And inappositely, as their glances met and locked, he knew a glow of gratitude at the thought that he had human eyes to look into. Yet they were eyes touched with panic and protest and a mute questioning which made him think of a doe brought down by a rifle-bullet. His mind had been too occupied to give much direct thought to his predicament. He knew, however, that it was anything but promising. And he knew she wanted the truth, that she would insist on the truth. But he was without the courage, as yet, to confront her with it.

"We ought to thank God that we got through alive," he told her with a glance back at the river.

"Ought we?" she demanded in her listless small voice. The hopelessness of it roweled Grimshaw's dormant courage into restiveness.

"And we're going to keep alive!" he said with sudden and strident vigor as he took a deep breath and folded his sinewy arms over his chest.

"How?" she asked almost indifferently, as she studied the interlacing muscles of his bronzed biceps and shoulders.

He sat back for a moment or two of silence, as though confronted by the necessity of picking his words.

"We've been flung out here," he told her, "we've been flung out here between the knees of Nature, and we've got to meet her on her own ground. And we'll live, as other people have lived through the same predicament."

"Without food?" she challenged. "And without clothes?"

"I'll get them," he retorted.

"How?" she demanded.

"I've lived enough in the woods," he asserted, "to learn a trick or two at this business. I tell you, we'll get clothing. And we'll win out, and be waiting for them, when they come through for us!"

"Will they even know we're here?" she disconcerted him by inquiring.

"Of course they'll know!" he mercifully dissimulated. "And they'll keep at it until they find us."

"Until they find us!" she repeated meditatively, with her face turned down into the hollow of her crooked arm.

She lay silent there for several minutes. "I wish we'd drowned, in those rapids," she finally said, without looking up at him.

"That's not fair," he contended, with a protective show of anger. "You want to live, don't you?"

She lifted her face, at that, and studied him. Then she slowly moved her head from side to side.

"I don't believe I do," she finally asserted.

"Well, I do!" proclaimed Grimshaw. "And the time will come when you'll feel the same way about it." He rose to his feet. "But it isn't what we feel that's going to save us; it's what we do. And we need every minute of this time we're wasting."

Still again she fell into her habitual silence. The look of mute protest was no longer on her face when she glanced up at him.

"I understand," she said in little more than a whisper. "What must I do?"

"Believe in me!" he exclaimed, with an unlooked-for up-gush of emotion. "Will you do that?"

"I'll try to," she murmured, without meeting his eye.

"You must do that," he contended. "It won't be easy, at the best. And without your help it might be impossible."

She misread the meaning of his words, for she made an effort to sit up, an effort that ended in a gasp of helplessness.

"I'm afraid I won't be of much use to you," she quavered as she let her bruised shoulders sink back on the warm sand.

It was her humility more than her helplessness that disturbed him.

"Time will take care of that," he maintained. "You'll be better, after a good night's sleep."

He stood over her, puzzled by the involuntary shudder which passed through her body.

"And after the good night's sleep?" she queried.

He caught the touch of mockery in her question. But he decided to ignore it.

"Our first problem," he told her, "is to get covering and shelter. And we must get that before the sun goes down."

So he left her there, after a quick glance at the western sky, and hurried back for his willow-wands and bark-thongs. Then he fell to weaving a second surtout of pliant wicker-work, profiting by his experience with his first effort and producing a more closely woven mat. The upper part, where the willow-butts stood thick together, he bruised and shredded and shaped between heavy stones. And before placing this odd garment beside her he double-braided and attached two shoulder-straps, to hold it in place after it had been bound and tied about her body.

"You'll have to use this," he told her, "until I can get something better."

He noticed her listless eye as she studied the roughly wattled tunic.

"There won't be much warmth in it," he explained. "So the next thing I must do is to build a shelter, a shelter for the night. We've got to keep warm. And we've got to have food."

"Food?" she echoed in her half-indifferent voice. "Where is there food to get?"

He forced a smile, at the forlornness of her voice, though it cost him an effort to do so.

"It's all about us," he proclaimed, "waiting for us to take it. This country is teeming with it, with fish and hare and game."

"It may be there," she admitted. "But with nothing to—with nothing but our naked hands?"

"I'll get you food," he proclaimed, for once sure of his ground.

"But food without fire?" she objected. "We haven't even a match."

"I don't need a match," he told her. "Before to-morrow night you'll have your fire. And before the next night you'll have something more, and before the next night, still more. We're going to get through this. But to do it you've got to believe in me."

She sat back, apparently pondering his words.

"It's not you I'm afraid of," she finally confessed. "It's—it's this terrible North."

"There's nothing terrible about it, if you meet it right," he said to the unhappy-eyed woman as she gazed about at the lonely hills.

"But if we don't get away?" she ventured. "It can't be always summer like this!"

"When the cold comes," asserted Grimshaw, "we'll be ready for it. But first of all we must get ready for to-night. As we are, we're rather at the mercy of the weather. So even before I look for food I'm going to throw a night-shelter together."

She gazed away, drearily, to where a heron called from the midst of the wastelands before her.

"I dread it," she said with a slight cringing movement of her body, "the thought of night!"

He turned back to her, solemn-faced.

"You'll sleep as warm as you would in your own bed," he asserted. Then, observing the stricken light that had crept into her eyes, he was prompted to add: "And as safe."