THE STOVE
“I’ll be back the third day at latest with the doctor. I’ve left you wood enough for three days and more and you’ve grub for a month.” Garth looked at her anxiously; his strong mouth twitched. Suddenly he leaned forward and brushed her cheek lightly with his yellow beard. “I—hate to leave you, little girl,” he said, with a gentleness not common with him, “but I guess it’s Derek’s only chance.”
“Of course you must go. It’s Derek’s only chance.” Dorette faced him steadily. She was pale, slight, sleepy-eyed, but wilderness born and bred, for all that; one guessed a spirit of steel in that fragile sheath. She finished wistfully: “There’ll be nothing for me to do—nothing, but—wait.”
“Only look after yourself and keep the stove up.”
“I’ll do it. And you—if you meet Maxime . . . .”
Rage blazed suddenly in her brother’s eyes. The barrel of his rifle gleamed blue as he gripped it. “If I meet Maxime,” he said, through his teeth, “it’s a finish for him or for me!”
He turned about without another word, and swung down the forest trail on his long run to Mandore.
Dorette watched him until he was no more than a dark shadow among the heavy blue shades that hung from spruce to spruce like tangible banners. All life, all sound, all motion seemed to go with him. Mile after mile, she knew, on each side of her was nothing but the same silence, the same stillness, league after league of the desolate fir forest of the North. She went into the cabin and bolted and barred the door behind her, as if the solitude were an enemy which she must keep out.
The cabin was a pleasant place. The walls were sheathed in red cedar, and there were fur rugs on the floor, red curtains at the windows. In the centre of the larger of the two rooms into which the cabin was divided stood the great iron stove, in winter the source of their very life.
Its voice filled the cabin with a roar like the forever unsatisfied roaring of the wind and sea—a hungry voice. Dorette swung open the heavy door, wincing from the furnace-glory within, as she flung on more wood. That was her one occupation until Garth came back—feeding the stove.
She went to one of the bunks—like the bunks of a ship—that were built on the wall behind the stove, and looked in.
Derek, her younger brother, lay there without sense or motion, as he had lain ever since the sergeant of police and Garth had carried him in and laid him there. He drowsed between life and death, shot through the body. Now and then he swallowed a little broth, but with no knowledge of the hand that fed him. She dared not touch him. There was nothing she could do for him but keep the cabin warm enough to sustain that flickering lamp of life till the doctor came, for the cold of that country kills like a sword.
Suddenly, clinging to the side of the bunk, she trembled. “If only you could speak to me, Derek,” she whispered. “If only I could hear your voice!”
But the only voice was the voice of the great stove.
Her mind painted for her the scene she had not witnessed—the hard men of the mines and the lumber camps, still men with formidable eyes, following Cain’s trail from Fort Dismay to Anisette; the end of the trail at a little lonely shack blinded in snow, ringed with watchful men; Derek pleading that Maxime might have “one more chance, boys;” the parley at the door, the shot coming from nowhere; men storming into the shack over Derek’s fallen body, and finding it empty; Maxime Dufour escaped again! She saw it all. Heard again Garth’s voice in hard-breathed sentences between shut teeth: “But he’s not goin’ to get away again. He’ll have to get food and shelter somewhere; and if it’s a thousand miles away, we’ll follow and shoot him down like the wolf he is!”
She glanced round, pale and shaken, thinking that still she heard that deep voice of bitter rage. But it was only the undertone of the roaring stove humming its angry song.
She busied herself about such duties as she could find. Twice she fed the stove from the pile of wood on the floor beside it. The fierce heat licked out at her each time, just as a savage beast will strike through the bars of his cage, and each time she shut the door with the sense of prisoning some lion-voiced living thing.
Her work was soon done. Everything in the cabin was tidied and tidied again. She glanced at the clock. Only an hour of the slow time had gone. Garth had only been gone an hour. She turned the clock with its face to the wall, took out a shirt she was making for Garth—red-and-black checked flannel, thick as felt—and stitched resolutely.
Her hearing, accustomed to the sound of the stove, as the ear adjusts itself to the thunder of a waterfall, was acute to catch the faintest noises. She heard the tiny sound of the thread passing through the flannel, the soft thud of snow slipping from the boughs of the forest, the least check and stumble in Derek’s shallow breathing. Each time she heard this last, her own heart checked and stumbled in tune with it. She held her own breath till her brother’s renewed its weak rhythm.
So the morning passed. In the afternoon, she found a snowshoe that needed re-stringing. Deftly as Montagnais she twisted the gut and wove the net.
It was dark sooner than she could have hoped. She needed no lamp. The stove filled the cabin with its glow. In the dark it became a beautiful and formidable thing, a shape of dull red, with a heart of lambent rose. She glanced at the little windows, sheathed thick with frost-ferns. It would be a cold night. Her thoughts went to Garth, then, with dread, to Maxime Dufour. She dragged her cot from the inner room, set it across the front of the stove, and lay down. The warmth was like a hand pressing on her eyelids.
With the subconscious watchfulness of those who care for the beloved, she was awake five times in the long night to feed the stove. Each time she looked at Derek, and thought, with a pang, that he was deeper sunken among the pillows. His eyes were not quite closed; the silvery line of eyeball reflected the red glow. She would have liked to close them, but her hand shrank from so prophetic an action.
The last time she woke the sun had risen. The gathered crystals on the windows were lit with a glow that paled the stove. Dorette went into the inner room and braided her hair.
That day passed as the first had done. Her brother was weaker. She pleaded with him, passionately tender. “Just a mouthful of soup, Derry. Wake up, Derry dear. Take it for my sake, Derry!” but her voice, which had dimly roused him the day before, could not reach him now. She looked round for something she might do for him.
The diminished heap of logs on the floor showed her work enough. She must bring in a fresh supply from the pile behind the cabin. She ate a hasty breakfast and made herself some coffee. Then, hooded and wrapped against the cold, she opened the door.
She stepped into a world of white, blue, and black; solid, translucent, and motionless as though built from gems. Where the blue sky touched the black trees there seemed to run a setting of gold; where the black trees trailed branches to the snow, was a stain of sapphire shadow. It was fiercely cold. She shut the door behind her, hastily, ran to the snow-buried wood pile behind the cabin, burdened herself with an armful of small logs, returned, set her load on the threshold, opened the door, and tumbled the wood on the floor. All the morning she worked thus. Her spirits rose; she began to believe that Derek would not die, and soon she might think of Garth’s return. The noise of the logs as she flung them on the floor pleased her. It was a change from the one unceasing voice that filled the cabin day and night—the voice of the stove.
The second night she was restless. She dared not sleep at first, for fear she should sleep too well. Wind came up with the electric stars; the great stove sang to a higher, more tremendous note; she could scarcely keep pace with its consuming hunger. The pine knots and bright birch logs fell to ash in a moment. If she slept, she dreamed that the stove was out, and the cold creeping into the cabin in long feathers of frost, that twisted under the door like snakes, until one touched her on the throat and she woke, choking.
Dawn found the sky fleeced with cloud, the cabin warm, and the hurt man yet alive.
Again with the day her heart lightened. Four—five hours from that time, and she might expect Garth with the doctor from the mines at Mandore. She wound the clock, and turned it with its chipped white face to the room, no longer dreading to tell the passage of the hours.
Yet five hours went, and Garth had not come.
She went to the door. Closing it behind her that the cold might not get into the cabin even for a moment, she stared down the trail. It ran in the straight no more than a half-mile; farther than that, she could not see. Yet it was less her eyes than her soul that she thus strained to see beyond the forest.
“Garth! Garth! Garth!”
Who had given that wild cry that rang among the trees? For a moment she wondered, then knew it had come from her own troubled heart.
She must see beyond the first bend of the trail; she must see if, farther than that, the blue-white ribbon between the trees was still empty of her hope.
She built up the fire again, put on coat and hood and snowshoes, took one glance at Derek, and left the cabin. She sped down the trail. She was panting when she reached the first curve. Almost afraid to look, she saw the long track before her—empty. There was something conscious and deliberate in that emptiness, as if the forest knowingly withheld from her a secret. She dared go no farther. She turned back and fled home.
The clock ticked off another hour—two, three, four. Garth had not come.
Darkness, and he had not come.
Loneliness and suspense were shaking her strong, young nerves. The worst of all was the silence. The voice of the stove became first an annoyance, then a weariness, then an intolerable burden. The voice of its devouring hunger was the very voice of silence, of desolation. She flung the wood in angrily. “If there was only someone to speak to,” she said, a little wildly—“just someone to give me a word!”
There was no one—then, nor through the endless night, when she feared to sleep, lest, in her dreams, or in reality, that insatiable thing in the stove that kept them alive might escape her, nor with the stormy dawn. Garth did not come.
There was no wood left in the house. Before she did anything else, she wrapped herself and went to the wood-pile.
The wood-pile was heaped against the back of the cabin: it was roofed and sheeted with snow. She pulled at the butt of a log, and the wood came down with a run, mixed with much snow—such dry snow that the wood was not moistened until she held it in her warm hand. The bitter work was a relief to her. She thrust the soft, dark hair out of her eyes and piled herself such a load that she swayed under it. “But it’s something to do for Derek,” she said, wistfully. “It’s all I can do.”
She took in enough for the day. But there was the night.
“Garth will be back by then,” she muttered, with cold lips, staring at the stove.
“Garth must be back by then.” The stove sent a screaming rush of flame up the pipe, as if in mockery. She felt an unreasoning hatred for it, as she went wearily out again to gather enough wood for the night too.
Kneeling beside the wood-pile, she groped with numbed hands. She felt nothing but snow.
She thrust in her arm to the shoulder. She met no resistance but that of the snow.
Her heart beat in shuddering throbs. She brought a long pole and prodded the pile, then swung the pole and levelled it. She found nothing but snow.
“How did it happen?” She heard herself asking this over and over. Easily enough. She or Garth or Derek had been drawing supplies from the other side of the pile, and the snow had slipped from the roof and filled the spaces; hardening, it had stretched a roof over emptiness. The pile, which had been taken for good, hardwood logs, fodder for that roaring hungry heat within, was no more than a heap of snow.
Dorette turned slowly, and went into the cabin.
She stood by Derek’s bunk, staring at the wood on the floor. It was enough for the day, but what of the night?
Would Garth return before the night?
She looked about the cabin. There were things there, things that would burn. Her sleepy brown eyes widened. There was war in them as she leaned and kissed Derek’s cheek. He did not stir from that deepening sleep of his.
“Sleep on, Derry,” she whispered, scarcely knowing what she said, “sleep well, Derry. I’ll take care of you, I’ll fight for you!”
She took Garth’s heavy axe, and began on the chairs.
They were heavy and clumsy things, Garth’s pride, since he had made them himself. They would feed the stove well; but they were hard for a girl’s arm to chop, even though she struck true as a woodman, and Dorette’s hands were scorched from the door of the stove. As she toiled, her eyes ranged the cabin, calculating on this box, that shelf, the table. Her heart beat to every sound. As the wind rose higher, the bitter day was full of sounds. A dozen times she ran to the door, crying, “Garth!” A dozen times she saw nothing but the forest and a driven mist of snow, as fine and dry as dust.
By the earliest dusk she had chopped up everything in the cabin. Each stroke sent a jar of pain to her shoulder from her burned and bruised hands, but she did not feel it. And still the stove roared, insatiable. The dried wood of their furnishings, pine for the most part, burned like straw. The great iron horror must be fed, and she had nothing to feed it.
She took the axe and went out.
The grey forest fronted her in a rustling drive of snow and shadow. There must be a hundred fallen boughs within range of the cabin. She found one, dragged it from the snow, and toiled with it into the house. She twisted it apart, desperately, and there was blood on the rough, broken stuff she thrust into the stove.
She went out again. She was growing more desperate as her strength failed. There was a great branch trailing from a spruce, and she tore and wrenched at it, but it would not yield—it was frozen. She swung her weight upon it, sobbing. She struck with all the force remaining in her, but the axe-blade turned in her weary hands. She felt as though the will in her, passionately strong, should sever the bough as by steel. She did not know she was beaten, until she slipped weakly and fell in the snow and lay there, wailing helplessly and softly as a child.
The bitter snow stung her face like heat—like the heat of the stove. If she stayed there, the stove would be out. She lifted herself to her knees, and saw in the growing dark a man, who stood with a rifle on his arm, looking down at her.
“Garth! Oh, Garth!”
But even as the cry left her lips, she knew it was not Garth.
A figure, lithe even under the heavy furs, a face hidden in the cowl he had drawn forward above his fur cap, a certain strange immobility that vaguely chilled her, but surely—help? So swift is thought, that in the transitory seconds before she spoke again her brain had shown her a picture, a memory of a wild-cat which she and Garth had vainly tried to corner in the yard—of the creature’s utter immobility until it launched itself and struck.
“The stove! Oh, the stove!”
She thought, as her hands went out to that motionless figure in the shadows, that she had spoken all the desperate appeal that was in her heart. But she only repeated: “Oh, the stove, the stove!”
“What stove?”
“The stove. The stove in our cabin. There’s—no more wood for it!”
She waited. Surely he understood. But he remained as he was, motionless, staring down at her.
She looked up at him with a burning appeal. She had forgotten to rise from her knees. She kneeled at his feet in the snow. Her breath came in gasps. “There,” she repeated, helplessly, “there—in the cabin—the stove! It’s going out!”
Still he waited.
“There’s a sick man there—my brother! Oh!” she finished, as he did not stir, “help me, if you’re a man!”
“Oh, b’gosh, yes, I’m a man!” She fancied that he was laughing in the shadow of the cowl. “But why should I help you?”
She had no more words. Silently she lifted and held out to him her bleeding hands.
After a long minute he stirred slowly. Without a word he laid his gun crosswise on two fir branches that grew above her reach, easily within his own. He lifted the axe from the snow. She watched him. Four sharp cross-cuts, and the trailing branch fell. He set his foot on it, chopped it quickly into four or five pieces. As each piece rolled free, Dorette snatched it as a starving woman might snatch bread.
“That enough?”
Staggering under her load, she stared at him. “No, no!” she stammered. “It’s not enough for the night. For the pity of Heaven, cut me some more!”
She turned away and hurried towards the cabin. Halfway there he overtook her. Without a word he lifted the logs from her arms into his own. She was too spent to thank him. Dumbly she moved at his side, conscious only that strength was here, help was here, that she might yet save Derek.
Entering the cabin, there was no glow, no light at all. With a low sound, Dorette swung open the door of the stove. Nothing was there but a handful of red ash ringed with grey.
With trembling hands she gathered a few splinters and thrust them in; she crouched before the gaunt, iron thing, as though she would hold it in her arms and warm it in her bosom. But the man, who had followed her, thrust her aside curtly enough. She watched him as he shaved a stick into delicate ribbons of wood—watched him as he coaxed them into flame. He tickled the appetite of the sullen, devouring thing in the stove with scraps of resinous bark and little twigs. Presently the fire laid hold on the larger logs, and fed upon them, hissing. He shut the door then, and turned to her.
She had lighted a lamp, and in the light stood looking at him, softly bright. Her eyes were stars of gratitude. She said at once: “My brother’s still living.”
She gestured towards the bunk. His eyes did not follow the gesture, or move from her pale face, as he said, abruptly: “You stay here with him. I’m goin’ to get you in some more wood.”
Her eyes flashed suddenly with tears. She said, brokenly: “You’re good. Oh, you’re a good man! While you’re—cuttin’ the wood, I’ll—thank God you came!”
He went out into the night without answering her.
He returned in half an hour, loaded mightily. Sitting on the end of her cot, she smiled at him, falteringly. She had been weeping.
He did not speak to her. Light-footed as a cat, he busied himself about the humming stove, then went forth again.
When he came back the second time, she was asleep.
Her face—very pale, very pure, fragile for one of her life and race—was rosed in the glow of the stove. Her hurt hands were curled within one another, like the hands of a child. Moving in his noiseless way, the man went again, and looked down at her.
His furred cowl had fallen back. His face also caught the light of the stove. Dark, keen, predatory, it was the face less of a man than of some embodied passion of hate or revenge, the face of an Ishmael, the face of Cain. It looked strange now, so little was it shaped or accustomed to the gentleness of expression it momentarily wore, as a breath blurs the gleam of steel. Light and silent as all his movements were, they showed no gentleness. But he seemed gentle when he lifted the end of one of Dorette’s dark plaits, which had fallen to the soiled floor, and laid it on the cot beside her just because he hesitated and was clumsy.
The plait of dark, silken hair was warm; his hand lingered over it. He leaned above her, and her breath was warm. That strangely unmoving regard of his was on her face. As if it had called her from her dreams, she woke, and lifted to him the clear eyes of a child. “I—did thank God—you came,” she whispered, with a child’s simplicity. Sleep held her again, almost before she had finished speaking.
The young man drew back, noiselessly lifted the axe, and once more went out.
Sinewy, silent, untiring, he toiled for her all night. And all night she slept.
She had slipped into unconsciousness as a child does, worn out with anxiety and fatigue. She woke a woman, and flushed to her hair, as she realized what she had done.
The man who had helped and guarded her all night, was standing in the doorway. The door was open; there was a frosty freshness in the air, which the roaring stove raised to the warmth of summer. The world outside was a dazzle of sun; silver drops rattled from the eaves; a crow called in the forest. It was the first sun of spring, the year’s change. In Dorette’s heart was a change also, a quickening, a birth of something new and unknown, that almost brought tears to her eyes. For the first time in her hard life she had rested on another’s strength; unconsciously she had found it sweet. That simple heart was in her look as she went to the stranger. She said, softly, “I did not mean to sleep. Why did you let me?”
He said, almost roughly; “You were all tired out.”
The tears brimmed over. She did not know if pain or happiness moved her. She went on: “I said—I knew—you were a good man.”
“Well,” he answered, but not as if he was answering her, “for one night.”
His furred hood hid his face. The wakening blush dyed her clear face again, as she said: “Let me see you. Let me see your face.”
“Why?”
On the word she faltered, confused. She did not know why. She stammered: “Because of what you have done—of what we owe you.”
“We?”
“My brothers and I. Derek’s still alive. I almost think he’s sleeping better—more natural. When—when Garth comes home, he’ll thank you as I’d like to.”
She looked up into the shadowed face, wistfully. He had turned from her again, and was gazing down the trail. After a moment, he said: “There’s coffee on the back of the stove, and some cornbread. You’d better eat it. I’ve had some.”
She went meekly, shamed that she had slept while her saviour served himself. She would have liked to serve him. Something strange and stormy was shaking her; she had no name for it. The food choked her, hungry as she was, but she ate it obediently.
She had scarcely finished, when he called her. She ran and joined him at the door. Something in his voice thrilled her; she saw in him again that strange and threatening immobility of the night before.
He said, swiftly: “You’re lookin’ for your brother to come back?”
“Yes, yes. Any time.”
“With another man?”
“With the doctor. Why?”
He raised his arm and pointed. In the blinding dazzle of sun on snow, she saw two small, dark figures, just rounding the curve of the trail.
Her heart rose and flooded her with a passion of thankfulness. She said, quietly, after a minute: “Yes, yes, it’s him and the doctor. Now—now, you’ll let him thank you, as you—won’t let me.”
Her words ended almost in a question, for she saw that, while she had been eating, he had taken his rifle on his arm and put on his snowshoes. Suddenly, she began to tremble a little, aware of something in his silence, his stillness, which vaguely threatened.
He swung upon her suddenly—one would have said, savagely, but that he was laughing. Those two black figures down the trail were sweeping rapidly nearer. All the latent fierceness of the man had flamed into being, at their approach. He laid a hard, slim hand on Dorette’s shoulder and turned her, so that, at less than arm’s length, she faced him. He said, softly, in the midst of his almost noiseless laughter: “I’ll show you how you can thank me.”
She looked up at him, her face colourless, her lips parted. In the shadow of the hood his eyes gleamed at her, his face bent nearer. The world fell away from her; there was nothing left in life for a minute but that face, that voice.
She just breathed: “Who are you?”
“You’ll know in a minute!” He looked swiftly from her to the two men down the trail. They were coming on fast. He seemed to be measuring his distance from them.
When they were so near that their faces were all but discernible, he caught the girl to him. She was slack in his hold; all her life seemed to be in her dazed eyes; she would have fallen, but that he held her with an arm like a steel bar. And twice and three times he kissed her.
“That’s how you can thank me!” He released her laughing still.
She staggered, her hands over her red mouth. With the movement of release he thrust her, rough and swift, within the door of the cabin. A bullet sent a spray of dusty snow over him. She saw, in one reeling instant, Garth on his knee down the trail, rifle levelled for another shot; the other, a laughing shadow, slipping from her hands, from her life, into the shadow of the forest from which he had come.
Another shot, wide of the mark; Garth leaping to his feet again and tearing towards her, followed by the doctor who was to save Derek, and whom he had found at last, thirty miles beyond Mandore. But she had no eyes for them—for a moment, no heart.
Eyes and heart were on that other figure at the edge of the trees, swift, terrible, laughing, calling to her with raised hand—
“Tell him you kissed Maxime Dufour!”
When Garth reached her side, she was on her knees, laughing and sobbing, striving, with her scarred small hands to obliterate his trail in the snow.