He paused, smiling grimly; then with an explosive motion, pulled back the lid of the stove and threw in another log. “Sit down, why don’t you?” he invited. “I don’t insist on my servants standing up always in my presence. You’ll have to sit down sometime, you know.”
Lenore, wholly despondent, sank back in her seat. To show that he was still her protector, Ned stood behind her, his hands resting on the back of her chair. Bess stole to a little rough seat between them and the squaw.
A single great chair was left vacant, almost in the middle of the circle. Doomsdorf glanced once about the room as if guarding against any possibility of surprise attack by his prisoners, then sat down easily himself. “Excuse me for not making you known to my woman,” he began. “In fact, I haven’t even learned your own names. She is, translating from the vernacular, ‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps.’ You won’t be expected to call her that, however—although I regret as a general thing that the picturesque native names so often undergo such laceration on the tongues of the whites. When I took her from her village, they gave her to me as ‘Sindy.’ You may call her that. It will do as good as any—every other squaw from Tin City to Ketchikan is called Sindy. It means nothing, as far as I know.
“ ‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps,’ however, fits her very well. You might make a point of it. And if you are interested in the occult sciences, perhaps you might explain to me how, when she was a pappoose, her parents could understand her character and nature well enough to give her a name that fits her so perfectly. I notice the same thing happens again and again through these northern tribes. But I’m wandering off the point. Sindy, you must know, speaks English and is second in command. What she says goes. Get up and do it on the jump.
“You’ll be interested to know that you are on one of the supposedly uninhabited islands of the Skopin group. Other islands are grouped all around you, making one big snow field when the ice closes down in winter. I could give you almost your exact longitudinal position, but it wouldn’t be the least good to you. The population consists of we five people—and various bear, caribou, and such like. The principal industry, as you will find out later, is furs.
“There is no need to tell in detail how and why I came here—unlike Caliban, I am not a native of the place. I hope you are not so deficient as to have failed to read ‘Tempest.’ I find quite an analogy to our present condition. Shakespeare is a great delight on wintry nights; he remains real, when most of my other slim stock of authors fades into air. I like ‘Merry Wives’ the best of the comedies, though—because we have such fine fun with Falstaff. Of the tragedies I like Macbeth the best and Lear, by far the worst; and it’s a curious paradox that I didn’t like the ending of the first and did like the second. Macbeth and his lady shouldn’t have fallen. They were people with a purpose, and purpose should be allowed to triumph in art as well as in life. In life, Macbeth would have snipped off Macduff’s head and left a distinguished line. Lear, old and foolish, got just what was coming to him—only it shouldn’t have been dragged over five acts.
“But I really must get down to essentials. It’s so long since I’ve talked to the outside world that I can’t help being garrulous. To begin with—I came here some years ago, not entirely by my own choice. Of course, not even the devil comes to such a hell as this from his own choice. There’s always pressure from above.”
He paused again, hardly aware of the horrified gaze with which his hearers regarded him. A startling change had come over him when he spoke again. His eyes looked red as a weasel’s in the shadowed room; the tones of his voice were more subdued, yet throbbing with passion.
“I remember gray walls, long ago, in Siberia,” he went on slowly and gravely. “I was not much more than a boy, a student at a great university—and then there were gray walls in a gray, snow-swept land, and gray cells with barred doors, and men standing ever on watch with loaded rifles, and thousands of human cattle in prison garb. It was almost straight west of here, far beyond Bering Sea; and sometimes inspectors would come, stylish people like yourselves, except that they were bearded men of Petrograd, and look at us through the bars as at animals in a zoo, but they never interfered with the way things were run! How I came there doesn’t matter; what I did, and what I didn’t do. There I found out how much toil the human back can stand without breaking, one day like another, years without end. I knew what it was to have a taskmaster stand over me with a whip—a whip with many tails, with a shot and wire twisted into each. I can show you my back now if you don’t believe me. I found out all these things, and right then there came a desire to teach them to some one else. I was an enemy of society, they said—so I became an enemy of society in reality. Right then I learned a hate for such society and a desire to burn out the heart of such weak things as you!”
He turned to them, snarling like a beast. His voice had begun to rumble like lavas in the bowels of the earth. There could be no question as to the reality of this hatred. It was a storm cloud over his face; it filled his gray eyes with searing fire, it drew his muscles till it seemed that the arms of his chair, clutched by his hands, would be torn from the rounds. To his listeners it was the most terribly vivid moment of their lives.