A Girl of the Klondike

by Victoria Cross

Her one idea, the sole thought that occupied her, was to make these two men happy, at any cost to herself. All day she studied how she could make their life, so hard and rough smoother for them, how she could alleviate the labour and monotony of it. She rose in the morning long before either was awake, and had the fires blazing, wood brought in, water melted out, and the coffee made by the time they came into the sitting-room, looking white and sleepy in the flare of the common candles. All the house work they had formerly found hard, when counted in addition to their outside labour, she took entirely upon herself, and insensibly they both felt the relief very great. There was no coming home now, worn out and frozen, to a cheerless cabin, and being obliged to chop wood and light fires and split ice before they could get warm and rested. A glowing hearth, a laid table, a smiling face, always awaited them. Often coming up from the dump at the lower end of the claim, they could see the square patch of red light flung out from the window on the snow, bidding them hurry in to the welcome warmth and light inside.

The daylight only lasted them now from ten to two, and for these hours the men worked out of doors. During their absence the girl went out on shooting expeditions of her own. She had invented a modified snow-shoe, broad and short, with slightly curved-up ends, and with these strapped on to her lithe feet, her fur coat fastened up to her chin, and her fur cap drawn over her ears and to her brows, she defied the fall of the mercury, and skimmed over the snow as silently and swiftly as a shadow moving.

She enjoyed these long, lonely excursions, with her heart kept warm by the hope of discovering something she could bring down with her pistol or her shot-gun, and carry back as a surprise and a treat for the men for supper. There was not much indeed to be found; but a small breed of snow-bird was prevalent, and quite a flock of these would very often follow or precede a snow-storm, and whenever Katrine's keen eye caught sight of the little dark patch that a cluster of them made against the snow, she would glide swiftly over in that direction, and have eight or ten of them swinging at her belt to take home. They were small, but cooked as she knew how to cook them, they were a delicacy beyond price to the men who for months had tasted little but beans and hard bacon. Katrine felt quite happy if she could return through the suddenly falling gloom of the afternoon and cross the darkened threshold just as the men came back, half frozen, from the creek, and show her cluster of victims swinging by their long-necked heads from her waist.

She thought of them, planned for their comfort, and worked for them all day; while to her husband she was absolutely devoted, and one would think that for such devotion a few smiles, a kiss, and some kind words was a small price to pay. Yet after the first few weeks, and even during them, Stephen, who worked all day to secure his mining gains, would not even exert himself to that degree to return the affection that was worth all his claims put together. One kiss given before he went out to his work in the morning would have made Katrine happy all day, one tender inquiry on his return would have amply rewarded her for all her labours, yet he invariably went out to the claims without bestowing the one, and returned without making the other. Hard work, privations, loneliness, even the absence of all the amusements she had delighted in, would not have broken her spirits; she would have accepted them all cheerfully, if her husband had only thrown over them the little light and warmth of his affection that she longed for. Each day she hoped it might be different; but no, he grew more and more absorbed by the gold fever that was eating away his heart and brain, and the girl grew more and more depressed and resentful. "It would be no trouble to him," she murmured to herself over and over again, as she stood at the wash-tub, wringing out his shirts, or knelt on the floor of the cabin scrubbing the boards, "just a kiss or a smile."

She did not in the meantime relax any of her attention to him. Her smile for him was always as sweet when he returned, her efforts to please him as untiring, but in her heart her thoughts turned more and more constantly day by day to the idea of leaving him, of returning to her own life, where at least she had not been tormented by this perpetual hope and expectation and disappointment.

Stephen never dreamed that the girl's thoughts were as they were; though if he had done so, he probably would not have altered his own course—for Katrine in several angry outbursts had appealed to him, had told him how she hungered after, not great and difficult proofs of his love, but the little ones, the trifles, how he was starving and killing her love for him by his neglect of it, and he either could not, or would not, understand. But that she contemplated ever leaving him never crossed his brain, any more than the conception of the passionate hate she felt for him at times when he left undone some trifling thing, that if done, would have roused an equally passionate access to her love. He, jaundiced with this mental yellow fever, thought his rich claims, his great wealth, had probably had some influence on the daughter of the Polish Jew when she accepted him. He relied, in fact, on his wealth, and on the material advantages she would gain by clinging to him, to hold her to him. And with Katrine this was a rope of sand. She cared no more for Stephen's wealth and for his claims than if they had been ash heaps. There was not a touch of avarice, of calculating greed, in her whole character, and to gratify her own impulse she would have cast all material advantages aside. From Stephen she wanted love, and that only, and this was the only chain that could hold for an instant her proud, independent, reckless will.

There were the makings of a splendid character in the girl, all the foundations of all the best qualities in her: a little care, a little culture bestowed on them, and she would have developed into a fine and noble woman; but Stephen's eyes were blinded by the glare of the gold he saw in his visions, and the far greater and more wonderful treasure, the living human soul, that chance had given over to his care, unfolded itself slowly before him in all its beauty, and he could no longer see it. To Talbot it seemed incredible that Katrine through her mere physical beauty did not obtain a greater hold upon him, that she seemed so unable to absorb him, that she could not triumph over him by the road of the senses. Talbot himself was absorbed in his work, but even he, the onlooker, the outsider, felt the influence of this brilliant young presence that had come suddenly into their sordid life, like the sun rising in radiant majesty over a barren plain. The common table at which they sat seemed no longer the same now that she was at the head, with her beautiful figure rising above it, and her laughing, lovely nineteen-year-old face looking down it. To him, those liquid flashing eyes, and arching brows, and curled red lips seemed to light, positively light, the small and common room. But the eye grows accustomed to beauty and ceases to heed it, just as it grows accustomed to, and ceases to heed, ugliness and deformity, especially where there is no standard, no measure for it, no comparison with other objects. Just as any shortcoming, any mental or physical defect that a man hardly notices in a woman he loves, when alone with her, becomes painfully apparent to him when he sees her surrounded by others, so does her beauty strike him when reflected in other eyes, and pass unheeded when seen only by his own. Katrine was alone, there was no other woman's face to either rival or be a foil to hers, and after the first six weeks her beauty ceased to sting and surprise Stephen's senses. She, as it were, became the standard, since there was no other. And there is no absoluteness about beauty, nor our admiration for it. When we say we admire a woman because she is beautiful, we mean we admire her because she is more beautiful than other women. If all others were the same as she, she would cease to be called a beautiful woman, and if there were none others than she, then she would simply be a woman for us. We could not know whether she was beautiful or not. Man's senses are made not to perceive, but to compare, and he cannot judge except by comparison. Talbot knew all this, and he could not help feeling sorry that a girl such as this should be so isolated with them, and that the man who possessed her should realise his good fortune so little. He suggested often, for the girl's sake, excursions down into the town; but Stephen, partly from his religious views, and more from his anxiety not to waste a minute of his literally golden time, always frowned down the question, and though the girl looked at him wistfully she never complained against his decisions. She seemed to have completely accepted the idea that her marriage meant the renunciation of all the things she had delighted in, and if her marriage had given her more of what she had hoped for, she would have been contented with the change.

One evening, when Stephen was out in the shed at the back of the cabin stacking up some wood by the light of a candle stuck in a chink of the logs, Talbot and the girl were sitting idle on each side of the stove, and somehow, though Talbot seldom opened his lips on such matters, seldom in his life offered opinion or advice to others, they had now been speaking of her marriage, and Stephen's attitude towards her.

There were tears in her great eyes, and her under lip quivered and turned downwards like a wet rose-leaf.

"He is so very wrapped up in all this digging business, why did he want to marry me at all?" she said, in a sort of helpless childish wonder.