"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:
"Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down,
yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"
The Spell of the Yukon.
and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"—the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs:
"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—."
The Spell of the Yukon.
SIN AND DEATH
The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"
"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace."
The Spell of the Yukon.