Part Nine. In Which The River Finds The Sea - Chapter 30. A Terror In The Snow

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_ PART NINE. IN WHICH THE RIVER FINDS THE SEA
CHAPTER XXX. A TERROR IN THE SNOW

Like a white snake upon the sands
She's writhing in the crispy foam,
She holds her soul in her open hands,
And now she staggers and now she stands,
And now she runs to her husband's home!

O I have seen a wife at rest,
That croons the babe upon her knee,
She lies upon her goodman's breast
As gentle as a bird at nest,
The mermaid's saved her soul from Sea!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.

Well, they stayed the month nearly out, and then Roger took a fancy to see the Island in winter, and I, hugging to my breast the consciousness of that furnace, was easily persuaded to go with them: it is January, February and March that punish me so fearfully in the North, and really only the last two of those. I had thought Margarita a little distraite and cold to us all, toward the last, and feared she was resenting her exile: she took a short trip to New York, accompanied, of course, by the faithful Jencks, and I had visions of American contracts, but Roger never mentioned the subject--didn't even ask her why she went, I believe, she hated to be questioned so.

We found everything in first-rate order (I had written ahead to light the furnace) and you should have seen Roger's face when he noticed the registers in the big room! Like a boy's when some good-natured trick has been played upon him. Suppose we had not had them nor the coal--it makes me cold now to think of it.

I find I can't write about it very fully, after all, and I must be forgiven if I cut it short. It's a little too near, yet, after all the years. I know I never want to see snow again--it is the most cruel blue-white in the world.

We stopped the night, of course, and in the morning Roger and Margarita went for a walk on the crust, for it had snowed all night and the evening before--the great, fat, grey clouds were full of it--and we thought we were in for another blizzard like last year's. It had "let up" for a little, as they say about there, but Roger was afraid to risk going away till it had definitely ended, so they went for their walk, and I chatted with Miss Jencks by the fire. They had been gone about an hour when we heard a great scratching and whining at the door (I thought for a moment it was Kitch) and Rosy bounded in, snapping his teeth and glaring fearfully. We both jumped up and he flew at me and caught my sleeve in his teeth--for a moment, I confess, I felt a little queer, for I had seen him throw Caliban and hold him--then, as I drew back, he uttered the most heartrending howl I have ever heard, and spun wildly around, and at that moment I felt suddenly that something was up and that I was wanted. Miss Jencks felt it at exactly that moment, too, and ran for my great-coat before I asked her.

She says that I said,

"Where are they, old fellow? Go seek!" but I don't remember it. I know that she said in a low voice,

"I shall be of no use--I can't run--but I will have everything ready," though she says I must have imagined it.

Rosy flew through the door and I after him--she had the sense to bring me my heavy arctic overshoes, or I should have slipped in a minute--and I ran for about fifty yards.

Then something stopped me. Where it came from, what did it, I don't know and can never know, but I swear I heard a low, distinct voice close to me (not a cry, mind you, but a quiet, hoarse voice) saying,

"Get a rope. Get a rope."

I checked like a scared horse and nearly fell.

"Get a rope," I heard again, "get a rope."

Then, cursing at myself for a crazy fool, I actually turned, with Rosy showing his teeth at me, and dashed back (all those precious yards!) and grabbed a pile of rope Caliban had brought out to bind some big logs for hauling and abandoned under the eaves when we arrived on the island. Rosy was far ahead now, but he had gone through the crust at intervals and I tracked him by that.

Suddenly the wind--it was blowing a steady gale behind me--shifted, and I heard a succession of terrible cries, great hoarse, high shrieks, like nothing human and yet unlike any animal. Wordless, throat-tearing screams they were, and I shouted back, against the head-on wind,

"Coming! Coming! Hold on! I'm coming!" till I coughed and strangled and had to stop.

How I ran! I never did it before and certainly never can again. Rosy's tracks curved and twisted, and I felt I was losing time, but dared not risk missing them, for I was coming nearer to that awful voice steadily, though it echoed so I should have been helpless without any other guide.

Well, I found them. Roger up to his shoulders in icy water, his head dropped back, white, on her arm, and she up to her waist on a slippery ledge under the highest point of the bank--the bank that I blasted out! She was caught, I could see, on a jagged point by her heavy, woollen skirt (it was made in London, bless it!) and must have wedged her foot, besides, in some way, for she had his whole weight; her lips were blue. She wore a blood-red cape, all merry and Christmas-like against the white ledges, and her hair streamed in the wind. Her head was thrown back like a hound's and those blood-curdling screams poured out of it; her eyes were shut. Now and then Rosy bayed beside her, scratching at the snow, and where the water was not frozen in the protected pools it swirled like a mill-race around the nasty, pointed rocks.

I leaned over the bank and cried that I was there, but she never stopped--it was terrible. Finally I made a slip-noose and actually managed to fling it over his head--Roger had taught me to do that at school, twenty years ago--and that stopped her, hitting against her cheek, and she opened her eyes.

"Put it under his arms, can you?" I cried, and after several efforts, for she was nearly frozen stiff, the brave, clever creature did, and I got it around a tree on the edge. Then I stopped, panting, for I realised that I could do no more. The run had taken all the strength out of me--I couldn't have dragged a cat--and she was little more than a foot below me!

I can't write about it. My arms ache now, just as my infernal shoulders ached with that paralysing, numb ache then.

"Listen!" I cried, for she had begun to scream again, "listen, Margarita, or I will beat you! Is he unconscious?"

She nodded.

"Can you hold on five minutes, with his weight gone?"

She blinked in a sort of stupid assent.

"Could you for ten? Are you braced solid?"

Again she blinked, and with an inspiration I plunged my shaking hand into my great-coat pocket and pulled out a brandy-flask. Miss Jencks had taken it from the sideboard.

I tied it into my handkerchief, opened, and swung it down to her, and she got her lips around it and coughed it down. It acted instantly and she could move a little, and while I encouraged her, and after several heartrending failures, which nearly spilled all the brandy, she got it into his mouth between his teeth, as his big body swung in the noose. It ran over his chin and down his neck, but a little got in, and his eyelids quivered. Soon he coughed, and I dared not wait another second.

"I am going for Caliban," I said very distinctly, "we will pull you out in a few minutes. Let him alone and hang on, do you hear? Don't scream any more--you are safe. Pour all the brandy into him--tell him he is tied fast. Don't try to move--you may slip, and tear your skirt. Hold on!"

Then I turned my back on them and ran, or rather stumbled off. I leaned over and kissed her forehead, first.

I remember muttering, "I never asked before--if You or Anybody is there, save them! Take me and save them!" and then I stumbled on and on....

It was not too long. Caliban was coming with his big wood-sled and more rope and blankets, and as I caught sight of him the most extraordinary thought flew into my mind, which worked with a dreadful clearness, for I saw them stiffen and sink and slip away every second. Rosy bayed just then, and as my heart sank, for I thought they were gone, it suddenly occurred to me what Rosy's name must have been!

"It's Rosencrantz!" I muttered, "and the one Margarita insists was called 'Gildy' was Guildenstern, and they were Hamlet's friends--poor Prynne!" Perhaps that wasn't idiotic--I laughed as I stumbled along!

Well, they were there, and Roger was enough himself to strike out with his feet a little and avoid hindering us, if he couldn't help much. I made another noose for her, and she hung in it while Caliban dragged him up--the fellow had the strength of an ox and showed wonderful dexterity--and later crawled down the rocks and cut her skirt through with his big clasp-knife. She was the hardest to move, for her foot was caught--all that saved her. I thought we should break her ankle before we could get her.

We laid them on the sledge, wrapped in blankets, poured in more brandy, and Caliban attached Rosy to it by his collar--an old trick of his, it seems--and they dragged us all home, for my worthless legs gave out completely.

Miss Jencks and Agnes rubbed them and mustard-bathed them and I wrote telegrams for Caliban to take in the launch--wrote them as well as I could in the clutches of a violent chill, with my teeth like castanets and my hands palsied--and even as I wrote, it came to me that Margarita had repeated monotonously, all the way home, in a hoarse, painful voice (but, mercifully, a low one) "get a rope, get a rope, get a rope."

It was the voice I had heard, that turned me back!

She was all right, but very weak and sore and with a little fever--not much. She was perfectly conscious of everything within an hour, and told us about it: how she had slipped and Roger had hit his head and strained himself in going after her. She thinks she held him under the arms ten minutes, screaming all the time! She sent Rosy back, finally, though at first he refused to go.

Roger was delirious for five days and very dangerously ill for three weeks--it was double pneumonia. Miss Jencks had seen it before and it was her prompt measures before we could get the doctor or Harriet that saved him, they think. It was a bad age for pneumonia; Harriet said she would rather have pulled Margarita through it. She brought a deaconess from the little dispensary with her and one or the other was watching him like a cat every second, for three weeks. It was a nurse's case, the doctor said, though he stopped the first week.

When Margarita came to herself after an hour or so, she asked for me, and as I knelt by her bed and she turned her great eyes on me I caught my breath, for I was looking at a new woman. I can't describe it better than by saying that she had a soul! There had always been something missing, you see, though I would never have admitted it, if she hadn't got it then. But it was there.

It was very pathetic, those first days when Roger was delirious: she was nearly so herself. And yet it was not wholly grief--there was a definite reason for it, which we all felt, somehow, but she would not give it.

"Will he not know me for a minute, a little minute, Harriet?" she would beg, so piteously, and Harriet would soothe her and try to give her hope. The fifth day he was very low and the doctor told us to make up our minds for anything: he hadn't slept all night. I took Harriet by the shoulders and asked her if she could not possibly make him conscious--before. I don't know why I asked her and not the doctor, but I did. She promised me she would try (I think she had nearly given up hope, herself) and at three the next morning she called me and said that I might have a chance--that he might know us for a moment. Margarita was by the bed: her face was enough to break your heart.

"Only a minute, Harriet--only a little minute!" she pleaded like a baby. I don't know what insane vow I didn't offer ... He opened his eyes and they fell on her. She put her hand on his forehead and said very plainly.

"Listen, Roger, you must listen. It is I--Margarita, Cherie, you know. Do you hear?"

His eyes looked a little conscious, and Harriet held his pulse and slipped something into his mouth. In a moment we all knew that he knew us.

"Now say one thing, Mrs. Bradley--quickly!" Harriet whispered.

Margarita bent like a flash and whispered in his ear very swiftly: her whole body was tense. You should have seen his eyes--he was old Roger again! I could see his hand press hers and she kissed him just as the flash went by, and he took to muttering again.

Harriet pushed her away and put her hand on his forehead, then nodded at the deaconess.

"Call the doctor!" she said sharply, and I thought it was all over....

But it was the turn, and after that by hair's breadths and hair's breadths they pulled him over.

"Now he knows, Jerry," Margarita said to me, and went to bed herself.

It was a good week after that, when the doctor had gone and we were all breathing naturally again, that Harriet asked me abruptly if I had noticed Mrs. Bradley's voice. I said yes, that it was still decidedly husky. She looked at me so sadly, so strangely, that my nerves fairly jumped--we had all been on edge for a month--and I commanded her rather sharply to say what she meant and be done with it.

"Is her voice injured?"

"I am afraid so, yes," she said gently.

"But surely time and rest and proper treatment," I began, but she shook her head.

"The doctor examined her throat before he left," she said. "Of course he had no laryngoscope with him, but he didn't need one, really. The vocal cords are all stretched--he said the specialists might help her and take away a great deal of the hoarseness, but that in his opinion she can never stand the strain of public singing again: he thinks excitement alone would paralyse the cords."

"Who's to tell her?" I said quietly.

You see, we'd all been stretched so taut that we couldn't use any more energy in exclamations or regrets.

"I thought you might," she said, but I shook my head.

"Miss Jencks--" I began, but it appeared that Miss Jencks felt unequal to it. So Harriet told her, of course, on the principle that when one has a heavy load he may as well carry a little more, I suppose.

And after all it wasn't so bad; for Margarita came down to me a little later, and told me she had known it all the time!

"But, of course, dear child," I said hopefully, "Doctor ---- is not a throat specialist, you know, and we can but try some of those famous fellows, a little later. Perhaps in a year or two----"

"You are very good to me, Jerry," she said, "but it is no use. I know. I shall never sing again. I am sorry, because----"

"Sorry?" I cried, "why, of course you are sorry! What do you mean?"

"Because," she continued placidly, "it will not be so much to give Roger."

"Give Roger?" I echoed stupidly, "how 'give Roger'?"

"I was not going to sing any more, anyway," she said.

For a moment I was dazed and then the simplicity of it all flashed over me.

"Why, Margarita!" I cried--and that is all the comment I ever made.

"That was what I wanted to tell him when he did not know me," she explained. "I--I was going to tell him the night--the night it happened."

"And does he know it now?"

"Of course. That is why he got well," she said promptly.

And do you know, I'm not sure she was wrong? That life was killing him--I mean it ran across his instincts and feeling and beliefs, every way.

There was no doubt she meant it. She never referred to the subject again.

He wanted her to see somebody else about her throat, but she absolutely refused to leave the Island till he was out of bed--Sarah came on with the baby two weeks later--and they sat by him all day nearly, the two of them, and he hardly let go her hand. He had changed a great deal in one way--his hair was quite silvered. But it was very becoming.

I didn't leave till I saw him in a dressing-gown in a long chair by the fire. Harriet went back to her hospital, and when Roger was up to it they went South for a bit before he began to work again.

The day before I left he did an odd thing--one of the two or three impractical, sentimental things I ever knew him to do in his life. He asked me to bring him his history of Napoleon--it had been packed into their luggage by mistake--and deliberately laid it on the heart of the fire! I cried out and leaned forward to snatch it--to think of the labour it represented!--but he put his hand on my arm.

"Don't, Jerry--I hate every page of it!" he said.

Well, I have been wondering these twenty years if perhaps they'll talk about it--the whole thing--some day. At the time, we all acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world for Margarita to settle down as a haus frau--perhaps when Nora got done with her studies of life (for I read Sue's Ibsen, you see) that is what she did, after all!

At any rate, I frankly hope so. For if all the wisdom and experience and training that the wonderful sex is to gain by its exodus from the home does not get back into it ultimately, I can't (in my masculine stupidity) quite see how it's going to get back into the race at all! And then what good has it done? I hope Mr. Ibsen knows! _

Read next: Part Nine. In Which The River Finds The Sea: Chapter 31. Fate Empties Her Creel

Read previous: Part Eight. In Which The River Rushes Into Perilous Rapids: Chapter 29. Fate Grips Her Landing Net

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