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Snow Blind

K >> Katharine Newlin Burt >> Snow Blind



Produced by Ketaki Chhabra and Wendy Crockett from the book.




SNOW-BLIND

BY

KATHARINE NEWLIN BURT

AUTHOR OF THE BRANDING IRON, Etc.




CHAPTER I


Under a noon sun the vast, flat country, buried deep in snow, lay
like a paper hoop rimmed by the dark primeval forest; its surface
shone with an unbearable brightness as of sun-struck glass, every
crystal gleaming and quivering with intense cold light. To the north
a single blunt, low mountain-head broke the evenness of the horizon
line.

Hugh Garth seemed to leap through paper like a tiny active clown as
he dropped down into the small space shoveled clear in front of his
hidden cabin door. The roof was weighted with drift, so that a curling
mass like the edge of a wind-crowded wave about to break hung low
over the eaves. Long icicles as thick as a man's arm stretched from
roof to ground in a row of twisted columns. Under this overhanging
cornice of snow near the door there was a sudden icy purple darkness.

As Hugh plunged down into it, his face lost a certain rapt brightness
and shadowed deeply. He let slip the load of fresh pelts from his
back, drew his feet from the skis which he stuck up on their ends
in the snow, and removed the fur cap from his head and the huge dark
spectacles from his eyes. Then, crouching, he went in at the low,
ill-hung door. It stuck to its sill, and he cursed it; all his
movements expressed the anger of frustration. He slammed the door
behind him.

Buried in drifts, the cabin was dim even at this bright hour of noon.
The stove glowed in a corner with a subdued redness, its bulging
cheeks and round mouth dully scarlet. The low room was pleasant to
look at, for it had the beauty of brown bark and the salmon tints
of old rough boards, and its furniture, wrought painstakingly by an
unskillful hand, had the charm of all handwork even when unskilled.
Some of the chairs were rudely carved, one great throne especially,
awkward, pretentious, and carefully ornate.

There was, too, a solid table in the center of the floor; and on it
a woman was setting heavy earthenware plates nicked and discolored.
She was heavy and discolored herself, but like the stove, she too
seemed to have a dull glow. She was no longer young, but she might
still have encouraged her youthfulness to linger pleasantly; she was
not in the least degree beautiful, but she might have fostered a charm
that lurked somewhere about her small, compact body and in her square,
dark face. Her hair of a sandy brown was stretched back brutally so
that her bright, devoted eyes--gray and honest eyes, very deep-set
beneath their brows--lacked the usual softness and mystery of women's
eyes. Her lips were tight set; her chin held out with an air of dogged
effort which seemed to possess no relation to her mechanical
occupation, yet to have a strong habitual relation to her state of
mind. She seemed, in fact, under a shell of self-control, to conceal
an inner light, like a dimly burning dark-lantern. Her expression
was dumb. She moved about like a deaf-mute. Indeed, her stillness
and stony self-repression were extraordinary.

A youth rose from a chair near the stove and greeted Hugh as he
entered.

"Hullo," he said. "How many did you get?"

It was the eager questioning of a modest, affectionate boy who curbs
his natural effervescence of greeting like a well-trained dog. The
tone was astonishingly young, a quiet, husky boy-voice.

"Damn you, Pete!" was snarled at him for answer. "Haven't you got
my boot mended yet?"

The boot, still lacking its heel, lay on the floor near the stove,
and Hugh now picked it up and hurled it half across the room.

"I have to get out into this ice chest of a wilderness and this
flaming glare that cuts my eyeballs open, and work till the sweat
freezes on my face, and then come home to find you loafing by the
fire as if you were a house cat--purring and rubbing against my legs
when I come in," he snarled. "Thanking me for a quiet nap and a saucer
of milk, eh? You loafer! What do I keep you for? You gorge the bread
and meat I earn by sweating and freezing, and you keep your sluggish
mountain of bones covered. A year or two ago I'd have urged you along
with a stick. I used to get some work out of you then. But you think
you're too big for that, now, don't you? You fancy I'm afraid of your
bigness, eh? Well, do you want me to try it out? What about it?"

During the first part of his brother's speech, Pete had faced him,
but in the middle he had turned his back and stood in front of one
of the clumsy windows. He looked out now at a white wall of snow,
above which shone the dazzle of the midday. He whistled very softly
to himself and sank his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroys.
He did not answer the snarling question, but his wide, quiet mouth,
exquisitely shaped, ran into a smile and a dimple, deep and narrow,
cut into his thin and ruddy cheek.

Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had
come into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled
the floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.

He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the
waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with
an ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who
limped and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his
tongue, gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon
the silence.

Suddenly the woman spoke. She turned back on the threshold of the
kitchen door through which her work had been taking her to and fro
during Garth's outbreak. Her voice was monotonous and smothered; it
had its share in her unnatural self-repression.

"Why don't you tell him to be quiet, Pete? You've been chopping wood
since daybreak to make up for what he didn't do last week, and you
only came in about ten minutes before he did. Why don't you speak
out? You're getting to be pretty close to a man now, and it isn't
suitable for you to let yourself be talked to that way. You always
stand like a fool and take it from him."

Pete turned. "Oh, well," he answered good-humoredly, "I guess maybe
he's tired. Let up, Hugh, will you? I'll finish your boot after
dinner."

"The hell you will! You'll do it now!" Venting on his brother his
anger at the woman's intervention, Garth swung his misshapen body
around the end of the table and thrust an elbow violently against
Pete's chest. The attack was so unexpected that Pete staggered, lost
his balance, and stepping down into the shallow depression of a
pebbled hearth, fell, twisting his ankle. The agony was sharp. After
a dumb minute he lifted a white face and pulled himself up, one hand
clutching the board mantel. "Now you've done it!" he said between
his teeth. "How will you get your pelts to the station now? I won't
be able to take them."

There ensued a dismayed silence. The woman had come back from the
kitchen and stood with a steaming dish in her hands. After the brief
pause of consternation she set down the dish and went over to Pete.
"Here," she said, "sit down and let me take off your moccasin and
bathe your ankle before it begins to swell."

Hugh Garth had seated himself in the thronelike chair at the head
of the table. His expression was still defiant, indifferent, and
lordly. "Come and eat your dinner, both of you," he commanded. "You've
had your lesson, Pete. After this, I guess you'll do what I tell you
to--not choose the work that happens to suit your humor. Don't, for
God's sake, baby him, Bella. Don't start being a grandmother before
you've ever been a sweetheart. You're too young for the one even if
you're getting a bit too old for the other!"

Bella flushed deep and hot. She went to her place, and Pete hobbled
to his, opposite his brother. Between them the woman sat, dyed deep
in her sudden unaccustomed wave of scarlet. Pete's whiteness too was
stained in sympathy. But Hugh only chuckled. "As for the pelts," he
said royally, "I'll take them down myself."

Bella looked slowly up.

"You think I don't mean it, I suppose?" Hugh demanded.

They did not answer, but the eyes of the boy and the woman met. This
silence and this dumb exchange of understanding infuriated Garth.
He clinched his hands on the carved arms of his chair and leaned a
little forward.

"I'll take the pelts myself," he repeated boisterously. "I'm not
afraid to be seen at the station. I'm sick of skulking. Buried
here--with _my_ talents--in this damn country, spending my days
trapping and skinning beasts to keep the breath in our three useless
bodies. Wouldn't death be better for a man like me? Easier to bear?
Fifteen years of it! Fifteen years! My best years!" He stared over
Pete's head. "In all that time no beauty to feed my starved senses,
no work for my starved brain, no hope for my starved heart." The woman
and the youth watched him still in silence. "That fox I killed this
morning had a better life to lose than I."

"It wouldn't be safe for you to go, Hugh," said Pete gently.

"Why not--watchdog?"

The sneer deepened the flush on Pete's face, but he answered with
the same gentleness, fixing his blue eyes on his brother's.

"Because not two months ago there was a picture of you tacked up in
the post-office."

Bella's face whitened, and Hugh's cheeks grew a shade more leaden.
"T-two months ago!" he stammered painfully; "but that's not p-possible.
They--they've given me up. They've f-forgotten me. They th-think I'm
dead. After fifteen years? My God, Pete! Why didn't you tell me?"
He pleaded the last with a shaken sort of sharpness, in pitiful
contrast to the bombast of the preceding speech.

"I didn't see the good of telling you. I was waiting until this trip
to see if the picture was still there, and maybe to ask some
questions."

"What does it mean?" whispered Bella.

"It means they've some fresh reason to hunt me--some fresh impulse--God
knows what or why. How can we tell out here, buried in the snows of
fifteen winters. Well!" He struck his hands down on the table edge
and stood up. He drew his mouth into a crooked smile and looked at
the other two as a naughty child looks at its doting but disapproving
elders. The smile transfigured his ugliness. "I've a fancy to see that
picture. Want to be reminded of what I looked like fifteen years ago.
I was a handsome fellow then. I'm going to take the pelts."

Pete looked dumbly up at him, his lips parted. Bella twisted her
apron about her hands. Both seemed to know the hopelessness of
protest. In the same anxious dumbness they watched Garth make ready
for his trip. As he pulled his cap down close about his ears, Pete
at last found his voice.

"Hugh," he began doubtfully, "I wish you wouldn't risk it. We can
get on without supplies until next trading-day, when I'll surely be
all right."

"Hold your tongue! I'm going," was the answer. "I tell you, the spirit
of adventure has me. Who knows what I may meet with out there?" He
flung back the door and, pointing with a long arm, stood silhouetted
against the dazzle.

"Beauty? Opportunity? Danger? Hope? Death? I shan't shirk it this
time. I'll meet whatever comes. But--" He came back a step into the
room. His harsh face melted to a shamefaced gentleness; his voice
softened. "If they get me down there, if I _don't_ come back, you
two try to think kindly of me, will you? I know what you think of
me now. I know you won't see me as I am--no one but God will ever
do me that kindness; but you two--be easy with me in your memories."

Bella, her arms now twisted to their red elbows in her apron, took
a few stiff steps across the floor. Her face was expressionless, her
eyes lowered. Garth smiled at them both and went out, shutting the
door. They heard him singing as he put on his skis:

A hundred men were riding,
A-hunting for Pierre.
They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.
They rode around by moonlight;
They rode around by day;
They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.

Then came the sharp scraping of his runners across the surface of
the snow on a level with the buried roof. It lessened from a hissing
speech to a hissing whisper. It sighed away. Bella sat down abruptly
on a chair, pulled in her chin like an unhappy child; her bosom lifted
as though a sob would force its way out.

"If he doesn't come back!" she murmured. "If he doesn't come back!"
She was speaking to God.




CHAPTER II


Pete blinked, swallowed hard and began to talk fast and hopefully.

"He'll come back. I don't believe he'll get halfway there, Bella,"
he reassured the woman. "He'll come to his senses. You know how moody
he is. Come over here and doctor up my ankle, please. 'Make a fuss
over me, Bell.' Isn't that what I used to say?"

He coaxed until at last she came and knelt before him and removed
his moccasin and heavy woolen sock. The strong white foot was like
marble, but the ankle was swollen and discolored. Bella clicked her
tongue. "He _is_ a brute, you know!" She laughed shortly. Since
Garth's departure she had become almost a human being. The deaf-mute
look had melted from her, and a sardonic humor emerged; her eyes
cleared; she could even smile. "Why do we care so much for him,
Pete--the two of us?"

Pete winced under her touch and puckered his brows. "Because he's
such a kid, I guess. He's always fretting after the moon."

"Don't you ever get angry with him, Pete? He does treat you shameful
sometimes."

"N-no. Not often. He's always sorry and ashamed afterward. He'd like
to be as kind as God. I believe if he could only fool us into thinking
he _was_ God, he could act like Him--ouch, Bella! Go easy."

"You're an awful smart boy, Pete. It's a sin you've never had any
schooling."

"Schooling! Gosh! I've had all the schooling I could digest. Hugh
beat it into me. He's taught me all he had in his head and a whole
lot he never ought to have had there, I guess. But _you've_ taught
me most, Bella--that's the truth of it."

"_Me_! I never knew anything. They saw to that. They never did
anything for me at home but abuse me. Hugh Garth was the only relation
I ever had in the world that spoke kind to me. Remember how I used
to run over from my folks to tuck you into bed in your little room
above the shop, Pete? No, you were too little."

"Of course, I remember," the boy replied. "The ankle's fine now,
Bella. Let up. I can't stand that rubbing. Let me stick the foot up
on another chair. There--that's great. It doesn't hurt near so bad
now. I remember Hugh's bookshop; yes, I do--honest! I remember sitting
on the ladder and listening to him talk to the students when they
came in. He always was a gorgeous talker, Bella. They used to stand
around and listen to his yarns like kids to a fairy story. Just the
same as you and I do now--when we can get him into a good humor. But,
you know, he used to like strangers best--to talk to, I mean."

Bella assented, bitterly. She had begun to clear the table of its
almost untouched meal. "Because he could put it over better with a
stranger. It isn't the _truth_ Hugh likes--about himself, or others."

Pete had begun to whittle a piece of wood. He was a charming figure,
slouching down in his chair, slim and graceful, his shapely golden
head ruffled, his chin pressed against his chest. His expression was
indescribably sweet and boyish, the shadow of anxiety and pain
accentuating a wistful if determined cheerfulness. He was deliberately
entertaining Bella, diverting her mind from its agony of apprehension.
She saw through him, but like a sick child she took the entertainment
languidly.

"Now, _you're_ too dead bent on the truth, Bella. You know you are.
You're a regular bear for the truth."

"I can't see anything else," she said gloomily. "Things are just so
to me--no blinking them."

He put his head a little to one side and contemplated her. "What do
you see when you look into the water-bucket, Bella?"

"The water-bucket?" She flushed. "Just because you caught me prinking
that once!"

"Well, if you had a mirror, what would you see in it, then?"

"An ugly old woman, Pete."

"There! Your mind's just the wrong-side-out of Hugh's. He won't see
himself ugly, and you won't see yourself pretty. I'm the only sane
fellow in this house."

"And you never in your life saw a pretty woman to remember her.
Besides, you're too young." She said it with a tart sweetness and
vanished into the kitchen.

With her departure Pete's whittling ceased, his hands fell slack and
he began to stare out through the snow-walled window. His anxiety
for Hugh slipped imperceptibly into a vague pondering over his own
youthfulness. That's what those two were always telling him, sometimes
savagely, sometimes tenderly! "You're too young." What did it mean
to him, anyhow, that he was "too young"? A desolation from which at
times he suffered in secret overcame him.

He was twenty-one or -two--or his memory lied. They had never
celebrated his birthdays, but he was five or six years old when Hugh
had been so suddenly, so unexplainably taken from the house, back
there in the little Eastern college town where they had lived. It
was a few months later that Bella--Cousin Bella, who worked at "the
farm"--came for him, a furtive, desperate Bella with a bruised
face--a Bella tight-strung for flight, for a breaking of the galling
accustomed ties of her life, for a terrible plunge into unknown
adventure. She had muttered to him, as she dressed him and bundled
together a few of his belongings, that they "were going to Hugh"--only
it was another name she used, a name since blotted from their lives.

Hugh had sent for them. She was the only person in the world that
Hugh could trust. But no one must know where they were going. They
must be away by the time the man who took charge of the shop came
back in the morning.

Pete remembered the journey. He remembered the small frontier station
where they left the train at last. He remembered that strange,
far-flung horizon, streaked with dawn, and his first taste of the
tangy, heady air. There had been a long, long drive and a parting
with the friendly driver where Bella turned on to the trail through
the woods. It had been dim and dark and terrible among the endless
regiments of trees--mazy and green and altogether bewildering. And
after vague hop-o'-my-thumb wanderings, he had a disconnected memory
of Hugh--a wild, rugged, ragged, bearded Hugh who caught him up
fiercely as though he had an ogrish hunger for the feel of little
boys. It was night when they came to Hugh's hiding-place. For miles
Pete had been carried in his brother's arms. Bella had limped behind
them. There had been a ford, he remembered; the splashing water had
roused Pete, and he stayed awake afterward until he found himself
before a dancing fire of logs in a queer, dark, resinous-smelling
house, very low, with unglazed windows. He remembered, too, that Bella
had burst out crying. That was the queerest memory of them all--that
crying of Bella's.--Even now he could not understand exactly why she
had cried so then.

The frightened, furtive life they had all led since--the life of
scared wild things--had left its mark on Pete. His fear for Hugh now
threw him back into the half-forgotten state of apprehension which
had been the atmosphere of all his little boyhood. He had not known
then why strange men were creatures to be feared and shunned. In fact,
he had never been told the reason for Hugh's flight. Only, bit by
bit, he had pieced together hints and vague allusions until he knew
that this strange, embittered, boasting poet of a brother had killed
or had been accused of killing. In his loyal boy mind Hugh Garth was
promptly acquitted. It was the world that was wrong--not Hugh. Yet
to-day, after all the long years of carefulness, he had gone back
to the cruelty of the world.

Like a beast the boy's anxiety for his brother began to prowl
about the walls of his mind. He imagined Hugh appearing at the
trading-station. He pictured the curious glances of the Indians
and the white natives. This limping, extravagant, energetic Hugh
with his whitening hair and eyebrows and flaring hazel eyes--with
his crooked nose and mouth, his magnificently desperate manner and
his magnificently desperate voice--attention would inevitably fasten
upon him anywhere; how much more in an empty land such as this! Pete
fancied the inquiring looks turned from the man to the man's posted
picture. It was no longer a faithful likeness, of course; still, it
was a likeness. There was no other man in all the world like Hugh! He
was made of odd, fantastic fragments, of ill-fitting parts--physically,
mentally, spiritually. It was as if a soul had seen itself in a
crooked mirror and had fashioned a form to match the distorted image.
Hugh wouldn't, couldn't force himself to be inconspicuous. He would
swagger; he would talk loud; his big, beautiful voice would challenge
attention, create an audience. He would have some impossible, splendid
tale to tell.

Pete sat up straighter in his chair, gingerly rearranging the ankle,
and lifted his blue and haunted eyes--the eyes of the North--to the
window.

The dazzle of noon had faded to a glow. The short winter day was
nearly done. There would be a long violet twilight, and then, the
blaze of stars.

But for his aching ankle Pete would be sliding out on soundless skis,
now poised for breathless flight down some long slope, now leaping
fallen trees or buried ditches. He spent half of his wild young
restlessness in such long night runs when, in a sort of ecstasy, he
outraced the stifled longings of his exiled youth. But there would
be no ski-running for several nights now. He was a prisoner, and at
a time when imprisonment was hard to bear.

If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had
Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly
by and allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction?
They might have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough
to bring him to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak
before Hugh's magnetic strength--always the audience, the following;
Bella, for all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And
Hugh's liberty, perhaps his life, might be the price of their
acquiescence.

Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across
the silence, the sound of skis.

He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see
above the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height
of nine or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized
a familiar slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis.

"Bella!" he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. "Bella! Here's
Hugh. He's come back."

Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway.
Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky
figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down
upon them, clumsy and shapeless.

"Let us in," panted Hugh. "Let us in."

Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them
and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms.




CHAPTER III


"Shut the door," Hugh whispered, and laid his burden down on a big
black bear-hide near the stove. He knelt beside it. He had no eyes
for anything else. Pete, hobbling to him, gazed curiously down, and
Bella knelt opposite and drew away Hugh's mackinaw coat, with which
he had wrapped his trove. It was not a woman whom they looked down
upon, but a girl, and very young--perhaps not yet seventeen--a girl
with cropped dark curly hair and a face so wan and blue and at the
same time so scorched by the snow-glare that its exquisiteness of
feature was all the more marked. Hugh's handkerchief was tied loosely
across her eyes.

"I heard her crying in the snow," he said with ineffable tenderness;
"crying like a little bleating lamb with cold and pain and hunger
and fright--the most pitiful thing in God's cruel trap of life. She's
blind--snow-blind."

Pete gave a sharp exclamation, and Bella gently removed the
handkerchief. The small figure moaned and moved its head. The lids
of her eyes were swollen and discolored.

"Snow-blind," echoed Bella.

"A bad case," said Hugh. "Get her some soup, Bella, and--perhaps,
hot water--I don't know." He looked up helplessly.

Bella went to the kitchen. She had regained her old look of dumbness.
Beside the figure on the floor Pete touched one of the girl's small
clenched hands. It was like ice. At the touch she moaned, and Hugh
ordered sharply: "Let her alone." So the boy dragged himself up again
and stood by the mantel, watching Hugh with puzzled and wondering
eyes.

"Think what she's been through," Hugh murmured, "that little delicate
thing, wandering for two days, out in this cold--scared by the woods,
blinded by the pain, starving. When I found her, you'd have thought
she'd be afraid of a wild man like me, but she just lifted up her
arms like a baby and dropped her head on my shoulder. She--she patted
my cheek--"

Bella brought the soup, and Hugh, raising the small black head on
the crook of his arm, forced a spoonful between the clenched teeth.
The girl swallowed and began again to whimper: "Oh, my eyes! My eyes!
They hurt me so!" She turned her face against Hugh's chest and clung
to him.

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