Jack London's Stories of the North - Complete Edition. Jack London
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to him, while the men and women of the Northland were ever knocking at his door—a door from which the latchstring hung always out. To Madeline, he could do no wrong, make no mistake. She had known him from the time she first cast her lot among the people of her father’s race; and to her half-barbaric mind it seemed that in him was centered the wisdom of the ages, that between his vision and the future there could be no intervening veil.
There were false ideals in the land. The social strictures of Dawson were not synonymous with those of the previous era, and the swift maturity of the Northland involved much wrong. Malemute Kid was aware of this, and he had Cal Galbraith’s measure accurately.
He knew a hasty word was the father of much evil; besides, he was minded to teach a great lesson and bring shame upon the man. So Stanley Prince, the young mining expert, was called into the conference the following night as was also Lucky Jack Harrington and his violin. That same night, Bettles, who owed a great debt to Malemute Kid, harnessed up Cal Galbraith’s dogs, lashed Cal Galbraith, Junior, to the sled, and slipped away in the dark for Stuart River.
II
‘So; one—two—three, one—two—three. Now reverse! No, no! Start up again, Jack. See—this way.’ Prince executed the movement as one should who has led the cotillion.
‘Now; one—two—three, one—two—three. Reverse! Ah! that’s better. Try it again. I say, you know, you mustn’t look at your feet. One—two—three, one—two—three. Shorter steps! You are not hanging to the gee-pole just now. Try it over.
‘There! that’s the way. One—two—three, one—two—three.’ Round and round went Prince and Madeline in an interminable waltz. The table and stools had been shoved over against the wall to increase the room. Malemute Kid sat on the bunk, chin to knees, greatly interested. Jack Harrington sat beside him, scraping away on his violin and following the dancers.
It was a unique situation, the undertaking of these three men with the woman.
The most pathetic part, perhaps, was the businesslike way in which they went about it.
No athlete was ever trained more rigidly for a coming contest, nor wolf-dog for the harness, than was she. But they had good material, for Madeline, unlike most women of her race, in her childhood had escaped the carrying of heavy burdens and the toil of the trail. Besides, she was a clean-limbed, willowy creature, possessed of much grace which had not hitherto been realized. It was this grace which the men strove to bring out and knock into shape.
‘Trouble with her she learned to dance all wrong,’ Prince remarked to the bunk after having deposited his breathless pupil on the table. ‘She’s quick at picking up; yet I could do better had she never danced a step. But say, Kid, I can’t understand this.’ Prince imitated a peculiar movement of the shoulders and head—a weakness Madeline suffered from in walking.
‘Lucky for her she was raised in the Mission,’ Malemute Kid answered. ‘Packing, you know,—the head-strap. Other Indian women have it bad, but she didn’t do any packing till after she married, and then only at first. Saw hard lines with that husband of hers. They went through the Forty-Mile famine together.’ ‘But can we break it?’ ‘Don’t know.
‘Perhaps long walks with her trainers will make the riffle. Anyway, they’ll take it out some, won’t they, Madeline?’ The girl nodded assent. If Malemute Kid, who knew all things, said so, why it was so. That was all there was about it.
She had come over to them, anxious to begin again. Harrington surveyed her in quest of her points much in the same manner men usually do horses. It certainly was not disappointing, for he asked with sudden interest, ‘What did that beggarly uncle of yours get anyway?’ ‘One rifle, one blanket, twenty bottles of hooch. Rifle broke.’ She said this last scornfully, as though disgusted at how low her maiden-value had been rated.
She spoke fair English, with many peculiarities of her husband’s speech, but there was still perceptible the Indian accent, the traditional groping after strange gutturals. Even this her instructors had taken in hand, and with no small success, too.
At the next intermission, Prince discovered a new predicament.
‘I say, Kid,’ he said, ‘we’re wrong, all wrong. She can’t learn in moccasins.
‘Put her feet into slippers, and then onto that waxed floor—phew!’ Madeline raised a foot and regarded her shapeless house-moccasins dubiously. In previous winters, both at Circle City and Forty-Mile, she had danced many a night away with similar footgear, and there had been nothing the matter.
But now—well, if there was anything wrong it was for Malemute Kid to know, not her.
But Malemute Kid did know, and he had a good eye for measures; so he put on his cap and mittens and went down the hill to pay Mrs. Eppingwell a call. Her husband, Clove Eppingwell, was prominent in the community as one of the great Government officials.
The Kid had noted her slender little foot one night, at the Governor’s Ball. And as he also knew her to be as sensible as she was pretty, it was no task to ask of her a certain small favor.
On his return, Madeline withdrew for a moment to the inner room. When she reappeared Prince was startled.
‘By Jove!’ he gasped. ‘Who’d a’ thought it! The little witch! Why my sister—’ ‘Is an English girl,’ interrupted Malemute Kid, ‘with an English foot. This girl comes of a small-footed race. Moccasins just broadened her feet healthily, while she did not misshape them by running with the dogs in her childhood.’ But this explanation failed utterly to allay Prince’s admiration. Harrington’s commercial instinct was touched, and as he looked upon the exquisitely turned foot and ankle, there ran through his mind the sordid list—‘One rifle, one blanket, twenty bottles of hooch.’ Madeline was the wife of a king, a king whose yellow treasure could buy outright a score of fashion’s puppets; yet in all her life her feet had known no gear save red-tanned moosehide. At first she had looked in awe at the tiny white-satin slippers; but she had quickly understood the admiration which shone, manlike, in the eyes of the men. Her face flushed with pride. For the moment she was drunken with her woman’s loveliness; then she murmured, with increased scorn, ‘And one rifle, broke!’ So the training went on. Every day Malemute Kid led the girl out on long walks devoted to the correction of her carriage and the shortening of her stride.
There was little likelihood of her identity being discovered, for Cal Galbraith and the rest of the Old-Timers were like lost children among the many strangers who had rushed into the land. Besides, the frost of the North has a bitter tongue, and the tender women of the South, to shield their cheeks from its biting caresses, were prone to the use of canvas masks. With faces obscured and bodies lost in squirrel-skin parkas, a mother and daughter, meeting on trail, would pass as strangers.
The coaching progressed rapidly. At first it had been slow, but later a sudden acceleration had manifested itself. This began from the moment Madeline tried on the white-satin slippers, and in so doing found herself. The pride of her renegade father, apart from any natural self-esteem she might possess, at that instant received its birth. Hitherto, she had deemed herself a woman of an alien breed, of inferior stock, purchased by her lord’s favor. Her husband had seemed to her a god, who had lifted her, through no essential virtues on her part, to his own godlike level. But she had never forgotten, even when Young Cal was born, that she was not of his people. As he had been a god, so had his womenkind been goddesses. She might have contrasted herself with them, but she had never compared.
It might have been that familiarity bred contempt; however, be that as it may, she had ultimately come to understand these roving white men, and to weigh them.
True, her mind was dark to deliberate analysis, but she yet possessed her woman’s clarity of vision in such matters. On the night of the slippers she had measured the bold, open admiration of her three man-friends; and for the first time comparison had suggested itself. It was only a foot and an ankle, but—but comparison could not, in the nature of things, cease at that point. She judged herself